d. “Enchantments be not always ill.” (An unknown friend with good intentions?)
e. This is something that happens to everybody but they deny it.
f. I’m a nut job. (No comment.)
Maybe I need to try to look at this from the outside, get some facts down.
What is known about this Bird Whitman?
She’s thirteen years old, and still looking for a way to put an extra two years on somehow, so she can catch up to Louis Chen. He says it can’t be done and he’ll always be older, but given the way mirrors have been behaving lately, anything’s possible.
She tells everyone her middle name is Novak. All her friends have middle names and she’ll be damned if she has to go without one.
Her dad prefers the waffles she makes to the ones her mom makes. The secret is buttermilk.
She’s five feet and four inches tall, already quite a lot taller than her girlfriends, and she hasn’t finished growing yet; where will it end? Gee-Ma Agnes says Bird is getting to be “as tall as Annie Christmas,” and Annie Christmas was an actual giant (if she existed at all), and while Bird has got nothing against giants, she refuses to stand taller than five feet and six inches without shoes. This is simply a matter of personal taste. All right, fine — Louis Chen just happens to be exactly five feet, six and three-quarter inches tall and reckons he’ll go up another couple of inches and then call it a day.
Her best friend’s family makes her realize that her own family isn’t as happy as it could be. The Whitmans aren’t unhappy. But the Chens are so much more… together, always have about a million things to tell each other, keep trying to make each other laugh. Louis rushes his dinner on the evenings his mom’s around to give him driving lessons, and his father takes him by the wrist and recites Climb Mount Fuji, / O Snail, / but slowly, slowly. That makes Louis slow down, as well as making him smile. He looks up to his dad. Mr. Chen works at the piano bar on Tubman Street; the crowd’s more mixed than it used to be, but it’s still mostly only colored people. According to Mrs. Chen, some of the regulars, especially the old ones, still stare at Mr. Chen as if they never saw an Asian man before. Some of them ask him how he learned to play ragtime so good when he wasn’t born with it in his soul, and Mr. Chen just looks at them all through a pair of opera glasses and says: “Ha ha.” Even if there hadn’t been Chens in New Orleans since 1900, Mr. Chen would still have jazz in his soul, I think. Mrs. Chen picks him up in her taxi and when they get home, they count up the day’s tips. Mrs. Chen claims never to get nervous about driving her taxi. She says she’s got an instinct about who to let into the car and who not to.
Mr. and Mrs. Chen are raising Louis to believe that he can be good at anything he wants to be, if only he keeps at it. Louis is the only kid the Chens have, and they act like he’s all the kid they want. Louis likes to tease Bird that the two of them are going to live in Flax Hill forever, him driving a taxi just like his mom, her making her way up to chief editor of the Flax Hill Record, both of them getting a little restless during butterfly season. But Bird won’t even let him joke about it. They’re getting out. Manhattan looks good, loud, and busy. If not there, then LA, where he’ll set up a management agency and turn starlets into big names and she’ll start out writing gossipy pieces until she gets the chance to do in-depth profiles.
Bird has an older sister. Snow. They’ve met, but that was when Bird was a baby, so it doesn’t really count. It isn’t clear why Snow doesn’t live with Bird and her parents, but she comes up in conversation a lot, as if she’s expected to walk in the door at any moment.
Gee-Ma Agnes: Snow’s getting to be so green-fingered; that mint she grows freshens up iced tea just like a charm.
Gee-Pa Gerald: Did I tell you about the crossword Snow and I did together over the phone? That girl persuaded me it’s better for our brains if we just put in any old letters and call it a word afterward. Then we talked definitions. “Hujus,” for instance — what do you reckon one of those is? Go ahead and guess; you’ll never get it.
Grammy Olivia: Gerald, do you think this so-called bebop Snow listens to might be real music after all? I almost hear it but I’m not sure. I thought we’d heard the last of that noise ten, fifteen years ago.
Snow, Snow, Snow, blah blah blah. Bird’s mom doesn’t talk about Snow; she just listens to the others talking about Snow and she gets that look people get when they feel like they’re being bored to death and there’s nothing they can do about it. Two weekends a month, three times on Snow’s birthday month, Bird’s father goes to Boston and comes back with bright eyes, a sprig of fresh flowers in his buttonhole, and photographs to show Bird and the grandparents down at number eleven. Bird never knows what to say when she looks at the photographs of her father with another daughter who was there first, had him first. Snow looks like a friend to woodland creatures; a unicorn would lay its head down on her lap, and everybody knows how picky unicorns are. Or, in the here and now, Snow could easily be one of those girls who’ve been in the news for going around singing “Peace, peace” and offering soldiers flowers to hold along with their guns, making the soldiers choose between bad manners and looking ridiculous. Bird has heard a story (she doesn’t think it’s the whole story) about her dad and her mom setting out to visit Snow one weekend. Apparently they took Bird along with them, but just as they arrived in Boston, Bird’s mom made Bird’s dad turn the car around and drive all the way back home again. Bird’s dad is big on finishing what he’s started—“It’s all about the follow-through, it’s all about the follow-through,” so Bird’s mom must have said or done something pretty spectacular to make him turn around like that.
Bird played a little fact-finding prank one day (and was surprised that it began to work) but was foiled by circumstance. The prank Bird pulled was voice imitation. Bird’s been talked at by Gee-Ma Agnes for so many hours of her life that she knows exactly how Gee-Ma Agnes sounds. Not just her accent, the crystal-clear elocution wrapped around the raw Mississippi molasses, but also the way she breathes between some words and mashes others together and stresses half of a word and lets the other half slip away. When Gee-Ma Agnes says “I do declare!” it has an entirely different effect than when Grammy Olivia says it. It was Grammy Olivia whom Bird fooled that afternoon; Bird was in Gee-Ma Agnes’s bedroom and Grammy Olivia was busy folding clothes next door. Phoebe the maid had just brought the week’s wash back from the laundromat. “Agnes, come get your good pajamas and this bed jacket before I steal them,” Grammy Olivia called out, and Bird realized Grammy Olivia had forgotten that Gee-Ma Agnes had gone to hear an afternoon lecture on mystic poetry that Kazim Bey was giving in the church hall. Grammy Olivia considered Kazim Bey to be of questionable character because he inked comics for Marvel and any day now there’d be scientific proof that superhero comics and 3-D movie theater glasses were leading causes of insanity. Also Mr. Bey was from a Nation of Islam family and all Grammy Olivia knew about the Nation of Islam was that they wore black suits all the time and they were “too polite… like undertakers, or Englishmen.”
“Agnes,” Grammy Olivia said. “Agnes!” Then she remembered Gee-Ma Agnes had left half an hour before and muttered to herself that if the maid had heard, she was going to start thinking she could slack off whenever she pleased. Up until that moment Bird had been reading a copy of Gee-Ma Agnes’s Last Will and Testament. Gee-Ma had given her permission — well, she’d said it didn’t matter whether Bird read it or not because she didn’t suppose Bird would be able to understand much of it. Bird understood enough. She understood that Gee-Ma was leaving all her earthly possessions, stocks and bonds and whatnot, to Snow Whitman. One exception was a houseboat currently moored in a residential harbor in Biloxi, Mississippi, and another was a lapis lazuli anklet “fit for a harem girl,” both of which Gee-Ma was leaving to Bird so she could have the wild times Gee-Ma never got around to having. Bird found the thought of dancing around a houseboat with a precious anklet on pretty satisfactory, but was ready to swap the houseboat and anklet in exchange for Gee-Ma having the wild times herself and just keeping on living. Gee-Ma reckons death isn’t anything to run toward, but it certainly isn’t anything to run from, either. She reckons it must be just like sleeping, and sleeping is something she’s always looked forward to at the end of a long day. Both Gee-Ma Agnes and Grammy Olivia have their funerals and coffins and burial plots all paid for, only Grammy Olivia also has a guest list for her funeral and strict instructions that anybody who isn’t on the list can’t come in. This makes Bird’s dad laugh and sigh at the same time and intrigues Bird, because it suggests Grammy Olivia is worried about unsavory characters from her past showing up to damage her reputation. There must be something about having your hands on someone’s signed and dated Last Will and Testament that gives you the nerve to impersonate her. Bird decided to try one tiny little sentence that she could laugh off if Grammy Olivia wasn’t fooled: “No, I’m here, Livia… I’m here.”