An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

In loving memory of my daughter Gracie Belle
September 24, 1996–April 18, 2002

CONTENTS

Total Cave Darkness

The Rightness of Things

The Language of Sorrow

After Zane

Joelle's Mother

Escapes

Lost Parts

Dropping Bombs

Inside Gorbachev's Head

New People

An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

An

ORNITHOLOGIST'S GUIDE
to
LIFE

TOTAL CAVE DARKNESS

H
E CALLS HER
Sweetheart, Darling, Honey Pie. Martha calls him Reverend. Even now, as she watches him stretch out on the hood of his car, shirtless, smiling to himself, face turned toward the blistering July sun, Martha thinks: The Reverend is so damn young. The pay phone is hot against her ear and she smells someone else's bad breath emanating from it. Martha is sweaty from heat and humidity, sore from too much acrobatic sex. And she wants a drink. God help her, she wants a cold beer, a chilled white wine, a vodka and tonic. Anything.

Six hundred miles from this parking lot, Martha's mother answers the phone with a weary hello. Massachusetts is in the middle of a heat wave too. Martha knows this. In between sex and free HBO she watches the Weather Channel. The whole country is hot.

“It's me,” Martha says with forced cheerfulness. “I'm about to go into a cave so I figured I should check in, in case you never hear from me again. You know.”

Her mother lowers her voice as if the phone could be tapped. “A cave! Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

Then there is a silence in which Martha hears her mother
thinking: You have done crazy things in your day, but running off with a priest tops them all.

The Reverend lazily wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He is nine years younger than Martha, with startling green eyes that remind her of her childhood cat Boo and a body that must come from God himself: wide shouldered and strong and golden haired.

“He's not a priest, you know, Mom. He's a minister. A Protestant.”

The Reverend scratches his balls with another lazy motion and Martha looks away.

“What did I say? Did I say anything about it? I don't care what you call him,” her mother is saying. “He wears one of those little white collars, doesn't he? He gets up on Sunday mornings and preaches to people, doesn't he?”

Martha smiles at this. Today is Sunday, and when he got up with her this morning he was definitely not preaching. Although she had jokingly whispered amen when they were done.

“What are you thinking?” her mother says. “You're a grown woman, Martha. Over forty—”

“Just over forty,” Martha reminds her, feeling cross.

“And you take off with him for three weeks—”

“Two! Almost two.”

“And everyone knows the two of you are not off praying together.” Her mother's voice grows weary again as she repeats, “What are you thinking?”

Martha asks herself the same thing. She had been gripped by an urge to call home after all these days away as if this simple act of reaching out would make everything different. Instead, everything is exactly the same. Her mother's voice,
baffled and questioning, sounds all too familiar. Words like
irresponsible and thoughtless
buzz around Martha's head like mosquitoes.

A bright yellow car pulls into the parking lot, and Martha squints at its unfamiliar license plate. She has been keeping a mental tally of all the different states' license plates she sees. South Dakota? Yes. The faces of the presidents are stamped right on the plate. There was a time, before the drinking took over so much of her life, when Martha could easily do things like name the presidents who were carved at Mount Rushmore or rattle off the state capitals without hesitation. But now her brain is all thick and soupy. She tells herself one more drink would not make it any worse.

As if he read her mind, the Reverend appears at her side and takes her hand as tenderly as an adolescent on a first date.

“Reverend Dave,” Martha whispers.

He smiles at her with his even white teeth while her mother shrieks in her ear. “What? He's right there? Right this minute?”

The Reverend nuzzles her. So many things he does remind her of her Boo that sometimes Martha worries that she will fall in love with Reverend Dave. She thinks of how Boo used to wait for her to come from school, perched on the low hanging branch of a maple tree at the corner of her street. Sometimes Martha would stop and watch him there instead of turning the corner. She would count—one minute, two, three. No matter how late she was, Boo waited. As soon as he saw her, he'd jump from branch to fence to sidewalk, landing right at her feet.

Thinking of his loyalty and patience makes Martha say, “Oh.”

“Martha?” her mother says, demanding, angry. “What is he doing?”

The Reverend lifts Martha's hand in his and presses her close, swaying against her body like they are at the prom. He is humming, off-key.

“Saving me,” Martha tells her mother. “He's saving my life.”

B
ACK IN
M
ARCH
, when Martha's drinking lost her everything—the condo in Marblehead that looked out over the harbor, her job as the restaurant/movie/theater critic for
The North Shore Press
, her husband—she moved in with her mother so she could drink in peace. “I've come to straighten out,” Martha lied the day they dragged her boxes across her mother's powder blue wall-to-wall carpeting and into the guest room. Her mother had a condo too, in Swampscott. And a job. And a boyfriend. She wasn't happy to have Martha back. “I'm not the Betty Ford Clinic here,” she grumbled. “You come back, you're on your own.”

At first, Martha made a show of getting up with her mother every morning and having dry toast and lots of coffee. She circled ads for jobs in the classifieds in red marker and discussed the pros and cons of each one. Her mother frowned at her and shook her head, not disgusted as much as baffled. “Why don't you just take yourself to AA?” her mother said one morning before she left for her job in the Better Dresses department at Filene's. She wore a Donna Karan outfit that, with markdowns and her discount, she got for eighty-eight dollars. “AA?” Martha laughed. “I'm not that far gone. I just
need to get my head on straight.” After her mother left, Martha paced while first the talk shows and then the soap operas droned on behind her. Her mind skipped and flitted from one thing to the next, leaving her unable to complete anything or to concentrate on something as easy as the
Reader's Digests
her mother kept in the bathroom.

But at five o'clock she was always able to focus. She turned off the television and went to the kitchen to fix a vodka and tonic in her mother's jumbo insulated to-go cup. She could nurse one of these until her mother came home and the two of them ate dinner together, sometimes joined by her mother's boyfriend Frankie. Martha always cleaned up afterward, then slipped out between
Wheel of Fortune
and
Jeopardy
. By eight o'clock she was settled on a stool at Matty's or the Landing, drinking until closing.

The truth was, Martha loved these nights. She loved the sound of ice cubes and laughter and jukebox music mingling together. She loved how her tongue felt thick in her mouth, how when she shifted her head too quickly the world around her spun. She loved the easy way a man might throw his arm around her shoulder, the first touch of a stranger's cold beery tongue on her body. She loved everything about drinking. All of it. For Martha, her favorite part of the day was quarter of five, watching the clock make its slow movement toward her first vodka, filling the glass with ice, then tonic, holding the bottle of vodka in her arms like a baby.

H
ER OLD FRIEND
Patty, newly relocated to Chicago, her voice filled with so much happiness that Martha wished she
would stop calling, ended each conversation by reminding Martha that help was out there, “when you're ready.” Patty had been to AA, NA, OA, and every other A imaginable. “I like drinking,” Martha told Patty. “So do I,” Patty said, her voice righteous, smug. It was Patty who gave Martha the Reverend's number. She had described him as kind and helpful. “Also, very cute in a koala way,” she said. Who would have imagined that Martha and the Reverend would run off together? That they would end up here in this parking lot in Virginia, about to go into the Endless Caverns? Certainly not Martha.

She reads to the Reverend about all the other caverns they drove past. “The Luray Caverns have an organ made out of stalagmites. The Skyline Caverns have cave flowers not found in any other caves in the U.S.”

“Sweetheart,” he says, grinning at her, “we missed all of those. We weren't thinking about caverns. Now we're thinking about them and we're here. That's how lucky we are. As soon as we imagine something that we want, we get it.”

“Mel Gibson,” Martha says, closing her eyes. But really she is imagining a bottle of vodka.

“Now don't go breaking my heart, darling,” the Reverend whispers, holding her close.

He is a solid man, like a rock or a mountain in her arms. Martha keeps her eyes closed and tries to think of something other than the way the first swallow of alcohol tastes, how it burns a little, punches your gut, makes you swoon.

“There's no fairyland in there,” Martha says. She is whispering too. “The Luray Caverns have Fairy Land. Reflecting pools that make the stalactites look like sand castles.”

Reverend Dave steps away from her and laughs. “We
already know it's an illusion,” he says. “Saved ourselves the trip! We've got the Endless Caverns. Miles and miles explored,” he says, tapping the guidebook in her hand, “but no end ever found.”

“What were we thinking to come here like this?” Martha says with a sigh.

They both know that she doesn't just mean here, to Virginia, to these caves, but rather the way they packed up his Dodge and drove out of town, meandering for almost two weeks now, sleeping at Motel 6s and eating breakfasts of 7-Eleven coffee and doughnuts. Every day they drive and drive, choosing their routes at random—he likes the name of a particular town, she wants to see something she'd heard about once, a lifetime ago. He has left behind a congregation of Unitarians who think he's spending his vacation in Michigan with his parents. She has left behind her longest lover—drinking. If she had not woken up one afternoon and realized that she had lost three whole days of her life—three days! she still thinks in amazement, and no matter how hard she tries she can not retrieve a single minute of them—she would still be at her mother's condo waiting for her first vodka of the day.