An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (2 page)

“Hey,” the Reverend says, “it's been almost two weeks. You haven't had even one drop in two whole weeks.”

“Some treatment you devised,” Martha snaps because she wants a drink so bad that the mention of her meager accomplishment embarrasses her. “Take a drunk, withhold liquor, drive her around all day, and sleep with her every night. Wow. You might even get a write-up in
Cosmopolitan
. ‘How I Cure Alcoholics' by Reverend Dave.”

He looks so wounded that Martha almost reaches out to
touch his cheek. But instead she whirls around and marches across the parking lot on wobbly legs to the fireworks store. She expects him to follow her but he doesn't. Martha stands in the middle of the store, alone, surrounded by country hams and a dizzying array of fireworks.

“Do you sell . . . uh . . . like microbrewery beers? Something local?” she asks the woman at the cash register. Martha hopes she sounds like a tourist instead of like someone desperate for a drink.

The woman points to a cooler in the corner. “We got some from up in Maryland.”

Martha's fingers tremble as she opens the cooler and lifts a beer from a six-pack carton. Its label is colorful, happy. Martha presses the cool amber bottle to her cheek.

The woman frowns. “You want just the one?”

She looks out at the parking lot, where the air ripples with heat and Reverend Dave kicks at stones, sending them flying past cars with license plates from Utah, Texas, Pennsylvania. Martha is flushed with guilt and excitement both. Like the winner on
Supermarket Sweepstakes
she begins to pull fireworks from the shelves around her, until she settles on a Roman candle and a box of sparklers.

“And these,” Martha says.

T
HE
R
EVEREND LOOKS
like a little boy out there, kicking stones, sulking. Nine years between them is really a lot of years, Martha thinks, not for the first time. Last week they drove to a county fair somewhere in Pennsylvania to hear
Paul Revere and the Raiders. Reverend Dave had never heard of them, even after Martha sang “Let Me Take You Where the Action Is” to him naked in their motel room.

“I have no idea who they are,” he told her, “but I'm sure I like your rendition better than theirs.”

“I wanted to marry Mark Lindsay,” she said. When he shrugged, she added, “Their lead singer.”

Even though the Reverend had danced with her, the Swim and the Jerk and the Twist, not one of their songs was remotely familiar to him. He had looked like a child, jumping up and down beside her, his hair flopping into his eyes. When they'd sung a ballad, “Hungry,” he took Martha into his bearish grasp and danced close and slow, smoothing her hair and not at all childlike.

“Nine years,” she whispers. “It's too much.” But then she remembers something: back at the pay phone, the song he was humming—it was “Hungry.” And this small gesture from him sends her running toward him.

“I got fireworks!” she yells.

He looks up, and what she sees in his eyes almost breaks her heart. The Reverend has fallen in love with her. She doesn't know whether to turn and run the other way or keep going into his open arms. What she does is stop, a few feet from him, and hold up the bag.

“Sparklers and everything,” she says. She imagines the beer bottle nestled among all the explosives, everything ticking away, ready to go off at any minute.

“We can light them later,” she says.

Reverend Dave nods and begins to walk toward the caverns. Knowing the beer is so close—that after the tour she
can duck into the ladies' room and drink it down, or later back at the motel while he's in the shower—just having it makes Martha feel lighthearted.

“I'm sorry I was so mean,” she tells him.

“I know,” he says.

O
N THE
F
OURTH
of July they found themselves in Gettysburg, unable to get a room.

“'Cause of the reenactment,” the fifth motel clerk told them.

Finally they found a room at an inn where everyone dressed in period costumes: women in long dresses and bonnets, the men in blue and gray uniforms. It depressed Martha. Their canopy bed and braided rug and the pitcher on the bureau, all of it made her sad.

“No HBO,” she told the Reverend as she flicked through the channels. She settled on the Weather Channel and watched the heat spread across the country, relentless.

The Reverend came up behind her and hugged her around the waist. Outside they could hear cannons being fired, and muskets.

“Why do you do it?” he asked her. It was the first time since she'd walked into his office at the church back in May that he asked her that.

“I can't remember,” she'd said, which was the truth. “But I love it more than anything. It is what I love.”

“I don't believe it's all you will ever love.” He turned her around to face him, but she averted her eyes. “I think you could love a person,” he said. “The right person.”

Martha looked up at him and laughed. The smell of gunpowder filled the room. “Like a reverend? Like someone practically a decade younger than me?”

“Yes,” he said simply. Then he kissed her full on the lips.

Later, naked in the canopy bed, Martha propped herself on one elbow to look down at him. That day she'd walked into his office he'd had on khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. She had studied him closely then too, like she was now. His face was round, boyish. That day in his office she'd said, “You're the reverend here?” And then she had burst into tears. Later, she had told him about those missing days, days when she could have run over someone, gotten AIDS, done anything—” God knows what,” she'd said, and he'd burst out laughing. “Sorry,” he told her, “me being a minister and all, the God thing struck me as funny.” She wasn't sure what to make of him. Not then nor weeks later when he took her to a corny Italian restaurant and paid the roaming accordian player to sing “That's Amore” to her.

“You courted me,” Martha whispered from her side of the canopy bed.

Even though his eyes were closed he smiled.

“I came in every day just so I wouldn't drink, and you let me sit there in your office week after week until one day you said—”

Reverend Dave opened his eyes. “‘Let me buy you dinner.' And you said yes.” He was playing with her hair, wrapping pieces of it in his fingers, then letting it fall free. “I never did that before. Asked out someone who came to me for help.”

“Sure. I bet that's what you say to all the drunk forty-year-olds who've fucked up their lives. It helps to make them feel special.”

The Reverend pulled her close to him by the hair.

“Hey,” Martha said.

“Shut up,” he told her. “You don't know anything.”

He had told her that he was supposed to visit his family in Grand Rapids during his three weeks off.

“For all you care I could have gone to Michigan and left you behind.”

“I know this,” Martha said, keeping her hair tangled in his hand. “I know I hate this town and all this morbid history. I know I want to go downstairs to Ye Olde Tavern and have a drink. I know more than you think I do.”

“Shut up,” he said again. He was kissing her, leaving her no choice.

T
HEIR TOUR GUIDE
is a teenager named Stuart. He has Buddy Holly glasses pus-filled pimples and a deep voice that Martha is certain belongs to someone else. Every time he talks he startles her. Reverend Dave keeps asking questions about oxygen and bats and spelunking, but Martha is having trouble listening. The cave looks fake, like the backdrop for a movie or the re-created environments at zoos. When no one is looking, Martha touches the stalagmites, knocks them with her knuckles as if she can prove them false.

“We're in the cut-rate cavern,” Martha whispers to the Reverend. “We missed all the good ones.”

He steps away from her. He has not forgiven her for what she said back in the parking lot. All it would take is a touch or a kiss, and she would have him back again. Martha stays away. She pretends she is part of a family from Georgia
who knows all the answers to Stuart's stupid questions. She is certain the family has been here before and so technically they are cheating when they shout out the answers. Still, they act smug.

“Have you been to Luray?” Martha asks the mother. They are making their way through a long tunnel. The Reverend's red-flowered shirt disappears around a corner.

“They're really commercial,” the mother tells Martha. “We like Endless best.”

Up close Martha sees that the woman is probably the same age as the Reverend.

“Your husband's real cute,” the woman whispers. “Is he really a minister?”

Husband? Martha thinks. Her heart is beating too fast and all she can do is nod.

“Golly, our minister is an old fart with a gut out to here.”

“He's nine years younger than me,” Martha blurts.

The woman looks pleased rather than appalled. “Good for you!” she says.

They reach the place where Stuart told them to wait for him. He is talking now about rivers in the caves but Martha could care less. The Reverend has his head bent, leaning toward Stuart, gobbling up all this useless information. Like at Gettysburg, where he had to stop at the visitors' center and get brochures before they left. Then he kept reading to her from them. The next night, in bed, he'd recited the Gettysburg Address from memory in the voice she guessed he used for preaching. Remembering this, Martha feels a pang of something from long ago. A feeling that she cannot name. Unexpectedly, she thinks of Boo and how he used to wrap himself around her neck like a stole.

Martha moves closer to the Reverend, but he doesn't look at her. Everyone is looking up at the ceiling.

“Many people see the face of Jesus there,” Stuart says in his deep voice.

Almost everyone is saying ah, and pointing.

Martha clutches the bag of fireworks in her hands. Despite the colder weather down here in the cave, her hands are sweating. When she presses the bag close to her chest she feels the cool hard bottle inside.

Reverend Dave is looking up too. Martha follows his gaze and tries hard to see the face of Jesus, but there is just more of the fake rock. This morning at the motel, the Reverend ran out of the bathroom, naked and wet, took Martha by the hand, and brought her to the small sliver of window by the shower. “Look! “ he said, awed. Martha had to stand on tiptoe to see.

“What?” she said.

The Reverend put his hands around her waist and lifted her so that she could see. Framed like a small painting were the Blue Ridge Mountains and the rolling hills below them. In the early morning mist, they seemed wrapped in gauze.

“Isn't that one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen, honey pie?” he said in a soft voice, holding her there in place so that she was forced to look.

Martha squirmed out of his grasp. “I like the view from the bedroom better. Parking lot, strip mall, ribbon of highway.” She'd hoped he would know that she stole that phrase—
ribbon of highway
—from Woody Guthrie.

Now Martha stares hard at the spot where Stuart is shining his flashlight. She doesn't want to make another wisecrack;
she wants desperately to find something there. But before she has a chance, Stuart says, “Total cave darkness,” and turns off the light. They are left in a dark that is so thick, Martha cannot see the fingers she holds up to her own eyes. She finds herself leaning into the darkness. The bag she has been holding drops, and in the stillness there comes the shattering of the bottle and the yeasty smell of the beer.

“Oops,” someone says, and the group titters.

“In total cave darkness,” Stuart booms—like God, Martha decides, “you would go blind and crazy in just two weeks.”

Martha wants the lights on again. She wants to find a face in the cave ceiling. She is certain if given another chance she will see it. In the darkness, she reaches out, not certain what she will find. Through the beer and the musty cave smell, Martha smells the Reverend beside her. Until this instant she did not know she could recognize his scent. And then her hand finds his, warm and familiar. Martha cranes her neck and lifts her face upward. There is something there, she decides. The longer she stands like this, squeezing the Reverend's hand and staring into the total cave darkness, the more that something begins to take shape. It is the blurry face of a stranger in a bar, promising her vodka if she will go home with him. It is the back of his New England Patriots sweatshirt as she stumbles across the parking lot toward his car, gagging on the smell of fresh sea air. She remembers peeling paint, sour sheets, a stranger's body. She remembers that for three days last spring she did anything for her next drink.

Without warning, the lights come back on. They all squint at each other in the brightness. Martha sees the Reverend looking at her.

“Or maybe you like the darkness better?” Stuart asks, grinning. He snaps off the lights again.

Someone behind Martha gasps. But instead of panicking her, the darkness wraps itself around Martha and soothes her. It is as if she is falling, like the game she played as a child where you fall backward, hoping someone will be there to catch you.

THE RIGHTNESS OF THINGS

E
VERY TIME
R
ACHEL
sees Mary, she is struck by how alike the two of them are—the same strawberry blond hair, the same parade of freckles across their arms and cheeks, even the same old wire-rimmed glasses, round ones that have bent over time and look slightly outdated; people often mistake them for sisters. Chasing Sofia up the steps to Mary's house, Rachel considers this, the way they seem so alike, so close, but after five years of friendship, Rachel still feels slightly awkward coming here, to Mary's house.

The house is a large Victorian, perfectly restored. It is a pleasant shade of pink, with a darker pink gingerbread trim. Inside, the rooms are dark and cool, the floors covered with Oriental rugs, the kitchen cupboards filled with the things one accumulates in married life—wedding gift soup tureens and espresso cups and parfait glasses, crystal vases that will be filled on Valentine's Day and anniversaries, good china.