Boy, Snow, Bird (16 page)

The snake bracelet Arturo gave me lies in its box for now, but soon I’ll be ready to wear it again. I’ve missed the feel of cold scales around my wrist. I can’t discount the possibility that the bracelet’s been molding me into the wearer it wants. There was an afternoon that I raised my hand to Snow, fully intending to swat her like a fly. She’d asked me if she could lift Bird out of her crib and walk around with her. She’d asked this a few times, and I’d told her no. She was too small and too clumsy to walk around with a baby. I didn’t tell her this; I just said no. Snow said she’d be very careful. She said please please please please. She leaned over Bird’s crib and pressed the side of her face against the side of her sister’s face as if showcasing the contrast between their features, and she gave me a look of radiant, innocent virtue that
made my skin crawl. Somehow it was spontaneous and calculated at exactly the same time. My hand came up to knock that look off her face, and I think if she’d looked fearful or piteous or anything like that I’d probably have hit her. I was gray-skinned with exhaustion, fat around the middle, my eyes were smaller than the bags beneath them, and Snow’s daintiness grew day by day, to menacing proportions. I would’ve hit her and decided it was self-defense. I wouldn’t have seen the rat catcher (or the snake bracelet) in my actions until much later. But Snow noted that split-second jerk of my arm with an expression that mixed incomprehension and curiosity—she had no idea what I was about to do, but she had a feeling it was going to be new to her and therefore interesting—I settled my hand on the nearest crib post and spoke to her gently:
Your sister’s sleepy, Snow. Go play outside.
She left, looking back at me, still curious. Maybe there is no Snow, but only the work of smoke and mirrors. The Whitmans need someone to love, and have found too much to hate in each other, and so this lifelike little projection walks around and around a reel, untouchable.

In the middle of another night of mirror dreams I got up and checked on Bird, who seemed to be having herself a highly satisfactory sleep; she was smacking her lips. Next I went into the bathroom, where I turned on both taps and held on to the edge of the sink with a feeling of terror. I didn’t switch on any lights. It didn’t seem impossible for the rat catcher to be right behind me, ready to dunk my head into the water and hold it down until I drowned this time.

I heard myself saying
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do
. But I was saying that only to divert my attention from what I was about to do.

I washed my face, then went into the parlor, picked up the phone, and tried Clara Baxter’s number. This time she answered immediately, which threw me a little bit. I mean, I gave the operator her number, and the next thing I knew Clara said, “Hello?”

“Hello, Clara. This is Boy—you sent me some flowers a while ago, and—”

“Hello, Boy. How are you?” Her voice was clear and gentle, and it sounded to me as if she was smiling.

“I’m fine, Clara. Thank you for the flowers,” I said. Then I held my hand over the receiver and tried to finish crying without making any noise.

“How’s the little girl? Arturo told me her name’s Bird. It’s a pretty name.”

She waited for me to answer, then she said: “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, Boy. When Bird starts eating solid food, you bring her over here. She can stay with me. I won’t blame you. No one will blame you, and you can come visit her whenever you want.”

“Clara.”

“Yes?”

“Your mother sent you away?”

“Yes, she sent me to Mississippi, to live with my aunt Effie.”

“And you’re not . . . you’re not mad at her?”

“No, Boy. I don’t like her much, but I’m not mad at her. Aunt Effie did right by me. And now I’m living how I want to live. Wouldn’t have been able to do that under Ma’s thumb, don’t you know. You didn’t have a mother yourself, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And you’re all right, aren’t you? We turn out all right.”

(Do we?)

“Let Bird start on solid food before you come see me,” Clara said. “And don’t be too hard on Arturo. He doesn’t mean any harm, couldn’t do any if he tried.”

“I want you to take Snow,” I said. “Just for a little while. Please.”

—

just for a little while.
Just for a little while. It was Arturo who took her to Boston. She was wearing a straw boater and had her pockets stuffed full of cookies, just as she had the first time I ever saw her. She gave Bird three hundred kisses and said: “That oughta hold ya ’til I’m home again.” Agnes Miller took ill; I knew it was because Snow was going away from her. She waved her handkerchief from her bedroom window by way of saying farewell. Up until then I hadn’t realized she lived in Olivia and Gerald’s house, that a room in that house was all she had to call home.

I was the last one she hugged before she jumped into the car with her father.

“See you next week,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Next week.”

Snow is not the fairest of them all. And the sooner she and Olivia and all the rest of them understand that, the better. Still, I’d snuck Julia’s records into the kid’s luggage because I didn’t want to leave her with nothing.

1

l
ately I’ve become the kind of girl who likes to think on paper, settle down with a notepad and a decent pen and an aniseed jawbreaker so big that my back teeth clasp around it as if it were a long-lost part of my skull they’re welcoming home. When I’m older, I’ll be a reporter like Aunt Mia, who isn’t really my aunt in any biological sense, but is much closer to my idea of an aunt than my dad’s sister is. I can usually get Aunt Mia to splash a little wine into my orange juice when Mom’s not around. And she’s not exactly a chore to look at. I’ve observed reactions to her on the street. Women look at her and get this happy “What a waste” expression on their faces, like the sight of her is making them feel good about themselves but also they think someone ought to give her some beauty tips. Aunt Mia wears flat shoes and really practical tortoiseshell hair slides and slacks and blouses in clashing colors; it can get pretty extreme. You think hmmm, could be a story there.
She was an ordinary librarian, innocent of any crime, but one day she fell into a giant paint box and has been on the run from the fashion police ever since . . .

So the women who pass Aunt Mia get a little extra pep to their step, but the men look at her the way I might look at a hot fudge sundae in the hours between lunch and dinner. You know, when you’re not sure if it’s a good idea to go ahead—you’re interested beyond a shadow of a doubt, but you wonder if it might turn out to be a little too much for you. Men seem to realize that Aunt Mia’s already making the most of herself. She and Aunt Viv are probably just as smart as each other, but Aunt Mia’s a lot more educational to be around than Aunt Viv, or she’s more my kind of educational.

Something about Aunt Viv is all curled up at the edges, like—I’ll die if she ever sees this, but she won’t, she won’t—like a piece of old bread. I’m mean. Dad’s warned me about it; I know the risk I run when I find fault with people more often than I look for something to appreciate. It’s like having grit in your eye; you see less and less of the real person standing right in front of you and more and more of the grit in your eye. I get the message. I’ve noticed that she doesn’t keep trying to test
his
vocabulary, though, so I feel like it’s easy for him not to get cranky with her. Also
The Ed Sullivan Show
isn’t one of Dad’s favorite TV shows, so when Aunt Viv drops by on a Sunday to watch it with us, it’s not Dad’s parade she’s raining on. Her face whenever the Supremes come on . . . she’ll try to be girlish and sing along but her eyes say
SOS SOS it’s an alien invasion
. Aunt Viv with her fingers patting away at her super-straight hair, like she’s trying to wake it up or calm it down or show it off or hide it or who knows . . . I guess she
tries her best to look out for me, but I’ve got better things to do than be precious about my complexion. Aunt Viv says it’s not so much a matter of making improvements, it’s more to do with stopping things from getting worse. But I can’t sit in the shade on a fine day, not when the sun wants me. It’s too much like playing hard to get, which I’ve heard all about and don’t believe in at all.

Aunt Viv lives alone and is always saying how much it suits her, even when no one was even talking about that. She had a fiancé but he abandoned her; she doesn’t know that I know a man ever fell in love with her. Gee-Ma Agnes says he broke the engagement off because of me. Apparently Aunt Viv’s fiancé had no idea she was colored until I was born, then he saw me and said: “Wait a minute . . .”

I don’t buy it. Aunt Viv wouldn’t speak to me at all if that was true; she’d be the way Grammy Olivia is with me. Grammy Olivia sometimes smiles at me by accident, like when she’s just turned away from somebody else who’s made her laugh and her eyes fall on me before she’s done smiling. Otherwise I get nothing from her. I remember being very small, or her being tall enough for me to expect to see a crown of clouds on her head when I looked up at her—and I made her a daisy-chain bracelet. I put it in her hand and she said “Thank you” and left it on the coffee table, but I picked it up and presented it to her all over again. The second time she held the bracelet over her wrist without letting it touch her skin, as if it looked cheap to her and she didn’t want to put it on in case it gave her a rash. Then she said something to my mother. That’s Grammy Olivia, a voice above my head, not even speaking to me, saying: “She gets darker and
darker every day.” Mom didn’t answer, but she pushed me a little behind her, somehow managing to hug me at the same time. A backward hug is the only way I can think of it, Mom putting herself between me and Grammy Olivia. I’m reconsidering. Aunt Viv may have had a lily-livered fiancé after all. If so, then Dad’s right about her, and Aunt Viv’s strength is in not blaming me. Another thing that happened a little while after I was born was that Mr. Clarke at the butcher’s started giving Grammy Olivia extra little bits of cheap meat she hadn’t ordered. Ham hocks and chitterlings. “I guess he figures Livia knows how to cook ’em up real good,” Gee-Ma says, cackling so much she can hardly speak. “Not our Livia.” Mr. Clarke’s just trying to be nice, but Aunt Olivia separates the little bag from the rest of her order and gives it to the housemaid who comes in twice a week, makes her take it home with her, ignoring Gee-Pa Gerald’s “Been too long since I tasted chitlins . . .”

Grammy Olivia gets extra meat but Aunt Viv lost her fiancé. Do I feel bad for blowing Aunt Viv’s cover? Not really. I accidentally brought truth to light, and bringing truth to light is the right thing to do.

Aunt Mia had a stomachache last week. It wasn’t your usual type of stomachache. You don’t normally call someone to come hold your hand through a stomachache, and that’s what Aunt Mia did. She called Mom at three in the morning, maybe because she knows that Mom never just lets the telephone ring. If it rings when she’s in the shower, she yells: “Don’t just stand there, get the phone! Get the phone!” Aunt Mia called at three in the morning and it woke me up, and I stared at the silvery-blue moons
painted on my ceiling, heard Mom talking to Dad.
Something-something-something-gotta-look-in-on-Mia.
By the time she was downstairs putting her shoes on, I was down there too, pulling on Dad’s old velvet blazer, the one he bought years ago and immediately wished he hadn’t. Mom said: “So it’s like that, huh,” and I said: “You know there’s no school tomorrow.” Mrs. Chen, Louis’s mom, drove us over to Worcester in her taxi. I think Mom tried to pay her extra for her trouble, but Mrs. Chen kept saying: “Not necessary. I don’t sleep much anyway.” Aunt Mia didn’t come to the door, so Mom let herself in with the key she has, and Aunt Mia was in her bed, on top of her sheets, not underneath them, looking greenish with nausea. Mom sat on the bed and tried to get Aunt Mia’s head on her lap but Aunt Mia said: “What, do you want me to puke?” So we just took a hand each and held on. I asked if I could get her anything and she pulled a smile out from somewhere and said what a well-brought-up child I was and, no, she couldn’t ask for anything more. After a while Mom jerked her head to bid me be gone, and I went into the kitchen, poured myself some chocolate milk, and wandered into the parlor to look at Aunt Mia’s wall of heroes. Most of her heroes are colored . . . like I am. Aunt Mia says she didn’t go out looking for colored heroes. She says that’s just the way it worked out. Mom and Aunt Mia murmured to each other and I studied the faces of journalists who spoke out against inequalities and wouldn’t shut up even when people threatened to kill them. If someone threatens to kill you for speaking up about something they’ve done, they must be feeling their guilt. So maybe that’s how you know you’re on the right track.

There was Ida B. Wells of the Washington
Evening Star
(“gutsy as hell”), her hair gathered up into a gorgeous pompadour that I’m going to try to copy as soon as my chin will agree to tilt up in just as dignified a way as hers. There was Charlotta Bass, publisher of the
California Eagle
 . . . she’s still very much alive, that one—Aunt Mia got her autograph and tucked it into the frame along with the picture. There was Robert S. Abbott of
The Chicago Defender
with his bowler hat on, his eyes stern and kind—when I fell asleep, he was the one who stuck up for me. “It is possible to
develop
a nose for a good story,” he told Charlotta Bass and Ida B. Wells, when they pointed out that I didn’t have one. He borrowed Dad’s voice to say that, and I liked him all the more for it.