Boy, Snow, Bird

1

lately I’ve become the kind of girl who likes to think on paper, settle down with a notepad and a decent pen and an aniseed jawbreaker so big that my back teeth clasp around it as if it were a long-lost part of my skull they’re welcoming home. When I’m older, I’ll be a reporter like Aunt Mia, who isn’t really my aunt in any biological sense, but is much closer to my idea of an aunt than my dad’s sister is. I can usually get Aunt Mia to splash a little wine into my orange juice when Mom’s not around. And she’s not exactly a chore to look at. I’ve observed reactions to her on the street. Women look at her and get this happy “What a waste” expression on their faces, like the sight of her is making them feel good about themselves but also they think someone ought to give her some beauty tips. Aunt Mia wears flat shoes and really practical tortoiseshell hair slides and slacks and blouses in clashing colors; it can get pretty extreme. You think hmmm, could be a story there. She was an ordinary librarian, innocent of any crime, but one day she fell into a giant paint box and has been on the run from the fashion police ever since…

So the women who pass Aunt Mia get a little extra pep to their step, but the men look at her the way I might look at a hot fudge sundae in the hours between lunch and dinner. You know, when you’re not sure if it’s a good idea to go ahead — you’re interested beyond a shadow of a doubt, but you wonder if it might turn out to be a little too much for you. Men seem to realize that Aunt Mia’s already making the most of herself. She and Aunt Viv are probably just as smart as each other, but Aunt Mia’s a lot more educational to be around than Aunt Viv, or she’s more my kind of educational.

Something about Aunt Viv is all curled up at the edges, like — I’ll die if she ever sees this, but she won’t, she won’t — like a piece of old bread. I’m mean. Dad’s warned me about it; I know the risk I run when I find fault with people more often than I look for something to appreciate. It’s like having grit in your eye; you see less and less of the real person standing right in front of you and more and more of the grit in your eye. I get the message. I’ve noticed that she doesn’t keep trying to test his vocabulary, though, so I feel like it’s easy for him not to get cranky with her. Also The Ed Sullivan Show isn’t one of Dad’s favorite TV shows, so when Aunt Viv drops by on a Sunday to watch it with us, it’s not Dad’s parade she’s raining on. Her face whenever the Supremes come on… she’ll try to be girlish and sing along but her eyes say SOS SOS it’s an alien invasion. Aunt Viv with her fingers patting away at her super-straight hair, like she’s trying to wake it up or calm it down or show it off or hide it or who knows… I guess she tries her best to look out for me, but I’ve got better things to do than be precious about my complexion. Aunt Viv says it’s not so much a matter of making improvements, it’s more to do with stopping things from getting worse. But I can’t sit in the shade on a fine day, not when the sun wants me. It’s too much like playing hard to get, which I’ve heard all about and don’t believe in at all.

Aunt Viv lives alone and is always saying how much it suits her, even when no one was even talking about that. She had a fiancé but he abandoned her; she doesn’t know that I know a man ever fell in love with her. Gee-Ma Agnes says he broke the engagement off because of me. Apparently Aunt Viv’s fiancé had no idea she was colored until I was born, then he saw me and said: “Wait a minute…”

I don’t buy it. Aunt Viv wouldn’t speak to me at all if that was true; she’d be the way Grammy Olivia is with me. Grammy Olivia sometimes smiles at me by accident, like when she’s just turned away from somebody else who’s made her laugh and her eyes fall on me before she’s done smiling. Otherwise I get nothing from her. I remember being very small, or her being tall enough for me to expect to see a crown of clouds on her head when I looked up at her — and I made her a daisy-chain bracelet. I put it in her hand and she said “Thank you” and left it on the coffee table, but I picked it up and presented it to her all over again. The second time she held the bracelet over her wrist without letting it touch her skin, as if it looked cheap to her and she didn’t want to put it on in case it gave her a rash. Then she said something to my mother. That’s Grammy Olivia, a voice above my head, not even speaking to me, saying: “She gets darker and darker every day.” Mom didn’t answer, but she pushed me a little behind her, somehow managing to hug me at the same time. A backward hug is the only way I can think of it, Mom putting herself between me and Grammy Olivia. I’m reconsidering. Aunt Viv may have had a lily-livered fiancé after all. If so, then Dad’s right about her, and Aunt Viv’s strength is in not blaming me. Another thing that happened a little while after I was born was that Mr. Clarke at the butcher’s started giving Grammy Olivia extra little bits of cheap meat she hadn’t ordered. Ham hocks and chitterlings. “I guess he figures Livia knows how to cook ’em up real good,” Gee-Ma says, cackling so much she can hardly speak. “Not our Livia.” Mr. Clarke’s just trying to be nice, but Aunt Olivia separates the little bag from the rest of her order and gives it to the housemaid who comes in twice a week, makes her take it home with her, ignoring Gee-Pa Gerald’s “Been too long since I tasted chitlins…”

Grammy Olivia gets extra meat but Aunt Viv lost her fiancé. Do I feel bad for blowing Aunt Viv’s cover? Not really. I accidentally brought truth to light, and bringing truth to light is the right thing to do.

Aunt Mia had a stomachache last week. It wasn’t your usual type of stomachache. You don’t normally call someone to come hold your hand through a stomachache, and that’s what Aunt Mia did. She called Mom at three in the morning, maybe because she knows that Mom never just lets the telephone ring. If it rings when she’s in the shower, she yells: “Don’t just stand there, get the phone! Get the phone!” Aunt Mia called at three in the morning and it woke me up, and I stared at the silvery-blue moons painted on my ceiling, heard Mom talking to Dad. Something-something-something-gotta-look-in-on-Mia. By the time she was downstairs putting her shoes on, I was down there too, pulling on Dad’s old velvet blazer, the one he bought years ago and immediately wished he hadn’t. Mom said: “So it’s like that, huh,” and I said: “You know there’s no school tomorrow.” Mrs. Chen, Louis’s mom, drove us over to Worcester in her taxi. I think Mom tried to pay her extra for her trouble, but Mrs. Chen kept saying: “Not necessary. I don’t sleep much anyway.” Aunt Mia didn’t come to the door, so Mom let herself in with the key she has, and Aunt Mia was in her bed, on top of her sheets, not underneath them, looking greenish with nausea. Mom sat on the bed and tried to get Aunt Mia’s head on her lap but Aunt Mia said: “What, do you want me to puke?” So we just took a hand each and held on. I asked if I could get her anything and she pulled a smile out from somewhere and said what a well-brought-up child I was and, no, she couldn’t ask for anything more. After a while Mom jerked her head to bid me be gone, and I went into the kitchen, poured myself some chocolate milk, and wandered into the parlor to look at Aunt Mia’s wall of heroes. Most of her heroes are colored… like I am. Aunt Mia says she didn’t go out looking for colored heroes. She says that’s just the way it worked out. Mom and Aunt Mia murmured to each other and I studied the faces of journalists who spoke out against inequalities and wouldn’t shut up even when people threatened to kill them. If someone threatens to kill you for speaking up about something they’ve done, they must be feeling their guilt. So maybe that’s how you know you’re on the right track.

There was Ida B. Wells of the Washington Evening Star (“gutsy as hell”), her hair gathered up into a gorgeous pompadour that I’m going to try to copy as soon as my chin will agree to tilt up in just as dignified a way as hers. There was Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle… she’s still very much alive, that one — Aunt Mia got her autograph and tucked it into the frame along with the picture. There was Robert S. Abbott of The Chicago Defender with his bowler hat on, his eyes stern and kind — when I fell asleep, he was the one who stuck up for me. “It is possible to develop a nose for a good story,” he told Charlotta Bass and Ida B. Wells, when they pointed out that I didn’t have one. He borrowed Dad’s voice to say that, and I liked him all the more for it.

I knew that there was more to be discovered about Aunt Mia’s stomachache, and I followed my nose a little, or tried to, anyway, not wanting to disappoint Robert S. Abbott. On the bus home the next afternoon I asked just one question and Mom looked at me with that quick flash in her eyes, the knife look. “Try to remember that it’s none of your business, Bird.”

Something happened, that much is clear, something bigger than indigestion. But I don’t know if I’m ready to cross Mom in order to get this particular scoop. It looks like Aunt Mia’s feeling better now, anyway. I can return to this matter once my skills are honed. I’ll call that choosing my battles.

In the meantime I’ll be finding out who my enemy is, and what exactly it is he or she has got against me. Proof or deduction, I’m not fussy about how I get there. I don’t know what it’s like to wish someone ill. Sure, I’ve occasionally told Louis Chen that I hope a monster eats him, and he’s told me to go boil my head a few times, but that tends to be in the heat of the moment, and anyway we’re getting married once we get old enough, so we don’t have to make nice all of the time.

Gee-Ma Agnes (not my grandmother in any biological sense, but… it’s similar to the way things are with Aunt Mia) says I’ve definitely got one. An enemy, that is. I told her what happens to me sometimes, with mirrors, and she said: “Watch out; that’s your enemy at work, trying to get rid of you.”

I don’t think she was trying to be spooky. She was shelling pistachio nuts and she made her words sound as if they were a comment on the color of the nut meat. People assume Gee-Ma doesn’t have anything to say because she’s small and shaky and doesn’t seem to follow conversations very well. But Gee-Ma can get interested in conversation when she wants to. The stories that make everyone else say “Get outta here” are the stories Gee-Ma takes an interest in. We used to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone together, and she’d slap her knee and crow: “He’s right! Rod Serling is right.” She doesn’t like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie because “Magic is not a joke, Bird.”

Phoebe the housemaid acts like Gee-Ma is too old to move—“You stay right where you are,” she tells her, and dusts carefully around her. She asks Gee-Ma real simple questions, real slowly: “Enjoying that soup, Mrs. Miller?” Phoebe should maybe stop and think of Mrs. Fletcher, my mom’s boss. She’s the same age as Gee-Ma Agnes. Just last year Mrs. Fletcher began living in sin with a bookbinder called Mr. Murphy. I have reason to believe that Mom and Dad interfere with each other pretty regularly; there are those mornings when I find Mom making breakfast and she’s wearing the shirt Dad was wearing just the night before and she hasn’t even buttoned it up, she just uses one of his neckties as a belt. The first moment of seeing Mom like that is always really, really gross, and now it seems that grown-ups just never stop interfering with each other. Me and Mom and probably half of Flax Hill saw Mr. Murphy and Mrs. Fletcher getting all cozy together on a picnic blanket on Farmer’s Green, feeding each other cherries, yet. Their combined age is around one hundred and thirty years, but Mr. Murphy isn’t shy about kissing Mrs. Fletcher’s hand in public. More than once Mrs. Fletcher has laid her head on Mr. Murphy’s shoulder and giggled like she’s never seen a shoulder before. Imagine what those two are like when there’s no one else there. Mrs. Fletcher isn’t even one of the quiet ones, so if that’s the kind of thing she gets up to, then there’s no telling what Gee-Ma’s got up her sleeve.

Gee-Ma’s husband moved back to Mississippi when their only daughter died. “He did invite me along,” Gee-Ma says. “He did invite me along, I’ll give him that.” But she liked Flax Hill better and anyway they hadn’t married for love. She won’t explain what they married for; another thing on my list to find out. She says the main thing is that they didn’t marry for love and neither of them really tried to make it grow, they sort of just expected to love each other after a certain number of years but it didn’t work out that way. All that happened was that she’d be having a nice day until she suddenly realized he’d be back from work in ten minutes, or he’d look at her during a gospel service and the sight of her seemed to get him all upset even though she was wearing a nice dress, and spotless gloves, and a smile.

I’ve seen Gee-Ma’s wedding photos and the “Well, here goes” look her and her husband both had on their faces, but in my head Gee-Ma’s husband is a colored man, not a sort of Italian-looking one. There was a man in Worcester last month… Aunt Mia was walking Mom and me to the bus stop and the man was huddled up in the doorway of a store that had closed up for the night. He drew even farther back into his corner when Aunt Mia tried to put some change into his hand. Words wobbled out from deep inside his beard: “Don’t want no trouble, don’t want no trouble, don’t want no trouble.” There was a glass bottle in his pocket and he folded his hands around it as it bumped against the wall.

Mom tapped my shoulder to make sure I kept walking and she called out: “Just put the money beside him, Mia,” but Aunt Mia didn’t listen until the man pushed her hand away. Then she dropped the coins at his feet and came running after us. “Gin and pride,” she said. Mom said it was most likely misery that was getting to him, not just gin or pride. Some ways of behaving seem distantly related to others. Now when I think of Gee-Ma’s husband getting all upset just because she smiled at him, he looks like the man in Worcester who badly needed the money in Aunt Mia’s hand and pushed it away.

Grammy Olivia says Gee-Ma Agnes’s husband is weak and Gee-Ma’s much better off without him. But Gee-Ma says that at heart her husband is still a boy from Itta Bena who couldn’t get used to not having to take his hat off whenever he speaks to a white person. “You can’t even say ‘the poor fella’—not really,” Gee-Ma says. “He’s probably really glad to be back to Mississippi, relieved that the world’s the right way up again and there are fountains specially marked out for him to drink from. I guess it’s not so different from those prisoners who get to feeling at home behind bars. I forgive him.” Gee-Ma Agnes talking about forgiving people tends to make Grammy Olivia say: “Indeed!” Especially when Gee-Ma tells people she forgives them before they even realize there’s anything they were supposed to apologize for. But Gee-Ma probably means well when it comes to her husband, the evidence of this being that they’re still married, and she remembers him in her prayers.

What I told her about me and mirrors is this:

Sometimes mirrors can’t find me. I’ll go into a room with a mirror in it and look around, and I’m not there. Not all the time, not even most of the time, but often enough. Sometimes when other people are there, but nobody ever notices that my reflection’s a no-show. Or maybe they decide not to notice because it’s too weird. I can make it happen when I move quickly and quietly, dart into a room behind the swinging of the door so it covers me the way a fan covers a face. Maybe I catch the mirror off guard somehow. It starts to look for me—“look for me” isn’t quite right — I know mirrors can’t see. But the image in the glass shifts just a little bit off center, left, then right, then back again, like it’s wondering why it isn’t reflecting all that stands in front of it. I know a girl just came in; now where’s she at?

I swear this is true.

I’m a hide-and-seek champion. I always win. It’s gotten so my friends don’t want to play anymore. “Don’t you think we’re a little old for that now, Bird,” they’ll say. Or they say I cheat. Maybe I do. I don’t know. Does catching the mirror off guard count as cheating? But if they had the option, there’s not a one of them who wouldn’t use it. Connie, Susan, Ruth, even Paula, who breaks out into a sweat every time we make her cross the road before the lights say go.

The first time it happened — this is the time I told Gee-Ma Agnes about — I got scared and I gave the mirror a whack with my shoe, trying to fix it, I guess.

It was just like any other Saturday afternoon except that I walked past my bedroom mirror and something was missing, some tiny, tiny element. I stood still, chuckling; it didn’t seem serious at first. The gap grew and grew. It was me. I wasn’t there. I saw the dusty blue wallpaper behind me, my hot-pink hula hoop hung on its special peg to the left of me. But I shouldn’t have been able to see the whole hoop from where I stood. My head and shoulders should’ve been in the way, but they weren’t, so I broke the mirror, and kept right on hitting it long after it broke, a cartoon mouse squeak coming out of my mouth, loud, loud. And the oval glass, that dear old glass that used to stand on my dresser, it tried to give me what I wanted, tried to give me my face, but it kept showing me bits of faces that weren’t mine. There were slivers of Mom’s face, and Dad’s, and Aunt Mia’s, and Grammy Olivia’s, and others, some shreds no wider than my index finger. I don’t know who they were, there was even a man or two, faces chasing each other like photographic slides when someone’s trying to show you their vacation in a hurry — in the end I had to knock the frame flat and run for Mom, who vanished all the broken glass with no questions asked.

It’s rare for Mom to ask me questions. Maybe she’s the enemy. Seems unlikely, though. We get along, in a big-brother-little-sister kind of way. Mom plays big brother. We can sit together for hours in almost complete silence, her smoking and sharing a magazine with me, reading the other side of the page I’m on. Occasionally she’ll remember where she is and make a comment: “You don’t say much, do you, kid?”

“Must’ve learned that from you.”

“Ha! Got a few ideas of your own, though, haven’t you?”

“Just a few, Mom.”

Mrs. Fletcher tells Mom over and over that she should be making more conversation with me, because apparently I’m at a “dangerous age.” (She’s got to be talking about menstruation. I haven’t started yet, but there’s probably some risk of bleeding to death if you’re taken unawares the first time. I won’t be caught unawares, though. That’s not how I’m going out.) When I was too young to walk home alone, Mom would pick me up from the Chens’ house, and once as we were walking through the woods she put her hand on my head. I looked up and said: “What are you touching my head for?” She said: “You know, all I expect is the unexpected. It’s been like that since the day you were born, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Is there anything you need, kid? What do you need?”

It felt good when she said that. It felt like she really would do anything. Mom looks foreign, like a Russian ice skater; her backdrop ought to be one of those cities that has a skyline topped with onion-shaped domes. I can just see Mom whizzing around with her hands tucked up inside a huge white muff, bloody sparks flying up behind her as the blades on her boots dig up all the hearts she broke before Dad got to her. Customers at the bookstore tend to look surprised when Mom opens her mouth and this New York City voice comes out. Her white hair sways down in tendrils, and her skirts brush the floor — she’s so graceful, swan-necked; when she’s getting all dressed up, she finishes by putting on a simple necklace Dad made, and it’s as good as if he took out a billboard and advertised. There’s that bracelet that winds around her arm too. Even when she wears long sleeves, a platinum snake lies there beneath the cloth, draining its favorite vein drop by drop, or resting until she has instructions for it. If she ever told that snake to come after me, who could stop it? The way snakes swallow small, live creatures, the terrible way they cram their food down with their sticky fangs and their yellow eyes rejoicing — I’ve seen pictures.

For the longest time I thought Mom had bought the bracelet for herself, or that it was something she’d inherited, but then Dad mentioned that he’d made it for her. It isn’t like anything else of his I’ve seen; he works a lot with wood grains and the web patterns you get on the undersides of leaves. A lot of people want to feel natural and connected to the earth right now, that’s how Dad sees it, and folks don’t get as excited about showy pieces as they used to. He said he made Mom’s bracelet out of a misunderstanding, and Mom laughed and said: “Don’t be so sure.” She’s tall too, tall in a way that you only really notice at certain moments. The statues of Greek gods were built two and a half times the size of the average human being; I read that in a book Miss Fairfax lent me. The book describes the magnification as being small enough for the figure to remain familiar, but large enough to make you feel mighty strange standing near it. You sense some imminent threat, but common sense tells you there’s no danger, so you don’t run away. You keep a distance that appears to be a respectful one, and you don’t run away, just keep hovering on the point of doing so. Mom and I have the same eyes. I’m all mixed up about seeing my eyes in a face like hers, her eyes in a face like mine.

Mom told me she would get me whatever I needed, but I didn’t need anything right then. “You tell me when you do,” she said. When I wanted those blue moons painted on my ceiling, she got it done without wanting to know why. We went down to the general store and got the paint right away. When we came back, she fetched out the stepladder and got the moons done in about an hour and a half including a cigarette break. She got the shape of the moons exactly right too. One thing to keep in mind with Mom is that I’d better be sure I really need something before I ask her for it, because she doesn’t give advice. For example, stucco moons might have been better. But you tell Mom “Blue moons, please,” and bam, there they are, enjoy! We’re not close the way Louis and his mom are close, but… while she dabbed away at the ceiling I danced in and out of the room with her ashtray, singing along to the radio: La la means I love you, words I was too shy to say to her without the music, words I don’t remember her ever saying to me. Mom was the only one who immediately saw that I’d dressed up as Alice in Wonderland for fancy-dress day at school. The costume made it glaringly obvious — the white ankle socks, the black Mary Janes, the fat ribbon tied in a bow around my head, the blue dress with the blue and white apron over it — it’s in all the picture books. But when I came downstairs, Dad said: “What a pretty little housekeeper!”

Mom laughed. “Is that what Alice grew up to be?” Then Dad said: “Alice…?” and looked at me again with his head to one side, and we realized he seriously thought I’d dressed up as a housekeeper. He began: “But Alice…” and Mom said: “Yes? What? What’s that about Alice?” and he mumbled something about Alice’s hair being long and suddenly became fascinated with the newspaper. But everyone was like that, all day. “Who are you supposed to be?” they’d say, giving up after guessing “housekeeper” or “washerwoman.” Then the next thing would be: “But Alice…” the beginning of a sentence nobody seemed to know how to finish. Louis Chen’s sailor “costume” went over well, maybe because it was real — his grandfather had worn it when he’d been a crew member on a fishing boat off the West Coast about a million years ago. He tried to give his award for best costume to me; he said mine was much better (once I’d explained it to him) but I couldn’t let him do that. He’d won fair and square. After school Mom and I went into the photo booth at the Mitchell Street diner and pulled terrible faces to scare away people who don’t know Alice when they see her, but in the last box of the photo strip we’re having a laughing fit. It turns out that the average annoyed American only needs to pull three terrible faces before she feels better.

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

Possibilities:

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

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

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

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

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

f. I’m a nut job. (No comment.)

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

What is known about this Bird Whitman?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking at this from the outside makes me afraid, as if I’m not Bird at all, and never was. Gee-Ma makes no allowance for me being a middle school kid when she talks to me, but then again I think she’s getting less and less able or willing to fix her mind on exactly who it is she’s talking to. When she calls me “child,” it feels as if she were trying to turn me into a different girl, the one she’d rather have there with her. There. It’s said.

Dad always comes back from Boston with something Snow wants me to have. The stuff she sends isn’t quite right for me — pairs of pink hair ribbons, meant for pigtails, for instance. I wear my hair short. I mean short-short. It looks like a cap of curls clinging to my head and I like that better than braids or bushiness. (Bushiness looks so good, but hurts so bad under the comb. I used to have to go to Tubman Street to get my hair braided. Maybe Merva Fairfax wove blessings or ill wishes into my hair with her nimble fingers…) Snow might think this is just a phase I’m going through and that I’ll want to grow my hair out soon. Pink, though? No.

Other things Snow has sent me: papier-mâché wings to wear on my shoulders… those looked great, but didn’t fit. The straps were too small, or my arms too big. There was also an unusual music box that I found cute in the daytime. My idea of a music box used to be that it was a nice version of a jack-in-the-box — all you had to do was open the lid and the music twinkled out at you and maybe there was a ballerina twirling around in there too. This music box didn’t have a lid. The display case was a wolf, stood on all four paws, and made of cloudy gray glass that looked as if it were full of breath. His head was lowered to the ground and his tongue was sticking out a little bit — you could almost hear him panting. He had a hole right in the middle of him, bigger than his stomach could ever be, really it was heart space, lung space, and stomach space combined. The hole was filled by a little tin doll, painted peach, smiling and wearing a red felt cape. She had a lot of joints to her and you could take her out of the wolf’s stomach and stuff her in again. To hear the music wound up inside her you had to turn a key. I couldn’t do it without wincing. Having to turn that key in her back just to hear thirty seconds of Peter and the Wolf… her smile was so hopeful: Ya having fun? Are ya, are ya?

When it got dark, I didn’t like to turn my back on the music box. It never made any moves. I think it was me who changed. At night I tend to wonder where things come from. I’d look at the wolf and at Red Riding Hood with her knees up, not even playing dead, openly living there, and I’d try to think who could’ve made them and what that person meant by it. It wasn’t like the things people make around here, which are just so pretty they make you smile and feel lucky and rich just to be looking at them. The music box was closer to the snake on Mom’s arm. That was another gift that had to be given away in the end, like the wings were. It isn’t Snow’s fault; it’s just that we don’t know each other.

2

dad says newspapers don’t hire reporters with bad grades. Aunt Mia says grades aren’t as important as being able to learn on the job. I know whom I’d rather believe. It’d be nice to get an A for once, but that would mean getting organized and doing all my homework at home instead of scribbling a few half-witted sentences about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or whatever it is at lunch break an hour before the report is due. I’m not completely hardened. I do still die a little bit inside when Miss Fairfax holds an essay of mine up to the light and asks: “Bird Whitman, do I see mayonnaise? Again?” That leads to me doing more homework in detention, where I work with an eye on the clock and often don’t finish a sentence if it means staying a second longer than I have to. Louis waits for me, and every time he waits he says it’s the last time. He only talks like that to show his independence; the boys in his class see him waiting and say I’ve got him well trained. I just look at him and say: “You’re a pal, Louis.” I tell him I don’t take him for granted. I tell him I honestly don’t know why he bothers with me. And he actually blushes—it’s the cutest thing in the world — and grabs my schoolbag and carries it to our next destination. Class work in class, and homework at home, I’d be a better student and a better daughter if I stuck to that, but I went and had a bad Monday at school and I brought it home with me.

It started at recess. I was lying on a bench listening to Connie Ross going over her half of the poem we’d had to learn for Spanish class: Caminante, son tus huellas / el camino, y nada más; / caminante, no hay camino… it was a poem I was falling in love with, I think. I must’ve been, because I’d whisper a couple of lines from it to myself or to the cobwebs: Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. The poem tells me it’s no big deal that I’m not like Snow. I can be another thing; I’m meant to be another thing.

Connie practiced and then I practiced, and we were excited, we were word perfect, maybe I was going to get my first A grade for this. Louis was a few yards away, playing at being a boxer; he and Jerry Fallon were mainly just sidestepping and jabbing their fists at each other, occasionally taking a dive as one or the other of them got hit by a fake knockout punch. Louis was commentating as well as fighting: “I’m Ah Wing Lee, Oregon State’s Chinese Lullaby, you’re Hubert ‘Kid’ Dennis of Montana, the year is 1933, we’re in Portland and this is our grudge match — yeah, you defeated me once, but once is all you get — you spring left, I spring left—”

A girl in Louis’s class named Barbara Thomas stepped up, beckoned to Louis, and whispered in his ear. It’s not that I’m the jealous type — I noticed that he’d stopped commentating before I noticed the girl Barbara whispering away into his ear. When she’d finished, he laughed, shrugged, said he wasn’t going to waste any steam on a dumb prank, and went back to his boxing match. I knew that fight and commentary inside out from reenactments in Louis’s front yard. “I swing… you duck right… you think maybe you stand a chance, you come up and find yourself in the middle of a storm, there’s nowhere to turn, fists coming at you from every which way, you guard your head on one side and there’s already another knock incoming on the other side — you’re about to drop, oh, you’re down!”

When it’s just he and I, Louis lets me be Ah Wing Lee. Each time he switches to the role of referee at the end and lifts my arm and declares me the winner, I go weak at the knees for real. How corny is that?

I’d been minding the boy’s jacket, and when he came over to the bench for it, I asked him what Barbara had been whispering about. He didn’t want to tell me, said I didn’t own him and he could have a private conversation with any girl he pleased, but I broke him down in the end. Someone had written LOUIS CHEN IS A VIETCONG in yellow chalk down at the other end of the school yard. Barbara wanted him to hear it from a friend first.

“That’s not actually the dumbest thing I ever heard, but it’s in the top ten,” was all I said, and we went back to class and forgot about it until the head teacher’s voice came over the PA system, instructing the “person or persons responsible for the yellow-chalk graffiti” to report to his office immediately.

So then everyone started asking each other, “What graffiti?” Some people had already seen it, and they told what they’d seen while others looked at me as if they expected to hear my opinion. There was no opinion for me to give. I said to Connie: “Dumb, right?” Connie said: “We’re above and beyond this,” and we went up and began to say the poem we’d learned, but the headmaster got back onto the PA system and cut my part of the recital in half. No one had turned themselves in, so he’d selected two members of the tenth grade at random — they were to go and scrub the wall immediately, remaining in the yard for as long as it took to remove the graffiti. He stressed that he didn’t think the two boys he was about to name were the culprits, but one of the boys was Louis’s friend Jerry Fallon. That sucked. It also got the whole class talking again — some people coughed out “Vietcong” into their hands while my Spanish dried up, and I wondered how big the letters chalked onto that wall were, that two people were needed to scrub them away.

By the end of the next lesson, word had got around that Louis was inviting whoever it was who had made the Vietcong jibe to meet him on the corner of Ivorydown and Pierce Road at three forty-five p.m. sharp, where he’d school them in geography the hard way. That’s a lonely turning off Ivorydown, a spot eleventh graders choose for robbing ninth and tenth graders of their lunch money. I met Louis by his locker and said: “Tell me it’s a rumor. You’re not really going to fight over this?”

He said: “Stay out of it.”

“What’s changed since recess?”

Louis sighed. “It’s getting out of hand. People are saying stuff. Gotta shut ’em up. You’ve got detention anyway. Call me at six and I’ll tell you what happened.”

There was no time to get any more out of him, but in my math class I heard so much idiocy I could hardly stand it.

“I’ll bet Chen wrote that himself, just ’cause he felt like getting talked about today.”

“He probably is a Vietcong.”

“Vietcong just love coloreds. And coloreds love them right back.”

I forced a laugh. Sometimes all the other kids want is for you to show you’re a good sport. If you stand out, you can’t expect people not to mention it.

“Yeah, like that boxer…” That was Larry Saunders, pretending he couldn’t remember Muhammad Ali’s name when it was practically written on his heart. “Didn’t he say he’s on their side? He won’t fight in Vietnam ’cause he’s an American Vietcong.”

“He didn’t say that,” I pointed out, on the brink of flipping my table over and my neighbor’s too. “He just said he didn’t have any quarrel with them. It’s not the same thing.”

“Words, words. If you’re not fighting ’em, you’re on their side,” Kenneth Young said. Kenneth and Larry both have fathers who served in Korea, and they talk about their big brothers who are serving the country right now — Larry’s big brother is an air force officer and fits the muscle-bound action man profile pretty well, but Kenneth’s brother works at a naval base. Kenneth calls it “security” and makes out that his brother is important — I asked Dad and apparently “security” means checking passes and pushing buttons to open doors. Big deal. But Dad says that both Kenneth and Larry are afraid that their brothers will get badly injured or die. “Their brothers are their heroes, and if anything happens to William Saunders or Robert Young, Kenneth and Larry might blame everyone around them, because we’re the citizens those men will have died for, and maybe they won’t believe we were worth it. Are we? Have we ever been worth it, any of the times before?” Dad was having a Gee-Ma moment when he said that; he was talking to somebody who wasn’t me, somebody who answered silently and made him hang his head. (I have a letter to Snow that I never sent. Dear Snow, Have you really got to be everywhere?) I was supposed to be in bed, and Dad was just talking. Late at night in the parlor, with a drink in his hand, telling his thoughts to Julia’s piano. If Mom had been there, she’d have said “Oh Lord” and made him eat something to soak up the drink.

Okay, so Kenneth Young was bound to feel some type of way about people who deny that there’s any duty for them to do. And “Shut up, Fat Kenneth” wasn’t the most mature or persuasive response I could’ve made to him, but I had a feeling that Connie, Ruth, and Paula would’ve studied their fingernails and failed to back me up no matter what I’d said. The others went on and on. They sounded like they were kidding around, but the things they said—Colored folks are so angry these days, lose their rag over nothing at all, rawwwrrrr, like wild animals. My dad says those Black Panthers are Vietcongs just waiting to happen. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile, gun us all down in broad daylight.

I skipped detention. I was first out of my history class and met Louis at the school gates; it was easy to spot him because he was on his own, exposed, down on one knee tying his shoelace. I put my foot down next to his.

“Hi.”

He didn’t look up, took his time getting the bow to droop just right. “Hi.”

“Let’s go.”

“You’re not involved.”

“The hell I’m not. You need me. If it turns out to be a girl we’re up against, I’ll punch her for you. Hurry, before Miss Fairfax comes.”

The other kids went quiet when we walked past them, but we didn’t look behind us to see if we were being followed. He said he’d told his other friends not to come. That shouldn’t have stopped them, but there was no point in saying so. He didn’t seem worried at all, but I was shaking. I don’t like real fights because people get so caught up in them, even watching them you get all caught up in them, and if that’s what it’s like watching them, how do the people who are right in the middle of the fight know how to find their way to the end of it alive? A few years ago one boxer killed another in the ring, just kept hitting him and hitting him, didn’t realize the other guy was dead, didn’t mean to kill him, just wanted to win. I won’t let Louis take up that sport professionally. He’s going to have to find something else to do. Louis’s arm brushed mine and for a moment I thought he was going to try to hold my hand. “Don’t even think about it,” I said. We’d never have lived it down if anyone saw.

“You’re really pretty, Bird,” he said, looking straight ahead of us. We were walking up Ivorydown, and the wind was blowing leaf scraps into our eyes.

“You don’t have to say that.”

I’d have liked for him to say my name again, though. You know how it is when someone says your name really well, like it means something that makes the world a better place. In Louis Chen’s case, he sometimes says my name as if it were a lesser-known word for bacon.

“I wanted to say it,” he said. “Don’t get bigheaded, but I think you’re the prettiest girl in school.”

I pretended not to hear. We reached the corner of Pierce Road and Ivorydown and waited with our backs up against the rough bark of a tree trunk. After ten minutes we decided, with a mixture of disgust and relief, that Yellow Chalk Guy (or Girl) wasn’t going to show, and we were ready to leave when three hefty boys from the eleventh grade turned up. These three didn’t take lunch money; they were less predictable than that. They might stop you and give you a stash of comic books, or they might rip up your homework. We knew their names, but never said them in case it made them appear. One of them was directly descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter; that one’s mother had mentioned it at one of Grammy Olivia’s coffee hours. Mom says everybody immediately began to feel oppressed by their humble backgrounds because they’d forgotten (or didn’t know) that anyone who’s descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne is also a descendant of John Hathorne, the Salem judge who put just about as many innocent people to death as he could, so was it any wonder that Hawthorne was so good at describing what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night.

“Did we miss it? Did he show up yet?” one of the eleventh graders asked.

“Who?” I asked, since Louis was taking too long to reply.

“The guy who called your friend here a Vietcong.”

“Do you think we’d still be standing here if he had shown up? What do you think we’d be doing here?” I asked. I got away with it because I put the question as if I were curious rather than just giving sass. But one of the boys told Louis: “I guess your girlfriend likes to talk.”

More kids showed up, in threes and fours and fives. They stood at a distance from us, filling the newcomers in on what was happening. “They’re waiting for the guy who called that boy there a Vietcong. Boy got sore about it, says he’s going to bust this other guy’s head.” Within half an hour we were surrounded, Louis and me, caught in a circle of snickering kids, without a single one of our lousy so-called friends in sight. Louis checked his watch and took a couple of steps forward, trying to look purposeful, I guess, trying to look like a boy who didn’t know about everybody else but he was going home. Nobody said we couldn’t leave, but the circle got tighter and people stood shoulder to shoulder.

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

“Yeah, he probably just had detention.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s a hard woman, Bird.”

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

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

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

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

Dear Boy,

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

All my love,

Snow

Dear Boy,

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

All my love,

Snow

After a few more letters, Snow learned cursive.

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

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

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

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

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

Hi, Bird,

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

Yours affectionately,

Snow

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

Don’t you let this get the better of you, Bird, I said to myself. You write to Snow and let her know she’s got a sister if she still wants one. I wonder if Snow knows that story; I don’t remember all of it, but at one point a woman takes two toads, the ugliest she can find, and she whispers spells to them and sends them to her stepdaughter’s bath, where they’re supposed to lie on the girl’s head and her heart and make the girl ugly inside and out. And the toads do as they’re told, they find the girl and one jumps up onto her head and the other onto her heart, but in the blink of an eye they turn to roses, because that girl’s the real deal and there’s no harming her.

The phone rang. I knew it was Louis, and I patted the phone apologetically as I walked past it. Dad has a photograph of Snow in a heart-shaped frame, beside the one of me and him and Mom wearing cotton-candy beards. I unlocked Dad’s studio and sat there looking at Snow and her soft, open smile and the pink bow in her long wavy hair. I looked at her until I began to feel as if she could see me and was smiling specifically at me, and then I started my reply all over again.

Dear Snow,

Yes, I can read now. I don’t recall ever having met you, but I’m sure that even as a baby I must have been very proud to be associated with a girl like you whom I’ve only ever heard good things about. I’m your usual kind of thirteen year old with the usual kind of personality — usual kind of usual kind of, good grief, oh well — except that I don’t always show up in mirrors. I’m hoping that might help me in my future career someday, though I’m not yet sure exactly how. I don’t know what’s deceived you into thinking I’m cool, but if it’s the way I turn up the cuffs of my pants, I only do that because Hannah Philby came back from her French vacation wearing her pants that way and everyone said “ooh la la” and copied her. So you see I do what I can to be just like everybody else.

Please tell me more about yourself (you’re almost twenty-one now, is that right?) and about Uncle John and Aunt Clara, and I hope it won’t be too much trouble for you to address your reply to me care of Louis Chen at 17 Duke Street. To tell you the truth I’m getting shy, Snow, so I’ll have to give you the info about Louis Chen next time and end this letter here.

Just your usual kind of sister,

Bird Whitman

PS — Can I ask you something? Do you understand how beautiful you are? Does anyone ever tell you, or does everyone assume that you already know? And does it ever bother you, or do you mostly just enjoy it? I haven’t put the question very well and I’m sorry about that. I may have made it sound like I’m jealous, and naturally I am. But I also want to know what it’s like.

PPS — I’d really appreciate it if you could skip any false modesty in your reply. If you reply. Hope you do. Thanks.

3

a week later Dad made another trip to Boston and brought me back a gift from Snow — a small, square, white birdcage with a broken door. I hung the cage from the ceiling and watched it swing, and I was happy. I can’t explain, maybe it isn’t something that needs explaining, how the sight of a broken cage just puts you up on stilts. The promise that the cage will always be empty, that its days as a jailhouse are done. So this was how it was going to be between Snow and me. No more words, it was too late for them, I’d asked her the wrong questions. She must have wished for an easier sister, one who asked her what to do about boys or how to turn the tables on the latest girl to snub me in the school cafeteria. I couldn’t grant that wish. But I wanted to send something back to her, something more than just two words Dad said to her on my behalf. I didn’t have anything she was likely to want. I had some handsome seashells, but everybody who’s ever been to the beach probably has seashells. You don’t even realize you’ve been collecting them like crazy until you try to sit down and they stab you through your shorts. My scrapbook filled with headlines from the Flax Hill Record was too much of an inside joke to send, and might only remind Snow of all the things she’d missed out on. Not that she’d missed out on much. Marriages, christenings, funerals, an asbestos scare, a spate of prank calls made to the mayor, a small fortune in Mexican pesos discovered in one of the drawers of an old pie safe. I’d also kept a record of the time a strong wind blew over Mr. Andrew Luckett’s barn and all the bats that had been living there hid out in the woods and then flew around town for three nights, looking for somewhere else to live. In the “famous people I have met” section there were the news clippings that covered a dispute between the Hammonds and the Websters over the origins of a meatloaf recipe that had been published in Good Housekeeping under Veronica (née Webster) Murray’s name. Both sides hired lawyers and the matter almost went to court, but Suky Hammond discovered that she’d misread a word in her great-grandma’s recipe, a word that changed everything, and everyone agreed that the only person to blame was Suky Hammond’s great-grandma, since her handwriting was barely readable, and even she would’ve been mortified to learn that she’d been the cause of such a falling-out between friends and neighbors.

Mom sells invisible ink pens at Mrs. Fletcher’s store, and I decided to buy one for Snow. Sometimes you write down barefaced lies, or words you don’t really mean, just to see how they look, and it’s comforting to think that after six hours the words will just disappear. No need to show them the door, they’ll just be seeing themselves out. I found it comforting anyway, and hoped Snow agreed. I’d probably get a discount because I was the manager’s daughter and also because a little handwritten sign in the store window said SPECIAL PRICES FOR MALADJUSTED INDIVIDUALS. INQUIRE WITHIN, but I’d still need money. Preferably money I’d earned. Ruth Cohen was giving up her paper route because she wanted more sleep on Saturdays, and I talked to her about taking her place.

A couple of days after that Mom and I had to shop for the week’s food. I go to the grocery store with her as often as I can because it’s better if I have final approval of the things she buys. Her combinations can be a little Martian otherwise. She made us lobster thermidor once, because someone in a novel she was reading had gone on a crazy lunchtime rampage and lobster thermidor was what she’d had. The flavors were really interesting (Dad’s words, not mine) but for a whole day afterward my stomach felt as if it had been kidnapped, boiled, and then deep-fried. I bet she put huckleberries in the sauce, or some other ingredient that isn’t supposed to go into lobster thermidor.

For a moment at the grocery store I thought Mom was going to say something about Snow. She knew I’d kept my letter, the one Snow had written to me, asking if I could read yet. What Mom did was leave her jewelry box on her dressing table, wide open so I could see that all the other letters had been taken out. And she’d started blushing whenever I caught her eye. She’d be talking and I’d tilt my head at her and her face would flood dark red. At the grocery store she said: “Bird… Bird, you listen to me,” and she was blushing again, my red and white mother. I said: “Yes, Mom?” and there was a nasty spike in my voice, but I didn’t care. She ought to know that if you want to set yourself up as queen and have everything the way you want it and keep sisters apart then you’re not going to have a big fan club. She ought to know that where there’s a queen there’s often a plot to overthrow her. She ended up just looking down at the shopping list and reading it aloud, and I picked the items up and put them in our cart, except for the stuff that sounded like it’d come out of one of her books. I’ve never known a grocery store to stock larks’ tongues or quince preserves anyhow.

Mom came and sat on the end of my bed that night, took a long, deep pull on her cigarette, and sent a jet of smoke up toward the birdcage. “You value objectivity, right?”

I decided not to give her an answer, but she wouldn’t leave without one. A skin-crackling silence rose up between us. It was new and truly awful and nothing like our other silences.

To put a stop to it I said: “What’s ‘objectivity’ mean?”

“Don’t give me that, Miss Reading-Age-of-Sixteen-Plus. Miss Fairfax has started saying the only reason your schoolwork’s sloppy is because you’re bored; it doesn’t challenge you.”

“No… I’m just lazy, Mom. And I try to be objective, but I keep forgetting.”

“I’m asking you a favor. I want you to concentrate on being as objective as you can about your sister.” (Whoever heard of anyone being objective about their sister?) “She’s a pretty convincing replica of an all-around sweetie pie, but… I think being objective may be the only way you’ll see that there’s something about her that doesn’t quite add up. Something almost like a smell, like milk that’s spoiled. Maybe it’s just as simple as her being an overpetted show pony; I don’t know. I’d be happy never to find out. You want to play investigator, so investigate. I’m here on standby. But… Bird, what could you have to say to a replica? You’re so much yourself. Whatever else happens, don’t let her mess that up. Okay?”

If that was Mom’s attempt to make me believe that my sister was bad news, it was a flop.

“Look — I’ve got to get up early tomorrow,” I said.

I wasn’t being mean — Aunt Mia was taking me to a conference for teen journalists. It was being held in Rhode Island, and I had special permission to take the day off school.

“Right,” Mom said. “Right. Hey, sweet dreams.”

I closed my eyes but she stayed in my room. She walked over to the window, drew the curtains around her, and stood there, smoking. It had been a foggy day and she’d done this before, on other foggy days — I knew she liked the view from my window, liked to trace the blurry shape of the hill with one finger. I was mad at her but glad that she was watching over me. I don’t know exactly when she left. I woke up a couple of times and she hadn’t left my room — an owl said tyick tyick outside my window, and the curtains rustled and Mom muttered: “Tyick tyick yourself, owl.” In the morning she was gone. She’d killed four spiders. There were no bodies, but their webs gaped at me.

—

the conference wasn’t too bad. I was there to eavesdrop for Aunt Mia. She was writing an article about what to expect from the journalists of the future, and she figured they’d clam right up if there was a grown-up around. I didn’t get very many quotes for her — the journalists of the future were introverts. They listened to the speakers up on stage, took notes, and occasionally asked each other how to spell a word. Some of them looked suspiciously like jocks and cheerleaders who’d put on eyeglasses and intelligent expressions just for the chance to be around kids from other schools, but apart from that I enjoyed being part of a silent, highly observant crowd that stored its opinions up until they were good and ready. I befriended a girl named Yasmin Khoury — she was sixteen, and looked like the princess of a faraway land, but claimed that her father was a janitor. We called ourselves the Brown People’s Alliance, though she said I was only just brown enough to qualify, so she’d have to be the spokesperson until we got a few more members. We sat together at lunch break, drinking ice-cold milk out of wineglasses.

Yasmin said: “So… have you got a boyfriend?”

I nodded.

“Really?”

“Ouch.”

Yasmin patted the long braid that ran down her back. “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. You should break up with him, though. Before it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“How do I put this… boys take up a lot of thinking time.”

“They do?” (I’d never considered Louis to be a time-tabled activity before. I love, and I mean love the way his hair falls across his forehead in a wave, and come to think of it, the time I spend thinking about pushing that wave of black hair out of his eyes could definitely be put to better use. His friends say: “Cut that hair, Chen,” but he reminds them that it was a haircut that drained the mighty Samson of his strength. Yes, the boy I’m sweet on can be such a nerd sometimes.)

Yasmin Khoury had another question: “Do you know what a lobotomy is?”

“I think so. It’s when they operate and remove parts of your brain, right?”

“Right. Boyfriends are the same thing. They shrink your brain. Any female who really wants to be able to think for herself shouldn’t be wasting her time on boys.”

“Oh.”

“So are you going to break up with your boyfriend?”

“Uh… maybe. If we stop liking each other or something.”

She was beginning to look around for somebody older and more revolutionary to talk to, so I asked a question to distract her. “What do you spend your thinking time on, anyway?”

She set her glass down on the table between us. “I think about things that are gone from the world.”

“What things?”

“Well… the ancient wonders. The libraries at Antioch and Timbuktu, the hanging gardens at Babylon, the ringing porcelain of Samarkand. The saddest thing isn’t so much that all that stuff is gone… in a way it’s kind of enough that it was all here once… but now it’s all just garbled rumors a brown girl’s father tells her until he thinks she’s gotten too big for bedtime stories. None of the stuff that’s gone has been replaced in any substantial way, and that depresses the hell out of me. Oh, never mind. Sorry. Forget it.”

“Well, I won’t. We’re the replacement.”

“The Brown People’s Alliance?”

“Do you see anybody else volunteering?”

She laughed. “No pressure, huh…”

“So. Do you still think boyfriends and, uh, lobotomies are the same thing?”

“Yup. Nothing’s going to change that.”

I didn’t tell Aunt Mia about the Brown People’s Alliance because I know how she is. Nothing’s off-limits with her; she would’ve put it in the newspaper and tried to pass it off as cute. She used to mention dumb convictions of mine in her articles, though Mom banned her from using my name: A six-year-old girl of my acquaintance won’t touch canned tuna fish because she believes it to be the flesh of mermaids. Words cannot adequately describe her solemn, speechless anger as tuna salad is served and consumed. It’s the anger of one who knows that this barbarism will go down in history and the sole duty of the powerless is to bear witness. “Reason with the kid,” I hear you cry. “Set the record straight.” Don’t you think we’ve tried? Nothing can be done to convince her that canned tuna really is fish. Were Chicken of the Sea to remove all mermaids from their packaging and advertising overnight, she’d only call it a cover-up. She quit making those little mentions when she realized that most of her readers thought I was her daughter. In their letters to the editor people kept writing things like “as the mother of a young child, Mia Cabrini ought to know…”

“So that’s all you’ve got for me?” Aunt Mia asked, after I told her what little I’d managed to overhear. We were driving home in her little pink car. When she slowed down, I thought she was going to fling open my door and tell me to get out and walk, but actually it was because there was a stoplight ahead.

“That’s all I’ve got. Sorry.”

Aunt Mia said: “Somehow I doubt that, but have it your way. You’re a deep one, Bird. Just like your mother.”

Don’t say I’m like her. Don’t say I’m like her. That’s what I was yelling inside.

“Hey, Bird—”

“Yeah?”

“Do I look forty?”

“Forty years old?” I asked, trying to buy time.

“Yes, forty years old.”

Her eyes flicked up toward the rearview mirror. I was sitting in the backseat because she doesn’t like to have anyone sitting next to her while she is driving. She says it makes her feel crowded in. I hadn’t shown up in her mirror at all that car ride. I begged that missing slice of me — hair, cheek, chin, and the top of my arm — to appear behind her before she started to feel funny about not seeing it there, but the mirror didn’t care whether Aunt Mia felt funny or not, or it was my reflection that didn’t care. Thanks a lot, rearview mirror. Between talking and watching the road and trying not to crash her car, Aunt Mia’s attention was fully booked anyway. Dad drives and Mrs. Chen drives but Aunt Mia just gets behind the wheel and hopes it’s another one of her lucky days. For a split second she lifted her hand to adjust the mirror — I could tell she was starting to feel funny, starting to feel that something didn’t fit, but couldn’t figure out exactly what — then she said, “Ha,” more to herself than to me, and looked ahead of her again.

“Well? Do I look forty?”

“Yeah.”

She muttered something in Italian. I think she was cursing.

“But aren’t you older than forty anyway?”

“Cara… this ice you’re skating on is very thin.”

I told her that she was obviously also gorgeous, but she said she didn’t want to hear about gorgeous. She’d heard me calling a grilled cheese sandwich gorgeous just last week.

Neither of us said anything for a while, then I asked if she was okay.

“Sure I am.”

“But your stomachache…”

“Stomachache? Oh. Stomachs. Sometimes they ache. That’s life.”

She kept her eyes on the road and got her smile right on the second try. I sat back and told myself that I was letting her keep her secret, that I could find out whenever I wanted. If I was able to mimic Mom’s voice, that might even have been true. I could have called Aunt Mia up and got her talking. But Mom is impossible to copy. I try and try, and each try sounds less like her. I’m not able to play Mom’s voice back in my head the way I can other people’s. I’m beginning to think that it’s my ear. Maybe I don’t hear Mom properly in the first place.

—

louis chen slipped me a flower-scented envelope when he came over that dinnertime. Bird Whitman, c/o Louis Chen… Snow had perfected her handwriting to a copperplate script. I stuck the letter into the pocket of my overalls, where it rustled impatiently as we watched Batman and Louis tried to get me to say “Sorry, toots… I’m antisocial” just the way Catwoman said it. Everyone at school had moved on from Louis’s being a Vietcong, and he said there were no hard feelings. (I had some, but he didn’t ask me.) The new thing was a note someone had pinned to Carl Green’s locker. The note read BARBARA THOMAS IS FAST and inquiring minds wanted to know whether this was true, and what Barbara Thomas was going to do to try to prove her innocence. Louis looked as if he was feeling sorry for her, especially when I pointed out that the only way she could prove she wasn’t fast was by never kissing another boy until the day she died. But I couldn’t think of a better person for such a thing to happen to, so I laughed. Going to middle school in the same building as the high school students makes you see the reality. School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it’s getting better or worse. But really it’s the same thing for years and years.

Dear Bird,

Your letter was such a wonderful surprise; really it was. I’m still thinking about how to answer the question in your postscript. I wasn’t expecting you to insist on honesty. Don’t you find that most people try to make each other say things that aren’t true? Maybe because it’s easier, and because it saves time, and… now it sounds like I’m trying to sell you dinner that comes in a can. (“So they got us eatin’ dog food now,” Uncle J says.)

I haven’t met very many people who seem to want me to say what I really think. So I’m out of practice. Wait for the next letter. I’ve got a question for you, though — what do you mean when you say that you “don’t always show up in mirrors”?

Best love from

Your sister,

Snow

Hi, Snow,

It’s great that you wrote back. Thanks for the birdcage! Please find enclosed an extra-special pen. Wait’ll you find out what it does; you’ll flip.

I’m writing this to you from detention; I’d better tell you right off that I’m not a delinquent or anything, but I’m frequently in detention. I’ve got this piece of paper underneath an essay about Flax Hill back in 1600, and every couple of minutes I turn the page of my notepad and write to you a little more. I don’t know how much more I can say about Flax Hill back in 1600. According to the textbooks, this town was just a big grassy field and some primitive peoples, but Miss Fairfax says finding out more about the plants and what they could be used for is a way of finding out more about the people. So I’m listing plants that grew here back then. Clammy ground-cherry, starved panic grass, jack-in-the-pulpit, scaldweed, nimblewill — don’t they sound like the ingredients of some terrifying potion? I don’t think those are the real names for those plants. I mean, the people who saw those kinds of plants every day wouldn’t have given them names like that. I’m guessing somewhere along the line it was decided that the Native American names weren’t important because they were too difficult to spell, and then, abracadabra, scaldweed and panic grass. The other day I met a girl who said a lot of things are gone from the world and seemed to feel kind of cheated, and I guess this is just another thing she’d get disgusted about.

About being honest: so far I haven’t noticed anybody picking out lies for other people to tell. Please give an example. Dad may have already told you that nothing ever happens around here.

When I say I don’t always show up in mirrors, that is exactly what I mean, i.e., it is a statement of fact.

Your detained sister,

Bird

Dear Snow,

It was nice of you to reply to me using the pen I sent you, but as you may have realized by now, the ink goes invisible after a few hours, and all I can say is it’s a good thing you used a different pen for the address or the letter wouldn’t have reached me at all. I tried to retrieve your words by tracing over the marks the pen made on the paper, but the result leaves me hopelessly confused, so be a pal and send it again—

Bird

Dearest Bird,

The incident of the disappearing letter is only one tenth of the mischief that gift of yours caused in my life, but thanks anyway. I wanted my kid sister back and I got her back with a vengeance. Sisters come with a lot of benefits — let me know if you’re ever in the mood for reading a really long poem and I’ll send you “Goblin Market.”

For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray,

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands.

I used to think that was stuff a mom should do for you — I guess I felt I needed someone in my life to do those things and decided it should be a mom. But a sister or a friend, or a combination of both, that works too. Let’s be those kinds of sisters if we can.

In my other letter I asked if you’re aware of what happens to girls who say that they don’t always appear in mirrors. Doctors get involved, Bird. Sometimes girls like that end up in clinics out in the middle of nowhere, being forced into ice baths and other terrible things I won’t write about here. I just want you to be really sure you mean what you said. Are you sure?

AML,

Snow

Dear Snow,

Was that supposed to scare me? I’m already in the middle of nowhere. And, yes, I’m sure. It obviously bothers you, so let’s just talk about something else.

Bird

Bird,

I was only asking like that because I don’t always show up in mirrors, either. For years I wondered whether it’s all right or not, but there’s been no one to ask, so I’ve decided that I feel all right about it. It’s a relief to be able to forget about what I might or might not be mistaken for. My reflection can’t be counted on, she’s not always there but I am, so maybe she’s not really me…

… Well, what is she then? I guess we’ll find out someday, but I’m not holding my breath. I think that maybe mirrors behave differently depending on how you treat them. Treating them like clocks (as almost everybody seems to) makes them behave like clocks, but treating them as doors — does any of this make sense to you? Yes, no?

My heart used to stop dead whenever I thought someone else had noticed. But I’ve found that other people usually overlook it, or if they notice, they think it’s something the matter with them, not me. Four times in my life so far someone’s started to ask me about it… “You know, for a second I thought…” and I’ve looked at them all mystified, as if they were talking gibberish. Then they start worrying about clinics and ice baths and soon after that they dry up. So, yes, when you say that it also happens to you, and you refuse to take it back — well. That unsettles me. Of course it does.

Either you’re lying or you’re the other thing — I don’t even want to write it down. But if you’re the other thing then I am too. And why would you lie? I’ve decided to believe you. Maybe it means we’re not supposed to be apart. Or… there’ll be some kind of mayhem next time we’re together.

Aunt Clara and Uncle John send you greetings. And I send you love

as always,

Snow

Dear Snow,

Yes, you’re grown up and I’m not. You’ve made that very clear. Have you forgotten how it felt when you were thirteen and people tried to humor you?

I guess you’d really like for us to have something in common, and that’s why you’re pretending you know what I mean about mirrors. But we have a father in common. That’s more than enough. I strongly recommend that you talk about something else in your next letter.

Yours respectfully,

Bird N. Whitman

4

Hi, Sis,

Here I am, talking about something else: our Aunt Clara. She’s a marvel. There’s a photo of her enclosed but she doesn’t photograph well. She won’t mind me saying that. She’s so lively in person, she’s got these bright eyes and her hair floats out every which way around her face and often looks as if it’s moving of its own accord. She thinks quick, talks slow, works porcupine hours — that’s what she calls her night shifts at the hospital because she sees porcupines along the road on her way to work. She taught me nice handwriting and how to cook. I want to make her happy and proud of me. I made her cry when I was young, Bird, and I wish so much that I hadn’t, or that either of us could simply forget it happened. It was during our first week together, one night just before she put me to bed and just before she left for work. She had a map of America on her lap and she was trying to explain to me that in some states colored people were equal to white people in the eyes of the law, and in some states they weren’t. We had to stand with the people who were still struggling until everybody had the same rights everywhere, that’s what she said. I was only eight years old (this is something I’m always telling myself in my own defense. I was only eight years old, only eight years old, Your Honor) and nobody had ever told me to my face that I’m colored, so I knew it and didn’t know it at the same time. I thought that if I accepted what Aunt Clara was saying, then that map would apply to me, that map with the hideous borders she’d drawn onto it in red and blue. So I grabbed both her hands and smiled at her, to try to get her to go along with me, and I said: “No, no, don’t say that about me. That’s awful. It can’t be true.” She wasn’t surprised, just sad. She let out this one quick breath, like she’d just been hit really hard in the stomach, and she rubbed her eyes and said she must have gotten dirt in one of them. I crept back to her in the morning with questions — what about Dad, what about my grandma, and my other grandma? Yup, them too. I remember it was very early, and she was eating her breakfast standing up, with her uniform hung up over the door behind her — when she’s not wearing it or washing it or pressing it or mending it, she keeps it in a plastic cover with a cake of lavender soap in each pocket — she was patient with me. It was Uncle John who said things like “Don’t know how I’ll go another day without boxin’ this child’s ears for her.” He used to run a home school; eight of us sat cross-legged on the carpet in Uncle J and Aunt C’s front parlor, learning Brer Anansi stories to begin with and years later reading our way through Othello and then a very interesting half-book called Peter the Great’s Blackamoor… (Russia’s another planet, Bird. Not only that, but the author stopped writing the book all of a sudden — nobody knows why. He lived in the nineteenth century. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time for him to tell the story. Or maybe it doesn’t matter what century it was, maybe he just didn’t like the way the story was headed and it screamed and laughed and spoke in tongues when he tried to turn it around. We’ll never know how it ends. He put it away and moved on to the next thing.) When Uncle John introduced me to the others, to my dear friends Ephraim and Laura and Abdul and Peter and Rukeih and Anita and Mouse, he told them they weren’t going to have any problems with me as long as they understood it was going to take me a while to get to know anything about anything. Uncle John was a sharecropper somewhere in North Carolina but he wound up in jail at one time — he says he was guilty, but he won’t say what it is he was guilty of, but he’s not a violent man, so I doubt he hurt anybody. Aunt Clara was dating his cousin, who let Uncle John sleep on his sofa when he got out of jail and was looking for some work to do. But Uncle John stole Aunt Clara away from his cousin. He’d had a lot of time to read while he was in jail. “Did you know England had a queen whose father had her mother executed?” he’d say. “She never married.” Aunt Clara would tell him he was making it up and he’d tell her more and more and they’d sit there talking themselves hoarse in Uncle John’s cousin’s kitchen until Uncle John’s cousin would say, “Well, I’m going to bed, y’all,” and leave them to it. He took his loss of Aunt Clara like a man and at the wedding he said he knew he could never be the encyclopedia that Aunt Clara needed. Our grandma told Aunt Clara that if she married Uncle John, she’d be disowned. Aunt Clara said: “Well, you found the excuse you were looking for, Mother.”

Got to run, Bird — working this evening. Not porcupine hours, but I’ll finish this letter to you tomorrow.

All right, I’m back. Back with you and Aunt Clara. She grew up in Biloxi; Great-aunt Effie was a live-in cook for a white family called the Adairs, and Aunt Clara laundered their sheets and scrubbed floors for bed and board. Great-aunt Effie would tell her stories about the Whitmans as she worked. All stories about pulling off confidence tricks and getting in with the right people and lording it over other colored folks and getting the last laugh. Aunt Clara had to ask and ask before Great-aunt Effie admitted the unhappy endings — there was Addie Whitman, who spent her life playing servant in various cousins’ houses because she was too dark and “ugly” to be allowed to marry, Addie Whitman who got herself a black tomcat for company. But even that cat, Minnaloushe, kept scratching her and hissing at her. Since Minnaloushe wouldn’t love her, Addie Whitman thought she’d better teach him to fear her, so she forced the cat into a sack and swung the sack over Perdido Pass. She was only going to give him one good dip in the mouth of the river but she lost her balance, fell in, and drowned. Minnaloushe got away and was quietly eating dinner out of a silver dish — don’t ask me why Effie remembers the color of the dish — at a neighbor’s house later on that evening. Or there’s Cass Whitman, who hung herself to show her parents and her brothers exactly what she thought of their having run her “unsuitable” fiancé out of town, or Vince Whitman, who fell in love with a white woman and proposed to her in front of a handful of his closest friends, who were shocked and terrified. She said yes, and she also said she would’ve loved him if he were purple or green or purple striped with green, and he said: “I’m so happy. That’s all I wanted to hear.” Then he led the party in a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” half singing it, half saying it. Try it for yourself, not quite singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—it changes the words, doesn’t it? At sunset Vince and his new fiancée went for a walk in the park and he shot her dead, then himself. One clean, accurate shot each, like he’d been practicing. Aunt Clara says he must have been out of his mind, but Effie says he was a realist. According to Effie, our dad’s the only Whitman she knows of who’s dared to actually just go ahead and marry a white person. Aunt Clara and I reminded her that it’s legal where we are, and therefore not so daring, but she’s still pretty amazed by our dad, Bird.

I’ve met Great-aunt Effie enough times to go beyond first impressions, and there isn’t a bad bone in that woman’s body. But… that girl you mentioned, the one who feels cheated, Great-aunt Effie is like that. She thinks there are treasures that were within her reach, but her skin stole them from her. She thinks she could’ve been somebody. But she is somebody. Somebody who’s chased bullies away with broomsticks, somebody who saved for years so Aunt Clara could go to nursing school without having to ask her mother for the money. She’s somebody who’s reached out to hold Aunt Clara whenever Aunt C felt the world was about to end. She’s somebody Aunt Clara loves, somebody she couldn’t have done without. A woman like Effie Whitman thinking she could’ve been somebody… that pushes icicles all the way down my spine.

Great-aunt Effie knows how to make that cobbler that no one can resist, that gratin that pursues people into their dreams and has them sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night for another bite or ten, that cake that can cause a family rift over the last slice. The Adairs were paying her wages lower than any white cook of her standard would accept, but they were pretty good wages for a colored cook. But Great-aunt Effie didn’t get too bitter about that. She says that sometimes she’d stand there watching the Adairs eat and she’d think how lucky this type of white family was that they employed cooks with a proper sense of right and wrong, conscience almost heavy enough to replace a slave collar. Without that proper sense of right and wrong, a colored cook might go astray. Such a cook — ever smiling, ever respectful, ever ready to go the extra mile — such a cook might fatten her employees up… not in a hurry, just little by little, fatten them and fatten them, add more and yet more cream to their coffee, add butter even (they’d say the coffee tasted too rich at first, but then they’d grow to like it), vile creatures that they were, accepting the ceaseless toil of others as their birthright. And when the family was too fat to run, this cook run astray might just take a brisk, ten-minute trip around the house, shooting every member of the family dead with the firearms they kept for their own protection. Aunt Clara and I said the exact same thing when Great-aunt Effie told us this little fantasy of hers: Jesus! And Great-aunt Effie told us in a very shocked tone of voice not to take the Lord’s name in vain.

Hey — at least you’ve got the Novaks to fall back on (as you reminded me with that “N” you threw into your last letter), but the Whitmans and the Millers are the product of generations of calculated breeding, whether they’ll admit it or not. The Whitmans have married to refine a look, they keep a close eye on skin tone and hair texture. They draw strict distinctions between degrees of color — quadroon, octoroon — darkest to lightest. But they can’t stop a face like Clara’s or Effie’s rising up every now and again to confront them. And who can speak for the Millers? My other grandma, the one I don’t share with you, sometimes says a little something about the Millers being “sensible people” who’ve made certain choices in order to remain comfortable just as any other “sensible” people would and what does any of it matter now that the world’s changing? Agnes is a silly old woman, Bird, and it’s hard for me to have any respect for her or for Olivia, it’s hard for me to even stand the sound of their voices on the telephone. I’ve grown up around people whose families have lived their lives without trying to invent advantages — some of them have marched and staged sit-ins, others have just lived with their heads held high. And what about my mom? If she was alive, would she have a cabinet full of “treatments” for her hair and skin? Would she have very delicately led me to believe that there’s something about us Whitmans that isn’t quite nice, something we’ve got to keep under control? Aunt Clara’s never said anything about how my mother might have felt about me. She’s been careful not to go down the “If only your mother could see you now” path. She doesn’t need to, anyway. It just so happens that I carry my mother around in three LP records. She sings and tells me she loves me, she’s proud of me, she’s right by my side. The records are wearing out and I’m not rushing the process or trying to delay it, I’m just letting it happen. Her voice skips and squeaks; she’s started to sound unsure of what she’s saying. All I can tell from those recordings is that my mom wanted me to remember the sound of her voice. I may or may not have hated my own face sometimes. I may or may not have spent time thinking of ways to spoil it somehow. (Maybe that answers your question about being “beautiful.”) But I’m slowly coming around to the view that you can’t feel nauseated by the Whitmans and the Millers without feeling nauseated by the kind of world that’s rewarded them for adapting to it like this. In the meantime I’m letting Agnes and Olivia think I don’t visit them because I’m scared of your mom. Are they good to you? Tell me. You can tell me.

I thought I’d finish writing to you today, but I’ve got to go to work again. I can’t be late. More tomorrow.

We live in a little suburb called Twelve Bridges. Everything’s a little broken-down, especially the bridges. People don’t make too much money around here, but what comes with that is a different definition of what it means to be well-off. You’re chairman of the board if you need twelve dollars a week and you make twelve dollars a week. If you’ve also got someone within ten minutes’ walk who can make you laugh and someone else within a five-minute walk who can help you mourn, you’re a millionaire. If on top of all that you’ve got a buddy or three who’ll feed you delicious things and paint you pictures and dance with you, and another friend who’ll watch your kids so you can go out dancing… that’s the billionaire lifestyle. We’re friendly toward strangers because of a general belief (I don’t know where it comes from) that we’re born strangers and that the memory of how that feels never really leaves us. If I’m ever in any other part of the world and I pass a house that has white fairy lights strung across its porch, I’ll think it’s likely that I’d get along with the people who live there. If it’s summer and the strangers out on the porch offer me a drink of water, an apple, the time of day, anything, then I’ll have to stop and find out if they’ve ever heard of a place called Twelve Bridges.

Bird, Bird. What a long letter this has been. But that’s what you get for wanting to be written to as if you were grown up. But also… I have plenty of people around me to talk to, and no one to be honest with. Write back just as soon as you can, will you, please?

Snow

Dear Snow,

First of all I don’t think you should continue to feel bad about making Aunt Clara cry that time. You learned something from it and it sounds like she’s completely forgiven you. Also… you know when something is so incredibly depressing that it’s actually kind of funny? I laughed when I read what you said to her.

So you were left alone with Uncle John while Aunt Clara was working her porcupine hours? That’s a Flax Hill kind of question, I’m afraid. If that had happened around here, people would talk. And having all your classes at home… I wish I was allowed to do that. I’ve been thinking a lot about those other Whitmans you wrote me about. There’s that blood tie, and it’s troublesome, and we don’t know what we would have done if we’d been in their place. They’re family and I still love them… can’t think of any other way to turn a chain into flowers… but I maybe wouldn’t ask Addie, Cass, or Vince Whitman for advice about anything.

There was more about them and Clara and Effie in that letter than there was about you. I’d like to know one thing about you — you choose which thing it is.

I wish I could tell you stuff about the Novaks, but they’re a mystery. What I do know is that they most probably came to Ellis Island from Hungary, which is another world (along with Russia, as you said).

I’m glad you know Brer Anansi stories. I know some too. There are quite a few spiders in my room, possibly most of the spiders in the house. Here’s something that happened a few months ago: I got curious about what the spiders in my room thought of Brer Anansi, or whether they’d even heard of him. I just wanted to know if he was a real spider to them. So one night when the house was as dark and as silent as could be, I sat up in my bed and whispered: Who speaks for the spiders?

And the president of the spiders came forward: I do.

(She didn’t speak aloud, she sort of mimed. That’s the only way I can explain it.)

I asked her if she’d heard of Anansi the Spider and she got cagey. She said: Have you yourself heard of Anansi the Spider?

I answered: Sure, sure. I can tell you a story about him if you want.

She said: Please do.

Halfway through the story about Anansi and the magic cooking pot, I got this feeling that the spiders didn’t like what I was saying. Their expressions aren’t easy to read, but they just didn’t seem very happy with me. I said: Hey, should I stop?

No, said the president of the spiders. Don’t stop now, we’re all very interested.

But have you heard this story?

Yes we have. Anansi is very dear to us.

I finished telling that story and the president of the spiders asked me how many more Anansi stories I knew. I said I knew at least fifteen, and she got openly upset.

Do a lot of people know these stories?

Uh… yeah. Sorry.

How? How did this happen? The president of the spiders started gliding around the walls of my room, glaring suspiciously at the poor spiders she found in the corners of each web.

This is deep treachery, she said. Since when do spiders tell tales? Since when do we talk to outsiders?

Only one spider answered her — he was gray and hairy and an elder, I think — he said: Don’t even worry about it, Chief! Let them think they know, but they don’t know! They don’t know!

Be that as it may, the president of the spiders said, someone must pay for this.

Her citizens began to beg. They swore on the lives of their mothers and grandmothers and children that the Anansi leak was nothing to do with them. I could see I’d stirred up some real trouble, and it was up to me to distract the president of the spiders while I still could.

Wait, WAIT, I said. I have another story — there are no spiders in it, but if you like it, can we forget the other one I told?

The president of the spiders folded her many arms. Very well. IF I like it, she said.

I told the spiders the story of La Belle Capuchine. The woman who told me this story was a maid employed by Grammy Olivia, and soon after she told me this story Grammy Olivia fired her. The official reason for this was that Leah wasn’t doing her job properly, but I think the real reason is because Grammy Olivia overheard parts of this story. I really liked it when Leah told me stories. She wanted to be an actress. She did voices pretty well. I hope she’s onstage somewhere right now. I’ve forgotten her exact words, but here it is as I remember it, except for the parts I’ve added because she told me that each time a story like this one gets retold the new teller should add a little something of their own:

If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one. But of course if you take that path you may also find that in the end you’re unloved. La Belle Capuchine loved no one; she was a house slave, an unusually dark one, but unusually comely. All the house Negroes were good-looking and talked nicely and some of them played the violin and could chart the movements of the planets because the master and the mistress of the house got more fun out of their hobbies when they taught them to others. But La Belle Capuchine had seen other house Negroes come and go. Some of them made the mistake of getting too good at astronomy or musicianship. It didn’t do to outstrip the master or the mistress. You weren’t supposed to take an interest in the subject for its own sake, you had to remember you were learning it to keep someone else company. You had to remember to ask anxiously whether your attempt was correct, and you had to make mistakes, but not jarring ones. Other house Negroes had been taken ill — not always physically ill, but often by sorrows of the spirit. Very few people can feel well having to make marionettes of themselves, prancing and preening and accepting affection and abuse alike as the mood of their masters and mistresses take them. Very few people can watch others endure humiliation without recognizing the part they play in increasing it. But La Belle Capuchine was a practical person. She knew that the best way to get by was to be amusing and to flatter through imitation. Save her coloring and her overabundant head of hair, she looked just like her mistress, Miss Margaux, and that worked very much in La Belle Capuchine’s favor. A visitor to the plantation caught sight of La Belle Capuchine, exclaimed that she looked exactly as Miss Margaux would if she were dipped in cocoa, and from then on everybody said it. La Belle Capuchine and Miss Margaux had the same dainty wrists and ankles, the same dazzling eyes; they even smiled in the same carefree way, though admittedly the smiling was something that La Belle Capuchine had taught herself to do. The two women had the same father, which explains some of the uncanny resemblance between them. The rest was down to La Belle Capuchine’s hard work. Miss Margaux’s tastes were La Belle Capuchine’s tastes, Miss Margaux’s opinions were La Belle Capuchine’s opinions, every now and again Miss Margaux found it entertaining to ask La Belle Capuchine, “What am I thinking right now?” and have La Belle Capuchine give her the correct answer without hesitation.

The other house Negroes had learned not to bother speaking to La Belle Capuchine. She didn’t consider herself one of them and addressed them as if she owned them — this was another way in which she amused her master and mistress and their family. But there was a footman named Michael who was pining away because of her beauty and, like dozens before him, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to win La Belle Capuchine’s heart. His words and serenades did nothing; she returned his gifts and letters unopened, or she showed them to Miss Margaux and together the two women laughed at the inexpensive trinkets and the spelling mistakes he’d made. The man ran out of hope and confronted La Belle Capuchine. He said that he could never blame anybody for trying their best to survive, but that she was the kind of traitor he’d never known before and hoped never to see again. La Belle Capuchine simply looked over her shoulder and asked, “Is someone speaking? For a moment I thought I heard somebody speak.”

Now something had been happening on the plantation. The other house Negroes had been keeping track of what happened among the field Negroes as best they could. So far six of the field hands had killed a white man each. The punishment for this was very heavy for everybody who was even associated with any Negro who killed a white man; the master was trying to make sure everybody was too scared to try it again. But the field hands on that plantation continued to take the lives of their overseers even as the harshness of the punishments increased. There was a woman there who was a skilled fortune-teller. She’d asked her cowrie shells, “Who will set us free?” And the cowrie shells told her: “High John the Conqueror.”

“When will he come?”

“The price of his passage is high. The highest: blood. First seven white men must die. Then High John the Conqueror will come.”

When the men of the plantation heard what the woman’s cowrie shells had told her, most of them said they didn’t believe it. “The prince you’re speaking of left these lands long ago, and there’s no calling him back,” they said. But there were seven whose hearts were heavy because they did believe what the cowrie shells had said, and they knew that their belief meant they wouldn’t live to see freedom. Even so those seven drew straws to decide which of them would attack first. And so six overseers were killed, and there was such punishment for these killings that the plantation got the reputation of being a place of horror.

The morning after Michael called La Belle Capuchine a traitor, the blood of the seventh white man was spilled, and High John the Conqueror strode through the plantation gates, shining with a terrifying splendor; he did no harm to anybody (though some cried out that he should take revenge); he healed the broken bodies of those who had awaited him and those who’d said he was dead and gone. He wept to see what had been done in that place, and where he walked, he ruined the earth so that nothing that could bring profit would ever grow there again. Then High John the Conqueror came to the Big House, where La Belle Capuchine and the other house Negroes lived with Miss Margaux and Master and Mistress. Master and Mistress had tried to flee when they saw what was happening, but the house Negroes had locked them into a bathroom, along with their daughter and La Belle Capuchine. Miss Margaux was screaming and La Belle Capuchine was screaming louder. Master was yelling, “Shut up or I’ll kill you both myself!” and Mistress had fainted dead away in the bathtub.

High John the Conqueror opened the bathroom door and stretched out a hand. “I go now,” he said, “and all my people go with me.”

Weeping tears of gratitude, La Belle Capuchine stepped forward, but much to everyone’s surprise, High John the Conqueror pushed La Belle Capuchine away and took Miss Margaux by the hand.

“La Belle Capuchine,” he said to her. “Your beauty is famous, and will become yet more so by my side.”

Miss Margaux batted her eyelashes and didn’t argue with him.

Miss Margaux’s father and mother had fled as soon as the door opened, so La Belle Capuchine was the one who had to protest: “She is not me! She’s Miss Margaux! I am La Belle Capuchine! Don’t you see that she’s white?”

High John the Conqueror looked at La Belle Capuchine and he looked at Miss Margaux. He looked each one of them over very carefully, from head to toe. “I think it’s only fair to tell you that I see with more than just my eyes, and I cannot tell the difference between you,” he said, finally. Miss Margaux wasn’t about to give up her chance to go adventuring with a Negro prince, so she loudly dismissed La Belle Capuchine’s desperate cries. “No, no. I am La Belle Capuchine. This is just a game we play sometimes, with chalk and boot polish.”

“No chalk can have that effect,” La Belle Capuchine argued, and, seeing Michael in the doorway behind High John the Conqueror, she called out: “Michael — you know! Tell him!” Michael turned away.

And so High John the Conqueror took his people away with him. Miss Margaux too, though that one didn’t stay with him for long. What about La Belle Capuchine? Well, she was truly free. She loved no one and she was unloved. She lived out the rest of her brief days on the deserted plantation, and in the end her beauty was worth nothing, since there wasn’t a soul around to see it and there was no comfort she could buy with it, not even a scrap of food, not even an extra half second of life.

The End.

I’m pleased to report that the president of the spiders is back on friendly terms with her citizens.

And yes, Gee-Ma Agnes and Gee-Pa Gerald are good to me and always came to my elementary school Nativity play when I had a part in it.

No fairy lights or riddles here, but I like Flax Hill best when the sky’s stormy gray and the clouds get little bits of sun and lightning tangled up in them. There’s a church up on the second hill, the less popular hill, and when you look through the tinted windowpanes, everyone in town looks like stained-glass angels, walking and cycling, moving in and out of small brick palaces, eating glittering rolls of sapphire bread.

What’s this job you’ve got? I’ve got a paper route and dogs are always barking at me.

Your little sis,

Bird

Dear Bird,

I can’t tell if you want me to believe everything you say or only some of it. You talk to spiders and they answer you. All right, fine. Suppose I wish to converse with spiders too — how do I do it?

La Belle Capuchine: I don’t know how much of it you forgot/added yourself, but Leah must have told you that story because she wanted to be fired. I mean, even I got paranoid reading it. I kept wondering if La Belle Capuchine was a code version of me. Take my paranoia and multiply it by a million and that’s how Olivia must have felt about La Belle Capuchine. Also — believe it or not (and this may remind you of another matter you’ve banned me from mentioning) — I have a story about someone named La Belle Capuchine too. I thought Aunt Clara told it to me, but when I retold it to her yesterday, she said she hadn’t heard it before.

La Belle Capuchine has a wonderful garden filled with sweet-smelling flowers of every color. She plants all the flowers herself, and she tends them herself, and every single one of those flowers is poisonous enough to kill anyone who comes close to them, let alone picks one. La Belle Capuchine is beautiful like her flowers, but she’s a poison damsel. She eats and drinks poison all day long and she can rot a person’s insides just by looking them in the eye. I don’t think Mother Nature likes us much. If she did, she wouldn’t make the things that are deadliest so beautiful. For instance, why does fire dance so bright and so wild? It isn’t fair.

So far La Belle Capuchine has ended the world seventeen times. She does it by making her poison garden bigger and bigger until it’s the only thing in the world. After that she takes a nap. But the world starts again from the beginning. And every time a few days after the new beginning somebody comes across a beautiful flower and picks it. That wakes La Belle Capuchine up, and then there’s hell to pay. I think we’d better get used to La Belle Capuchine, since she’ll never be defeated.

The End.

Writing it down like that makes me see that there’s no way this could have come from Aunt Clara. Of course this came from me. Of course it does. I felt abandoned for a while. By “a while” I mean years, not months or weeks. I’d be able to push Flax Hill and you and Dad and your mom to the back of my mind for a few days, but then there’d be nights when that turned me over and lay me on my side like a doll that had been dropped on the floor. I began to know what dolls know. It felt like I’d been discarded for another toy that was better, more lifelike (you). People sometimes said, “What a beautiful little girl,” but I thought that beautiful was bad. I must have come up with my Belle Capuchine around that time.

I sprained my arm out here in Twelve Bridges when I was about twelve; we were ice-skating and I tried to break my fall with my hand, which is what Uncle John might call “unintelligent”… one hand against the weight of an entire body. The arm hurt for so long I began to be afraid that it would never get done hurting. Until the day Aunt Clara came and hugged me and I put both my arms up and around her without even thinking about it. The arm had healed. More important, it hadn’t come off. So I reasoned I couldn’t be a doll, and neither could you.

The one thing I’d tell you about me is that I’m a deceiver. In another draft of this letter I wrote that I wasn’t always like this, but let’s try the truth and see what it does. It’s probably been official since the night Ephraim, Laura, and I were waiting in line for drinks at a bar over in the next town. We had brand-new fake IDs in our wallets; they’d been expensive and they were convincing and we were excited. Ephraim thought the line was moving faster than it really was and he ended up stomping on someone’s heel. The guy Ephraim had bumped into was a nice guy, I think. He accepted Ephraim’s apology at first. But everybody was a little drunk and a little tired of standing in line, so maybe, just maybe, it was to pass the time that one of the guy’s friends started wondering aloud who “that nigger” thought he was, and the guy began to feel like he had to act a certain way in front of his friends — I could see him begin to feel it, saw the feeling growing on him, like a fur, only faster than anything natural can grow. He said: “Yeah…” and he called Ephraim the same name his friend had, only I think he was ashamed to say it, because he stuttered.

Ephraim said: “Cool out, man. Nothing really happened. So why use that kind of language?” He’s got a way about him, my friend Ephraim. Another guy might have sounded like a weakling, another guy might have sounded like he was backing down. But Ephraim was stepping up and giving the other guy a chance for everything to be okay. The other guy got braver once he’d called Ephraim a name, though, and he looked right at me and said that classy-looking girls should choose better friends. I was confused that he felt he could speak to me like that — I used to assume that when I’m with colored people the similarities become obvious, but I guess it’s something people don’t see unless they’re looking to see it. I felt as if I’d left my body, felt as if I were standing over on the other side of a room, watching as a big lie was being told about me. I should have told that guy that when he called anybody that name in my hearing he was saying it directly to me. I should have told him never to dare call anybody that name again. All I did was turn to Ephraim and whisper: “Ephraim, let’s go.”

Laura shook her head and called me “un-bee-leeve-able.” I was afraid that those boys would follow us out onto the street, maybe with broken bottles in their hands. I’ve heard how one thing leads to another, it’s not only in the South that an evening gets that way… but they preferred to keep their place in the line. We looked for another bar to go to, but Ephraim and Laura kept rejecting each one we came across, kept saying it’d be just like the bar we’d left. Then they said they were tired and wanted to go home. I went with them. I’m wondering if that’s all I can do for them. I can’t seem to speak up, but I can go with them, silently. That was a little more than three years ago, so I don’t think I can honestly say that it was only this year I became deceptive.

Aunt Clara thinks I transcribe interviews at a newsroom in the city. Uncle John thinks the same, and so does almost everybody else except Mouse. Mouse knows I didn’t even make it past the first day of secretarial college and so efficiently transcribing a series of interviews would actually be a little beyond me. I told Mouse because I had to tell somebody, and also because I know a couple of things about her that she doesn’t want me to tell anybody, so that makes her less likely to spill.

Bird, here’s what happened on the first day of secretarial college:

I got there half an hour early. Near the entrance I was given a clipboard and a square tag with MISS S. WHITMAN printed on it. I went up a staircase and into a sky-lighted auditorium — it was as big as an auditorium, anyhow — filled with row after row of desk-and-chair sets, each chair attached to each desk with a gray bar. There was a black typewriter set on each desktop; more typewriters and desks than I could count. Seven or eight other girls had already taken their seats, looking straight ahead of them as if they’d already begun the march into infinity. I remember feeling doubtful about the bun I’d twisted my hair into just an hour before. I patted it, and it was more or less the same as theirs, not too high, not too low. The desks at the back were designated for Adamses and Allens, so I walked and walked until I found the Walkers and Williamses. There was a blackboard at the front of the room, hung on the wall like a picture frame. I found MISS A. WHITMAN and thought, Almost there. It felt as if my legs would buckle under me from all the walking I’d done.

MISS B. WHITMAN was next. Then MISS C. WHITMAN and MISS D. WHITMAN. Immediately followed by Misses E., F., G., and H. Whitman. None of them had taken their seats yet. “Who are all these girls?” I asked aloud. “Who the hell are they?”

MISS K. WHITMAN was the last straw, she was the moment I realized the secretarial college had an alphabet’s worth of us. Mouse says I was surely hallucinating, but I know what I saw. I removed my name tag, left my clipboard on K. Whitman’s seat, and went shopping with the money I’d saved to pay for the next month’s classes. I bought lipstick and peaches and cigarettes and a ticket to a theater matinee. After the matinee I went home and was asked how college had been and I said: “It was fine.”

I left the peaches in a bowl on my bedside table, and spent the next day filling out forms at an employment agency. There was an additional cover sheet that asked you to declare your race. The woman at the front desk said that it was just for the agency records, that it wasn’t information they passed on to employers, but the girl next to me said to her: “You people need to think about what you’re doing to us. You’re bad people… you’re making us paranoid. You’re driving us crazy. Every time I don’t make it through to interviews I’ll be wondering whether it’s because there are better candidates or because of color. Color, color, color; what you’re doing is illegal and you know it. I should find myself a lawyer who’s ready to make an example of you.”

The woman at the front desk had heard it all before and she recited something about it being impossible to obtain any proof that employers were shown the information agency clients provided on the additional cover sheet. The girl who’d talked about suing the agency couldn’t make up her mind. First she crumpled the cover sheet up in her hand, then she smoothed it out again and ticked her box. I left mine blank; I knew that I was within my legal rights not to say. Ms. Front Desk pushed my forms back across the table to me and said I had to fulfill all of the requirements. I told her, “None of these options say what I am,” and she rolled her eyes. “Every day. Every day a philosopher walks in off the street and makes my job that little bit harder to do.”

Then she said: “Why won’t you say? Hmmm?” and I had to tick “colored” to show Aunt Clara I wasn’t ashamed, even though Aunt Clara wasn’t there and would never know what box I ticked. When I got home, I said college had been fine, and I counted up the remainder of my money and wolfed down the peaches. If I hid them and saved them for later, they’d only have rotted away. They were already getting too soft and my fingers sank through their flesh and closed around their stony hearts. The agency couldn’t seem to find anything for me to do and I kept back from the brink of paranoia by reminding myself that I had no experience. I sort of happened upon my real job about a week later. The details of it don’t matter, but it involves a hell of a lot more deceiving, with and without words.

You just hang on to that paper route.

Snow

Snow,

You don’t have to tell me anything about your job if you don’t want to, but can you please just answer me this — is it dangerous? I mean, is there a chance you could get hurt? Yes or no?

I’ve been trying to see things from your point of view. Maybe it looks to you as if a whole bunch of things are expected of you. Maybe you’re trying to live up to what you think people expect. But people really don’t expect all that much. You should see how happy it makes Gee-Ma Agnes to get a note from you, just a little sign that you’ve been thinking of her. I’m guessing you’d go pretty far to make sure you don’t disappoint anyone. But look… you don’t have to prove anything.

I’m also guessing you might not like to be hearing all this from your younger sister. Well, I read about fifty pages of advice columns before sitting down to write to you, so really this is the wisdom of Dear Abby.

Bird

PS — Speaking with spiders and other things you call unusual… there’s no special trick to it. When something catches your attention just keep your attention on it, stick with it ’til the end, and somewhere along the line there’ll be weirdness. I’ve never tried to explain it to anyone before, but what I mean to say is that a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can’t pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen. Let me know how it goes if you try it. And if you’re thinking I’m going to grow out of this, you’re wrong.

Hi, Snow,

I’m in detention again. It’s been five weeks since I last heard from you. According to Dad, you’re not only alive but getting prettier and more gracious every day, et cetera, but what I want is an answer to the question in my previous letter. One word: yes or no?

A thing you should understand about me is that I won’t keep a secret just because it’s a secret. I’ve been told that this makes me a bad friend, but I actually think it makes me a better friend than the secret-keepers. (Time will tell.)

If you don’t answer within the week, I’ll show your previous letter to Dad.

I’m sorry to have to threaten you like this. Really, I am.

Bird

Stop fretting, Bird. I’m in no more danger than you are. And right now I’m feeling embarrassed for both of us. I was a fool to write that other letter. It was too much for you — don’t try to tell me it wasn’t — and I’m sorry. Get ready for Thanksgiving… I’m coming with Aunt Clara and Uncle John and an assortment of baked goods and trinkets, and the first thing I’m going to do when I arrive is give you the biggest squeeze you ever had in your life.

Snow

—

over at the bookstore I asked Mom if she was really going to let Snow come home for Thanksgiving. That’s exactly how I asked it: “Are you gonna let her?”

Mom was deciding on prices for some books that had just come in the day before. Mrs. Fletcher had taught her to do this by smelling the paper and rubbing the corners of the pages between her fingertips.

Her hair was in her face, her eyes were closed, her nose was pressed to a coffee-brown page. “It’s been discussed,” she said.

“And you said yes?”

She wrote a number down on her notepad. Three figures, a pause, then she added another ninety-nine cents. “If you’re saying yes, then I’m saying yes.”

“Really? Well… I am saying yes, Mom.”

“That’s what I figured. Needless to say I’ll be watching her every move. Kidding, kidding…”

She wasn’t kidding. I asked her what Snow had ever done to her, and she said it was a good question.

5

i never knew a Thanksgiving that took so long to come around. I guess Louis Chen got tired of hearing me repeat those words, because he said: “You know, the way you’re talking is getting kind of creepy.”

Aunt Mia told me not to get my hopes up. Dad made chain mail, little scraps of knitted electrum with circles of blue crystal peeping through the links. He cut the crystals in deep Vs and the surfaces were dull until you tried to look down to the bottom of them and almost cooked your eyeballs. It wasn’t really jewelry — he couldn’t sell it, could only give it away. He handed me a piece and told me to hit my hopes right out of the ballpark.

Mom stopped going to Grammy Olivia’s coffee hours. “The gloating,” she said to Aunt Mia.

Everyone who remembered Snow seemed glad to hear she’d be back. “So pretty,” I kept hearing. “So well behaved.” No one said they’d missed her. Take Christina Morris who worked at the bakery — she’d been in Snow’s class at school, and when Dad told her Snow might look in on her, she said “Hurray!” just as if she’d been told Miss America was coming to town. It wasn’t the kind of reaction you’d give to news about someone who’d really been part of your life. I wanted to hear someone say they’d cried when they found out she wasn’t coming back to school. It would’ve been good to hear that somebody had done what I did last summer when Louis went away to summer camp. I went after him that very same afternoon, through fields and over low bridges in the direction I’d seen the bus take, running, then limping. I got as far as the fire station in Marstow, two towns over, then the sun set and I realized I didn’t know where to go next, so I walked back home with stones in my socks and was grounded for two weeks. I wanted somebody to say they’d done something like that because of Snow (who’s about a hundred times prettier than Louis, after all) but no one did.

Louis’s birthday was on the same day as Connie Ross’s, right in the middle of September, and Mom loaned me her blanket-sized U.S. flag in exchange for my promise that I’d guard it with my life. My contribution to the picnic was a few perfectly ripe Bartlett pears and some soft cheese that had a long name and came wrapped in waxy brown paper. I wound the flag around the pears and the cheese, tied the whole package to a stick, and went through the woods with lunch over my shoulder. As I went I made a deal with myself not to talk about Snow or Thanksgiving anymore. Talking wasn’t bringing either subject of conversation any closer. Also I was getting angry. Angry about the things people were saying, the way they were making Snow sound like some kind of ornament just passing by… not even passing by, but being passed around. Everybody agreed that Snow was valuable, but she was far too valuable to have around for keeps. Nice to look at for an afternoon, but we’ll all breathe easier once she’s safely back at the museum. I was beginning to hate people because of the way they talked about my sister, because of the way they didn’t really want her. Even Miss Fairfax was doing it, telling Dad to just have one afternoon when Snow would be at home to all visitors so as to get all the visiting over with in one go.

We sang “Happy Birthday” and Jerry Fallon started a food fight, running around the tree trunks whooping and throwing slices of luncheon meat. Later, once everything had been hurled or eaten, we washed the cheese and bread crumbs out of our hair and passed out in the sunshine, the six of us on Mom’s flag, which we’d spread out on the grass near Spooner’s Brook. I made everyone take their shoes off first. Jerry and Sam were back to back, and Connie and Ruth were top to toe, but we all had our arms around and over and under one another, warm skin and frosty violets (Ruth was wearing her mother’s perfume). Louis fell asleep with his head on my stomach. Once I was sure the others were asleep I laid my hand on his head. The boy was huffing and puffing the way he does when he’s having dreams; it made his hair dance. I didn’t sleep myself. I was just resting. Connie stood up and walked away — to pee, I thought. She didn’t make any effort to sneak away quietly. She walked normally, her feet crushing leaves.

Sam went next, then Jerry, I think — I’m not sure of the order because I didn’t open my eyes — then Ruth, their footsteps promising that they’d be back in a few seconds. They didn’t come back. When Louis got up, I opened my eyes. I was on my own beside the brook and the splash of the water was like fast, soft hand claps, keeping time with my heart. I sat up and the flag rolled up around me. I didn’t pull it up around my shoulders, it tucked itself around them. I looked over my shoulder, hoping I’d see the others in the distance, perched up in the trees grinning ghoulishly. They weren’t there. But as I breathed I felt a hand crumpling my shirt, fingers and thumb spread wide across my back. My eyes were open, and I looked right at him, the owner of the hand. But I couldn’t see anyone. He was there all right, but somehow it was like trying to see all of the sky at once. That was nonsense, so I tried to turn and look at him again, but an arm crossed my other shoulder and held me still. He wasn’t playing rough, whoever he was; it was more like he was shy, or just teasing me.

I was still trying to decide whether it’s smarter to scream before you start getting scared when he touched his lips to the back of my neck. Five times, maybe more, each kiss a little lower down. Slow, light, soft. All I saw was red, white, and blue above us, the flag streaming high as fountain jets. When he stopped, I shuddered and was breathless and warm all over. The flag lay flat and after a few minutes I felt tough enough to run my hands along the cotton, checking, but nothing moved inside it.

It wasn’t Louis who kissed me. It was a boy, as far as I could tell. Those arms, still a little unsure of their own strength. I don’t know who he was. He smelled of lemon peel, and I don’t know any boys who go around smelling of lemon peel. Louis doesn’t need to know about it, either. I doubt those kisses were even meant for me. They must belong to Mom. You know when you put on someone else’s coat and old train tickets fall out of the pockets? I think maybe it was like that. Not really anything to do with me at all. Mom looked the flag over very closely when I brought it back to her, even held the seams up to the light. Once she was sure there was no damage she said I could borrow it anytime. I said thanks. And thought: But no, thanks. We were Whitmans. That was how I liked it — that n I sometimes add to my name doesn’t mean much after all, it’s just a frill — and that must have been how Mom liked it too, because she talks as if Flax Hill is where her memory begins. Whenever we’re out of town, she compares everything to Flax Hill. Parks, stores, fountains. If that changed, I’d really have to wonder why.

It was the following Saturday that a man with an un-American accent phoned the house and asked to speak to Boy Novak. “Sorry,” I said. “No Novaks around here.” I thought it was a prank call, somebody calling from “deepest Transylvania” to remind me that an ancient prophecy was supposed to come true tonight. There’d been a storm going on for hours — a dark sky with lightning jumping across it, and rain coming down so hard you couldn’t see exactly who was coming toward you on the street; it turned your friends into tall, damp figures scurrying around on secret business. Dad and Louis had decided it was perfect weather to grab a baseball glove and go play catch in the backyard. For everyone else the weather was right for staying home and making stupid phone calls.

“Who is this?” the man asked, in a hollow, B-movie-sorcerer voice. I told him it was the Queen of Sheba and hung up.

But that was really the way he talked. The next day Gee-Ma Agnes came round for breakfast and brought a pan of hominy pudding with her, brimming with lemons and cream. Phoebe had made it and it was so good that nobody even said anything when I licked my bowl. When Gee-Ma threatened to take me to church, Dad told her I’d go if she could catch me; it must’ve been the pudding that made him think it was all right to just give away a chunk of your daughter’s Sunday like that. Gee-Ma made a grab at me and I ran out of the house and along the riverbank with my hula hoop, a desperate heathen in polka-dotted rubber boots, yelling Keep laughing, Dad. You’re gonna pay for this. Gee-Ma was a lot faster than I’d expected, but she ran out of steam about ten steps away from a tree I’d planned to climb to escape her.

“I’m gonna pray for your soul, Bird Whitman,” she puffed. She bent over and put her hands on her knees, letting her breath find its way back to her.

“Don’t chase me, Gee-Ma,” I said. “I’m not worth it.” I threw my hula hoop into the air a few times until it found a branch to spin around. Then I scrambled up into the heart of that old tree. It was a linden tree, and it didn’t mind being climbed — its bark had little pegs in it, pegs that held steady beneath the sole of your foot. There’s a lot of privacy up there too, with the green leaves pouring down all around you. I was cold; the mist kept creeping in under my clothes. “It’s not natural to flee like that when you’re offered a chance to praise the Lord,” Gee-Ma said. “You come down from there!”

“I can’t, Gee-Ma. I’m stuck. Hey, look at all this mud.”

The rainstorm had swollen the water level. I forget how tall water can be until I see it standing above earth, lifting leaves and stones off the grass and floating them away. Gee-Ma stayed back because she didn’t dare get wet all the way up to her knees. My hula hoop was close by, but I didn’t start swirling it around my ankle until she realized she’d be late for church and went away. That’s what the man who’d phoned our house must have seen as he walked under the trees talking to himself in that B-movie voice of his (I heard him before I saw him). He must’ve been following us. He must’ve looked up and seen a hot-pink circle working its way from one end of a branch to the other, slowly, like it was searching for something. I knew he’d seen me because he stopped talking to himself. I think he was in the middle of a sentence, but he stopped. A second later he knocked the hula hoop into the mud. At first I thought he’d thrown a stone, but it was a walking stick he struck out with — he struck out more than once, more than twice, and by the time I realized that knocking my hula hoop out of the tree was only the first stage of his plan, he’d hooked the handle of the walking stick around my ankle and was pulling, pulling—

“Who are you?” he asked, real loud, as if he was scared, as if he was in my place and I was in his. I reached up, or down, it was hard to tell because my head slammed against the tree trunk and I saw my feet swinging in the air above me — my body was twisted around the branch and I locked my hands around it and held tight. The wood pushed through my skin, I said “Vvvahhhh,” or something like that, my teeth chopping at my tongue, the branch groaned, it wasn’t going to hold me, it was coming away from the tree. I’d fall six feet or more. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Please. Please.”

He stopped pulling. “Get down here.”

I climbed down without answering him, hands and feet slipping in bloodied mud, and my knees gave out as soon as I was back on the ground. He put an arm around my neck and made me get up. We walked backward into the bushes. I was crying, but he didn’t care. What he held flat against my hip bone was scarier than a knife — it was a syringe filled with clear liquid. The needle. There was a plastic cap on it, but light flashed along it as I struggled to breathe. “Control yourself,” he said. His mouth was right against my ear, and his lips were wet. There was liquor on his breath. Some kids walked past, arguing, laughing. The girls were trying to teach the boys pig Latin. I turned my head so I was looking right at the man with his hand over my mouth — he pushed my face away from him, but I waited and then turned my head toward him again.

“Ha, looks like Bird lost her dumb hula hoop,” Fat Kenneth Young said. I heard a splash — I think he kicked at it.

The man asked me what I was staring at. He was a white man, clean-shaven. Ultra-clean-shaven; not a single cut. He had a round nose and wide-awake blue-green eyes and his white hair went up into a peak above his forehead; if we’d met some other way, I might have looked at him and thought, Weird, it’s a dolphin-man, or a man-dolphin, in a plaid shirt and jeans. He looks nice, maybe Gee-Ma would like him.

“Please let me go home,” I said, in a calm, completely fake voice. “My mom and dad are expecting me and—”

“Shut up,” he whispered. “Who are you? I’ve seen you with Boy. At her job. And you try to boss her around at the grocery store. Queen of Sheba my ass.”

(We haven’t seen you.)

“I’m Bird.”

He said: “You are Bird.”

“Yeah. I’m — Boy’s my mom, that’s why I’m with her a lot.”

The other kids’ voices faded into the distance, and he let go of me once we were alone again. I never saw what he did with the syringe. I don’t think he dropped it. Hands shaking, he fumbled around in the top pocket of his shirt, pulled out a pair of eyeglasses, put them on, and looked at me. Then he took the eyeglasses off and muttered: “Well. What can I do?”

He looked sick to his stomach. He tried to hide it, but he couldn’t. His skin turned a little gray and his cheeks puffed out. I could have stood there for hours, watching him turn to stone, watching the gargoyle appear. That was his real face. Or do people only turn ugly for as long as they’re looking at something ugly? I played dumb. I said: “Uh… what’s wrong? What did I say?”

He answered me so quietly I pretty much had to lip-read. “I came to meet with my granddaughter, and you are her.”

I dried my eyes on my sleeve and sighed. I didn’t want it to be true, would have given a lot for it not to be true, so it had to be true.

He raised his voice. “You are slow or something? You didn’t hear me?”

“I heard you.”

“Well?”

“Well.”

“What has your mother told you about me?”

“Nothing.”

He rubbed his chin. “You hungry?”

“What?”

He offered to buy me a cheeseburger. I said I’d eat at home, but changed my mind and went to the Mitchell Street diner with him after he promised to tell me how to catch rats, and also what Mom had been like as a kid.

“Do you really want to know how to catch rats?”

“Yeah.”

“They just want the rats to go away. They believe that they should not have to think about the rats that sneak out of their garbage and into their walls, they should not have to see how those disgusting creatures die. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m supposed to catch my rats and hold my tongue and let it all be like magic.”

“Well, tell me about it.”

“You are not squeamish?”

“Yeah, I am. But I still want to know.”

“I shouldn’t have treated you this way that I have treated you. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t believe him and I walked behind him so I’d have fair warning if he went for me again. I guess I wanted to have something to tell Snow.

We took a booth at the Mitchell Street diner. Susie Conlin handed him a menu before she took me to the restroom and soaked my hands in a basin. She dabbed disinfectant on the cuts the linden tree gave me. There were seven. She counted them aloud and made me count along with her. She was my regular babysitter for about a year and a half, so she still talks down to me something awful, and maybe always will. I don’t mind her doing it, though. She just likes looking after people. Dad’s making her a tiny rainbow stud for the piercing she just got in her nose.

—

i ate my cheeseburger with a knife and fork so it wouldn’t taste of disinfectant. But Frank thought I was trying to be ladylike. “Your father teach you that?” He grinned, and I did the same. I just took what was in his grin and gave it right back to him. He choked on a french fry and I passed him a napkin.

When he really started talking, I borrowed a pad and pen from Susie and took notes. Taking notes meant I didn’t hear his tone of voice as much.

FRANK NOVAK

He was flattered that I was writing down what he said. Flattered or he felt he had a message to give. He spoke slowly and repeated himself so I could get it all down.

He wanted to know if I was going to call the police on him. “Good luck getting them to believe you.”

“You are not adopted?” he asked, hopefully.

How can he be Mom’s dad? There’s no trace of her in him, or vice versa. And that’s weird, because he’s a forceful man. For instance, I couldn’t push back against his accent. My vowels started to copy his — he thought I was making fun of him. Mom would’ve had to be really careful and deliberate in her decisions not to do anything the way he did it. No moving her hands through the air in an almost musical way as she speaks, no pursing her lips, no excitement, calm, always calm. Maybe he noticed what she was doing. I’ll bet he hated that.

When he talked about rats, his forehead tightened and he looked lost. It was as if the words he was saying didn’t mean anything to him, they’d decided to say themselves and he was hoping they’d leave him alone if he just cooperated. He didn’t tell me how to catch rats in the end. He kept working up to it, then he’d say: “It’s all I know. Maybe you shouldn’t say everything you know. Maybe it leaves you empty-headed, eh?”

I asked him about the syringe, what the liquid in it was. He said: “What syringe?” (What did he do with it? If I’d called the police, would they have found it on him? I went back to the linden tree with Louis a couple of days later and we searched for hours. If he’d dropped it, we would have found it. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Acting? I half believe I could dream up a syringe. But only half.)

He says a rat bit him on the face when he was a boy. Mom was really surprised that he’d told me that. She doesn’t know if it’s true; that was the first she’d heard of it. He said he used to have to go through trash cans looking for food. And there was a rat in the trash can, and the rat was hungry too; he was taking its food, so it bit him on the face. I tried to dislike him a little bit less after he told me that, because that’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen to anyone. “Where’s the scar?” I asked. He laughed. “It healed well. It healed well.”

He read to me from a little suede-covered book. “The bites of rats are sometimes difficult to recognize. They always attack the parts that are fat, i.e., the cheeks and the heels—” The book was falling apart onto the tabletop, and the pages he was reading from didn’t have any print on them. “They divide the skin in a straight line, which often has the appearance of having been cut with a knife; so close is the resemblance that it’s often difficult to avoid a mistake—” He said those were the findings of a French doctor from a long time ago. I just said okay. He said: “Look it up sometime. I’m serious… look it up.” I said okay.

Hard to know how to take the things he said about Mom. I don’t accept what he said but I can’t get past it. He told me Mom is evil. I said: “What do you mean, ‘evil’?”

FN stands for Frank Novak and BW stands for Bird Whitman. (I had to be quick; I think I said more but I can’t remember what I said.)

FN: I’m not talking about powers of darkness or something you can protect yourself from with crosses and holy water. Of course it is difficult to describe, because it seems so ordinary. Seems so, but is not. Evil studies the ordinary and imitates it. Then you can say it was just a little bad temper, we all know what that is. But some people… with some people the spite goes so deep, it is a thing beyond personality… you don’t want to understand me. I’m speaking of a little girl who was born too early. She was so small. It was crazy how small she was. She didn’t open her eyes for days after she was born. She kept her eyes closed and shivered and shivered, like someone was yelling at her that she wasn’t going to make it and she was doing all she could to ignore them. Maybe she wasn’t meant to live, I don’t know. But she wanted to, this baby girl. She struggled. She really struggled. I didn’t work for a month. I held her, walked around the house holding her in a blanket. They couldn’t do much at the hospital. They didn’t have those good machines to help out back then. I remember a nurse told me I should have a Mass said for the baby’s soul. A wet nurse came every day — it was the one time in my life I’ve wished I was a woman, so the wet nurse wouldn’t have had to come for my child. The doctor came every other day. I don’t know how she pulled through. This is the thing — maybe it wasn’t her that pulled through. Maybe it was just that will to exist in the world. I mean, it wasn’t the will of someone young, it was the will of… something that has had life before and knows that life is good.

It’s not Mom’s fault if she was born too early.

There was so much he wasn’t saying I didn’t know where to start with the questions.

When I opened my mouth, he held up his hand.

FN: There was a morning I was sure that she was gone. I woke up and she wasn’t shivering anymore. You see, I slept sitting up in a chair against the wall, so it couldn’t tilt back. I slept that way so I could have her against my chest through the night. To keep her warm, I suppose. To keep her alive. If anything was wrong, I wanted to feel it immediately. So. She wasn’t shivering. I lifted her up and she was so much heavier than she had been the night before. She didn’t move at all. I put my cheek against her cheek and I cried. I cried so much. And I said Why? There was knocking at the outside door as well. I heard it but I didn’t answer, I held the dead child. It was afternoon when I looked at her again… I’d been crying all that time. I looked at her again and her eyes were open. She was alive again. There was a tear-drop on her chin and she was trying to see it.

BW: You think it was the crying that brought her back?

FN: Without question it was the crying. She liked it. She got better after that. She got strong. The first time I saw her smile — I switched on the wireless set one evening and tried to find some music for us. A woman was being killed in a radio play on one of the stations, and the actress screamed. I thought it’d make Boy nervous, but Santa Claus himself couldn’t have gotten a wider smile out of her.

BW: That all?

FN: I could tell you tens of stories about the pain she caused other children before she learned to be scared that I’d catch her at it. Most children get into fights, but it’s a bad sign when a child fights dirty, without anyone even showing her how. One girl angered Boy in some way — she said something, I think — this girl had a sore leg; she’d had some small accident days before… it was the sore leg that Boy went for, quick as quick. She kicked that sore leg out from under the girl. The happy children, the ones who had friends they could rely on, those children were safe from her. She was drawn to the anxious ones. The ones who had potential for misery. I watched her. When she ran away from home, I knew she’d gone to find someone who was unhappy, and once she’d found them she’d use her gift to make it worse.

BW: What do you think Boy would say if I told her all this?

FN: Don’t know. Try it.

He suddenly became a gentleman and asked if I wanted the rest of his french fries. He said he hated waste.

—

dad knocked on the diner window; I saw him and Frank didn’t. He had my hula hoop tucked under his arm, and when he reached us, he dropped it and picked me up off my seat. He held me tight against his chest and said, “Thank God,” and “You’re grounded forever,” and I heard the hoop rolling around on the tiled floor.

I said: “I don’t get why I’m grounded forever.”

“It’s directly connected to what happens in a father’s heart when he finds a pink hula hoop just lying there in the mud. To find that and have no idea where its owner is — I mean, goddamn it, Bird.”

I thought about it. He was right.

“And then I ask around and nobody remembers having seen her. And then Agnes starts talking about enemies—”

“This is Flax Hill. I couldn’t have gone far.”

“Don’t you see that that’s what made it so scary that no one had seen you? Your mom’s been on the phone to every kid in your class. But then Susie called your grammy. And you’re grounded forever.”

It was funny — I’d kind of expected Frank to be gone when Dad finally put me down, but Frank was still there, dipping his french fries in mayonnaise. He’d probably guessed that Dad wouldn’t hit an old man.

“Arturo Whitman,” Dad said, and held out his hand.

Frank went right on eating. “I know who you are,” he said.

Dad looked at me, looked back at Frank, then suggested that Frank introduce himself. Frank said his name, said it with pride, and Dad grabbed his arm and forced him out of the booth. For a second I thought Frank was going to get beaten around the head with his own walking stick, but Dad pressed it into his hand and told him to get out. “Just go. And if I see you look back at me or my daughter — if you look back at us even once — I’ll kick you right into the middle of next week.”

Frank said: “Why would I want to look back?” And he did as he was told.

—

apparently susie conlin told Dad to come get me because of Frank’s negative energy. She told Dad I was sitting in a booth with an old man who was telling me his life story and stopped talking whenever she walked past. She said I was writing down everything the man said, that I was wincing as I wrote with my bandaged hand, and that I looked really tired. She thought the old man should find somebody else to tell his life story to.

“He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No.”

“If he did—”

“No. It was the tree that cut me.”

“Show me what you wrote down.”

“He took it with him.”

Mom was sarcastic when we got home. “You and your Nancy Drew act. Thanks for coming home,” she said, interrupting Dad, who was telling her about Frank and how he didn’t think Frank was going to come near us again. She was red-faced and red-eyed. I put her arms around me and held them there until she hugged me.

—

also… i found out the worst thing that can happen when you tell someone you love them. I thought that if you love someone and they don’t love you back then they’re nice to you. Or at least, if you end up feeling terrible, the other person didn’t mean for that to happen. But Mom said “I love you” to some man on the phone, a man named Charlie, and he said: “Why?”

I got into the eavesdropping late, but I knew she was the one who’d called him, because the phone hadn’t rung. She was mad at him. She thought he’d told her dad where to find us. “You told that man about me and Bird!” she said. He said he hadn’t spoken to Frank Novak in years, and was Bird a boy or a girl, and Mom said: “She’s my daughter. My little girl.” Then this Charlie person said he had two sons, and a wife. He said he was happy. (I could almost hear Frank Novak saying “The happy ones were safe from her.”) That was when Mom told him she loved him. And he asked why.

Mom said: “Charlie? Charlie?” as if the phone line wasn’t working properly, but the line was clear. He said he had to go and hung up. Then I had to wait for Mom to hang up — obviously I couldn’t hang up before she did. She didn’t put the phone down for at least a minute. I stood there listening to the dial tone and began to wonder if this was a trick and she’d left the receiver off the hook in the parlor so she could appear in the hallway and tell me I’d been busted. Then I thought she might be crying into the phone, but her breathing was regular. After she hung up I dashed across the hallway and into bed with my heart going like gangbusters.

Mom: Charlie… I love you.

Charlie: Why?

Mom wore sunshades for the next few days. She wore them indoors and at night, and she smiled when Dad teased her. He thought she was acting that way because Snow was coming home.

Dad: I love you, honey.

Mom: And I love you.

She slept all the way through the weekend. She didn’t even get up to eat.

I tried to tell Aunt Mia that she should maybe come over or take Mom out somewhere. I’d want someone to tell Louis I was feeling down if for some reason I couldn’t tell him myself. But Aunt Mia was avoiding me. When I called her apartment, she said, “Hello?” and then dropped the phone when she heard my voice, and then I had to call back six times before she finally answered. If that isn’t avoiding somebody then I don’t know what is.

“What’s new?” she asked, once she was done denying that she was avoiding me.

“I met my grandfather.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, on Mom’s side.”

“I figured. Well?”

“Well, we sort of hated each other.”

(I’d cried about that. The tears came all of a sudden, when I was jumping rope with Ruth and Paula. Suddenly my feet wouldn’t leave the ground and my face and neck felt raw, as if they’d been scraped with rocks. It was the look he’d given me when he understood that I was his granddaughter. It was like a burn. And now that I was safe from it, the syringe scared me even more.)

“It’s okay, cara. I didn’t get along too well with one of my grandfathers, either.”

“Yeah, but… this was… anyway, he said something weird.”

Aunt Mia dropped something — a coffee cup, something like that. There was clattering and I heard her curse and scrabble around with a paper towel. Then she said: “To you? He said something weird to you?”

“Yeah. How’s your objectivity?”

Aunt Mia said: “Fine, I guess. Why? What did he say?”

“He said that Mom’s evil.”

I repeated myself after a couple of seconds because Aunt Mia didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure she was still there. I’m not always sure about Mom, but Aunt Mia is definitely not evil, and in a way she’s my proof that Mom is morally okay. It would’ve helped if Aunt Mia had laughed or seemed shocked, but she was just quiet. I began to whisper it a third time but she stopped me: “Can you put your mom on the line?”

“I thought you’d never ask. She’s sleeping, though. Do I try to wake her up?”

“No. No, let her rest. Just… tell her to call me.”

“But you’re okay, right?”

She called me a sweetheart for asking. It was hard to tell whether or not Mom and Aunt Mia had fallen out. Mom didn’t seem to think so, but maybe she’d done something that Aunt Mia was holding a grudge over. I know she went to Aunt Mia’s place twice, but both times Aunt Mia wasn’t home.

Dad asked if we should be worried about Mia, and Mom got irritated. “Why should we be worried about Mia, Arturo? Because she’s not married? Because she works hard at a job she likes?”

Dad let a few seconds go by and then said: “The Mia we know makes a little time for her friends no matter what, that’s all.”

“‘The Mia we know,’ eh? So what are you saying… that there’s this whole other Mia we don’t know?”

There was quite a long discussion about it and Mom didn’t realize she’d been tricked out of being irritated until Dad had made some rough sketches to show us which one of Aunt Mia’s bookcases could be a door that revolved into a hidden room.

I did what I could to smoke Aunt Mia out… I mailed her a copy of the notes I’d taken at the diner. She’d have called if she’d read them, no doubt about it. They must have gotten lost in the mail.

6

i came home from school on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and Snow was there, playing Julia’s piano. Not a whole piece of music, just tumbling little passages. I peeped around the parlor door and watched her working the piano pedals with her bare feet. The bare feet seemed proof that she was out of the ordinary; it was already so cold that I was wearing socks over two layers of pantyhose. Dad came up behind me and pushed me into the room with her, saying: “C’mon, that’s your sister in there.”

She looked more colored in person. Maybe it was the way she’d chosen to wear her hair, combed and pinned up on one side of her head so that it all rained down on one shoulder and left the other exposed to the dusty sunlight. She smiled at me and the words I’d been about to say went into hiding.

“Have mercy, Bird Whitman. I may need you to dial it back a notch with the cuteness,” she said, and slid off the piano stool. She was three days early. Her voice was a lot more girlish than I’d imagined it, considering the things she’d written to me, but her hugging technique was like Dad’s, maybe even a little more intense. She’d brought me a bouquet. Some of them looked like squashed gray-blue poppies. Others were almost roses, their color a stormy purple. Their petals and stamen were all twisted together, but they smelled good. Snow said they were the kind of flowers that only opened up at night; you picked them at night and then they stayed open.

“They’re not poison flowers, are they?”

She stared at me. “What?”

“You know… like La Belle Capuchine’s flowers in your letter…”

“Oh! Ha ha. No, no poison.”

“And no suitcase, either?”

“Left it at number eleven. I’ll be sleeping over there, in that creepy room with the tulle curtains and the sugar plum fairy mobiles. You know, I never even liked ballerinas.”

“Huh, well you should’ve said so.”

“I think I started to once, and everybody started saying, ‘Uh oh… somebody’s not herself today.’ I was outnumbered.”

“Oh.” So she was outnumbered. That was not a good excuse.

“Come to the mirror.” She fixed one of the night flowers behind my ear and stood looking over my shoulder.

“I see it,” she said.

I looked at us. “What?” We didn’t look as though we were related. Not even cousins.

“That thing you wrote to me about how technically impossible things are always trying so hard to happen to us, and just letting the nearest technically impossible thing happen—”

“Oh… yeah, I see it too! Oh, Snow. Think of all the pranks we can play.”

The mirror caught a few rays of sunset through the open front door, and the image of us went chestnut-colored at the corners. Snow’s hand was on my shoulder and both my own hands were at my sides, but our reflections didn’t call that any kind of reunion. The girls in the mirror had their arms around each other, and they smiled at us until we followed their lead.

“Looks like long ago,” Snow said. “Like Great-aunt Effie just said: ‘I hope you girls don’t think you’re something new? We’ve had sisters like you in this family before.’ And then she shows us an old, old photo… one of those tinted daguerreotypes…”

She lay with her head in my lap for most of the afternoon, jumping up every now and again to start a disc spinning on the record player. We talked about Frank Novak and how he’d told me Mom was evil and she said, “You know that’s not true, right? I don’t know what she is, but evil isn’t it.” We talked about Ephraim, who was most definitely not her boyfriend and was never going to be.

“So… your room at number eleven. What did you want instead of ballerinas?” I asked.

She really considered the question, as if it still mattered and changes would be made based on the answer she gave.

“Plain pink and white. Deep pink, not cotton-candy pink.”

We heard Dad telling someone it was an open house, and Miss Fairfax started walking up the hallway toward us. The pattern of her footsteps is pretty distinctive, elegant, just like her. I know it well from being designated lookout at school. But she turned back when she heard us talking. Others came by with covered dishes and clay pots; they didn’t speak to us, just rapped their knuckles on the open door, waved, and left notes on the kitchen table, alongside their offerings.

(Will return to kiss thine hand at thy earliest convenience, fair maiden — Anon.

Welcome back, Snow. Let’s catch up soon! Susie Conlin.

Hey there, beautiful one, don’t you dare leave before you come see us — Mr. and Mrs. Murray.)

Later in the evening we went to see what there was to eat and I was awestruck. There wasn’t an inch of space left on the tabletop, or on any of the counters; it had all been taken over by multicolored crockery. The air smelled roasted. “Uh… I’ve never seen anything like this before,” I said, grabbing at a pile of note cards before they slipped onto the floor. But when I looked at Snow, I caught her finishing a yawn.

“Me, either,” she said. “Isn’t it kind of everybody?” I didn’t answer her. She started reading some of the note cards with a really touched expression, but I’d caught her. She was used to being treated like this. It was nothing to her. I had a moment of hating her, or at least understanding why Mom did. Thankfully it came and went really quickly, like a dizzy spell, or a three-second blizzard. Does she know that she does this to people? Dumb question. This is something we do to her.