Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
One day Mariah persuaded Lewis to go to the marshlands with her. This was the day I received the tenth letter from my mother to which I would make no reply; as with the nine others before it, I would not even break the seal on the envelope. I believe I heard them drive away; I believe I heard the sound of the car’s wheels on the dirt road; I believe so, but I could not really say for sure; it’s possible that I just took those things for granted. Later, I wondered if just the way the car door had sounded as it slammed shut, or the way the car’s wheels sounded as they ran over the dirt road, should have told me to expect something. The children and I were getting ready to go to the lake when we heard a scream, and we ran to a window that looked out in the direction from which the scream came. We saw Mariah running back toward the house, crying, her hands moving about in the air as if she were conducting a choir. She ran into the house, and just as we were about to go downstairs to see what was the matter, Lewis came into view. He was walking slowly, and in his hands he carried the limp body of a small animal, a rabbit. He had a funny look on his face; he looked like a boy in a picture, a boy who had placed a live mouse under his mother’s saucer and, on getting the desired result, pretended not to know what all the commotion was about. Lewis walked along in this way, and then something made him look up, and he saw our five faces framed behind the large glass-paned window. He stopped for a moment; whatever he saw in his children’s faces I do not know, but I suddenly felt sorry for him. He looked lost, unhappy, as if he might remember this as one of the most unhappy days in his entire life.
They buried the rabbit in a ceremony I could not bring myself to attend. The ceremony was another one of those untruths that I had only just begun to see as universal to life with mother, father, and some children. I had thought the untruths in family life belonged exclusively to me and my family, with my mother’s unopened letters representing evidence of the most important kind. Mariah and Lewis told the children that the car had run over the rabbit by accident, and they said it in such a way that I could only think they wanted the children to believe the car was driving itself. But when the children were out of the room Mariah would accuse Lewis of running over the rabbit on purpose, and Lewis would say that it really had been an accident, that the very path he took to avoid hitting the rabbit was just where the rabbit ran. Then Mariah would say, “But you aren’t sorry that you did it?” and he would say, “No, I am not sorry that it happened.” It was an important difference, but in a situation like that, how could Mariah be expected to see it?
* * *
Everything remains the same and yet nothing is the same. When this revelation was new to me, years ago, I told it to my mother, and when I saw how deeply familiar she was with it I was speechless. One day, Louisa said to me, after reading a letter from one of her school chums, “My mother and father love each other very much.” She said it with such force that I looked at her closely, for I thought she would reveal something. And what made her say that—something in the letter, or something in the air? Hours before, I had walked into a room and heard Mariah say to Lewis, “What’s wrong with us?” Then their friend Dinah came in; she was on her daily walk and was stopping by to say hello. Before Dinah came in, Mariah and Lewis had been standing there like two beings from different planets looking for evidence of a common history and finding none. It was horrible. As soon as Dinah came, Lewis’s mood changed. He was no longer in the same room with Mariah; he was in the same room with Dinah. Lewis and Dinah started to laugh at the same things, and their peals of laughter would fly up into the air wrapped around each other like a toffee twist. Mariah could not see this and tried to join in, but every time she started a sentence about one thing, they started on another, completely different subject. This all happened very quickly, and probably if I had not disliked Dinah so much I would not have noticed it. But I did notice it, and it seemed important, like a small part of a map, isolated and blown up large in the hope that it might yield a clue. Mariah and I left that room together, but I had forgotten to take with me what I had gone there to get in the first place, and so I went back. I saw Lewis standing behind Dinah, his arms around her shoulders, and he was licking her neck over and over again, and how she liked it. This was not a show, this was something real; and I thought of Mariah and all those books she had filled with photographs that began with when she and Lewis first met, in Paris in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower or in London in the shadow of Big Ben or somewhere foolish like that. Mariah then wore her yellow hair long and unkempt, and did not shave her legs or underarms, as a symbol of something, and was not a virgin and had not been for a long time. And there were pictures of them getting married against their parents’ wishes, behind their parents’ backs, and of their children just born in hospitals, and birthday parties and trips to canyons and deserts and mountains, and all sorts of other events. But here was a picture that no one would ever take—a picture that would not end up in one of those books, but a significant picture all the same.
A woman like Dinah was not unfamiliar to me, nor was a man like Lewis. Where I came from, it was well known that some women and all men in general could not be trusted in certain areas. My father had perhaps thirty children; he did not know for sure. He would try to make a count but then he would give up after a while. One woman he had children with tried to kill me when I was in my mother’s stomach. She had earlier failed to kill my mother. My father had lived with another woman for years and was the father of her three children; she tried to kill my mother and me many times. My mother saw an obeah woman every Friday to prevent these attempts from being successful. When my mother married my father, he was an old man and she a young woman. This suited them both. She had someone who would leave her alone yet not cause her to lose face in front of other women; he had someone who would take care of him in his dotage. This was not a situation I hoped to take as an example, but I could see that, in marrying a man, my mother had thought very hard not so much about happiness as about her own peace of mind.
Mariah did not know that Lewis was not in love with her anymore. It was not the sort of thing she could imagine. She could imagine the demise of the fowl of the air, fish in the sea, mankind itself, but not that the only man she had ever loved would no longer love her. She complained about the weather, she complained about all sorts of things that ordinarily she would not have noticed; she criticized my behavior, and then she criticized herself for criticizing me.
* * *
I said goodbye to everything one month before we left. I would not miss the lake; it stank anyway, and the fish that lived in it were dying from living in it. I would not miss the long hot days, I would not miss the cool shaded woods, I would not miss the strange birds, I would not miss animals that came out at dusk looking for food—I would not miss anything, for I long ago had decided not to miss anything. I sang songs; they were all about no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no good deed going unpunished, and unrequited love. I sang the tunes out loud and kept the words to myself.
I said goodbye to Hugh, though he did not know it. It was late at night, and we were lying on the shore of the lake without any clothes on. A large moon was overhead; it was in a shroud, and so rain would fall the following day. As I kissed Hugh, my tongue reaching to caress the roof of his mouth, I thought of all the other tongues I had held in my mouth in this way. I was only nineteen, so it was not a long list yet. There was Tanner, and he was the first boy with whom I did everything possible you can do with a boy. The very first time we did everything we wanted to do, he spread a towel on the floor of his room for me to lie down on, because the old springs in his bed made too much noise; it was a white towel, and when I got up it was stained with blood. When he saw it, he first froze with fear and then smiled and said, “Oh,” a note too triumphant in his voice, and I don’t know how but I found the presence of mind to say, “It’s just my period coming on.” I did not care about being a virgin and had long been looking forward to the day when I could rid myself of that status, but when I saw how much it mattered to him to be the first boy I had been with, I could not give him such a hold over me. Before that, there was a girl from school I used to kiss, but we were best friends and were only using each other for practice. There was the boy I used to kiss in the library and continued to kiss long after I had ceased to care about him one way or the other, just to see how undone he could become by my kisses. One night my friend Peggy and I, on our rounds in the city, met a boy in a record store and we both thought he was quite interesting to look at, for he reminded us of a singer we liked. We invited him to have a cup of coffee with us, and he accepted, but over the coffee all he talked about was football. Peggy hated sports of any kind, because they reminded her of her father, and I only liked cricket, which was the sport my father played. We were so disappointed that we went back to my room and smoked marijuana and kissed each other until we were exhausted and fell asleep. Her tongue was narrow and pointed and soft. And that was how I said goodbye to Hugh, my arms and legs wrapped tightly around him, my tongue in his mouth, thinking of all the people I had held in this way.
COLD HEART
ALL THE WINDOWS
in Lewis and Mariah’s apartment had outside them iron bars twisted decoratively into curves and curls, so that if somehow the children should climb up on the windowsill and slip out, they would be unable to fall down from the tenth floor and land on the sidewalk. It was a reasonable thing to do, protect your children’s lives, but all the same I was confounded: Couldn’t human beings in their position—wealthy, comfortable, beautiful, with the best the world had to offer at their fingertips—be safe and secure and never suffer so much as a broken fingernail?
I was standing at one of those windows in the living room, looking down at the street. It was a cold day in October, and the wind was blowing small bits of rubbish about. As a child in school, I had learned how the earth tilts away from the sun and how that causes the different seasons; even though I was quite young when I learned about this, I had noticed that all the prosperous (and so, certainly, happy) people in the world inhabited the parts of the earth where the year, all three hundred and sixty-five days of it, was divided into four distinct seasons. I was born and grew up in a place that did not seem to be influenced by the tilt of the earth at all; it had only one season—sunny, drought-ridden. And what was the effect on me of growing up in such a place? I did not have a sunny disposition, and, as for actual happiness, I had been experiencing a long drought.
From where I stood at the window, I could see into the apartment across the way. A man and a woman and some children lived there. I had observed them before at various times. I had seen them in bathrobes, in evening clothes, and in ordinary, everyday wear. I had never seen these people do anything interesting—not exchange a kiss, not have what looked like a quarrel. They were always just passing through this room, as if it were a way station. Now it was empty of people. I could see a sofa, two chairs, and a wall of books. How luxurious, I thought, to have an empty room in your house, a room that nobody really needed. And isn’t that what everyone in the world should have—more than was needed, one more room than you really need in your house? Not a question I would put to Mariah, for she felt just the opposite. She had too much of everything, and so she longed to have less; less, she was sure, would bring her happiness. To me it was a laugh and a relief to observe the unhappiness that too much can bring; I had been so used to observing the results of too little. This reminded me that lately I had been having the same dream over and over: There was a present for me wrapped up in one of my mother’s beautiful madras head-kerchiefs. I did not know what the present itself was, but it was something that would make me exceedingly happy; the only trouble was that it lay at the bottom of a deep, murky pool, and no matter how much water I bailed out I always woke up before I got to the bottom.
It was a Sunday, and I was alone in the apartment. Mariah and Lewis had taken their children somewhere in the country to pick apples. The way they looked as they were leaving—if I had not known, I would have said, “What a happy family!” The children were well dressed, their stomachs filled with a delicious breakfast of muffins that Mariah had made from specially purchased ingredients, and bacon and eggs from what could only have been specially cared-for pigs and hens. As they waited for the elevator to come, they were laughing. Lewis was in the role of the amusing and adorable father today, and so he had put on a lion’s mask and then said and done things not expected of a lion. The children, in response, shrieked and laughed and fell down on top of each other with pleasure. When the elevator came, it was hard for them to just calmly go into it, and Mariah gathered up their coats and gloves and hats and “shoo-shooed” them, mocking the gesture of a farm wife to a brood of chicks. All of them, mother and father and four children, looked healthy, robust—everything about them solid, authentic; but I was looking at ruins, and I knew it right then. The actual fall of this Rome I hoped not to be around to see, but just in case I could not make my own quick exit I planned to avert my eyes.
I was waiting for a call from Peggy. Since it was a Sunday, she had gone to church with her mother and then to visit an old relative who insisted on living alone. Peggy was going to call to let me know what time we should meet in the park. It was our custom on Sunday afternoons to go for a walk in the park and look around, then pick out the men we imagined we would like to sleep with. We would pay careful attention to their bottoms, their legs, their shoulders, and their faces, especially their mouths. If all passed muster, though, Peggy would put a stop to our making an approach. She would look closely at their hands and say that though everything else seemed acceptable, their hands were too small. She had said to me—with such sincerity I almost thought it something taught to her in catechism class—that if a man had small hands, it meant he had a small penis to match. When she first said this to me, it came as a complete surprise: I had never dreamed that such a thing as a penis did not come in a uniform size. When I then asked her what could a small penis mean to me, she raised her eyebrows and said only, “Disappointment.” It soon became clear that I was a failure at judging the size of a man’s hand, and so it was left up to Peggy; whenever we went to the park we came home alone, just the two of us.