Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that’s supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone’s crossed that line? I said Sidonie was top of my class and that everybody liked her.

It was getting dark when I left, and I thought about calling Arturo from a phone booth and getting him to come pick me up. But it would take too long. So I just walked fast, with my head down, and didn’t raise it again until I got back to Jefferson Street.

—

snow kept me company as I embraced The Joy of Cooking . She sat up on the counter with an apron over her dungarees and tasted the cake batter and the cream sauce for the chicken. She looked extremely doubtful about the cream sauce, but how sophisticated could her six-year-old palate be anyway?

“Maybe you’ll get a mother for your birthday,” she said. I dabbed the end of her nose with a square of kitchen paper, even though there was nothing there.

“Who said I want a mother? Maybe I want a daughter.”

“What kind of daughter?” Snow said, with the air of a department store attendant, invisible stock list in hand.

“I said maybe. It depends. I might forget to feed and water her.”

“That would be very bad, because mothers have to give their daughters cookies all the time.”

“Oh, like Grandma Olivia and Grandma Agnes give you cookies?”

“Yeah, but then they pat my stomach,” she said, stabbing toothpicks through the anchovy ham rolls. She hit the dead center of each one. She parted her own hair in the mornings with that same extreme precision. I think she observed her father’s work more closely than he might have guessed.

“Okay, so cookies yes, stomach pat no. What else?”

“You have to hide her.”

“Hide her?”

“Not all the time. Only sometimes. Like if a monster comes looking for her, you have to hide her.”

“Well, of course.”

“Even if the monster comes with a real nice smile and says ‘Excuse me, have you seen my friend Snow?’ you have to say ‘She’s not here! She’s gone to Russia.’”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll say: ‘Snow? Who’s Snow?’”

She clapped her hands. “That’s good!”

“Anything else?”

“You have to come find me if I get lost.”

“Lost? Like in the woods?”

“Not just there. Anywhere.”

“Hmmmm. Let me think about that one. It’s a big job. Meanwhile, do you think you can get your daddy out of his workroom so he can help you dress?”

She threw her arms around my neck, gave me a kiss, and hopped down from the counter. What made her so trusting, so sure of people’s goodwill? If I was like her I wouldn’t have shrunk back later when Olivia Whitman draped a gray fur stole around my shoulders and said: “Happy birthday!” It felt expensive, thick to the touch but a lighter weight on the skin than it looked. Mrs. Fletcher asked: “Is that chinchilla?” and gave me a stern look, as if I were at fault for accepting it.

(The only thing I felt guilty of was already knowing that it was chinchilla fur — Olivia had worn it the week before, when she took me to see The Magic Flute in Worcester. We’d smoked cigars outside the opera house and she asked me how I liked the show. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said. I said that as far as I could gather it was a tale about a woman who could be led out of captivity only by a man, and that the man could save her only by ignoring her.

“Correct,” she’d said.

“Uh… I really like the costumes,” I said.

Olivia switched my cigar from the left side of my mouth to the right side and looked approvingly at me through her opera glasses. “Yes, the tale is what you just said it is, but it’s also about two people who walk through fire and water together, unscathed because they are together. You’ll agree that that’s not a sentimental interpretation, that that’s literally what happens? The trials those two undergo are about being beyond words.”

I shivered, and she’d offered me the stole. “Chinchilla. It keeps you warm.” But I’d declined. Cuban cigars and chinchilla stoles; this was more Mia Cabrini’s scene, and I was better off not developing a taste for it.)

Olivia stood back, admiring the effect. “Yes, it never looked quite right on me. But Boy, you were born to wear this.”

Arturo whispered, “Poor Viv—” in my ear. Vivian said a stole like that wouldn’t have lasted long in her wardrobe anyway, what with her talent for spilling things. But she minded; of course she minded, here was a fur stole she’d probably grown up coveting and I’d swiped it right from under her nose. Her fiancé didn’t even have the good sense to say he’d get her one. Or maybe it was good sense and a healthy awareness of his salary level that kept him from saying it.

All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table, like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: “Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity?”

Gerald clinked wineglasses with her and said: “You were always a curiosity, darling.” And Arturo proposed a toast to curiosities.

Webster and Agnes didn’t eat much dinner, but that would have been the case even if we’d been at a restaurant. Webster was three weeks away from getting married and consequently she was on the diet to end all diets. Arturo thought it was rude of her to eat so little, and was ready to tell her so. I said, “Look… I wouldn’t if I were you.” I’d fasted before, so I knew how being hungry can make a girl get a little bit enigmatic. Webster’s psychology was one short straw away from abnormal. She’d conceived a disgust for the moon, kept calling “her” fat. “Fat hog, fat hog… what does she eat, to bloat up like that? Nothing up there but air, right? So greedy she stuffs herself with air… or stars…?” Ted and Arturo started talking shop during the first course, just making remarks about the new catalogue they were putting together and how hard it was to find professional hand-and-ankle models who didn’t demand that a full makeup team be present at the shoot. Webster said, “Talking shop, Teddy?” and gave him such a ghoulish smile that he broke his sentence off there and started reminiscing about wedding speeches he’d heard and liked. I didn’t care whether or not Webster ate what I cooked. She cared enough to show up, and that was great. The same went for Agnes, though Snow was probably the main attraction for her. She was sitting directly across from Snow, and her eyes lit up whenever Snow laughed, which was often, since the girl shared a private joke with every spoonful of potato salad on her plate.

There was a brass water pitcher set up in the center of the table, and a couple of times I found myself smiling at my reflection in the side of it, but stopped just before anyone caught me. The smile was a chinchilla fur kind of smile. Look what I got you, it seemed to say. And I can get you more . But I wasn’t the only one smiling at myself that night. Snow was too, peeping out from under her eyelashes. She might have been copying me. I couldn’t tell. When she got tired, she lay her head down beside her ice cream dish and just slept. It was Agnes who put her to bed, blushing at the way everybody at the table went slightly gooey eyed at the resemblance between them.

i ’m sure I didn’t mean to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” Mrs. Fletcher said the next morning. She put on a pretty good show of being abashed, folded hands and glum head shakes, but I wasn’t fooled. When I saw that I wasn’t going to get an explanation out of her, I changed the subject and told her about meeting Sidonie’s mother and very briefly masquerading as a teacher. She covered her eyes and groaned.