An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  “They’re quails, you know,” Mr. Bishop told my mother as if he were sharing a great confidence.

  From where I sat, bored and sleepy, my throat still aching, on our brown corduroy beanbag, I could see that Mr. Bishop had one ear pierced and wore a diamond stud in it.

  “Honestly,” my mother said, all la-di-dah, “I don’t know one fucking thing about birds.”

  Mr. Bishop thought this was the funniest thing ever. He laughed long and hard, still way too close to my mother, who smiled up at him.

  “Do you know anything about stained-glass windows?” Mrs. Randall was asking Mrs. Bishop. That’s how Mrs. Randall was, relentless. At her house she never left you alone, always plying you with her homemade granola or iced tea with soggy mint leaves floating in it. “Because I believe this one could be a Tiffany. An original. The amethyst and topaz colors are as rich as any I’ve seen in the books. Maybe you could come and look at it? Maybe tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Bishop said, trying to catch her husband’s attention. But he only had eyes for my mother. He had knelt down at her side and the two of them, heads bent toward each other, were talking quietly.

  “I won’t hold you to it,” Mrs. Randall said. “Just a look-see.”

  My father stood in the corner with two other men who also worked in Manhattan. He went off to teach Earth Science at City College; Mr. Randall was in advertising, like Darren on Bewitched, and he had the same buggy eyes and nervous sweaty look about him as Darren; Mr. Markowitz worked in book publishing and liked to toss around the names of writers everyone was supposed to have read but who my mother always dismissed as schlocky. Whenever they got together, which was almost every weekend, after they discussed grouting and wholesale tile warehouses, they talked about how wonderful Brooklyn was, as if they were trying to convince each other that was true.

  The walls in this room were streaked at least a dozen different colors, from beige to buttercream. We were living with them to see which one suited us before we painted the room. My father stood in front of the lightest streaks, the beige and ivory and antique white. But my mother and Mr. Bishop were nearest the bright yellows, the ones we had already discarded as silly. Yet that night, at least from where I sat, those yellows seemed to illuminate my mother’s face, to cast a light, in fact, around the two of them.

  “BIRDS ARE GROUPED into orders, families, and genera according to similarities of bills, feet, and internal anatomy,” my guidebook said. “If you know these groups, the relationship and classification of birds will be clearer.” So I set about memorizing the groups. Herons and bitterns; plovers and snipes; hummingbirds and woodpeckers; hawks, eagles, and vultures. I liked to memorize things. I knew every birthstone for every month, for example, and pestered people to quiz me. My mother didn’t usually indulge me. But my father would happily ask, “August?” and beam when I answered, “Peridot.” I knew the birthdays of rock stars, the dates famous people died in plane crashes (Jim Croce, Carole Lombard, Glenn Miller), the dates and personality characteristics of every astrological sign.

  “Your scientific name,” I told my mother, “is Sayornis phoebe.”

  “Great,” she said. “Terrific.” She was working on plans for a porch. My father did not pay attention to her desire for a porch in the back of the house. We need plumbing, he would say. We need electricity on the third floor. We need to fix the goddamn holes in the walls and all you can think about is a porch?

  Finally, spring had arrived with thick hot air and too-bright sunshine. In our curtainless kitchen, all that light made everything seem even worse than it was. The old appliances sat away from the walls, unplugged and uncleaned. Half of the linoleum was curled back, exposing not a lovely hardwood floor but speckled concrete. We were in the process of tearing down two walls, which left every surface covered with a thin veneer of plaster. For the next two weeks, we were eating only cold food or take-out.

  For lunch, my mother had opened a bag of Fritos and a can of deviled ham. The Fritos hurt my throat. My new tonsillectomy date was May 4, in just ten days. My mother had ordered me to stay healthy.

  “Do you know the scientific name for a blue jay?” I asked my mother.

  She kept drawing. “Honey,” she said, “I don’t care.” Even though she had quit smoking years earlier, she had very recently started up again. But she lit cigarettes and then seemed to forget she was a smoker, leaving them to burn on the edge of the kitchen sink or in one of the shells we’d brought home from our vacation in Cape May last summer. A curl of smoke from her forgotten Salem drifted in front of her.

  “Cyanocitta cristata,” I told her.

  She looked up, as if she had just realized I was there. “I forgot,” she said. “We’re having dinner at the Bishops’ tonight. Just us. Colin doesn’t like big neighborhood things.” She noticed her cigarette then and took a halfhearted puff. “Oh,” she said. “Maybe you can make friends with the daughters. I think they’re lonely.”

  “They wear flip-flops to school,” I said.

  She smiled. “Do they? Is that allowed?”

  “Everything’s allowed,” I mumbled. My school was a progressive cooperative school, which meant parents were always lurking around and we spent more time expressing ourselves than learning real school things. We baked bread and kept a sad little vegetable garden, we cooked spaghetti on Fridays and dressed in traditional Vietnam folk costumes to celebrate Tet. Flip-flops were not going to cause much of a stir there. I changed tactics. “Fiona smokes pot,” I said.

  My mother laughed. “What is she? Thirteen? Please, Alice. Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “Colinus virginianus,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s the bobwhite,” I said, waiting for a reaction. But she was already gone, back to her dreams of a porch.

  IN SOME WAYS, Brooklyn was exciting. For one thing, we had a yard. For another, suspicious-looking people roamed the periphery of the streets, adding a sense of danger that had been missing on West Twelfth Street. As for birds, however, Brooklyn was disappointing. Still, I sat, binoculars in hand, watching and waiting for a discovery. Through the pink and white blossoms of the dogwood trees, planted by the Neighborhood Association, I could just make out the Bishops’ second floor. Mrs. Bishop was painting there. All day she painted. I could see the tumble of her blond hair, the motion of her arms as she worked.

  Mr. Bishop slept. He was in Manhattan at rehearsals of his play until late into the night. Sometimes I heard a taxi door slam and I would open my eyes to see the silver light of dawn covering our street. His play was done in the nude by three naked actors sitting on the edge of a Dumpster. It was about politics and ideas. No one understood any of it, although my mother had announced that Colin Bishop was a genius.

  I watched a robin tend her three perfect blue ovals of eggs. Beyond the nest, I saw Mr. Bishop, shirtless, in the kitchen, finally awake. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. My father left the house at six-thirty in the morning, smelling of Irish Spring soap and shoe polish. He returned twelve hours later. I could set a watch by my father’s comings and goings. He was predictable, someone a person could count on. I knew that at seven o’clock he watched the news with Roger Grimsby and drank a Heineken straight out of its green bottle. I knew that he read Time magazine in the bathroom, keeping them neatly stacked on the back of the toilet where they would wrinkle from dampness. I knew that on Saturday mornings he jogged around Prospect Park even if it was raining or freezing or humid and hot. He came home with bagels and orange juice and the newspaper; I could rely on that.

  But what about a person like Mr. Bishop? A person who stayed out all night with naked people sitting on Dumpsters in warehouses south of Houston Street? A person who slept all day and walked around the house naked maybe? He was a person with no roots. He had migrated here from California via Chicago and Minneapolis and who knew where else. What could Fiona and Imogen depend on him for? What could Mrs. Bishop rely on? The ground beneath their brownstone s
eemed shaky to me. No matter how much Mrs. Bishop painted, I wondered what she could possibly hope for in the end.

  MY FATHER BROUGHT a dark green box with a gold bow on top to dinner at the Bishops’ that night.

  “How does he afford this stuff?” he mumbled as we crossed the street. “It’s pretentious, if you want to ask me.”

  My mother rolled her eyes and smoothed her skirt. My father hated that skirt, a long thing with rows of different material. He thought she looked silly in it. She hated his bow ties. My students get a kick out of them, he told her. If I closed my eyes I could recite the order of the fabric: red and yellow flowers, black corduroy, green and gold paisley, denim, blue and white boat striped, and then a final black velvet ruffle. She always wore it with a white pocket tee shirt tucked into the waist, and a fat belt of large silver discs connected by rope.

  “Why did you wear that thing?” my father said. He didn’t expect an answer. He rang the doorbell and stared hard at the front door, which had been stripped of paint and stood bare before us.

  Fiona opened the door. She was stoned, even I knew that, and I’d only had two of the required drug education classes at school. Her eyes were heavy lidded and she wore a stupid grin. Also, she smelled of pot. In our school, the playground was a drug paradise, with pills and hashish and pot getting traded the way the younger kids traded baseball cards.

  “Hey,” she said, and smiled at us. Fiona’s teeth were beautiful and white and straight. The boys all loved her, with those teeth and that pale blond hair.

  We followed her through a labyrinth of empty rooms to the kitchen. Unlike everyone else we knew, the Bishops had done their kitchen first, and after the chipped paint and scuffed floors we’d passed on our way, the kitchen positively dazzled us. A double slate sink. Marble floor. A library table set with dishes the color of dangerous things like maraschino cherries and orange nuclear waste. At the six burner Glenwood stove, stirring and tasting, stood not Mrs. Bishop, but Mr. Bishop. I had never seen my father cook anything. My mother even grilled the hamburgers and hot dogs in the summer. But Mr. Bishop looked relaxed and in charge. He was drinking wine from a water glass and when he saw us, after he shook hands with my father and hugged my mother, he poured them each a glass too.

  My mother elbowed me toward Fiona, who was staring at us blankly.

  “Why don’t you show Alice around?” she said to Fiona. “I know she’d like to see your room.”

  I groaned.

  “Okay,” Fiona said in her placid voice.

  The kitchen was warm and smelled of garlic and exotic spices. I didn’t want to leave it. But I once again followed Fiona, this time upstairs to her room. Instead of a door, a curtain of beads hung in the doorway. She parted it for me and then flopped onto her bed, which was really just a mattress on the floor, covered with Indian bedspreads.

  “You like Jethro Tull?” she said, putting the arm down on an album before I could answer. “Aqualung,” she said. She sighed. “We won’t be here long. We just sort of, you know.” She moved her hands like a hula dancer and smiled to herself. “Pass through. Usually my father does something terrible and there’s some kind of scene.” She squinted up at me. “I bet your father never makes a scene.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, shrugging.

  “I bet your mother does though. Right?” before I could answer she said, “Isn’t this flute like so, I don’t know?”

  Then she closed her eyes and moved her head in time with the music.

  I listened but I didn’t like the music. There was nothing to look at in the room. No posters on the wall. No place for me to sit, unless I climbed on the mattress beside Fiona, which seemed uncool. I stood awkwardly by the curtain of beads, until I realized that Fiona had actually drifted off to sleep. Her breathing was slow and even. “Fiona?” I said softly. But she didn’t wake up.

  As quietly as I could, I moved between the beads and out into the hallway. Leaning against the wall were framed posters from museum shows in London and Los Angeles and Chicago. All the doors were shut except for one room where the door was off its hinges and propped at an odd angle in the frame. I stepped inside.

  Mrs. Bishop was in there painting. This was the room I could see from my bedroom and now I saw what was taking her so long. She was painting a mural that spread across all four walls, a mural of a garden filled with bright flowers—asters and zinnias and dahlias and marigolds—all of them thick with paint and color, oranges and yellows and purples and reds.

  She didn’t stop painting when I walked in. She said, “Oh? Is it dinner already?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was just looking around.”

  “Find anything interesting?” she said. She was working on a section of tulips.

  “This is pretty interesting,” I said.

  “I always paint a garden in a new house. Always,” she said.

  I nodded. I was thinking about birds, how their bills developed depending on the food they ate. The shrike, the cardinal, the wood thrush, the crossbill, the yellow throat were all in the same family, yet their bills all looked different.

  Mrs. Bishop looked up then and smiled. Her teeth were horsey and big, but they only added to her unique look. “I guess we should see what’s cooking, hmmm?”

  My mother would have showered and primped before joining her guests. But Mrs. Bishop didn’t bother. She stayed in her paint splattered clothes, her hair in a messy ponytail, without even bothering to put on shoes. When we walked into the kitchen, my mother smiled her Queen Elizabeth smile.

  “Babe,” she said. “I was wondering where you were.”

  My father sat at the table eating olives and looking miserable.

  “Upstairs,” Mrs. Bishop said.

  “She’ll have to show you her masterpiece sometime,” Mr. Bishop said.

  I wanted to say that it was beautiful. But something stopped me. Perhaps it was the way Mr. Bishop had said the word masterpiece. Or the way my mother smiled when he did. Or maybe it was just the air in the kitchen that night, which seemed oddly charged, the way the air feels just before a cold front moves in.

  ONE DAY TO my tonsillectomy and I spiked a fever during School Meeting. In School Meeting, all the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders sat on colorful cushions in the Activity Room and aired our feelings. Susan Markowitz wanted to talk about male chauvinism, how the boys dominated certain areas of the school. Trini Randall wanted to discuss changing the morning snack from peanut butter and crackers to fruit and nuts. Fiona Bishop used her red cushion as a pillow, stretched out with her head on it, and went to sleep.

  I raised my hand.

  “Alice?” said Bob, my literature teacher.

  “My throat hurts. It feels like I have razor blades in it.”

  The health teacher, Patty, came over to me and touched my forehead with her large cool hand. “You have a temperature,” she said. “Do you want me to call your mom?”

  “I’ll just go home by myself,” I said.

  “Do you want Trini to walk with you?”

  I shook my head. As I gathered my things, I heard Felix Crawley saying that the school should write a letter to the president about the MIAs. Once, at a Saturday night dinner at the Crawleys’, I had let Felix French-kiss me. Now his voice made me nauseated. His tongue had felt cold and slimy and ever since I had hated him. With my head hurting and my throat sore, I practically ran out of there and the six blocks home, past the bodega with its weird chicken smells and the Irish bar with its stale beer smell and the head shop with its strong incense and B.O. smell. Finally I was home and all I could think of was a blue Popsicle and TV game shows.

  But when I pushed into the kitchen I found my mother and Mr. Bishop eating Chinese food and drinking my father’s Heineken.

  “Oh, no,” my mother said when she saw me. “Not your throat.”

  She had a smear of brown sauce on her cheek, as if she’d been sticking her whole face in the white cartons of food. When she reached her hand out to touc
h my forehead, I pulled away.

  “What’s the matter with her throat?” Mr. Bishop said. He was eating the food with long green chopsticks, and they hung in the air like daggers.

  “It’s her tonsils,” my mother said, exasperated. “She was supposed to finally have them out tomorrow but they can’t operate if they’re infected.” She stood up and sighed. “I’ll have to call Dr. Williams again and cancel. Get you some antibiotics.”

  Mr. Bishop took hold of her wrist. “Phoebe, don’t you know that antibiotics are poisoning us? Really they are. Soon they won’t even work anymore and new mutant bacteria will kill us all.”

  She sat back down. He didn’t let go of her wrist. “Do you know about the Bach Flower Remedies?”

  My mother shook her head. The way she looked at Mr. Bishop made me uncomfortable, like I shouldn’t be there. I rummaged in the freezer for a stray Popsicle.

  “Dr. Edward Bach discovered them in England in the thirties. Thirty-eight different flowers for various characteristics and emotions. Let me bring some by for Alice tomorrow.”

  “We’re out of Popsicles,” I said.

  “Yes, bring them,” my mother said. “You’re absolutely right. The antibiotics aren’t doing a thing.”

  EVERY DAY FOR a week Mr. Bishop arrived at one o’clock with a combination of cherry plum, clematis, impatiens, rock rose, and star of Bethlehem in a vial with an eye dropper. He placed four drops on my tongue while I glared at him through my feverish eyes. “I need medicine,” I croaked, my throat worse every day.

  After he left I propped my pillows up so I could watch the mother robin feeding her newly hatched babies. They were ugly, those babies, like Martians. But she tended them carefully, bringing them worms and bugs to eat, flapping her wings whenever she arrived.