Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
Each day, after breakfast, at around ten o’clock or so, the children—Louisa, May, Jane, and Miriam—and I would set out for the lake. I would make a lunch for us, sandwiches, and we would walk there in our bathing suits and shirts—a long walk through a thickly wooded area. The ground was uneven, sometimes going up, sometimes going down, and always we met a congregation of biting insects. The children were used to it, but I was not, and I would complain from beginning to end, coming and going. We could have driven to the lake, but I could not drive. Mariah had specifically requested a girl who could swim and drive a car; but through the correspondence that served as an interview she had got to like me so much that she thought we could work around it.
I carried Miriam on my back. She hated the walk, and after going a short way she looked so miserable that I would give her a ride on my back. I loved Miriam from the moment I met her. She was the first person I had loved in a very long while, and I did not know why. I loved the way she smelled, and I used to sit her on my lap with my head bent over her and breathe her in. She must have reminded me of myself when I was that age, for I treated her the way I remembered my mother treating me then. When I heard her cry out at night, I didn’t mind at all getting up to comfort her, and if she didn’t want to be alone I would bring her into bed with me; this always seemed to make her feel better, and she would clasp her little arms around my neck as she went back to sleep. Whenever I was away from them, she was the person I missed and thought of all the time. I couldn’t explain it. I loved this little girl. And so I didn’t mind carrying her through the woods, all forty pounds of her, for fifteen minutes.
I hated walking through the woods; it was gloomy and damp, for the sun could hardly shine through the tops of the trees. Without wanting to, I would imagine that there was someone or something where there was nothing. I was reminded of home. I was reminded that I came from a place where there was no such thing as a “real” thing, because often what seemed to be one thing turned out to be altogether different. When I was at an age where I could still touch my mother with ease, I used to like to sit in her lap and caress a large scar she had on the right side of her face, at the place where her temple and hairline met. When she was a girl growing up in the country, she had to walk a long distance to school, going through part of a rain forest and crossing two small rivers. One day, on her way home, while going through the rain forest, she saw a monkey sitting in a tree. She did not like the way the monkey stared at her, and so she picked up a stone and threw it at the monkey. The stone missed, because the monkey shifted out of its way. This went on for a few days: she passed the monkey and felt that she did not like the way it stared at her, she threw a stone at it, the monkey shifted and missed being struck. One day when she threw the stone, the monkey caught it and threw it back. When the stone struck my mother, the blood poured out of her as if she were not a human being but a goblet with no bottom to it. Everyone thought that she might not stop bleeding until she died, and then that it was a miracle she survived, though the truth lay in her own mother’s skill at dealing with such events.
That was just one of many stories I knew about walking through places where trees live, and none of them had a happy outcome. And so as soon as we started our walk through the woods I would strike up a conversation—either with the children or, if they were not interested, with myself. Eventually I got so used to being afraid to walk through the woods that I did it by myself and began to see that there was something beautiful about it; and I had one more thing to add to my expanding world.
When the children and I got to the lake, we would run into the water to cool ourselves off. We would then explore various parts of the beach, eat our lunch, play in the water; I would read to them. Not long after we started our daily routine of going to the lake, we were sitting in the shade of a bush I did not know the name of, looking at people going by. Louisa and May made up stories about them as they passed; the stories were all about what the passerby’s life would be like as a certain sort of dog. They were such imaginative and funny stories that I laughed until my jaws ached. We saw a woman coming toward us; she had long black hair that kept falling into her face, and she kept pushing it back with both her hands. They decided she was a Labrador and started to say things about “Labbie.” As the woman got closer, we saw that it was their mother’s best friend, Dinah. We all started to laugh at the mistake, and Dinah, seeing us, thought it was the pleasure of seeing her that made us laugh so. She was that sort of person—someone who thought her presence made other people beside themselves with happiness.
I had met Dinah the night after we arrived here on our holiday, and I did not like her. This was because the first thing she said to me when Mariah introduced us was “So you are from the islands?” I don’t know why, but the way she said it made a fury rise up in me. I was about to respond to her in this way: “Which islands exactly do you mean? The Hawaiian Islands? The islands that make up Indonesia, or what?” And I was going to say it in a voice that I hoped would make her feel like a piece of nothing, which was the way she had made me feel in the first place. But Mariah, who by then knew me so well, started to clear her throat loudly, as if a frog the size of a moon was caught in it. Later, when Mariah and I were having our before-we-turn-in conversation, she expressed the hope that I would like Dinah. She said Dinah was a wonderful person—so giving, so full of love. She said, “What I like the most about Dinah is how she embraces life.” And this almost rushed out of me: “Yes, you mean your life. She embraces your life.” But I caught myself, for if Mariah had asked me what I meant I would not have been able to explain. I did not like the kind of women Dinah reminded me of. She was very beautiful and it mattered a great deal to her. Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away—your beauty would go away, and there wouldn’t be anything you could do to bring it back. I could see that Dinah was attached to her beauty: she stroked her hair, from the crown of her head all the way down, constantly; she would put her hands to her mouth, not in modesty but as a gesture to draw attention to her lips, which were perfectly shaped, the sort of lips used in advertisements for lipstick. I did not like this kind of woman, but it only showed what a superior person Mariah was that she saw in Dinah not a woman who envied her but a friend full of goodness and love.
Dinah now showered the children with affection—ruffling hair, pinching cheeks, picking Miriam up out of my lap, and ignoring me. To a person like Dinah, someone in my position is “the girl”—as in “the girl who takes care of the children.” It would never have occurred to her that I had sized her up immediately, that I viewed her as a cliché, a something not to be, a something to rise above, a something I was very familiar with: a woman in love with another woman’s life, not in a way that inspires imitation but in a way that inspires envy. I had to laugh. She had her own husband, she had her own children (two boys, two girls), she had her own house in the city and one on the lake—she had the same things Mariah had, and still she liked Mariah’s things better. How to account for that.
* * *
The times that I loved Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother. The times that I did not love Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother. She was standing at the kitchen table, a table she had found in an old farmhouse in Finland when she accompanied Lewis on a business trip to Scandinavia and liked so much that she bought it and had it shipped back home (when she told me this, it amazed me to think that someone could find an old piece of kitchen furniture at one end of the world and like it so much they would go to so much trouble to make sure it was always in their possession), surrounded by enormous blooms of pink and white flowers. I was supposed to be upstairs giving the children their baths, but seeing Mariah look so beautiful, I couldn’t tear myself away. How many times had I seen my mother surrounded by plants of one kind or another, arranging them into some pattern, training them to grow a certain way; and they were the only times I can remember my mother serene, motionless, for she had the ability to appear to be moving even though she was standing still. Mariah reminded me more and more of the parts of my mother that I loved. Her hands were just like my mother’s—large, with long fingers and square fingernails; their hands looked like instruments for arranging things beautifully. Sometimes, when they wished to make a point, they would hold their hands in the air, and suddenly their hands were vessels made for carrying something special; at other times their hands made you think they excelled at playing some musical instrument, though in fact the two of them were dunces at anything musical. Mariah, now mistaking my intense study of her for curiosity about the flowers, held them up in the crystal vase in which they were arranged and said, “Peonies—aren’t they gorgeous?” I agreed that they were and said I did not know a climate like this could produce flowers that bloomed like that, bloomed with such abandon, as if there were no tomorrow. Mariah placed the flowers before me and told me to smell them. I did, and I told her that this smell made you want to lie down naked and cover your body with these petals so you could smell this way forever. When I said this, Mariah opened her eyes wide and drew in her breath in a mock-schoolmistress way, and then she laughed so hard she had to put the vase of flowers down, for she was afraid she would break it. This was the sort of time I wished I could have had with my mother, but, for a reason not clear to me, it was not allowed.
* * *
Before we came to the lake, Mariah had worried that I would be lonely, that I would feel isolated, that I would miss my friend Peggy. She did not like Peggy. Peggy smoked cigarettes, used slang, wore very tight jeans, did not comb her hair properly or often, wore shiny fake-snakeskin boots, and generally had such an air of mystery that it made people who did not know her well nervous. I had met Peggy in the park once when I was taking Miriam for a walk. Peggy was with her cousin, also an
au pair,
a girl from Ireland. Peggy hated her cousin and only saw her because of family obligation. They were opposites; the cousin was someone who thought a good outward appearance and proper behavior should carry the day. I had seen the cousin a few times with the children she took care of; immediately recognizing each other as foreigners, we tried to form a friendship. It was not a success. Only after Peggy described her to me did I see why. The funny thing was that Peggy and I were not alike, either, but that is just what we liked about each other; what we didn’t have in common were things we approved of anyway. She hated to read even a newspaper. She hated sunlight and wore sunshades all the time, even at night and indoors. She hated children and had nothing but hatred and scorn to heap on her own childhood. She hated silence, and she hated sitting still and looking at nothing in particular. She lived at home with her mother and father, and she said that I could never meet them because they were extremely stupid and hated everyone who did not come from Ireland or someplace near there. She carried in her wallet a photograph of three sisters, singers in a group. I could see that she wanted to look like them: always posing her mouth in a pout, trying to give the same impression of a difficult and hard-to-please woman. But she wasn’t a singer, and she wasn’t difficult or hard to please. She worked for the government, in the motor-registry department, stamping approval or disapproval on documents as they passed her way. She lived far from the city where I lived with Mariah and Lewis, and where she worked, so she had to travel by train every day. When I first saw her, she was standing off to one side, apart from everybody, her shoulders hitched up and bent forward, sucking in heavily the smoke of a Lucky Strike cigarette. I recognized the cigarettes instantly, for they were the same sort my father smoked. I had never seen anyone female smoke this kind of cigarette before. It was something I had always wanted to do, and so I started to smoke them also; I was not good at inhaling the smoke, though, and soon gave up the whole idea. When her cousin introduced us, she had lowered her sunshades down her nose and looked over them at me. She said, “Hi,” and it sounded strange, as if her voice box were covered over with cobwebs. She started to tell me about a long trip she had just taken, and then in the middle of it she stopped and said, “You’re not from Ireland, are you? You talk funny.” And I laughed and laughed, because in a long time that was the funniest thing anyone had said to me. People from Ireland, after all, did not look like me. We exchanged telephone numbers, and after that we spoke to each other at least once a day, sometimes more. We saw each other every weekend and sometimes during the week. We told each other everything, even when we knew that the other didn’t quite understand what was really meant.
This new friendship of mine drove Mariah crazy. She couldn’t tell me what to do, exactly, because she wasn’t my parent, but she gave me lectures about what a bad influence a person like Peggy could be. She said that Peggy was never to come to the house and should never be around the children. But one weekend, a Saturday night, after Peggy and I had been carousing around town, going to movies and visiting record stores and buying marijuana and smoking it by ourselves because all the boys we saw we thought were too dangerous to go home with, she missed the last train of the night and so had to sleep with me in my room. I could have asked her to leave early in the morning, before Mariah could find out she was there, but I didn’t. I told Mariah about Peggy’s missing her train, and Mariah said, “I guess you like Peggy a lot, and, you know, you really should have a friend.” This was a way in which Mariah was superior to my mother, for my mother would never come to see that perhaps my needs were more important than her wishes.
Now I missed Peggy, especially from early evening until I went to bed. We tried to talk every day—she would call from her office, on the government telephone—but it wasn’t the same. Mariah, noticing how I felt, thought it would be good for me to meet people—her friends and their children who were my age. She and Lewis gave a party.