An Ornithologist's Guide to Life

by Ann Hood

  “Jim?” his mother said. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Jim,” she said again, “how are you? Are you happy?”

  He had decided that if she really came this time, he would tell her. But now he wasn’t so sure. She did not seem ready. Why, even a glass of tea with mint in it threw her into a tizzy! Even the sight of healthy, tanned people upset her! Sometimes, when he was alone, her face floated in front of him, frowning and disappointed, holding all the pain of knowing the truth, of knowing there would never be a big church wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, or grandchildren, or even him at home for Christmas with his lover beside him. Right now, his mother’s face seemed open, expectant even, as if she were waiting for him to say it. He wondered again if she already knew.

  “I . . .” he began. He felt his hand beginning to sweat beneath hers.

  “What?” she said. She leaned toward him. “What?”

  His throat felt dry, scratchy. “I am,” he said.

  The pressure on his hand increased.

  “You are what, Jim?” she said.

  Her eyes were wet. Maybe from the salt air, Jim thought.

  He said, “Yes. I am happy.”

  Eve’s hand slipped off his, and settled back into her lap. There were circles of sweat under the arms of her mauve jacket. On the pocket she wore a rhinestone pin of an owl with glittering green eyes.

  Suddenly the waiter was back with her water. He placed it in front of her with a flourish, then winked at Jim. Jim realized his heart was pounding, but he wasn’t sure if it was from how close he had come to finally telling her the truth, or from the closeness of this blond man whose nametag read RANDY.

  “Thanks, Randy,” Jim said, pronouncing the name with great care.

  “Ugh,” Eve said, spitting water back into the glass. “What’s in here?”

  Randy’s face clouded. “Lemon,” he said.

  Eve slumped back into her seat, defeated.

  “Maybe we could just take the check?” Jim said.

  Randy nodded. When he returned with it, he slipped Jim a note written on a napkin. Their eyes met for just an instant. Jim’s hands shook slightly as he read the note: “Call me?” and Randy’s name and phone number. Jim looked up. His mother was staring at him. He glanced away from her, his eyes seeking out Randy. He saw him, across the patio, waiting. Jim gave him the slightest nod.

  “Ready?” he said to his mother.

  “What’s on that napkin?” she said.

  The sun had shifted and seemed to be boring right through Jim’s skull. It made him slightly light-headed. He shrugged.

  Eve frowned at him. “I waited forever,” she said.

  “No, you didn’t,” he told her. “You were in the wrong place. I was right where I was supposed to be.”

  “No,” she said. “You weren’t.”

  EVE WAS SUPPOSED to stay for five days. But after three she told Jim she wanted to go home. “I don’t like it here,” she said. “A person can’t even get a drink of water that tastes right. You can’t walk anywhere. Always in the car. Drive, drive, drive. And everything seems wrong, smaller or something.” She was disappointed in the stars’ homes he drove her past, disappointed in the Hollywood sign, disappointed in the Ramos gin fizzes at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They saw Mel Gibson in a restaurant and she was disappointed in him too. “Even he’s smaller than he seems,” she said. Jim was afraid she was going to cry.

  On the night she announced she was leaving on a flight the next day, Jim said, “Then we’ll go out somewhere special for dinner.”

  But Eve shook her head. “We haven’t spent any time together.”

  “Ma,” he said, “we’ve been together constantly for three straight days.”

  “Not really. You’ve been keeping me busy all the time. So we don’t have to talk.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jim said.

  “Remember when your father left?” his mother asked him. Eve patted the couch beside her. Reluctantly, Jim went and sat there. She had on the mauve pantsuit again. Jim caught a slightly sour smell coming from her. “He sent us up to the lakehouse for a weekend and when we got back he had moved out.”

  “I remember,” Jim said. He remembered how hot it was that night, how the crickets seemed to sing extra loud, cracking through the summer air. They had walked inside and found most of the furniture gone, the refrigerator empty, and a note. His mother had sat down on the yellow and green linoleum and sobbed. Jim was seven.

  “In some ways,” Eve said now, “you’re like him.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Jim said. “That’s a real compliment. Especially knowing how you feel about him.”

  Instead of getting angry, his mother smiled at him, a small, sad smile.

  “I’m not like him,” Jim said. He had not seen his father in over ten years. Once, his father had taken him camping. To Jim, that was the last time they were together, although his mother told him he was wrong. Jim had refused to go to the bathroom in the woods and his father had yelled at him, taken him home early. “You disgust me,” his father told him in the car. When they got to his mother’s, Jim ran out of the car and up the walk. “You run like a girl,” his father shouted after him.

  “I said in some ways,” Eve said. “The way you avoid talking about things, for example.”

  “Fine. I’ll talk,” Jim said too loudly. He jumped off the couch and stood before her, fists and jaw clenched. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well,” she said, “for instance, are you dating anyone special?”

  “No,” he said. That was the truth. He had been dating a man whose name, strangely, was also Jim. But they had broken up a few months back and the man had moved to Tucson.

  “Are you dating anyone at all?” she said.

  “Yes,” Jim said, truthfully again. Last night, after his mother went to sleep, he had called Randy, the waiter, from the phone in his bedroom. They had talked for an hour and set up a date for Monday night. Jim was going to cook him dinner here.

  “Who?”

  “What is this?” Jim said. He recognized the shrillness in his voice. It was just like hers. “Even if I tell you, you won’t know them. You don’t know anyone here except for me, do you?”

  Eve didn’t say anything. She just sat there, waiting. Wasn’t this what he’d brought her here for? To tell her? But Jim could not think of what to say exactly, or how to say it.

  Finally he said, “Can we go to dinner now?” He felt exhausted. He felt like he could sleep for days without waking up. He imagined doing just that, crawling into bed and going to sleep. When he finally woke up, she would be gone, back in her own house with Debbie’s picture smiling out at her, comforting her.

  “Are you still a good cook?” Eve said, her voice soft.

  “Yes.”

  “Cook me dinner then. It’s our last night.”

  HE GRILLED CHICKEN coated with Dijon mustard, and potatoes. He tossed a big salad. They sat outside on his small patio to eat. Eve admired his garden, the lush tomatoes and baby lettuce. Jim drank too much wine on purpose.

  “You know what’s a shame?” his mother said. “That I have to fly back. I’m terrified.”

  “It’s safer than driving in a car,” he told her. He had told her that before she came too.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Well, it’s true,” he said, trying not to sound irritated.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” she said. “How do you think those people felt when that bomb went off and they fell out of the sky?”

  “What people?”

  “All those people on that Pan Am jet. Flight 103. And right before Christmas. I saw all those mothers on TV who had lost children.” She took a big breath. “There is nothing worse than losing your child. Nothing.”

  Drunkenly, Jim threw his arm around his mother’s shoulders and placed a too-wet kiss on her cheek. “Well,” he said, “you’re stuck with me no matter what.”

  She laughed. “Stuc
k,” she said. “Hardly. You’re the one stuck with me.”

  The image of those unclaimed bags, circling, suddenly popped into Jim’s mind again. He frowned, and the arm he’d tossed so casually around his mother tightened into a hug.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “No one wants to bomb a plane to Chicago.”

  She hugged him back, hard. “Oh, Jim,” she said, “you’re wrong. Bombs fall all the time. Unexpected. If people knew when they were going to drop, they’d avoid them, avoid getting hurt. Those people on that Pan Am plane, you think they would have gotten on had they known?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He held his mother at arm’s length. She seemed ready for anything. But hadn’t she just told him that a person wouldn’t walk into a situation where a bomb was going to drop? He got up and moved toward the door that led inside.

  “Where are you going?” Eve said.

  He smiled at her, happy that she was sitting here on his patio at dusk, happy that tomorrow she would be gone.

  “Dessert,” he said. “The grand finale.” And he went inside to get it, vanilla ice cream with cherries. He would come back out, pour cherry liqueur on top, then hold a match to it until, right before their eyes, it burst into flames.

  “SO,” JIM SAID as they stood together at the airport waiting for his mother’s flight to board, “Aunt Dodie will pick you up? She’ll be there waiting?”

  Eve nodded. She had on a different pantsuit, a lemon yellow one with a pin of a clown on the lapel. Despite the bright color, the cheerful pin, she looked older, worried. Even when she smiled up at him, her frown did not disappear completely.

  Jim watched a young couple kissing goodbye. The girl seemed hungry, starved even. His mother turned and watched too, as the boy kneaded the girl’s rear end, pushing her into him greedily.

  “Young love,” Eve said, and turned away. Her frown deepened.

  Jim could not take his eyes from them, from the curve of the girl’s neck as she tilted her head, from the boy’s slender fingers pressing her flesh. He wore a Yankees baseball hat, she wore floral leggings.

  “Jim,” his mother told him, “don’t stare.”

  But he continued to watch. What would become of them? he wondered. They would grow up, fall out of love, never feel this way again. Or they would get married and grow to hate each other, forget this day when they could not bear to say goodbye. Maybe he would board this plane and it would get blown up. Maybe he carried the bomb himself.

  “You’re being rude,” Eve said.

  Jim sighed and turned away from the couple. His mother seemed to have shrunk in these few minutes since he last looked at her. She looked old, frail.

  “Oh,” she said, “I hate to fly. I’ll never come to see you again, unless you move closer to home.”

  “I won’t,” he told her softly.

  She looked out the window, at a plane taxiing in. “If you fall out of a plane at thirty-five thousand feet, you vaporize,” she said distractedly. “Zap! Gone. Just like that.”

  “Well, then, you’d better keep your seat belt fastened,” he said. In that moment he decided he could not tell her. Not now, not ever. She was unable to handle it. She worried about sun exposure, vaporizing, bombs, and hijacking. At her own house, he knew, she had installed an elaborate alarm system. His mother was afraid to fly, afraid of everything. He saw again Debbie’s face smiling out from on top of the television.

  Eve tugged at his arm. “They’re calling my flight now.”

  “I wish . . .” he said, but didn’t finish.

  “I wish you could come with me, see me on the plane safely.” She took her bag from him. “Will you wait here and watch until I’ve taken off safely? That way if the plane goes down, you’ll be right here.”

  Jim had no intention of doing anything so ridiculous but he said, solemnly, “Yes. I’ll wait right here.” He kissed her quickly on the cheek. “Have a good trip. Have a Bloody Mary or something. Relax.”

  She began to move away from him, toward security. “Ha!” she said. “Easy for you to say. You’ll have your feet planted firmly on the ground.”

  Jim waved goodbye. He turned, and the couple was gone, vanished, like they were never there at all.

  Suddenly, his mother was back, standing right in front of him, her face close to his. “Jim,” she said, “I think it’s a shame that people can’t be who they are. Whatever that is. If someone loves you, they don’t care what you are. They love you no matter what. You have to be yourself. Be happy with who you are.” She reached up and held his face in her hands. “There is nothing worse than losing a child. That’s what they say. You’re my only child, my boy. And I love you. I accept you for what you are. Do you know that?”

  He nodded. He tried to speak but she was off again, walking away from him with great determination, like a small, lemon yellow soldier.

  “Mom,” he called after her. “Thank you.”

  She didn’t look back. She just lifted her arm and waved, then disappeared down the long hall to her gate.

  Slowly, Jim began to walk away. She had left two days early so he still had time off from work. He thought of calling Randy and asking him if he wanted to drive up to Big Sur for a few days. Yes, he thought, he would go home and do that. The loud roar of a jet engine revving made him stop. That would be his mother’s plane, carrying her back home.

  He turned and went back to the big window that looked out over the runway. Jim pressed his palms against the glass. His breath steamed a small O in front of him. The plane moved slowly down the runway, then picked up speed, and began to take off. Jim’s heart beat hard against his chest as he watched. He realized he was holding his breath. Then the plane soared into the sky, lifting higher and higher, taking his mother upward, and away. Jim stood like that, palms pressed against the cool, smooth glass, eyes following the now speck of a plane, until he could no longer see it, and he was sure his mother would not fall from the sky.

  INSIDE GORBACHEV’S HEAD

  ELLIOT IS WAITING on Angell Street for the woman he loves. She is Georgia, his mother’s friend. At 8:20 he finally sees her. She’s driving a BMW 2002, Amazon green and rickety, and stalls right in front of his dorm, where he’s been standing and waiting for fifteen cold, gray, early morning minutes. Instead of getting the car started again, she leans across the seats and opens the passenger door from the inside.

  “Get in, Elliot,” Georgia says. “I can’t be late for my shrink.”

  Everybody his mother knows, his mother included, has a shrink; Elliot believes there is an entire population of women over forty getting analyzed, Prozaced, and twelve stepped to death.

  He can’t get the door shut and Georgia can’t get the car started, so they both sit there with their private struggles until finally the car turns over and Georgia says, “Hold the door shut if you have to.” There’s no seat belt. The door rattles. It’s a precarious situation. Still, Elliot manages to notice what Georgia’s wearing—black leggings, brown Doc Martens boots, a thick woolen sweater, probably Guatemalan, with abstract people dancing across the lumpy wool and too many loose threads.

  Georgia lights up a cigarette and offers him one.

  Even though he wants to take it, he shakes his head, afraid of balancing the cig and a match without falling out of the car, which is now darting through Providence like an amusement park ride.

  “I thought smoking was back,” Georgia says. “I can’t keep up anymore.” She wraps her full lips around her cigarette and inhales, deeply. Her lipstick makes him think of seaweed, wet and dark, and that makes him think of sex, so he tries to push other images into his mind—Miró’s Nocturnals, the ‘86 World Series—but it’s too late. He’s sitting in Georgia’s car and he can see her calf muscles push against her leggings when she brakes. Every time Elliot is around Georgia he thinks like this. He tries the direct approach and looks right at her, blatantly. Even lustfully, he thinks. Her hair is dyed an unnatural black and falls in tight springs around her face and down her
shoulders. He imagines her pubic hair, where it begins and how it must be wild and untamed. Her voice makes him think of a smoky bar.

  “What?” she says when she catches him staring, but he just shrugs and tries to stop imagining her naked.

  She pops in a tape, Counting Crows, and keeps smoking. Her eyes are hidden behind crooked Wayfarers, but Elliot knows they are dark brown, deep set, lined in black. He has known Georgia since he was seven and she lived in Manhattan, on Bank Street, in a fifth-floor walk-up that looked the way he has come to think apartments in Paris must look. Whenever he thinks of that apartment it seems there were constants—sheer curtains always moved in the breeze, fresh flowers sat in bowls, the espresso machine gurgled. There was always sunlight, somewhere.

  They used to visit her, Elliot and his mother, every Saturday, from their oversized Colonial in Chappaqua, forty minutes by train. Georgia had three cats, Abyssinians, and cat hair all over her clothes and couch. She always had a disaster—a broken heart, unrequited love, or the wrong man pursuing her. Once, a former boyfriend even stalked her and she lived, or so she told them, in fear for months. His mother would listen; she would nurse Georgia’s frequent hangovers; they would all three go for a walk; Georgia would nod and smoke and not take any of his mother’s advice. Back home in Chappaqua his mother made him take a hot bath right away. While she did the laundry she mumbled, about germs and cats and Georgia.

  “Providence is such a hole,” Elliot blurts above the BMW’s noisy muffler. Having thought of Georgia on Bank Street, it almost hurts to think of her anywhere else. “How can you stand it?”