Twelve years ago, Christmas morning, my parents presented my brothers and I with a challenge before our gift. They set a jar of dill pickles on the coffee table and said, “If you can guess what you’re getting, we’ll give you $100. These pickles are your only clue.” We stared at the pickles, dumbfounded. After a few half-hearted guesses, we gave up. If we had known then what we know now, we probably would have requested that they give us the $100 instead of the mysterious gift. But how could we have known?
A half-hour later our doorbell chimed. In walked a heavy-set man with a giant crate. Our eyes grew wide as he unveiled the creature within. Inside was “Pickles,” a fluorescent green parrot, with ridge of yellow encircling her neck.
At first, I was smitten. Pickles was brilliant, already pointing out to us that she was a “Pretty Bird.” When she gripped my shoulder with her scaly clawed feet, I would turn my cheek to her and feel the ripple of her heartbeat under her downy feathers. She smelled of apricot lotion and Amazon soil. She was one of the most fascinating creatures I’d ever met—and one of the most complex.
It took her a few weeks to decide that my dad was the love of her life, and that the rest of us (especially my mom) threatened to her plans to elope with him. After a few months, my father became the exclusive bird handler, as the rest of us opted to preserve our appendages. Pickles grew, with time, both increasingly vocal and increasingly ferocious. She charmed us by learning how to say “Bye-Bye’ while waving a clawed foot, and then stunned us by chiding “Do you want a bite?” before lunging at us.
Eventually she learned to call herself “Pretty Pickles,” and learned to call our dogs by name: “Aurora, Godiva,” she would call, “Do you want a treat? Do you want to go outside?” For a few months, the dogs would race to the door and wait there with pleading eyes and wagging tails, until they realized that Pickle’s promises were empty.
As the rest of us grew increasingly wary, my father’s attachment to Pickles grew stronger. He would carry her to bed with him on Sunday afternoons, and she would coo, closing her eyes in sleep while perched on his chest. Occasionally, my mom would bravely attempt to join the two of them, only to be chased off the bed by Pickles, flapping her wings and clenching my mother’s hand in her beak. Pickles often drew blood.
Pickle’s worst trait was not that she bit or delighted in tormenting others. Her very worst trait was that she screamed. Everyday, just before my dad returned from the office, she shrieked in a primal effort to call the birds home. Summer days, when all of the windows were opened, her tortured cries echoed through the neatly manicured suburban neighborhood where I grew up. We feared that Child Services would be contacted if we did not find a way to silence the bird.
Eventually my mom presented my dad with an ultimatum: “It’s either me or the bird,” she said. The next morning, my dad packed Pickles into a traveling crate and took her with him to the office.
To this day, Pickles goes to work with my dad Monday through Friday. There, she perches on an artificial tree in my dad’s cluttered office. From her tree, she is able to peer through a window into an atrium. She spends her days attempting to dazzle passers-by with new tricks. Sometimes when she tries to flip upside down or swing from a branch supported only by her beak, she falls, landing on her back on the newspaper beneath. In these moments, she is crippled by humiliation, unable to move. As she stares helplessly up at my father, wiggling her feet in the air, he shakes his head. “You vain, vain bird,” he says.
Originally published in Parrot Magazine (October 2003)
