Our lady Hortense then wrapped the writer’s hair in a pale pink towel, told her to wait by the sink and disappeared again behind the curtain.
While the writer waited, she looked through the magazines on display on a gilded side table with cabriole legs. In an issue of Vogue, in a spread on the latest YSL collection, she recognised the model who had just come in, the one behind the curtain being tended to by Hortense. The model was hailed as the new Iman because she too was a student and was discovered by a famous American photographer while walking down the street of her East African home town.
The writer once read somewhere that fashion models are among the most insecure and neurotic people in the world. Here is why: they are routinely rejected, sometimes several times in a day, because no matter how beautiful you are, as a fashion model, you are not going to be selected for every single job. Maybe they need a brunette for the job, and you are a blonde. Maybe they need a young girl, and you are a model who has reached the ripe old age of, say, twenty-six. And so it goes.
Then Hortense reappeared with the model, whose face was covered with a treatment mask, which Hortense noted was made mostly from egg whites and lemon juice, to refine the pores. It made the skin on the model’s face very taut and very shiny, as though she was swathed in cellophane. Her hair was now covered with a pearl-grey mushroom-shaped plastic cap and she was wearing a calf-length grey kimono. She looked very different from the vision toting the Birkin bag who strode into the salon half an hour earlier.
Hortense settled her under one of the two hairdryers set in an alcove at the back of the shop, then motioned to the writer to sit in the high chair facing the ornate mirror above her work station. She used her own brand of setting lotion and, when she squeezed some directly from the bottle onto the top of the writer’s head, the Femme de la Martinique seemed to reach down from the label and lightly touch the writer on the crown of her head. Swiftly, deftly, Hortense parted her hair into sections then rolled it onto smooth plastic rollers. She tied a pink hairnet over the rollers and positioned the writer under the dryer next to the model.
The writer sat under the dryer and turned the pages of the latest Vogue, which happened to feature the model seated in the next chair, whose name, the writer learned from reading the captions accompanying her photographs, was Mathilde.
Mathilde walking the runway, Mathilde in an advertisement for perfume, Mathilde at a party, champagne flute in hand, head thrown back, eyes shut tight, wide and perfect mouth open as if to drink in all the flavours of the lovely It-girl life.
And the writer was sitting beside her, in Paris no less! She shifted her head slightly inside the dryer in order to glance at the real Mathilde, as she studied the images of Mathilde caught on the page. Nobody is going to believe this, she thought. I best just keep this one to myself, people already believe that because I’m a writer I exaggerate, and I sometimes do, but this time they’ll accuse me of showing off if I tell them that I managed to find myself sitting in a salon in Paris, next to a famous model, who in person looks much darker than she does in all her pictures. A famous model who at this moment looked nothing like the picture of the fabulous bird of paradise streaming down the runway in an elaborate hand-embroidered ballgown.
Suddenly the model pushed the metal cone of the hairdryer back and turned to the writer. She smiled and said ‘I must tell you, your sandals? Très jolies!’
The writer pushed back her dryer too, she was so pleased that the model liked her sandals. ‘Merci beaucoup… Thank you.’ And, pointing to the model’s face on the cover of Vogue, the writer said, ‘And congratulations to you. This is so, so wonderful!’
‘You are good to recognise me looking like this!’
And they both laughed.
Maybe, after that laugh, the writer should have just stopped.
She should have just felt pleased that the famous model had been nice enough to compliment her on her exquisite taste in footwear.
She should have just felt happy that her choice of sandals had received the seal of approval from one of the world’s top fashion models, but no, she had to go on and say something more, just had to say one more thing, something she imagined the model would have liked to hear. She said, ‘Your family must be so proud and happy.’
But when she said that the model said nothing.
There was an awkward silence before the model pointed to her own face on the cover of the magazine and said, ‘Ma famille? Non. Proud? Non. My father? He does not like these photographs. He will have no pictures of me in his house. He told me, “I do not know you.” He says I have turned myself into a ghost. My brothers? They are crazy, crazy. They say I sell my body. One of them, he tells anyone who asks about me that I am a prostitute in Paris. Non, ma chère, they are not proud of me, they are happy to take the money I send, yes, but proud of me? Non.’
The famous fashion model looked so sad, so distraught under the patina of her egg-white and lemon mask that the writer was tempted to get up from under the hairdryer and give her a big hug, but she thought that might seem overly familiar. Instead she murmured that she was sorry, so sorry to hear that. Then they both put their heads back up inside the metal cones and sat staring out at the blurred stream of traffic through the frosted glass doors of Les Trois-Îlets.
But when the writer’s hair was dry, and Hortense had brushed and styled it so her face was framed by big loose curls, and after she’d paid her, and said merci beaucoup, and au revoir with a softening of the ‘re’ so it sounded like ‘au voir’, and after she’d waved goodbye to Mathilde who was having her natural hair plaited into cornrows so that Hortense could sew onto them, with a big-eyed bone needle, long falls of blue-black human hair imported from India, the writer stepped out into the spring sunshine and turned her face in the direction of the Boulevard Saint-Michel. I am now well put together, she thought to herself. I am now well put together upon this gorgeous day in spring. In Paris!
YEARS LATER, the writer is sitting up in bed in a hotel room in New York. Walking about the streets earlier that day she’d noticed the many young Black New Yorkers sporting extravagant natural hairdos. She wonders to herself just how many hairdressers have been put out of business by these fine and confident young Black women who look as if they roll out of bed, shower, dress, and then just shake their heads vigorously from side to side. Wild and woolly tresses taken care of. Hairstyle that. Love it.
She turns on the television set and sees scenes of carnage in Paris. Parisians out dining, some attending a rock concert, others cheering on their team at a soccer game in a stadium, blown-up, murdered and maimed by hate-crazed zealots who condemn the city of light as the city of prostitution and decadence. And she remembers Hortense and Les Trois-Îlets and Mathilde whose brothers take her money even as they accuse her of selling herself, and who are crazy! Crazy!
21
The waterman
OFF-WHITE PLATES were prized by the ancient Chinese because they reminded them of the moon. She placed her knife and fork at the twelve o’clock position on her plate and sat back in her chair; then she immediately leaned forward and with her right forefinger shifted the tines of the fork so the cutlery hands on the china plate clock face read more like eleven than twelve o’clock. As she got up from the table she remembered that the sentence about off-white plates and the moon came from one of her textbooks on pottery-making.
‘Excuse me… the baby…’
‘You are excused,’ the hostess said.
As she left the table the hostess began to tell a joke that she had heard many times before.
She wanted to get home before the clock struck midnight. She made her way from the dining room through the living room, down a long passage to the family room where the children of the house were watching TV.
Her son was half-asleep on one of the sofas with a fort of cushions set up around him to prevent him from falling onto the floor.
‘Come on, baby, we’re going home,’ she said to the drowsy one-year-old in his
yellow flannel one-piece pyjamas. She pressed her face into the flannel belly of the sleepy bundle and inhaled his delicious smell of milk spit-up, Woodwards gripe water, baby powder, pee, and clean baby. She almost burst into tears, so in love was she. Stepping in the spaces between the children sprawled out on the carpet she sang ‘Happy New Year to you, Happy New Year to you, Happy New Year to you.’
‘Happy New Year, Auntie,’ chorused the children of the house, never taking their eyes off the television screen where a cartoon Bob Cratchit was hoisting a cartoon Tiny Tim up unto his shoulders, so the sweet-faced boy could pipe in dulcet tones, ‘God bless us, everyone.’ This Christmas classic courtesy of Disney.
Not inclined to give any excuses as to why she was leaving before midnight, she bypassed the dining room by exiting through the kitchen, which had a side door that led out to the yard where her car was parked.
One of the hostess’s pointed remarks disguised as a joke made earlier in the evening had been about how ‘eccentric’ she was since she had become a mother. If she had thought of it then, she could have made a witty comeback by quoting something from Bertrand Russell about not being afraid of being regarded as eccentric. But that evening she could not remember any quotation from anybody because she suffered a lot from a condition that could be called foggy baby brain, baby on the brain, all her mental resources marshalled to cope with taking care of teething baby, colicky baby, restless baby, don’t-know-why-baby-is-crying-baby.
If that blue-skinned genie in one of those Disney movies could materialise and grant her three wishes, one of those wishes would be a week’s sleep.
She’d just sat at the dinner table and smiled and shrugged when her hostess had dropped the charge of eccentricity on her. She’d thought to herself, I’d rather plunge my arms up to the elbows in a bucket of poop-filled nappies than expend any effort defending myself against charges of eccentricity from this woman who is waiting for me to return to being the aimless single woman, always available to her friends, that I used to be before the advent of baby.
Not one more New Year’s Eve like this. Not one more New Year’s Eve pretending she was having a good time.
She lay the baby down in his wicker bassinet in the back seat of her car and tucked him in tight with his blue blanket appliqued all over with gambolling satin sheep. The car was small and rode close to the ground and the hum of the engine soon lulled the baby to sleep. She turned into her driveway at 11.20. She put the baby to bed and midnight found her raising a solitary toast to the new year with a cup of mint tea.
In the morning she got up and went to the bathroom and turned on the tap to find there was no water. There are over one hundred rivers on the island of Jamaica. ‘Xamayca’ is supposed to mean Land of Wood and Water; water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink, bathe in, cook with or flush your toilet! Here it was, the first day of a brand-new year and she had no water to wash herself, to bathe the baby, to flush the toilet. O shit!
The woman who took care of her son for her on weekdays, when she went out to work, had told her about the waterman. It seemed this man, by virtue of being put in charge of turning on and off the valves of the communal water tank, had become, almost overnight, the most powerful person in their small hilltop village.
She herself had never actually seen the waterman, but there were stories circulating in the village that, if you angered the waterman he would make sure that no water ran through the pipes to your house. They also said that if you bribed him, the waterman would make sure that your pipes never ran dry.
After a while the waterman began to assume mythic status; it was as if he was some Arawak god who had to be placated by having his name called over and over by the awestruck people of the village.
So, this morning, she woke to find that she had been caught unprepared – I mean seriously, who would expect the water to be locked off on New Year’s Day? – and that she had forgotten to fill the large plastic bottles that had become a fixture in most Jamaican kitchens, and that she had neglected to fill the bathtub the night before with enough water to bathe in and flush the toilet. She thought, I have no choice, I have to go in search of the goddamn waterman, to see if I can persuade him to turn on the water.
So, after making herself a cup of tea and fixing the baby’s morning cereal with water from one of the two bottles in the refrigerator, boiled in a pot on top of the stove, she fed the baby, wiped his round brown limbs down with a rag dampened with the rest of the warm water and then used the same rag to wipe her face. She dressed the baby, then dressed herself, feeling a little out of sorts and irritable because she really needed a shower.
She had no idea where to find the waterman, so she drove to the house of the woman who looked after her son when she went out to work. When she got there, the front door of the small wooden house was locked, and the jalousie windows shut. Only a yapping mawga dog ran out to the gate when she drove up; she honked the horn a few times and called out, ‘Good morning, anybody at home?’ but no one answered. She remembered that her son’s babysitter had a new boyfriend who lived in town. They must have gone to a dance on New Year’s Eve and stayed over at his place. That was way more action than she herself saw last night.
She decided to drive down to the town square and see if anybody there knew the whereabouts of the waterman. To get to the square, she had to drive past the house of one of her friends.
She hoped she wouldn’t see her erstwhile friend because she had stopped returning her calls. If she did see her, she would feel compelled to stop and have a pointless conversation with her for Auld Lang Syne, about things and people that no longer interested her, during which she was bound to feel at a disadvantage because she hadn’t had a shower and her car really needed washing. God, what a way to start a new year! As she approached her friend’s house she saw that there were cars parked outside and she could hear Home T-4 carolling ‘Mek the Christmas Catch You in a Good Mood’, one of her favourite Jamaican Christmas songs.
A passing glance at the laughing group on the wide verandah let her know that these were revellers who had partied in the New Year and were now keeping the revelry going at a bang-up New Year’s Day breakfast/brunch.
As she shifted into third gear, sped up and drove determinedly past the house, she wondered if she was just jealous of her friends. After all, they were bringing in the New Year in style and here she was, a sad figure searching for the waterman on New Year’s Day. Perhaps she was somewhat jealous, but she was also quite certain that she didn’t want to be back there on the verandah with her old friends because she’d done enough of that. There was no doubt in her mind that that particular phase of her life had ended, but she had no idea what form the next one would take.
Your life is supposed to go somewhere. You are supposed to start somewhere and end up somewhere, preferably in a better place than the one where you started.
One Easter Sunday when she was twelve years old, the sight of the bell-mouthed lilies on the altar dripping with ice-white lace cloths, the tall white candles burning in the brass candleholders and the smoke and scent of incense streaming from the brass thurible swung from the end of a long brass chain had propelled her up and out of herself, and for the entire service she had hovered somewhere between her pew and the vaulted church ceiling in a state of pure bliss. She remembers thinking to herself that, if she’d died then, she would surely have been taken up into heaven.
There was no sign of anybody who could be the waterman in the town square, which looked, on New Year’s Day, like the deserted streets of a town in a cowboy movie.
There was absolutely no point in asking the one drunken man – who presumably had no family, or else why would he be leaning cross-legged like Lee Marvin’s horse in the movie Cat Ballou, against the door frame of the village rum bar on the morning of New Year’s Day? The drunken man was calling out to everyone who passed by, ‘Happynewyear! Happynewyear!’
Maybe he was, despite all appearances, really happy. It occurred to her ri
ght then that the drunk was what Jamaicans would refer to as: ‘a waters man’ and she was looking for ‘the waterman.’ And that stupid lame joke made her laugh, and after she had laughed she felt a little more like herself.
She turned the car around and headed back home. She fed the baby tepid orange juice from a sippy cup and gave him two arrowroot biscuits which he gummed away at, one in each fist, like a sweet old man. She changed his diaper and put him in his play pen, where he promptly fell asleep with the biscuits mushing in his chubby fists.
She then had an idea. If she melted the ice cubes from the freezer, she’d get nice cold ice water. She opened the refrigerator to find that the ice cubes had started melting without her. Stale and flat, that was how that water would taste. Power cut. No light, no water. Happynewyear to you too.
She needed to wash the baby’s clothes. She needed to wash herself.
She needed to wash herself of what was beginning to feel like a fine dusting of sand and salt that had sifted down over her and her whole life, over her dreams of finding true love and interesting rewarding work, and good friends. She really wished she had all those things but mostly she needed access to water: cool clear water. She began to hum that song that she’d read somewhere was about a man hallucinating about finding water as he crossed the desert.
I’ll do a rain dance, she thought. I will not just hum, I will do a rain dance.
I’ll make my limbs rise and fall down like rain. I will face the Blue Mountains, which was surely what the Tainos – who she had been taught were called Arawaks – did when they prayed for rain.
So, taking off her sandals, she stepped out onto the wooden verandah and she faced the mountain and proceeded to dance while the baby slept there in the living room in his play pen.
Redemption Ground Page 11
