Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

Apartment 25

New York City

I received that letter on Wednesday morning and opened it at the breakfast table while Mitzi Cole licked grapefruit segments and Katherine Cole sat with her eyes closed, repeating “split the lark split the lark split the lark split the lark” in what she thought was an English accent. After a few minutes, Mitzi joined in: “Split the lark split the lark split the lark split the lark” but gabbled, her words hastily jammed into the pauses Katherine took to breathe.

Katherine opened her ice-blue eyes to intone: “And you’ll find the music.”

Mitzi poked my wrist with her spoon. “Anything of note?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Just a letter from my father.” I hadn’t exactly lied — beside my plate there was an envelope addressed in my father’s handwriting but unopened.

The Coles have a musical clock hung on a bracket in their living room; it is lantern-shaped with a circular opening for the clock face. It chimes the hour every hour from seven in the morning to ten at night, and it also plays a snatch of “Für Elise.” It makes me laugh now to think that “Für Elise” ever used to send a chill down my spine. Katherine has said several times that the clock offends her sensibilities, but Mr. Cole likes it, so it stays. When the family interviewed me in London, the second or third thing Mr. Cole told me after shaking my hand was that he had no culture, none at all. Mitzi, tiny, white-blonde, and warmly rounded, like a soft diamond, had immediately interjected: “God bless our Papa Bear; he doesn’t need any culture.”

The clock chimed nine just as Katherine turned to her mother and said, “You know, your elocution is really terrible.”

Mitzi smoothed Katherine’s hair and said, “Why, thank you, my sweet.”

Katherine replied, “You had grapefruit juice on your hands and now it’s in my hair.” She left the table immediately — with purpose more than petulance. Mitzi and I heard the bathroom taps go on and we looked at each other.

“I find it slightly ridiculous that Katy is my child,” Mitzi remarked, and resumed with her grapefruit. She was simultaneously reading the dictionary (I saw she had just begun the letter K ) and looking through a Bergdorf Goodman catalogue, choosing clothes for Katherine.

Katherine returned to the table damp-haired. Mitzi tapped a page of the catalogue with her pen and asked, “Honey, what do you think of this little skirt suit here?”

“It’s great, I’ll take it,” Katherine said without looking. Katherine is Mitzi miniaturised, brunette, and wiped entirely clean of conscience. I have the strong feeling that unless Katherine is closely watched she will one day do something terrible to another person, or perhaps even to a large group of people. The key is not to aggravate her, I think.

Mitzi placed a large tick on the catalogue page.

Let’s see if we can pick each other out. .

I looked at the walls as I ate my toast — everything was butter and marmalade. The blondest wood that Mitzi had been able to find, yellow countertops, yellow tablecloth, linoleum of the same colour but in such a shocking hue that I can never quite believe in it and constantly find myself walking or sitting with only my toes on the ground, never my full weight.

Katherine’s white silk blouse was wet from her washing, possibly ruined. I would take it to the dry cleaner’s before our morning walk. Her pine-green skirt was cut so simply that I knew it cost the equivalent of at least three months of my wages.

“Better change your blouse, Katherine,” I said. If she heard me, she gave no sign. I took Mr. Fox’s letter ( If you’d still like me to read your pages I’d be glad to. . Glad to, he’d be glad to. .) and the letter from home, took them to my bedroom, and tucked them in alongside the others, between the covers of my copy of Foxe’s Martyrs, a book to which Katherine had shown an aversion, so I knew they’d be safe from her eyes.

Mitzi had switched on the wireless set; a band was swinging Gershwin, trombones loudest. I returned to the kitchen to clear the plates and cups.

“I’ve been reading some of your poems,” Katherine told her mother. Mitzi went wide-eyed with alarm and said, “And?”

“They don’t make any sense,” Katherine said. “You know that? I have some questions.” She pulled a square of paper out of her skirt pocket and unfolded it. Mitzi looked to all four corners of the room for help. I turned quickly and ran water over the dishes.

“Oh, it’s blank,” Mitzi whispered, hoarse with relief. “Honey, it’s blank. What a dirty trick to play on your old ma.”

“April Fools’,” Katherine explained.

“It’s October,” Mitzi told her.

Katherine didn’t say anything for some time; she seemed to be brooding. No one else said anything, either. The band on the radio heaved into another song, and I began to dry the dishes. I would give Mr. Fox just three stories — I already knew which ones. The previous weekend I’d looked at the stories I’d typed, reading them over and over. If Mr. Fox doesn’t think you’re any good, I asked myself, what will you do?

The dishcloth was yellow, too — as I dried each cup I checked my hands for jaundice. Katherine appeared at my side. She had changed into a grey dress. “Come on, Mary,” she said, handing me my coat. “Let’s go for our walk.”

It had rained overnight, and in the trees it was still raining. Every branch along 65th Street shed leaves on us. The leaves were dark, and their moisture made noise. There was a sense that at any time they might bite — they were like bats. The Mercier Hotel was down the block on our way to Central Park. Pigeons stumbled across the white portico that jutted over the doors, and I could distantly hear the bustle, see people moving behind the smoky glass.

We stopped at the dry cleaner’s with Katherine’s blouse and a couple of Mr. Cole’s suits. Then I told Katherine about the literature assignment I was setting her: read The Woman in White and The Count of Monte Cristo, then answer the question “What is a villain?” I had two copies of each book in my satchel for when she settled down to read at the park. I meant to read along with her, to see if it was possible to catch her thinking. It wasn’t the reading itself that would throw Katherine — she read everything. The problem was eliciting a response from her afterwards. If asked for a review, she impersonally rehashed every detail of the story. “Oh, everyone’s got a view, haven’t they?. . Everyone’s got something to say,” she’d tell me, when all I wanted to know was whether she’d liked the book.

As I’d expected, Katherine wasn’t listening to what I was telling her. She picked leaves off her black beret. “Say, do you think Ma’ll let me bob my hair like yours?”

We crossed at the light, hand in hand.

“Your hair suits you as it is.”

“But I want a bob. Ma says it’s quaint because it’s so out of style.”

I blushed hard. No point asking whether Mitzi had really said that.

Katherine looked sideways at me. “Why do you bob your hair? Waiting on a flapper revival?”

“I bob my hair because I don’t care about trends, only about what suits me, thank you very much for asking,” I said severely.

Really I bob my hair because I’ve given up on it. It’s so palely coloured that if I pull it back from my face I look bald. My mother used to kiss my cheeks and run her fingers through my hair. She’d hold locks of it up to the light and say, “Look at that colour, spun gold. You’ll be such a beautiful woman. . ”