Boy, Snow, Bird (11 page)

“Maybe you’ll get a mother for your birthday,” she said. I dabbed
the end of her nose with a square of kitchen paper, even though there was nothing there.

“Who said I want a mother? Maybe I want a daughter.”

“What kind of daughter?” Snow said, with the air of a department store attendant, invisible stock list in hand.

“I said maybe. It depends. I might forget to feed and water her.”

“That would be very bad, because mothers have to give their daughters cookies all the time.”

“Oh, like Grandma Olivia and Grandma Agnes give you cookies?”

“Yeah, but then they pat my stomach,” she said, stabbing toothpicks through the anchovy ham rolls. She hit the dead center of each one. She parted her own hair in the mornings with that same extreme precision. I think she observed her father’s work more closely than he might have guessed.

“Okay, so cookies yes, stomach pat no. What else?”

“You have to hide her.”

“Hide her?”

“Not all the time. Only sometimes. Like if a monster comes looking for her, you have to hide her.”

“Well, of course.”

“Even if the monster comes with a real nice smile and says ‘Excuse me, have you seen my friend Snow?’ you have to say ‘She’s not here! She’s gone to Russia.’”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll say: ‘Snow? Who’s Snow?’”

She clapped her hands. “That’s good!”

“Anything else?”

“You have to come find me if I get lost.”

“Lost? Like in the woods?”

“Not just there. Anywhere.”

“Hmmmm. Let me think about that one. It’s a big job. Meanwhile, do you think you can get your daddy out of his workroom so he can help you dress?”

She threw her arms around my neck, gave me a kiss, and hopped down from the counter. What made her so trusting, so sure of people’s goodwill? If I was like her I wouldn’t have shrunk back later when Olivia Whitman draped a gray fur stole around my shoulders and said: “Happy birthday!” It felt expensive, thick to the touch but a lighter weight on the skin than it looked. Mrs. Fletcher asked: “Is that chinchilla?” and gave me a stern look, as if I were at fault for accepting it.

(The only thing I felt guilty of was already knowing that it was chinchilla fur—Olivia had worn it the week before, when she took me to see
The Magic Flute
in Worcester. We’d smoked cigars outside the opera house and she asked me how I liked the show. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said. I said that as far as I could gather it was a tale about a woman who could be led out of captivity only by a man, and that the man could save her only by ignoring her.

“Correct,” she’d said.

“Uh . . . I really like the costumes,” I said.

Olivia switched my cigar from the left side of my mouth to the right side and looked approvingly at me through her opera glasses. “Yes, the tale is what you just said it is, but it’s also about two people who walk through fire and water together, unscathed because they are together. You’ll agree that that’s not a sentimental
interpretation, that that’s literally what happens? The trials those two undergo are about being beyond words.”

I shivered, and she’d offered me the stole. “Chinchilla. It keeps you warm.” But I’d declined. Cuban cigars and chinchilla stoles; this was more Mia Cabrini’s scene, and I was better off not developing a taste for it.)

Olivia stood back, admiring the effect. “Yes, it never looked quite right on me. But Boy, you were born to wear this.”

Arturo whispered, “Poor Viv—” in my ear. Vivian said a stole like that wouldn’t have lasted long in her wardrobe anyway, what with her talent for spilling things. But she minded; of course she minded, here was a fur stole she’d probably grown up coveting and I’d swiped it right from under her nose. Her fiancé didn’t even have the good sense to say he’d get her one. Or maybe it was good sense and a healthy awareness of his salary level that kept him from saying it.

All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table, like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: “Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity?”

Gerald clinked wineglasses with her and said: “You were always a curiosity, darling.” And Arturo proposed a toast to curiosities.

Webster and Agnes didn’t eat much dinner, but that would have been the case even if we’d been at a restaurant. Webster was
three weeks away from getting married and consequently she was on the diet to end all diets. Arturo thought it was rude of her to eat so little, and was ready to tell her so. I said, “Look . . . I wouldn’t if I were you.” I’d fasted before, so I knew how being hungry can make a girl get a little bit enigmatic. Webster’s psychology was one short straw away from abnormal. She’d conceived a disgust for the moon, kept calling “her” fat. “Fat hog, fat hog . . . what does she eat, to bloat up like that? Nothing up there but air, right? So greedy she stuffs herself with air . . . or stars . . . ?” Ted and Arturo started talking shop during the first course, just making remarks about the new catalogue they were putting together and how hard it was to find professional hand-and-ankle models who didn’t demand that a full makeup team be present at the shoot. Webster said, “Talking shop, Teddy?” and gave him such a ghoulish smile that he broke his sentence off there and started reminiscing about wedding speeches he’d heard and liked. I didn’t care whether or not Webster ate what I cooked. She cared enough to show up, and that was great. The same went for Agnes, though Snow was probably the main attraction for her. She was sitting directly across from Snow, and her eyes lit up whenever Snow laughed, which was often, since the girl shared a private joke with every spoonful of potato salad on her plate.

There was a brass water pitcher set up in the center of the table, and a couple of times I found myself smiling at my reflection in the side of it, but stopped just before anyone caught me. The smile was a chinchilla fur kind of smile.
Look what I got you,
it seemed to say.
And I can get you more
. But I wasn’t the only one smiling at
myself that night. Snow was too, peeping out from under her eyelashes. She might have been copying me. I couldn’t tell. When she got tired, she lay her head down beside her ice cream dish and just slept. It was Agnes who put her to bed, blushing at the way everybody at the table went slightly gooey eyed at the resemblance between them.

8

i
’m sure I didn’t mean to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” Mrs. Fletcher said the next morning. She put on a pretty good show of being abashed, folded hands and glum head shakes, but I wasn’t fooled. When I saw that I wasn’t going to get an explanation out of her, I changed the subject and told her about meeting Sidonie’s mother and very briefly masquerading as a teacher. She covered her eyes and groaned.

“I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

“Oh, so I should’ve told Sidonie’s mom that her daughter doesn’t go to school but comes here—”

“And drinks much more soda than is good for her and associates with disagreeable women and reads novels she’s permitted to select without supervision or even orderly thought, yes. Then her mother would have made her stop coming here.”

“Well, exactly.”

“But since you failed to inform Mrs. Fairfax of those facts, now I’ve got to do the forbidding.”

I licked an envelope flap. “I don’t see how that follows, but sure. Let’s see how long that lasts.”

Mrs. Fletcher still hadn’t uncovered her eyes. “No, really, Boy. This goes for all three of them. They’ve got to go to school.”

She didn’t seem to notice that those were more or less the same words I’d said to her on my first day at the bookstore.

I said: “Well, this joke has fallen flat. I never met Mrs. Fairfax; I don’t care for that neighborhood. Everything’s the same as it was this time yesterday, okay?”

She didn’t answer.

“Those kids won’t know what to do with themselves if you send them away.”

“Oh, rubbish. I know them. They’ll mope for five minutes, then they’ll go to school and grow up and make something of themselves, that’s what they’ll do. There are ladders they’ve got to get up. Ladders made of tests and examinations and certification papers that don’t mean anything to us, but Phoebe and Sid and Kazim can’t get where they want to go without them. I’ve been selfish. No more.”

We were busy with customers from opening time onward, so when Phoebe and Sidonie came by at about two p.m., I was sure that Mrs. Fletcher had reconsidered. She couldn’t ban them. She’d miss them too much. They both made a rush at the shelf that had
Les Misérables
on it—Sidonie to confiscate it and Phoebe to snatch it out of Sidonie’s way. Kazim came in after them, calling out to the back room: “What, what, what, did you miss me?”

“Oh yes—very horribly awfully much,” Mrs. Fletcher called back. “Wait there. I’m trying to make this man understand that
it’s a nineteenth-century first edition he’s trying to buy. He seems to think it’s an item of clothing, keeps talking about ‘jackets’—”

Kazim sidled over to the cash register and handed me a piece of card he’d folded into quarters. “When you look at my comic strips, you’re always saying—and what happened next? And after that? And after that? So I drew this.” I set my elbows on the desk and looked at him, and the more I looked, the less sure I was that I’d seen him in the group gathered around the parakeet. I was afraid to be wrong. I was afraid not to be able to tell the difference between Kazim, who I’d seen nearly every day for the past six months or so, and any other fuzzy-headed colored boy with eyeglasses.

Mrs. Fletcher came out and sent me to the back room to wrap up her customer’s purchases. I missed what she said to Sidonie and company because the man kept wanting to know things—whether I could recommend a good place to eat while he was here, and so on. The kids were gone by the time I got out front again, and I went after them with cake I’d saved from the night before. I’d only brought two slices, but it didn’t matter because Kazim was the only one who accepted. Phoebe held out her hand, but Sidonie glared at her and she dropped her hand just as I tried to place the carton into it.

“Ever since we started going to the bookstore I wondered what it’d be that put a stop to it,” Sidonie said. She and Phoebe had their arms around each other’s waists, holding each other up. “I knew it wouldn’t be anything we did. I thought maybe some customer would damage a book and it would look like we were to blame, or Mrs. Fletcher would get her sums mixed up one day and think one of us stole, or—any number of things. But no. You did it.”

“We told you it wasn’t him.” Phoebe had tears in her eyes. “It
wasn’t
.”

Kazim just eyed his cartonful of cake as if willing it to provide answers. I cleared my throat. The truth wouldn’t sound like the truth coming from me. It might even contradict whatever Mrs. Fletcher had told them, and Mrs. Fletcher was their friend. “Go to school,” I said, and watched them leave.

—

a week passed
before I could stand to look at the comic strip Kazim had drawn for me. It was about a king called Mizak and his queen, Sidie. Every December a little boy and a little girl approached the throne, the girl “from above” and the boy “from below.” Their names were Mizak and Sidie too, and the boy Mizak struggled with King Mizak for the right to the name and the next twelve months of life. The girl Sidie fought Queen Sidie for the same rights. When King Mizak and Queen Sidie were dead, the boy and the girl were dressed in their robes and crowned with their crowns, aging with preternatural speed every month until December, when the children came again. “It does us good to fight for life,” Queen Sidie said, and her lips were wrinkles that clung to her teeth. Her words were empty; she and King Mizak were too weak and weary to put up a real fight. It was slaughter, and the boy and the girl were merciless. They said: “Remember you did the same.”

Kazim used to give me strange looks whenever I tapped a corner of one of his comic strips and asked what was next. He thought it was strange of me to ask.
What’s next is what happened before.

9

a
rturo’s birthday gift to me was a weekend trip to Florida. Snow came with us, and brought Julia with her—a framed photograph she held out of the hotel-room window so that they could admire the view together. We got sandy beach and weathered cliff all in one window frame: a double whammy, as the hotel manager called it.

Arturo piggybacked Snow all around the hotel grounds and she showed Julia the coconut trees and the tropical fish whose tanks lined the reception walls. I followed with my purse stuffed full of Snow’s dolls, who wanted in on the hotel tour too. The other guests found us picturesque, and the maids and bellhops pretended to. Really we were in their way. But: “Isn’t that nice,” they said. “Isn’t that nice . . .”

In the afternoon we got Snow settled by the pool with her seven dolls in a row beside her, watching muscular men in swimming trunks making showy dives into the water and oohing and aahing as if she were at the circus. The key thing about Florida
was that almost everybody we saw was good-looking in exactly the same way. They were all tanned and excitable, closing their eyes in ecstasy as the breeze tousled their hair. I perched on the end of a sun bed and held my sun lotion out to Arturo.

“Okay, I get it, Boy.” He laid his hand flat between my shoulder blades; I felt a print forming in the lotion. “You don’t want to be alone with me.”

“That isn’t true, and you know it.” I picked up the bottle, walked around him, and worked my hands down his back.

“Could have left Snow with either one of her grandmas . . .” he said.

“You do that too much. And I like having her around. I like having you around too.” I nipped his earlobe, laughing when he looked around and asked me if I wanted to get us barred from poolside. Later that evening, when Snow was fast asleep, we went out to the beach with blankets and torches, and the sound of the waves swept around us, rising and falling. Water raked the sand we lay on and locked our bodies together, tugged us apart a little. But only a very little. Only as far as we let it.