Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

it was difficult telling the difference between the three women. Olivia and Agnes had a good excuse for sharing their style and mannerisms, in that they were both in their mid-sixties. Vivian was twenty-three. Twenty-three and wearing a twinset, with her hair in fussy curls. But she had Arturo’s narrow amber eyes. She began by listing everybody she knew in New York and asking me if I’d ever met them. Her perfectly straight face threw me off at first. But by the time she’d got to the seventeenth name or so—“Fernanda Crackenbone. You’ve honestly never run into Fernanda? But she’s awfully sociable. The most sociable girl I know. Goes every place there is to go”—I realized she was kidding around, and alsothat Olivia and Agnes had been holding their laughter in so that I wouldn’t think they were laughing at me, which accounted for their strangely cramped expressions. When I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, that I didn’t believe there was any such person as Fernanda Crackenbone, Olivia threw up her hands, let herself have a good roar at last, then said: “I’m only glad you don’t think this girl of mine has a screw loose.”
    “I do have a screw loose, you know,” Vivian said. “It’s just that Mama doesn’t want anybody to think so. More tea?”
    I slipped up twice—once when Olivia talked about Vivian’s progress at law school and what a wonderful singer Julia had been, a classical contralto, no less. Then she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said: “Oh, I like it at the bookstore,” and Vivian and Olivia gave each other the briefest but most chilling glance, then changed the subject. Oddly enough, that was when Agnes, Julia’s mother, smiled at me. Her smile was encouraging, though she shook her head a little bit, as if she thought I needed coaching. The second slipup was when Olivia announced that she wanted Arturo to return to academic life. “I didn’t raise my son to be a jeweler,” she said. “My husband didn’t work all the way up from bank clerk to branch manager for that.” When I forgot myself so far as to try to argue with her, she said “outrageous” and rattled the sugar tongs in a manner that was positively alarming.
    Agnes took my mostly incoherent argument and rephrased it for me: “Livia, dear. Boy has got a point. Arturo is just as smart as he ever was—he’s just making smart jewelry now. He’s bringing ancient Egypt and Byzantium alive again in ways people cantouch and wear. He always got so sore when people fell asleep during his history lectures, didn’t he?”
    I kept looking at the curtains and missing the sunlight. Maybe Agnes or Olivia had bad eyes. Even so, I didn’t know how they could bear to sit here in this chintzy gloom. Agnes’s neck was very thin. Swallowing tea seemed to cause her pain. There was a framed photo of Arturo’s father, Gerald, on the sideboard, well-groomed white sideburns and all; his golf club was in midswing and his gaze was incredulous—I seemed to be putting him off his game. What would Agnes say, what would any of these three say if I began to tell them about Sidonie, the eldest of the colored kids who came into the bookstore day after day just to read? Sidonie, whose colored father had taken just one look at her Caribbean mother and fallen in love? “They’re crazy,” Sidonie told me, shaking her head. “She just can’t seem to pick up any American fighting words, and he never learned any French ones. So they don’t fight . . .”
    I could have talked about how a photograph of Sidonie’s mother had inspired a painting on the side of a fighter jet flown by colored pilots back in ’44, and how Sidonie had inherited her mother’s looks, and stayed away from school because she didn’t want trouble. “White boys get stupid around this girl,” her friend Kazim explained, and the couple of times I’d walked Sidonie halfway home from the bookshop, I saw what Kazim meant. Sidonie Fairfax had a