A couple of days after that Mom and I had to shop for the week’s food. I go to the grocery store with her as often as I can because it’s better if I have final approval of the things she buys. Her combinations can be a little Martian otherwise. She made us lobster thermidor once, because someone in a novel she was reading had gone on a crazy lunchtime rampage and lobster thermidor was what she’d had. The flavors were really interesting (Dad’s words, not mine) but for a whole day afterward my stomach felt as if it had been kidnapped, boiled, and then deep-fried. I bet she put huckleberries in the sauce, or some other ingredient that isn’t supposed to go into lobster thermidor.
For a moment at the grocery store I thought Mom was going to say something about Snow. She knew I’d kept my letter, the one Snow had written to me, asking if I could read yet. What Mom did was leave her jewelry box on her dressing table, wide open so I could see that all the other letters had been taken out. And she’d started blushing whenever I caught her eye. She’d be talking and I’d tilt my head at her and her face would flood dark red. At the grocery store she said: “Bird . . . Bird, you listen to me,” and she was blushing again, my red and white mother. I said: “Yes, Mom?” and there was a nasty spike in my voice, but I didn’t care. She ought to know that if you want to set yourself up as queen and have everything the way you want it and keep sisters apart then you’re not going to have a big fan club. She ought to know that where there’s a queen there’s often a plot to overthrow her. She ended up just looking down at the shopping list and reading it aloud, and I picked the items up and put them in our cart, except for the stuff that sounded like it’d come out of one of her books. I’ve never known a grocery store to stock larks’ tongues or quince preserves anyhow.
Mom came and sat on the end of my bed that night, took a long, deep pull on her cigarette, and sent a jet of smoke up toward the birdcage. “You value objectivity, right?”
I decided not to give her an answer, but she wouldn’t leave without one. A skin-crackling silence rose up between us. It was new and truly awful and nothing like our other silences.
To put a stop to it I said: “What’s ‘objectivity’ mean?”
“Don’t give me that, Miss Reading-Age-of-Sixteen-Plus. Miss Fairfax has started saying the only reason your schoolwork’s sloppy is because you’re bored; it doesn’t challenge you.”
“No . . . I’m just lazy, Mom. And I try to be objective, but I keep forgetting.”
“I’m asking you a favor. I want you to concentrate on being as objective as you can about your sister.” (Whoever heard of anyone being objective about their sister?) “She’s a pretty convincing replica of an all-around sweetie pie, but . . . I think being objective may be the only way you’ll see that there’s something about her that doesn’t quite add up. Something almost like a smell, like milk that’s spoiled. Maybe it’s just as simple as her being an overpetted show pony; I don’t know. I’d be happy never to find out. You want to play investigator, so investigate. I’m here on standby. But . . . Bird, what could you have to say to a replica? You’re so much yourself. Whatever else happens, don’t let her mess that up. Okay?”
If that was Mom’s attempt to make me believe that my sister was bad news, it was a flop.
“Look—I’ve got to get up early tomorrow,” I said.
I wasn’t being mean—Aunt Mia was taking me to a conference for teen journalists. It was being held in Rhode Island, and I had special permission to take the day off school.
“Right,” Mom said. “Right. Hey, sweet dreams.”
I closed my eyes but she stayed in my room. She walked over to the window, drew the curtains around her, and stood there, smoking. It had been a foggy day and she’d done this before, on other foggy days—I knew she liked the view from my window, liked to trace the blurry shape of the hill with one finger. I was mad at her but glad that she was watching over me. I don’t know exactly when she left. I woke up a couple of times and she hadn’t left my room—an owl said tyick tyick outside my window, and the curtains rustled and Mom muttered: “Tyick tyick yourself, owl.” In the morning she was gone. She’d killed four spiders. There were no bodies, but their webs gaped at me.
—
the conference wasn’t too bad. I was there to eavesdrop for Aunt Mia. She was writing an article about what to expect from the journalists of the future, and she figured they’d clam right up if there was a grown-up around. I didn’t get very many quotes for her—the journalists of the future were introverts. They listened to the speakers up on stage, took notes, and occasionally asked each other how to spell a word. Some of them looked suspiciously like jocks and cheerleaders who’d put on eyeglasses and intelligent expressions just for the chance to be around kids from other schools, but apart from that I enjoyed being part of a silent, highly observant crowd that stored its opinions up until they were good and ready. I befriended a girl named Yasmin Khoury—she was sixteen, and looked like the princess of a faraway land, but claimed that her father was a janitor. We called ourselves the Brown People’s Alliance, though she said I was only just brown enough to qualify, so she’d have to be the spokesperson until we got a few more members. We sat together at lunch break, drinking ice-cold milk out of wineglasses.
Yasmin said: “So . . . have you got a boyfriend?”
I nodded.
“Really?”
“Ouch.”
Yasmin patted the long braid that ran down her back. “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. You should break up with him, though. Before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“How do I put this . . . boys take up a lot of thinking time.”
“They do?” (I’d never considered Louis to be a time-tabled activity before. I love, and I mean love the way his hair falls across his forehead in a wave, and come to think of it, the time I spend thinking about pushing that wave of black hair out of his eyes could definitely be put to better use. His friends say: “Cut that hair, Chen,” but he reminds them that it was a haircut that drained the mighty Samson of his strength. Yes, the boy I’m sweet on can be such a nerd sometimes.)
Yasmin Khoury had another question: “Do you know what a lobotomy is?”
“I think so. It’s when they operate and remove parts of your brain, right?”
“Right. Boyfriends are the same thing. They shrink your brain. Any female who really wants to be able to think for herself shouldn’t be wasting her time on boys.”
“Oh.”
“So are you going to break up with your boyfriend?”
“Uh . . . maybe. If we stop liking each other or something.”
She was beginning to look around for somebody older and more revolutionary to talk to, so I asked a question to distract her. “What do you spend your thinking time on, anyway?”
She set her glass down on the table between us. “I think about things that are gone from the world.”
“What things?”
“Well . . . the ancient wonders. The libraries at Antioch and Timbuktu, the hanging gardens at Babylon, the ringing porcelain of Samarkand. The saddest thing isn’t so much that all that stuff is gone . . . in a way it’s kind of enough that it was all here once . . . but now it’s all just garbled rumors a brown girl’s father tells her until he thinks she’s gotten too big for bedtime stories. None of the stuff that’s gone has been replaced in any substantial way, and that depresses the hell out of me. Oh, never mind. Sorry. Forget it.”
“Well, I won’t. We’re the replacement.”
“The Brown People’s Alliance?”
“Do you see anybody else volunteering?”
She laughed. “No pressure, huh . . .”
“So. Do you still think boyfriends and, uh, lobotomies are the same thing?”
“Yup. Nothing’s going to change that.”
I didn’t tell Aunt Mia about the Brown People’s Alliance because I know how she is. Nothing’s off-limits with her; she would’ve put it in the newspaper and tried to pass it off as cute. She used to mention dumb convictions of mine in her articles, though Mom banned her from using my name: A six-year-old girl of my acquaintance won’t touch canned tuna fish because she believes it to be the flesh of mermaids. Words cannot adequately describe her solemn, speechless anger as tuna salad is served and consumed. It’s the anger of one who knows that this barbarism will go down in history and the sole duty of the powerless is to bear witness. “Reason with the kid,” I hear you cry. “Set the record straight.” Don’t you think we’ve tried? Nothing can be done to convince her that canned tuna really is fish. Were Chicken of the Sea to remove all mermaids from their packaging and advertising overnight, she’d only call it a cover-up. She quit making those little mentions when she realized that most of her readers thought I was her daughter. In their letters to the editor people kept writing things like “as the mother of a young child, Mia Cabrini ought to know . . .”
“So that’s all you’ve got for me?” Aunt Mia asked, after I told her what little I’d managed to overhear. We were driving home in her little pink car. When she slowed down, I thought she was going to fling open my door and tell me to get out and walk, but actually it was because there was a stoplight ahead.
“That’s all I’ve got. Sorry.”
Aunt Mia said: “Somehow I doubt that, but have it your way. You’re a deep one, Bird. Just like your mother.”
Don’t say I’m like her. Don’t say I’m like her. That’s what I was yelling inside.
“Hey, Bird—”
“Yeah?”
“Do I look forty?”
“Forty years old?” I asked, trying to buy time.
“Yes, forty years old.”
Her eyes flicked up toward the rearview mirror. I was sitting in the backseat because she doesn’t like to have anyone sitting next to her while she is driving. She says it makes her feel crowded in. I hadn’t shown up in her mirror at all that car ride. I begged that missing slice of me—hair, cheek, chin, and the top of my arm—to appear behind her before she started to feel funny about not seeing it there, but the mirror didn’t care whether Aunt Mia felt funny or not, or it was my reflection that didn’t care. Thanks a lot, rearview mirror. Between talking and watching the road and trying not to crash her car, Aunt Mia’s attention was fully booked anyway. Dad drives and Mrs. Chen drives but Aunt Mia just gets behind the wheel and hopes it’s another one of her lucky days. For a split second she lifted her hand to adjust the mirror—I could tell she was starting to feel funny, starting to feel that something didn’t fit, but couldn’t figure out exactly what—then she said, “Ha,” more to herself than to me, and looked ahead of her again.
“Well? Do I look forty?”
“Yeah.”
She muttered something in Italian. I think she was cursing.
“But aren’t you older than forty anyway?”
“Cara . . . this ice you’re skating on is very thin.”
I told her that she was obviously also gorgeous, but she said she didn’t want to hear about gorgeous. She’d heard me calling a grilled cheese sandwich gorgeous just last week.
Neither of us said anything for a while, then I asked if she was okay.
“Sure I am.”
“But your stomachache . . .”
“Stomachache? Oh. Stomachs. Sometimes they ache. That’s life.”
She kept her eyes on the road and got her smile right on the second try. I sat back and told myself that I was letting her keep her secret, that I could find out whenever I wanted. If I was able to mimic Mom’s voice, that might even have been true. I could have called Aunt Mia up and got her talking. But Mom is impossible to copy. I try and try, and each try sounds less like her. I’m not able to play Mom’s voice back in my head the way I can other people’s. I’m beginning to think that it’s my ear. Maybe I don’t hear Mom properly in the first place.
—
louis chen slipped me a flower-scented envelope when he came over that dinnertime. Bird Whitman, c/o Louis Chen . . . Snow had perfected her handwriting to a copperplate script. I stuck the letter into the pocket of my overalls, where it rustled impatiently as we watched Batman and Louis tried to get me to say “Sorry, toots . . . I’m antisocial” just the way Catwoman said it. Everyone at school had moved on from Louis’s being a Vietcong, and he said there were no hard feelings. (I had some, but he didn’t ask me.) The new thing was a note someone had pinned to Carl Green’s locker. The note read BARBARA THOMAS IS FAST and inquiring minds wanted to know whether this was true, and what Barbara Thomas was going to do to try to prove her innocence. Louis looked as if he was feeling sorry for her, especially when I pointed out that the only way she could prove she wasn’t fast was by never kissing another boy until the day she died. But I couldn’t think of a better person for such a thing to happen to, so I laughed. Going to middle school in the same building as the high school students makes you see the reality. School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it’s getting better or worse. But really it’s the same thing for years and years.