Boy, Snow, Bird(43)

Gee-Ma Agnes: Snow’s getting to be so green-fingered; that mint she grows freshens up iced tea just like a charm.

Gee-Pa Gerald: Did I tell you about the crossword Snow and I did together over the phone? That girl persuaded me it’s better for our brains if we just put in any old letters and call it a word afterward. Then we talked definitions. “Hujus,” for instance—what do you reckon one of those is? Go ahead and guess; you’ll never get it.

Grammy Olivia: Gerald, do you think this so-called bebop Snow listens to might be real music after all? I almost hear it but I’m not sure. I thought we’d heard the last of that noise ten, fifteen years ago.

Snow, Snow, Snow, blah blah blah. Bird’s mom doesn’t talk about Snow; she just listens to the others talking about Snow and she gets that look people get when they feel like they’re being bored to death and there’s nothing they can do about it. Two weekends a month, three times on Snow’s birthday month, Bird’s father goes to Boston and comes back with bright eyes, a sprig of fresh flowers in his buttonhole, and photographs to show Bird and the grandparents down at number eleven. Bird never knows what to say when she looks at the photographs of her father with another daughter who was there first, had him first. Snow looks like a friend to woodland creatures; a unicorn would lay its head down on her lap, and everybody knows how picky unicorns are. Or, in the here and now, Snow could easily be one of those girls who’ve been in the news for going around singing “Peace, peace” and offering soldiers flowers to hold along with their guns, making the soldiers choose between bad manners and looking ridiculous. Bird has heard a story (she doesn’t think it’s the whole story) about her dad and her mom setting out to visit Snow one weekend. Apparently they took Bird along with them, but just as they arrived in Boston, Bird’s mom made Bird’s dad turn the car around and drive all the way back home again. Bird’s dad is big on finishing what he’s started—“It’s all about the follow-through, it’s all about the follow-through,” so Bird’s mom must have said or done something pretty spectacular to make him turn around like that.

Bird played a little fact-finding prank one day (and was surprised that it began to work) but was foiled by circumstance. The prank Bird pulled was voice imitation. Bird’s been talked at by Gee-Ma Agnes for so many hours of her life that she knows exactly how Gee-Ma Agnes sounds. Not just her accent, the crystal-clear elocution wrapped around the raw Mississippi molasses, but also the way she breathes between some words and mashes others together and stresses half of a word and lets the other half slip away. When Gee-Ma Agnes says “I do declare!” it has an entirely different effect than when Grammy Olivia says it. It was Grammy Olivia whom Bird fooled that afternoon; Bird was in Gee-Ma Agnes’s bedroom and Grammy Olivia was busy folding clothes next door. Phoebe the maid had just brought the week’s wash back from the laundromat. “Agnes, come get your good pajamas and this bed jacket before I steal them,” Grammy Olivia called out, and Bird realized Grammy Olivia had forgotten that Gee-Ma Agnes had gone to hear an afternoon lecture on mystic poetry that Kazim Bey was giving in the church hall. Grammy Olivia considered Kazim Bey to be of questionable character because he inked comics for Marvel and any day now there’d be scientific proof that superhero comics and 3-D movie theater glasses were leading causes of insanity. Also Mr. Bey was from a Nation of Islam family and all Grammy Olivia knew about the Nation of Islam was that they wore black suits all the time and they were “too polite . . . like undertakers, or Englishmen.”

“Agnes,” Grammy Olivia said. “Agnes!” Then she remembered Gee-Ma Agnes had left half an hour before and muttered to herself that if the maid had heard, she was going to start thinking she could slack off whenever she pleased. Up until that moment Bird had been reading a copy of Gee-Ma Agnes’s Last Will and Testament. Gee-Ma had given her permission—well, she’d said it didn’t matter whether Bird read it or not because she didn’t suppose Bird would be able to understand much of it. Bird understood enough. She understood that Gee-Ma was leaving all her earthly possessions, stocks and bonds and whatnot, to Snow Whitman. One exception was a houseboat currently moored in a residential harbor in Biloxi, Mississippi, and another was a lapis lazuli anklet “fit for a harem girl,” both of which Gee-Ma was leaving to Bird so she could have the wild times Gee-Ma never got around to having. Bird found the thought of dancing around a houseboat with a precious anklet on pretty satisfactory, but was ready to swap the houseboat and anklet in exchange for Gee-Ma having the wild times herself and just keeping on living. Gee-Ma reckons death isn’t anything to run toward, but it certainly isn’t anything to run from, either. She reckons it must be just like sleeping, and sleeping is something she’s always looked forward to at the end of a long day. Both Gee-Ma Agnes and Grammy Olivia have their funerals and coffins and burial plots all paid for, only Grammy Olivia also has a guest list for her funeral and strict instructions that anybody who isn’t on the list can’t come in. This makes Bird’s dad laugh and sigh at the same time and intrigues Bird, because it suggests Grammy Olivia is worried about unsavory characters from her past showing up to damage her reputation. There must be something about having your hands on someone’s signed and dated Last Will and Testament that gives you the nerve to impersonate her. Bird decided to try one tiny little sentence that she could laugh off if Grammy Olivia wasn’t fooled: “No, I’m here, Livia . . . I’m here.”