The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,7
to Bryn Mawr Market to save gas for Jimmy Carter.
I won’t discuss my efforts to make Theo or myself a better person. The projects and hobbies taken up like molds I could press us into. The surprise when we walked away from the ballroom dance studio or potter’s wheel unchanged. No. I won’t speak of how he closed himself off from me after we lost our daughter, how he used his drafting pencils to draw a taut boundary around himself, a room with no window or door. It was years before I realized it wasn’t grief; on some level, he had been that way all along: he had his work, and I had him, and that was supposed to be enough. But it isn’t, is it? It never is.
Of course there are many things that will be safe to tell you, Ellie. Good to say, even. There are a few I remember entirely, that shine crystalline and whole in my memory. Like that summer after Tom was born, how the fireworks were set off at intervals up and down the Main Line. You could look left or right and see sparks and sprays for hours. Everyone stood on their roofs and decks, and all you could hear between the pops and streaks were sighs and exclamations. Nothing but beauty and the contemplation of beauty. No matter what horrible things had happened to any of us, for one evening, there was nothing else.
I don’t consider, not for one second, doing the practical, truly safe thing—asking if Grandma Blankenship couldn’t help instead. No, I’m selfish. I want Ellie to sit with me and go over the project, not her other grandmother. I want her to ask me her questions. I want to help frame the assignment, to draw conclusions and look for symbolism and personification and theme. I may not have used my English major to work, but after all these years of journal keeping, I’ve learned what to show and what to hide.
And oh, the thought of her understanding! The nod, the small smile, the light in her eyes!
I want it all now, I want too much. I want to show her off at the old Gladwyne lunch counter and answer her questions between bites of tuna salad. I want to see her slightly furrowed brow as she bends toward her notebook and ignores her homemade potato chips. Afterward I want her to sit at my antique desk. I want my high arched ceilings to echo the glide of her pencil on paper, the soft puff that emanates from her lips as she blows the pink dust of the eraser into the air. It will linger there for a moment, a writer’s jet stream, before it joins the mites and pollen of my house, microscopic evidence of what we’ve done wrong and made right again.
I dried off quickly and called her back while I was still in my robe.
“Sorry I missed your call, Ellie,” I said. “I was in the bath.”
“Does your tub have those safety grips in it?”
“No,” I laugh. You don’t lie to a child like Ellie.
“’Cause Courtney’s grandmother broke her hip when she slipped in the tub. They have all kinds of them at the hardware store, like flowers and circles.”
“Really?”
“They have glue on one side and are kind of sandpapery on the other.”
“Well, I’ll have to look into that, then. Thank you for the information.”
How can you not love a person who worries just a little, just the right amount, over you?
I suppose we’ve all known people who could never find the right balance between neglectful and fawning. But oh, when someone does. How often did that happen in a lifetime? Twice?
“Okay, so we need to figure out when we can work on my Generations project together.”
“Indeed. How much time do you think we’ll need? An afternoon?”
“Oh, more than that, Grandma. It has to be ten to fifteen pages!”
“Well, then,” I exclaimed, “we might need to hire some assistants! When is it due?”
“In three weeks.”
“Why don’t we start with twice a week, after school? You and your mother figure out which days are best and let me know. In the meantime, I’ll sharpen my pencils.”
“No, Grandma, sharpen your memory! I need you to tell me stuff about the family.”
“I’ll do my best.”
It struck me after that phone conversation that Ellie’s clearness and grace reminded me of Peter Littleton. Not the Peter of now, sunburned and bloated, but the Peter of long ago, the Peter who was my