When my mother died I inherited her bird. Rudy was a parrot, an African grey. My mother told me he was unusually reserved for his species, capable of speaking but preferring not to. During my annual visits, Rudy seemed to take most of his pleasure from imitating the mundane sounds of the kitchen: the thock-thock-thock of a knife on the cutting board, the maraca-like rattle of my mother preparing a Shake ‘n Bake. After the funeral, we only sat shiva for one day, but I was still amazed by Rudy’s quietude, not a peep from his cage as my mother’s friends stacked chocolate babkas on a plastic foldout table. So I was surprised, two months later, when Rudy began to speak to me in my own voice.
There was no mistaking it. Following a bike accident when I was eight years old, I developed a stutter I still carry. The stutter is severe. My sentences are afflicted with long, breathless pauses, and I am prone to what my childhood speech pathologist called maze behaviors; I will begin a sentence only to restart it, revise it, leave it unfinished—anything to avoid a word I can’t say.
Rudy first spoke to me after I returned home from a lunch date, a second date with Paula, a woman I liked very much but who, when she realized how little I would be contributing to the conversation, began to take quick, enthusiastic sips of her wine. Back home, I tossed my keys on the table and checked on Rudy, who slept in the guest bedroom in an enormous rectangular cage. The veterinarian had warned me to expect some misbehavior from the bird as he adjusted to our lives together, that he might bite me or even even pluck his own feathers, but so far all he had chewed was my doorframes. I worked from home, so he was rarely alone, and my house—a sizable one-story in a suburb of Orlando—offered...
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