Boy, Snow, Bird(39)

Grammy Olivia gets extra meat but Aunt Viv lost her fiancé. Do I feel bad for blowing Aunt Viv’s cover? Not really. I accidentally brought truth to light, and bringing truth to light is the right thing to do.

Aunt Mia had a stomachache last week. It wasn’t your usual type of stomachache. You don’t normally call someone to come hold your hand through a stomachache, and that’s what Aunt Mia did. She called Mom at three in the morning, maybe because she knows that Mom never just lets the telephone ring. If it rings when she’s in the shower, she yells: “Don’t just stand there, get the phone! Get the phone!” Aunt Mia called at three in the morning and it woke me up, and I stared at the silvery-blue moons painted on my ceiling, heard Mom talking to Dad. Something-something-something-gotta-look-in-on-Mia. By the time she was downstairs putting her shoes on, I was down there too, pulling on Dad’s old velvet blazer, the one he bought years ago and immediately wished he hadn’t. Mom said: “So it’s like that, huh,” and I said: “You know there’s no school tomorrow.” Mrs. Chen, Louis’s mom, drove us over to Worcester in her taxi. I think Mom tried to pay her extra for her trouble, but Mrs. Chen kept saying: “Not necessary. I don’t sleep much anyway.” Aunt Mia didn’t come to the door, so Mom let herself in with the key she has, and Aunt Mia was in her bed, on top of her sheets, not underneath them, looking greenish with nausea. Mom sat on the bed and tried to get Aunt Mia’s head on her lap but Aunt Mia said: “What, do you want me to puke?” So we just took a hand each and held on. I asked if I could get her anything and she pulled a smile out from somewhere and said what a well-brought-up child I was and, no, she couldn’t ask for anything more. After a while Mom jerked her head to bid me be gone, and I went into the kitchen, poured myself some chocolate milk, and wandered into the parlor to look at Aunt Mia’s wall of heroes. Most of her heroes are colored . . . like I am. Aunt Mia says she didn’t go out looking for colored heroes. She says that’s just the way it worked out. Mom and Aunt Mia murmured to each other and I studied the faces of journalists who spoke out against inequalities and wouldn’t shut up even when people threatened to kill them. If someone threatens to kill you for speaking up about something they’ve done, they must be feeling their guilt. So maybe that’s how you know you’re on the right track.

There was Ida B. Wells of the Washington Evening Star (“gutsy as hell”), her hair gathered up into a gorgeous pompadour that I’m going to try to copy as soon as my chin will agree to tilt up in just as dignified a way as hers. There was Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle . . . she’s still very much alive, that one—Aunt Mia got her autograph and tucked it into the frame along with the picture. There was Robert S. Abbott of The Chicago Defender with his bowler hat on, his eyes stern and kind—when I fell asleep, he was the one who stuck up for me. “It is possible to develop a nose for a good story,” he told Charlotta Bass and Ida B. Wells, when they pointed out that I didn’t have one. He borrowed Dad’s voice to say that, and I liked him all the more for it.

I knew that there was more to be discovered about Aunt Mia’s stomachache, and I followed my nose a little, or tried to, anyway, not wanting to disappoint Robert S. Abbott. On the bus home the next afternoon I asked just one question and Mom looked at me with that quick flash in her eyes, the knife look. “Try to remember that it’s none of your business, Bird.”

Something happened, that much is clear, something bigger than indigestion. But I don’t know if I’m ready to cross Mom in order to get this particular scoop. It looks like Aunt Mia’s feeling better now, anyway. I can return to this matter once my skills are honed. I’ll call that choosing my battles.

In the meantime I’ll be finding out who my enemy is, and what exactly it is he or she has got against me. Proof or deduction, I’m not fussy about how I get there. I don’t know what it’s like to wish someone ill. Sure, I’ve occasionally told Louis Chen that I hope a monster eats him, and he’s told me to go boil my head a few times, but that tends to be in the heat of the moment, and anyway we’re getting married once we get old enough, so we don’t have to make nice all of the time.

Gee-Ma Agnes (not my grandmother in any biological sense, but . . . it’s similar to the way things are with Aunt Mia) says I’ve definitely got one. An enemy, that is. I told her what happens to me sometimes, with mirrors, and she said: “Watch out; that’s your enemy at work, trying to get rid of you.”

I don’t think she was trying to be spooky. She was shelling pistachio nuts and she made her words sound as if they were a comment on the color of the nut meat. People assume Gee-Ma doesn’t have anything to say because she’s small and shaky and doesn’t seem to follow conversations very well. But Gee-Ma can get interested in conversation when she wants to. The stories that make everyone else say “Get outta here” are the stories Gee-Ma takes an interest in. We used to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone together, and she’d slap her knee and crow: “He’s right! Rod Serling is right.” She doesn’t like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie because “Magic is not a joke, Bird.”

Phoebe the housemaid acts like Gee-Ma is too old to move—“You stay right where you are,” she tells her, and dusts carefully around her. She asks Gee-Ma real simple questions, real slowly: “Enjoying that soup, Mrs. Miller?” Phoebe should maybe stop and think of Mrs. Fletcher, my mom’s boss. She’s the same age as Gee-Ma Agnes. Just last year Mrs. Fletcher began living in sin with a bookbinder called Mr. Murphy. I have reason to believe that Mom and Dad interfere with each other pretty regularly; there are those mornings when I find Mom making breakfast and she’s wearing the shirt Dad was wearing just the night before and she hasn’t even buttoned it up, she just uses one of his neckties as a belt. The first moment of seeing Mom like that is always really, really gross, and now it seems that grown-ups just never stop interfering with each other. Me and Mom and probably half of Flax Hill saw Mr. Murphy and Mrs. Fletcher getting all cozy together on a picnic blanket on Farmer’s Green, feeding each other cherries, yet. Their combined age is around one hundred and thirty years, but Mr. Murphy isn’t shy about kissing Mrs. Fletcher’s hand in public. More than once Mrs. Fletcher has laid her head on Mr. Murphy’s shoulder and giggled like she’s never seen a shoulder before. Imagine what those two are like when there’s no one else there. Mrs. Fletcher isn’t even one of the quiet ones, so if that’s the kind of thing she gets up to, then there’s no telling what Gee-Ma’s got up her sleeve.