An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  “Absolutely,” Marjorie says, coolly. “Every morning when he’s finished with his work, I take him inside and make love to him until Daddy pulls up from golf. He’s delicious actually.”

  Only Gary laughs. “That’s a good one, old girl,” he says, slapping her knee.

  Ted and Bonnie look at each other, embarrassed.

  Then Ted refills all the drinks and stands, raising his own martini glass, his initials TBC etched into it, and says, “Well, then. It seems time for a toast.”

  He’s practically bursting with his news. Marjorie feels smug, satisfied. She already knows their news, and she has secrets of her own. Good ones, she thinks, still feeling the sting of Gary’s playful slap.

  “A toast,” Ted says, “to the new, about to be grandparents.”

  Gary looks shocked. His cheeks redden. “My God,” he says, then shakes Ted’s hand with ridiculous enthusiasm, as if, Marjorie thinks, fucking is something to be congratulated.

  “Here’s to me then,” she says. At first, downing the cold martini, she is smiling at her own little joke. But suddenly, from nowhere, she finds herself crying. Sobbing, really. Unable to stop, to catch her breath, to do anything but stand there and cry.

  MARJORIE DOES THE unthinkable. She waits for Justin to come loping up the street and, before he can disappear into the garage to get the lawn mower, she calls him inside, in a too loud voice—those new people seem to be everywhere, all the time.

  “Justin!” Marjorie says. “I need some help with the air conditioning system. It’s making an odd noise.”

  He stands at the foot of the driveway, thumbs hooked in his cutoffs’ pockets, smirking.

  “Really?” he says. “I’m not very good with electrical stuff.” He speaks loudly too.

  In high school, Marjorie was an actress, the star of all the school plays—Our Town and A Streetcar Named Desire and, in her senior year, The Children’s Hour. She has forgotten how that felt, to be on stage, to be watched, until right now.

  “I’m hot,” she announces. “It can’t wait.”

  And then she does the really unthinkable. Marjorie leads him into her room, hers and Gary’s, onto their bed. The room is, she realizes as Justin stands naked in the middle of it, stuffy and imposing. The smell of peach potpourri hangs in the air with its false aroma, not at all reminiscent of peaches. It’s the room of two old people. Marjorie sees that now.

  But Justin is on her, with his sex talk, dirty and guttural in a way that no one has ever spoken to her.

  “Give me that pussy,” he says. “Fuck me.”

  And later he tells her that her tits are fantastic, that she tastes so good, that her ass drives him nuts. The talk does something to her, to them, because even though the clock—a silly old lady clock from a long ago trip to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria—is inching toward noon, when Gary gets back from golf and late morning martinis, Marjorie is back on Justin, frantically pulling him into her.

  The voice that floats up from downstairs—“Mrs. Macomber? You home?” —frightens Marjorie so much that she yelps, and thinks for a moment she might faint.

  “Mrs. Macomber?”

  Marjorie grabs her robe, pulls it on, and races downstairs where, standing in the foyer, is the mother from next door.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman says, frowning. Her maternity top, pink with blue giraffes bouncing across her grossly large belly, is pulled tight.

  Marjorie knows what she’s thinking, how odd it is for someone like Marjorie to be still in her robe this late in the morning. Is she thinking too that the garden boy has come in and never gone back out? The lawn is unmowed, the hedges unclipped. Dandelions poke their heads out here and there.

  “I was getting into the shower,” Marjorie says.

  A thin stream of come trickles out of her, down her thigh, and she pushes her legs together.

  “It’s just Jessica again,” the woman says, arms open in apology. “Except this time she took Ashley with her.”

  “You know she hides in the garage,” Marjorie says.

  The grandfather’s clock chimes noon; Gary could walk in right now. Upstairs, Justin is naked, hard, waiting. And more than anything, that is where Marjorie wants to be too, with that boy, in his tattooed arms, feeling his long hair on her breasts. For a crazy moment, Marjorie thinks she will run off with him. She will leave everything and go with this boy somewhere.

  Annoyed, Marjorie says, “Have you looked in the garage?”

  The woman blushes and nods.

  “It’s just so hard for me to get around,” she explains. “And it’s so hot out.” Then she looks at Marjorie, expressionless, and says, “It ain’t hot in here, though. Is it?”

  Marjorie meets her gaze. Beneath the pink silk of her robe, she feels her heart fluttering like a butterfly trapped in a jar.

  “Let me get dressed,” she says finally.

  The woman smiles a broad smile that shows all her small teeth.

  Marjorie was right; Justin is still on her bed, stretched out naked, stroking his penis.

  “You have to get dressed,” she says, turning her back to him as she takes off the robe and slips on a beige cotton sift.

  “Not until you come here and sit on this,” he says.

  Everything seems to be off balance, Marjorie thinks. Because she is afraid the woman knows, and she is afraid that Gary will walk in, and yet she takes the shift back off and does what Justin asks and, riding him, she imagines again that she will leave here with him, that they will just do this, somewhere, anywhere.

  When they are both done, toppled over him, she says, “You didn’t say you were leaving. Going to college.” Saying it, she feels as betrayed as she did when her high school boyfriend—a year older—left her behind to go off to Yale.

  “Yeah,” he says, his fingers tangled in her hair. “Well.”

  Marjorie sits up, looks down at him, at the sweaty curled hair that climbs down his chest and belly, and his penis lying pink and soft, pointing lazily upward.

  “We could go away together,” she says.

  “Like to the beach or something?” he asks her, puzzled.

  “No,” Marjorie tells him. “Really away. Run off.”

  Justin laughs. “You’re crazy,” he says.

  But he is happy with the idea. She can tell by the way he pulls her back down to kiss her, fully, on her bruised lips.

  BY THE TIME Marjorie appears next door, the girls have been found. They make themselves small, roll into tight balls, like a Persian cat Marjorie once had. She stands in the open garage door, where their mother kneels before them. Both girls are sucking their thumbs. The younger one has her eyes closed, and she rocks back and forth like she is trying to soothe herself, to go to sleep.

  “I knew they were okay,” Marjorie announces. Her voice is bright; maybe tomorrow or the day after she will be gone.

  The mother turns toward her. “But they say they’re not,” she tells Marjorie.

  Marjorie is impatient with this woman, who clutters the neighborhood, the O’Haras’ yard, with Lion King swimming pools and lost children, who has babies she can’t take care of, and expects everyone to give her a hand.

  “But here they are,” Marjorie says. “Fine.” Actually, they don’t look fine. They look frightened or even a little crazy.

  The older one says, talking around her thumb, “The boogeyman got me again.”

  The younger girl nods, eyes still closed, rocking back and forth.

  Their mother gets to her feet with some difficulty. “That’s what I’ve been hearing all fucking summer.”

  Her language, out here on a bright summer day, shocks Marjorie.

  “The boogeyman, the boogeyman. They say he comes in here and gets them. First it was just Jessica. Now Ashley’s starting too.”

  “He’s hairy! And he’s ugly!” Ashley blurts. “And he hurts us!” She runs past her mother and Marjorie, into the house.

  The older girl says solemnly, “He has a big long
thing, like a dragon has maybe, and he makes us touch it and today he put it in my mouth until fire came out.”

  Of course it’s the girl’s imagination talking. Marjorie can’t believe it’s anything else.

  “My God,” the mother says. “What is she telling me?” The woman looks to Marjorie and asks again. “What is she saying?”

  WHEN GARY GETS home it is after two, and he has had too many martinis.

  “I’m drunk,” he says happily. “God, it’s good to get drunk in the middle of the day.” He is red-faced and red-eyed.

  Marjorie has put her robe back on and is sitting in the cool dark of the family room. She is almost happy for her husband’s drunkenness; she has not showered away all of the sex she had that morning, she has not made the bed. She has simply sat here, trying to piece together what is going on. Gnawing at her is that she was right all along; something is very wrong with Justin. He has done something to those little girls. But when? she keeps thinking. She watched him come up the street. And she reminds herself how the older girl is a liar; someone has said that.

  Sloppily, Gary makes room for himself on the chair where she sits. He licks her neck. When she pulls away, he says, “I’m probably too damn drunk anyway.”

  She doesn’t know why she brings it up, but she says, “There’s something going on next door. With those children.”

  Gary buries his head in her chest and murmurs, “Why, you smell funny! All sweaty! Where’s your kiwi soap and your grapefruit bubblebath? You smell like you’ve been in the hot yard.”

  Marjorie tries to pull away, but he holds on too tight. She says, “You don’t think Justin would do anything to those girls, do you?” She laughs when she says it out loud. “That’s ridiculous,” she says. “I know it is.” Somehow, she does know it. They have told themselves ghost stories, the way children do, and frightened each other. They need friends. They need to go to day camp somewhere and make bracelets out of gimp and eat s’mores.

  “Oh,” Gary says, “those beautiful delicate little things. That one, that littlest one, has yellow in her eyes, like that old tabby we used to have. She is the prettier one, I think.” He climbs onto Marjorie’s lap, awkward and drunk, smelling of booze, and wraps his arms around her. “I wish I could,” he mutters, resting his head on her shoulders, “but I’m too drunk and tired and old. Probably in this condition, that gardener you like so little could still manage. But I’m a grandfather, after all.”

  Marjorie cannot get her own arms around him, so they sit there, like that, for too long, in the cool, dim room.

  IT IS LATER that night, as Marjorie stands over the hot stove frying bacon for a bacon and egg supper, that Gary, head aching, breath sour, says: “I’m so ashamed.”

  The bacon hisses and splatters Marjorie’s arm, burning her.

  “It’s just that I told them our news, about Bonnie and the baby coming, and they kept toasting me, buying more drinks.” Gary stares into his cup of black coffee. “It’s humiliating really.”

  Marjorie takes the bacon from the pan and lays it to drain on paper towels decorated with homespun advice: Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like home. Friends and family matter most. She cracks eggs, four of them, right into the hot bacon grease. This is what makes the best fried eggs, she knows.

  As they cook, she studies them, the way the white part bleeds and the yolk clots.

  “How do you know about that girl’s eyes?” Marjorie says.

  “What girl?” Gary asks, and Marjorie hears the chair squeak across the floor as he sits up straighter.

  “The little one next door. Ashley.” She prods at the eggs with a spatula, letting the hot grease seep beneath them.

  “I don’t know about her eyes,” Gary says. “Those poor little things,” he adds, changing the direction. “No one tends them at all. They smell sour, you know.”

  Their faces float above the heat that rises from the frying pan, the snarled hair and frightened faces.

  “They’re just children,” Marjorie says, her voice flat and even. “Little girls.”

  Gary doesn’t answer. When she finally turns to face him, he has his face buried in his hands. She watches his shoulders shaking, sees the bright red of a flush creep across his forehead and scalp. Outside, the automatic timer sends light across the patio and the ragged lawn. Beyond it, Marjorie can see the sloped roof of the new people’s house, where inside those little girls are doing what—cowering? hiding? telling everything? Smoke rises from the burning grease and eggs, foul.

  Marjorie stumbles to the sliding glass door and yanks it open. She steps onto the patio, its stones cold on her bare feet, and she keeps walking. The grass—twice now she has kept Justin from doing what he came here to do—is wet and scratchy on her ankles.

  She goes to the garage and takes the mower from its place, and pushes it out to the yard. It spits, then turns on, and Marjorie uses all her strength, everything, to push it in a zigzag line across her yard, cutting away the weeds and grass. Funny how the yard looks so flat until you do this, until you push this way; then you see how uphill it really is. She mows and mows, unable to put her thoughts in any order that makes sense. The timer shuts off, leaving just her kitchen illuminated, with her husband sitting at the table, unmoving, a distinguished man with silver hair.

  In the darkness, Marjorie chews up flowers, fallen twigs. When the silent blue light from a police car spins across her old, stately yard, she keeps going. They are outside her house, those policemen. They are about to come in.

  AN ORNITHOLOGIST’S GUIDE TO LIFE

  ALL OF THE HOUSES on our street were in some form of disrepair. This was Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1974. This was the land of brownstones to be had for next to nothing. Crumbling, linoleumed, shag carpeted, knotty oak paneled brownstones. They held the promise of hidden treasures in the form of parquet floors and intricately tiled fireplaces. At dinner parties, my parents and their friends talked endlessly about what they had uncovered. The spring the Bishops arrived, the biggest find belonged to the Markowitzes: an entire staircase, small and steep and painted sea green. We speculated about the slave trade, prostitution, homosexual love. But the Markowitzes only gloated, happy to unseat the Randalls who had discovered an entire stained-glass window that winter. Cracked and missing pieces, it still stood as a majestic tribute to everyone’s wisdom in leaving Manhattan with its crime and high rents and small apartments for Brooklyn, the New Frontier.

  I was eleven going on twelve that year the Bishops moved across the street from us. I had bad tonsils. They had to come out. But every time my surgery date neared I got another bout of tonsillitis. By March I had missed fifty-two days of school and developed an allergy to penicillin. To keep me occupied—our family was in a no television phase then—my father gave me a guidebook to birds and a pair of binoculars. “Open your eyes, Alice,” he told me, “to the exciting world of ornithology.” Then he went off to work.

  The year before he had told me, “Everybody talks about the weather, Alice. But nobody does anything about it.” For a while I measured rainfall and hours of sunlight and tracked the highest and lowest temperatures around the world. But then the tonsillitis began and I abandoned meteorology. Ornithology could be practiced from my bed, if necessary, though on good days I walked the four blocks to Prospect Park in hopes of an exciting discovery.

  From my room, I could gaze out the bay window and into the treetops. Beyond the treetops I could see the Bishops’ house, perfectly. Since the variety of birds in Brooklyn was small—sparrows, robins, and finches mostly—watching the Bishops was at least equally as interesting.

  The day they moved in, a cold and rainy March day, I was home with a new bout of sore tonsils, eating blue Popsicles and hoping for a cardinal sighting. Instead, I saw the U-Haul truck pull up and the Bishops emerge, blinking and dazed like they had landed on the moon. All of them looked misplaced, even the father, who lacked the efficient demeanor of most of the fathers I knew. Mr. Bishop appeared to have just w
oken up. Mrs. Bishop seemed about to break, too delicate and fragile for a mother. Normally I would have delighted in spying on two girls moving into our neighborhood, but these two, shivering in their thin cotton shirts and jeans jackets, wispy blond hair tangling in the rain, did not look like new friends to me.

  Just-beginning-to-bud trees blocked the view between the street and the Bishops’ third floor. Disappointed, I turned my attention back to birdwatching. “The only essential equipment for seeing birds is a pair of eyes,” my guidebook said. I ate blue Popsicles and chewed Aspergum. Our house filled with the sounds of repair, drills, saws, large things being torn apart. I watched.

  “THE PHOEBE,” MY mother, Phoebe, announced drunkenly, “is the only bird who says its name.”

  We were hosting the welcome party for the Bishops. All the parties in those days were the same. Vats of vegetarian food—hummus and lasagna and tabouleh. Down on Atlantic Avenue Middle Eastern stores lined the street and supplied our neighborhood with all of its hors d’ouevres. The adults drank jugs of chianti, talked too loudly, burned thick candles everywhere, played old Bob Dylan albums, sang Simon and Garfunkel songs until their voices cracked. The Bishops didn’t know what to make of any of it.

  “It’s true,” my mother insisted. “The phoebe is unique that way.”

  Mr. Bishop, who had been aloof and maybe even bored the entire night, said suddenly and loudly, “Bobwhite! Bobwhite!” He said it like a challenge, in a booming voice.

  My mother laughed. “Excuse me?” she said. Whenever she drank too much wine she grew an accent like the Queen of England.

  “The bobwhite, darling,” Mr. Bishop said, leaning his tall frame until his face was very close to hers. “The bobwhite says its name.”

  Of course everyone was watching. Already no one much liked the Bishops. He drank scotch all night and refused the lasagna; he was a playwright who had come here from California. His wife had murder in her past, which explained the terrified look she wore. Her entire family—parents and two brothers—had been famously killed while they slept in their suburban Ohio home; Mrs. Bishop was away at college. She was an artist of some kind, a dancer or a poet, mysterious and sad. Mr. Bishop, Colin, was tall and hawk-nosed but his wife was small and slender with thick wavy blond hair. Her name was Babe.