Boy, Snow, Bird

1

nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. I’d hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me’s. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us, and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton. I felt the reflection at my shoulder like a touch. I was on the most familiar terms with her, same as any other junior dope too lonely to be selective about the company she keeps.

Mirrors showed me that I was a girl with a white-blond pigtail hanging down over one shoulder; eyebrows and lashes the same color; still, near-black eyes; and one of those faces some people call “harsh” and others call “fine-boned.” It was not unusual for me to fix a scarf around my head and spend an afternoon pretending that I was a nun from another century; my forehead was high enough. And my complexion is unpredictable, goes from near bloodless to scalded and back again, all without my permission. There are still days when I can only work out whether or not I’m upset by looking at my face.

I did fine at school. I’m talking about the way boys reacted to me, actually, since some form of perversity caused me to spend most lessons pretending to absorb much less information than I actually did. Every now and then a teacher got suspicious about a paper I’d turned in and would keep me after school for questioning. “Has someone been… helping you?” I just shook my head and shuffled my chair sideways, avoiding the glare of the desk lamp the teacher invariably tried to shine into my eyes. Something about a girl like me writing an A-grade paper turns teachers into cops. I’ll take the appraisal of my male peers over that any day. Four out of five of them either ignored me or were disgustingly kind, the way nice boys are to the plainest Jane they know. But that was only four out of five. Number five tended to lose his balance for some reason and follow me around making the most extraordinary pleas and offers. As if some kind of bug had gotten into him. Female classmates got “anonymous” notes that said things like: So — I fall for you. Probably because I can see and hear. I see you (those eyes, that smile) and when you laugh… yeah, I fall. I’m not normally this sincere, so you might not be able to guess who I am. But here’s a clue… I’m on the football team. If you feel like taking a chance, wear a blue ribbon in your hair tomorrow and I’ll walk you home.

The notes I received were more… tormented. More of the “You’ve got me going out of my mind” variety. Not that I lost any sleep over that stuff. How could I, when I had a little business going on the side? Boys paid me to write notes to other girls on their behalf. They trusted me. They had this notion that I knew what to say. I just wrote whatever I thought that particular girl wanted to hear and collected dollar bills on delivery. The notes my friends showed me were no work of mine, but I kept my business quiet, so it stands to reason that if anyone else had a similar business, they’d have been discreet about it too.

When my hair started to darken, I combed peroxide through it.

As for character, mine developed without haste or fuss. I didn’t interfere — it was all there in the mirrors. Suppose you’re born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-something. Suppose your father’s a rat catcher. (Your absent mother is never discussed, to the extent that you nurse a theory that you’re a case of spontaneous generation.) The interior of the house you grow up in is pale orange and rust brown; at dawn and sunset shadows move like hands behind the curtains — silhouettes of men with Brylcreemed waves in their hair gathered on the street corner to sing about their sweethearts in seven-part harmony, the streetcar whispering along its track, Mrs. Phillips next door beating blankets. Your father is an old-fashioned man; he kills rats the way his grandfather taught him. This means that there are little cages in the basement — usually a minimum of seven at any given time. Each cage contains a rat, lying down and making a sound somewhere between twittering and chattering: lak lak lak lak, krrrr krrrrr krrr. The basement smells of sweat; the rats are panicking, starving. They make those sounds and then you see holes in their paws and in their sides — there’s nothing else in that cage with them, and all your father does to them at first is give them water, so it stands to reason that it’s the rats making the holes, eating themselves. When your father’s about to go out on a job, he goes to the basement, selects a cage, and pulls its inhabitant’s eyes out. The rats that are blind and starving are the best at bringing death to all the other rats, that’s your father’s claim. Your father puts three or four cages in the trunk of his car and drives away. He comes back late in the evening, when the job’s done. I guess he makes a lot of money; he does business with factories and warehouses, they like him because he’s very conscientious about the cleanup afterward.

So that’s Papa. Cleanest hands you’ll ever see in your life. He’ll punch you in the kidneys, from behind, or he’ll thump the back of your head and walk away sniggering while you crawl around on the floor, stunned. He does the same to his lady friend, who lives with you, until he starts going for her face. She’ll put up with a lot, but not that. One day she leaves a note under your pillow. It says: Look, I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I’d say you deserve better. Take care of yourself.

You don’t get too upset about her departure, but you do wonder who’s going to let you bum Lucky Strikes now. You’re all of fifteen and you’re a jumpy kid. You don’t return people’s smiles — it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains. One of the first things you remember is resting your head against the sink — you were just washing your hair in it, and you had to take a break because when your hair’s wet it’s so heavy you can’t lift your head without your neck wobbling. So you’re resting, and that clean hand descends out of nowhere and holds you facedown in the water until you faint. You come around lying on the bathroom floor. There’s a burning feeling in your lungs that flares up higher the harder you cough, and the rat catcher’s long gone. He’s at work.

Where does character come into it? Just this: I’ve always been pretty sure I could kill someone if I had to. Myself, or my father — whichever option proved most practical. I wouldn’t kill for hatred’s sake; I’d only do it to solve a problem. And only after other solutions have failed. That kind of bottom line is either in your character or it isn’t, and like I said, it develops early. My reflection would give me a slow nod from time to time, but would never say what she was thinking. There was no need.

A couple of teachers asked me if I was applying to college, but I said: “Can’t afford it.” Actually, I was pretty sure that the rat catcher could, but I didn’t want to have that, or any, conversation with him. He hit me when one of his caged rats bit him. He hit me when I pronounced a word in a certain way that made him think I was acting stuck-up. (He told me that the difference between him and other people was that other people would only think about kicking me in the shins whenever I used a long word, but he went ahead and took action.) He’d hit me when I didn’t flinch at the raising of his arm, and he’d hit me when I cowered. He hit me when Charlie Vacic came over to respectfully ask if he could take me to prom. I seem to recall he began that particular beating in a roundabout way, by walking up to me with a casserole dish and dropping it on my foot. There was almost a slapstick element to it all. I got a sudden notion that if I laughed or asked “Are you through?” he’d back off. But I didn’t try to laugh, for fear of coming in too early, or too late.

There were times I thought the rat catcher was going to knock me out for sure. For instance, the morning he told me to run downstairs and blind a couple of rats real quick for him before I went to school. I said NO WAY and made inner preparations for stargazing. But he didn’t really do anything, just pointed at my clothes and said: “Rats paid for those,” then pointed at my shoes and said: “Rats paid for those,” and pointed at the food on the table and said: “Rats…”

He imitated them: “Krrrr. Lak lak lak lak.” And he laughed.

The unpredictability of his fist didn’t mean he was crazy. Far from it. Sometimes he got awfully drunk, but never to a point where he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was trying to train me. To do what, I don’t know. I never found out, because I ran away almost as soon as I turned twenty. I wish I knew what took me so long. He didn’t even hit me that night. He just sat in his easy chair snoozing after dinner, like always. I watched him and I woke up, I kind of just woke up. He was sleeping so peacefully, with a half smile on his face. He didn’t know how rotten he was. He’ll never know, probably never even suspect it.

My feet walked me into my bedroom while I thought it over. Then I gave my mattress a good-bye kick. I didn’t pack much because I didn’t have much. There was only one really important thing in my bag: a flag that Charlie Vacic had wrapped around my shoulders once when we were watching the Fourth of July fireworks over at Herald Square. He said it was a loan, but he never asked for it back. Ever since he’d started at medical school people talked about him as if he’d died, but he was the same old Charlie — he wrote to me from upstate, and he mentioned the flag, and that night. I’d written back that I was still looking after the flag for him. It took up a bunch of room in my bag, but I couldn’t just leave it there with the rat catcher.

I did look for the key to the basement, but I couldn’t find it. Hard to say how much of a good turn it would’ve been to set those rats free after standing by while they’d starved, anyway.

Three times I opened and closed the front door, testing the depth of the rat catcher’s sleep, trying to make the softest click possible. The third time I heard him shift in the chair, and he mumbled something. The fourth time I opened the door I didn’t have the nerve to close it behind me, just ran. Two girls playing hopscotch outside Three Wishes Bakery saw me coming and hopped right out of the way. I ran six or seven blocks, the street one long dancing seam of brick and bicycle bells, hats and stockings, only stopping to turn corners when traffic lights wouldn’t let me pass. I ran so fast I don’t know how my pumps stayed on. A crosstown bus, then a subway ride to Port Authority. “Nervous” simply isn’t the word. I stayed standing on the bus ride, stuck close to the driver, looking behind us, looking ahead, my heart stirring this way and that like so much hot soup, my hands stuck deep in my pockets so my sleeves couldn’t be grabbed. I was ready for the rat catcher to appear. So ready. I knew what I’d do. If he tried to take me by the elbow, if he tried to turn me around, I’d come over all tough guy, slam my skull into his forehead. I stayed ready until I got to Port Authority, where the priority shifted to not getting trampled.

I really wasn’t expecting that kind of hullabaloo. If there’d been more time I’d just have stood stock-still with my eyes closed and my hands clapped over my ears, waiting for a chance to take a step toward the ticket counter without being pushed or yelled at. Folks were stampeding the last bus with everything they had — it was as if anyone unlucky enough to still be on the station platform turned into a pumpkin when the clock struck twelve. I tumbled into the bus with a particularly forceful gang of seven or so — a family, I think — tumbled off the bus again by way of getting caught up in the folds of some man’s greatcoat, and scuttled over to the ticket counter to try to find out just where this last bus was going. I saw the rat catcher in the ticket line, long and tall and adamant, four people away from the front, and I pulled my coat collar over my head. I saw the rat catcher get out of a cab and stride toward me, veins bulging out of his forehead, looking like he meant nothing but Business. I whirled around and saw the rat catcher again, pounding on the bus window, trying to find me among the passengers. Okay, so he wasn’t really there at all, but that was no reason to relax — it’d be just like him to turn up, really turn up, I mean, a moment or two after my guard came down. I saw him at least twenty times, coming at me from all angles, before I reached the counter. And when I finally did get there, the guy behind it told me it was closed for the night.

“When do you open up again?”

“Six in the morning.”

“But I’ve got to leave tonight.”

He was basically a jerk. “Jerk” isn’t a term I make free and easy use of. I don’t go around saying He/she/it is a jerk. But this guy was something special. There I was, looking right at him through the glass as I wept desperately, and there he was, petting his moustache as if it were a small and fractious creature. He sold me a ticket five minutes before the bus left, and he only did it because I slipped him an extra five dollars. I felt a bout of sarcasm coming on when he took the money, but made sure I had the ticket in my hand before I said: “My hero.” I was going to the last stop, on account of its being the farthest away — the ticket said the last stop was Flax Hill, and I’d never heard of it.

“Flax Hill? Whereabouts would you say that is?”

“New England,” my hero said. “You’re gonna miss that bus.”

“Where in New England? I mean… what state? Vermont, or what?”

He studied me with narrowed eyes, selecting a nerve, the fat juicy nerve of mine he’d most like to get upon. “Or what,” he said.

He drew the blinds down over the counter window, and I ran. There were only two seats left on the bus — one beside an elderly man and one beside a colored woman who was sleeping with her head laid up against the window. The man smelled somewhat urinaceous, so I sat beside the woman, who opened her eyes, asked me if she should get up, nodded, and fell asleep again when I said no. She looked just about worn-out.

Across the aisle, a baby started screaming, and its mother bounced it up and down on her knees, trying to soothe it into good behavior. But the shrieking went on and on, primal, almost glad — this protest was righteous. I couldn’t make up my mind whether the baby was male or female; the only certainties were near baldness and incandescent rage. The kid didn’t like its blanket, or its rattle, or the lap it was sat on, or the world… the time had come to demand quality. This continued until the mother, who had been staring into space, suddenly came to and gave her child a particularly vicious look, along with a piece of information: “I don’t have a baby that acts this way.” The baby seemed taken aback, hiccupped a few times, and fell silent.

I held that talisman ticket of mine smooth between my hands right up until the bus pulled out of the station, even though deep down I knew there was no way the rat catcher could have figured out where I was. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that I’d leave the state. Maybe he wouldn’t look too hard. Maybe he’d just shrug and think, Well, that’s cut down the grocery bill. (Actually, I knew he would be murderously mad — I could almost hear him bellowing: “I’m a RAT CATCHER. No two-bit wretch runs out on me, even if she is my daughter!”) Don’t think of his face—Flax Hill, Flax Hill. With a name like that, it was probably the countryside I was going to. Moonlight, hay, cows chewing cud and exchanging slow, conversational moos. It was a scenario I felt doubtful about. But I was game. I had to be.

As pillows go, my bag served pretty well. I listened to the drumming of the bus wheels on the road, made a note that running away from home was as easy as pie once you’d made your mind up to it, and fell asleep with my limbs carefully arranged so as not to touch my neighbor’s.

2

it was snowing when I got off the bus at Flax Hill. Not quite regular snowfall, not exactly a blizzard. This is how it was: The snow came down heavily, settled for about a minute, then the wind moved it — more rolled it, really — onto another target. One minute you were covered in snow, then it sped off sideways, as if a brisk, invisible giant had taken pity and brushed you down. Next, just as you’d caught your breath, a boomerang effect made a snowman of you all over again. I could only see a few steps ahead of me, and about one step behind me. When a pair of headlights slid past my elbow, I got out of the road and began following the voices of two women huddled under a broken umbrella, mainly because I heard them mention their landlady. I had to find a landlady. Any landlady would do. I stuck close to the umbrella girls, even when the snow hid them from me for seconds at a time and I began to doubt that they were real, even when they took what they called “the shortcut” across abandoned railway tracks overgrown with grass and through a pitch-black tunnel — I retched and retched again at the smell of it. Dead things and rotten eggs. Insects dropped onto my shoulders, tentatively, as if wondering whether we’d met before. More than once I became certain we were being pursued by the very darkness itself. But if the umbrella girls could take it, so could I. A couple of times they stopped and called out: “Hey, is someone there?”

I hung back, kept my mouth shut, and thought: This landlady had better be great. Once we were out the other side of the tunnel, the umbrella girls giggled and accused each other of being nervous Nellies. Of course that got me thinking about times I’d been in the dark and felt that someone else was there but convinced myself that I was wrong. Probably nine times out of ten there really had been someone there.

When the umbrella girls finally went in at the door of a prim, skinny, redbrick building, I walked up and down in front of it for a few minutes after the door had closed, wondering what story to tell. But I didn’t know the landlady’s name and it was too cold to think. I knocked at the door and managed to walk in and ask for the lady of the house without shivering too much. She had steel gray hair, an elegant figure, and a “Honey, I’ve seen it all” expression that served as the basis for all her other expressions, from amusement to annoyance.

I said: “I heard you’re a landlady. Please don’t tell me I heard wrong,” and then I ran out of vocabulary. She sat me down on her own personal sofa, piled cushions onto me until only my head stuck out, and called for soup and blankets. Her name was Mrs. Lennox, and she was Flax Hill born and bred—“A Massachusetts classic, you know.” She told me she’d never lost a prospective tenant yet, and the girls who answered the cry for soup and blankets backed her up. “Doesn’t get under your feet, either,” one of them added. (That turned out to be correct. She wasn’t someone that you just saw around, you had to make appointments with her.) The girls hadn’t consulted one another, so there were four bowls of soup and seven blankets. I took that as a sign that I was welcome and said “Thank you” about fifty times in a row until someone laughingly pointed out that it was only soup.

Over the days that followed, I tried to identify the umbrella girls by the sounds of their voices, since it was all I had to go on. But fifteen women who live together get to talking alike. It could’ve been any two of them who’d led me in out of the snow.

As for Flax Hill itself, I was on shaky terms with it for the first few months. Neither of us was sure whether or not I genuinely intended to stick around. And so the town misbehaved a little, collapsing when I went to sleep and reassembling in the morning in a slapdash manner; I kept passing park benches and telephone booths and entrances to alleyways that I was absolutely certain hadn’t been there the evening before. My boarding house room was the cheapest around, and truly, I got what I paid for. A narrow bed, low beams I kept knocking my head against, and a view of a bus stop with a hangdog air (its sign was illegible). There was no chair to sit on, and no mirror in my room, so I made brief consultations with myself as I washed my face in the bathroom down the hall—“I heard she’s a gangster’s moll,” I whispered, repeating things I’d overheard while supposedly out of earshot. “Nah, she’s an actress studying her next part. Trust me, I’ve seen this before.” The woman in the mirror gave me a big wink, told me it’d blow over soon enough, and sent me to bed on my own.

I dreamt of rats. They spoke to me. They called me “cousin.” And I dreamt of being caught, dreamt of sedative smoke, tar, glue, and strange lights the size of the sun, switching from red to green so fast that I had no time to react. Then the rat catcher held me by the tail. He exhibited me at a conference and answered questions on my habits. He was awarded a medal, and I was very much against the whole thing, but I was dead. I’d wake up with both hands covering my nose, which twitched violently and felt like the coldest part of my body after such dreams. I tasted salt, and that was how I knew I’d been crying in my sleep. I think I missed home. A lot. It didn’t make any sense but I missed home a lot.

—

three things were unsatisfactory about me — the first, that I was from Manhattan.

(“What could a girl from there be looking for around here?”)

The second problem was my name.

(“It’s Boy.”

“Oh, sure. Very cute. And what’s your government name?”

“I already told you: Boy. Boy Novak.”

“Wow…”

“Wow yourself.”)

The third problem was that I hadn’t brought any skill with me. Flax Hill is a town of specialists, and if someone turns up in that kind of town with nothing but a willingness to get their hands dirty, that someone had better forget about being given a break. All anybody ever seemed to want to know about me at first was how come. How come I wasn’t good at anything? I went on a lot of double dates with a girl named Veronica Webster who lived on the floor below me. Like the other tenants, she carried her pawnshop tickets folded up inside an antique locket around her neck. Unlike the other tenants, she had a nice room with a fireplace, and she hosted hot chocolate parties, but you had to bring your own hot chocolate. Webster was seventy percent all right and thirty percent pain in the neck, one of those women who are corpselike until a man walks into the room, after which point they become irresistibly vivacious. She wore her hair like Mamie Eisenhower’s only with longer bangs, and she was out three nights a week, one of them with Ted Murray, her unofficial steady date. I kept feeling I should try to talk her out of her attachment to Ted. First of all he was a stingy tipper, just couldn’t seem to make himself round up to the nearest zero, and that filled me with foreboding. The other thing was that we all met at his place for predinner cocktails once and he had this garish oil portrait of Lincoln up on a wall — the product of one of those mail-order paint-by-number kits if I ever saw one. Something came over me as I stood there looking at that noble profile reproduced in puce. I don’t ever want to feel that way again. It’s Lincoln. You can’t do that to Lincoln.

Back at the boarding house I said to Webster: “So… how about that portrait of Lincoln in Ted’s parlor?”

She shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but a man who admires Lincoln is my kind of man.”

I said darkly, “Ah, but does he… does he?” and left it at that. I wasn’t supposed to rock the boat. It was up to me to try to keep Ted’s friend entertained. The friend’s name was Arturo Whitman, and he and Ted were a team — Ted sold the jewelry that Arturo made. I could see how Arturo might not be the best salesman; he was big and shaggy and not a little gruff. More often than not he knocked both our wineglasses over on account of waving his hands about too much while talking about the parallels between Robespierre and McCarthy. He had tawny, heavy-lidded eyes, and he wasn’t very good at dancing, but I couldn’t help liking it when he held me in his arms. One evening when Ted and Webster were playing footsie and talking about Guatemala (Ted was describing parts of it he’d been to, and Webster chipped in with “Sounds divine!” and “I’m awfully jealous!” and “I’d sure like to see that for myself someday, Teddy…”), Arturo and I just sat there watching the rain wrap the window round and round in a trembling veil. I heard the raindrops say, “I have a daughter. She wears red amaryllis blooms in her hair”; then I realized it was Arturo talking.

I looked across the table. He smiled. Not at me, but at the window, as if he saw her there. “Last month it was forget-me-nots,” he said. “And before that, yellow everlastings.”

“I bet she’s pretty.” The safest remark I could think of.

“Her name’s Snow,” he said, as if that explained it all. He checked his watch. “Her grandma will have put her to bed about ten minutes ago.”

“It’s early. How old is she?”

He frowned. “She’ll be six tomorrow.”

“Ah. Is it all happening too fast?”

“No, it’s — fine. The birthday present she’s asked for is a tall order, though.”

“Lemme guess: a pony.”

“I almost wish it was. Two more guesses.”

“Uhm… an enchanted object. A lamp with a genie in it, something like that.”

“Not exactly,” he said, after wavering for a moment.

The next guess was inappropriate, I knew, but I was too curious not to give it a shot. “A mother.”

He stared. “You’re good.”

“It’s just… you said it was a tall order.”

“Yeah.”

He closed his mouth tight after saying that one word. I figured he only kept coming out on those dates of ours because Ted was blackmailing him — he always looked so relieved when it was time to go home. On the boarding house doorstep I halved a cigarette and lit Webster’s half, then mine, so we could have a quick couple of smokes before going in for the night. Arturo’s wife had died a week after giving birth to his daughter, Webster told me. Childbirth complications. He’d been a history professor at Boston University at the time. But he took Snow and went away, he still wouldn’t say where. Wherever it was, he’d learned to work metal there; when he came back two years later, he set up a workshop in his home.

“What was his wife’s name?”

“Julia, I think.”

“You’re not sure?”

“He doesn’t really talk about her.”

“And have you met the kid?”

I’d reached the end of my cigarette half before she had, and Webster grinned as she blew smoke past my ear. “Who, Snow? Sure. She’s a doll.”

There was a misunderstanding between Arturo and me. An unspoken one, and how do you correct those? It happened at Ted’s place, when I was transfixed by that god-awful portrait. I stayed standing in front of it for longer than I actually looked at it. Time ticked by and I faced the portrait dead-on without seeing it at all. Had anyone asked me what it was that I could see, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them. It was almost as if I’d left the room. I say almost because I could still hear Ted trying his best to wet blanket Webster’s Halloween costume idea.

“This year — wait for it — this year I’m doing the telltale heart.”

“And how do you propose to dress up as a heart?”

“Oh, I’ll just paint myself red all over and wear a red hat, silly. And I’ll tell tales.”

“That’s just plain cryptic. Anyhow, didn’t the telltale heart throb horrifically loudly?”

“Oh, that’s hardly difficult. I can throb horrifically loudly right now, if you like.”

“Be my guest.”

“Buh-boom,” Webster began, in a deep voice. “Buh-boom, buh boom.”

I was smiling. My eyes came back into focus and that was what I saw — a face I recognized, smiling. I’d been looking at myself in the picture frame the whole time. The smile turned wry, I scanned the room without turning around, and there was Arturo Whitman. The left side of him, to be precise. The rest of him was out of the picture, but there was a look of steady dislike in that left eye of his. He seemed to think he’d caught me practicing being fascinating.

He was pretty sarcastic with me after that, when before he’d been almost kind; he took to replying to any little observation I made with “Indeed,” and he got even worse a couple of dates later when I fell into a similar trance only to come to and discover that I’d apparently been contemplating my mysterious smile in the back of my dessert spoon.

Our misunderstanding worried me. I thought: I should talk to him. I should tell him it isn’t vanity. If it was vanity, I’d have been able to disguise it, all this insipid smirking at myself. Other women did it all the time; it was just that they didn’t get caught. No, the only behaviors we can’t control are those caused by nerves. I rehearsed an offhand explanation. It began with the words: “Hand me some nerve tonic, Whitman.” But I didn’t know for sure that it wasn’t vanity running the show. What I did know was that I wouldn’t be able to stand it if I tried to explain myself in good faith and his only answer was “Indeed.”

The other two date nights Webster and I spent with bachelors eligible enough to stop Ted from taking her for granted but not so eligible that he quit competing. As for me, I knew I was onto a good thing. I was guaranteed three moderately fancy dinners a week, including dessert, and I was mingling with the locals. The only cost was a little of my pride. I had one dress that was fit for a dinner date, a deep red shantung number the rat catcher’s girlfriend had outgrown. Each time I went to a restaurant, that dress came too. My dates cracked jokes about it, and I acknowledged the jibes with an affable but distant smile. Every other young person I met was an apprentice at this studio or that workshop. The potters scrubbed up pretty well but never managed to shed every last bit of clay; there’d always be just a little daub of it on their chins or wrists. My favorite potter, whose name I forget, said, “Awww, not again,” when I told him there was clay on his forehead. He said: “You know how possessive clay is.” His tone of voice made me wish I could agree with him. As far as he was concerned, he was talking about something as true as thunder, as true as his thumb. So clay leaves hickeys. Who knew…

I told Arturo Whitman about it, just to make conversation. He shrugged, and said: “You should go back to New York.”

In my head I counted slowly to five before answering. “Oh, I should, should I?”

“Yup.” He cracked his knuckles. Maybe he just felt a little stiff at that moment, but as a gesture made while telling someone to leave town, I didn’t like it.

“And just why is that?”

He finished his lunch and started on mine, methodically, without enthusiasm. He didn’t seem to approve of lamb chops and spinach. “You must’ve thought you’d get an easy ride around here. You must’ve thought you could show up and say ‘Hey, I’m from the big city’ and everyone would just roll over—”

“Would it kill you to get to the point?” I inquired.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll keep it simple. People make beautiful things here. We’re interested in the process, not the end product. Now, you — you don’t have what it takes to start that kind of process, let alone see it through. So. There’s nothing here for you.”

I looked him in the eye and said slowly: “Oh, isn’t there?” I wasn’t referring to anything in particular — all I was conscious of was the desire to give him a gigantic scare, right there in the diner, with the rest of the Sunday lunch crowd all around us, happy young families and grandpas carefully chewing the pasta in their minestrone as they listened to the baseball scores.

Arturo didn’t turn a hair. “What were you at home, a dressmaker’s model?”

“No,” I said, amazed that he could have got it so wrong. That “big city” stuff too. New York wasn’t a big city to me. It was no bigger than a Novak rat cage. The nearest of those blinded creatures always knew when I was nearby, and would turn their heads toward me if I made the slightest movement, just as if I’d called their names.

“Well, you could probably do that kind of work here. I know someone who—”

“I’ll find my own job. Thanks.”

That evening I told Webster she should find someone else for her double dates. It was just one of those things, I said.

I found it easy to disregard the suggestion that I didn’t belong in Flax Hill. The town woke something like a genetic memory in me… after a couple of weeks, the air tasted right. To be more specific, the air took on a strong flavor of palinka, that fiery liquor I used to sneak capfuls of whenever the rat catcher forgot to keep it under lock and key. But now, here, clear smoke rose from my soul every time I breathed in. A taste of the old country. Of course I knew better than to mention this to anybody.

Arturo was right about the way Flax Hill worked, though. I swept the floors of European-style ateliers and watched luxury made before my very eyes. Brocade gloves in quarter sizes for a perfect fit, peau de soie slippers with a platinum sheen, hall-length tapestries woven from hand-dyed thread, wooden doorknobs shaped like miniature tigers midleap — the people of Flax Hill made all these things, packed them up in crates with no more emotion than if they were hen’s eggs, and sent them to department stores and private clients across the country. The town should really have been called Flax Hills, since it was huddled up between two of them, but maybe that was the locals’ way of instructing one of the hills to scram. The hills are ringed round with old, dark, thick-trunked trees. They’re so tall you feel a false stillness standing under them; when you look all the way up, you see the wind crashing through the topmost branches, but you hear all the commotion only distantly, if at all. I met men out among those trees. Bearded men who carried axes, and drove carthorses, occasionally stopping to deftly bind logs of wood more tightly together. The woodcutters didn’t seem surprised to see me. They’d just say hello and point, reminding me where north was so I wouldn’t lose my way. Light fell through the leaves, liquid in some places, sometimes stopping to hang in long necklaces — but only for a second or two, as if aware it wouldn’t get much admiration in Flax Hill.

There were houses along the road back into town. I hadn’t taken much notice of them when I was walking toward the trees, but the closer it got to nightfall, the more those houses stood out. They were mostly basic, hutlike structures, and the majority of them looked abandoned, but I saw stripy curtains here and there, or a basketball hoop fixed to an outer wall with a freshly chalked scoreboard beside it. One of the bigger houses had brambles growing up the front of it in snakelike vines. The smell of baking chocolate-chip cookies aside, it looked like a house you could start fanciful rumors about: “Well, a princess has been asleep there for hundreds of years…” and so on. The front door was open, and the porch light was on, and a little girl came around the side of the house, singing loudly. I couldn’t see her face properly — it was obscured by clouds of dark hair with big red flowers plaited into them — but she had a large cookie in each hand and more in the pockets of her dress, and I wanted to go in at the door behind her, sit down at the old piano I could see in the living room while she stood on tiptoes to retrieve the glass of milk set on top of it. Her voice sounded exactly the way I’d thought it would sound. For some reason that scared me, so I didn’t stop at the gate to greet her even though I heard her saying “Hi” in a startled way. I just said “Hi, Snow” as if we’d met before, when of course we hadn’t, and I kept going, kept my gaze fixed on the road ahead of me. “Scared” doesn’t even really describe it. I almost crossed myself. It felt like the evil eye had fallen upon us both.

3

i became well acquainted with the Help Wanted column in the local paper. I read it in the mornings, lying in bed with my little wireless set on my chest, pouring piano concertos directly into my heart as I scanned job descriptions I couldn’t answer to. I continued my reading at the Mitchell Street lunch counter, where Gertrude the waitress called me (and everyone) “schatzie” and kidded that I was cold-blooded because I drank my coffee without blowing on it first. One day I opened the newspaper to Help Wanted as usual, slumped for no particular reason, ordered a cream soda for a change, and started reading an article on the other half of the page. A “shy, quiet” girl of sixteen had been missing for a month and a half, and various developments had led to the police dragging the river. They’d found the remains of a young female, but apparently it wasn’t the shy, quiet girl — this one was older, “somewhere between twenty and twenty-six years old, well nourished…” The police were looking for help identifying the body, and there were a couple of other details, but it was “well nourished” I got stuck on. How could they say that? How was that going to help jog people’s memories? Were they calling her fat? I mean, being well nourished is good, it means you’re healthy. But when you’re dead and someone says that about you without any kind of modification to the description — I guess it’s all wrong to describe a corpse as “well nourished yet slender”—I just wouldn’t want that for myself. I pushed the cream soda away. I should cut back on treats. I pulled my cream soda back toward me, feeling as embarrassed as if I’d just said that out loud. What a way to be thinking when some poor girl had been murdered. I returned to the Help Wanted column and read it with extra attention to make up for the past few minutes’ slacking. A company that specialized in cocktail mixers had put a call out for blondes (lots of blondes, most shapes, shades, and sizes! Tell your friends!) to act as hostesses for their Valentine’s Day soiree. It was a one-off, an evening cruise on Lake Quinsigamond in a party boat, but the money was good, so I picked up the telephone around the corner from the soda fountain and gave my dress measurements to a decidedly unfriendly receptionist who instructed me to be at the club at four p.m. the following Friday. “You’d better not be lying about those measurements, by the way. This party is for the big-shot investors, and the bosses want to make sure that these investors like what they see. So if you don’t fit into the dress we’ll have ready for you, you’ll have to go home.”

Webster lent me bus fare. “Must be great being a blonde,” she said. “Maybe you’ll meet a millionaire!” I couldn’t find any sarcasm in her gaze. I told her she could quit secretarial college and join “us” anytime she wanted.

I was one of about a hundred blondes who showed up at the dock that afternoon, and none of us got sent home — in fact, quite a few of us found that our violet chiffon dresses were too loose, evidence of the prune juice diets we’d been on ever since we’d heard the secretary’s malignant warning. When we all stood in front of the event director, he rubbed his hands together and chuckled and announced that he liked what he saw. The boat would be sailing to Drake Island, where we’d continue the drinking and dancing begun on the boat before returning to Worcester. This was going to be the best party we’d ever been to, because this party was going to represent the spirit of Herb Hill Beverages — fun, accessible, yet exclusive, just like us lovely ladies. Accessible and yet exclusive? It seemed to me that a party could only be one or the other, never both, and I for one did not understand exactly what it was he expected of us. “Oh, and it’s my birthday,” he finished, and we chorused, “Happy birthday, sir.”

He split us into groups. Then he and a few other suited men who never spoke to us directly gave us little tasks to do — walking up and down the subtly shifting floor of the cabin, with or without a tray that had glasses balanced on it, or saying “Hello” with a smile, or matching tickets to numbered hangers. It turned out I had a genius for matching tickets to hangers, so I was one of ten coat-check girls.

“Not terrible, but not great,” a girl in my group commented. “The hardest thing is staying awake long enough to give the coats back at the end.”

“Yeah, I think I heard Mr. Ramsey say that this thing’s gonna go on ’til six in the morning,” someone else said. We were sitting in the belly of the boat, looking over the deck plan. We’d already padded around the velvet-draped suites making sure the fire extinguishers were where they were supposed to be. We’d already stood silhouetted by the sunset, letting the lake breeze blow our hair into a golden haze around our heads as we tested the outer railings on all three levels. We checked the escape hatches and made each other locate them blindfolded, because the two more experienced girls said that sometimes the lights cut before the alarm went off. “When rich folks get drunk…” Betty began, and Dinah finished: “They burn money. Handfuls of dollar bills.”

I said I found that hard to believe.

Dinah sniffed, “Don’t, then,” but Betty said kindly: “Sweetie, I didn’t believe it either until I saw ’em do it.”

“Businessmen do all kinds of things we wouldn’t be able to understand,” Dinah said.

“It’s all the pressure they’re under,” Betty agreed.

I listened in silence, hoping that they’d say more. They were women so determined to think well of people that they made it seem effortless, and I hadn’t really come across their kind before.

“Baloney. We’re all under pressure. If these guys really do set dollar bills alight, they’re a bunch of devils,” said the girl beside me. She put a napkin around her neck and another one on her lap, took a sandwich out of her handbag and sank her teeth into it. She was a tidy eater, and like me, she had very dark eyes for a blonde. I’d also noticed her looking exasperated when the event director said it was his birthday.

Her name was Mia Cabrini, and I was paired with her at the coat check; we were on for the first three hours. I’d thought there’d be a busy period of checking in coats and then a slow period until it was time to give all the coats back, but the coat check never stopped being busy. These big shots were indecisive; they couldn’t make up their minds whether they were cold or not. Mia had a notepad and filled pages of it with shorthand. I didn’t ask her why.

When our first three hours were up, we switched with Dinah and Betty and “mingled” with the guests. Well, Mia mingled. I went out onto the top deck and smoked my leisure time away. The boat was going pretty fast; the solid brick and earth of the waterfront lagged stubbornly, it seemed to be having a hard time keeping up. We left streaks of light on the dark water behind us. Canapés were brought around, but the girls with the trays didn’t offer me any. The same went for wine; we weren’t supposed to drink. I watched wealthy men and their wives and dates dancing and playing cards and making deals: I will admire you exactly as much, no more or less, as you admire me. I will love you in the strictest moderation. Some couples seemed pleased with their negotiations and others were in despair. They looked around with drained faces and drank less than their friends did, barely wetting their lips so as to keep their secrets. Merchant families, mostly, descendants of Englishmen who’d gotten rich trading with the tsars and sultans and rajahs of long ago, then come over to America because all their money didn’t stop the aristocrats from snubbing them. Now their great-grandchildren just made a few investments here and there, and kept charitable institutions the way an average Joe keeps a pet. I’d read quite a number of lifestyle magazines over the years; you’ve got to have some sort of setting for your daydreams. At the end of the interview about the redecoration of a nursery or the refurbishment of a mansion, the reporter never failed to ask the price of a loaf of bread and a pint of milk at the nearest corner store, and the interviewee always knew the answer, down to the last cent — it reeked of research. So I got a kick out of seeing the stars of the show close up. Some of them even knew how to jitterbug. But I remembered my manners. I didn’t let anyone catch me staring. I reminded myself over and over again that I wasn’t at the zoo.

Mia came and found me when the band started playing “Pico and Sepulveda.” She grabbed both my hands and I let her lead our quickstep, trying to match the swing of her hips as we mouthed the names of Los Angeles streets at each other, streets neither of us had ever been on. Doheny… Cahuenga… La Brea… Tar Pits!

The thing about dancing when you’re hungry is that at the end of the song you find yourself sitting on the floor, or the nearest knee, whichever happens to be more readily available. I settled for a knee, and its owner got overfamiliar, put a hand to my waist, and said in my ear: “So she loves me.” It was Arturo Whitman, got up in all his finery, managing to look both drowsy and savage at once, as a bear might if forced to wear a tuxedo.

I said: “Arturo Whitman, are you… rich?”

He held both hands up in the air. “I’m not. I swear I’m not. Ask the guys I came in with. I’m just here to amuse them.” He gave me the once-over. “Same as you. What would you do if I kissed you right now?”

“Sock you in the solar plexus.”

“Do you even know where to find the solar plexus?”

“No, but I’d keep going ’til I got there.”

“Aw, she loves me not…”

I opened my mouth with that reckless joy that comes just before you give someone a genuine piece of your mind, but Mia pounced on us before I got started, crying, “Dr. Whitman!” They gave each other an odd, fleeting look with some kind of question in it. Arturo said: “Mia Cabrini. How the hell are you? Still involved in passionate love affairs with long-dead German philosophers?”

She glanced at me with a smile. “Mind if I hog this old man? He taught me history a million years ago, and I need to tell him all about how a guy called Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche and I finally split up for good.”

I said: “What do I care?” at the same time as he said: “Why would she mind?”

He found a table inside for the two of them, and a dish of ice cream just for her, and I took a sudden interest in “mingling,” passing them more often than was strictly necessary. “Do you want this ice cream?” he asked her, whisking the dish all around the tabletop. “I mean, do you truly want it? Would you fight for this ice cream? Would you bear a deep wound in order to possess this ice cream completely? How deep a wound? What if it was as deep as the grave? What does this ice cream really mean to you, Miss Cabrini?”

They looked good together. They were what society columnists called “a striking pair.” I don’t say this maliciously — at least, I don’t think I do — but it was only when I saw her with him that I fully realized I was younger than she was. She pulled a face and whacked him with her spoon. Not gently, either. “How’s Snow?” she asked.

I didn’t catch his answer. A few minutes later Dinah and Betty were back in circulation, and Mia and I were back on the coat-check desk. For almost an hour we hardly said a word to each other. Then she kicked off one of her shoes, placed her bare foot on the hem of my dress so I couldn’t move away from her, and said: “Say, what’s the meaning of this? Are we back at kindergarten?”

I said: “I don’t know.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t sound so sure.” She moved her heel in a slow circle, dragging the material along with it.

“Okay, okay. I’m sure.”

“Whitman and I are just good pals,” she said. “Goodish — whenever I catch a glimpse of him, anyway. And yeah, maybe… maybe we were almost something more once, but it would’ve been a complete disaster. I don’t know… he’s a nice guy, but there are thoughts he doesn’t allow himself to think. So you can’t think aloud around him… it’s too risky. You might accidentally hit a nerve. Did I already say he’s a nice guy? He is, but you just stumble across one of those thoughts he hates to think and — it ain’t pretty. When I die, they’ll make me the patron saint of lucky escapes. And that’s all there is to it.” She took her foot off the dress and we both checked for a print. Luckily there wasn’t one.

“I don’t know why you feel a need to tell me—”

“Because he says he can’t stand you and you act like you can’t stand him, and whenever a man and a woman behave like that toward each other, it usually means something’s going on. There’s a precious metal kind of gleam about you, and the man’s a jeweler, you know. So look out. And listen carefully, Boy — we’ve got to start right. I’m talking about you and me. Kiss me now, right this minute, and I’ll take it as a promise that the next time you get mad at me it’ll be a fight that’s actually worth having.”

I kissed her cheek, and she kissed mine. “He said he can’t stand me?”

She chuckled.

“What have you been writing in that notebook all evening?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you later.”

The boat docked at Drake Island and every one of us hired blondes temporarily became a coat-check girl. Afterward I stood on the middle deck and sipped a glass of water as I watched a crowd of fur coats with people in them tottering across the sand. I was one of the girls who had to stay on board with the guests who didn’t want to go ashore, and my interpretation of “exclusive yet accessible” was to offer a smiling side profile to anyone who spoke to me. If my conversation partner moved to try to face me directly, I just turned my head again, and if they made another attempt to adjust our interaction, then so did I, and it was a merry circle that we walked until my opponent was defeated and either went away or settled for a cozy chat with a silhouette. It got so Arturo was the only man on board who’d talk to me.

“What are you playing at?” he said, taking my glass of water from my hand and tasting it.

“Keep it,” I said, when he tried to hand the glass back. “I hear you can’t stand me.”

He didn’t reply.

“You feel you’ve seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.”

That tickled him. “I doubt it,” he said, when he was through laughing. He wiped tears from his eyes — that’s how tickled he was. “But Mia likes you, so…”

“I like Mia too.”

“She’s a sweet kid,” he said, and I thought: What? You didn’t have to talk to Mia for five minutes to get the message that she wasn’t any sweet kid.

“Why’d you quit teaching?”

I felt him look at me, but I gazed steadily into the pastel pink dawn.

“I’m just trying to look busy, Whitman. I’m throwing myself on your mercy here. If you don’t talk to me, I might not get paid.”

“Ha. All right, since you asked so nicely. Two reasons. First of all history got itchy. As a field of study, I mean.”

“Itchy?”

“Yeah. I’m telling you it itched. I figured it’d pass, but it didn’t. I’d sit in my office with my shirtsleeves rolled up, kind of clawing myself from wrist to elbow — my neck sometimes too. It got so bad I’d have to take my shirt off. I was terrified my wife would think they were love scratches, but… anyway, she didn’t think that. No, don’t look at me… stay just as you are, if you don’t mind. Talking to you like this reminds me of confession.”

“Well, go on, my child…”

“Thank you, Father. I think I got too close to the details of my era of supposed expertise. You lose certainty that anyone or anything is really instrumental; you know, maybe time just does all the deeds from great to despicable, and uses us, and we pitifully try to save face by pretending we were at the controls. From where I was sitting the whole thing looked and felt like a flea circus. Not entertaining, not illuminating, just endlessly pathetic. Why is this flea being made to carry that grain of rice across a stick of spaghetti? Sure, it’s the strongest flea there, the strongman of the crew, but it’s struggling… the rice is obviously too heavy. The whole thing’s kind of degrading to watch… I decided to quit, with no clear idea of what I wanted my new job to be. That wasn’t as important as planning how to break it to my family that I was about to throw away a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice, theirs and mine. Snow was well on her way to being born, and my wife liked things the way they were; I think her favorite thing about our… collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.”

He rested an elbow on the top railing and stood at a slant that made me think of the crooked man who walked a crooked mile. How does the rest of that nursery rhyme go? Something to do with this crooked man journeying farther and farther along and coming across crooked things that he takes for his own because nobody else wants them, and then he finds a crooked wife and the two of them have a crooked whale of a time ever after…?

It began to look as if he was just going to stand like that without saying another word for the rest of the boat trip, so I said: “I didn’t know you had to change friends when you change jobs.”

I think he smiled. “You don’t, I guess. I don’t know… I sometimes go to dinner with those same people now and I feel like a poser. I get what they’re saying but I’m not as invested in their bickering. I’d rather talk metals. Anyway, back when I was still a professor, I think my wife got wise to me before I even said anything about quitting. She sat me down to tell me, quite urgently and emphatically, how proud she was of all my achievements…”

“I think I get the picture. But you said there were two reasons.”

“Right. Good memory. The second reason is that I met a jeweler on the train from Boston to Flax Hill one evening, and we got talking. Making baubles wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before I got talking to that man. Why feed vanity? He said: “Oh, come on now. What do you think you are, a Puritan?” He said any Puritan worth his salt knows that vanity isn’t fussy; it’ll eat almost anything. He said it’s a matter of fact that there’s no way to avoid feeding vanity, no matter what line of work you’re in. He seemed to be doing okay, much better than I was. He was happy with his work. He mentioned that he’d recently left his wife, not for another woman, just for peace of mind, but he continued to look forward to the future and saw no reason why it shouldn’t bring him good things. I picked up his briefcase by mistake as we were getting ready for our stop. We swapped back almost immediately, of course, but — his briefcase was so light. It was one of those cases that looked heavy — it looked like mine, which was full of printed matter — but its lightness was tempting. It made me want to walk away with it, walk all the way out of my existence and into his. He was going home to eat beans out of a can and sketch fractals into his design book. There were no flea circuses in his life.”

“No Julia in his life, either,” I said, wishing for a cigarette or something to do with my hands. I was learning the ways of the world; one of them being that the presence of a certain type of curly-haired man — your type — will cause you to fidget and fidget until the only way to reach some level of calm is to touch him.

“Right,” he said.

I waited seven heartbeats and then I said: “Yeah, your kind isn’t so rare. Spoiled brat. When he’s a bachelor, life’s tough because he has everything he needs except Miss Right, and when he finds a sweetheart with the full package — beauty, brains, sweet temper — she’s too much, she’s smothering him.”

He poured the rest of the glass of water into the harbor. “Guess I wasted my breath, huh?”

“Guess you did.”

—

at seven a.m., as the three of us walked back along the dock in Worcester, the sun shone onto us through wooden slats and Mia pulled off her wig, ran her fingers through her bouncy black hair, and laughed at my expression. She was writing a piece for the Telegram & Gazette. She was going to call it “The Secret World of Blondes.” I wondered aloud what she’d managed to find out.

“It’s going to be the final nail in the coffin for blonde-brunette relations,” Arturo predicted. “That or she’ll win a Pulitzer.”

“Very funny…” Mia blew him a kiss. She’d promised to give me a lift, so we climbed into her pink roadster and sped away. The road got brighter the farther east we went, and we passed trucks coming into the city. I think Mia wanted to swap some tales about the experience of being blonde, but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking, so I pretended to be asleep. Then I guess I got too committed, because the next thing I knew we were parked outside the boarding house and Mia was tickling me under the nose with a feather.

—

back in my room I used the windowsill as a desk and wrote a brief and painstakingly breezy note to Charlie Vacic from home, just to tell him that I was still looking after his flag, and to give him my address in case he wanted to write to me. I’d appreciate it if you kept this address to yourself.

I read it over through the steam from my coffee cup. Over the years there’d been long moments when Charlie and I had looked at each other without blinking, and I’d wondered what it was that was separating us and whether he or I could make it disappear. For my part I was always a little disturbed by him because I’d never heard him tell a lie. That was horrifying to me, like living in a house with every door and window wide open all day long. When I was in a reasonable mood, I knew Charlie wasn’t for me. The note was only a few words long, but it took me the best part of an hour to get it written because I was aware of how closely he would read it.

The other girls were at work, so the bathroom was all mine. I ran a bath and walked back and forth before the mirror as I tugged at buttons, slowly removing my clothing piece by piece. The sight was unfamiliar, and I imagined I was watching a lover undressing just for me. My lover wasn’t shy. Her motions were calculated, intent. Naked, I gathered the white mass of my hair up in my hand and turned my face from side to side, trying to see what Charlie, or Arturo, or Mia, or anyone saw. Then I moistened my lips with my tongue and walked toward the mirror, not too fast, giving myself time to change my mind, to stop if it felt too peculiar. But it was just peculiar enough. I kissed the glass with my fists against it, kissed wantonly until I felt an ache in my breasts and a throbbing between my legs. There was a taste of blood where my mouth met my mouth, as if our lips were blades.

4

charlie Vacic’s reply to my note contained a lot of guff about his sincere hope that I didn’t consider myself under any obligation to him, not even as a pen pal. I happened to know that he’d soon be returning to the city from Albany, so I figured he was sweet on someone else. I considered all the girls we both knew and picked one at random — Jane-Ellen Nugent, she would do — and I wrote to Charlie that I didn’t see what was so great about Jane-Ellen Nugent but I wouldn’t dream of interfering with his happiness and have a nice life.

He sent a telegram: Cut it out Boy you know where I stand when it comes to you — C.V.

I didn’t know, and said so by return.

His reply: Can’t believe you’re making me say this am willing to fill any role required by you i.e. buddy best buddy laborer unpaid driver unpaid gardener unpaid father of your children coat etc just tell me which and how we’ll manage come home will square things with your Pa — Charlie

Alarmed, I changed my tune. You really don’t know that man at all let’s stick to letters from now on you nut — Boy.

He wrote letters, but I didn’t reply. It wasn’t a genuine attachment. We didn’t even have photographs of each other. Charlie’s telegrams were meant for the Grace Kelly look-alike in his mind’s eye, and I–I had written a jealous letter directly to his freckles.

He kept up the letters for three months, then wrapped up his one-sided correspondence with a note that was so… like him that I had to show it to Mia.

All right, Boy. You win. I won’t be bothering you anymore. This fella you’ve met out there, whoever he is… I was going to write that he’s lucky, but actually I don’t think he is. Because… with all due respect… I think you’ve got something that looks an awful lot like an attitude problem, and that’s quite aside from the matter of whether or not you left the city with a roll of your Pa’s cash like he says you did. Sorry. I had to be honest. Doesn’t stop me wishing you were my bad luck, though.

So long,

C

We were having a little picnic at the park, Mia and I, wearing daring hats we’d made out of sheets of newsprint. Mia read the note slowly, placing a finger beneath each word, opening her mouth wide every now and again to indicate that I should place a pitted olive in there. That girl was suspiciously good at being waited on. I’d expected, even wanted, her to laugh at the note, but she didn’t. She touched the letter C at the end.

“Huh,” she said. “Did you really take the money?”

“It wasn’t as much as he makes out. It was practically peanuts.” She refused the next olive, so I ate it myself. “Also I’m going to pay it back.”

“You’re going to Hell, you dirty thief,” she said, in a very mild tone of voice. “But this C — he’s not like you?”

“No. He’s just… Charlie.”

“Charlie,” Mia said, around a strawberry. “Charlie. Char-lie.” She pushed her sunshades farther down the bridge of her nose so that I could see her serious eyes. “I think Charlie could really love you,” she said.

“Oh, please,” I said. “What do you think you know about him?”

“All I know is I’d think twice before counting out someone who could really love me.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe you’re a sap.” I tapped a corner of her hat and it collapsed.

—

i got work as a telephone operator — they said they’d train me up because I had the right voice and manner for it. I counted myself lucky apart from the fact that I kept seeing Arturo Whitman on the way to work. He went running every morning, and I walked to the telephone exchange to save bus fare. Our routes coincided for about half a mile, along a road that swirled around one of the hills like a helter-skelter. That road was called Ivorydown, and I was always glad when I reached the turn onto Willoughby Street. Not just because of having to observe Arturo running up ahead or approaching from behind (there’s something about being chased by a big strong man with yellowish eyes that makes you feel like an antelope in a bad situation), but because I’ve never liked roads that take you down from steep heights too quickly. Ivorydown was like that, the tyrannical kind of road that makes you take quick little step after quick little step until you’re all the way at the bottom. Cars and buses flowed down the hill with ease, and the people in them watched you placidly through the windows. The road was lined with saplings, but they weren’t there to help, they just stood there making pretty frames for the landscape with their branches. Arturo slowed down to speak to me.

“Hey,” he said, as if he’d completely forgotten that we despised each other. “So when’s our next double date?”

He may have been told that a rakish grin works wonders. If so, he’d been getting bad advice.

I became extremely conscious of the sound of my heels tapping on the concrete. I wanted to stop walking, but the road was forcing us both down it as fast as it could, and he was already a few strides ahead, looking back at me. And so, hurrying after him with only a bunch of saplings, a couple of cars, and a truck to see us, I told him I never wanted to see his stupid face again.

He said: “Oh,” and continued his run. After that he’d pass me on the road without seeming to see me. And I went merrily on to the telephone exchange. I don’t even know what happened to that particular job. I can’t remember if I really tried at it. All those voices buzzing up and down wires, all those switches and dials, a single shift was like a long day out in dry rain. Of all the things that got to me, I never expected it to be that operator job. I couldn’t work out why, either. It was just people saying hello to each other.

Then there was the usherette job — that one lasted three weeks and a day.

When the ax came, it was because I watched the movies too much. I’d already been given three warnings, two of them in writing. Then, half an hour after I’d received the third warning, the manager himself caught me sitting down and watching a movie like a regular audience member. To be honest I wasn’t even really watching the movie. It was one of those ones they call screwball comedies, where people mislead and ill-treat each other in the most shocking and baffling ways possible, then forgive and forget about it because they happen to like the look of each other. Only they call it falling in love. Those movies are the equivalent of supernatural thrillers for me — if I watched them too closely, I’d shriek uncontrollably. So mainly I was just sitting.

The manager stood over me and asked me to explain myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to speak; it just seemed smarter not to. All of a sudden it felt as if I had far too many teeth, more teeth than it was decent to show.

“In that case I’m afraid we’ve come to the end of the road, Miss Novak,” the manager said.

I was a little sad on my last day.

I wasn’t going to miss being an usherette — the uniform itched, and identifying couples who were sitting too close together and assaulting them with a blast of light lost its charm surprisingly quickly. But I’d miss the cool, fresh, all-day darkness of the screening theaters, and the way light played across the screen with a staggering indifference. The men and women up there would speak, and laugh, and sing, and cry, walk away, stand still, and as long as the reel ran, all this would go on whether the audience was there or not, whether they watched or not.

I left the cinema with a tailor who took me to dinner, then stopped me in the midst of some bushes in the park and pushed his tongue into my mouth. The weak wriggling made me so extravagantly sad that I gagged. He looked stricken, and I was sorry. I took an “Are you frigid?” quiz in a magazine once and got the highest score. You are: Winter in Siberia. Few survive you, and those who do are… changed! I mentioned this to my date, just to let him know he was dealing with a frigid woman. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear; he left me at the front door of the boarding house and walked around the corner at a pretty fast pace. I’ll bet he started running as soon as he was sure he was out of sight.

The following day Mia came over to the boarding house to celebrate the six-month anniversary of my escape from the rat catcher. Following an ancient Cabrini recipe, she filled a stew pot with cold champagne, stuffed in as many handfuls of chopped fruit as it would hold, and served it up. We clinked bowls at the dining room table, which was otherwise empty because it was eleven in the morning, and Mia said: “This, my friend, is champagne soup. Make a wish.”

And I did.

It was standard-issue stuff. I wanted a family. But it was just as Arturo said — I didn’t know how to start anything from scratch, and I didn’t want to know. Getting pushed around as a kid had made me realistic about my capabilities. I know some people learn how to take more knocks and keep going. Not me. I’m the other kind. That’s what stopped me from telling Charlie Vacic I’d marry him. See, I’m looking for a role with lines I can say convincingly, something practical. And I know Charlie, or at least I know that he’s some kind of idealist. Charlie’s woman probably wouldn’t be able to complain that he didn’t love her enough. She’d be getting his all. Not worship or anything weird, just a certain way he looks at her, something in his voice when he speaks to her, he’d let her know that he’s ready to be asked anything, ready to ask anything. No games, no rules, no about-turns, no limits, by my side when rainstorms sound like serenades, by my side for flat hours of word tennis, each of us guarded, exchanging little comments that are so wretchedly banal that all we want to do is turn away from each other and throw up every single one of our internal organs. It’d be a love like the Siege Perilous. Nice work if you have the constitution for it, but otherwise the harshest of all tests, eliminating everyone who attempts it until the purest of heart happens along. And okay, it’s just about conceivable that you could have a heart that pure and never suspect it until the crucial moment. Maybe I’d give it a shot if the conditions were the same as in the story: You sit in the chair and you die faster than your feet can touch the floor, and that’s how you find out you’re not the one. But in real life the finding out can really drag on, can’t it? Mrs. Boy Vacic was a nightmare of mine. She hit her forties hard and fell to pieces. She had a gushing, anxious laugh that took a while to trickle to a stop (krrr krrr) and made her children ask her if she was okay. She babied herself, rewarding her own good deeds with candy and spoonfuls of grape jelly. That woman — the me that had married Charlie — had tried and failed to find a gap in all of this that was so ordinary, to take some instrument to the gap and shape it, widen it until it got big enough to slip through. She’d wanted to make a beautiful thing, like the Flax Hill natives did. But not a lantern or a bookcase, a life. Not to have what it takes, and to be surrounded by witnesses too. The man you tried with. The children. A boy version of you, or a girl version of him, or both, looking at you with clear, pitiless eyes. These are thoughts that come to you while you spend however long you spend holding icepacks to your eye, or tilting your head back against the wall to try to do something about the way your nose is bleeding, letting your mind work on the question: What reasons might somebody have for leaving her kid in the care of a man like Frank Novak? Don’t ever try to find her. Don’t even try to find out if she’s alive. This way my mother’s alive, she’s dead, she’s whatever she deserves to be on that particular day.

I was new to champagne, but as soon as I tasted it, spark after golden spark, I thought, well, there’s magic in this water, no wonder Mia said to wish on it.

“So when are you due to blow the secret world of blondes wide open? I keep walking into stores and waiting for some official-looking person to take me aside and inform me I’m not welcome in their establishment. It hasn’t happened yet, but I can’t go on like this.”

Mia refilled our bowls. “You can’t go on like this? I can’t go on like this. This piece has me petrified. It’s my first big piece after a year and a half on the ‘cat stuck up a tree’ beat. My dad’s giving this journalism thing another three months to take off before he sends me to Chicago to run another one of his damn hotels. I keep telling him and telling him that I need more time, that it’s not so easy for women in this field, but he just says: ‘Don’t give me that! You’re a Cabrini! And this is 1953! Stop making excuses!’ And I say to him, ‘Yeah, it’s 1953 and down South there’s still a nice little system going, it’s called segregation.’ And he says, ‘How about just showing a little gratitude that you’re not colored?’”

“One of his hotels?” I said. “How many does he own?”

She shook her head. “Excuse me, but that’s not the point. The point is I’ve been assigned a piece of froth — oh, look, it’s a catty article about blondes written by a brunette — and I want to use it to pull the rug out from under their feet. But the more I write up my notes, the more it all just looks like a pack of playing cards.”

“Well — show me what you’ve got.”

She pulled a couple of typed pages out of her pocket. They had been folded into quarters. I opened them out and read.

You want the scoop, and I’m going to give it to you. But let’s make a deal first. How often have you read an article all the way through to the end and said to yourself: “I don’t know where this chump gets the nerve to show up for work in the morning!” I’ll tell you how I get the nerve, and if you don’t buy it, you don’t have to read another word of it.

Here goes: I’m a brunette from a long line of brunettes. We’ve never really had anything to worry about. After all, gentlemen marry us. But something happened to me when I was ten years old. My hands began to draw distinctions between the sacred and the profane. I watched them and made notes. My left hand was part of me, it belonged to me, and it only consented to touch things I considered beautiful. If Peter Pan had visited me, I’d have given him a thimble with my left hand. I wrote letters to my best friend with my left hand. When I was reading a book and found that a line or paragraph moved me in some way, I’d touch the words with my left hand.

My right hand was an object, it belonged to the world, and I used it to manipulate other objects. Putting my clothes on, pulling my socks up, holding on to the standing pole in the bus, and so on.

I looked up from the page and said: “Mia, this is wacky.”

“Oh, absolutely. But that’s what happened.” She had a little pot of nail varnish out on the tabletop and was painting the fingernails of her right hand blue. “I support you if you want to quit already.”

“No, I’m in — I’m in.”

It was around that time that my parents got divorced. My clothes and books and posters were divided up. Some were put into a room in my dad’s new apartment and the rest stayed at home (which suddenly became new too, without him). My dad said: “Don’t cry. Aw, what are you crying for? What’s happening right now isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t good, either — it’s normal. Okay?”

My mom said: “Yeah, listen to your dad.”

That summer we had a heat wave that killed a lot of people. “More than a thousand?” I asked my dad. He said yeah. “More than TWO thousand?” He said yeah. I was chicken, so I stopped there. That summer Jesse Owens was in all the papers with that gold medal he won representing our country in the Olympics. That was the year the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteered to do the right thing by Spain and help fight Franco. And all the while there was the theater of my hands. It was theater, in that it was the performance of something that was true, and as such, I believed in it with all my heart but was also able to come to the end of it at a moment’s notice. The whole thing was set up as a transaction: My hands were giving me a show. There was my left hand, dangling limp for most of the day — my parents took turns asking if it hurt — and there was my right hand, weary from gripping and pushing and pulling and lifting for two. When I asked my hands to end the show, they wanted payment. My right hand made me promise to “see far” and my left hand made me promise to “remember what is said.”

I gave them my word. And I’ve kept it, partly from a fear of a repeated mutiny. Add a third action: “Write it all down,” and it seems to me you’ve got yourself a journalist of some kind.

All right, if you’re still with me, thanks for staying. I write these words with a fifteen-dollar wig on my head. Wheat-sheaf blond, that’s what it said on the tag. So this is a bulletin direct from the secret world. The first thing you learn is whom to beware of. They’re exactly the same people you had to beware of as a nonblonde. The kind who think they know what you are and don’t mind telling you all about it.

I turned the page over, but there wasn’t any more. Mia blew on her nails. “I guess I could start a hotel newspaper.”

“No, you’re going to do this. Got a pen?”

She handed me her fountain pen. “Finish that coat of polish,” I told her. She still had three fingernails to go, but instead of doing as she was told, she read over my shoulder as I wrote.

Here’s a story for you — the kind you find in an old library book with cobwebs between the pages. You know that book; you forget the title after you’ve returned it and over the years you try to look it up a few times, but you never find it again.

Once there was a pretty powerful magician. He spoke to the things around him, and as long as the thing he addressed had life in it, it obeyed him. “Barren tree, bear fruit,” he’d say. And no matter what had happened to the tree, no matter how ravaged its roots, the tree flourished. “Horse, grow wings,” he’d say, and the horse bowed its head as strong, finely plumed wings swept over its back. But that wasn’t how the magician made his living. Mostly he improved women’s looks for a fee. Women came to him themselves, or were brought to him by their ambitious mothers or diffident fathers. He’d look into a woman’s eyes and say: “You are a beauty,” and she heard the words and believed them so deeply that her features fell into either lush, soft harmony, or heartbreakingly strict symmetry — whichever suited her better. He’d say it to her only once, and it lasted the rest of her lifetime, so his fees were high. But the magician could also undo natural beauty, for a greater fee than the one he charged for beautifying. He sort of hoped the high fee would discourage people, but it didn’t. It was well-known that if your wife or daughter was unruly or otherwise deserving of punishment you could bring her to this magician, who would tell her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow…” He said it in such a way that the woman who heard him believed him, and the words did their work. It was a shame, and he didn’t like to do it, but business is business.

Mia snapped her fingers. “I remember how this one goes!”

“Great.” I was only too happy to push the paper over to her. I’ve always had a hard time figuring out what the moral of a story is supposed to be, and she was bound to know: She’d been to college.

Mia wrote.

One day a farmer came to the magician. “I’ve hesitated over this decision for many days, because my wife is very beautiful,” the farmer said. “Possibly the most beautiful woman in all the world. Still, I think you’d better make her ugly all the same. She frightens me; she frightens everyone who goes near her.”

“Frightens you?” the magician asked. “Frightens you how? And where is she?”

“She’s back at the farm.” The farmer shuffled his feet apologetically. “I tried to bring her with me, but she wouldn’t come.”

“Wouldn’t come?” The farmer was big and tall, at least twice the size of the magician. He must not have tried very hard to persuade his wife to travel with him.

“Somehow I couldn’t lay a hand on her,” the farmer said, unable to hide his anguish. “I moved to seize her arm, and found I’d seized my own arm. I snatched at her hair and ended up pulling my ear. And if you want to know how I got this black eye…”

The magician was interested. He’d met several stunning witches, but none of them had married farmers, and none of them practiced this particular kind of passive resistance. He agreed to accompany the farmer home.

Mia dropped the pen and nodded at me to continue. “You do remember how it goes, right? I mean… we’re not just…?”

“Sure,” I said. “I mean — no. Sure I remember.”

I made my handwriting much smaller than usual, in case I was wrong.

The magician found the farmer’s wife kneeling, planting cassava, setting the cuttings up inside little hills of soil. There’s no use trying to describe her in detail; all that can really be said is that she had the kind of beauty that people write songs about and occasionally commit suicide over. The type who seems a very long way away even when she’s right there in your arms. She wiped her hands on her apron, looked up at him, and said: “Hello.”

As a test, he said to her: “Come, woman, be more beautiful.” (Her husband groaned at that.) But nothing happened. The farmer’s wife went on planting. The magician felt uneasy — was it really impossible for her beauty to be any greater? Could she really be first among women, hidden away here on this farm? — and so he told her, “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” in the strongest tones possible. The woman didn’t raise her eyes from the ground. Her hands continued to plant cassava, and she remained exactly the same. “Don’t disturb my life, magician,” she said. “Just leave me be.”

The magician took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to his, though her gaze and the feel of her skin made his flesh crawl. “Scarecrow, scarecrow,” the magician said again. The field itself heard him this time, and three scarecrows appeared at the perimeter. But the farmer’s wife didn’t change. She said: “All I’ve ever wanted is to make things grow, and to feed people. I’ve been doing that for some years now, and I’ve been happy. I don’t want anything more or less than what I already have. I beg you: Don’t disturb my life.”

“But your husband is frightened of you,” the magician told her.

“I’ve given him no cause to be,” she replied.

“And yet he can hardly bear to look at you…”

“It isn’t necessary for him to look at me.”

Mia read that part over three times, and for a moment I thought I was busted. But she continued writing in silence, cupping her hand over the page as though she were the imposter and not me.

“Grow wings,” he told her. “Bear fruit.” She did neither. He pursued her for miles of farmland, got in the way of all her daily tasks, issued command after command, whatever came into his head. “Become a walking stick!” She didn’t. His voice grew hoarse. At last he admitted that she was a formidable witch, and that he was willing to learn whatever she could teach him.

“It isn’t magic,” she said. “It’s just that I’m well dressed. You men who try to tell me I’m a scarecrow or try to grab my arm but can’t manage it, don’t you understand that you’re not really addressing me? It’s more as if you’re talking to a coat I’m wearing.”

She was sat on a low chair, shelling beans, and he sat down at her feet and began to help her. “I don’t see what you mean,” he said. “Teach me. Show me.”

“What can I teach you?” she said. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide. She stayed like that for one minute, two minutes. He thought she was sleeping and forced himself to place a hand on her shoulder. A snake’s head glided out from between her lips, bright as new chainmail; he saw that its golden coils wound down her throat.

“You’re wrapped around her heart,” the magician said.

“I am the heart,” the snake replied.

He left the farm without looking back. There are few things in life more unpleasant than the laughter of a snake.

“Maybe that isn’t the version you read,” Mia said, watching me. She bit the end of the pen a few times. “I think I read it in Italian, so…”

“No, this is pretty much the version I read,” I said, because it felt too damn late to back down. I imagine that from time to time some similar situation has led governments to declare war.

I had to be up early for a trial shift at a bookstore, so I sent Mia home right after dinner.

“Hey,” she said, on her way out of the door. “Maybe this bookstore job is the one.”

I said: “Maybe!” But I thought: Probably not.

The best line of work for me would be roadside sprite. I’d live quietly by a dust-covered track that people never came across unless they took a wrong turn, and I’d offer the baffled travelers lemonade and sandwiches, maybe even fix their engines if they asked nicely (I’d have used my solitude to read extensively on matters of car maintenance). Then the travelers would go on their way, relaxed and refreshed, and they’d forget they’d ever met me. That’s the ideal meeting… once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.

5

the next morning Ted took Webster on a trip to Wachusett Mountain. He said it was “just because,” but we decided between us that he was either going to propose or he was going to call the whole thing off. I hoped he would propose. She’d been so sad that he hadn’t proposed on Valentine’s Day. She’d asked me if I thought some women just weren’t meant to be married. I said: “Yes. But not you.” I meant it too.

She swung between hope and despair. She rehashed old conversations with Ted until I told her she had to stop it before she made herself ill or something. She was hopeful because she’d caught Arturo Whitman looking thoughtfully at her fingers, sizing them up, as it were. She despaired because long ago Ted had told her he didn’t believe in marriage. She’d asked him how he could say that when there were so many real, live married people walking around, and he’d called her a wise guy. I told her she was born wife material whether Ted Murray realized it or not. She smiled at that. “And what about you?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m nothing but a pack of cards.” I echoed Mia to protect myself. Not that it was necessary. Webster asked questions only out of politeness. Pursuing answers wasn’t her style.

She knocked on my door just before Ted picked her up. It was six in the morning.

“Just wanted to say good-bye,” she said, sitting on my feet. (When had we become friends?) “This could be the last time I speak to you as an unengaged woman.”

I muttered, “Try not to break your neck on the slopes, Webster. I’ve gotten used to you,” and I waved good-bye from my bedroom window as Ted drove away with all their ski apparatus clattering away on top of his car. I even crossed my fingers for her.

—

a couple of hours later I emptied my purse out onto the windowsill and counted up my coins. I had bus fare, but only one way if I also wanted to eat lunch. I figured I’d take the bus back and began walking along Ivorydown, taking the route I’d so gladly abandoned a few weeks before when I’d changed jobs. It was a windy morning, and the wind pushed me, and the road dragged me, and the tree branches flew forward and peeled back and broke away, and their scrawny trunks hugged each other. I glimpsed — or more became aware of — someone walking on the other side of the saplings. She wasn’t there at the beginning of the walk; I don’t know when she caught up with me. This person was my height, her stride more or less the length of mine, smooth locks of her hair (blond) and flashes of her coat (navy blue) showing through the leaves. I was wearing a navy blue coat too. She had her hands in her pockets and I didn’t want to speak to her, I’m not sure why, maybe because she was walking so close to me but didn’t seem to notice that I was there. Or if she did, she didn’t find it odd that we stayed neck and neck all the way down the hill. I tried to get a little ahead of her so that I could look back through the branches and see her face, but she chose the exact same moment to speed up and I began to feel as if we were running from somebody. Then she spoke. She said: “Hello? Hello? Is that you?”

My lungs kicked my ribcage, just once. I’ve never heard my own voice recorded, but at that moment I was sure it’d sound like that. It was me, but me played back out of some kind of machine, that was the only way I could understand what I was hearing.

“Hello? Hello? Is that you?”

We stopped walking. “I’m here, I’m here.”

Shards of her face emerged through brown bark and greenish shadows. Her left eye was aligned with mine; we raised our left hands at the same time, and hers was bloody. She said: “I don’t know what to do.”

“Show your other hand,” I said. She didn’t move. “Show me!” She wouldn’t until I raised my right hand too. There was a lot of blood. Dark, dark, red. She had done something, or something had been done to her. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, and took a step back, silently asking me to go to her there on the other side of the hill, but it wasn’t clear what she was or what she’d done and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and I walked faster than I had before, but with a weak feeling in my knees that almost threw me into the road with the motorcars and buses. A man with a ragged beard honked his horn and yelled that I ought to be ashamed of myself, drunk at eight in the morning. He couldn’t see the other woman; she was well hidden from him. “Come here, come here and I’ll tell you everything,” she laughed, right beside me, not at all out of breath. I wasn’t as scared as I could have been — the main thing was to get away from her — but my thoughts ran with me.

What could you be, what could you be

Some future vision, will I go home this week, next week, the week after, strike suddenly, get the rat catcher back at last

What have you done Boy

Am I going to do the same, do I deserve her, whatever she is, did I call her to me somehow

Please go, go away

The view through the saplings was so calm — miles and miles of crushed green-velvet valley behind her, and a line of telegraph poles marching out as far as the eye could see. And the wires ran between the poles, three lines, direct, direct. I became painfully conscious of my heels tapping the sidewalk a moment before I noticed she’d disappeared, a deafening solo drum roll, and at the bottom of that hilly road I placed both hands on the top of my head, to check, in all seriousness, if my head was still there. Then I buried my face in a handkerchief because my nose was running. I had that feeling that comes after days of fever — the beginning of recovery, the memory of how things worked before the cold flame ate away at you. The solution seemed simple to me. Forget this road. Don’t come here again. I never did like it.

“You okay?” Arturo asked. He was sprawled out on a bench a few steps away, huffing from his run. I wondered what he’d seen, but not enough to ask him. I said I was fine and sat down next to him. He had a knife, a napkin, and a pear, and he was dropping peel for the birds, whose reaction seemed to be that he could keep it.

“Well, White Rabbit,” he said. “Where do you lead me?”

“Who are you calling a white rabbit?”

“You can take offense or you can take it as a reference to your hair.”

“I’ll reference your hair,” I said. Then I got mad at myself. I mean, I was two seconds away from fainting and “I’ll reference your hair” was the best I could come up with. Meaningless. If you’re about to fall to the ground like a frail creature in need of smelling salts, you owe it to yourself to at least say something fantastically vicious beforehand. But all I did was make him laugh. I pinched my temples, seeing the blood on her hands again. “Look — I’m going to have to ask you for a bite of that pear. I’m… dizzy. Think I’d better eat something.”

“You didn’t eat yet?”

I didn’t have the money for breakfast, but I’d rather have died than admit it. I said I was slimming. “Hmm… let’s see…” He cut a slice of pear, the longest, thinnest shaving, near transparency, and he fed it to me bit by sweet, grainy bit, his thumb brushing tiny, wary circles across my cheek. I cut the next piece for him, and I held the knife until he’d eaten all the fruit off the tip of the blade. He licked the juice away afterward, and I kissed his mouth because of the way he drank down that one drop.

—

i was an hour late to the bookstore, and as soon as I stepped inside, Mrs. Fletcher jumped up from her seat behind the till with her hair all standing on end and yelled at me to get out. I didn’t waste any time arguing and was halfway down the street when she bawled after me: “Just where do you think you’re going?”

She prowled around the shop floor, slapping price stickers onto books, and I trailed her, removing duplicate stickers. Her prices looked very high to me and I didn’t see how she made any money, but I quickly learned that there was no real point to her pricing her books — she preferred to haggle. Popular paperbacks and required reading for college classes were sold out front, but her main business was in the back room, where she dealt in antique books and first editions. She sent out catalogues and people drove cross-country to take a closer look, and even then she wouldn’t let customers go home with the goods they’d paid for until they demonstrated an ability to open a book in the correct and proper way.

Three colored teenagers, two girls and a boy, came in just after lunch and stayed for hours, just sitting by the bookshelves, reading. After they spent four hours without a purchase, I was ready to kick them out and went to ask Mrs. Fletcher’s advice, but she said: “Don’t you bother those kids.”

She didn’t seem to care that they weren’t buying anything, so I said: “They ought to be in school.”

“That’s your opinion,” she said. “That’s what you think.”

“Don’t blame me when it turns out some of your stock has been stolen.”

She stared at me as if I had three heads and she was curious about which one was boss. “Just don’t let the youngest eat apples around my books, that’s all.”

“How am I supposed to tell which one’s the youngest?”

“Don’t annoy me, Boy.”

I thought she was terrific, and hoped she liked me, but she was clearly very precise in the allocation of her affections, so she probably didn’t. At six-thirty, an hour after the store was supposed to close and only half an hour after the kids had put their books back on the shelves and sauntered out, I heard her hooting with laughter and put my head around the door of the back room, thinking I’d better take advantage of her good mood and ask if she wanted me to come back the next day. She was leafing through the obituaries section of the newspaper and wouldn’t let me in on the joke, but said: “See you tomorrow.”

I took a magazine quiz on the bus home, but I knew the result before I added the figures up. I wasn’t in love with Arturo, and I wasn’t going to be. You don’t need a quiz to tell you these things; they don’t escape your notice. The flag stuffed into the back of my wardrobe was there because someone had once draped it around my shoulders in such a way that the touch of his fingers made me feel like a million bucks. That’s not how it was with Arturo. He held me so tightly that numbness stretched all the way down my arms and only let go a few minutes after he did. It wasn’t as nice a feeling as the flag around my shoulders. But I felt more certain of it because it lasted longer.

6

people — well, Mia and Webster — told me I should make Arturo take me out more. Webster gave me lectures. “You don’t seem to understand how quickly a man will stop treating you right if you let him. So when he gives you half-assed invitations like ‘Hey, why not drop by for potluck tonight?’ you can’t stand for that, Boy.”

(Tra la la, I can and will. She didn’t know about his grilled cheese sandwiches. I’d asked him what made them taste so good and he’d closed my hand up into a fist, wrapped his own hand around the fist, and told me: “This much butter.” Webster’s lecture persisted, but my attention wouldn’t stick. She had a lot of powder on, which made me think of geishas. She was probably right, though; she was wise in the ways of getting what you want; she was walking on air and sporting an engagement ring with a rock so notable that I and the other boarding house girls took to including it in our conversations, addressing it as “Gibraltar,” demanding that it take sides.)

I made excuses. I was tired of my date dress. In fact I felt a little violent toward it. I’d open my bedroom closet and the red silk would shrink and shudder among the clothes hangers, as if it knew that I was on the brink of tossing it onto a trash heap. There was no need to go public with Arturo. I was happy to go to the Salome Club with Mia and a couple of her family friends, different ones each time. Her half brother came along one night too — her father’s son, a gangly fellow with a passing resemblance to Frank Sinatra. His name was Rocco, and he knew how to lean in and light a girl’s cigarette with a look and a smile that had me stubbing my cigarette out whenever his attention was elsewhere, just so he’d light up another one for me. It could have been the way he guarded the flame with his palm, the unexpected care with which he carried it up toward your lips; who knows what makes a man’s gesture attractive?

If you’re not afraid of a real night out, hit the town with guys who just got out of jail. They’re the ones who can’t be kept off the dance floor — they’ll dance till they drop, and even when they’re stretched out flat on the floor, they’ll still shake their ankles. Sometimes our companions didn’t speak much English and communicated with me through smiles and mimed gestures. It was nice. Their questions were some of the simplest there are. Will you have another drink? Care to dance? Simple to give clear answers to—sì, sì. I sat out the meaningful slow dances and sipped my sarsaparilla with closed eyes, trying to squeeze every drop of meaning out of the love songs. According to Kitty Kallen, little things mean a lot.

Mia’s “Secret World of Blondes” had been the subject of enough letters to the editor for the paper to let her go ahead with a new piece. Her plan was to attend catechism classes with three girls and be an eyewitness to the preparations that led all the way up to each girl’s Mexican, Italian, or Irish Holy Communion. By the time she’d attended one class with each girl, she already had a title: “Lucrezia Borgia Never Died.”

So Mia was all right and I was to be one of Webster’s bridesmaids. I’d become respectable overnight, was greeted on the street with cheery variants of “What’s new?” instead of blank glances. Flax Hill had begun to see the point of me. Aside from bridesmaid duties, I was holding down a job at a bookstore notorious for having an owner who’d as soon fire her assistants as look at them. And I apparently had something to do with the renewed spring in Arturo Whitman’s step, as well as his tone-deaf whistling of show tunes.

I hear singing and there’s no one there…

All it would take was a single comparison to Julia Whitman and I’d be right back to square one. I didn’t add up to much when placed beside old J. W. I couldn’t think of many members of the non-movie-star population who did. I looked at photos of Julia, and listened to her voice on the vinyl recordings she’d made for her daughter. In a way they were practice for her. She was an opera singer; great onstage, but she’d signed a contract and was due to start work on her classical record once she’d recovered from having Snow. But in these recordings she didn’t sound operatic — she was a mother singing her daughter lullabies; her appeal was for love, not for admiration.

She’d left notebooks filled with handwritten recipes for the wartime cook: four different kinds of butterless-eggless-milkless cake, tens of tips for stretching meat and sugar rations as far as they would go. She’d also left a list of all the names she’d considered giving to Snow. There were hundreds of them. She had wanted her daughter very much; anyone could see that. The multitude of names didn’t seem like indecision — Julia Whitman was trying to summon up a troop of fairy godmothers. Somewhere in among the names of all those mermaids, warriors, saints, goddesses, queens, scientists, and poets I could see a woman trying to cover all the bases, searching for things her daughter would need in order to make friends with life. Conscience, resolve, loyalty, the kind of far sight that Mia wanted, the fearlessness to cross strange borders, whatever it was that gave Alice the guts to stick up for herself when Tweedledum and Tweedledee informed her she wasn’t real. I sat with those names for hours while vaguely worrisome sheets of smoke poured out from under the door of Arturo’s workroom. I’ve always wanted to know whether Boy is the name my mother wanted for me, and if so, what kind of person the name was supposed to help me grow up into.

Julia and I wouldn’t have been friends. She looked like a bashful Rapunzel, dark hair pinned up high, doe eyes always downturned or gazing off to the side in every single photograph. I don’t trust anyone who poses like that any farther than I can throw them. I think I know the drill: Mrs. Whitman only let down her hair when Mr. Whitman had been a good boy. He probably even thought their getting married was all his idea. These were things I couldn’t really say to anyone. I’d have been able to say them only from a disinterested position. But I was grateful too, grateful to Julia in yet another way I couldn’t tell anyone about. She’d left me her husband, who didn’t expect much from me. He’d had his great love. And now he was willing, determined even, to be amused, to belly laugh at the slightest provocation, to appreciate heart-shaped pieces of toast as tokens of my affection. On our first night together I kept thinking, Do I, do I, do I, do I… then Do I what? Something to do with wanting, or daring. We sat facing each other, cross-legged on his bed, and the lamp light laid a strip of gold along his bare shoulders. I leaned forward so that there were mere inches between our faces and he could smell me. I smelt of soap and musk. I’d made sure of that. Not too animal, not too pure. The idea was that his reaction would show me what to do next.

He didn’t move. He didn’t even blink. We were both naked, and his arm was spread loosely across the bedspread; I’d moved so that his right hand was just behind me, less than an inch away. And he was aroused, he was visibly aroused. All he had to do to bring our bodies together was raise his hand to the small of my back. Instead of doing that he gave me this reserved but friendly smile. A smile from an official portrait — a politician’s. Vote for me.

It felt like time to put my clothes on again, then add an extra layer of clothes on top of those clothes, for additional modesty. I used to make fun of women who ask men the question “What are you thinking?” but that night I got dangerously close to becoming one of them.

I asked: “Should I… leave?”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No,” I said. “But…”

“Stay,” he said, in a comfortable tone of voice, as if this was just the kind of conversation he preferred. (Later I asked him about this and he said: “I had a feeling it was your first time and I was trying not to rush you. I thought I was doing so well.”)

I switched off the lamp and returned to the bed to find him stretched out on his back, breathing easily. I curled up beside him, found his ear, and whispered: “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Boy…” He stroked my cheek with the back of his hand.

I described the options to him one by one. I devised a minimum of twenty, each new configuration of body parts arriving in my mind with some kind of diabolical inspiration before I’d even fully dealt with the previous image. I used language that would have made Webster fall down in a faint. I promised him that he could have me in any way that he wanted, then I went on before he could choose. He nuzzled my collarbone a couple of times, and laughed at some of my more outlandish descriptions; because we were so close together and couldn’t see each other clearly, it began to feel as if we were school friends plotting some ridiculous prank. He was a good listener. But I can’t remember now exactly when he stopped listening and I stopped talking, at what point our breathing changed, fingernails dug into skin, and he covered my mouth with his so that I cried out into him. The whole thing kind of astounded me. I’d expected to have to explain to him about my being Winter in Siberia, but in the end I got to keep that to myself.

So there was the man (I began to think of him as mine when I told him about the rat catcher and he half seriously offered to drive down to New York, kneecap him, and bring me back a slice of pie from my favorite diner). And there was the home, with its long, low-ceilinged rooms. The floorboards were so snugly fitted that walking across them was like gliding across a bank of honey. There were no clocks, no real sense of time passing. It was the kind of house you went to in order to get well. Some nights I’d walk back to the boarding house from Arturo’s house and see the stars through the tree branches, nestled in between the leaves as if they’d grown there. It wasn’t just the man and the house, there was more. “I don’t mean much to you, do I?” Arturo teased. “I’m just… you know, Snow’s dad.”

What was it about Snow? Some days she was just another little girl who considered the presence of green vegetables and the absence of a Fluffernutter sandwich on her dinner plate such a great tragedy that she’d cry until her face was swollen. She wasn’t yet seven, but seemed a few years younger. Partly because she hadn’t yet learned to smile even when she didn’t feel like it, and partly because she was inattentive in the way that kids are when they’re still learning to speak — always looking above or behind you while you’re talking to them, their heads wobbling with concentration, as if they’re receiving secret information that’s much more important than anything you have to say. Her eyes were the shade of hazel that doesn’t seem able to decide whether it’s brown or green.

If Snow was ever worried, if any anxieties ever disturbed her for longer than a day, she rarely showed it. She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who’d just come from the future but didn’t want to brag about it. She’d pat your arm, and say, “Everything is okay. Everything is normal,” and you took her word for it. Sometimes I think it was a trick of hers, deciding aloud what was going on so that everyone who loved her fell over themselves to make it so. Sometimes I think we needed her to be like that and she obliged. It’s sad if that’s true — I’m thinking of the time she crawled down the staircase on her hands and knees to announce that there was a troll in her room. Arturo asked her where exactly the troll was. Under her bed, in the closet? She said: “It is in all the room. Come see.”

I would have gone with her, but Arturo got mad at her for not saying please, of all things, and refused to indulge her. That’s enough, Snow. Back to bed with you. I added: “That silly old troll will be gone by the time you get back into bed. You’ll see.”

She said okay, and went back upstairs slowly, shivering. In the morning I asked her if the troll had disappeared like I’d promised. I asked real quietly, so Arturo didn’t hear. She used a few spoonfuls of applesauce to draw a smiley face on her plate, and when she’d finished, she said: “Mmm hmmm, no more troll.” She was lying, though; I could tell. As far as she was concerned, the troll hadn’t gone anywhere, and would remain just as long as it pleased. All she could do was try to sleep in spite of it. I hate the thought of her trying, trying. Not just with her troll, but with me too, right from the beginning.

—

there’s something ominous about being handed an ivory-colored card with scalloped edges that basically says Hello, I’m your boyfriend’s mother and I’ve heard such a lot about you and do please come to tea at half past five tomorrow. I was in a terrible state about it, sweaty as anything. The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven’t got an attitude problem.

Olivia lived two doors down from Arturo, in a bigger house than his, a house full of playthings for her granddaughter. Skipping ropes, tin soldiers, all colors of crayons, and toy cars strewn everywhere. I wondered how many falls Olivia Whitman had had and was going to have just for the sake of keeping a little girl amused. Two other women joined us for tea, and I really felt that wasn’t fair, especially since the other women turned out to be Arturo’s younger sister and Julia’s mother. Olivia really had summoned the committee. I wished I wasn’t wearing violet eye shadow, which was funny, because just half an hour before I’d thought of the eye shadow as armor that I couldn’t have stepped out of the boarding house without. It might have been the darkness of the room — they sat with the curtains drawn, and the only real light seemed to come from the silverware — but it was difficult telling the difference between the three women. Olivia and Agnes had a good excuse for sharing their style and mannerisms, in that they were both in their mid-sixties. Vivian was twenty-three. Twenty-three and wearing a twinset, with her hair in fussy curls. But she had Arturo’s narrow amber eyes. She began by listing everybody she knew in New York and asking me if I’d ever met them. Her perfectly straight face threw me off at first. But by the time she’d got to the seventeenth name or so—“Fernanda Crackenbone. You’ve honestly never run into Fernanda? But she’s awfully sociable. The most sociable girl I know. Goes every place there is to go”—I realized she was kidding around, and also that Olivia and Agnes had been holding their laughter in so that I wouldn’t think they were laughing at me, which accounted for their strangely cramped expressions. When I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, that I didn’t believe there was any such person as Fernanda Crackenbone, Olivia threw up her hands, let herself have a good roar at last, then said: “I’m only glad you don’t think this girl of mine has a screw loose.”

“I do have a screw loose, you know,” Vivian said. “It’s just that Mama doesn’t want anybody to think so. More tea?”

I slipped up twice — once when Olivia talked about Vivian’s progress at law school and what a wonderful singer Julia had been, a classical contralto, no less. Then she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said: “Oh, I like it at the bookstore,” and Vivian and Olivia gave each other the briefest but most chilling glance, then changed the subject. Oddly enough, that was when Agnes, Julia’s mother, smiled at me. Her smile was encouraging, though she shook her head a little bit, as if she thought I needed coaching. The second slipup was when Olivia announced that she wanted Arturo to return to academic life. “I didn’t raise my son to be a jeweler,” she said. “My husband didn’t work all the way up from bank clerk to branch manager for that.” When I forgot myself so far as to try to argue with her, she said “outrageous” and rattled the sugar tongs in a manner that was positively alarming.

Agnes took my mostly incoherent argument and rephrased it for me: “Livia, dear. Boy has got a point. Arturo is just as smart as he ever was — he’s just making smart jewelry now. He’s bringing ancient Egypt and Byzantium alive again in ways people can touch and wear. He always got so sore when people fell asleep during his history lectures, didn’t he?”

I kept looking at the curtains and missing the sunlight. Maybe Agnes or Olivia had bad eyes. Even so, I didn’t know how they could bear to sit here in this chintzy gloom. Agnes’s neck was very thin. Swallowing tea seemed to cause her pain. There was a framed photo of Arturo’s father, Gerald, on the sideboard, well-groomed white sideburns and all; his golf club was in midswing and his gaze was incredulous — I seemed to be putting him off his game. What would Agnes say, what would any of these three say if I began to tell them about Sidonie, the eldest of the colored kids who came into the bookstore day after day just to read? Sidonie, whose colored father had taken just one look at her Caribbean mother and fallen in love? “They’re crazy,” Sidonie told me, shaking her head. “She just can’t seem to pick up any American fighting words, and he never learned any French ones. So they don’t fight…”

I could have talked about how a photograph of Sidonie’s mother had inspired a painting on the side of a fighter jet flown by colored pilots back in ’44, and how Sidonie had inherited her mother’s looks, and stayed away from school because she didn’t want trouble. “White boys get stupid around this girl,” her friend Kazim explained, and the couple of times I’d walked Sidonie halfway home from the bookshop, I saw what Kazim meant. Sidonie Fairfax had a goofy laugh, but when her face was at rest, it was imperious. There’s a certain type of colored girl who speaks softly and carries herself well, but when you talk to her, her eyes firmly reject every word that comes out of your mouth, just as if she’s saying: Oh, come on now. Bullshit. Bull. Shit. It had been hard to get her talking. She was often deep in conversation with Mrs. Fletcher, but when I said something like “It’s a nice afternoon, isn’t it, Sidonie?” she’d say “Certainly, Miss Novak.” (Subtext: If you say so.) If I’d been a guy, I wouldn’t have been sure how to approach her without getting shot down, either. And so the jesters lined up to entertain the queen, scrambling up trees and trying to hit her with their satchels, starting impromptu wrestling matches with each other on the sidewalk at the very moment she happened to be passing by. One fool took it upon himself to turn a backflip and nearly broke his skull doing it. Those morons embarrassed her. She was only fifteen. At that age embarrassment is something you can actually die of, and avoiding it is more important than what your father will say when he finds out you’ve missed a month and a half of school. Someone had copied out a poem and put it in her coat pocket—I would liken you / To a night without stars / Were it not for your eyes—and that had been the last straw for her. “Miss Novak, I’m the only teenager I know who reads Langston Hughes. I mean, that note can’t have come from a student. That’s got to have come from a teacher, right? I’m not the one to get mixed up in that kind of nonsense.”

What if I’d told that drawing room tea party: “Sidonie likes the bookstore too, because nobody gives her a hard time there. White girls don’t spill ink all over her dress at the bookstore, and colored boys don’t twist her arm behind her back, and nobody stands in her way just leering like crazy when all she wants to do is walk down the corridor. That’s the kind of girl that exists out there, less than a mile away from those linen curtains. But if you saw her without talking to her, she’d make you paranoid in a way that only a colored girl can make a white woman paranoid. That unreadable look they give us; it’s really shocking somehow, isn’t it? Kind of like finding someone staring in at the window of your home, but not in a way that gets you scared you’ll be robbed. No, it’s a different kind of stare. A stare that says ‘I don’t particularly like being outside, but I don’t want to come in, either.’”

“My, my,” Olivia and Agnes and Vivian would have said. Or maybe just “indeed.” Arturo must have learned his devastating phrasing of that word from somewhere.

I managed not to say anything about Sidonie Fairfax. I managed to drink my tea without slurping, and I passed the “Will you have another Fig Newton” test. (The correct answer was “Thank you, but I really think I’d better not. They’re so delicious they could be my downfall!”) I crossed my ankles and tried to settle, to be at peace. After a while Olivia asked if I’d met her granddaughter.

I said I hadn’t. The lady didn’t need to know that I’d seen Snow once and been so spooked that I could barely remember what exactly I’d seen.

“Well — would you like to meet her?”

“Oh, is she around?” I’d assumed she was with her father.

Vivian lifted up the corner of the tablecloth that the tea things sat on and revealed Snow, curled up under the table, snoring. She’d crushed the flowers someone had carefully pinned behind each ear. A white petal fluttered on one of her eyelids, and with each snore her eyelashes swept the petal farther down, onto her cheek. I couldn’t understand how she’d managed to sleep while we’d all been talking at full volume. I guess it was all just noise to her. I watched the women watching Snow. Their reverence was over the top. Sure, she was an extraordinary-looking kid. A medieval swan maiden, only with the darkest hair and the pinkest lips, every shade at its utmost. She was like a girl in a Technicolor tapestry, sure, sure, but… they’d had a while to get used to her, and acting like that every time they laid eyes on her seemed to me like the fastest way to build an insufferable brat. Vivian let the tablecloth drop, but Olivia signaled to her to raise it again and cooed: “Why don’t you come out and meet Boy, sweetie?”

Five minutes later, Snow was sitting on the sofa beside me, swinging her legs and asking questions.

(“Do you like cookies? Do you like cold water? Do you like elephants? How do you spell ‘genius’? Can you jump rope? How are ya today? What does ‘genius’ mean?”)

I was already halfway to smitten. Olivia looked on and fanned herself with carded lace and smiled at us.

When I left, it was Agnes who saw me to the door. “Snow’s the spitting image of Julia when she was a girl,” she said, leaning close, as if she were letting me in on classified information. I knew what I should say next, so I said it: “And Julia was the spitting image of you when she was a girl.”

Agnes gave me a little push. “Oh, you know what you’re about. You’ll get around Livia quicker than quick.”

Olivia had already decided she’d put up with me. I knew it and so did Agnes. If Olivia had decided against me, I’d have finished my tea and been shown out without even beginning to suspect that Snow had been less than a foot away all afternoon. I doubt the kid would have come out before she was called.

It was all kind of irregular, but if that was how they felt about Snow, then that was how they felt about her. People insist that beauty fades. Take Webster and Mia — both of them older than I am but not by all that much. (Actually, I’m not sure. Maybe in the case of Mia and me, the seven years between us is a lot.) Webster often said things along the lines of “Hey, what we’ve got only lasts a minute, only one goddamned minute and we’ve got to make the most of it.” Mia’s view seemed to be that it wasn’t a good idea to trade on your looks at all if you could help it. Not for ethical reasons, but because she was very protective of her future self — she called her “Mia the crone”—and didn’t want her to get horribly depressed when people stopped letting her get away with things. But, Agnes’s frailty aside, she and Olivia were pretty good examples of lasting beauty, right down to the creases that ran around their foreheads and lips, some soft, like folds in cream, others deeply scored. One frown or smile from either woman went a long way. If you’d just been smiled at, there was some dimension to the smile you couldn’t quite get at. If you’d just been frowned at, the hint of amusement that came with the frown told you that all was not lost. Olivia’s snub nose and wide mouth made her more minxlike than pretty, but whatever it was that her peers had gone nuts for was still there. She clearly intended for Snow to be part of her lasting-beauty club. And really, what of it? Most of the people who say beauty fades say it with a smirk. Fading is more than just expected, it’s what they want to see. I don’t.

7

the morning I turned twenty-two I put twenty-two dollars cash into an envelope addressed to Mr. Frank Novak and mailed it to Mia’s address in Worcester. It was the sum total of the money I stole plus interest. Mia was to mail the envelope to a friend she had in New York, who’d drop it into the rat catcher’s letterbox and make him wonder if I was around. I didn’t enclose a note, though there were a few things I’d have liked to say. Restraint is classier.

Over at the bookstore, Mrs. Fletcher asked me if I thought it was shaping up to be a good year for me. It was the closest thing to “Happy birthday” I was going to get from her, so I took it with a neutral smile. We were sitting in her office, dealing with her correspondence. She went through a folder of letters I’d already opened for her, scrawled responses at the top or in the margins, and I turned those responses into letters.

Thirteen-year-old Phoebe was crying next door, because she was reading Les Misérables—a trial for all of us, since it was such a long book, and she was liable to cry all the way through it. Sidonie was jeering at Phoebe for crying. “And just why are you weeping over a bunch of French people from eighteen hundred and whenever?”

“It’s too sad,” Phoebe sobbed. “I mean, it was only a loaf of bread.”

“What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid? It’d be less phony if you cried for every man who’s been lynched in Tennessee or Alabama or South Carolina since eighteen hundred and whenever.”

“Don’t tell me who to cry for and who not to cry for, Sidonie Fairfax. Dark girl like you talking as though you’re the top. You’ve got a face like a bowl of goddamned molasses. Did you know that, Know-It-All?”

“Molasses is sweet, molasses is sweet,” Sidonie chanted.

“Uh… where’s Kazim?” I asked Mrs. Fletcher, preferring to ask that question rather than remind her that people were less likely to enter the store if they saw two colored schoolgirls fighting out front. I already knew how she responded to reminders of that kind: “Hm… I don’t care.” Besides, Kazim was my favorite of the bookstore gang — fourteen and tall for his age, his gaze vague behind the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. He drew comic strips about a boy called Mizak, and his card tricks went just a little bit beyond sleight of hand. He’d snap his fingers over a spread-out pack, say “Joker, fly,” and the Joker sprang up into his hand. It had to be something to do with magnets. Still, we all exchanged glances. Because what if it wasn’t?

“I suppose I’ll have to be the peacekeeper today,” Mrs. Fletcher said, and she went out front, yelling even louder than Sidonie and Phoebe. I looked over the letters I was yet to answer. I still didn’t know Mrs. Fletcher’s first name. It was beginning to look as if nobody did. Every letter came in addressed to Mrs. A. Fletcher.

Having sent Sidonie out to buy RC Cola, Mrs. Fletcher returned and asked what she should bring to my dinner party that evening.

“Oh, thanks, but I can handle this.”

She dealt with three letters in rapid succession, writing NO at the top of one, A THOUSAND TIMES NO at the top of another, and OKAY in the margins of a third. “I’m not asking to be helpful,” she said. “I’m asking so as to make sure there’s something there I’ll want to eat.”

I handed her the menu I’d been working on for weeks.

“‘Pear spread and crackers,’” Mrs. Fletcher read aloud. “‘Anchovy ham rolls. Stuffed tomatoes ravigote. Potato salad. Chicken à la King. Banana chiffon cake. Peach pie. Postdinner cocktail: Rye Lane… a stupendous blend of whiskey, curaçao, orange squash, and crème de noyaux, stirred, not shaken, as recommended by the International Association of Bartenders.’”

She leaned back in her chair. “Why on earth are you putting yourself through all this on your own birthday? And what’s pear spread? Life has changed a lot, you know. You didn’t used to get all this food inside food inside food when I was a girl. The other day I was eating a mushroom and found it had been stuffed with prawns. I’ve got so many misgivings over this craze, Boy. It’s flying in the face of nature. A mushroom is a woodland fungus and a prawn comes from the sea. People have got no business stuffing one inside the other. Are the Whitmans treating you well?”

“What?” My mind was on the pear spread. I’d already made it the night before, over at Arturo’s. It was sitting in a bowl in his refrigerator looking radioactive.

“The Whitmans. Arturo Whitman’s family. Are they treating you well?”

“Oh. Yes. Gerald keeps issuing orders to Arturo not to let me get away and Viv’s very sisterly and Olivia’s very motherly and — it’s nice.”

She nodded. “Olivia Whitman looks so young, doesn’t she?”

“Yup.”

I typed I hope this finds you well, which was pretty high up on the list of phrases Mrs. Fletcher would never include in a letter if she was writing it herself.

She lifted a lock of her hair with a pencil and gave it a baleful stare. This was the first gesture of concern about her appearance that I’d seen from her. She cut her own hair carelessly, with regular kitchen scissors, and it showed. The ends looked like a bar graph. The hair itself was fine, though — rich brown streaked with gray. “I’m about the same age as she is,” she said. “I just don’t know how she does it.”

Olivia made Mrs. Fletcher nervous. That was difficult to process. I’d recently come across a proverb about not speaking unless you’d thought of something that was better than silence. So I kept typing.

Mrs. Fletcher wanted to know if she could ask me a personal question. I gave her an “mmm hmmm” that Snow would’ve been proud of.

“Do you know what it is you want from Arturo?”

An impressive U-turn, but I didn’t look up from my work. “You guessed right, Mrs. Fletcher. I’m a gold digger. If you know anyone richer and more gullible, let me at him.”

The bell above the shop door jangled — Sidonie or a customer. There was a quiet exchange of words in the next room, followed by the sound of caps falling off soda bottles. Sidonie, then.

“Nobody’s calling you a gold digger,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “Let me explain myself.”

“You don’t have to.”

She reached over and took my hand, patted it. “But if I don’t, you’ll poison me tonight, won’t you? I want to be able to enjoy my cocktail, just as the International Association of Bartenders recommends. Listen — I’m not a Flax Hill original, either. I’m from a market town in the South of England.”

“So that’s why you talk like that!”

“Well, what did you think?”

“I thought you just went to one of those… schools.”

“Oh, good grief. I’m not in the mood for this. Don’t interrupt me anymore. My husband died nine years ago, and I came here looking for some trace of him. He was my right-hand man for twenty-three years. No children; we married late, liked books, and liked each other and that was all. His heart was dodgy — anatomically speaking, I mean — and it killed him. I was all undone. That man. The first time we met, he called me cookie. I said ‘I beg your pardon?’ and he said ‘You heard. When are we having dinner?’ so I said ‘We might as well have it now.’ Then a week later he agreed to marry me—”

“You asked him?”

“I don’t mess about.”

“And he never brought you here while he was alive?”

“No. He told me he was a misfit in his hometown. But it wasn’t true. I barged into people’s homes and found him in their photo albums, being carried around on people’s shoulders. Homecoming King! People here are nice to me just because I’m his wife — was his wife, I mean. When I opened this store, so many people came by and bought books. Not to read them, I don’t think. Well, Joe Webster might read The Canterbury Tales one day… anyway, it was a gesture, to help me set up. I’d never seen anything like it.”

“I didn’t know you cared about being liked.”

“It isn’t a matter of like or dislike, and you know it. People are nice to me for his sake. They remember him. It’s a different Leonard they remember — he was becoming the man I ended up falling head over heels in love with. But that’s fine. We’ve all got different pieces of him to put together. It means I’m closer to him here than I would be in Newton Abbot.”

I squeezed her hand. From where I was sitting I could see the chess set on her window seat. It was always there; once I asked her if she liked chess and she just sort of hissed and left it at that. The black army faced the white army across their field of checkered squares; the kings and queens seemed resigned, companionable. There was never any change in their configuration. But no dust, either. No neglect.

“I’m only going to say this once, so don’t fly off the handle,” she said. “Flax Hill is home to me because I loved Leonard Fletcher. Not the other way around.”

“Right, but I’m not trying to — Arturo’s not — the air tastes of palinka, you see,” I said, idiotically. “Here in Flax Hill, I mean.”

Mrs. Fletcher took this in her stride. “Does it indeed? It tastes like lemon curd to me. Needless to say, I consider lemon curd to be an excellent comfort food. Now get back to work. Here are customers, and you’re behind.”

—

that day I walked Phoebe and Sidonie all the way home instead of just three-quarters of the way. As usual I walked on the outside of our trio, taking the position of a gentleman protecting ladies from roadside traffic. As usual Phoebe’s siblings were waiting for us outside the elementary school, three rowdy little girls of indeterminate age and the shortest of short-term memories. Every school day they asked if they could play with my hair, and I let them. Every school day they squealed: “It’s just like sunshine!” and I wished they’d find a new sensation. Ordinarily I stopped when we reached the corner of Tubman and Jefferson — less because there was a tangible change in the neighborhood and more because that was when we started seeing groups of colored boys leaning against walls with their arms folded, not talking or doing anything else but leaning. I figured they were the Neighborhood Watch, and left them to it. So did the white boys who followed us along Jefferson calling out Sidonie’s name. We got to Tubman Street and the catcallers evaporated. But that day I kept going because I wanted Sidonie to come to dinner. Phoebe had already excused herself on account of having to watch her sisters while her mom was at work. But Sidonie was an only child, and hesitated. “Ma probably needs me to help her tonight,” she said. “But maybe if you came and asked her yourself…”

I wavered, needing time to get everything on the menu wrong and then get it right. Sidonie said: “Hey, you’ve got a lot to do before dinnertime, right? Save me a slice of that chiffon cake; it’s going to be in my dreams tonight.”

Phoebe said, “Me too!” and her sisters said, “Me too, me too!” I told them it’d be Sidonie who brought them the cake, and passed the Tubman Street Neighborhood Watch without incident. Farther along Tubman, a mixed group was crammed into a motorcar; girls sat on boys’ laps, waving transistor radios in time to the music that poured out of them. These kids looked a little older than Sidonie, and ignored us completely. The houses were smaller and newer and better cared for than in Arturo’s part of town. Their doors were pastel painted, the front yards were meticulously well-swept, and their windows sparkled in the way that only the truly house-proud seem able to achieve. We passed other groups. Boys and girls, singing, wisecracking. Lone dutiful daughters and sons laden with groceries. One boy with a buzz cut was carrying what looked like a week’s supplies for an old lady who called him “Tortoise” and “Useless.” His friends pulled faces at him when the old lady wasn’t looking, and he grinned good-humoredly. “That’s Sam,” Phoebe said. “He’s my boyfriend. He just doesn’t know it yet.” And she and Sidonie giggled.

Then I saw Kazim. He was part of a bunch of boys gathered around an open window, trampling some poor gardener’s petunias. There was a green parakeet in a cage inside the living room, and the boys were trying to teach it a new phrase. This is what they were trying to teach it to say: Fuck whitey. The parakeet stumbled backward along its perch. Sidonie put her hand on my arm to keep me walking, and I did keep walking, but I looked back. The group’s main teaching method seemed to be intimidation. They crowded the square of grass beneath the window, repeating the phrase over and over, all voices together. I heard the parakeet pleading “Hey diddle diddle, he-ee-ee-y diddle diddle!” but the boys insisted: Fuck whitey, fuck whitey. I saw Kazim and he saw me. He looked away first. He had been laughing until he saw me.

“I guess Kazim’s found better things to do than read books,” I said to Sidonie, or to Phoebe, or maybe just to the air. Phoebe and Sidonie looked at each other, and Phoebe said: “I don’t know what you mean, Miss Novak.”

I jerked my thumb at the boys across the way. “Yes, you do. I saw him.”

Phoebe said: “Saw… Kazim?”

A man about a quarter of a block down opened his window and issued a warning that he was on his way to end the lives of anyone responsible for creating “this racket,” and the parakeet boys scattered.

Sidonie said: “That wasn’t Kazim.”

Phoebe said: “I guess we all look the same to you.” She smiled to show she wasn’t saying it in a mean way, and ran in at her front door with her sisters hot on her heels.

My temples began to throb. It was Kazim; I knew it was him. What did Phoebe and Sidonie take me for, and why had they just closed ranks like that? Were they trying to tell me that I was on my own if I said anything about Kazim back at the bookstore?

Sidonie stopped at a peppermint-colored door and said: “Voilà—chez Fairfax.” I didn’t answer her, just looked all around me, picturing the walk back down to Jefferson without the girls. All the lines washed out of everything I tried to fix my eyes on. It was like a floodlight had been switched on just above my head. Sidonie said something I didn’t hear, then: “Miss Novak? It wasn’t him. Really. Kazim’s not a round-the-way boy. He stays home drawing and doing his wizard stuff. Relax. We all make mistakes.”

—

i sat down on a wicker bench in the hallway, next to a table stacked with Ebony and Jet magazines. Intriguing text hovered beside the faces of the colored models on the covers: Are homosexuals becoming respectable? End of Negro race by 1980 predicted by top scientist. An older, far less haughty-looking version of Sidonie approached; she was in a wheelchair, and spun the wheels with her arms. I stood, then sat down again, not wanting to stand over her. Elsewhere in the house a television set blared and women talked over it and each other.

“Welcome, welcome,” Mrs. Fairfax said, shaking my hand. She said I should call her Merveille, or Merva if I couldn’t manage to say Merveille. “In America I am Merva…”

Sidonie must have told her I was a teacher: “You are so kind to invite Sidonie to dinner. Some other time… let Sidonie bring you; you will dine with us, I will give you such a dinner. Does Sidonie behave herself? Is her schoolwork good? Does she read too much?”

Merveille made me drink something so sweet it made my teeth ache; she said it was called sorrel. She was a hairdresser; she worked from home and Sidonie helped her in the evenings. She must have seen that I was wondering how she managed to do people’s hair — maybe everyone who met her for the first time wondered about that — she tapped my wrist and said: “I manage. People have to sit a lot lower than usual while I work, but they don’t mind because they leave looking good. Not just good… very good.” Her husband was a Pullman porter working the train route to Quebec and back. She showed me her appointment book. She had clients all the way up to midnight.

Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that’s supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone’s crossed that line? I said Sidonie was top of my class and that everybody liked her.

It was getting dark when I left, and I thought about calling Arturo from a phone booth and getting him to come pick me up. But it would take too long. So I just walked fast, with my head down, and didn’t raise it again until I got back to Jefferson Street.

—

snow kept me company as I embraced The Joy of Cooking. She sat up on the counter with an apron over her dungarees and tasted the cake batter and the cream sauce for the chicken. She looked extremely doubtful about the cream sauce, but how sophisticated could her six-year-old palate be anyway?

“Maybe you’ll get a mother for your birthday,” she said. I dabbed the end of her nose with a square of kitchen paper, even though there was nothing there.

“Who said I want a mother? Maybe I want a daughter.”

“What kind of daughter?” Snow said, with the air of a department store attendant, invisible stock list in hand.

“I said maybe. It depends. I might forget to feed and water her.”

“That would be very bad, because mothers have to give their daughters cookies all the time.”

“Oh, like Grandma Olivia and Grandma Agnes give you cookies?”

“Yeah, but then they pat my stomach,” she said, stabbing toothpicks through the anchovy ham rolls. She hit the dead center of each one. She parted her own hair in the mornings with that same extreme precision. I think she observed her father’s work more closely than he might have guessed.

“Okay, so cookies yes, stomach pat no. What else?”

“You have to hide her.”

“Hide her?”

“Not all the time. Only sometimes. Like if a monster comes looking for her, you have to hide her.”

“Well, of course.”

“Even if the monster comes with a real nice smile and says ‘Excuse me, have you seen my friend Snow?’ you have to say ‘She’s not here! She’s gone to Russia.’”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll say: ‘Snow? Who’s Snow?’”

She clapped her hands. “That’s good!”

“Anything else?”

“You have to come find me if I get lost.”

“Lost? Like in the woods?”

“Not just there. Anywhere.”

“Hmmmm. Let me think about that one. It’s a big job. Meanwhile, do you think you can get your daddy out of his workroom so he can help you dress?”

She threw her arms around my neck, gave me a kiss, and hopped down from the counter. What made her so trusting, so sure of people’s goodwill? If I was like her I wouldn’t have shrunk back later when Olivia Whitman draped a gray fur stole around my shoulders and said: “Happy birthday!” It felt expensive, thick to the touch but a lighter weight on the skin than it looked. Mrs. Fletcher asked: “Is that chinchilla?” and gave me a stern look, as if I were at fault for accepting it.

(The only thing I felt guilty of was already knowing that it was chinchilla fur — Olivia had worn it the week before, when she took me to see The Magic Flute in Worcester. We’d smoked cigars outside the opera house and she asked me how I liked the show. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said. I said that as far as I could gather it was a tale about a woman who could be led out of captivity only by a man, and that the man could save her only by ignoring her.

“Correct,” she’d said.

“Uh… I really like the costumes,” I said.

Olivia switched my cigar from the left side of my mouth to the right side and looked approvingly at me through her opera glasses. “Yes, the tale is what you just said it is, but it’s also about two people who walk through fire and water together, unscathed because they are together. You’ll agree that that’s not a sentimental interpretation, that that’s literally what happens? The trials those two undergo are about being beyond words.”

I shivered, and she’d offered me the stole. “Chinchilla. It keeps you warm.” But I’d declined. Cuban cigars and chinchilla stoles; this was more Mia Cabrini’s scene, and I was better off not developing a taste for it.)

Olivia stood back, admiring the effect. “Yes, it never looked quite right on me. But Boy, you were born to wear this.”

Arturo whispered, “Poor Viv—” in my ear. Vivian said a stole like that wouldn’t have lasted long in her wardrobe anyway, what with her talent for spilling things. But she minded; of course she minded, here was a fur stole she’d probably grown up coveting and I’d swiped it right from under her nose. Her fiancé didn’t even have the good sense to say he’d get her one. Or maybe it was good sense and a healthy awareness of his salary level that kept him from saying it.

All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table, like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: “Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity?”

Gerald clinked wineglasses with her and said: “You were always a curiosity, darling.” And Arturo proposed a toast to curiosities.

Webster and Agnes didn’t eat much dinner, but that would have been the case even if we’d been at a restaurant. Webster was three weeks away from getting married and consequently she was on the diet to end all diets. Arturo thought it was rude of her to eat so little, and was ready to tell her so. I said, “Look… I wouldn’t if I were you.” I’d fasted before, so I knew how being hungry can make a girl get a little bit enigmatic. Webster’s psychology was one short straw away from abnormal. She’d conceived a disgust for the moon, kept calling “her” fat. “Fat hog, fat hog… what does she eat, to bloat up like that? Nothing up there but air, right? So greedy she stuffs herself with air… or stars…?” Ted and Arturo started talking shop during the first course, just making remarks about the new catalogue they were putting together and how hard it was to find professional hand-and-ankle models who didn’t demand that a full makeup team be present at the shoot. Webster said, “Talking shop, Teddy?” and gave him such a ghoulish smile that he broke his sentence off there and started reminiscing about wedding speeches he’d heard and liked. I didn’t care whether or not Webster ate what I cooked. She cared enough to show up, and that was great. The same went for Agnes, though Snow was probably the main attraction for her. She was sitting directly across from Snow, and her eyes lit up whenever Snow laughed, which was often, since the girl shared a private joke with every spoonful of potato salad on her plate.

There was a brass water pitcher set up in the center of the table, and a couple of times I found myself smiling at my reflection in the side of it, but stopped just before anyone caught me. The smile was a chinchilla fur kind of smile. Look what I got you, it seemed to say. And I can get you more. But I wasn’t the only one smiling at myself that night. Snow was too, peeping out from under her eyelashes. She might have been copying me. I couldn’t tell. When she got tired, she lay her head down beside her ice cream dish and just slept. It was Agnes who put her to bed, blushing at the way everybody at the table went slightly gooey eyed at the resemblance between them.

8

i’m sure I didn’t mean to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” Mrs. Fletcher said the next morning. She put on a pretty good show of being abashed, folded hands and glum head shakes, but I wasn’t fooled. When I saw that I wasn’t going to get an explanation out of her, I changed the subject and told her about meeting Sidonie’s mother and very briefly masquerading as a teacher. She covered her eyes and groaned.

“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.

9

arturo’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?)

Arturo asked what I wanted to know.

“What do you want me to know?”

He looked down at our feet. We were walking in step, which was taking some effort on my part.

“Our parents were good friends, double-dated all the time — it felt like they’d picked us out for each other. Whatever they did, it worked, because she’s almost everything I remember about being a kid and being a young man — I got my first job so I could buy her an opera record she just had to have; still remember what it was — Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. It was never ‘Will you buy me candy?’ with her; she always wanted stuff that… I don’t know, stuff you always felt in danger of losing her to. Books, music. If you took her to one of those big art galleries, you wouldn’t be able to find her again until closing time. I was in a running battle with the Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom won, but—”

“Arturo.” I held him closer, walked with my head above his heart.

“I gave him a run for his money. I never had eyes for anyone but her, right up until she died. And even then, for a long time after… it just didn’t seem true that she was gone. She had to have Snow by Caesarean, and when she came home, she got a fever. She said she was just tired, and she’d just sleep it off. I knew why she was saying that: She hated it at the hospital; didn’t want to see any more white coats or nurses’ uniforms. Two days, she kept saying, I’ll just sleep it off, Arturo — don’t fuss. Her mother and mine kept telling me I didn’t know what it was like for a woman after she’s got through childbirth, that I should just let her hold her baby and rest. She died in the night, Boy. It seemed impossible. She was laughing and singing to Snow in the afternoon, then in the middle of the night she woke me up saying Call a doctor, call a doctor, and I was downstairs for an hour or so trying to get hold of someone. I couldn’t. It was Saturday. I went back upstairs and Julia was so quiet. It didn’t feel final; it was more like she was thinking and was about to speak. It looked like she was breathing, but it was just air escaping. I remember I covered Snow’s eyes. And… I don’t want to say any more.”

He sighed when I told him I was sorry. “I’ve still got Snow,” he said. It sounded rehearsed, a phrase he’d assembled around his real feelings like a screen.

“Hey. Hey, you. I’m here too.”

I thought that was that, but in the morning I woke up to find him kneeling beside my bed. His eyes were on me; I think they had been for a long time.

“Say you love me,” he said. The sun hadn’t been up for long, and Snow was snoring in the bed beside the window. She wriggled when he spoke, then tucked her head deeper into her pillow. I tried to fake a return to sleep myself, but Arturo said: “No. Say you love me.” I sat up and he trapped my heel in his hand, so hard that my other foot, the free foot, drew up in a weak pirouette.

“I’ll stay with you,” I said. We both spoke lightly, we were both smiling, but I didn’t know what Arturo was going to do if he found he couldn’t make me say I loved him. Not much, surely. Snow was right there, after all. And she wasn’t sleeping. She didn’t give herself away even for a second, but that kid was keeping tabs. I knew and she knew.

He stood up and went over to his suitcase. “I made you something.”

It was the first piece of jewelry he ever made me, and it was the equivalent of an engagement ring. I say “equivalent” because it was a bracelet, a white-gold snake that curled its tail around my wrist and pressed its tongue against the veins in the crook of my elbow. When I saw it lying on its bed of tissue paper, I didn’t want to pick it up, let alone put it on. All I could think was: I will fear no evil, I will fear no evil, I will fear no evil. That snake was what he’d made for me, it was what he thought I wanted, was maybe even what he thought I was, deep down.

I’d said I’d stay, so I stayed. I put it on for him. I said I’d marry him. He said: “Are you sure?”

I ran my fingertips over the scales, dozens of colorless hexagons that warped even as they reflected. According to them, the room was a lilac-wallpapered blur, and my forehead was west of my nose. I didn’t go inside Arturo’s workroom, and he’d never invited me there, just came out when he was done for the day, sweating hard. He said it was because of the details, having to get them right. The switch from pliers to magnifying glass to the rubber mallet, back to magnifying glass, then the reach for the scoring knife. He said that most of the time he felt as if he were making a monstrosity right up until the last step. It’s not work I could do, breaking something and then breaking it again and again until it looks the way I want it to. I’d falter, and try to go back to where I’d started. I’d just be there all day making solid gold blobs.

I said: “What do you mean, am I sure? What kind of question is that? Of course I’m sure.” And I kissed him.

“It’s just that sometimes you get this look… you know how in movies people come around after fainting or hitting their head and immediately start asking, ‘Who am I? Where am I? Who are you?’ I’ve seen you looking like that sometimes, and I can’t tell if that’s just how life strikes you or if you’re only like that when you’re around me. I kind of like that look. It’s endearing. But what if one day you figure out who you are and where you are and who I am and realize it’s all a big mistake?”

“Impossible. For the last time, I’m sure.”

Magic words. As soon as I’d said them, Snow was halfway to the ceiling, waving her arms and yelling “Hurray!” Arturo climbed up onto his own bed, stating that it was the principle of the thing. I was the one he’d said yes to, so he had to bounce higher than Snow. Then of course I had to show them who the real bed-bouncing champ was. They surrendered pretty quickly.

I put the bracelet in the hotel-room safe, and checked on it once a day. We were almost carefree for the rest of the weekend, Snow, Arturo, and I; they were carefree, we built sandmen and taught Snow’s dolls how to play beach volleyball with water balloons. The snake was always there each time I checked, and there was no way to go back to Flax Hill without it.

—

when mia saw the bracelet, she said: “Oh, Boy.” She spun the jewelry box around on the tabletop, wouldn’t even touch its contents.

I said: “I know.”

“I mean, could that scream ‘wicked stepmother’ any louder?”

“I know.”

Mia ruffled my hair. “It’s okay, it’s fine. It only looks like that. That’s not how it really is.”

10

i shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that there was a man three blocks away from the boarding house who specialized in bespoke wedding-cake toppers. It was Flax Hill, town of specialists. He had a storefront full of ready-made cake toppers available for sale. Clay ballerinas and baseball players and owls, numbers shaped out of wax, all of which were far less unsettling than the wedding-cake toppers. Each tiny bride and groom had this beseeching smile painted onto their face. The kind of smile that suggested dark magic was afoot, a switch had been made, the couple leading the first dance were not who they claimed to be, and wouldn’t someone please intervene? That’s what I’d think if I saw a pair of smiles like that on top of a wedding cake, anyway. But Webster had set her heart on having a pair of cake toppers made by this particular specialist. Something about his father having made her parents’ cake toppers, and his grandfather having made her grandparents’… so I sat with her while she went through photographs of her and Ted together. Mr. Cake Topper Specialist wanted the photographs to work from, and she dismissed every photo I suggested. “Maybe we’ll have to take a new one,” she said.

I’d collected my bridesmaid’s dress from the seamstress’s store the day before and run into a couple of Webster’s other bridesmaids. We’d debated whether or not to tell her that if she didn’t end her diet now she wouldn’t look pretty on the day, just brittle. As her friend Jean put it: “She’s got no business getting this thin for a December wedding. If there’s snow, she’ll catch pneumonia so quick she won’t know what’s hit her.”

“Ted keeps saying, ‘Let’s just elope,’” Webster said, and gave me such a wicked grin that I didn’t have the heart to say anything about brittleness.

Brenda, Webster’s neighbor, knocked on the door. “You’ve got a gentleman caller, Novak. No, no, not Loverboy. Though it could be Loverboy Mark Two. He says it can’t wait.”

“Is he handsome?” Webster asked, following me to the staircase. Brenda shrugged. “I guess so. In a freckled kind of way. Some girls get all the luck.”

Webster and I took a peek over the banister. We saw a mop of light brown hair, then Charlie Vacic looked up and gave us the full winsome-puppy-dog treatment. I was already on my way down the stairs, so the push Webster gave me was wholly unnecessary, as was her crowing that she was going to tell Arturo on me, which brought seven of our fellow tenants out onto the landing to see who I was two-timing my fiancé with.

“Hi,” I said, pulling him into the front parlor and closing the door behind us. “What are you doing here?”

“How are you, Charlie, long time no see, how’s med school, was it a long bus ride, can I offer you something to drink?” Charlie said. He dropped into an armchair and closed his eyes. I sat down too, in the chair opposite his. My knees had turned to water.

“I’m well, thank you, Boy,” he supplied. “Yes, it has been a while. Med school’s fine, I’m not failing, and I’ve avoided hypochondria by deciding my time’s up when it’s up. The bus ride aged me by about ten years and a cold beverage would be the best thing that could happen to me right now.”

What could I do or say, other than bring him a glass of someone else’s root beer that I found in the icebox? He drained the glass without speaking, so I got him a refill. Then he was ready to talk.

“I got your letter. Are you really getting married?”

I looked into his eyes. He couldn’t return the gaze steadily, kept focusing on my left eye, then on my right. I could guess what he was thinking: that there were two of me, that was the explanation, that was why I was acting like this. I had applied this rationale to the rat catcher the first time he’d punched me. First you try to find a reason, try to understand what you’ve done wrong so you can be sure not to do it anymore. After that you look for signs of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, the good and the bad in a person sifted into separate compartments by some weird accident. Then, gradually, you realize that there isn’t a reason, and it isn’t two people you’re dealing with, just one. The same one every time. Keep switching eyes all you want, Charlie. You’re going to hate the conclusion you reach.

I answered: “Yes, Charlie, it’s true.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

He loosened his collar, swallowed air. “Why?”

He smiled when I didn’t answer. Not an amused smile, a nervous one. The quirk at the left corner of his mouth when he smiled. For so long I’d wanted to kiss him just there. He was Charlie. Maybe I could tell him: Listen, there’s this little girl who makes herself laugh. You hear her from the other room, and when you try to get her to explain, she just says: “Don’t worry about it.” And maybe it’s the thief in me, but I think this girl is mine, and that when she and I are around each other, we’re giving each other something we’ve never had, or taking back something we’ve lost. Maybe Charlie would say: Let’s kidnap her, go to Europe, and raise her as our own. We’re young. Starting over won’t be so hard for us. But even if some madcap spirit did pick that moment to possess Charlie Vacic, what I felt for the girl wasn’t all that distinct from what I felt for her father.

“I wish you’d written to let me know you were coming,” I said. “Where are you staying?”

“I’ll find someplace. Take it easy, I’ll be out of your hair soon enough. Tomorrow, probably. Why are you doing this, Boy? Don’t you understand that I just want to take care of you any way I can? Or do you think I don’t know what I’m saying when I say things like that?”

“I love you,” I said, then sat there, appalled at what had just come out of my mouth.

He moved forward in his chair, rested his forehead against mine. “I know. So, please, Boy. I’m asking you, please. Don’t marry him.”

“I don’t want to be taken care of, Charlie. That’s not what I want.”

“How dare you write me a letter like that? You wanted me to come here and say this. Don’t marry him.”

Just one kiss, I thought. But then I couldn’t pull away.

Out in the hallway, Mia bawled: “Anyone seen Boy Novak? That girl owes me a pastrami sandwich.” That might have been her way of making a tactful entrance. We’d let go of each other by the time she tried the door handle. I introduced them, praying Mia wouldn’t say “That Charlie?” She didn’t.

Instead she said: “Come to lunch with us,” and looked up at him with a smile that made me want to stick a No Trespassing sign on him. Charlie excused himself on the grounds of having to find a room, but once Mia and I found a quiet booth at the diner, I had words with her about that smile she’d given him. Not straightforward words; I just asked a few questions about her love life, whether she was seeing anyone she liked, etc.

“No, not really — I’m just snacking right now.”

“Snacking, Mia?”

“That’s the only way I can think of to put it to you, my dear, innocent Boy. But about that Charlie… why did he say ‘Good-bye’ when he left? I mean, ‘Good-bye,’ not ‘See you later.’ Isn’t he in town to see you? Did you just break his heart? Don’t you know how to let ’em down easy?”

—

webster was all aglow at her wedding, and Ted was in awe.

(“I get to grow old with this woman? This woman right here?”

Arturo slung an arm around his neck and told him it was clearly a charity case.)

There was hardly a dry eye in the house. The miniature Ted and miniature Webster stood on top of the cake looking resigned, if not content. They realized that nobody was even going to think about rescuing them. We filled the reception room with paper flowers that each of us seven bridesmaids had spent a total of twenty-one hours folding — three hours a day for a week. It was gratifying that Webster sobbed over the flowers. She seemed to understand that we were trying to say good luck and trying to say that we were there just in case. Her official name might be Mrs. Ted Murray now, and she might have forsaken the Mamie Eisenhower haircut for long romantic waves that she flung to and fro like some kind of cape, but to me she was just the usual Veronica Webster.

Webster and Ted were on honeymoon when I married Arturo at Worcester City Hall. Olivia, Gerald, and Vivian were there. Mia too, and Snow. I hadn’t asked Mrs. Fletcher because she’d made it clear that she disapproved. I hadn’t asked Agnes because being Julia’s mother would have made the ceremony difficult for her. Mia gave me away, and I think Olivia was scandalized by that, but managed not to comment. I wore a plain dress that was somewhere between white and gray; its skirt was long and straight, and Snow said that when I stood still, I looked like a statue. Arturo wore a red bow tie and his hair slicked back. And his power doubled, maybe even tripled — that power he had of making me feel certain. The black of his hair, the red of his tie, the gold band I slipped onto his finger. Outside it snowed lightly, lifelessly, thousands of white butterflies falling to earth. Becoming Mrs. Whitman was a quiet affair that I didn’t have to diet for.

11

i remember Vivian Whitman said something a little odd at the wedding, as we were walking down the steps of city hall in the snow. She said: “You know, you’ve made my mother happy today. I think she only ever wanted one daughter, and nature never did give her the one that fit the bill.” I said: “What? Last time I looked I wasn’t a law student—” And she said: “Oh, come on. Look at you!” I’d thought she was just getting emotional because she thought Arturo and I should have made our wedding more of an occasion, but when the hothouse calla lily arrived, her remark was the first thing I thought of. The little card that came with the lily said: Congrats, Boy, and welcome to the family! Sorry this is late; I only just heard. Always wanted a sister, and never did see eye to eye with my biological one — Clara.

Snow wandered over, eyeing the purple blooms, assessing their potential for wearing in her hair. I told her to forget it.

“The calla lilies ah in bloom again,” she announced, in a surprisingly decent imitation of Katharine Hepburn’s voice.

“That’s right.”

“Where’d it come from?”

I watched her face as I said: “Your aunt Clara sent it,” but there was no flicker of recognition. She lost interest, said “Mmm hmmm,” and wandered away. It’s true that kids are inquisitive, but sometimes you forget that they pick and choose their projects.

I took the plant pot to Arturo’s workroom and knocked. He didn’t answer, so I kept knocking, switching hands when my knuckles got sore. Eventually he came to the door wearing goggles that covered half his face and asked: “What’s the big idea?”

I held up the lily. “It’s from Clara.”

He removed his goggles, read the card she’d written, and laughed.

“Any particular reason why you’ve never said anything about her? Snow doesn’t seem to know who she is, either.”

“She’s estranged from our parents. From our mother, really.”

“What did she do?”

“Oh, God. A lot of stuff, Boy. Too much to talk about.”

“So she’s estranged from you too?”

“No. She’s my big sis. It was her, then me, then Viv. Matter of fact it was Clara who put a roof over my head for a year. When Julia died. Snow was too young to remember. Don’t mention the roof over my head part to my mother, she’d have a heart attack.”

He kissed me and ducked back into his workroom.

—

mia said she’d never heard of a Clara Whitman, and Webster broke her Vow of Silence against me (punishment for getting married while she was away) to say the same thing. Mrs. Fletcher breathed out when I said Clara’s name. She breathed out and held on to the nearest bookshelf and said: “So you know. All this time I’ve been thinking how wrong it was of Olivia Whitman to send that girl away and act as if she only had two children.”

“What did she do?”

Mrs. Fletcher shook her head. “Nothing out of the way, Boy. Was just herself and fell in love. I must say, I’m glad you find it so humorous.”

“I don’t. I don’t know what to think. You say she didn’t do anything, Arturo says she did a lot of stuff he can’t even talk about. I mean, which is it?”

Mrs. Fletcher peered at me for a long time. Her expression became grim. She said: “They didn’t tell you about her.”

“You tell me. Someone’s got to. How did you meet?”

“She contacted me about a book she wanted to buy for her husband’s birthday. It was the first I’d heard of her, and I didn’t believe her when she said she’d been born in Flax Hill, and that Olivia Whitman was her mother. Then she came by to look at the book, and I saw she was a Whitman all right. She said the book was too expensive and went away, then came back the next day, said she guessed it was worth the price, paid up, and left town. That was four years ago. I haven’t seen her since.”

“Where does she live?”

“In Boston, I believe.”

“With her husband…”

“Yes. Her married name is Baxter.”

“Any kids?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was the book she bought from you?”

“It was an 1846 edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”

“She’s a historian?”

“No.”

I couldn’t think of anything else to ask; a riddle ran all the way through the account I’d just heard. I questioned a detail and the answer didn’t tell me anything. Finally I said: “Okay. Do you have her address or telephone number? I’d like to talk to her. Introduce myself. Thank her for the flowers, that sort of thing.”

Mrs. Fletcher hesitated, and I said: “Nobody else needs to know about it. I guess I just want as much family as I can get. Surely you understand that?”

I tried the telephone number she gave me three times, but the phone on the other end just rang and rang, and no one picked it up.

12

charlie sent a letter to the boarding house and Mrs. Lennox sent it on to me at Caldwell Lane.

This doesn’t count as bothering you; it’s just that there’s something that’s been on my mind and I can’t do anything to get it off my mind but tell you. I’ve always liked the way you listen — you have what they call an impartial air, like the ideal judge. Then afterward you just say four or five words and the case is closed. This is about my aunt Jozsa, in the old country. You know, we read the papers, but it’s hard to say what’s really going on over there. We just know it’s something. Aunt J was sent to an internment camp in Szeged, which is so crazy, I don’t even know how to express the insanity of her having been interned — hand on my heart, she’s red all the way through, risked her life for the party and the cause on too many occasions to talk about back when the fascists ran things. So we don’t know… someone with some sort of grudge against her must have denounced her. The camp officials wanted her to confess disloyalty and collaboration with enemies of peace (enemies of the government, I guess) and she racked her brain for weeks and weeks but couldn’t think of anything she’d said or done that could even be construed as disloyal or treacherous. So then she started putting some of her own statements of the past few weeks to herself, to see how they sounded. She remembered that once, at a party meeting, her mind had wandered, she’d looked out of the window at all the snow and whispered to her friend: “Will spring never come?” So maybe it was that. Aunt Jozsa told my dad she sat in her cell repeating those words until they became sinister… and incriminating. But when she confessed to having asked if spring would come, her interrogator just said: “Oh, I see we’ve got a joker here.”

I don’t know, Boy. I think she got close to going crazy. But when Stalin died last March, they let everybody out of the camps and Aunt J went home again. I wrote to her right away. She hasn’t seen me since I was a boy, but she says I’m her favorite and stupidest nephew. I wrote: Hey, Aunt Jozsa, what can I do for you, what can I send you? A plane ticket maybe? I mean, I could do it too, with a little help from my dad and my uncle in Milwaukee.

She answered: Send me candy, my boy. Send a lot of that great American candy. Send an amount that will shock me, send enough to make the neighbors say “That is a LOT of candy, the New World is certainly being kind to the Vacics.”

So I did, Boy. I sent her a cardboard box by freight. A couple of feet wide, a couple of feet tall, and heavy. At the bottom of the box I put a note saying that there was more where that came from if she came to America. She’s a skinny woman and I now know for sure that she doesn’t really eat much candy, because she only found the note a couple of weeks ago — a year and a few months after I sent her the candy box. She wrote: You know very well I can’t live in your shitty capitalist country, Charlie. I’m not even interested in visiting.

I got angry. Because who was it who locked her up — communists or capitalists? I asked her that question, and I asked her what had become of her communism now. And I’ve got her reply right here; I’m looking at it as I write to you — she says:

I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But it will not always be like this.

That’s it. What am I supposed to do with that?

C

Charlie’s Aunt Jozsa, who just couldn’t walk away from certain principles. I thought of her, on and off, for days. I didn’t reply to his letter, but if I had, I would’ve told him that his aunt probably called him her favorite because their hearts worked the same way. Charlie and I were still in love. How strange it is to wake up in the middle of the night with that feeling that someone has just left the room, that just moments before someone has been whispering: Me and you, you and me, soft music that stops playing the moment you really begin to listen. Who’d have thought that Charlie Vacic could be so tenacious? “People underestimate the freckled.” He’d told me that more than once, with all seventy-two of his own freckles scrunched up together. I’d underestimated him too, and I had to face up to the reason why.

It’s true that nothing really happened the night I ran away. It’s a night two weeks before that I don’t like to think about. It was a Saturday and Charlie Vacic was back in the city visiting his mom. He met me for a slice of pie at the diner where I worked, and then he walked me home. I told him and told him there was no need to walk me right to my door, but he insisted, and the rat catcher came out with a covered cage just as we reached the front doorstep. I bet he’d timed it that way. I bet he’d been watching us from the window. “Hello, Charlie,” he said, friendly as could be. “I’ve seen the way you look at my daughter. You think she’s pretty, don’t you?”

Charlie said: “More than just pretty, sir. I think she’s beautiful.”

They both turned to me and went on a looking spree. I left them to it and wished I could sail over their heads and into the acid blue sky. They didn’t look for long, it was more a practiced series of glances; they knew what they were looking for and seemed to find it. It was a wonder there was anything left by the time they were through looking.

“Say thank you, Boy. Didn’t you hear what Charlie said? He thinks you’re beautiful.”

I told the sidewalk thank you, and the rat catcher took me by the arm, thanked Charlie for “bringing me home safe and sound,” and closed the front door in his face. We walked side by side down the hallway to our apartment door, the rat catcher and I, and he scraped away at me a little more with his dull nickel gaze. “So you’re a beauty, hey?” He slapped me. “Or are you not?”

“I’m not.”

“So you’re ugly?”

I nodded.

Another slap, harder. “You have to say it.”

“I’m ugly.”

I went to my room, switched on the radio, and lay down with a book. But I didn’t read it. I left the door open and watched for the rat catcher’s approach, feeling very bitter toward Charlie Vacic. He’d really done it this time. I heard the rat catcher moving around the apartment and waited for him to yell that it was time I made dinner, but he didn’t. I smelled cooking. Good cooking. When my father called me to the table, there was chicken paprikash and dumplings and cold beer to cool the heat of the paprika. Foodwise it was the best dinner I’d had yet, and I ate a lot. We didn’t talk, he watched foam swirling in his beer, but he kept biting his lip, and I stopped eating when I clocked that he’d bitten down so hard that blood came through. The rim of his beer glass was smeared with it. I muttered a compliment to the chef, went to bed, and lay on my swollen stomach in the hope that it’d be flat again by morning. Yeah, ideally in the morning my stomach would be flat again and the rat catcher would already have left for work and life would be as good as it could get.

I woke up in the basement with the rats. I tried to lift myself out of the chair I was in, but my arms were tied behind me and my ankles were so tightly bound to the chair legs that they already felt broken. There was no light, and the rats crunched on the newsprint that lined their cages. The rat catcher loomed over me and I smelled wet fur. The blinded creature he held paddled the air with its front paws. A paw thudded against my forehead, but if I hadn’t seen it happen, I wouldn’t have known. No part of my face would move. I looked up into the rat catcher’s clear eyes.

“I’m glad you liked the paprikash, stupid. Do you think Charlie really means it when he calls you beautiful, Boy? Do you think he could be the one?”

I watched the rat lap hungrily at the corner of my mouth with its pink, delicate tongue; I saw it, but couldn’t feel it. The numbness was total. It froze my fear. After a moment he hauled the rat back up into the air and it snapped its snout this way and that, seeking me.

“There is no exquisite beauty without strangeness in the proportion, is that not so? Let’s fix it so that Charlie is truly mesmerized by you. Let’s fix it so that he stares. Seven scars should do it.”

There was a teardrop on my cheek; I know this because my father flicked it with a finger and thumb to make it fall faster. With effort I closed my eyes. No way out. Get through this, then kill him. Figure out the rest later.

“Why are you shaking like that?” my father asked, tenderly. “Do you think that if I scar you no one will love you? You’ve got the wrong idea, girl. This will help your true love find you. He’ll really have to fight for you now.”

There was a thickness to his voice; I cracked one eye open. He was crying. The rat hung limp and lay its head on my cheek in a confiding way, exhausted and childlike. Drool bubbled from its jaws, but it didn’t bite me. Perhaps it had become too hungry to eat. I don’t know if that happens to rats, I don’t know… a second later the rat was dead, its head smashed against the basement floor, and my father was running up the stairs, cursing, still crying. A true thing I can still hardly believe of myself is this: I fell asleep again until he came back to untie me.

I was reluctant to look at myself for a couple of days after this happened — the anesthesia had worn off and my lips and right cheek were sore. I couldn’t tell how much the rat had been able to do. I didn’t touch the sore places, not wanting to worsen any infected bites. But there were no bites. I probed the skin with my fingers — there wasn’t even a rash. The rat catcher stayed out of my way and I stayed out of his. The trouble is I can be such a slow thinker at times. But once I got the situation in focus it stayed clear. No matter what anybody else said or did my father saw something revolting in me, and sooner or later he meant to make everybody else agree with him. Worst and weirdest of all was his weeping — I think he’d really believed that he was doing something good for me. He’d faltered that time but the next time he wouldn’t.

Mirrors see so much. They could help us if they wanted to. In those days I spoke to every mirror in the apartment. I questioned them, told them I didn’t know what to do, but none of them answered me. The girl in the glass exaggerated my expression, her gaze zigzagging as though watching a waterfall. She was making fun of me for sure, but I decided not to take it personally.

mirror: ['mırǝ]

noun

A surface capable of reflecting sufficient diffused light to form an image of an object placed in front of it.

Such a reflecting surface set in a frame. In a household setting this surface adopts an inscrutable personality (possibly impish and/or amoral), presenting convincing and yet conflicting images of the same object, thereby leading onlookers astray.

Beautiful Boy, ugly Boy, rat, rat, food for the rats, sick and sickening… it took two weeks for my thoughts to twist themselves into a membrane that I could break only by leaving, or by murdering the rat catcher. I’m not sure Charlie could have rescued me from that. And I think I decided not to love Charlie because I thought I had to be rescued. For practical reasons but also as a proof of love. It’s better that Charlie and I didn’t make an automatic transaction, love exchanged for rescue. All you can do after that is put the love and the rescue up on the shelf, moving them farther and farther back as you make room for all the other items you acquire over the years. This way a ragged stem still grows between us, almost pretty. Though really we should crush it now, before the buds bloom skeletal.

I didn’t say his name aloud to anyone. If Mia asked how he was, I pretended not to hear. But Charlie Vacic just wouldn’t let up. I’d think he was done, but a week or so later he came back ten times as strong.

Every now and again I’d look at Arturo, just look at him until he said “What gives?” He was a little surprised at me for not wanting to make my mark on the house, but I wasn’t interested in undoing what Julia had done. Across the years we accepted each other, Julia and I, neither of us exactly thrilled by the other’s existence, but there was enough difference between her and me to suggest that her Arturo wasn’t exactly the same as mine anyway. My puzzlement regarding him was greater: I didn’t understand how he could do the things he did. He took Snow cherry picking, he took me hiking around the lake, he swam at the pool with his father every Thursday afternoon, took Agnes Miller all the way to Baden-Baden because her chest wasn’t as strong as it used to be and he thought a spa week might help. He behaved as if he belonged with us, belonged to us. But he was crazy if he thought Julia was finished with him. I mean, it was bad enough with Charlie, and he was still alive.

Did I talk in my sleep? Was it the flag in my side of our closet? Somehow a corner of it always emerged whenever I reached for something to wear. Arturo and I never spoke about it, but somehow he knew that there was someone else. He must have, because it was around that time that Arturo began to make chains.

Ankle chains, wrist chains, necklaces made of heavy brass links. He laid the collection on a bed of red velvet, piece by piece, as he completed them.

“What do you think of these?” he said. And I told him they were ugly. I was angry with him for making such threats; I thought he should know better than to do that.

“Why don’t you try them on?” I said. I didn’t yell. If anything, I made my tone pleasant, modeled it on the way the rat catcher had spoken once, half a second before he grabbed my head and tried to smash it against a wall as if it weren’t even connected to my neck.

I think I unnerved him, because he did what I said. He put all the chains on, four bracelets on each wrist, anklets on over his socks, necklace upon necklace upon necklace. He held his hands out to me, and I tried hard not to grin, but it didn’t work. “Come on, Boy. I’m sorry.”

I undid the bracelets first. “Something to think about in future: Hinting that you think you can hold me against my will only makes me mad.”

“Got it.” He looked as if he was going to add something else, some excuse or explanation, then decided against it.

“You’ve got around eight months to become a new man,” I told him, dropping chains onto the floor. “I mean… is this the kind of father my child’s got to look forward to?”

“Eight months…?”

“That’s what Dr. Lee says.”

He yelled “Gee whiz” so loud and for so long that Snow came running from Olivia’s house screaming, “What? What?”

We told her she was going to have a little brother or sister and she said: “Oh, good. Make it a sister, okay?” and ran straight back to her court of dolls.

—

i made my list of names in secret. Partly so that no one would know I was copying Julia’s idea, and partly so that no one would know how wild my hopes were. Olivia suggested Scarlett for a girl and Alexander for a boy, and I thought: Not bad. Gerald suggested Artemis for a girl, which made me suspicious that he’d somehow gotten hold of my list. I’ll never get into the habit of calling him “Pop” like he wants me to — I can’t make myself say it casually or kindly. The word comes out sounding like a deliberate insult, and I don’t want to apply that word to someone like him, someone who gets enthusiastic over English marmalade and Swiss fountain pens. The way his hair sits on his scalp makes me smile too — it’s all his, since nature can’t seem to do without its jokes. That luxurious mop is wasted on a bank manager. It ought to be grown a tad longer and then employed at a ritzy Parisian music hall, helping some showgirl hit the big time. From certain angles Gerald’s hair assumes the personality of a disarmingly earnest counterfeit, a Brylcreemed wig that would feel so happy and honored and gratified if you’d only say it had fooled you for a second.

“And for a boy?” I asked.

“Why, Girl, of course,” he deadpanned.

My reflection changed as I got bigger. Well, obviously it changed, but what I mean to say is that when I looked into the mirror, I couldn’t see myself. That’s not quite it, either. I’d look into the mirror and she was there, the icy blonde with the rounded stomach, the thickened thighs and arms — just as I’d become accustomed to wearing it, the snake bracelet wouldn’t fit anymore. I also went up half a shoe size, which pleased me because it was another bridge burned between me and the rat catcher. Come into town, rat catcher, come looking for your daughter, come holding a pair of the shoes she left. Say to everyone who’ll listen: “If the shoes fit, she’s mine.” Gather witnesses… the more the merrier. They’d see me wedge my feet into the narrow shoes, see how far my heels spill over the back of them. Then they’d hear me tell him: “I’m so sorry. Keep searching. Good luck.”

When I stood in front of the mirror, the icy blonde was there, but I couldn’t swear to the fact of her being me. She was no clearer to me than my shadow was. I came to prefer my shadow. She came into the shower cubicle with me and stood stark against the bathroom tiles, so much taller than I was that when I began to get backaches, I could find shelter crouched under her.

Snow was the one who came up with the right name. We were lying on the couch together, her chin on my shoulder, Arturo’s arm around us both as he read poetry to my stomach. He said he’d read poetry to Snow before she was born, and hey, if it ain’t broke, etc.

“Maybe Margaret for a girl?” Arturo said. “This Maggie sounds okay, doesn’t she?

Gentle as falcon

Or hawk of the tower.

With solace and gladness,

Much mirth and no madness,

All good and no badness.”

Snow yawned. “What’s a falcon?”

“It’s a bird,” I told her.

“And the other thing in the tower?”

“A hawk. It’s another kind of bird.”

“Bird for a boy and Bird for a girl,” Snow said. “Birds sing and fly.”

She was right. I put her to bed, and when I went next door to spin Julia’s lullaby around on the gramophone, she said: “No, you sing it to me.”

“Snow, you know I can’t carry a tune. And your mother has the loveliest voice, let her—”

“She’s tired of singing the same song every night,” Snow said, firmly. “And you’re my mother too. Aren’t you?”

I drew a chair up beside her bed and sang. All I do is dream of you the whole night through… It was a horrible rendition, and I quite enjoyed attempting it, setting the notes free from the song as each one went farther and farther astray. Snow was nice about it. I think she pretended to fall asleep faster than she usually did just so I’d stop. I switched off all the lights except her nightlight, then went downstairs and threw my list of names into the trash.

—

when I got too big and too distracted to meet the demands of being Mrs. Fletcher’s assistant, I stayed home, ate my way through the fruit baskets Mia and Webster sent over, and listened to Julia Whitman’s voice. You’re every thought, you’re everything, you’re every song I ever sing…

I hoped Bird would sing like that, would have a voice as strong and rich as the one I listened to, with all those teasing little trips and breaks in it. It was a voice Snow didn’t seem interested in hearing anymore—“I’m almost eight years old now,” she said, as if that had anything to do with it — but maybe in time Bird could make her listen again.

A simple solution, maybe. Just like running away from home, just like staying away from Ivorydown because of the woman I’d seen there. But the thing about these simple solutions is that they work.

13

bird was born in the spring. I say “was born” because the pain was so tremendous that I just let it come. It was like quicksand. The only way to make it out alive was to stop struggling against it, to submit. I’m told I was in labor for thirteen hours, but I really wouldn’t know. There was the quicksand, then there was Bird in my arms, safe and well, and dark. No. It wasn’t just her shade of gold (the closest skin could get to the color of my husband’s eyes. I think I made some dumb joke: “Look at this kid, born with a suntan—”), it was her facial features too. As the nurse said when she thought I was too wiped out to hear: “That little girl is a Negro.”

I didn’t want to show her to anybody. Not to her father, not to her sister. No one. The doctor told me that Arturo seemed like a reasonable man, that he could talk to Arturo for me if I wanted, that everything could still be okay, and I realized that he thought he was talking to an unfaithful wife. I laughed and laughed, high-pitched laughter that roused Bird to try to outdo me with her crying. The doctor thought I’d gone to bed with a colored man, and I had. He was my husband.

What did I think Arturo would do when he saw Bird at last? Whatever it was I’d prepared for, he didn’t do it. He held her, gave her Eskimo kisses, and said she was a smash hit. Snow climbed up onto the bed, did a triple take, then said: “Let’s keep her!” Arturo didn’t even try to touch me; he knew I wouldn’t let him. I looked at him over the top of Snow’s head and I mouthed: “Who are you? Who are you?”

He came back later in the afternoon, without Snow. He brought a hip flask full of apricot palinka with him (he refused to reveal its source) and we passed it back and forth, drinking in silence, not quite looking at each other. When the flask was three-quarters empty, he asked: “You drunk yet?”

Everything had become polka dots, especially him. I found this endearing… I may even have smiled. “A little.”

“Me too,” he said. “We’d better talk.”

In his mind he was no more colored than I was; he’d never even met his grandparents or cousins, his parents were the only ones from their families who’d decided to move north from Louisiana and see if anyone called them out on their ancestry. His father had stood in line behind a colored man at the front desk of the Flax Hill Country Club and eavesdropped as the colored man tried and failed to gain membership. “We’re fully subscribed,” the colored man was told. But Gerald Whitman was offered a membership form to fill out without further ado. It was too bad for the other guy, but Gerald liked golf and didn’t see why he shouldn’t play it in those surroundings if he could get away with it. Gerald had thought: Well, what if I just don’t say… what if I never say? He’d passed that down to Arturo, the idea that there was no need to ever say, that if you knew who you were then that was enough, that not saying was not the same as lying. He asked me a question that threw me into confusion because I couldn’t honestly answer yes or no. He asked if I’d have married him if I’d seen him as colored.

“And Julia?”

“Mom says as soon as she saw Joe and Agnes Miller she knew they were the same as her and Dad. You should have seen how long their faces were at the wedding — Mom’s face, Dad’s face, Agnes’s face, Joe’s. But Snow turned out to be… Snow, and we got to go on not saying.”

Snow was blameless. And Arturo was forgivable; maybe because he said that he felt that Bird was his, ours, in a way that he hadn’t felt with Snow. He said that for a long time he’d looked at Snow and seen her as Julia’s child. Snow’s beauty had seemed so strange to him for a while, so blank, like a brand-new slate. But Bird looked up at him confidingly, in a way that made him grin. “This kid is pretty sure we’re old friends.”

It was Olivia Whitman I could not forgive. When Bird and I came home, she was our first visitor, and she took one look at Bird, a cold, thorough look, then turned her gaze away. “Well, she’s healthy, thank God.” She then began to insinuate that I’d two-timed Arturo and gave me to understand I had another thing coming if I expected Arturo to raise another man’s child. I said: “You think I won’t slap you, Olivia, but I will. Keep going and you’ll see.”

Next she implied that my background was questionable. She didn’t know where I was really from, she hadn’t met my father, she’d taken everything I said on trust.

“Nice try, but I’m not going to stand here while a colored woman tries to tell me that maybe I’m the one who’s colored.”

I sat down with Bird, who wailed because she preferred me to stand. Olivia sat down too, on the same couch, but leaving a large space between us. Now that I knew about her it was incredible that I hadn’t seen it before. Or had I? Tea with her and Agnes and Vivian had made me think of Sidonie; it hadn’t just been my mind wandering.

“The last person who threatened to slap me was a white woman. Blonde, like you. No Southern belle, either. Just trash.”

“I guess that’s how we operate.”

I told myself, Stop it. Whatever else she says, don’t rise to it. I wanted a grandmother for Bird. Olivia wasn’t the one I would have chosen, but she was a generous grandmother to Snow and if she put her mind to it, she could do it again. Bird was beautiful too, with her close curls and her bottomless eyes, and she was only just getting started.

“I was working at a grocery store,” Olivia said. “And I didn’t fetch a box of soap flakes down fast enough for that woman’s liking, so she said: ‘I’ll slap you, girl.’ ‘I’ll slap you, girl’ to a grown woman. And I knew I’d lose my job if I went at her, so I just said: ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot of things to do, ma’am, and I’m as stupid as they come. Please be patient with me.’ That was standard, that kind of cringing and crawling. I didn’t want it to be. She was not my better, I don’t care what anyone says, she wasn’t. None of them were. I thought: If I have a daughter, I don’t want anyone talking to her like that. I don’t ever want to hear my daughter wheedling at anyone the way I do every working day. I thought: If I do, if I ever hear that in the voice of a child of mine, I’ll make her sorry all right. I’ll wring her damn neck. Couldn’t very well wring my own neck, could I?”

Olivia’s voice was very calm, but her hands trembled. I backed up, moved farther away so that Bird and I were pressed against the arm of the sofa. I didn’t think she was going to lash out. No, I wanted to keep us from catching what was in her, what was there in her voice and her eyes. But babies have some unfathomable criteria for what they consider attractive. Bird was wriggling like crazy. Her intuition should’ve told her that Olivia was terrible, just the worst, but I was having trouble keeping the kid from stretching her hands out in Olivia’s direction. I don’t know, maybe she already had expensive tastes and liked the scent Olivia was wearing.

“What you don’t understand is that we’re being kept down out there. All the way down. In my town you couldn’t vote unless you passed a literacy test. How does that stop colored folks from voting, you ask? You didn’t see what the colored school was like, how big the classes were. The teachers did what they could, but half my male cousins could hardly read. They lost patience before the girls did. No matter how literate a colored man was, there was always some excuse to whip him. There were other things too. Little things. You’d save up and go out for a nice night at a nice place, all right, fine. All the high-class places we were allowed to go to, they were imitations of the places we were kept out of — not mawkish copies, most of it was done with perfect taste, but sitting at the bar or at the candlelit table you’d try to imagine what dinnertime remarks the real people were making… yes, the real people at the restaurant two blocks away, the white folks we were shadows of, and you’d try to talk about whatever you imagined they were talking about, and your food turned to sawdust in your mouth. What was it like in those other establishments? What was it that was so sacred about them, what was it that our being there would destroy? I had to know. I broke the law because I had to know. Oh, only in the most minor way. Gas station restrooms when Gerald would drive me cross-state on vacation — one day I used the White Only restroom and nobody noticed me. Gerald begged me not to, but I just got my compact out, repowdered my face, and walked in. I felt like laughing in all their faces. The rest room experience is more or less the same, in case you were wondering.”

“Olivia,” I said. “Look at Bird. Look at her.” I drew the baby blanket down a little so that Olivia could really see her. But the woman just wouldn’t look, and it broke my heart.

“Every now and then there’d be a colored cleaning lady in there, in the White Only restroom, I mean, scrubbing a washbasin that nobody was using right then. And she’d look at me and know, and I’d look at her. They didn’t do anything or say anything, those cleaning ladies, but for hours and hours afterward I’d just want to pull all my skin right off my body. So I said to Gerald: We’ve got to go north, let people take us how they take us, then we won’t feel like we’re betraying anybody. But it’s the same thing over here. Same thing, only no signs. The places you go to, do you see colored people there? Let me answer that for you. You see them rarely, if at all. You’re trying to remember, but the truth is they don’t exist for you. You go to the opera house and the only colored person you see is the stagehand, scattering sawdust or rice powder or whatever it is that stops the dancers slipping… folks would look at him pretty hard if he was sitting in the audience, they’d wonder what he was up to, what he was trying to be, but being there to keep the dancers from slipping is a better reason for him to be there, he’s working, so nobody notices him but me. Listen, I love that Grand Theater down in Worcester and I love all that dancing I see there, been there at least once a year for the past… oh, how old is that son of mine… for the past thirty-seven years or so. Almost forty years! But sometimes right in the middle of the second act my vision darkens just like a lantern shade’s been thrown over it, and the dancers are colored, every shade, from bronze to tar, and every hand touching strings in the orchestra is colored too, and the tops of their heads are woollier than sheep, and the roses in my lap, the ones I throw to the prima ballerina at the end, even the petals of those roses are black, burnt black. And then I think, Well, it’s out, the truth is out…”

She glanced at Bird. “This one’s dark like my eldest, Clara. See if Clara will take her.”

—

i said i didn’t care that Bird was colored. I said that to Mia, and to Webster, and to Mrs. Fletcher, who replied: “That’s the spirit. Keep saying it until it’s true.”

Nothing got past Mrs. Fletcher. It’s true that it was hard. Olivia and Gerald attended Bird’s christening, and Gerald kissed her, but Olivia didn’t. And it was hard to take Bird for walks, pushing her stroller around town, and watch people’s faces when they saw her. I saw them deciding that if Arturo meant to claim her as his daughter then they weren’t going to contradict him. Once I passed Sidonie and Merveille, deep in conversation, the daughter pushing her mother’s wheelchair, and I almost escaped them, but Merveille instructed Sidonie to bring her up to the stroller so she could bless the baby. Merveille invited me to coffee when she found out I’d lied about being Sidonie’s teacher, and it was excruciatingly awkward for the first half hour or so. I felt sick about having lied to her; there are people it’s a bad idea to tell the truth to, but never Merveille. She didn’t have to set me at ease — not by any means — but she did, by telling me about her grudging respect for Olivia Whitman. She said Olivia’s “masquerade” had been ugly, but that she couldn’t help but appreciate a woman with sangfroid. “Let us say that means ‘cold blood.’ No — nerve is what she has. Nerve.” It turns out Olivia respects Merveille Fairfax too, because of the stink she raised over a decade ago about Flax Hill’s colored children having to go to a separate school when it was their right by law to be educated alongside their white peers. Apparently Merva got up a letter-writing campaign, The Boston Globe ran an editorial piece about the situation, and the school board gave in under the pressure. Olivia said most people weren’t overtly against joining the schools, more people than she expected were in favor of it, but a few called Merva bad names in the street and asked her if she thought her daughter was too smart for the colored school. And Merva smiled and said: “Every single child in this town is too smart for the colored school.” That put her on Olivia’s list of people not to trifle with.

I looked at the sky while Sidonie and Merveille gasped and cooed over Bird, so I didn’t see their expressions. But when they finally let me go on my way, Sidonie put her hand on my shoulder, and that hurt me all the way home.

Yes, it was hard. Snow would place a finger on each of Bird’s palms and raise her little hands up when they closed into fists. She’d say: “I’m your best friend, Bird.” Bird seemed to understand and believe this, and her eyes searched for her sister when she was away. Bird adored Snow; everybody adored Snow and her daintiness. Snow’s beauty is all the more precious to Olivia and Agnes because it’s a trick. When whites look at her, they don’t get whatever fleeting, ugly impressions so many of us get when we see a colored girl — we don’t see a colored girl standing there. The joke’s on us. Olivia just laps up the reactions Snow gets: From this I can only make inferences about Olivia’s childhood and begin to measure the difference between being seen as colored and being seen as Snow. What can I do for my daughter? One day soon a wall will come up between us, and I won’t be able to follow her behind it.

Every word Snow said, every little gesture of hers made me want to shake her. Arturo told her I was just tired. It was true that I was up at whatever hour Bird chose. I rarely let him go to her instead. He got good at changing her diaper really fast, before I really noticed what he was doing. “You think I’m gonna let you tell her I never helped out?” he said. Our daughter suckled so slowly, with the sucked-in cheeks of a wine-tasting expert. I’d nod over her while she fed, slipping in and out of sleep.

“Snow is not as wonderful as everybody thinks she is,” I said to Mia on the telephone, and my reflection smiled bitterly at me.

“What did she do?”

“Nothing yet. But I’m wise to her.”

Bird was napping in her crib, and I had to whisper so as not to wake her.

After a tense silence, Mia said: “I think you just need to rest, Boy.”

When I was pregnant and Olivia and I were still friendly, she told me that this would be the part of my life that brought me closer to my mother than ever, that this would be the time I felt what my mother had felt for me. Was this it? I’m learning that loving that kid as much as I do means that in some way we’re still not separate. I’m hungry when she’s hungry, and the cold hits me the same way it hits her, it makes me that much clumsier in scrambling to get us what we need.

I began to have dreams that made the ones I’d had about the rat catcher look like tea at the Ritz. I’d fall asleep and discover that I was Bird, my own little Bird. Snow being my big sister, that’s the bad dream. I’m the smaller girl and Snow has her arm around me, and she’s like a rose with a touch of dusk, so abundantly beautiful that it feels contagious — we’re touching, so…

“I’m your best friend, Bird,” Snow keeps saying, and it’s a hall of mirrors we’re walking down, and I don’t look the way I feel, I hate the mirrors but it’s okay as long as I just keep looking at her. She’s laughing. She’s my best friend. There her arm is, around me, but the mirrors say I’m alone, that I haven’t got a sister, and Snow thinks it’s hilarious. I have to get away from her, there’s this terrible emptiness in the way she smiles and the words she keeps saying, I have to get away from her.

I don’t set too much store by dreams, but it’s probably unwise to ignore this kind. These are the kind of dreams that show you you’re not doing so well, that you haven’t accepted what you thought you’d accepted, that you’re a mess, lying there like you’ve been hit by a bus, your heart and mind standing over you tutting and trying to figure out what even happened, never mind fixing it. This doesn’t feel like my life, it feels like somebody else’s. I’m standing here holding somebody else’s life for them, trying to keep it steady while it bobs up and down like a ferocious balloon. Make this little girl let me go — I don’t know if I want her. Can’t I start over?

The snake bracelet Arturo gave me lies in its box for now, but soon I’ll be ready to wear it again. I’ve missed the feel of cold scales around my wrist. I can’t discount the possibility that the bracelet’s been molding me into the wearer it wants. There was an afternoon that I raised my hand to Snow, fully intending to swat her like a fly. She’d asked me if she could lift Bird out of her crib and walk around with her. She’d asked this a few times, and I’d told her no. She was too small and too clumsy to walk around with a baby. I didn’t tell her this; I just said no. Snow said she’d be very careful. She said please please please please. She leaned over Bird’s crib and pressed the side of her face against the side of her sister’s face as if showcasing the contrast between their features, and she gave me a look of radiant, innocent virtue that made my skin crawl. Somehow it was spontaneous and calculated at exactly the same time. My hand came up to knock that look off her face, and I think if she’d looked fearful or piteous or anything like that I’d probably have hit her. I was gray-skinned with exhaustion, fat around the middle, my eyes were smaller than the bags beneath them, and Snow’s daintiness grew day by day, to menacing proportions. I would’ve hit her and decided it was self-defense. I wouldn’t have seen the rat catcher (or the snake bracelet) in my actions until much later. But Snow noted that split-second jerk of my arm with an expression that mixed incomprehension and curiosity — she had no idea what I was about to do, but she had a feeling it was going to be new to her and therefore interesting — I settled my hand on the nearest crib post and spoke to her gently: Your sister’s sleepy, Snow. Go play outside. She left, looking back at me, still curious. Maybe there is no Snow, but only the work of smoke and mirrors. The Whitmans need someone to love, and have found too much to hate in each other, and so this lifelike little projection walks around and around a reel, untouchable.

In the middle of another night of mirror dreams I got up and checked on Bird, who seemed to be having herself a highly satisfactory sleep; she was smacking her lips. Next I went into the bathroom, where I turned on both taps and held on to the edge of the sink with a feeling of terror. I didn’t switch on any lights. It didn’t seem impossible for the rat catcher to be right behind me, ready to dunk my head into the water and hold it down until I drowned this time.

I heard myself saying I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. But I was saying that only to divert my attention from what I was about to do.

I washed my face, then went into the parlor, picked up the phone, and tried Clara Baxter’s number. This time she answered immediately, which threw me a little bit. I mean, I gave the operator her number, and the next thing I knew Clara said, “Hello?”

“Hello, Clara. This is Boy — you sent me some flowers a while ago, and—”

“Hello, Boy. How are you?” Her voice was clear and gentle, and it sounded to me as if she was smiling.

“I’m fine, Clara. Thank you for the flowers,” I said. Then I held my hand over the receiver and tried to finish crying without making any noise.

“How’s the little girl? Arturo told me her name’s Bird. It’s a pretty name.”

She waited for me to answer, then she said: “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, Boy. When Bird starts eating solid food, you bring her over here. She can stay with me. I won’t blame you. No one will blame you, and you can come visit her whenever you want.”

“Clara.”

“Yes?”

“Your mother sent you away?”

“Yes, she sent me to Mississippi, to live with my aunt Effie.”

“And you’re not… you’re not mad at her?”

“No, Boy. I don’t like her much, but I’m not mad at her. Aunt Effie did right by me. And now I’m living how I want to live. Wouldn’t have been able to do that under Ma’s thumb, don’t you know. You didn’t have a mother yourself, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And you’re all right, aren’t you? We turn out all right.”

(Do we?)

“Let Bird start on solid food before you come see me,” Clara said. “And don’t be too hard on Arturo. He doesn’t mean any harm, couldn’t do any if he tried.”

“I want you to take Snow,” I said. “Just for a little while. Please.”

—

just for a little while. Just for a little while. It was Arturo who took her to Boston. She was wearing a straw boater and had her pockets stuffed full of cookies, just as she had the first time I ever saw her. She gave Bird three hundred kisses and said: “That oughta hold ya ’til I’m home again.” Agnes Miller took ill; I knew it was because Snow was going away from her. She waved her handkerchief from her bedroom window by way of saying farewell. Up until then I hadn’t realized she lived in Olivia and Gerald’s house, that a room in that house was all she had to call home.

I was the last one she hugged before she jumped into the car with her father.

“See you next week,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Next week.”

Snow is not the fairest of them all. And the sooner she and Olivia and all the rest of them understand that, the better. Still, I’d snuck Julia’s records into the kid’s luggage because I didn’t want to leave her with nothing.