Boy, Snow, Bird(24)
Sidonie stopped at a peppermint-colored door and said: “Voilà—chez Fairfax.” I didn’t answer her, just looked all around me, picturing the walk back down to Jefferson without the girls. All the lines washed out of everything I tried to fix my eyes on. It was like a floodlight had been switched on just above my head. Sidonie said something I didn’t hear, then: “Miss Novak? It wasn’t him. Really. Kazim’s not a round-the-way boy. He stays home drawing and doing his wizard stuff. Relax. We all make mistakes.”
—
i sat down on a wicker bench in the hallway, next to a table stacked with Ebony and Jet magazines. Intriguing text hovered beside the faces of the colored models on the covers: Are homosexuals becoming respectable? End of Negro race by 1980 predicted by top scientist. An older, far less haughty-looking version of Sidonie approached; she was in a wheelchair, and spun the wheels with her arms. I stood, then sat down again, not wanting to stand over her. Elsewhere in the house a television set blared and women talked over it and each other.
“Welcome, welcome,” Mrs. Fairfax said, shaking my hand. She said I should call her Merveille, or Merva if I couldn’t manage to say Merveille. “In America I am Merva . . .”
Sidonie must have told her I was a teacher: “You are so kind to invite Sidonie to dinner. Some other time . . . let Sidonie bring you; you will dine with us, I will give you such a dinner. Does Sidonie behave herself? Is her schoolwork good? Does she read too much?”
Merveille made me drink something so sweet it made my teeth ache; she said it was called sorrel. She was a hairdresser; she worked from home and Sidonie helped her in the evenings. She must have seen that I was wondering how she managed to do people’s hair—maybe everyone who met her for the first time wondered about that—she tapped my wrist and said: “I manage. People have to sit a lot lower than usual while I work, but they don’t mind because they leave looking good. Not just good . . . very good.” Her husband was a Pullman porter working the train route to Quebec and back. She showed me her appointment book. She had clients all the way up to midnight.
Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that’s supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone’s crossed that line? I said Sidonie was top of my class and that everybody liked her.
It was getting dark when I left, and I thought about calling Arturo from a phone booth and getting him to come pick me up. But it would take too long. So I just walked fast, with my head down, and didn’t raise it again until I got back to Jefferson Street.
snow kept me company as I embraced The Joy of Cooking. She sat up on the counter with an apron over her dungarees and tasted the cake batter and the cream sauce for the chicken. She looked extremely doubtful about the cream sauce, but how sophisticated could her six-year-old palate be anyway?
“Maybe you’ll get a mother for your birthday,” she said. I dabbed the end of her nose with a square of kitchen paper, even though there was nothing there.
“Who said I want a mother? Maybe I want a daughter.”
“What kind of daughter?” Snow said, with the air of a department store attendant, invisible stock list in hand.
“I said maybe. It depends. I might forget to feed and water her.”
“That would be very bad, because mothers have to give their daughters cookies all the time.”
“Oh, like Grandma Olivia and Grandma Agnes give you cookies?”
“Yeah, but then they pat my stomach,” she said, stabbing toothpicks through the anchovy ham rolls. She hit the dead center of each one. She parted her own hair in the mornings with that same extreme precision. I think she observed her father’s work more closely than he might have guessed.
“Okay, so cookies yes, stomach pat no. What else?”
“You have to hide her.”
“Hide her?”
“Not all the time. Only sometimes. Like if a monster comes looking for her, you have to hide her.”
“Well, of course.”
“Even if the monster comes with a real nice smile and says ‘Excuse me, have you seen my friend Snow?’ you have to say ‘She’s not here! She’s gone to Russia.’”
“I’ll do better than that. I’ll say: ‘Snow? Who’s Snow?’”
She clapped her hands. “That’s good!”
“Anything else?”
“You have to come find me if I get lost.”
“Lost? Like in the woods?”
“Not just there. Anywhere.”
“Hmmmm. Let me think about that one. It’s a big job. Meanwhile, do you think you can get your daddy out of his workroom so he can help you dress?”
She threw her arms around my neck, gave me a kiss, and hopped down from the counter. What made her so trusting, so sure of people’s goodwill? If I was like her I wouldn’t have shrunk back later when Olivia Whitman draped a gray fur stole around my shoulders and said: “Happy birthday!” It felt expensive, thick to the touch but a lighter weight on the skin than it looked. Mrs. Fletcher asked: “Is that chinchilla?” and gave me a stern look, as if I were at fault for accepting it.
(The only thing I felt guilty of was already knowing that it was chinchilla fur—Olivia had worn it the week before, when she took me to see The Magic Flute in Worcester. We’d smoked cigars outside the opera house and she asked me how I liked the show. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said. I said that as far as I could gather it was a tale about a woman who could be led out of captivity only by a man, and that the man could save her only by ignoring her.