Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

—

THE NIGHT a fortuneteller outside KFC seized Radha by both hands and told her that little by little she was falling for an invisible man, she was confounded and kept me awake until dawn asking who on earth it could possibly be…

I couldn’t decide whether the Grimaldi boy was to be pitied, congratulated, or scolded. Granted, this was one way to have a secret love affair, but there was no telling what his own feelings were, or whether this was just a routine seduction for him. Put yourself in his place: You’re descended from generations of people who speak and have spoken primarily through puppets… as such you’re a kind of champion at psychological limbo. And you happen to like girls with brilliant eyes that see hidden things and dark hair from which they occasionally retrieve forgotten notes to themselves. Then you meet a new one. Wouldn’t you try and see how close you could get without her noticing?

—

RADHA TOOK to checking her phone constantly but with no clear objective — most of her messages were from Tyche Shaw, who she felt both jealous and protective of and would have preferred not to have to deal with at all. Tyche was in the Orkney Isles with Myrna and her father, and in addition to relying on Radha to keep her updated on puppet school assignments, the girl insisted on being friendly and requesting personal news. Unaware that she had any, Radha settled for sending pictures of herself sitting on the curbstone outside her house drinking homemade smoothies with her brother. I was in the photo too, sat on Arjun’s shoulders. I never spoke to him and so he viewed me as a kind of fashion accessory of Radha’s. At that time I was getting some of my best fun from being alone with him and sporadically opening and closing my mouth whenever he blinked.

Me, Gepetta, and A.J. on the corner drinking heavy juice all day long. What about you and my wife?

That was all the invitation Tyche needed to flood Radha’s in-box with angst that Radha unintentionally increased by responding only with emoticons.

Where do I begin… well, everything I do pisses “your wife” off

I keep answering her rhetorical questions & then not daring to answer her non-rhetorical questions

Oh and her specialty seems to be saying insanely awful stuff out of nowhere

The kind of things you have to forget in order to be able to go on living, you know?

This one comment about my hands made me want to cut them off & just throw them away. Has anyone ever spoken to you like that

Never mind, I just avoid looking at my hands now, hahaha sob

Never been good at comebacks, so I just pick up rocks and pretend to clobber her when her back is turned.

How’s it going with Gustav anyway

Radha, what exactly do you like about this WENCH?

Her dad genuinely thinks she’s human…

—

FOR EVERY TEN MESSAGES from Tyche there were perhaps three or four from Myrna (all in praise of Tyche) and one from Gustav. One night, just as Radha had lain down on her bed, he sent a photo of his glove puppet Cheon Song Yi wielding a tube of lipstick like a sword. Accompanying text: Somebody stop her . As for Gustav, all that could be seen of him was a full, shapely lower lip stained orchid pink from Song Yi’s lipstick attack. He was positioned behind the puppet, but it was one of those photos where the background very gradually becomes the foreground. At first glance Radha snorted and rolled her eyes. Then she tilted her head, took another look, and slowly crossed and uncrossed her legs. Still studying the photo, she absentmindedly traced the shape of her own mouth and sucked the tip of her index finger. The bedroom ghost and I looked at each other and silently agreed to vacate the room.

—

I MISSED DESIRE. And I was glad my friend’s heart had been given a puzzle to work on while it ached over Myrna Semyonova. Even if it became necessary to drop Gustav, Radha had other tutoring options. Her classmates were a friendly bunch, lacking in the competitive spirit their teachers would have liked to see. They worked on one another’s ideas. Their puppets swapped costumes, props, catchphrases, and sometimes even characters. This kind of camaraderie made the ostracization of Rowan Wayland all the more marked.

—

HISTORY OF PUPPETRY was the hour of the week in which Radha and others played with paper, making puppets with pinned joints and hands and feet that spun like weather vanes. They were learning histories of Punchinello, a beak-nosed figure who stands for nothing. The place and century of his birth is the sort of thing learned people in tweed jackets argue about, but for a couple of centuries he’s been present in Austria, where he is Kasperle, setting his cunning aside to concentrate on brutality without pause, until every other puppet in his world is dead and then his master must see to it that he doesn’t go after his audience too. In Hungary he’s the terse and sardonic Vitéz László, in France the twinkle returns to his eyes and he becomes Polichinelle, a demon from the merriest of hells. In England Punch is a sensitive chap; any passerby who so much as looks at him the wrong way is promptly strangled with a string of sausages. When he takes up his Turkish residence Karagöz is too lazy to attempt very much murder, though he has a reservoir of verbal abuse to shower upon anyone who comes between him and his meals. Wherever you find him, he is careful not to discuss the past. Whatever it is you’re asking about, he didn’t do it and hasn’t the faintest idea who might be responsible, in fact he doesn’t know anything at all, he wasn’t “there,” see, he’s been “here” the whole time… which begs the question, where were you?

—

WHEN RADHA and I walked into the History of Puppetry classroom the first thing we noticed was the ocean of space that surrounded Rowan Wayland, and for caution’s sake we chose seats that maintained his solitude. We watched him but had difficulty finding out whether keeping our distance was weak or wise; nobody would talk about him. Wayland himself behaved as if his pariah status was perfectly natural, walking around the building looking straight ahead with his collar popped up around his ears. Radha remarked that he gave her the strange feeling of being an extra on a film set. It took two weeks for curiosity to change our seating vote. “Maybe he’s just misunderstood,” I said. Radha agreed to risk it.

He had a pair of red needles and a heap of wool on top of his books and was knitting while he waited for the teacher to arrive. There’s a gentle assurance many knitters have as they fix their patterns in place. Rowan’s knitting wasn’t like that. He stared at his sock-in-progress with an insistence that brooked no compromise, as if he’d learned that this was the only way to ensure that each stitch stayed where he’d put it. We took the seats alongside him, Radha said hello, and kept saying it until he acknowledged her with a sidelong glance.

“I’m Radha,” Radha said, before he could look away again.

“OK,” he said. “Why — I mean, what do you want?”

“Nothing,” Radha answered, with the guileless good cheer that makes her so dear to me. “Just saying hello. This is Gepetta.”

He smiled at me, and kept knitting. At first, second, or even third glance it was difficult to pin down what made him so much avoided. Rowan’s physical effect — godlike jawline, long-lashed eyes, umber skin, rakish quiff of hair — is that of a lightning strike. In full sunlight the true color of his hair is revealed to be navy blue, and when he scratches his head, as he sometimes does when he’s thinking, his hair parts so that the two tiny corkscrews of bone at the front of his skull are visible. Yes, horns. Not scary ones — I think these were intended as a playful touch. The problem with Wayland is that he’s a puppet built to human scale. Masterless and entirely alive. No matter how soft his skin appears to be he is entirely wooden, and it is not known exactly what animates him — no clock ticks in his chest. Rowan is male to me, since he moves and speaks with a grace that reminds me of the boys and men of my Venetian youth. He’s female to Myrna. For Radha and Gustav Rowan is both male and female. Perhaps we read him along the lines of our attractions; perhaps it really is as arbitrary as that. He just shrugs and says: “Take your pick. I’m mostly tree, though.” His fellow students already had all those confusing hormone surges to deal with. So most of them stayed away, though I’m sure they all dreamed of him, her, hir, zir, a body with a tantalizing abundance of contours, this Rowan who is everything but mostly tree. I’m sure Rowan Wayland was dreamed of nonstop.