The Bird House A Novel

March 21, 2010



I’d hoped the Generations reception at the Langley School would be festive. I imagined a bowl of punch and trays of little cakes, and pictured some sort of slide show or video presentation, with our cover sparkling and Ellie’s name in lights. Perhaps there would be some sort of competition, with a blue ribbon presented to her by the principal in the middle of a well-lit stage. Ellie had worked so hard. Surely my alma mater would recognize these efforts with appropriate fanfare. I realized later I was picturing an event similar to my high school reunion. Silly me.

I arrived in the middle of an overlit gymnasium filled with people eating crumbly muffins and holding cups of lukewarm coffee. As I walked amid the sea of mounted covers and projects, I smelled not the thrillingly creative aroma of glue or paint or Magic Markers, but the scent of dirty rubber sneakers. I imagine if you ran a hand over any surface in the gym you would not find dust, but the ground-down detritus of black waffle-bottom shoes.

We entered together, Ellie, Tom, Tinsley, and I, and soon split up. Tinsley and Tom joined the other parents they knew, who stood in small circles between weighted balloons at the edges of the new gymnasium, while Ellie and I joined the other children leading their grandparents through the maze of projects. When I attended Langley, back in the day, this patch of land was a softball field; now it held this domed and overly lit bubble that was supposed to inspire play. I still remember the old structure on the other side of the school’s entrance, more barn than gymnasium. You couldn’t serve a volleyball without brushing your fist against the wooden wall. Peter’s prep school was across the way, and he’d walk over after chess club and watch us play. I couldn’t hear him cheering through the window, but I’d see him, fists pumped in the air, whenever I scored a point. That old gym was almost unrecognizable now; they’d bathed it with windows and called it a greenhouse.

The winding trail of grandparents lingered over every child’s project, sniping and comparing, while their grandchild pulled on their hand, anxious to get to theirs. Ellie and I were no exception.

“No one else has a new photo on the cover,” I noted somewhat gleefully. “Everyone else has old photos.”

We passed by an acre of xeroxed black-and-white portraits of couples, some lumpy and foreboding, some lipsticked and smiling. How alike all these projects looked, as if the children had furtively copied from each other during study hall. And I couldn’t help noticing four other projects cut out in the shape of something—what a merciful accident we’d had, with those failed layers of paper and glue!

When we reached Ellie’s display, several other grandmothers and children stood in front of it.

“It’s awfully new looking,” one of the grandmothers whispered. She herself was old looking, with a teased globe of hair and fat, sensible shoes.

At the next display the same grandmother whispered, “I don’t think a child drew that picture, do you? Who is her grandpa, Andrew Wyeth?”

“You should be very proud, Ellie,” I whispered. “It’s the best one here.”

“I know,” she whispered back with a huge sigh and squeezed my hand. There were no drips of glue, or uneven edges, the signs of haste. We’d taken our time, and it showed.

To celebrate, we went out for dinner to a place where the smell of a wood-fired pizza oven permeated the entire room. I coughed when I walked in; it was a bit like being in a hut where they were about to roast a goat.

“This has always been Ellie’s favorite restaurant,” Tinsley said.

“Really?” I choked out.

Instead of crayons, they gave the children dough to play with. Tinsley reassured me that there was no raw egg in it. “They pasteurize it first,” she said and smiled, as if that made a difference, as if I cared, as if I hadn’t eaten enough cookie and pie dough to kill me ten times over.

“Oh, how lovely,” I said.

“Ann,” she said, fiddling with the rustic napkin on her lap, “have you ever made cookies when Ellie was over and eaten the dough?”

I blinked at my daughter-in-law.

“No, we usually pick wild mushrooms in the backyard and sauté them,” I replied, and Tom, god bless him, laughed.

“An old family tradition,” he added. “Remember when we found the wild onions, Mom? I told you the daffodils smelled funny.”

“Yes, yes, I believe we made soup from them.”

“You made soup from something you found in the yard?” Tinsley said.

Tom and I stared at her as if she’d lost her marbles.

“People generally have their vegetable gardens in their yards,” Tom said.

“That’s not the same thing, honey,” she replied.

Tinsley gestured to our waiter and Tom glanced over at me with a rueful smile. I widened my eyes back at him, but said nothing. It wouldn’t do to gang up on Tinsley in front of Ellie; no sense in blurting out, “You’re insane, it is the same thing!”

When the waiter came over, Tinsley asked for sparkling water, and said that Ellie could have a Sprite if she wanted. Ellie smiled but gave me a sideways glance. I knew what she really wanted: Coca-Cola. Tom and I each ordered a glass of merlot, and the waiter wondered if we’d like a bottle for the table. We looked at each other and Tom squinted, considering.

“Oh, I only want one glass,” I said, and I swear I could hear Tinsley exhale. She was watching me, I knew. Not looking at me, watching.

The drinks arrived and Tinsley raised her glass.

“To our darling Ellie,” Tinsley said. “To a job well done!”

We all clinked glasses and drank and Tinsley asked Ellie if, as the guest of honor, she’d like to make a speech.

“Yes,” Ellie said, standing up and lifting her glass again. “To Grandma! For helping me.”

“Thank you, sweetheart, but you did all the work. All I did was bring out the albums,” I said.

“And the snacks,” she added, and we all laughed.

“I’m sure,” Tinsley said and smiled, “Ann did a lot more than that.”

Ellie started rolling her dough into a long coiled snake as Tom spoke about his firm’s newest client, a pharmaceutical company accused of using tainted vaccine. He said he was glad he hadn’t been asked to defend them, since one of their friends had an autistic child and claimed the vaccine had been the cause.

“Can’t you turn down assignments, now that you’re a partner?” I asked.

He shrugged, and I saw Ellie in him then, the not giving anything away.

“If you’d lived through the polio epidemic, you’d understand how important vaccines are,” I added.

“It’s probably not the best dinner conversation with a little one, though, Tom,” Tinsley said.

“What?” Ellie said, looking up from the small snake eyes she’d just formed.

“Nothing, honey,” Tom replied. “Just grown-up talk about diseases and stuff.”

“If I’m going to be a doctor, I need to know about what you’re talking about.”

“Do you want to be a doctor, baby?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Then I could cure Grandma’s breast cancer.”

I dropped my head to avoid Tinsley’s gaze, but couldn’t help allowing a smile to curl up on the edges of my mouth. I had inspired her! This is what they write about in people’s autobiographies, the exact moment their passions took hold!

“Sweetie,” Tinsley said softly, “Grandma isn’t sick anymore.”

“I meant cure it for everyone.”

Tinsley blinked. “Oh.”

“Ellie,” I said, emboldened, turning to her in the half-circle booth, “doing this project together gave me an idea. What if,” I said, my eyes dancing, “you and I had a regular get-together to do crafts?”

“Like a playdate?” Her eyes seemed to brighten.

“Yes, just like that. We could do it perhaps twice a month, or once a month if you’re busy.”

“Great idea,” Tom said, but Tinsley was quiet, and so was Ellie for just a moment. She glanced at her mother nervously before she looked back at me. Had I read her wrong? Had they discussed something I wasn’t privy to? I thought if I asked them in a group, in public, they couldn’t say no. The same way Tom used to ask if his friend could stay for dinner when the child was standing right in front of me with a rumbling stomach.

Ellie’s brief silence—two seconds? three?—crushed me in the way that only a child can crush you. I felt my face start to flush on the edges.

“I think that would be fun,” she said with a nod of her head for punctuation.

“We have to look at your schedule, though,” Tinsley said, frowning. “And see if you even have a couple of hours free.”

Ellie didn’t look at her mother, but she flashed me a small conspiratorial smile.

I smiled back widely. “Yes, of course, Tinsley,” I said brightly, “and I’ll look at mine.”

When the pasta dishes arrived, the plates were enormous and steaming in a way that struck me as false, like a restaurant commercial. I could have eaten for a week off my plate of primavera alone. I thought of our visit to Stuart’s, and the genius of those old red plastic baskets: they always held a perfectly sized portion.

When we finished eating Tom slipped his arm around his wife and she squirmed a little beneath his grasp. If I had just been looking, I wouldn’t have noticed, but I was watching. Oh, I was watching her now, too.