“I don’t understand,” Beryl began and turned to the others, then swung back to Selina. “I say the same thing he says.” Her voice was sharp but unsure.
Again she appealed to the others, and when their eyes darted away she searched Selina’s for the meaning of her question and at the same time strained in her mind to understand. But her eyes remained baffled and slowly tears of frustration and doubt gathered. “Why would you ask something like that?” she whispered and then suddenly cried, grabbing Selina’s arm, “What’s wrong with what he says, or what he’s gonna give me? What’s your father gonna give you?”
Her hand reached her mouth too late. Her eyes dilated and a small choking sound came from her throat. “Selina . . . Oh Lord, I’m sorry. I forgot. I didn’t mean that. I forgot. You made me so mad I forgot . . . I swear I forgot . . .”
Selina did not hear, for the familiar upheaval had started. The cold and powerful wave drowning out her mind, the same one, she imagined, that had borne her father down to the sea’s floor. She was hardly aware of picking up her coat or of leaving the room. Only when Beryl caught and clasped her from behind on the stairs did she slowly rouse.
“Selina, please, I didn’t mean anything. I just forgot.”
Selina would have turned then and told her that it was all right but for the tears. She could not bear for Beryl to see them. But she would have liked to turn and tell Beryl, very quietly, there in the dim hall with the others gathered apprehensively on the landing above, what he had given her. How one cold March afternoon long ago she had found him stretched on the cot in the sun parlor in his shirt sleeves, his head cradled in his arms and humming. “Is it spring?” she had asked, her breath coming in cold wisps. He had drawn her down beside him, loosened her arms and said, “Yes.” And suddenly she had sensed spring in the air, seen it forming beyond the glass walls and had not been cold any more.
How could Beryl understand that this was what he had given her? and its worth? But oh, Christ, she raged, perhaps it was not enough. For hadn’t envy pricked her at the solid sure things Beryl would have? Things that had not been part of his legacy since he could not, like Percy Challenor, stand in the halls and yell at the roomers for the rent money to buy them. What, then, had been his way?—and since he had made her like him, what was to be hers? Before she could grasp them the thoughts flickered out—tiny flames snatched by the wind of her mind.
“Selina, tell me, please, what was so wrong with what I was saying?” Beryl whispered against her ear. Selina turned in her tight hold and through her own tears she saw Beryl’s tears of confusion and doubt. Beryl’s face was no longer tranquil and smooth from her seventeen-year stay in the warm nest, but worried. Selina remembered how she had always thought of Beryl’s mind as a neat well-lighted room—and suddenly she wanted to restore Beryl’s calm. For if Beryl was always sure and untroubled, it would somehow mean that their years together and those other selves were not utterly lost. Whenever she saw Beryl, she would glimpse them.
“What was so wrong with it, Selina?” Beryl pleaded for an answer.
“Nothing. It’s just me,” Selina said softly and watched the doubt slowly shift and break, like ice in a spring thaw, and Beryl’s eyes emerge, dark but clear and tranquil, like lake water.
“Why’re you like this?” Beryl whispered, and Selina heard a rustle on the landing above as the others strained to hear her answer. But she made none. Very gently she pushed away Beryl’s arms and hastened downstairs. Once outside she lifted her face full to the wind, welcoming its brutal but cleansing lash.
II
“I tell yuh, you like you ain one-two particular about college. Here it tis . . .”
“Oh please, not again this morning.” Selina got up from the table and, taking her cup, went out to the back yard and stood amid the broken flower pots, rusted toys and tools, the last autumn’s leaves, drinking the hot tea quickly against the chill and watching the steam twist into the morning haze.
It was a spring haze and soft. At noon it would turn gold in the sun and in the evening hang in a blue wistful blur against the darkening sky. Gulping the tea and shivering, she sensed the earth swollen with life and heaving in its blind act; she smelled the sad, sweet, fecund musk of birth. All over the ruined yard green tufts nudged toward the sun and their own brief life. New leaves craned in the wind. Aching, she thought of the lovers tonight in the pavilion and the silence that would seem loud with the sound of their mouths and hands.
Her irritation gone, she turned and stared at the mother through the kitchen window. Every morning she found the mother at the table, sometimes asleep or simply staring down into a cup that had long since been emptied. For days the bed upstairs remained untouched, dust sown like fine seeds on the rose satin bedspread. Instead of sleeping she cleaned at night—Selina would hear the vacuum cleaner’s whine in her sleep—and studied a course in practical nursing, since she worked in a hospital now that the war plant had closed. She would be studying in the kitchen, yet the lights in all the rooms, the halls, even the chandelier in the parlor would be burning, giving the high-ceilinged rooms with their gilt and rich wood a festive air. Often she fell asleep amid the books on the table or stumbled with exhaustion into the dining room and slept, fully clothed, in one of the stiff-back chairs, her body braced.
Yet, on Saturdays, with her friends in the kitchen and the window sweating from the cooking, it was as though nothing had happened. The old formidable strength flashed in her hands as she kneaded the dough. The probing eyes that gave no hint of what lay behind them still set off her angular handsomeness. There was the familiar determined thrust to her back. And her voice still soared with theirs as, together, they inveighed against a world they did not trust.
“I tell yuh, Silla,” Florrie Trotman said once, shaking her head, “you’s a real-real Bajan woman. You can bear up under I don know what.”
No, they did not know about the nights, Selina thought grimly, reëntering the kitchen.
“Here it tis near time for you to graduate and nobody can’t even mention college or so before you ain ready to fly off,” the mother said and she might not even have left the room.
She turned to make some sharp answer, but paused, unsettled by something in the mother’s voice. The usual harsh imperative note was missing. Ever since the night Selina had struck her, she had often surprised a veiled assuagement in the mother’s glance, a guarded respect in her voice. Frowning down into her empty cup, Selina tried to remember that night, but it was only a blurred memory of striking and shouting the name, and then climbing out of a black depth to find herself in bed with the sheet in place. It could have been a dream, since the mother never mentioned it—except for her strange apologetic air and her hesitant attempts at reconciliation.
Under this covert gaze, Selina experienced tangled emotions: bewilderment as to its real meaning; disconcertion at the love and admiration it masked; a dark satisfaction at its mute plea for forgiveness when she knew she would never forgive; and fear at the possessiveness lurking behind its softness.
Caught in this mesh of feeling now she said carefully, “Oh all right, I’ll go at night and work during the day like Ina.”
“No, you’ll go during the day along with Beryl and them so. The college is free so I can manage. Besides, Ina is different. She ain interested in nothing but clothes and the church . . . but the teachers did always say you had a good mind, so it got to be train right. You made up your mind what you gon study?”
“No.”
“Well, there’s always teaching or so. Some profession that’s practical. Percy Challenor once said you might even make a good doctor . . . Yes . . .” She suddenly became absorbed in this thought and her voice lapsed, then surged back strongly. “Yes, maybe I could even see my way for that.” A small wistful smile softened her face and, still absorbed, she did not even hear Selina’s loud protest. “If I could only make upstairs into smaller rooms and charge little more . . . But that old woman wun dead and the free-bee ai
n thinking about moving.” She sucked her teeth in disgust. And then her old indomitable temper flared; her head snapped up menacingly. “But I gon start thinking hard for both of them and we gon see.”
Selina realized the seriousness of that threat one afternoon weeks later, sitting beside Miss Mary’s bed, watching the old woman’s face, more wizened and fey now, screw in her painful effort to speak. Selina knew what she was trying to say. It was the old ream of memories which she could have said for her.
“Tom . . .” It was a dry rasp after a long struggle.
“Him so tall and strong with a smile for everyone,” Selina said.
“Aye.”
All afternoon they whispered together, the old woman’s eyes, buried in a web of wrinkles but still alert, urging her on, and Selina filling in the words and feeling vaguely happy. For the room with its musty smell of the past and stale light was comforting. Its timelessness meant there was neither time nor change and she could imagine, sitting there in her black clothes, that when she went downstairs she would find him. Suddenly she saw the old eyes grope toward the door and she heard a step behind her. Thinking it was the daughter, Maritze, she reluctantly started to rise, but the old woman snatched her dress and she saw terror, like a thick mucus, drown out her eyes.
“What?” She turned, peering through the tarnished light.
The mother stood in the doorway, an ominous figure broken off from the hall’s gloom with her face lost in shadow.
“You want me?” Selina asked and, as in the restaurant, felt the world ground to a halt and her heart pause.
A bewildered whisper came from out the shadows. “But girl, what you does find in sitting up here with this rank, half-dead old woman, nuh? Or with that whore next door? Why you would rather visit Thompson with that smelly life-sore on her leg than Beryl and them so? Why?” The question impelled her into the room. “Why?” Her perplexed face emerged from the dimness.
“What do you want up here?” Selina asked coldly.
“I can’t fathom you a-tall, a-tall.”
“Don’t come in here. She’s scared and she can’t talk.”
“What it tis you does find here?” Silla suddenly shouted, and the dust, motionless for years, moiled as in a wind. When Selina offered no answer, she strode up to the foot of the bed and, thrusting out her face, stared with bitter curiosity at Miss Mary. “But why you wun dead, nuh?” she whispered.
The wasted arms began beating the covers in panic, the sunken mouth gaped wide in a mute scream as though Silla, lowering darkly at her from the footboard, were the embodiment of all she had ever feared and the image of her imminent death.
“What it tis you waiting on? Tell me. You can’t take this old house with you. It belong to me now. You don understand that yet?”
A choked protest came from Miss Mary’s ruined cords.
“Yes, it belong to me!” Silla cried and gestured widely and then glared down at her again, adding, “And I gon get you out yet. Yuh hear that? I gon call in the Board of Health to see all this dirt and get you out that way. Yes, and your long-face daughter too that never once count me to speak because my skin black . . .”
With this her full rage suddenly broke. “All this dirt!” she shouted and bounded across the room with a lithe animal lunge and scooped up the cracked oil paintings and slammed them down, breaking the frames and plunging her foot through the canvas. “All these old junks!” She tore open the boxes of rotted clothes and smashed the piles of delft across the floor. “All this dirt!” She ripped the gray sheets on the furniture and then came wheeling out of the wreckage and the spiraling dust to the footboard of the bed again. Her arms reached out pleadingly. “Why you wun dead?”
For a time they struggled silently, Silla’s curved fingers drawing the life from Miss Mary, while Miss Mary strained to hold it. The old head with the skull transparent under the wisps of hair quivered up, the wasted body writhed out of Silla’s reach. But as Silla leaned forward, her fingers tightening and her face becoming more menacing, Miss Mary slowly dropped back, weakening, until finally she lay still. Through the maze of wrinkles a profound disappointment emerged, and defeat. It was as if Silla had proved to her at last the futility of her long wait.
“Oh God, how could you do something like this?” Selina whispered, too stunned and shamed to move or even speak before.
Silla’s arms dropped and with them, her high anger. She gave Selina that assuaging, apologetic look; her hand sketched a plea for forbearance. But at Selina’s cold condemning stare, the gesture died and, giving the old woman a final bitter glance, she left.
Miss Mary died a few months later. Entering the room, Selina saw the wizened form contorted in the last throes, the pinched mouth open as if to speak and the quiet stare. She was not afraid, for there was no difference between this and Miss Mary’s living death in the dust-yellow tomb. A thought sparked and died as she stood there beside the bed. Perhaps everyone had his tomb: the mother hunched over the table all night might be locked in hers, her father, stretched on the cot, might have been sealed in his, just as she was shut within the lonely region of herself. She might never find a way out, but like Miss Mary, move from one death to another. Suddenly she resented the old woman for having lured her as a child into her tomb with her crooning memories. For the first time her resentment reached out to her father for having died and left her always to mourn. She wanted something else. She sought it in the old woman’s set eyes, which were startlingly blue now and clear, as though life was simply an impurity which death washed away. The air in the room seemed washed also. The tarnished dust was gone and the silence no longer hummed of the past. She heard noises from the street, the brash, surging, alive sound of children playing. It rushed in to fill the emptiness, and caught between that clamorous call and Miss Mary’s fixed silence, she knew what she wanted. It was not so much a thought as something deeply felt. To flow out of herself into life, to touch and know it fully and, in turn, to be touched by it. And then, sometimes, to withdraw and be quiet within herself . . . But how? How even to begin? She did not know.
III
“Lord-God, death been busy enough ’bout here! Come, mahn, le’s wash the taste of it out we mouth,” Suggie hooted and tossed the rum neatly over her tongue. “The old woman in she grave! The long-face daughter move away from all you colored people! Yuh mother overcharging the new roomers something unmerciful, so le’we toast till we’s tottering!”
Selina smiled thinly and raised her glass. While she sipped Suggie spun across the room, her black hair whipping and the red chenille robe flaring high, and put a record on the phonograph. A loud lilting calypso exploded in the room and she danced, subdued at first. Then slowly she lifted her head, her arms, her eyes half-closed, and her full hips swayed in wide emphatic motion that swung the robe softly around them. She sang:
Saga-boy, come in muh bed,
I got a fine brush to tease yuh head.
Saga-boy, don ’cause me cry
Yuh know I want you, stop acting shy.
She lured the invisible lover with somnolent eyes and lush arms, with each thrust of her hips. She danced over to Selina. “Come, mahn, the music too sweet to waste.”
Protesting, Selina sidled along with her, a slight, somber figure in her black clothes next to Suggie. Selina glanced up at her as they danced. With all the different mouths and hands and bodies that had touched her Suggie seemed untouched, still innocent. Yet Selina had just passed the newest lover on the stairs and saw the signs of their love-making: the tossed bed, the bottle of rum and Suggie’s bare body under the robe. His smell should be still on her, yet she smelled only the subtle fragrance of Suggie’s body. Could what they had done be so sinful and yet smell so sweet?
Her mind began to reel from the rum and Suggie’s fragrance as her feet reeled in the dance. The room joined the dance and soon Selina felt that the walls and furniture were spinning while she stood still. This made her laugh suddenly. The records dropped on the spindle, the roo
m spun, Suggie sang and she laughed. Soon her laughter became confused with tears. Until laughing and sobbing all at once, she was too weak to dance. Dragging Suggie with her, she stumbled across the room and they fell, amid wild shouts and laughter, onto the bed.
The last record dropped, the last loud rhythms spun the room, and then there was only the soft whir of the turntable and the laughter and sobs catching in Selina’s throat as they died. Suggie got up, turned off the machine and returned. They lay in a pure silence, gazing out the window at the twilit sky and the pale stars embedded there, at the dark fringe of trees in Fulton Park and above them the bright smolder of Fulton Street’s lights.
The sky was completely dark, the stars full, when Selina said, “Miss Suggie, do you think I’ll ever meet anybody—a boy, I mean.”
The small bed light went on, revealing Suggie propped on her elbow and her eyes, still wanton and warm from the dance and her afternoon pleasures, suddenly tender. Caught in the snatch of light she reminded Selina of a painting she had once seen on a museum trip from school. The figure of a woman in a gay-figured cloth seated against a torturous mass of foliage with sunlight scattered in bright flakes on her bronze flesh which, like Suggie’s, absorbed the light, with the same ripe, gently sloping breasts and liquid languid form. The woman’s expression had made Selina pause, and then followed her as she trooped behind the others. It had been serene despite the green violence of the background, wise yet artless, voluptuous, and above all secretive—as if she held what all men truly sought, and was proud yet fated to suffer in the knowledge and possession of it.
This was Suggie’s look now and Selina, helplessly envious, said almost harshly, “Well, do you?”
Suggie shook her head, amazed, her full laugh starting low in her throat. “Jesus-God, it about time, soul. I was beginning to think that nature had by-passed you. Lemme look good now.” Squinting, she examined Selina’s face: the full mouth always parted, it seemed, for some impulsive word, the abrupt nose, the graceful upward slant of her bones under the dark brown tight skin, and finally the eyes, wide and willful under straight downswept lashes which seemed to have ensnared all that they had ever encountered in their depth. Suggie lay back and turned off the light. “Yes, somebody someplace gon look at you twice. But you best stop looking like you spending your old-days first.”
Brown Girl, Brownstones Page 20
