So what ought she to do about Phyllis this time? Repent? She’s done that already. Visit Phyllis? She’s just reached Ann Arbor and she has neither the money nor the time, given her obligations. Write? She’s already decided she will do that. And she will phone of course, Sister Mary Agnes, and the place in Cohasset, if it doesn’t cost too much, although she doubts that she will be able to talk to her mother.
All the same, she’s sick of being nailed to the Ten Times Ten Commandments. Ann Arbor is a whole new experience waiting. She’d decided that maybe this time she can enjoy it, instead of quaking in terror and hiding in books. Hard work isn’t toddling off anywhere soon, but she’s not afraid of that. And the whole thing with Phyllis isn’t going away either. But maybe the reason she is mean, sour, and desperate is that all she does besides work is flagellate herself.
“Wise man say no point in studying God. Man to study himself” was Gramps’s sage counsel. Till the showdown with Phyllis, and Steph’s averring that she is a tough cookie, she’d figured on being a pretty decent person. But whoever she is, that person is going to have to do. She will tread light, make sure to watch her mouth, not say or do or plan to do any crazy things, especially since there is no Steph, or Scott family, or Maisie here to rescue her.
A diary. She will keep a diary. She writes down a to-do list every day so as to keep track of work. Fill out the lists a bit, and that can easily be a diary. Pick out the bits and pieces Phyllis will like, and that will make up her weekly letter. Matter of fact, she can use the diary to write a newsletter, and send it to everybody, not just Phyllis, but Ma and Pa, the boys, Steph, Maisie, Daphne, even Pansy and Mortimer. She knows it’s a good idea when she hears Gramps chuckling. “If they all get the same letter, everybody would vex. If it name ‘newsletter,’ that is a whole different matter!”
Church is the next thing. She has to find a church. She knows things would not have turned out so badly if she hadn’t given up on Beloved in Toronto. She will ask someone, maybe the St. Chris young woman in the office at Rackham. She has no family nearby, not even distant kin, and she feels as if a load of rockstone has just buried her. All she can think of is the St. Chris remedy — taking it to the Lord, which means church.
The big stained glass window in the Museum of Archaeology stops her like a splash of ice water in the face on the first Saturday. No glass window she has seen anywhere looks like it. At first she sees only a shedding of soft tones, a gentle splashing of well-behaved hues playing into the room. When she steps forward to focus, she sees a royal purple frill outlining a huge arch and running all the way down the two sides and across the bottom of a large, long window. Inside the frill is another border that resembles accordion pleats of thin brown louvres, or dark popsicle sticks ranged side by side. A vine bearing bright, round emerald leaves, or maybe fruit, each in a curled lilac nest, winds its way close to these edges. Some old, overripe balls of Seville oranges, greenish, dirty yellow, brown-and-gold, looking as though they are spoiling or spoiled, roll around in a bold blue circle at the top, and run down in two lines that lead from the blue circle above to the bottom. Everything lands in a leafy design below. Scrutinized, it’s not so pretty, but altogether the colours and the design bloom soft rays on everything.
She can’t stop gazing the day she finds it. For no reason, it brings back Wentley and rests it on her heart. Gramps sleeping in dark dirt with a passion fruit vine growing on his grave; Pa reading the Bible in his rocking-chair; Ma watering her purple and orange cosmos with dirty dishwater; Conrad, on his way to school, collecting showers of morning dust as he shepherds Princess in her mauve basic school uniform, matching clips in her hair, hugging her lilac lunch pan; and Sam in his olive short-pants khaki suit, lugging his giant brown school bag. Never mind that they are teenagers now, this is how she thinks of them. When she finds out that it is the Student Christian Association that built Newberry Hall, the place where this window is, and that they used to hold prayer meetings there once long ago, she considers her discovery anointed. She’s certain of it when Gramps teases, “You don’t find church, Gracie! Church find you!”
So this is her church. She stops by almost every day, stares, considers, rails a little at Papa God. In time, she assembles a small group of four or five Caribbean folks who meet here once a week to meditate.
Grace volunteers on weekends at Myrta’s Home, a women’s shelter. She registers women and children, cooks and serves meals, makes beds, does laundry, cares for babies, teaches literacy classes. It is at Myrta’s that she loses her diffidence, thrust past it by the unabating stream of battered women and their children.
Felicity arrives at Myrta’s one Sunday at midday, holding her left eye into the socket. Somebody has broken her nose and busted her mouth, which is bleeding like Jesus’s side. It’s Grace’s second day there. When she looks up from the desk, she gasps. “Oh, my God!” She runs to the woman and urges, “Talk to me! Who did this to you? We have to call the cops!”
People appear straight off, scoop up Felicity, and take her inside. Babs Fiorito, who’s in charge, sends Grace to help with the babies.
Hours later, when Grace is about to leave, Babs calls her into the office.
“Grace, I owe you an apology. We’ve thrown you into things with almost no training, and that’s not fair to you.”
“It’s my fault, Babs. I shouldn’t have reacted like that.”
“Your reaction was natural enough. Felicity was beat up bad. But when women arrive, they need to feel that they’re okay now, safe. That’s why reception is more like a living room than a lobby. That’s why whoever meets them must communicate calm, give them a sense that we can make it better, whatever it is.”
“And I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t. But you’ll do fine next time.”
“Thanks for looking at it that way, Babs.”
“I’ve a grandma who used to say, ‘Everything tell a story. You talk soft? That’s a story. Talk loud? Another story. Your children smile? A story. Always cross? Another story. The man hold hands with his wife. One story. Never touch her. Another story.’ ”
“So we have to get their story right, and ours, from the beginning?”
“Quite.”
Grace writes Edgar, “Babs says it’s her grandmother’s philosophy — and effectively, her psychology and media theory as well. You’re communicating all the time. Not just mouth, face, hands, but your whole body, and not just one body, bodies together, and their contexts. The design of a building, the order of a meeting, the layout of a city, the smell of a bathroom, they all talk. The world is one big text that we’re always reading, consciously or unconsciously, and writing too, to send one message or another. Amazing, yes?”
Beside a big smiley face Edgar writes back, “You learning about tings, sis!”
In fall of 1982, near the end of her second year at the shelter, Grace starts meeting women who complain of dry coughs, night sweats, recurring fevers, tiredness that won’t go away, and persistent diarrhea — a disease, but nobody knows what the deuce it is. Handling folks with an undiagnosed plague would frighten anyone, but not Babs. At U of M, Grace has ready access to computers, so she gets the job of pinning down the disease.
So it’s at Myrta’s that Grace meets someone other than Gramps, Pa, and Ma with a profound respect for homegrown points of view, and it is also at Myrta’s that she starts acquiring the skills to track epidemiological data and spot the symptoms of HIV/AIDS, though the plague is still nameless. As she’d tell Charlie on their first all-nighter, borrowing the tagline from Anancy stories, “Is Myrta’s make it.”
Phyllis is still not answering letters, although Daphne says she is making steady progress. Grace is about to make a big move, so she writes a longish letter.
111 Edgelake Ave
Ann Arbor
Michigan 48103
12 August 1982
Dear Phyllis,
Tomorrow I’m going back to St. Chris for the first time since they sent for me
before Gramps died. I’ll be forever grateful for that visit, though it was difficult in many ways. That was when Gramps gave me your letters, and the surprise of my life! I’m going home with some trepidation. I’m looking forward to examining the impact of Non-Government Organizations with health-related missions in the region to see how they make a difference to the communities they serve. I’ve developed a way of taking account of the occurrence of diseases like malaria and dengue fever so that health and related services can respond promptly, as needed. I wrote it up in a paper that was published and got quite a bit of notice, so I suspect the people at UA in St. Chris are treating me better than the average grad student. It all began with work in a women’s shelter here when folks started turning up with symptoms of AIDS, which you may know as GRID or the 4-H disease. I figured that if we could identify the communities in which AIDS was likely to occur, we could make interventions that would be preventative and responsive in a timely fashion. I’m hoping to do some teaching as well. However, several people have warned me it’s not like here, hence my misgivings.
I’ve called Our Lady of Good Hope and spoken to Sister Mary Agnes many times, for I promised to stay in touch with her. You will know that I am also good friends with Sister Mary Clement, the phone lady at Mary’s Haven! I’d love to hear from you too, if and when. For sure, I will keep sending the newsletter. Meantime, work hard to get better!
Much love,
Grace
Maybe it is the ebullience of the Quad at U of M, the joie de vivre of the students, or Babs Fiorito’s undiminishing hope; perhaps it is the green splash of the city, the glory of the Little Church of the Tiffany Window, the helpfulness of the people who teach her, or maybe she simply sees, as she wanders all over, to protests and poetry readings, festivals and flea markets, chorales and slams and jam sessions and jails that she has no corner on “hard life.” It boxes everyone about. Perhaps she is simply tired of the hair shirt. Whatever the reason for the sea change, in Ann Arbor she becomes someone else: Charlie’s Grace.
31
Charlie
Grace meets Charlie in January 1984, or, more accurately, Charlie meets her, at the St. Chris airport, because Edgar can’t make it. Edgar was going to the Canadian High Commission to collect his visa, which he had to get that morning, because Lindsay, whom he was visiting in Ottawa for a few days, had found a cheap flight leaving that afternoon. He’s managed to get the visa just in time.
Charlie is rum red, tall, and powerful. His straight, dark brown hair has reddish tints. His blue-green eyes are the colour of the sea at Richfield. Edgar says on the phone that she is sure to know Charlie, and “Anyway, he’ll know you.”
She walks out of customs, looks round, and somehow recognizes him as he says he recognized her. “How?” she asks him.
“Your aura. It’s turquoise. Means you are efficient, a leader, excellent organizer, multi-tasker, resilient, really good at working with people. ”
“You’re joking.”
“All the time, but not about your aura.” He laughs, and informs her that he has a yellow aura, “meaning I’m very spiritual, like Buddha and Jesus.”
“You are joking!”
Grace has been in Antigua for two weeks collecting data. She had to change her flight, and since the new one gets in late to the smaller international airport and she’s brought a few things with her that she wants Edgar to take to Wentley, she plans to spend the night at his digs in Queenstown, leave the things there, and go to her flat at UA the following day.
Charlie takes her to her brother’s tiny apartment, one of three in a converted bungalow. Another, slightly larger flat, is Charlie’s. His base, he calls it. She doesn’t stay at Edgar’s though. She spends the night with Charlie, talking, listening to a steel band as they practise in a yard down the road, drinking fruit-and-vegetable juice in strange colours that her host concocts in a blender, eating johnnycakes she cooks when they get hungry.
Charlie is thirty-four, American born. His mother, from Louisiana, is half-black and half-Native American; his father, from Maine, is half-French and half-Irish.
“Lord! What a mixture!” She catches herself. “Sorry. I don’t mean it in a bad way.”
“Didn’t take it in a bad way. You look stirred and shaken yourself, you.”
“Please don’t go there, Charlie.”
“There be dragons?”
“Demons more likely.”
“Never mind, sweet lady. Give me a chance, and I’ll banish them.”
They laugh. From the start, Charlie makes her laugh. Because his parents are missionaries, he’s been to school on several Caribbean islands.
“That must have been interesting.”
“Bloody hard on a child. I’d fly in, say hi to the kids down the road, play one game of cricket, and they’d yank me out!”
He was a late bloomer. Unmotivated at school, he hadn’t done well until, persuaded by his parents who had retired to Lafayette, Indiana, he enrolled at Purdue and got acquainted with his first computer. Then he was off at mongoose speed: a degree in computer science there, then an MA at Stanford and doctorate at Carnegie Mellon, all on scholarships. On and off, during the summers, he spent time in Silicon Valley, attached to software outfits with big names.
“So what are you doing here, holy man?”
“Well, some of the time I’m at UA, setting up IT systems and teaching courses in computer science. The rest of the time I’m in Haiti. Which is why this lovely flat is one of my bases.”
She’s learned a lot about computers and software, helping out at Myrta’s. She’s done courses in measurement and stats in preparation for her research, although the Real Time (RT), Real Circumstance (RC), Tailor-Made Interventions (TMI) model comes to her while thinking of how they deal with basic matters in Wentley, like what to do about mosquitoes, cow dung, and the outhouse when the rains come, the water table rises, there are breeding pools everywhere, and the aedes aegypti mosquito inspector is not due for another six months. Of course, she’s been obliged to devise stats to support her model, and has done a good job, but what Charlie tells her about that night is at another level, a skill set that she recognizes as likely to add flexibility and versatility to approaches in her current research, as well as projects she’s thought about pursuing post doc.
“So what are you doing in Haiti?”
“You know there’s this idea that AIDS started there? We’re trying to track how it got there, where it went after, and how.”
Grace glances at his wall clock, an enormous Mickey Mouse affair, and says, “We’d better go to bed. It’s after four.”
After that she makes the one-hour trip to Queenstown to see Edgar, and do some shopping about once a month, saving her trips to Wentley, a four-hour journey, for occasions like birthdays or anniversaries. At Edgar’s, she makes lunch for her brothers, for quite often Stewie is passing through to buy school materials as well. If he is home, Charlie joins them, after which they all go to a movie or for a stroll down by the harbour.
Pretty soon her visits are solely to work with Charlie. Edgar doesn’t mind; he knows she is in a hurry to get her research done. As she gets further into analyzing the data, the visits become overnights and then weekend stays. If she comes in on Friday afternoon and works at Charlie’s till Monday morning, she gets far more done than she does in the rest of the week, when she also has to teach. Eventually she is doing this every weekend that she isn’t in the field collecting data, whether Charlie is there or in Haiti.
It isn’t all work when she is with Charlie. They make lunch or dinner together, walking through the vegetable garden in back to cut kale or lettuce, pick tomatoes, pull up onions, gather thyme or parsley.
“So how come you’re such a big gardener?”
“You forgetting Edgar is my flatmate, you?”
“How you talk so funny?”
“You’re talking about talking funny?”
Sometimes on a clear night he teaches her about the stars, tellin
g her stories his Cherokee grandmother told him.
“Gramps showed me,” Grace recalls. “the Little Dipper, Big Dipper, Southern Cross. And the Milky Way!” She identifies the powdery trail of stars.
“Bet you don’t know who made the Milky Way?”
“Who?”
“Grandmother Spider. It’s a web she spun and threw across the sky so she could steal the sun from the other side of the world and take it back to her side, where there was only darkness.”
“Ha-ha!”
“Honestly.”
She spends countless nights with Charlie before they make love. One October night with the wind lashing trees, the sky overcome by a lightning show accompanied by 3-D sound effects, she burrows her whole body, migraine head and all, under the spread on his divan. When Charlie rolls her up in it and takes her into his bedroom, her body is ripe in a second, like a flower, pistil sticky with juice.
Kissing her belly-bottom, he announces, “You smell like flowers.”
“Flowers? What kind of flowers?”
“Jasmine.”
“You making fun, Charles?”
“Always, but not about this inflorescence.”
He closes the dark blue curtains against the lightning, but like an inquisitive adolescent, it peeks in, flashing around them through cracks and crevices. Water beats on the roof in one solid, undifferentiated sound they hardly hear, but there is no mistaking it racing through gutters, crashing over paths, streaking for the trenches into which it dives, oblivious.
“Didja have fun, you?” he asks her afterwards.
“Is that what you call it?” She sits on his belly and thumps him.
“Why are you beating me up?”
“How come you kept this from me all this time?”
“We can do it again,” he says.
She drops asleep with Charlie croaking foolish love songs at her. The next morning she walks around content, Charlie having kissed her goodbye and left early for a restive Haiti. After that, they are almost always together. He helps her with the statistics related to her research, and reads drafts of each chapter before she sends it off. They talk about whether she’ll be confident defending some of the statistical measures Charlie has suggested, and he runs her through their comparative advantages, insisting that the choice of approaches be hers, and one she can argue for.
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