Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel

by Oyeyemi, Helen

  She walked ahead of us without turning around, Louis nudged me good-bye and peeled off in the direction of his house, and I went up to her as she was letting herself in at her front door. “Thanks, Grammy Olivia.” She frowned, picked a leaf out of my hair, and said: “You’re welcome, Bird.”

  I’d have liked to ask her about what had happened over on Ivorydown; she seemed to understand it. But I didn’t because I thought I might cry while asking her and then she’d wash her hands of me altogether. Grammy Olivia’s got no time for weeping willows; I’ve heard her say so.

  Dad was in the parlor, reading the paper and tugging at the collar of his shirt. Dad in a suit is a persecuted man. I asked him what the state of the nation was, and he said the president had taken it into his head to raise taxes and so everybody was probably going to move to Canada out of spite. On a more local level, good old Flax Hill would probably last just about another day. A new restaurant had opened on Colby Street, and Mom and Dad wanted to see about the food there, so they’d booked a table and were going to share it with their friends the Murrays. “Can you see if your mom’s ready to leave?”

  “Oh . . . is she doing that ‘every question you ask me adds half an hour to your waiting time’ thing again?”

  “She’s a hard woman, Bird.”

  Upstairs Mom checked her lipstick while I stood behind her holding two pairs of earrings, a pair in each hand. She’d picked them out and couldn’t decide which to wear. In the mirror I looked like her maid, and that made me want to throw the earrings at her head and run.

  For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors. Grammy Olivia avoids her own gaze and looks at her hair. Gee-Ma Agnes peeps reluctantly and then looks glad, like her reflection’s so much better than she could have hoped for. Aunt Mia shakes her head a little, Oh, so it’s you again, is it? Louis tenses and then relaxes—Who’s that? Oh, all right, I guess I can live with him. Dad looks quietly irritated by his reflection, like it just said something he strongly disagrees with. Mom locks eyes with hers. She’s one of the few people I’ve observed who seems to be trying to catch her reflection out, willing it to make one false move. She waved away the earrings I held and reached for a third pair. Gold pendulums. They swung hypnotically, and we looked at each other with those eyes of ours that are so similar.

  I asked her what Snow was like. “She’s okay if you like that sort of thing,” Mom said. Denise Arnold had said that about the gold-plated fountain pen Gee-Pa Gerald gave me last birthday. I guess it’s a thing you say when you’re jealous and don’t have the guts to come right out and be sincerely nasty.

  “I don’t get it; do you like that sort of thing or not?” I muttered under my breath. Mom kept letters from Snow. She opened them and must have read them, and she kept them in her jewelry box. There weren’t very many, maybe about ten. I’d seen them, but I’d been biding my time. You can’t bide your time forever. I gave Mom a chance to say whatever she wanted to say about Snow, and that was all she wanted to say. So once she and Dad had left for their dinner date I took the letters and I read them. Afterward I felt less sure that Mom wasn’t the enemy. Of course her replies weren’t there, so I wasn’t getting her side of the story. But it looked bad. There’d been months and sometimes years between each letter, so the handwriting changed. It started off big and wonky and basic.

  Dear Boy,

  How are you? I hope you’re feeling better. How’s Bird? Aunt Clara and Uncle John are nice but I don’t like it here.

  All my love,

  Snow

  Dear Boy,

  Don’t you miss me? I miss you and Bird and everybody. Uncle John is like a big black dark mountain and he laughs so loud it makes me jump. Remember you said I could come home thirty days ago.

  All my love,

  Snow

  After a few more letters, Snow learned cursive.

  Uncle John and Aunt Clara are perfect treasures. I’m afraid that the way I laugh might be too loud for you now. Dad tells me I make quite a racket. I figured that if I couldn’t beat Uncle J, I’d better join him.

  In the later letters she shortened “All my love” to AML, then she dropped it.

  You were like some sort of glorious princess who swept into my life and I just wanted to sit at your feet all day and amuse you. Did that get on your nerves? It’s really stupid of me, but I can’t see what it was that came between us. Will you try to explain it to me?

  That one got me. According to my calculations, Snow would have written that when she was fifteen. She stopped asking how I was and started asking what I was like. She stopped asking to come home and started asking just to visit.

  The last letter was a year old, and addressed to me. Mom had opened it and read it and then slipped it into the jewelry box along with the others.

  Hi, Bird,

  It’s your sister here. Can you read yet? I hope so. I’ve seen pictures of you and you’ve grown so much I don’t recognize you. You look like a super stylish tomboy. The kind of girl who wouldn’t have spoken to me when I was your age and probably still wouldn’t speak to me now. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to spend time together, but what do you say we catch up? I’m afraid I’ve been forgetting you. I used to think I knew all these things about you, but now I can’t remember what they were, and anyway, how much can you know about a baby that’s a few months old? I’d love it if you wrote to me with some information about your personality.

  Yours affectionately,

  Snow

  I put all the letters back where I found them, all except the one that was mine. That one I wrote a reply to. Well, ten replies. Fifteen. Each one contained too much of something. One reply was too chatty, another too dry, yet another too blunt. Mom was on my mind. My writing to Snow was me apologizing for Mom, in a way, even if I didn’t mention her. That was the problem. Mom, the glorious princess who swept into Snow’s life and then kicked her out without a word of explanation. I got overwhelmed and climbed into my bed, pulled the covers over my head. A weight gathered on my forehead and another one landed bang in the middle of my chest. There was something false about the pain—it wasn’t even anatomically correct. I was ashamed that I couldn’t switch it off even though I knew it wasn’t a truthful pain.

  Don’t you let this get the better of you, Bird, I said to myself. You write to Snow and let her know she’s got a sister if she still wants one. I wonder if Snow knows that story; I don’t remember all of it, but at one point a woman takes two toads, the ugliest she can find, and she whispers spells to them and sends them to her stepdaughter’s bath, where they’re supposed to lie on the girl’s head and her heart and make the girl ugly inside and out. And the toads do as they’re told, they find the girl and one jumps up onto her head and the other onto her heart, but in the blink of an eye they turn to roses, because that girl’s the real deal and there’s no harming her.

  The phone rang. I knew it was Louis, and I patted the phone apologetically as I walked past it. Dad has a photograph of Snow in a heart-shaped frame, beside the one of me and him and Mom wearing cotton-candy beards. I unlocked Dad’s studio and sat there looking at Snow and her soft, open smile and the pink bow in her long wavy hair. I looked at her until I began to feel as if she could see me and was smiling specifically at me, and then I started my reply all over again.

  Dear Snow,

  Yes, I can read now. I don’t recall ever having met you, but I’m sure that even as a baby I must have been very proud to be associated with a girl like you whom I’ve only ever heard good things about. I’m your usual kind of thirteen year old with the usual kind of personality—usual kind of usual kind of, good grief, oh well—except that I don’t always show up in mirrors. I’m hoping that might help me in my future career someday, though I’m not yet sure exactly how. I don’t know what’s deceived you into thinking I’m cool, but if it’s the way I turn up the cuffs of my pants, I only do that becau
se Hannah Philby came back from her French vacation wearing her pants that way and everyone said “ooh la la” and copied her. So you see I do what I can to be just like everybody else.

  Please tell me more about yourself (you’re almost twenty-one now, is that right?) and about Uncle John and Aunt Clara, and I hope it won’t be too much trouble for you to address your reply to me care of Louis Chen at 17 Duke Street. To tell you the truth I’m getting shy, Snow, so I’ll have to give you the info about Louis Chen next time and end this letter here.

  Just your usual kind of sister,

  Bird Whitman

  PS—Can I ask you something? Do you understand how beautiful you are? Does anyone ever tell you, or does everyone assume that you already know? And does it ever bother you, or do you mostly just enjoy it? I haven’t put the question very well and I’m sorry about that. I may have made it sound like I’m jealous, and naturally I am. But I also want to know what it’s like.

  PPS—I’d really appreciate it if you could skip any false modesty in your reply. If you reply. Hope you do. Thanks.

  3

  a week later Dad made another trip to Boston and brought me back a gift from Snow—a small, square, white birdcage with a broken door. I hung the cage from the ceiling and watched it swing, and I was happy. I can’t explain, maybe it isn’t something that needs explaining, how the sight of a broken cage just puts you up on stilts. The promise that the cage will always be empty, that its days as a jailhouse are done. So this was how it was going to be between Snow and me. No more words, it was too late for them, I’d asked her the wrong questions. She must have wished for an easier sister, one who asked her what to do about boys or how to turn the tables on the latest girl to snub me in the school cafeteria. I couldn’t grant that wish. But I wanted to send something back to her, something more than just two words Dad said to her on my behalf. I didn’t have anything she was likely to want. I had some handsome seashells, but everybody who’s ever been to the beach probably has seashells. You don’t even realize you’ve been collecting them like crazy until you try to sit down and they stab you through your shorts. My scrapbook filled with headlines from the Flax Hill Record was too much of an inside joke to send, and might only remind Snow of all the things she’d missed out on. Not that she’d missed out on much. Marriages, christenings, funerals, an asbestos scare, a spate of prank calls made to the mayor, a small fortune in Mexican pesos discovered in one of the drawers of an old pie safe. I’d also kept a record of the time a strong wind blew over Mr. Andrew Luckett’s barn and all the bats that had been living there hid out in the woods and then flew around town for three nights, looking for somewhere else to live. In the “famous people I have met” section there were the news clippings that covered a dispute between the Hammonds and the Websters over the origins of a meatloaf recipe that had been published in Good Housekeeping under Veronica (née Webster) Murray’s name. Both sides hired lawyers and the matter almost went to court, but Suky Hammond discovered that she’d misread a word in her great-grandma’s recipe, a word that changed everything, and everyone agreed that the only person to blame was Suky Hammond’s great-grandma, since her handwriting was barely readable, and even she would’ve been mortified to learn that she’d been the cause of such a falling-out between friends and neighbors.

  Mom sells invisible ink pens at Mrs. Fletcher’s store, and I decided to buy one for Snow. Sometimes you write down barefaced lies, or words you don’t really mean, just to see how they look, and it’s comforting to think that after six hours the words will just disappear. No need to show them the door, they’ll just be seeing themselves out. I found it comforting anyway, and hoped Snow agreed. I’d probably get a discount because I was the manager’s daughter and also because a little handwritten sign in the store window said SPECIAL PRICES FOR MALADJUSTED INDIVIDUALS. INQUIRE WITHIN, but I’d still need money. Preferably money I’d earned. Ruth Cohen was giving up her paper route because she wanted more sleep on Saturdays, and I talked to her about taking her place.

  A couple of days after that Mom and I had to shop for the week’s food. I go to the grocery store with her as often as I can because it’s better if I have final approval of the things she buys. Her combinations can be a little Martian otherwise. She made us lobster thermidor once, because someone in a novel she was reading had gone on a crazy lunchtime rampage and lobster thermidor was what she’d had. The flavors were really interesting (Dad’s words, not mine) but for a whole day afterward my stomach felt as if it had been kidnapped, boiled, and then deep-fried. I bet she put huckleberries in the sauce, or some other ingredient that isn’t supposed to go into lobster thermidor.

  For a moment at the grocery store I thought Mom was going to say something about Snow. She knew I’d kept my letter, the one Snow had written to me, asking if I could read yet. What Mom did was leave her jewelry box on her dressing table, wide open so I could see that all the other letters had been taken out. And she’d started blushing whenever I caught her eye. She’d be talking and I’d tilt my head at her and her face would flood dark red. At the grocery store she said: “Bird . . . Bird, you listen to me,” and she was blushing again, my red and white mother. I said: “Yes, Mom?” and there was a nasty spike in my voice, but I didn’t care. She ought to know that if you want to set yourself up as queen and have everything the way you want it and keep sisters apart then you’re not going to have a big fan club. She ought to know that where there’s a queen there’s often a plot to overthrow her. She ended up just looking down at the shopping list and reading it aloud, and I picked the items up and put them in our cart, except for the stuff that sounded like it’d come out of one of her books. I’ve never known a grocery store to stock larks’ tongues or quince preserves anyhow.

  Mom came and sat on the end of my bed that night, took a long, deep pull on her cigarette, and sent a jet of smoke up toward the birdcage. “You value objectivity, right?”

  I decided not to give her an answer, but she wouldn’t leave without one. A skin-crackling silence rose up between us. It was new and truly awful and nothing like our other silences.

  To put a stop to it I said: “What’s ‘objectivity’ mean?”

  “Don’t give me that, Miss Reading-Age-of-Sixteen-Plus. Miss Fairfax has started saying the only reason your schoolwork’s sloppy is because you’re bored; it doesn’t challenge you.”

  “No . . . I’m just lazy, Mom. And I try to be objective, but I keep forgetting.”

  “I’m asking you a favor. I want you to concentrate on being as objective as you can about your sister.” (Whoever heard of anyone being objective about their sister?) “She’s a pretty convincing replica of an all-around sweetie pie, but . . . I think being objective may be the only way you’ll see that there’s something about her that doesn’t quite add up. Something almost like a smell, like milk that’s spoiled. Maybe it’s just as simple as her being an overpetted show pony; I don’t know. I’d be happy never to find out. You want to play investigator, so investigate. I’m here on standby. But . . . Bird, what could you have to say to a replica? You’re so much yourself. Whatever else happens, don’t let her mess that up. Okay?”

  If that was Mom’s attempt to make me believe that my sister was bad news, it was a flop.

  “Look—I’ve got to get up early tomorrow,” I said.

  I wasn’t being mean—Aunt Mia was taking me to a conference for teen journalists. It was being held in Rhode Island, and I had special permission to take the day off school.

  “Right,” Mom said. “Right. Hey, sweet dreams.”

  I closed my eyes but she stayed in my room. She walked over to the window, drew the curtains around her, and stood there, smoking. It had been a foggy day and she’d done this before, on other foggy days—I knew she liked the view from my window, liked to trace the blurry shape of the hill with one finger. I was mad at her but glad that she was watching over me. I don’t know exactly when she left. I woke up a cou
ple of times and she hadn’t left my room—an owl said tyick tyick outside my window, and the curtains rustled and Mom muttered: “Tyick tyick yourself, owl.” In the morning she was gone. She’d killed four spiders. There were no bodies, but their webs gaped at me.

  —

  the conference wasn’t too bad. I was there to eavesdrop for Aunt Mia. She was writing an article about what to expect from the journalists of the future, and she figured they’d clam right up if there was a grown-up around. I didn’t get very many quotes for her—the journalists of the future were introverts. They listened to the speakers up on stage, took notes, and occasionally asked each other how to spell a word. Some of them looked suspiciously like jocks and cheerleaders who’d put on eyeglasses and intelligent expressions just for the chance to be around kids from other schools, but apart from that I enjoyed being part of a silent, highly observant crowd that stored its opinions up until they were good and ready. I befriended a girl named Yasmin Khoury—she was sixteen, and looked like the princess of a faraway land, but claimed that her father was a janitor. We called ourselves the Brown People’s Alliance, though she said I was only just brown enough to qualify, so she’d have to be the spokesperson until we got a few more members. We sat together at lunch break, drinking ice-cold milk out of wineglasses.

  Yasmin said: “So . . . have you got a boyfriend?”

  I nodded.

  “Really?”

  “Ouch.”

  Yasmin patted the long braid that ran down her back. “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. You should break up with him, though. Before it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “How do I put this . . . boys take up a lot of thinking time.”

  “They do?” (I’d never considered Louis to be a time-tabled activity before. I love, and I mean love the way his hair falls across his forehead in a wave, and come to think of it, the time I spend thinking about pushing that wave of black hair out of his eyes could definitely be put to better use. His friends say: “Cut that hair, Chen,” but he reminds them that it was a haircut that drained the mighty Samson of his strength. Yes, the boy I’m sweet on can be such a nerd sometimes.)