The Bird House A Novel

June 1, 1967

bubble bath

black coffee



PETER CALLED ME AFTER I dropped Emma off at nursery school. I was still shaking from my experience there, could barely register his voice.

I held the phone in one hand, the baby basket in the other. Don’t cry, I said to the baby, to myself, to the air. Don’t cry.

“Ann?”

I said nothing, but I know he could hear me, breathing, being, on the other end. I was aware of my own weight, the heaviness of a human being standing upright. It was unbearable, suddenly, and all I wanted was to fall into the pillow of his voice. The soft, appropriate words he always chose.

“When were you going to tell me, Ann?”

“When his draft number came up?” I answered feebly.

“Annie,” he said. A world in one word. “Is he—”

“No,” I said too quickly. “How did you know?”

“Is it a secret?”

“Well, no, of course not.”

“I saw Betsy at the post office. She told me you’d had a boy this time.”

“What did you say?”

“I asked her if you’d named him after me.”

“Oh, Peter, you did not!”

“You’re right. I did not.”

He wanted to see me again, just for coffee. Not anything else, just coffee. Said he’d been thinking about me every day since the reunion. He said he was in my neighborhood for a business meeting and wondered if I could slip away. Just for coffee, Annie, I promise.

I said no. Although I hadn’t seen him since that night at our class reunion, somewhere in the throat of that single syllable I knew there would be another chance, another meeting, another coffee. I was prescient; I was beginning to hear things people didn’t say. I said I couldn’t, but promised him I would call him next week, and he chuckled, saying he’d heard that one before.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when you broke up with me that August before college, when we met at your aunt’s house, that’s exactly what you said. Your parting words, for a dozen years.”

“I broke up with you and then said I’d call you?”

“Well, it was a little worse than that. You broke up with me after I gave you three hundred dollars, and then said you’d call me.”

“What?”

“Remember, your father had just left, and there was that business with the money? You were worried about going to college, about expenses, what you would wear. So I gave you a gift certificate to Lord and Taylor. You broke up with me two weeks later.”

“I thought we both agreed to break up before college, and agreed to be friends.”

“Ah, selective memory. You probably don’t remember that on fall break, I ran into you with Mike Dunwoody and I cried like a baby right in front of you both.”

“Who?”

He laughed. “See, he wasn’t worth it! You broke my heart and you don’t even remember him. Big, lanky guy with black hair, went to Evan Academy.”

“Funny, I usually remember the big ones.”

“Oh, that’s choice,” he laughed, “kick me in my weak spot.” Peter was barely five ten, and everyone else in his family was taller. Even his mother was taller. “Maybe, Annie, you’ve had so many gentlemen you just can’t possibly place them all.”

“I think when you give birth, your brain goes fuzzy, and deletes the names of your past loves.”

“Ah, the old fuzzy brain. See, you need coffee, and I know just where to procure it. It’s kismet.”

That was pure Peter—he had a way of convincing you that you needed the same things he did. I remember his chess club once held a car wash and, because I was on a diet, he convinced me that washing cars burned as many calories as calisthenics. Now that he was a journalist for the Philadelphia Times, this technique was probably how he convinced his sources to be interviewed—by showing them they needed the article written as much as he did. Your story needs to be told, I could practically hear him say. Let’s do this together. Wasn’t that what he said the night of the class reunion as he kissed me under the stars above the baseball diamond?—I know you want this as much as I do.

He was patient while I took a deep breath and explained that I just wasn’t up to seeing anyone, that I was still tired from giving birth, that I’d already had too much coffee and needed a nap, and that I would call him the following week, I really would, and he said that was fine, that he completely understood, which he didn’t, of course, not really. He paused and I couldn’t fill the space to help him understand, so I simply said good-bye. He didn’t understand because he was a man and he didn’t know what had just happened to me and I couldn’t tell him. How do you tell what happened to someone who isn’t a mother?

Emma had been fine at nursery school yesterday, fine. She’d run off toward the jungle mural and the macramé owls and monkeys with bright beaded eyes and never turned back. But today? Today she sobbed and lunged at me as I tried to leave, begging me to stay.

“Emma, it’s time for you to go to school, and time for Mommy to go grocery shopping.”

“I want to go with you!”

“No, honey, it’s time for school.”

She dropped to her knees and clawed at the hem of my capri pants, scraping her nails down my calf. “I hate you!” she said. “I hate the baby!”

The teacher extricated Emma’s fingernails, one by one, from my leg. I can still feel them in me, like hooks; like shrapnel that lingers long after the war. Was this why some of Betsy’s young babysitters wore those wide bellbottomed pants? To protect their calves from thorns, rabid animals, and furious toddlers? The teacher cradled Emma and her straight hair fell around them both, blocking the light. She kissed her head, voluntarily, not because she was her mother, and when she looked up she mouthed, “She’ll be fine.”

I crept backward into the hallway, my guilt weighing me down, even though the baby was still in the car and my Kotex was about to overflow and I had every reason, every logical reason, to hurry. I thought it would be good for Emma, being with children her age, being away from the baby. And yes, part of me wanted a witness. Wanted the teacher to observe her and tell me whether she was normal, if this was indeed how girls nearly four years old behaved. Betsy had told me repeatedly that tantrums were normal, that sibling rivalry was normal. But who am I kidding? I thought the separation would be good for me. I thought it would be good for the baby. I thought it would help me bond with him instead of being irritated every time he cried or bit my sore swollen right breast.

In the car, the baby was asleep. I wiped the blood off my leg with a tissue, and drove home not thinking of Peter, or Theo, or any man, child, or other appendage. I thought of the preschool teacher.

I tried to memorize the serenity that lived in her hands and arms, the calmness and sweetness that came off her like incense as she enfolded my flailing, slippery daughter.