Boy, Snow, Bird(41)
It’s rare for Mom to ask me questions. Maybe she’s the enemy. Seems unlikely, though. We get along, in a big-brother-little-sister kind of way. Mom plays big brother. We can sit together for hours in almost complete silence, her smoking and sharing a magazine with me, reading the other side of the page I’m on. Occasionally she’ll remember where she is and make a comment: “You don’t say much, do you, kid?”
“Must’ve learned that from you.”
“Ha! Got a few ideas of your own, though, haven’t you?”
“Just a few, Mom.”
Mrs. Fletcher tells Mom over and over that she should be making more conversation with me, because apparently I’m at a “dangerous age.” (She’s got to be talking about menstruation. I haven’t started yet, but there’s probably some risk of bleeding to death if you’re taken unawares the first time. I won’t be caught unawares, though. That’s not how I’m going out.) When I was too young to walk home alone, Mom would pick me up from the Chens’ house, and once as we were walking through the woods she put her hand on my head. I looked up and said: “What are you touching my head for?” She said: “You know, all I expect is the unexpected. It’s been like that since the day you were born, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Is there anything you need, kid? What do you need?”
It felt good when she said that. It felt like she really would do anything. Mom looks foreign, like a Russian ice skater; her backdrop ought to be one of those cities that has a skyline topped with onion-shaped domes. I can just see Mom whizzing around with her hands tucked up inside a huge white muff, bloody sparks flying up behind her as the blades on her boots dig up all the hearts she broke before Dad got to her. Customers at the bookstore tend to look surprised when Mom opens her mouth and this New York City voice comes out. Her white hair sways down in tendrils, and her skirts brush the floor—she’s so graceful, swan-necked; when she’s getting all dressed up, she finishes by putting on a simple necklace Dad made, and it’s as good as if he took out a billboard and advertised. There’s that bracelet that winds around her arm too. Even when she wears long sleeves, a platinum snake lies there beneath the cloth, draining its favorite vein drop by drop, or resting until she has instructions for it. If she ever told that snake to come after me, who could stop it? The way snakes swallow small, live creatures, the terrible way they cram their food down with their sticky fangs and their yellow eyes rejoicing—I’ve seen pictures.
For the longest time I thought Mom had bought the bracelet for herself, or that it was something she’d inherited, but then Dad mentioned that he’d made it for her. It isn’t like anything else of his I’ve seen; he works a lot with wood grains and the web patterns you get on the undersides of leaves. A lot of people want to feel natural and connected to the earth right now, that’s how Dad sees it, and folks don’t get as excited about showy pieces as they used to. He said he made Mom’s bracelet out of a misunderstanding, and Mom laughed and said: “Don’t be so sure.” She’s tall too, tall in a way that you only really notice at certain moments. The statues of Greek gods were built two and a half times the size of the average human being; I read that in a book Miss Fairfax lent me. The book describes the magnification as being small enough for the figure to remain familiar, but large enough to make you feel mighty strange standing near it. You sense some imminent threat, but common sense tells you there’s no danger, so you don’t run away. You keep a distance that appears to be a respectful one, and you don’t run away, just keep hovering on the point of doing so. Mom and I have the same eyes. I’m all mixed up about seeing my eyes in a face like hers, her eyes in a face like mine.
Mom told me she would get me whatever I needed, but I didn’t need anything right then. “You tell me when you do,” she said. When I wanted those blue moons painted on my ceiling, she got it done without wanting to know why. We went down to the general store and got the paint right away. When we came back, she fetched out the stepladder and got the moons done in about an hour and a half including a cigarette break. She got the shape of the moons exactly right too. One thing to keep in mind with Mom is that I’d better be sure I really need something before I ask her for it, because she doesn’t give advice. For example, stucco moons might have been better. But you tell Mom “Blue moons, please,” and bam, there they are, enjoy! We’re not close the way Louis and his mom are close, but . . . while she dabbed away at the ceiling I danced in and out of the room with her ashtray, singing along to the radio: La la means I love you, words I was too shy to say to her without the music, words I don’t remember her ever saying to me. Mom was the only one who immediately saw that I’d dressed up as Alice in Wonderland for fancy-dress day at school. The costume made it glaringly obvious—the white ankle socks, the black Mary Janes, the fat ribbon tied in a bow around my head, the blue dress with the blue and white apron over it—it’s in all the picture books. But when I came downstairs, Dad said: “What a pretty little housekeeper!”
Mom laughed. “Is that what Alice grew up to be?” Then Dad said: “Alice . . . ?” and looked at me again with his head to one side, and we realized he seriously thought I’d dressed up as a housekeeper. He began: “But Alice . . .” and Mom said: “Yes? What? What’s that about Alice?” and he mumbled something about Alice’s hair being long and suddenly became fascinated with the newspaper. But everyone was like that, all day. “Who are you supposed to be?” they’d say, giving up after guessing “housekeeper” or “washerwoman.” Then the next thing would be: “But Alice . . .” the beginning of a sentence nobody seemed to know how to finish. Louis Chen’s sailor “costume” went over well, maybe because it was real—his grandfather had worn it when he’d been a crew member on a fishing boat off the West Coast about a million years ago. He tried to give his award for best costume to me; he said mine was much better (once I’d explained it to him) but I couldn’t let him do that. He’d won fair and square. After school Mom and I went into the photo booth at the Mitchell Street diner and pulled terrible faces to scare away people who don’t know Alice when they see her, but in the last box of the photo strip we’re having a laughing fit. It turns out that the average annoyed American only needs to pull three terrible faces before she feels better.