Boy, Snow, Bird (29 page)

“I thought you’d never ask. She’s sleeping, though. Do I try to wake her up?”

“No. No, let her rest. Just . . . tell her to call me.”

“But you’re okay, right?”

She called me a sweetheart for asking. It was hard to tell whether or not Mom and Aunt Mia had fallen out. Mom didn’t seem to think so, but maybe she’d done something that Aunt Mia was holding a grudge over. I know she went to Aunt Mia’s place twice, but both times Aunt Mia wasn’t home.

Dad asked if we should be worried about Mia, and Mom got irritated. “Why should we be worried about Mia, Arturo? Because she’s not married? Because she works hard at a job she likes?”

Dad let a few seconds go by and then said: “The Mia we know makes a little time for her friends no matter what, that’s all.”

“‘The Mia we know,’ eh? So what are you saying . . . that there’s this whole other Mia we don’t know?”

There was quite a long discussion about it and Mom didn’t realize she’d been tricked out of being irritated until Dad had made some rough sketches to show us which one of Aunt Mia’s bookcases could be a door that revolved into a hidden room.

I did what I could to smoke Aunt Mia out . . . I mailed her a copy of the notes I’d taken at the diner. She’d have called if she’d read them, no doubt about it. They must have gotten lost in the mail.

6

i
came home from school on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and Snow was there, playing Julia’s piano. Not a whole piece of music, just tumbling little passages. I peeped around the parlor door and watched her working the piano pedals with her bare feet. The bare feet seemed proof that she was out of the ordinary; it was already so cold that I was wearing socks over two layers of pantyhose. Dad came up behind me and pushed me into the room with her, saying: “C’mon, that’s your sister in there.”

She looked more colored in person. Maybe it was the way she’d chosen to wear her hair, combed and pinned up on one side of her head so that it all rained down on one shoulder and left the other exposed to the dusty sunlight. She smiled at me and the words I’d been about to say went into hiding.

“Have mercy, Bird Whitman. I may need you to dial it back a notch with the cuteness,” she said, and slid off the piano stool. She was three days early. Her voice was a lot more girlish than I’d imagined it, considering the things she’d written to me, but her
hugging technique was like Dad’s, maybe even a little more intense. She’d brought me a bouquet. Some of them looked like squashed gray-blue poppies. Others were almost roses, their color a stormy purple. Their petals and stamen were all twisted together, but they smelled good. Snow said they were the kind of flowers that only opened up at night; you picked them at night and then they stayed open.

“They’re not poison flowers, are they?”

She stared at me. “What?”

“You know . . . like La Belle Capuchine’s flowers in your letter . . .”

“Oh! Ha ha. No, no poison.”

“And no suitcase, either?”

“Left it at number eleven. I’ll be sleeping over there, in that creepy room with the tulle curtains and the sugar plum fairy mobiles. You know, I never even liked ballerinas.”

“Huh, well you should’ve said so.”

“I think I started to once, and everybody started saying, ‘Uh oh . . .
somebody’s
not herself today.’ I was outnumbered.”

“Oh.” So she was outnumbered. That was not a good excuse.

“Come to the mirror.” She fixed one of the night flowers behind my ear and stood looking over my shoulder.

“I see it,” she said.

I looked at us. “What?” We didn’t look as though we were related. Not even cousins.

“That thing you wrote to me about how technically impossible things are always trying so hard to happen to us, and just letting the nearest technically impossible thing happen—”

“Oh . . . yeah, I see it too! Oh, Snow. Think of all the pranks we can play.”

The mirror caught a few rays of sunset through the open front door, and the image of us went chestnut-colored at the corners. Snow’s hand was on my shoulder and both my own hands were at my sides, but our reflections didn’t call that any kind of reunion. The girls in the mirror had their arms around each other, and they smiled at us until we followed their lead.

“Looks like long ago,” Snow said. “Like Great-aunt Effie just said: ‘I hope you girls don’t think you’re something new? We’ve had sisters like you in this family before.’ And then she shows us an old, old photo . . . one of those tinted daguerreotypes . . .”

She lay with her head in my lap for most of the afternoon, jumping up every now and again to start a disc spinning on the record player. We talked about Frank Novak and how he’d told me Mom was evil and she said, “You know that’s not true, right? I don’t know what she is, but evil isn’t it.” We talked about Ephraim, who was most definitely not her boyfriend and was never going to be.

“So . . . your room at number eleven. What did you want instead of ballerinas?” I asked.

She really considered the question, as if it still mattered and changes would be made based on the answer she gave.

“Plain pink and white. Deep pink, not cotton-candy pink.”

We heard Dad telling someone it was an open house, and Miss Fairfax started walking up the hallway toward us. The pattern of her footsteps is pretty distinctive, elegant, just like her. I know it well from being designated lookout at school. But she turned
back when she heard us talking. Others came by with covered dishes and clay pots; they didn’t speak to us, just rapped their knuckles on the open door, waved, and left notes on the kitchen table, alongside their offerings.

(
Will return to kiss thine hand at thy earliest convenience, fair maiden—Anon.

Welcome back, Snow. Let’s catch up soon! Susie Conlin.

Hey there, beautiful one, don’t you dare leave before you come see us—Mr. and Mrs. Murray.
)

Later in the evening we went to see what there was to eat and I was awestruck. There wasn’t an inch of space left on the tabletop, or on any of the counters; it had all been taken over by multicolored crockery. The air smelled roasted. “Uh . . . I’ve never seen anything like this before,” I said, grabbing at a pile of note cards before they slipped onto the floor. But when I looked at Snow, I caught her finishing a yawn.

“Me, either,” she said. “Isn’t it kind of everybody?” I didn’t answer her. She started reading some of the note cards with a really touched expression, but I’d caught her. She was used to being treated like this. It was nothing to her. I had a moment of hating her, or at least understanding why Mom did. Thankfully it came and went really quickly, like a dizzy spell, or a three-second blizzard. Does she know that she does this to people? Dumb question. This is something we do to her.

1

i
don’t know who or what anybody is anymore. There are exceptions: My husband is one, and Alecto Fletcher’s another. The other day Arturo looked into my eyes and said: “Here I am, with my stupid face. Remember? The face that’s so stupid you told me you never wanted to see it again?” His hair’s thinned a lot on top, but he’s even more lionlike now that he’s all bewhiskered, and I just haven’t got a single defense against him anymore. I almost spoke about it to Webster. Ted gets cheaper and cheaper all the time; his behavior at restaurants is becoming incredible—how convenient that he falls asleep or has to use the restroom just before the bill arrives. The question “How can you love him?” could sour my friendship with Webster at this point. Because she does love Ted. Fiercely. Wives are uncanny creatures, the day is a boxing ring and we dart around the corners of it, pushing our luck with both hands. We risk becoming so commonplace to the men we’ve thrown our lots in with who can’t see us anymore, and who pat the sofa when they mean to pat our
knee. That or we become so incomprehensible that it repulses our husbands, who after all can’t be expected to stomach a side dish of passionate misery at every meal, no matter how much variety there is. But husbands are uncanny too. It all seems to come from having to be each other’s anchor, bread and butter, constant calm. Emotionally speaking he and I have to remain in some fixed state where we can always be found if necessary. In the midst of arguments I should rightfully have won I’ve found myself conceding points to him because some appeal is made to this fixed place. A look, a word, a touch. How could anyone enjoy this, the possibility, necessity even, of their being called to heel in this way? It disturbs me that there’s a part of my heart or mind, or some spot where the two meet, a spot that isn’t mine because I’m a wife. This part isn’t really me at all, but a promise I made on a snowy day. A promise to stay and to be with Arturo and to be good to him, and when there’s no other way, I have to go to that promise to find my feeling for my husband. We walk the finest of foolish, foolish lines. How can Webster still love Ted? How can anybody love anybody else for more than five minutes?

Alecto Fletcher was the only one I could tell about Charlie and Arturo—without using their names, of course. I said: “Suppose there’s a woman who’s finding that she’s only really started to love somebody now that somebody else has stopped loving her—do you think that’s real, or would you say this woman’s just trying to make the best of things?”

Alecto picked caviar out of her teeth and said: “Well.”

“I’m asking for a friend.”

“Were those exact words said: ‘I no longer love you’?”

“No.”

“No. Hardly anybody ever says it like that, do they? They simply become unkind. Look—for some people love is like a king they swear allegiance to. That kind of person has to be released from one bond before they can begin to forge another. All very conventional behavior, but fiercely interior convention. I’m not trying to imply that such people are wise or that they impress me—I’m one of them, and it’s probably the most futile form of integrity going. But if it’s a side dish to other forms of integrity, then it’s all right. And there are worse scenarios, Boy.”

“Worse scenarios than what?”

“Than love not beginning on time, of course.”

All right, I don’t know what or who anybody is anymore except for Arturo, Alecto, and Clara and John Baxter. Clara and John are a fine couple and that’s all there is to it. They put an impenetrable barrier of good manners up against some of Olivia’s more insulting inquiries, but didn’t bow their heads to pray when grace was said. As we all sat around that table together, Gerald putting away heavy-duty quantities of turkey and stuffing so he didn’t have to talk, Vivian clearly wanting to show some warmth toward her sister but ending up just squeaking platitudes at her, John attempting to drink away the feeling of being pretty damn unwelcome, Agnes keeping Snow’s left hand prisoner so that the girl had to alternate between use of her knife and use of her fork, as I sat there with that family of mine I reassessed Olivia as a fellow nonswerver. She stood by the decisions she’d taken with Clara because there was nowhere else for
her to stand. Clara has a good heart, but goodness is independent from gentleness. Had Olivia exposed a chink in her armor there could’ve been a bloodbath. Quite rightly so, I guess. That old woman treats my Bird as coldly as she can get away with, stopping just short of making Arturo lose his temper. But the sight and sound of her acting out all that hostility . . . I couldn’t sit next to that without wanting to try to shield her somehow. I don’t know, just so she could rest for a moment before picking up her battle-ax again. Olivia was young when she sent Clara away, young and probably so brutal that Gerald thought it was better for the child to grow up in Biloxi than stay home and be stepped on. If that’s what Gerald thought, who’s to say he wasn’t right about that? Olivia had raised Vivian, and there Vivian was, a thirty-eight-year-old attorney-at-law who should have had enough poise to keep her from gaping when her brother-in-law told her some of the things he used to do for youthful kicks. John Baxter used to follow middle-aged white ladies down deserted streets at night, walking faster as they walked faster, slowing down if a witness appeared. He found their fear of him hilarious and sad. One woman begged him to leave her alone and tried to make him take her purse. Another woman turned around, walked toward him, put her hand on his arm, and whispered, “How much?” That took the thrill out of the game, and he stopped playing it. Clara, Arturo, and I were the only ones who laughed at that. Snow said, “Uncle John,” in a tiny, distressed voice. It was pretty effective, the gasp of distress combined with the white dress and the ardent glance and the shadowy hair all loose around her face.

“I don’t get it,” Bird said. I told her I’d explain later, and she answered: “No, you won’t.” She nudged me and pointed her chin in Gerald’s direction. My usually amiable father-in-law had stopped chewing and was just holding his food in his mouth. He looked revolted by John and everything John said. But then Gerald had been eating too much.

“Emmett Till,” he said, suddenly. “Emmett Till did what he did just one time. Livia, what is it he did . . . right, he whistled. He was a Northerner and he didn’t know any better. So he whistled at a Mississippi white woman. She didn’t like that, so fetched her gun. But she didn’t have to use it; she had a husband and a brother-in-law, real men who weren’t afraid to take on a fourteen-year-old boy. You saw what they did to Emmett Till. You saw the boy’s face. Agnes, you cried and said he looked melted—”