The Bird House A Novel

August 2, 1967

3:00 PM

sponge bath



MY BREAST IS GONE, BUT sometimes I still feel it. When the left one fizzes with milk, I feel the right one, too. When I take off my bra, an imagined weight pulls on both sides. Then I look down, and I know. Betsy and I had a laugh over this—that now I really never could burn my bra even if I wanted to.

This morning I stood in front of the open bathroom window, letting my hair dry in the breeze. I felt it curl up only at the ends; it would never be stick straight like Faye Dunaway’s or Jane Fonda’s, just as it would never be wavy like Grace Kelly’s. I will never be in style, but that is probably the least of my worries. When I lifted my arms, the breeze gathered force across the bandages on my right side, like wind picking up momentum in an alley. Will I ever get used to it? Will I always notice every little thing?

When Dr. Ferrell had called with the biopsy results, I knew what he was going to say. “It’s cancer, isn’t it?” I said quietly, watching as the bacon I’d just turned popped and sizzled in the cast-iron pan. He said yes, and that he was sorry. He didn’t ask how I knew; maybe he assumed my fate was sealed because of my mother. He suggested a date for the surgery and advised me to wean the baby completely beforehand. But I still had a little milk. This morning I crept into the nursery and cradled the baby until his mouth opened and started to burrow, even sleeping, even blind. I opened my shirt and guided him on. I cupped his feet with my right hand to keep him from kicking against my dressing, and closed my eyes. In a few minutes my breast was flat, the skin almost papery. He cried loudly when I pulled him off, cried as I burped him, cried in his crib while I went downstairs to get him a bottle, my shirt still unbuttoned. My son, it seems, would miss my right breast more than anyone else. Was that what I wanted? To know someone would?

Theo brought me home from the hospital and propped pillows all around me, as if to compensate, somehow, for my own new lack of padding. He made a point of looking me straight in the eye, whenever he spoke, trying to train his eyes to not look at my body. I tell you this so you’ll know he was trying. He stayed home from the office, working in the study, on that first day, and when it became clear I would need help beyond that, hired a nurse for a week to feed and diaper the baby, make Emma supper and give her a bath. What else could he do? My family couldn’t help—my mother was half mad in the nursing home, and Aunt Caro was traveling overseas. It was both thoughtful and necessary to have another person there, but I became dangerously accustomed to it. The day after the nurse left, I clanged around the kitchen angrily, furious at lids that didn’t fit pots, at the vague smears of butter and jelly Theo had left on his breakfast plate. The baby was still sleeping but I’d woken up Emma.

“Stop it!”

She called from behind me and I sighed as I whisked the eggs. Who spoke in this rough way? Where had she soaked it up—at the nursery school I paid for? At the playground I’d fought so hard to keep in her life?

“What did you say?”

“I can’t sleep,” she pouted as she covered her ears with her hands. “That baby always cries and you’re making noise.”

There was a moment when her voice turned into Theo’s. Throaty and ugly, a man in her mouth. Was that who Emma was, Theo’s darkest thoughts and deeds embodied? I imagined he felt exactly the same way and was so polite he didn’t dare speak of it. I breathed deeply and kept my voice calm.

“You’re not supposed to sleep, Emma,” I sighed. “It’s morning.”

I poured orange juice into her favorite plastic cup, an orange bottom with a yellow lid, and handed it to her before I went back to scrambling eggs. When I turned around, she picked it up and I swear she brought it up to her lips, a centimeter away, which is why I didn’t see it coming.

The cup could have hit anywhere else and hurt less. Her aim was true, almost straight to the heart: direct to the right breast. I shrieked and collapsed; it hurt so much, so instantaneously, I gagged, nearly vomiting on my own feet.

Emma’s hands covered her mouth, her eyes open in surprise.

“Why did you do that, Emma? Why?”

“I was trying to throw it in the sink,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Okay, Emma,” I sighed and pulled myself upright. But it wasn’t okay, because I confess, part of me didn’t believe her.





August 3, 1967



MY MOTHER IS NOT DELUSIONAL, just asleep, although sometimes that can be the same thing. She thrashes as I stand above her, repeating the word “no” as she shakes her whole body along with her head. I put the bundle of roses at the foot of her bed, freeing my hands to hold hers.

“Mom,” I say gently. “It’s okay.”

“No,” she continues, “no.”

Her damp hair, parted low, clings to one side of her face, obscuring one eye. When I reach up to brush it away, she swats at my hand. I go to the bathroom and dampen a washcloth, not the standard-issue ones stacked on the toilet tank, but one of the plush ones I brought last week and hid in the metal cabinet.

The cool cloth calms her for a second; her head stops turning and her breath becomes deep. When she speaks, I jump a little, as if I’d forgotten she was alive.

“If you don’t stop this, you’ll regret it,” she growls.

I lift the cloth above her head.

“I’ll make you pay,” she says.

“Make who pay, Mom?”

“Mark my words, P.S. Mark my words.”

When she wakes up, it’s as if she doesn’t know me. I try to tell her about my trip to the doctor, but she gets a faraway look in her eyes. Half an hour later, after we have tea, she has no recollection of what she said when I arrived, and brushes it aside. I tell her she said it in a different voice, as if she was restaging something someone had said to her.

“Like playacting?” she says brightly, and I say yes. Then she asks me if she’s ever told me the story of how she won the lead in her high school play. And even though I know it by heart, every nuance of how she found out the name of the play in advance, and memorized all the lines for her audition, I say no, Mom, tell me how you did it.

And that is the end of it. When I mention it to the nurse later, she tells me that dementia patients often remember things in their dreams that they can’t remember awake, things that they have shoved aside, things that hurt, things they can’t bear to recall.





May 12, 2010



I dillydallied quite a bit scheduling my next outing with Ellie; the truth was, I didn’t want to face Tinsley. All that week after we’d seen her on the running path, I’d gone back over practically every evening I’d spent with her, scanning them for pieces of discontent, for frowns or pursed lips or uneaten meals, rooting around in my memory like photographs in attic trunks.

Certainly, I’d always liked her on the surface, that’s no secret. The night we met, at that café on the Schuylkill River Tom insisted upon, she was dressed very low key, in beige slacks and a cream sweater, as if she knew she could rely on her personality for color. She laughed easily and tolerated Theo’s serious and plodding questions, even teasingly asking him if he was interviewing her. I didn’t think it was the champagne cocktails fueling her, but her own engine, her own power. Tom smiled and said so little I was afraid he might be ill. By the time we’d ordered coffee and chocolate mousse, I could see what Tom was up to. He was just letting her shine, not getting in the way. Not trying too hard to play matchmaker—not after all the brooding intellectual girlfriends he’d brought home who we didn’t like. He knew he’d hit pay dirt, and he just let it become apparent to us. And of course it worked.

Who wouldn’t want a happy, friendly, curious daughter-in-law? Now I wonder if Tinsley was too friendly—if that’s what got her into trouble.

I thought of other dinners we’d had together, and of course their wedding, barely a year after Theo died, and the lovely tribute Tom gave him with Tinsley looking on adoringly. The day Ellie was born, the christening, Thanksgiving and Christmas, the birthday dinners. In my mind’s eye Tinsley is smiling in all of them. Even lately, when she chides me about Ellie, these little run-ins over diet or curfew or for discussing the family medical history, I don’t get the sense that she is completely frowning on the other end of the phone. It’s a happy kind of complaining, surely? Or is she fed up with the entire family? Not just Tom, but Tom’s mother?

I called Tom at the office and reached him just before he got on a train to New York. I asked whether I could see Ellie Saturday morning. He said he thought it would be okay, but he’d have to look at something called the “family calendar” and confirm. I thought about asking him to come to breakfast with us then realized, sharply, that that would give Tinsley more time alone. Was that why she agreed to our playdates, at all? To help with her assignations?

At least I could be relatively certain Tom would be there when I picked up his daughter. His little rule was that he’d always be back from his trips by Saturday morning.

When I arrived I’d barely lifted my hand to knock when Ellie pulled the heavy door away from my knuckles. She must have been sitting on the bench in the foyer, waiting.

“Well, good morning to you,” I said.

“I’m ready,” she said, grinning and gesturing to a puffy vest that was meant to suffice for a coat.

“Indeed you are.” I smiled and decided not to ask what on earth she planned to do if her arms and legs felt an unseasonable chill, and not her chest. I looked past her, toward the slice of kitchen visible from where I stood. I saw dishes in the drainer, rubber gloves. No parents.

“Where’s your father?”

“He’s in New York.”

I frowned; Tom had broken his rule? “Really? What about your mother?”

“She’s in the bathroom.”

“Is she bathing?”

“No, silly! She’s brushing her teeth.”

Tinsley’s phone vibrated on the kitchen island like a trapped June bug. I watched it scuttle about, and leaned over to steady it.

“Run and tell your mother we’re leaving,” I said, and the moment her back was turned, I whisked the phone into my purse.

“Well,” Tinsley said and smiled widely as she ascended the steps, “where are we off to today?”

Her teeth, which had always been large, gleamed postbrushing and suddenly struck me as ridiculous. I couldn’t take my eyes off them as we spoke—they were comical, a parody of a mouth.

I endured reexplaining myself: that we were going to the orchard. That there would be cider and strawberry picking. That it was right off Westchester Pike past the place where Theo and I had always bought corn. I left out the part about their famous cider doughnuts—I didn’t care to be admonished again for feeding her child sugar.

“Strawberry picking, huh?” Tinsley replied, ruffling Ellie’s hair. “But Westchester Pike—isn’t that kind of a long drive?”

I picked at the edge of my purse. It was my turn to speak in slow motion.

“Why do you ask, Tinsley?” I said, pulling out every syllable. “Do you need extra time for something today?”

I met her eyes, and to her credit, she didn’t look away. But she didn’t look angry, either; she looked at me the way women have looked at each other in locker rooms, in ballrooms, in drawing rooms since the beginning of time. She looked as if she was sizing up a rival.

“No,” she said, too late.

“Well then.” I smiled, a small smile, graceful, just a hint of teeth. “We’ll see you… later. Give Tom my love.”

At the orchard we went on a hayride through the farm and Ellie whispered, “Are there seat belts?” I told her just to hold on to the edge of the truck and the look on her face when we first took off was a mix of fear and joy. The freedom of her body, the swaying and bouncing, not held back by restraint. It was like seeing an astronaut’s first weightlessness in space. This is childhood, Ellie! I wanted to shout above the children’s squeals. This is all it is, so much and so little. My father and I took a hayride every year to pick pumpkins. We’d walk down every row in the patch, and he’d pick up vine after vine to look beneath it, trying to find the smallest pumpkins for our fairy gardens. The last things we’d add before the winter took them away. And in the spring, we picked strawberries together, too, not from an orchard, but from our own land, out past the gazebo, just short of our neighbor’s stables. We always stopped to give a strawberry or two to their horses.

There were no horses at this orchard, though, and we walked into the barn and looked at displays of fruit carvings—elaborate faces that dried and fell into themselves, sunken apple cheekbones, tiny apple dimples. That’s how I will look in five years, I thought. I let her eat not one, but three cider doughnuts because she said they were the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted. She wanted to take some home for her father, but I advised against it.

“Your mother would not like that,” I said.

“My mother is ridiculous,” she said, crumbs flying as the words came out.

I laughed and told her everyone thought their own mother was ridiculous.

“You loved your mother,” she said. “We drank a toast to her.”

“Well, when I was a girl I didn’t appreciate her as much.”

I thought of my mother’s life after my father left; dressed up and going out to country clubs night after night when she lived at Aunt Caro’s. The earnest men in blue blazers she introduced me to at Christmas or Thanksgiving, men she dated for meals. Thinking of her shining face as they poured her a glass of sherry turns my stomach to this day.

We agreed to bring home a pint of strawberries instead of the cider doughnuts, and as I was digging in my purse, Tinsley’s phone bobbed to the surface.

“Did you pick up my mom’s phone by accident?” Ellie asked.

Her words shot straight to my heart. You don’t lie to a child like Ellie.

“No,” I replied.

“Did you get a new phone like hers?” she asked as we wove our way through the bales and bushels to our car.

I got into the car and started the engine.

“Ellie,” I said slowly, “I was worried that there might be a reason your mother never lets you touch her phone.”

She blinked. “Like because there are naughty pictures on there?”

Good lord, that had never occurred to me! It’s a sad day when your granddaughter knows more about pornography than you do.

“Uh, actually,” I stalled, knowing I was getting into dangerous territory. Maybe a half lie wouldn’t hurt? “I thought perhaps it’s broken. Perhaps I should check it.”

“But, Grandma?”

“Yes, dear?”

“That’s a BlackBerry. Do you even know how to work it?”

“Well…”

She held out her hand. “It turns on fine,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Is there some sort of… directory? Of names and numbers?”

“Here are her contacts right here.”

“Wonderful!” I said and took the phone away before she stumbled on to something she shouldn’t. I scrolled down through them, the way I’d seen Ellie do, and Tom and Tinsley, for that matter, a thousand times. But there weren’t that many names on it—and most of them I remembered from the wedding and baby showers. Interestingly, there were no men other than Tom.

“Well, it seems to be working just fine,” I said as I got down to the end and saw the name “Zoe.” It struck me as an odd name for someone of Tinsley’s generation. Someone younger, Ellie’s age, perhaps.

“Do you have a friend named Zoe?” I asked her.

She shook her head, and didn’t mention her mother having one, either.

I had to stop for gas before I dropped Ellie at home, and I sent her into the mini-mart for a candy bar while I sneaked over to the pay phone. It was covered with graffiti and the metal cord was bent unnaturally. Please work, I thought as I tossed in my quarter and dialed the number listed under “Zoe.” The call was answered on the second ring.

“This is Zachary,” he said. “Hello? Anyone there?”

I hung up the phone and sighed. The breath in my chest felt so deep it was painful. I hadn’t really wanted to be right this time.

When I dropped Ellie off, I slipped Tinsley’s phone back into the pocket of a coat that was hanging in the foyer. It felt as if I was concealing a weapon.