Boy, Snow, Bird(50)
Mom sells invisible ink pens at Mrs. Fletcher’s store, and I decided to buy one for Snow. Sometimes you write down barefaced lies, or words you don’t really mean, just to see how they look, and it’s comforting to think that after six hours the words will just disappear. No need to show them the door, they’ll just be seeing themselves out. I found it comforting anyway, and hoped Snow agreed. I’d probably get a discount because I was the manager’s daughter and also because a little handwritten sign in the store window said SPECIAL PRICES FOR MALADJUSTED INDIVIDUALS. INQUIRE WITHIN, but I’d still need money. Preferably money I’d earned. Ruth Cohen was giving up her paper route because she wanted more sleep on Saturdays, and I talked to her about taking her place.
A couple of days after that Mom and I had to shop for the week’s food. I go to the grocery store with her as often as I can because it’s better if I have final approval of the things she buys. Her combinations can be a little Martian otherwise. She made us lobster thermidor once, because someone in a novel she was reading had gone on a crazy lunchtime rampage and lobster thermidor was what she’d had. The flavors were really interesting (Dad’s words, not mine) but for a whole day afterward my stomach felt as if it had been kidnapped, boiled, and then deep-fried. I bet she put huckleberries in the sauce, or some other ingredient that isn’t supposed to go into lobster thermidor.
For a moment at the grocery store I thought Mom was going to say something about Snow. She knew I’d kept my letter, the one Snow had written to me, asking if I could read yet. What Mom did was leave her jewelry box on her dressing table, wide open so I could see that all the other letters had been taken out. And she’d started blushing whenever I caught her eye. She’d be talking and I’d tilt my head at her and her face would flood dark red. At the grocery store she said: “Bird . . . Bird, you listen to me,” and she was blushing again, my red and white mother. I said: “Yes, Mom?” and there was a nasty spike in my voice, but I didn’t care. She ought to know that if you want to set yourself up as queen and have everything the way you want it and keep sisters apart then you’re not going to have a big fan club. She ought to know that where there’s a queen there’s often a plot to overthrow her. She ended up just looking down at the shopping list and reading it aloud, and I picked the items up and put them in our cart, except for the stuff that sounded like it’d come out of one of her books. I’ve never known a grocery store to stock larks’ tongues or quince preserves anyhow.
Mom came and sat on the end of my bed that night, took a long, deep pull on her cigarette, and sent a jet of smoke up toward the birdcage. “You value objectivity, right?”
I decided not to give her an answer, but she wouldn’t leave without one. A skin-crackling silence rose up between us. It was new and truly awful and nothing like our other silences.
To put a stop to it I said: “What’s ‘objectivity’ mean?”
“Don’t give me that, Miss Reading-Age-of-Sixteen-Plus. Miss Fairfax has started saying the only reason your schoolwork’s sloppy is because you’re bored; it doesn’t challenge you.”
“No . . . I’m just lazy, Mom. And I try to be objective, but I keep forgetting.”
“I’m asking you a favor. I want you to concentrate on being as objective as you can about your sister.” (Whoever heard of anyone being objective about their sister?) “She’s a pretty convincing replica of an all-around sweetie pie, but . . . I think being objective may be the only way you’ll see that there’s something about her that doesn’t quite add up. Something almost like a smell, like milk that’s spoiled. Maybe it’s just as simple as her being an overpetted show pony; I don’t know. I’d be happy never to find out. You want to play investigator, so investigate. I’m here on standby. But . . . Bird, what could you have to say to a replica? You’re so much yourself. Whatever else happens, don’t let her mess that up. Okay?”
If that was Mom’s attempt to make me believe that my sister was bad news, it was a flop.
“Look—I’ve got to get up early tomorrow,” I said.
I wasn’t being mean—Aunt Mia was taking me to a conference for teen journalists. It was being held in Rhode Island, and I had special permission to take the day off school.
“Right,” Mom said. “Right. Hey, sweet dreams.”
I closed my eyes but she stayed in my room. She walked over to the window, drew the curtains around her, and stood there, smoking. It had been a foggy day and she’d done this before, on other foggy days—I knew she liked the view from my window, liked to trace the blurry shape of the hill with one finger. I was mad at her but glad that she was watching over me. I don’t know exactly when she left. I woke up a couple of times and she hadn’t left my room—an owl said tyick tyick outside my window, and the curtains rustled and Mom muttered: “Tyick tyick yourself, owl.” In the morning she was gone. She’d killed four spiders. There were no bodies, but their webs gaped at me.
—
the conference wasn’t too bad. I was there to eavesdrop for Aunt Mia. She was writing an article about what to expect from the journalists of the future, and she figured they’d clam right up if there was a grown-up around. I didn’t get very many quotes for her—the journalists of the future were introverts. They listened to the speakers up on stage, took notes, and occasionally asked each other how to spell a word. Some of them looked suspiciously like jocks and cheerleaders who’d put on eyeglasses and intelligent expressions just for the chance to be around kids from other schools, but apart from that I enjoyed being part of a silent, highly observant crowd that stored its opinions up until they were good and ready. I befriended a girl named Yasmin Khoury—she was sixteen, and looked like the princess of a faraway land, but claimed that her father was a janitor. We called ourselves the Brown People’s Alliance, though she said I was only just brown enough to qualify, so she’d have to be the spokesperson until we got a few more members. We sat together at lunch break, drinking ice-cold milk out of wineglasses.