Boy, Snow, Bird (20 page)

“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.