The Bird House A Novel

The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons


October 22, 2010



Beneath the surface of any problem, if you scrabble a bit, you’ll find a secret.

It may take a while—decades perhaps—not for your excavation, mind you, but for your desire to appear; for that childlike curiosity to float up again. Indeed, you may need an actual child to summon it, as I did.

But this is what drives us—the historians, the trash pickers, the gossips, the shrinks. And yes, the readers of books. We’re all rooting around, teasing out other people’s hidden reasons.

Haven’t we all profited from another’s heartache? Anything antique or inherited comes to you out of pain. And it comes to you, doesn’t it? Why, even the comforting of a sniveling acquaintance carries a sweet center: after they sob on your shoulder, they will tell you why.

Please don’t say I’m drawn to others’ secrets because I have several in my own deep past. That’s a bit tidy, don’t you think? In fact, I’ll come clean with a confession right now. Perhaps that will make you feel better about my motives.

Forty years ago, my young daughter died because of something I did. Notice I stop short of saying I killed her, even though I clearly did. No one knows this. Do you think my daughter-in-law would ever let me near my granddaughter if she knew?

I didn’t bury this pivotal event, or suffocate it in a cloud of good works, as so many venerable Main Line ladies would, yet much of it, the details especially, have sloughed away. By necessity, by neglect, by a need for the widow to soldier on. And yes, by the failure of my own memory. Call it what you will: “senior moments,” old age, dementia. It’s inevitable, that’s what it is. You go right ahead and complete all the crosswords your children press on you; but know they can keep you only so sharp.

Sometimes my memory of that awful day wanders away completely, and when it returns, it jolts me, like falling in dreams. I can’t summon my actions in crystal detail anymore; I see the house, that room, through a haze, in pieces. I can see the maple tree outside the window, and beyond it, the old field on one side and the park with the verdigris Revolutionary War statue on the other. But I’ve forgotten, for instance, what time it was; whether the light sparkled when it hit the water, or cast shadows across it, making it look more gray and deeper than it actually was. I draw a blank on whether the baby cried in the distance, or where Peter was hiding—in the cellar; in the field; or in the small, dark shed. Parts of it are gone, perhaps forever. I miss the details, the small intricacies of many things now, even this. All the more reason to continue to write things down in my diary. All the more reason for me to take my pictures, to hang on to scrapbooks and photo albums in steamer trunks. All the more reason to collect evidence.

This morning, for instance, I completely forgot that I’d been to the lawyer. My newest secret, and I only remembered when I opened my freezer and saw what I’d hidden there. Imagine!

It will all come out in time, the tidbits I’ve learned and swung round to my advantage. But I did not set out to do any of it, and neither did Ellie. It’s important you believe me. The natural order of things merely took over. The drive to dig pulled us like the tides.

All we did, after all, was pay attention. You should try it sometime. Watch a woman’s face as she fingers her antique locket. Hear the jangle of charm bracelets covering up an ancestor’s cries. Feel the ring handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, how the gold is worn down at the back by everything they’d done while wearing it—all the games they’d played, all the people they’d touched, all the things they’d held and broken.

It’s all there, in every jewelry box and trunk, every photo album and yellowed postcard, every attic and basement. Just look, and you’ll see what I mean. You don’t have to travel to a lost city to find the artifacts of a mysterious society. Just go ask your grandmother.





July 1, 2010

THREE MONTHS EARLIER



Earlier this week, I positioned navy and red cushions on the porch chairs, tucked blue pansies into planters, and hung an enormous flag. It flaps so loudly on breezy nights I think a man in a canvas raincoat has entered the room. It was one of those days when I missed Theo dearly. After all, it takes one to hold the ladder and one to climb it.

I don’t normally approve of such obvious seasonal decor, but Ellie was coming over and I wanted her parents—my son, Tom, and his wife, Tinsley—to know that I was quite aware, fully cognizant, of the upcoming holiday.

Of course I can’t remember every single thing; who can? Maybe that’s why I took up photography so late in life, started lugging Theo’s Nikon camera around. So I could document things, remember them, the way he used to. The stages of the buildings he designed were as fleeting as memory, after all; once the plaster covered the fragile wooden bones you never saw them again. Even when they were finished, completed, they changed by the season. Everything changes, even the way we look at it. I remember Theo used to lay out the progression of construction photos across his big desk, and explain each step to me, and what had gone right and what had gone wrong. In the beginning, before we had children, I sat on the corner of that desk with my chin on his shoulder and listened as he explained the engineering dilemmas and described the imported materials. He taught me about divided light and molding, about soffits and cupolas, giving names to things I’d seen but never truly known.

On the weekends, after we made the rounds of the tag sales, Theo and I would sneak into Realtors’ open houses, pretending to be in the market, and Theo would whisper in my ear the flaws and strengths of each floor plan. The den was too dark, the bedrooms too small. The kitchen should be reoriented to face south. These were our jigsaw puzzles; this was our cinema. When the children arrived, it was as if there was no room for our home life in his work life. I heard their voices, not his. And he heard his clients, no one else. That’s what I remember, and of course Theo isn’t here to refute me. There’s a certain glory in that, I tell you. Widowhood means I’ll always have the last damn word.

I invited Ellie over for more than just the Fourth of July. I forgot some of what the lawyer told me to do—but no matter. I believe I managed to collect what he needed. I do remember him saying it should be simple, and he was right—it was easy to execute, childlike, almost, except for one part.

Ellie arrived to spend the night and I didn’t even have to ask if she was thirsty. Aren’t all eight-year-old girls thirsty? I simply set out a glass of Coca-Cola next to the tray of sparklers and that little blond head bobbed straight for it, moth to flame. Why, I could have poisoned her, easily, with that amber glass.

When she finished drinking I brought out the fireworks jigsaw puzzle, then made a big show of needing to do the dishes, so Ellie didn’t think twice about me ferrying away her tumbler while wearing rubber gloves. I sealed it in a plastic bag and put it the freezer, just as George Marquardt Esquire told me to. Well, he told me to put something in the freezer.

The whole business reminded me briefly of a game I used to play with my father. Whenever he returned from one of what my mother called “his adventures”—a safari, a trek of some kind, a bird-watching expedition—he’d bring me back a present and hide it somewhere symbolic in the house, while providing only the barest of clues. This was no small undertaking, searching for these treasures, as we had ten bedrooms, eight baths, and, as I recall, many similar rooms with different names: den, office, library, sitting room. They had minor differences among them—the library had books and the den had taxidermy—but only the bedrooms seemed wholly differentiated, as each was a different pale color. Salmon, gold, mint. I console myself with the lack of memory by reminding myself that ten is quite a few of anything for anyone to recall. At any rate, I do distinctly remember my father hiding an Inuit doll in our freezer, of all places. (It was wildly unfair, the freezer being totally out of reach for a young girl, yet completely appropriate as a stand-in for tundra.) As I closed my own freezer door I heard the solid, reassuring hum that signaled its frosty seal, and I wondered about that doll. I’d thrown out most of my father’s gifts, and given some to my mother to sell at auction. But I couldn’t picture the doll. Pity; perhaps Ellie would have liked it.

Later that night, we watched the fireworks from the deck off my bedroom. They were far enough away that we could appreciate their expanse, but close enough that they were terribly loud, and Ellie snuggled into the curve of my shoulder during several startling booms. Afterward I taught her how to light and hold a sparkler, and she promptly went through the whole box, her blond curls bouncing as she wrote her name and mine in the sky. When I close my eyes I can still see them there, the loops of her e’s and the bumps of my n’s burning an electric trail.

Theo and I had done that with sparklers, too, on one of our earliest dates. He took me for a walk in the evening near the library, around the art museum circle. We sat on the towering steps in the dark and when he reached into his book bag and pulled out the sparklers I was struck by the romance of it, by his organization and forward thinking. Not by his thriftiness, or the student-y simplicity of the date. Funny the things you remember and the things you forget. He always had sparklers for Tom, too, and now I had them for Ellie.

It had grown late, and a mere ten minutes after the last sparkler fizzled down to a glowing silver nub, Ellie fell asleep clutching her worn stuffed bear and breathing heavily, mouth open, in the guest room. I call it the guest room, but it used to have another name, another purpose. Another child once slept in it, in another life, in another bed. I didn’t remove anything; only Theo, of course, would have thought to change the furniture. He was the one who spent a whole weekend putting away her toys and books and clothes, keeping only a few cherished photographs around. One day I walked in and her maple canopy bed was gone; a wrought-iron headboard as delicate as filigree jewelry stood in its place. It was impossible to imagine my daughter against that frilly backdrop, and I suppose that’s why he chose it. Its pattern circled round and round; you could lose yourself trying to find your way out of its curves and whorls.

I stood over Ellie a long time, making certain she was fast asleep before I stepped forward and snipped a locket of her golden hair. It was only when I stood above her with my sharpest scissors that I realized the import of what I was doing. The scene below me—the cottony pillow interrupted by the swirl of flaxen hair; the graceful indents below her ears; her neck, as tiny as an animal’s, pulsing with her soft breath—was something only a mother or a criminal would be privileged to see. Or someone, like me, who was both.