Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel

by Oyeyemi, Helen

  “How do you know what she thought and what she was interested in?”

  “I met four of her former girlfriends for coffee, and they all brought letters with them. Letters she’d written to them when they were all at Barnard together. I’d thought the friendships were platonic, but the letters get pretty raunchy in places, and all three of the ex-girlfriends said, ‘Yes, yes, we were true friends, but we were lovers as well, you know’—these serene intellectual women who only really get bashful about abstract theory. They brought me photos too. Look at her. Apparently impressionable young woman after impressionable young woman would just up and leave their boyfriends for her. I know she’s your mother, but you get the appeal, right? I don’t know when Frances started expressing a preference for females, but it was most certainly by the time she was in the final year of her BS studies.”

  I shuffled through all the photos of my glamorously disheveled bluestocking mother, hair as long as Lady Godiva’s at a time when short hair was all the rage. She had the look of someone who sings inside themselves, silently and continually; at least I hope that’s what people mean when they say someone has a twinkle in their eye. Hers was there even when she was playing possessive, her arms tangled around the woman on her lap. “What happened to her, Mia?”

  “This is exactly what Frances’s girlfriends wanted to know. They all showed up hoping I could tell them. She was twenty-nine and that was supposed to be the year she got her doctorate, but she skipped campus and the apartment on Morningside that she shared with two other women. She was there on a Tuesday—spotted in the library—she asked one of the women I met with to loan her some money, but her friend was just as broke as she was. Then on Wednesday she didn’t show up to a talk she’d agreed to give to some undergraduates. She’d never done anything like that; she was the kind who showed up to lectures even when she was ill. Nobody seems to remember her as being particularly highly strung, either. By Friday her friends were making active efforts to track her down. Then other friends suggested she didn’t want to be tracked down, that she was just working hard on her paper. But working where? She hadn’t returned to the Morningside apartment since Tuesday evening. Her roommates wanted to call the police but everybody said they were overreacting. Her parents ended up reporting her missing in April 1933.”

  “I was born in November 1933,” I volunteered.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what have you found out?”

  Mia looked out of the window and braced herself, then looked back at me. “Frank told me this himself. Frances was raped. It was an acquaintance of hers; a male friend’s younger brother. He was an undergrad at Columbia who thought that all lesbianism meant was that you were holding out for the man who really got you excited. Frances had warned him to stop airing this view. He’d also, I don’t know, grabbed at a friend of hers and called her a tease and so on. Frances had issued her warning to this guy in front of other people and I guess that had humiliated him and—don’t let me rationalize what he did anymore, Boy. He caught her coming out of the library that night in February, seemed contrite, told her he was just a boy trying to grow into a man and that his motto was live and let live, and he urged her to visit a speakeasy he’d heard about. And she went with him, to show him there was no longer any quarrel between them. He bought her three drinks. They went for a drive along the Hudson. He said, ‘What do you say we drive all night?’ She said sure. Being in motion helped her get a lot of good thinking done. His parents were out of town and he drove up to their house in Westchester, drove into the garage, shut the doors, and broke her life in two.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Steven.”

  “Steven what?”

  “Steven Hamilton.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Screw him. I didn’t check. It’s Frances I followed, and she didn’t encounter him again.”

  “So where did she go?”

  “There was a women’s shelter she knew of, run by a Harlem heiress out of her own home. Mainly for nonwhite women, but they didn’t automatically turn you away if you were white. She stayed there for three months under the name Francine Stone, but they eventually asked her to leave. She was . . . uh, demoralizing the other women who ‘had suffered their own violations but were determined to continue their lives as women in spite of them,’ I think the note said. Frances understood and admired that, but it wasn’t her way. Her distress had hardened. You know how Frank says he became Frank? He says he looked in the mirror one morning when he was still Frances, and this man she’d never seen before was just standing there, looking back. Frances washed her face and fixed her hair and looked again, and the man was still there, wearing an exact copy of her skirt and sweater. He said one word to her to announce his arrival. What he did was, he flicked the surface of his side of the mirror with his finger and thumb and he said: ‘Hi.’ After that he acted just like a normal reflection; otherwise she would’ve felt like she had to go to a psychiatrist and complain about him. Once she’d established that he was there to stay, she named him Frank and stopped off at a barbershop and got a short back and sides—she felt that haircut suited Frank’s personality. She went around in heavy boots, and a high-collared shirt . . . maybe you’ll remember the rat catcher’s collared shirts and the way he’d wear them even in the summer, to hide the fact that he didn’t have an Adam’s apple . . . she took to speaking in an artificially deep, gruff voice. The people around her didn’t know what to do about her and frankly they didn’t like her. To them it was as if she’d been bitten by something vile and that in some way she was becoming the thing that had bitten her. She left the shelter, found a room that she shared with a girl on a strict twelve-hour basis—from six in the morning to six in the evening the room was Frank’s, and from six in the evening to six in the morning the room belonged to the other girl and Frank had to get out.”

  “I take it the roommate was a hooker?”

  “Maybe. However it was she made her living, she knew all kinds of people, and hooked Frank up with a physician who was willing to turn criminal for a reasonable fee. Frank made two appointments, and ended up breaking them both. He was afraid of dying on the physician’s table. He’d heard stories, and he wanted to live. He worked jobs that didn’t require documentation—an extermination company that had a high turnover of illegal immigrant employees turned out to be the job he lasted longest at, but it was a job he lost when he had you. You were premature and he said he had to take a lot of time off. He remembered his father’s rat-catching methods and started working for himself—”

  “Stop calling her ‘him.’ You’re telling me my mother has been desperately ill for decades and I’m fighting like hell to take it in, but you’ve got to stop calling her ‘him.’”

  “I don’t know that I can. As it stands right now he’s been Frank longer than he was Frances. It’s gone beyond alter egos. Boy, I’ve been reading medical monographs about people whose alleged alter egos have different blood types from theirs—one guy’s alter ego was diabetic, and he wasn’t—or he was the alter ego and the diabetic was the ‘true’ personality—who’s to say? When those kinds of biological facts start coming in, you have to ask if becoming someone else is more than some delusion or some dysfunction of the mind. What I mean to say is that Frank’s personality is pretty awful—he tried to hit me when I told him I was going to tell this story, but he wasn’t fast enough—but he’s awfully sane. Well, maybe not when it comes to thinking of names. He says he almost named you Pup.”

  “Mia.”

  She took my hands, and kissed them. “Boy.”

  “Please don’t write about this. Find someone else to write about.”

  “I’m sorry, cara. I don’t expect you to understand this, but I have to tell. You know, Bird sent me something in the mail a few days ago. Some notes she’d made while Frank was talking to her over lunch.”

  “What?”

  �
��He said some stuff to her that’s probably going to upset you—no, he didn’t threaten her. I think he was actually trying to tell. Trying to tell her what he had agreed to come down here and tell you.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” I said.

  “I’m sorry it’s like this. You’ve got a daughter who has to know and a friend who would do anything for you apart from not telling. This can’t be what you signed up for.” She squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back.

  “Do you think Frances is gone forever?”

  “Boy . . . you know I can’t answer that . . . I never met her.”

  I don’t know why that was a comfort, but it was.

  2

  reading Bird’s notes took the comfort away. Frank’s claim that I’m evil doesn’t shock me so much, partly because I’ve questioned myself on the very same subject before. It’s not my actions that raise the questions, but my inaction, the way I’ve consciously and consistently avoided chances to reduce other people’s unhappiness. I call it a side effect of growing up in a building full of families and thin walls and floors: We all heard everything and did nothing. I heard love going wrong for people, so wrong. The silence for weeks when Mrs. Phillips next door miscarried. Then the weeks of noise that followed—Mr. Phillips came home later and later, and Mrs. Phillips waited up for him, playing records until the small hours, switching off the gramophone and sobbing when he came in through the door. Mr. Kendall on the other side of us kept spending the rent money; his wife kept faking surprise at this. Every month Mrs. Kendall asked, “How could you, Fred? How could you? What are we going to do?” and you could hear her hatred and her boredom; it stayed in her voice even as he hit her. For a few months there was a pretty glamorous-looking couple upstairs—down on their luck, I guess. I remember them particularly because I never found out either of their names, only heard him calling her whore, whore, WHORE. Of course they must have heard the rat catcher knocking me around too. We all got a little less human so we could keep living together.

  No, these are the words that kissed my equilibrium good-bye:

  It was the one time in my life I wished I was a woman.

  There it was, in my daughter’s handwriting. Frances had wanted to come back.

  I couldn’t sleep. Arturo snored blissfully beside me until I put a stop to that.

  “Arturo. Arturo. Wake up.”

  He gasped and waved his arms. “What? What is it? Fire?”

  “No. I need to know how to break a spell. Any ideas?”

  “Break a spell, you say?”

  “Yeah. How?”

  “Woman, how the hell should I know? Let me sleep.”

  “Quit yelling.”

  “I’m not yelling.”

  “Sounds like yelling to me.”

  He stuck his head underneath his pillow; I got up. Dawn broke calmly and filled the house with its glow. And Alecto Fletcher answered the phone when I called her.

  “Oh. I knew it was you. Who else could be so disrespectful of an old woman’s need for rest?”

  “I won’t keep you long, Alecto. I just wondered if you knew how to break a spell.”

  “That’s right, ask the crone; she’ll know. Are we talking about a magic spell?”

  “Um. Not in origin, but in effect maybe.”

  “And you’re asking for a friend . . .”

  “My friends just don’t know how to behave.”

  “Your friend already asked me herself. Sid Fairfax came over yesterday with a fairly interesting book of art monographs and the very same question you’ve just called me to ask. I’m worried about her too. It’s plain to see that she loathes this town, but she’s told herself she can’t leave because she loves her mother and she can’t be happy if her mother is unhappy.”

  “I didn’t know any of that. I thought she was staying because she’s in love with Kazim.”

  “Yes, we’d be in love with Mr. Bey, wouldn’t we, if we dared to be? Agnes Miller allows herself to flirt with him; perhaps we should too.”

  “What can I say? He’s an actual Prince Charming. But what’d you tell Sidonie?”

  “I told her that magic spells only work until the person under the spell is really and honestly tired of it. It ends when continuing becomes simply too ghastly a prospect.”

  “I’m not sure I . . .”

  “Pester your subject, Boy. Pester this person, whoever it is. Make the enchantment inconvenient for them, find myriad ways to expose their contentment as false, show them that the contentment is part of the spell, engineered to make it last longer. Do you see?”

  “I take it you’ve broken a lot of spells, Alecto?”

  “I’m speaking more from the experience of having been under them.”

  “May you live forever.”

  “Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? So you could phone me at five in the morning forever.”

  —

  i made cocoa, took a cupful out onto the porch and closed my eyes as the sun climbed the sky. I pretended that the light was patting my black eye in a friendly, investigative way, trying to see if early light alone could heal it. I’d pretended this a number of times back in New York. It was the quickest way to feel cared for after you’d taken a battering. With my eyes closed, I returned to the apartment on Rutgers Street, tried to find something, anything, maternal in what I remembered of the rat catcher. There was nothing. I saw his sneer again. His sneer and his fists. His eyes I couldn’t remember so well; I rarely let him look into my eyes, I’d kept him out no matter what. Okay, scratch maternal. How about feminine? Maybe a few moments too fleeting to articulate, but that’s men for you—it was like that with Arturo too. Through the keyhole of the rat catcher’s bedroom door I once saw him place his hand on his girlfriend’s calf and slide upward to the top of her thigh. Could I file that under feminine? Yes and no. It was the touch of a lover. Slow and sure. Taking pleasure, promising more. She bent over him and nipped at his earlobe and they laughed a little and moaned a little and I backed away from that keyhole in a hurry.

  —

  snow came up the garden path and asked if there was any cocoa going spare. I said yes and made a fresh batch, ignoring her protests that she hadn’t intended to put me to any trouble.

  “Why are you up so early?”

  “I just wanted to walk around without seeing anybody,” she said, studying the porch floor. I thought she looked a little fatigued, so I made her take a vitamin tablet and tried to enact a talking cure.

  “You go home tomorrow, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And do you go back to work right away?”

  “No, I don’t have a case until next week.”

  There was a skin on my cocoa, and a thicker one on hers, but she was drinking around the edges of it.

  “A case?”

  “I knew you weren’t listening the other morning.”

  “I’m sorry, honey.” Honey. I’d never called anybody honey in my life before then.

  She smiled. “Don’t be. It’s dirty work, Boy. I’ve been following men’s wives and taking note of their indiscretions. It pays well because it’s valuable to the clients. It makes their divorces significantly cheaper.”

  You never really feel your jaw until it drops. I think it was the crispness of her words just as much as the worldliness of what she was saying. Should a diaphanous butterfly ever perch on my finger and provide analysis of the day’s stock market activity I won’t bat an eyelash.

  She looked up (we were directly beneath Bird’s window) and continued in a whisper: “I don’t know if I can stick it out for much longer. You’re taking photos of a couple from across the street, you’re sitting next to them in some bar, eavesdropping for incriminating details, sometimes the guy will get up and go to the restroom and the unfaithful wife will turn around and just start talking to you. Peop
le in love are so trusting. They’ll say, ‘Hey, don’t worry, your prince will come,’ and I’m all no no no, don’t talk to me, I’m stalking you. One woman . . . I liked her, and it was sad to hand in the stuff I’d got on her . . . she started telling me about her life with her lover. It was all moonshine, I knew who her husband was, and where their home was, and where she sent her kids for their education. But she told me the man she was with was her husband and they had four boys he took fishing every Sunday, and between the boys and work they only had one date night a month so they had to make it special, and I just started shaking. I keep going to Isidor—that’s my boss—to tell him I’m quitting, but then he pays me . . .”

  I sniggered, and then we were both laughing.

  “Don’t go home tomorrow, Snow. Stay awhile, okay?”

  She hesitated.

  “Isidor might fire you, but if the job makes you shake, is it really right for you? Visit awhile longer. Please.”

  “It’s not because of Isidor. It’s that kiddie bedroom. But I guess I only have to sleep there.”