An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  Jennifer says, “Some things don’t make sense to me. Like why was my father in a car in Pennsylvania when we lived in Miami? And why aren’t there any pictures of us all together?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I was away at the time.” I don’t fill in the details, that I was living in St. Thomas, serving tropical drinks and soaking up the sun until my skin turned very brown.

  She studies my face for a long time, searching for something that I can’t give her.

  WHEN SHERRY CALLS I ask her when she will take Jennifer back. “She should go to school,” I tell her.

  “She’ll be expelled again anyway. She steals from kids’ lockers, takes whatever she wants. Can you believe it?”

  I feel like both Jennifer and Sherry are hiding things from me, giving me little bits and pieces but keeping the big parts to themselves. I try to imagine Sherry in the small pink house she and Jennifer live in. Jennifer has told me that they have orange trees in their backyard, and a plastic pink flamingo on their lawn. I can see Sherry there, in her high-heeled sandals and platinum hair. I used to think she looked exactly like my old Barbie doll, all pointy breasts and tiny waist. Her hair is blond like Jennifer’s, but bleached and molded into a tight bubble. That is how I imagine her as she talks to me now, a Barbie doll in her Florida toy house, surrounded by bougainvillea and orange blossoms, staring blankly at a plastic lawn ornament.

  “She is nothing but trouble,” Sherry is telling me. “Stealing and cheating on tests. She actually copied a Time magazine article about Houdini and handed it in as her report on a famous person. Like the teacher wouldn’t know someone else wrote it.”

  Jennifer is stretched out on my couch, lazily flipping through a magazine. She does not seem to be listening to the conversation.

  “Well,” I ask Sherry, “what’s the problem?”

  “Who knows? I’m trying to make a better life for us. Travel agents get discount tickets and hotels. We could see the whole world if we wanted to.”

  Over the years, Sherry has learned many skills. She was a licensed electrologist, removing women’s mustaches and shaping their eyebrows. She booked bands for a nightclub and tried her hand at calligraphy. None of it worked as well as her days with David breaking the law.

  “I would think she’d want to travel,” I say. It was all that I used to want, my way of getting out of tough spots, of leaving men and looking for new ones.

  Sherry laughs. “All she wants is to make trouble. But you say she’s being good there, so let her stay for a bit more.”

  I want to explain that I am tired of Jennifer being here. That she is not really helping me decide what to do next. That I have an urge, once more, to pick up and go. To L.A., maybe. Or even Hawaii. Luke signed his letter “Sincerely” and I want to run.

  But I say none of these things. I just stare at Jennifer and wonder how she could have actually done it to herself. How she felt when it didn’t work. From Miami, Sherry makes excuses for having to hang up. She doesn’t ask to speak to her daughter, and I don’t offer.

  “WOW,” JENNIFER SAYS when I take her to my tiny, cramped office. “Look at all of these places.” She touches the photographs that line my desk and walls and shelves. Pictures of Peru and British Columbia, of people climbing a frozen waterfall and of seals in the Galápagos Islands.

  From my window, I can see hookers on the corner, a man drinking something from a paper bag. They call this area of the city the Tenderloin. That sounds gentle to me. Tender loins. This is not a gentle place.

  “Have you been to all these places?” Jennifer asks me. She holds out a picture of a dense jungle. She has on a new ring, a thin gold one with two hearts dangling from it.

  “No,” I tell her. “I just put them in the magazine.”

  “If I could,” she says, still clutching at the jungle photograph, “I would go everywhere. Around the world. I’d even volunteer to go on the space shuttle.”

  I frown, thinking about Sherry. “When your mother finishes travel-agent school—”

  Jennifer laughs. “She’ll never finish. She never finishes anything.”

  “She told me you were expelled from school,” I say softly.

  Now Jennifer sighs. “I was. I’d rather stow away on a ship than go to school every day. There’s nothing there.”

  “She told me—”

  “Whatever she told you is true,” Jennifer says firmly.

  “Oh.”

  My eyes drift to her wrists, to her bracelets and beneath them, to her scars.

  “Caryn,” Jennifer says, “what was he doing in Pennsylvania? What was his job?”

  I hesitate. His job was dealing drugs, I say in my mind.

  Jennifer laughs again. “My mother says I’m a wild thing. She says I’m like my father.” She leans out the open window, too far out. My heart seems to slow down, to freeze. I think, she is jumping from this fifth-floor window but I can’t reach out in time to grab her. Then she pulls herself back in, and looks at me as if she didn’t just dangle five stories.

  “I like looking out,” she says. And then she smiles. A smile that makes her face look like it hurts.

  SOMEWHERE, I HAVE a map of Hawaii. I will find it, I decide, and study it. I will make plans for a new life in the shadow of a volcano. I’ve served drinks before at seaside resorts. I can do it again. The names of the islands are magical. Maui and Kauai. For days, the fog here in San Francisco has been thick as mashed potatoes and it is starting to depress me. Every morning, Jennifer is staring at me, waiting for answers. It’s time, I think, to move.

  I search my drawers, but the map is gone. What I find instead are handfuls of jewelry: the bracelets Jennifer likes to wear, and thick ropes of rose quartz and yellow jade, and earrings made of dangling crystals and rings in all sizes. There is no way that Jennifer could have bought all of this jewelry. Where would she get the money? I lay everything out across my bed, and it sparkles and winks at me in the late afternoon light. Then I put it all away.

  THE FOG IS still thick on the day we go to Alcatraz. We wait in line, then crowd onto the ferry. I have paid an extra dollar for us to get the recorded tour, which comes from a bright yellow Walkman and clunky headphones that make us look like Martians. Jennifer is wearing a Cal Berkeley sweatshirt and a boy asks her if she goes there.

  “I’m in ninth grade,” she tells him.

  The boy walks away.

  On the island, we walk through the steps that the tour instructs us to take. Stop at the sign that says DINING HALL, we are told. Take a right on Michigan Avenue. Stand under the clock. Look at the pictures on the wall. We do whatever the voice tells us, like robots. Jennifer’s tape is two steps ahead of mine, and every time I approach her it seems she has to walk on to somewhere else.

  The recorded voice tells us how on New Year’s Eve, the prisoners could hear music and laughter from a yacht club across the bay.

  We step inside a cell and pretend we are in solitary confinement. All around us, families snap pictures of each other behind bars. I stand in my cell in the dark and close my eyes. The voice tells me about the cold, damp air here. About all the tricks inmates used to help them get through solitary. Throw a button on the floor and try to find it in the dark. Imagine entire movies.

  I can feel Jennifer come and stand beside me, I can smell the perfume she wears all the time. She takes my hand in hers.

  “Imagine being locked in here and knowing that San Francisco is right across the bay,” she says. “Hearing people at a party.”

  I open my eyes. “But we can walk out,” I tell her. “We’re not in solitary.”

  “I know,” she says. “But imagine.”

  We are way behind on our tapes now. And we have to fast forward to catch up. Quickly, Jennifer and I go through the prison, poking our heads into cells and rooms, until we find the rest of the tour. We are at the end, listening to a description of escapes from Alcatraz.

  There were many that failed, the voice croons in my ears, and only one
that perhaps was successful. I listen to the details of that escape, of how the men collected hair from the barbershop floor to use on papier-mâché masks of their faces. How they dug for months to get through the prison walls to an air shaft. They were never found, the tape tells me.

  JENNIFER AND I stand on the top of Alcatraz, looking out. Her hair is blowing wildly in the cold breeze, but she does not try to control it, to hold it down.

  “I know you took all that jewelry,” I tell her. “I know you stole it.”

  She doesn’t answer me. I cannot see her face under her blowing hair.

  Finally, she says, “I like to think they made it.”

  “Who?”

  “Those three men who tried to escape. Maybe one of them didn’t drown. Maybe at least one of them is free.”

  I gaze down the rock to the water pounding the shore. I don’t agree with her. I think they must have all died down there.

  “About that jewelry,” I say.

  She turns to me. “Here,” she says. “Take it.” She unclasps each bracelet, letting them drop into my hands.

  “I don’t want it,” I tell her. “That’s not the point.”

  But she keeps taking them off, until finally she has bare arms, and all of her crooked scars are revealed. She is standing before me, arms turned upward, naked of all the turquoise and amethyst and copper.

  I take her wrists in my hands, lightly. There are so many questions I could ask her. So many things I want to know. But what I realize, standing there, feeling the bumps of her skin under my hands, is that there really is no escaping. Not for Sherry, not for Jennifer, not for me. The only thing left to do is to stick it out.

  Jennifer’s eyes are set right on me. She says, “If I really wanted to do it, I would have made the cuts deeper. And up and down instead of across. No one understands that I knew the real way. The right way. But I just wanted to see what would happen, to faint or go away for a little while.”

  “It’s not worth it,” I say. “Sooner or later you have to come back.”

  She nods. There are tears in her eyes, but they could be from the stinging salty air, like mine. The ferry is chugging toward us, and still holding on to each other we slowly make our way down that rock.

  We stand in the line, waiting for the ferry to take us back.

  Suddenly I turn to Jennifer. “Your father did it,” I say. “He hung himself.”

  Her expression doesn’t change at all.

  “He was in prison,” I continue. “For drugs. And he killed himself.”

  “I know,” she says. “I found the death certificate last year when we moved. I wanted my mother to tell me the truth.”

  I say, “That’s the truth.”

  The ferry arrives, and we move forward, toward it. Its steps are steep, and we have to link arms for the climb.

  LOST PARTS

  THE LAST THING Helen remembered before she missed the curve on Thurbers Avenue and sent her white Toyota Celica tumbling forty feet off the embankment until it finally settled roof-side down in a deserted lot, was looking at Scott in the passenger’s seat beside her and saying, “What is wrong with you anyway?” She never got an answer. Instead, the car crashed, jumped, flew, landed. There were no screams or explosions, just the WGBH fund-raising drive, the fake intellectual accent of the classical music announcer asking for just ten more phone calls please. Scott, she was told later, died instantly of multiple head and neck injuries. Helen lost her spleen.

  The spleen, a doctor explained, functions as a blood filter and as a place to store blood. He drew a picture in the air, plucking the invisible body part and tossing it, casually, Helen thought, over his shoulder. The doctor looked a little like Scott, and for a moment Helen considered asking him this hypothetical question: If you lived with your girlfriend for two years and suddenly you stopped getting along, fought over when the pasta was al dente, whether to watch Letterman or Nightline, where to keep the unread magazines, would you start to sulk and sigh dramatically at odd moments or would you break up or would you at least discuss what was wrong? But by the time the question was formulated, he was already on his way out, his Nicole Miller tie, decorated with hot pink stethoscopes and bright blue syringes, flapping behind him.

  Propped in her hospital bed, her stomach clamped shut with staples, IVs in the tops of both hands, a slight Percocet buzz in her head, Helen realized that after all the hours of phone conversations with her friends, all the nights spent awake staring down at Scott as he slept, all the daisies plucked from their ridiculously small garden murmuring to herself, “He loves me, he loves me not,” after going to a palmist and a tarot card reader—each with different opinions and predictions—after all that, Helen realized she would never know what Scott was thinking. Her question, “What is wrong with you anyway?” would never be answered. Instead, it would hang for eternity over the Thurbers Avenue curve.

  HELEN’S FRIEND JOANNE knew the truth.

  Helen had told her that she was going to break up with Scott. I’ll move out, Helen had said, and give us both some breathing room.

  So when Joanne appeared in Helen’s hospital room, dressed in black, she seemed embarrassed, red-faced with downcast eyes.

  She said, “God, your spleen. How awful.” Even though both of them knew that was not what was awful.

  Helen answered by telling her about the staples.

  Without looking at her, Joanne said, “My cousin’s wife got really fat and had her stomach stapled so she couldn’t eat a lot.”

  “I think those are internal staples,” Helen said. “Mine are outside.” Her hands fluttered above the damp gauze. A faint, strange smell came from the wound. A smell that Helen could not place. She supposed it was the smell of the insides of bodies. Scott, she’d been told, had no apparent injuries. No blood or gaping holes. Everything was internal; he looked fine.

  “Did you see Scott?” Helen blurted.

  Joanne looked up, frightened. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again.

  “He . . . uh . . . died, Helen,” she said. She indicated her black outfit as proof. Then she glanced into the hall for a nurse or someone to assist her.

  Inappropriately, Helen laughed. “I know that,” she said. “I meant . . .” She searched for the word. “Did you view him?”

  Joanne lowered her voice, eased herself onto the very edge of Helen’s hospital bed. “He looked great,” she said.

  They were silent, each contemplating, Helen supposed, what that meant. To Joanne, she supposed, it meant not dead. But to Helen it conjured images of Scott in his white boxer shorts, about to dress or undress, caught between things. That was when he looked vulnerable, open. Asleep, he kept his crotch guarded with both hands. Active, he was a frowner, a worrier, a man who disliked clutter, who complained she left her mail and necklaces and shopping lists in too many piles on every countertop.

  “God,” Helen said. “Dead.”

  She tried to think of what that meant. Really meant. If they had simply broken up, she would drink too much wine alone one night and call him, drunkenly, to cry. They would go to bed together a few more times, passionately. She would hate him, miss him, desire him. People would call her to say he had been spotted—at a café, in his car, mailing a letter. Dead was something else altogether.

  She started to cry.

  It wasn’t the first time. The first time was when his parents arrived at her bedside, their faces red and blotchy, their eyes swollen, and told her they did not blame her. “That fucking curve,” Scott’s father had said. He was an economics professor at Brown and Helen had never heard him say “fuck” before. It startled her. Scott’s mother said, “I know how much you loved him.” That was when Helen began to cry. Did she? Love him? Hadn’t she been thinking of breaking up with him? That very morning of the accident she had yelled at him for obsessively dust-busting around the litter box. “I am stepping on tiny pebbles!” he had shouted back at her.

  Crying made her side ache and her staples itch. But onc
e it started, there was nothing Helen could do.

  “Hey,” Joanne said, wrapping her arms awkwardly around Helen. “Come on.”

  “I killed Scott,” Helen blabbered.

  “No, you didn’t,” Joanne said, her voice soothing, the way a mother calms an infant.

  But they both knew she had.

  Helen could feel the impact, car against guardrail. She remembered being airborne, rocketing off the highway. In that instant, she had time-traveled back to her high school senior-class trip to Disney World, where she rode Space Mountain again and again, convinced dying felt like that.

  Joanne was talking in that maternal voice, urging Helen to reconsider and spend the summer at an artists’ colony in upstate New York with her. She had made that offer a few weeks ago. Joanne was a photographer; there would be other artists there. There would be cocktail parties. “I’ll say you’re my assistant,” she’d said. “You can get away from Scott for a little while.” But Helen had been unsure. Was getting away the right thing? Was a little while the right thing? Maybe they should be apart, she’d thought, forever.

  Helen inhaled sharply, knowing it would hurt.

  “It’ll be fun,” Joanne said, smiling sadly, squeezing Helen’s hand.

  “I think I will come,” Helen said, her voice sounding slow and dreamlike. “But I don’t think I could allow myself to have fun.”

  NO ONE COULD look Helen in the eye. It was, she thought, as if they all knew something deep and dark about her, something horrifying. Even her own mother seemed to brighten when Helen told her she was going to spend the summer in upstate New York with Joanne. “Good for you,” her mother said, cheerfully. Helen used to think Joanne’s life was mysterious—artists! Scott worked in human resources at a bank; Helen taught composition at the junior college. When she’d told Joanne she was thinking about breaking up with Scott, Joanne had said, “I know a lot of interesting men.” Helen had imagined black turtlenecks, clove cigarettes, thick coffee in little cups. She packed to go, avoiding Scott’s drawers—the two top ones, his side of the closet. She pretended not to notice his Newsweek, so outdated now with Jackie Kennedy on the cover, folded open to the page where he’d left off the night before the accident. Scott would like that he died the same week as Jackie; it was the kind of thing he would have chosen. Helen’s hands brushed against his glasses, ugly aviator-shaped ones that he wore only in the house, at night. The cold metal and glass made her recoil, step back. His other pair, his public ones, must have been in his suit pocket, she thought. For a crazy moment she considered packing the aviator glasses, taking them with her to New York. She imagined them nestled in her suitcase among her sweaters and socks and hiking boots. Her hand reached for them, sitting there on top of black and white pictures of a young, happy Jackie. But instead of picking them up, her hand hung there for a moment, suspended in midair, then dropped, heavily, to her side.