Boy, Snow, Bird(20)

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?”