The Bird House A Novel

February 17, 2010



Ellie was still in her Langley uniform when she arrived, carrying a canvas bag as if she knew she’d be taking things home. Tinsley didn’t come in, but watched and waved to me through the car window, as if she was in a huge hurry to be somewhere else. Though a welcome change—I would endure no questions about sodium content of foods or whether I planned to screen a PG-13 movie—this was unusual, completely unlike her, and it struck me enough to note it here.

We sat in the dining room, where I’d already spread out the scrapbooks, and arranged the macaroni and cheese casserole, plates and forks, and tea sandwiches I’d made. Nothing too fancy; nothing that would damage our artifacts or distract us from our task. She started with a small, polite serving of macaroni and cheese. It looked different to her, I’m sure, with its toasted bread crumbs and curly noodles. She took one tentative bite, then stood up to ladle more onto her Beatrix Potter plate. After that was gone, she chose a round sandwich and examined it in the air before she ate it, as if trying to determine how it had been shaped. Only after she’d chewed and swallowed it did she ask if I’d used a cookie cutter on the bread, and I told her it was a shot glass.

“A shot glass?” She wrinkled her nose, and I brought her one from the kitchen.

“This is a shot glass,” I said. “The edges don’t need to be sharp to cut the bread.”

She held it in her hand. “Well, it seems too small to drink out of, so you may as well use it for something,” she said, and I smiled. I was learning—she was practical, she liked jelly, she liked cheese, and she took her homework very, very seriously.

I suggested we look through the scrapbooks together, and perhaps a theme would emerge. She opened the first one and asked the usual kinds of questions—“Who is that?” and “Where are they?” and “When was this taken?” I took care to point out the large homes in the backgrounds. About halfway through the second scrapbook she asked me if I’d looked at them earlier in the day.

“I looked at them last night, before I took them down from the attic. Why?”

“Because you’re not really looking, you’re just waiting for me to look.”

“Well, I’ve seen them before,” I said defensively.

But she was right. I was waiting; my moment would come in just a few pages.

But when Ellie turned the page and saw a photo of my father looking at blueprints, she barely gave it a glance. She was more interested in the photo opposite it, an eight-by-ten of my mother on a horse, posing with a shotgun.

“You know, that photo gives me an idea,” I said.

“Guns?” she said. “I don’t think Ms. Westerman wou—”

“No, the other one. The blueprints. My father was an architect and so was Grandpa Theo. And there are so many beautiful homes in all these pictures. Nantucket, Bar Harbour, Stamford, the Adirondacks… and did you see my uncle’s house in Miami Beach?”

“Um—”

So what do you think of ‘Architecture’ as a theme?”

“Aspect.”

“Yes, well, aspect then.”

“I don’t know, Grandma,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It’s so… grown up.”

“Well, cooking was also grown up.”

She shrugged. “But kids can cook. If they want to.”

I wanted to say they could also build houses, of a sort. Lincoln logs and whatnot. Even my fairy garden contained structures. But it was a lame argument; she’d won. I’m a little ashamed to admit I felt deflated.

“Well,” I said brightly, “if we don’t think of anything else, we know ‘Architecture’ will certainly work. It can be your fallback.”

She continued to turn pages, still scanning the photos earnestly. But there was a detachment about the way she did it that reminded me of dealers at flea markets. All business. It was clear my idea had been shot down—you could tell by her posture and the little furrow of blond hair between her eyebrows. She wasn’t going to change her mind. It was a boy’s quality, really, that kind of focus. Tom had it, too. He had his choice of clients at the law firm, and he always chose the ones who were innocent. Tinsley says it’s a gift, his ability to know what’s in a person. To sort through the rubble of an organizational chart and find who is destined to rise to the top. He could probably choose presidential candidates, she once said, be a political consultant. And now, watching Ellie, perhaps she could, too. She certainly was looking through the scrapbooks with nation-building intensity. Then it struck me with a smile: this was also how Theo looked at his blueprints.

“Is this your father, here?” she asked, lingering on a page.

I nodded. It was a snapshot of him in the Adirondacks, submerged in the lake up to his chin. Behind him in the water, perhaps thirty feet away, were two ducks. But all I saw when I looked at it was the “cabin” on the lake, a compound really, with tennis courts and a boathouse, that Mother had been forced to sell. I’d planned to take my girlfriends for a weekend there just after high school graduation; the invitations were sent, the menu was chosen, and poof, it had to be canceled. When I called my father to beg him to stop, his secretary said he was out of the country and couldn’t be reached. I took the train downtown and sat at a coffee shop across from his office, waiting for him to walk out the door, waiting for a new lie to unfold. But he never showed up.

“Are you thinking ‘Swimming’?” I asked. There was a lot of water in the vacation photos. Perhaps that could be a common sport.

“No,” she sighed as she turned the page. “I just like the picture.”

I prattled on a bit, about how clear and cold that lake was, and how the children slept in the boathouse and watched the ducks until it grew dark; how entire families used to canoe to the country club for dinner, dressed in black tie and bare feet. Tuxedos in a canoe, Ellie, can you imagine that! Then I stopped myself. What was I doing, trying to make her yearn for another version of something I couldn’t give her? The family cabin, the yearly treks, the dinners of fresh-caught trout under the moose head in the dining room. The skating parties in the woods overlooking the pond, catered bonfires with hot Mexican cocoa. She would never have that childhood. That’s what my father had taken away—not just the ease of life but the yearly rituals, the boisterous vacations in an assortment of wonderful places, the big houses overflowing with family and friends, the fresh maple syrup in winter and the cod cakes and eggs for breakfast. These things were sold to strangers to pay taxes.

I went to the kitchen and brought out the cookies I’d made. Nothing fancy, just fork-pressed sugar cookies with pink sprinkles since it was near Valentine’s Day, but I’d baked them on parchment paper, as the magazine suggested, and they’d come out perfectly, not the least bit burned on the bottom. I was proud of how well I cooked; I’d taught myself. After the houses were sold and Mother moved to Aunt Caro’s carriage house, I went to Bryn Mawr College, as planned, but with no walking-around money and no understanding of what one could do with a hot plate. I started small, with cocoa, trying to replicate the wonderful flavor of those iceskating parties in the woods. I cut up real chocolate, learned to whip cream, bought a grater for the cinnamon stick. A simple thing, but done well. From there I moved on to French toast, croque monsieurs. It was years before I graduated to the inside of an oven; I found roasts terrifying. But I learned. I persevered. And Mother, well, her friends fed her. She went from being the consummate hostess to the consummate guest, overnight.

The cookies smelled sweet and buttery, but Ellie didn’t look up from the page, not even when I set the plate down under her nose.

I looked up at the clock, fiddled with the hem of my sweater, edged the cookie plate even closer to her.

“Anything strike you?”

“Not yet,” she said, without looking up.

“Shall we just skip to the ones of me, as a little girl? Maybe that would be less grown up, as you put it.”

“No,” she said. “I’d rather just go in chronological order.”

The word sounded heavy in her mouth, as if it were the first time she’d said it, a vocabulary word.

Minutes passed, pages turned. She ate one cookie distractedly as she viewed the scrapbook; she seemed to appreciate neither. I took away the dishes, rinsed them, came back. Cleared my throat, looked around my own living room. Two formal paintings of dogs looked down on us from the mantel. We’d never had a pet, since our yard was so small. But my mother loved dogs—we had three Labradors at the main house—and Theo’s family, as I recall, kept beagles.

“What about ‘Pets’?” I asked.

“I don’t see any pictures of them.”

I frowned. “There’s bound to be some.”

“Not yet.”

“Or… ‘Art,’” I said too brightly. “There’s beautiful art in many of the homes.”

“Was anyone in your family a painter?”

“Well… no.”

She nodded as if the matter was settled.

Another half hour passed. I took to flipping through National Geographics and Ladies’ Home Journals, looking for random ideas and calling out one or two—“Playing Cards”? “Fashion”?—before stopping completely, realizing the futility.

“I don’t think this is going to get solved tonight,” Ellie said. Something in the way she said it, and the way she’d been nodding quietly, reminded me of a psychiatrist. I frowned and picked at a pill on my velvet armchair.

I stood up. I was happy to end the evening—the one I’d envisioned as a quilting bee, and that had started to feel like an IRS audit.

“Sometimes it’s best to sleep on things, dear,” I said.

She asked to take a few scrapbooks home, and I hesitated. She said she’d take good care of them and I nodded; I knew she would. I also knew that taking them home meant taking away my influence; she would look over them with her mother. Tinsley, a darling girl really, but one who knew nothing about me or my family, would suggest unusual aspects to her; Tinsley would see something different in the pages than I would, than Theo, than Tom. And what if Tinsley started asking questions, dredging up things? She had always been such a curious person, that was one of the things Theo and I had loved about her. When we shared a meal, she never failed to inquire after Theo’s business or our tennis games, our tomato plants, what-have-you. If you had a new sofa she would ask where you had it made, and what kind of fabric it was. What questions would she carry forth into that scrapbook? There were no pictures of my daughter—I purposely hadn’t even opened that trunk. But what if she started in on my father, my mother? The last thing I could imagine doing was explaining our family’s heartaches to Tinsley. The very thought of it made me feel queasy. Funny, isn’t it, that I could sooner imagine telling Ellie? A child over an adult!

“Well… as long as you’re careful,” I said finally. “And remember, there’s more to look through here, upstairs. Don’t make any… snap decisions.”

I put them in her tote bag and we sat on the window seat together, watching for the lights of Tinsley’s station wagon. When it was 8:15 and she still hadn’t arrived, I dialed her cell phone number but it went to voice mail. She was one of those people who insisted you leave a “brief message,” so I simply said, “Tinsley, your daughter is wondering where you are.”

“She never answers her phone,” Ellie said quietly.

I looked over at Ellie but her eyes were fixed on the floor.

“Well, that seems silly, doesn’t it? Why have one?”

“And she never lets me play games on it, either.”

“She probably thinks those games are a waste of time. And they are.” Tinsley had excellent policies, I thought, on some of these things. No video games ever. No television on a school night. Good, solid parenting, that.

“She gets mad if I even touch it.” Ellie’s eyes were fixed on the floor. “You know, when it rings or something. She freaks out.”

I patted Ellie’s hand.

“Someday you’ll have your own phone, and maybe you won’t let her play games on it.”

She smiled. “Even if she begs.”

Across the street a young woman was walking two dogs on one leash. “Dogs,” I thought—I was seeing everything in “aspects.” A group of college boys passed her but didn’t whistle or hoot; it was too early in the evening for that. Ellie sat with one leg tucked under her, looking out at the street, watching the dogs and boys, waiting for the next thing to happen, while I waited for the next thing she would tell me. I couldn’t force it. I just had to let it come.