An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  EVERYONE AT THE artists’ colony assumed Joanne and Helen were lesbians.

  A sculptor who “worked in wire” told Helen that every lesbian he knew wore shoes like hers.

  A muralist named Ali told Helen that she had loved women at different times in her life. “When it was appropriate.”

  There was a nightly cocktail party followed by a slide show of one of the artists’ work. The muralist painted familiar comic strip characters with their genitalia showing—Snoopy, Nancy, Cathy. Helen felt that she did not understand anything anyone was doing there. Everyone had come alone, except for a man named Andrew, who wouldn’t tell her what he worked in. “That kind of question offends me,” he said. Andrew had brought his children and a young nanny that everyone assumed he was sleeping with. His children were named Monday and Tuesday and were pasty skinned and sullen; the nanny, Danielle, was plump and cheerful, with honey-blond hair and bright eyes. Andrew, Helen decided, looked unclean. Like a man who didn’t wash.

  The slide show the first night was the work of a woman named Leila. Leila painted the names of body parts on wood along with their definition, function, and other meanings they might have. Helen was a little drunk by the time the slide show began, drunk in the way you can only get from too much sweet white wine and not enough food. She watched Leila’s slides loom in front of her on the wall. LIVER, she read. A LARGE COMPOUND, TUBULAR, VERTEBRATE GLAND . . . The words jumped crazily and Helen had to close her eyes for an instant. ONE WHO LIVES IN A SPECIFIC MANNER, she read when she opened them again.

  Then the slide changed abruptly and Helen was faced with a bigger than life definition of SPLEEN. She gasped. THIS ORGAN CONSIDERED AS THE SEAT OF MIRTH, MERRIMENT, CAPRICE.

  “I lost my spleen,” Helen whispered to the person next to her. In the dark, she could not make out who it was. She didn’t even care. She was overwhelmed by guilt and some other unnameable emotion—grief, perhaps?

  The person beside her leaned in so close to Helen that their shoulders touched. It was Danielle, the nanny. Helen felt Danielle’s hair against her neck.

  “Awesome,” Danielle whispered back.

  Foolishly, Helen grabbed Danielle’s soft hand. It felt like freshly kneaded dough, begging Helen to press it, which she did, aggressively.

  “Do you think that means I’ve lost my ability for happiness?” Helen asked her. She was no longer whispering. In fact, several people had turned around in their seats to glare.

  Danielle remained unnerved. “I never knew,” she said, keeping her own voice low, “that spleens were so expendable. Like an appendix. Or tonsils. I thought if you lost your spleen you’d die.”

  Helen was gulping air too quickly. Soon she would have the hiccups. That was what happened when she got nervous. She would get hiccups that nothing could stop—not holding her breath or being frightened or large spoonfuls of sugar.

  “No,” Helen managed to say. “You can die from multiple head injuries.”

  “Bummer,” Danielle said.

  She had not pulled away from Helen’s desperate grip on her hand, and they now sat calmly, holding hands, Helen’s hiccups beginning to escape.

  The screen said: THYROID: OBSELETE DEFINITION: SHAPED LIKE A DOOR.

  THAT NIGHT IN their little cabin, Joanne said to Helen, “Maybe it was a mistake, you coming here?”

  Helen still had the hiccups. She was remembering how someone had once told her that a man in Scotland had the hiccups for thirteen years and then he finally killed himself.

  “I mean,” Joanne said, “why were you holding hands with the nanny?”

  Helen couldn’t think of a reasonable answer. “She has the softest hands in the world,” she said finally.

  Even though they were in the woods, it was noisy outside. People seemed to be running about, laughing loudly. Doors slammed. In the distance, Helen heard salsa music.

  “I’m not sorry you came,” Joanne said, which meant of course that she was, “but you have to respect people’s work here.”

  “I do,” Helen said quickly, afraid that Joanne was going to make her leave, send her back to the apartment in Providence, where Scott’s clothes still hung in her closet, where the photograph of them sailing last summer—smiling, sunburned, arms thrown intimately around each other’s bodies—would stare out at her as soon as she walked in.

  “Leila is a very well respected artist,” Joanne began.

  Helen hiccuped loudly.

  Joanne sighed, rolled over in her creaky cot.

  The salsa music grew louder.

  “I’ve got this strange urge to have a child,” Helen said. “A baby.”

  Joanne didn’t answer, but her bedsprings twanged some more, reminding Helen of the sad notes of a country-western song.

  AT THE COCKTAIL party before the slide show the next night, Helen told Leila that her work had moved her immensely. Helen was afraid that everyone was going to gang up on her, force her to go. Joanne was right: she had to make more of an effort. Leila had pink skin and pale hair and the overall appearance of a rabbit. As Helen talked she was aware of her own nose twitching.

  “Yes,” Leila said to Helen, “I noticed you reacting.”

  Leila sounded like Greta Garbo. Everything about her was unnerving.

  “Because,” Helen said, pretending to have a bit of a cold so as to hide the twitching, “I lost my spleen in a tragic accident.”

  The words were true, but they seemed grandiose, embellished. But it had been tragic. Even now she could exactly recall the particular way the sunlight bounced through the windshield that morning, the smooth-shaven planes of Scott’s face, his jaw chewing Dentyne fast. She remembered for the first time that he’d had two dots of blood from shaving on his neck. “Vampire bite,” she’d said, poking him with two fingers.

  “The spleen,” Leila was telling her, “is a contradictory organ, don’t you think? Merriment. Melancholy.” She moved her hands like a scale to demonstrate.

  “Melancholy?” Helen asked, trying not to twitch.

  “You paid attention, no?” Leila said sharply.

  “Yes, of course,” Helen said. She downed her chablis and tried to find the table with the cheese log.

  Had she missed something important? she wondered as she nibbled the sharp cheddar rolled in walnuts that she’d hastily smeared on a water cracker. Melancholy and merriment? Did that mean that she would lose all emotion now that she’d lost her spleen? She thought of Scott again. Before that inexplicable thing went wrong, they used to laugh together. It was what they’d had, she decided. What they’d lost. Merriment. Both of them could watch Some Like It Hot any time, any place. They played a word game that went like this: she’d say center violin and he’d say middle fiddle. Bird ghost. Robin goblin. Northern tissue. Yankee hanky. Helen started to cry.

  That soft, doughy hand found hers again.

  “I’ve been thinking about your spleen and stuff,” Danielle said. “Once, when I was really bummed out, I dyed my hair red. It felt so good. Like, I was a redhead.”

  Helen looked at Danielle’s honey-blond hair. It was straight and fine, parted in the middle, tucked behind her ears.

  “There’s this woman here? In town,” Danielle continued. “Ashley? She does a good job. Everyone who comes up here at least gets highlights from her.”

  Helen’s hand twisted a piece of her own brown hair. She had always liked that her hair was a good, solid medium brown. Not auburn or chestnut or mahogany.

  “You don’t have to go ballistic,” Danielle told her. “But you’d be surprised.”

  “Ashley?” Helen said.

  “Everyone goes to her.” Danielle smiled. She had the sweet, innocent smile of a child.

  The lights dimmed for the slide show. Helen sat down right where she was on the floor. Probably that would be considered disrespectful. But her side ached the way a person aches when they are homesick, or heartbroken.

  HELEN KEPT WAKING up all night with the feeling that someone was holding her. Not ho
lding her down or even tightly. She was just aware of arms around her waist, the sense of warm flesh, the weight of someone else. But of course when she woke up, she was alone. Joanne slept across the room. The salsa music played. People laughed. No one wrapped their arms around her. Helen settled back down in her small cot. But as she drifted back to sleep, the arms, the embrace, returned.

  ON HER WAY to Ashley’s—which was a short walk down a dirt road, past cows grazing, a broken fence, a pile of rocks, those were the directions she got—Helen practiced what she would say. I don’t know why I’m doing this, she’d say. I like my hair. Nothing drastic, please. Nothing ballistic.

  But then she saw the gently curving path that led to Ashley’s log cabin and Helen, out of nowhere, imagined herself as a platinum blonde. Then with blue-black hair. She could even picture herself with I Love Lucy red. By the time she reached the front door, her heart was pounding. Inside this log cabin, she thought, was the power to change her.

  The door opened before she knocked.

  Ashley stood there, frowning, already studying the top of Helen’s head. She was tall and thin, the kind of woman that Helen’s mother called willowy. She had a powder puff of white-blond hair and round blue eyes. Her accent, when she finally spoke, was thick and southern.

  “Lulabelle,” she said to Helen, “your hair is earth and you are water. It is sapping you of nourishment, darling.”

  “Uh-huh,” Helen said, and followed her inside.

  Ashley turned to her. “I use no electricity, no chemicals, no toxins.”

  Helen swallowed hard. The cabin smelled like her old Lincoln Log set from when she was a child.

  Ashley began massaging Helen’s scalp. “Your hair is earth,” she said again. “It gives life.”

  Helen gasped and moved away. “I killed Scott,” she blurted.

  As if she hadn’t heard, Ashley’s hands resumed their massaging. “It should be terra-cotta,” she said finally. “And you need to drink more water. You are dehydrating from your soul outward.”

  She stopped massaging as abruptly as she began and left the room.

  Helen’s eyes had to adjust to the darkness—no electricity!—but when they did, she realized there was nothing much to see. The room, with its log walls and floors, was bare except for several chairs and an old-fashioned white porcelain basin. Helen supposed this was what it was like where Loretta Lynn grew up. She’d seen that movie about her life, the one with Sissy Spacek. That was a long time ago. Before she even knew Scott. Helen realized that Scott had not been in her life for most of her life. He had been with her for only three and a half years. When she had been thinking about breaking up with him, she’d come up with a theory that television shows outlive relationships. She’d had a boyfriend during the Dynasty years who was gone long before the show was canceled. Another that L.A. Law had outlived. She supposed had Scott not died, then he would have been her Seinfeld boyfriend. But he had died. Out of the blue. Without warning. So that now it would seem wrong, irreverent, to think of him in terms of Seinfeld. He was her dead boyfriend. He was the man she had accidentally killed. And it was wrong, irreverent, to think about how she’d been unhappy with him recently. His own grieving mother had told her they were so much in love. Helen could not tell her that wasn’t true anymore. She thought again of those two dots of blood on his neck. Marking him. After she’d left the hospital and before she’d come to New York, Helen had gone to see Scott’s parents. His father had talked about his neck. “It broke,” he’d said, wringing his hands as if he were demonstrating how to kill a chicken. “It snapped.”

  Ashley stood there like a flamingo, long legs and arms bent at weird angles, balancing jars and pots of powders and creams on a tray.

  “I don’t want to go ballistic,” Helen told her.

  Ashley seemed to float toward her. Incense burned an unfamiliar, foreign smell.

  “It’s important, you think,” Ashley said, easing Helen into a chair, “to maintain control.”

  Helen closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said.

  Ashley was mixing, rubbing, stroking, pouring water, applying hot, applying cold, wrapping, tugging.

  Time slowed down, the way it had when Helen and Scott were in her car and it was airborne, flying off Thurbers Avenue. Was Scott already dead at that point? Helen wondered for the first time.

  “Your hair tells me you should drive a Volvo,” Ashley said.

  “I recently totaled my Toyota,” Helen told her.

  “When your hair is terra-cotta and you drink more water, you will understand better.” Ashley tapped her on the shoulders. “You can go now.”

  At a hair salon, a mirror hung in front of you, but here there were just logs.

  Helen touched her hair, expecting it to feel different. But it didn’t.

  “You can leave your check in the mailbox at the end of the path,” Ashley said. “I don’t like to handle money so soon after I do someone’s hair.”

  Helen felt let down somehow. “You don’t have a . . . mirror?” she asked, though that wasn’t what was really bothering her.

  “In the back there’s a pond with a fine reflection,” Ashley said.

  For a moment Helen thought she meant for her to go back there.

  “But,” Ashley continued, “I find no need to look at myself. At least, not my outer self.”

  “Right,” Helen said.

  On her way back, she imagined her hair was like a flower box cradling her head. That was what terra-cotta made her think of. Or Mexican pottery. Her hair was like a large jug. She tried to pull a piece in front of her so she could get a look, but it wasn’t quite long enough.

  Before she’d come up here, she’d gone for a haircut. Everyone in her salon back home knew what had happened—it had been the lead story on the six o’clock news the night of the accident—and acted strangely toward her, so strangely that Helen had felt frivolous for going in the first place, even though she’d worn a black turtleneck and asked for something “simple.” As a result, she had a kind of shag that reminded her of a helmet.

  The cocktail party was ending when she got back. Through the window, Helen saw people finding seats for the slide show, guzzling final glasses of wine before it was whisked away, settling in. She saw Joanne, with her head bent intimately toward the sculptor who worked in wire. Helen slipped in the back door and took a seat in the last row. Joanne was flirting with that man. Hadn’t they both giggled at his phrase “worked in wire” ? It sounded painful, they’d laughed. Now Joanne was—stroking his thigh! During the day, the artists supposedly went into their little private studios and worked. Lunch was delivered silently, anonymously, on their doorsteps in solemn brown bags. When did Joanne have time to get to the point where she would stroke this guy’s inner thigh?

  “Rocks,” a woman’s voice said.

  The slide showed dozens of rocks, all flat and smooth.

  “They do not betray us,” the voice continued.

  The slide changed.

  A black rock with white writing appeared on the wall. MURDERER.

  Next slide.

  BIRTH.

  Then the lights went on.

  Joanne and the wire man were gone! Helen looked around the room frantically. They had slipped out. They were in his cabin, Helen realized, fucking. She was trembling. A woman came up to her, took a rock from a pail, and handed it to her with a piece of colored chalk. Pink.

  “On one side,” the voice said, “write the word that describes the best side of you. On the other side, the worst.”

  Some people began to scribble right away. Others thought first, then wrote more carefully. But Helen just stared at her blank rock. She remembered how as a child she would collect rocks on the beach, glue them together, and paint the words ROCK CONCERT on them. She gave them as Christmas presents.

  “You went,” Danielle said. Her rock had bright blue writing on it.

  Helen nodded.

  “Did it help?” Danielle said.

  She looked
so hopeful that Helen smiled and nodded.

  Helen wished she could read what Danielle had written on her rock. She wished she could read all the rocks. But she supposed that was like reading someone else’s mail. Unethical.

  Danielle was bending down to be closer to Helen. She said, “This guy I went to high school with? Jerry? He got shot in a hunting accident and they had to cut off his leg.”

  Helen pulled away. Was this what she had become? Someone to tell horrible stories to?

  But Danielle moved closer again. “And this guy, Jerry, said that at night his leg would itch. The leg that wasn’t there! It would itch! Or cramp!”

  Helen had heard of this phenomenon before. She’d heard that women who’d lost their babies still heard them cry at night.

  “A phantom limb,” Helen said.

  “What I wonder is if you still feel your spleen,” Danielle said.

  “Oh,” Helen said, relaxing, “well, no. I mean, I never really felt it in the first place, when it was there.”

  Danielle considered that. “Wow,” she said at last.

  IN THE CABIN, Helen finally saw her hair. It did not look very different, though she examined it closely. She separated large pieces of it, let them fall slowly back into place. She made a cat’s cradle of hair with her fingers, searching for the change, the claylike color. It seemed shinier, perhaps. It felt softer. She smelled, vaguely, salad smells coming from it. She wished Joanne would come back so she could get a second opinion. But Joanne was with the wire man, fondling him. Being fondled.