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 unhappy. 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.
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-maché 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.