The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,12

African safari, for instance, with the bloody zebra carcasses, was probably something to avoid. She might, however, be interested in my aunt Lillian’s time as a missionary in Costa Rica. (We told people she was a missionary, but what she really did was give family money to young men she found attractive and compelling. “He speaks like a poet!” she’d told us one Christmas, and while my mother smiled tersely, my darling aunt Caro replied, “And have you played with his pentameter yet?”)

But choosing a topic? That was harder. Ellie’s teacher wanted the class to gather materials on an “aspect” of the family—a sport or a hobby that was threaded through the generations. Interview a grandparent and focus on one aspect of the family, was what the assignment sheet said. Collect items for scrapbook pages and write one or two paragraphs about this aspect. She read it to me over the phone, and her voice changed when she read it, in a serious, concentrating way.

“I think we should do cooking,” Ellie said.

I loved the way she said “we,” as if I were her classmate, but I had to stifle a bit of laughter as I informed her that neither of her great-grandmothers knew how to boil water.

“What about the great-grandfathers?”

This swelled me with pride for her father’s unique cooking abilities. I had taught him how to make a croque monsieur at ten, and by the time he was in high school, instead of taking his prom date to the country club for dinner, he made her steak on our patio. Tom, I was certain, packed his own lunch.

“Well, men didn’t cook much back then, dear. They worked and traveled a lot.”

“So there are no family recipes?” she asked innocently.

“Not really,” I sighed.

She thought about this for a moment; you could feel the heat of her brain absorbing this new information, this lacking. Recipes could fill up many pages of a report. Cooking was an excellent choice when you were going for quantity.

“Did they eat a lot of takeout?”

“Yes,” I said and smiled, and left it at that. Let one of her other privileged Main Line classmates be the one to stand up and say her family had servants who planned seasonal menus, who shopped, cooked, and cleaned up after them. That her family recipes included Mamie’s buttermilk pancakes.

Her disappointment was palpable, even over the phone. She’d imagined photos of her grandmother and great-grandmother in the kitchen, heads bowed over a marble rolling pin. She’d hoped for photographs of birthday cakes, of glistening roasts, of generations gathered around the barbecue pit. She’d hoped, in short, for another family. I told her I thought a lot of other children would choose “Family Recipes”; that if she wanted to stand out, she’d have to think of something cleverer anyway.

“But I already drew the cover,” she confessed.

I laughed, and she giggled, too, realizing how silly and futile a decision that was. I decided to let Tinsley handle the rest of that conversation—about being organized but also being flexible. Applauding the cover before it was thrown away. A mother’s place, not a grandmother’s. Still, I glistened with a mother’s pride as I held the phone—that some part of me had resulted in a child who could see a project complete, whole and pleasing, before she’d even begun.

I sat on the attic floor paging through the scrapbooks, looking for “aspects.” There were no common sports—some played tennis, some golf. Some rode animals and some hunted them, like my father. (My great-grandfather Biddle and his brother were alcoholics, but I didn’t think a family recipe like shaken martinis would go over so well.) There wasn’t even a common town—we’d scattered. Some lived in Chestnut Hill and Connecticut, in addition to the Main Line. And Theo’s family was from Wilmington of course.

Gardening? There was a photo of my father and me cross-legged on the path, fiddling near the stone wall past the patio. We must have been working on our fairy garden. I remember how gently he gathered toadstools and wove lean-tos of grass with moss roofs, while I assembled a family of pinecone mice. We made a new one every year, until I was sixteen and stopped speaking to him. I’d tried to get Tom interested in building one, but he preferred large projects—he loved digging, carrying rocks, getting dirty. Even as a little boy, he thought big, and had no patience for anything too twee. But Ellie—perhaps she’d enjoy it? It was possible she was too