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 touch 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.
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.