Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

“I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

“Oh, so I should’ve told Sidonie’s mom that her daughter doesn’t go to school but comes here—”

“And drinks much more soda than is good for her and associates with disagreeable women and reads novels she’s permitted to select without supervision or even orderly thought, yes. Then her mother would have made her stop coming here.”

“Well, exactly.”

“But since you failed to inform Mrs. Fairfax of those facts, now I’ve got to do the forbidding.”

I licked an envelope flap. “I don’t see how that follows, but sure. Let’s see how long that lasts.”

Mrs. Fletcher still hadn’t uncovered her eyes. “No, really, Boy. This goes for all three of them. They’ve got to go to school.”

She didn’t seem to notice that those were more or less the same words I’d said to her on my first day at the bookstore.

I said: “Well, this joke has fallen flat. I never met Mrs. Fairfax; I don’t care for that neighborhood. Everything’s the same as it was this time yesterday, okay?”

She didn’t answer.

“Those kids won’t know what to do with themselves if you send them away.”

“Oh, rubbish. I know them. They’ll mope for five minutes, then they’ll go to school and grow up and make something of themselves, that’s what they’ll do. There are ladders they’ve got to get up. Ladders made of tests and examinations and certification papers that don’t mean anything to us, but Phoebe and Sid and Kazim can’t get where they want to go without them. I’ve been selfish. No more.”

We were busy with customers from opening time onward, so when Phoebe and Sidonie came by at about two p.m., I was sure that Mrs. Fletcher had reconsidered. She couldn’t ban them. She’d miss them too much. They both made a rush at the shelf that had Les Misérables on it — Sidonie to confiscate it and Phoebe to snatch it out of Sidonie’s way. Kazim came in after them, calling out to the back room: “What, what, what, did you miss me?”

“Oh yes — very horribly awfully much,” Mrs. Fletcher called back. “Wait there. I’m trying to make this man understand that it’s a nineteenth-century first edition he’s trying to buy. He seems to think it’s an item of clothing, keeps talking about ‘jackets’—”

Kazim sidled over to the cash register and handed me a piece of card he’d folded into quarters. “When you look at my comic strips, you’re always saying — and what happened next? And after that? And after that? So I drew this.” I set my elbows on the desk and looked at him, and the more I looked, the less sure I was that I’d seen him in the group gathered around the parakeet. I was afraid to be wrong. I was afraid not to be able to tell the difference between Kazim, who I’d seen nearly every day for the past six months or so, and any other fuzzy-headed colored boy with eyeglasses.

Mrs. Fletcher came out and sent me to the back room to wrap up her customer’s purchases. I missed what she said to Sidonie and company because the man kept wanting to know things — whether I could recommend a good place to eat while he was here, and so on. The kids were gone by the time I got out front again, and I went after them with cake I’d saved from the night before. I’d only brought two slices, but it didn’t matter because Kazim was the only one who accepted. Phoebe held out her hand, but Sidonie glared at her and she dropped her hand just as I tried to place the carton into it.

“Ever since we started going to the bookstore I wondered what it’d be that put a stop to it,” Sidonie said. She and Phoebe had their arms around each other’s waists, holding each other up. “I knew it wouldn’t be anything we did. I thought maybe some customer would damage a book and it would look like we were to blame, or Mrs. Fletcher would get her sums mixed up one day and think one of us stole, or — any number of things. But no. You did it.”

“We told you it wasn’t him.” Phoebe had tears in her eyes. “It wasn’t .”

Kazim just eyed his cartonful of cake as if willing it to provide answers. I cleared my throat. The truth wouldn’t sound like the truth coming from me. It might even contradict whatever Mrs. Fletcher had told them, and Mrs. Fletcher was their friend. “Go to school,” I said, and watched them leave.

—

a week passed before I could stand to look at the comic strip Kazim had drawn for me. It was about a king called Mizak and his queen, Sidie. Every December a little boy and a little girl approached the throne, the girl “from above” and the boy “from below.” Their names were Mizak and Sidie too, and the boy Mizak struggled with King Mizak for the right to the name and the next twelve months of life. The girl Sidie fought Queen Sidie for the same rights. When King Mizak and Queen Sidie were dead, the boy and the girl were dressed in their robes and crowned with their crowns, aging with preternatural speed every month until December, when the children came again. “It does us good to fight for life,” Queen Sidie said, and her lips were wrinkles that clung to her teeth. Her words were empty; she and King Mizak were too weak and weary to put up a real fight. It was slaughter, and the boy and the girl were merciless. They said: “Remember you did the same.”

Kazim used to give me strange looks whenever I tapped a corner of one of his comic strips and asked what was next. He thought it was strange of me to ask. What’s next is what happened before.

a rturo’s birthday gift to me was a weekend trip to Florida. Snow came with us, and brought Julia with her — a framed photograph she held out of the hotel-room window so that they could admire the view together. We got sandy beach and weathered cliff all in one window frame: a double whammy, as the hotel manager called it.

Arturo piggybacked Snow all around the hotel grounds and she showed Julia the coconut trees and the tropical fish whose tanks lined the reception walls. I followed with my purse stuffed full of Snow’s dolls, who wanted in on the hotel tour too. The other guests found us picturesque, and the maids and bellhops pretended to. Really we were in their way. But: “Isn’t that nice,” they said. “Isn’t that nice…”

In the afternoon we got Snow settled by the pool with her seven dolls in a row beside her, watching muscular men in swimming trunks making showy dives into the water and oohing and aahing as if she were at the circus. The key thing about Florida was that almost everybody we saw was good-looking in exactly the same way. They were all tanned and excitable, closing their eyes in ecstasy as the breeze tousled their hair. I perched on the end of a sun bed and held my sun lotion out to Arturo.

“Okay, I get it, Boy.” He laid his hand flat between my shoulder blades; I felt a print forming in the lotion. “You don’t want to be alone with me.”

“That isn’t true, and you know it.” I picked up the bottle, walked around him, and worked my hands down his back.

“Could have left Snow with either one of her grandmas…” he said.

“You do that too much. And I like having her around. I like having you around too.” I nipped his earlobe, laughing when he looked around and asked me if I wanted to get us barred from poolside. Later that evening, when Snow was fast asleep, we went out to the beach with blankets and torches, and the sound of the waves swept around us, rising and falling. Water raked the sand we lay on and locked our bodies together, tugged us apart a little. But only a very little. Only as far as we let it.

As we walked back to the hotel, I said: “So we’re never going to talk about Julia?” A straight question, just as Mrs. Fletcher would have asked it. (Why am I always imagining that I’m other people?)