Authors: Helen Oyeyemi
“I suppose I’ll have to be the peacekeeper today,” Mrs. Fletcher
said, and she went out front, yelling even louder than Sidonie and Phoebe. I looked over the letters I was yet to answer. I still didn’t know Mrs. Fletcher’s first name. It was beginning to look as if nobody did. Every letter came in addressed to Mrs. A. Fletcher.
Having sent Sidonie out to buy RC Cola, Mrs. Fletcher returned and asked what she should bring to my dinner party that evening.
“Oh, thanks, but I can handle this.”
She dealt with three letters in rapid succession, writing NO at the top of one, A THOUSAND TIMES NO at the top of another, and OKAY in the margins of a third. “I’m not asking to be helpful,” she said. “I’m asking so as to make sure there’s something there I’ll want to eat.”
I handed her the menu I’d been working on for weeks.
“‘Pear spread and crackers,’” Mrs. Fletcher read aloud. “‘Anchovy ham rolls. Stuffed tomatoes
ravigote
. Potato salad. Chicken à la King. Banana chiffon cake. Peach pie. Postdinner cocktail: Rye Lane . . . a stupendous blend of whiskey, curaçao, orange squash, and
crème de noyaux
, stirred, not shaken, as recommended by the International Association of Bartenders.’”
She leaned back in her chair. “Why on earth are you putting yourself through all this on your own birthday? And what’s pear spread? Life has changed a lot, you know. You didn’t used to get all this food inside food inside food when I was a girl. The other day I was eating a mushroom and found it had been stuffed with prawns. I’ve got so many misgivings over this craze, Boy. It’s flying in the face of nature. A mushroom is a woodland fungus and a prawn comes from the sea. People have got no business stuffing one inside the other. Are the Whitmans treating you well?”
“What?” My mind was on the pear spread. I’d already made it the night before, over at Arturo’s. It was sitting in a bowl in his refrigerator looking radioactive.
“The Whitmans. Arturo Whitman’s family. Are they treating you well?”
“Oh. Yes. Gerald keeps issuing orders to Arturo not to let me get away and Viv’s very sisterly and Olivia’s very motherly and—it’s nice.”
She nodded. “Olivia Whitman looks so young, doesn’t she?”
“Yup.”
I typed
I hope this finds you well,
which was pretty high up on the list of phrases Mrs. Fletcher would never include in a letter if she was writing it herself.
She lifted a lock of her hair with a pencil and gave it a baleful stare. This was the first gesture of concern about her appearance that I’d seen from her. She cut her own hair carelessly, with regular kitchen scissors, and it showed. The ends looked like a bar graph. The hair itself was fine, though—rich brown streaked with gray. “I’m about the same age as she is,” she said. “I just don’t know how she does it.”
Olivia made Mrs. Fletcher nervous. That was difficult to process. I’d recently come across a proverb about not speaking unless you’d thought of something that was better than silence. So I kept typing.
Mrs. Fletcher wanted to know if she could ask me a personal question. I gave her an “mmm hmmm” that Snow would’ve been proud of.
“Do you know what it is you want from Arturo?”
An impressive U-turn, but I didn’t look up from my work. “You guessed right, Mrs. Fletcher. I’m a gold digger. If you know anyone richer and more gullible, let me at him.”
The bell above the shop door jangled—Sidonie or a customer. There was a quiet exchange of words in the next room, followed by the sound of caps falling off soda bottles. Sidonie, then.
“Nobody’s calling you a gold digger,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “Let me explain myself.”
“You don’t have to.”
She reached over and took my hand, patted it. “But if I don’t, you’ll poison me tonight, won’t you? I want to be able to enjoy my cocktail, just as the International Association of Bartenders recommends. Listen—I’m not a Flax Hill original, either. I’m from a market town in the South of England.”
“So that’s why you talk like that!”
“Well, what did you think?”
“I thought you just went to one of those . . . schools.”
“Oh, good grief. I’m not in the mood for this. Don’t interrupt me anymore. My husband died nine years ago, and I came here looking for some trace of him. He was my right-hand man for twenty-three years. No children; we married late, liked books, and liked each other and that was all. His heart was dodgy—anatomically speaking, I mean—and it killed him. I was all undone. That man. The first time we met, he called me
cookie
. I said ‘I beg your pardon?’ and he said ‘You heard. When are we having dinner?’ so I said ‘We might as well have it now.’ Then a week later he agreed to marry me—”
“You asked him?”
“I don’t mess about.”
“And he never brought you here while he was alive?”
“No. He told me he was a misfit in his hometown. But it wasn’t true. I barged into people’s homes and found him in their photo albums, being carried around on people’s shoulders. Homecoming King! People here are nice to me just because I’m his wife—was his wife, I mean. When I opened this store, so many people came by and bought books. Not to read them, I don’t think. Well, Joe Webster might read
The Canterbury Tales
one day . . . anyway, it was a gesture, to help me set up. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“I didn’t know you cared about being liked.”
“It isn’t a matter of like or dislike, and you know it. People are nice to me for his sake. They remember him. It’s a different Leonard they remember—he was becoming the man I ended up falling head over heels in love with. But that’s fine. We’ve all got different pieces of him to put together. It means I’m closer to him here than I would be in Newton Abbot.”
I squeezed her hand. From where I was sitting I could see the chess set on her window seat. It was always there; once I asked her if she liked chess and she just sort of hissed and left it at that. The black army faced the white army across their field of checkered squares; the kings and queens seemed resigned, companionable. There was never any change in their configuration. But no dust, either. No neglect.
“I’m only going to say this once, so don’t fly off the handle,” she said. “Flax Hill is home to me because I loved Leonard Fletcher. Not the other way around.”
“Right, but I’m not trying to—Arturo’s not—the air tastes of
palinka
, you see,” I said, idiotically. “Here in Flax Hill, I mean.”
Mrs. Fletcher took this in her stride. “Does it indeed? It tastes like lemon curd to me. Needless to say, I consider lemon curd to be an excellent comfort food. Now get back to work. Here are customers, and you’re behind.”
—
that day I
walked Phoebe and Sidonie all the way home instead of just three-quarters of the way. As usual I walked on the outside of our trio, taking the position of a gentleman protecting ladies from roadside traffic. As usual Phoebe’s siblings were waiting for us outside the elementary school, three rowdy little girls of indeterminate age and the shortest of short-term memories. Every school day they asked if they could play with my hair, and I let them. Every school day they squealed: “It’s just like sunshine!” and I wished they’d find a new sensation. Ordinarily I stopped when we reached the corner of Tubman and Jefferson—less because there was a tangible change in the neighborhood and more because that was when we started seeing groups of colored boys leaning against walls with their arms folded, not talking or doing anything else but leaning. I figured they were the Neighborhood Watch, and left them to it. So did the white boys who followed us along Jefferson calling out Sidonie’s name. We got to Tubman Street and the catcallers evaporated. But that day I kept going because I wanted Sidonie to come to dinner. Phoebe had already excused herself on account of having to watch her sisters while her mom was at work. But Sidonie was an only child, and
hesitated. “Ma probably needs me to help her tonight,” she said. “But maybe if you came and asked her yourself . . .”
I wavered, needing time to get everything on the menu wrong and then get it right. Sidonie said: “Hey, you’ve got a lot to do before dinnertime, right? Save me a slice of that chiffon cake; it’s going to be in my dreams tonight.”
Phoebe said, “Me too!” and her sisters said, “Me too, me too!” I told them it’d be Sidonie who brought them the cake, and passed the Tubman Street Neighborhood Watch without incident. Farther along Tubman, a mixed group was crammed into a motorcar; girls sat on boys’ laps, waving transistor radios in time to the music that poured out of them. These kids looked a little older than Sidonie, and ignored us completely. The houses were smaller and newer and better cared for than in Arturo’s part of town. Their doors were pastel painted, the front yards were meticulously well-swept, and their windows sparkled in the way that only the truly house-proud seem able to achieve. We passed other groups. Boys and girls, singing, wisecracking. Lone dutiful daughters and sons laden with groceries. One boy with a buzz cut was carrying what looked like a week’s supplies for an old lady who called him “Tortoise” and “Useless.” His friends pulled faces at him when the old lady wasn’t looking, and he grinned good-humoredly. “That’s Sam,” Phoebe said. “He’s my boyfriend. He just doesn’t know it yet.” And she and Sidonie giggled.
Then I saw Kazim. He was part of a bunch of boys gathered around an open window, trampling some poor gardener’s petunias. There was a green parakeet in a cage inside the living room, and the boys were trying to teach it a new phrase. This is what
they were trying to teach it to say:
Fuck whitey
. The parakeet stumbled backward along its perch. Sidonie put her hand on my arm to keep me walking, and I did keep walking, but I looked back. The group’s main teaching method seemed to be intimidation. They crowded the square of grass beneath the window, repeating the phrase over and over, all voices together. I heard the parakeet pleading “Hey diddle diddle, he-ee-ee-y diddle diddle!” but the boys insisted:
Fuck whitey, fuck whitey
. I saw Kazim and he saw me. He looked away first. He had been laughing until he saw me.
“I guess Kazim’s found better things to do than read books,” I said to Sidonie, or to Phoebe, or maybe just to the air. Phoebe and Sidonie looked at each other, and Phoebe said: “I don’t know what you mean, Miss Novak.”
I jerked my thumb at the boys across the way. “Yes, you do. I saw him.”
Phoebe said: “Saw . . . Kazim?”
A man about a quarter of a block down opened his window and issued a warning that he was on his way to end the lives of anyone responsible for creating “this racket,” and the parakeet boys scattered.
Sidonie said: “That wasn’t Kazim.”
Phoebe said: “I guess we all look the same to you.” She smiled to show she wasn’t saying it in a mean way, and ran in at her front door with her sisters hot on her heels.
My temples began to throb. It was Kazim; I knew it was him. What did Phoebe and Sidonie take me for, and why had they just closed ranks like that? Were they trying to tell me that I was on my own if I said anything about Kazim back at the bookstore?
Sidonie stopped at a peppermint-colored door and said: “Voilà—chez Fairfax.” I didn’t answer her, just looked all around me, picturing the walk back down to Jefferson without the girls. All the lines washed out of everything I tried to fix my eyes on. It was like a floodlight had been switched on just above my head. Sidonie said something I didn’t hear, then: “Miss Novak? It wasn’t him. Really. Kazim’s not a round-the-way boy. He stays home drawing and doing his wizard stuff. Relax. We all make mistakes.”
—
i sat down on a
wicker bench in the hallway, next to a table stacked with
Ebony
and
Jet
magazines. Intriguing text hovered beside the faces of the colored models on the covers:
Are homosexuals becoming respectable? End of Negro race by 1980 predicted by top scientist.
An older, far less haughty-looking version of Sidonie approached; she was in a wheelchair, and spun the wheels with her arms. I stood, then sat down again, not wanting to stand over her. Elsewhere in the house a television set blared and women talked over it and each other.
“Welcome, welcome,” Mrs. Fairfax said, shaking my hand. She said I should call her Merveille, or Merva if I couldn’t manage to say Merveille. “In America I am Merva . . .”
Sidonie must have told her I was a teacher: “You are so kind to invite Sidonie to dinner. Some other time . . . let Sidonie bring you; you will dine with us, I will give you such a dinner. Does Sidonie behave herself? Is her schoolwork good? Does she read too much?”
Merveille made me drink something so sweet it made my teeth ache; she said it was called sorrel. She was a hairdresser; she worked from home and Sidonie helped her in the evenings. She must have seen that I was wondering how she managed to do people’s hair—maybe everyone who met her for the first time wondered about that—she tapped my wrist and said: “I manage. People have to sit a lot lower than usual while I work, but they don’t mind because they leave looking good. Not just good . . . very good.” Her husband was a Pullman porter working the train route to Quebec and back. She showed me her appointment book. She had clients all the way up to midnight.
Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that’s supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone’s crossed that line? I said Sidonie was top of my class and that everybody liked her.
It was getting dark when I left, and I thought about calling Arturo from a phone booth and getting him to come pick me up. But it would take too long. So I just walked fast, with my head down, and didn’t raise it again until I got back to Jefferson Street.
—
snow kept me
company as I embraced
The Joy of Cooking
. She sat up on the counter with an apron over her dungarees and tasted the cake batter and the cream sauce for the chicken. She looked extremely doubtful about the cream sauce, but how sophisticated could her six-year-old palate be anyway?