Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

Who says Gee-Ma knows all there is to know about the reasons why a person might not show up in a mirror, anyway?

Possibilities:

a. It’s an optical illusion or a symptom of eye disease. (Eye disease doubtful: The optician has my vision down as 20/15 in both eyes and says that if I keep eating my greens and don’t try to read by flashlight I can be an airplane pilot if I want, fly for real like every Bird should.)

b. I’m not human. (Pretty sure that I’m physically and emotionally similar to all the other kids I know. There’s maybe even just a little more emotion than there’s supposed to be, like on school mornings when Louis jumps into the seat I’ve been saving for him and I get a little dizzy because he’s so close and I want to tell him I missed him even though it’s been less than sixteen hours since we last said good-bye, even though he just burped me “Good morning” in a grossly immature way. One day I couldn’t bite back the “I missed you,” and he nudged me with his elbow and said: “Uh… I guess I missed you too, weirdo.” As for vampirism, a love of sunny days and garlic bread makes that very improbable.)

c. The enemy thing. Someone wishing and willing me out of sight. (Me: That’s kind of an exciting thought, being that big of a deal to someone . Gee-Ma Agnes: Sometimes I think you’re almost grown up, then all of a sudden it looks like you’ve got a long way to go. I’d love to get her back for that one day, just clap a hand to my forehead and say: “Oh! Sometimes I think you’re a member of the teenaged set, then it hits me that you’re ancient.” Of course that’s only a fantasy — Gee-Ma knows exactly when to get tears in her eyes and make you feel like a criminal. I asked her to teach me how to do it once and she welled up right there and then said: “I don’t understand what you’re asking me, child.”)

d. “Enchantments be not always ill.” (An unknown friend with good intentions?)

e. This is something that happens to everybody but they deny it.

f. I’m a nut job. (No comment.)

Maybe I need to try to look at this from the outside, get some facts down.

What is known about this Bird Whitman?

She’s thirteen years old, and still looking for a way to put an extra two years on somehow, so she can catch up to Louis Chen. He says it can’t be done and he’ll always be older, but given the way mirrors have been behaving lately, anything’s possible.

She tells everyone her middle name is Novak. All her friends have middle names and she’ll be damned if she has to go without one.

Her dad prefers the waffles she makes to the ones her mom makes. The secret is buttermilk.

She’s five feet and four inches tall, already quite a lot taller than her girlfriends, and she hasn’t finished growing yet; where will it end? Gee-Ma Agnes says Bird is getting to be “as tall as Annie Christmas,” and Annie Christmas was an actual giant (if she existed at all), and while Bird has got nothing against giants, she refuses to stand taller than five feet and six inches without shoes. This is simply a matter of personal taste. All right, fine — Louis Chen just happens to be exactly five feet, six and three-quarter inches tall and reckons he’ll go up another couple of inches and then call it a day.

Her best friend’s family makes her realize that her own family isn’t as happy as it could be. The Whitmans aren’t un happy. But the Chens are so much more… together, always have about a million things to tell each other, keep trying to make each other laugh. Louis rushes his dinner on the evenings his mom’s around to give him driving lessons, and his father takes him by the wrist and recites Climb Mount Fuji, / O Snail, / but slowly, slowly. That makes Louis slow down, as well as making him smile. He looks up to his dad. Mr. Chen works at the piano bar on Tubman Street; the crowd’s more mixed than it used to be, but it’s still mostly only colored people. According to Mrs. Chen, some of the regulars, especially the old ones, still stare at Mr. Chen as if they never saw an Asian man before. Some of them ask him how he learned to play ragtime so good when he wasn’t born with it in his soul, and Mr. Chen just looks at them all through a pair of opera glasses and says: “Ha ha.” Even if there hadn’t been Chens in New Orleans since 1900, Mr. Chen would still have jazz in his soul, I think. Mrs. Chen picks him up in her taxi and when they get home, they count up the day’s tips. Mrs. Chen claims never to get nervous about driving her taxi. She says she’s got an instinct about who to let into the car and who not to.

Mr. and Mrs. Chen are raising Louis to believe that he can be good at anything he wants to be, if only he keeps at it. Louis is the only kid the Chens have, and they act like he’s all the kid they want. Louis likes to tease Bird that the two of them are going to live in Flax Hill forever, him driving a taxi just like his mom, her making her way up to chief editor of the Flax Hill Record , both of them getting a little restless during butterfly season. But Bird won’t even let him joke about it. They’re getting out. Manhattan looks good, loud, and busy. If not there, then LA, where he’ll set up a management agency and turn starlets into big names and she’ll start out writing gossipy pieces until she gets the chance to do in-depth profiles.

Bird has an older sister. Snow. They’ve met, but that was when Bird was a baby, so it doesn’t really count. It isn’t clear why Snow doesn’t live with Bird and her parents, but she comes up in conversation a lot, as if she’s expected to walk in the door at any moment.

Gee-Ma Agnes: Snow’s getting to be so green-fingered; that mint she grows freshens up iced tea just like a charm.

Gee-Pa Gerald: Did I tell you about the crossword Snow and I did together over the phone? That girl persuaded me it’s better for our brains if we just put in any old letters and call it a word afterward. Then we talked definitions. “Hujus,” for instance — what do you reckon one of those is? Go ahead and guess; you’ll never get it.

Grammy Olivia: Gerald, do you think this so-called bebop Snow listens to might be real music after all? I almost hear it but I’m not sure. I thought we’d heard the last of that noise ten, fifteen years ago.

Snow, Snow, Snow, blah blah blah. Bird’s mom doesn’t talk about Snow; she just listens to the others talking about Snow and she gets that look people get when they feel like they’re being bored to death and there’s nothing they can do about it. Two weekends a month, three times on Snow’s birthday month, Bird’s father goes to Boston and comes back with bright eyes, a sprig of fresh flowers in his buttonhole, and photographs to show Bird and the grandparents down at number eleven. Bird never knows what to say when she looks at the photographs of her father with another daughter who was there first, had him first. Snow looks like a friend to woodland creatures; a unicorn would lay its head down on her lap, and everybody knows how picky unicorns are. Or, in the here and now, Snow could easily be one of those girls who’ve been in the news for going around singing “Peace, peace” and offering soldiers flowers to hold along with their guns, making the soldiers choose between bad manners and looking ridiculous. Bird has heard a story (she doesn’t think it’s the whole story) about her dad and her mom setting out to visit Snow one weekend. Apparently they took Bird along with them, but just as they arrived in Boston, Bird’s mom made Bird’s dad turn the car around and drive all the way back home again. Bird’s dad is big on finishing what he’s started—“It’s all about the follow-through, it’s all about the follow-through,” so Bird’s mom must have said or done something pretty spectacular to make him turn around like that.