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.