The Bird House A Novel

May 27, 1967

regular bath

leftover oatmeal



THEO DIDN’T COME HOME LAST night. Looks a tad dramatic when I write it down, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, I know in my bones.

Yes, it happens to be one year to the day after my high school reunion, but I don’t entertain thoughts of Theo’s retaliation, or of my comeuppance. Perhaps if I felt guiltier I would. Perhaps if he knew of my transgression I would. When I think back on that night, it felt necessary and absolute. There could have been no other ending. The Tuesday before, Emma ran a fever so high I woke Theo and asked him to drive us to the emergency room. He rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. He said he’d only come to bed an hour earlier. What? I’d said as I held Emma tightly, though I hadn’t misheard him. He didn’t repeat himself, he only blinked and sat still, as if his eyes were trying to adjust to the darkness. I told him to get dressed and meet me downstairs, and he asked me if I wasn’t overreacting. Children get fevers, he said. Get dressed, Theo, I replied.

At the hospital, they decided to keep Emma overnight for observation. Thought it was just a virus, but they wanted to be safe. I asked the nurse if she could roll a cot into the room, and she turned to us and asked if we wanted one cot or two. One, I said.

No, I’m certain it was work keeping Theo at the office. “All-nighters” are part of any young architect’s life (thirty being young for an architect, yet old for a mother). He had stayed over several times before, so it didn’t even register as an important detail. The trains stop running at 10:30, and there are sofas in nearly everyone’s office. It was common practice and all the wives knew it. I confess I didn’t even notice his absence until morning—the baby slept through the night, finally, and so did I. It was only at 5 a.m. when Emma tumbled in and announced she’d had a bad dream that I told her Daddy would take her back to bed and she informed me, half shouting, half sobbing, that Daddy wasn’t there!

That’s what aggravated me: not that he might be cheating on me, or lying about his whereabouts, but that he couldn’t deal with Emma. I groaned as I stood and scooped her up. She was big for three and a half, and loud. She snuffled in my arms, wiping her nose with her hand. I always thought of girls as quiet, because I was that way—witty, perhaps, but not boisterous. My mother says Emma takes after her sister Caroline, which gives me hope: we all love Aunt Caro, who arrives at staid family events with water balloons and firecrackers smuggled in from her drives to and from Kentucky, where she keeps horses. My mother used to say she looked like she was full of secrets, but always willing to let you in on one. Emma has her coloring, too; darker than my mother and I, almost black Irish looking, with Theo’s turquoise eyes. You never know what you’re going to get in the stew of the womb. But when I wished things for Emma, and tried to imagine her future unfolding, I wished for a spirit, and a life, like Aunt Caro’s. Tomboy spunk in a beautiful package—that’s what I told myself my daughter was heading for. She was just taking her time getting there.

I cradled her head with one hand, and her thick dark hair, always a challenge, felt even more tangled than usual, and she smelled of oil and dust, that vague place between dirty and clean. She often smelled that way. Even as an infant, even after I bathed her, a few hours later something greasy would emanate from her again. I’d say to Theo, she just doesn’t smell like she’s supposed to, and he’d look at me like I had two heads. People would go on and on about the glorious smell of a baby’s scalp; other mothers buried themselves in the furry intersection at the base of their child’s neck, and I kept asking my pediatrician if she had a skin condition, allergies, or clogged sweat glands. Every baby is different, he said. Every sense of smell is different.

My mother said some babies simply have oily scalps, just like adults. My pediatrician suggests a different shampoo, and that does seem to help. But when I ask my mother what I smelled like as a baby, she rubs her hand across my cheek, says I was sweeter than any angel, then changes the subject. She does that often, gives a compliment that doesn’t really answer the question. I think she doesn’t want to admit that she rarely bathed me herself; Louise did. Whenever I ask her a question about parenting, she often struggles to put an answer together. That’s what having servants will do to you, I suppose.

Late at night I’d sneak in to watch Emma sleeping, elegant and quiet, even after a bad day. She looked so sweet in her bed, so calm. I’d breathe deeply in her room, more filled with the cotton candy smell of baby lotion than with her. But now, with the baby and his greedy cries, I was too tired to do anything but Emma’s basic maintenance. Too tired for watching her breathe in her sleep, too tired for guilt or overcompensation. I crouched over Emma’s pink bed, my back protesting as I tried to place her gently down in the middle, between her bunny and her teddy bear, where there was still an indentation on the covers. But my aim was off, and her cheek rolled against her bunny and she cried, “Ow, my eye, my eye!” Since the bunny was soft, plush as a mink coat, I couldn’t imagine she was doing anything but exaggerating.

“Oh, please, Emma. Your eye is fine,” I said.

“The whiskers!” she wailed. “The whiskers!”

Was it possible the bunny’s fine nylon whiskers, as thin as hair, had actually poked her in the eye as I lowered her down? I pulled her hand away to look; her eye wasn’t even red.

“Emma, you’re fine,” I said more firmly.

“I’m not fine! I’m not fine!”

My breasts seized up, tingling, preparing to nurse, as they sometimes did when she cried, not just her brother. It had shocked me the first time it happened; made me understand why mothers in Europe breast-fed toddlers: because their breasts told them to. I squeezed my arm against it, willing it to stop. For it all to stop, really. I tightened the strap on that side of my bra for more support. I would never be one of those hippies who burned her bras; I needed mine more than ever.

I don’t know how long I watched her flail on her bed. Ten seconds? Enough. Enough to see her pound her fists into her pastel chenille spread, hard enough to raise dust. I left her mid-tantrum, closing the door to her small room, and to the baby’s room. If she wakes him up, I thought, I’ll kill her.

“We can talk about this when you’re calm,” I called to her from the other side of the door.

She pounded her fists against the door, shrieking louder, and a few seconds later I heard the baby crying in his crib. I closed my eyes and counted to ten, willing him to stop, or her to stop; neither one did. Guilt seeped from my heart into my limbs. Two sobbing children, and it wasn’t even daylight.

I stood up and went to the baby’s room and put his pacifier back in his mouth and turned on his music mobile, hoping he’d go back to sleep, hoping he didn’t want to nurse.

I backed out of his room slowly and nearly stepped on Emma, in the hallway.

“Ow!” she cried and I winced, expecting the baby’s cry. I closed his door swiftly.

“Emma, what is wrong with you this morning?” I whispered.

“That bunny made me mad.”

“Well, should we put the bunny in the naughty chair?”

“No, I forgave him.”

“Then…,” I sighed, “then I forgive you for waking up your brother.” I hesitated a moment and then added, “Do you want to come help me in the garden later this morning? We could find some worms, we could—”

“No,” she said. “The garden is dumb.”

And the moment, the crack in the armor, is gone.

Later, Betsy would point out that the tantrum was all Theo’s fault. We laughed at all the different ways Betsy could absolve me and blame Theo. Theo’s fault for never being home. Theo’s fault for not making enough money to have servants. Theo’s fault for the genes that combined with mine to make Emma just a bit different from the child we saw in our minds, the photograph of a life, the one you hope for, plan for. Not the one you have. But when I thought of my married life, the picket fence, the Christmas photos with children dressed in red velvet, I never thought there would be a shadow behind my husband, of another man.

My high school reunion was a bit like being trapped in the world’s longest receiving line. So many people I half knew. My old lab partner, Bill Miller. Lou Ann Banner, whose locker was next to mine for four years. It was as if there were two of me: one who hugged each of them, and one who scanned the room for Peter over their shoulders. He was there, I just knew it. I imagined him hiding behind a nest of emerald balloons, peeking around the wide bass of the jazz trio, cloaked in the camouflage of a blue blazer. At most Main Line parties you couldn’t tell the men apart from the back, but I was certain I would know Peter right away. Certain he wasn’t one of the pairs of flannel shoulders I watched heaving with laughter. I nibbled on a cracker with cucumber and pimiento and watched the band. It was one of those earnest groups where the men nod and sway and make faces when they play. No one was dancing yet; it was too early, people had too much to say and not enough to drink.

I saw Peter before he saw me. He was making his way across the crowded gym, weaving gracefully between hanging streamers and swaying people, pausing for nods and handshakes along his route. Halfway through, his eyes found mine and held.

“Annie,” he said and smiled, covering the last few yards in double time. His hands were on my hands, and his lips were against my cheek, lingering there a moment too long, as if they were just scouting out the territory for later. “It’s been ages.”

“I was hoping you might make the trip.”

“Oh, we live here now.”

My face flushed, and I wasn’t sure if it was fear of his proximity, or the heavy width of the word “we.”

“Really? Since when?”

“Last month.”

We exchanged basic information: where we lived, how many children. He mentioned that his wife was from Baltimore and didn’t feel at home here yet.

“Is she here? I’d love to meet her.”

“She stayed back; one of the kids is sick.”

“Oh, mine was sick earlier this week. Terrible fever.”

“But you weren’t?”

“Me?”

“Sick, you weren’t sick?”

“No, no. Why, do I look… unwell?”

His eyes skimmed my body lightly before landing back on my face. “I didn’t think it was possible, but you look better than you did in high school.”

“I look old.”

“No, you look… wise.”

“Wise to your tricks, maybe,” I said and we both laughed.

He looked toward the punch bowl. “And what about you? Is your illustrious architect husband getting you a drink?”

“He’s at a ribbon cutting.”

“Oh, of one of his skyscrapers?”

“One of his shopping malls, actually. But I’ll tell him you find him illustrious.”

He laughed, and I watched him, marveling at his wide, easy smile as if it had been a dozen years since I’d seen teeth.

“Do you, too?”

“Do I what, Peter?”

“Find him illustrious?”

I narrowed one eye, considering this. I wasn’t used to hanging adjectives on Theo, but if I had to choose one, that would not be it. Industrious, perhaps. He’d had the nerve to be upset that I wouldn’t go with him instead of to the reunion. He’d said I lived a mile from Langley, and anyone I wanted to see I could probably see at the grocery store. He said I didn’t care about his work. I said he didn’t care about my friends. Both of us were right, and we knew it. I stopped short of adding that he didn’t care about his own daughter when she was sick.

“So… couldn’t someone else have cut the ribbon, Annie? Or does he have special scissors?” Peter teased.

“I didn’t come here to talk about my husband,” I said with a smile.