Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel

by Oyeyemi, Helen

  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.

  I knew that there was more to be discovered about Aunt Mia’s stomachache, and I followed my nose a little, or tried to, anyway, not wanting to disappoint Robert S. Abbott. On the bus home the next afternoon I asked just one question and Mom looked at me with that quick flash in her eyes, the knife look. “Try to remember that it’s none of your business, Bird.”

  Something happened, that much is clear, something bigger than indigestion. But I don’t know if I’m ready to cross Mom in order to get this particular scoop. It looks like Aunt Mia’s feeling better now, anyway. I can return to this matter once my skills are honed. I’ll call that choosing my battles.

  In the meantime I’ll be finding out who my enemy is, and what exactly it is he or she has got against me. Proof or deduction, I’m not fussy about how I get there. I don’t know what it’s like to wish someone ill. Sure, I’ve occasionally told Louis Chen that I hope a monster eats him, and he’s told me to go boil my head a few times, but that tends to be in the heat of the moment, and anyway we’re getting married once we get old enough, so we don’t have to make nice all of the time.

  Gee-Ma Agnes (not my grandmother in any biological sense, but . . . it’s similar to the way things are with Aunt Mia) says I’ve definitely got one. An enemy, that is. I told her what happens to me sometimes, with mirrors, and she said: “Watch out; that’s your enemy at work, trying to get rid of you.”

  I don’t think she was trying to be spooky. She was shelling pistachio nuts and she made her words sound as if they were a comment on the color of the nut meat. People assume Gee-Ma doesn’t have anything to say because she’s small and shaky and doesn’t seem to follow conversations very well. But Gee-Ma can get interested in conversation when she wants to. The stories that make everyone else say “Get outta here” are the stories Gee-Ma takes an interest in. We used to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone together, and she’d slap her knee and crow: “He’s right! Rod Serling is right.” She doesn’t like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie because “Magic is not a joke, Bird.”

  Phoebe the housemaid acts like Gee-Ma is too old to move—“You stay right where you are,” she tells her, and dusts carefully around her. She asks Gee-Ma real simple questions, real slowly: “Enjoying that soup, Mrs. Miller?” Phoebe should maybe stop and think of Mrs. Fletcher, my mom’s boss. She’s the same age as Gee-Ma Agnes. Just last year Mrs. Fletcher began living in sin with a bookbinder called Mr. Murphy. I have reason to believe that Mom and Dad interfere with each other pretty regularly; there are those mornings when I find Mom making breakfast and she’s wearing the shirt Dad was wearing just the night before and she hasn’t even buttoned it up, she just uses one of his neckties as a belt. The first moment of seeing Mom like that is always really, really gross, and now it seems that grown-ups just never stop interfering with each other. Me and Mom and probably half of Flax Hill saw Mr. Murphy and Mrs. Fletcher getting all cozy together on a picnic blanket on Farmer’s Green, feeding each other cherries, yet. Their combined age is around one hundred and thirty years, but Mr. Murphy isn’t shy about kissing Mrs. Fletcher’s hand in public. More than once Mrs. Fletcher has laid her head on Mr. Murphy’s shoulder and giggled like she’s never seen a shoulder before. Imagine what those two are like when there’s no one else there. Mrs. Fletcher isn’t even one of the quiet ones, so if that’s the kind of thing she gets up to, then there’s no telling what Gee-Ma’s got up her sleeve.

  Gee-Ma’s husband moved back to Mississippi when their only daughter died. “He did invite me along,” Gee-Ma says. “He did invite me along, I’ll give him that.” But she liked Flax Hill better and anyway they hadn’t married for love. She won’t explain what they married for; another thing on my list to find out. She says the main thing is that they didn’t marry for love and neither of them really tried to make it grow, they sort of just expected to love each other after a certain number of years but it didn’t work out that way. All that happened was that she’d be having a nice day until she suddenly realized he’d be back from work in ten minutes, or he’d look at her during a gospel service and the sight of her seemed to get him all upset even though she was wearing a nice dress, and spotless gloves, and a smile.

  I’ve seen Gee-Ma’s wedding photos and the “Well, here goes” look her and her husband both had on their faces, but in my head Gee-Ma’s husband is a colored man, not a sort of Italian-looking one. There was a man in Worcester last month . . . Aunt Mia was walking Mom and me to the bus stop and the man was huddled up in the doorway of a store that had closed up for the night. He drew even farther back into his corner when Aunt Mia tried to put some change into his hand. Words wobbled out from deep inside his beard: “Don’t want no trouble, don’t want no trouble, don’t want no trouble.” There was a glass bottle in his pocket and he folded his hands around it as it bumped against the wall.

  Mom tapped my shoulder to make sure I kept walking and she called out: “Just put the money beside him, Mia,” but Aunt Mia didn’t listen unt
il the man pushed her hand away. Then she dropped the coins at his feet and came running after us. “Gin and pride,” she said. Mom said it was most likely misery that was getting to him, not just gin or pride. Some ways of behaving seem distantly related to others. Now when I think of Gee-Ma’s husband getting all upset just because she smiled at him, he looks like the man in Worcester who badly needed the money in Aunt Mia’s hand and pushed it away.

  Grammy Olivia says Gee-Ma Agnes’s husband is weak and Gee-Ma’s much better off without him. But Gee-Ma says that at heart her husband is still a boy from Itta Bena who couldn’t get used to not having to take his hat off whenever he speaks to a white person. “You can’t even say ‘the poor fella’—not really,” Gee-Ma says. “He’s probably really glad to be back to Mississippi, relieved that the world’s the right way up again and there are fountains specially marked out for him to drink from. I guess it’s not so different from those prisoners who get to feeling at home behind bars. I forgive him.” Gee-Ma Agnes talking about forgiving people tends to make Grammy Olivia say: “Indeed!” Especially when Gee-Ma tells people she forgives them before they even realize there’s anything they were supposed to apologize for. But Gee-Ma probably means well when it comes to her husband, the evidence of this being that they’re still married, and she remembers him in her prayers.

  What I told her about me and mirrors is this:

  Sometimes mirrors can’t find me. I’ll go into a room with a mirror in it and look around, and I’m not there. Not all the time, not even most of the time, but often enough. Sometimes when other people are there, but nobody ever notices that my reflection’s a no-show. Or maybe they decide not to notice because it’s too weird. I can make it happen when I move quickly and quietly, dart into a room behind the swinging of the door so it covers me the way a fan covers a face. Maybe I catch the mirror off guard somehow. It starts to look for me—“look for me” isn’t quite right—I know mirrors can’t see. But the image in the glass shifts just a little bit off center, left, then right, then back again, like it’s wondering why it isn’t reflecting all that stands in front of it. I know a girl just came in; now where’s she at?

  I swear this is true.

  I’m a hide-and-seek champion. I always win. It’s gotten so my friends don’t want to play anymore. “Don’t you think we’re a little old for that now, Bird,” they’ll say. Or they say I cheat. Maybe I do. I don’t know. Does catching the mirror off guard count as cheating? But if they had the option, there’s not a one of them who wouldn’t use it. Connie, Susan, Ruth, even Paula, who breaks out into a sweat every time we make her cross the road before the lights say go.

  The first time it happened—this is the time I told Gee-Ma Agnes about—I got scared and I gave the mirror a whack with my shoe, trying to fix it, I guess.

  It was just like any other Saturday afternoon except that I walked past my bedroom mirror and something was missing, some tiny, tiny element. I stood still, chuckling; it didn’t seem serious at first. The gap grew and grew. It was me. I wasn’t there. I saw the dusty blue wallpaper behind me, my hot-pink hula hoop hung on its special peg to the left of me. But I shouldn’t have been able to see the whole hoop from where I stood. My head and shoulders should’ve been in the way, but they weren’t, so I broke the mirror, and kept right on hitting it long after it broke, a cartoon mouse squeak coming out of my mouth, loud, loud. And the oval glass, that dear old glass that used to stand on my dresser, it tried to give me what I wanted, tried to give me my face, but it kept showing me bits of faces that weren’t mine. There were slivers of Mom’s face, and Dad’s, and Aunt Mia’s, and Grammy Olivia’s, and others, some shreds no wider than my index finger. I don’t know who they were, there was even a man or two, faces chasing each other like photographic slides when someone’s trying to show you their vacation in a hurry—in the end I had to knock the frame flat and run for Mom, who vanished all the broken glass with no questions asked.

  It’s rare for Mom to ask me questions. Maybe she’s the enemy. Seems unlikely, though. We get along, in a big-brother-little-sister kind of way. Mom plays big brother. We can sit together for hours in almost complete silence, her smoking and sharing a magazine with me, reading the other side of the page I’m on. Occasionally she’ll remember where she is and make a comment: “You don’t say much, do you, kid?”

  “Must’ve learned that from you.”

  “Ha! Got a few ideas of your own, though, haven’t you?”

  “Just a few, Mom.”

  Mrs. Fletcher tells Mom over and over that she should be making more conversation with me, because apparently I’m at a “dangerous age.” (She’s got to be talking about menstruation. I haven’t started yet, but there’s probably some risk of bleeding to death if you’re taken unawares the first time. I won’t be caught unawares, though. That’s not how I’m going out.) When I was too young to walk home alone, Mom would pick me up from the Chens’ house, and once as we were walking through the woods she put her hand on my head. I looked up and said: “What are you touching my head for?” She said: “You know, all I expect is the unexpected. It’s been like that since the day you were born, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Is there anything you need, kid? What do you need?”

  It felt good when she said that. It felt like she really would do anything. Mom looks foreign, like a Russian ice skater; her backdrop ought to be one of those cities that has a skyline topped with onion-shaped domes. I can just see Mom whizzing around with her hands tucked up inside a huge white muff, bloody sparks flying up behind her as the blades on her boots dig up all the hearts she broke before Dad got to her. Customers at the bookstore tend to look surprised when Mom opens her mouth and this New York City voice comes out. Her white hair sways down in tendrils, and her skirts brush the floor—she’s so graceful, swan-necked; when she’s getting all dressed up, she finishes by putting on a simple necklace Dad made, and it’s as good as if he took out a billboard and advertised. There’s that bracelet that winds around her arm too. Even when she wears long sleeves, a platinum snake lies there beneath the cloth, draining its favorite vein drop by drop, or resting until she has instructions for it. If she ever told that snake to come after me, who could stop it? The way snakes swallow small, live creatures, the terrible way they cram their food down with their sticky fangs and their yellow eyes rejoicing—I’ve seen pictures.

  For the longest time I thought Mom had bought the bracelet for herself, or that it was something she’d inherited, but then Dad mentioned that he’d made it for her. It isn’t like anything else of his I’ve seen; he works a lot with wood grains and the web patterns you get on the undersides of leaves. A lot of people want to feel natural and connected to the earth right now, that’s how Dad sees it, and folks don’t get as excited about showy pieces as they used to. He said he made Mom’s bracelet out of a misunderstanding, and Mom laughed and said: “Don’t be so sure.” She’s tall too, tall in a way that you only really notice at certain moments. The statues of Greek gods were built two and a half times the size of the average human being; I read that in a book Miss Fairfax lent me. The book describes the magnification as being small enough for the figure to remain familiar, but large enough to make you feel mighty strange standing near it. You sense some imminent threat, but common sense tells you there’s no danger, so you don’t run away. You keep a distance that appears to be a respectful one, and you don’t run away, just keep hovering on the point of doing so. Mom and I have the same eyes. I’m all mixed up about seeing my eyes in a face like hers, her eyes in a face like mine.

  Mom told me she would get me whatever I needed, but I didn’t need anything right then. “You tell me when you do,” she said. When I wanted those blue moons painted on my ceiling, she got it done without wanting to know why. We went down to the general store and got the paint right away. When we came back, she fetched out the stepladder and got the moons done in about an hour and a half including a cigarette break. She
got the shape of the moons exactly right too. One thing to keep in mind with Mom is that I’d better be sure I really need something before I ask her for it, because she doesn’t give advice. For example, stucco moons might have been better. But you tell Mom “Blue moons, please,” and bam, there they are, enjoy! We’re not close the way Louis and his mom are close, but . . . while she dabbed away at the ceiling I danced in and out of the room with her ashtray, singing along to the radio: La la means I love you, words I was too shy to say to her without the music, words I don’t remember her ever saying to me. Mom was the only one who immediately saw that I’d dressed up as Alice in Wonderland for fancy-dress day at school. The costume made it glaringly obvious—the white ankle socks, the black Mary Janes, the fat ribbon tied in a bow around my head, the blue dress with the blue and white apron over it—it’s in all the picture books. But when I came downstairs, Dad said: “What a pretty little housekeeper!”