He Drown She in the Sea

by Shani Mootoo

  “You mustn’t live in a box,” he said, “not one of those make-do things put up by a fellow who has no idea about convenience or comfort, nothing more than how to bang two pieces of wood together. You know, they see no value, no function in prettiness. But prettiness is not slackness, it is a way to call and honor God. God willing, I and your mother will live to see you settled in a nice place, eh?” His arm still around the boy’s back, he directed him back to the car, which now smelled of yeast and hot bread.

  Back home, the boy saw their house differently. He realized that although he and his mother had bettered their circumstances through the move to Marion, everything was relative. In the eyes of the owners of the houses they had just seen, she and he were probably only a little better off than when they lived in Raleigh.

  THEATER

  Looking up from some simple accounting, the boy saw the Sangha car being refueled by one of the attendants. He leaped off the stool and pressed his face against a pane of glass that allowed those in the office to observe what was going on outside but not the other way around. Mr. Sangha was in the front seat with the chauffeur. The boy rushed out to the ground and loudly, officiously shouted out to Gordon, the attendant who had been sitting idly on an overturned oil drum. “Ey, Gordon. You don’t have nothing better to do or what?” He shouted so loudly that Andrew, the other attendant, was himself startled. The boy saw in his peripheral vision, as he made sure not to look directly at the occupants, that those in the car had heard and had turned to see what was happening.

  “Get off that drum, man. You can’t see it have vehicle here. Get over there and clean the windshield, man. What you think you getting pay for? Check the tires. Check the oil.”

  Gordon jumped up and headed to the car. He began to say, “Yes, boss. Sorry. I was just—”

  “You was just what! I don’t want to hear what you was just. Get some life in you.”

  The blood in his body was racing, his heart beating wildly with the excitement of being able to exercise his position in front of this particular customer whom he made sure not to look at directly.

  He stayed in their view, walking around the station, proprietorially checking on the eaves of the office building and pretending to write in a little book pulled out of his pocket, until their car moved off and disappeared out of view.

  To his horror, when he went back into the office, he realized that Mr. Persad had been watching him from the little window.

  Mr. Persad very quietly said, “Why you were so hard on Gordon?”

  “Well, he was just sitting idle, doing nothing.”

  “Yes. But why you chose to talk to him like that in front of your mother’s former employer? You see what I am asking you?”

  The boy’s face stung with embarrassment and shame. He said nothing.

  “Imagine somebody treating you like that. How you would feel? Being a boss does not make you more worthwhile man than your workers, you hear? Without them, how you will carry on your business by yourself? We need each other, boy. Most times it is only luck and chance that separates us, one from the other, village and town people, rich and poor, the customer, the gas-station owner and the gas-station attendant, you know. How you can be so sure that one day you will not have to ask Gordon for something only he can give you? We don’t know the twists and turns of the world. I myself was once a factory worker. You must take it easy with people. Even dogs don’t respond to being shouted at. They only get frightened.” He told the boy to go for a walk and to think hard about why he spoke to Gordon that way.

  After the station closed and he and Mr. Persad had gone back up to the house, although the boy was reluctant, he thought it best to apologize at once to Mr. Persad for his attitude toward Gordon, and in so doing to put it all behind them. Mr. Persad simply said, “It’s all right. As long as you learn something.” Without dwelling on it, he changed the subject. “You see today’s newspapers? I want to know what time is low tide. I thinking about taking a drive to the sea. You feel to eat roast corn?” The boy had gotten to know his stepfather well enough to realize that changing the subject was his way of forgiving and sparing him further shame.

  PARTIES

  Evenings, after dinner and before settling into homework, the boy would sit on the verandah with the man he more often than not thought of now as his father.

  On one occasion Mr. Persad began—after a long silence and the rhythmic pensive rocking that had become like an overture to Dolly and the boy—“Not so the Bihar boy in your class?”

  The boy, expecting something but not this, sat upright and nodded.

  “You know, in the early days, when I bought the gas station, the chamber of commerce used to have a lot of parties. Well, the time I am about to relate to you, the party was held in the home of one of its members. I had to take a taxi … yes, I had a gas station, but even then I had no car. So I took a taxi to the house. Soon as I arrived at the gate to the house, I ready to back out of there. You never see men dress up so! I was the only one with shoes that had the sole worn thin. Lots of women, and all of them looking so tidy and pretty and everything looking very dear.

  “One of them was Bihar. The taxi people. What is the name of the boy in your class?”

  “Shem.” The boy could but whisper the name. He was aware that the Bihar family and the Sangha family were well acquainted, and now that Mr. Sangha was living at home again, it seemed, from classroom chatter he overheard, that the families visited each other’s houses regularly. Somehow it had become known that his mother once worked for Mrs. Sangha, and he was uncomfortable in the Bihar boy’s presence.

  Mr. Persad hadn’t heard what he said, and he had to repeat Shem’s name.

  “He is the only boy. He have sisters, but it is he who will inherit his father’s business, you know. A lot of properties and businesses. The whole taxi service. Now, if we can get the account for gas for the taxi service, we would be in big business, eh? So, he and you might be doing business together, and I was thinking one day you might have to entertain him in your home. It is never too early to start preparing yourself.”

  Everyone in school knew that Shem didn’t want to be a businessman. He was always making fun of business families, as if he were different, saying that he was going to study law when he finished school.

  The boy wanted to tell Mr. Persad about a party Shem’s parents had thrown for him that year to celebrate his seventeenth birthday. Two boys from the class had been invited. The school day after, they bragged incessantly that they had drunk champagne to toast Shem’s birthday. It later became known that it was not champagne at all that they drank, but a new carbonated drink, a bubbly apple-flavored drink the color of champagne that was being advertised as the champagne of soft drinks. According to them, however, they got falling-down drunk from that one glass. That was good champagne, they said again and again, as if they were regular drinkers. The boy wondered what Mr. Persad would have thought about that.

  Listening to the wishes of Mr. Persad, knowing he was placing them in the wrong basket, the boy was reminded of a time not long before, which, ever since, had caused him no small measure of grief.

  It had been talked about in school that Mr. and Mrs. Sangha were having a party for their daughter’s sixteenth birthday. It was to be at the prestigious All India Members Only Club of which her father was treasurer. Shem’s family had already received their invitation, which Shem was using as a bookmark in one of his class texts. The boy went home from school every day until the day before the event, expecting to learn from his mother that his family—his mother, businessman Bhatt Persad, and himself—had received an invitation. When none came on that second-to-last day, he decided to take the situation into his own hands. Even as he took the circuitous walking route home from school that passed the Sanghas’ house, he did not have a plan. When their house was in view, he paused, watched, and tried to find some reason to enter the yard. He looked to see if there might have been a delivery of the evening newspaper tucked in the wrou
ght-iron fronds of the gate or thrown on the front steps that he could retrieve and take up to the door. There was none. Perhaps a window that had blown open and was not latched. This was a vain wish; there had not been any such obliging wind. But he couldn’t have hoped for more than what presented itself like a blessing. When he was close enough, he noticed that a large clay pot that had been on the front verandah lay on the paved yard below, shattered, the bread-and-butter begonia it had contained still looking fresh and salvageable. He felt he had chanced upon a truly urgent situation, not a contrived or convenient reason to call out to the Sanghas, but something he could not in good conscience ignore. He unlatched the front gate. The pine tree he had so long ago planted was almost his height. He ran up the stairs, calling out not to the young lady he thought of as his friend but to Mrs. Sangha. A servant he did not recognize peeped around a wall and disappeared. Mrs. Sangha came out with a dish towel in her hand. She saw him, and the moment of silence between that time and when she said, “Eh-eh, child? What you doing here? I wasn’t expecting you,” seemed an eternity.

  He lied that he was walking home with a friend from school who lived nearby when, as he was passing the house, he saw the fallen begonia. She looked at the place on the verandah wall where the plant would have been. It missing indeed, she quickly glanced over the wall. She shouted out to the woman who had looked out before, saying, “Joyce, the cat was in the house again. Come quick. It knock over a plant again. Come and clean it up. Leave what you doing. Now-now.”

  Perhaps the boy could have left then, having accomplished that task, but he stayed. He thought about offering to clean it up, but he couldn’t bear to be put to work in that house, and he also didn’t want to lose the opportunity to chat with Mrs. Sangha. He waited while she seemed preoccupied with Joyce’s cleaning. Then she said, “Well, you really growing up, yes, child. How is Mammy?”

  He said his mother was fine and that, well, it was true, he was indeed getting older. After all, he was sixteen that year. She seemed oblivious to his opening and said distractedly that, well, everything and everybody was changing. He pointed to the pine and said, “The Christmas tree looking nice,” hoping to engage her in a familiarity. She said, “Yes. That is a Norfolk pine. First time you seeing that tree?” He was shocked that she had forgotten it was he who had planted it. He did not remind her. She said nothing more, and in the silence the boy felt, strangely, shame for her, that she, too, had changed. All at once she looked unfamiliar. He would not be invited to the party. In a voice that of its own accord had become coarse and had dropped in volume and enthusiasm, he muttered that he had better get home before it got any later. He ran down the stairs and as fast as he could away from the house.

  That night he did not eat his dinner. He suffered bouts of fever, nausea, and profuse sweating. His mother wanted to send for a doctor. He begged her not to send for anyone, assured her that he would be well by the following morning, and only then, if he was not, should she call for the doctor. He remained curled up in his bed under several cotton blankets, crying when he was alone, and praying that Mrs. Sangha would forget that he had gone to her house. He begged God to keep him from being, at that very moment, the topic of conversation and jokes between Mrs. Sangha and her daughter. That he would not be talked about at the party among the children or the adults. That Shem Bihar and Paul Busby would not hear about the visit he had made on the day before the party—to which he remained uninvited.

  For weeks he expected his mother to say questioningly, surely with rage, that she had heard he went to the Sanghas’ house the day before the birthday party. He fell into a depression that threatened, in the face of Mr. Persad’s current conversation, to engulf him again.

  THE PASSING ON OF A SMALL FIRE

  Mr. Persad had made his decision. He would buy at least one more station. It was time to tell Dolly. As he contemplated how to make his announcement, he watched her and played with a slice of bread she had warmed and buttered for him. He thought that she was, indeed, a businessman’s wife. When he told her that after all these years of being in business, because of her support he had finally developed courage, her response surprised and hurt him a little. She pursed her lips, got up, and busied herself at the sink immediately, uttering only, “Hm.” She sent up a pout that lasted a week. When he wasn’t around to hear but her son was, she ranted and wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t understand why this man should want more than the one gas station at the foot of the hill in Marion. Her son recognized in the purchase of another property the opportunity to rise in the eyes of all the Sanghas, Bihars, and Busbys of the island. He did his best to impart his enthusiasm to his mother. If he might have explained this keenness, she didn’t give him the chance.

  She turned on him and asked, “Why? What making you say so? Since when you interested in gas station? Your head too full of wanting to show off, yes. Is not business you interested in one bit. It is that Sangha family that have you stupid-stupid. And another thing, when will you learn, child, that it is not the girl you interested in but her father and that boy in your class who like to taunt you so? If I really believe you so interested in business for business self, I would pay you some mind, but what you know? Eh?”

  At first some semblance of truth in her words slapped him in his face harder than if she had employed a pot spoon. But he convinced himself that his mother had truly misunderstood him, and she had even misunderstood Mr. Persad.

  For a good while after, the house felt heavy. Mr. Persad spent more time down the hill in the station. And the boy, feeling insulted and misunderstood by the one person he felt knew him best, sulked and at the same time made determinations to show that he was as capable as anyone else of being business-minded and competent. His mother muttered about the house, using any opportunity even if it wasn’t warranted, to state that she wasn’t no big shot and didn’t want people mentioning her name behind her back, saying she or her son came to Marion to climb ladder.

  Then suddenly, the day before Mr. Persad was to close the deal on the first of two stations he had bid on, he suffered a heart attack. In the hospital he suffered two more, one after the other, in quick succession. It was a miracle, the doctors said, that he had not succumbed to them.

  When Mr. Persad returned home, he was too weak to go down to the station. After school the boy went directly there. He took cash, did his homework at the desk in the office. His mother surprised him; she knew how to use the cash register and to make simple entries in the station’s journal. Somehow, over time, she had learned the basics of the business. Her pouting had come to a halt. On the contrary, she took charge of the overall running of the station and with an acumen her son had never witnessed. His well-meaning compliments offended her. To them she retorted gruffly that she was not stupid, she just had not had any opportunities before. Thinking back, the boy realized that he had often seen her and Mr. Persad bent over the business log-books, and he had heard Mr. Persad mumble things to her about the figures, but he hadn’t understood what attention she was paying, or that Mr. Persad might have been instructing her, or that she was even capable.

  Mr. Persad arose to a quiet house in the mornings; he would be on the verandah in his pajamas, rocking in his chair, while Dolly his wife already would have gone down to begin work. She did everything there was to do in running such a business, and left only the accounting for her son to check and finalize at the end of the day, before bringing the books up to the house for her husband to check. They fell into a comfortable pattern where, after work and before dinner, she and the boy would sit with him and together discuss what had taken place down the hill that day, what went well, who did what, and who was not working up to standard. What products needed to be ordered, what deliveries came in, what cash came in, and what went out. Mr. Persad was pleased to find that besides the products he normally sold in the shop—engine oils, batteries, jacks for changing tires, cigarettes, and cigarette lighters—Dolly had taken it in her own hands to bring in a small assortment of chocola
te bars, bottles of soda water, packages of nuts, and assorted scents of car fresheners in the form of ornaments that were meant to be hung from rear-view mirrors. Mr. Persad began to relax when he realized that the woman he had married and her son were able to run his business as well as he. She and Mr. Persad seemed to grow closer. On a few occasions the boy was present when she rubbed Mr. Persad’s head with Limacol, and several times he came upon her sitting quietly in the chair beside his bed as he lay sleeping.

  As if to remind them, and to keep his spirits high, Mr. Persad spoke urgently and incessantly of his plans to expand once he was strong enough to meet with a lawyer and his bank manager. They conferred about the boy going abroad to study business at university right after the final school exams.

  The boy lay awake after the lights in the house and in most of Marion had been turned off, when everything was still and quiet, and only the moon slid in and out of clouds across the frame of his window. He remembered the words of Mrs. Sangha’s servant, Patsy: “Once a servant son, always a servant son.”

  His entrance into the last year of high school coincided with an unpleasant turn of circumstances: Mr. Persad developed complications and was hospitalized. Schooling suffered as the boy worried about Mr. Persad and about his mother being left alone yet again by a husband. As Mr. Persad became weaker, the boy tried to encourage his mother to hurry the purchase of that second station so Mr. Persad might feel that he had realized his dream, but she was ever more decidedly against such expansion.

  And then, the week before the exams began, Mr. Persad passed away. The boy knew in his heart that he could not leave his mother. He would not go abroad to study business, or anything else, for that matter.