“What’s new?” she asked, once she was done denying that she was avoiding me.
“I met my grandfather.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, on Mom’s side.”
“I figured. Well?”
“Well, we sort of hated each other.”
(I’d cried about that. The tears came all of a sudden, when I was jumping rope with Ruth and Paula. Suddenly my feet wouldn’t leave the ground and my face and neck felt raw, as if they’d been scraped with rocks. It was the look he’d given me when he understood that I was his granddaughter. It was like a burn. And now that I was safe from it, the syringe scared me even more.)
“It’s okay, cara. I didn’t get along too well with one of my grandfathers, either.”
“Yeah, but… this was… anyway, he said something weird.”
Aunt Mia dropped something — a coffee cup, something like that. There was clattering and I heard her curse and scrabble around with a paper towel. Then she said: “To you? He said something weird to you?”
“Yeah. How’s your objectivity?”
Aunt Mia said: “Fine, I guess. Why? What did he say?”
“He said that Mom’s evil.”
I repeated myself after a couple of seconds because Aunt Mia didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure she was still there. I’m not always sure about Mom, but Aunt Mia is definitely not evil, and in a way she’s my proof that Mom is morally okay. It would’ve helped if Aunt Mia had laughed or seemed shocked, but she was just quiet. I began to whisper it a third time but she stopped me: “Can you put your mom on the line?”
“I thought you’d never ask. She’s sleeping, though. Do I try to wake her up?”
“No. No, let her rest. Just… tell her to call me.”
“But you’re okay, right?”
She called me a sweetheart for asking. It was hard to tell whether or not Mom and Aunt Mia had fallen out. Mom didn’t seem to think so, but maybe she’d done something that Aunt Mia was holding a grudge over. I know she went to Aunt Mia’s place twice, but both times Aunt Mia wasn’t home.
Dad asked if we should be worried about Mia, and Mom got irritated. “Why should we be worried about Mia, Arturo? Because she’s not married? Because she works hard at a job she likes?”
Dad let a few seconds go by and then said: “The Mia we know makes a little time for her friends no matter what, that’s all.”
“‘The Mia we know,’ eh? So what are you saying… that there’s this whole other Mia we don’t know?”
There was quite a long discussion about it and Mom didn’t realize she’d been tricked out of being irritated until Dad had made some rough sketches to show us which one of Aunt Mia’s bookcases could be a door that revolved into a hidden room.
I did what I could to smoke Aunt Mia out… I mailed her a copy of the notes I’d taken at the diner. She’d have called if she’d read them, no doubt about it. They must have gotten lost in the mail.
6
i came home from school on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and Snow was there, playing Julia’s piano. Not a whole piece of music, just tumbling little passages. I peeped around the parlor door and watched her working the piano pedals with her bare feet. The bare feet seemed proof that she was out of the ordinary; it was already so cold that I was wearing socks over two layers of pantyhose. Dad came up behind me and pushed me into the room with her, saying: “C’mon, that’s your sister in there.”
She looked more colored in person. Maybe it was the way she’d chosen to wear her hair, combed and pinned up on one side of her head so that it all rained down on one shoulder and left the other exposed to the dusty sunlight. She smiled at me and the words I’d been about to say went into hiding.
“Have mercy, Bird Whitman. I may need you to dial it back a notch with the cuteness,” she said, and slid off the piano stool. She was three days early. Her voice was a lot more girlish than I’d imagined it, considering the things she’d written to me, but her hugging technique was like Dad’s, maybe even a little more intense. She’d brought me a bouquet. Some of them looked like squashed gray-blue poppies. Others were almost roses, their color a stormy purple. Their petals and stamen were all twisted together, but they smelled good. Snow said they were the kind of flowers that only opened up at night; you picked them at night and then they stayed open.
“They’re not poison flowers, are they?”
She stared at me. “What?”
“You know… like La Belle Capuchine’s flowers in your letter…”
“Oh! Ha ha. No, no poison.”
“And no suitcase, either?”
“Left it at number eleven. I’ll be sleeping over there, in that creepy room with the tulle curtains and the sugar plum fairy mobiles. You know, I never even liked ballerinas.”
“Huh, well you should’ve said so.”
“I think I started to once, and everybody started saying, ‘Uh oh… somebody’s not herself today.’ I was outnumbered.”
“Oh.” So she was outnumbered. That was not a good excuse.
“Come to the mirror.” She fixed one of the night flowers behind my ear and stood looking over my shoulder.
“I see it,” she said.
I looked at us. “What?” We didn’t look as though we were related. Not even cousins.
“That thing you wrote to me about how technically impossible things are always trying so hard to happen to us, and just letting the nearest technically impossible thing happen—”
“Oh… yeah, I see it too! Oh, Snow. Think of all the pranks we can play.”
The mirror caught a few rays of sunset through the open front door, and the image of us went chestnut-colored at the corners. Snow’s hand was on my shoulder and both my own hands were at my sides, but our reflections didn’t call that any kind of reunion. The girls in the mirror had their arms around each other, and they smiled at us until we followed their lead.
“Looks like long ago,” Snow said. “Like Great-aunt Effie just said: ‘I hope you girls don’t think you’re something new? We’ve had sisters like you in this family before.’ And then she shows us an old, old photo… one of those tinted daguerreotypes…”
She lay with her head in my lap for most of the afternoon, jumping up every now and again to start a disc spinning on the record player. We talked about Frank Novak and how he’d told me Mom was evil and she said, “You know that’s not true, right? I don’t know what she is, but evil isn’t it.” We talked about Ephraim, who was most definitely not her boyfriend and was never going to be.
“So… your room at number eleven. What did you want instead of ballerinas?” I asked.
She really considered the question, as if it still mattered and changes would be made based on the answer she gave.
“Plain pink and white. Deep pink, not cotton-candy pink.”
We heard Dad telling someone it was an open house, and Miss Fairfax started walking up the hallway toward us. The pattern of her footsteps is pretty distinctive, elegant, just like her. I know it well from being designated lookout at school. But she turned back when she heard us talking. Others came by with covered dishes and clay pots; they didn’t speak to us, just rapped their knuckles on the open door, waved, and left notes on the kitchen table, alongside their offerings.
(Will return to kiss thine hand at thy earliest convenience, fair maiden — Anon.
Welcome back, Snow. Let’s catch up soon! Susie Conlin.