All her life, as far back as memory took her, Pepper was always craving something. First: sugar from the tin her mother kept it in. These were the days her mother used to comb Pepper’s hair in two, like cow horns sticking out the sides of her head, ribbons hanging from the ends of the plaits. Pepper would scoop a little sugar between her fingers, small enough so that her mother wouldn’t notice. But the cumulative occurrences always revealed the thief—plus the fact that she often forgot to reattach the lid of the canister, which invited ants into the sugar. When Pepper was a little older, she used to take a piece of dough from the large lump her mother left sitting to be made into dumplings. She would knead the dough between her dirty fingers and then push it around her mouth before finally swallowing it. Later on, when Pepper no longer wore ribbons in her hair, her mother developed a nighttime craving for water crackers dipped in tea, and Pepper eventually came to share the craving. After her mother boiled water over a smashed piece of ginger, after she poured the water into a cup and added a little sugar and a few crackers to the tea, she would start to eat the whole thing with a spoon, and Pepper would turn up next to her with a spoon of her own. Pepper didn’t need to say anything. Her mother would always push the cup in her direction but not before complaining, “Yuh no feel good if yuh nah lean up pon me.”
And then Pepper craved Lester. But not at first. When she first saw him at the front of the shop, playing dominoes with the other men, men her mother called “dutty” because they were idle, playing dominoes in the middle of the day, she barely noticed him. And then he threw a fresh grin her way, not because he found her attractive, but because she was there, and he was the type of Caribbean man for whom schoolgirls in their uniforms are to be admired and pursued without shame. Pepper called him “dutty” in her mind, and walked off hissing her teeth. But this was one of those things, the kind where the fruits of flattery wedge themselves where common sense, repulsion, and the fear of being seen together in public would be. This was one of those things where a more seasoned man is persistent enough, sweet-talking enough, to confuse a young girl so that she could look at his face and wonder if he couldn’t do something about his teeth, maybe at least not grin so wide, while at the same time glowing under the light of his compliments. This was one of those old-time grown-man/young-girl stories, nothing unusual in its pages.
And then after he got what he wanted, Pepper lost interest. The proximity of Lester’s mouth when she laid down under him, remembering everything her mother told her about how easy it was to come home with a belly, the awkwardness and rawness of the intimacy, all of it shamed her. She stayed away from the shop after that. No more passing by to see if Lester was playing dominoes. One time when Pepper was leaving the schoolyard with her friends, he was standing by the school gate waiting for her, but she pretended not to see him. One of her friends said, “Pepper, one ole man a look pon you! Mek yuh no go talk wid him?” They all laughed.
It went on like this for a while, Pepper trying to dodge the three-teeth man, all the while wondering how she could have lost her mind to lay down for such a nasty man. Eventually, Lester lost interest too. He wasn’t the kind of man to chase a woman. One time, Pepper’s mother gave her a basin of rice to pick and rinse. She found herself picking out and eating pearls of rice, something she had never done before. But it didn’t appear out of the ordinary for her, and she wouldn’t put two and two together until her period refused to greet her.
But all of that is history. When the people of June Plum Road knew her, Pepper craved her children. There were school uniforms to wash, a house to look about, and two faces constantly in need of something, even when they were away, in school or playing in the yard at the front of the house. Sometimes Pepper’s mind would remember herself, and she might wonder with a detached curiosity what became of a certain three-teeth man.
* * *
—
The day it happened, the purple flowers of the tree outside Kadi-ann and Jadi-ann’s window were in bloom. Mornings before school when the daylight flooding through the open curtain of the window forced their eyes open, they lay in bed watching the tree outside their window, elbowing each other every time a bird appeared. They lay this way until their mother’s calls beckoned them to their knees thanking God for another morning, then to meet the cooling porridge she laid on the table for them.
But that morning was different because it was the first day of Christmas vacation, so there was no cooling porridge or the hurried rag Pepper wiped them down with. Neither of the girls liked to be wiped down, since the rag was dipped in a basin of cold water, but they knew better than to wriggle or complain, because their mother would pinch their necks. Pepper would wipe each girl separately. First the face, and then she would always wipe the inside of their ears, even if the insides looked clean, because she hated to see wax in a child’s ear. To her it made a child look as if she belonged to no one. If Pepper was strict about anything, she was strict about how she sent the girls to school. When the ears were done, she would put the rag over the girls’ noses for any mucus to be blown out, and then the rag was rinsed in the basin. When next the rag was wringed, it would meet the little girls’ backs, stomachs, the spaces between their legs they knew to open without having to be reminded. Then the rag was rinsed again. But that morning the girls lay in bed holding their mermaid dolls and whispering a game where the bedsheets became a body of water. Later, Pepper would appear with the basin and two rags for Kadi-ann and Jadi-ann to clean themselves, and there was relief in gently handling the cold water by themselves.
* * *
—
People who can’t afford nice things want nice things too, the holidays especially bring them about, and so Pepper agreed to sew Vernetta’s Christmas church dress on the agreement that Vernetta would bring her a weekly portion of the freshwater fish her husband caught until the dress was paid off. That was why Pepper was scaling fish behind the house when Old Henry’s wife came to her, tears in the old lady’s eyes. Pepper wiped her hands on her apron and stood to hear what Mrs. Old Henry had to say.
But before Mrs. Old Henry showed up behind the house, Pepper was scaling the fish Vernetta brought over that morning while her mind debated how to prepare it. She knew the girls only liked fried fish when she picked out the bones and they only had to be worried with the white flesh, but she didn’t have any oil and couldn’t be bothered to go buy or borrow any. She wondered if Mrs. Old Henry might have a little oil she could borrow, and that was what she was waiting to ask after Mrs. Old Henry said whatever it was that carried her next door with tears in her eyes.
* * *
—
Who knew what stories the two little girls told themselves as they dipped the mermaid tails into the water their mother used to wash clothes. Who knew what magic, if any, they created in the worlds their mermaids inhabited. Or if mermaids fit into their world, a world where their mother sewed clothes while she drank a cup of tea and watched that they ate their dinner; they slept in the bed where their grandmother used to sleep before she died and they were afraid whenever they remembered that the bed they slept in was where their grandma used to sleep before she died.
The two mermaid dolls came in a barrel, stuffed between the clothes, rice, beans, canned foods, and various dry goods Pauline’s people sent her from the States. Pauline, who lived on the other side of Old Henry, asked her sister to include two dolls in the barrel for payment to Pepper since she was short on cash when she picked up her husband’s new church suit for the Christmas service.
Pauline brought over the dolls, and because she was in a generous mood, a packet of spaghetti, a can of spaghetti sauce, and a can of meatballs. She remembered that the girls were eating their dinner and Pepper was drinking a cup of tea and sewing. Pauline would tell people that the girls looked shyly at the dolls the whole time she spoke with Pepper. When the conversation started to die, she remembered what she was there for, and offe
red one doll to each girl. Pauline said they looked at her as though she was telling them lies.
Except for a hi and bye when they passed each other on the road, Pauline didn’t talk to Pepper again until after the girls were gone. Her husband told her he saw Pepper spread on the steps in the front of her house showing everybody her business, so it was Pauline who asked Pepper for the phone numbers of her family members. She started calling around until the sister in the States offered to take Pepper.
Pauline used to see the girls holding the dolls when they followed behind Pepper to go to the shop or to drop off sewing at somebody’s house. When she heard about the drowning, the part about the mermaids haunted her days and even her nights. She soon fretted away the baby weight she had been holding on to for five years. Everybody who she told the story to, and she told the story to everyone who came her way, said it wasn’t her fault and had nothing to do with her because they realized a part of her felt some kind of accountability in the whole mess.
* * *
—
They swam those mermaids all over. In the tub their mother was washing clothes in whenever she turned her back because she forgot the soap or wanted to check on whatever she left cooking on the stove. In the buckets their mother left outside for collecting rainwater, or in rain puddles if the rain left a deep enough puddle. Living next to Old Henry, they couldn’t help knowing about his tank. On the hottest days, they saw the boys Old Henry chased from his tank. Pepper had given the girls an old bucket she found in the old chicken coop behind the house. They filled it with water and for days anyone passing by could see the girls making the mermaids swim at the front of their house. Some people who passed by would smile at two identical little girls so focused on a dusty old bucket. No one would wonder at the stories they were whispering to themselves until they were gone. And people would wonder if the crack along the bucket that traveled down and ruined the possibility of it keeping water was what sent the girls to Old Henry’s tank.
Because of the cement blocks, it seemed to everyone that the girls were smart enough to play in the water without getting into the tank. Recent heavy rainfall had filled the tank, bringing the water level almost to the brim. People guessed they fell in, maybe one started falling in and the other held on to her and that was how both girls fell in. This was the story people told to each other and passed down to their children as a warning. Still, dissatisfaction lurked in everybody’s minds. Did those girls jump in that tank? Were the cement blocks only used as stepping-stones to climb into the tank? They didn’t think they would drown? They had to know they would drown.
The part that bothered people was why when the girls were found they were only wearing their panties. Their clothes had been spread on the grass nearby. If they weren’t going swimming, what was the sense in undressing? An explanation went around and it settled some people’s questions: the girls were afraid of getting in trouble with Pepper if their clothes got wet. But no one who saw the girls swimming their mermaids in puddles the rain left behind in the middle of the road believed that explanation. No one who saw the girls running out of the road when the rare approaching car started to beep its horn was satisfied. No one who saw the girls with the dolls could believe that they could have common sense as far as the dolls were concerned to be worried with keeping their clothes dry. No one who saw them believed that explanation because how it was in those old-time stories, how a mermaid could sing a sweet song and turn someone into a fool was how it was with those two little girls. Maybe because they had never owned anything so good in their short lives.
BAD BEHAVIOR
Pam and Curtis brought Stacy to Jamaica because they didn’t know what else to do with her. They believed that her old-time granny would straighten her out. In Brooklyn, Stacy cut her classes often, and she was caught giving a boy a blowjob in an empty classroom. They looked at the sweet little face on the body of a woman, and they were terrified of her and for her. It seemed that her breasts and ass were getting bigger every day. Often Pam would pull down Stacy’s shirt to give her ass better coverage, and Stacy would groan and laugh, tucking her shirt back into her jeans. Pam wondered aloud to Curtis whether Stacy’s curvy body was because of all the chicken wings she enjoyed eating from the Chinese restaurant. In America, Pam argued, chickens were injected with hormones, which could explain all the little black girls with breasts and asses before their time. Stacy refused to eat breakfast because she was never hungry in the mornings, and because the school lunch was “nasty,” she was ravenous by the end of the school day. She would come home with a takeout box: pork fried rice and fried chicken wings. She ate while she did her homework—somehow, in the midst of teenage angst and man hunger, she remained a diligent student—and later she would refuse to eat dinner with her parents and little brother because she was still full. Recently, Curtis was driving on Rockaway Parkway when he saw Stacy walk out of the train station, just come from school. A man, not a boy, but a man in baggy jeans, just any old street thug, had called to his daughter, and she had actually turned around and walked back to him. They were still talking when Curtis showed up to escort Stacy home. Pam and Curtis were afraid of their fourteen-year-old daughter. Often they would tell each other that this was what America did to children. This blasted country that turned parents into children and children into parents! One need not look any further than the white people on television who asked their children what they wanted to eat for dinner. In Jamaica, children knew to respect adults, while it wasn’t unusual to hear an American child call an adult by her first name. It wasn’t that Jamaican children were perfect—it was that when they made mistakes, they knew to be ashamed. All children were selfish, but American ones had an easier time living for themselves.
They took their daughter to Jamaica on the pretense of a vacation. Before they left Brooklyn, when Pam checked Stacy’s suitcase, she found that her daughter had packed two nameplate necklaces that read BAD BITCH and FLAWLESS, and some thongs that Pam didn’t know she owned. Pam left the “flawless” necklace in the suitcase and hid the “bad bitch” necklace and thongs. Stacy didn’t seem to notice the missing items. On the beach, she wore sunglasses and the two-piece bathing suit she’d bought with her own money, revealing the belly button piercing her parents didn’t know she had. When a dreadlocked man saw her sitting on the beach by herself, he invited her to follow him to his house. She had looked into the man’s face and hissed her teeth without fear as though he and she were size. Every day, Stacy climbed the mango tree behind her grandma’s house and then she ate several mangoes in one sitting. In the afternoons, she walked down to the shop to buy banana chips, even though she had five unopened packages sitting on the dresser, because she liked that the boy at the counter flirted with her and looked openly at her breasts.
On the fifth day, while Stacy slept, her parents and little brother left. A few hours later, her grandmother, Trudy, nudged her out of bed, asking, “Yuh goin’ sleep di whole day?” She was eating the saltfish and dumplings her grandmother made for breakfast when she thought to ask about her parents and brother. It wasn’t the first morning she’d awakened late to hear that they’d started the day without her. At first, Trudy ignored her, so Stacy asked again. “Yuh nah be’ave yuhself,” her grandmother told her, speaking quietly and carefully, “so dey lef’ yuh wid me until yuh can be’ave yuhself.” Stacy behaved very badly, cussing up some bad words and throwing her breakfast on the floor, which surprised the old lady so much that all she could say was “Jesus Christ.” She hadn’t believed the girl was as bad as they said, and since she was lonely living in that house by herself, she’d gladly welcomed her. Stacy ran to the front of the house and looked down the road to see if they had only recently left. She knew this couldn’t be the case, but she looked anyway. Then she went to the back of the house, behind the old pit toilet, so that she could cry without anyone seeing her. She bawled for a long time. She punched her fist into the walls of the long-retired pit t
oilet, but the pain only made her cry harder. She felt someone watching, and when she looked down, Fatty, her grandmother’s mongrel dog, was looking up at her. She bent to rub Fatty’s belly, which was heavy with puppies, and the dog reached up to lick the tears from her face.
Over the first two weeks after her parents left, Stacy’s spirit softened. She was quieter, more inward. When she spoke to her parents on the phone, she promised that she would behave herself. But Curtis and Pam weren’t ready to let Stacy back into their home. There were times they missed her—she was, after all, a sweet girl when she wanted to be, and she was the firstborn, which meant they loved her in a different—not necessarily better—way than they loved their son, Curtis Jr., a chubby ten-year-old who was an easy child. They told her that after a year, if she improved, she could come home.
* * *
—
Eventually, Trudy brought up Stacy’s bad behavior back in New York: “Yuh such ah pretty girl fi do some ugly tings. Why yuh won’ be’ave yuhself?” And Stacy had smiled and looked embarrassed because she was shy for her grandmother to know certain things about her, and yet it was a compliment to hear that she was pretty. She’d been afraid when she put her mouth on the boy’s penis. Patrick was one of the most desired boys in school, and of all the other girls, he had pulled Stacy into an empty classroom, putting her hand down his pants so that she could touch his penis. This happened a few times, them kissing in empty classrooms, and one day he pushed his fingers down her jeans, and eventually she climaxed, and it was surprising and gratifying because she had never masturbated before and hadn’t known that a boy’s fingers could do that to her. She told one of her friends and the friend had been surprised to hear that Stacy hadn’t reciprocated, and this made Stacy feel as though she’d done something wrong. She was sure that Patrick would never pull her into a classroom again, and when he did, she wanted to make it so that he wouldn’t be disappointed. The first and only time, she was caught. Her parents had been furious, and they had said all kinds of things, but they hadn’t asked why.
How to Love a Jamaican Page 6
