Sometimes someone would go home with a busted-open foot, a sharp stone having made its mark. The time it happened for my grandmother she was walking softly on that foot when her mother asked her, “Wah wrong wid yuh foot, gal?” “Nothing, ma’am,” my grandmother said, and then she tried to walk normally on the foot, just until her mother shifted her attention to something else. Later my grandmother was made to reveal the foot, to lift it onto her mother’s lap, because her mother once again noticed how lightly the foot was touching the ground. Somehow my great-grandmother knew the cut was from a stone in the river, so even while holding my grandmother’s foot on her lap, she smacked the side of her daughter’s head, hard enough for tears, because she wasn’t allowed at the river without somebody grown watching. Later, though, my great-grandmother found a piece of aloe vera to rub on the cut. And that day under the tree, the memory of the whole incident made my grandmother smile.
* * *
—
My closest friend is a Chinese boy named Jason. His real name is something else. Every time we have a new class, the teacher will try to pronounce his Chinese name and Jason will say, “Just call me Jason.” We met freshman year in literature class because we sat next to each other, so we were always assigned to work together. When Jason asked where I was from and I said Jamaica, he complimented my English and asked what language Jamaicans speak. I laughed. That question is what I remember when I think about us first becoming friends.
We are the same: quiet, loyal, but mostly our commitment is because we were each other’s first friend in a new school. Sometimes we forget each other. Jason will hang out with some other Chinese boys, and I will hang out with the smaller amount of black boys in our school. The black boys like me, especially because sometimes what I say that isn’t meant to be funny is funny because I say it. Since I don’t want to bother with the pizza they are serving in the cafeteria, and I see Jason with some other Chinese boys eating pizza, I go to the gym to watch the basketball game.
Since the game has already started, I sit on the bleachers and watch. Nicolas looks up and asks if I want to play. “Next game,” I say, knowing that by the time the next game starts it will be time to head back to class. Before I moved to Brooklyn, I’d never played basketball before. I like that they want to include me and I’ve grown to enjoy watching them play when I have nothing better to do, but usually I try to get out of playing, because I know I’m no good.
If I could play basketball better or liked watching it more, my stepfather and I would get along better. We get on fine. Nothing is wrong. I just know I am not the son he was hoping for. Sometimes he sees me studying and says, “I could have used a little bit of that when I was your age,” but I know he is also saying, “You are not how I was expecting.” Sometimes I’ll sit for a while to watch a game with him and I can tell my presence pleases him. When he and my mother picked me up from the airport, he touched my shoulder and smiled; later he would laugh at my accent. My mother told me that because he is older than she is, he didn’t want to bother with any babies, which is why he was glad she already had a son. They married just before they sent for me, since my mother didn’t want me to think of her without respect. She said she couldn’t bring me into any living arrangement with a man she wasn’t married to. She is always telling me everything, even what she is ashamed for me to know. This is how my mother kneads the eight years away.
Sometimes I want to lie on my bed in the middle of the day, which is another thing my stepfather doesn’t understand about me. I just lie there thinking, with my hands folded under my head, and sometimes I fall asleep. When I lived with my grandmother I used to sit up in the mango tree to think, or when I had to memorize something for school. One time, my grandmother told me that the man next door complained that I was sitting in the mango tree because I wanted to peep on him. But when she told me this, she was smiling like she really wanted to laugh at the man. Because she did things the old way, she didn’t want to laugh at him in front of me, because she didn’t want me to forget I was a child. I smiled back at her, because this old man was known to be miserable and forever convinced that people were stealing from him, or watching him, or talking his business.
* * *
—
All those years later, my grandmother still went back to Mermaid River, though she hadn’t let the water touch her in years. All her life, she only called one place home, and she watched it build up and change so that some parts didn’t bear any resemblance. As a little girl walking to and from school, she’d become familiar with the concrete-and-zinc houses whose backyards dipped into the river. In the afternoons a woman used to sit on one of the verandas discreetly breastfeeding a fat baby. Next door lived a couple that seemed to enjoy cursing each other at their gate. A cherry tree leaned out of one of the yards, which attracted schoolchildren. When the houses and the inhabitants were gone, the government finally looked about the potholes in the roads. My grandmother packed her basket every morning and walked the twenty minutes to the river, where people will remember her, if they remember her, as an old woman selling food from a basket when they got off the bus, or stopped their car to see Mermaid River, maybe to take a photograph by the sign. Perhaps they heard the story given by the tour guide, or read it in a pamphlet, or knew it for themselves: an old-time story about how old-time people used to see a mermaid combing her hair on the bank of the river. The mermaid is said to have jumped back into the water when she realized she was being watched. WELCOME TO MERMAID RIVER and in smaller print, NO SWIMMING, THE ROCKS ARE SHARP. Always, someone will dip his or her foot into the water, since the sign only forbids swimming.
Only now does the history of that river sit on me. I realize that my grandmother had a world all her own, one that excluded me because I’d never thought of her as a little girl or as anyone other than the woman who took care of me until the real woman who should have been taking care of me was set up good enough to send for me.
The day after I helped my grandmother down at Mermaid River, I still had the fire lit under me, so I flung the coconuts against the cement at the back of the house. I cracked open tamarinds and, following my grandmother’s instructions, folded them into little balls with sugar. I got to school a few minutes early and was shocked to see Roger Boxx playing cricket. That was how he would level out his height; he turned out to be the strongest cricket player in our school. And he brought me along. He convinced the other boys to look past my overall mediocrity and my subpar batting skills, and then my mornings and afternoons were filled with cricket. The first few days, I felt guilty when I thought of my grandmother, an old woman, whom I should have been helping. But guilt often loses its flavor, I’ve found. My grandmother shook her head when I raced out of the house in the mornings. She said she should have known it was too good to be true, but I knew she missed me. The morning I started leaving early again, I left the coconuts on the dining table. I left them even though I knew they were laid out for me to crack.
* * *
—
I close my eyes on the plane. I see three old women under a tree, laughing a dancing laugh. My mind doesn’t recognize who they are and still I want to tell one of them, “I never seen you laugh like that but once the whole time I knew you.” I open my eyes and I can’t say whether I was dreaming or remembering, maybe both.
My cricket days ended when the school year came to a close because my mother finally sent for me. She had married a man for love. It also solved the problem of getting her papers. Now I am back, finally, for my grandmother’s funeral. In the city, the heat feels as if it wants to knock us down; that’s what my mother says, she says the heat wants to knock us down. I have been craving the sunshine the whole time I’ve been away. On our way from the airport, my mother convinces the taxi man to stop in the city. All because my stepfather wants oxtail from a restaurant he ate from when he visited the island with another woman long before he knew my mother. My stepfather says
he has been thinking of the oxtail for the past seven years. I see my mother look at him because she cooks oxtail in New York whenever he wants it. I see the look she gives him and I understand because I am her child. The look passes, and then my mother is telling my stepfather to buy enough oxtail for all of us.
This is how my mother and I are alone in Kingston, Jamaica, such a small place on the globe in my world history class that if you aren’t careful you can easily miss it. At that market, there are so many people, most of them trying to sell us something. There is a man selling string crafts, he has them stacked up on top of his head and he is shouting that the crafts are patterned into the hummingbird, the national bird. There is a woman selling bammy from a basket on her head. There are fruit stands and men roasting meat, corn, and yams. My mother’s head is turning to look at everything and everyone because she so badly wants to use the spending money she budgeted.
Long after my mother and I have eaten, my stepfather is still sucking the oxtail bones.
The taxi is driving my mother, my stepfather, and me to my grandmother’s house, where we will meet relatives before the funeral tomorrow. Even though I’m waiting to see Mermaid River, I almost miss it, because on the other side of the street, there is a tree, and behind the tree is a blue house that used to be painted yellow. There is no longer a sign that reads, WE SELL HOT GOOD FOOD. There are no old women laughing a dancing laugh.
I can’t remember this, but my grandmother used to say I would sleep on her breast after my mother left. I cried when she put me in bed by myself, so she put me in bed next to her. She said I used to fall asleep with my head on one of her breasts. This embarrassed me because it was a story that my grandmother repeated often to her friends and I realized early that old-women breasts were something I should stay far away from. I didn’t know what about the story pleased her to retell it. Now I think maybe she was trying to say “Listen, to how this boy loves me.”
Valerie O’Riordan
Bad Girl
MISS YORK—the school counselor; a meddling, newt-faced wench—gave my stepdad, Simon, the flier: a therapeutic speech and drama course in St. Richard’s Church Hall, Cleaverton.
“He’s very good!” she said. “It’s all about confidence, you know: forming positive attachments with one’s peers! Right, Cheryl?”
I grunted. This was Parents’ Night, eighteen-point-five months since Ma’s funeral. I was down on the school’s records as withdrawn/hostile/uncooperative, but mainly, in block capitals, ABSENT. According to the deputy head, it was therapeutic speech and drama or bust, and Simon was panicked.
He flipped the page: on the other side was an ad for York’s Hypersexual Disorder Support Group! “What,” he said, “in case the attachments get too fuckin positive? How confident are yeh hopin she’ll get?”
York reddened, glanced at me. “That’s not really—”
“Ah, God,” he went, “I’m jokin, amn’t I? She’s barely fifteen.” He scratched his beard. “Well. I suppose we could give it a shot. Eh, Cher? Pet?” He slapped my back. “Lady Macbeth, innit?”
York smiled anxiously—first at Simon, then at me. The deputy head was surveilling our table from his podium at the far side of the assembly hall.
“All right,” I went, at last. Fed up. “Fine! God, whatever.”
* * *
—
So: me, Mondays, four thirty p.m.—Malachy Mahoney’s Am Dram Family.
Malachy was a dramatherapist and an RSC fanatic. According to York’s sales pitch, he took referrals from shrinks and teachers across the city, although, after my first session, I wondered if any of them had ever actually seen him in action—romping sweatily about the overheated hall, trilling in Ye Olde English at his “behaviorally challenged” students to emote! And the students! A sorry band of also-rans, I thought; a social services wet dream.
They were rehearsing Pygmalion, Malachy explained, and he stuck me with this gawky sixteen-year-old lump from Overhulme College—Arthur Leese—to run some lines. But as soon as Malachy had pranced off, Arthur ditched the script; he wanted to tell me about insect reproduction. This, he explained, was his calling.
“It’s f-fascinating,” he said, “it’s all about organ p-palpation!” He clutched my arm.
“Ew, bug-face!” A girl, tall, a little older than I was—Arthur’s age, maybe—and wearing, like me, a Cleaverton Comp cardigan, planted herself between us: she flicked her chin at Arthur. “Get your mandibles off her, hey?”
He flushed, scowled, scuttled behind the drop curtains. The girl laughed. She had a high forehead and pocked cheeks smoothed out with thick cream foundation, and her hair was chopped to ear level: her breath was sweet, like sugared-up Irn-Bru; her vowels drawn out like strawberry gum.
“So,” she said, “Chloe says you live in a pub?”
Chloe? I glanced around. Chloe Regan: of course. Chloe was on her third go-round in Year Ten up at the Comp; this time, we shared a form tutor. I’d heard she’d drunk her own piss once to get out of a maths GCSE paper.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “The Glory Hole. But, like, not in it—above it? My dad—my stepdad?—he’s the landlord.”
“Amazing! And, what, your mother’s the barmaid?”
“Well, no,” I said. “She’s actually dead?”
“Got hit by a bus, din’t she—Cher’s mam?” said Chloe, bouncing up to us, ignoring my scowl. “Like, smack!” She drove her fist into her other palm.
I nodded, curtly, though I wasn’t so sure about the smack: I’d seen Ma’s arms flying up, is all, one of her shoes coming off as the bus carried her along, pure terror buckling her face. We’d been on the way to Tesco’s—we’d been rowing about packed lunches and she’d stepped off the curb without looking.
“Oh, fuck.” The other girl had started to laugh. “Oh, man, I’m sorry! Oh my God.”
* * *
—
And that’s how I met Tan. Tania Malone. It turned out Tan was lacking in “positive attachments,” too; her da’d been jailed for, like, fraud—he’d brought down a charity, or something; it’d been in the papers, according to Chloe. Anyway, Tan’s ma had pulled her from the über-swish St. Fidelma’s Grammar in Scranton and sent her instead to scummy old Cleaverton Comp for Girls—and now Tan had York on her case, as well; like me, she was flagged as “troubled.” The difference was, Tan was psyched to be here, in Malachy’s Academy for Misanthropic Freaks: she wanted to act. She was going to LA, she told us; she’d get Golden Globes, she’d feature on E! News—she wasn’t clomping about bloody Cleaverton forever, like an absolute spod. She said this glaring at Arthur Leese, who was sitting alone on the edge of the stage dissecting his egg sandwich.
Then, my second week, she invited herself round the Hole for tea.
Simon was exuberant: “I fuckin knew it, Cher—look at yeh! Visitors! Yer fuckin blossomin!”
He raided the carvery, laid us out a greasy binge of onion rings and pork chops, shepherded Tan around the Hole on the Grand Tour: the keg store, the snug, the Smoking Hole (a rickety balcony over the bin yard with a corrugated plastic roof).
“We do karaoke,” he said, “an there’s a Singles’ Night, an—”
“Amazing,” said Tan. “And, Cher, what do you do? Like, mix cocktails?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, well, I—”
I looked to Simon for help—it was embarrassing enough I had to live here, without admitting that all he’d let me do was soap the floors—but he looked flummoxed. She gazed at us, we both floundered, and then the buzzer sounded—a delivery. A delivery! I snatched the docket book from the bar.
“I liaise with the suppliers,” I said. “For the deliveries. Don’t I, Si?”
“Oh,” he went, “well, if yeh—I mean, yeah, that’s what—”
“Super!” said Tan. “Very real-life.”
She followed me downstairs,
to where old Jim Lanigan, the butcher, was rolling a fag as his apprentice, Fredek, a shaven-headed skinny Hungarian lad in dungarees, heaved pallet after pallet of bloody lamb shanks out of the truck and into our freezer.
“Cheryl! And Cheryl’s friend, hello!” Jim jumped up, spilling his tobacco. Sometimes he’d offer me a smoke: I’d always refused, but today, I thought, I might—
Only this time he wasn’t asking; he was ogling Tan, and then snipping at his helper: “Fredek! Say hello to the girls, will you, for fuck’s sake!”
Fredek was snaggletoothed, twentyish, with a shiny bruise on his left cheekbone and a long, thin nose. He looked us up and down—Tan, anyway; I was old news—and twitched his upper lip. A smile? A grimace? I couldn’t tell and I didn’t care; he was a freakoid perv, a meat-stinker. I saw Tan note his name tag—F. Rijj—and grin.
After they’d gone, she gave my cheek a pinch. “Seriously, girl?” she said. “This place is the absolute bomb. You have it made.”
Well, I thought, maybe, actually, I had. That night I felt unexpectedly jaunty. And Simon was jubilant:
“There yeh go,” he cried, “positive fuckin attachments! Just like yer woman said! Yeh see, Cher? We’re fuckin laughin!”
* * *
—
Within a fortnight, Tan was sleeping over twice, three times a week—begging Si to teach her to pour porter, borrowing his laptop to watch Method-acting tutorials on YouTube, asking me for loans of knickers and pads. Simon wanted to know if all this—the pub, the overnights—was all right with her ma, but Tan, who never spoke about her family, just shrugged, and he let it pass by: I was going into school again, wasn’t it? I was, like, smiling.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 18
