“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 can touch 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 goofy laugh, but when her face was at rest, it was imperious. There’s a certain type of colored girl who speaks softly and carries herself well, but when you talk to her, her eyes firmly reject every word that comes out of your mouth, just as if she’s saying: Oh, come on now. Bullshit. Bull. Shit. It had been hard to get her talking. She was often deep in conversation with Mrs. Fletcher, but when I said something like “It’s a nice afternoon, isn’t it, Sidonie?” she’d say “Certainly, Miss Novak.” (Subtext: If you say so.) If I’d been a guy, I wouldn’t have been sure how to approach her without getting shot down, either. And so the jesters lined up to entertain the queen, scrambling up trees and trying to hit her with their satchels, starting impromptu wrestling matches with each other on the sidewalk at the very moment she happened to be passing by. One fool took it upon himself to turn a backflip and nearly broke his skull doing it. Those morons embarrassed her. She was only fifteen. At that age embarrassment is something you can actually die of, and avoiding it is more important than what your father will say when he finds out you’ve missed a month and a half of school. Someone had copied out a poem and put it in her coat pocket—I would liken you / To a night without stars / Were it not for your eyes—and that had been the last straw for her. “Miss Novak, I’m the only teenager I know who reads Langston Hughes. I mean, that note can’t have come from a student. That’s got to have come from a teacher, right? I’m not the one to get mixed up in that kind of nonsense.”
What if I’d told that drawing room tea party: “Sidonie likes the bookstore too, because nobody gives her a hard time there. White girls don’t spill ink all over her dress at the bookstore, and colored boys don’t twist her arm behind her back, and nobody stands in her way just leering like crazy when all she wants to do is walk down the corridor. That’s the kind of girl that exists out there, less than a mile away from those linen curtains. But if you saw her without talking to her, she’d make you paranoid in a way that only a colored girl can make a white woman paranoid. That unreadable look they give us; it’s really shocking somehow, isn’t it? Kind of like finding someone staring in at the window of your home, but not in a way that gets you scared you’ll be robbed. No, it’s a different kind of stare. A stare that says ‘I don’t particularly like being outside, but I don’t want to come in, either.’”
“My, my,” Olivia and Agnes and Vivian would have said. Or maybe just “indeed.” Arturo must have learned his devastating phrasing of that word from somewhere.
I managed not to say anything about Sidonie Fairfax. I managed to drink my tea without slurping, and I passed the “Will you have another Fig Newton” test. (The correct answer was “Thank you, but I really think I’d better not. They’re so delicious they could be my downfall!”) I crossed my ankles and tried to settle, to be at peace. After a while Olivia asked if I’d met her granddaughter.
I said I hadn’t. The lady didn’t need to know that I’d seen Snow once and been so spooked that I could barely remember what exactly I’d seen.
“Well — would you like to meet her?”
“Oh, is she around?” I’d assumed she was with her father.