Looking at this from the outside makes me afraid, as if I’m not Bird at all, and never was. Gee-Ma makes no allowance for me being a middle school kid when she talks to me, but then again I think she’s getting less and less able or willing to fix her mind on exactly who it is she’s talking to. When she calls me “child,” it feels as if she were trying to turn me into a different girl, the one she’d rather have there with her. There. It’s said.
Dad always comes back from Boston with something Snow wants me to have. The stuff she sends isn’t quite right for me—pairs of pink hair ribbons, meant for pigtails, for instance. I wear my hair short. I mean short-short. It looks like a cap of curls clinging to my head and I like that better than braids or bushiness. (Bushiness looks so good, but hurts so bad under the comb. I used to have to go to Tubman Street to get my hair braided. Maybe Merva Fairfax wove blessings or ill wishes into my hair with her nimble fingers . . .) Snow might think this is just a phase I’m going through and that I’ll want to grow my hair out soon. Pink, though? No.
Other things Snow has sent me: papier-mâché wings to wear on my shoulders . . . those looked great, but didn’t fit. The straps were too small, or my arms too big. There was also an unusual music box that I found cute in the daytime. My idea of a music box used to be that it was a nice version of a jack-in-the-box—all you had to do was open the lid and the music twinkled out at you and maybe there was a ballerina twirling around in there too. This music box didn’t have a lid. The display case was a wolf, stood on all four paws, and made of cloudy gray glass that looked as if it were full of breath. His head was lowered to the ground and his tongue was sticking out a little bit—you could almost hear him panting. He had a hole right in the middle of him, bigger than his stomach could ever be, really it was heart space, lung space, and stomach space combined. The hole was filled by a little tin doll, painted peach, smiling and wearing a red felt cape. She had a lot of joints to her and you could take her out of the wolf’s stomach and stuff her in again. To hear the music wound up inside her you had to turn a key. I couldn’t do it without wincing. Having to turn that key in her back just to hear thirty seconds of Peter and the Wolf . . . her smile was so hopeful: Ya having fun? Are ya, are ya?
When it got dark, I didn’t like to turn my back on the music box. It never made any moves. I think it was me who changed. At night I tend to wonder where things come from. I’d look at the wolf and at Red Riding Hood with her knees up, not even playing dead, openly living there, and I’d try to think who could’ve made them and what that person meant by it. It wasn’t like the things people make around here, which are just so pretty they make you smile and feel lucky and rich just to be looking at them. The music box was closer to the snake on Mom’s arm. That was another gift that had to be given away in the end, like the wings were. It isn’t Snow’s fault; it’s just that we don’t know each other.
2
dad says newspapers don’t hire reporters with bad grades. Aunt Mia says grades aren’t as important as being able to learn on the job. I know whom I’d rather believe. It’d be nice to get an A for once, but that would mean getting organized and doing all my homework at home instead of scribbling a few half-witted sentences about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or whatever it is at lunch break an hour before the report is due. I’m not completely hardened. I do still die a little bit inside when Miss Fairfax holds an essay of mine up to the light and asks: “Bird Whitman, do I see mayonnaise? Again?” That leads to me doing more homework in detention, where I work with an eye on the clock and often don’t finish a sentence if it means staying a second longer than I have to. Louis waits for me, and every time he waits he says it’s the last time. He only talks like that to show his independence; the boys in his class see him waiting and say I’ve got him well trained. I just look at him and say: “You’re a pal, Louis.” I tell him I don’t take him for granted. I tell him I honestly don’t know why he bothers with me. And he actually blushes—it’s the cutest thing in the world—and grabs my schoolbag and carries it to our next destination. Class work in class, and homework at home, I’d be a better student and a better daughter if I stuck to that, but I went and had a bad Monday at school and I brought it home with me.
It started at recess. I was lying on a bench listening to Connie Ross going over her half of the poem we’d had to learn for Spanish class: Caminante, son tus huellas / el camino, y nada más; / caminante, no hay camino . . . it was a poem I was falling in love with, I think. I must’ve been, because I’d whisper a couple of lines from it to myself or to the cobwebs: Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. The poem tells me it’s no big deal that I’m not like Snow. I can be another thing; I’m meant to be another thing.
Connie practiced and then I practiced, and we were excited, we were word perfect, maybe I was going to get my first A grade for this. Louis was a few yards away, playing at being a boxer; he and Jerry Fallon were mainly just sidestepping and jabbing their fists at each other, occasionally taking a dive as one or the other of them got hit by a fake knockout punch. Louis was commentating as well as fighting: “I’m Ah Wing Lee, Oregon State’s Chinese Lullaby, you’re Hubert ‘Kid’ Dennis of Montana, the year is 1933, we’re in Portland and this is our grudge match—yeah, you defeated me once, but once is all you get—you spring left, I spring left—”
A girl in Louis’s class named Barbara Thomas stepped up, beckoned to Louis, and whispered in his ear. It’s not that I’m the jealous type—I noticed that he’d stopped commentating before I noticed the girl Barbara whispering away into his ear. When she’d finished, he laughed, shrugged, said he wasn’t going to waste any steam on a dumb prank, and went back to his boxing match. I knew that fight and commentary inside out from reenactments in Louis’s front yard. “I swing . . . you duck right . . . you think maybe you stand a chance, you come up and find yourself in the middle of a storm, there’s nowhere to turn, fists coming at you from every which way, you guard your head on one side and there’s already another knock incoming on the other side—you’re about to drop, oh, you’re down!”
When it’s just he and I, Louis lets me be Ah Wing Lee. Each time he switches to the role of referee at the end and lifts my arm and declares me the winner, I go weak at the knees for real. How corny is that?
I’d been minding the boy’s jacket, and when he came over to the bench for it, I asked him what Barbara had been whispering about. He didn’t want to tell me, said I didn’t own him and he could have a private conversation with any girl he pleased, but I broke him down in the end. Someone had written LOUIS CHEN IS A VIETCONG in yellow chalk down at the other end of the school yard. Barbara wanted him to hear it from a friend first.
“That’s not actually the dumbest thing I ever heard, but it’s in the top ten,” was all I said, and we went back to class and forgot about it until the head teacher’s voice came over the PA system, instructing the “person or persons responsible for the yellow-chalk graffiti” to report to his office immediately.
So then everyone started asking each other, “What graffiti?” Some people had already seen it, and they told what they’d seen while others looked at me as if they expected to hear my opinion. There was no opinion for me to give. I said to Connie: “Dumb, right?” Connie said: “We’re above and beyond this,” and we went up and began to say the poem we’d learned, but the headmaster got back onto the PA system and cut my part of the recital in half. No one had turned themselves in, so he’d selected two members of the tenth grade at random—they were to go and scrub the wall immediately, remaining in the yard for as long as it took to remove the graffiti. He stressed that he didn’t think the two boys he was about to name were the culprits, but one of the boys was Louis’s friend Jerry Fallon. That sucked. It also got the whole class talking again—some people coughed out “Vietcong” into their hands while my Spanish dried up, and I wondered how big the letters chalked onto that wall were, that two people were needed to scrub them aw
ay.
By the end of the next lesson, word had got around that Louis was inviting whoever it was who had made the Vietcong jibe to meet him on the corner of Ivorydown and Pierce Road at three forty-five p.m. sharp, where he’d school them in geography the hard way. That’s a lonely turning off Ivorydown, a spot eleventh graders choose for robbing ninth and tenth graders of their lunch money. I met Louis by his locker and said: “Tell me it’s a rumor. You’re not really going to fight over this?”
He said: “Stay out of it.”
“What’s changed since recess?”
Louis sighed. “It’s getting out of hand. People are saying stuff. Gotta shut ’em up. You’ve got detention anyway. Call me at six and I’ll tell you what happened.”
There was no time to get any more out of him, but in my math class I heard so much idiocy I could hardly stand it.
“I’ll bet Chen wrote that himself, just ’cause he felt like getting talked about today.”
“He probably is a Vietcong.”
“Vietcong just love coloreds. And coloreds love them right back.”
I forced a laugh. Sometimes all the other kids want is for you to show you’re a good sport. If you stand out, you can’t expect people not to mention it.
“Yeah, like that boxer . . .” That was Larry Saunders, pretending he couldn’t remember Muhammad Ali’s name when it was practically written on his heart. “Didn’t he say he’s on their side? He won’t fight in Vietnam ’cause he’s an American Vietcong.”
“He didn’t say that,” I pointed out, on the brink of flipping my table over and my neighbor’s too. “He just said he didn’t have any quarrel with them. It’s not the same thing.”
“Words, words. If you’re not fighting ’em, you’re on their side,” Kenneth Young said. Kenneth and Larry both have fathers who served in Korea, and they talk about their big brothers who are serving the country right now—Larry’s big brother is an air force officer and fits the muscle-bound action man profile pretty well, but Kenneth’s brother works at a naval base. Kenneth calls it “security” and makes out that his brother is important—I asked Dad and apparently “security” means checking passes and pushing buttons to open doors. Big deal. But Dad says that both Kenneth and Larry are afraid that their brothers will get badly injured or die. “Their brothers are their heroes, and if anything happens to William Saunders or Robert Young, Kenneth and Larry might blame everyone around them, because we’re the citizens those men will have died for, and maybe they won’t believe we were worth it. Are we? Have we ever been worth it, any of the times before?” Dad was having a Gee-Ma moment when he said that; he was talking to somebody who wasn’t me, somebody who answered silently and made him hang his head. (I have a letter to Snow that I never sent. Dear Snow, Have you really got to be everywhere?) I was supposed to be in bed, and Dad was just talking. Late at night in the parlor, with a drink in his hand, telling his thoughts to Julia’s piano. If Mom had been there, she’d have said “Oh Lord” and made him eat something to soak up the drink.
Okay, so Kenneth Young was bound to feel some type of way about people who deny that there’s any duty for them to do. And “Shut up, Fat Kenneth” wasn’t the most mature or persuasive response I could’ve made to him, but I had a feeling that Connie, Ruth, and Paula would’ve studied their fingernails and failed to back me up no matter what I’d said. The others went on and on. They sounded like they were kidding around, but the things they said—Colored folks are so angry these days, lose their rag over nothing at all, rawwwrrrr, like wild animals. My dad says those Black Panthers are Vietcongs just waiting to happen. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile, gun us all down in broad daylight.
I skipped detention. I was first out of my history class and met Louis at the school gates; it was easy to spot him because he was on his own, exposed, down on one knee tying his shoelace. I put my foot down next to his.
“Hi.”
He didn’t look up, took his time getting the bow to droop just right. “Hi.”
“Let’s go.”
“You’re not involved.”
“The hell I’m not. You need me. If it turns out to be a girl we’re up against, I’ll punch her for you. Hurry, before Miss Fairfax comes.”
The other kids went quiet when we walked past them, but we didn’t look behind us to see if we were being followed. He said he’d told his other friends not to come. That shouldn’t have stopped them, but there was no point in saying so. He didn’t seem worried at all, but I was shaking. I don’t like real fights because people get so caught up in them, even watching them you get all caught up in them, and if that’s what it’s like watching them, how do the people who are right in the middle of the fight know how to find their way to the end of it alive? A few years ago one boxer killed another in the ring, just kept hitting him and hitting him, didn’t realize the other guy was dead, didn’t mean to kill him, just wanted to win. I won’t let Louis take up that sport professionally. He’s going to have to find something else to do. Louis’s arm brushed mine and for a moment I thought he was going to try to hold my hand. “Don’t even think about it,” I said. We’d never have lived it down if anyone saw.
“You’re really pretty, Bird,” he said, looking straight ahead of us. We were walking up Ivorydown, and the wind was blowing leaf scraps into our eyes.
“You don’t have to say that.”
I’d have liked for him to say my name again, though. You know how it is when someone says your name really well, like it means something that makes the world a better place. In Louis Chen’s case, he sometimes says my name as if it were a lesser-known word for bacon.
“I wanted to say it,” he said. “Don’t get bigheaded, but I think you’re the prettiest girl in school.”
I pretended not to hear. We reached the corner of Pierce Road and Ivorydown and waited with our backs up against the rough bark of a tree trunk. After ten minutes we decided, with a mixture of disgust and relief, that Yellow Chalk Guy (or Girl) wasn’t going to show, and we were ready to leave when three hefty boys from the eleventh grade turned up. These three didn’t take lunch money; they were less predictable than that. They might stop you and give you a stash of comic books, or they might rip up your homework. We knew their names, but never said them in case it made them appear. One of them was directly descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter; that one’s mother had mentioned it at one of Grammy Olivia’s coffee hours. Mom says everybody immediately began to feel oppressed by their humble backgrounds because they’d forgotten (or didn’t know) that anyone who’s descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne is also a descendant of John Hathorne, the Salem judge who put just about as many innocent people to death as he could, so was it any wonder that Hawthorne was so good at describing what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night.
“Did we miss it? Did he show up yet?” one of the eleventh graders asked.
“Who?” I asked, since Louis was taking too long to reply.
“The guy who called your friend here a Vietcong.”
“Do you think we’d still be standing here if he had shown up? What do you think we’d be doing here?” I asked. I got away with it because I put the question as if I were curious rather than just giving sass. But one of the boys told Louis: “I guess your girlfriend likes to talk.”
More kids showed up, in threes and fours and fives. They stood at a distance from us, filling the newcomers in on what was happening. “They’re waiting for the guy who called that boy there a Vietcong. Boy got sore about it, says he’s going to bust this other guy’s head.” Within half an hour we were surrounded, Louis and me, caught in a circle of snickering kids, without a single one of our lousy so-called friends in sight. Louis checked his watch and took a couple of steps forward, trying to look purposeful, I guess, trying to look like a boy who didn’t know about everybody else but he was going home. Nobody said we couldn’t
leave, but the circle got tighter and people stood shoulder to shoulder.
“He’ll be here soon enough,” someone said. It sounded like Fat Kenneth Young.
“Yeah, he probably just had detention.”
“Patience, my friends, patience,” said the eleventh grader with the witch-hunter’s blood.
It was around then that I began to be sure that the person who’d started the whole thing was right there in the circle, hidden like a worm in an apple, and I hated him or her like I hate all sneaks.
“Just come on out,” I said. “Come out right now.”
“Who are you talking to?” said a long-faced boy with red-rimmed eyes. “Hey, is she talking to me?”
Louis gave me a nod. Somebody was going to get their head busted no matter what, and it looked like he’d just picked that somebody at random. He put his fists up, the circle around us broke, poked apart with the steel tip of a parasol, and Grammy Olivia looked through the gap and said: “What in the world is all this? Louis Chen, I hope you don’t intend to hit a girl for the entertainment of these feral beasts gathered here.”
They let us pass. They muttered, but they let us pass. It put me in awe of Grammy Olivia’s Saturday morning coffee hour, because that was part of the reason we went in peace—everyone’s mother, aunt, grandmother, or great-aunt goes to Grammy Olivia’s coffee hour. Also Gee-Pa Gerald regularly plays golf with Worcester’s chief of police, et cetera. Also Grammy Olivia’s tone of voice offers you ten seconds to do as she says or the rest of your life to be sincerely sorry that you didn’t.
Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel Page 15
