An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  She did know, of course; Melinda had filled her in. But what Dora said was, “I hardly think your father killed himself.”

  That bark again, then Peter stuck his face in hers. “What do you call it when someone smokes so much cocaine that they jump out a fifth-story window running from imaginary monsters? Huh?”

  Dora reared up to her full height, five feet, eight inches. She had always believed in the benefit of calcium and as a result had not shrunk like other women her age. Why, Madeline Dumfey had died a full three inches shorter than she had lived.

  “An accident,” Dora said, “I call it an accident.”

  DORA DID NOT see the point of dwelling on her losses. But often, at night, they seized her and shook her awake. Sometimes she found herself groping for Bill on the other side of the bed, reaching and reaching as if her life depended on finding him there until, finally, panting, she had to remind herself that he had died on April 14, 1983, from lung cancer. A picture of him taking those last gasping breaths in a hospital bed would come to her and she would close her eyes and press the lids hard until it vanished.

  Other times she awoke thinking she had to call Madeline about one thing or another and then a strange uneasiness took hold as Dora remembered that Madeline was dead. They had known each other since 1943 when they worked side by side as secretaries at the army base in Quonset Point. Dora wore her hair in a Veronica Lake peekaboo cut back then; Madeline favored more of a Gene Tierney wave. They went together every Friday afternoon after work to Isabella’s Parisian Hair Salon in Wickford to get their hair done. Both of them had slim hips, good legs, a wide collection of shoes. They shared nylons, a real commodity back then, and lipstick. They double-dated, covered for each other when they wanted to give a guy the bum’s rush. They stood up for each other at their weddings; Dora wore a deep maroon velvet for Madeline’s and Madeline wore an icy blue satin at Dora’s. Those were the things that came to mind when Dora woke up with an urgency to call Madeline: the smell of the chemicals at their beauty parlor near the base, the feel of a nylon stocking sliding on her leg, the crush of velvet against cool skin on a November morning.

  Since Peter had arrived, what woke Dora was the feeling that she needed to check on the children, the way she would when they were young. She used to walk through the darkness of the house and slip into their rooms and make sure they were breathing. First Tillie, a neat sleeper, on her back with her covers tucked under her chin. Then Dan, often upside down in his bed, his sheets and blankets a tangle around his waist and feet. Dora would stand and count their breaths before climbing back into her own bed, satisfied.

  PETER SAT IN the kitchen, ate entire boxes of Oreo cookies, drank milk straight from the bottle, and talked to Rebecca. At first Dora reprimanded him, reminding him of her promise to his mother. But Peter would just stare at her with those practically albino eyes, popping whole cookies into his mouth while she explained. Really, Dora didn’t care if he talked to the girl. Talking wasn’t going to change anything. So she gave up and let him do it.

  “. . . so Polly’s coming over a lot? Her mother lets her?” Dora heard him say one afternoon.

  Dora was making baked scrod for dinner, with parsley potatoes. He didn’t like anything she cooked but she continued to make complete meals for the two of them despite that. Over her roast beef and mashed potatoes he’d asked her if there was anyplace around to get a good burrito. The night she’d made leg of lamb he’d requested fish sticks. Last night he’d described something called Hot Pockets, a frozen bread type thing stuffed with meat and vegetables. Dora had nodded and taken another pork chop from the platter.

  “I’m surprised her mother lets her. Really surprised. Her mother’s like so uptight. She’s a Republican, you know.”

  Dora glanced at him. She was a Republican, after all. But she would have let Tillie visit her pregnant friend. She would have considered it a positive experience for Tillie, to know that there were consequences for actions.

  “What?” Peter said, cupping his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

  Dora spread the crumbled Ritz crackers over the scrod and put the pan in the oven. “I think you have foolish ideas, that’s all,” she said, and set the timer.

  “Excuse me,” Peter said. “But I wasn’t talking to you.”

  Dora shrugged.

  “You’re eavesdropping,” he said.

  “I’m making dinner,” Dora told him.

  “Anyway, I think Polly is probably sick of Jen and Justin and that’s why she’s hanging around so much,” Peter said, presumably not to Dora.

  Dora took out two of the blue and white everyday dishes and began to set the table around Peter. She tried to picture the girl on the other end, but could only come up with an image of Melinda at that age, a sullen girl who always looked like she was not to be trusted. She’d slunk into their home during dinner one night, Dan’s arm protectively around her waist, dressed in torn jeans and brown suede Indian moccasins. Those shoes had bothered Dora. Earlier that day she had commented to Madeline Dumfey that it seemed loose girls wore those. Then right in her kitchen, hanging on to her son, Melinda appeared with that very type of shoe. “That girl’s trouble,” Dora had announced as soon as Melinda and Dan had gone. And of course she’d been right. Before Melinda he had never even gotten drunk. After Melinda’s appearance in their kitchen Dan had started with marijuana and who knew what else. The school was calling every other day about his absences. One night the police brought him home, stoned, confused, and with Melinda.

  Dora sighed. She was holding two forks, the timer was buzzing, and Peter was staring at her hard.

  “Gran?” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’m fine.” She went to the oven for the scrod, her heart twisted in grief. In her own lifetime she had taken chances. When she was only twenty she’d fallen foolishly in love with a married man. He had taken her to a lopsided ski cabin he and his wife owned in Maine and Dora lost her virginity on the floor there; he felt too guilty to have sex in his marriage bed. The next morning, feeling reckless, Dora took two runs down the bunny slope, then boarded the chairlift to the top of the mountain where she promptly fell and broke her leg. The man drove her home in a stony silence and never called her again. My how she had carried on! she remembered now, making Madeline drive her past his house, her leg stuck in that awful cast for two entire months, a reminder of her indiscretion.

  She’d told servicemen on their way overseas that she loved them when she didn’t, sad young men who did not always come back. Dora had enjoyed the way they used to cling to her, as if she mattered more than anything else. She remembered one young man from Pennsylvania who was headed to France. He had cried after they’d made love because he was so afraid to die. So she knew about risk, how any of those trysts could have resulted in pregnancy, how the wife could have discovered the affair. And worse. When her own children were small she’d had an affair with Bill’s partner, an affair that lasted almost two years. She’d even considered leaving Bill for him. Talk about risk. There were dinners with the man and his wife, even a week long vacation together in Puerto Rico with all of their children. Like the foolish people they were, Dora and the man had met every night on the beach and made love while Bill and Gloria looked over them from the twenty-eighth floor of the Old San Juan Hotel.

  But all of that was nothing compared to Dan. Dora liked to blame Melinda for what happened but she knew the truth: it was drugs that took her son from her. He and Melinda drifted around a world that Dora could not even imagine. They moved from job to job and city to city so much that entire months passed when she couldn’t even find them. Landlords had no forwarding address, operators had no new numbers. Finally the night came when Dan called Dora, waking her from a fitful sleep. He was leaving Melinda, he’d told her. He was checking into rehab. “I have to save myself,” he’d said, and she heard the desperateness in his voice. Dora still could feel the way dryness gripped her throat that night. She’d hung up and drunk glass afte
r glass of water, unable to quench the horrible thirst. Before she hung up she’d told him that she would pay for treatment, if that’s what it took. She told him it was about time he’d realized where Melinda had led him. “If you leave her,” she’d said, “you can come back here and start over. You can even bring the boy.” It wasn’t until a week later, when she got the call that he was dead, that Dora regretted all she hadn’t said that night. She hadn’t said she was proud of him for finally realizing he needed help. She hadn’t told him she loved him.

  “Gran!” Peter shouted, and he ran over to her.

  That was when Dora felt the hot butter on her leg, burning her as it dripped from the pan. She let the boy take the fish from her and lead her to a chair. Already an ugly blister appeared on her calf, and smaller ones ran down to her ankle like a trail of tears.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  But she stayed seated, feeling the hot pain surge through her as Peter grabbed a dishtowel and ice cubes. She watched him move through the kitchen as if she were watching a movie. His own strong calves under khaki shorts, the golden hair on his arms. A stranger, kneeling at her feet, pressing a cool cloth to her burns.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded.

  Dora took her hand and placed it on his bent head. She kept it there until he looked up, searching for a clue that she was fine. The thing was, Dora did not want him to go away from her. She didn’t want to let go.

  “Another minute,” she lied. “Just another minute.” Again Dora rested her hand on his head.

  CHECK THE CHILDREN. Stumbling, Dora pulled on her robe and walked barefoot down the dark hallway. She should get a nightlight, she thought as she pushed open the door to Tillie’s room. A nightlight to keep everyone safe. Tillie’s bed was a mess, the summer quilt in the tumbling blocks pattern was on the floor, the sheets a knot beside it. Not at all like Tillie, Dora thought, her heart racing. She took another step into the room before she remembered. Tillie was in California. That’s where she lived. Dan’s boy slept here now.

  Her heart still beating fast, Dora dropped onto the chair at Tillie’s old desk, where photographs of Tillie as a teenager stared back at her. She had taken ballet forever, then without warning switched to modern dance. Even though Dora never really enjoyed those later performances, she’d enjoyed watching her daughter. In one of the pictures, Tillie sat on the grass at Roger Williams Park, strumming a guitar, grinning. Braless, the outline of her nipples poked through the cotton tee shirt. Dora lifted the picture to look closer.

  Right after Dan had died, that very next winter, Tillie had a breast cancer scare. They’d done a lumpectomy, some radiation. Dora had flown out to San Francisco to be with her, had driven her through the maze of unfamiliar streets to doctors and hospitals, keeping her tone upbeat even as her gut ached with fear. When Madeline Dumfey drove Dora to Logan Airport for her flight to San Francisco, she asked her if she felt life was being unfair to her. Bill gone. And Dan. And now Tillie sick. Dora had been surprised by the question. Life unfair? She had known three big loves, she had borne two children, she had traveled as far as China, she was old and alive, she had her own health. She had listed these things to Madeline. “But to lose everyone,” Madeline had said. “Really, Dora, you must let yourself get angry. You must.” Someone, Dora no longer remembered who, had once said that one death was a tragedy, but many deaths were a statistic. Dora told Madeline this and Madeline had blinked back at her in that way she had, part disbelief, part disgust. “Really, Dora. That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  Now here was Madeline, dead, and Tillie fine except for a small ugly scar on her left breast. Dora did not feel equipped to understand any of it. What of all those boys she’d held who’d been killed in the Pacific, at Omaha Beach, at sea? What of the other men she’d loved, dead now too, both of them? Bill’s partner had died right at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in front of a Winslow Homer painting, of a massive heart attack. If that hadn’t happened, it was possible that she would have run off with him.

  Standing, Dora heard the low hum of a voice downstairs. She followed it, carefully holding the banister as she walked. There in the kitchen, hanging up the telephone, was Peter. He looked at her, weary.

  “It could be any day now,” he said. “She’s dilated two centimeters. Her back hurts.”

  Dora allowed herself to ask the question that had been on her lips since Melinda had first called back in the spring.

  “Why the hell didn’t she get an abortion?” Dora said.

  “She’s Baptist. You know. Super religious. She thinks she’ll go to hell for something like that.”

  “That’s plain stupid,” Dora said. She sat across from Peter. “What kind of nincompoop is this girl?”

  He laughed. For the first time it did not sound like a harsh bark. Dora laughed too.

  SHE TOOK HIM to lunch at the Rue de L’Espoir. “You can’t sit waiting by the phone,” she told him as she hustled him into the car. “Having a baby can take a very long time. I was in labor twenty-eight hours with your father.”

  Dora ordered her martini with her lunch. She always enjoyed a good martini.

  “May I ask,” she said to her grandson, “how all this came to pass?”

  “Come on, Gran,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “You know how girls get pregnant.”

  “I’m not sure I know how teenage girls get pregnant by boys who don’t even love them,” she said. The martini was perfect, dry and cold.

  “Love,” he said, practically spitting out the word. “What good is loving someone? Then they die, or leave, or don’t love you back. Big deal.”

  “Well,” Dora said, “everyone is going to die. Even you. That’s one of humankind’s most foolish ideas, that everyone will die except you.”

  “You know what my mother says about you?” Peter said, narrowing his eyes again. “She says you’re a tough old bird. Cold hearted too.”

  Dora rolled her eyes. “How would Melinda know anything about me at all? As far as I can tell she was in a drug-induced haze until my son died. Then she got scared enough to straighten herself out, go to law school, and join the real world.” She leaned across her sandwich and added, “Am I cold hearted because I call things as I see them?”

  Peter smiled. She was almost starting to like the boy. “Not at all.” He sighed. “I guess maybe I do love Rebecca a little. I mean, I love being with her and everything. Touching her and stuff.”

  “Yes, well, that’s obvious,” Dora said, blushing a little. “You know, Tillie, your Aunt Tillie, I mean, got herself in similar trouble. Of course, she was older, in college, and she came home for Christmas with the news. I said, Tillie, you are far too young and immature to have a baby. I’ll arrange an abortion for you and that was that. Of course, Tillie agreed.”

  Peter said, his mouth full of hamburger, “I thought she was . . . you know . . .”

  “A lesbian. Yes. Apparently that wasn’t always the case.”

  Peter swallowed and then looked at Dora, all seriousness. “Boy, you’ve had a sad life, haven’t you?”

  Dora finished her martini. “Not at all. If you asked anyone about their life when they were seventy-eight years old it would be full of the same sorts of stories. I guarantee you. This baby of yours that’s getting born is just one of many blips in your lifetime.”

  “But it breaks my heart,” Peter said.

  “What does?” Dora asked him, surprised.

  “That I’ll never even lay eyes on it. That I’ll grow old with a child in the world that I don’t even know. That I’m losing something important.”

  Without warning, Dora felt tears spring to her eyes. Hastily, she closed them and pressed her fingers to her eyelids, hoping her grandson did not see her do it.

  “I THOUGHT YOU said it took forever!” Peter shouted.

  Dora was surprised to see his cheeks wet with tears, surprised that he would cry so freely.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and her own
voice sounded weak and feeble.

  Peter stood in the middle of the kitchen, still rumpled from sleep. His thin cotton striped pajamas and the way his cowlick stood straight up like a miniature bale of hay made him seem like a child rather than a young man who had just become a father.

  “Sorry? That’s all you can say?”

  His hands were placed on his hips, his jaw jutted out. Dora thought of Dan, how he would stand in this very spot in this very way and challenge her. The thought made her dizzy enough to drop, sighing, into a chair and hold her head in her hands.

  “Her mother said she had it yesterday afternoon,” Peter was saying, his voice bordering on shrill. “The kid’s already like a day old practically.”

  Dora shook her head. He would never see this child of his anyway. Hadn’t he told her that the girl wasn’t even going to hold it? That the adopting parents would be right there, waiting, ready to take the baby away with them?

  “What can it possibly matter,” Dora said evenly, “that you got the news twelve hours after the fact?”

  “Almost a day later!” he insisted.

  Slowly, Dora stood and made her way to the stove to put on the kettle. She didn’t like noise and discussion before she’d had her cup of Earl Grey. She never had. When the children were still at home she would wake up early, make her tea, then slip back into bed to drink it quietly. Now here she was at a time in her life when she should not have to get screamed at and be accused right in her own kitchen, before she’d had her tea.

  She concentrated on the kettle, the way it shook slightly as the water began to heat.

  “You haven’t told me what she had,” Dora said.

  A puff of steam rose from the spout, then the low whistle began.

  Peter’s voice was soft now. “A boy,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe it himself.

  A sharp pang of regret shot through Dora’s gut. A baby boy. Her Dan’s grandson. Her own great-grandchild. She tried to keep her hand steady as she poured the boiling water into her mug, a lumpy thing that Tillie had made in a pottery class some years ago. For an instant Dora believed that she would turn around and find her children there: Dan’s face still creased from sleep, his frown deep, Tillie’s sunnier self humming tunelessly. She would turn, Dora let herself think, and her children would ask for French toast and quarters for treats after school and their mittens and erasers for their pencils and hair ribbons and papers that needed signing. She took a breath and spun around expectantly. But of course there was just this other boy. Peter. Still crying, his face blotchy and swollen now, he waited for something from her, something she could not possibly give him.