A Field Guide to the Rest of the World
by
Erica Olsen
When I think of the things that
happened, the things that became this story, I think of us all, and of the
myriad adaptations we undertook so quickly. Like Darwin’s finches we who had
known my mother scattered to our separate islands and set about growing beaks
just a little different from the ones we’d been born with. My mother died
unexpectedly, which left me an orphan, though as an adult I could hardly give
myself such a pathetic, Dickensian name. But that was it, the thing that
happened, bald and unmysterious.
I stayed on in my apartment in the
city, but midweek I sometimes went up to Bolinas, where my mother’s friend
Valerie had a bed-and-breakfast. She kept kayaks there, and I would go out on
the soft water of the lagoon and paddle until I raised a hot blister between my
thumb and index finger.
I was supporting myself. That was
the important thing. I did editing and proofreading jobs the way I imagined
women in a different era took in washing. In those days, that was enough to pay
the rent on my tiny apartment on Green Street. It must have been a storefront
at one time. There was a big front window, and the building came right up to
the sidewalk—no yard. I kept the blinds drawn all the time. I could imagine a
tailor’s shop here, or a dry cleaner’s, with a wall-to-wall motorized rack of
suits. Though it was a single room, it was called a “cottage” because it had
its own front door, behind a gate in the fence.
Here I brought home my bags of
groceries. Once a week I dusted the moldings assiduously, with a special rag. I
was going to get ready for something: life, love, a place in the world.
When the phone rang one day, and it
was Valerie inviting me up for a few days, I said right away that I would come.
I was going crazy with a huge, messy proofreading job. The letter from the
publishers was extraordinarily apologetic and began, “This book is still, we
think, in fairly bad shape....” They were doubling my usual rate to clean up
after a careless copyeditor, but the money wasn’t going to be worth it. The book
was a bird-watching guide. I didn’t know anything about birds before I took on
that project, and only a little bit about them afterward. What they looked
like, for instance, remained a blank because the pages had only empty squares
where the photographs would go.
Because it was a long, tedious
project, I took a lot of breaks. Sometimes I went for a walk down to the water
a few blocks away, where there were plenty of birds, mostly gulls and pelicans.
I knew, now, that there were many kinds of gulls, California and Thayer’s and
Ring-billed and Yellow-footed, though this knowledge didn’t help me recognize
what these particular birds were. “You don’t know the trouble you’re giving
me,” I said as I threw them pieces of bread.
When I looked at the amount of
manuscript that remained, I could see that I was behind schedule in a way that
frightened me. The pages I had already gone through bristled with Post-Its on
which I’d written questions to myself. There were notes on discrepancies in
names and a piece of punctuation—half question mark, half exclamation
point—that signified my annoyance that someone else hadn’t done their job.
Upper Pauls Lake. Lower Pauls
Lake. Paul’s Lakes? Pauls’? Some names, the first
time you see them, you know there’s going to be trouble. In another hundred
pages or so, I’d be in a position to go back and answer some of those
questions. By then I’d know what were the points that couldn’t be resolved by
me. I’d be absolved of responsibility. There was a place for queries, the right
margin, in neat red ink.
“You sound tired,” Valerie said.
“Bring your work. I’ll put you in the cottage where you’ll have some privacy.
And Carl won’t be here. You can help keep me sane around the guests.”
Carl was Valerie’s husband. During
the week, he stayed in his apartment in the city. “Before you come up,” Valerie
said, “could you pick up for me—” She named a few things—a sweater, a book—that
she had left at Carl’s. “I left him a message on the machine and on his voice
mail,” she said. “He’ll be expecting you.”
Because Carl was not just an
unfaithful husband but a careless one as well, there was no answer when I rang
the apartment from the front step that evening. In the lobby, the doorman sat
behind a swoop of dark, polished wood, reading a newspaper and glancing now and
then at the security monitors. Gangly plants with naked green stalks and purple
blooms lined the walkways like a Disney jungle, lit from below.
Back in my car, I waited a while. If
Carl drove up, just then, I would be able to bring Valerie the things she
wanted. But Carl had once tried to start something with me, an incident I still
found embarrassing, so it was also a relief not to have to see him. I’d make up
some story, tell Valerie I’d forgotten, that it must have slipped my mind. And
while I was saying I was sorry, she’d say that’s all right, it doesn’t
matter...
After thirty-five minutes I buckled
my seat belt and started the engine. The doorman came to the door. He stood
like a man on guard. But the night he looked out into held strange shapes that
moved in the shadows, not young women in modest cars who exited the courtyard
at a reasonable speed.
What
can I say about Valerie’s house? It was a place people slowed down to look at,
the way you take time to pet a nice dog or smile at a happy baby. Seasons of
fog had weathered the boards until they appeared the color of fog itself, and
reflected light in a way that was a kind of blessing to behold. The windows,
large, wide, and tall, gave the house an open, honest expression, like an
unwrinkled forehead. The sandy driveway under my wheels as I pulled in that
morning whispered home, home, home.
The house was in the trees, and on
the other side was the lagoon. A little distance from the house, and also on
the water, was my cottage, the old boathouse. Down by the shore was a small
dock. The old boards, pegged to the bank, rose and fell on the water, although
the water itself seemed still.
Valerie’s car was in the yard. Other
than that there was no sign of life. Valerie was never one for keeping dogs or
cats. I put my bags into the boathouse—it wasn’t locked—and breathed in the
good smell of the place. It smelled of summer, dry wood in sunlight. Whether
this was from the cottage itself or all the living trees around it, I couldn’t
tell.
In the house, two things took me
aback. The first was my own face, in a mirror in the hallway. I didn’t like the
looks of me. Where I lived, the mirror over the bathroom sink had become a part
of the wall, and I’d grown into the habit of not meeting my own eyes.
“Annie,” Valerie said. “So glad you
came.”
Then I was hugged, and out on the
porch, in the still air, with something to drink in my hand. Valerie
disappeared and came back a moment later with an Audubon.
“You know,” I said, “that’s really
not what I want to see right now.”
“You told me what you were working
on, and I got all interested in birds again,” Valerie said. “There’s one bird I
see all the time, and I don’t know what it is.” She opened the book. “You have
to follow up on these things,” she said. “Otherwise—”
“What I’m working on,” I said. “I
wouldn’t say I’m learning lots about birds.” I explained how the book was full
of maps to bird-watching sites, and how the maps were wrong, so I was spending
a lot of time comparing the maps to the gazetteer, circling roads that turned
east when they should have turned west, roads that gave up miles before their
destinations.
“This is the power I have,” I said.
“I circle things, and in the margin I write, ‘fix this.’ But then I send it off
and I have to trust that all these changes do get made, that I haven’t been
wasting my time.”
I flipped through Valerie’s book,
reading aloud the funniest bird names. Wandering Tattler. Buffleheads and
boobies. I tried to look up birds I thought I’d seen on my drive up, glimpses
of white and black in the marshes.
“Not that I’ll remember,” I said.
“It’s like pine trees, that difference between firs and pines, because there is
a difference.”
Valerie said, “You don’t have to
remember. That’s why it’s in a book.”
“I mean if you had lots of friends,”
I said, “and you didn’t know their names? Wouldn’t it be weird? The whole world
would be like blurry.”
Valerie looked thoughtful. “I feel
quite strongly about this. These names we have—for plants and things—they don’t
mean anything. It doesn’t mean we know anything about them.”
“What we need,” I said, “is a field
guide to the rest of the world.” I sighed. “Of course that field guide would be
full of mistakes when it came to me for proofing ... I can’t even spell the way
I used to. When I was a kid, I never used a dictionary, I just knew I’d be
right. I had that confidence. Now I look at a manuscript, all I see is ways for
things to be wrong. I have to look everything up.”
“Animals aren’t our friends,
anyway,” Valerie said. “You think they care what we call them? ”
The
second thing that took me aback when I went into the house was a picture of
Valerie and my mother. Valerie was between me and my mother in age and had been
more my mother’s friend. When my mother died I inherited Valerie’s friendship.
When I stopped to think about it, I guessed she might have lost more than I
had: a friend her own age.
In the picture, my mother and
Valerie were younger than I am now. They were standing outside an apartment
building, on a red sidewalk, in California light. There was an enormous
geranium hedge, and gray rectangular cars parked on the street. They seemed to
be dressed in tennis clothes. It was an ordinary picture. They weren’t doing
anything special. I just hadn’t known about the picture. Valerie touched its
frame. She’d come across the negative only recently, in a box of old photos,
and had it developed. “I can’t even remember that day,” she exclaimed, amazed.
Which put my flicker of jealousy right out. The picture—it was like a memory
the world still had of them.
I
hurried to the water that afternoon, when guests arrived and I heard her
explaining the house. I heard the snap of an unfolded map, and “There’s
Inverness, there’s Tomales Bay. You can go hiking,
bird-watching.” The guests’ voices, guidebook-savvy, chased me away. I wanted
the place to myself.
The kayaks were in a shed next to
the boathouse. I pulled one down from the lower rack—a medium-size blue plastic
boat, scratched and gouged from use. I stuck my left arm inside, grabbed the
paddle, and chuffed the short distance to the dock.
In calm water a kayak can be
impossible to paddle. You need the surge, the rise and fall of waves, something
to push against. This water was smooth, the day windless. Moving the paddle
through the soft green water, I might’ve been waving my arms in the air.
Floating, once I got used to it,
seemed a fine, wondrous thing. All my heaviness seemed to lift away. I drifted
into the shallows, digging the paddle into the grassy bank, feeling the boat
touch bottom underneath me. I tried to notice things. Birds with long wings;
birds with feathers; birds with beaks. It was quiet inside my head and out.
Quiet but not silent: there was the slippery sound of reeds in the wind, and
every so often a car whistled by on the road, sounding as far away as a jet. I
plucked the elastic cord that stretched across the deck: thunk, and quiet afterward. And I studied it, everything, the deep blue,
the sun, because I wanted to be able to know a place like this if it were ever
mine.
In the shallows, a white bird
emerged from the reeds. What a graceful creature, a body like blown glass. It
was stalking a fish. Each step it took was elegant and hungry. The heron or
crane, I didn’t know what it was, stepped high, then drove its long, sharp beak
into the water.
That
night I proofread the bird book. Monks who copied Bibles by hand, that’s the
kind of concentration I had. It felt like holy work as I went about repairing a
hundred small mistakes. This was the last stage, when perfection came gleaming
into view: the realm of italic periods and en-dashes wielded with surgical
precision. Even though it was my job to catch all these mistakes, I couldn’t
help resenting the fact that others had overlooked them. Why tolerate that kind
of carelessness ? With words on a page, it was actually possible to get them
all correct. With people, on the other hand, there was no telling what word or
action would turn out to have been a horrible mistake. No page proofs there! I
worked until late at night. Birds and the mysterious, odd names that people had
given them rustled their feathers in the dark corners of my room. Nightjar. Whimbrel. Brant.
In
the morning, from out on the water, I saw that Carl had arrived. Valerie was
serving breakfast on the back porch, and in another room her husband’s hunched
profile appeared, making jerky motions as he talked to some client on the
phone.
Looking at Valerie and Carl in their
house, I got the feeling I was spying on my parents. The resemblance wasn’t in
how they acted, with each other or toward me, and not in their age either.
Carl, in fact, was really a stranger to me; his work clothes aligned him
magnetically with the business world, and in his square-shouldered suits, in my
mind, he resembled some bill you don’t see too often, a fifty or a hundred. No,
it had to do with how I felt when I looked at them in their house—that the
world was what it was, and I wasn’t responsible for every last thing in it. Lights
could go on in a house without my turning the switch. When I glimpsed this, I
knew it was why people came to inns like this. Bed. And breakfast. It was a feeling worth paying for.
I
paddled back in and hosed off the boat, then walked up to the house. Valerie
was showing her garden to the guests, a couple who admired everything out loud.
Valerie’s house had been featured, several months before, in a sidebar in a
glossy magazine.
“Where’s that article?” the woman
kept saying to her husband. “Where’s that article about this place? I thought I
brought the article.”
“Excuse me just a moment,” Valerie
said to them. She had the guests’ Visa card in her hand. She walked me into the
house and poured me a cup of coffee. Under her breath, she said, “Sometimes you
wish you’d put out the No Vacancy sign.”
As I stared out the window, Carl, in
shorts, walked onto the porch.
“Oh,” I said, “it slipped my mind
till now. Those things you wanted—”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I
always feel that I need all of my things with me, which isn’t true at all. A
need for abundance, isn’t that what they call it?”
She swiped the credit card through
the machine. “Keep talking,” she said. “I’m trying to get these people out the
door, but I’m listening. I’m so glad you came up.”
The credit card machine chattered in
a friendly way. Out on the porch, Carl and the guests were talking.
“So how much did you pay for this
property?” the man was asking. “Anything available in this area now? What do
the taxes run?”
How
do you control your success? For most of us, there’s never enough. But Valerie
got guests like those people, and she was busy. She’d had to hire someone to
clean and make up the beds. Lucia, Linda, something like that—I could hear the
vacuum cleaner moaning in another room.
“Annie,” Carl said. “Come in here a
minute?”
In the past, Carl had disapproved of
my paddling alone, without a lifejacket. It wasn’t the first time he had said
something to me. It sprang into my mind that he was worried about liability,
his and Valerie’s, if something “happened” on the water.
“We
have something to tell you,” Valerie said. “And then we’re going to go on a
picnic.”
They were sitting next to each other
on the couch, holding hands. Both of them looked so serious, and happy, too.
The two of them, separate, individual, almost looked like teenagers. It wasn’t
about my going by myself out on the water. I couldn’t say nothing under their beautiful, steady gaze. I couldn’t pretend,
either, that I knew, had known all along ... And to think that for years I’d
wondered what Valerie was doing with Carl. Now I wondered what on earth was
causing them to split up. Had something happened?
“It’s those people, isn’t it?” I
said, meaning the guests. “That’s why you’re leaving?” We all laughed, but it
was true that Valerie was giving up the house. The business had gotten to be
too much for her. She was selling. There was already a potential buyer.
“No, no, no,” Valerie said. “This
was all decided already. Annie—it doesn’t mean we’re not going to see each
other again. Or you. It’s just a separation.”
“The picnic,” Carl reminded her.
“Yes,” Valerie said. “We’re going to
enjoy this place today. We are! And we want you to come with us.”
We
packed lunches, and what lunches—three kinds of cheese from two different kinds
of animals, which Valerie claimed to know personally—they came from dairies
somewhere on Point Reyes. Out on the water Valerie produced a bottle of wine
that we passed back and forth between our boats.
Carl was jovial, and Valerie kept
laughing, a laughter that today seemed indistinguishable from the way she
breathed. I couldn’t deny it—I was happy too. I’d never had a picnic like this,
on the water. The circumstances were mysterious and not to be looked into too
deeply.
“Oh, we don’t have a camera,”
Valerie exclaimed at one point. “Don't you always mean to bring one and then
you forget?”
The shape of memories that day went
by like clouds. Valerie had been wrong in what she told me. The names we had for
things were all we knew about the world. It was the names that made them
visible to us. People and the things they did with each other, that was another
story. You couldn’t index it, you couldn’t correct it. You had to tell it, even
when there seemed to be nothing to tell.
In my mind, I went back to the day
before, when I was out by myself on the water. The floating, drifting feeling
came back. Then it had felt like something to indulge in: a romance. I’d wanted
to think that I was the only one who drifted. But that was how we all were. All
three of us were wobbling in our boats. In some general way, you could even say
our lives were in each other’s hands. And we trusted that nothing would happen,
out on the water that lay now like blue skin, wrinkled in the afternoon breeze.
It was amazing, really, how rarely anything happened.