Chapter 1
FEBRUARY 1991
Slivers of light slanted past the cracked molding and threw licks of pale, late-winter sunshine on the dingy walls. Tongues of old paint hung like cane trash right before the fields were burnt to chase away vermin. I’d been looking for work for seven weeks straight, and each Tuesday morning I’d been going out earlier and earlier for The Irish Echo. I layered up in the room’s semidarkness, trying not to trip over balled-up diapers, traps of unwashed clothes, and Uncle Bo folded tight in his corner on the floor.
“Grace, is you who there?”
I breathed out breath I didn’t realize I was holding in. “Yes, Sylvia, is me.”
“But is where you going this hour of the morning?”
“Today is Tuesday, Sylvia. The Echo coming out today, remember. I want to see if I can’t find anything.” All this Sylvia knew.
“Well, go quick.” I started to the door. “And bring a pack of More for me when you come back. Menthol.” She farted long and low, and her mattress, zippered in plastic, deflated as her bulk resettled to carve a new dent. Throughout the apartment, similar depressions marked the furniture Sylvia liked best: the raffia bottom of her kitchen chair hung loose and broken, like a tropical basketball hoop. Her cushion on the sofa was a trap to the unsuspecting.
I knew Sylvia wouldn’t be giving me the $2.50 I spent for her cigarettes. For weeks now, I’d bought her a pack of More menthols every time she caught me going out. Two fifty every time and never once had she paid me back. I was down to my last twenty dollars. I needed money. I needed work.
Only one newsstand in the whole of Crown Heights, the one on President and Nostrand, sold the Echo. It was a small stand framed by pornographic magazines and black hair magazines, where jars of lollipops, sour candies, and jelly worms were displayed alongside boxes of wrapping paper, hairpins, and ginseng jelly. Tucked into the seams of the glass case, partially barring the condoms, were photos of smiling, dark-haired boys holding very big guns. Here, every Tuesday morning, the West Indian domestics competed for the nanny paper like marketwomen for fresh fish. I had my very own challenger, a short, thick woman who was usually walking away from the stand just as I got there. The week before last, she’d actually beaten me to the last paper, leaving me with nothing as she swished away in her nylon tracksuit.
I had never been this early before. I wasn’t taking any chances.
“The Echo and a pack of More, please,” I said to the Arab behind the kiosk. Everyone called him Ali. I didn’t call him anything. Now, instead of taking my money, he took my hand and held it. “Pritty girl.” His rusty mustache drooped around discolored teeth, and he tilted his balding head toward the back. “You come behind. I give you peppir and cigrette free.”
I wrenched away, slamming my fingers hard against the counter. “Just give me the cigarettes and my change, okay.”
“You no want come behind?” He dropped my change on the counter. “You look for job? I give you job.”
I walked away fast, nursing my bruised fingers and holding back tears. I walked past the closed Chinese restaurant, the Korean greengrocer always open for business, the permanently shuttered soul food joint, and the twenty-four-hour “We Buy Gold” shop where Bo bought weed. Far enough away, now, I sat on one of the new benches lining the parkway and watched the morning traffic through hot, salty tears. Cars roared up and down the six-lane highway. People scurried past, heads tucked into turned-up collars and furry hoods, bounding like giant rabbits down the steps of the station. Hasidic men clutched black coats and hurried in the opposite direction, deeper into Crown Heights. All this rushing around me and my life stood still.
I unfolded the paper to scan the help wanted section. I’d almost stopped believing anyone ever got a job from The Irish Echo. Week after week I had scrolled up and down these columns, circling the jobs I could apply for. The ones that said “must be legal” I crossed out. The live-out ones, the ones requiring a driver’s license, the ability to swim, five years’ minimum experience, two years’ minimum experience, knowledge of infant CPR, I crossed them all out. My friend Kathy said it was all luck and chance, and that I should put my own ad in the paper, make them call me. So I did:
FULL-TIME BABYSITTER, LIVE IN.
EXCELLENT REFERENCE AVAILABLE.
GRACE: 718-555-7263
Still, just in case it was my turn to be lucky, I scrolled through the “Domestic Help Wanted” section and circled an ad placed by a Mrs. Bruckner.
Passing winter days inside Sylvia’s apartment was killing me. It had been over a year since I came to America, over a year since my cousin hadn’t picked me up at the airport, and over a year since I got the job with Mora. But that had ended nearly two months ago, and I hadn’t worked since. Well, not for money anyway. I didn’t know what to do. A van zoomed by, and the huge picture of a gray-bearded face with kind eyes stared at me. MOSHIACH IS ON THE WAY. I wondered who he was and if he could bring me a job.
SYLVIA OPENED THE DOOR before I could touch it. Upright, she was huge. Five feet eleven and maybe three hundred pounds and change. She used to be pretty, but now her high cheekbones fought to stay above the fat crawling up her face. Her perfectly straight, bright white teeth were now her best feature, the only part of her able to withstand her slow corpulence. “So long you gone outside for a papers, Miss Grace, and you now come back.” She gave me no chance to respond. “You bring my cigarette?” She stared at me as I handed over the pack, daring me to ask for the two dollars and fifty cents.
Micky, Sylvia’s oldest, was waiting for me to do her hair. “You have the comb?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Mick.” I dropped onto the red sofa and pointed to the breakfront. “Did you check in there?” To questions about the location of anything, the answer was always to look in, on, under, or behind the breakfront. It leaned against the wall and held a few decorative plates, loose change, petroleum jelly, ribbons and clips, a half-empty bottle of body lotion, combs, remote controls that didn’t work anything, spare ties for Derek’s uniform, maxi pads, Vicks, and a stereo system.
Micky got the comb and knelt between my legs, gripping my thighs with her elbows. She was ten and still sucked her fingers.
Sylvia came and stood on the once red carpet, now the color of warm ground beef. “Grace, you not done with that child head yet?”
The extra flesh around her throat strangled her words on their way out. Even if she wanted to speak softly, she could not. “Grace, plait that child hair in two cane rows now for me please.” This was not a question, and the please was not courtesy. She walked on, and Micky hung her head.
“You want that style, Mick, two cane rows top to bottom?” I asked.
Sylvia shouted at her so much that Micky spoke with a slight stutter whenever her mother was around. “I w-w-want two cane rows please, Grace.”
“Two cane rows coming right up, then.” I tickled her where her armpits, too moist for a ten-year-old’s, tightly clamped my legs.
“Grace? Grace, you see my other shoe?” Derek was seven and wild. He never walked but sprinted across the short spaces inside the apartment and was forever hurting himself, running into walls and people and table edges. Now, wearing one shoe, he hopped in from the hall to the living room.
Micky giggled and clamped her fingers over her mouth. Derek’s hair was uncombed, his light yellow shirt untucked, and his blue, checked tie tied in a knot around his neck.
“Derek”—I pointed the comb to the bulging fabric—“who did your tie?”
“Uncle Bo. He tied it sleeping, Grace. Grace, you could tie it again?”
I nodded. “First find your shoe.”
“I lookeded . . .” He spun his head around the room.
“Looked.”
“I looked for it, Grace, I did. I look under the bed and under the chessadrawers, and it nowhere.”
My fingers were buried midway down the length of Micky’s cane row, and I tilted my head to the seat. “You look und
er here?”
He slipped half his skinny body under the scrolled lip of the couch and slithered out with the shoe.
“Sit on the floor and put it on.”
“And my tie, Grace?”
“In a second.”
We all paused as Sylvia came down the corridor. “Hurry up, hurry up,” she said and continued to the bathroom.
“Mammy smelling like pee-pee,” Derek whispered, and Micky laughed.
“Don’t say that, Derek. That’s not very nice.”
“Sorry, Grace.”
I patted Micky’s shoulder with the comb. “Go brush your teeth.”
Derek scampered up. I slid the tie under his collar and handed him the two ends.
Over, under, and over again.
Up and straight through.
What a gentleman.
My mother’s rhyme, taught to Helen and me to help the decent churchmen we would someday marry. Derek said the words with me as I guided his twitchy hands slowly through the motions, but even after almost two months, I did the actual tying.
“You want me to comb your hair?”
He ran a small hand over his head. “I comb my hair already, Grace.”
I snapped the comb against my leg.
“Okay,” he said, “if you want me to comb it again, I’ll comb it again.”
I left Derek pulling the snags out of his hair and went back to the bedroom, where Uncle Bo was now unfurled and sprawled X-shaped and snoring. He slept in grimy jeans, his sweater flung over a broken dining chair. Bo breathed heavily. His hairy chest rose and fell with every grinding inhale. The stink of rum and weed hovered around his body, mingling with the general dank of the room. I walked over him and reached for my soap and towel. Little Damien was still on the bed, nestled in the scoop Sylvia had left. As much as Derek was rambunctious, Dame was quiet. Too quiet for an almost three-year-old.
“Dame-Dame,” I called, and he smiled up at me. “Stay there, all right, I’ll come back for you.” He kept on smiling, and I didn’t know whether he understood me or not.
Derek fidgeted, and Micky stood silent in the corridor, ready to go. Sylvia was giving them a once-over.
“Derek, zip up your pants.”
“The zip break, Mammy.”
Sylvia raised her palms in supplication. “Lord Father Jesus, I begging you to give me patience.” Unfastening a jumbo safety pin from her hem, she skewered shut Derek’s fly, the pin on the outside and Derek’s yellow shirttail visible through the gape in his crotch.
“Grace, give them children a dollar each for me please. I will pay you back later. They have some sale to raise funds. Always raising funds.”
I reached into my pocket and peeled away two singles. I had fourteen dollars left.
“All right”—Sylvia shooed after I gave them the money—“go quick and reach before breakfast finish.” Out in the hall, Derek must have sped ahead of his sister because I and everybody else in the building heard Sylvia’s voice as she shouted for him to come back and hold his sister’s hand.
Of course, she beat me to the bathroom. While she ran the water, I cleaned up the flotsam left in the morning’s wake, starting from the closet in the corridor and moving down toward the living room. Sylvia used her front closet for broken baby strollers and a barrel bought to send clothes and food to relatives on the island. It never managed to get full. Also crammed in were two nonworking televisions, a vacuum, an old ironing board patterned with chocolate triangles, and a collapsible drying rack. A puddle of shoes for every season flooded the floor.
Perched at the very top of the spectacular mountain was the pair of shiny costume wings I wore to last year’s Labor Day carnival. Mora didn’t pay me for holidays, so on Labor Day I went to the West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn. Before I left, her daughter Hannah ran to the playroom and came back with her fairy wings. “Here, Grace,” she said, slipping the wings over my arms. “You can’t go to a carnival without a costume.” And because they didn’t look ridiculous, I wore them all day long.
The last time I had seen this many West Indians was on the plane ride to America. Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Bajans, Haitians, Guyanese, we were all there. For the first time since leaving home, I ate roti and doubles and curry everything. I couldn’t tell who was having more fun, the revelers in costume jumping up behind the ten-foot trucks with twenty-foot speakers or the throngs of spectators eating, drinking, feting, and having a good time. My mother would have had a heart attack.
On a stretch of the parkway just past Nostrand Avenue, people paused to watch a huge woman shake a tree. I stopped too, and there was a woman holding a small boy in one arm and shaking the tree trunk with the other. “You playing monkey,” she shouted up to the branches, “just wait till you come down from this tree.”
An older boy’s face looked down from the dark green leaves. “But Mammy, I couldn’t see nothing from the pavement. Everybody taller than me, Mammy.”
The woman looked around and passed me the boy she was holding. “Here, take this child for me.”
I took the sleepy child and watched as she gave the trunk a violent shake. The kid held on tight and grinned. “Okay, okay, Mammy. I coming.” He backed down and jumped the final three or so feet to the ground. His mother swiped the back of his head hard.
“Derek, why it is you trying to make me sin my soul on a day of fun?” She took the baby from my arms. “Thanks, Miss Lady. You see how children nowadays harden.”
This was the first time I had ever been called Miss Lady. “What part of Trinidad you from?” I asked her.
“Down south, in Penal.”
I looked at her again, trying to see if she resembled anyone I knew. “I’m from Morne Diable.”
“You see how the world small. I bet we know plenty same people.”
A little girl I hadn’t noticed before said, “Miss Lady, I could try on your wings?”
Before I could shrug them off, the woman said, “Micky, what it is I tell you about talking to strangers. Lord help me.”
I laughed and put Hannah’s wings on the girl’s slender shoulders. She twirled and took off after her brother. “Just don’t go past Nostrand, you hear me.” The woman and I chatted, and we figured out the people we both knew from home, and pretty soon I had told her my whole story about coming to America and my cousin not meeting me at the airport and working in New Jersey and being on my own. And when we were done, she told me her name was Sylvia and gave me her number.
“Here.” She passed me her telephone bill. “Tear off the number on the top. Whenever you see you want to come Brooklyn to lime, or if you need a place to stay, give me a call.”
I phoned Sylvia in January, and she welcomed me then, laughing when she saw the wings she remembered from Labor Day. Since then, she has repeatedly asked me to throw out the wings. To make space, she says. But I will not.
Now, almost two months later, here I was on hands and knees, reaching under her couch to find whatever else Derek might have misplaced, when Sylvia walked out of the bathroom. She stopped and looked down at me half buried under the couch. I turned and looked at her massive feet, ankles, calves. Then, drawing out too fast, I slammed the back of my head against the base of the stupid sofa.
I rubbed the sore spot, then looked over at Sylvia and froze. She was naked. At least I thought she was naked. She was definitely topless. Her huge breasts weighed down like two freshly slaughtered baby seals, dark noses still wet, that had been flung over her shoulders. A towel, hopelessly small, hung limp in her hand. She had no navel I could see.
“Wait till you make children and see what happen to you,” Sylvia said, trying to dry her back with that scrap of towel. “I used to be maga too.” She held out a breast and stropped the underside dry. “I going to see if my agency don’t have any old people for me to mind. Watch Dame till I come back. You going anywhere?”
She knew full well I had noplace to go.
“Where it is you have to go, Grace?” she asked, voice rising, misunders
tanding my nod.
“No, Sylvia. Yes, I’ll watch him. I have to make calls this morning and wait to see if anybody call for me.”
“Just try not to tie up my phone for too long, Miss Grace. I might try and call you from outside.”
She walked off to the bedroom, and, still on my haunches, I stared in amazement at the flat, broad canvas, rippled at the edges and slit at the base, that was her back to her low-slung bottom.
AT TEN THE PHONE rang.
“You placed the ad in The Irish Echo?”
“Yes, that was me. You looking for a babysitter?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” I lied.
“How tall are you?”
“Five nine.”
“And how much do you weigh?”
“Pardon me?”
“My boy is big,” the man said a little breathlessly. “How much do you weigh?”
“About a hundred and twenty-five pounds.”
“You’re twenty-one, five nine, and a hundred and twenty-five pounds?”
“Yes. How old is your son, sir?”
“And what size are your tits?” he asked, his breath coming faster.
I hung up the phone, not knowing if what had just happened was funny.
WITH BO STILL ASLEEP, and Dame napping, I had some quiet time to make my calls. Ah, the fine balance of calling. First, not too too early to wake them; if you called them around eight, you could expect “Oh, could you please call back later, we’re just heading out.” Later, the phone was busy. Busy. Busy. Or “Sorry, the answering system is full. Please try your call again later.” Sometimes, though, the phone rang and my heart leapt as I tried to compose myself. Usually the phone kept ringing. So I called later. Just not at five or at six. That’s when they were coming in, making dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up after dinner. Finally! Finally I got through. “Oh, sorry, the position’s been filled already.”
Minding Ben Page 2
