An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (18 page)

Elliot's mother points to a place with her dirty fingernail and says, “That's the heart.”

“Looks just like you,” Elliot tells her, and slides the picture back across the table.

“He inherited his sarcasm from his father,” she tells Mr. Rickey.

“Elliot,” Mr. Rickey says, taking his mother's hand in both of his, “your mother and I would like you to join us at the birth of our child.”

“It's allowed,” Elliot's mother says. “We can make a whole list of people.”

Elliot wonders if Mindy and Randi Rickey will be there too. It doesn't seem right.

“Don't worry,” Mr. Rickey says, “no squatting and chanting.”

Elliot can see it, Georgia squatting naked, her teeth gritted, pushing out her baby, chanting. But he can't understand what his mother and Mr. Rickey want from him, can't picture his mother naked and panting or doing any of it. The busboy picks up the dirty plates and smiles at Elliot, oddly, when he whisks his away.

“Georgia said they massaged her with honey,” his mother whispers to Mr. Rickey.

Georgia's baby could be anyone, Elliot thinks. He could be here at Duck's eating dinner with his adopted parents. He could be the busboy. Anyone at all.

O
N
T
HANKSGIVING MORNING
Elliot's mother and Mr. Rickey show up smelling like fish.

“I'm doing a bouillabaisse,” his mother announces.

“Not a turkey?” Elliot says.

It is unseasonably warm, too warm for all the sweaters he packed, so he is wearing an old golf shirt of his father's, a kelly green clingy thing. He feels ridiculous.

“What are you wearing?” his mother says, holding a lobster in the air.

“All I want to know is why we're not having turkey,” Elliot insists. “And cranberries and mashed potatoes.” He doesn't mention the yams topped with marshmallows that she usually makes just for him.

“Well,” she says slowly, like she's talking to a stupid person, “Mindy and Randi are having Thanksgiving with their mother in Katonah, and we thought that we'd make something else so they wouldn't have to force down two entire turkey dinners.”

Those yams had brown sugar and molasses on them too. They had them every Thanksgiving Elliot can remember.

His mother has started to slam things on the counter—New Zealand mussels and jumbo shrimp and oysters still in
their shells. “If you can't enjoy bouillabaisse with us, then maybe you should have Thanksgiving with your father.”

“He's eating at a restaurant,” he tells her.

“Well,” she says, staring at him from under her bangs, “there you have it.”

“Bouillabaisse,” Elliot mutters, and stomps out, into the mudroom where an array of outdoorwear hangs on chunky hooks. No one ever got their own winter coat or ski jacket. Instead, his mother bought half a dozen in different colors and they grabbed whatever they needed. The same with rain boots and aqua socks and hiking shoes. They stood, orphans, in a neat row beneath the bench in the mudroom.

Today Elliot grabs a red down vest that is a little snug under the armpits and heads outside into the bright sun. Al Roker had promised balmy weather and he was right. Elliot cuts across the Rickeys' backyard, all overgrown and swampy from clogged gutters. Those Russian parties used to be held out here, he remembered. Mrs. Rickey used to serve the vodka in frozen blocks. Once, a few years ago, his mother had told him—cattily, Elliot decides now—that it wasn't such a big deal. “She fills an empty milk carton with water, sticks the bottle inside, and freezes the whole thing. Then she cuts away the milk carton and acts like she's done something monumental.” Elliot pauses near the sliding glass doors that lead into the Rickeys' kitchen. Was his mother already fucking him back then?

The Rickeys' kitchen looks like someone still lives there. There is a vase of dried flowers on the table; a digital clock on the stove glows the correct time in red; and when Elliot presses his ear to the glass, he thinks he hears the clunky hum
of the refrigerator, like an airplane about to take off. Theirs used to do that too. When they kicked it, it quieted, until eventually it broke down completely.

He wants nothing more than to go inside the Rickeys' house and poke around. Maybe he would find a pair of his mother's white cotton underpants under the bed, or a smudge of her pink lipstick somewhere private. Elliot jiggles the door until it opens, and steps inside. The first thing he does is kick the refrigerator and, after a gush of water drops from the ice-maker part, it shuts up. It smells a little rancid, like old fruit, and he sees that the dried flowers are actually just dead, not some Martha Stewart centerpiece idea. A card propped against the vase says,
Happy Anniversary, Babushka! Love, Fran
. He puts the card in the pocket of his jeans and wanders through other rooms.

Unlike Elliot's house, the Rickeys' sprawls like a wide yawn, all on one floor with little steps here and there. Elliot has to step down into the living room, up into the dining room. It's a house where people would fall a lot, he decides, stumbling. The den has, standing almost as tall as Elliot, one of those Russian dolls with the other dolls inside. When he gets closer, he recognizes that it's Gorbachev. It takes two hands to untwist and remove Gorbachev's head, and when he finally does, the next doll is Bush. To the Rickeys, this was probably very funny. Elliot wanders out of the den, past two closed doors, and into the master bedroom, still holding Gorbachev's head.

The bed is stripped, the bureau tops are dusty, and the drawers and closets gape open, empty except for crumpled tissues, pennies, and twisted coat hangers. He sets Gorbachev's
head on the tall chest of drawers and stretches out on the bed. He's surprised when he picks up the phone and gets a dial tone. The only number he can think to call is his old buddy Rhett, who has dropped out or flunked out of six colleges in two years.

Rhett is happy to hear from him. “Are you back?” he asks.

“Remember Mindy and Randi Rickey?” Elliot whispers. “I'm at their house. Next door to mine.”

“I thought that family moved or something,” Rhett says.

“The house is abandoned except for some former world leaders.”

“Like, empty?” Rhett says.

“Yeah.” Elliot looks around. “Empty.”

“Cool. I've got some killer weed. I'll bring it over and we can get really wasted before dinner.” This is why Rhett can't finish a semester in one place.

“Cool,” Elliot says.

While he waits for Rhett to show up, Elliot wanders back through the house, opening the two closed doors as he goes. They were probably Mindy's and Randi's rooms, but now they too are empty—stripped beds, gaping closets. The refrigerator is acting up again, so he goes back to the kitchen and gives it a kick. Those dead flowers are bugging him. Elliot takes them out of the vase and throws them in the trash compactor. How could Mr. Rickey give his wife an anniversary bouquet while he was fucking Elliot's mother? Elliot imagines Mrs. Rickey, with her pale blond hair and round reddish cheeks, arranging the flowers in her good crystal vase. He imagines her smiling, humming even, thinking she's still his babushka, that he still loves her.

The refrigerator won't shut up this time, no matter how hard Elliot kicks. When he opens the door to give it a good hard slam, he sees the freezer is lined in neat rows with milk cartons that have bottles of vodka stuck in them, frozen into blocks. There are maybe a dozen in there. It takes three trips to the master bedroom to carry them all. Unlike Mrs. Rickey, Elliot doesn't cut off the milk cartons. He just screws off the caps and pours all the vodka into Gorbachev's head.

By the time Rhett shows up, Elliot has consumed quite a bit. It's icy and smooth and tastes like water.

“Whoa,” Rhett says when he sees Elliot drinking from Gorbachev's head. “That is totally fucking weird.”

“I don't know,” Elliot says. “I think they were spies or something. This is all Russian vodka.” His hands sweep dramatically, the way they do when he's well on his way to being good and drunk, pointing out all the empty bottles sticking out of those milk cartons.

“Who is that anyway?” Rhett asks, pointing to the head with the joint he's brought. “Stalin or somebody?”

“No, no,” Elliot tells him. “See the birthmark.”

Rhett looks at it upside down, twisting his own head. “Whoa,” he says again, and lights up.

The joint and the vodka loosen Elliot's tongue. He wants to say things out loud, but instead he closes his eyes and imagines Georgia naked. Once, briefly, Elliot saw his own mother naked. He opened the bathroom door and there she was, standing in front of the mirror, her arms stretched up over her head, staring at herself. Her flesh was pink from a hot shower, her stomach bulged slightly, like a pouch. She turned toward him as if she were expecting someone. Elliot closed the door, fast, and ran down the hall
to his own room, nauseated. But Georgia naked in his mind takes on the body of the girls his age, the ones he's seen. And he knows, watching her there, swimming in his spinning brain, that if he touched Georgia, she would be smooth like them, taut.

“What are you doing? Jerking off?” Rhett says, nudging Elliot with his foot. “You're moaning, man.”

Elliot opens his eyes and watches the ceiling spin. He is one of the few people he knows who like having the spins.

Rhett's eyes are bloodshot, the lids drooping. “Fucking Thanksgiving,” he mutters.

T
HEY STUMBLE BACK
across the Rickeys' old yard, toward home. But instead of going in, they go to the dining room window and watch. Mindy and Randi Rickey are seated side by side, dressed in black mini-dresses, looking funereal. Elliot can actually see the steam rising from the bouillabaisse. He's hungry, but unable to propel himself inside.

“They look like a family,” Elliot says.

“This is when I'm glad I'm adopted,” Rhett whispers. “I feel no familial obligation.”

Elliot's already dry throat turns drier. “Adopted?” he croaks.

Rhett shrugs and keeps watching. Elliot sees that his usual chair is empty and sad.

“Do you know who your mother is?” Elliot asks, noticing the reflection of his frown over the tureen. Georgia made that tureen for his mother one Christmas. It is lumpy, ugly, misshapen, and his mother hates it.

“Who cares?” Rhett answers. He is watching Elliot's mother, too.

Between them sits Gorbachev's head, vodka sloshing around inside it.

“All I know is the adoption was in New York. Private,” Rhett says.

In that moment Elliot is certain that Rhett's mother is Georgia. He has the same springy black hair, the same “fuck it” attitude. He keeps watching his own mother, raising a glass in a toast. Is she even missing me? Elliot wonders. He feels invisible, erased. There are the Rickeys in his dining room, a new Rickey in his mother's stomach, and him nowhere, unmissed.

“What if I told you I might know who your real mother is?” Elliot whispers.

He waits for an answer, but Rhett has slipped away, into the darkness. He is alone.

L
IKE A BURGLAR
, Elliot eases back inside. Still stoned and drunk, he has to hold the wall with one hand for support as he makes his way through the house. Nothing has changed, not really. There are men's shoes in the den, the smell of foot powder creeping out of them. On the coffee table, an almost empty snifter of brandy, a pipe, a
Sail
magazine. Elliot finishes off the brandy and with it gets a taste of cherry pipetobacco. He goes from familiar room to familiar room, but sees nothing else out of place.

Upstairs, he hesitates at the guest room door. For years, before he moved out, that was where his father slept. But
now, it is the lumps of the Rickey sisters that he sees when he peers inside, frowning against the darkness.

“Hey,” Elliot says in his normal tone of voice.

One of the lumps moves, shifts, but the voice comes from the other one.

“Elliot?” she says.

“How was the bouillabaisse?” he asks.

“I'm allergic,” she says. “To all fish and seafood. If I eat it, I swell and ultimately choke.” She sighs, and Elliot hears her settle back into the pillows and blankets. He does not know which sister she is, but he doesn't want her to go to sleep.

“I have some great vodka,” he says. “In the backyard.”

“Is that where you've been?” she says. Elliot remembers the expressionless tone of this particular Rickey sister; he just doesn't remember which one possesses it. “Drinking vodka?” she continues, her voice flat.

“Come on,” he says, whispering suddenly.

Even in the dim hall light, seeing her face to face, Elliot does not know which sister this is. Her face has red sleeplines on one side, her hair on that side is slightly matted.

“This Thanksgiving has been awful,” she says as they wander through the quiet house and into the backyard, where Gorbachev's head leans drunkenly against the back steps.

“Hey,” she says, “we used to have one of those too.”

Elliot tips it forward so she can drink, then drinks more himself. The buzz he had has turned into a dull headache.

“My mother is a mess,” she says with her flat voice. She stretches out on the grass. The air has turned cooler, damp, and her nipples are hard against the white cotton nightgown she wears.

Elliot thinks of books like
Wuthering Heights
;
this Rickey sister on the grass could be a heroine from a novel like that, her hair fanning out around her, all that white. He drinks more, then thrusts his hand beneath her nightgown. She doesn't have on any underwear, and her pubic hair surprises him. Elliot pulls his hand back.

“Yes,” she says, sitting up and pulling her nightgown over her head. “Let's do that. Maybe it will help this rotten day.”