An Ornithologist's Guide to Life (9 page)

Then I went inside and called Aurora. It wasn't until I heard her casual “Hello” that I started to cry.

A
LL THE BAKING
had begun with those pumpkins in our yard. Whenever I tried to carve happy faces on them, I ended up with jack-o'-lanterns that looked like the Elephant Man. Finally, I threw out the ghoulish shells and tried to figure out what to do with all the leftover pumpkin flesh.
Pies
, I thought. Ten pies, four dozen pumpkin cookies, and six loaves of pumpkin-spice bread later, I was a baking maniac. Now it was winter, and I had moved on to holiday baking—eggnog cheesecake, Swedish sugar cookies, Noel date bars.

“What you need,” Aurora told me as she nibbled a lemon-hazelnut
biscotto
, “is to make lists.”

“Lists,” I repeated. In the past when my heart was broken, I would drink jug zinfandel and eat lots of chocolate. This time, I couldn't do either. I concentrated on my gingerbread people. Man, woman, child, all with happy icing clothes and wiggly smiles. A happy family.

Aurora wiped the crumbs from her chin and pulled out a pad and pen. “You need a lawyer. You need child support.” She glanced at my bulging stomach. “You need a birthing partner,” she said. She was starting to scare me. “
Wait
,” I said. “You're assuming he's not coming back.”

She cleared her throat, then patted my arm. “How could he choose someone so horsey over you? How could he choose a woman who buys furniture from furniture showrooms? You have Mexican antiques! You have folk art! You have style!”

That was when I really started to cry. I had everything, I thought, feeling the strange flutterings of our baby's first movements. Everything except Zane.

W
HEN
I
MET
Zane, he and Alice had just split up. I had just split up with my boyfriend, Matthew, and had gone to Boston for the day to shop. Zane was in Crate and Barrel buying glassware. I was buying dishes. He came up to me, holding a wine goblet as if he were making a toast. “Your dishes,” he said, “and my glasses make a good combination.”

Zane was tall and blond, like a guy in a toothpaste ad. He looked too good: I was suspicious. But by the time we left the store and went for Italian food at the kind of restaurant
people in movies go to—red-and-white-checked tablecloths, a candle dripping from a chianti bottle, a waiter whispering, “Ah . . .
amore
!” my suspicions had gone the way of all the wine and fettuccine Alfredo we'd had.

“Do you believe in love at first sight?” Zane asked me that night as he left me at my front door.

“Absolutely not,” Aurora told me the next morning when I told her the story. “Love at first sight is a myth. A line.”

The next time I saw Zane, we sat in my bathtub until our skin wrinkled, and told each other our life stories. He told me about Alice. I told him about Matthew. We discovered we both liked Indian food. We both loved the Isle of Skye. We both knew all the lines to
The Graduate
by heart. We both wanted to move to the country and have babies.

“Alice got indigestion from beef vindaloo,” Zane said, nuzzling my neck.

“Matthew said he could never be more than three miles from a building over ten stories high,” I told him.

“Alice thought Skye was too cold and rainy.”

“Matthew can never stay awake long enough to see when Benjamin and Elaine Robinson have their date,” I said.

Then Zane said exactly what I was thinking. “Beth,” he whispered, “we're perfect for each other.”

“You're nuts,” Aurora told me, as I packed all my belongings into liquor store boxes. “You've known this guy a week?”

I didn't have a logical answer. All I could do was hum “Mrs. Robinson.”

F
OR THOSE FIRST
few months after Zane left, I thought about how foolish I had been. I was glad Aurora never said, “I told you so.” I walked around our old farmhouse and touched our things to remind myself these past months had been real. Here were our beeswax candles, our wreaths of dried herbs, our wedding vows framed in wood.

Sometimes, after I made my rounds, traveling from room to room and touching everything, I sat on the sofa bed I hated and tried to picture Zane with Alice, the two of them tucked under a pastel quilt, their golden retriever at their feet and a Duraflame log burning in their fireplace. Sometimes I even tried to imagine Matthew, who had moved to Los Angeles after we broke up.

But mostly I thought about the life Zane and I were supposed to be having. We had talked about taking a week off from work and flying to the Bahamas. We had talked about having all our friends over for Thanksgiving. We had chosen names for our baby—Benjamin after the hero of
The Graduate
, Skye after our favorite place in the world. I walked around and whispered those names like a mantra that would bring Zane back.

He called every week, but I never picked up the phone. Let him miss me, I thought as I listened to his voice on the answering machine. He sounded the same. Would you buy toothpaste from this man? I asked myself. Would you elope with him? Would you have his baby? When I rewound the tape, I always tried to imagine him here with me, with his bright white smile. But I could only picture him in a snapshot I once saw of him and Alice. In it, he is smiling, staring straight at the camera. She stands beside him, her hair pulled
back in a ponytail, her face serious, her fingers locked together like a church steeple in that child's game.

A
URORA SAID
, “T
HERE'S
no way you're spending New Year's Eve alone.”

I had spent Christmas with my family, flown to St. Louis clutching jars filled with tiny star-shaped spice cookies, the lids tied with festive plaid ribbons. Everyone had eyed my baked goods suspiciously. They knew I was good for a basic spaghetti sauce, a pot of chili—but tiny cookies? Plaid ribbons? They all thanked me and averted their eyes.

When I got back to Rhode Island, there were two big packages from Zane wrapped in shiny paper on my doorstep. A plush stuffed panda for the baby. An antique silver Mexican tray for me. I put them both in the trash and didn't go back outside until the garbagemen took them away.

“This will not do,” Aurora said. She went to each window and opened the blinds, letting in the glaring winter sun. “I'm getting you a blind date for this party.”

“He'd better be blind,” I muttered, looking down at my stomach. At my last visit, the doctor had smiled and said, “Twenty weeks and your fundus measures twenty. Everything's perfect.”

“Hey,” Aurora said, “some men find pregnant women very attractive.”

“Zane didn't.”

“Zane,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Do you think he'll come back?” I asked, trying to sound like it didn't matter.

“Beth,” Aurora said, planting herself directly in my line of vision, “do you really want this guy back?”

“Of course not,” I lied.

W
HILE
I
DRESSED
for the party, I wondered what was wrong with me. Why did I, deep down, still want Zane back? Pride? Revenge? The baby? I remembered how I had broken up with Matthew with such confidence. How I had been so firm and sure.

I squeezed into some black velvet leggings, size large, and looked in the mirror. My blind date was named Arnie. “Think of Arnie Becker on
L.A. Law
,” Aurora had told me. “Then the name won't seem so bad.” I wondered what Alice and Zane were doing tonight. An image of Alice in something slinky and Zane in a silk smoking jacket, champagne bubbles floating around them, came into my head. I decided to go downstairs and put the finishing touches on the cake I was bringing to the party.

By the time I was done, the doorbell was ringing. Arnie had arrived. He had a chic short ponytail and a bow tie. He taught at Brown and lived on the East Side. “It's one of those historic houses,” he said, doing a bad imitation of humble. “Little brass plaque out front. Et cetera.” One thing was for certain, Arnie liked himself. A lot. All I had to do was smile and nod from time to time.

By the end of the night, he had drifted into a corner
with a woman named Chloe who modeled. “Catalogue work,” she'd said, sounding very much like Arnie. I sat alone on the sofa and ate carrot sticks, watching Arnie and Chloe whisper together while everyone else dug into my chocolate mousse cake.

Aurora plopped down beside me. She wore a glittery minidress.

“Arnie's a jerk,” she said.

I nodded. We both watched him rub his nose against Chloe's, like an Eskimo.

“This time next year,” Aurora said, “you'll have a great little baby and nothing else will matter.”

I was growing very tired of Aurora's advice. It wasn't midnight yet, but I didn't care. All I wanted was to go home and crawl into bed. I stood and thanked Aurora for everything.

She looked puzzled. “But it's not next year yet,” she said.

“It's close enough,” I told her.

W
HEN
I
GOT
home, Zane was sitting at the kitchen table eating some white chocolate macadamia cookies I had baked.

“Are you here for an affair?” I said, surprised at how quickly I could retrieve a line from
The Graduate
, at how well I was keeping my cool.

“You don't answer my calls,” he said. “I miss you.”

I chewed on my bottom lip, eating off the remnants of the lipstick I'd worn to the party. I wanted him back so badly my knees were shaking. “You look beautiful,” Zane said.

“Where's Alice? I mean, New Year's Eve and all that.”

Zane finished off another cookie before he answered. “We're discussing our relationship,” he said finally. “What was good. What was bad. Why it turned sour.”

“Isn't that all old news? When I met you, you two had broken up. A fait accompli.”

“She knows how much I love you. We're both taking some time to think. To decide.”

I squeezed my eyes shut so I didn't have to look at him.
He isn't coming back
, I told myself.

“Beth?” Zane said softly.

I opened my eyes. “I don't want to see you until you've made up your mind,” I said.

Later, I was shocked at my firmness. I lay alone in our bed, feeling our baby roll and tumble, and wondering where I'd gotten the strength to throw Zane out when what I really wanted was to wrap myself around him and never let go.

A
FTER THE SNOW
melted and spring threatened, the rain came, turning our backyard into mud. I spent my weekends buying baby clothes, tiny things called Onesies and Sleepers. I refinished a crib, painted plump animals in bright primary colors on the walls of the nursery, interviewed nannies.

I still baked, but now it was simple things—sugar cookies for Valentine's Day, apple pie, pound cake. Aurora missed the fancy stuff, but my neighbors seemed relieved. “Oh, spice cake! How wonderful!” Mrs. Grady told me. Things were starting to change.

The only thing that remained constant was that I was still waiting for Zane to make up his mind. Sometimes when
he called, I almost picked up the phone. Almost, but I resisted. Instead, I did my prenatal Jane Fonda exercises and practiced my breathing.

“A spring baby is the best kind,” Aurora told me. She was my birthing partner, and after class she always came over for coffee and dessert.

“Guess what?” she said, nibbling on her oatmeal cookie. “Arnie and Chloe are getting married.”

“So soon?”

Our eyes met for an instant.

“You know,” Aurora said, “sometimes, maybe there is such a thing as love at first sight. What do I know? I've had sixteen boyfriends in eight years.” She caught my gaze again. “You never know.”

“That's for sure.”

“I think he's going to come back,” Aurora said. “How could he not? He's just being a typical man. Considering his options. Stuff he should have done first.”

W
HEN
Z
ANE DID
come back, it was raining. Hard. I had just frosted a dozen chocolate cupcakes and sprinkled them with multicolored jimmies. Outside, our yard was bursting with life—bright crocuses and tulips, lime green buds on the tips of tree branches. My due date was two weeks away, and everything was ready.

I heard Zane's car pull up, heard him swear as he stepped into some mud. I was upstairs, getting ready for bed. I went to the window and watched as he made the slippery route back home.

He rang the doorbell. But instead of answering it, I opened the window and pressed my face to the screen. The rain felt warm against my skin.

“Hi,” I said.

Zane stepped back to get a good look at me. He didn't have on a raincoat or hat, and water streamed down his face, matted his hair to his head.

“Let me in,” he said. “It's pouring.”

“What do you want?” I called down. “I was just going to bed.”