Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
One of my pastimes at home, my old home, had been to sit and look through a catalogue from which, each year, my father ordered a new felt hat and a pair of dress shoes. In the catalogue were pictures of clothes on mannequins, but the mannequins had no heads or limbs, only torsos. I used to wonder what face would fit on the torso I was looking at, how such a face would look as it broke out in a smile, how it would look back at me if suddenly we were introduced. Now I knew, for these people, all standing there, holding drinks in their hands, reminded me of the catalogue; their clothes, their features, the manner in which they carried themselves were the example all the world should copy. They had names like Peters, Smith, Jones, and Richards—names that were easy on the tongue, names that made the world spin. They had somehow all been to the islands—by that, they meant the place where I was from—and had fun there. I decided not to like them just on that basis; I wished once again that I came from a place where no one wanted to go, a place that was filled with slag and unexpectedly erupting volcanoes, or where a visitor was turned into a pebble on setting foot there; somehow it made me ashamed to come from a place where the only thing to be said about it was “I had fun when I was there.” Dinah came with her husband and her brother, and it was her brother that Mariah had really wanted me to meet. She had said that he was three years older than I was, that he had just returned from a year of traveling in Africa and Asia, and that he was awfully worldly and smart. She did not say he was handsome, and when I first saw him I couldn’t tell, either; but when we were introduced, the first thing he said to me was “Where in the West Indies are you from?” and that is how I came to like him in an important way.
His name was Hugh. I liked the sound of his voice, not because it reminded me of anything in particular—I just liked it. I liked his eyes—they were a plain brown. I liked his mouth and imagined it kissing me everywhere; it was just an ordinary mouth. I liked his hands and imagined them caressing me everywhere; they were not unusual in any way. His hair lay on his head unevenly, like pieces of mercerized cotton cut at random lengths, and it was the color of a warm brown coat. He was about five inches shorter than I was, and I especially liked that. He smelled like sandalwood. I knew this smell because my father had a shaving cream that he used on Sundays, and it was the same scent. As soon as we met, we spoke only to each other. Nothing we said to each other was meant to leave a lasting impression. Eventually, we were sitting on grass behind a huge hedge of wild roses, away from everybody. For a long time we said nothing, and then Hugh said, “Isn’t it the most blissful thing in the world to be away from everything you have ever known—to be so far away that you don’t even know yourself anymore and you’re not sure you ever want to come back to all the things you’re a part of?” I knew so well just what he meant, and it made me sigh and press myself against him as if he were the last thing in the world. He kissed me on my face and ears and neck and in my mouth. If I enjoyed myself beyond anything I had known so far, it must have been because such a long time had passed since I had been touched in that way by anyone; it must have been because I was so far from home. I was not in love.
We were still lying on the grass. We had no clothes on. It had gotten quite dark, but the air was still very hot. The wild roses perfumed the air in a sickly but delicious way. I was feeling that I was made up only of good things when suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to protect myself, something Mariah had told me over and over that I must remember to do. She had taken me to her own doctor, and every time I left the house on an outing with Peggy, Mariah would remind me to make sure I used the things he had given me. My period was due in two weeks, and the thought that it might not show up made me stiffen suddenly. I felt like running, running for the two weeks; at the end of this time, either my period would show up or I would die from exhaustion. I shivered so hard that Hugh noticed and said, “What’s the matter?” and pulled me back down next to him. He buried his face in the hair under my arms; he took first one breast, then the other into his mouth as if he meant to swallow them whole. He meant to make me feel again the thing that had just happened between us, but now I was only reminded of my past, filled with confusion and dread.
When I was around twelve years old or so, I was given three yards of cloth as a present. It was an ugly piece of cloth; it had printed on it a design of brown boxes with the word “Pandora” written across each one and a black-haired beast emerging from the open lid. With my mother’s permission, I had it made up in a dress not appropriate to wear to church but appropriate to wear to a fete: no sleeves and a sweetheart neck. One day I was putting on that dress, and while my arms were raised high above my head I saw this amazing thing—a brownish, curly patch of hair growing under each arm. I was shocked at this sign of something I thought would never happen to me, a sign that certain parts of my life could no longer be kept secret from my mother, or people in general; anyone could look at me and know things about me. I got a washrag and rubbed hard under my arms, but the hair just stayed there; it would not go away. I had known that, but I could not prevent myself from trying. I then thought that if I had hair growing in one place, perhaps I had hair growing in other places also, and I put my hands in my underpants and felt. My worst fears were true; I had hair growing there also—a patch of small, short curls, like hair on a baby’s head. Sometimes, when I would find myself in a mess that left me very disturbed, I would say to myself, I am going to wake up now, and I would wake. But this was not a dream, this was my real life. I was undergoing a change, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Not long after, I was about to take my bath in preparation for school. I had been feeling odd while going about my morning chores, and had complained to my mother about an ache in my stomach and a chill. I got undressed for my bath. I removed my underpants. My underpants were stained with a rust color, but I didn’t recognize this color as blood. It frightened me all the same, and I immediately cried out for my mother to come and help me. When she saw my predicament, she laughed and laughed. It was a kind laugh, a reassuring laugh. And then she said that finding blood in my underpants might be something one day I would get down on my knees and pray for.
I did not spend the next two weeks worrying about my period. If it did not show up, there was no question in my mind that I would force it to do so. I knew how to do this. Without telling me exactly how I might miss a menstrual cycle, my mother had shown me which herbs to pick and boil, and what time of day to drink the potion they produced, to bring on a reluctant period. She had presented the whole idea to me as a way to strengthen the womb, but underneath we both knew that a weak womb was not the cause of a missed period. She knew that I knew, but we presented to each other a face of innocence and politeness and even went so far as to curtsy to each other at the end. The only thing now was that if I did need those herbs, they did not grow where I was and I would have to write to my mother and ask her for them. That would have been hard to do; just my asking for these particular herbs would let her know exactly what I had been up to, and I had always thought I would rather die than let her see me in such a vulnerable position—unmarried and with child.
For the first time in a long time, I began to look forward. It wasn’t that I thought each new day would bring unlimited pleasure and happy surprises; I just had a feeling, a wonderful feeling, inside of me. If someone had asked me, I would have had to say, Yes, life isn’t so bad after all. It was Mariah who asked me if the source of all this was Hugh—she had caught me whistling—and when I told her no, I could see that she did not altogether believe me. What made sense to her was that if you liked being with someone in that particular way, then you must be in love with him. But I was not in love with Hugh. I could tell that being in love would complicate my life just now. I was only half a year free of some almost unbreakable bonds, and it was not in my heart to make new ones. I could take in all of this very easily. Just thinking about his hands and his mouth could make me feel as if I were made up of an extravagant piece of silk; yet if I were told that he had left unexpectedly on a trip and would not be back for a long time, I would have to say too bad, for I had not yet grown tired of him, and accept it with no more than a shrug of my shoulders. For already I could see ahead to the fifteenth of September, the day when I would bend my knee a little so that I could kiss Hugh’s cheek, step into a car, and then wave and wave as it drove away, until he was out of sight. To latch on to this boy—man, I suppose—who liked the way the tightly curled hair on my head and other parts of my body trapped his fingers was not for someone my age, and certainly not for me.
* * *
Mariah and Dinah and other people they knew had become upset by what seemed to them the destruction of the surrounding countryside. Many houses had been built on what they said used to be farmland. Mariah showed me a place that had been an open meadow, a place where as a girl she went looking for robin’s eggs and picking wildflowers. She moaned against this vanishing idyll so loudly that Louisa, who was just at the age where if you are a girl you turn against your mother, said, “Well, what used to be here before this house we are living in was built?” It was a question I had wanted to ask, but I couldn’t bear to see the hurt such a question would bring to Mariah’s face.
Mariah decided to write and illustrate a book on these vanishing things and give any money made to an organization devoted to saving them. Like her, all of the members of this organization were well off but they made no connection between their comforts and the decline of the world that lay before them. I could have told them a thing or two about it. I could have told them how nice it was to see them getting a small sip of their own bad medicine. Some days she would go out from early morning until late afternoon sketching specimens of all sorts in their various habitats; she gave me the impression that everything was on its last legs and any day now would disappear from the face of the earth. Mariah was the kindest person I had ever known. Her concern was not an unexpected part of her; it could be said that her kindness was the result of her comfortable circumstances, but many people in her position were not as kind and considerate as she was. And that was the reason I couldn’t bring myself to point out to her that if all the things she wanted to save in the world were saved, she might find herself in reduced circumstances; I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to examine Lewis’s daily conversations with his stockbroker, to see if they bore any relation to the things she saw passing away forever before her eyes. Ordinarily that was just the sort of thing I enjoyed doing, but I had grown to love Mariah so much.
* * *
Mariah and Lewis had been having a disagreement over what animal was eating the new shoots of a vegetable Lewis had planted in a small patch of dirt that he had turned over and made good for growing vegetables. Lewis really had nothing to do when he was here; he read papers he had sent from the office, and all sorts of books, but being here in a house that overlooked a lake was not his idea. I never got the feeling from him, as I did from Mariah, that this was the only place in the world to be from the middle of June to the middle of September. And so, I suppose to amuse himself, he had made a little garden, and he grew in it green beans, spinach, lettuce, and some tomato plants that bore fruit the size of grapes. He had done this for years now, and always he had enjoyed all the fruits, so to speak, of his labor. But this time, as each little shoot of something made an appearance, an animal would come at night and eat the shoots. Lewis built a fence around the garden, but the animal got under it and ate everything down to the ground. Lewis was sure it was a family of rabbits that Mariah and the children had grown fond of and encouraged to come up into the house.
We were sitting at the dining table, all of us, just finishing a delicious pie of red berries that Mariah had made, when Lewis mentioned again the destruction of his vegetables. Mariah, trying to turn the conversation away from the rabbits, said that a certain sort of bug will slice off the tops of young shoots, but that of course Lewis should avoid pesticides and find a natural antidote, an enemy of this bug. A minute or so went by, allowing the subject of destroyed vegetables to pass from everybody’s mind, and then Mariah told, with actual jubilation in her voice, of a sighting of yet another family of rabbits living near the entrance of the driveway; how astonishing and incredible they were, she said, coming up to a few inches from her and looking her right in the eye as if they meant to say something, to tell her the secrets of their existence. Lewis said, “Jesus Christ! The goddam rabbits!” and he made his hands into two fists, lifted them up in the air, and brought them down on the table with such force that everything on the table—eating utensils, plates, cups in saucers, the empty pie dish—rattled and shook as if in an earthquake, and one glass actually tipped over, rolled off the table, and shattered. We all looked at Lewis; in the long silence that followed, that was all we seemed able to do—just look at Lewis. In the silence, a world of something must have appeared; the children were too young to get to the bottom of it, and I was too unfamiliar with a situation like this. But it made Mariah force both her hands into her mouth as if desperate to keep something from coming out. I thought, In the history of civilization, they mention everything; even the water glass shattered on the floor—something is said about that—but there is not one word on the misery to be found at a dining-room table. We all sat there locked up in that moment, and without a doubt it meant something different to everybody, none of it good. The spell was broken by Miriam, who started to cry; she cried and cried, the way children will when they know something is wrong but not exactly what. I picked her up to comfort her, and kissed her little head, but I might as well have been doing all that to myself, for I felt as if I were about to lose something I had just found. I gathered the children, and we went upstairs to my room and played a game of gin rummy.