An Ornithologist's Guide to Life Read online

  In loving memory of my daughter Gracie Belle

  September 24, 1996–April 18, 2002

  CONTENTS

  Total Cave Darkness

  The Rightness of Things

  The Language of Sorrow

  After Zane

  Joelle’s Mother

  Escapes

  Lost Parts

  Dropping Bombs

  Inside Gorbachev’s Head

  New People

  An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life

  An

  ORNITHOLOGIST’S GUIDE to LIFE

  TOTAL CAVE DARKNESS

  HE CALLS HER Sweetheart, Darling, Honey Pie. Martha calls him Reverend. Even now, as she watches him stretch out on the hood of his car, shirtless, smiling to himself, face turned toward the blistering July sun, Martha thinks: The Reverend is so damn young. The pay phone is hot against her ear and she smells someone else’s bad breath emanating from it. Martha is sweaty from heat and humidity, sore from too much acrobatic sex. And she wants a drink. God help her, she wants a cold beer, a chilled white wine, a vodka and tonic. Anything.

  Six hundred miles from this parking lot, Martha’s mother answers the phone with a weary hello. Massachusetts is in the middle of a heat wave too. Martha knows this. In between sex and free HBO she watches the Weather Channel. The whole country is hot.

  “It’s me,” Martha says with forced cheerfulness. “I’m about to go into a cave so I figured I should check in, in case you never hear from me again. You know.”

  Her mother lowers her voice as if the phone could be tapped. “A cave! Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

  Then there is a silence in which Martha hears her mother thinking: You have done crazy things in your day, but running off with a priest tops them all.

  The Reverend lazily wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He is nine years younger than Martha, with startling green eyes that remind her of her childhood cat Boo and a body that must come from God himself: wide shouldered and strong and golden haired.

  “He’s not a priest, you know, Mom. He’s a minister. A Protestant.”

  The Reverend scratches his balls with another lazy motion and Martha looks away.

  “What did I say? Did I say anything about it? I don’t care what you call him,” her mother is saying. “He wears one of those little white collars, doesn’t he? He gets up on Sunday mornings and preaches to people, doesn’t he?”

  Martha smiles at this. Today is Sunday, and when he got up with her this morning he was definitely not preaching. Although she had jokingly whispered amen when they were done.

  “What are you thinking?” her mother says. “You’re a grown woman, Martha. Over forty—”

  “Just over forty,” Martha reminds her, feeling cross.

  “And you take off with him for three weeks—”

  “Two! Almost two.”

  “And everyone knows the two of you are not off praying together.” Her mother’s voice grows weary again as she repeats, “What are you thinking?”

  Martha asks herself the same thing. She had been gripped by an urge to call home after all these days away as if this simple act of reaching out would make everything different. Instead, everything is exactly the same. Her mother’s voice, baffled and questioning, sounds all too familiar. Words like irresponsible and thoughtless buzz around Martha’s head like mosquitoes.

  A bright yellow car pulls into the parking lot, and Martha squints at its unfamiliar license plate. She has been keeping a mental tally of all the different states’ license plates she sees. South Dakota? Yes. The faces of the presidents are stamped right on the plate. There was a time, before the drinking took over so much of her life, when Martha could easily do things like name the presidents who were carved at Mount Rushmore or rattle off the state capitals without hesitation. But now her brain is all thick and soupy. She tells herself one more drink would not make it any worse.

  As if he read her mind, the Reverend appears at her side and takes her hand as tenderly as an adolescent on a first date.

  “Reverend Dave,” Martha whispers.

  He smiles at her with his even white teeth while her mother shrieks in her ear. “What? He’s right there? Right this minute?”

  The Reverend nuzzles her. So many things he does remind her of her Boo that sometimes Martha worries that she will fall in love with Reverend Dave. She thinks of how Boo used to wait for her to come from school, perched on the low hanging branch of a maple tree at the corner of her street. Sometimes Martha would stop and watch him there instead of turning the corner. She would count—one minute, two, three. No matter how late she was, Boo waited. As soon as he saw her, he’d jump from branch to fence to sidewalk, landing right at her feet.

  Thinking of his loyalty and patience makes Martha say, “Oh.”

  “Martha?” her mother says, demanding, angry. “What is he doing?”

  The Reverend lifts Martha’s hand in his and presses her close, swaying against her body like they are at the prom. He is humming, off-key.

  “Saving me,” Martha tells her mother. “He’s saving my life.”

  BACK IN MARCH, when Martha’s drinking lost her everything—the condo in Marblehead that looked out over the harbor, her job as the restaurant/movie/theater critic for The North Shore Press, her husband—she moved in with her mother so she could drink in peace. “I’ve come to straighten out,” Martha lied the day they dragged her boxes across her mother’s powder blue wall-to-wall carpeting and into the guest room. Her mother had a condo too, in Swampscott. And a job. And a boyfriend. She wasn’t happy to have Martha back. “I’m not the Betty Ford Clinic here,” she grumbled. “You come back, you’re on your own.”

  At first, Martha made a show of getting up with her mother every morning and having dry toast and lots of coffee. She circled ads for jobs in the classifieds in red marker and discussed the pros and cons of each one. Her mother frowned at her and shook her head, not disgusted as much as baffled. “Why don’t you just take yourself to AA?” her mother said one morning before she left for her job in the Better Dresses department at Filene’s. She wore a Donna Karan outfit that, with markdowns and her discount, she got for eighty-eight dollars. “AA?” Martha laughed. “I’m not that far gone. I just need to get my head on straight.” After her mother left, Martha paced while first the talk shows and then the soap operas droned on behind her. Her mind skipped and flitted from one thing to the next, leaving her unable to complete anything or to concentrate on something as easy as the Reader’s Digests her mother kept in the bathroom.

  But at five o’clock she was always able to focus. She turned off the television and went to the kitchen to fix a vodka and tonic in her mother’s jumbo insulated to-go cup. She could nurse one of these until her mother came home and the two of them ate dinner together, sometimes joined by her mother’s boyfriend Frankie. Martha always cleaned up afterward, then slipped out between Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. By eight o’clock she was settled on a stool at Matty’s or the Landing, drinking until closing.

  The truth was, Martha loved these nights. She loved the sound of ice cubes and laughter and jukebox music mingling together. She loved how her tongue felt thick in her mouth, how when she shifted her head too quickly the world around her spun. She loved the easy way a man might throw his arm around her shoulder, the first touch of a stranger’s cold beery tongue on her body. She loved everything about drinking. All of it. For Martha, her favorite part of the day was quarter of five, watching the clock make its slow movement toward her first vodka, filling the glass with ice, then tonic, holding the bottle of vodka in her arms like a baby.

  HER OLD FRIEND Patty, newly relocated to Chicago, her v
oice filled with so much happiness that Martha wished she would stop calling, ended each conversation by reminding Martha that help was out there, “when you’re ready.” Patty had been to AA, NA, OA, and every other A imaginable. “I like drinking,” Martha told Patty. “So do I,” Patty said, her voice righteous, smug. It was Patty who gave Martha the Reverend’s number. She had described him as kind and helpful. “Also, very cute in a koala way,” she said. Who would have imagined that Martha and the Reverend would run off together? That they would end up here in this parking lot in Virginia, about to go into the Endless Caverns? Certainly not Martha.

  She reads to the Reverend about all the other caverns they drove past. “The Luray Caverns have an organ made out of stalagmites. The Skyline Caverns have cave flowers not found in any other caves in the U.S.”

  “Sweetheart,” he says, grinning at her, “we missed all of those. We weren’t thinking about caverns. Now we’re thinking about them and we’re here. That’s how lucky we are. As soon as we imagine something that we want, we get it.”

  “Mel Gibson,” Martha says, closing her eyes. But really she is imagining a bottle of vodka.

  “Now don’t go breaking my heart, darling,” the Reverend whispers, holding her close.

  He is a solid man, like a rock or a mountain in her arms. Martha keeps her eyes closed and tries to think of something other than the way the first swallow of alcohol tastes, how it burns a little, punches your gut, makes you swoon.

  “There’s no fairyland in there,” Martha says. She is whispering too. “The Luray Caverns have Fairy Land. Reflecting pools that make the stalactites look like sand castles.”

  Reverend Dave steps away from her and laughs. “We already know it’s an illusion,” he says. “Saved ourselves the trip! We’ve got the Endless Caverns. Miles and miles explored,” he says, tapping the guidebook in her hand, “but no end ever found.”

  “What were we thinking to come here like this?” Martha says with a sigh.

  They both know that she doesn’t just mean here, to Virginia, to these caves, but rather the way they packed up his Dodge and drove out of town, meandering for almost two weeks now, sleeping at Motel 6s and eating breakfasts of 7-Eleven coffee and doughnuts. Every day they drive and drive, choosing their routes at random—he likes the name of a particular town, she wants to see something she’d heard about once, a lifetime ago. He has left behind a congregation of Unitarians who think he’s spending his vacation in Michigan with his parents. She has left behind her longest lover—drinking. If she had not woken up one afternoon and realized that she had lost three whole days of her life—three days! she still thinks in amazement, and no matter how hard she tries she can not retrieve a single minute of them—she would still be at her mother’s condo waiting for her first vodka of the day.

  “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.

  THE REVEREND 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.

  ON THE FOURTH 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 s
he’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.

  THEIR 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.