An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  Georgia shrugs. “It’s not so bad,” she says.

  But it is. Everyone keeps reminding Elliot how lucky he is to be here, at Brown, but he misses the lawns and trees of home, the order that prevails there. Georgia is here because she teaches at RISD, but mostly she is an artist; she paints in thick, dark oils. Her paintings are always described as masculine, but Elliot doesn’t agree. They are big, intimidating, earthy, like Georgia herself. Once, in her bathroom on Bank Street, he took her pantyhose that were hanging over the shower to dry and sniffed them, the feet and crotch and long leg part in between. Under the smell of Dove soap, he caught a vague whiff of Georgia. Remembering it, he leans toward her to try to find it again. But all he smells is stale smoke and old leather.

  They are already at the cutoff for the airport.

  “This state is so small you can’t even get lost,” Elliot mumbles.

  “Have you been to the Indian place?” Georgia asks. “We should do Indian when you get back.”

  That is not the way to talk to your friend’s kid, but Georgia has no experience. She did have her own kid, but she gave it up for adoption and then moved to Mexico. Elliot knows all her secrets from the days when he used to go with his mother to visit her. That kid would be his own age, twenty. A boy. “I didn’t even hold him,” Georgia told his mother on one of those long-ago Saturdays. She did not sound sad. “I handed him over and headed south.” Briefly, Elliot wonders what became of him, Georgia’s son. Maybe he’s like me, he thinks. Maybe he’s even at Brown. Maybe he and Georgia pass each other on Waterman Street every day.

  “It’s bring-your-own,” Georgia is saying, still talking about the Indian restaurant.

  “Whatever,” he says. Georgia and Elliot have lived seven blocks from each other all semester and this is the first time he’s seen her.

  Georgia leans close to him. “Give your mother a big kiss for me, okay?”

  He smells it. Her smell. He’s afraid he’s actually drooling. Does he even mumble, “Thanks,” as he lurches out of the car? She sits there, stalled, trying to turn it over for as long as it takes him to check his bag and get a boarding pass. On his way to the coffee shop, Elliot walks past the big plate-glass window, conspicuous. He wonders if he should do something to help, but he can’t for the life of him think what that might be.

  IN THE THREE months since Elliot was last home, his mother has married their next-door neighbor, Mr. Rickey, and gotten knocked up. Elliot doesn’t know what to expect when the Westchester Airport Service drops him off at the house. It looks the same, at least, large and white and neatly trimmed. He glances next door. The Rickeys’ house has a FOR SALE sign perched on the lawn, and all the lights are off. They had daughters that he went to school with, Mindy and Randi Rickey. He thinks of them and their slightly bucktoothed grins, pug noses, skinny legs. They are off at schools in New England too. He wonders, horrified, if he is suddenly related to them. At least he never dated either of them. Would that be retroactive incest? Maybe he did kiss Mindy once, at a party in someone’s dark basement rec room. He did. It hits him with great clarity. She tasted like grape bubble gum and smelled like coconut hair spray. The combination nauseated him, but they definitely used their tongues.

  His mother’s voice sails across the front lawn. “Elliot? Is that you lurking out there?”

  “I’m not lurking,” Elliot mutters.

  “Yes. You are,” she calls. “You’re lurking.”

  He doesn’t know what to expect when he walks inside. After all, someone new has moved in—and not just anyone, but Mr. Rickey, whom Elliot has seen shirtless mowing his old lawn, his back covered with patches of reddish blond hair and freckles; whose daughter Elliot has French-kissed; whose wife used to overtip when Elliot was the neighborhood paperboy. And his mother is pregnant, almost out of her first trimester is how she put it, and he expects her to be glowing and round, Buddha-like.

  But, to his surprise, everything is the same. The slate blue kitchen, the smell of Pine-Sol, the one chipped tile on the floor with its corner cut like someone stole a taste of pie. His mother has on faded jeans, an old pink button-down of his father’s, bare feet. She is an L. L. Bean mother, just like the ones who fill that catalogue—long and straight hipped, blunt-cut hair that’s close to blond, practical clothes, sensible face. Once, before his parents got divorced, Elliot heard his father accuse her of not being pretty enough. He was right; she was what you would call handsome, but never pretty. Still, it wasn’t something men told the women they loved. Even at ten Elliot had known that.

  “Well, hello,” she says. She is planting bulbs—forcing them is what she calls it—and doesn’t stop to welcome him.

  Elliot kisses her cheek and notices she has acne, that she’s covered it with a too-pink makeup.

  “Good,” she says. “I worried about Georgia getting you there on time.”

  He picks up an apple from the Bennington Potters bowl that sits on the counter, and takes a noisy bite. “She was early,” he lies.

  “Bravo,” his mother says. “And here you are.”

  From somewhere in the cavernous house he hears Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

  “As soon as I finish forcing these bulbs,” she tells him, “we’ll get on with things.”

  “Things?” Elliot asks.

  “You have to call your father, of course. Make plans to see him at some point. And I thought we’d all go for dinner at Duck’s tonight.”

  Since their divorce, his parents haven’t spoken except to discuss when Elliot would get dropped off and picked up and where. He can’t imagine why they would all go to dinner. His father has lived on the Upper West Side with a woman, Veronica, since he left. Veronica looks exactly like the old movie star Louise Brooks. She does that on purpose, then acts surprised when people go up to her and say, “You look exactly like Louise Brooks!”

  “We who?” Elliot manages to ask.

  “Franklin and you and me,” his mother says.

  Franklin is Mr. Rickey. Elliot knows that from delivering his newspapers. H. Franklin Rickey. He realizes that he doesn’t even know if his mother is Mrs. H. Franklin Rickey now, or if she kept her old name, Pamela Stern. He realizes that although everything looks the same and smells the same, it’s all different. When Mr. Rickey appears in the kitchen, smiling dopily, his thin hair combed over his bald spot, his glasses smudged, his feet bare too, Elliot wants to run out of there.

  “Elliot,” he says. “Good to see you.”

  “Done!” his mother announces. She steps back to study her planting. “In six weeks this entire pot will be filled with paper whites. Lovely little things. Just in time for Christmas.”

  The three of them stand there and stare at the terra-cotta planter, which, although her prediction is accurate, looks like a bunch of onions stuck in a lot of dirt. They stare at it much longer than necessary.

  ELLIOT IS MAJORING in English, but he can do math. Mr. Rickey got his mother pregnant first, and married her second. Over fish en papillote at Duck’s, he thinks back to the summer, which was too hot and too long. Elliot worked odd jobs, as a tutor, a playground crafts director, and a picture developer at a one-hour photo place. In between, he lay on the green-striped sofa in the family room or on a chaise by the unfilled pool or in the hammock. He didn’t read much. He saw his friends sometimes. He spent Fourth of July with his father and Veronica on their roof, where they had a barbecue because even though his father has lived in Manhattan for eight years, he can’t let go of his suburban life—he keeps a car and shops at malls and has barbecues on rooftops. During all this, Elliot’s mother was somehow, somewhere, fucking Mr. Rickey. “The Rickeys are having trouble,” she told Elliot sadly. On Friday nights, she and Mr. Rickey had dinner here at Duck’s. But she was always home and in her pajamas, her half-glasses perched on her nose, a book opened, when Elliot got home.

  They are acting like they are in love, his mother and Mr. Rickey. They keep touching, intimately, knees and hands, and even gently bumpin
g foreheads. Mr. Rickey is drinking too much, almost a whole bottle of wine himself.

  “It’s so different having a baby now,” Elliot’s mother tells him. She has taken small sips from Mr. Rickey’s wineglass all night. “When I had you, I still had a martini whenever I wanted one. I got knocked out during delivery. I had never even seen my cervix.”

  They bump foreheads and giggle.

  “These days, they make a point of including you in everything. We’re going to Lamaze classes together. Fran will cut the umbilical cord. The works.”

  Embarrassed, Elliot looks down at his fish until his mother says, “You know who did all this way back when? Georgia. You know she had a child, don’t you?”

  He looks up and nods, suddenly interested.

  His mother lowers her voice and leans across the table. “At the time I thought she was crazy, of course, but she had it with a midwife, and this woman made her squat like she was in a field or something, made her stay naked the whole time, and made her chant these Indian birthing songs while she rubbed her perineum with eucalyptus oil. Georgia says it wasn’t so bad.”

  “Squatting?” Mr. Rickey asks. It is clear he cannot imagine such a thing.

  Elliot’s mother says, “Something about gravity.”

  “But she gave that baby away,” Elliot reminds her.

  “She never even held him.”

  “Tragic, really,” Mr. Rickey says, shaking his head.

  Elliot’s mother has returned to her perfect posture. Her cheeks are slightly flushed, there is potting soil under her fingernails. She opens her small oval purse and pulls out a bad Polaroid that she slides across the table to Elliot. Mr. Rickey kneads her neck. They both grin.

  The picture is dark, blurry. A picture of a night sky, perhaps. Or airplane radar.

  “That’s Tatiana or Alexander,” she says proudly. “Of course we’ll find out the sex. Why not? They can tell you nowadays, you know.”

  It sinks in slowly: this is a photograph of their baby. Tatiana or Alexander? Why the Russian names? Elliot wonders. Then he remembers that Mr. Rickey has something to do with Russia. His old house was filled with those dolls that sit inside each other and ornate, painted Easter eggs. Once a year he and the real Mrs. Rickey used to have a party with caviar and borscht and thirty different kinds of vodka. Maybe he was even a spy.

  Elliot’s mother points to a place with her dirty fingernail and says, “That’s the heart.”

  “Looks just like you,” Elliot tells her, and slides the picture back across the table.

  “He inherited his sarcasm from his father,” she tells Mr. Rickey.

  “Elliot,” Mr. Rickey says, taking his mother’s hand in both of his, “your mother and I would like you to join us at the birth of our child.”

  “It’s allowed,” Elliot’s mother says. “We can make a whole list of people.”

  Elliot wonders if Mindy and Randi Rickey will be there too. It doesn’t seem right.

  “Don’t worry,” Mr. Rickey says, “no squatting and chanting.”

  Elliot can see it, Georgia squatting naked, her teeth gritted, pushing out her baby, chanting. But he can’t understand what his mother and Mr. Rickey want from him, can’t picture his mother naked and panting or doing any of it. The busboy picks up the dirty plates and smiles at Elliot, oddly, when he whisks his away.

  “Georgia said they massaged her with honey,” his mother whispers to Mr. Rickey.

  Georgia’s baby could be anyone, Elliot thinks. He could be here at Duck’s eating dinner with his adopted parents. He could be the busboy. Anyone at all.

  ON THANKSGIVING MORNING Elliot’s mother and Mr. Rickey show up smelling like fish.

  “I’m doing a bouillabaisse,” his mother announces.

  “Not a turkey?” Elliot says.

  It is unseasonably warm, too warm for all the sweaters he packed, so he is wearing an old golf shirt of his father’s, a kelly green clingy thing. He feels ridiculous.

  “What are you wearing?” his mother says, holding a lobster in the air.

  “All I want to know is why we’re not having turkey,” Elliot insists. “And cranberries and mashed potatoes.” He doesn’t mention the yams topped with marshmallows that she usually makes just for him.

  “Well,” she says slowly, like she’s talking to a stupid person, “Mindy and Randi are having Thanksgiving with their mother in Katonah, and we thought that we’d make something else so they wouldn’t have to force down two entire turkey dinners.”

  Those yams had brown sugar and molasses on them too. They had them every Thanksgiving Elliot can remember.

  His mother has started to slam things on the counter—New Zealand mussels and jumbo shrimp and oysters still in their shells. “If you can’t enjoy bouillabaisse with us, then maybe you should have Thanksgiving with your father.”

  “He’s eating at a restaurant,” he tells her.

  “Well,” she says, staring at him from under her bangs, “there you have it.”

  “Bouillabaisse,” Elliot mutters, and stomps out, into the mudroom where an array of outdoorwear hangs on chunky hooks. No one ever got their own winter coat or ski jacket. Instead, his mother bought half a dozen in different colors and they grabbed whatever they needed. The same with rain boots and aqua socks and hiking shoes. They stood, orphans, in a neat row beneath the bench in the mudroom.

  Today Elliot grabs a red down vest that is a little snug under the armpits and heads outside into the bright sun. Al Roker had promised balmy weather and he was right. Elliot cuts across the Rickeys’ backyard, all overgrown and swampy from clogged gutters. Those Russian parties used to be held out here, he remembered. Mrs. Rickey used to serve the vodka in frozen blocks. Once, a few years ago, his mother had told him—cattily, Elliot decides now—that it wasn’t such a big deal. “She fills an empty milk carton with water, sticks the bottle inside, and freezes the whole thing. Then she cuts away the milk carton and acts like she’s done something monumental.” Elliot pauses near the sliding glass doors that lead into the Rickeys’ kitchen. Was his mother already fucking him back then?

  The Rickeys’ kitchen looks like someone still lives there. There is a vase of dried flowers on the table; a digital clock on the stove glows the correct time in red; and when Elliot presses his ear to the glass, he thinks he hears the clunky hum of the refrigerator, like an airplane about to take off. Theirs used to do that too. When they kicked it, it quieted, until eventually it broke down completely.

  He wants nothing more than to go inside the Rickeys’ house and poke around. Maybe he would find a pair of his mother’s white cotton underpants under the bed, or a smudge of her pink lipstick somewhere private. Elliot jiggles the door until it opens, and steps inside. The first thing he does is kick the refrigerator and, after a gush of water drops from the ice-maker part, it shuts up. It smells a little rancid, like old fruit, and he sees that the dried flowers are actually just dead, not some Martha Stewart centerpiece idea. A card propped against the vase says, Happy Anniversary, Babushka! Love, Fran. He puts the card in the pocket of his jeans and wanders through other rooms.

  Unlike Elliot’s house, the Rickeys’ sprawls like a wide yawn, all on one floor with little steps here and there. Elliot has to step down into the living room, up into the dining room. It’s a house where people would fall a lot, he decides, stumbling. The den has, standing almost as tall as Elliot, one of those Russian dolls with the other dolls inside. When he gets closer, he recognizes that it’s Gorbachev. It takes two hands to untwist and remove Gorbachev’s head, and when he finally does, the next doll is Bush. To the Rickeys, this was probably very funny. Elliot wanders out of the den, past two closed doors, and into the master bedroom, still holding Gorbachev’s head.

  The bed is stripped, the bureau tops are dusty, and the drawers and closets gape open, empty except for crumpled tissues, pennies, and twisted coat hangers. He sets Gorbachev’s head on the tall chest of drawers and stretches out on the bed. He’s surprised when he picks up
the phone and gets a dial tone. The only number he can think to call is his old buddy Rhett, who has dropped out or flunked out of six colleges in two years.

  Rhett is happy to hear from him. “Are you back?” he asks.

  “Remember Mindy and Randi Rickey?” Elliot whispers. “I’m at their house. Next door to mine.”

  “I thought that family moved or something,” Rhett says.

  “The house is abandoned except for some former world leaders.”

  “Like, empty?” Rhett says.

  “Yeah.” Elliot looks around. “Empty.”

  “Cool. I’ve got some killer weed. I’ll bring it over and we can get really wasted before dinner.” This is why Rhett can’t finish a semester in one place.

  “Cool,” Elliot says.

  While he waits for Rhett to show up, Elliot wanders back through the house, opening the two closed doors as he goes. They were probably Mindy’s and Randi’s rooms, but now they too are empty—stripped beds, gaping closets. The refrigerator is acting up again, so he goes back to the kitchen and gives it a kick. Those dead flowers are bugging him. Elliot takes them out of the vase and throws them in the trash compactor. How could Mr. Rickey give his wife an anniversary bouquet while he was fucking Elliot’s mother? Elliot imagines Mrs. Rickey, with her pale blond hair and round reddish cheeks, arranging the flowers in her good crystal vase. He imagines her smiling, humming even, thinking she’s still his babushka, that he still loves her.

  The refrigerator won’t shut up this time, no matter how hard Elliot kicks. When he opens the door to give it a good hard slam, he sees the freezer is lined in neat rows with milk cartons that have bottles of vodka stuck in them, frozen into blocks. There are maybe a dozen in there. It takes three trips to the master bedroom to carry them all. Unlike Mrs. Rickey, Elliot doesn’t cut off the milk cartons. He just screws off the caps and pours all the vodka into Gorbachev’s head.

  By the time Rhett shows up, Elliot has consumed quite a bit. It’s icy and smooth and tastes like water.