An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (10 page)

“You, Beth,” He said. I could see his dazzling smile even from that distance, even in the dark and rain. “I want you.”

I stared down at him. He looked, I thought, very small.

“Beth,” he said. “Come on. I'm soaked.”

But all I did was shake my head.

“Come on,” he said again, leaning his head back to try to see me more clearly.

“Zane,” I said, “I don't know if I want you to come back.”

He laughed. “Very funny,” he said. When I didn't answer, he shouted, “What about our baby? What about us?”

“I don't know,” I told him, which was only half true. I felt certain about the baby, but about us I really didn't have a clue. “I guess I need some time. To think. To decide.”

“But I love you,” he said.

“I know,” I said. Then I stepped back from the window.

He stood out there a very long time. But finally, I heard the car door slam shut, the tires spin in the mud, then Zane driving away. That was when I made my way downstairs, into the kitchen. My cupcakes were lined up, shining with chocolate and colorful sprinkles. I removed the plastic wrap
and sank my teeth into a cupcake. In the morning, I would call Aurora, I would practice my breathing, I would pick a bouquet of spring flowers. But for right then, I wanted nothing more than to sit and enjoy what I had made. It had been too long since I'd had something that sweet.

JOELLE'S MOTHER

S
HE MUST BE
beautiful, the three of us thought. Not like our mother or the mothers of our friends with their long tangle of hair and arms lined with silver bracelets from Mexico. But beautiful like Joelle herself, all matching sweater sets and small pearl earrings and hair tamed by a fat headband. In our school, we did not have girls like Joelle. Instead of plaid skirts with a big gold pin on the side and loafers, we wore long flowered dresses, clogs from Sweden. Exotic, we thought,whenever we saw Joelle, our stepsister, again.

She made us lose our breath when we caught that first sight of her stepping, bored, from the train once a month. She came to visit our father who was her father too; it was our mothers who were different. We would run to Joelle with such ferocious hugs she almost lost her balance. Joelle was not a hugger, but she let us hug her and hang on the sleeve of her cardigan, dragging her toward our mother who waited by the car. For those few minutes, we had Joelle to ourselves. We breathed in her scent: Christmas trees. We babbled, the three of us talking at once about the total eclipse or the new Italian phrases we'd learned or how a snake sheds its skin. Joelle kept
her eyes straight ahead, nodded if we were lucky. She let us guide her through the train station and outside.

Our mother waved at us, standing beside our VW, the one that could not make a steep hill so our mother had to get out and push, letting one or two of us steer. Also, the heater never worked so in winter we kept our mittens on, even inside the car. Joelle's mother drove a Ford of some kind. We knew because Joelle told us; her mother always drove Fords.

In those moments, wrapped in Joelle's scent, bursting from the train station, and seeing our mother there, disappointment and embarrassment flooded us. Joelle's mother did not want her to speak Italian, did not have hard bottoms of her feet from going barefoot, did not have long dark hair under her arms or candles stuck into empty wine bottles made thick from melted wax. Our mother grinned and waved and whistled through an O made with her fingers stuck beneath her tongue, shrill and loud. She always mussed up Joelle's hair, first thing. She always said,
Time to let your hair down now!

The three of us piled into the back of the VW. Joelle sat straight as a ruler up front. Our mother put on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” too loud, then shouted at Joelle about our weekend plans. We shrank into the back seat, not wanting to hear. Our weekends were always the same: Friday night potlucks that ended in everyone dancing and drunk in our tiny square yard. Saturday afternoon drives from our house in Baltimore to Washington where we had to look at paintings or mummies or dinosaur bones. Then Chinese at Mr. Hsu's on P Street. Sundays meant long walks somewhere, by the harbor or in the park, maybe crabs for dinner. Why our mother had to say all of this to Joelle, who knew it as well as we did, we
could not understand. Joelle stared out the window while our mother shouted over Crosby, Stills and Nash.

We pretended our mother disappeared and we were sent to live in the suburbs with Joelle and her mother. Our mother made us eat yogurt at lunchtime. Also raisins, dried figs, Brazil nuts. But not Joelle's mother. She bought her TV dinners, Salisbury steak or turkey with stuffing, all four courses nestled in their own private compartments. We imagined a dishwasher, a swimming pool—built-in. We imagined bedspreads light as angels' wings, white or maybe baby blue. We counted all the Fords we passed, and sighed.

I
N A CIGAR BOX
that had long ago been painted black and covered with seashells glued onto it crookedly lay evidence of our father's former life with Joelle's mother. A wedding band, thick and gold, a lock of hair, also thick and gold, the only remnants of our father's past. We thought him mysterious. A golden-haired first wife, a daughter, a life he talked about only when we pushed him.

How did you meet Joelle's mother?

How did you fall in love?

Where did you get married? Did she wear a long satin dress?
Our mother didn't. Hers was white, Mexican, cotton, embroidered. She stood barefoot on a beach in Delaware. They blew conch shells, wore wedding rings fashioned from seaweed, had their friend Raymond play the flute. We knew Joelle's mother wouldn't stand for any of that. We had proof: the solid gold ring. Inside, in scrolly letters, initials carved beside a date. June 6, 1966. A million years ago.

“Another lifetime,” our father told us, sighing heavily.

But we pushed and prodded, hungry for details.

“We met in college,” he told us finally. “Are you satisfied?”

Satisfied? We were starving.

“Why didn't you stay married to her?” we asked. Unspoken between us was our fantasy—then she would be our mother too.

“If I had, then none of you monkeys would be born,” our father said, leveling his gaze at us, the one he used in his lectures at Johns Hopkins; he was a professor of English literature. “You are one part me and one part your mother.”

Guiltily, we left him to his blue books for grading.

But he called to us, and we turned back to face him.

“It's about love, you know,” he said. “I thought I loved her, but I didn't. Your mother,” he added, “your mother I adore. For always.”

Of course, we asked Joelle.
Did our father live with you and your mother? Did he make up stories for you at night? Did he hold your mother's hand? Kiss her on the back of the neck while she stood stirring soup on the stove?

Joelle was stingy with details. Sometimes she would bark at us. “No, he never did any of those things. He left us, you know!” We would sulk out of her room and whisper about what that meant. Could he leave us too someday? Then we would study our father for signs of his possible departure. But he remained the same, slightly goofy and distracted, circling our mother with nervous attention. Other times Joelle would cry and blame our mother for ruining their life. We thought our mother capable of ruining lives, with her strong opinions and the certainty with which she did everything. But Joelle and her mother's life hardly seemed ruined. Still,
when we raised this point to Joelle she would only shake her head and refuse to elaborate.

Once in a while Joelle would tell us something that we wanted to know, how our father and her mother had honeymooned in Bermuda in a big hotel with a pink sand beach. We could not, of course, imagine it: our father at a resort, lounging on the beach, sipping rum swizzles and slathering Joelle's mother's back with coconut oil. But she told us it was true; she had seen pictures. When we begged Joelle to bring the pictures to us she grew quiet, sullen. “My mother,” she told us, “would kill me if I did that.”

Our mother, we knew, would never go to Bermuda. We looked it up in the atlas and stared at the tiny island with the pink sand beaches where everyone spoke in British accents and stopped midafternoon for teatime. One night we asked her, feigning innocence, if we could take a vacation to Bermuda. We waited, breaths held, for her reply. “Why in the world would we ever go there?” she said, wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something very very bad.

J
OELLE IN SUMMER
was best. She arrived in cool tennis whites, tanned from days spent at The Club swimming or taking lessons of one kind or another. We made her tell us details of The Club. Our summer days were spent sitting on the sidewalk trying to finish our Popsicles before they melted. Or running under someone's sprinkler. Or taking turns standing in front of the fan in the kitchen. For two weeks every year our parents rented a cottage at Rehoboth
Beach. Then we rode waves, collected fireflies in empty mayonnaise jars, ate watermelon on the screened in porch. We waited all summer for those two weeks. Until then, we had Joelle's descriptions of The Club.

“No one can yell there,” she told us. “Suppose your mother wants you to come out of the pool. Maybe it's time to go home. Or maybe she wants you to go with her to The Grill for a hamburger. She has to walk to the edge of the pool and get you. No yelling from the chaise lounge.”

She pronounced chaise,
chezz
. We imitated her, taking turns being Joelle's mother. Sit on the chezz, we'd say. Now walk to the very edge of the pool and ask us politely to come out for lunch. This game always ended in a fight: everyone wanted to be Joelle's mother all the time.

We made her tell us more. What kind of bathing suits did people wear at The Club?

“One piece,” Joelle said. “Or a two piece that doesn't show your belly button.”

She explained that intermittent belly buttons were okay. That was when a woman walked and her belly button showed sometimes. But full out belly buttons were prohibited. The rule applied to kids as well. Embarrassed, we did not mention the way our mother sunbathed topless in our backyard, the way she said
chase
lounge, the way she stood on the front porch of our row house and yelled above the noisy crickets for us to come inside. Instead of nightly games of kick the can, we forced our neighbors to play our version of tennis or golf, using branches of trees and old musty balls from someone's basement. Joelle only watched, sitting on our stoop, high above us, her sneakers so white they glowed.

O
UR NAMES—
Molly, Sarah, Hannah—were common and dull. Not at all like Joelle, which sounded exotic, practically French. In every class or every house for one square block, there resided another Molly, another Sarah, another Hannah. But we never met another Joelle. We took this naming of us as still one more betrayal.

“What were you thinking?” we asked our mother.

“I was thinking of lovely little girl names,” she said, “for my lovely little girls.”

We told her our names were horrid, ugly, everywhere.

“Should I have named you Tallulah?” she asked us. “Hermione? What?”

“Something fancy,” we said sadly. “Something like Joelle.”

W
HEN EXACTLY THE
phone calls began, we could never pinpoint. It seemed that one summer they were suddenly there, the tinny ring of our black telephone, then the hushed voices, the tears, the slam of Joelle's bedroom door, my father placating, pleading. Sometimes we huddled in the hallway, trying to hear what was being said, but the words always sounded vague and muddled behind the closed doors. Sometimes we came upon Joelle whispering into the telephone. She would glare at us and stop talking until we left the room. Then, our ears pressed against the door, we would try to make out what exactly she was saying.

Our mother grew silent and edgy. Whenever the phone rang she jumped as if she'd been shot, then answered it softly, turning her head away from us. More than once we stumbled inside from the blazing Baltimore heat for more Popsicles or to complain about how bored and hot we'd grown, to find her sitting at our big wooden kitchen table, crying.

All summer, this went on, until we stopped thinking about it and accepted it as part of the grown-up world our parents inhabited. Instead we focused on other things: stringing long strands of beads to hang in our doorway, monitoring the growth of a litter of newborn kittens who resided in our neighbor's garage, begging our mother for one of those kittens, counting the days until we finally left the city and went to our rented cottage in Rehoboth Beach. We traded 45s with our friends. We made up dances—the Frog and the Cobra. We pretended our backyard was The Club, and threw out anyone who yelled there. We begged our mother for some of the little white socks Joelle always wore, ankle length with pastel pom-poms on the backs, and when she finally relented, we wore them day after day, with the sticks and the musty balls, practicing our golf and tennis.