An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (14 page)

“Ashley?” Helen said.

“Everyone goes to her.” Danielle smiled. She had the sweet, innocent smile of a child.

The lights dimmed for the slide show. Helen sat down right where she was on the floor. Probably that would be considered disrespectful. But her side ached the way a person aches when they are homesick, or heartbroken.

H
ELEN KEPT WAKING
up all night with the feeling that someone was holding her. Not holding her down or even tightly. She was just aware of arms around her waist, the
sense of warm flesh, the weight of someone else. But of course when she woke up, she was alone. Joanne slept across the room. The salsa music played. People laughed. No one wrapped their arms around her. Helen settled back down in her small cot. But as she drifted back to sleep, the arms, the embrace, returned.

O
N HER WAY
to Ashley's—which was a short walk down a dirt road, past cows grazing, a broken fence, a pile of rocks, those were the directions she got—Helen practiced what she would say. I don't know why I'm doing this, she'd say. I like my hair. Nothing drastic, please. Nothing ballistic.

But then she saw the gently curving path that led to Ashley's log cabin and Helen, out of nowhere, imagined herself as a platinum blonde. Then with blue-black hair. She could even picture herself with
I Love Lucy
red. By the time she reached the front door, her heart was pounding. Inside this log cabin, she thought, was the power to change her.

The door opened before she knocked.

Ashley stood there, frowning, already studying the top of Helen's head. She was tall and thin, the kind of woman that Helen's mother called willowy. She had a powder puff of white-blond hair and round blue eyes. Her accent, when she finally spoke, was thick and southern.

“Lulabelle,” she said to Helen, “your hair is earth and you are water. It is sapping you of nourishment, darling.”

“Uh-huh,” Helen said, and followed her inside.

Ashley turned to her. “I use no electricity, no chemicals, no toxins.”

Helen swallowed hard. The cabin smelled like her old Lincoln Log set from when she was a child.

Ashley began massaging Helen's scalp. “Your hair is earth,” she said again. “It gives life.”

Helen gasped and moved away. “I killed Scott,” she blurted.

As if she hadn't heard, Ashley's hands resumed their massaging. “It should be terra-cotta,” she said finally. “And you need to drink more water. You are dehydrating from your soul outward.”

She stopped massaging as abruptly as she began and left the room.

Helen's eyes had to adjust to the darkness—no electricity!—but when they did, she realized there was nothing much to see. The room, with its log walls and floors, was bare except for several chairs and an old-fashioned white porcelain basin. Helen supposed this was what it was like where Loretta Lynn grew up. She'd seen that movie about her life, the one with Sissy Spacek. That was a long time ago. Before she even knew Scott. Helen realized that Scott had not been in her life for most of her life. He had been with her for only three and a half years. When she had been thinking about breaking up with him, she'd come up with a theory that television shows outlive relationships. She'd had a boyfriend during the
Dynasty
years who was gone long before the show was canceled. Another that
L.A. Law
had outlived. She supposed had Scott not died, then he would have been her
Seinfeld
boyfriend. But he had died. Out of the blue. Without warning. So that now it would seem wrong, irreverent, to think of him in terms of
Seinfeld
. He was her dead boyfriend. He was the man she had accidentally killed. And it was
wrong, irreverent, to think about how she'd been unhappy with him recently. His own grieving mother had told her they were so much in love. Helen could not tell her that wasn't true anymore. She thought again of those two dots of blood on his neck. Marking him. After she'd left the hospital and before she'd come to New York, Helen had gone to see Scott's parents. His father had talked about his neck. “It broke,” he'd said, wringing his hands as if he were demonstrating how to kill a chicken. “It snapped.”

Ashley stood there like a flamingo, long legs and arms bent at weird angles, balancing jars and pots of powders and creams on a tray.

“I don't want to go ballistic,” Helen told her.

Ashley seemed to float toward her. Incense burned an unfamiliar, foreign smell.

“It's important, you think,” Ashley said, easing Helen into a chair, “to maintain control.”

Helen closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said.

Ashley was mixing, rubbing, stroking, pouring water, applying hot, applying cold, wrapping, tugging.

Time slowed down, the way it had when Helen and Scott were in her car and it was airborne, flying off Thurbers Avenue. Was Scott already dead at that point? Helen wondered for the first time.

“Your hair tells me you should drive a Volvo,” Ashley said.

“I recently totaled my Toyota,” Helen told her.

“When your hair is terra-cotta and you drink more water, you will understand better.” Ashley tapped her on the shoulders. “You can go now.”

At a hair salon, a mirror hung in front of you, but here there were just logs.

Helen touched her hair, expecting it to feel different. But it didn't.

“You can leave your check in the mailbox at the end of the path,” Ashley said. “I don't like to handle money so soon after I do someone's hair.”

Helen felt let down somehow. “You don't have a . . . mirror?” she asked, though that wasn't what was really bothering her.

“In the back there's a pond with a fine reflection,” Ashley said.

For a moment Helen thought she meant for her to go back there.

“But,” Ashley continued, “I find no need to look at myself. At least, not my outer self.”

“Right,” Helen said.

On her way back, she imagined her hair was like a flower box cradling her head. That was what terra-cotta made her think of. Or Mexican pottery. Her hair was like a large jug. She tried to pull a piece in front of her so she could get a look, but it wasn't quite long enough.

Before she'd come up here, she'd gone for a haircut. Everyone in her salon back home knew what had happened—it had been the lead story on the six o'clock news the night of the accident—and acted strangely toward her, so strangely that Helen had felt frivolous for going in the first place, even though she'd worn a black turtleneck and asked for something “simple.” As a result, she had a kind of shag that reminded her of a helmet.

The cocktail party was ending when she got back. Through the window, Helen saw people finding seats for the slide show, guzzling final glasses of wine before it was whisked
away, settling in. She saw Joanne, with her head bent intimately toward the sculptor who worked in wire. Helen slipped in the back door and took a seat in the last row. Joanne was flirting with that man. Hadn't they both giggled at his phrase “worked in wire” ? It sounded painful, they'd laughed. Now Joanne was—stroking his thigh! During the day, the artists supposedly went into their little private studios and worked. Lunch was delivered silently, anonymously, on their doorsteps in solemn brown bags. When did Joanne have time to get to the point where she would stroke this guy's inner thigh?

“Rocks,” a woman's voice said.

The slide showed dozens of rocks, all flat and smooth.

“They do not betray us,” the voice continued.

The slide changed.

A black rock with white writing appeared on the wall.
MURDERER
.

Next slide.

BIRTH
.

Then the lights went on.

Joanne and the wire man were gone! Helen looked around the room frantically. They had slipped out. They were in his cabin, Helen realized, fucking. She was trembling. A woman came up to her, took a rock from a pail, and handed it to her with a piece of colored chalk. Pink.

“On one side,” the voice said, “write the word that describes the best side of you. On the other side, the worst.”

Some people began to scribble right away. Others thought first, then wrote more carefully. But Helen just stared at her blank rock. She remembered how as a child she would collect rocks on the beach, glue them together, and paint the words
ROCK CONCERT
on them. She gave them as Christmas presents.

“You went,” Danielle said. Her rock had bright blue writing on it.

Helen nodded.

“Did it help?” Danielle said.

She looked so hopeful that Helen smiled and nodded.

Helen wished she could read what Danielle had written on her rock. She wished she could read all the rocks. But she supposed that was like reading someone else's mail. Unethical.

Danielle was bending down to be closer to Helen. She said, “This guy I went to high school with? Jerry? He got shot in a hunting accident and they had to cut off his leg.”

Helen pulled away. Was this what she had become? Someone to tell horrible stories to?

But Danielle moved closer again. “And this guy, Jerry, said that at night his leg would itch. The leg that wasn't there! It would itch! Or cramp!”

Helen had heard of this phenomenon before. She'd heard that women who'd lost their babies still heard them cry at night.

“A phantom limb,” Helen said.

“What I wonder is if you still feel your spleen,” Danielle said.

“Oh,” Helen said, relaxing, “well, no. I mean, I never really felt it in the first place, when it was there.”

Danielle considered that. “Wow,” she said at last.

I
N THE CABIN
, Helen finally saw her hair. It did not look very different, though she examined it closely. She separated large pieces of it, let them fall slowly back into place. She
made a cat's cradle of hair with her fingers, searching for the change, the claylike color. It seemed shinier, perhaps. It felt softer. She smelled, vaguely, salad smells coming from it. She wished Joanne would come back so she could get a second opinion. But Joanne was with the wire man, fondling him. Being fondled.

Helen got into bed and closed her eyes.

There was no salsa music tonight. In fact, it was quiet. Everyone had probably paired off. Everyone was making love. She found that she could not remember the feel of Scott's kisses or touches or what exactly it was like in the instant when he entered her, before movement began. She had forgotten. No. She could almost remember the way his hand felt resting on her leg when they slept, the light weight of it, flesh on flesh.

At some point in the night, she woke herself, sat upright in her bed, said out loud, “What is wrong with you anyway?” felt her heartbeat quicken as if an answer might really come, as if she would feel a crash, go airborne, know something more. But she sat like that, waiting, until she fixed herself in that place, that cabin, that cot, alone.

A
T FIRST
, H
ELEN
thought she was dreaming, that it was still night and she was asleep. But slowly she came to realize that someone really was in the cabin touching her forehead with their fingertips.

“Hi,” Danielle said when Helen opened her eyes. “That's how I like to wake up. By someone writing me messages on my head.”

Danielle had on some kind of white lace bonnet and looked vaguely Amish.

Helen's mouth was cottony.

“You were writing me messages on my head?” she said.

“Just like ‘Hi' and ‘Ellen' and stuff,” Danielle giggled.

By the cast of the sunlight streaming through the window, Helen realized it was already afternoon.

“My name is Helen. Not Ellen,” she said, struggling to sit up. Her side throbbed.

“Really?” Danielle said, surprised. “I thought Helen was an old person's name. But I know a lot of young Ellens.”

Helen got up and went to look at her terra-cotta hair in the light. Besides being flat from too much sleep, her hair looked the same.

“I've got a confession to make,” Danielle said.

Helen realized she had missed both breakfast and lunch. She looked at Joanne's unslept-in bed, then out the window where, in those woods, the studios sat. If Joanne was still with the sculptor, maybe Helen could go and steal her brown bag lunch.

“Remember that guy Jerry I told you about?” Danielle was asking.

“The phantom limb?”

“Cool,” Danielle said. “You're a good listener.” She pointed at Helen happily.

“What about him?” Helen wanted Danielle to leave. The bonnet was bothering her. Danielle was bothering her.

“I did it,” Danielle said. “I shot him.”

Helen took a step backward. “It wasn't a hunting accident?” She had seen made-for-TV movies about crazy women who stalked men and shot them. She had seen
Fatal Attraction
.

“It was a hunting accident,” Danielle said. “I thought he was a wild turkey, you know? It was right before Thanks-giving and we were turkey hunting and I shot him.”

Knowing that Danielle wasn't deranged, Helen wondered why she didn't feel more relieved.

“He was my boyfriend,” Danielle added. “Then I felt really guilty for breaking up with him because he, like, only had one leg and stuff. What a nightmare. Anyway, I decided not to hide it anymore. I shot him and he lost a leg and then I broke up with him, and maybe that makes me a bad person, but that is what happened.” She exhaled loudly. “I feel better telling you the truth.”

They stood looking at each other across a shaft of sunlight filled with dancing dust motes until Danielle remembered that she was supposed to take Monday and Tuesday swimming.

That was when Helen saw that the Amish bonnet was actually a bathing cap.

On her way to steal Joanne's lunch, Helen tried to figure out why she hadn't told Danielle about Scott. It was the same kind of situation, in a way. Except Scott had died and they hadn't gotten the chance to break up and this guy Jerry lost a leg and got his heart broken. Was one worse? Helen wondered.