The Bird House A Novel

May 19, 2010



Betsy called and suggested I take Ellie ice skating. Said there was a new rink open near the old township building, and that there was rumored to be a disco ball and something called laser tag, which sounded just dreadful. Usually Betsy is the friend who reminds me of how easy it is to break a hip, and that I should stop using bath oils in the tub, so I was starting to wonder about the state of her aging brain.

“Well, I used to be quite good, as you know, but I haven’t skated in years,” I mused.

“Oh, Ann, I said you should take her there, not that you should skate, too. Dear lord!”

“Well, what fun would that be?”

“You could give her pointers.”

I wrinkled my nose; I remembered trying to teach my daughter to skate when I was pregnant with Tom; I’d call out instructions from the sidelines and she’d travel two steps and then flop down like Bambi, legs akimbo. When she got up, she glared at me as if I were an instrument of the devil. No; the only way to teach them was to skate along backward and hold their hands in front of you.

Who knows, maybe Betsy is finally losing it after all those years of smart and steady. Maybe she got tired of always being right, of always having the answer, of always knowing what was best. When my mother died, she was the only one who understood. She stood with me at the grave site and held me as I sobbed. I kept saying I didn’t expect it to hurt so much; I didn’t know why, with her death imminent for so long, that it affected me so. And she said, “It hurts because when your mother dies, your whole childhood disappears. It’s as if it never happened.”

Betsy could have been a psychologist or a priest, but now she’s telling seventy-year-olds to go to ice-skating rinks, and last week she actually bought a contraption that allows her to play tennis on her television set via some sort of handheld device. When I stopped by on Wednesday, she was swinging a white remote in the air and complaining about her backhand. Through the window it looked as if she’d taken up interpretive dance.

Though I hadn’t been on ice skates in many years, I reluctantly mentioned it as an option to Ellie, in a list that included bowling, pottery painting, and going to the movies. When she hesitated I was afraid I’d have to think of a new list of things; I supposed if push came to shove we could always play tennis on Betsy’s TV.

“Can’t I just come over?” Ellie said.

“Well, certainly,” I said, relieved. “We’ll make a collage, or bake cookies, or do a jigsaw puzzle.”

When Tom dropped her off, she headed straight to the puzzle on the dining room table with barely a hello. I asked how he was, how work was going, specifically, and he simply said he was busy, and so was Tinsley—she was training for a marathon.

“Well, make sure she doesn’t run too far,” I said quietly.

He sighed. “That’s the whole point of a marathon, Mother—running twenty-six miles.”

“I’m well aware of what a marathon is, Tom.”

He seemed tired, so I didn’t push things. After I waved good-bye, I vowed to be less meddling, subtler.

The puzzle was of a lake filled with ducks, and it was difficult—the water and the birds were all the same brackish color; the pieces of waves and feathers all looked vaguely alike. Ellie frowned after she’d laid in all the corners—it was hard to know where to begin. I suggested she look for pieces that contained both duck feathers and water—that way she could build heads and wings onto bottoms. But after half an hour, we’d built only two ducks and had no idea where they belonged on the lake.

“You’d think they could have thrown in a red rowboat or something,” I muttered.

“Grandma, can we play in the attic?” Her face shone brightly, as if the word attic was “ice cream.” I felt a flush, too, as I always did, I’d noticed, whenever she called me Grandma.

“Play dress up? I don’t have much clothing up there, you know.”

“No, just, you know, like, look through the old trunks like we did before, on your mom’s birthday.”

In the last week she seemed to have added “you know” and “like” to her sentences, the same way the college students did.

“Okay, but it will be hot up there.”

“I don’t care.”

“We’re going to need some beverages, I believe.”

“Coke?” she whispered conspiratorially.

“Let’s get the ice cubes and the jelly jars,” I replied, and headed for the kitchen.

There were two chairs in the attic from the last time. I brought up a portable fan, cranked open the windows on each side, and we settled in with our drinks, taking care to stay away from the green trunks. I read her a few letters Theo had written me while we were engaged; she got a huge kick out of his misspelled words. I explained to her that architects were like mad scientists—no time for frivolities like spelling or nuisances like cooking, cleaning, mowing the lawn. It was all about the projects—their babies, their life. Ellie said that sounded like too much work. She said her father always mowed the lawn, and I smiled, then frowned. I hated hearing ways in which Tom didn’t take after Theo; it brought back all the old worries. Over the years, I’d make mental lists of all the ways in which they were alike: their blue eyes, their love of art and music, their quietness and seriousness. At night I’d count them like sheep, willing them, bonding them. When Tom chose to be a lawyer, I tried to talk him into architecture, which he’d always admired. As if I could change all things by changing one thing.

Under Tom’s christening gown and baby book was a box of buttons, which I’d completely forgotten about. Ellie took them out and surveyed them, like marbles. My mother and Aunt Caro had collected buttons as children—many of them were antique, made of glass or bone and other things that are probably legislated against and outlawed now. Ellie held up one that appeared to be alligator, and said, “Wow.”

“We should do something with those, I suppose.” I sighed. “Sew them onto a felted purse or something. Betsy might have some ideas. She thought I should teach you to knit this winter.”

“Or you could just put the buttons in a glass jar on your coffee table,” Ellie said.

“Well, that would be easier, wouldn’t it?”

I took a sip of my Coke while Ellie crouched above the brown trunk. She set the box of buttons on the floor and pulled out a rolled-up calendar from 1962 with photos of office buildings.

“Oh, that’s Theo’s. Are his office things in there, too? I didn’t look in this trunk.”

“Yes,” she said, pulling out a red stapler and a leather pencil cup that had a mechanical pencil and paper clip still in it.

“Are there blueprints in there? We could make wrapping paper from them. I did that now and then with your father. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?”

When Ellie pulled up the woven basket, I had no idea whose it was. I remembered the leather pencil cup, but not this. She opened the lid and we both expected, and hoped for, something else. I expected paper clips. She probably hoped for coins, buried treasure.

She pulled out two rubber ducks, one larger than the other. The fan swept across my back, calves, ankles, oscillating so hard that I went cold. The Coke fizzed in my throat, threatening, and I held my hand over my mouth.

“Are these my dad’s?”

I closed my eyes slowly and willed myself to nod. If I didn’t open my eyes, maybe I wouldn’t see any more, or say any more. Maybe I wouldn’t have to lie to the child I didn’t ever want to lie to.

“A mama and a baby duck,” she said.

“Yes,” I whispered and swallowed. “Put those away now, Ellie,” I said. “They’re very fragile.”

“Okay,” she said uncertainly.

“Are you sure there aren’t any blueprints?”

“Well, there’s a bunch of tubes.”

“Take those out instead, why don’t you?”

I heard the rustling and I opened my eyes. But I still saw the bright yellow of those floating ducks and the way their blue eyes had faded, peeled off beneath not Tom’s fingers but Emma’s, Emma of the tangled hair and tantrums, the child who never looked like a child unless she was asleep. At her funeral, that’s what struck me most—that she looked peaceful and sweet, almost elegant in death. A way she had so rarely presented herself to me in life. It was graceful, almost, to say good-bye to her in that state. I stood over her coffin and thought she had never looked so happy. But when I heard a man say, “She’s at peace now,” over my shoulder, I whirled around as if prepared to pounce. My father stood in front of me, with Theo just behind him, looking sheepish.

“Will you excuse me? I think I’m going to be ill,” I said, and ran outside. Predictably, my father followed me, not Theo.

He waited in the parking lot, fifty feet away, and watched as I tucked my feet beneath me and sat at the edge of the wooded lot, picking tufts of grass out of the ground and throwing them.

He stepped toward me; I heard his heavy feet on the gravel.

“Don’t come any closer,” I said.

“Ann, I can’t imagine what you’re going through—”

“No, you can’t.”

“I just wanted to say—”

“That you’re sorry?”

“Well, yes.”

I turned and shook the last pieces of grass off my black skirt. “Daddy,” I said slowly, “I hope you’re sorry for the rest of your life.”

There was more I could have said, and might have, if I hadn’t seen Betsy appear outside the funeral parlor door. If she had stepped outside a minute earlier, she might have stopped me from going as far as I did.

My father turned to see where I was looking. Emboldened, knowing there was a witness, he walked up to me and took an envelope out of his breast pocket.

“Whatever that is, I don’t want it.”

“Annie,” he said, his face contorting as he tried to stop the tears. “What do I have to do for you to forgive me? Please, just read this.”

The envelope’s paper was thick and starchy, and when his tears dropped on it, they looked as big as raindrops.

I took the envelope without a word, and when I got home, cracked it open just far enough to recognize the loops of his familiar handwriting, then threw it away.

That was the last time I saw him. When he died five years later, I didn’t go to his funeral. His new wife, Bitte, sent me the small check from his estate, and I put it in an account for Tom. I didn’t even send her a condolence card.

“Grandma, are you okay?” Ellie asked, and I said yes, clearing my throat. I waited a few seconds, swallowing, then said why don’t we go downstairs and make something out of those blueprints?

As we sat at the dining room table and made book jackets for her textbooks, she stopped suddenly and looked up.

“I found something strange in my house yesterday, too. And not in the attic, either.”

“Really?” I smiled, pouring her more Coke.

“I found a red Villanova sweatshirt.”

“That doesn’t sound so strange.”

“It’s not my dad’s.”

I met her eyes. “How do you know?”

“He hates red, and he went to Penn.”

“Well, it could be your mother’s.”

She shook her head. “It’s huuuuge.”

“Babysitter?”

“I asked Lauren and she said no.”

“There’s probably a logical explanation.”

“Yeah, just like there is for the kissing.”

“Ellie,” I said, taking her hands in mine, “your mother loves you. And there are far worse things she could have done to you or to anyone else than, than—”

“Than kissing a friend.”

“Yes,” I said. “So let’s not think about it anymore.”

“My friend Courtney says I should use it to blackmail her for an iPod.”

“I think I’d like to meet Courtney,” I said and smiled. The mood lightened, but the word “blackmail” hung in the air, dark and silty.





August 22, 1967

bubble bath



HE CALLED WHEN THE CHILDREN were napping. He is thoughtful that way.

He’d read about my mother’s death in the paper, and he said the same thing he’d said the last time he called: When were you going to tell me, Annie? As if we were still high school sweethearts at the private schools across the street from each other, and I owed him information about my life, my family, the events of my day. Back then we shared grades, scores, gossip. He’d always wanted detail—what was your time in the relay? How many people were at the pep rally? Now I’d had a baby and not told him. I’d lost my mother and not told him. I don’t know what he had for breakfast or what color shirt he is wearing. What else don’t I know? He doesn’t know I lost my breast as well as my mother, and I don’t know how to tell him that.

“I want to see you,” he says, holding on to the word “you” like a glider, moving across the pitch of towers and monuments and cupolas, west to where I stand in a shuttered upstairs window with the beige phone cord curled around one hand. Can he imagine he sees my roofline, Theo’s deck where he takes his coffee, the whitewashed brick chimney, the tree that brushes it out back, the wrens that flit through its branches, and all the houses, the woods, hills, wires, everything in between, that separate us?

The last time I was in the city, I drove past Peter’s office building, a tall silver scar, circling the block for nearly an hour, watching the revolving glass door, the way it pulled people in in slow motion and spit them back out again. He didn’t come out. I didn’t go in. The taste of disappointment in my mouth reminded me of the day I’d waited for my father. The city blocks weren’t like mine, filled with neighbors and an occasional college student, where I could hear the drag and slide of their guitar cases and blue jeans brushing against the sidewalk. No. This was all clicking briefcase and honking horn. I felt frumpy even hidden in my car.

“How about this afternoon?” I say and he is stunned, quiet for a second. He expected protest, impossibility. “I have a sitter coming at four.”

We agreed to meet at four thirty, at a grimy tavern not far from the train station. I’d thought of Stuart’s first, but it was too popular. No one we knew had ever gone to the tavern—I’d lived in the area my entire life and never been. All I knew was that it used to be called the Lamplighter, but now it had a cheap sign that simply said TAVERN. I tried not to dress too carefully; didn’t want the babysitter to think anything was off. I wore a red silk blouse with plain gray slacks, and low heels. At the last minute I added a woven Tibetan belt Betsy had given me; it looked like something a hitchhiker would wear until you put it on, until you saw what joy a new texture could add. I decided not to put my red lipstick on until I got in the car. When Emma’s teacher asked where I was going, and did I want to leave a number? I said I was running errands, that Theo could be reached at his office in an emergency. I kissed the baby, and when I tried to hug Emma, she squirmed away, preferring her teacher.

“You’re so good with her,” I said softly, and they both smiled. I felt no guilt leaving, not one bit. Only later would I feel guilty over not feeling guilty.

I arrived first and chose a booth near the jukebox. Two men sat at the bar drinking beer near the neon PABST sign; they didn’t turn when I came in. Good, I thought; I wasn’t dressed too flashily. After a few minutes the bartender walked over, snapped a coaster down, and asked what I’d like to have. I looked up into his soft cushion of a face, took in his faint scent of beer and eggs, and was tempted, for just a second, to tell him all the things I wanted to have. A staff of four, a husband who was always home to help. A daughter who loved me back. But I smiled and said a Manhattan, please, and one for my friend. I tripped a little over the word “friend” and his eyebrows went up.

“An imaginary friend?” He smiled, and I said no, he’d be here in a second, and just then Peter walked in the door. His sport coat held the smell of the outside world—clear and fragrant. When I hugged him I held on to one of his lapels, trying to memorize the feel of the linen in my hand.

“Look at you.” He smiled as he sat down.

“That’s a silly phrase, isn’t it? I can’t look at myself.”

“You look terrific.”

“I wish I felt more terrific.”

“Was it terrible? Your mother’s funeral?”

“No. Yes. My father showed up.”

I realized as the words slipped out that I hadn’t told anyone else.

“Oh, Ann, I don’t know what to say, let alone feel—was it okay? Were you glad to see him?”

My chest heaved. “No.”

“How is his health? He was always so hale and hearty.”

I smiled ruefully; I’d stopped trying to picture my father when I was young, but I could remember Peter and my father together, waiting in front of the big stone fireplace for me to come downstairs in my sweater set and pearls. My father nursing a highball in one hand and leaning over to stoke the fire with the other. Putting the poker down and standing up to his full height, with Peter so much smaller, so much less manly in comparison that he looked like some prey my father had shot and brought home to mount.

“We didn’t actually converse.”

“All these years, Ann, and you don’t talk?”

“He just felt guilty. That’s all it was—he came because he feels guilty.”

Peter took my hand across the table. “I still can’t believe it, after all this time. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

I shrugged. “He’s selfish, feels guilty, and wants forgiveness. End of story.”

“I did a story for Esquire, a few years back, about rich men who hide their assets from their wives in divorces. I guess I was inspired by Frank, who knows. Anyway, the profile of these guys—well, your father doesn’t fit it. These guys are heartless, they’re sociopaths… He just… it doesn’t fit. I really liked your dad. I’ve never been so wrong about anyone in my life. It will never make sense.”

“No, I suppose not,” I said. I closed my eyes, shook my head, as if I could empty myself of all the memories. “Let’s talk about something else, shall we?”

“Have I ever told you,” he said, “that you always reminded me of a bird?”

“What?”

“You know how Greggy Peterson always had that sheepdog hair? And how Mina Bellows had eyes like a tabby cat?”

“Yes.” I smiled, remembering our classmates and the endless conversations about them.

“You’re like a beautiful little bird.”

“Am I?” My smile widened as I leaned down to sip my drink. I wondered if I’d always been birdlike; if that’s the quality my mother adored; if that’s why my father made the bird houses.

He nodded toward my blouse. “Robin redbreast,” he said and smiled.

My tears were involuntary and instantaneous, as if he’d turned on a spigot. He misinterpreted them at first, holding my hand and telling me my mother was a lovely woman, that she’d lived through difficult times with honor and dignity. That he was sorry he’d brought up my father, that he didn’t mean to dredge up old memories.

I held up one hand to stop him, and finally, I laughed.

“Did I say something funny?”

I shook my head. There were so many things to be sad about; how could he know? And he held his own sadness; my mother had loved Peter, had fawned over him, giggled like a schoolgirl at his jokes. When we broke up, she was sadder than either of us, and never ceased to ask if I’d seen him, or heard word of him, whenever I ran into someone from Langley. And she kept the pictures of the two of us in her album, instead of slicing him off the way Betsy’s mother had unceremoniously removed her old beaux. Peter, I knew, had loved my mother, too.

“Peter,” I said, “it’s not just my mother, there’s more.”

And then, slowly, with both tears and laughter safely at bay, I told him about my breast surgery. I must have given him enough details to satisfy him, because he didn’t ask questions, and his eyes, god bless him, his eyes didn’t go to my chest like some people’s do. They stayed with me, eye to eye.

And then he did it again, as he had last year at our high school reunion. Once again, he said the perfect thing at the perfect time.

“Oh, Annie. How can I miss what’s gone when what you have left is so beautiful?”

That’s not when our evening ended, but that’s the last thing I remember him saying: the perfect thing. Everything else that came after, the small talk, the we should do this again, the aren’t the cheeseburgers delicious, the call me next week, paled in comparison. He kissed me good-bye, just once, on the lips, and I felt that same electricity. It would never go away; it would run between us always, over hill and dale, through drought and famine, month to year to decade. It was a fact, not a feeling, and I had to accept it.


When I got home I went up to tuck in the baby. He was asleep, but I just wanted to look at him for a few seconds. Peter had asked me what day he was born. I could see him counting backward, fingers tapping it out on the nicked linoleum table, the months, the weeks. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was wrong. How do you know? he replied. How can you be sure? “He has blue eyes,” I said, looking straight into Peter’s brown.

Now the baby’s long-lashed eyes were closed, and it was as if I couldn’t remember their hue. Had I conjured it up, looked into them like a reflecting pool and seen what I’d wanted to see?

When I’d walked in, Theo had tilted his face up from the blueprints spread across the dining room table and sniffed the air. Like a dog, I thought.

“You smell of smoke,” he said, not distastefully.

“They should outlaw smoking in theaters,” I said, and he sniffed again.

He’s a dog and I’m a bird and he’ll forever be looking for me, searching me out, wondering where I am. I went to the kitchen and set the table for breakfast while Theo concentrated on his project. I don’t think I’d ever noticed before how much less handsome Theo was with his eyes downcast. And they were always down now, aimed toward his blueprints, low to the ground, an animal not meant to fly.