Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
We came out of the bathroom feeling, I suppose, relief that we had avoided a permanent collapse between us, but also knowing that sometime, sooner or later, we would only exist for each other with a faint “Oh, yes…” The room was full of laughter; all attention was directed at Paul, whose hands were plunged into a fish tank in an effort to retrieve an earring of rhinestones in the shape of a starfish. It looked strangely at home there, for all the things in the tank—the coral, the vegetation, the sand, even the fish—had looked unreal in the first place. Paul’s hands, as they moved about the tank, looked strange also; the flesh looked like bone, and as if it had been placed in a solution that had leached all the life away. And I remembered this:
I used to know a girl named Myrna, whose mother was so cruel that it was as if she were not a mother at all but a wicked stepmother. Perhaps in response to this situation, everything about Myrna refused to attain a normal size: her body, her eyes, her nose, her mouth—even her hair would grow no longer than the length of a fingernail, and she was often described as that “picky-haired girl.” Though she lived in the house across from me, we were not friends, but our families shared the same fishermen, Mr. Thomas and Mr. Mathew, and she and I would often stand together under a tree, shading ourselves from the hot sun, waiting for them to return from sea with that day’s catch. One day, Mr. Mathew came back in their boat alone; there was no Mr. Thomas, and there were no fish. A squall had sprung up out at sea, and in the midst of it Mr. Thomas had been swept overboard as he was trying to retrieve some fish pots. As Mr. Mathew told the story, he seemed unable to believe what he was saying himself, as if he expected someone to tell him that it had all been a mistake, he had imagined the whole thing. He was so pitiful my heart broke just looking at him. He had been orphaned as a child; his mother and father had died when they were trapped in a sugarcane field that was on fire, and now he was orphaned again, for he and Mr. Thomas had been like parents to each other, as would be expected of two people who depended on each other as much as they did. He then started to cry, and it was such a sorrowful sound. I did not know a man could sound like that. I wanted to say something to him, something that would be comforting and at the same time take his mind away from his sorrow, if only for a moment, but all I could say was “Poor Mr. Thomas, poor Mr. Thomas, and, you know, he would have enjoyed growing old with you so much—just the two of you sitting here mending your nets.” As I was saying this, I knew it would have the opposite effect of what I wanted it to have, but I couldn’t help myself. I turned away, taking Myrna’s arm, and we started to walk home.
We walked along for a while, and then I realized that she was crying quite hard, and that made me feel how wrong I always am about my judgments of other people, because if I had been asked I would have said that Myrna was not capable of feeling great sorrow about Mr. Thomas’s death or about too much else, for that matter. And so I put my arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze, at the same time saying a lot of nonsense I didn’t believe, nonsense about Mr. Thomas going to a better place, nonsense about there being a great and wise purpose behind such a thing as Mr. Thomas’s being swept overboard. Her response to this was to push me away with a great big shove, her eyes boiling with anger and contempt. And she told me some things. She told me that she had not been crying for Mr. Thomas at all—she had been crying for herself. She said that she used to meet Thomas (she did not call him “Mr.” now) under a breadfruit tree that was near her latrine and near the entrance to the alley that was at the back of her house, and she would stand in the dark, fully clothed but without her panties, and he would put his middle finger up inside her. It never lasted very long, for her mother would become suspicious if she was missing from her house for too long a time. She and Mr. Thomas never spoke about it; often she would go to this place and he would not show up; he never explained. After he had removed his finger from inside her, he would give her sometimes a shilling, sometimes just sixpence; he never told her why it was sometimes more, sometimes less. She kept the money in an old Ovaltine tin, hidden under the stones in the middle of her mother’s stone heap. She said that she had not decided exactly what she was going to do with the money yet, but whatever it would be, she did not yet have enough. She said it was for this she cried: whatever she would eventually do with the money, she did not have enough of it yet.
I, of course, had many feelings about this amazing story—all the predictable ones—but then one feeling came to dominate the others: I was almost overcome with jealousy. Why had such an extraordinary thing happened to her and not to me? Why had Mr. Thomas chosen Myrna as the girl he would meet in secret and place his middle finger up inside her and not me? Myrna spoke of this in a flat, uninterested way, as if all they had done was share a cup of fresh rainwater together. This would have become the experience of my life, the one all others would have to live up to. What a waste! It meant nothing to Myrna; she spoke only of the money, and even so she did not have a plan for what she would do with that. For me, the money would have been beside the point. I am sure I would have given it away; I am sure, in fact, that I would have found a way to steal a shilling or two and give it to Mr. Thomas to have been in Myrna’s shoes. Oh, the injustice of everything. What words did Mr. Thomas use to make this arrangement with her, and why, again, had I not been worthy of hearing them?
I remembered that he had a wide mouth, large lips, and a big wide pink tongue, which could be seen clearly when he laughed—a loud laugh. He had the sort of bloodshot eyes that betrayed a lot of rum-drinking. He smoked so many cigarettes that sometimes when he came to deliver the fish to us, he smelled more of tobacco than he did of the sea. He called me Little Miss. Once, my mother had sent me to his house—the house he and Mr. Mathew shared—with the payment for a week’s worth of fish, and when he came to the door and saw that it was me he said, “Oh, my!” and he went back inside, because he wasn’t wearing a shirt, just his underpants, which were oversized and made of the same blue chambray as my father’s. When he came back, he was wearing an old madras shirt, patched here and there, and he held the cigarette he was smoking behind his back, because since he wasn’t my father or a close relative, smoking a cigarette in front of me would show disrespect. He thanked me for the payment, and as I was turning to leave he said, “And how is life treating you, Little Miss? How is school?” And I had replied, “As well as can be expected, sir, as well as can be expected.” With that answer, I knew I was being a direct imitation of my mother, and he knew it, too, for he just burst out laughing, and I got a good look at his big tongue and gums and teeth. I felt so embarrassed that I had caused him to laugh so heartily and with such abandon when we were alone that I stumbled away without saying goodbye, and he called after me, “God bless you, Little Miss.” It was a way of letting me know that no offense had occurred on either side. That was the Mr. Thomas I knew, a nice man who went to sea and always brought me back the fish I liked, which my mother would then cook in a sauce of lime juice, butter, onions, and green pepper. And, in turn, I suppose he would have said, if he could, that the Little Miss he knew was a teenage girl so beyond reproach in every way that if you asked her a question she would reply in her mother’s forty-year-old voice—hardly a prospect for a secret rendezvous.
After Myrna had finished telling me her story, we walked home in silence. There were so many things to say, so many questions to ask, but I didn’t know where to start. I was afraid that if I asked one thing I would reveal my feelings and show how familiar I was with what she had just described. I could not ask, for instance, “Did it feel great?” which was really one of the things I most wanted to know. I might betray that right then I was screaming inside,
“This should have happened to me! This should have been me!”
I could have retreated into falseness and said all the appropriate disapproving things, but I saw she was beyond condemnation. Our houses were soon in view, and so I said, mock sympathy on my face and in my voice, “Did it hurt?” The look she gave—I was the one who felt like dirt.
That night, as I lay on my bed, of course unable to sleep, I thought of the events of the day, dwelling not so much on Mr. Thomas’s falling overboard as on Myrna and Mr. Thomas’s meeting in the alley near the latrine, under the shade of the breadfruit tree. I imagined her at the end of a long day, after cooking her family’s food, washing their clothes, getting water from the pipes that were far away from her house, and in other ways waiting on them hand and foot, and then finally, after eating her supper, perhaps pretending to make a visit to the latrine, waiting in the dark for Mr. Thomas. She had made no mention of kiss on the hair, fierce tongue in her ear or mouth, kisses on the neck, hands caressing breasts. Just his hands between her legs, with one finger going up inside her. And there I had to stop. What did Mr. Thomas’s hands look like? I did not know. At the time, I thought it would haunt me until the day I died. I had never noticed his hands. I remembered many things about him: his mouth, his teeth, his gums, even his feet. His feet were big and broad, with cracks around the heels. I had never seen a pair of shoes on them. I had once seen him walking in mud. The mud was soft, and it came between his toes, four little pats decorating the ground. But his hands—what did they look like? I did not know, and I never would know. And so it was that hands I would come to know very well—Paul’s hands, moving about in the fish tank—reminded me of some other hands lost forever in a warm sea.
* * *
Because Peggy and I were now not getting along, we naturally started to talk about finding an apartment in which we would live together. It was an old story: two people are in love, and then just at the moment they fall out of love they decide to marry. Our thoughts went this way: would it not be nice if Peggy no longer had to take a train each day back to the house in which she lived with her parents, two people whose views about everything she found abominable; would it not be nice if I no longer had to live in Mariah and Lewis’s apartment and take care of their children, if I could have a life of my own and come and go at my own convenience and when it pleased me? There was nothing wrong with my life as I lived it with Mariah and Lewis, but I could hardly imagine spending the rest of it overseeing their children in one situation or another. And the children would not remain children forever. I began to feel like a dog on a leash, a long leash but a leash all the same. Mariah was like a mother to me, a good mother. If she went to a store to buy herself new things, she thought of me and would bring me something also. Sometimes she paid me more money than it had been agreed I would earn. When I told her how much I enjoyed going to the museum, she gave me my own card of membership. Always she expressed concern for my well-being. I realized again and again how lucky I was to have met her and to work for her and not, for instance, some of her friends. But there was no use pretending: I was not the sort of person who counted blessings; I was the sort of person for whom there could never be enough blessings. Besides, there was something else.
When I was around thirteen or so, my mother had pointed out to me a girl—her goddaughter, in fact—who had just turned nineteen years of age; my mother had said what a wonderful person this girl was, how she had given her parents such cause to be proud of her, and how, generally speaking, she was a good example to all girls who came after her. I had known this girl close up, and I had come to a different conclusion about her. For my mother used to place me in her care from time to time, hoping, I suppose, that some of her good example would rub off on me. If I did anything she considered bad, she would threaten to give me senna tea, a purgative that caused bad stomach gripes; or she would threaten to put me in a barrel and shut the lid tight and forget about me. When I did things that pleased her, she would bathe me and comb my hair and dress me up in her old clothes, and then she would insist that I go to sleep in a clothes basket lined with clean rags. I was much too big for the basket, but she would force me to lie in it all cramped up until she thought an appropriate time had passed. It was hard to see the difference between the punishments for one set of things and the rewards for others. This girl’s name was Maude, Maude Quick, and her father was the head of jails—Her Majesty’s Prisons—and I used to think of her as my own personal jailer. I had long ago grown to despise her, and so as soon as my mother finished singing this long Psalm of Maude, I burst out, “When I turn nineteen I will be living at home only if I drop dead.” This made my mother fall into a silence—a sadness, really—for she didn’t know what to do. It was the beginning of my expressing hatred, hostility, anger toward my parents, sometimes with words, sometimes with deeds. And now it was true, but not true enough to suit me: at nineteen, I was not dead, and I was not living in the home I grew up in. I was living in a home, though, and it was not my own.
* * *
A strange calm had come over Mariah and Lewis’s apartment. They quarreled constantly but never in my presence. I would return to the apartment after running an errand with the children in tow, and I could smell the disagreement in the air. Something serious had been said. Perhaps it was “I no longer love you.” Lewis would have said that, and it was true; he no longer loved Mariah. He would have said it in a kind way, because it is so easy to be kind when you are in his position, the winning-hand position. Always when I came in, Mariah’s eyes were in one of the various stages of a cry. Mariah was, after all, not my mother, for anyone who made my mother cry so much—she would have seen to that person’s demise immediately.
One day Mariah and I were in the kitchen, seated at the table. This is where we always found ourselves if we had to talk about anything at all. She had made me a cup of coffee, strong, with lots of hot, steaming milk, and she had served it to me in a large cup, the size of a small bowl. She had learned to make it that way in France, where she had lived when she was about my age. I began to tell her about my life with Paul, which was spent almost entirely in his bed. I told her everything that we did, all the small details that to someone with more experience of the world would have gone unnoticed. There was much to take note of; except for eating, all the time we spent together was devoted to sex. I told her what everything felt like, how surprised I was to be thrilled by the violence of it (for sometimes it was that, violent), what an adventure this part of my life had become, and how much I looked forward to it, because I had not known that such pleasure could exist and, what was more, be available to me.