The Meeting Point

by Austin Clarke

  “The missy home?” she asked.

  “You mean that music, eh?” Bernice asked, smiling.

  “That damn rock-’n’-roll waking me up,” Dots grumbled. “She don’t know that is heathen-music?”

  “My missy don’t play that music, darling! It is the children you hearing.” Bernice assumed great pride in defending Mrs. Burrmann’s tastes.

  Dots was apparently impressed. “Oh!” she said, with great relief; and straightway, like an animal awakened from its hibernation by a small disturbance of no consequence, she retreated into her reverie. It was part reverie, and part silent appraisal of Bernice’s apartment, which she envied because it was always kept so clean; and also because it was a room larger than hers. She reached out, and touched the animals from the north of Canada, all dead, all seeming to be prancing, or grazing on grass that was the colour of green clay: animals roaming in glazed and plastic enthusiasm. They were on the centre table. Dots ran her fingers over them again; and then she touched the jungles of false trees: maples, spruce, pine; trees coniferous and deciduous. A miniature waterfall bubbled and gurgled when she held it in her hand. She turned it upside down; and was shocked by its origin: MADE IN JAPAN. “Christ!” she exclaimed, “Niagara Falls, gal!”, although it was not the first time she had seen the Falls, in artificial reproduction.

  “You ever went there?” Bernice asked, noticing her interest; and coming awake from her own thoughts.

  “Niagara Falls,” Dots repeated, noting the likeness.

  The room was quiet again, as if a door on a noisy city street was shut against the din of traffic. Bernice, wishing that Dots wouldn’t talk so much, returned to the letter which her wandering thoughts had interrupted. All Lonnie comes round for, is to ask me if Bernice send the thing? I don’t know why you don’t put an end to Lonnie. Lonnie is no good for you. Lonnie, since the day you left for Canada, has been running after ever thing wearing a skirt. Lonnie does not even take Terence to Gravesend Beach on a first Sunday, for a sea bath. He passed round here once, which was a month after you left, and he took Terence to the Garrison Race Pasture. Terence came back in here at eleven o’clock at night. Terence tells me that he lost Lonnie who went drinking rum with his friends, and if it wasn’t for a police, Terence would still be lost. By luck, the police found Terence, and somebody happened to know that Terence belonged to you, meaning that you is Terence’s mother, and that you far from here, up in Canada. I had to bathe Terence in licks for doing that trick to me, because I think he is too big to say he getting himself lost. Bernice had to laugh at Mammy: she ain’t change a bit, that Mammy. And looking up, she saw Dots inspecting her dressing table, which was the largest piece of furniture in the room, and Bernice’s priceless possession. There was a looking glass attached to it. On this dressing table, Bernice had placed every bottle which contained manufactured tricks to improve a woman’s facial beauty and personality. Some bottles contained a fluid thick as molasses, but white; one boasted, and backed up its boast with a guarantee, that it had the ability to transform Bernice’s personality and complexion in such a way that men would trip over her. And this was the bottle Dots was examining. Others contained complexion-lighteners. These Bernice had discovered in Harlem where she had recently spent two weeks, visiting a cousin. Except for her complexion-lighteners, the entire collection of miracles were manufactured by Avon. Mrs. Burrmann had called her downstairs, and had given her this collection.

  Bernice broke into Dots’s thoughts, grumbling, “Lady Burrmann expecting friends, and I expecting a sister. I have to forsake my own flesh-and-blood so that the princess down there could drink her whiskey till her damn face is as red as a cherry, and she and her guests start singing Negro spirituals and folk songs, and carrying-on … holding up their clothes in front o’ the men, and swapping mottor car keys, and …”

  “No! They don’t do them things, gal!”

  “Them?”

  The room was so quiet, that the snow seemed to be making noises as it fell. Dots sighed again. “I wish I could lay my hands on Boysie!” And a lifetime of disappointment and frustration seemed to rise from her sight. “Every night, each night, Boysie comes in at three, four, five, and one morning that bastard creep in Dr. Hunter’s house, at seven. Christ, gal! and I was so shame in case the doctor see my husband coming in at that hour. Boysie crawls home late, like a dog, tired as hell, and saying all the time, the car break down, something wrong with the car, and be-Christ, when I call-on ‘pon Boysie to give me little loving, Boysie licked-out like a wet rag. Bernice, gal, sometimes I envies you, ’cause you don’t have no man-worries to worry you.…”

  “You have a lot on your mind, too.”

  “Boysie running after white woman, gal. My husband in love with white woman. But I swear to you, in the presence o’ God up there, be-Jesus Christ! let me just catch Boysie with one o’ them!”

  “Lord have mercy.”

  “And I telling you now, Bernice, that I don’t intend to stay in that damn place by myself, night in and night out. I am going to get myself a nice, young strapping white man and put a horning in Boysie’s backside that will learn him sense. Let Boysie take that! ’Cause he don’t know how to appreciate a nice black woman.”

  “But what you saying at all?” Bernice was nonplussed.

  “Many’s the night. Bernice, you know not, because a woman can’t tell everything concerning her life, not even to her closest bosom friend … many things goes on between my husband and me that I can’t break to you. Them is things I have to keep buried inside here.” She patted her breast heavily; and Bernice nodded her head, in sympathy. “Many’s the night, gal, I sitting down at the edge o’ that bed, and I watching that hour-hand as it move round from eleven, twelve, one, through two, and three and four o’clock, and my husband isn’t in my bed beside me. Where the hell he could be? In somebody bed? Tell me.”

  Bernice could understand this way of feeling things, and this way of expressing them. But she was still stunned by the compromise in Dots’s words. “For a decent person like you, to say that,” she said, “is nothing but a damn surrender to the past and the past histories that used to be the way o’ life for my great-great grandmother. Mammy tell me all that happen in them days. And I telling you now, so you won’t mention no more past-tense thoughts and commit no more fornications and suicides, with those thoughts. Mammy tell me that in them black days, any excuse for a man, as long as he was white, could hold on ’pon her grandmother by the hand, or grab her grandmother by the neck, or by her behind and drag her in the nearest canefield or behind the pig pen, and lay down flat on top o’ she, and work off himself and his unwanted substance and seed in her belly. And on the back o’ that, leave her to the four winds. Jesus, Dots, you mean to tell me that you want them days to come back? Is that why you want to go with a white man?” (Dots was twisting and turning uncomfortably.) “Look, child, I reading some serious knowledge these days, since I went down in Harlem. I think you should go there.”

  “It does happen every day, gal!” Dots did not give the impression that she had been joking all along. “It happens every damn day, black woman and white man. I ain’t the first and I won’t be the last, and there ain’t nothing you could do to stop this modern trend.” Bernice remained unimpressed. Dots had to go further; and with mock exasperation, she added, “But have you never pass through Yorkville, Yorkville Village? Near by Bloor and Avenue Road. Or the Little Trinidad Club? Toronto integrated now, gal. It is a technicolour city, now.”

  “Technicolour, or no technicolour, I still say what you just tell me has a damn lot to do with histories.”

  “Histories, my arse! — if you would pardon my vernacular, please.”

  After this, Dots flounced into silence and sulking. Bernice, somewhat humiliated by what had been said about finding a white man, went back to her letter. She got up from the chesterfield, and sat beside the window, counting the snowflakes passing her window. Dots was looking at the chesterfield, which was a couch by d
ay, and a bed by night; and she felt very sorry for Bernice, because she knew the chesterfield had never been occupied, at night, with Bernice locked in the thighs of a man’s satisfaction. Perhaps, had there been a man, Dots thought, Bernice might not have reacted so violently to what she had said a moment ago. Although I tell the old bitch I was joking, Dots thought, throwing a glance in Bernice’s direction.

  Just then, the telephone rang, and frightened them. Dots’s expression said it was the airport calling about Estelle; perhaps the flight was delayed. But Bernice knew it was the princess downstairs. And that was who it was.

  “What she want, now, gal?”

  “I have to fix dinner for he. She going out to the YWHA, she say. Mr. Burrmann eating by himself again tonight. Four times this week, already!”

  “These people ain’t have no damn respect for their husbands. Suppose you hear the way Mrs. Hunter talks to the Doctor? Christ, gal, if that was Boysie, Boysie would have lick-in my arse with the broomstick already … and Boysie isn’t even what you would call a real husband to me, neither!”

  “Dots, he is a good man to her, Mr. Burrmann is, a damn good man,” Bernice said, shaking her head from side to side, to let Dots know how good a man was Mr. Burrmann. “Good man. She ain’t lacking in clothes, pocket money, mottor car, fur coats, nothing. The broadlooms in this house is enough to hide a man in.…”

  “Like a dog …”

  “He kisses the dirt that bitch walks on.”

  “But you can’t buy love, gal. You could maybe buy anything saving that!” Dots yawned. She stretched, and while stretching, she tickled herself under her left arm; and smiled. Bernice smiled too. “Well, gal, what about tonight, and Estelle?”

  “Child, everything fix up already,” Bernice said. “Observe how I plan to operate on that princess down there! I have already pinch three bottles o’ Haig-and-Haig scots whiskey, and I put it under my bed, three months ago, when I first knew Estelle was coming up. I have a big piece o’ ham left back from last Christmas. That hide away too. A half dozen bottles of her nice Jewish wine that helps to make her face red as a beet, well, that Jewish wine will have to help give me some thrills tonight! Even though I can’t turn red as a beet when I drink it, heh-heh-heee! … and some eatables and delicacies, deli-deli-delicacies, that I been hoarding up on her arse, on the sly.” Dots convulsed into laughter. “Look, you have to use your head with these people, man. I telling you, you have to sit down a long time, and think how to outsmart these bitches and bastards living in this world with you.” Bernice noticed that Dots was suddenly very quiet; and when she looked back, Dots was getting her coat from the cupboard. “You going, child?”

  “I am going, gal, I going.”

  “What about tonight? I having something for Estelle.”

  “I don’t know if I coming,” Dots said irritably. “I ain’t coming. And I going tell yuh why. Gal, I am tired sitting down and looking at a bunch o’ damn frustrated women who don’t have no man, and can’t find no man. Usually, I am the only one who bring a man. And he is my husband, Boysie. Every woman in the place always have her eyes on him, and I tired as hell always having to watch my husband.” After this, Bernice was silent. There wasn’t anything she could say to change Dots’s mind. You could hear the snow falling, it was so silent in the room. Dots gathered up her things; said, “I going, gal,” once more, and then walked towards the door. When she turned the doorknob half in its circle, she held it there for a moment. She looked back at Bernice; said something very awful about Bernice in her thoughts; and left. Not yet arrested and handcuffed by this desertion, Bernice watched the doorknob as it moved back throughout its circle.

  Bernice didn’t know how long it was since Dots had left. She could hear the music climbing the stairs; but not Mrs. Burrmann’s music. And this made her feel even more displaced. The music was what Dots liked to call, “White people’ music, gal!”

  A little blue light, twinkling like a star, said the snow was going to fall and fall, as if winter had decided to compress itself into one day, and drown the land. Bernice experienced a sensation similar to strangulation: things were moving, but moving slowly and only with the permission of the snow, which held life itself in a cold neck-tie. The blue star of light, of night (although it was not yet eight o’clock), brought a melody to her mind. She sang it until her memory snowed the words from her tongue; and she had to begin again at the beginning, and come to that same snow bank which she could not climb in the first instance; and then the melody was buried. The light of blue, the night star, was the star of light on the snow plough which passed under the window of her memory; and it passed once more; and just then, the melody returned to her:

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are …

  Up above the … so high …” and when the melody died finally, and the snow plough left Marina Boulevard, unreality returned. She began to talk in conversation with herself. She began where the reality of her earlier conversation with Dots had ended: You have to learn how to use your head, Dots; and how to sit down at a window and think, and focus your attention and thoughts on things above; and learn how to out-smart them bitches and bastards, and use them the same way they uses you; and you have to learn how to use the same weapons they use on you; and you have to understand what them weapons is. Lemme tell you: them weapons is brainpower and brainwashing; and I know, ’cause I come across it in a magazine I got in Harlem, when I was visiting there. Brainpower and brainwashing … “Come here, Dots,” she said aloud, in her make-believe conversation, “come and let me show you something.” … you see them things running ’bout in the trees, looking as if they is big big mice? there, on Mrs. Burmann’s lawn and all over the sidewalk? What you think their name is, Dots? … “Squirrels, gal.” … you’re blasted right, they is squirrels. And I wish that you, Mister Squirrel, you dark-brown one down there, had the sense to read my mind when I throw you a piece o’ stale bread; and I wish too, Mister Squirrel, that I could, some day, come down there and talk with you, ’cause you have open up my eyes to many mysteries of this place … “Gal, are you telling me there is something important with a simple thing as a damn squirrel? Christ, a big woman like me, and wasting time talking ’bout squirrel? I must be going mad as hell!” … you ain’t going mad, child; and if you going mad, you going mad only to learn sense. Don’t forget every mad person is a sensible person in some way. I come across that in a book, in Harlem, too; a lot o’ things and mysteries I come across in Harlem … but Lord, at this moment, that isn’t a damn use to me, because there ain’t one man I could call on to ask for a favour from. Not one blasted person, white, black or blue, or pink! the only person I could think of, is Brigitte; I inviting Brigitte tonight, that German girl from ’cross the street; never mind she is a, a-a-a, what Mrs. Gasstein boy called Brigitte?… and the steam in the breath of her conversation melted, and the glass in the window returned to the window; and she looked down and saw it. And she called Dots to watch. Since the steam in her conversation had polished the glass in the window, and she could see, and she knew she was seeing, there was no need to pretend that Dots was still in the room with her. She had to see the act for herself: there were two men, standing beside a tree, while their two dogs (Bernice didn’t know the pedigree of the dogs) were bent stiff as icicles, in their shivering act of easing their bowels. A brown, dotted line of spaghetti, dit-dotted and dot-ditted out, into the cloud bank of snow. The men stood nearby, like landlords. They were pretending: they were pretending their presence was based on the pretences of the past, and all the time, the endless sausage was coming out of the two dogs; and they pretended they knew it was going to end. They were jerking their heads, up and down the street, at second floors and bottom floors, to see if anyone was going to raise a window, and screel down at them, Take your goddam dogs, and scoot, or! But the dogs, both white, continued to shiver and to strain from the exercise and the exertion of their deliverance. A smile came to the faces of the men, as
they saw the faeces of the dogs, still bent like two skeletons of a dinosaur, curved backs, still in the position of the act, although the act itself was now only wind, and air, and gas. “Now, watch,” Bernice told the presence of Dots, which she felt in the room. “You watching, Dots? Watch something now.” The dogs were finished now. One of the men, the tall one, with wisps of grey hair at his temples, raised the left side of his winter coat, and pulled out a piece of tissue paper, the colour of snow and blood mixed, the colour of pink. And he was about to bend down to the snow and to the dog that was his dog, when Bernice turned away her eyes. (She made Dots’s presence turn away her eyes, too.) And she said to Dots’s presence, “Jesus Christ, no! No, no, no! he don’t intend to do what I think he intends to do! No, he couldn’t be such a …” But the man did what she thought he was not intending to do. He reached down. Down to the dog and the snow. And he wiped the dog’s behind. Twice. Clean. With the tissue paper that was pink as dirty snow, mixed with blood. He looked up sharply, like a man caught stealing. He tried to wipe the other dog. But that dog wouldn’t have any of it. He pranced off, as if ants were stinging his balls. He pranced and shook and scratched many invisible, stinging ants out of his balls and his ears. (Bernice thought of Putzi kissing Mrs. Burrmann with his pink tongue; and of the times, when eating alone, she would put Putzi on the table, to lick, wash, rinse and dry her plate.) When the man was satisfied that his dog was a clean dog, he looked anxiously up, to see whether anybody else knew his dog was a clean dog; and then he lifted the left side of his black winter coat with the black fur-trimmed collar, and he pushed the pink tissue paper back into his pocket. “Jesus Christ!” The shock was so great, that Bernice really thought Dots had seen the act. Now, you have seen (Bernice was not only talking to Dots, now; she was addressing the world and the room, which was the world), now you have witness with your own two eyes the manner in which this world does spin round, from this window. I have seen them two niggermen pass here, and I have wonder if, because o’ the things I see, they aren’t two she-she men. What you think? Nobody can’t convince me that when two young, clean, strapping gentlemens walk ’bout the place, holding hand in hand, something ain’t wrong! As soon as darkness fall, they holding hands, as if one frighten for the darkness, and the other, for the Lord. And they think nobody don’t know? Christ, I been seeing them in this incidence days on end … “Jesus God!” … and it resting heavy on my mind, Dots; heavy, heavy, heavy. When I tell you that one day I see those two sammy-geese pass ’cross here with their two dogs, and the two o’ them four-legged dogs dressed off in clothes. They were dressed off, and their two dogs were dressed-off, too, to suit. Man matching dog and dog matching master. Man, master and dog matched-up. On another occasion. One afternoon. Catching my breath before going back down in that steaming kitchen. When, I ups and see them two missy-missy men, standing up and waiting till their dogs did their number one, and number two, next to Mrs. Burrmann maple tree. Number one and number too, I tell yuh! Then. They bend down, both o’ them men. They bend down and wiped them two dogs … “This is an advanced place, gal!” … They wiped those two dogs as how you or me or the next human being would cleanse ourselves after going to the bathroom, and … “They say this place is a civilized place, gal!” … but a man, any man at all who does a thing like that to a dog, who is only a animal, that man isn’t really and truly a human being anymore. No, Dots; that man cease to be a man and become a dog, too. And if I had never seen a dog back home in Barbados, and if I had never witness how people back there treats their dogs, which after all is only animals, now that I’m in this country, this civilize place as you refer to it, I couldn’t discern a dog from a human person, at all! heh-heh-hai, looka Dots, I licked my mouth long enough, so let me crawl back downstairs and see what Princess Burrmann calling my name for.