Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel

by Oyeyemi, Helen

  I was new to champagne, but as soon as I tasted it, spark after golden spark, I thought, well, there’s magic in this water, no wonder Mia said to wish on it.

  “So when are you due to blow the secret world of blondes wide open? I keep walking into stores and waiting for some official-looking person to take me aside and inform me I’m not welcome in their establishment. It hasn’t happened yet, but I can’t go on like this.”

  Mia refilled our bowls. “You can’t go on like this? I can’t go on like this. This piece has me petrified. It’s my first big piece after a year and a half on the ‘cat stuck up a tree’ beat. My dad’s giving this journalism thing another three months to take off before he sends me to Chicago to run another one of his damn hotels. I keep telling him and telling him that I need more time, that it’s not so easy for women in this field, but he just says: ‘Don’t give me that! You’re a Cabrini! And this is 1953! Stop making excuses!’ And I say to him, ‘Yeah, it’s 1953 and down South there’s still a nice little system going, it’s called segregation.’ And he says, ‘How about just showing a little gratitude that you’re not colored?’”

  “One of his hotels?” I said. “How many does he own?”

  She shook her head. “Excuse me, but that’s not the point. The point is I’ve been assigned a piece of froth—oh, look, it’s a catty article about blondes written by a brunette—and I want to use it to pull the rug out from under their feet. But the more I write up my notes, the more it all just looks like a pack of playing cards.”

  “Well—show me what you’ve got.”

  She pulled a couple of typed pages out of her pocket. They had been folded into quarters. I opened them out and read.

  You want the scoop, and I’m going to give it to you. But let’s make a deal first. How often have you read an article all the way through to the end and said to yourself: “I don’t know where this chump gets the nerve to show up for work in the morning!” I’ll tell you how I get the nerve, and if you don’t buy it, you don’t have to read another word of it.

  Here goes: I’m a brunette from a long line of brunettes. We’ve never really had anything to worry about. After all, gentlemen marry us. But something happened to me when I was ten years old. My hands began to draw distinctions between the sacred and the profane. I watched them and made notes. My left hand was part of me, it belonged to me, and it only consented to touch things I considered beautiful. If Peter Pan had visited me, I’d have given him a thimble with my left hand. I wrote letters to my best friend with my left hand. When I was reading a book and found that a line or paragraph moved me in some way, I’d touch the words with my left hand.

  My right hand was an object, it belonged to the world, and I used it to manipulate other objects. Putting my clothes on, pulling my socks up, holding on to the standing pole in the bus, and so on.

  I looked up from the page and said: “Mia, this is wacky.”

  “Oh, absolutely. But that’s what happened.” She had a little pot of nail varnish out on the tabletop and was painting the fingernails of her right hand blue. “I support you if you want to quit already.”

  “No, I’m in—I’m in.”

  It was around that time that my parents got divorced. My clothes and books and posters were divided up. Some were put into a room in my dad’s new apartment and the rest stayed at home (which suddenly became new too, without him). My dad said: “Don’t cry. Aw, what are you crying for? What’s happening right now isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t good, either—it’s normal. Okay?”

  My mom said: “Yeah, listen to your dad.”

  That summer we had a heat wave that killed a lot of people. “More than a thousand?” I asked my dad. He said yeah. “More than TWO thousand?” He said yeah. I was chicken, so I stopped there. That summer Jesse Owens was in all the papers with that gold medal he won representing our country in the Olympics. That was the year the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteered to do the right thing by Spain and help fight Franco. And all the while there was the theater of my hands. It was theater, in that it was the performance of something that was true, and as such, I believed in it with all my heart but was also able to come to the end of it at a moment’s notice. The whole thing was set up as a transaction: My hands were giving me a show. There was my left hand, dangling limp for most of the day—my parents took turns asking if it hurt—and there was my right hand, weary from gripping and pushing and pulling and lifting for two. When I asked my hands to end the show, they wanted payment. My right hand made me promise to “see far” and my left hand made me promise to “remember what is said.”

  I gave them my word. And I’ve kept it, partly from a fear of a repeated mutiny. Add a third action: “Write it all down,” and it seems to me you’ve got yourself a journalist of some kind.

  All right, if you’re still with me, thanks for staying. I write these words with a fifteen-dollar wig on my head. Wheat-sheaf blond, that’s what it said on the tag. So this is a bulletin direct from the secret world. The first thing you learn is whom to beware of. They’re exactly the same people you had to beware of as a nonblonde. The kind who think they know what you are and don’t mind telling you all about it.

  I turned the page over, but there wasn’t any more. Mia blew on her nails. “I guess I could start a hotel newspaper.”

  “No, you’re going to do this. Got a pen?”

  She handed me her fountain pen. “Finish that coat of polish,” I told her. She still had three fingernails to go, but instead of doing as she was told, she read over my shoulder as I wrote.

  Here’s a story for you—the kind you find in an old library book with cobwebs between the pages. You know that book; you forget the title after you’ve returned it and over the years you try to look it up a few times, but you never find it again.

  Once there was a pretty powerful magician. He spoke to the things around him, and as long as the thing he addressed had life in it, it obeyed him. “Barren tree, bear fruit,” he’d say. And no matter what had happened to the tree, no matter how ravaged its roots, the tree flourished. “Horse, grow wings,” he’d say, and the horse bowed its head as strong, finely plumed wings swept over its back. But that wasn’t how the magician made his living. Mostly he improved women’s looks for a fee. Women came to him themselves, or were brought to him by their ambitious mothers or diffident fathers. He’d look into a woman’s eyes and say: “You are a beauty,” and she heard the words and believed them so deeply that her features fell into either lush, soft harmony, or heartbreakingly strict symmetry—whichever suited her better. He’d say it to her only once, and it lasted the rest of her lifetime, so his fees were high. But the magician could also undo natural beauty, for a greater fee than the one he charged for beautifying. He sort of hoped the high fee would discourage people, but it didn’t. It was well-known that if your wife or daughter was unruly or otherwise deserving of punishment you could bring her to this magician, who would tell her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow . . .” He said it in such a way that the woman who heard him believed him, and the words did their work. It was a shame, and he didn’t like to do it, but business is business.

  Mia snapped her fingers. “I remember how this one goes!”

  “Great.” I was only too happy to push the paper over to her. I’ve always had a hard time figuring out what the moral of a story is supposed to be, and she was bound to know: She’d been to college.

  Mia wrote.

  One day a farmer came to the magician. “I’ve hesitated over this decision for many days, because my wife is very beautiful,” the farmer said. “Possibly the most beautiful woman in all the world. Still, I think you’d better make her ugly all the same. She frightens me; she frightens everyone who goes near her.”

  “Frightens you?” the magician asked. “Frightens you how? And where is she?”

  “She’s back at the farm.” The farmer shuffled his feet apologetically. “I tried to bring her with me, but
she wouldn’t come.”

  “Wouldn’t come?” The farmer was big and tall, at least twice the size of the magician. He must not have tried very hard to persuade his wife to travel with him.

  “Somehow I couldn’t lay a hand on her,” the farmer said, unable to hide his anguish. “I moved to seize her arm, and found I’d seized my own arm. I snatched at her hair and ended up pulling my ear. And if you want to know how I got this black eye . . .”

  The magician was interested. He’d met several stunning witches, but none of them had married farmers, and none of them practiced this particular kind of passive resistance. He agreed to accompany the farmer home.

  Mia dropped the pen and nodded at me to continue. “You do remember how it goes, right? I mean . . . we’re not just . . . ?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I mean—no. Sure I remember.”

  I made my handwriting much smaller than usual, in case I was wrong.

  The magician found the farmer’s wife kneeling, planting cassava, setting the cuttings up inside little hills of soil. There’s no use trying to describe her in detail; all that can really be said is that she had the kind of beauty that people write songs about and occasionally commit suicide over. The type who seems a very long way away even when she’s right there in your arms. She wiped her hands on her apron, looked up at him, and said: “Hello.”

  As a test, he said to her: “Come, woman, be more beautiful.” (Her husband groaned at that.) But nothing happened. The farmer’s wife went on planting. The magician felt uneasy—was it really impossible for her beauty to be any greater? Could she really be first among women, hidden away here on this farm?—and so he told her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” in the strongest tones possible. The woman didn’t raise her eyes from the ground. Her hands continued to plant cassava, and she remained exactly the same. “Don’t disturb my life, magician,” she said. “Just leave me be.”

  The magician took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to his, though her gaze and the feel of her skin made his flesh crawl. “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” the magician said again. The field itself heard him this time, and three scarecrows appeared at the perimeter. But the farmer’s wife didn’t change. She said: “All I’ve ever wanted is to make things grow, and to feed people. I’ve been doing that for some years now, and I’ve been happy. I don’t want anything more or less than what I already have. I beg you: Don’t disturb my life.”

  “But your husband is frightened of you,” the magician told her.

  “I’ve given him no cause to be,” she replied.

  “And yet he can hardly bear to look at you . . .”

  “It isn’t necessary for him to look at me.”

  Mia read that part over three times, and for a moment I thought I was busted. But she continued writing in silence, cupping her hand over the page as though she were the imposter and not me.

  “Grow wings,” he told her. “Bear fruit.” She did neither. He pursued her for miles of farmland, got in the way of all her daily tasks, issued command after command, whatever came into his head. “Become a walking stick!” She didn’t. His voice grew hoarse. At last he admitted that she was a formidable witch, and that he was willing to learn whatever she could teach him.

  “It isn’t magic,” she said. “It’s just that I’m well dressed. You men who try to tell me I’m a scarecrow or try to grab my arm but can’t manage it, don’t you understand that you’re not really addressing me? It’s more as if you’re talking to a coat I’m wearing.”

  She was sat on a low chair, shelling beans, and he sat down at her feet and began to help her. “I don’t see what you mean,” he said. “Teach me. Show me.”

  “What can I teach you?” she said. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide. She stayed like that for one minute, two minutes. He thought she was sleeping and forced himself to place a hand on her shoulder. A snake’s head glided out from between her lips, bright as new chainmail; he saw that its golden coils wound down her throat.

  “You’re wrapped around her heart,” the magician said.

  “I am the heart,” the snake replied.

  He left the farm without looking back. There are few things in life more unpleasant than the laughter of a snake.

  “Maybe that isn’t the version you read,” Mia said, watching me. She bit the end of the pen a few times. “I think I read it in Italian, so . . .”

  “No, this is pretty much the version I read,” I said, because it felt too damn late to back down. I imagine that from time to time some similar situation has led governments to declare war.

  I had to be up early for a trial shift at a bookstore, so I sent Mia home right after dinner.

  “Hey,” she said, on her way out of the door. “Maybe this bookstore job is the one.”

  I said: “Maybe!” But I thought: Probably not.

  The best line of work for me would be roadside sprite. I’d live quietly by a dust-covered track that people never came across unless they took a wrong turn, and I’d offer the baffled travelers lemonade and sandwiches, maybe even fix their engines if they asked nicely (I’d have used my solitude to read extensively on matters of car maintenance). Then the travelers would go on their way, relaxed and refreshed, and they’d forget they’d ever met me. That’s the ideal meeting . . . once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.

  5

  the next morning Ted took Webster on a trip to Wachusett Mountain. He said it was “just because,” but we decided between us that he was either going to propose or he was going to call the whole thing off. I hoped he would propose. She’d been so sad that he hadn’t proposed on Valentine’s Day. She’d asked me if I thought some women just weren’t meant to be married. I said: “Yes. But not you.” I meant it too.

  She swung between hope and despair. She rehashed old conversations with Ted until I told her she had to stop it before she made herself ill or something. She was hopeful because she’d caught Arturo Whitman looking thoughtfully at her fingers, sizing them up, as it were. She despaired because long ago Ted had told her he didn’t believe in marriage. She’d asked him how he could say that when there were so many real, live married people walking around, and he’d called her a wise guy. I told her she was born wife material whether Ted Murray realized it or not. She smiled at that. “And what about you?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m nothing but a pack of cards.” I echoed Mia to protect myself. Not that it was necessary. Webster asked questions only out of politeness. Pursuing answers wasn’t her style.

  She knocked on my door just before Ted picked her up. It was six in the morning.

  “Just wanted to say good-bye,” she said, sitting on my feet. (When had we become friends?) “This could be the last time I speak to you as an unengaged woman.”

  I muttered, “Try not to break your neck on the slopes, Webster. I’ve gotten used to you,” and I waved good-bye from my bedroom window as Ted drove away with all their ski apparatus clattering away on top of his car. I even crossed my fingers for her.

  —

  a couple of hours later I emptied my purse out onto the windowsill and counted up my coins. I had bus fare, but only one way if I also wanted to eat lunch. I figured I’d take the bus back and began walking along Ivorydown, taking the route I’d so gladly abandoned a few weeks before when I’d changed jobs. It was a windy morning, and the wind pushed me, and the road dragged me, and the tree branches flew forward and peeled back and broke away, and their scrawny trunks hugged each other. I glimpsed—or more became aware of—someone walking on the other side of the saplings. She wasn’t there at the beginning of the walk; I don’t know when she caught up with me. This person was my height, her stride more or less the length of mine, smooth locks of her hair (blond) and flashes of her coat (navy blue) showing through the leaves. I was wearing a navy blue coat too. She had her hands in her pockets and I didn’t want to speak to her, I’m not sure wh
y, maybe because she was walking so close to me but didn’t seem to notice that I was there. Or if she did, she didn’t find it odd that we stayed neck and neck all the way down the hill. I tried to get a little ahead of her so that I could look back through the branches and see her face, but she chose the exact same moment to speed up and I began to feel as if we were running from somebody. Then she spoke. She said: “Hello? Hello? Is that you?”

  My lungs kicked my ribcage, just once. I’ve never heard my own voice recorded, but at that moment I was sure it’d sound like that. It was me, but me played back out of some kind of machine, that was the only way I could understand what I was hearing.

  “Hello? Hello? Is that you?”

  We stopped walking. “I’m here, I’m here.”

  Shards of her face emerged through brown bark and greenish shadows. Her left eye was aligned with mine; we raised our left hands at the same time, and hers was bloody. She said: “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Show your other hand,” I said. She didn’t move. “Show me!” She wouldn’t until I raised my right hand too. There was a lot of blood. Dark, dark, red. She had done something, or something had been done to her. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, and took a step back, silently asking me to go to her there on the other side of the hill, but it wasn’t clear what she was or what she’d done and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and I walked faster than I had before, but with a weak feeling in my knees that almost threw me into the road with the motorcars and buses. A man with a ragged beard honked his horn and yelled that I ought to be ashamed of myself, drunk at eight in the morning. He couldn’t see the other woman; she was well hidden from him. “Come here, come here and I’ll tell you everything,” she laughed, right beside me, not at all out of breath. I wasn’t as scared as I could have been—the main thing was to get away from her—but my thoughts ran with me.