Authors: Helen Oyeyemi
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
un
happy. 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.