Boy, Snow, Bird(40)

Gee-Ma’s husband moved back to Mississippi when their only daughter died. “He did invite me along,” Gee-Ma says. “He did invite me along, I’ll give him that.” But she liked Flax Hill better and anyway they hadn’t married for love. She won’t explain what they married for; another thing on my list to find out. She says the main thing is that they didn’t marry for love and neither of them really tried to make it grow, they sort of just expected to love each other after a certain number of years but it didn’t work out that way. All that happened was that she’d be having a nice day until she suddenly realized he’d be back from work in ten minutes, or he’d look at her during a gospel service and the sight of her seemed to get him all upset even though she was wearing a nice dress, and spotless gloves, and a smile.

I’ve seen Gee-Ma’s wedding photos and the “Well, here goes” look her and her husband both had on their faces, but in my head Gee-Ma’s husband is a colored man, not a sort of Italian-looking one. There was a man in Worcester last month . . . Aunt Mia was walking Mom and me to the bus stop and the man was huddled up in the doorway of a store that had closed up for the night. He drew even farther back into his corner when Aunt Mia tried to put some change into his hand. Words wobbled out from deep inside his beard: “Don’t want no trouble, don’t want no trouble, don’t want no trouble.” There was a glass bottle in his pocket and he folded his hands around it as it bumped against the wall.

Mom tapped my shoulder to make sure I kept walking and she called out: “Just put the money beside him, Mia,” but Aunt Mia didn’t listen until the man pushed her hand away. Then she dropped the coins at his feet and came running after us. “Gin and pride,” she said. Mom said it was most likely misery that was getting to him, not just gin or pride. Some ways of behaving seem distantly related to others. Now when I think of Gee-Ma’s husband getting all upset just because she smiled at him, he looks like the man in Worcester who badly needed the money in Aunt Mia’s hand and pushed it away.

Grammy Olivia says Gee-Ma Agnes’s husband is weak and Gee-Ma’s much better off without him. But Gee-Ma says that at heart her husband is still a boy from Itta Bena who couldn’t get used to not having to take his hat off whenever he speaks to a white person. “You can’t even say ‘the poor fella’—not really,” Gee-Ma says. “He’s probably really glad to be back to Mississippi, relieved that the world’s the right way up again and there are fountains specially marked out for him to drink from. I guess it’s not so different from those prisoners who get to feeling at home behind bars. I forgive him.” Gee-Ma Agnes talking about forgiving people tends to make Grammy Olivia say: “Indeed!” Especially when Gee-Ma tells people she forgives them before they even realize there’s anything they were supposed to apologize for. But Gee-Ma probably means well when it comes to her husband, the evidence of this being that they’re still married, and she remembers him in her prayers.

What I told her about me and mirrors is this:

Sometimes mirrors can’t find me. I’ll go into a room with a mirror in it and look around, and I’m not there. Not all the time, not even most of the time, but often enough. Sometimes when other people are there, but nobody ever notices that my reflection’s a no-show. Or maybe they decide not to notice because it’s too weird. I can make it happen when I move quickly and quietly, dart into a room behind the swinging of the door so it covers me the way a fan covers a face. Maybe I catch the mirror off guard somehow. It starts to look for me—“look for me” isn’t quite right—I know mirrors can’t see. But the image in the glass shifts just a little bit off center, left, then right, then back again, like it’s wondering why it isn’t reflecting all that stands in front of it. I know a girl just came in; now where’s she at?

I swear this is true.

I’m a hide-and-seek champion. I always win. It’s gotten so my friends don’t want to play anymore. “Don’t you think we’re a little old for that now, Bird,” they’ll say. Or they say I cheat. Maybe I do. I don’t know. Does catching the mirror off guard count as cheating? But if they had the option, there’s not a one of them who wouldn’t use it. Connie, Susan, Ruth, even Paula, who breaks out into a sweat every time we make her cross the road before the lights say go.

The first time it happened—this is the time I told Gee-Ma Agnes about—I got scared and I gave the mirror a whack with my shoe, trying to fix it, I guess.

It was just like any other Saturday afternoon except that I walked past my bedroom mirror and something was missing, some tiny, tiny element. I stood still, chuckling; it didn’t seem serious at first. The gap grew and grew. It was me. I wasn’t there. I saw the dusty blue wallpaper behind me, my hot-pink hula hoop hung on its special peg to the left of me. But I shouldn’t have been able to see the whole hoop from where I stood. My head and shoulders should’ve been in the way, but they weren’t, so I broke the mirror, and kept right on hitting it long after it broke, a cartoon mouse squeak coming out of my mouth, loud, loud. And the oval glass, that dear old glass that used to stand on my dresser, it tried to give me what I wanted, tried to give me my face, but it kept showing me bits of faces that weren’t mine. There were slivers of Mom’s face, and Dad’s, and Aunt Mia’s, and Grammy Olivia’s, and others, some shreds no wider than my index finger. I don’t know who they were, there was even a man or two, faces chasing each other like photographic slides when someone’s trying to show you their vacation in a hurry—in the end I had to knock the frame flat and run for Mom, who vanished all the broken glass with no questions asked.