An Ornithologist's Guide to Life
Page 19
Our new stove had arrived. My mother cooked all morning, preparing for Mr. Bishop’s visit. I would hear her downstairs in the kitchen, the clanging of lids on pots, the whir of her Cuisinart, the one my father had surprised her with last Christmas. Then strange smells drifted up to my bedroom. Mr. Bishop liked Italian food. Not the kind we ate at Rossini’s in the Village, but another kind with no red sauce or melted cheese. She made him a special rice that required her to stand at the stove and stir it constantly, adding small amounts of warm broth at certain intervals. When I called down in my hoarse voice for ginger ale, she answered, “I can’t leave the risotto, Alice!” She roasted pork with sprigs of rosemary that looked like part of the robin’s nest outside my window. She sautéed sweetbreads, which were not bread at all but rather the internal organs of some animal. The smells made me gag.
So did the drops of rescue remedy that Mr. Bishop administered. My tongue felt swollen and burned by them. He looked solemn afterward.
“Alice,” he said each time, “you are on the road to recovery. Wait and see.”
Then he’d screw the lid back on the vial and go downstairs where he and my mother ate for hours. I listened to the lilt and murmur of their voices, hating both of them. From my window I watched him leave for the theater, and watched my father walk up our street a few hours later, precisely at six-thirty. My mother served him leftovers, reheated, and sat at the table smoking cigarettes, watching as he ate.
UNBELIEVABLY, I AWOKE one morning a week after Mr. Bishop began treating me with the Bach Flower Remedies, cured. I swallowed easily. I spoke clearly. It was a glorious warm day and the sun was bright and yellow in the sky. My mother had already begun making lunch for Mr. Bishop. She sat at the kitchen table hand-grating from a big wheel of stinky cheese. I slipped out unnoticed, my binoculars around my neck and my birding notebook in my hand.
In school I had done an oral report on ornithology. The topic was “My Hobby.” Trini Randall gave a talk on ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging. She had taken a class on it at the Botanical Garden. Felix gave his on collecting bottle caps. He had shown a cigar box painted in splatter paint and filled with bottle caps he found on the streets of our neighborhood. But my report was the best because ornithology really was my hobby and I really had started to love it. Unlike meteorology, ornithology taught useful skills. The skills of observation. The powers of deduction.
“Birdwatching is exciting,” I’d said, “because birds are easy to see, easy to identify, great in numbers and variety, beautiful to observe, and attractive to hear.”
On this May morning, as I walked into Prospect Park, the trill and chirp of various birds filled my ears. I could make out the birds singing each song, the black throated green warbler, the chickadee, and the wood thrush with its clear, flutelike sound. I stood beneath the blooming trees and lifted my face upward where the birds perched high above me.
Something caught my eye. At first, I thought it was a crow. But then I saw its yellow bill. My mind raced through all the birds I had memorized, alphabetically, the red-eyed vireo and scarlet tanager, the northern cardinal and rose-breasted grosbeak. But it was none of these. I was almost certain that I was looking at a yellow-billed magpie, a bird that did not migrate east. I stood staring up at that bird until my neck ached and my fingers gripping the binoculars grew numb. A yellow-billed magpie, I knew, had no reason to be in Brooklyn, New York.
I recorded my observations in my notebook, then slowly made my way home, imagining how I would call my local birdwatching club and report my discovery. Maybe I would even get on the news with Roger Grimsby. I could see myself in Prospect Park, under the trees, getting interviewed live. I could warn the population of Park Slope about the yellow-billed magpie. With its impressive sweeping tail, it was easy to admire. But like its cousin the crow, it could easily become a pest. Roger Grimsby and all of New York City would be impressed by my knowledge.
At my front door I paused. A small bundle of dried grass lay at the foot of the steps. With my toe I lifted the grass and saw that this was the nest I had watched all these weeks. The smallest slivers of blue eggshell still clung in places. But the birds were gone. They had flown away. Carefully, I picked up the nest, unsure of what else to do, and carried it inside with me.
At the grand staircase that led upstairs, I stood still, listening to the voices of my mother and Mr. Bishop from somewhere in the house.
“Pine,” he was saying, “to rid you of guilt. Honeysuckle to keep you from living in the past.”
I heard this and understood he had brought her a remedy too.
Since we’d moved in here, the house had smelled of paint and plaster, of cottonseed oil and sawdust. But as I stood holding that nest, the air smelled unfamiliar, like the strange Italian food my mother had been cooking and other unfamiliar smells, things I could not identify.
The excitement of my discovery began to fade. Gently, I placed the nest on the bottom step. These stairs had been covered in dark orange indoor outdoor carpeting when we’d moved in. My parents had spent hours on their hands and knees, removing it from the stairs and marveling at the fine wood beneath it. I could still see the circular motion of my mother’s hands as she’d nourished the wood, sanding it, then oiling it, until it gleamed like it did now.
I stepped outside, empty handed, and looked up and down the street, at the brownstones that needed repair, every one of them broken in some way. Nothing looked the same to me. I sat on the stoop and waited. Whether for my mother to come out, or my father to turn the corner, I could not say.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE AUTHOR WISHES to thank the Providence Area Writing Group for their comments and suggestions on many of these stories; the editors of the various journals and magazines where the stories first appeared; Yaddo; Marianne Merola and Meg Giles; Gail Hochman; Jill Bialosky; Gloria Hood; Melissa Hood; my husband, Lorne Adrain; and our son, Sam, whose love gives me strength.
More Praise for An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life
“I’ve been reading and writing for around 65 years now, and how can it be that I’ve never read anything by—or even heard of—somebody as wonderful as Ann Hood? . . . An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life is . . . an antidote to the vulgarity, love-of-violence and bone-dumb stupidity we tend to encounter every day. . . . These tales are unpretentious, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but all written from a position of tenderness so profound that at any moment, on any page, feeling bursts, explodes, into painful knowledge or knowledgeable pain.”
—Carolyn See, Washington Post
“Humorous, heartfelt stories. . . . [Hood’s] quirky characterization, stylistic intelligence, and adroit timing combine to produce an ending that the reader feels in the gut. . . . A strong, fine collection overall.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Hood] takes direct aim at failed relationships, sexual betrayals and encounters, death, family secrets, loss, and sudden, often incandescent epiphanies with a deceptively frank and luminous style that sensationalizes nothing but quietly strips away the layers of her troubled and stranded characters. . . . These beautiful tales resonate and shimmer and in their realistic way reveal the way we live now.”
—Sam Coale, Providence Journal
“Hood’s tales are sexy, silly and full of sympathy for trapped creatures of the feathered or human variety.”
—Time Out New York
“Hood, author of Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, has an easy, natural voice and a beguiling sense of humor. It’s easy to slip into the intriguing situations of the stories in her latest collection, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life.”
—Margaret Quamme, Columbus Dispatch
“These stories are simply the way life is, not the way we would like it to be, and reading them is joyous, painful and, finally, exhilarating.”
—Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Ann Hood tells 11 sharp, surreal stories in her new collection, An Ornithologist’s Guide to L
ife.”
—More
“Short stories are sorely underrated, yet they are a wonderful amuse bouche between headier works or as a staple for commuters, and this new collection by acclaimed author Ann Hood will keep readers sated.”
—Elliot Bay Booknotes
“Writing with elegant precision, Hood’s awareness of place is tactile and familiar, drawing the reader into the scenes with her fumbling characters as they struggle with issues that require both courage and resilience; in the end, each tale uncovers an irrevocable moment of reckoning. . . . As the title intimates, the author is indeed an observer of human behavior, in this case human, not winged. Her protagonists are skillfully arranged for maximum emotional impact, illuminated, exposing the fragile undersides they are vainly trying to protect.”
—curled up with a good book
“These stories have bite. . . . Hood has enough perception to leave her characters room to grow after the stories end.”
—Library Journal
“An entertaining, brightly detailed collection.”
—Kathryn Schwille, Charlotte Observer
“Ann Hood has written a moving collection of stories about our everyday victories and defeats. Diverse and filled with surprises, these stories are bound by a common vision and with characters, lovingly drawn, who come together in incongruous and unanticipated ways.”
—Mary Morris, author of Acts of God
“Of course there is humor and wisdom and grace in these well-crafted short stories—Ann Hood wrote them. Even in the face of adversity, her characters cannot help but revel in all that life has to offer; they know no other tack.”
—Helen Schulman, author of P.S.
“What’s possible after loss? Ann Hood’s stories aim to find out by tracing the lives of families and couples blown apart by divorce, death, abandonment, and other departures. What’s left? Pain, tenuous new attachments, and hope, all of which Hood explores in her energetic new collection. Wry, entertaining, and entirely of the moment, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life offers up honest examples of how people in the twenty-first century manage to carry on.”
—Debra Spark, author of The Ghost of Bridgetown
“Ann Hood’s writing is an unusual combination of the delicate and the fierce. The stories in her collection feature characters whose lives are as eccentric, imperfect, and mysterious as our own. An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life is one of those collections that is a pure pleasure to dip into, for its author has so much to say, and we really want to listen.”
—Meg Wolitzer, author of Surrender, Dorothy
“Winging her way through caverns, kitchens, tattoo parlors, and tourist destinations, Ann Hood blesses with extraordinarism the most ordinary inhabitants of our world, proving yet again she is a rare literary bird who should be on the life list of every reader, and writer.” —Suzanne Strempek Shea,
author of Songs from a Lead-Lined Room
ALSO BY ANN HOOD
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
Waiting to Vanish
Three Legged Horse
Something Blue
Places to Stay the Night
The Properties of Water
Ruby
Do Not Go Gentle
These stories have appeared in:
Total Cave Darkness, The Paris Review; The Rightness
of Things, Five Points; The Language of Sorrow, Five
Points; After Zane, Redbook; Joelle’s Mother, Good
Housekeeping; Escapes, Story; Lost Parts, The Colorado
Review; Dropping Bombs, GlimmerTrain; Inside
Gorbachev’s Head, The Colorado Review; New People,
Gulf Coast Quarterly; An Ornithologist’s Guide to
Life, GlimmerTrain.
Copyright © 2004 by Ann Hood
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 2005
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10110
Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate
Production Manager: Anna Oler
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed
edition as follows:
Hood, Ann, 1956–
An ornithologist’s guide to life / Ann Hood.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-393-05900-6
1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction.
2. Psychological fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3558.0537075 2004
813'.54—dc22 2004006112
ISBN 978-0-393-32704-5
ISBN 978-0-393-28541-3 (e-book)
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