Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
It was this sight that was before me when I asked my mother why she had named me Lucy. The first time I asked, she made no reply, pretending that she had not heard me. I asked again, and this time under her breath she said, “I named you after Satan himself. Lucy, short for Lucifer. What a botheration from the moment you were conceived.” I not only heard it quite clearly when she said it but I heard the words before they came out of her mouth. And yet I said, “What did you say?” But she wouldn’t repeat it; she only said, “Why do you torment me so?” and wouldn’t speak to me anymore. In the minute or so it took for all this to transpire, I went from feeling burdened and old and tired to feeling light, new, clean. I was transformed from failure to triumph. It was the moment I knew who I was. When I was quite young and just being taught to read, the books I was taught to read from were the Bible,
Paradise Lost,
and some plays by William Shakespeare. I knew well the Book of Genesis, and from time to time I had been made to memorize parts of
Paradise Lost.
The stories of the fallen were well known to me, but I had not known that my own situation could even distantly be related to them. Lucy, a girl’s name for Lucifer. That my mother would have found me devil-like did not surprise me, for I often thought of her as god-like, and are not the children of gods devils? I did not grow to like the name Lucy—I would have much preferred to be called Lucifer outright—but whenever I saw my name I always reached out to give it a strong embrace.
* * *
I got out of bed and stood on an old rug Mariah had given me. I wanted to stretch my arms up and out, but the room was cold, so I hugged myself. I walked through the apartment. Peggy was still asleep in her room; I could hear her snoring through her closed door. She had once gone to church every Sunday morning with her parents, and now said she would never do that again. In the bathroom I looked at my face in the mirror. I was twenty years old—not a long time to be alive—and yet there was not an ounce of innocence on my face. If I did not know everything yet, I would not be afraid to know
everything
as it came up. That life might be cold and hard would not surprise me.
I went to stare out the front window. When I looked down, I could see people, not as many as on a weekday, bustling about. I could see the roofs of other buildings far away. I could not see any trees. Everything I could see looked unreal to me; everything I could see made me feel I would never be part of it, never penetrate to the inside, never be taken in. A building across the way had a tower with a clock. I stared at the clock for a long time before I realized that it was broken, and it made me even more conscious of a feeling I had constantly now: my sense of time had changed, and I did not know if the day went by too quickly or too slowly.
Peggy came to look out the window, too. Was she seeing the same things as we looked out on the same view? Probably not. In the less than twenty-four hours we had been together under the same roof, our differences had been piling up. She preferred food that came in a tin, or already prepared, to food she had to cook herself. In general, she preferred having things done for her. She did not even know how to sew on a button. As she stood next to me at the window, she smelled of cigarettes and old food; she had not yet taken a bath or brushed her teeth. She rested her head on my shoulder and said, “Can you believe this? Can you believe we did it?” Her hair smelled of lemons—not real lemons, not lemons as I knew them to smell, not the sort of lemons that grew in my yard at home, but artificial lemons, made up in a laboratory. Peggy did not know what a real lemon smelled like. How am I going to get out of this?—the thought was welling up inside me, but I quickly placed a big rock on top of it. She lit a cigarette; I wished she had not done that. She wanted to make us cups of instant coffee, but I made us coffee with steaming-hot milk, the way Mariah had shown me. The afternoon passed. For a very long moment, I wondered what my mother was doing just then, and I saw her face; it was the face she used to have when she loved me without reservation.
Early that evening, Paul came by to see the apartment for the first time and to take us out to dinner. He brought us a large bouquet of small yellow roses, and he gave me a photograph he had taken of me standing over a boiling pot of food. In the picture I was naked from the waist up; a piece of cloth, wrapped around me, covered me from the waist down. That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him. I had been singing a song out loud. The words were: “Your crazy, crazy love / Is what I am dreaming of.” He thought I was in a certain state of mind, having to do only with him. But it was just a song I was singing; I meant nothing at all. He kissed me now in that possessive way, lingering over my mouth, pressing my whole body into his; and though I was not unmoved, it was not as special as he believed. I knew him better than he realized. He loved ruins; he loved the past but only if it had ended on a sad note, from a lofty beginning to a gradual, rotten decline; he loved things that came from far away and had a mysterious history. I could have told him that I had sized him up, but it was not as if he were going to matter to me for years and years to come. He took us to a restaurant where they served macaroni in many sizes and shapes and with all sorts of sauces, only it wasn’t called macaroni but a name foreign to me, and so I felt false saying it that way. We went back to the apartment, and I realized when I crossed the threshold that I did not think of it as home, only as the place where I now lived. Paul stayed in my bed with me. I had never had a man stay with me in my own bed. If I had imagined that such a thing would be a desirable landmark, it meant not much to me now; I only made a note of it.
* * *
On that Monday I started a new job. When I told Mariah that I was leaving, I did not know what I would do. In fact, there was nothing I could really do. I had no experience, except being a student and a nursemaid. But I was not afraid. Somehow I was not afraid. Paul knew a man who took pictures of food and other things with no life any longer in them, and the photographs were sold to magazines. This man said he would pay me a salary for answering his telephone, taking messages, answering correspondence, and running errands. It was a small salary, but I was grateful all the same. Peggy had been preparing me for the world of employee-employer relationships. She had shown me how to behave when applying for a job, how to show the proper amount of respect, submission, eagerness to please, even though in my heart I would not mean any of those things; she said that as soon as I had the job and was safely in it, I could let my real personality come out. I was not opposed to deception, but I would have preferred not to start out that way.
That Monday morning was like many to come, as the rest of the day was like many to come also. Peggy and I silently made our arrangements for time in the bathroom, time in front of the full-length mirror in the passageway, time in the kitchen preparing our breakfasts. At the corner, she hugged me, kissed my cheek, and wished me good luck. Something in that moment, something buried underneath, made tears come to our eyes, but before they could spill out we turned and went our separate ways. I walked along the streets, trying to hold my head up and observe everything, wanting to remember how everything looked and felt, but I knew even then that later on the things that would stick in my mind were not the things my eyes were fixed on. I got to my job, I said good morning to everyone, I sat at my desk. I was now living a life I had always wanted to live. I was living apart from my family in a place where no one knew much about me; almost no one knew even my name, and I was free more or less to come and go as pleased me. The feeling of bliss, the feeling of happiness, the feeling of longing fulfilled that I had thought would come with this situation was nowhere to be found inside me.
The man I worked for was named Timothy Simon. I called him Mr. Simon, not Tim, or even Timothy, as he begged me to do; this made him not call me “honey,” or “darling,” the two endearments he used when addressing any woman. He was a friend of my friend, he said, and so he and I should be friends also. But I did not know men very well then; the things I did know about them were not so very good. Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds. We did not become friends, but he interested me all the same. For he was the first person I had met who had deeply compromised himself. He did not want to be in a studio taking photographs of things with the life gone out of them; he had wanted to roam the world taking photographs of people who had suffered horribly and through no fault of their own. But the market for the work he really wanted to do was limited, he said, and this work that he did paid the bills. After he had said the word “bills” he pressed his lips together into one of those smiles that is not a smile at all but a way of warding off further inquiry.
Each morning I got up and had a breakfast that was becoming flimsier and flimsier until eventually it amounted to just a cup of tea. Peggy and I walked together as far as the corner and then parted, she heading north, I south. At the studio I performed my chores, some of them better than others; my typing skills, for instance, did not exist, but everyone agreed that I answered the phone better than it had ever been answered before. I took up the custom of drinking coffee all the time, though it tasted more like soiled water than the coffee I was used to. I ate lunches of cold moist food, sandwiches, or something that was a combination of gelatin and soured milk; I was sure none of it was good for me, and I liked that.
Mr. Simon allowed me to develop film in his darkroom when he was not using it. I did this in my own time. I had continued to take photographs, but I had no idea why. I even put aside a small amount of the money I earned so that I could take a course at night at a nearby university, but it was not with any ideas about my life in mind—it was only that I enjoyed doing this. Sometimes I would stay late at night, working in the darkroom, trying to get right a print of something I had made a snap of. I mostly liked to take pictures of people walking on the street. They were not pictures of individuals, just scenes of people walking about, hurrying to somewhere. I did not know them, and I did not care to. I would try and try to make a print that made more beautiful the thing I thought I had seen, that would reveal to me some of the things I had not seen, but I did not succeed.
I would walk home alone at night, the air a little thicker, a little warmer than when I had first started on this new phase of my life, for the winter had gone away. At home Peggy was already in her robe, her hair washed and smelling of that false lemon scent. She washed her hair every night and then slept with it wet to get an effect she wanted the next morning. It was after the first time I had come home and met her like this that she had told me she hoped to go to school to study hairdressing and beauty secrets. The way she put it, though, I found very touching, for she made it sound as if she were really going into public service. I knew then that I could never discuss with her my printmaking difficulties. Sometimes Paul would be there waiting for me; he waited for me in my bed, because Peggy felt his presence encroached on her privacy. I knew just what she meant. His presence in my bed was often not what I wanted at all, but unless a final goodbye came from him I had had enough of partings just now.
* * *
I was alone in the world. It was not a small accomplishment. I thought I would die doing it. I was not happy, but that seemed too much to ask for. I had seen Mariah. She had asked me to come and have dinner with her. We were friends again; we said how much we missed each other’s company. She looked even more thin than usual. She was alone, and she felt lonely. She lived with her four children, but children are not companions. She was going away, she said, far away, to live in a place of uncommon natural beauty. Everyone who lived in this place, she said, was filled with love and trust and greeted each other with the word “Peace.” We sat on the floor and ate our food. Around us were some of the remains of her marriage: wine and water goblets made from crystal, china plates decorated with real gold around the edges, real silverware. She was giving all of this away, along with many other things from her married life. She told me to take anything I wanted, but I wanted nothing. I could not imagine living with any of it; everything she had reminded me, as it must have reminded her, too, of the weight of the world. As a present, she gave me a notebook she had bought in Italy a long time before. She found it while going through her old things. The cover was of leather, dyed blood red, and the pages were white and smooth like milk. Around the time I was leaving her for the life I now led, I had said to her that my life stretched out ahead of me like a book of blank pages. As she gave me the book, she reminded me of that; and in the way so typical of her, the way that I had come to love, she spoke of women, journals, and, of course, history. When we said goodbye, I did not know if I would ever see her again.
I was alone at home one night. Peggy was on an outing by herself. Paul was on an outing by himself. I had noticed that this happened more and more; the two of them were busy at something, and I suspected it was with each other. I only hoped they would not get angry and disrupt my life when they realized I did not care. I did all sorts of little things: I washed my underwear, scrubbed the stove, washed the bathroom floor, trimmed my nails, arranged my dresser, made sure I had enough sanitary napkins. When I got into bed, I lay there with the light on for a long time doing nothing. Then I saw the book Mariah had given me. It was on the night table next to my bed. Beside it lay my fountain pen full of beautiful blue ink. I picked up both, and I opened the book. At the top of the page I wrote my full name: Lucy Josephine Potter. At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: “I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it.” And then as I looked at this sentence a great wave of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur.