IN SOME WAYS, Brooklyn was exciting. For one thing, we had a yard. For another, suspicious-looking people roamed the periphery of the streets, adding a sense of danger that had been missing on West Twelfth Street. As for birds, however, Brooklyn was disappointing. Still, I sat, binoculars in hand, watching and waiting for a discovery. Through the pink and white blossoms of the dogwood trees, planted by the Neighborhood Association, I could just make out the Bishops’ second floor. Mrs. Bishop was painting there. All day she painted. I could see the tumble of her blond hair, the motion of her arms as she worked.
Mr. Bishop slept. He was in Manhattan at rehearsals of his play until late into the night. Sometimes I heard a taxi door slam and I would open my eyes to see the silver light of dawn covering our street. His play was done in the nude by three naked actors sitting on the edge of a Dumpster. It was about politics and ideas. No one understood any of it, although my mother had announced that Colin Bishop was a genius.
I watched a robin tend her three perfect blue ovals of eggs. Beyond the nest, I saw Mr. Bishop, shirtless, in the kitchen, finally awake. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. My father left the house at six-thirty in the morning, smelling of Irish Spring soap and shoe polish. He returned twelve hours later. I could set a watch by my father’s comings and goings. He was predictable, someone a person could count on. I knew that at seven o’clock he watched the news with Roger Grimsby and drank a Heineken straight out of its green bottle. I knew that he read Time magazine in the bathroom, keeping them neatly stacked on the back of the toilet where they would wrinkle from dampness. I knew that on Saturday mornings he jogged around Prospect Park even if it was raining or freezing or humid and hot. He came home with bagels and orange juice and the newspaper; I could rely on that.
But what about a person like Mr. Bishop? A person who stayed out all night with naked people sitting on Dumpsters in warehouses south of Houston Street? A person who slept all day and walked around the house naked maybe? He was a person with no roots. He had migrated here from California via Chicago and Minneapolis and who knew where else. What could Fiona and Imogen depend on him for? What could Mrs. Bishop rely on? The ground beneath their brownstone seemed shaky to me. No matter how much Mrs. Bishop painted, I wondered what she could possibly hope for in the end.
MY FATHER BROUGHT a dark green box with a gold bow on top to dinner at the Bishops’ that night.
“How does he afford this stuff?” he mumbled as we crossed the street. “It’s pretentious, if you want to ask me.”
My mother rolled her eyes and smoothed her skirt. My father hated that skirt, a long thing with rows of different material. He thought she looked silly in it. She hated his bow ties. My students get a kick out of them, he told her. If I closed my eyes I could recite the order of the fabric: red and yellow flowers, black corduroy, green and gold paisley, denim, blue and white boat striped, and then a final black velvet ruffle. She always wore it with a white pocket tee shirt tucked into the waist, and a fat belt of large silver discs connected by rope.
“Why did you wear that thing?” my father said. He didn’t expect an answer. He rang the doorbell and stared hard at the front door, which had been stripped of paint and stood bare before us.
Fiona opened the door. She was stoned, even I knew that, and I’d only had two of the required drug education classes at school. Her eyes were heavy lidded and she wore a stupid grin. Also, she smelled of pot. In our school, the playground was a drug paradise, with pills and hashish and pot getting traded the way the younger kids traded baseball cards.
“Hey,” she said, and smiled at us. Fiona’s teeth were beautiful and white and straight. The boys all loved her, with those teeth and that pale blond hair.
We followed her through a labyrinth of empty rooms to the kitchen. Unlike everyone else we knew, the Bishops had done their kitchen first, and after the chipped paint and scuffed floors we’d passed on our way, the kitchen positively dazzled us. A double slate sink. Marble floor. A library table set with dishes the color of dangerous things like maraschino cherries and orange nuclear waste. At the six burner Glenwood stove, stirring and tasting, stood not Mrs. Bishop, but Mr. Bishop. I had never seen my father cook anything. My mother even grilled the hamburgers and hot dogs in the summer. But Mr. Bishop looked relaxed and in charge. He was drinking wine from a water glass and when he saw us, after he shook hands with my father and hugged my mother, he poured them each a glass too.
My mother elbowed me toward Fiona, who was staring at us blankly.
“Why don’t you show Alice around?” she said to Fiona. “I know she’d like to see your room.”
I groaned.
“Okay,” Fiona said in her placid voice.