The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,4

was a “secret family recipe.” The cheek! And the last time I had dinner at Tom and Tinsley’s, a few weeks ago, she presented me with a painting she called a “self-portrait.” It was all bright colors, sprays of yellow hair, slashes of green eyes and red lips, and had a bit of Picasso about it—a kind of knowing crookedness. I was grateful to Tinsley for sharing something so precious. I can’t tell you how many years it has been since I had a child’s drawing on my refrigerator. When I anchored it there, magnets on all four sides to keep it from curling, something enormous rose in my chest. Swells of pride in the deep waters of grief. Looking at it yesterday, I almost knew something big was going to happen; knew she had something to tell me, and then she did. Called me herself.

I took a longer bath than usual today because of the light in the room: speckled, almost fractured as it spilled from east to west. Made me wish my camera was nearby instead of hanging on the hook in the entryway. New tubs are deeper and longer—soaking tubs, they call them, which strikes me as redundant—but they feel like swimming pools to someone my size. In my old tub, I can stretch my legs all the way out, and rest my neck back over the curved lip, just so. It fits me. It’s mine. And if the words “claw-footed tub” evoke something visceral, scrabbling and dark, well, fine. I take that, too, the bitter with the sweet.

Since Theo died I’ve had no desire to redo the bathroom or kitchen, to rearrange the furniture, let alone move. Over the years I’ve grown quite accustomed to the pieces Theo and I discovered at all those estate auctions in Gladwyne or Greenville—though I confess he always favored the beautiful over the comfortable. Wasn’t that why he chose me? In the early days, we’d go to an auction nearly every weekend, and I’d tease him by stretching or scratching my nose when bidding began on expensive pieces. He’d swat me with his bidding number and I’d tickle him in retaliation. We’d strap our finds to the roof of Theo’s old Saab and when we got them home, polish them with oil or wax, and try them in different rooms. Nothing made Theo happier than rearranging furniture.

Now I scan our possessions with their lack of upholstery and curve, and think he was just preparing me for old age—get used to the hard backed, the flat bottomed, the squeeze in, the sit up straight. Life is a ladder-back chair. I still remember how stiffly he sat, how damned upright he could be. Was it to compensate for a job that required him to bend downward, poring over his blueprints, his notes and plans? Theo was barely five ten, but he looked taller, with his graceful neck and arms. Even the cowlicks in the front of his hair brought the eye upward. In one corner of the bathroom I have the chair from the den: a plain Shaker style with a navy toile cushion. Some days when I look at it I see Theo smiling ever so slightly as he carried it over his head to the car, the tag still on it; some days I see him perched on it, designing a building he loved; and some days I see his legs crumpled under him on the tennis court, spindly and thin, a paler version of the legs of his chair.

As I soak in the water, I wonder what piece of our furniture would have reminded Theo of me. And that, of course, is precisely the kind of question I might have asked him in the dark twilight as I lay in his arms; and exactly the kind of question he would have been clinically unable to answer. He was a doer, not a talker.

There is one blessing in Theo’s antiques. The older I get, the more I take comfort in being surrounded by something more ancient. At last, younger by comparison!

Of course many of my old things aren’t quite quaint anymore. Like the fat black answering machine that’s separate from the phone and insists on squawking when I take my bath. I hear all manner of nonsense: receptionists confirming doctor appointments as if it were tea with the queen, Robert Redford calling to remind me to save the earth, Betsy asking if I forgot about the tennis clinic (which I