An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (3 page)

Perhaps that is what causes the feeling, Rachel thinks.
Ever since her divorce three years ago, she and Sofia have lived on the top floor of a three family house in the iffier part of the city. In summer, now, the apartment is too hot and stuffy and Rachel imagines she can smell the remnants of every meal she has ever cooked there. They have no yard. Sofia's room is too small to contain all the things a five-year-old needs, so that her dollhouse and play stove and drawing easel crowd the living room and kitchen.

Rachel hears Mary approaching; it always takes her a long time to answer the door. She will have been in the basement folding clothes, or upstairs braiding her daughter's hair, or elbow deep in bread dough.

“Look at me, Sofia,” Rachel whispers.

Sofia looks up at her with red Kool-Aid rimmed lips. Her sweaty round face, dark eyes, tangled curls, break Rachel's heart. She finds herself still angry at Peter for doing something as foolish and cliché as falling in love with his assistant. She finds herself angry at herself too. Three years later and she still has not found the right job, a better home, a new love.

The door creaks open, and there stands Mary—yes, it was bread she was making; there is flour on her shirt and in her hair—and
her
Sophia. It was what had brought them together in the first place: their daughters had the same name, though spelled differently, they later discovered. But that day in the supermarket—a day as hot as this one; Rachel had gone simply to cool off—when Mary had cooed to her daughter,
Sophia, Sophia, you're so good today
, Rachel had blurted,
Why, I have a Sofia too
! and she'd pointed at her daughter, who was crushing a pint of strawberries, one by one. That was the summer Peter had moved out, the summer Sofia had meningitis and was in the hospital for two weeks,
the summer that Rachel thought of as the time when everything changed.

But Mary is ushering them into the house, and stands in the foyer calling, “Sophia! They're here!”

There is the smell of burned candles, the hushed air, the stream of light spilling through the stained glass window that presides over the house's impressive double staircase. Rachel thinks of church.

“Can I go up?” Sofia asks. Her voice is hushed too, awed, as it always is when they enter Mary's house. She holds on to Rachel's clammy hand.

Mary smiles down at her. “Yes. Of course. Run right up.”

Upstairs Sophia has her own playroom, with dolls lined up on shelves and a small table always set up for a tea party.

Rachel thinks Mary looks too pink, flushed, perhaps. She is Italian, but fair, and her skin burns too easily in the sun. When she gardens, she wears long sleeves, an oversized straw hat. Rachel has seen her like that, working in her garden.
I like to make things grow
, Mary has told her. She has given Rachel shoots from her plants, small pots of herbs for her windowsill, but Rachel cannot make anything thrive. Her houseplants refuse to flourish, even with expensive potting soil, careful attention, love.

“Have you been gardening?” Rachel asks, following Mary through her maze of rooms—the formal living room, the family room, the library, the pantry, and then finally, the kitchen.

“Not today,” Mary says. “Too hot.”

The kitchen is overly bright, a sunshine yellow that Mary has told Rachel was common in Victorians. But it reminds Rachel of her own old dorm room. She and her
roommate had painted the cinderblock walls a similar yellow with bright orange trim and put Indian bedspreads on their beds. When they got stoned at night, the room seemed to vibrate. It made them think of sunsets.

Mary pours two tall glasses of iced tea, and points to the bread cooling on the counter.

“I thought it would be ready by the time you got here but I'm moving so slowly,” she says.

Rachel laughs. They both know that Mary always gets everything done. She goes to church. She gives dinner parties. She works out every day.

“Right,” Rachel says. “Slow for you is still high speed for the rest of us.”

Mary leans toward Rachel, conspiratorially. “No,” she says, lowering her voice. “I
am
slow. You'll never guess.”

Rachel shrugs, smiles. Mary often has announcements. She and Dan are going to India, or she's heading a clothing drive for children's winter coats, or Sophia is going to a certain private school. She shares all of this information like it's top secret, as if Rachel is the only one she's divulging the information to.

“What?” Rachel says. The tea has fresh mint in it.

“I'm
pregnant
,” Mary says, squeezing Rachel's arm with both of her cold, dry hands.

“Pregnant?” Rachel repeats, and her own stomach does a strange flop.

“Fourteen weeks,” Mary tells her.

It comes back to Rachel, how in pregnancy time is counted week by week. It takes her a moment to calculate.

“Why, that's over three months!” Rachel says finally.

Mary's face clouds. “Don't be mad,” she says, still gripping
Rachel's arm. “I would have told you sooner, but I felt so superstitious. It's silly, I suppose. But we've been trying for two years—”

“You have?” Rachel asks, startled. Of course Mary wouldn't have told her that; they really aren't good enough friends for such an intimacy. Rachel used to refer to Mary as one of her “Mommy friends,” the women she saw for play dates or in the playground or at Story Hour at the local bookstore. With her other friends, the ones she often thought of as her
real
friends, she sometimes made fun of the other mothers, their competitiveness, their ability to discuss trivial things endlessly. With her real friends, Rachel drank wine and rented foreign movies and stayed up too late; with her Mommy friends she put on a different, more placid face.

Somehow, she supposed, watching Mary's concerned expression, Mary fell somewhere in between.

“You
are
angry,” Mary is saying. “It was silly of me to not tell you sooner. I just didn't want to jinx it, that's all.”

“I was the same way,” Rachel lies. “With Sofia. I waited forever to tell people.”

Really she called everyone, immediately. She can still remember staring at the bright pink circle on the home pregnancy test while she dialed the phone. But Mary looks relieved.

“I just didn't want to jinx it,” she says again. “You hear so many stories.” Her face softens. “I'm so glad you're not mad at me,” she says.

I
T IS
P
ETER'S
weekend to have Sofia. These Fridays leave Rachel with such a mixed feeling—glad to have some time to
herself, but jealous too, of all the hours he will have with Sofia. Packing her daughter's
Little Mermaid
suitcase, folding the baby doll pajamas, and tucking her Madeline doll in the zipper compartment, Rachel knows that it is not just the hours Peter will have with their daughter; it's the hours Yvonne will have. When Peter left them and moved in with Yvonne, everyone told Rachel it would never last.
He'll be back
, they assured her. But now, three years later, Peter and Yvonne are still together, cozily ensconced in a cottage at the beach.

Although Rachel has never been there, she imagines it every time Sofia drives off with them for the weekend. Weathered shingles, dark green shutters, Adirondack chairs overlooking the water. Some of these details she's gleaned from Sofia, or the dozens of pictures Yvonne and Peter take and send home with her. Others she makes up—sheer curtains, a clawfoot tub, botanical prints. And of course the animals. Sofia talks about them by name.
Lulu Gus Annabelle Rusty MacNamara Beatrice Bubba
. But Rachel gives them faces, breeds. She imagines two tabby cats, an Irish setter, several mutts, and a pair of cockatiels. Peter is a veterinarian, and he cannot resist a hurt or homeless animal. The one thing Rachel does not miss about her marriage is all the hours nursing strays, making splints for bunnies, or cleaning wounds. She lost an Afghan to blindness, a cat to feline leukemia, several dogs to hit and runs. It was too much. Now, she and Sofia keep goldfish. When one dies, they unceremoniously flush it down the toilet and go and buy a new one. Rachel likes that. You don't invest emotion in goldfish.

Outside, a horn beeps.

Rachel looks down the three stories to the street below, where Peter and Yvonne sit in his blue Honda, the same one
he and Rachel picked out when she was pregnant with Sofia. It was reliable, they thought. Sensible. A good family car.

Sofia runs in to get her suitcase.

“Did you forget Madeline?” she asks. She stands on tiptoe and peeks out the window too.

“No,” Rachel says, snippy. She has never forgotten to pack the doll, yet Sofia asks her every time.

Sofia swoops her suitcase from the bed, and begins to skip away.

“We're going for chowder and clamcakes,” she says, grinning.

Her hair needs to be combed again, Rachel notices. And there is a spot of something bright blue in the middle of her Simba tee shirt. She will come back neater, bathed and shampooed with expensive beauty products made from papaya and mango and coconut. After her last weekend there, she returned with a white rope bracelet that she has refused to take off her wrist, even though it grows dingier every day.

“Have fun,” Rachel says, trying to sound cheerful.

Sofia hesitates, frowning in the doorway.

The horn beeps again.

Sofia runs back into the room and hugs Rachel around the legs, hard, so that she is thrown slightly off balance.

“See you Sunday!” Sofia shouts, gone that fast.

Rachel turns back to the window. In a few seconds, Sofia appears, skipping again, across the front yard, a sad lot of dirt and tufts of brownish grass that remind Rachel of an old man's head.

“Daddy!” Sofia is shouting, happily.

Rachel's stomach tightens. Peter gets out of the car and picks Sofia up into his arms, bear hugs her, spinning slightly.
Sofia's thin legs wrap around her father's waist. Rachel sees the bottoms of her Keds as the two of them twirl. She sees the bright blond—
dyed
, her friends had assured her—of Yvonne's hair. She wants to turn away; there are things to get done. But behind her the house hums with quiet, and Rachel finds she cannot move from her spot at the window.

R
ACHEL HAS CONVINCED
herself it is not a date. It is just dinner at Mary and Dan's.

“I've never fixed anyone up before,” Mary told her on the phone that next morning, Saturday. “So I can't say that's what this is. But Dan's cousin Harry is coming over for dinner tonight and he was supposed to bring Victoria, his girlfriend, well, his ex-girlfriend, I guess, because he called fifteen minutes ago and said they've broken up but could he come anyway. And Dan and I immediately had the same thought:
Rachel
.” She paused, then added, “He's an architect.”

Rachel was nursing a hangover; she'd had too much white wine the night before while she'd watched
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, a stupid movie to rent on a night when you've pulled out your own wedding album and cried over it.

Dressing for dinner, Rachel blames that early morning hangover for making her agree to go to Mary's. She hardly knows Dan; she has been single ever since she met Mary and, politely, Mary doesn't usually invite Rachel to couples' things. At Sophia's birthday parties, he is always there, grinning behind the video camera, handing out little Cinderella
napkins and paper plates, pouring lemonade. But Rachel can hardly say she knows him. Tonight seems like one of those lines that she and Mary do not cross. On weekends, they don't even speak on the phone, never mind having dinner together.

But she is too cotton headed and embarrassed to cancel.

So she puts on her black cotton sheath, what she thinks of as her summer date dress, and black strappy sandals, and, because there is finally at least a breeze, she decides to walk to Mary's. Once she leaves her own neighborhood, with the clusters of tough looking teenagers on the corners and the loud music spilling from open windows, she actually enjoys the walk. She has brought a bottle of wine that her last date brought to her, a good wine that she's been saving for something special, and she cradles it in her arms as she meanders through the streets of Providence, walking slowly now that she's in the better part of town.

The houses here are large, like Mary's, with yards that have green grass, flower beds, neat hedges. When she can, she looks into the windows. There is a family eating dinner, an old man alone reading a book, the blue glare of a television. She should have been a spy, Rachel decides. Or something where she could watch things unnoticed. In college, she sat at the periphery of war protests, attending more for the free drugs that always got passed around. She remembers watching Peter and Sofia yesterday. Yes, she decides, she is a good voyeur.

Since her divorce, she has worked as a manager for various stores—books, shoes, and now an upscale toy store. She is ready to leave that job; it annoys her. All the overpriced wooden trains and planes, the complicated puzzles, the precious
dolls that live behind glass. She did get Sofia's Madeline doll there, thirty percent off with her employee discount, but no other good has come from this job. In her mind, before she goes to sleep, Rachel tries to imagine what she will do next. But she majored in sociology, and never went on for her MSW. She is not trained for anything really. As crazy as it sounds, Rachel believed she would stay married to Peter, have children with him, grow old like that. She believed she would volunteer for good causes, help out in a soup kitchen, have friends over for good vegetarian meals from recipes in
Laurel's Kitchen
. In a way, she supposes as she turns down Mary's street of renovated Victorians, a street that seems to rocket you back in time, she had imagined she'd have a life not unlike Mary's.