An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  We made her tell us more. What kind of bathing suits did people wear at The Club?

  “One piece,” Joelle said. “Or a two piece that doesn’t show your belly button.”

  She explained that intermittent belly buttons were okay. That was when a woman walked and her belly button showed sometimes. But full out belly buttons were prohibited. The rule applied to kids as well. Embarrassed, we did not mention the way our mother sunbathed topless in our backyard, the way she said chase lounge, the way she stood on the front porch of our row house and yelled above the noisy crickets for us to come inside. Instead of nightly games of kick the can, we forced our neighbors to play our version of tennis or golf, using branches of trees and old musty balls from someone’s basement. Joelle only watched, sitting on our stoop, high above us, her sneakers so white they glowed.

  OUR NAMES—Molly, Sarah, Hannah—were common and dull. Not at all like Joelle, which sounded exotic, practically French. In every class or every house for one square block, there resided another Molly, another Sarah, another Hannah. But we never met another Joelle. We took this naming of us as still one more betrayal.

  “What were you thinking?” we asked our mother.

  “I was thinking of lovely little girl names,” she said, “for my lovely little girls.”

  We told her our names were horrid, ugly, everywhere.

  “Should I have named you Tallulah?” she asked us. “Hermione? What?”

  “Something fancy,” we said sadly. “Something like Joelle.”

  WHEN EXACTLY THE phone calls began, we could never pinpoint. It seemed that one summer they were suddenly there, the tinny ring of our black telephone, then the hushed voices, the tears, the slam of Joelle’s bedroom door, my father placating, pleading. Sometimes we huddled in the hallway, trying to hear what was being said, but the words always sounded vague and muddled behind the closed doors. Sometimes we came upon Joelle whispering into the telephone. She would glare at us and stop talking until we left the room. Then, our ears pressed against the door, we would try to make out what exactly she was saying.

  Our mother grew silent and edgy. Whenever the phone rang she jumped as if she’d been shot, then answered it softly, turning her head away from us. More than once we stumbled inside from the blazing Baltimore heat for more Popsicles or to complain about how bored and hot we’d grown, to find her sitting at our big wooden kitchen table, crying.

  All summer, this went on, until we stopped thinking about it and accepted it as part of the grown-up world our parents inhabited. Instead we focused on other things: stringing long strands of beads to hang in our doorway, monitoring the growth of a litter of newborn kittens who resided in our neighbor’s garage, begging our mother for one of those kittens, counting the days until we finally left the city and went to our rented cottage in Rehoboth Beach. We traded 45s with our friends. We made up dances—the Frog and the Cobra. We pretended our backyard was The Club, and threw out anyone who yelled there. We begged our mother for some of the little white socks Joelle always wore, ankle length with pastel pom-poms on the backs, and when she finally relented, we wore them day after day, with the sticks and the musty balls, practicing our golf and tennis.

  The weekend we were finally leaving for the beach, Joelle arrived at our house with our father. She had her lovely suntanned arms folded tightly across her chest and whenever we spoke to her she turned her head, lifting it upward so her nose pointed at the ceiling. We all begged her to talk to us. But she wouldn’t, not to us or our father or our mother, who walked around looking as tight as the blue metal top we liked to spin across the kitchen floor.

  At a sullen dinner on the screened in porch, we tried to entice her with plans for the beach. Last year, we reminded her, we had found a jellyfish. We talked about the french fries available there, salty and greasy and hot. We told her that Hurricane Margaret was headed north from Puerto Rico. We might have to get masking tape and make X’s for our windows. The waves, we said, would be tall. Maybe even a hundred feet high.

  “Shut up,” Joelle told us. They were the first words she’d spoken all day, and they flew out of her mouth like gunfire. “Just shut up. All of you.”

  In a flash our mother was out of her seat and leaning right into Joelle’s face. “Don’t you ever say that to my children again. Ever. Do you understand? I have had enough of you. Of this. Do you hear me?”

  We stared at the two of them, silent and unsure of who to hate—Joelle for telling us to shut up, or our mother for offending Joelle. We did not know what to do or what might happen next. It seemed like right then a car screeched up to our house, but maybe that was some time later. A car did screech up that night, its door flying open and banging shut. We heard the unfamiliar sound of high heels pounding up our front walk.

  Then just one word, spoken into the hot summer air: “Joelle.”

  We looked through the screen, where moths clung, batting their gossamer wings, and saw Joelle’s mother standing on the steps that led to our house, her arms folded in such a way that she appeared to be hugging herself. In the glare of the single bulb that hung over the front stairs, we could make out every detail. She was the tallest woman we had ever seen, or so she seemed standing there like that. Her hair, no longer golden, was pulled into a tight chignon, and everything she wore matched: pale yellow pants and tunic top, large wooden earrings painted red and yellow, with matching large wooden beads around her neck. She had on nylons under the wide legs of her pants, and high heels in a color we would later call taupe, but then thought of as the color of flesh. Her lips and cheeks were pink.

  Everything about her shocked us. But mostly what we saw was that she was not, as we had thought, beautiful. At least not in the soft and exotic way we had imagined. She looked like women we saw pushing carts at the Safeway, choosing fruits and vegetables with care. She looked like anyone, different than our mother, but not the extraordinary, magical woman we had hoped. She was simply a mother—someone else’s mother at that.

  We all—the three of us, our parents, and Joelle—stayed seated on the red folding chairs at the red card table, our plates full of our mother’s famous couscous salad, the one with cucumbers and kalamata olives, and feta cheese; the one she always took to potluck suppers. Joelle’s mother spoke again. “Joelle,” she said, in a cool voice, “come on now.” We could imagine that voice at The Club, floating across the shimmering blue of the swimming pool, beckoning Joelle to her. We could imagine it whispering good night. But we could not then understand the power in that voice. With those few words it took Joelle away from us and changed our lives.

  Joelle stood, but it was our mother who stepped outside. “Please,” she said to Joelle’s mother. “Let’s not do this. Not in front of my girls. I don’t want them upset by any of this. Let’s go inside with Hal and talk like adults.”

  “I’ve talked all summer,” Joelle’s mother said. “She doesn’t want to come here anymore. She wants to come home.”

  This shocked us. Later, the three of us hot and sweaty in our bed, our legs tangled together, we would try to sort it out, how all of those whispered phone calls had been pleas from Joelle to leave us, to not come back. We felt betrayed by Joelle, by her mother, by the things we could not even begin to understand.

  “After all this time,” our mother said, “why can’t you let it go? It was all so long ago.”

  Joelle’s mother did not answer her. She just said in her cool voice, “Joelle, let’s go. I’ve come to take you home.”

  Joelle took the napkin from her lap and folded it into a neat square, then got to her feet. She did not look at any of us, not even our father. She just walked away, past us, past her own mother who stood in the same pose Joelle had held all day, arms folded across her chest, face turned upward so that her nose pointed toward the ceiling. Joelle opened the screen door carefully and stepped outside, into the hot August night.

  Our father was on his feet now too, but somehow we understood that this was between our mothers—
Joelle’s and ours. We understood the way it was, that Joelle would always belong to her mother, and we would always belong to our mother. The adults said things, but we were no longer listening. Instead, we let the realization that we could not have a different mother, that we belonged to this one, settle in. Joelle and her mother walked down our path, side by side, to their Ford and we watched them drive away from us.

  Eventually, of course, Joelle would visit again, awkwardly at first and then slowly with a confidence and understanding that somehow she straddled two families, two lives. She never again seemed as mysterious as she had before that summer night. In the way that children have, we put aside that which we could not have or comprehend and let both Joelle and her mother become ordinary in our eyes. They both lost the hold on us they used to have and instead developed into two separate people, fixtures in our lives in different ways, but firmly a part of us: the big sister with a different mother, our father’s ex-wife.

  As for us that August, we went to the beach, where we brought our mother perfect shells that we collected along the shore. In the sunshine there she seemed to grow beautiful. Had her hair always had that particular wave to it? And wasn’t the way her front teeth overlapped interesting? We wore the new bikinis she had bought for us, and brightly colored rubber flip-flops, and wreaths of black-eyed Susans. Every chance we had, we hugged our mother tight. We whispered that we loved her because we did, irrevocably, unconditionally, eternally. We don’t want any mother but you, we assured her, and ourselves. It was August and hot and summer was coming to an end. Even there, at the shore, we could smell autumn approaching. We could feel its chill in the air, sending goosebumps up our arms at night. Our mother pulled us into her arms and held us, thankfully, close.

  ESCAPES

  WHAT I DO with my niece Jennifer is this. I ride the cable cars again and again, paying four dollars each time. She is fourteen and gets a thrill hanging off the side of the car as it plunges down San Francisco’s steep hills. She says it is like flying, and indeed the wind does pick up her Esprit scarf, the one decorated with purple and yellow palm trees, and tosses it stiffly backward in the same way that Charles Lindbergh’s scarves appear in old flying photos of him.

  I take her to Candlestick Park for the Giants’ last game of the season and sit shivering under an old blanket I bought in Mexico long ago. Jennifer does not understand baseball, but I try to explain it to her. Three outs to an inning, nine innings to a game, the importance of a good shortstop. But she does not get it. When Chris Sabo of the Reds strikes out she says, “Caryn, why is it still their turn? You said three outs to an inning.”

  “But three strikes,” I tell her, “is just one out.” Jennifer shakes her head and closes her eyes for the rest of the game. Even when I nudge her and say, “Look! A home run!” she keeps her eyes closed, does not move.

  We spend an entire day at the Esprit factory outlet. Jennifer fills a shopping cart with bargains. She is tall, like her father, my brother, was. She is fourteen and already almost six feet, and so thin that her hip bones poke out from her faded blue jeans. She does not have to wear a bra. She keeps her hair long, so that it flies around her head like a golden cloud. One of the saleswomen asks Jennifer if she is a model. “Me?” Jennifer says, confused, embarrassed. She slouches even more than usual and shakes her yellow hair. Then she walks away. But when we go into the dressing room and she sees that there is no privacy, no curtains or doors, that everyone is standing half-naked in front of mirrors, Jennifer leaves her shopping cart and walks out of the store without trying on a thing.

  What I do not do is mention Jennifer’s arms. Tiny uneven scars creep up her wrists like a child’s sloppy cross-stitch. She wears long-sleeved blouses, and dozens of tiny bracelets, but still the scars peek through. I pretend that Jennifer’s wrists are as smooth as the rest of her. That the scars are not even there. I don’t ask her any questions about it. Instead, I take her to the Top of the Mark at sunset. I bring her to Seal Rock where we stare through telescopes at the sea lions sunning themselves.

  RIGHT BEFORE JENNIFER came to stay with me, my boyfriend, Luke, left. He said he needed to try his luck in New York. Maybe, he said, he’d become really famous there. Like Laurence Olivier. That was in August and I haven’t heard from him since.

  Sherry, Jennifer’s mother, called me on a Saturday morning in late September and said, “You’ve got to take her. She’s been kicked out of school. Sell her. Adopt her. I don’t care. Just take her. I’m going nuts.” I looked out my window at the California sky, a bluer, higher sky than anywhere else in the world. Since Luke left, I hadn’t done much of anything except swim two miles a day, go to work at the tiny magazine office on Polk Street where I’m a copy editor, and dream of where to escape to next. Sometimes, I rented old movies, ones with Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford in them. Ones that forced me to cry.

  While I looked at the sky I thought about my life as a flat straight line like a dead person’s heart on a monitor. Sherry told me that Jennifer was really out of hand now. “And I have my studies to worry about,” Sherry added. She was in travel-agent school. On weekends, she got to take junkets to Puerto Vallarta and New Orleans.

  I had not seen Jennifer in almost two years when Sherry called me that day. My brother David had been dead for almost ten years. So I’m still not sure what made me say yes, I’ll take her for a while. Except for maybe the thought of sharing that ultrablue sky with someone seemed so appealing, and the thought of a few bleeps and peaks in my life seemed like a good idea.

  Before she hung up, Sherry said, “Don’t feel compelled to talk about her cutting her wrists or anything. She wants to put that behind her.”

  “What?” I said. Had I missed something here? I thought. Jennifer had cut her wrists? They say suicide is contagious and David had done it, hung himself in his jail cell where he was serving time for dealing drugs. “I thought you weren’t going to tell her,” I told Sherry. We had invented a story when it happened to David. He was in a car accident, we’d decided. He fell asleep at the wheel.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “It must run in your family or something.”

  “It does not,” I said, wishing I had not agreed to take Jennifer. What did I know about teenagers? Or suicide? Or anything at all?

  ON FISHERMAN’S WHARF, Jennifer buys more bracelets. They are copper or gold, with tiny beads in the center or chunks of stones, turquoise and amethyst. I wait, bored, gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge while she chooses them from the street vendors that line the sidewalks. She has been with me for two weeks and shows no signs of leaving. Yesterday, she got a postcard from Sherry in Acapulco, written entirely in Spanish. She read it, her face a blank, then tossed it in the trash. “I didn’t know you could read Spanish,” I told her.

  “I can’t,” Jennifer said.

  Jennifer loves all the tourist trap things around the wharf. She spends hours in the souvenir shops and pushing her way through the crowds. She does not smile much, but here her face softens and I almost expect her to break into a grin. David was a great smiler. And so was Sherry. But their daughter’s face is set and hard. A mask.

  “What’s that?” she asks me as we eat our crab cocktails at the crowded food stall. We are crushed against a family of tourists wearing identical pink-and-blue-striped sweatshirts, all fresh-faced and blond.

  I look at where she is pointing, across the bay.

  “Alcatraz,” I tell her.

  She frowns. “Alcatraz.”

  “It was a maximum-security prison.”

  “Can we go there?” she asks me. Her eyes are topaz. They remind me of a tiger’s.

  “Maybe next week,” I sigh, tired of sightseeing.

  “Okay,” Jennifer says, fixing her eyes on the hunk of rock in the water. Around her neck, a charm on a chain catches in the sun. A cable car.

  “That’s pretty,” I say. “When did you buy it?”

  She looks at me now. “You can have it if you want,” she says. She slips the chai
n over her head and holds it out to me.

  “No, that’s okay,” I tell her.

  But she is putting it on me even as I protest. The little gold cable car settles against my collarbone. I feel guilty for not wanting to take her to see Alcatraz and I promise myself we’ll definitely go next week. If she hasn’t gone home to Miami by then.

  I GET A LETTER from Luke in New York. It is written on paper with his initials on the top, and sounds like it is from a stranger. He tells me about the weather there, and how difficult it is to figure out the subway system. He signs the letter “Sincerely, Luke.”

  “Who’s Luke?” Jennifer asks me.

  I did not show her the letter, so I figure she has been looking through my things. Somehow, this does not even make me angry. My tiny apartment on Fourth Avenue has been so lonely that the idea of sharing it and everything in it makes me almost happy. For a while, Luke’s shirts were crammed into my one closet, his deodorant and toothbrush and comb cluttered my bathroom. Now, Jennifer’s things are mingling with mine. When I turn off the bathroom light, her toothbrush glows orange. Her multitude of bracelets are everywhere I look, as if they are actually reproducing.

  So I tell her who Luke is without mentioning that she really shouldn’t be reading my letters.

  “Did you love him?” she asks me.

  I only shrug. “Who knows?” I say.

  “Did my mother love my father?” she asks then, suddenly.

  I answer, “Yes,” immediately, but then I wonder about my answer. To me, Sherry and David were like Bonnie and Clyde. They were always doing something illegal. Their apartment was filled with an air of danger. Once, in a kitchen drawer, I saw dozens of stolen credit cards. Their cars disappeared mysteriously. They kept scales and spoons and plastic bags where other people kept pots and pans. How do I know that they loved each other? But Jennifer seems satisfied with my easy answer.