The Bird House A Novel

March 4, 2010



“You’re lucky,” Betsy said, “that you didn’t fall and kill yourself. Or god forbid, break a hip!”

If there were two words most frequently invoked for the purpose of spreading fear among older women, they had to be “broken hip.”

Still, I laughed when she said this to me, fairly dancing at the mossy base of the tree I’d just shimmied out of.

“I used to climb trees much higher than this one,” I said. “My house had fat sycamores lining the drive, which weren’t good climbers, but out by the gazebo, there were oaks and maples and willows. I climbed trees every day when I was young,” I said, brushing leaves from my shoulders.

“Have you looked in the mirror recently? You’re not young anymore, Ann.”

A sentence like that shouldn’t sting between good friends, but that one did. Betsy had a knack for painful honesty. I faced her and raised one eyebrow. I was thinner and far stronger than she was, and it was obvious every time we played doubles. She wheezed on the court and squeezed her plump feet into her Tretorns. We were seventy-three but she looked seventy-five and I looked sixty-eight and we both knew it.

“It’s not very tall for an oak,” I said and Betsy rolled her eyes.

I looked up and smiled. The tree’s spring shoots brushed across the butter-colored trim on the second story, leaving thin green streaks as it swayed in the wind. If the tree had been any wider, its branches would have encircled Theo’s little deck upstairs, but it stopped just short. By summer the foliage would thicken, grow lush, and conveniently shade the slate patio below.

“What were you doing up there, anyway?”

The bird house hadn’t come willingly; I’d yanked on the twine for nearly five minutes, angry with myself for not bringing scissors. But climbing a tree with a sharp object seemed unduly risky, even to me. Finally it gave way and tumbled out of my fingers, bringing small bits of branches and the rhythmic ping of acorns with it as it crashed on the patio. It sat there now, behind us, mostly intact except for its now-sideways chimney and the moss clinging to one side of the green enamel.

I brushed my hands together. “Taking down a bird house to photograph for one of Ellie’s projects.”

“That old chipped brown-and-green thing?”

I surveyed her curiously, surprised she’d ever noticed it, but not wanting the subject discussed. Maybe she’d merely glimpsed it when she walked up?

“Well,” she deflected, “you could have bought her a nice new one at Firth’s for nine dollars. Painted it any color you like. Red would be nice.”

“It’s an historical project.”

“The historical preservation of Victorian bird houses?”

I laughed again. “Something like that.”

“I never thought you, of all people, would turn out to be this sentimental.” She sighed.

My heart skipped a beat; we’d never discussed the origins of that bird house. She couldn’t know what it meant to me. Her comments, I told myself, simply referred to its obvious age. I swallowed hard and pressed my lips into a smile.

“I just like old things,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” She started toward her house. “Remind me to buy you a ladder for Christmas,” she said as she left. “Or a handyman. I’ll make sure he’s old, since you like old things.”

I picked up the bird house and dusted it off on my pants. I couldn’t imagine it red or any color other than its own muted browns and greens. The moss that crept across it was lighter than the paint; it gave it a homey, cottagey look, as if a bird might actually live there, not just visit. The caramel-colored roof was steep; Theo would say it was too steep for its chimney. But bird houses didn’t have to be brought up to code; they could be as rakish as a thrown-together fort. This one, despite the wild pitch of its roof and the lean of its chimney, had been assembled with love and care. I knew that much. I felt that pull again, of wanting to tell Betsy, but of course I didn’t. Just as always. I’d learned over the years, the hard way, how different we were. How she always seemed to see those differences through a cloud of judgment, rather than the gauzy haze of empathy. I suppose I didn’t want practical Betsy to know precisely how sentimental I could be.

In the kitchen I took a damp cloth and tried to clean the house over the sink. Sap clung stubbornly to parts of the brown slatted roof; it formed flat shellacky moles I’d have to chip away later with a tool. I pulled gently on the miniature rust-colored door and looked inside, fearing gummy waste, pecked walls. Assuming the birds had trashed their hotel room. But no, the finches and robins and cardinals had left it fairly clean. The wind and weather had beaten the bird house, not the birds.

What to tell Ellie of this? Could we sit with a book of North American birds, catalog the species and the behavior, tell her all I’d learned since the bird house went up? How in the beginning I watched them fly and flit from the comfort of my morning bath, before the children woke up, in those few weeks—was it a month? was it less?—before everything changed?

And how afterward I’d simply stand at the window, having come in to brush my teeth or cream my face or go through some other motion, and be surprised that it was still there, still standing and serving its purpose, providing a haven. All those days when Theo worked till dawn, the bird house swung in the breeze, less empty, less small and confining than my own dwelling.

Since I had to go out and run errands with Ellie, I took a shower to rinse the leaves from my hair, and at the last minute, I brought the bird house in with me, and let the hot water soak into its sticky roof.

When Ellie arrived, we hopped in the car and drove outside town to pick up supplies. Carole’s Crafts was in one of the upscale strip malls Theo had designed. That was his legacy: a better strip mall. My father, who approved of me marrying an architect, would have been appalled by this. He worked only for people, not companies; he designed homes, not buildings. Theo didn’t even design buildings, really, but places. Locales. He did make sure that all the stores had similar facades and similar signage—small, wooden, subtle. He was proud of how he made them blend in. But inside, where he’d had no control, all subtlety was lost—in Carole’s Crafts, the aisles were crammed from floor to ceiling, boxes were open, displays pulled apart. People yakked on their cell phones as they searched through the rubble; one woman spoke in Russian over her receiver and I stared at her until she moved away.

“The nerve of people,” I said as Ellie led me to the wreath-making area at the back of the store.

“They all have to call their kids because they’re confused about what stuff to buy.”

“Well, that makes sense.”

“Here they are, Grandma!” she cried, and skipped to the shelf bulging with robins, cardinals, blue jays, finches, and ravens.

“What, no turkeys?”

“They only have those out for Thanksgiving, silly,” she said and smiled. “We could come back then.”

“Oh, I don’t think there’ll be a need for that,” I said as a woman behind me shouted, “What size?” into her phone.

Ellie held up a cardinal in each hand, surveying them like a falconer. As she angled her head from one to the other, something about her bearing, the tilt of her chin and nose, was birdlike, too.

“Which cardinal do you like better?” she asked. “Blue eyes or black?”

“I rather like the blue jay,” I said.

“No,” she said with finality. “Red goes better with black-and-white photos.” She sounded exactly like Tinsley when she said it—firm and exacting but smiling. I remember the first time Tinsley cooked Thanksgiving dinner. I offered to bring a side dish, but she had all the recipes planned and a shopping list already made. Ellie and I left with the darker-eyed cardinal, foam board, and wire. Outside the magnetic door I dug my keys out of my handbag and asked if she wanted to go somewhere for ice cream.

“No, thanks. But—”

“But what?”

“Can we just go to the pet store and look? I promise I won’t beg for a kitten or anything.”

She pointed to the wooden sign a few doors away: SQUEAK’S PET VILLAGE.

“All right, why not?”

Some of the same people who’d been in the crafts store were also in the pet store, using their phones to photograph puppies. This looked ridiculous to me, snapping pictures with a phone. Like using a hand mixer as a microphone.

Ellie wiggled her fingers through the openings in a sheltie puppy’s cage, despite the sign that said not to. She looked at me for a second, as if waiting for a reprimand, but I said nothing, just leaned down to marvel at how small the dog was and, indeed, how cute.

A few dogs later, Ellie headed toward the Kitten Korral and I lingered outside Aviary Avenue. I’d never cared much for parrots or macaws, which seemed more like clowns than birds. I preferred smaller birds: goldfinches, sparrows. A small brown bird in the cage suddenly burst into song and I nearly clapped my hands.

“Are you a nightingale?” I said.

“Nightingale,” squawked the parrot.

“Look, Grandma, that little finch has only one leg.”

I squinted. “Indeed she does.”

She was smaller than the palm of Ellie’s hand. We watched her hop from perch to perch, landing a bit unsteadily. Once she nearly fell off, but like a tightrope walker, quickly recovered.

“Her balance is off,” I said quietly. “When you have only one of something, it affects your balance.” I wrapped my arms around my ribs, and rubbed the spot where my right breast used to be. Gone, but never forgotten. Some nights I still dream of breast-feeding, the fullness and release, the smell in the air, as sweet as baked apples. When I wake up I am startled, and always, always hugging my chest, as if I was trying to rock myself back to sleep.

“Do you think she’s a baby? That she was born that way?”

I pictured her in a pale blue shell, tumbling in the ovoid enclosure, scratching wildly for an exit, only one set of claws to break free of it.

“Probably not. Some things you are born with, and some things just… uh, develop.”

We walked past rows of dog beds and collars, leashes and treats on our way out. So many ways a person could fritter away their money. Ellie asked me what my favorite animal was and I told her it was the emu. Hers, she confessed, was a koala.

In the parking lot I wondered about all the time Ellie and I had been spending together. Sooner or later we’d be at a swimming pool, or I’d be in a robe. I’d bend over, or twist… or worse, we’d be home, and she’d knock on the bathroom door, and it would squeak open a few inches. I didn’t want to scare her with what she might see. I thought perhaps I should tell her about my breast before she discovered it in some grotesque way, and I suddenly become her old, deformed shriveled-up grandmother.

“I believe there’s still time,” I said brightly, “for a milk shake or a float.”

She said fine, and as we got in the car she cocked her head and asked, “What’s a float?” and I realized there was work, so much work, to be done!

I headed to Stuart’s, the only place I could think of where she could have a root beer float and I could have a beer. Places were so specialized now—you went to separate locations for ice cream, for drinks, for food. Imagine driving to three places when you used to walk to just one. The village of Bryn Mawr wasn’t as quaint as it had been when I went to college. Developers had found a way to commoditize its charm, to make it look quaint instead of just being quaint. But it still had Stuart’s, a bar and grill near the train station that also had a soda fountain and a spinning rack of greeting cards. No matter that it sat next to a boutique that sold only jeans and a restaurant that made only smoothies; one couldn’t hope for complete stagnation; one couldn’t pine for everything that had changed.

A handful of men around my age sat on stools, looking as if they’d stopped off to have a few drinks and pick up their wives’ birthday cards. Familiar red baskets of glistening onion rings and French fries slid across the wooden bar with a kind of grace impossible to find at a fast-food restaurant. There is more to inexpensive food than inexpensive ingredients; there has to be humility. Hardworking humility. I was comforted by the dirty aprons and dented spoons; they spoke of effort and toil. The muscles in the young woman’s arm flexed as she scooped the ice cream for Ellie’s float; anything good, anything worthy, I wanted to tell her, took some doing.

Ellie’s eyes widened as the waitress set down my frosty glass.

“I’m only having one,” I said, and she nodded.

There was plenty of time for me to drain the mug, and the waitress to refill it while Ellie was in the ladies’ room lathering up her hands. It wasn’t so much that in the surroundings of my youth I felt young; I was merely bolstering my courage for what I was about to tell her.

“Ellie,” I said quietly when she came back, “do you know about breast cancer?”

“The pink ribbons,” she said.

“I thought of this today when we saw that one-legged bird at the pet store, and I—well, do you know what breast cancer is? Do you know what it means, or, or, how you get it?”

“From… birds?” Her face was open and sincere, the opposite of scared. That’s why I went on, I told myself. That’s why.

“I had breast cancer,” I said. “It means sometimes you have to have your breast removed.”

“They cut it off?”

“Yes, that’s what happened to me. Now I only have one breast. The left one. I wear a sort of pad to balance it out.”

She tried not to look at my chest, but couldn’t help herself. “How did that happen?”

“It’s genetic. I had cancer and so did my mother and Aunt Lillian. You get it when you are born, when you are a tiny baby, and it shows up later.”

“Will my dad get it, then?”

“No, honey, only girls need to worry.”

“But you don’t have any girls.”

I blinked at her. I couldn’t tell if she had missed the point or made one.

“Well, dear, I just wanted you to know. It’s one of those interesting things about a person, like having a scar or a hidden constellation of freckles on your hip.”

“Like Harry Potter’s lightning bolt,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, relieved, and almost willing to believe that my ragged chest could be the source of such strength, such power, if only I was able to look at it in the proper way.