Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

Bird played a little fact-finding prank one day (and was surprised that it began to work) but was foiled by circumstance. The prank Bird pulled was voice imitation. Bird’s been talked at by Gee-Ma Agnes for so many hours of her life that she knows exactly how Gee-Ma Agnes sounds. Not just her accent, the crystal-clear elocution wrapped around the raw Mississippi molasses, but also the way she breathes between some words and mashes others together and stresses half of a word and lets the other half slip away. When Gee-Ma Agnes says “I do declare!” it has an entirely different effect than when Grammy Olivia says it. It was Grammy Olivia whom Bird fooled that afternoon; Bird was in Gee-Ma Agnes’s bedroom and Grammy Olivia was busy folding clothes next door. Phoebe the maid had just brought the week’s wash back from the laundromat. “Agnes, come get your good pajamas and this bed jacket before I steal them,” Grammy Olivia called out, and Bird realized Grammy Olivia had forgotten that Gee-Ma Agnes had gone to hear an afternoon lecture on mystic poetry that Kazim Bey was giving in the church hall. Grammy Olivia considered Kazim Bey to be of questionable character because he inked comics for Marvel and any day now there’d be scientific proof that superhero comics and 3-D movie theater glasses were leading causes of insanity. Also Mr. Bey was from a Nation of Islam family and all Grammy Olivia knew about the Nation of Islam was that they wore black suits all the time and they were “too polite… like undertakers, or Englishmen.”

“Agnes,” Grammy Olivia said. “Agnes!” Then she remembered Gee-Ma Agnes had left half an hour before and muttered to herself that if the maid had heard, she was going to start thinking she could slack off whenever she pleased. Up until that moment Bird had been reading a copy of Gee-Ma Agnes’s Last Will and Testament. Gee-Ma had given her permission — well, she’d said it didn’t matter whether Bird read it or not because she didn’t suppose Bird would be able to understand much of it. Bird understood enough. She understood that Gee-Ma was leaving all her earthly possessions, stocks and bonds and whatnot, to Snow Whitman. One exception was a houseboat currently moored in a residential harbor in Biloxi, Mississippi, and another was a lapis lazuli anklet “fit for a harem girl,” both of which Gee-Ma was leaving to Bird so she could have the wild times Gee-Ma never got around to having. Bird found the thought of dancing around a houseboat with a precious anklet on pretty satisfactory, but was ready to swap the houseboat and anklet in exchange for Gee-Ma having the wild times herself and just keeping on living. Gee-Ma reckons death isn’t anything to run toward, but it certainly isn’t anything to run from, either. She reckons it must be just like sleeping, and sleeping is something she’s always looked forward to at the end of a long day. Both Gee-Ma Agnes and Grammy Olivia have their funerals and coffins and burial plots all paid for, only Grammy Olivia also has a guest list for her funeral and strict instructions that anybody who isn’t on the list can’t come in. This makes Bird’s dad laugh and sigh at the same time and intrigues Bird, because it suggests Grammy Olivia is worried about unsavory characters from her past showing up to damage her reputation. There must be something about having your hands on someone’s signed and dated Last Will and Testament that gives you the nerve to impersonate her. Bird decided to try one tiny little sentence that she could laugh off if Grammy Olivia wasn’t fooled: “No, I’m here, Livia… I’m here.”

“So do I bring you your night things, Agnes? Is that how it is now, you just sleeping all the time and me waiting on you hand and foot?” Grammy Olivia wanted to know.

“I’ll come get it in a while, Livia… you always were in a hurry,” Bird said, and covered her mouth with her hand afterward, laughing silently. “I was thinking, you know, about that time our son went out to visit Snow and Boy made him turn the car around… just as they were almost there. Really seems kinda flighty of Boy, doesn’t it?”

Grammy Olivia sniffed. “Don’t think on it too long,” she said. “She knows what she’s doing to that child, that’s why she can’t face her. And you know what I’ve told the woman. You know I told her she better beware the Gullah in me. I told her ‘If Agnes dies or I die, if either one of us dies before you let our baby come home, you’ll find there’s a curse on your head.’ She said fighting talk only makes her stubborn. Well, I warned her.”

Bird was thinking up her next question when Gee-Ma Agnes returned and called up the stairs: “Well, the whole thing would probably have left you stone cold, Livia, but I like what those mystics say. How ’bout this: Gamble everything for love — if you are a true human being — if not, leave this gathering! ” Grammy Olivia said: “Agnes?” and came to see who was in Gee-Ma’s bedroom, but by then Bird had already stepped into Gee-Ma’s wardrobe and was holding bunches of clothes hangers still with both hands behind the closed wooden door. You may be sure that since then Bird has been practicing her voice imitations, with future opportunities in mind. She can’t do her mom, but any other woman who’s spoken to Bird more than a couple of times is a snap to imitate. This is a secret skill, and nothing that would make a grandmother proud.

Grammy Olivia looks at the pictures of Bird’s father laughing with his other daughter and she shakes her head and sighs. Snow’s studying history at college, just like Bird’s father did, and Bird’s grades… well, Bird’s grades are below average. “Who’s the better daughter?” Bird asks her father. “Me or Snow?”

He kisses her forehead and says: “Snow in winter, you in spring, Snow in summer, you in the fall.”

Bird sleeps in the same room Snow used to sleep in. Wait… there might be something in that. The mirror stuff only tends to happen in a handful of places. A couple of rooms in Bird’s house and a couple of rooms over at her grandma’s — if Bird takes a seat in the chair beside Gee-Ma Agnes’s bed, there’s almost guaranteed invisibility there, for example — maybe it happens when she steps into spots that belong to this other girl named Snow? There’s a photograph of Snow’s mother in Bird’s bottom drawer — no one’s had the nerve to take it out of the room. There’s a piano in the house that nobody plays — it doesn’t pick fights with anybody and it doesn’t draw any particular attention to itself. Visitors can talk about it if they like, they can ask, “Hey, is that piano in tune?” but instead of an answer they get: “Well, it’s Julia’s piano.” That piano is staying where it is, and Julia Whitman is calm inside her photo frame. She’ll see her daughter again, she has no doubts about that. Could Snow be the enemy (or the friend)?

If Snow came back and asked for her room, that would certainly not be okay with Bird. Bird really likes her bedroom. There are quite a few cobwebs in it and Bird has no intention of tampering with a single one of them, no matter how many times her mom says her room is a disgrace. At the very most Bird might dust a cobweb off with the tip of a feather, but only to keep it looking spick-and-span. A lot of the time there are tiny memorials on the walls, in the corner behind the wardrobe, little specks only Bird and the spiders understand the importance of. Flies and other weaker insects have fought epic battles against the spiders and they’ve lost, leaving behind them a layer of a wing, or a thin black leg joint that holds to the wallpaper for as long as it can before drying out and peeling away. Bird enjoys the stealthy company of the spiders, and in all other respects her room is tidy. Her mom has asked her if she thinks she’ll continue to enjoy the stealthy company of the spiders after one of them has taken a bite out of her, and Bird answers: “We’ll see.” In the evening, when the street lamp just outside Bird’s window switches on, the gray cobwebs quiver and glow around the blue moons. It’s the kind of view that Bird doesn’t mind risking a spider bite for. Back when she used to say bedtime prayers, right after she’d prayed for her mom and her dad and her grandparents and the Chens and Aunt Mia and Snow and anybody who was sick or in trouble or all alone, Bird would throw in seven words for herself: Let spiders spin webs in my hair. It’d be great if they could be persuaded to spin little hats for her, dusty towers of thread that lean and whisper. Sometimes she gets tired of hearing nonsense from people who think they’re talking sense; it makes her want people to be scared of her, or at least to hesitate the way they sometimes do around Louis because “I don’t know… maybe he knows kung fu or something.” If she were Louis, she’d take advantage of that, though on the other hand she supposes allowing people to believe that you were born knowing how to destroy a man with a simple kick could backfire. No, a spiderweb hat is a better warning to beware. Bird would look out from under this hat with the watchful eyes of a girl from long ago, each pupil an unlit lamp, waiting for the magic ring to be rubbed, for the right words to be said. She’d give a lot to know why she and her mom have those eyes — the eyes of people who come from someplace strange they can never go back to. Bird and her mom and that servant-of-the-lamp look they go around giving people. Bird can’t think of a single excuse for it. She’s just as much her dad as she is her mom, and her dad’s all darting flashes of warmth; he laughs, he holds both your hands, and his eyes tell you that here is here and now is now. That must be how he manages to go back and forth between those two daughters of his without getting all torn up. Snow goes to the back of his mind when Bird’s at the front of it, and vice versa. How could he ever have taught history?