An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  When the bedroom door opens, the smell of fresh paint floats in.

  “It’s me,” the Rickey sister says.

  It is the same one as last night. She has on the same long, white nightgown, but as soon as she closes the door she takes it off and, naked, climbs onto the bed with him. He hands her Gorbachev’s head, and she gulps from it.

  When she hands it back, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, “We used to have one like this.”

  “You told me that already,” Elliot says.

  “Where’s the rest? There’s a bottom and other dolls, you know.”

  “I know. They’re next door.”

  “At my house?” she says in her flat voice.

  Elliot nods.

  “You mean this is ours?” she says.

  He nods again.

  “Is that what your entire family does? They take things that aren’t theirs? What kind of people are you?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  She drinks more, taking in huge gulps. “The point here is to get totally wasted,” she says.

  After he left St. Gregory’s, Elliot went to a phone booth and called information, looking for an Alexander Lewis in Manhattan on Bank Street, then just in Manhattan, then in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island. He was desperate to find Georgia’s son. He checked for a Margaret Lewis. He checked for them in Long Island and Westchester and Albany and New Jersey and Connecticut. He began to call random Informations—Denver, Seattle, Miami. But the Lewises had disappeared.

  “It’s working,” the Rickey sister is saying. “I’m getting drunk this fast. This is good to know. That it’s possible to do this.”

  He takes the head from her and drinks.

  “My mother is so depressed,” she says. “She’s on Prozac. Can you believe that? She told us everything. How once she came home and found your mother fucking my father in their bed. In my parents’ bed, I mean. During the day. And another time, during one of their Russian Night parties, she went downstairs to get more ice, and they were doing it right on the floor. Like animals, my mother said.” Her words are starting to slur. “She said she took him back time and again because she loved him, but it was like your mother had put a spell on him. He’d apologize and promise never to do it again, but then she’d start calling, asking him to come over, to do this or that.”

  Elliot tries to imagine this vixen mother she is describing. His mother wears white cotton underwear, for God’s sake. She wears chinos. How sexy is that?

  The Rickey sister is looming over him now, her face pasty and drunk looking, sloppy. “He told my mother, ‘She’s in my blood. I’m sorry.’ Then my parents went to Russia to make amends. My mother is a forgiving person—”

  “A saint,” Elliot says.

  “Yes. That’s right. A saint. They went to Russia and came back in love and your mother went nuts. She took a key and scratched my mother’s car. Her Saab. Ran a key along one whole side.”

  “My mother?” Elliot says.

  “She freaked out. She called him all night sometimes. She threatened to kill herself if he didn’t come over. And he resisted.”

  Elliot tries to imagine this. All the while he was at Brown, was this going on? As he wandered along Thayer Street at night, half stoned, peering into the weird fluorescent lights of the Gap, was his mother doing these things? Or even last summer, while he worked his ridiculous jobs and wasted time?

  “And then one night my mother wakes up. It’s hot. Summer. And my father isn’t in bed. She thinks maybe he’s sick. The heat gets to him, you know? So she starts looking for him. She looks around the whole house, and he’s not there and she’s worried. Then from somewhere outside she hears this sound, this kind of screaming, and she thinks it’s two cats fucking on the lawn but then she hears my father’s name, and she steps outside and follows the sounds right to your yard. They’re coming from your whore mother’s bedroom and that’s where my father is and that’s when she got knocked up. Okay? Are you happy?”

  “No,” Elliot says.

  He puts his arms around her and holds her the way he wants to be held. He rocks her, soothes her. And later, when she throws up, he holds her head and strokes her hair and cleans up after her and lets her kiss him sloppily on the mouth. He tastes her vomit, her cold tongue fills him, and even though she’s drunk and smells of puke, he pulls her on top of him and makes love like it’s his only desire, like it matters. When he comes, he opens his mouth and lets his cry fill the air.

  “GEORGIA,” ELLIOT WHISPERS INTO the phone, to the blankness of an answering machine at the other end. “Georgia. Pick up, please. It’s me. It’s Elliot.”

  As long as he keeps talking, the machine will listen; it isn’t one of those that cut you off after thirty seconds. He stands, naked, in the hallway, the phone cord stretched taut. The air smells of stale vomit and the fish from yesterday’s bouillabaisse.

  “Everything here is so weird,” he whispers, realizing he has nothing to say, really. Outside the window at the end of the hallway, Elliot sees snow starting to fall, small, dizzy flakes bombarding the glass. “It’s snowing all of a sudden,” he says.

  The hall light comes on, blinding him, and in it stands his mother.

  “I love you,” he whispers into the phone. He doesn’t want to hang up, to end the connection, so he just stands there, clutching it to his chest the way, as a child, he’d clutched his worn and faded baby blanket.

  “Elliot,” his mother says, averting her eyes.

  She is wearing a long, red plaid nightshirt that makes her look, suddenly, ridiculously, young. And pregnant, Elliot realizes. Her breasts, her belly, are swollen and round. He feels embarrassed for all of them.

  “Is Mindy Rickey in there?” his mother is asking him. She still looks away from him, even as she points to his room behind him.

  “I don’t know,” he answers honestly. Then says, “Yes. I guess so.” He slumps down to the floor, dropping the phone, letting his back trace the wall as he slides. He imagines that the blue flowers on the wallpaper are real, imagines their thorns slicing into him.

  Now that his nakedness is partially hidden, his mother advances, glaring, her nostrils flared. Elliot remembers how, when he used to get mad at her, he would mutter, “Pig nose,” and it made him feel better.

  “What is it you’re trying to prove exactly?” his mother hisses. She stands over him like a balloon in the Macy’s parade, inflated, too large.

  “Me?” he asks. “What am I trying to prove?”

  “Do you think I’m deaf?” she says, her voice rising. “Do you think I’m blind?”

  Out of the blue, he remembers something. He remembers Mrs. Rickey’s black Saab 900 sitting in her driveway last summer with a key scratch down its side. He remembers his mother shaking her head as they passed it, and saying, “What a shame. Such a nice car too.”

  “Last night right outside my window. And tonight in my own house. Have you no respect at all?”

  “You did it,” Elliot says, stunned, even a little awed.

  “I did it?”

  “You scratched Mrs. Rickey’s car last summer.” Saying it, he realizes that it all must be true. He studies his mother’s face, trying to recognize something in it.

  Her mouth opens, then shuts again, several times, like a fish gasping for air.

  The house has changed, turned cold. Elliot feels himself coiling, folding, trying to find warmth somehow. But he can’t. His mother moves, slightly awkwardly, down to the floor beside him.

  “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she says, weary. “Someday you’ll fall in love and maybe then you’ll understand.”

  “What a useless, ridiculous thing to say,” Elliot says.

  They sit like this a moment more, neither of them talking. Then his mother gets up, awkward again. He watches her carefully, her pig nose, her straight bangs and blunt hair. Her lips are chapped. Her nails are square. These things are all familiar, yet he does not know her
.

  From the dangling telephone, a voice is screaming. “Elliot? Elliot? What the hell is going on?”

  Elliot picks it up and places it, gently, back into the cradle.

  THE SNOW IS accumulating quickly. He has carried Gorbachev’s head out with him. Finally, it is empty; all the vodka has been drunk. Elliot wants to return it to the Rickeys’ house, where it belongs. With so much snow, the walk is slippery. There is little moonlight. He is on his own.

  When Elliot looks behind him, his footprints are already covered. It is as if he is the first one to walk here, ever. He imagines it. Pausing, he looks back at his own house, dark again. What would the first person to see it think? Would he think there was love inside? Would he believe how much had been risked there? Gorbachev’s head feels light in his arms. Like a blanket, like an infant. He raises it above his own head and slips it on, letting it settle over his head, resting on his shoulders. Like a cocoon, Elliot thinks. It is so silent inside that he can hear his own breath, his own heartbeat, even the blood pulsing in his veins. He stands there and listens. He listens hard.

  NEW PEOPLE

  MARJORIE MACOMBER IS stretched out on a chaise lounge in her backyard, eyeing the new boy her husband hired to take care of the lawn. She is wet with Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil; she is pretending to read a home decorating magazine; she is thinking the boy is too young, too sexy, too trashy to be here, in her yard, distracting her. His name is Justin, one of those soap opera names people give their children. He is shirtless, tanned, tattooed. He makes Marjorie nervous.

  The Macombers live in a big white house with stone pillars in the front that was built back in the forties. Some of the neighbors—like the O’Haras next door—have divided up their large lots and sold them off so that now new slapped-together houses are wedged in between the older, better homes. Marjorie has a burning distaste for these new people and their boxy houses. They have come in and ruined the neighborhood, which used to be quiet and friendly, the kind of place where neighbors got together for barbecues in summer or skating parties in winter—and even the pond has been filled in and sold; there’s no place to skate now. Cissy O’Hara used to babysit Marjorie’s daughter Bonnie. Bonnie used to babysit the Hummers’ three children down the street. That’s the kind of place it was. Now people move in and out, build sloppy homes, fill their yards with junk.

  The yard boy is one of these new people, Marjorie knows. Her husband mentioned he lived down the street, in the Exeters’ yard, which means in a tacky little house in the part of the lot the Exeters sold off. Marjorie tries to focus on her magazine, but the boy is shearing the hedges nearby and he’s noisy about it. She watches his muscles ripple, his shoulder blades roll, and wonders what in the world Gary had been thinking when he hired someone like this. Their last gardener was a kindly old Cambodian man named Phong, who moved in and out of their yard with great quiet and grace.

  The boy is, suddenly, right in front of her.

  “Hey,” he says, “you know what time it is?”

  Marjorie slowly lifts her sunglasses off her nose and slides them onto the top of her head.

  “Almost noon,” she says, pointing to the sky.

  He follows her finger with his whole body, then turns back, smiling a smart-alecky grin. “Someone up there telling you something?”

  She levels a stare at him, the one that used to send Bonnie running to her room but that has no effect on this kind of boy.

  “The sun is directly overhead at noon,” she tells him. She hears the condescension drip from her mouth and it makes her feel satisfied. He is a stupid, beautiful boy and she doesn’t want him in her yard.

  Justin looks back at the sun and then at her. “Cool,” he says.

  The shears droop like a gun from his left hand. His tattoos are sprawling and colorful—the yin and yang, a dead rock star, even a heart with a banner of roses and the name Janis written inside.

  “Joplin,” the boy says, startling Marjorie. He has caught her staring at his big arms and he grins a different, slyer grin now. This boy is used to girls wanting him; he’s too cocky, too sure of himself.

  “How interesting,” Marjorie says, and lowers her sunglasses, hoping he doesn’t see her hand tremble. From the safety of her Wayfarers, Marjorie takes in his face: angular, a good straight nose, full lips, and bright blue eyes. The eyes are surprising; his hair is very dark, as long as Bonnie’s, and wavy.

  “So,” Justin says. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  She can smell him, all sweat and earth and male.

  “No,” Marjorie manages.

  From next door, there is the sound of children, splashing and squealing with delight. The people who live in the O’Haras’ yard have two or three little girls, all with tangled hair and sunburns. The children always seem to have on clothing from a Disney movie—a Pocohantas tee shirt, IOI Dalmations bathing suit, even the pool is decorated with Lion King characters. Marjorie wonders how the O’Haras can stand having them in their yard.

  Justin is still standing there, close enough that Marjorie can see the dark curly hair on his legs.

  She turns the page of her magazine.

  “Are we paying you to stand around?” she says.

  He grins again. What a wiseguy! Marjorie thinks, and decides she will insist that Gary fire him. Surely Phong has relatives, dozens of them, who could work here.

  “You tell me,” Justin says. His voice has a flat affectless quality that disturbs her. “I’ll do whatever you want. Boss.”

  “Honestly,” Marjorie says.

  She gathers her things—magazines, bottled water, suntan oil—gets up, and walks away, aware of his eyes following her across the long expanse of green yard. There are neat lines where he’s mowed. She hopes her bathing suit bottom isn’t riding up on her, hopes that her thighs aren’t jiggling at all, hopes that he understands exactly what kind of person she is.

  MARJORIE AND GARY are eating on the patio. This summer, she has decided to serve only salads for dinner, and to eat out here whenever they can. She has citronella candles burning, the too bright outside light off. The salads tonight are mozzarella with fresh tomato and basil, and mixed greens with red onion and cannellini beans. There is sourdough bread, extra virgin olive oil, the pepper mill, all spread out on the table between Marjorie and Gary. Already Marjorie has had too much wine. She isn’t drunk, but she is light-headed in a pleasant way.

  “That boy,” she says. “I don’t like him.”

  One of the reasons she has kept the light out here off is so Gary won’t sit and read the newspaper while they eat.

  “Which boy?” Gary says. His white golf shirt seems to glow in the candlelight.

  “Jason, Justin, whoever he is,” Marjorie says, knowing it’s Justin but wanting to demean him, even here with Gary. “He gives me the creeps.”

  “He’s only charging five dollars an hour,” Gary says.

  “I liked Phong,” Marjorie says. She is pouting a little; all that wine.

  “Phong has some awful cancer,” Gary says. “Bone cancer, I think. He certainly can’t come and cut our grass with something like that.”

  She knows why they’ve lost Phong. She sent a fruit basket to his house.

  From the yard next door, those children scream and play.

  “Don’t they ever go to bed?” Gary says, his voice hushed. “They’re so . . .” He struggles for the word. “Untended,” he says finally.

  Gary’s hair is silver, cut short. He is tall and lean, like he always has been, and he plays tennis and golf. Five years ago he quit smoking. He is aging well, Marjorie thinks, pleased.

  It’s just for the summer,” Gary is saying.

  “He’s the sort of boy who will break into the house and kill us while we sleep,” Marjorie says. She doesn’t really believe this. But how can she tell Gary her real problem with the boy? “Like those Menendez brothers,” she adds.

  Gary laughs at her, affectionately. Even though she went to Wellesley and go
t a degree in English, he has always seen her as a scatterbrain. It charms him, this image of her.

  “They killed their own parents,” he says, reaching across all the food for her hand. “Not someone else’s.”

  He follows her hand like it’s a lifeline out of deep water, follows it around the table, holding on tight, until he is at her side. Then he lets go, and moves his hands onto her shoulders so that he can turn her toward him, then moves them inside her button down shirt and inside her bra until he finds each nipple. He is kissing her too, urging her off her chair down onto the stone patio.

  “There are berries,” Marjorie says. “For dessert.”

  Gary laughs. He is tugging on the zipper of his shorts.

  “Here?” Marjorie whispers. “Not here.” But she is taking off her own shirt and shorts and underwear.

  From next door, a woman’s voice, high, too shrill: “Jessica! Jessica!”

  Gary has found his way inside her. Marjorie sees his tanned back, his white buttocks, clear in the candlelight.

  “Jessica!”

  The stone patio is hard and cold on Marjorie’s back. Above her the stars seem to drip from the sky, toward her. She hears herself sigh. She closes her eyes. The silly tufts of gray hair that have sprouted on his shoulders and back in his middle age tickle her hands when she moves them there.

  “Oooh,” Gary whispers into her ear, his breath sharp with red onion. “I’m glad the little girls are having fun too.”

  Of course they aren’t; one of them seems to be lost. But Marjorie doesn’t care. She lifts her hips up to meet her husband.

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING Bonnie stops in for coffee. Like her mother, Bonnie is small boned, wiry. Her hair is the same dark blond Marjorie’s once was; now Marjorie gets hers frosted so that it is more of a silvery blond. They both wear it in a blunt cut, collarbone length, with headbands or pulled back in ponytails, which is what they both have today. People used to think they were sisters.

  Bonnie is a lawyer and lives on the East Side in Providence, in a condo in what used to be a church. She and her husband—a lawyer too—sank all their money into a beach house, where they disappear every weekend. All of these things make Marjorie proud of her daughter.