“Poor t’ing is right,” Delores says. “Remember how him used to bring yuh flowers he pick from s’maddy else yard?” Margot chuckles when she remembers this—John-John stealing flowers to give to her. “Both of oonuh was so young,” Delores continues, with the memory glistening in her eyes. “Him used to sit here an’ wait on me, jus’ so he could geet to yuh.” But the humor quickly disappears from Delores’s face, wiped clean by a scowl. “If only he knew.”
“I guess you’d rather put me wid a man who was into fondling and fucking likkle girls?” Margot says, her voice conversational. She’s been friendly with her mother, but the day’s disappointment has her raw, prodding the wounds of her past. This painful fact has solidified into a rock she throws at her mother when it becomes too big, too heavy to carry alone.
Delores stops fanning. After a long pause, she braces herself into the chair, which creaks under her weight. “Why are you here?” Delores asks. “To tell me how me is a bad mother?” Delores’s spit flies on Margot’s face. Delores continues. “What should I have done, eh? Tell me!” Her eyes are bulging. “Didn’t it put food on the table? Didn’t it feed yuh? If yuh t’ink yuh bettah than dat—now dat you is Miss High ’an Mighty—then g’weh! G’long!”
Margot doesn’t budge. She can’t. “Ah want to talk to you,” she says. Her voice drops, giving in to a slight tremor.
Delores’s eyes gleam like the edges of swords, her mouth twisted to the right side of her face. “’Bout what?”
“Ah don’t know where to start.”
“Start somweh. Yuh wasting me time.” Delores starts fanning herself again, but before Margot can gather her thoughts, three tourists enter the stall. Delores’s attitude changes. Margot steps aside and waits until her mother is done with them. Suddenly she’s a pleasant woman, the type of woman Margot would’ve liked to get to know, or wanted as a mother—not the mother she grew up with, who was quick to anger and even quicker to trample Margot’s self-esteem. Margot always wondered what it was about her that made her mother so angry. She wished she could make her mother happy the way these tourists do. The way Thandi does. “Yes, sweetie, ah can give yuh dat for a discounted price,” Delores says to the young American teen.
When the tourists leave, Delores goes back to being Delores. “So talk,” she says. “More people soon come an’ me need fi sell.”
Margot treads lightly. “I’m seeing someone.” She clears her throat, feeling an overwhelming need to specify, if not for herself, then for Delores, whose eyes hold in them the question that Margot can never avoid. “A man.” It rolls off her tongue so easily, so naturally, so necessary. A man. Her mother’s facial expression remains neutral, though Margot imagines the smirk behind the dark emotionless face.
“He’s in di hotel business,” Margot continues. “A Wellington.”
“A Wellington?” Delores asks, her eyes wide. “What yuh doing wid ah Wellington?” she asks. “Since when those people commune wid di help? Don’t you work fah dem?”
“He said he loves me,” Margot says, defensive. All she hopes for is Delores’s grudging approval. “He’s willing to leave his wife. And he’s serious about it.”
“Oh?” Delores sits up straight and puts down the rolled-up newspaper she was using to fan with, a gleam finally creeping into her eyes, filling Margot with hope.
“So yuh get yuhself a big man.”
“Yes.”
“How yuh so ch’upid, gyal?”
Delores leans forward, her big arms flopping over her knees. Margot realizes that it wasn’t pride she has seen in her mother’s eyes, it was a sneer. A sneer that reveals the wide gap in her mother’s teeth as she says, “My question to you, Miss High an’ Mighty, is how ah man like dat can leave him pretty wife fi s’maddy like you? Yuh t’ink dem man deh want a black gyal pon dem arm in public? Dey like yuh to fuck. Not to marry. So know yuh place.”
Margot feels the sting of tears, but she narrows her eyes. She doesn’t even want Alphonso. All Margot wants—now more than ever—is to prove her mother wrong.
Margot bursts through Verdene’s bedroom door and puts her palms against the woman’s cheeks. Her lips trail Verdene’s neck, her breasts. Verdene gasps in surprise, but slows Margot’s fingers.
“Calm down, now. Why don’t you sit down?”
Margot relents, resting her head against Verdene’s before slumping onto the bed. “I wish things were different,” she says. Verdene is watching her, watching the storm of unknown origin rage across her face. “Don’t you just wish things were different?” she asks.
“Many times,” Verdene says.
They peer at each other in the mirror.
“I don’t think I can go on living like this,” Margot says.
“What are you saying?” Verdene sits up against the headboard. Margot studies her face to see if the answer she hopes to find is there. But all she sees is concern and confusion just above Verdene’s eyebrows.
“If you love me, then why haven’t you offered to sell this house so that we can have a fresh start? You know. In an area where we can—”
Verdene cuts her off. “It’s not that simple, Margot.”
“Why not? What do you have to lose by selling this house? It’s not like you have anything left here. We can build something together.”
“It’s all I have left of my mother.” Verdene looks at the picture of her mother that sits on the small table, facing the wall—the only picture she kept out. She reaches over and turns the picture around.
“So I’m best kept as a secret?” Margot asks quietly, turning away from the smiling Miss Ella.
Verdene allows the question to fall between them before she says, “You’re fooling yourself if you think things would be any different in another neighborhood. It’s still Jamaica.”
“Then why don’t you take me with you to London so that we could have a life outside of this?”
“You’ve never been willing to leave River Bank.” Verdene moves to the edge of the bed. “You’re the one always talking about your sister and how you have to be here for her.”
Margot walks to the rocking chair for her bag. Verdene has a point. Thandi needs her. But that was not what she wanted to hear. Alphonso would never choose her, and maybe she can never choose Verdene. She has been wasting time vacillating between two secret lives. She wonders if what she feels—and has always felt—for Verdene is nothing more than a spell, something temporarily debilitating like a gigantic wave in the ocean. She has to break the water’s surface. Swim back to shore. She cannot afford to be controlled.
“I have to go,” Margot says. She kisses Verdene goodbye on the mouth.
“When will I see you again?” Verdene asks.
“I don’t know.”
9
THANDI GOES OUTSIDE TO THE BACKYARD WITH HER SKETCHPAD. The grass is knee-high, neglected. The sun peers through the branches of the trees. Two roosters that escaped the neighbor’s yard high-step toward the side of the shack. The old tire tied to the tree where Little Richie likes to sit swings by itself as though a ghost is pushing it. Thandi tries to sketch whatever she sees, but every time an image appears on the page, she rips it out and balls it inside her fists. Nothing looks or feels right. By the time she’s halfway through ripping page after page out of her book, she’s ready to scream into the open air. Her frustration threatens to break free and shatter to pieces the image she has struggled so hard to uphold. But this backyard is too small. The web of branches above her head might contain her frustrated scream. The sleeping dogs might holler at it. The chickens will halt, one leg suspended like the breaths of the nearby washerwomen, who might wonder about the commotion and come running.
Finally, she decides that her growing discomfort might have to do with the plastic that Miss Ruby meticulously wrapped around her limbs and torso. She makes her way back inside, takes it off, and slips a modest yellow dress over a tank top and a pair of shorts—since she has to wash her slip. She grabs her sketchpad and leaves, pass
ing Grandma Merle, who is sitting stiff-necked on the wooden chair; and Miss Francis and Miss Louise, who wave. The hum of their voices washes her back. “Is where she going in di hot sun dressed like dat? Shouldn’t she be in school?”
She hurries along to the river, passing by the bathers who have their clothes spread out on the rocks. She makes her way to where the boats are tied up. The construction workers with their tools aren’t on site today. There is a sign that reads NO TRESPASSING on the beach right where Thandi used to play as a child, which was once an extension of River Bank. The hotels are building along the coastlines. Slowly but surely they are coming, like a dark sea. Little Bay, which used to be two towns over from River Bank, was the first to go. Just five years ago the people of Little Bay left in droves, forced out of their homes and into the streets. It was all over the news when it happened, since the people—out of anger—ended up blocking roads with planks and tires and burning them. In the past, developers would wait for landslides and other natural disasters to do their dirty work. But when tourism became the bread and butter for the island’s economy, the developers and the government alike became ravenous, indifferent. In retaliation, people stole concrete blocks and cement and zinc from the new developments to rebuild homes in other places, but their pilfering brought soldiers with rifles and tear gas. The developers won the fight, and the people scattered like roaches. Some came to River Bank begging to be taken in, some fled to other parishes. Those who could not bear the stress of uprooting all their belongings to start a new life roamed the streets and mumbled to themselves. It was as though their own land had turned on them—swallowed up their homes and livestock and produce and spat out the remains. By the time the workmen arrived in River Bank, Little Bay had been long forgotten.
There is no sound out here. Just the gentle lull of the sea and her heart beating in her eardrums when she sees Charles, sitting in his father’s fishing boat. He’s looking at the tranquil water where the river meets the ocean. He looks like he belongs in a painting, contemplating the blue of the water and the sky. Just above them, the coconut trees rustle in the wind, their fronds wavelike. Thandi looks up at the sky between the palm branches through which the sun plays a game of hide-and-seek. She sits on an abandoned crate underneath one of the trees and sketches Charles with his head tilted back in the face of the sun, careful with each line, her fingers wrapped around the pencil. His back is an elegant stretch of muscle. It takes her longer than usual to get it right, erasing shadows and drawing them over. Charles turns and catches her staring. “What yuh doing out here?” he asks above the gentle roar of the sea.
Embarrassed, Thandi fumbles to cover the drawing with her hands as if he can see them from where he sits. He gets up out of his father’s boat and walks over to her, his bare feet making footprints in the white sand. He’s wearing a pair of khaki trousers cut off at the knees, a faded green shirt slung over his right shoulder. Thandi inches closer to the tree as if it can hide her. She crosses and uncrosses her legs, pressing her sketchpad to her chest as she watches him look around for a crate to sit on. She sits up straight, unsure what posture she should assume. She’s afraid she might look too rigid this way. Too schoolgirlish. So she curves her back. Just a little. What would Margot do? Too many times Delores says to Thandi that she’s nothing like Margot. “Nothing like yuh sistah a’tall.” Thandi wonders if this is good or bad.
When Thandi was younger she used to observe her sister. Under the appraisal of men’s stares was the mysterious force that swayed Margot’s wide hips atop sturdy bow legs. When she passed them by, they would turn their heads, their eyes trained on those hips, their hands stroking their chins as though contemplating a plate of oxtail stew. “Wh’appen, sugah?” Brown sugar, or brownin’ for short. Margot never seemed uncomfortable, unlike Thandi, who shies away from such attention; Margot touched men frequently as she talked, her hand casually stroking their arm or chest. And when they said something, anything, Margot used to throw her head back and laugh a soft, titillating laugh that rippled through the air above the sounds of Gregory Isaacs, Beres Hammond, or Dennis Brown coming from the boom box at Dino’s. This caused the men to pause and observe the skin of her neck, the length of her lashes that swept her full cheeks as her eyes squinted with delight; lust filling their own eyes, like smoke from a ganja spliff. In Margot’s presence, a man would shout to his contenders amid the shuffling of dominoes, slamming his hand or his beer hard on the wooden table, “Anotha roun’!” Then, to Margot, “Watch me win nuh, sugah?” And Margot, gracious as she is, would decline, stroking the man’s arm. “Maybe next time, love.” The man would proceed to play his hand, smiling to himself as though he had already won.
When Charles approaches Thandi with a crate he’s found inside another abandoned boat, he’s grinning from ear to ear. He plops down in front of her, smelling like the salty air. Their knees touch but she doesn’t move hers away.
“So why yuh not in school?” he asks, his eyes gentle like the water with flecks of gold from the sun. She shrugs. She wonders what to tell him. What role should she play? Charles might like rude girls. Girls not afraid to raise their voices in the street. Girls who spar with grown men in the square, whom they let lift their skirts, slip their fingers inside. “Dis is a nice surprise,” he continues.
“What’s so surprising?” Thandi counters, immediately regretting that she forgot to mangle her words, chew them up, and spit them out in patois. She’s afraid she sounds too proper. But Charles doesn’t seem to mind.
“You neva strike me as a girl who would be out here jus’ like dat,” he says, regarding her face the way Brother Smith regards her paintings—with studied observation. “Yuh always to yuhself.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Yuh neva gimme a chance to.”
“So how would you know what I’m like?”
“I watch you. Like ah watch di sky.”
Thandi blushes.
“So tell me,” he says, cocking his head to one side. “What’s in dat book of yours?” he asks. “Don’t tell me is jus’ me yuh draw in it.” He’s leaning closer, his lips parted, his thick eyebrows raised. Behind him the water seems to rise, mounting the rocks.
Thandi squeezes her legs together. “You’re really full of yuhself to assume you’re my subject.”
“Ah wouldn’t say it if ah didn’t notice you staring wid it open on yuh lap.” Charles twists his mouth to the side like he’s sucking something from his teeth or trying not to laugh.
“I draw anything I feel. Don’t have to have meaning. I mean, I can’t really seem to capture what I really want to capture,” Thandi responds, searching for a reaction in his face. But she can’t tell what she sees. Charles listens to her with the intentness of a wizened old man, watching her gestures, affirming her ambivalence. She wonders how old he really is. She’s afraid that she has revealed too much too soon. “I don’t know why I even care. This might sound stupid, but I just want to win this art competition at school.” Her nervousness makes her talk too much. Very rarely does she say this much to anyone about what she wants, much less to a common boy she barely knows.
“If it is dat important to you, then why would you t’ink it’s stupid?” he asks.
Thandi shrugs her shoulders.
Charles reaches for her hand and holds it as though he has done this many times before. “Somehow ah get di feeling dis is more important to you than winning.”
Unlike her sweaty ones, Charles’s palms are dry and surprisingly warm, like sun-warmed stones. She doesn’t pull away, though a girl like her—a Saint Emmanuel High School girl—should have rebuked such audacity. A series of thoughts chastises her: Who does he think he is? Since she’s getting lighter, shouldn’t she be looking elsewhere—at the boys in Ironshore, with big houses and cars? What now? But sitting here with her hand in Charles’s feels oddly natural. Their brown skin seems connected; and a lump of uncertainty over her cream rises in Thandi’s throat. Her inhibitions melt like candle wax
under his heat. She imagines this is how girls with boyfriends feel. Thandi leans into Charles, closing her eyes. But Charles pulls back, his sudden motion rustling the sticks at their feet, snapping them in half.
“Yuh all right?” he asks.
“Sorry.”
Thandi picks up the sketchpad, which had slipped from her lap. Charles puts his hand on her shoulder. She cannot read his expression.
“You’ll figure it out,” Charles says, moving away. She wishes she were still wrapped in plastic, for it might have worked to keep her broken heart intact. If this is a test, then she has failed miserably. She gets up and flees in the direction of the water.
“Where yuh going?” he asks.
“For a swim,” she says, hoping to sound casual, though in fact she cannot swim. She takes off her shoes, and dips her toes into the water. The sand is warm and the water isn’t cold at all. She takes off her dress, leaving her shorts and tank top like the local bathers do. She knows Charles is watching, waiting to see what she will do. Behind her is the skeleton of a majestic castle—one of the resorts emerging right here in her backyard. No one is in sight, but in months the white sands will be populated by the sunburned bodies of white tourists. From a plane flying overhead they might look like seals, their heads tilted toward the rays, bodies open for as much exposure as possible, basking in luxury. The castle fades away like a mirage as Thandi drifts and drifts farther away from shore. She moves forward as though going toward the middle of the sea—a dare she soon realizes was not a dare, but an impulse.
Charles hasn’t followed. The disappointment disorients her, but it is quickly replaced by fear, which creeps up on her with each wave that rises like a giant blue wall. They tumble toward her, each one bigger than the other. Thandi loses her footing and goes under. She tries to float as long as she can, her eyes on the sky, angry at herself for acting a fool. Her hands flail against the avalanche of waves as she tries to swim. She’s not sure which direction she’s turned. The undercurrent pulls her with possessive force. She remembers why the fishermen call this area Pregnant Heidi—for the waves are majestic, rising like the concave belly of a woman with child. The tale dates back to the days of slavery, when a slave girl named Heidi flung herself into the sea after finding out that she was pregnant with her master’s baby. Her body was never found. At night Pregnant Heidi gives birth in a surge of waves rushing to the sand, her screams carried in the swift breeze that whistles against every window of every shack. By day she seeks a victim to drown. Just when Thandi thinks she will be propelled to the ocean’s floor into the crease of Pregnant Heidi’s bosom, someone grabs her by the waist and pulls her. Through the water and terror, she sees the head of the person pulling her with impressive strength and dexterity. She might have imagined it, but he cuts through the water like a fish.
Here Comes the Sun Page 11
