Uncle Esey lets me distract him from his work when I am bored. I poke through cubbyholes of his rolltop desk, which is stuffed with notecards, bottles of ink, boxes of paper clips, rubber bands. I sit on his lap and peck at the keys on his black typewriter. He tells me funny stories. He has a soft smile and gentle hands, and I follow him around the apartment and go out with him to run errands. He takes me to the Museum of Natural History and spends hours with me when I discover the ancient Egyptian exhibits—the jewelry, the pottery, the artifacts. I am mesmerized by the display. I imagine her, my Egyptian princess, wearing silver and gold and smelling of the mysterious green water of the Nile.
Patsy and Esey take us to my first Chinese restaurant. My favorite part is the fortune cookie and Esey gives me his. I’m amazed that one’s fortune can arrive serendipitously in a cookie. I save my slips of white paper as proof of a bright future. I believe in this, in the future, more than the present, certainly more than the past.
At dusk I stand at the window in their living room and watch lights bloom across Manhattan. We are high in a skyscraper, and I think of the mountains at home, standing on the terrace of the V. I. Hotel and gazing down at Charlotte Amalie. The island seems unreal and far away. I try to imagine my father alone up at the hotel while we, his three little girls, as he still calls us, are away from him. I wonder if he misses us. I know he does. He has to. He must. Before I left he whispered to me how much he would miss me, me, his most special, precious little girl. But maybe he’s not alone at the hotel, I think. He hates to be alone. I feel slightly scared when I think of him dancing with another precious little girl.
I lie on the leather couch. Light from the rest of the apartment filters into the living room. From Esey’s study comes the sound of typing. My sister is in the bedroom reading. She loves to read, to be alone, and I know better than to ask her to play with me. In the kitchen my mother talks to my aunt. Earlier in the day I had discovered a toy, a Hawaiian dancing girl, stuffed into a drawer in a bureau. It is about three inches high. The Hawaiian girl, made of rubber, wears a grass skirt, but her breasts are bare. She stands on a wood base and by turning a small lever her hips and breasts gyrate. I am entranced by this motion. I know my daddy must have bought this present for my uncle, for he is the one who traveled to Hawaii.
My father arrives in New York to take us to Monhegan Island in Maine. On his first night in the city he holds me on his lap while telling us all the news of St. Thomas. He is stroking my knee, and suddenly I am filled with dread when I think of the trip to Maine. I thought I had missed him, had been waiting to see him, but now I want to stay here with my Uncle Esey. Later I take the Hawaiian doll to bed with me, hiding it under the sheet. My father turns off the light after he kisses my sister and me good-night. His bay rum aftershave smells too foreign here in the city. It reminds me of there, back there in my four-poster mahogany bed in our house next to Blackbeard’s Castle.
After my father leaves the room, I see her again, the Egyptian princess. It’s night. She’s running across the sands of the desert. An orange slice of a moon dazzles the water of the Nile and reflects on the gold and silver bangly bracelets encircling her arms and her wrists. Reeds slash at her ankles as she runs faster, fleeing an angry pharaoh. She hides in the shadow of the Sphinx, waiting for an Egyptian prince to save her. But the prince doesn’t come. I can’t sleep. I still hold the Hawaiian dancer, but she’s no longer Hawaiian. She’s the Egyptian princess. I don’t understand why I grip her so tightly, my thumb against her throat. Nor do I understand why I must bite off one of her nipples.
By the time we reach Monhegan Island my father is in a rage. Nothing has gone right on the trip: the food, the car, the maps, the directions, the roads, the ferry ride, his children, his wife—all are wrong. My mother, sister, and I are sullen. So even though the white wood hotel is lovely, the island is lovely, no one wants to be here. We all want to be back home where we are more comfortable in our own small private furies. As we unpack, my mother makes a final stab at a vacation and suggests we all change immediately and head to the beach. But this beach is not like the Caribbean. The water is frigid, the shoreline rocky. My mother will not enter this water and sits on a rock to sun herself. My sister wanders off down the shore. My father marches into the ocean. Even though water is scary to me, I follow. I must. I know he wants someone to be with him, and I must be the one.
The cold water stuns me, but I pretend to love it, knowing this will please my father. My mother calls to me to come out—that I will catch pneumonia or polio. My father tells her to leave me alone, the water is fine. She persists. He screams at her to shut up, shut up, to leave me, leave him alone, if she doesn’t stop bothering us, he’ll…
I sink below the surface of the water. Their voices fade. All I hear is the deep throb of the ocean, connecting me to all oceans … and if I loosened my moorings I would be able to float back to the Caribbean, float to New York City to see my Uncle Esey, float…
In this murky water I see nothing. The sodden cold weighs me deeper and deeper. I close my eyes and expel my breath in a slow rush of bubbles. It is here, now, I lose my fear of water. It is here I discover its soothing lap, lap against my skin, rocking me. In this body-numbing water I can let go and float to a deep basin of the sea. My seaweed hair will drift about my shoulders. My skin turns to phosphorescence. My fingernails are delicate pink shells. My teeth are pearls. And I will dwell forever beneath a warm blanket of sand on the ocean floor.
But then I feel his hands on me, those hands, on my arms, yanking me. When I surface, all I hear are tattered remnants of words from my mother. “There, now, you satisfied—” By the time I open my eyes she has turned from us and is walking back to the cabin.
I shiver so much my legs feel wayward and useless. My father carries me from the water and arranges towels on the rocks, placing me on them. He rubs my arms and legs to warm me. Heat from the rock feels as if it radiates my skin, seeping along my spine to the backs of my limbs. At first this feels good. As he breathes deeply, though, I begin to feel as if I’m back under water—this time fighting for air. He pulls my hand under the leg of his bathing suit, but my numb hand has trouble gripping him there. I feel his tension: We’re outside, hurry up and do this. If I don’t do this correctly and quickly he will be angry. I try to concentrate. I must remember what he has taught me, how he has taught me to do this. Yes, you Dina, you weren’t in the water, you ’re not shivering, you can do this.
But her small hand, too, at this angle, has trouble. We, Dina and I, are lying on the rock and we can’t turn. Her elbow is rigid against stone, but Dina, you want to do this for him. You want this as much as he does. She rubs him as hard as she can, but it’s not hard enough. Perhaps he’s worried someone will see us. We’ve never done this outdoors before, and I—my body is shamed. I feel stripped, exposed, naked. His tension grows. He hasn’t seen me in several weeks, and if he doesn’t get what he needs soon he will hurt us. He yanks aside the crotch of my suit but doesn’t even bother to touch me, just stares, stares, stares at me. No, not at me, at it. He stares at it. Yes, do this, Father, do this. If this will make it happen quicker, do it. Do whatever you want. Just do it.
His voice is hoarse, whispering: “Open your mouth. We can’t get any on the towel, open your mouth. Damnit. Hurry.”
My mouth is frozen shut, but he’s pulling up the leg of his suit farther as he moves up and over me. Someone will see, I think, someone will come walking along the rocks. My sister will return. My mother. I shut my own eyes, not wanting to witness this. It is Dina, Dina is finally able to open her mouth, and he shoves it against the roof of her mouth just as he ejaculates. But she can’t swallow fast enough. Damn her, damn her. What’s wrong with her? Maybe she’s not used to sunlight either. Before, it’s always been dark … Dina disappears, and now it is my throat. I can’t swallow. I spit it out all over the towel. He lies back, and I think about lifting a rock and smashing him … No, I think, no. I must be perfect, and he w
ill love me. I must clean up this mess I have made, do nothing to make him angry. I take the towel to the edge of the ocean and scrub it with sand. I scoop water into my mouth and swallow it, but still I taste it, that taste, and I put a handful of sand in my mouth and scrub it across my teeth and my tongue with a finger.
It is then I see my mother. My legs buckle and I sit flat on the sand. She’s walking toward me over the rocks, and I don’t know whether she saw us or not. My body feels as if she did see—it is weak with shame—and I believe that even from this distance she can smell that stuff in my mouth. I look down at my body. My father has not properly arranged the crotch of my suit, but my arms are unable to move in order to fix it. I am without will. And as I sit here, I think I see myself floating away, rising up from the shoreline, as if the ocean opened its mouth in a curl of a wave and released me in a spindrift. I float higher and higher, so by the time my mother reaches the spot where my body once was, I know it is not me she touches. It is not my mouth her fingers probe as she scoops out sand. It is not my ears threatened with her words. It is not my arm her fingernails puncture as she yanks me back to the cabin, passing my sleeping father without a word or a glance. Again, it is not my ears that hear her say I have sand in my crotch; if it’s not properly cleaned, it will become infected. I am in a bathtub of icy water—icy, she says, to kill any germs that might cause infection. She separates my legs and washes the sand away with her hand. Yes, do this, Mother, I think. Wash it away. My mother will make me better. She is calmer now. The bottom of the tub is gritty with sand, but as soon as she pulls the plug it will disappear forever. Everything will be fine, she tells me. We ’11 just get you cleaned up. We’ll wash the sand from your hair. You have such pretty hair.
By the time I am clean and dry and dressed, my father has returned to the cabin. He, too, is now calm. Yes, my mother is right: Everything will be better now. I know this. He just needed to do that. Then he is calm and better. We’re all better. He sits in a chair reading the New York Times and barely glances at us as we enter.
I leave the cabin and go to the lobby of the hotel. Through a picture window overlooking the ocean, I see my sister far down the beach jumping from rock to rock. If she tripped and fell … I want her to, but not because I hate her. I want her to fall so I can rush out and save her. She would be indebted to me forever. She would love me forever, love me more than she loves to be alone. Except my sister will never trip. Insistently, her ramrod body will refuse ever to stumble, ever to waver, ever to fall. So why, then, do I feel so sad watching her?
I wander into the dining room where college kids on vacation set tables for dinner. I watch a girl with shiny blonde hair pour water from a pitcher into a glass. Her skin looks healthy and scrubbed. She wears lipstick the color of pink pop-it beads, and she smiles at me with white-white teeth as she wanders over. I want her to like me. I want to be her friend. She says her name is Trixie, and immediately I love the solid sound of her name, the way her tongue ticks the roof of her mouth when it hits the hard “x” and “t.” Solid, yes, and I wish I had a solid name, not the too-soft, too-weak whisper of a fading vowel. To myself, I say her name over and over and smile back. She asks if I’m hungry, and when I nod she brings me a piece of chocolate cake. When I finish, she brings me another. I want her to invite me to go with her to college.
That night at dinner she is our waitress. What luck, I think, as I see her bring us menus. But now I’m worried my father won’t like the food, that he’ll raise his voice at Trixie, that he will send food back to the kitchen. I’m so scared I can’t eat much dinner. Besides, I’m full of chocolate cake. All I eat are a couple of rolls and another piece of cake. But my father likes the food. He also likes Trixie. He jokes with her, asks where she goes to college, asks if she has boyfriends. “You must have loads of boyfriends,” he says, smiling. When she pours him a cup of coffee he pats her hip, and the three of us, his three little girls, sit hunched inside ourselves, silent.
For two weeks I only eat cake and rolls. Trixie feeds me cake between meals as if she knows I’m hollow and she will be the one to fill me. So I eat and eat and eat. The more cake I eat, the more ravenous I become, and could eat even more cake than offered but am too shy to ask. I eat until I am drunk on sugar. Later, all I can do is sit on the rocks or sleep. I don’t go for walks. I can’t go swimming—I am too bloated. Too dizzy. Too stuffed. When I awake I feel hungover and must return to Trixie to feed me more and more cake, until no longer do I remember what my father and I did together on the beach.
I get sick. My skin and my eyes yellow. For days I lie in bed, finally completely stuffed and unable to eat one more bite of cake. I want my mother to comfort me, sit beside me, tell me she loves me. She doesn’t. She can’t. She doesn’t seem to know how to love me, but of course who could possibly love this bloated yellow body? Trixie visits, but just seeing her I think of sugar and I wait for her to leave. When my father talks to her he stands close to her and puts his hand on her arm when he smiles. She tells my parents a newly arrived hotel guest is a doctor. My mother asks him if he will see me. The doctor gives me enemas, but this strange man touching my body doesn’t scare me. My body no longer feels shame. Finally, I feel nothing.
From Maine we stop in New York for a few days to see my aunt and uncle before returning to the West Indies. It is late September. The Antilles School will start soon. In this early fall, the leaves in Central Park are red and yellow. I remember the fall in second grade, in Maryland, when I couldn’t attend school and try to think back to that time, try to remember why I stayed home, but that seems like another little girl afraid of school, another little girl afraid to leave her mother.
I’m not yet old enough to attend the dance at the Grand Hotel for the young Danish sailors who sail to port aboard the Danmark, but I want to meet a sailor. I must go. Earlier in the day my friends and I watched the square-rigged training ship glide around the point by Hassel Island. The bow gently plowed and furrowed the blue water. Wind puffed the rows of square-rigged sails. As the ship neared port I saw the blurred outlines of sailors swabbing the deck, getting ready for the islanders who would come aboard to visit. The Danmark dropped anchor next to the yellow bauxite on the pier, the silver flecks in the bauxite reflecting tiny wands of sunlight till it shimmered. I must meet a sailor. I want to dance with one.
Without letup I beg my mother. She keeps saying no. I will leave early, I say. She can fetch me any time she wants, but I must go. “I have to go,” I say. “I’m going.”
Finally she relents. My father puts on his linen jacket and says he has to work late. Since the bank is only a block from the Grand Hotel, he says, he’ll pick me up afterwards.
My mother helps me dress in my red and black dress with tiny black buttons and black patent-leather shoes. I slip a long strand of white pop-it beads around my neck. I ask her to braid my ponytail, and she does. When I am ready, I walk carefully down the 99 Steps, scared I’ll scuff a shoe, rip a hem, mess my hair. I have to be perfect. I have to be asked to dance, for this will make me perfect.
At first, though, I don’t think about dancing, because all I can see is the dance itself. It is perfect, exactly the way it should be. The girls’ dresses look like butterfly wings fluttering across the dance floor. The sailors’ uniforms are as white as the foam on the waves at Magens Bay, with the word Danmark embroidered in gold on black cap-bands. Their unfamiliar accents circle the whorls of my ears. I feel as if they’ve traveled the world, yes, and brought all the world with them, here to this dance, here to me.
From across the room I notice a sailor watching me. Most of the sailors are blonde, but this one isn’t. His black hair, I know, will smell like the mysterious depths of the sea. I glance away from him, down at the floor. I step back. For a moment I remember the way Billy smells in the forest: of fresh lime trees and the sun. The sailor is different. I know this. And then I understand that if he is different, I must be, too. I am not like these other girls. So as much as I want hi
m to ask me to dance, as much as I want to dance, I don’t want him to know me, know I am not like these other girls, in their soft pastel dresses. I am in red and black. I should not have braided my ponytail. I should not have worn this long strand of plastic pearls. I am … I am another kind of girl, and I believe he must know it.
He walks toward me. I hold my breath. He doesn’t ask me to dance, but he takes my hand. Even though he doesn’t hold me tight, still, with his hand pressed to my back, I feel stifled and trapped. My chin brushes his starched uniform and feels as if it’s been burned. Yet if he leads me from the dance, if he leads me to his ship, I will have to follow. I will go with him, even though if he touches my body my father will know.
I see now I should not have come to the dance. No longer can I hear music. The girls’ dresses, the sailors’ uniforms, the dancing couples seem flat, muted. I am too far away to see. With the sway of his body the sailor edges me outside to the second-story veranda overlooking Emancipation Park and the harbor where the Danmark is anchored. Still we are dancing, but slower. He is dancing with Dina, and he must know it. From the moment he saw me he knew who I was: a girl who would dance outside with a stranger. He pauses by the rail and brushes a strand of hair from my forehead. No, don’t do this, stop. But he can’t hear the words. From his pocket he removes a white and blue silk handkerchief with an image of the Danmark on it. He gives it to me, a present, but I believe it is payment—I understand what is expected, what I am supposed to do in order to be able to keep it. Still, I take it. I want it. I smile at him. He bends to hold me again, and I must let him. I don’t know how to stop. He is bending closer and closer—and maybe it’s only to dance with me, but…
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You Page 6
