Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

( Tra la la, I can and will. She didn’t know about his grilled cheese sandwiches. I’d asked him what made them taste so good and he’d closed my hand up into a fist, wrapped his own hand around the fist, and told me: “This much butter.” Webster’s lecture persisted, but my attention wouldn’t stick. She had a lot of powder on, which made me think of geishas. She was probably right, though; she was wise in the ways of getting what you want; she was walking on air and sporting an engagement ring with a rock so notable that I and the other boarding house girls took to including it in our conversations, addressing it as “Gibraltar,” demanding that it take sides.)

I made excuses. I was tired of my date dress. In fact I felt a little violent toward it. I’d open my bedroom closet and the red silk would shrink and shudder among the clothes hangers, as if it knew that I was on the brink of tossing it onto a trash heap. There was no need to go public with Arturo. I was happy to go to the Salome Club with Mia and a couple of her family friends, different ones each time. Her half brother came along one night too — her father’s son, a gangly fellow with a passing resemblance to Frank Sinatra. His name was Rocco, and he knew how to lean in and light a girl’s cigarette with a look and a smile that had me stubbing my cigarette out whenever his attention was elsewhere, just so he’d light up another one for me. It could have been the way he guarded the flame with his palm, the unexpected care with which he carried it up toward your lips; who knows what makes a man’s gesture attractive?

If you’re not afraid of a real night out, hit the town with guys who just got out of jail. They’re the ones who can’t be kept off the dance floor — they’ll dance till they drop, and even when they’re stretched out flat on the floor, they’ll still shake their ankles. Sometimes our companions didn’t speak much English and communicated with me through smiles and mimed gestures. It was nice. Their questions were some of the simplest there are. Will you have another drink? Care to dance? Simple to give clear answers to— sì, sì. I sat out the meaningful slow dances and sipped my sarsaparilla with closed eyes, trying to squeeze every drop of meaning out of the love songs. According to Kitty Kallen, little things mean a lot.

Mia’s “Secret World of Blondes” had been the subject of enough letters to the editor for the paper to let her go ahead with a new piece. Her plan was to attend catechism classes with three girls and be an eyewitness to the preparations that led all the way up to each girl’s Mexican, Italian, or Irish Holy Communion. By the time she’d attended one class with each girl, she already had a title: “Lucrezia Borgia Never Died.”

So Mia was all right and I was to be one of Webster’s bridesmaids. I’d become respectable overnight, was greeted on the street with cheery variants of “What’s new?” instead of blank glances. Flax Hill had begun to see the point of me. Aside from bridesmaid duties, I was holding down a job at a bookstore notorious for having an owner who’d as soon fire her assistants as look at them. And I apparently had something to do with the renewed spring in Arturo Whitman’s step, as well as his tone-deaf whistling of show tunes.

I hear singing and there’s no one there…

All it would take was a single comparison to Julia Whitman and I’d be right back to square one. I didn’t add up to much when placed beside old J. W. I couldn’t think of many members of the non-movie-star population who did. I looked at photos of Julia, and listened to her voice on the vinyl recordings she’d made for her daughter. In a way they were practice for her. She was an opera singer; great onstage, but she’d signed a contract and was due to start work on her classical record once she’d recovered from having Snow. But in these recordings she didn’t sound operatic — she was a mother singing her daughter lullabies; her appeal was for love, not for admiration.

She’d left notebooks filled with handwritten recipes for the wartime cook: four different kinds of butterless-eggless-milkless cake, tens of tips for stretching meat and sugar rations as far as they would go. She’d also left a list of all the names she’d considered giving to Snow. There were hundreds of them. She had wanted her daughter very much; anyone could see that. The multitude of names didn’t seem like indecision — Julia Whitman was trying to summon up a troop of fairy godmothers. Somewhere in among the names of all those mermaids, warriors, saints, goddesses, queens, scientists, and poets I could see a woman trying to cover all the bases, searching for things her daughter would need in order to make friends with life. Conscience, resolve, loyalty, the kind of far sight that Mia wanted, the fearlessness to cross strange borders, whatever it was that gave Alice the guts to stick up for herself when Tweedledum and Tweedledee informed her she wasn’t real. I sat with those names for hours while vaguely worrisome sheets of smoke poured out from under the door of Arturo’s workroom. I’ve always wanted to know whether Boy is the name my mother wanted for me, and if so, what kind of person the name was supposed to help me grow up into.

Julia and I wouldn’t have been friends. She looked like a bashful Rapunzel, dark hair pinned up high, doe eyes always downturned or gazing off to the side in every single photograph. I don’t trust anyone who poses like that any farther than I can throw them. I think I know the drill: Mrs. Whitman only let down her hair when Mr. Whitman had been a good boy. He probably even thought their getting married was all his idea. These were things I couldn’t really say to anyone. I’d have been able to say them only from a disinterested position. But I was grateful too, grateful to Julia in yet another way I couldn’t tell anyone about. She’d left me her husband, who didn’t expect much from me. He’d had his great love. And now he was willing, determined even, to be amused, to belly laugh at the slightest provocation, to appreciate heart-shaped pieces of toast as tokens of my affection. On our first night together I kept thinking, Do I, do I, do I, do I… then Do I what? Something to do with wanting, or daring. We sat facing each other, cross-legged on his bed, and the lamp light laid a strip of gold along his bare shoulders. I leaned forward so that there were mere inches between our faces and he could smell me. I smelt of soap and musk. I’d made sure of that. Not too animal, not too pure. The idea was that his reaction would show me what to do next.

He didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. We were both naked, and his arm was spread loosely across the bedspread; I’d moved so that his right hand was just behind me, less than an inch away. And he was aroused, he was visibly aroused. All he had to do to bring our bodies together was raise his hand to the small of my back. Instead of doing that he gave me this reserved but friendly smile. A smile from an official portrait — a politician’s. Vote for me.

It felt like time to put my clothes on again, then add an extra layer of clothes on top of those clothes, for additional modesty. I used to make fun of women who ask men the question “What are you thinking?” but that night I got dangerously close to becoming one of them.

I asked: “Should I… leave?”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No,” I said. “But…”

“Stay,” he said, in a comfortable tone of voice, as if this was just the kind of conversation he preferred. (Later I asked him about this and he said: “I had a feeling it was your first time and I was trying not to rush you. I thought I was doing so well.”)

I switched off the lamp and returned to the bed to find him stretched out on his back, breathing easily. I curled up beside him, found his ear, and whispered: “Tell me what you want me to do.”