by Cherie Jones
You struggle to keep up with Tone through the rickety stalls of galvanize and plywood from which vendors hawk fried fish and fish cakes and American hot dogs in fat yellow rolls of bread. He pays no mind to your rounded belly and even less to the glimmer of Chinky’s rough-set diamond in a gold band that used to be part of a chain Adan stole. No, Tone walks apace through the narrow alleys and roadways toward Baxter’s Village and the beach and the house you have recently moved into with your husband, and he hardly looks behind him to make sure you are keeping up. And though you are nearly panting from the effort of staying a few paces behind him, you keep your eyes on your orange booties, marching one in front of the other, being splattered by soft mud and scraped by rough pebbles and rocks and wood. When he takes you through an alley so narrow that a two-foot stone blocks the path, you have a dilemma: You don’t have a choice but to climb over this stone, but you can’t because the miniskirt will not allow your legs to lift that high. And though you had resolved, when he disappeared years before, that you would never again call this boy in such a way that he can think you need him, you start to stumble and you have to take your eyes off the booties and call this name you cannot forget.
“Robert.”
How do you learn to love a man?
You might think you learn by speaking, because of the warmth that fills your chest and escapes your lips when Tone helps you up and over the rock. When he asks you about your husband, about how you met him, the day you married him, the day you moved into his house on the beach, you talk and your body fills with heat. This warmth is the proof of your love, you consider, and speaking of it makes it stronger. It is to this love for your husband that you credit the heat in your chest when you speak, and not the memory of other days with this boy who is not your husband, whose arms hug your own and heave you upward, over the obstacle and unto the part where the path is again clear.
The rain comes and the heat does not fizzle and this boy tells you that there is an entrance to the tunnels just close by this path you are on, do you remember the tunnels? And the warmth leaves your chest and fans up across your face and down and perhaps love is indeed obedience because when he asks you if you would like to try to run the rest of the way to Adan’s house on the beach or to follow him to that entrance, you tell this boy yes, yes you would like to follow him to that entrance, you would like to shelter in those tunnels.
But of course you do not only shelter in those tunnels, you do not only listen to the rain and wait for it to end. In those tunnels, you understand that you do not learn to love a man, because for the right man there is no need for the learning, the love is the most natural thing in the world. You understand that if you must learn to love a man, he is probably not the man you should be loving.
And this is the reason you shriek your joy so that it echoes through these small, dark passageways and fills them with light. This knowledge, you tell yourself, and not the hands and the tongue and the thighs of Tone beneath you, on the ground in these tunnels, is why you are singing. This truth that only the girls who dare to enter the tunnels are able to find out.
* * *
The thing is, how to love a man is clear only in the dark of the tunnels. When you exit them, when your husband comes home in the dank of the early morning and he is drenched in the stink of a vulture, when you remove the same sneakers you earlier cleaned for him, now smeared and sullied with wet mud; when you remove the same tracksuit you pressed, your mind snakes its way back to the question of how best to love him because he smells like weed and another woman and you are thinking perhaps there is something you are doing wrong. And he does not have a mother who can show you how best to love him and you do not have one who can tell you what to do. And you do not know how to deal with the memory of your husband’s friend, his right-hand man, loving you in the deep dark of those tunnels, so you push that memory away and you try to avoid this friend when he comes to see Adan and soon he starts to avoid coming to see Adan and he starts knocking before entering when he does.
And you wish you had someone you could ask, someone you could confide in, but you don’t, because you cannot confide in Wilma and because Esme is dead.
It is at times like these, although you’ve never really known her, that you miss your mother more than ever.
Chapter 26
Esme
20 December 1968
There are things she will tell her daughter about love when she is grown, promises Esme while tramping across the dew-wet blades of grass on the pasture that leads to Wilma’s house, just after five in the morning – things it is best for her to know, important things. While she is marching Esme watches her feet, which seem to know exactly where they are headed, even if her heart does not want to follow. One of the things she will teach Lala, vows Esme, is what to do when you have a man who does not love your children. And then Esme vows to tell her daughter never to find herself in that position in the first place.
The feet pause only when they pass the banana patch and Wilma’s cold stone house comes into view. They hesitate before moving off again, more slowly this time. Wilma, it turns out, is waiting, arms akimbo beside the okra trees, her face as cold as the limestone with which her house is made.
“Morning,” says Esme when she is within hearing range, and when Wilma’s silence makes her doubt that she spoke aloud, she says Morning again.
“What bring you now?” says Wilma, looking at the sleeping child burdening Esme’s slight shoulders. “Why you waking people so early in the morning?”
Esme will tell her daughter that the affection of others cannot be depended upon, even if they gave birth to you. She will tell her, she vows, that loving a child does not come naturally, not for everyone, not even if it is a child you gave birth to. This wisdom, Esme will explain to Lala, is why she did not leave Rainford at the first sign he was unable to love Lala.
She adjusts the bundle on her shoulder. Lala is asleep, and at two years old already looks set to dwarf her mother’s slight frame and fine features. Lala’s thick legs hang heavy down the front of her mother’s torso, her chubby arms are locked around Esme’s neck, every so often she stirs when her leg is boxed by the two bags Esme packed in a huff. Esme can feel the wide damp spot where Lala’s soaked undies have wet her good dress. She remembered to change her clothes before running, she chides herself, but not her toddler’s wet underwear.
“We just want to stay a few days, until I can get by Auntie Earlie,” Esme begins.
“And why you must go and take your trouble to your Auntie?” wonders Wilma. “Old women don’t deserve their rest?”
Esme shifts from one foot to the other, and Wilma eyes the wet spot and relents.
“Come,” she says. “I suppose it is okay just for a few days.”
That night they sleep in the sewing room, on a makeshift mattress on the floor. Carson, it turns out, is away visiting family in Canada, but Esme is already planning how she will leave, what she will do next, and she knows that she is not wrong when, days into their stay, Wilma starts to complain about how Esme keeps the sewing room, how Lala’s play threatens to upset the dress forms and the in-progress dresses Wilma has pinned there. Wilma starts to complain about how the sewing room is no place for a little child, she might swallow a pin or something, and she only has the two other bedrooms, one of which is Carson’s.
Esme understands.
A few days later, when Rainford’s little Suzuki Forsa finds the street in front of Wilma’s stone house, Esme does not protest. She does not take very long to pack their things, to pull the dress forms back to their position of prominence in the middle of the sewing room in a space newly cleared of their makeshift bedding. She tells Wilma thanks, Esme does, and she walks into Rainford’s little car and deposits Lala in the back seat despite her crying, resolved that she has made her bed and now, alas, she must lie in it.
Rainford tries, at first – of course he does. Esme imagines that he wants to love her Lala, but we struggle, she thinks, to love a
nything that is not a reflection of ourselves. This struggle is human, and so is Rainford. She tells herself that this is why she does not act when his awkwardness of manner in the first few months after she and little Lala move back in ossifies into a habit of ignoring Lala altogether, although Esme tries her best to have her toddler clean and combed and cute when Rainford parks the Forsa in front of the little stone house in the city where he has rented three rooms for them. It is why she does not protest when Rainford suggests she let Lala spend the weekend with Wilma, just so they could have some time alone, despite everything Esme has told him about her mother.
Esme does not act when Rainford, gently, suggests that perhaps Lala should be sent to live with her grandmother permanently, despite everything that Esme has told him about Wilma and about Carson. It is because she understands this thing about love that Esme does not say no, doesn’t pack up her clothes in a temper and take she and her Lala away, doesn’t ask the Cuban to rent them a room in her warren again. But she does not pack Lala off to any other relative, either. Instead Esme tucks her daughter more firmly against her bosom when Rainford is around, shields her from his harsh barks, and sings her name in the hope that her daughter will never forget precisely how it should sound from the lips of anyone who truly loves her, the tone that reflects the real reverence of the singer. She sings her baby’s name and she sings silly songs about escapes she never speaks of aloud. But that morning when he strikes her Lala in her face for once again wetting their one good bed, Esme loses her empathy. She runs back to Wilma.
“It is okay,” she sings to Lala in the sewing room, “it will be okay.”
And Lala, with the innocence of childhood, believes her, snuggles her big baby body to her mother’s slight frame and hums to herself, trying to imitate the sound of the name her mother sings to her.
But it will not be okay.
When Rainford had first suggested that Esme come live with him, she’d considered the invitation an answer to prayer, even if it did not come on the tail end of a marriage proposal. It never occurred to her that it would be something she would pay for, least of all with her life. Within two hours of the offer she had packed up her white Spanish blouse, a gift from the Cuban, some secondhand skirts she’d inherited from Wilma, and a little crystal candleholder the sailor man had given her. Then she packed her baby.
The Cuban had watched her, mouth stuffed with cigar, fist stuffed with the month’s rent she’d insisted on for a month’s lodging not received, bosom stuffed with the scarves she said kept out the cold. The Cuban had stood with Esme and the baby and waited for the Forsa to shudder to a stop at the top of the alley and wait for them. The Cuban’s house was one of those with a door that opened unto a side street; it did not pretend to be the kind of place you wanted to enter through a front door, and so it did not bother to have any. Esme had held Lala tight against the white ruffles of a blouse made for dancing, watching Rainford light a cigarette and come walking down the alley while the Cuban made deals with the orishas under her breath.
* * *
By the time Lala is old enough to want to discuss dilemmas like marriage proposals, Esme is dead, so she cannot warn her. Had Esme been alive she would probably have relayed to her the way in which her own heart sank when, four months after that second run to Wilma, when Esme had again returned to Rainford, he had arrived home, climbed out of the Forsa with a small box in his hand, and asked her to come inside. Esme would have relayed how her protests that she had to stay outside a little longer to catch the light while she finished her chores had all been in vain. Esme would have told her daughter that she had already decided by that time that she would never marry Rainford, so the absence of his asking, up to that point, was more of a relief than anything else because it freed her from the burden of saying no. Esme would have relayed how, as Rainford professed his love, she had kept her eyes on the Ixora bush she had planted in the little hardscrabble patch outside the rented rooms. It had just begun to flower, Esme would have told her, and she’d been outside tending to it, talking to it and congratulating it on this feat, when the Forsa had honked into earshot and then into her view. She would have told Lala how Rainford’s face had been full of glee as he kept his hand on the horn to the annoyance of the neighbor, who had come outside and was sharpening his cutlass when Rainford at last alighted from the car with a box wrapped with ribbons that trailed from his hands and ended in curls that bobbed and glinted in the afternoon sun. Esme would have relayed how slowly she had followed Rainford back inside, her heart sinking with the realization of the coming proposal. She would have told her how her hands trembled as she took off her apron, removed the scarf with which she kept her hair restrained so that it would not carry her sweat to sting her own eyes. She would have told her that this is not the reaction of a woman in love, for whom marriage is a natural progression of that love. She would have told her that when a proposal is right, what a woman should feel, above all, is safe – like she has found a soft place for landing. She would have told her that the thudding heart and trepidation meant that this was not the marriage for her.
Esme would have explained to her daughter, if she had lived, why, despite all this, she did not say no, why she had stood in the cramped bedroom she shared with a man she did not love and watched him get on one knee and present her with a box with a thin gold band crowned by the single small diamond he had slaved the better part of a year for. She would have said to her that she did not wish this for her own daughter – the responsibility of having to say yes to a man for whom this proposal was the singular objective of several months’ unrequited affection. Esme would have explained that she had said yes so her own daughter would never have to.
Esme would have relayed that this reluctance on her part was no mere instance of cold feet. It was nothing so transient. Esme would explain that she had discovered that living with Rainford gave her the sensation of being unable to breathe, as if she had been shut tight in a box from which there was no escape. Within this box, Esme might have said, there was the semblance of bliss – Rainford was faithful, his eyes did not waver from hers, he brought her the money he earned from selling household items and encyclopedias door to door, he helped her with the cooking and the cleaning and took her (and little Lala, when he could stand her) to the Burger Bee in Bush Hall for chicken and chips and vanilla soft serve that flopped to the left and was melted not even five minutes after it had been put on the cone. But, Esme would plead with Lala to understand that this was not enough; Esme did not wish to run her life like a well-kept clock. Eventually the afternoon ritual of readying the house, herself, and her daughter for her intended’s arrival home wore on her.
And so it happened that Esme started taking afternoon walks with Lala in the hours before Rainford came home. And it was during these afternoon walks that men who had previously met her in the brothel would call her name, remind her that she made them weak, that there was nothing they wouldn’t do to have a woman like her.
One of these, a man by the name of Plucka, is more persistent. He does not merely call at Esme as she is passing with Lala in a pram the latter has far outgrown, he walks up to her, admires Lala, lifts her out of the pram and onto his neck, and talks to her in words children understand while Esme pushes the empty stroller by his side and he tells jokes that make Esme laugh and laugh and laugh.
On a few of these evenings Rainford comes up the hill in the Forsa just as Plucka is removing Lala from his shoulders, depositing her in the little garden with the Ixora bush, saying his goodbyes. This does not bother Rainford unduly on the first occasion it happens, does not rile him on the second. But by the third time he is irked by the sight of this man – a coarse, rum-drinking hulk of a man – walking beside his fiancée with his stepdaughter hoisted on his shoulders. He is irritated by the sight of his little stepdaughter, already built like the bypass bus, laughing and laughing at the attention of one Plucka. He brings the Forsa to a stop with a screech of the tires and is out of the driver’s se
at in a huff.
“Esme!” he scolds, “you ain’t got nothing better to do than walk about with nasty, rum-drinking men?” His voice is high, carries far, embarrasses her.
“Keep your bony ass quiet, Rainford,” is what Esme replies. “You feel you is more man if everybody hear you?” Her many bangles rustle and ding.
Lala remembers watching the Ixora flowers, the bees that buzzed around them, while the adults quarreled. She cannot recall Plucka asking Rainford to excuse him, that he did not mean to disrespect him or his wife. She cannot recall this incensing Rainford even further – that the interloper would apologize while his fiancée would not. She cannot later recall the stinging slap that Rainford delivers to the side of her mother’s face, cannot know how it makes the baby in her stomach jump, how it makes her knees buckle.
Lala would not now remember Plucka saying, “You didn’t have to do that, my man – we was just walking,” as if the punishment could be legitimately applied in some circumstances but just happened, at that instant, to be unwarranted. Lala might not now remember these things: the way Plucka just walked away shaking his head, while Rainford dragged her mother inside by hers and started to beat her, while young Lala stayed outside in obedience to her mother’s screams to her not to enter.
Esme would have told her daughter, had she been given the chance, that the marriage proposal of a bad man is an invitation to lose your way, only an idiot accepts such a proposal. Had she lived, she would perhaps have told her this while fiddling with the wedding ring on the ring finger of her left hand because, as Lala has heard, Esme marries Rainford on a wet December day. It is while they are walking back to the house from the gospel assembly where they exchange vows that Plucka whistles at Esme as they pass the rumshop. Perhaps it is the effect of one too many glasses of rum, perhaps it is his last hurrah before surrendering his admiration of a woman now married to a better man than he thinks himself to be, perhaps it is Plucka’s way of telling Esme that, marriage or no, she is still the whore who used to live in the Cuban’s brothel in town and sell her sex for the price of a coco-bread-and-cheese. Whatever it is, Plucka doesn’t stop there.
