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his whistling noises. She gets up and reaches out to pet him one last time, but he flies high up into the tree. He looks like jewelry. “Good-bye, Lucky,” she says, and he chirps back in response to hearing his name. She picks up the cage and starts down the path. This is better than finding him dead on the bottom of the cage. It is better to get it over with now. She feels something land on her shoulder. It frightens her; she jumps, tries hurriedly to brush it away. But it is Lucky, squawking outrageously at her. He flies up to the top of her head to avoid her abusing hand. She holds her finger up to him, and when he sits on it, she puts him in front of her face. “Go!” she says, and flings him from her hand. But he circles around and comes back to sit on her shoulder. She begins walking. He’ll take off in a minute, as he always does, she thinks.But he doesn’t. He stays on her shoulder until she again puts him on her finger. She opens the cage door, holds him up to it, and he goes in. He gets a drink, hops over to his mirror, and kisses himself.
    Alice puts a piece of lettuce in Lucky’s seed cup when she gets home. He ignores it. She turns on the radio and goes to lie down on her bed. Her hand picks up the phone and dials the number. Her voice says she wants to come home, and his voice says he will come and get her. It will be easy to pack. One cage, holding everything, and lined with a weather report that, despite what it pretends, knows nothing for sure.

Things We Used to Believe

    Martha is lying in the grass, top of head to top of head, with her best friend, Alan. They’d had it in mind to watch the clouds pass and get pleasantly dizzy, but the sky is vacant, only blue. Alan is forty-nine and Martha is thirty-eight. She thinks sometimes that she would like to marry him but she is already severely married. Sometimes it just happens that you meet people in the wrong order.
    They compensate in ways that will let them sleep nights: they discuss books over huge ice cream sundaes; they watch movies and hold hands in the dark under the camouflage created by the little pile of their jackets; they talk endlessly on the phone while they make dinners in their respective kitchens.
    Today Martha is feeling the way your skin feels when the weather is just right—when it’s not too hot, and not too cold, and there is no breeze whatsoever. It is a feeling of being inside something perfect, a feeling of very pleasant nothingness. “My mind feels like it’s in absolute neutral,” Martha tells Alan. He makes one of his deep, smooth sounds that implies agreement. Martha likesthe sound, as she likes all the sounds that Alan makes. His voice comes out like silk or like velvet. The silk is usual, his old radio voice from the years that he was a disc jockey on a jazz radio show. The velvet is rare, and seductive, and irresistible, and it makes Martha nervous.
    They are quiet for a long time, listening to the bold, irregular sounds of daytime life. It is one of the things Martha likes most about Alan that she knows his stomach will pull to the sounds of tiny children playing just as hers will. She also likes the way he always has a few fresh wildflowers on his kitchen table, gathered on his daily walks, and she likes the discrete, high-class way he uses a fork to squeeze lemon onto his fish. She asked him once to show her how, and he did.
    Eventually, she breaks the friendly silence to say, “When I was a little girl, I thought that our appliances talked about us after we all went to bed. I thought they came into the kitchen and sat around talking about how they were treated.”
    Alan picks out a fat blade of grass and sucks on it as he contemplates what she has said. Then he says, “When I was a little boy, I thought Hawaii was off the coast of South Carolina. I was sure of it. I even lost money on a bet about it.”
    Martha smiles over at him. She thinks, I am so happy. She says, “I used to believe that after I’d gone