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
arturo’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.
As we walked back to the hotel, I said: “So we’re never going to talk about Julia?” A straight question, just as Mrs. Fletcher would have asked it. (Why am I always imagining that I’m other people?)
Arturo asked what I wanted to know.
“What do you want me to know?”
He looked down at our feet. We were walking in step, which was taking some effort on my part.
“Our parents were good friends, double-dated all the time—it felt like they’d picked us out for each other. Whatever they did, it worked, because she’s almost everything I remember about being a kid and being a young man—I got my first job so I could buy her an opera record she just had to have; still remember what it was—Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. It was never ‘Will you buy me candy?’ with her; she always wanted stuff that . . . I don’t know, stuff you always felt in danger of losing her to. Books, music. If you took her to one of those big art galleries, you wouldn’t be able to find her again until closing time. I was in a running battle with the Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom won, but—”
“Arturo.” I held him closer, walked with my head above his heart.
“I gave him a run for his money. I never had eyes for anyone but her, right up until she died. And even then, for a long time after . . . it just didn’t seem true that she was gone. She had to have Snow by Caesarean, and when she came home, she got a fever. She said she was just tired, and she’d just sleep it off. I knew why she was saying that: She hated it at the hospital; didn’t want to see any more white coats or nurses’ u
niforms. Two days, she kept saying, I’ll just sleep it off, Arturo—don’t fuss. Her mother and mine kept telling me I didn’t know what it was like for a woman after she’s got through childbirth, that I should just let her hold her baby and rest. She died in the night, Boy. It seemed impossible. She was laughing and singing to Snow in the afternoon, then in the middle of the night she woke me up saying Call a doctor, call a doctor, and I was downstairs for an hour or so trying to get hold of someone. I couldn’t. It was Saturday. I went back upstairs and Julia was so quiet. It didn’t feel final; it was more like she was thinking and was about to speak. It looked like she was breathing, but it was just air escaping. I remember I covered Snow’s eyes. And . . . I don’t want to say any more.”
He sighed when I told him I was sorry. “I’ve still got Snow,” he said. It sounded rehearsed, a phrase he’d assembled around his real feelings like a screen.
“Hey. Hey, you. I’m here too.”
I thought that was that, but in the morning I woke up to find him kneeling beside my bed. His eyes were on me; I think they had been for a long time.
“Say you love me,” he said. The sun hadn’t been up for long, and Snow was snoring in the bed beside the window. She wriggled when he spoke, then tucked her head deeper into her pillow. I tried to fake a return to sleep myself, but Arturo said: “No. Say you love me.” I sat up and he trapped my heel in his hand, so hard that my other foot, the free foot, drew up in a weak pirouette.
“I’ll stay with you,” I said. We both spoke lightly, we were both smiling, but I didn’t know what Arturo was going to do if he found he couldn’t make me say I loved him. Not much, surely. Snow was right there, after all. And she wasn’t sleeping. She didn’t give herself away even for a second, but that kid was keeping tabs. I knew and she knew.
He stood up and went over to his suitcase. “I made you something.”
It was the first piece of jewelry he ever made me, and it was the equivalent of an engagement ring. I say “equivalent” because it was a bracelet, a white-gold snake that curled its tail around my wrist and pressed its tongue against the veins in the crook of my elbow. When I saw it lying on its bed of tissue paper, I didn’t want to pick it up, let alone put it on. All I could think was: I will fear no evil, I will fear no evil, I will fear no evil. That snake was what he’d made for me, it was what he thought I wanted, was maybe even what he thought I was, deep down.
I’d said I’d stay, so I stayed. I put it on for him. I said I’d marry him. He said: “Are you sure?”
I ran my fingertips over the scales, dozens of colorless hexagons that warped even as they reflected. According to them, the room was a lilac-wallpapered blur, and my forehead was west of my nose. I didn’t go inside Arturo’s workroom, and he’d never invited me there, just came out when he was done for the day, sweating hard. He said it was because of the details, having to get them right. The switch from pliers to magnifying glass to the rubber mallet, back to magnifying glass, then the reach for the scoring knife. He said that most of the time he felt as if he were making a monstrosity right up until the last step. It’s not work I could do, breaking something and then breaking it again and again until it looks the way I want it to. I’d falter, and try to go back to where I’d started. I’d just be there all day making solid gold blobs.
I said: “What do you mean, am I sure? What kind of question is that? Of course I’m sure.” And I kissed him.
“It’s just that sometimes you get this look . . . you know how in movies people come around after fainting or hitting their head and immediately start asking, ‘Who am I? Where am I? Who are you?’ I’ve seen you looking like that sometimes, and I can’t tell if that’s just how life strikes you or if you’re only like that when you’re around me. I kind of like that look. It’s endearing. But what if one day you figure out who you are and where you are and who I am and realize it’s all a big mistake?”
“Impossible. For the last time, I’m sure.”
Magic words. As soon as I’d said them, Snow was halfway to the ceiling, waving her arms and yelling “Hurray!” Arturo climbed up onto his own bed, stating that it was the principle of the thing. I was the one he’d said yes to, so he had to bounce higher than Snow. Then of course I had to show them who the real bed-bouncing champ was. They surrendered pretty quickly.
I put the bracelet in the hotel-room safe, and checked on it once a day. We were almost carefree for the rest of the weekend, Snow, Arturo, and I; they were carefree, we built sandmen and taught Snow’s dolls how to play beach volleyball with water balloons. The snake was always there each time I checked, and there was no way to go back to Flax Hill without it.
—
when mia saw the bracelet, she said: “Oh, Boy.” She spun the jewelry box around on the tabletop, wouldn’t even touch its contents.
I said: “I know.”
“I mean, could that scream ‘wicked stepmother’ any louder?”
“I know.”
Mia ruffled my hair. “It’s okay, it’s fine. It only looks like that. That’s not how it really is.”
10
i shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that there was a man three blocks away from the boarding house who specialized in bespoke wedding-cake toppers. It was Flax Hill, town of specialists. He had a storefront full of ready-made cake toppers available for sale. Clay ballerinas and baseball players and owls, numbers shaped out of wax, all of which were far less unsettling than the wedding-cake toppers. Each tiny bride and groom had this beseeching smile painted onto their face. The kind of smile that suggested dark magic was afoot, a switch had been made, the couple leading the first dance were not who they claimed to be, and wouldn’t someone please intervene? That’s what I’d think if I saw a pair of smiles like that on top of a wedding cake, anyway. But Webster had set her heart on having a pair of cake toppers made by this particular specialist. Something about his father having made her parents’ cake toppers, and his grandfather having made her grandparents’ . . . so I sat with her while she went through photographs of her and Ted together. Mr. Cake Topper Specialist wanted the photographs to work from, and she dismissed every photo I suggested. “Maybe we’ll have to take a new one,” she said.
I’d collected my bridesmaid’s dress from the seamstress’s store the day before and run into a couple of Webster’s other bridesmaids. We’d debated whether or not to tell her that if she didn’t end her diet now she wouldn’t look pretty on the day, just brittle. As her friend Jean put it: “She’s got no business getting this thin for a December wedding. If there’s snow, she’ll catch pneumonia so quick she won’t know what’s hit her.”
“Ted keeps saying, ‘Let’s just elope,’” Webster said, and gave me such a wicked grin that I didn’t have the heart to say anything about brittleness.
Brenda, Webster’s neighbor, knocked on the door. “You’ve got a gentleman caller, Novak. No, no, not Loverboy. Though it could be Loverboy Mark Two. He says it can’t wait.”
“Is he handsome?” Webster asked, following me to the staircase. Brenda shrugged. “I guess so. In a freckled kind of way. Some girls get all the luck.”
Webster and I took a peek over the banister. We saw a mop of light brown hair, then Charlie Vacic looked up and gave us the full winsome-puppy-dog treatment. I was already on my way down the stairs, so the push Webster gave me was wholly unnecessary, as was her crowing that she was going to tell Arturo on me, which brought seven of our fellow tenants out onto the landing to see who I was two-timing my fiancé with.
“Hi,” I said, pulling him into the front parlor and closing the door behind us. “What are you doing here?”
“How are you, Charlie, long time no see, how’s med school, was it a long bus ride, can I offer you something to drink?” Charlie said. He dropped into an armchair and closed his eyes. I sat down too, in the chair opposite his. My knees had turned to water.
“I’m well, t
hank you, Boy,” he supplied. “Yes, it has been a while. Med school’s fine, I’m not failing, and I’ve avoided hypochondria by deciding my time’s up when it’s up. The bus ride aged me by about ten years and a cold beverage would be the best thing that could happen to me right now.”
What could I do or say, other than bring him a glass of someone else’s root beer that I found in the icebox? He drained the glass without speaking, so I got him a refill. Then he was ready to talk.
“I got your letter. Are you really getting married?”
I looked into his eyes. He couldn’t return the gaze steadily, kept focusing on my left eye, then on my right. I could guess what he was thinking: that there were two of me, that was the explanation, that was why I was acting like this. I had applied this rationale to the rat catcher the first time he’d punched me. First you try to find a reason, try to understand what you’ve done wrong so you can be sure not to do it anymore. After that you look for signs of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, the good and the bad in a person sifted into separate compartments by some weird accident. Then, gradually, you realize that there isn’t a reason, and it isn’t two people you’re dealing with, just one. The same one every time. Keep switching eyes all you want, Charlie. You’re going to hate the conclusion you reach.
I answered: “Yes, Charlie, it’s true.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
He loosened his collar, swallowed air. “Why?”
He smiled when I didn’t answer. Not an amused smile, a nervous one. The quirk at the left corner of his mouth when he smiled. For so long I’d wanted to kiss him just there. He was Charlie. Maybe I could tell him: Listen, there’s this little girl who makes herself laugh. You hear her from the other room, and when you try to get her to explain, she just says: “Don’t worry about it.” And maybe it’s the thief in me, but I think this girl is mine, and that when she and I are around each other, we’re giving each other something we’ve never had, or taking back something we’ve lost. Maybe Charlie would say: Let’s kidnap her, go to Europe, and raise her as our own. We’re young. Starting over won’t be so hard for us. But even if some madcap spirit did pick that moment to possess Charlie Vacic, what I felt for the girl wasn’t all that distinct from what I felt for her father.
Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel Page 9