An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (19 page)

But, of course, it doesn't. While Elliot is on her, his knees digging into the grass and dirt, he thinks he hears sounds from the house. He thinks there is light coming from upstairs, illuminating them, there on the grass, capturing this dispassionate act. And when they are done—finally, Elliot catches himself thinking—when he can finally turn around, he sees that there is a light on, his mother's bedroom light.

He looks at the Rickey sister beside him, naked on the lawn, crying silently.

“I hate you, you know,” she says. “I hate your whole rotten family.”

Rotten, he thinks. And he thinks of his father and Veronica, of his mother upstairs with Mr. Rickey, of what he himself has just done.

“We were happy, you know,” she continues, crying harder now. Elliot remembers the bouquet on their kitchen table, the note. “Your mother's a whore. A rotten whore.”

This shocks him. The girl is passionate now, sitting up, trembling.

“Do you know how long she'd been sleeping with my father? Three years. And when he didn't leave my mother, she went and got herself pregnant so he would.”

Foolishly, Elliot covers himself with his shirt. “What?” he manages.

“My parents fought about her for three years. The way he used to sneak over here to fuck her in the middle of the night—”

“Hey,” Elliot says. “That's not right.” But somewhere inside him he knows that it is right. All the numbers add up only this way. His mother stretching, naked, waiting for someone. The comments after those Russian parties. The suddenness of all this change. The baby.

“Oh, it's right, Elliot. It's right,” she says, struggling to her feet and making her way back to the house, naked.

He does not move. In the light from his mother's bedroom window, Elliot watches her go, wonders who she is.

V
ERONICA AND HIS
father are arguing about worms and how they reproduce. His father has bought an entire series of educational videos on animal sex. Elliot remembers the Rickey girl beneath him last night and feels nauseated.

“Worms,” Veronica is saying, “are both. Male and female. They fuck themselves.” Veronica loves to say “fuck.” She uses it whenever she can.

His father throws his hands up, exasperated. “They're better off than we are, then, aren't they, Elliot?”

They are eating lunch at an overpriced restaurant in the Village. His father is acting like a country bumpkin, mispronouncing items on the menu, ordering beer and drinking it straight from the bottle. And now this, fighting with Veronica, loudly, about the sex habits of worms. Elliot is hungover and has small splinters in his lips from drinking out of Gorbachev's head, but somehow he feels enlightened.
Perhaps, he thinks, startled, his father is uncouth, perhaps he always has been, with his sherbet-colored clothes and loud, overly enthusiastic voice.

“This salad,” his father is saying, “is going to send me straight into cardiac arrest.” He picks at it. “Too much bacon.”

“Lardons,” Veronica says. She lights up a cigarette and inhales deeply, even though they are all still eating.

“Whatever,” his father says, and waves his fork around, sending lardons and some lettuce—“Free-zays,” his father had called it when he'd ordered—flying onto the floor. Ignoring it, he leans toward Elliot. “Cholesterol, hypertension, blah blah blah. You can't relax for a minute.”

Veronica is gazing at everyone else in the restaurant, her eyes flickering, settling, moving on.

“Now there's all this safe sex you have to worry about,” Elliot's father continues in his boisterous, “atta boy” voice.

Elliot looks around too, embarrassed. He remembers a night out with his parents back before they got divorced. They went to a new Japanese restaurant for sushi and his father kept squinting his eyes and saying, “Ah so,” as if it were the biggest joke in the world. His mother had gotten up, gathered her jacket and purse, and left, her head bent, her cheeks red. But Elliot and his father had sat and finished their dinner, had taken their time, really. Elliot had been surprised to find his mother sitting in the car when they went out to the parking lot. Somehow he had expected her to be home, gone. But she was sitting in the front seat, looking out the window, waiting.

“Do you?” his father is asking, and Elliot realizes he missed some important part of a conversation.

“What?” he says.

“Do you have safe sex? Use condoms? Whatever?”

Elliot looks around again, certain that everyone is listening.

“Of course,” he lies, thinking again of the Rickey sister last night. This morning he had been unable to get the grass stains off his knees.

Veronica leans back in her chair, blows a long stream of smoke, and says, “Cats have barbed penises, you know.”

At least she spoke softly, Elliot thinks, grateful.

“That's why they scream that way during sex. It hurts,” Veronica says, studying him.

His father laughs. “You've got to see these videos, Elliot.”

E
LLIOT WALKS UP
and down Bank Street, trying to find Georgia's old building. He is certain of the block, but all the brownstones look the same. Sitting on a stoop, he wishes he could find Georgia herself, wishes he could lose himself in her black curls, her sex smell. He imagines what her breasts would look like, feel like, taste like, imagines himself suckling on them, drawing out the long, hard nipple, feeding off her. Like a baby, he finds himself thinking.

All these years, Elliot's fantasies about Georgia have been sexual. In junior high, his wet dreams alternated between Kristie Madden, a science whiz with strawberry blond hair and freckles, and Georgia. Suddenly, he is imagining something else, something more. He thinks of his father and how embarrassed he had made him feel; he thinks of his mother stealing Mr. Rickey away from his family. Is that who he's a part of? Or is he someone else, cut loose from them, really, taken in?

Elliot closes his eyes and pictures himself inside Georgia. In the past, he has imagined himself there often, riding her, thrusting himself into her. But this is different; he thinks of floating in her, the way this new baby floats inside his mother, cushioned there, warm, safe. He imagines sliding out of her, Georgia squatting and pushing until he emerges. For an instant, it does not feel like pretending. It feels real. Maybe, Elliot thinks, maybe it is real, a buried memory. Maybe these two other people had nothing to do with him at all. Thinking it, he feels light, uplifted, hopeful.

He stands, knowing what he has to do.

A
T THE END
of the day, St. Gregory's Hospital is empty, the air thick with pine-scented floor cleaner and old urine. For almost seventy-five years, St. Gregory's has served as an orphanage, a place where unwed mothers could have their babies and give them away, or bring their children and leave them for someone else to take home. It was where Georgia had sent her son; Elliot knows that because every time they passed St. Gregory's his mother told him about Georgia's child, how she never even held him, how a transfer here had been made, and someone had, presumably, adopted him.

Waiting for someone to appear at the records office to help him, Elliot hopes for another rush of memory, a sign that he has been here once, briefly, before he was transferred over to the people who had raised him. Already, in the short subway ride uptown, the faces of his parents have dimmed, his connection to them has grown frayed and thin.

There is nothing modern about St. Gregory's. Thick, dusty files line the room that stretches before him beyond the desk where he waits. The telephones have rotary dials. I'm like a time traveler, Elliot thinks, smiling. He hears someone approaching, slowly, shuffling along the newly washed floors. He hears his mother's constant reprimand when he was a child:
Pick up your feet, Elliot. Don't drag them like that
. He thinks too of Georgia and the clogs she always used to wear. She clopped when she walked, heavy, noisy. His mother used to wonder aloud at home how someone could wear those things, why someone would wear them. “They aren't even attractive,” she'd say, shaking her head, looking down at her own practical loafers. Elliot used to like it best when Georgia wore no shoes at all and padded around her Bank Street apartment barefoot, the pads of her feet thick and callused, her arches so high that she always appeared to be about to jump.

A voice behind him says, “I can guess why you're here.”

Elliot turns to face a small, wizened nun, dressed in a black habit, bent almost in two, her back like a bridge in a Japanese garden.

“They all come back,” she says, shuffling past him, to the desk.

“They who?” Elliot says.

Once, in an adult education class at the local high school, his mother took a course in making figures out of dried apples. She made a woman, dressed it in a long red-print dress and white bonnet, put a doll-size butter churn in its hand. That apple woman's face looked just like this nun's: wrinkled and dried so much that it appears to be folded like that, pressed into its own peculiar shape.

“The children,” the nun says, shaking her head. “The little ones who were given away.”

Elliot fights back an urge to touch her, to stroke that dried-apple face. He longs for arms around him, he realizes. He longs to be held. He thinks he might cry, so he merely nods.

“I have cancer,” the nun says without self-pity. “Of the stomach. They say my intestines have disintegrated, that they're just hanging there, loose, like old yarn. I can only tolerate applesauce and baby food.” She shakes her head, as if remembering. “Not even water will stay down,” she continues. “Do you know what I used to love? Pizza! With pepperoni!” Her eyes sparkle. “I always used to add extra hot pepper flakes.” She starts to shuffle away from him, to the room beyond. She pauses. “Name?”

“Elliot Stern,” he says.

“No, no, no. Do you know your mother's name, sonny?”

“Georgia,” Elliot says, his voice barely above a whisper. “Montenegro.”

The nun nods, then disappears between those shelves, her feet leaving smeared footprints in the dust.

While he waits for her to return, Elliot considers all the possibilities that lay before him. He will never have to go back to the house in Chappaqua, where, when he left this morning, his mother and Mr. Rickey had started to paint his father's old study a color called celery, which his mother had read soothed infants. He will never have to endure another meal with his father and Veronica, with their arguing and Veronica's smoking while he eats and his father's slapping him on the back. He will never have to face the Rickey sisters in daylight. He could go back to
Providence tonight, ring Georgia's doorbell, lose himself in her arms, in her hug. Thinking it, he can almost actually feel those arms around him. She never got to hold him, he remembers.

The nun comes back with a file, thin, dusty, sealed.

In front of him she breaks the seal and opens the folder.

“Baby boy Montenegro,” she reads. “April 16, 1975. Mother: Georgia A. Father: Unknown. Adopted April 23, 1975, by Margaret M. and Alexander D. Lewis, 10 Bank Street, New York, New York.”

The information rattles around in his brain. None of it is him. Not the birthday—his is in January—or the names of the adopted parents. He is not Georgia's son, after all. The feeling of her embrace vanishes and he is left shivering, as the nun hands him the file and shuffles out.

“Send me more,” she says. “I'll tell them. I don't want these babies walking around the earth alone, untethered.”

But he is, Elliot realizes. He is alone and untethered.

E
LLIOT DRAGS
G
ORBACHEV'S
head from the backyard, where he left it, up to his room. The temperature has dropped and a thin layer of ice has formed across the top of the vodka that was left. Like an ice fisherman, Elliot breaks through it, then begins to drink, lying naked on his bed in his room. He wonders if Georgia had known she was living a few blocks from her son all those years. Had she moved there to watch him grow up after all? He does not remember any children his age on those long-ago Saturday trips to Manhattan and Georgia's apartment. But why would he?
They had only sat up there, listening to Georgia talk, trying to sort out the loose ends of her life.

When the bedroom door opens, the smell of fresh paint floats in.

“It's me,” the Rickey sister says.

It is the same one as last night. She has on the same long, white nightgown, but as soon as she closes the door she takes it off and, naked, climbs onto the bed with him. He hands her Gorbachev's head, and she gulps from it.

When she hands it back, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, “We used to have one like this.”

“You told me that already,” Elliot says.

“Where's the rest? There's a bottom and other dolls, you know.”

“I know. They're next door.”

“At my house?” she says in her flat voice.

Elliot nods.

“You mean this is ours?” she says.

He nods again.

“Is that what your entire family does? They take things that aren't theirs? What kind of people are you?”

“I don't know,” he says.

She drinks more, taking in huge gulps. “The point here is to get totally wasted,” she says.

After he left St. Gregory's, Elliot went to a phone booth and called information, looking for an Alexander Lewis in Manhattan on Bank Street, then just in Manhattan, then in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island. He was desperate to find Georgia's son. He checked for a Margaret Lewis. He checked for them in Long Island and Westchester and Albany and New Jersey and Connecticut. He began to call
random Informations—Denver, Seattle, Miami. But the Lewises had disappeared.

“It's working,” the Rickey sister is saying. “I'm getting drunk this fast. This is good to know. That it's possible to do this.”