“And eat plenty tofu. I know. Thanks.”
He wrote me a prescription for estrogen patches and gave me a glossy pamphlet. As I was heading out the door, he said, “Oatmeal compress.”
I stopped in his doorway. “And which one of my senescent body parts you want me to apply that to?”
“Miriam say it used to help her plenty. For the itching in her extremities.”
“Thank you, Cedric. Say hello to Miriam for me.”
So. Looked like I wasn’t finding again after all. Menopause explained the itchy fingers. And forgetting that the almond tree had always been there.
And Dumpy had been stuck down inside the couch, so he didn’t even count.
But what about Bare Bear landing on me from out of the sky?
Even when I had been convinced I was a finder, things didn’t used to come to me; I went to them.
Goose was walking on my grave. Symptoms of menopause: clammy feeling. I went into the mall to get a hot drink. But at the counter, I changed my mind. Not coffee; a mango smoothie. “With soy milk, please,” I said. Might as well get started on eating right.
While I waited in the line, I had a good look at Cedric’s pamphlet, The Best Years of Your Life. It pictured a slim, smiling white woman in a tasteful navy one-piece bath suit. She was climbing up a ladder out of a pool. She was about thirty-five years old, her hair in a perky grey bob that was obviously a wig; I guess to fool us menopause-addled women into believing that she was in her sixties, and that if we only used their fine product, we could look like that, too. An equally trim and dignified man waited for her on the pool deck. He was leaning back in one of two matched lounge chairs. He had a little touch of grey hair at each temple. A full head of hair, too; no male-pattern baldness for this fellow. He wore modest and nondescript swim trunks. I guess he was handsome, in a 1950s martini ad kind of a way. In fact, there were two martinis—his with a green paper umbrella, hers with a pink one—on the little table that sat between the two lounge chairs. It was all so perfect I could gag. Jesus. Death by connubial bliss. Apparently, if I took Cedric’s pills, I’d turn into a Stepford wife and get married to a Ken doll.
Though at least I’d have a man.
I wondered what Gene was doing right now. Bouts of rapid heartbeat. He hadn’t called. And fool that I was, I hadn’t asked for his number. Disturbing memory lapses.
The pamphlet had sections with titles like: “Life’s Next Big Step,” and “A Healthy Attitude.” I got my mango soy smoothie. I spied a free seat in the food court and headed towards it. A young man’s body glanced me, nearly knocking the smoothie out of my hand. He didn’t notice. He just kept walking, chatting with his friend.
Next I got mobbed by a tittering of young women, all tight jeans, short skirts, and straightened hair. They flowed around me, chattering. One of them dropped her change purse. “You lost something,” I said to her. She turned, searched her friends’ faces to see who had spoken. I waved the hand with the pamphlet in it. “Over here.” I swear she looked at everybody else before her eyes settled on me, not five feet away from her. I pointed to the ground. “You dropped your change purse.”
“Oh,” she said. “Thank you.” She picked it up and moved off with her friends.
I sat in the free seat, played both incidents over in my mind. No, she hadn’t looked at everybody else before she looked at me. She had looked at all the young people. I wasn’t quite real for her, or for the guy who’d bumped me. I kissed my teeth and sucked a big glob of the smoothie up through the wide straw. It tasted like ass. I crumpled the pamphlet up, stood, tossed it and the drink into the nearest garbage can. Then I dropped into the pharmacy. Turned out I didn’t have enough money to pay for the prescription. Liquor store for me; what money I had would stretch far enough for a flask of Cayaba’s good red rum. Dizziness, light-headedness, episodes of loss of balance.
My poor old red Mini Moke sat in the parking lot in her crumbling paint, looking nothing like the queen after which I’d named her.
And wait; was she listing a little to one side, or were my glasses dirty again? I peered through the specs, trying to find the right place on the tri-focals that would let me focus at that distance. See why I scarcely wore the damned things.
Motherass. Victoria was leaning, yes. The right back tyre had a flat. Shit.
How the hell I was going to get home? Maybe I could call Ife. Then I remembered that the bus stop was just on the other side of the parking lot. And there was the bus, only half a block away from the stop. I started to run. What had possessed me to wear heels today? But I’d been walking, running, dancing in high heels since God was a boy. I moved faster.
The bus was nearly to the stop. God, I thought, please don’t make me miss it. I threw myself into an all-out run in my stilettos. A sleek Mercedes had to slam on the brakes to avoid me. I landed hard on one foot, and felt the heel of my stiletto give. Shit. My best pair of shoes. The driver glared at me and smoothed back her perfectly pressed hair. She wore her sunglasses on her head, so fucking fashionable.
The bus was at the stop. I shouted, “Wait, please, driver!” and continued the fifty-yard dash. Thank the heavens for short slit skirts. The legs might be fifty-three years old, but they were good legs. Running was showing them off real nice, so long as I made sure not to wobble on my broken shoe. The bus driver stayed put to watch my thighs in action, and that gave me time to run up the stairs. “Thank you,” I said to him, trying to look fetchingly windblown, when what I really felt was good and winded. He put the bus in gear and drove off. Victoria’s one good headlight eye looked at me mournfully as I pulled away.
“I just going to catch my breath,” I said to the driver. He gave my legs one more look and nodded. I found a seat and rummaged around in my purse for the fare.
Only a few coppers in there. I’d paid for the smoothie with the last of my money. Shit, shit, shit. When I left the mall, my plan had been to drive to the cambio to withdraw some cash to pay for the waterbus home. I still had a few dollars in there until payday. When Dadda began to sink, I’d started working part-time at the library so I could be with him more. Money was tight.
Maybe the driver would forget me. I scrunched down small in my seat and tried to disappear. The bus rocked and belched on its way into town. I would just sneak off at the nearest cambio, get some cash, go home.
The bus stopped, in between stops. The driver leaned out of his seat and turned around to look at me. “Lady, like you forget you have to pay to ride this bus?” he said, loudly enough for
everyone to hear. An old man in one of the side seats stared at me, his eyes avid, waiting to see what I was going to do. A little girl in a St. Rose’s school uniform snickered.
I thought I was going to dead from shame right there. “I just…” I said, stalling for time. I got up to go and talk to him so he wouldn’t have an excuse to shout any more of my business right down through the whole bus. Maybe I could persuade him to carry me as far as a cambio and wait till I got some money out. If I had any money in there. I even owed Mr. Mckinley for the grunts I had bought from him two weeks ago.
“Chastity!” called a voice from the back of the bus. “Calamity!”
Lord on a bicycle; it was Dr. Evelyn Chow, witnessing how badly I managed my affairs. I sighed as any chance I’d had to take Agway home with me evaporated. I must be was born bad-lucky.
Evelyn bustled up to the front, waving her purse at me. “Renny,” she said to the bus driver, “it look like you catch my friend here without any change for the bus?”
“She have to pay, Doctor,” he said.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” she said to me. “I always have extra tokens.” She fished in the change purse and dropped one into the fare box. Renny nodded and drove on.
“Thank you,” I whispered to her.
“Not at all, not at all. Come and sit with me then, nuh?”
“Yes. All right.” She’d paid the piper, she got to call the dance. I would bloody well have to sit
with her. I fell in behind her as she made her way back to her seat. The St. Rose’s school girl was still laughing behind her hand. I lifted one side of my lip at her, doglike, to show her my teeth. She gasped and stopped her stupid giggling. Good. She reminded me of Jane Labonté from my school days. Jane could make me feel bad just by looking at me. Make me feel like the common class poor relation. In high school, she and Evelyn had paired up to make my life a hell.
“Let’s sit here,” said Evelyn. She pointed to two empty seats side by each. I slid in beside her.
“I’ll pay you back,” I whispered.
“Don’t worry about it. How come you’re on this bus? The waterbus is the other way.”
“Yes. I was going back home, but my car broke down,” I said. “I was just trying to get to a bank machine, and forgot I didn’t have bus fare on me.”
“Well, that’s an inconvenience! Where’s your car?”
“In the parking lot of the medical centre.”
“Oh, there’s a lovely restaurant in the mall there! Really good Mediterranean cuisine. Have you ever been?”
“No, can’t say I have.”
“Expensive to eat there, though. My husband likes to go there of a Sunday evening, but my dear, I have to say I prefer a beer and a fish and chips at Mrs. Smalley’s Chicken Boutique any day.”
“You do?” My lord. I had a sudden vision of the proper
Evelyn Chow in her white lab coat, sitting at one of Mrs. Smalley’s brukdown tables with a Red Stripe beer at her left hand and a heaping plate of the house’s fresh fried grunt fish in front of her, sucking the flesh from the bones.
“How was the little boy when you left him?” she asked.
“Fine. Sleeping.”
She looked at me. “You’re worried about him. Don’t fret; we’ll find someone qualified to take care of him.”
“I’m qualified. I’ve raised a child of my own.”
She patted my hand. “I’m sorry, Chastity. I just think it would be too much for you to take on.”
“But—”
“You and I not getting any younger, you know.” She smiled. “Time to slow down now.”
“Arawak Court!” yelled the bus driver. The St. Rose’s school girl got off. She stood on the pavement and watched the bus pull away. As she came level with me, she stuck her tongue out at me. I flashed a silent snarl. Of course she’d waited until she was safe. Little spring chicken with her high bust and her tight thighs.
“Friend of yours?” asked Evelyn.
“Something like that.” The bus was following the coast road. I stared at the blue strip of water. Agway’s home.
“You’re quiet,” said Evelyn.
“‘Quiet here on this rock; sitting still and thinking,’” I quoted. Bad bookworm habit of mine.
“?‘The Cayaba Fairmaid.’?”
“You know that story?” Evelyn had surprised me for the second time in five minutes.
“We did learn it in school,” she reminded me.
“Yes, I know. But most people seem to forget about it afterwards.”
“You know the one about the blue child?” she asked me.
“I kinda remember it, yeah.” Now she was a folklorist, too? She seemed more the ballet and art cinema type. “Old lady finds a blue devil baby in a hole, the baby tries to force her to do something, I forget what. Old lady throws the baby into the sea, thinking that will drown it.”
Evelyn nodded. “When the blue baby hits the water, it grows huge, turns into the devil woman of the sea who drags ships down. That’s what the baby had wanted the whole time; to reach the sea.”
Huh. That story had quite a different cast to it since my experiences of the past few days. Now I would be willing to bet that it was a fictionalized story of somebody else bucking up with a sea person.
“When I was young,” said Evelyn, “I used to wish that the oldtime stories were true.”
“You did? You never told me.”
“You would have laughed after me.”
“No, I wouldn’t have.”
“Yes. You would have. Your mouth hot now, and it was
hot then.”
I decided to make nice. “All right. Maybe I would have.” I was busting to talk to somebody about the sea people, and I hadn’t heard from Gene. I had been like that from since; when I learned something new, I had to tell somebody, anybody. But I had to lead Evelyn to this gently. “It’s interesting, you don’t find, that we have all these stories about devils living in the sea?”
She shrugged. “Sea kill plenty people in the history of Ca-yaba. It make sense the devil would live in the sea.”
Shit, how to get her to think this through? “You know the legend about Captain Carter?”
Her face brightened. “Yes. Such a beautiful love story.”
“I guess. Except the lovers throw themselves into the water and die.”
She kissed her teeth. “You have to have a litte romance, man. The story says they transformed.”
“They adapted to living in the sea.”
“I suppose you could think of it that way.” She looked out the window, checked her watch. I was losing her.
“When I was a girl,” I said, “I used to try to figure out how I could go and live with the dolphins.”
“Oh. Well, that’s different. If you were going to remain an oxygen breather, the rest is pretty easy.” She sat up straight, started counting off on her fingers: “Extra body fat like whales and seals have, to protect the organs from the cold.”
Check. Agway was fat as mud, just like his daddy, and the little blue girl. “What else?” I asked her.
She thought a little bit. “They would need broad ribcages.”
Check. “Why, though?”
“To make room for lungs with a lot of surface area; they’ll be going under the water for long periods, so they’d need to be able to hold extra oxygen in their lungs. And their lats and delts—these muscles here, in your upper back—would be hyperdeveloped, to help with swimming.”
“So their arms would change, too?” I couldn’t help coaching her just.
“They wouldn’t have to. But it would be nice if their limbs were relatively short. More streamlined for swimming. Oh! I just thought of another one!”
She was practically jigging in her seat. We used to compete in school for who could answer Teacher’s questions first.
She said, “This one would be really cool, okay? You know that webbing between the fingers and toes? Like Agway has? All humans have that in the womb. If our mermaid people never lost it, it would help them swim better.”
“Uh-huh…”
“Eyes! Really big eyes. It’s dark down there. Nictitating membranes would be so cool! Imagine being able to have your eyes closed and open at the same time! I don’t know what function those patches on the inner thighs would have, though…”
Her eyes opened wide. She put her hands to her mouth. “Oh, my God!” she blurted through her fingers.
“Courtice Plaza!” announced the bus driver. The bus clattered to a halt.
“This is my stop,” I said. “I pay you back the bus fare tomorrow, all right?” I stood up and headed for the door, my heart going powpowpow. Please. Please.
She grabbed her purse and ran to catch up. “I’m getting off with you,” she said. “You can’t just ups and leave me with this idea you put into my head.”
“What idea?” I chirruped at her over my shoulder. I stepped down off the bus stairs and right onto the broken shoe heel. Miracle I didn’t twist my ankle.
“Good night, ladies,” Renny called out.
A soft evening breeze was blowing. There was the overpowering ice cream smell of frangipani blossoms from somewhere, and the sky had that look of evening turning into night; like someone had poured black ink into blueing and was stirring it.
Courtice Plaza was in front of us; a small, three-storey shopping centre built around a courtyard. The designer said he’d had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in mind
when he constructed it. Looked more like one of those Escher drawings, with staircases leading every which way. Confused the eye. I could never remember which level the cambio was on, and which set of stairs would lead me to it. I hobbled up to the plaza. A woman with matted hair and tattered clothing sat on the grass verge. She was barefoot. The bottoms of her feet were black horns of callous. She spied us.
“Please, lady, do,” she said to me. “Beg you little money. I ain’t eat from morning.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have any.” It was the God’s truth. I didn’t have one red cent.
“Please, lady,” she said again.
“Here.” Evelyn gave the woman a bill.
“Thank you, lady. Bless you.”
We went on. I stopped and dithered around a bit, looking from one entrance to the other. Evelyn dithered right alongside me.
“That little boy,” she said. “It would be incredible.”
“What would?”
“It’s just possible; an isolated archipelago like this. An evolutionary branch…”
This sort of looked like the entrance I wanted. I began up the stairs. Evelyn followed.
“It worked for Darwin,” she said. “The finches, you know?”
“The library archives are full of reported sightings of mermaids off Cayaba,” I said. “Newspaper clippings, people’s diaries from long ago.”
We passed a fancy women’s clothing store. It was lit in screaming pink and yellow neon. The skirt on the mannequin in the window was so short that even though she was plastic, I felt embarrassed for her.
Time was, I could have gotten away with a skirt like that.
We rounded the corner, and there was the food court, and the cambio. I made for it. Evelyn stood beside me while I punched in the numbers. She was almost vibrating, she was so excited. “You knew this whole time, didn’t you?” she said. “About the child, I mean.”
“I don’t know, I just suspect. Could be wishful thinking.” Nothing in the chequing account. “But I think I bucked up another one like him when I was a little girl.”
“You lie!” Wide-eyed, she grabbed my arm. “When? Where? Did you talk to it? How come you never said?”
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