Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

“He’ll be here soon enough,” someone said. It sounded like Fat Kenneth Young.

“Yeah, he probably just had detention.”

“Patience, my friends, patience,” said the eleventh grader with the witch-hunter’s blood.

It was around then that I began to be sure that the person who’d started the whole thing was right there in the circle, hidden like a worm in an apple, and I hated him or her like I hate all sneaks.

“Just come on out,” I said. “Come out right now.”

“Who are you talking to?” said a long-faced boy with red-rimmed eyes. “Hey, is she talking to me?”

Louis gave me a nod. Somebody was going to get their head busted no matter what, and it looked like he’d just picked that somebody at random. He put his fists up, the circle around us broke, poked apart with the steel tip of a parasol, and Grammy Olivia looked through the gap and said: “What in the world is all this? Louis Chen, I hope you don’t intend to hit a girl for the entertainment of these feral beasts gathered here.”

They let us pass. They muttered, but they let us pass. It put me in awe of Grammy Olivia’s Saturday morning coffee hour, because that was part of the reason we went in peace — everyone’s mother, aunt, grandmother, or great-aunt goes to Grammy Olivia’s coffee hour. Also Gee-Pa Gerald regularly plays golf with Worcester’s chief of police, et cetera. Also Grammy Olivia’s tone of voice offers you ten seconds to do as she says or the rest of your life to be sincerely sorry that you didn’t.

She walked ahead of us without turning around, Louis nudged me good-bye and peeled off in the direction of his house, and I went up to her as she was letting herself in at her front door. “Thanks, Grammy Olivia.” She frowned, picked a leaf out of my hair, and said: “You’re welcome, Bird.”

I’d have liked to ask her about what had happened over on Ivorydown; she seemed to understand it. But I didn’t because I thought I might cry while asking her and then she’d wash her hands of me altogether. Grammy Olivia’s got no time for weeping willows; I’ve heard her say so.

Dad was in the parlor, reading the paper and tugging at the collar of his shirt. Dad in a suit is a persecuted man. I asked him what the state of the nation was, and he said the president had taken it into his head to raise taxes and so everybody was probably going to move to Canada out of spite. On a more local level, good old Flax Hill would probably last just about another day. A new restaurant had opened on Colby Street, and Mom and Dad wanted to see about the food there, so they’d booked a table and were going to share it with their friends the Murrays. “Can you see if your mom’s ready to leave?”

“Oh… is she doing that ‘every question you ask me adds half an hour to your waiting time’ thing again?”

“She’s a hard woman, Bird.”

Upstairs Mom checked her lipstick while I stood behind her holding two pairs of earrings, a pair in each hand. She’d picked them out and couldn’t decide which to wear. In the mirror I looked like her maid, and that made me want to throw the earrings at her head and run.

For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors. Grammy Olivia avoids her own gaze and looks at her hair. Gee-Ma Agnes peeps reluctantly and then looks glad, like her reflection’s so much better than she could have hoped for. Aunt Mia shakes her head a little, Oh, so it’s you again, is it? Louis tenses and then relaxes— Who’s that? Oh, all right, I guess I can live with him. Dad looks quietly irritated by his reflection, like it just said something he strongly disagrees with. Mom locks eyes with hers. She’s one of the few people I’ve observed who seems to be trying to catch her reflection out, willing it to make one false move. She waved away the earrings I held and reached for a third pair. Gold pendulums. They swung hypnotically, and we looked at each other with those eyes of ours that are so similar.

I asked her what Snow was like. “She’s okay if you like that sort of thing,” Mom said. Denise Arnold had said that about the gold-plated fountain pen Gee-Pa Gerald gave me last birthday. I guess it’s a thing you say when you’re jealous and don’t have the guts to come right out and be sincerely nasty.

“I don’t get it; do you like that sort of thing or not?” I muttered under my breath. Mom kept letters from Snow. She opened them and must have read them, and she kept them in her jewelry box. There weren’t very many, maybe about ten. I’d seen them, but I’d been biding my time. You can’t bide your time forever. I gave Mom a chance to say whatever she wanted to say about Snow, and that was all she wanted to say. So once she and Dad had left for their dinner date I took the letters and I read them. Afterward I felt less sure that Mom wasn’t the enemy. Of course her replies weren’t there, so I wasn’t getting her side of the story. But it looked bad. There’d been months and sometimes years between each letter, so the handwriting changed. It started off big and wonky and basic.

Dear Boy,

How are you? I hope you’re feeling better. How’s Bird? Aunt Clara and Uncle John are nice but I don’t like it here.

All my love,

Snow

Dear Boy,

Don’t you miss me? I miss you and Bird and everybody. Uncle John is like a big blackdark mountain and he laughs so loud it makes me jump. Remember you said I could come home thirty days ago.

All my love,

Snow

After a few more letters, Snow learned cursive.

Uncle John and Aunt Clara are perfect treasures. I’m afraid that the way I laugh might be too loud for you now. Dad tells me I make quite a racket. I figured that if I couldn’t beat Uncle J, I’d better join him.

In the later letters she shortened “All my love” to AML, then she dropped it.

You were like some sort of glorious princess who swept into my life and I just wanted to sit at your feet all day and amuse you. Did that get on your nerves? It’s really stupid of me, but I can’t see what it was that came between us. Will you try to explain it to me?

That one got me. According to my calculations, Snow would have written that when she was fifteen. She stopped asking how I was and started asking what I was like. She stopped asking to come home and started asking just to visit.

The last letter was a year old, and addressed to me. Mom had opened it and read it and then slipped it into the jewelry box along with the others.

Hi, Bird,

It’s your sister here. Can you read yet? I hope so. I’ve seen pictures of you and you’ve grown so much I don’t recognize you. You look like a super stylish tomboy. The kind of girl who wouldn’t have spoken to me when I was your age and probably still wouldn’t speak to me now. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to spend time together, but what do you say we catch up? I’m afraid I’ve been forgetting you. I used to think I knew all these things about you, but now I can’t remember what they were, and anyway, how much can you know about a baby that’s a few months old? I’d love it if you wrote to me with some information about your personality.

Yours affectionately,

Snow

I put all the letters back where I found them, all except the one that was mine. That one I wrote a reply to. Well, ten replies. Fifteen. Each one contained too much of something. One reply was too chatty, another too dry, yet another too blunt. Mom was on my mind. My writing to Snow was me apologizing for Mom, in a way, even if I didn’t mention her. That was the problem. Mom, the glorious princess who swept into Snow’s life and then kicked her out without a word of explanation. I got overwhelmed and climbed into my bed, pulled the covers over my head. A weight gathered on my forehead and another one landed bang in the middle of my chest. There was something false about the pain — it wasn’t even anatomically correct. I was ashamed that I couldn’t switch it off even though I knew it wasn’t a truthful pain.