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.