Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel

by Oyeyemi, Helen

  He says a rat bit him on the face when he was a boy. Mom was really surprised that he’d told me that. She doesn’t know if it’s true; that was the first she’d heard of it. He said he used to have to go through trash cans looking for food. And there was a rat in the trash can, and the rat was hungry too; he was taking its food, so it bit him on the face. I tried to dislike him a little bit less after he told me that, because that’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen to anyone. “Where’s the scar?” I asked. He laughed. “It healed well. It healed well.”

  He read to me from a little suede-covered book. “The bites of rats are sometimes difficult to recognize. They always attack the parts that are fat, i.e., the cheeks and the heels—” The book was falling apart onto the tabletop, and the pages he was reading from didn’t have any print on them. “They divide the skin in a straight line, which often has the appearance of having been cut with a knife; so close is the resemblance that it’s often difficult to avoid a mistake—” He said those were the findings of a French doctor from a long time ago. I just said okay. He said: “Look it up sometime. I’m serious . . . look it up.” I said okay.

  Hard to know how to take the things he said about Mom. I don’t accept what he said but I can’t get past it. He told me Mom is evil. I said: “What do you mean, ‘evil’?”

  FN stands for Frank Novak and BW stands for Bird Whitman. (I had to be quick; I think I said more but I can’t remember what I said.)

  FN: I’m not talking about powers of darkness or something you can protect yourself from with crosses and holy water. Of course it is difficult to describe, because it seems so ordinary. Seems so, but is not. Evil studies the ordinary and imitates it. Then you can say it was just a little bad temper, we all know what that is. But some people . . . with some people the spite goes so deep, it is a thing beyond personality . . . you don’t want to understand me. I’m speaking of a little girl who was born too early. She was so small. It was crazy how small she was. She didn’t open her eyes for days after she was born. She kept her eyes closed and shivered and shivered, like someone was yelling at her that she wasn’t going to make it and she was doing all she could to ignore them. Maybe she wasn’t meant to live, I don’t know. But she wanted to, this baby girl. She struggled. She really struggled. I didn’t work for a month. I held her, walked around the house holding her in a blanket. They couldn’t do much at the hospital. They didn’t have those good machines to help out back then. I remember a nurse told me I should have a Mass said for the baby’s soul. A wet nurse came every day—it was the one time in my life I’ve wished I was a woman, so the wet nurse wouldn’t have had to come for my child. The doctor came every other day. I don’t know how she pulled through. This is the thing—maybe it wasn’t her that pulled through. Maybe it was just that will to exist in the world. I mean, it wasn’t the will of someone young, it was the will of . . . something that has had life before and knows that life is good.

  It’s not Mom’s fault if she was born too early.

  There was so much he wasn’t saying I didn’t know where to start with the questions.

  When I opened my mouth, he held up his hand.

  FN: There was a morning I was sure that she was gone. I woke up and she wasn’t shivering anymore. You see, I slept sitting up in a chair against the wall, so it couldn’t tilt back. I slept that way so I could have her against my chest through the night. To keep her warm, I suppose. To keep her alive. If anything was wrong, I wanted to feel it immediately. So. She wasn’t shivering. I lifted her up and she was so much heavier than she had been the night before. She didn’t move at all. I put my cheek against her cheek and I cried. I cried so much. And I said Why? There was knocking at the outside door as well. I heard it but I didn’t answer, I held the dead child. It was afternoon when I looked at her again . . . I’d been crying all that time. I looked at her again and her eyes were open. She was alive again. There was a tear-drop on her chin and she was trying to see it.

  BW: You think it was the crying that brought her back?

  FN: Without question it was the crying. She liked it. She got better after that. She got strong. The first time I saw her smile—I switched on the wireless set one evening and tried to find some music for us. A woman was being killed in a radio play on one of the stations, and the actress screamed. I thought it’d make Boy nervous, but Santa Claus himself couldn’t have gotten a wider smile out of her.

  BW: That all?

  FN: I could tell you tens of stories about the pain she caused other children before she learned to be scared that I’d catch her at it. Most children get into fights, but it’s a bad sign when a child fights dirty, without anyone even showing her how. One girl angered Boy in some way—she said something, I think—this girl had a sore leg; she’d had some small accident days before . . . it was the sore leg that Boy went for, quick as quick. She kicked that sore leg out from under the girl. The happy children, the ones who had friends they could rely on, those children were safe from her. She was drawn to the anxious ones. The ones who had potential for misery. I watched her. When she ran away from home, I knew she’d gone to find someone who was unhappy, and once she’d found them she’d use her gift to make it worse.

  BW: What do you think Boy would say if I told her all this?

  FN: Don’t know. Try it.

  He suddenly became a gentleman and asked if I wanted the rest of his french fries. He said he hated waste.

  —

  dad knocked on the diner window; I saw him and Frank didn’t. He had my hula hoop tucked under his arm, and when he reached us, he dropped it and picked me up off my seat. He held me tight against his chest and said, “Thank God,” and “You’re grounded forever,” and I heard the hoop rolling around on the tiled floor.

  I said: “I don’t get why I’m grounded forever.”

  “It’s directly connected to what happens in a father’s heart when he finds a pink hula hoop just lying there in the mud. To find that and have no idea where its owner is—I mean, goddamn it, Bird.”

  I thought about it. He was right.

  “And then I ask around and nobody remembers having seen her. And then Agnes starts talking about enemies—”

  “This is Flax Hill. I couldn’t have gone far.”

  “Don’t you see that that’s what made it so scary that no one had seen you? Your mom’s been on the phone to every kid in your class. But then Susie called your grammy. And you’re grounded forever.”

  It was funny—I’d kind of expected Frank to be gone when Dad finally put me down, but Frank was still there, dipping his french fries in mayonnaise. He’d probably guessed that Dad wouldn’t hit an old man.

  “Arturo Whitman,” Dad said, and held out his hand.

  Frank went right on eating. “I know who you are,” he said.

  Dad looked at me, looked back at Frank, then suggested that Frank introduce himself. Frank said his name, said it with pride, and Dad grabbed his arm and forced him out of the booth. For a second I thought Frank was going to get beaten around the head with his own walking stick, but Dad pressed it into his hand and told him to get out. “Just go. And if I see you look back at me or my daughter—if you look back at us even once—I’ll kick you right into the middle of next week.”

  Frank said: “Why would I want to look back?” And he did as he was told.

  —

  apparently susie conlin told Dad to come get me because of Frank’s negative energy. She told Dad I was sitting in a booth with an old man who was telling me his life story and stopped talking whenever she walked past. She said I was writing down everything the man said, that I was wincing as I wrote with my bandaged hand, and that I looked really tired. She thought the old man should find somebody else to tell his life story to.

  “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  “No.”

  “If he did—”

  “No. It wa
s the tree that cut me.”

  “Show me what you wrote down.”

  “He took it with him.”

  Mom was sarcastic when we got home. “You and your Nancy Drew act. Thanks for coming home,” she said, interrupting Dad, who was telling her about Frank and how he didn’t think Frank was going to come near us again. She was red-faced and red-eyed. I put her arms around me and held them there until she hugged me.

  —

  also . . . i found out the worst thing that can happen when you tell someone you love them. I thought that if you love someone and they don’t love you back then they’re nice to you. Or at least, if you end up feeling terrible, the other person didn’t mean for that to happen. But Mom said “I love you” to some man on the phone, a man named Charlie, and he said: “Why?”

  I got into the eavesdropping late, but I knew she was the one who’d called him, because the phone hadn’t rung. She was mad at him. She thought he’d told her dad where to find us. “You told that man about me and Bird!” she said. He said he hadn’t spoken to Frank Novak in years, and was Bird a boy or a girl, and Mom said: “She’s my daughter. My little girl.” Then this Charlie person said he had two sons, and a wife. He said he was happy. (I could almost hear Frank Novak saying “The happy ones were safe from her.”) That was when Mom told him she loved him. And he asked why.

  Mom said: “Charlie? Charlie?” as if the phone line wasn’t working properly, but the line was clear. He said he had to go and hung up. Then I had to wait for Mom to hang up—obviously I couldn’t hang up before she did. She didn’t put the phone down for at least a minute. I stood there listening to the dial tone and began to wonder if this was a trick and she’d left the receiver off the hook in the parlor so she could appear in the hallway and tell me I’d been busted. Then I thought she might be crying into the phone, but her breathing was regular. After she hung up I dashed across the hallway and into bed with my heart going like gangbusters.

  Mom: Charlie . . . I love you.

  Charlie: Why?

  Mom wore sunshades for the next few days. She wore them indoors and at night, and she smiled when Dad teased her. He thought she was acting that way because Snow was coming home.

  Dad: I love you, honey.

  Mom: And I love you.

  She slept all the way through the weekend. She didn’t even get up to eat.

  I tried to tell Aunt Mia that she should maybe come over or take Mom out somewhere. I’d want someone to tell Louis I was feeling down if for some reason I couldn’t tell him myself. But Aunt Mia was avoiding me. When I called her apartment, she said, “Hello?” and then dropped the phone when she heard my voice, and then I had to call back six times before she finally answered. If that isn’t avoiding somebody then I don’t know what is.

  “What’s new?” she asked, once she was done denying that she was avoiding me.

  “I met my grandfather.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, on Mom’s side.”

  “I figured. Well?”

  “Well, we sort of hated each other.”

  (I’d cried about that. The tears came all of a sudden, when I was jumping rope with Ruth and Paula. Suddenly my feet wouldn’t leave the ground and my face and neck felt raw, as if they’d been scraped with rocks. It was the look he’d given me when he understood that I was his granddaughter. It was like a burn. And now that I was safe from it, the syringe scared me even more.)

  “It’s okay, cara. I didn’t get along too well with one of my grandfathers, either.”

  “Yeah, but . . . this was . . . anyway, he said something weird.”

  Aunt Mia dropped something—a coffee cup, something like that. There was clattering and I heard her curse and scrabble around with a paper towel. Then she said: “To you? He said something weird to you?”

  “Yeah. How’s your objectivity?”

  Aunt Mia said: “Fine, I guess. Why? What did he say?”

  “He said that Mom’s evil.”

  I repeated myself after a couple of seconds because Aunt Mia didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure she was still there. I’m not always sure about Mom, but Aunt Mia is definitely not evil, and in a way she’s my proof that Mom is morally okay. It would’ve helped if Aunt Mia had laughed or seemed shocked, but she was just quiet. I began to whisper it a third time but she stopped me: “Can you put your mom on the line?”

  “I thought you’d never ask. She’s sleeping, though. Do I try to wake her up?”

  “No. No, let her rest. Just . . . tell her to call me.”

  “But you’re okay, right?”

  She called me a sweetheart for asking. It was hard to tell whether or not Mom and Aunt Mia had fallen out. Mom didn’t seem to think so, but maybe she’d done something that Aunt Mia was holding a grudge over. I know she went to Aunt Mia’s place twice, but both times Aunt Mia wasn’t home.

  Dad asked if we should be worried about Mia, and Mom got irritated. “Why should we be worried about Mia, Arturo? Because she’s not married? Because she works hard at a job she likes?”

  Dad let a few seconds go by and then said: “The Mia we know makes a little time for her friends no matter what, that’s all.”

  “‘The Mia we know,’ eh? So what are you saying . . . that there’s this whole other Mia we don’t know?”

  There was quite a long discussion about it and Mom didn’t realize she’d been tricked out of being irritated until Dad had made some rough sketches to show us which one of Aunt Mia’s bookcases could be a door that revolved into a hidden room.

  I did what I could to smoke Aunt Mia out . . . I mailed her a copy of the notes I’d taken at the diner. She’d have called if she’d read them, no doubt about it. They must have gotten lost in the mail.

  6

  i came home from school on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and Snow was there, playing Julia’s piano. Not a whole piece of music, just tumbling little passages. I peeped around the parlor door and watched her working the piano pedals with her bare feet. The bare feet seemed proof that she was out of the ordinary; it was already so cold that I was wearing socks over two layers of pantyhose. Dad came up behind me and pushed me into the room with her, saying: “C’mon, that’s your sister in there.”

  She looked more colored in person. Maybe it was the way she’d chosen to wear her hair, combed and pinned up on one side of her head so that it all rained down on one shoulder and left the other exposed to the dusty sunlight. She smiled at me and the words I’d been about to say went into hiding.

  “Have mercy, Bird Whitman. I may need you to dial it back a notch with the cuteness,” she said, and slid off the piano stool. She was three days early. Her voice was a lot more girlish than I’d imagined it, considering the things she’d written to me, but her hugging technique was like Dad’s, maybe even a little more intense. She’d brought me a bouquet. Some of them looked like squashed gray-blue poppies. Others were almost roses, their color a stormy purple. Their petals and stamen were all twisted together, but they smelled good. Snow said they were the kind of flowers that only opened up at night; you picked them at night and then they stayed open.

  “They’re not poison flowers, are they?”

  She stared at me. “What?”

  “You know . . . like La Belle Capuchine’s flowers in your letter . . .”

  “Oh! Ha ha. No, no poison.”

  “And no suitcase, either?”

  “Left it at number eleven. I’ll be sleeping over there, in that creepy room with the tulle curtains and the sugar plum fairy mobiles. You know, I never even liked ballerinas.”

  “Huh, well you should’ve said so.”

  “I think I started to once, and everybody started saying, ‘Uh oh . . . somebody’s not herself today.’ I was outnumbered.”

  “Oh.” So she was outnumbered. That was not a good excuse.

  “Come to the mirro
r.” She fixed one of the night flowers behind my ear and stood looking over my shoulder.

  “I see it,” she said.

  I looked at us. “What?” We didn’t look as though we were related. Not even cousins.

  “That thing you wrote to me about how technically impossible things are always trying so hard to happen to us, and just letting the nearest technically impossible thing happen—”

  “Oh . . . yeah, I see it too! Oh, Snow. Think of all the pranks we can play.”

  The mirror caught a few rays of sunset through the open front door, and the image of us went chestnut-colored at the corners. Snow’s hand was on my shoulder and both my own hands were at my sides, but our reflections didn’t call that any kind of reunion. The girls in the mirror had their arms around each other, and they smiled at us until we followed their lead.

  “Looks like long ago,” Snow said. “Like Great-aunt Effie just said: ‘I hope you girls don’t think you’re something new? We’ve had sisters like you in this family before.’ And then she shows us an old, old photo . . . one of those tinted daguerreotypes . . .”

  She lay with her head in my lap for most of the afternoon, jumping up every now and again to start a disc spinning on the record player. We talked about Frank Novak and how he’d told me Mom was evil and she said, “You know that’s not true, right? I don’t know what she is, but evil isn’t it.” We talked about Ephraim, who was most definitely not her boyfriend and was never going to be.

  “So . . . your room at number eleven. What did you want instead of ballerinas?” I asked.

  She really considered the question, as if it still mattered and changes would be made based on the answer she gave.

  “Plain pink and white. Deep pink, not cotton-candy pink.”