An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  Helen got into bed and closed her eyes.

  There was no salsa music tonight. In fact, it was quiet. Everyone had probably paired off. Everyone was making love. She found that she could not remember the feel of Scott’s kisses or touches or what exactly it was like in the instant when he entered her, before movement began. She had forgotten. No. She could almost remember the way his hand felt resting on her leg when they slept, the light weight of it, flesh on flesh.

  At some point in the night, she woke herself, sat upright in her bed, said out loud, “What is wrong with you anyway?” felt her heartbeat quicken as if an answer might really come, as if she would feel a crash, go airborne, know something more. But she sat like that, waiting, until she fixed herself in that place, that cabin, that cot, alone.

  AT FIRST, HELEN thought she was dreaming, that it was still night and she was asleep. But slowly she came to realize that someone really was in the cabin touching her forehead with their fingertips.

  “Hi,” Danielle said when Helen opened her eyes. “That’s how I like to wake up. By someone writing me messages on my head.”

  Danielle had on some kind of white lace bonnet and looked vaguely Amish.

  Helen’s mouth was cottony.

  “You were writing me messages on my head?” she said.

  “Just like ‘Hi’ and ‘Ellen’ and stuff,” Danielle giggled.

  By the cast of the sunlight streaming through the window, Helen realized it was already afternoon.

  “My name is Helen. Not Ellen,” she said, struggling to sit up. Her side throbbed.

  “Really?” Danielle said, surprised. “I thought Helen was an old person’s name. But I know a lot of young Ellens.”

  Helen got up and went to look at her terra-cotta hair in the light. Besides being flat from too much sleep, her hair looked the same.

  “I’ve got a confession to make,” Danielle said.

  Helen realized she had missed both breakfast and lunch. She looked at Joanne’s unslept-in bed, then out the window where, in those woods, the studios sat. If Joanne was still with the sculptor, maybe Helen could go and steal her brown bag lunch.

  “Remember that guy Jerry I told you about?” Danielle was asking.

  “The phantom limb?”

  “Cool,” Danielle said. “You’re a good listener.” She pointed at Helen happily.

  “What about him?” Helen wanted Danielle to leave. The bonnet was bothering her. Danielle was bothering her.

  “I did it,” Danielle said. “I shot him.”

  Helen took a step backward. “It wasn’t a hunting accident?” She had seen made-for-TV movies about crazy women who stalked men and shot them. She had seen Fatal Attraction.

  “It was a hunting accident,” Danielle said. “I thought he was a wild turkey, you know? It was right before Thanks-giving and we were turkey hunting and I shot him.”

  Knowing that Danielle wasn’t deranged, Helen wondered why she didn’t feel more relieved.

  “He was my boyfriend,” Danielle added. “Then I felt really guilty for breaking up with him because he, like, only had one leg and stuff. What a nightmare. Anyway, I decided not to hide it anymore. I shot him and he lost a leg and then I broke up with him, and maybe that makes me a bad person, but that is what happened.” She exhaled loudly. “I feel better telling you the truth.”

  They stood looking at each other across a shaft of sunlight filled with dancing dust motes until Danielle remembered that she was supposed to take Monday and Tuesday swimming.

  That was when Helen saw that the Amish bonnet was actually a bathing cap.

  On her way to steal Joanne’s lunch, Helen tried to figure out why she hadn’t told Danielle about Scott. It was the same kind of situation, in a way. Except Scott had died and they hadn’t gotten the chance to break up and this guy Jerry lost a leg and got his heart broken. Was one worse? Helen wondered.

  Joanne’s lunch was already gone, which meant she was probably inside her studio.

  Helen peeked in the window.

  There was Joanne, not working, the brown bag empty, crumpled.

  She saw Helen looking at her and waved.

  “You know,” Helen said, “people end up in a lot of unusual situations. It doesn’t make them bad.”

  Joanne frowned.

  “I can’t believe you fucked the wire man,” Helen said.

  “His work is very sensitive,” Joanne said, sounding haughty. “He spins it. Like cotton candy.”

  It was Helen’s turn to frown.

  “It might do you some good to make contact with another man,” Joanne said.

  Helen felt like an alien. Make contact. Take me to your leader.

  “Who?” Helen said. “Andrew?”

  Joanne ignored her. “I thought you were getting your hair colored.”

  “I did,” Helen said. “Terra-cotta.”

  Joanne shrugged.

  Beside the bag was an apple core and cookie crumbs.

  “It cost seventy-five dollars and it looks exactly the same,” Helen said.

  “Actually,” Joanne said thoughtfully, “it looks worse.”

  “WHAT DO YOU expect?” Ashley said. “You didn’t do what I told you.”

  “What?” Helen said, waving her arms. “Buy a Volvo?”

  Ashley bent down and returned to her gardening. She had splotches of dirt all over her bare arms and legs and sweat marks on her tee shirt. Her hair was the exact color of the carrots she pulled from the dirt.

  “I needed help,” Helen said. Her voice was coming from somewhere deep inside of her. It was rising up out of her. It was erupting. “I came to you for help.”

  Ashley’s garden bursted with vegetables. Everywhere Helen looked, something was growing, sprouting, budding.

  Ashley pointed her hoe at Helen. “You said you didn’t want anything drastic.”

  “But I wanted something Now I have nothing. I’m worse off than before.”

  It was too hot out there in Ashley’s garden, and the air was heavy with the smell of dirt, of the earth. Helen thought she might choke or faint. Without thinking about it, Helen dropped to her knees, right into the dirt, and sobbed. She thought she might die, right there.

  “You are losing control,” Ashley said.

  Helen clutched at the earth, began to dig. Her hands hit something hard. Radishes. Small, perfect, red ones.

  “Do not ruin my garden,” Ashley said. She dropped her hoe and made her way toward the log cabin.

  Helen got to her feet, shaky, uncertain. She could not stop crying. She held on to her little bunch of radishes and made her way back toward her own cabin.

  Somehow—the sun?—Helen wandered the wrong way through the woods. She missed the broken fence, the pile of stones, the grazing cows, and ended up by the studios.

  There was Joanne’s.

  Helen went to the window. Joanne was in there, with the wire man. They were clothed, sitting across from each other. But when Joanne glanced up and saw Helen standing there, she looked away, guilty.

  Disoriented, Helen made yet another wrong turn. The smell of dirt clung to her, confused her.

  At the next studio, Helen hesitated. There was a strict rule about disturbing the artists during work time. She felt relieved when the door opened and one of the artists stepped out. Although he looked familiar, she could not remember who he was exactly. The potter? The abstract expressionist?

  “Helen?” he said. “Is that right?”

  She went to shake his hand, but it looked like she was offering him the radishes.

  He laughed. “Radishes,” he said. Then he took them.

  “Actually,” Helen said, “I sort of stole those.”

  Carefully, he wiped each radish on his shirt. “Then we’d better eat them. Destroy the evidence.”

  He held one out to her. There was color on his hands. Terra-cotta, Helen thought.

  They ate the radishes in silence, except for the crunching.

  Helen wanted to tell him something, bu
t she could not form the words.

  HELEN TOOK HER blank rock and the piece of pink chalk from her desk drawer. She sat cross-legged on her bed.

  Joanne had told her that she and the wire man might be falling in love.

  She said it like a confession.

  “It’s okay,” Helen had told her.

  “I like this part,” Joanne said, “when you think the very things that will later drive you crazy, maybe even drive you apart, are quirky and wonderful. When everything you do or say, they find fascinating.”

  “This is the happy part,” Helen said.

  “Right,” Joanne said. “Then you get used to each other, maybe even move in together, maybe even get married, and the laundry doesn’t get done and he hates your friends and you get sick of going to obscure foreign movies with him and you can’t remember the last time the two of you took a shower together.”

  “The real part,” Helen said.

  “Right. Then maybe you realize you’ve fallen out of love and it’s over.”

  Helen felt something strange where her spleen used to be. She realized it no longer hurt very much. The itching had stopped.

  “The sad part,” Helen said.

  “Or,” Joanne had said, smiling, stretching in that slow, catlike way that people who are having a lot of good sex do, “love wins out.”

  Helen smoothed her already smooth rock.

  On one side, she wrote MERRIMENT.

  On the other, she wrote melancholy.

  She put the rock back in the drawer.

  ON THE DAY before they went back home, Helen made her way to Ashley’s log cabin again. There were the cows, the fence. But the pile of stones was gone. Helen wondered if the woman rock artist—she and Joanne called her Wilma—had stolen them.

  Ashley was in her garden again, though not gardening. She was sitting there, bent like a piece of origami.

  Helen stood in front of her, waiting.

  Finally Ashley opened her eyes.

  “You,” she said.

  “I took some radishes,” Helen told her. “That day.”

  Ashley nodded and unfolded herself. “If you want, I’ll do your hair again. For half price.

  But Helen didn’t want her hair colored. “I just wanted to tell you about the radishes.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Ashley said.

  “What?”

  “Who’s Scott?”

  Helen narrowed her eyes. “How do you know about Scott?”

  “You told me when I did your hair. You said, ‘I killed Scott.’”

  Helen was surprised to see that a few leaves at the very top of a maple tree had already turned to scarlet. Those leaves made her—almost—happy.

  “He was my boyfriend,” Helen told Ashley. “He died in an accident.”

  “The Toyota,” Ashley said.

  Helen saw that today Ashley’s hair was, oddly, the color Scott’s had been. A rich brown, the color of wet dirt.

  “We were on the very verge of breaking up when it happened,” Helen added.

  She looked from Ashley to the tall stalks of corn behind her, to the woods that stretched beyond them. If she walked through those woods she would reach Vermont, then Mass-achusetts, and then, finally, home. Standing there in the fading sunlight, Helen could imagine that, could imagine walking and walking until she found her way back.

  DROPPING BOMBS

  JIM TOLD HIS mother everything. He explained every detail, every reason, every step. How Aunt Dodie could drive her to the airport and wait with her while she picked up her ticket. How to pack in a small bag that she could take on the plane with her so she wouldn’t have to worry about her things getting lost. How once she boarded, she did not have to worry about anything at all because the pilot would do the rest. “Once you take off,” he told her, “just sit back and relax.” He even sent her some paperbacks and a stack of cooking magazines to read en route. “You’ll be in Los Angeles in time for lunch,” he said.

  But still she couldn’t handle it. With increased airport security he couldn’t meet her at the gate, so Jim told her to wait for him at baggage claim. “But you said not to check a bag,” Eve said, and Jim could hear the shrill panic rising in her voice. “Just follow the signs to baggage claim. Hell,” he told her, “follow all the other passengers. Then just stand there. I’ll find you.” Instead, she stood at the gate, frozen there in her new mauve pantsuit, clutching her bag to her chest, eyes wild like a trapped animal.

  Jim got to the airport almost an hour early and stood watching each new planeload of passengers arrive and claim their bags. Even after everyone left, the luggage carousels kept spinning, sending a few unclaimed bags around again and again. Jim kept wondering who owned those bags. Wasn’t that unsafe? Couldn’t some crazed terrorist check a bag with a bomb in it and then not board the flight at all? Those bags worried him, circling endlessly like that.

  A redcap passed him.

  “Excuse me,” Jim said, and he pointed toward Carousel C. The same two bags had been going around on it since Jim arrived, a small brown leather one that looked like a mail pouch and a beat-up, dusty blue duffel bag.

  The redcap looked at Jim like he didn’t trust him. The whites of his eyes were yellow. They reminded Jim of eggs.

  “Those bags,” Jim said, wagging his finger,” whose are they?” Slowly, the man turned and studied the circling luggage.

  “Well,” he said, “how am I supposed to know that now?” He pointed too, at Carousel B, where a fresh group of passengers jockeyed for position. “Whose bags are those?” he said, and he wagged his finger at the luggage cluttering the carousel. “You think I go around, matching up bags with people?”

  The man wore his hat far back on his head, revealing a short, military-type haircut. For an instant, Jim pictured him fighting a war, in Korea maybe, rushing forward, angry and mean.

  “You think I got nothing better to do?” the man was saying.

  “It just seems dangerous,” Jim said. “That’s all.” He was aware that he was still half-pointing, his wrist drooping slightly, his finger pointing downward.

  “Yeah,” the redcap said. “Them bags are real dangerous. You keep your eye on them.”

  He lifted his empty cart, aiming toward Carousel B, where passengers were claiming their luggage now in a frenzy that reminded Jim of animals gobbling their prey on National Geographic specials.

  A loudspeaker crackled and a voice announced, “James Morgan, please meet your mother at the TWA ticket counter, upper level.”

  “Shit,” Jim said, startled to hear his own name like that.

  The redcap had started to move away from him. As he wheeled past Jim he muttered, “Faggot.”

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE you didn’t come for me. I waited just like you said. I waited and waited. Finally this nice girl, maybe a stewardess, I don’t know, she came up to me and said, ‘Are you lost?’ and I told her my son was supposed to be there. That he was late or forgot or something.” Eve glared at him. “I waited forever, just like you said.”

  They were at an outdoor restaurant in Venice, eating lunch. His mother had told Jim the story twice already, first when he claimed her and then again in the car on their way here. She also told him it was impossible to read on the flight. “You have to stay alert,” she said. “Anyone could be a hijacker. A Shiite Moslem or Libyan terrorist. Who knows? Do you think Klinghoffer, cruising like that on the Mediterranean, expected to be shot and dumped in the sea? You don’t know who to trust.” She’d handed him the paperbacks and cooking magazines, still in the padded shipping envelope he’d sent them in.

  Now Jim pointed toward the parade of people that whizzed past them on rollerblades, bicycles, skateboards, and rollerskates. “Look at them,” he told his mother. “See how everyone looks different out here.”

  She snorted. “So I noticed,” she said. “Too many of them dye their hair. And they spend too much time in the sun. Don’t they read out here? It’s very dangerous.” She sipped her iced tea and
made a face. “This is terrible.”

  “I mean they’re more active,” Jim said. “Health conscious. Any day of the week you’ll see people out here like this.”

  “Great,” Eve said. “Wonderful.” She looked around until she spotted their waiter, then motioned him over. “What is in this tea?” she said to him.

  He was handsome, tanned and blond with a dimple in his chin. He looked first at Jim and smiled, then at Eve. “Fresh mint,” he said. “Isn’t it yummy?”

  “If I wanted mint,” she said, “I’d chew gum.”

  The waiter looked at Jim again. Jim felt a warm familiar rush in his gut. Sometimes he wondered if the real reason he had moved to L.A. was because he liked these surfer boys so much. He imagined for an instant this waiter naked, no tan lines, a smooth hairless chest.

  “Could I just have some water?” Eve was saying.

  “You bet,” the waiter said, smiling again. When he left, he brushed against Jim, so lightly it felt like the breeze from the water that lay ahead of them.

  Eve studied Jim’s face, hard.

  “What?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  Jim cleared his throat and looked off toward the ocean. He had lived in L.A. for almost three years and this was the first time his mother had come to visit. He’d asked her in the past, tried to lure her here with promised trips to Mann’s Chinese Theatre and Disneyland, places that she’d always heard about and thought she’d never see. Secretly, he was always relieved when she refused to come. She would say, “I’ll see you out here at Christmas anyway. Right?” And he would feel a ballooning in his chest, a fullness that he liked. He would think, Good. It was like buying a few more months of not having to tell her.

  Once, she’d said yes, then canceled at the last minute. “There are some things I really don’t want to see,” she’d said as way of an explanation. That had startled Jim. What exactly had that meant? Even now he wondered if she was trying to tell him something, if maybe she knew somehow already. But that seemed impossible. When he’d lived in Chicago, just an hour from her house in the suburbs, he was still pretending, even to himself. He used to date girls who were pretty, former Homecoming queens, girls who dressed in pale colors, who wore soft fuzzy sweaters and pink lipstick. Last Christmas he noticed that his mother still had a picture of him with one of those girls, one she especially liked named Debbie, right on top of the television set. In it, Jim is slightly behind Debbie, so that it is her smiling, heart-shaped face that dominates. It is her locket, her wispy blond bangs and bright pink lips that you noticed. Jim was really in the background, a blur.