there’s something ominous about being handed an ivory-colored card with scalloped edges that basically says Hello, I’m your boyfriend’s mother and I’ve heard such a lot about you and do please come to tea at half past five tomorrow. I was in a terrible state about it, sweaty as anything. The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven’t got an attitude problem.
Olivia lived two doors down from Arturo, in a bigger house than his, a house full of playthings for her granddaughter. Skipping ropes, tin soldiers, all colors of crayons, and toy cars strewn everywhere. I wondered how many falls Olivia Whitman had had and was going to have just for the sake of keeping a little girl amused. Two other women joined us for tea, and I really felt that wasn’t fair, especially since the other women turned out to be Arturo’s younger sister and Julia’s mother. Olivia really had summoned the committee. I wished I wasn’t wearing violet eye shadow, which was funny, because just half an hour before I’d thought of the eye shadow as armor that I couldn’t have stepped out of the boarding house without. It might have been the darkness of the room—they sat with the curtains drawn, and the only real light seemed to come from the silverware—but it was difficult telling the difference between the three women. Olivia and Agnes had a good excuse for sharing their style and mannerisms, in that they were both in their mid-sixties. Vivian was twenty-three. Twenty-three and wearing a twinset, with her hair in fussy curls. But she had Arturo’s narrow amber eyes. She began by listing everybody she knew in New York and asking me if I’d ever met them. Her perfectly straight face threw me off at first. But by the time she’d got to the seventeenth name or so—“Fernanda Crackenbone. You’ve honestly never run into Fernanda? But she’s awfully sociable. The most sociable girl I know. Goes every place there is to go”—I realized she was kidding around, and also that Olivia and Agnes had been holding their laughter in so that I wouldn’t think they were laughing at me, which accounted for their strangely cramped expressions. When I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, that I didn’t believe there was any such person as Fernanda Crackenbone, Olivia threw up her hands, let herself have a good roar at last, then said: “I’m only glad you don’t think this girl of mine has a screw loose.”
“I do have a screw loose, you know,” Vivian said. “It’s just that Mama doesn’t want anybody to think so. More tea?”
I slipped up twice—once when Olivia talked about Vivian’s progress at law school and what a wonderful singer Julia had been, a classical contralto, no less. Then she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said: “Oh, I like it at the bookstore,” and Vivian and Olivia gave each other the briefest but most chilling glance, then changed the subject. Oddly enough, that was when Agnes, Julia’s mother, smiled at me. Her smile was encouraging, though she shook her head a little bit, as if she thought I needed coaching. The second slipup was when Olivia announced that she wanted Arturo to return to academic life. “I didn’t raise my son to be a jeweler,” she said. “My husband didn’t work all the way up from bank clerk to branch manager for that.” When I forgot myself so far as to try to argue with her, she said “outrageous” and rattled the sugar tongs in a manner that was positively alarming.
Agnes took my mostly incoherent argument and rephrased it for me: “Livia, dear. Boy has got a point. Arturo is just as smart as he ever was—he’s just making smart jewelry now. He’s bringing ancient Egypt and Byzantium alive again in ways people can touch and wear. He always got so sore when people fell asleep during his history lectures, didn’t he?”
I kept looking at the curtains and missing the sunlight. Maybe Agnes or Olivia had bad eyes. Even so, I didn’t know how they could bear to sit here in this chintzy gloom. Agnes’s neck was very thin. Swallowing tea seemed to cause her pain. There was a framed photo of Arturo’s father, Gerald, on the sideboard, well-groomed white sideburns and all; his golf club was in midswing and his gaze was incredulous—I seemed to be putting him off his game. What would Agnes say, what would any of these three say if I began to tell them about Sidonie, the eldest of the colored kids who came into the bookstore day after day just to read? Sidonie, whose colored father had taken just one look at her Caribbean mother and fallen in love? “They’re crazy,” Sidonie told me, shaking her head. “She just can’t seem to pick up any American fighting words, and he never learned any French ones. So they don’t fight . . .”
I could have talked about how a photograph of Sidonie’s mother had inspired a painting on the side of a fighter jet flown by colored pilots back in ’44, and how Sidonie had inherited her mother’s looks, and stayed away from school because she didn’t want trouble. “White boys get stupid around this girl,” her friend Kazim explained, and the couple of times I’d walked Sidonie halfway home from the bookshop, I saw what Kazim meant. Sidonie Fairfax had a goofy laugh, but when her face was at rest, it was imperious. There’s a certain type of colored girl who speaks softly and carries herself well, but when you talk to her, her eyes firmly reject every word that comes out of your mouth, just as if she’s saying: Oh, come on now. Bullshit. Bull. Shit. It had been hard to get her talking. She was often deep in conversation with Mrs. Fletcher, but when I said something like “It’s a nice afternoon, isn’t it, Sidonie?” she’d say “Certainly, Miss Novak.” (Subtext: If you say so.) If I’d been a guy, I wouldn’t have been sure how to approach her without getting shot down, either. And so the jesters lined up to entertain the queen, scrambling up trees and trying to hit her with their satchels, starting impromptu wrestling matches with each other on the sidewalk at the very moment she happened to be passing by. One fool took it upon himself to turn a backflip and nearly broke his skull doing it. Those morons embarrassed her. She was only fifteen. At that age embarrassment is something you can actually die of, and avoiding it is more important than what your father will say when he finds out you’ve missed a month and a half of school. Someone had copied out a poem and put it in her coat pocket—I would liken you / To a night without stars / Were it not for your eyes—and that had been the last straw for her. “Miss Novak, I’m the only teenager I know who reads Langston Hughes. I mean, that note can’t have come from a student. That’s got to have come from a teacher, right? I’m not the one to get mixed up in that kind of nonsense.”
What if I’d told that drawing room tea party: “Sidonie likes the bookstore too, because nobody gives her a hard time there. White girls don’t spill ink all over her dress at the bookstore, and colored boys don’t twist her arm behind her back, and nobody stands in her way just leering like crazy when all she wants to do is walk down the corridor. That’s the kind of girl that exists out there, less than a mile away from those linen curtains. But if you saw her without talking to her, she’d make you paranoid in a way that only a colored girl can make a white woman paranoid. That unreadable look they give us; it’s really shocking somehow, isn’t it? Kind of like finding someone staring in at the window of your home, but not in a way that gets you scared you’ll be robbed. No, it’s a different kind of stare. A stare that says ‘I don’t particularly like being outside, but I don’t want to come in, either.’”
“My, my,” Olivia and Agnes and Vivian would have said. Or maybe just “indeed.” Arturo must have learned his devastating phrasing of that word from somewhere.
I managed not to say anything about Sidonie Fairfax. I managed to drink my tea without slurping, and I passed the “Will you have another Fig Newton” test. (The correct answer was “Thank you, but I really think I’d better not. They’re so delicious they could be my downfall!”) I crossed my ankles and tried to settle, to be at peace. After a while Olivia asked if I’d met her granddaughter.
I said I hadn’t. The lady didn’t need to know that I’d seen Snow once and been so spooked that I could barely remember what exactly I’d seen.
“Well—would you like to meet her?”
“Oh, is she around?” I’d assumed she was with her father.
Vivian lifted up the corner of the tablecloth that the tea things sat on and revealed Snow, curled up under the table, snoring. She’d crushed the flowers someone had carefully pinned behind each ear. A white petal fluttered on one of her eyelids, and with each snore her eyelashes swept the petal farther down, onto her cheek. I couldn’t understand how she’d managed to sleep while we’d all been talking at full volume. I guess it was all just noise to her. I watched the women watching Snow. Their reverence was over the top. Sure, she was an extraordinary-looking kid. A medieval swan maiden, only with the darkest hair and the pinkest lips, every shade at its utmost. She was like a girl in a Technicolor tapestry, sure, sure, but . . . they’d had a while to get used to her, and acting like that every time they laid eyes on her seemed to me like the fastest way to build an insufferable brat. Vivian let the tablecloth drop, but Olivia signaled to her to raise it again and cooed: “Why don’t you come out and meet Boy, sweetie?”
Five minutes later, Snow was sitting on the sofa beside me, swinging her legs and asking questions.
(“Do you like cookies? Do you like cold water? Do you like elephants? How do you spell ‘genius’? Can you jump rope? How are ya today? What does ‘genius’ mean?”)
I was already halfway to smitten. Olivia looked on and fanned herself with carded lace and smiled at us.
When I left, it was Agnes who saw me to the door. “Snow’s the spitting image of Julia when she was a girl,” she said, leaning close, as if she were letting me in on classified information. I knew what I should say next, so I said it: “And Julia was the spitting image of you when she was a girl.”
Agnes gave me a little push. “Oh, you know what you’re about. You’ll get around Livia quicker than quick.”
Olivia had already decided she’d put up with me. I knew it and so did Agnes. If Olivia had decided against me, I’d have finished my tea and been shown out without even beginning to suspect that Snow had been less than a foot away all afternoon. I doubt the kid would have come out before she was called.
It was all kind of irregular, but if that was how they felt about Snow, then that was how they felt about her. People insist that beauty fades. Take Webster and Mia—both of them older than I am but not by all that much. (Actually, I’m not sure. Maybe in the case of Mia and me, the seven years between us is a lot.) Webster often said things along the lines of “Hey, what we’ve got only lasts a minute, only one goddamned minute and we’ve got to make the most of it.” Mia’s view seemed to be that it wasn’t a good idea to trade on your looks at all if you could help it. Not for ethical reasons, but because she was very protective of her future self—she called her “Mia the crone”—and didn’t want her to get horribly depressed when people stopped letting her get away with things. But, Agnes’s frailty aside, she and Olivia were pretty good examples of lasting beauty, right down to the creases that ran around their foreheads and lips, some soft, like folds in cream, others deeply scored. One frown or smile from either woman went a long way. If you’d just been smiled at, there was some dimension to the smile you couldn’t quite get at. If you’d just been frowned at, the hint of amusement that came with the frown told you that all was not lost. Olivia’s snub nose and wide mouth made her more minxlike than pretty, but whatever it was that her peers had gone nuts for was still there. She clearly intended for Snow to be part of her lasting-beauty club. And really, what of it? Most of the people who say beauty fades say it with a smirk. Fading is more than just expected, it’s what they want to see. I don’t.