Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel

by Oyeyemi, Helen

  I was reluctant to look at myself for a couple of days after this happened—the anesthesia had worn off and my lips and right cheek were sore. I couldn’t tell how much the rat had been able to do. I didn’t touch the sore places, not wanting to worsen any infected bites. But there were no bites. I probed the skin with my fingers—there wasn’t even a rash. The rat catcher stayed out of my way and I stayed out of his. The trouble is I can be such a slow thinker at times. But once I got the situation in focus it stayed clear. No matter what anybody else said or did my father saw something revolting in me, and sooner or later he meant to make everybody else agree with him. Worst and weirdest of all was his weeping—I think he’d really believed that he was doing something good for me. He’d faltered that time but the next time he wouldn’t.

  Mirrors see so much. They could help us if they wanted to. In those days I spoke to every mirror in the apartment. I questioned them, told them I didn’t know what to do, but none of them answered me. The girl in the glass exaggerated my expression, her gaze zigzagging as though watching a waterfall. She was making fun of me for sure, but I decided not to take it personally.

  mirror: ['mırǝ]

  noun

  A surface capable of reflecting sufficient diffused light to form an image of an object placed in front of it.

  Such a reflecting surface set in a frame. In a household setting this surface adopts an inscrutable personality (possibly impish and/or amoral), presenting convincing and yet conflicting images of the same object, thereby leading onlookers astray.

  Beautiful Boy, ugly Boy, rat, rat, food for the rats, sick and sickening . . . it took two weeks for my thoughts to twist themselves into a membrane that I could break only by leaving, or by murdering the rat catcher. I’m not sure Charlie could have rescued me from that. And I think I decided not to love Charlie because I thought I had to be rescued. For practical reasons but also as a proof of love. It’s better that Charlie and I didn’t make an automatic transaction, love exchanged for rescue. All you can do after that is put the love and the rescue up on the shelf, moving them farther and farther back as you make room for all the other items you acquire over the years. This way a ragged stem still grows between us, almost pretty. Though really we should crush it now, before the buds bloom skeletal.

  I didn’t say his name aloud to anyone. If Mia asked how he was, I pretended not to hear. But Charlie Vacic just wouldn’t let up. I’d think he was done, but a week or so later he came back ten times as strong.

  Every now and again I’d look at Arturo, just look at him until he said “What gives?” He was a little surprised at me for not wanting to make my mark on the house, but I wasn’t interested in undoing what Julia had done. Across the years we accepted each other, Julia and I, neither of us exactly thrilled by the other’s existence, but there was enough difference between her and me to suggest that her Arturo wasn’t exactly the same as mine anyway. My puzzlement regarding him was greater: I didn’t understand how he could do the things he did. He took Snow cherry picking, he took me hiking around the lake, he swam at the pool with his father every Thursday afternoon, took Agnes Miller all the way to Baden-Baden because her chest wasn’t as strong as it used to be and he thought a spa week might help. He behaved as if he belonged with us, belonged to us. But he was crazy if he thought Julia was finished with him. I mean, it was bad enough with Charlie, and he was still alive.

  Did I talk in my sleep? Was it the flag in my side of our closet? Somehow a corner of it always emerged whenever I reached for something to wear. Arturo and I never spoke about it, but somehow he knew that there was someone else. He must have, because it was around that time that Arturo began to make chains.

  Ankle chains, wrist chains, necklaces made of heavy brass links. He laid the collection on a bed of red velvet, piece by piece, as he completed them.

  “What do you think of these?” he said. And I told him they were ugly. I was angry with him for making such threats; I thought he should know better than to do that.

  “Why don’t you try them on?” I said. I didn’t yell. If anything, I made my tone pleasant, modeled it on the way the rat catcher had spoken once, half a second before he grabbed my head and tried to smash it against a wall as if it weren’t even connected to my neck.

  I think I unnerved him, because he did what I said. He put all the chains on, four bracelets on each wrist, anklets on over his socks, necklace upon necklace upon necklace. He held his hands out to me, and I tried hard not to grin, but it didn’t work. “Come on, Boy. I’m sorry.”

  I undid the bracelets first. “Something to think about in future: Hinting that you think you can hold me against my will only makes me mad.”

  “Got it.” He looked as if he was going to add something else, some excuse or explanation, then decided against it.

  “You’ve got around eight months to become a new man,” I told him, dropping chains onto the floor. “I mean . . . is this the kind of father my child’s got to look forward to?”

  “Eight months . . . ?”

  “That’s what Dr. Lee says.”

  He yelled “Gee whiz” so loud and for so long that Snow came running from Olivia’s house screaming, “What? What?”

  We told her she was going to have a little brother or sister and she said: “Oh, good. Make it a sister, okay?” and ran straight back to her court of dolls.

  —

  i made my list of names in secret. Partly so that no one would know I was copying Julia’s idea, and partly so that no one would know how wild my hopes were. Olivia suggested Scarlett for a girl and Alexander for a boy, and I thought: Not bad. Gerald suggested Artemis for a girl, which made me suspicious that he’d somehow gotten hold of my list. I’ll never get into the habit of calling him “Pop” like he wants me to—I can’t make myself say it casually or kindly. The word comes out sounding like a deliberate insult, and I don’t want to apply that word to someone like him, someone who gets enthusiastic over English marmalade and Swiss fountain pens. The way his hair sits on his scalp makes me smile too—it’s all his, since nature can’t seem to do without its jokes. That luxurious mop is wasted on a bank manager. It ought to be grown a tad longer and then employed at a ritzy Parisian music hall, helping some showgirl hit the big time. From certain angles Gerald’s hair assumes the personality of a disarmingly earnest counterfeit, a Brylcreemed wig that would feel so happy and honored and gratified if you’d only say it had fooled you for a second.

  “And for a boy?” I asked.

  “Why, Girl, of course,” he deadpanned.

  My reflection changed as I got bigger. Well, obviously it changed, but what I mean to say is that when I looked into the mirror, I couldn’t see myself. That’s not quite it, either. I’d look into the mirror and she was there, the icy blonde with the rounded stomach, the thickened thighs and arms—just as I’d become accustomed to wearing it, the snake bracelet wouldn’t fit anymore. I also went up half a shoe size, which pleased me because it was another bridge burned between me and the rat catcher. Come into town, rat catcher, come looking for your daughter, come holding a pair of the shoes she left. Say to everyone who’ll listen: “If the shoes fit, she’s mine.” Gather witnesses . . . the more the merrier. They’d see me wedge my feet into the narrow shoes, see how far my heels spill over the back of them. Then they’d hear me tell him: “I’m so sorry. Keep searching. Good luck.”

  When I stood in front of the mirror, the icy blonde was there, but I couldn’t swear to the fact of her being me. She was no clearer to me than my shadow was. I came to prefer my shadow. She came into the shower cubicle with me and stood stark against the bathroom tiles, so much taller than I was that when I began to get backaches, I could find shelter crouched under her.

  Snow was the one who came up with the right name. We were lying on the couch together, her chin on my shoulder, Arturo’s arm around us both as he read poetry to my stomach. He said he�
��d read poetry to Snow before she was born, and hey, if it ain’t broke, etc.

  “Maybe Margaret for a girl?” Arturo said. “This Maggie sounds okay, doesn’t she?

  Gentle as falcon

  Or hawk of the tower.

  With solace and gladness,

  Much mirth and no madness,

  All good and no badness.”

  Snow yawned. “What’s a falcon?”

  “It’s a bird,” I told her.

  “And the other thing in the tower?”

  “A hawk. It’s another kind of bird.”

  “Bird for a boy and Bird for a girl,” Snow said. “Birds sing and fly.”

  She was right. I put her to bed, and when I went next door to spin Julia’s lullaby around on the gramophone, she said: “No, you sing it to me.”

  “Snow, you know I can’t carry a tune. And your mother has the loveliest voice, let her—”

  “She’s tired of singing the same song every night,” Snow said, firmly. “And you’re my mother too. Aren’t you?”

  I drew a chair up beside her bed and sang. All I do is dream of you the whole night through . . . It was a horrible rendition, and I quite enjoyed attempting it, setting the notes free from the song as each one went farther and farther astray. Snow was nice about it. I think she pretended to fall asleep faster than she usually did just so I’d stop. I switched off all the lights except her nightlight, then went downstairs and threw my list of names into the trash.

  —

  when I got too big and too distracted to meet the demands of being Mrs. Fletcher’s assistant, I stayed home, ate my way through the fruit baskets Mia and Webster sent over, and listened to Julia Whitman’s voice. You’re every thought, you’re everything, you’re every song I ever sing . . .

  I hoped Bird would sing like that, would have a voice as strong and rich as the one I listened to, with all those teasing little trips and breaks in it. It was a voice Snow didn’t seem interested in hearing anymore—“I’m almost eight years old now,” she said, as if that had anything to do with it—but maybe in time Bird could make her listen again.

  A simple solution, maybe. Just like running away from home, just like staying away from Ivorydown because of the woman I’d seen there. But the thing about these simple solutions is that they work.

  13

  bird was born in the spring. I say “was born” because the pain was so tremendous that I just let it come. It was like quicksand. The only way to make it out alive was to stop struggling against it, to submit. I’m told I was in labor for thirteen hours, but I really wouldn’t know. There was the quicksand, then there was Bird in my arms, safe and well, and dark. No. It wasn’t just her shade of gold (the closest skin could get to the color of my husband’s eyes. I think I made some dumb joke: “Look at this kid, born with a suntan—”), it was her facial features too. As the nurse said when she thought I was too wiped out to hear: “That little girl is a Negro.”

  I didn’t want to show her to anybody. Not to her father, not to her sister. No one. The doctor told me that Arturo seemed like a reasonable man, that he could talk to Arturo for me if I wanted, that everything could still be okay, and I realized that he thought he was talking to an unfaithful wife. I laughed and laughed, high-pitched laughter that roused Bird to try to outdo me with her crying. The doctor thought I’d gone to bed with a colored man, and I had. He was my husband.

  What did I think Arturo would do when he saw Bird at last? Whatever it was I’d prepared for, he didn’t do it. He held her, gave her Eskimo kisses, and said she was a smash hit. Snow climbed up onto the bed, did a triple take, then said: “Let’s keep her!” Arturo didn’t even try to touch me; he knew I wouldn’t let him. I looked at him over the top of Snow’s head and I mouthed: “Who are you? Who are you?”

  He came back later in the afternoon, without Snow. He brought a hip flask full of apricot palinka with him (he refused to reveal its source) and we passed it back and forth, drinking in silence, not quite looking at each other. When the flask was three-quarters empty, he asked: “You drunk yet?”

  Everything had become polka dots, especially him. I found this endearing . . . I may even have smiled. “A little.”

  “Me too,” he said. “We’d better talk.”

  In his mind he was no more colored than I was; he’d never even met his grandparents or cousins, his parents were the only ones from their families who’d decided to move north from Louisiana and see if anyone called them out on their ancestry. His father had stood in line behind a colored man at the front desk of the Flax Hill Country Club and eavesdropped as the colored man tried and failed to gain membership. “We’re fully subscribed,” the colored man was told. But Gerald Whitman was offered a membership form to fill out without further ado. It was too bad for the other guy, but Gerald liked golf and didn’t see why he shouldn’t play it in those surroundings if he could get away with it. Gerald had thought: Well, what if I just don’t say . . . what if I never say? He’d passed that down to Arturo, the idea that there was no need to ever say, that if you knew who you were then that was enough, that not saying was not the same as lying. He asked me a question that threw me into confusion because I couldn’t honestly answer yes or no. He asked if I’d have married him if I’d seen him as colored.

  “And Julia?”

  “Mom says as soon as she saw Joe and Agnes Miller she knew they were the same as her and Dad. You should have seen how long their faces were at the wedding—Mom’s face, Dad’s face, Agnes’s face, Joe’s. But Snow turned out to be . . . Snow, and we got to go on not saying.”

  Snow was blameless. And Arturo was forgivable; maybe because he said that he felt that Bird was his, ours, in a way that he hadn’t felt with Snow. He said that for a long time he’d looked at Snow and seen her as Julia’s child. Snow’s beauty had seemed so strange to him for a while, so blank, like a brand-new slate. But Bird looked up at him confidingly, in a way that made him grin. “This kid is pretty sure we’re old friends.”

  It was Olivia Whitman I could not forgive. When Bird and I came home, she was our first visitor, and she took one look at Bird, a cold, thorough look, then turned her gaze away. “Well, she’s healthy, thank God.” She then began to insinuate that I’d two-timed Arturo and gave me to understand I had another thing coming if I expected Arturo to raise another man’s child. I said: “You think I won’t slap you, Olivia, but I will. Keep going and you’ll see.”

  Next she implied that my background was questionable. She didn’t know where I was really from, she hadn’t met my father, she’d taken everything I said on trust.

  “Nice try, but I’m not going to stand here while a colored woman tries to tell me that maybe I’m the one who’s colored.”

  I sat down with Bird, who wailed because she preferred me to stand. Olivia sat down too, on the same couch, but leaving a large space between us. Now that I knew about her it was incredible that I hadn’t seen it before. Or had I? Tea with her and Agnes and Vivian had made me think of Sidonie; it hadn’t just been my mind wandering.

  “The last person who threatened to slap me was a white woman. Blonde, like you. No Southern belle, either. Just trash.”

  “I guess that’s how we operate.”

  I told myself, Stop it. Whatever else she says, don’t rise to it. I wanted a grandmother for Bird. Olivia wasn’t the one I would have chosen, but she was a generous grandmother to Snow and if she put her mind to it, she could do it again. Bird was beautiful too, with her close curls and her bottomless eyes, and she was only just getting started.

  “I was working at a grocery store,” Olivia said. “And I didn’t fetch a box of soap flakes down fast enough for that woman’s liking, so she said: ‘I’ll slap you, girl.’ ‘I’ll slap you, girl’ to a grown woman. And I knew I’d lose my job if I went at her, so I just said: ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot of things to do, ma’am, and I’m as stupid as
they come. Please be patient with me.’ That was standard, that kind of cringing and crawling. I didn’t want it to be. She was not my better, I don’t care what anyone says, she wasn’t. None of them were. I thought: If I have a daughter, I don’t want anyone talking to her like that. I don’t ever want to hear my daughter wheedling at anyone the way I do every working day. I thought: If I do, if I ever hear that in the voice of a child of mine, I’ll make her sorry all right. I’ll wring her damn neck. Couldn’t very well wring my own neck, could I?”

  Olivia’s voice was very calm, but her hands trembled. I backed up, moved farther away so that Bird and I were pressed against the arm of the sofa. I didn’t think she was going to lash out. No, I wanted to keep us from catching what was in her, what was there in her voice and her eyes. But babies have some unfathomable criteria for what they consider attractive. Bird was wriggling like crazy. Her intuition should’ve told her that Olivia was terrible, just the worst, but I was having trouble keeping the kid from stretching her hands out in Olivia’s direction. I don’t know, maybe she already had expensive tastes and liked the scent Olivia was wearing.

  “What you don’t understand is that we’re being kept down out there. All the way down. In my town you couldn’t vote unless you passed a literacy test. How does that stop colored folks from voting, you ask? You didn’t see what the colored school was like, how big the classes were. The teachers did what they could, but half my male cousins could hardly read. They lost patience before the girls did. No matter how literate a colored man was, there was always some excuse to whip him. There were other things too. Little things. You’d save up and go out for a nice night at a nice place, all right, fine. All the high-class places we were allowed to go to, they were imitations of the places we were kept out of—not mawkish copies, most of it was done with perfect taste, but sitting at the bar or at the candlelit table you’d try to imagine what dinnertime remarks the real people were making . . . yes, the real people at the restaurant two blocks away, the white folks we were shadows of, and you’d try to talk about whatever you imagined they were talking about, and your food turned to sawdust in your mouth. What was it like in those other establishments? What was it that was so sacred about them, what was it that our being there would destroy? I had to know. I broke the law because I had to know. Oh, only in the most minor way. Gas station restrooms when Gerald would drive me cross-state on vacation—one day I used the White Only restroom and nobody noticed me. Gerald begged me not to, but I just got my compact out, repowdered my face, and walked in. I felt like laughing in all their faces. The rest room experience is more or less the same, in case you were wondering.”