An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (13 page)

H
ELEN'S FRIEND
J
OANNE
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 once 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.”

N
O 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.

E
VERYONE AT THE
artists' colony assumed Joanne and Helen were lesbians.

A sculptor who “worked in wire” told Helen that every lesbian he knew wore shoes like hers.

A muralist named Ali told Helen that she had loved women at different times in her life. “When it was appropriate.”

There was a nightly cocktail party followed by a slide show of one of the artists' work. The muralist painted familiar comic strip characters with their genitalia showing—Snoopy, Nancy, Cathy. Helen felt that she did not understand
anything anyone was doing there. Everyone had come alone, except for a man named Andrew, who wouldn't tell her what he worked in. “That kind of question offends me,” he said. Andrew had brought his children and a young nanny that everyone assumed he was sleeping with. His children were named Monday and Tuesday and were pasty skinned and sullen; the nanny, Danielle, was plump and cheerful, with honey-blond hair and bright eyes. Andrew, Helen decided, looked unclean. Like a man who didn't wash.

The slide show the first night was the work of a woman named Leila. Leila painted the names of body parts on wood along with their definition, function, and other meanings they might have. Helen was a little drunk by the time the slide show began, drunk in the way you can only get from too much sweet white wine and not enough food. She watched Leila's slides loom in front of her on the wall.
LIVER
, she read.
A LARGE COMPOUND, TUBULAR, VERTEBRATE GLAND
. . . The words jumped crazily and Helen had to close her eyes for an instant.
ONE WHO LIVES IN A SPECIFIC MANNER
, she read when she opened them again.

Then the slide changed abruptly and Helen was faced with a bigger than life definition of
SPLEEN
. She gasped.
THIS ORGAN CONSIDERED AS THE SEAT OF MIRTH, MERRIMENT, CAPRICE
.

“I lost my spleen,” Helen whispered to the person next to her. In the dark, she could not make out who it was. She didn't even care. She was overwhelmed by guilt and some other unnameable emotion—grief, perhaps?

The person beside her leaned in so close to Helen that their shoulders touched. It was Danielle, the nanny. Helen felt Danielle's hair against her neck.

“Awesome,” Danielle whispered back.

Foolishly, Helen grabbed Danielle's soft hand. It felt like freshly kneaded dough, begging Helen to press it, which she did, aggressively.

“Do you think that means I've lost my ability for happiness?” Helen asked her. She was no longer whispering. In fact, several people had turned around in their seats to glare.

Danielle remained unnerved. “I never knew,” she said, keeping her own voice low, “that spleens were so expendable. Like an appendix. Or tonsils. I thought if you lost your spleen you'd die.”

Helen was gulping air too quickly. Soon she would have the hiccups. That was what happened when she got nervous. She would get hiccups that nothing could stop—not holding her breath or being frightened or large spoonfuls of sugar.

“No,” Helen managed to say. “You can die from multiple head injuries.”

“Bummer,” Danielle said.

She had not pulled away from Helen's desperate grip on her hand, and they now sat calmly, holding hands, Helen's hiccups beginning to escape.

The screen said:
THYROID: OBSELETE DEFINITION: SHAPED LIKE A DOOR
.

T
HAT NIGHT IN
their little cabin, Joanne said to Helen, “Maybe it was a mistake, you coming here?”

Helen still had the hiccups. She was remembering how someone had once told her that a man in Scotland had the hiccups for thirteen years and then he finally killed himself.

“I mean,” Joanne said, “why were you holding hands with the nanny?”

Helen couldn't think of a reasonable answer. “She has the softest hands in the world,” she said finally.

Even though they were in the woods, it was noisy outside. People seemed to be running about, laughing loudly. Doors slammed. In the distance, Helen heard salsa music.

“I'm not sorry you came,” Joanne said, which meant of course that she was, “but you have to respect people's work here.”

“I do,” Helen said quickly, afraid that Joanne was going to make her leave, send her back to the apartment in Providence, where Scott's clothes still hung in her closet, where the photograph of them sailing last summer—smiling, sunburned, arms thrown intimately around each other's bodies—would stare out at her as soon as she walked in.

“Leila is a very well respected artist,” Joanne began.

Helen hiccuped loudly.

Joanne sighed, rolled over in her creaky cot.

The salsa music grew louder.

“I've got this strange urge to have a child,” Helen said. “A baby.”

Joanne didn't answer, but her bedsprings twanged some more, reminding Helen of the sad notes of a country-western song.

A
T THE COCKTAIL
party before the slide show the next night, Helen told Leila that her work had moved her immensely. Helen was afraid that everyone was going to
gang up on her, force her to go. Joanne was right: she had to make more of an effort. Leila had pink skin and pale hair and the overall appearance of a rabbit. As Helen talked she was aware of her own nose twitching.

“Yes,” Leila said to Helen, “I noticed you reacting.”

Leila sounded like Greta Garbo. Everything about her was unnerving.

“Because,” Helen said, pretending to have a bit of a cold so as to hide the twitching, “I lost my spleen in a tragic accident.”

The words were true, but they seemed grandiose, embellished. But it had been tragic. Even now she could exactly recall the particular way the sunlight bounced through the windshield that morning, the smooth-shaven planes of Scott's face, his jaw chewing Dentyne fast. She remembered for the first time that he'd had two dots of blood from shaving on his neck. “Vampire bite,” she'd said, poking him with two fingers.

“The spleen,” Leila was telling her, “is a contradictory organ, don't you think? Merriment. Melancholy.” She moved her hands like a scale to demonstrate.

“Melancholy?” Helen asked, trying not to twitch.

“You paid attention, no?” Leila said sharply.

“Yes, of course,” Helen said. She downed her chablis and tried to find the table with the cheese log.

Had she missed something important? she wondered as she nibbled the sharp cheddar rolled in walnuts that she'd hastily smeared on a water cracker. Melancholy and merriment? Did that mean that she would lose all emotion now that she'd lost her spleen? She thought of Scott again. Before that inexplicable thing went wrong, they used to laugh together. It was what they'd had, she decided. What they'd lost. Merriment. Both of them could watch
Some Like It Hot
any time, any place. They played a word game that went like this: she'd say
center violin
and he'd say
middle fiddle. Bird ghost. Robin goblin. Northern tissue. Yankee hanky
. Helen started to cry.

That soft, doughy hand found hers again.

“I've been thinking about your spleen and stuff,” Danielle said. “Once, when I was really bummed out, I dyed my hair red. It felt so good. Like, I was a redhead.”

Helen looked at Danielle's honey-blond hair. It was straight and fine, parted in the middle, tucked behind her ears.

“There's this woman here? In town,” Danielle continued. “Ashley? She does a good job. Everyone who comes up here at least gets highlights from her.”

Helen's hand twisted a piece of her own brown hair. She had always liked that her hair was a good, solid medium brown. Not auburn or chestnut or mahogany.

“You don't have to go ballistic,” Danielle told her. “But you'd be surprised.”