Boy, Snow, Bird(21)
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.
7
the morning I turned twenty-two I put twenty-two dollars cash into an envelope addressed to Mr. Frank Novak and mailed it to Mia’s address in Worcester. It was the sum total of the money I stole plus interest. Mia was to mail the envelope to a friend she had in New York, who’d drop it into the rat catcher’s letterbox and make him wonder if I was around. I didn’t enclose a note, though there were a few things I’d have liked to say. Restraint is classier.
Over at the bookstore, Mrs. Fletcher asked me if I thought it was shaping up to be a good year for me. It was the closest thing to “Happy birthday” I was going to get from her, so I took it with a neutral smile. We were sitting in her office, dealing with her correspondence. She went through a folder of letters I’d already opened for her, scrawled responses at the top or in the margins, and I turned those responses into letters.
Thirteen-year-old Phoebe was crying next door, because she was reading Les Misérables—a trial for all of us, since it was such a long book, and she was liable to cry all the way through it. Sidonie was jeering at Phoebe for crying. “And just why are you weeping over a bunch of French people from eighteen hundred and whenever?”
“It’s too sad,” Phoebe sobbed. “I mean, it was only a loaf of bread.”
“What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid? It’d be less phony if you cried for every man who’s been lynched in Tennessee or Alabama or South Carolina since eighteen hundred and whenever.”
“Don’t tell me who to cry for and who not to cry for, Sidonie Fairfax. Dark girl like you talking as though you’re the top. You’ve got a face like a bowl of goddamned molasses. Did you know that, Know-It-All?”
“Molasses is sweet, molasses is sweet,” Sidonie chanted.
“Uh . . . where’s Kazim?” I asked Mrs. Fletcher, preferring to ask that question rather than remind her that people were less likely to enter the store if they saw two colored schoolgirls fighting out front. I already knew how she responded to reminders of that kind: “Hm . . . I don’t care.” Besides, Kazim was my favorite of the bookstore gang—fourteen and tall for his age, his gaze vague behind the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. He drew comic strips about a boy called Mizak, and his card tricks went just a little bit beyond sleight of hand. He’d snap his fingers over a spread-out pack, say “Joker, fly,” and the Joker sprang up into his hand. It had to be something to do with magnets. Still, we all exchanged glances. Because what if it wasn’t?
“I suppose I’ll have to be the peacekeeper today,” Mrs. Fletcher said, and she went out front, yelling even louder than Sidonie and Phoebe. I looked over the letters I was yet to answer. I still didn’t know Mrs. Fletcher’s first name. It was beginning to look as if nobody did. Every letter came in addressed to Mrs. A. Fletcher.