The Bird House A Novel

March 5, 2010



I was walking out the door, literally walking out the door with my tennis racket in hand, when I made the mistake of answering the phone. Tinsley’s words sounded as if they’d been filtered through a wall of tears.

“Ann, I know you must have meant well, but… we really need to discuss what you told Ellie.”

“Tinsley?” I asked dumbly. Was I stalling for time, or was I really surprised? Her voice seemed unusually deep, and there were several long stunned seconds when I believed, truly, that I had no idea who she was or what she was talking about.

“Yes, it’s Tinsley, Ann, we need—”

“I’m afraid you’ve caught me on my way out—I, uh—”

“You need to explain this to me, Ann. What on earth made you tell a little girl she had the breast cancer gene?”

“That’s certainly not what I told her.”

“Well, that’s what she heard.”

I wrinkled my nose. Maybe that’s what Tinsley heard. It was hard to believe that was Ellie’s interpretation. She hadn’t given any indication in that direction. None at all.

“Why, Ann? I don’t understand.”

“Well, the subject… just… presented itself.”

I struggled to recall the exact context of our breast cancer discussion. I confess I could not. Later I looked up my diary entry to remind myself that it did, in fact, come up naturally. I wanted to show it to Tinsley as evidence, like a courtroom drawing.

“Well, how would that subject just come up, Ann? I don’t—”

“Something… in the store prompted it, I believe.”

“Did she touch your prosthetic, or—”

“Yes, something like that.”

“I know she asks a lot of questions, but you can’t give her too much information. It needs to be managed. Maybe you should have asked her to speak to m—”

“Ellie is very mature, Tinsley. She doesn’t need to be mollycoddled.”

“She was up all night, Ann! I think she was afraid she had cancer!”

I shifted my weight from foot to foot in my sneakers. I thought of the float we’d shared at Stuart’s, the scoop bobbing in the fizz.

“Well, she did have a little cola with her ice cream. Maybe that kept her awake.”

“You gave her caffeine?”

I sighed. Tinsley made it sound like I’d put a goddamn IV in her arm!

“No,” I said firmly. “She drank a little cola, that’s all. A few sips.”

I couldn’t wait to end the conversation so I could tell Betsy about it. Betsy, who had hated every girl her son ever dated. Over the years we’d raised eyebrows at their clothes and their helmets of hair and their earnest fund-raising careers. Now he was dating women with fake breasts and grim unwrinkled smiles. And then there were the women all around us, at the grocery store, restaurants, the club. We could go on and on about these young mothers who didn’t let their children get a little tan or climb a little tree or eat a little cotton candy a few damn times a year when the carnival came to town. And having only one child made it worse. You never learn to relax because you never get a second chance at anything. Every year, every stage, every phase—it’s all new and requires the same fumbling about. But Tinsley—well, we always had hope for Tinsley. Were we wrong?

“She’s only allowed to have root beer.”

“Oh,” I said archly, as if that explained it. As if root beer were somehow more acceptable than a Coca-Cola! As if they both wouldn’t rot your damned teeth! Tinsley was lucky I didn’t give her a few sips of my beer!

There was a long pause, and I’ve been living on this earth long enough to understand what that space was supposed to contain. I gathered up my breath and my pride and filled it.

“Well, I’m sorry, Tinsley, if I did something to upset you or Ellie.”

I heard her sniff on the other end of the line and that small sound made me cringe. She sounded prissy and particular and whiny in that moment; not the sensible, openminded high-energy Tinsley I thought my son had married, not at all.

“I guess,” I sighed, “cancer is a subject one just can’t talk about.”

“Oh no, Ann, that’s not true. Look, I’m sorry, too. It must be—well, it must be hard for you. I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through.”

I smiled. I had her now, didn’t I? At the end of the day, shouldn’t a cancer survivor be given the slack to say any damn thing she pleased? A few seconds later the subject was easily changed; we agreed on a time for Ellie’s next playdate, and I left for the club, almost guilt free.

After our tennis round, I told Betsy the whole story over a club sandwich and she pointed out how incredibly ironic the whole situation was. Tinsley and Tom sent me their child to learn the family history, but the medical history was off-limits! Well, I said, I guess I’d better not mention that my mother had dementia or they’ll make me do a Sudoku puzzle before they let me take Ellie out! Betsy tilted her head and said softly that she didn’t know dementia ran in my family.

I waved my hand in the air. “One person,” I said, “is hardly an epidemic.” Well, Betsy rejoined, since you’re climbing trees I thought perhaps you’d forgotten how old you are. We laughed and the subject changed to something else.

In the late afternoon I spread the newspaper across my dining room table and laid out scissors, glue, and pipe cleaners in addition to the recently purchased construction paper, poster board, and faux cardinal. Looking at everything laid out that way confounded me. It was like looking at the parts of an engine. I still didn’t quite understand what Ellie was going to make of all these pieces, but I’d come to realize it was her project, not mine. I was just one of the pieces, like the paper or glue. Assemble your materials, her teacher told her. Lay out your markers, your photos, and your grandmothers.

When Tom arrived with Ellie, he lingered for a long time. I invited him twice to stay, but he said he couldn’t. Kept asking if we needed supplies, if he could run out and get paper or pipe cleaners.

“No,” I said firmly.

“Tinsley has a hot-glue gun if you need it.”

I recoiled from the phrase “hot-glue gun” as if I’d been shot.

“No, dear,” I said deliberately, “we’re all set.”

I knew he wanted to say something to me, beyond the discussion I’d had with Tinsley, but he couldn’t bring himself to. We’d never had sharp words for each other, Tom and I. Even during the inevitable childhood kerfuffles and adolescent pranks. I couldn’t yell at him, and that gave him no reason to yell back. We were wildly unpracticed at arguing with each other. Theo and he could always stir up a heated debate at least, over politics or pending legislation. Not us. Now, he couldn’t even summon a stern face.

He finally left, saying he’d be back at nine. Nine, I repeated to myself. Nine.

Ellie cut brown construction paper in the shape of a house, then cut smaller houses out of other colors. Her plan, she told me, was to “layer” the houses and decorate the roofline with pipe cleaners. Her name would go on a welcome mat in front of the house, and the bird would be wired into the binding. I nodded. I sensed I shouldn’t say anything, but my comments twitched inside me. I blinked, breathed, shifted feet. At one point, when the glue squished out the edges of the third soggy house, I almost had to leave the room, stop watching. She was doing it wrong. She was making a mistake, and I was letting her.

“Ellie,” I said brightly, “do you think maybe the layers are…”

“Too thick?” she said, standing back to survey her progress.

“Yes,” I said, relieved.

“Too wet,” she added.

“The paper isn’t strong enough to support all that glue and pipe cleaners.”

She nodded and looked up at me. “Do you have any other ideas?”

I tried to hide my shock. But why was I surprised? Didn’t children appreciate their elders only when they were in a pickle?

This vortex was my opportunity, I knew. I had to think quickly. I rubbed my chin with one hand and looked skyward. After a minute something swelled in me, ballooned into being, rising up fuller with each passing second, a feeling familiar from my own classrooms, the old writing desks and dusty labs and lockered hallways of Langley, before it had been renovated and wiped clean of any personality. A brilliant idea forming itself, carving and polishing inside me. I smiled broadly and prepared for its necessary, exuberant birth.

“When exactly is this due?”

“In a week,” she said glumly.

“What if…,” I said, rising to stand, “we took new photos for the cover? To juxtapose with the old?”

When she looked up, her eyes were a tad brighter. I understood what was happening between us. There were words like “juxtapose” that could thrill just with their sound, the music of something bursting forth, clanging itself forward into miraculous change. I wish I could have breathed them over my children’s cribs, repeating them instead of singsongs.

“Like… what kind of photos?”

“How about,” I rubbed my hands together, “I take pictures of you or maybe your mother and father, running, flapping your wings…” I paused and moved my own arms slowly, ballerina-like, invoking the grandest of birds. “The camera blurring, showing you in motion? I have a great camera, and I’m not a bad shot. We could take them in black and white to look old.”

“Or on the computer,” she added brightly, “we could make them that old brown color!”

“Sepia!”

“Yes!”

If we were another sort of pair, we might have cried “Eureka!” or slapped each other high fives. Instead, we set to work. We finished all the interior pages, nestling the photos into plastic sleeves, writing captions. She put all the pieces into the large portfolio envelope she’d brought along, then started cleaning up. She began closing the albums, stacking them. I went to the coat closet to get a hand vacuum for the paper scraps.

“Grandma,” she called out, “are there any other family secrets besides the breast cancer?”

My hand went to my heart. I knew I hadn’t opened the green trunks in the attic. I knew I hadn’t brought down the wrong albums. But what had she seen? Could a photo have fallen in and stuck to the back of the album? The birthday photo, the one I kept under my pillow for so long—was that where it had gone?

I turned so quickly I got dizzy. The album in front of her was open to a photo of two boys in letter sweaters swinging my aunt Caro by her legs and arms. I leaned in for a closer look. Caro had her engagement ring on, but my mother did not. Who were these boys? Where was this picture taken?

“Grandma?”

“All families have secrets,” I said quietly, with as much tact as I could muster.

“Like what?”

I took a breath; I had to be more careful, I did.

“Oh, it’s complicated, sweetheart.”

“Too complicated for a kid to understand?”

“Too boring, really,” I said and smiled. “Tangled and silly. Not all secrets are interesting, some are just plain silly.”

“My mommy has a secret,” she said quietly.

“Oh?”

“She has a friend she works out with. Who is a boy.”

I swallowed and took a deep breath. Ellie’s eyes moved up from the album to meet mine.

“That’s different from a boyfriend.” She said it as a pronouncement, but I saw the crack in her armor. I felt the fissure coming, as we walked, as if the floor Theo had designed but never built could have opened up at any time.

“Yes, why, yes it is,” I said, patting her hand. “Completely different.”

“But she told me not to tell anybody.” Her voice was soft again and I felt her unease. It was one thing to move closer to your grandmother with a confidence, and another thing to have to move away from your own mother to do it.

I cocked my head. Why would Tinsley do such a thing? This seemed completely unnecessary, unless… was Tom the jealous type? I couldn’t recall ever seeing him be overbearing or controlling.

“You know, when you were tiny, she used to take you with her when she ran, in the jogging stroller. She never went anywhere without her little sprout. That’s what she called you, ‘sprout.’”

I smiled, proud of myself for remembering so clearly. At Tinsley’s baby shower her friends had wheeled in that red canvas monstrosity with the enormous tires and everyone oohed and ahhed over it like it was a new car. Tinsley had always liked to be outdoors, baby or no baby. She and Tom were constantly hiking or biking somewhere when they were first married. For their first anniversary, Theo and I had given them a tent, and Tinsley’s eyes lit up as if she’d gotten a string of pearls. Tom used to joke that Tinsley was born outside, and found among the leaves, like Mowgli.

“She doesn’t take me anymore, and she exercises all the time now,” Ellie said quietly and I realized that if you added her statements together, their sum was greater than their parts. Was Tinsley exercising all the time with her friend? Was she worried her husband would be jealous? Was she not spending enough time with her daughter?

“Well,” I said, “she probably is just… nervous about getting older. Watching her weight, making sure she stays healthy.” It seemed to me her fortieth birthday must be approaching. As was Tom’s. Maybe instead of having Botox, she was simply working out.

I asked Ellie if she wanted something to drink and she said yes.

I brought out a can of Coca-Cola and two glasses filled with ice.

“To our cover,” I said.

Her eyes widened in the glow of the bright red can.

“It can be our tiny secret,” I whispered.

We drank deeply, the bubbles tickling our noses. This is how revolutions begin, I wanted to tell her. Just like this.