After her husband died, Marjorie took up hobbies, lots of them, just to see what stuck. She went on a cruise for widows and widowers, which was awful for everyone except the people who hadn’t really loved their spouses to begin with. She took up knitting, which made her fingers hurt, and modern dance for seniors, which made the rest of her body hurt, too. Most of all, Marjorie enjoyed birding, which didn’t seem like a hobby at all, but like agreeing to be more observant. She’d always been good at paying attention.
She signed up for an introductory course at the Museum of Natural History, sending her check in the mail with a slip of paper wrapped around it. It was the sort of thing that her children made fun of her for, but Marjorie had her ways. The class met twice a week at seven in the morning, always gathering on the Naturalist’s Bridge just past the entrance to the park at 77th Street. Marjorie liked that, the consistency. Even on days when she was late—all year, it had only happened twice, and she’d been mortified both times—Marjorie knew just where to find the group, as they always wound around the park on the same path, moving at a snail’s pace, a birder’s pace, their eyes up in the trees and their hands loosely holding onto the binoculars around their necks.
Dr. Lawrence was in charge. He was a small man, smaller than Marjorie, who stood five foot seven in her walking shoes. His hair was thin but not gone, pale but not white. To Marjorie, he seemed a youthful spirit, though he must have been in his late fifties. Dr. Lawrence had another job at the museum, unrelated to birds. Marjorie could never remember exactly what it was. He arranged bones, or pinned butterfly wings, or dusted off the dinosaurs with a toothbrush. She was too embarrassed to keep asking. But the birds were his real love, that was clear. Marjorie loved listening to Dr. Lawrence describe what he saw in the trees. Warbling in the fir tree, behind the maple, eleven o’clock. Upper branches, just below the moon. Do you hear them calling to each other? Don’t you hear them? Sometimes Marjorie would close her eyes, even though she knew that wasn’t the point. But the park sounded so beautiful to her, like it and she had been asleep together and were only now waking up, were only now beginning to understand what was possible on a daily basis.
Marjorie’s husband, Steve, had had a big personality and the kind of booming voice that often made people turn around in restaurants. In the end, it was his heart that stopped working, as they had long suspected it would be. There had been too many decades of three-hour dinners, too much butter, too much fun. Steve had resisted all the diets his doctors suggested on principle—if that was living, what was the point? He’d known that it would happen this way, that he would go down swinging, or swigging as the case may have been. Marjorie understood. It was the children who argued.
Their daughter, Kate, was the eldest, and already had two children of her own. She would send articles over email, knowing that neither of her parents would read them. Lowering his salt, lowering his sugar, lowering his alcohol intake. Simple exercises that could be done while sitting in a chair—Kate had tried them, they were easy. Marjorie knew how to press delete.
by Emma Straub, Fifty-Two Stories | Read more:
She signed up for an introductory course at the Museum of Natural History, sending her check in the mail with a slip of paper wrapped around it. It was the sort of thing that her children made fun of her for, but Marjorie had her ways. The class met twice a week at seven in the morning, always gathering on the Naturalist’s Bridge just past the entrance to the park at 77th Street. Marjorie liked that, the consistency. Even on days when she was late—all year, it had only happened twice, and she’d been mortified both times—Marjorie knew just where to find the group, as they always wound around the park on the same path, moving at a snail’s pace, a birder’s pace, their eyes up in the trees and their hands loosely holding onto the binoculars around their necks.
Dr. Lawrence was in charge. He was a small man, smaller than Marjorie, who stood five foot seven in her walking shoes. His hair was thin but not gone, pale but not white. To Marjorie, he seemed a youthful spirit, though he must have been in his late fifties. Dr. Lawrence had another job at the museum, unrelated to birds. Marjorie could never remember exactly what it was. He arranged bones, or pinned butterfly wings, or dusted off the dinosaurs with a toothbrush. She was too embarrassed to keep asking. But the birds were his real love, that was clear. Marjorie loved listening to Dr. Lawrence describe what he saw in the trees. Warbling in the fir tree, behind the maple, eleven o’clock. Upper branches, just below the moon. Do you hear them calling to each other? Don’t you hear them? Sometimes Marjorie would close her eyes, even though she knew that wasn’t the point. But the park sounded so beautiful to her, like it and she had been asleep together and were only now waking up, were only now beginning to understand what was possible on a daily basis.
Marjorie’s husband, Steve, had had a big personality and the kind of booming voice that often made people turn around in restaurants. In the end, it was his heart that stopped working, as they had long suspected it would be. There had been too many decades of three-hour dinners, too much butter, too much fun. Steve had resisted all the diets his doctors suggested on principle—if that was living, what was the point? He’d known that it would happen this way, that he would go down swinging, or swigging as the case may have been. Marjorie understood. It was the children who argued.
Their daughter, Kate, was the eldest, and already had two children of her own. She would send articles over email, knowing that neither of her parents would read them. Lowering his salt, lowering his sugar, lowering his alcohol intake. Simple exercises that could be done while sitting in a chair—Kate had tried them, they were easy. Marjorie knew how to press delete.
by Emma Straub, Fifty-Two Stories | Read more:
