Authors: Helen Oyeyemi
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
d
ad 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 L
OUIS
C
HEN IS A
V
IETCONG
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.”