Boy, Snow, Bird(58)

The End.

Writing it down like that makes me see that there’s no way this could have come from Aunt Clara. Of course this came from me. Of course it does. I felt abandoned for a while. By “a while” I mean years, not months or weeks. I’d be able to push Flax Hill and you and Dad and your mom to the back of my mind for a few days, but then there’d be nights when that turned me over and lay me on my side like a doll that had been dropped on the floor. I began to know what dolls know. It felt like I’d been discarded for another toy that was better, more lifelike (you). People sometimes said, “What a beautiful little girl,” but I thought that beautiful was bad. I must have come up with my Belle Capuchine around that time.

I sprained my arm out here in Twelve Bridges when I was about twelve; we were ice-skating and I tried to break my fall with my hand, which is what Uncle John might call “unintelligent” . . . one hand against the weight of an entire body. The arm hurt for so long I began to be afraid that it would never get done hurting. Until the day Aunt Clara came and hugged me and I put both my arms up and around her without even thinking about it. The arm had healed. More important, it hadn’t come off. So I reasoned I couldn’t be a doll, and neither could you.

The one thing I’d tell you about me is that I’m a deceiver. In another draft of this letter I wrote that I wasn’t always like this, but let’s try the truth and see what it does. It’s probably been official since the night Ephraim, Laura, and I were waiting in line for drinks at a bar over in the next town. We had brand-new fake IDs in our wallets; they’d been expensive and they were convincing and we were excited. Ephraim thought the line was moving faster than it really was and he ended up stomping on someone’s heel. The guy Ephraim had bumped into was a nice guy, I think. He accepted Ephraim’s apology at first. But everybody was a little drunk and a little tired of standing in line, so maybe, just maybe, it was to pass the time that one of the guy’s friends started wondering aloud who “that nigger” thought he was, and the guy began to feel like he had to act a certain way in front of his friends—I could see him begin to feel it, saw the feeling growing on him, like a fur, only faster than anything natural can grow. He said: “Yeah . . .” and he called Ephraim the same name his friend had, only I think he was ashamed to say it, because he stuttered.

Ephraim said: “Cool out, man. Nothing really happened. So why use that kind of language?” He’s got a way about him, my friend Ephraim. Another guy might have sounded like a weakling, another guy might have sounded like he was backing down. But Ephraim was stepping up and giving the other guy a chance for everything to be okay. The other guy got braver once he’d called Ephraim a name, though, and he looked right at me and said that classy-looking girls should choose better friends. I was confused that he felt he could speak to me like that—I used to assume that when I’m with colored people the similarities become obvious, but I guess it’s something people don’t see unless they’re looking to see it. I felt as if I’d left my body, felt as if I were standing over on the other side of a room, watching as a big lie was being told about me. I should have told that guy that when he called anybody that name in my hearing he was saying it directly to me. I should have told him never to dare call anybody that name again. All I did was turn to Ephraim and whisper: “Ephraim, let’s go.”

Laura shook her head and called me “un-bee-leeve-able.” I was afraid that those boys would follow us out onto the street, maybe with broken bottles in their hands. I’ve heard how one thing leads to another, it’s not only in the South that an evening gets that way . . . but they preferred to keep their place in the line. We looked for another bar to go to, but Ephraim and Laura kept rejecting each one we came across, kept saying it’d be just like the bar we’d left. Then they said they were tired and wanted to go home. I went with them. I’m wondering if that’s all I can do for them. I can’t seem to speak up, but I can go with them, silently. That was a little more than three years ago, so I don’t think I can honestly say that it was only this year I became deceptive.

Aunt Clara thinks I transcribe interviews at a newsroom in the city. Uncle John thinks the same, and so does almost everybody else except Mouse. Mouse knows I didn’t even make it past the first day of secretarial college and so efficiently transcribing a series of interviews would actually be a little beyond me. I told Mouse because I had to tell somebody, and also because I know a couple of things about her that she doesn’t want me to tell anybody, so that makes her less likely to spill.

Bird, here’s what happened on the first day of secretarial college:

I got there half an hour early. Near the entrance I was given a clipboard and a square tag with MISS S. WHITMAN printed on it. I went up a staircase and into a sky-lighted auditorium—it was as big as an auditorium, anyhow—filled with row after row of desk-and-chair sets, each chair attached to each desk with a gray bar. There was a black typewriter set on each desktop; more typewriters and desks than I could count. Seven or eight other girls had already taken their seats, looking straight ahead of them as if they’d already begun the march into infinity. I remember feeling doubtful about the bun I’d twisted my hair into just an hour before. I patted it, and it was more or less the same as theirs, not too high, not too low. The desks at the back were designated for Adamses and Allens, so I walked and walked until I found the Walkers and Williamses. There was a blackboard at the front of the room, hung on the wall like a picture frame. I found MISS A. WHITMAN and thought, Almost there. It felt as if my legs would buckle under me from all the walking I’d done.