The Bird House A Novel

February 11, 2010

SIX MONTHS EARLIER



Yes, I’ve taken up my journal again after many years away. Let’s see how long I can sustain it. I gave it up twice before; once, when my father left, and then a second time after all that business with Peter and my daughter. It’s as if I knew there were some things I wouldn’t need to write down to render them indelible. I remember, for instance, that both of these men cried the exact same way, their tears so heavy they made an audible splash. My father’s rained on the letter he held out to me. Peter’s plunked on the wax paper of the cheeseburger he’d brought from that greasy spoon we used to go to. Parting gifts. After everything else fades, we seem to remember what people give us last, don’t we?

It hardly seems fair, since we get the best of everyone at the beginning. My father, in particular, seemed to float through the rooms of my youth, carried in on a cloud, all smiles and ease. My mother’s cheeks always flushed in welcome; it was like witnessing roses at the precise moment they unfurled. But when my father left us, her cheeks went pale, and stayed pale. She never looked healthy again. When I stare in my own mirror, I’m always happy to see a sprinkle of brown sunspots, a constellation of blue veins, or a redrimmed eye. At least there is color. Where there is color, there is life.

I’ve started writing because two interesting things have happened. I find them ironic as well, although in the fifties, “ironic” was a term we Bryn Mawr English majors could stay up all night debating the nuances of, the way my daughter-in-law goes on and on about cacao percentages in chocolate, or how much artificial sweetener or sodium is in every box on my pantry shelf. (If you’ve ever wondered what a housewife “does all day,” well, these days I’d say they scrutinize nutritional content.)

One: I have begun to grow close to a child who is a girl, when I thought I never could again. Two: I have taken to bathing after more than thirty-five years of showering. A seventy-year-old dog, back to ancient tricks.

The girl is my granddaughter, Ellie. Tom’s daughter, although to be fair, there is much of her mother about her. Organized and something of a perfectionist, just like my daughter-in-law, Tinsley, who graduated first in her class and runs a gift business out of her attic and still manages to keep her house spotless and exercise every day. Tinsley has always seemed so much happier and more organized at home than I ever was with my children. Always baking cookies and blowing bubbles and painting faces with these crayons that wash right off. But then, she has only one: Ellie.

Everything I found difficult about Ellie at three years of age (a stage I have always disliked) has fallen off her now at eight, revealing a pink new self. I guess, given my lack of involvement, and the fact that her father works so hard, that this is mainly her mother’s doing. She has raised her well. Even her name suits her. She is not an Ellen or an Eleanor. Tinsley could have named her something snappier, and last-name-ish, more like her own name. I know they toyed with naming her after Tom’s sister, but didn’t, to my eternal relief. Tinsley’s aunt suggested Ellie be named Lucretia, after her grandmother, then called Lulu. Lucretia, a name for a corpse. Lulu, a name for a dog. This old Philadelphia business of naming everyone after someone else, then giving them a fresh, sporty nickname—ridiculous!

Tom and Tinsley might have added to Ellie, chosen Shelley or Nellie, embellished a bit, but they knew, perhaps, that she would end up pared down, straightforward and true. Tom was guileless as a child, trusting and open, easily hurt. Not Ellie.

She speaks her mind without whining. She looks you in the eye, she shakes hands. Not a firecracker, as some amusing children are, but an arrow.

I confess to a soupçon of relief that she isn’t a gentle soul like Tom. Those openhearted qualities are so much more delectable in boys than girls. Even as a toddler, Tom was always doing sweet things. I remember he charmed Betsy and the other mothers in the neighborhood when he helped me plant flowers, and dutifully watered them every morning. I have a picture somewhere of him—one of the first decent ones I ever took with Theo’s camera—struggling to carry a brass watering can that was nearly as large as he was. A darling photograph, but only because he was a boy. Let’s face it: a softhearted girl eventually becomes a cliché. But Ellie? Ellie isn’t like that.

That’s what started drawing me to her after years at arm’s length. I confess to it all, these past years—to half cuddling and faux cooing; to giving envelopes when there should have been gifts. I did only the minimum. At Harriton Tennis Club the post-round-robin lunches throbbed with the ladies’ swollen conceits of whose grandchild won what, played what, sang what. Oh, the tales of toe shoes and tumbling, of minuets, coxswains, and dressage! I sat through them mutely, with nothing to offer. I’d seen her at her birth, her christening, all the major holidays. But I didn’t know, then, if she preferred dogs or cats. I didn’t know her favorite color was purple. I didn’t know if she could sing or whistle or turn a cartwheel. In the last six months, I’ve seen her perform all three. Betsy, my neighbor and doubles partner, says it took me a while to warm up to my only grandchild, but that’s clearly not the case. In the past year, it was Ellie who shape-shifted. She came closer to me, not the other way round.

For my birthday a few months ago she baked me a cake herself. When I asked what was in it, she said it was a “secret family recipe.” The cheek! And the last time I had dinner at Tom and Tinsley’s, a few weeks ago, she presented me with a painting she called a “self-portrait.” It was all bright colors, sprays of yellow hair, slashes of green eyes and red lips, and had a bit of Picasso about it—a kind of knowing crookedness. I was grateful to Tinsley for sharing something so precious. I can’t tell you how many years it has been since I had a child’s drawing on my refrigerator. When I anchored it there, magnets on all four sides to keep it from curling, something enormous rose in my chest. Swells of pride in the deep waters of grief. Looking at it yesterday, I almost knew something big was going to happen; knew she had something to tell me, and then she did. Called me herself.

I took a longer bath than usual today because of the light in the room: speckled, almost fractured as it spilled from east to west. Made me wish my camera was nearby instead of hanging on the hook in the entryway. New tubs are deeper and longer—soaking tubs, they call them, which strikes me as redundant—but they feel like swimming pools to someone my size. In my old tub, I can stretch my legs all the way out, and rest my neck back over the curved lip, just so. It fits me. It’s mine. And if the words “claw-footed tub” evoke something visceral, scrabbling and dark, well, fine. I take that, too, the bitter with the sweet.

Since Theo died I’ve had no desire to redo the bathroom or kitchen, to rearrange the furniture, let alone move. Over the years I’ve grown quite accustomed to the pieces Theo and I discovered at all those estate auctions in Gladwyne or Greenville—though I confess he always favored the beautiful over the comfortable. Wasn’t that why he chose me? In the early days, we’d go to an auction nearly every weekend, and I’d tease him by stretching or scratching my nose when bidding began on expensive pieces. He’d swat me with his bidding number and I’d tickle him in retaliation. We’d strap our finds to the roof of Theo’s old Saab and when we got them home, polish them with oil or wax, and try them in different rooms. Nothing made Theo happier than rearranging furniture.

Now I scan our possessions with their lack of upholstery and curve, and think he was just preparing me for old age—get used to the hard backed, the flat bottomed, the squeeze in, the sit up straight. Life is a ladder-back chair. I still remember how stiffly he sat, how damned upright he could be. Was it to compensate for a job that required him to bend downward, poring over his blueprints, his notes and plans? Theo was barely five ten, but he looked taller, with his graceful neck and arms. Even the cowlicks in the front of his hair brought the eye upward. In one corner of the bathroom I have the chair from the den: a plain Shaker style with a navy toile cushion. Some days when I look at it I see Theo smiling ever so slightly as he carried it over his head to the car, the tag still on it; some days I see him perched on it, designing a building he loved; and some days I see his legs crumpled under him on the tennis court, spindly and thin, a paler version of the legs of his chair.

As I soak in the water, I wonder what piece of our furniture would have reminded Theo of me. And that, of course, is precisely the kind of question I might have asked him in the dark twilight as I lay in his arms; and exactly the kind of question he would have been clinically unable to answer. He was a doer, not a talker.

There is one blessing in Theo’s antiques. The older I get, the more I take comfort in being surrounded by something more ancient. At last, younger by comparison!

Of course many of my old things aren’t quite quaint anymore. Like the fat black answering machine that’s separate from the phone and insists on squawking when I take my bath. I hear all manner of nonsense: receptionists confirming doctor appointments as if it were tea with the queen, Robert Redford calling to remind me to save the earth, Betsy asking if I forgot about the tennis clinic (which I did). I listen and don’t move. The early sun hits the windowpanes and scatters, spinning cracked rainbow circles whenever I move in the water. It’s the sort of thing that would fascinate a baby or a cat. By spring the light in the bathroom and bedroom will be hazy, filtered, a green-yellow instead of its current yellowwhite. Or is that summer? I can’t recall. Part of me wishes I’d kept a photo journal instead of a diary, just to chronicle the light properly. I remember once, on a particularly bright winter morning, as I lay warm and enveloped in our bed, I asked Theo to join me. Well, “ask” isn’t truly the proper word; I dangled my arm outside the tangle of covers and grasped his fingers as he walked by. He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth. His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked. He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he’d tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg. I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow. And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I’d spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign. He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers and he went in and brushed his teeth. The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away. I wonder if I’d find that moment catalogued in my old diary. I wonder if I’d find others that hurt me more.

Some find it silly, the old habit of writing things down. Betsy calls it “Victorian therapy.” Here on the Main Line, we live among people who don’t think too much about their lives. I’m just as guilty—writing it down is not the same as contemplating it, I assure you. However, it provides some assurance that one will remember it.

The last call before Ellie’s was a message from Jaxie, the hostess of our book group. She calls me every month now, to remind me, and to tell me to please bring salad. Salad, as if that was simple, with the produce selections, the washing, the chopping, the pressure of a homemade dressing. In the time salad takes, a pie could be cooling on the sill. As always, I feel no urge to get up and answer the phone, dripping in a towel, to talk to anyone or write anything down. No wonder I’m forgetful!

But then Ellie’s voice comes on, and I’m half tempted to pop out soaking wet and pick up the phone. Instead, I stay, and I smile. She has a husky sound to her, earthy, like Tinsley’s voice. Tinsley has always sounded lovely and charming on the phone. She and Tom had met that way, on the phone, when she solicited him to join an organization at college. He’d fallen in love, he’d once confessed to me, before he’d even laid eyes on her tawny hair and hazel eyes.

“Grandma,” Ellie says breathlessly, “I need you for an important homework project. It’s called ‘Generations’ and it’s an oral history of our family. So call me back right away and let me know when we can get started, okay? We’ve got a lot of work to do, and my mom says we have to work out a time line, so call me back, okay, bye!”

Oral history? That sounded a bit like medicine, sour and unswallowable. The things these teachers think of! Nothing an assignment, everything a project. As if children were archeologists or journalists. As if family truths weren’t better off untold. Who fell out of love with whom. Who lost whose money. Who ran off to God-knows-where. Who never spoke to whom again. I don’t think Tom was ever assigned such a thing; I’ll have to ask him.

This would be tricky, I thought. But what she probably wants is a family tree or photographs. Lord knows I have plenty of photos of myself and Theo to give Ellie, if that’s all she wants. Theo when he was handsome and young and driven, back in the days when we admired ambition, and didn’t see it as heart disease waiting to happen. I remember the photo from the night of my engagement party, at Aunt Caro’s house. Taken at twilight, the fireflies flashing green at the edges of the frame. After all the hoopla and toasts, Theo took me out on the back porch, the heady scent of spring lilacs still in the night air, and told me we’d have beautiful gardens one day, too.

“Yes, we will,” I said, smiling, “because I’m going to plant them.”

“Oh, no,” he mock-protested, knowing what was coming.

“Yes, our humble home will teem with roses before you know it,” I teased and he put his arm around me and kissed my hair. Theo thought roses were overused and overbred, and he preferred less formal flowers, things that drooped and swayed in the breeze.

“I tell you what,” he said, “I’ll plan and plant the flower beds if you water and weed them.”

“Deal,” I said, and we walked back in, arm in arm, as if it was really going to be that easy.

I soap up my arms and legs, then duck underneath the water to rinse. In addition to photos, I have stubs from the theater, business clippings from the Inquirer, obituaries written and awards given, the natural ephemera of a long life. Ellie will likely be equipped with her own flotsam of course: markers, colored pencils, construction paper, poster board in every color. Tinsley has kitted out her bedroom like an elementary school cloakroom with its pegs and cubbyholes and art supplies. How long will that last? How long can she enjoy sharpening her pencils every night, running her fingers across them, comforted by their presence, like lead soldiers standing sentry in their case? How much time before socks and bras are scattered, candy wrappers everywhere? That’s my deepest fear when I shut my eyes in the bathtub: Ellie’s future. The horrible half women all girls become. She’ll reject her mother and father. She’ll reject me eventually, too.

I shudder. The bath has cooled. A slight breeze leaks from the lowest corner of the window where the ivory lace curtain doesn’t quite brush the ledge. It’s shrunk over the years, as I have, and now it’s shorter on the left than the right, something that would have bothered Theo, but not me. He was always straightening pictures, moving a vase or a candle one inch to the left or the right, as if he was setting a stage or taking a picture. He’d cock his head, then squint to focus in on something, then decide, like God, where it needed to be.

I sigh as I stand, the breath bringing me up. Some of the water drips off my left breast like a ski slope; the rest of it finds a faster path, running straight down the empty right side of my chest. I should be thankful, I know, that one breast remains. That I have exactly half what I used to.

Some days I am. It is easier to find that grace in the tub than the shower. The pounding rivulets on the right side used to vibrate and thrum like hard rain on a flat roof. I am well rid of my shower.

Yes, some days I am thankful just for being upright. Grateful I can get in and out of things without fanfare or contraption. That I can walk up stairs and play tennis. My knees are fine and so is my back, and most days my memory is steady enough. I am here, Ellie. I need no pink ribbon to trumpet my ordinary survival. I am not to be wept over or admired or donated to. I am not quite whole, but I am here. I was spared. I’m here to tell the future about the past.

Together, we will construct some kind of history. Not the real history, of course—I’ll spare your classmates the tales of death and disease and embezzlement, of women who got in over their heads. I won’t tell them how my mother took all her meals at friends’ country clubs when she ran out of money, or how I refused to let my own father walk me down the aisle. There is no need to scare you, Ellie. We’ll build one that’s more romantic and colorful, one that will glean an A. I’ll make Theo’s architecture career more illustrious, perhaps. I’ll credit him with rebuilding the Philadelphia waterfront, instead of the strip malls dotting the turnpike. I’ll say he was a man devoted to his family, instead of a man who was devoted only to his work. I’ll emphasize my own feminist protests, my radical leanings. I’ll speak of the time mothers circled bulldozers about to demolish Haverford Park. How we collected for UNICEF and dialed back our thermostats and rode bicycles to Bryn Mawr Market to save gas for Jimmy Carter.

I won’t discuss my efforts to make Theo or myself a better person. The projects and hobbies taken up like molds I could press us into. The surprise when we walked away from the ballroom dance studio or potter’s wheel unchanged. No. I won’t speak of how he closed himself off from me after we lost our daughter, how he used his drafting pencils to draw a taut boundary around himself, a room with no window or door. It was years before I realized it wasn’t grief; on some level, he had been that way all along: he had his work, and I had him, and that was supposed to be enough. But it isn’t, is it? It never is.

Of course there are many things that will be safe to tell you, Ellie. Good to say, even. There are a few I remember entirely, that shine crystalline and whole in my memory. Like that summer after Tom was born, how the fireworks were set off at intervals up and down the Main Line. You could look left or right and see sparks and sprays for hours. Everyone stood on their roofs and decks, and all you could hear between the pops and streaks were sighs and exclamations. Nothing but beauty and the contemplation of beauty. No matter what horrible things had happened to any of us, for one evening, there was nothing else.

I don’t consider, not for one second, doing the practical, truly safe thing—asking if Grandma Blankenship couldn’t help instead. No, I’m selfish. I want Ellie to sit with me and go over the project, not her other grandmother. I want her to ask me her questions. I want to help frame the assignment, to draw conclusions and look for symbolism and personification and theme. I may not have used my English major to work, but after all these years of journal keeping, I’ve learned what to show and what to hide.

And oh, the thought of her understanding! The nod, the small smile, the light in her eyes!

I want it all now, I want too much. I want to show her off at the old Gladwyne lunch counter and answer her questions between bites of tuna salad. I want to see her slightly furrowed brow as she bends toward her notebook and ignores her homemade potato chips. Afterward I want her to sit at my antique desk. I want my high arched ceilings to echo the glide of her pencil on paper, the soft puff that emanates from her lips as she blows the pink dust of the eraser into the air. It will linger there for a moment, a writer’s jet stream, before it joins the mites and pollen of my house, microscopic evidence of what we’ve done wrong and made right again.

I dried off quickly and called her back while I was still in my robe.

“Sorry I missed your call, Ellie,” I said. “I was in the bath.”

“Does your tub have those safety grips in it?”

“No,” I laugh. You don’t lie to a child like Ellie.

“’Cause Courtney’s grandmother broke her hip when she slipped in the tub. They have all kinds of them at the hardware store, like flowers and circles.”

“Really?”

“They have glue on one side and are kind of sandpapery on the other.”

“Well, I’ll have to look into that, then. Thank you for the information.”

How can you not love a person who worries just a little, just the right amount, over you?

I suppose we’ve all known people who could never find the right balance between neglectful and fawning. But oh, when someone does. How often did that happen in a lifetime? Twice?

“Okay, so we need to figure out when we can work on my Generations project together.”

“Indeed. How much time do you think we’ll need? An afternoon?”

“Oh, more than that, Grandma. It has to be ten to fifteen pages!”

“Well, then,” I exclaimed, “we might need to hire some assistants! When is it due?”

“In three weeks.”

“Why don’t we start with twice a week, after school? You and your mother figure out which days are best and let me know. In the meantime, I’ll sharpen my pencils.”

“No, Grandma, sharpen your memory! I need you to tell me stuff about the family.”

“I’ll do my best.”

It struck me after that phone conversation that Ellie’s clearness and grace reminded me of Peter Littleton. Not the Peter of now, sunburned and bloated, but the Peter of long ago, the Peter who was my lover, and before that, my high school sweetheart. What a waste, to be chaste in high school. What silly fools we were. Were we saving ourselves for infidelity, for cheating and lies?

I think of how we slow-danced at the sock hops, how we held each other too close. When the song ended, our cheeks were flushed and damp, and they made the smallest sound as we pulled apart. I still remember it; it’s mixed in with the rustle of taffeta and the scuff of white bucks across an old oak floor. And later, much later, after we’d broken up because our colleges were too far apart, after he ran into me at Christmas break one year with Leo Comstock, and the next year with Theo, after both of us had married and lost track of each other—then, only then, were there other sounds, bouncy and breathy and bright. Theo was always so quiet; he arrived in the bedroom in stocking feet, his oxfords in shoe trees in the hall closet. He always undressed carefully, hanging his trousers on the valet by the bed. Placing his nickels and pennies in the leather tray on the dresser, never tossing them. But Peter! Oh! That night at our reunion held not the music of the band, but the music of his silver belt buckle, the pop of the first button, the glide of our zippers… and the surprising warmth of what lay inside. Like a perfectly prepared picnic basket, full of things someone else has packed, but you know you are going to lay out on the ground and love.

Where is that person now? I wonder. When I glimpse Peter occasionally at the post office, or the farmers’ market, it’s always in passing. He doesn’t see me. Perhaps I am as unrecognizable to him as he is to me. It’s always a bit of a shock—not that he could grow lumpy and pink, but that I must have been prescient; I saw it coming. Perhaps I got out just in time.

Betsy tells me that among her divorced or widowed friends who are dating, it’s common practice to exchange photos of themselves in their youth. They display them on the mantel or the piano, and we both find this amusing. Look! My barnacle was once a shiny conch shell! And though it’s also vaguely disturbing, like having a photo of a stranger on your fireplace mantel, Peter’s transformation makes me understand it better. Whoever Peter dates when his wife dies would be proud to have a photo of him at twenty-eight or eighteen. Not because he was so exceptional looking, but because he shone. With eagerness, with curiosity, with metallic rhythm. He leaned toward the world, as if he knew there was a good story about to be told.

But I see now, in his eyes, when I glimpse him two or three times a year, that he believes his wife will live forever. Part of me wants to reach out to him again, to try to say the right thing to him as he once did to me. To tell him that nothing is forever unless you choose it to be.

Things change. People come and go. If a little girl can delight me once again, Peter, isn’t anything possible?