An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  But she is too cotton headed and embarrassed to cancel.

  So she puts on her black cotton sheath, what she thinks of as her summer date dress, and black strappy sandals, and, because there is finally at least a breeze, she decides to walk to Mary’s. Once she leaves her own neighborhood, with the clusters of tough looking teenagers on the corners and the loud music spilling from open windows, she actually enjoys the walk. She has brought a bottle of wine that her last date brought to her, a good wine that she’s been saving for something special, and she cradles it in her arms as she meanders through the streets of Providence, walking slowly now that she’s in the better part of town.

  The houses here are large, like Mary’s, with yards that have green grass, flower beds, neat hedges. When she can, she looks into the windows. There is a family eating dinner, an old man alone reading a book, the blue glare of a television. She should have been a spy, Rachel decides. Or something where she could watch things unnoticed. In college, she sat at the periphery of war protests, attending more for the free drugs that always got passed around. She remembers watching Peter and Sofia yesterday. Yes, she decides, she is a good voyeur.

  Since her divorce, she has worked as a manager for various stores—books, shoes, and now an upscale toy store. She is ready to leave that job; it annoys her. All the overpriced wooden trains and planes, the complicated puzzles, the precious dolls that live behind glass. She did get Sofia’s Madeline doll there, thirty percent off with her employee discount, but no other good has come from this job. In her mind, before she goes to sleep, Rachel tries to imagine what she will do next. But she majored in sociology, and never went on for her MSW. She is not trained for anything really. As crazy as it sounds, Rachel believed she would stay married to Peter, have children with him, grow old like that. She believed she would volunteer for good causes, help out in a soup kitchen, have friends over for good vegetarian meals from recipes in Laurel’s Kitchen. In a way, she supposes as she turns down Mary’s street of renovated Victorians, a street that seems to rocket you back in time, she had imagined she’d have a life not unlike Mary’s.

  The thought unsettles her, so that she is awkward again as she climbs the front steps and rings Mary’s doorbell.

  Rachel is surprised when Dan answers the door. She has come to think of the house as just Mary’s. This too tall man with the slightly basset hound face startles her, as if he is the one who doesn’t belong there.

  “Finally,” he says.

  “Am I late?” Rachel asks, surprised.

  The stained glass window looks ominous in this light. Rachel cannot remember ever being here at night before. She shivers.

  “Just twenty minutes,” he says, sounding cheerful. But Rachel recalls how Mary sometimes complains about his what she calls anal retentiveness. Creases in trousers, no crumbs anywhere, that sort of thing. Rachel isn’t certain, but she thinks punctuality is a concern of his too.

  Dan has somehow taken the bottle of wine from her without Rachel noticing. Her arms are still folded into a cradle, but they are empty. She lets them fall stiffly to her side as they enter the formal living room. There he is: her date. She hadn’t expected him to have a goatee. Rachel does not like facial hair. And she’d imagined him to be taller, like Dan. Weren’t they cousins?

  “We’re having Mount Gay and tonics,” Dan says, handing her one.

  Rachel takes it, but frowns. They don’t seem to go together—rum with tonic. She’d rather have gin and tonic. It occurs to her that she might not like Dan. There is music playing, Emmylou Harris, she thinks. Or one of those women that Peter used to call depressed female singers.

  “Where’s Mary?” Rachel asks. The drink actually doesn’t taste too bad. She tries to relax.

  “Working some culinary wonder, as usual,” Dan says.

  Rachel looks at the cousin. “So you’re an architect, Mary tells me?”

  “I studied architecture,” he says. He is glum. Probably over the girlfriend. Rachel is certain he was dumped; he has that look about him.

  “It’s fascinating really,” Dan says. “Harry is restoring some buildings in Paris. They were going to be torn down and he’s rescued them, haven’t you?”

  “You live in Paris?” Rachel asks, almost angry. What a waste of time. A date with a man who lives an entire ocean away.

  “Part of the time,” Harry says. “I keep a flat there.”

  Rachel finds it pretentious when Americans call apartments flats. She finishes her drink and plays with the ice cubes, letting them knock against each other and clink against the sides of the glass. The glass has a bridge etched on it.

  “We refill without too much commotion here.” It’s Harry who speaks, laughing and standing right in front of her. “A simple, ‘May I have another’ usually does the trick.”

  Rachel blushes. “Well then,” she says, handing him her empty glass. Up close, he’s actually kind of sexy. This surprises her. Not tall, no, but built well. And she likes his shirt. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d come in, but it’s a vintage 1950s Hawaiian shirt, in really awful colors, orange and green and mustard yellow.

  Mary comes in then, all fluttery and silly, with a plate of cheese and crackers.

  “How’s it going in here?” she asks, looking in Rachel’s direction.

  Harry hands Rachel a fresh drink.

  “I see you’ve got a drink,” Mary says, happily.

  They all sit back down and Mary tells the same details about Harry’s work in Paris.

  “Where are these buildings you’re saving?” Rachel asks. The rum has made her bold.

  “The fifteenth arrondisement,” Harry says.

  “Near that big cemetery? The one with Chopin and Gertrude Stein and everyone?” Rachel asks him.

  “Yes,” he answers, obviously excited. “You know Paris?”

  “Well, I spent time there, years ago. Almost ten years ago, I guess. I was there in winter. And it rained all the time. That made it even more perfect, roaming around that cemetery in the cold rain.”

  “Yes,” Harry says. “It would.”

  “We rented a drafty apartment near Notre Dame.” Rachel tries to keep her voice from catching. But a rush of warm memories slide over her. The peeling paint on the walls, the sourish smell of falafels from a stand below, the lumpy mattress on their bed. She can almost hear Peter’s poor attempts at romancing her in French. Shut the door, shut the door, he whispered each night as he moved inside her, and Rachel would struggle for a way to do that, to somehow close their bedroom door—though it only opened into a high ceilinged sitting room filled with faded velvet high backed chairs and a worn sofa whose stuffing fell out and floated around the apartment like the fluff from old dandelions. It was weeks before she realized what Peter was whispering to her: Je t’adore.

  Harry has rested his hand lightly on her bare arm.

  “You have fond memories of living in Paris,” he says.

  Rachel can manage only a nod.

  “Maybe someday you’ll go back?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she tells him, surprising herself with the enthusiasm in her voice, as if by going back she could reclaim something.

  THEN LATER, AT DINNER—Mary has made sate, shrimp and chicken, with jasmine rice—Rachel and Harry have their heads bent together like old friends. She is telling him about Europe, how she and Peter spent two years there. She doesn’t mention Peter by name, or that she later married him. Instead, she calls him my friend; she says we.

  “We managed to get into Eastern Europe. That was something,” she says.

  “Ten years ago?” Harry whistles. “I wish I’d seen it back then.”

  “I had no idea you were such an adventurer,” Mary says. “Hitchhiking around Europe and such.”

  “Mary knows me better as the crazed mother making sure my daughter doesn’t fall head first off the curly slide,” Rachel explains.

  “You have a daughter?” Harry asks her.

  “She has a Sophia!” Mary tells him. />
  “Spelled differently,” Dan adds.

  “Mine is S-O-F-I-A,” Rachel begins.

  Harry finishes for her. “Like the city,” he says.

  WHEN HARRY HEARS where she lives, he insists on driving her home. “You can’t walk there at this time of night,” he tells her.

  It is very late. After dinner, they all go outside and eat strawberry shortcake on the patio. Dan brings out a bottle of grappa that he and Mary got in Italy.

  “Is that when you saw the pope?” Harry asks. It is obvious this is a joke between them.

  “Yes,” Dan says, “that’s when we saw the pope.”

  By the time they are leaving, Rachel feels happy. She lets Harry take her arm. She agrees to his offer of a ride home. His car is a beat up Triumph Spitfire with a noisy muffler. She tries to ask something once, but the muffler is too loud. They cannot talk. When they get to her house, and he turns off the car, the silence almost hurts her ears. She thinks of how after rock concerts her ears would feel this way when she walked outside. This is something Harry would appreciate, but when she turns to tell him he has already moved out of the car and is opening her door for her.

  “I would like to come in,” he tells her.

  It is odd, but since that first rush of memories about Paris, Rachel cannot get the idea of it out of her mind. She misses Peter, yes. But she misses more than just him. She wants that again. The kind of love they had then, in Paris, and all the rest of their time in Europe, the months in Krakow and Sofia, the nights spent sleeping tangled together in second class compartments on trains, speeding toward—toward what? A future, she supposed. A future that was good, and right. She did not think of any of that then, drinking bad Polish coffee in the early morning, or walking the gray streets of Sofia, each tucking a hand into the other’s coat pocket, or chewing the yeasty warm rolls that every Hungarian bakery seemed to sell. You don’t think of the rightness of things then; you simply bask in it. Later, when you find yourself on a sidewalk in Providence late at night with a stranger, it all comes back—why, Rachel can almost taste those rolls! She takes Harry’s hand. It is small for a man’s hand, and soft. She takes it in hers and leads him inside.

  MARY CALLS, FIRST thing Sunday morning. She has just come back from church—She goes to church? Rachel thinks, blinking against the sun that filters in between the slats of her mini-blinds—and, Mary squeaks into the phone, she only has a minute but she really really thinks that Harry liked Rachel. Rachel stifles a laugh. She is finding out that Mary is oddly innocent.

  “I’m sure he’ll call you,” Mary is saying.

  She sounds almost schoolgirlish, and for a moment Rachel imagines her in the plaid skirt and cardigan uniform of some Catholic church.

  “I think he will,” Rachel manages. A conversation with a real friend would play so differently. She knows this. She can still smell Harry on her sheets; her thighs are sticky from him.

  “All of that stuff about Europe,” Mary says. “He ate that up.”

  Rachel stifles more laughter. She promises to tell Mary every detail when he does call. She promises to get the girls together later in the week. Until finally she can hang up, and go back to sleep.

  WHEN HE FINALLY does call, on Wednesday, she invites him over for lunch. It is her day off, and Rachel is reworking her résumé. She does not want to manage the toy store anymore. In fact, she is sick of managing things. Rachel puts all of the papers aside, into a heap, on the kitchen table, and makes poached chicken. Then she pours herself a glass of wine—So decadent, she thinks, drinking wine in the middle of the day—and waits.

  Harry arrives late, breathless. She is struck again by how small he is, and how she has spent so much time with large men. Perhaps, she decides, as he forgoes the poached chicken and instead undresses her right there in the kitchen, perhaps she has wasted her time on large men. Here she is, making love on her kitchen table—she sits, he stands, and they are eye to eye. Her résumé flutters to the floor. Like snow, she thinks. Like fallout. Like the stuffing from that old sofa in Paris. Is it an omen? She tries to focus on what she is doing, her legs wrapped around Harry’s waist, her breath coming out in tight little gasps, but she is too far ahead of herself, past this moment and seeing somewhere down the road. Living near that cemetery in Paris, Sofia in a Madeline outfit—blue coat, yellow hat, and Harry taking her like this, on tables and in doorways. What a future, she sees as Harry collapses against her, done.

  Rachel puts her hands on the back of his neck. She can feel the bristly hair growing there. The tops of his ears are red.

  “We’ve made quite a mess,” he says, looking down at her papers.

  He bends to pick them up, and she is suddenly embarrassed at what she had been thinking just a moment before. This man is a stranger. His body, in daylight, reminds her of a rooster, compact and sure of itself. He struts, she realizes as he gathers all of her papers and hands them to her. He has freckles she did not know about, an appendectomy scar.

  “My résumé,” she says, for something to say. The air between them has gotten to that fragile place.

  He brightens. “That’s why I called,” he says.

  She wishes he would put on his pants, but he doesn’t. Rooster, she thinks again, and pulls her tee shirt over her head.

  “All of our talk the other night, about Europe, and how you’d like to go back. The office I work with there needs someone. It’s a one year thing, a funny job really. Kind of a goodwill person, to woo possible donors for the restoration project. You would take them to the various sites, take them to dinner, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.”

  “My French isn’t great,” she says, stopping him. It’s too much, what he’s telling her.

  “That’s the thing. They want an American. Most of these donors are British or American.”

  “Really?” she says. She has stepped too far forward and too far back. Rachel tries to return to somewhere in the middle. Aren’t all people strangers when they first meet? she thinks. She tries to remember Peter as a stranger. Once he was someone she did not yet know.

  Harry has moved closer to her. “Are you interested?” he asks.

  “Definitely,” Rachel says.

  SHE DUTIFULLY REPORTS the phone call and the lunch at her house—he did stay and eat the poached chicken and finish the bottle of wine with her—to Mary at the playground on Thursday. Of course, Rachel leaves out what happened on the kitchen tab le, and the job possibility.

  “He seems really enthusiastic,” Rachel says as a finale to their date.

  But Mary is frowning.

  Rachel sighs. She thought Mary wanted something to happen between her and Harry. Once again she is reminded of how little she knows about Mary—who she really is, what she expects.

  “Did he ask you out again?” Mary says. Now she is watching the girls come down the bright orange curly slide.

  “Not in so many words,” Rachel says. She tries a different approach. “I like him. He’s not my usual type and I think that’s good.”

  “Mmmmm,” Mary says. She has started to nibble on dried fruit. For extra vitamins during her pregnancy, she explained earlier.

  “My ex-husband is very big. Tall and burly,” Rachel continues, though she wants to stop. Mary is annoying her. “I kind of like Harry’s size. And he’s very funny.”

  “If he hasn’t actually said he’ll call again, maybe he won’t,” Mary says.

  “Thanks a lot,” Rachel blurts. Mary was probably a virgin when she got married, she thinks. She doesn’t know anything. Still, she has managed to make Rachel feel unsettled.

  In the distance, Sofia pauses at the top of the slide to wave. “Watch me, Mommy,” she calls. “Are you watching?”

  Rachel thinks of this often as the days pass and Harry doesn’t call. Maybe Mary had known something, after all. Maybe she even knew about the kitchen table. Or the job. She would be upset that Rachel hadn’t told her everything. So would she then keep some information from Rachel? Throughout the we
ekend—it rains every day—as she thinks of ways to occupy Sofia, she almost calls Mary several times. She almost calls Harry. But in the end she just helps Sofia make a large floor puzzle of Madeline and Pepito, watches Mary Poppins and The Wizard of Oz too many times, and eats a lot of junk food. By the time Monday comes, Rachel is relieved to see Sofia off to day care, relieved even to go to work at the toy store.

  RACHEL HAS COME up with a list of excuses. He knows that Sofia is away this coming weekend; he will ask her out for Friday night. He is waiting the obligatory week between dates. He is in Paris. He is dead.

  She goes to the interview in Boston on Wednesday, dressed in her most sophisticated suit and a pair of borrowed patent leather Mary Janes with chunky heels that her friend Liz swears are “in.” Although she does not expect to see Harry, she decides that if she does, he will see how great she can look.

  In fact, she doesn’t see him. Instead, she sails from office to office in Government Center, talking to different people who are delighted to see her—Harry says you’re perfect for this job!—and who, finally, simply, offer her the job. She can start in September. She will have to move to Paris. They have lists of apartments, of schools for Sofia, of shipping companies for her furniture; they give her maps and a guide to Paris and a little booklet called Now that You Are an American Living in Paris. They say, Harry was right! You’re perfect for this job.

  Still, no word from Harry.

  But Rachel feels her life has taken a right turn, after three years of wrong moves and bad decisions. She looks around her crummy apartment and imagines where she and Sofia will be in two short months. Fuck Harry, she thinks. And when she explains to Sofia about the job, her daughter’s eyes grow wide. “Will I meet Madeline?” she says. “And Miss Clavel?” Rachel, for an instant, almost thinks they might.

  THE FIRST THING that goes wrong is that Rachel forgets to pack Sofia’s Madeline doll for her weekend with Peter.

  “I’m not even going to discuss her overdependence on her T-O—” Peter barks into the telephone.