Boy, Snow, Bird(70)

The sink was big enough for Snow and me to stand side by side while we soaked and scrubbed all the sauce boats and soup bowls and the swallow-patterned plates. We looked into the dishwater instead of at each other. She trickled water through her fingers.

“Weren’t we here together like this years ago? Only I sat up on the counter. It was your birthday and you were stirring things and chopping things and begging a cake to rise.”

“That was in the other house.”

She brought both her hands down and punched the water, spraying us both with greasy suds. I took a few steps back in case she was about to run amok, but she went still and kept her eyes averted. I wiped my face with a kitchen towel, decided to work the “game of charades” angle, and said, “Angry?” in the same tone of voice I’d have used to ask Animal, mineral, or vegetable?

She said: “I’m sorry. Close the door, please. This isn’t like me.”

When I came back to the sink, she was scrubbing again, elbow deep in dishes.

“Snow. Who told you it isn’t like you to get mad?”

She didn’t answer, just dragged her sleeve across her face, then returned both hands to the sink.

“You feel I’ve treated you badly? Snow?”

“Yes, you have.”

I’d like to know if Snow has come to feed on adoration, on the gentle tone of voice people take with her. Does everybody who crosses her path have to love her? Capture all hearts and let none go free, is that the way she wants it? But I don’t think she knows the answer any more than I do. She’s mad that I haven’t been able to love her. Maybe she’s afraid that I see something in her that she isn’t able to see for herself. But the trouble is, I don’t see much of anything when I try to see her. She stands near me and I know that someone’s there, but when I look, I find another face in the way, and hear another voice, not Snow’s at all, but distorted versions of my own face and voice, I think. And even though this screen and I have become aware of each other, the screen rests easy, banking on its history of standing between people and my own aversion to closeness. I’ve been so afraid of getting closeness wrong, because I don’t know how to do it, because I don’t know what my mistakes reveal—maybe they reveal very good reasons for my having been unloved as a child, I just don’t know.

“Let’s make up,” I said.

“How? I don’t hear you apologizing.”

Our reflections rippled in the water, stretching to breaking point, and swam away from each other in pieces, then the pieces shivered together again, stretched to their limit, burst.

“Let’s do it the way kids do it,” I said.

“The way kids do it?” She was looking at my reflection, not at me.

“You know . . . when you treat a friend badly and you both know it and the only way to get them to forgive you is to let them hurt you.”

“What? That wasn’t how I made up with my friends,” she said with alarm.

“Oh. Maybe it was just a Lower East Side thing.” (Maybe it was me who’d taught my classmates that this was the way to make up.) “Anyway. Hit me.”

She blinked rapidly. “No.”

“I recommend it.”

“But I don’t want to. So.”

“Look . . . the way it was when I was a kid, the person you’d treated badly had to hurt you back, or there were two possibilities. The first was that you continued to like them but you lost respect for them, because in the world of kid think, not taking revenge can be a sign of weakness. The other option, and this is something that continues into adult think, is that the other person’s not taking their moment to hurt you made you stop liking them as much. You started to fear them, because it seemed like they were waiting for a better chance, a chance not just to hurt you, but to devastate you. The only way for there to be both liking and respect is if you hit me now and we call it quits. Do you get what I’m saying?”

I could see I’d somehow sold her on the method, but still she hesitated.

“I’ve never hit anyone before.”

I drew her arms up out of the water and brought her right hand down against my cheek. She pulled back sharply, scattering soapsuds. “Okay, it’s done,” she said.

I shook my head. “Come on. That was nothing.”

She tried to run, and knocked a chair over—Arturo called out “Everything okay in there?” and we called back: “Yup!” and “Absolutely!” It was like a two-legged race around the room, a race against nobody, but I wouldn’t let her go, I had her by the wrists and I used both her hands to strike at my face until she began doing it for herself. That girl slapped me so hard my ears rang, and she said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” even as she hit me. She simmered down, sank onto a chair, and I folded up onto the floor and rested my chin on her knee. According to the clock on the wall five minutes had passed.

“I hate Olivia,” she said. I looked up at her.

“I believe you.”

“I asked her if she was surprised that you sent me to Boston. I said I bet she’d expected it to be Bird who was sent away. She said, ‘Surprised?’ and she told me about a white woman who went to Africa back in the thirties. While they were out there, the woman’s husband shot a gorilla dead. They didn’t realize it was a female gorilla until they saw the baby gorilla she’d been trying to protect. They felt guilty, so they brought the baby gorilla into their home and got an African woman to nurse it—”