Boy, Snow, Bird(51)
Yasmin said: “So . . . have you got a boyfriend?”
I nodded.
“Really?”
“Ouch.”
Yasmin patted the long braid that ran down her back. “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. You should break up with him, though. Before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“How do I put this . . . boys take up a lot of thinking time.”
“They do?” (I’d never considered Louis to be a time-tabled activity before. I love, and I mean love the way his hair falls across his forehead in a wave, and come to think of it, the time I spend thinking about pushing that wave of black hair out of his eyes could definitely be put to better use. His friends say: “Cut that hair, Chen,” but he reminds them that it was a haircut that drained the mighty Samson of his strength. Yes, the boy I’m sweet on can be such a nerd sometimes.)
Yasmin Khoury had another question: “Do you know what a lobotomy is?”
“I think so. It’s when they operate and remove parts of your brain, right?”
“Right. Boyfriends are the same thing. They shrink your brain. Any female who really wants to be able to think for herself shouldn’t be wasting her time on boys.”
“Oh.”
“So are you going to break up with your boyfriend?”
“Uh . . . maybe. If we stop liking each other or something.”
She was beginning to look around for somebody older and more revolutionary to talk to, so I asked a question to distract her. “What do you spend your thinking time on, anyway?”
She set her glass down on the table between us. “I think about things that are gone from the world.”
“What things?”
“Well . . . the ancient wonders. The libraries at Antioch and Timbuktu, the hanging gardens at Babylon, the ringing porcelain of Samarkand. The saddest thing isn’t so much that all that stuff is gone . . . in a way it’s kind of enough that it was all here once . . . but now it’s all just garbled rumors a brown girl’s father tells her until he thinks she’s gotten too big for bedtime stories. None of the stuff that’s gone has been replaced in any substantial way, and that depresses the hell out of me. Oh, never mind. Sorry. Forget it.”
“Well, I won’t. We’re the replacement.”
“The Brown People’s Alliance?”
“Do you see anybody else volunteering?”
She laughed. “No pressure, huh . . .”
“So. Do you still think boyfriends and, uh, lobotomies are the same thing?”
“Yup. Nothing’s going to change that.”
I didn’t tell Aunt Mia about the Brown People’s Alliance because I know how she is. Nothing’s off-limits with her; she would’ve put it in the newspaper and tried to pass it off as cute. She used to mention dumb convictions of mine in her articles, though Mom banned her from using my name: A six-year-old girl of my acquaintance won’t touch canned tuna fish because she believes it to be the flesh of mermaids. Words cannot adequately describe her solemn, speechless anger as tuna salad is served and consumed. It’s the anger of one who knows that this barbarism will go down in history and the sole duty of the powerless is to bear witness. “Reason with the kid,” I hear you cry. “Set the record straight.” Don’t you think we’ve tried? Nothing can be done to convince her that canned tuna really is fish. Were Chicken of the Sea to remove all mermaids from their packaging and advertising overnight, she’d only call it a cover-up. She quit making those little mentions when she realized that most of her readers thought I was her daughter. In their letters to the editor people kept writing things like “as the mother of a young child, Mia Cabrini ought to know . . .”
“So that’s all you’ve got for me?” Aunt Mia asked, after I told her what little I’d managed to overhear. We were driving home in her little pink car. When she slowed down, I thought she was going to fling open my door and tell me to get out and walk, but actually it was because there was a stoplight ahead.
“That’s all I’ve got. Sorry.”
Aunt Mia said: “Somehow I doubt that, but have it your way. You’re a deep one, Bird. Just like your mother.”
Don’t say I’m like her. Don’t say I’m like her. That’s what I was yelling inside.
“Hey, Bird—”
“Yeah?”
“Do I look forty?”
“Forty years old?” I asked, trying to buy time.
“Yes, forty years old.”
Her eyes flicked up toward the rearview mirror. I was sitting in the backseat because she doesn’t like to have anyone sitting next to her while she is driving. She says it makes her feel crowded in. I hadn’t shown up in her mirror at all that car ride. I begged that missing slice of me—hair, cheek, chin, and the top of my arm—to appear behind her before she started to feel funny about not seeing it there, but the mirror didn’t care whether Aunt Mia felt funny or not, or it was my reflection that didn’t care. Thanks a lot, rearview mirror. Between talking and watching the road and trying not to crash her car, Aunt Mia’s attention was fully booked anyway. Dad drives and Mrs. Chen drives but Aunt Mia just gets behind the wheel and hopes it’s another one of her lucky days. For a split second she lifted her hand to adjust the mirror—I could tell she was starting to feel funny, starting to feel that something didn’t fit, but couldn’t figure out exactly what—then she said, “Ha,” more to herself than to me, and looked ahead of her again.