with me to the country. All my shorts would go, because I would be outside most of the time and it was the hottest time of the year. I would take the one yellow bath-suit I’d had for years – getting too tight for me, I thought, but not as far as my mother was concerned. All my old jeans and T-shirts – my yard clothes – would go, for I needed those to wear about the place. But what I most wanted to take was the sheer pink dress Mama had bought two weeks ago for my graduation from primary school. But she’d spent good money on the dress and I wasn’t to take it out of the plastic bag it was hanging in, much less consider taking it to the country with me.
Last night, when I thought Mama wasn’t looking, I’d taken the dress out and kept looking and looking it over. It had garnered oohs and ahs at the graduation. Many people wanted to take my picture. The sheer material shimmered in the lights, and the large bow at the back, with what looked like fish-scales, changed colours depending on how the light hit it. Quite a stir that dress caused. Easily the prettiest dress in the entire place.
And now Mama wasn’t allowing me to take the dress with me to the country, because I didn’t know how to take care of anything, was always ruining the things she used her hard-earned money to buy. Every year she complained Grandy didn’t supervise me enough, allowing me to have my own way, running all over the place like some wild animal, staining-up and dirtying-up all my good things. Every year when I came back home she’d say all I had in my bags were rags and she couldn’t believe Grandy was the same woman who had grown her, who would breath fire on her when she was growing up if she got so much as a spot on her clothes; here she was so lax with me now.
“Just what do you think you’re doing with that dress?” Mama demanded when she caught me with the dress on my lap. “Gloria, don’t you realize you’re getting to be a young lady now? That it’s time you started taking more care of your things? Tell me, Gloria, you really think I have the money to be buying back the things you ruin over the summer?”
I stood there, pretending to be listening to her, but what I was really doing was singing a little song in my head to drown out her ever-present voice.
“You need to take more care of your things! You need to become more responsible! Take Nilda for example. She is your age, yet the two of you are light years apart in behaviour. If Nadia is not home, Nilda takes care of herself and the younger ones, as good as her mother! Nilda don’t dirty-up her good clothes, she can even wash her own clothes! Why can’t you be more like Nilda?”
This was always her question to me. Nilda this, Nilda that, why couldn’t I be more like Nilda? Meantime I kept trying to figure out how I could take the earrings with the tiny ruby and emerald bird – as well as the dress. The earrings with the dress! Now that would show Junie, Sophie, Monique, and especially that girl Yvette, who was boss! I really wanted Yvette to see the dress, for she, more than any of the other girls, was always running her mouth that nothing I brought from Kingston was anything new. Nothing special. Nothing she hadn’t seen before.
“Mama,” I said, committing the crime of interrupting her, “Can I just please take the dress with me to the country? Just please? I promise to take extra good care of it!”
She looked at me as if I was crazy. “No,” she said with finality, “you cannot take the dress with you.”
I’d stood there just looking at her. Why didn’t my sad face move her? I never seemed to get away with anything with my mother. It was then I decided what I would do. I even convinced myself it was Mama’s fault that I had to resort to my plan. After all, I’d asked her up front to take the dress and she’d refused. Now she was forcing me to get Grandy to take the dress for me.
My mother was still talking as I schemed. “By the time you come back home that dress will be fit only for the garbage! Mango stain, guinep stain, all sorts of stain will be on that dress.”
Grandy always said if Mama had more children, or if she had a man to come home to in the evening, then these little things would never bother her so much.
“She only fuss so much with you because you’re the only one. She focus all her attentions on you. It wouldn’t be the same if she had other people in the house…”
Sometimes I did wish Mama had something or someone else to attract her attention, especially when I wanted to go outside and play and she refused to let me. But in truth, I really could not see Mama with a man or with any more children. I could not see Mama with anyone but myself. There were the times when she took my face in her hands and just stared and stared down at me. She would straighten out my eyebrows and kiss me on the tip of my nose and I knew I was the centre of her universe.
“I can see everyone in your face,” she would say. “I can see Mama, Aunt Clara, I can even see your father…” she always paused when she mentioned that-man-your-father, “his bones, his eyes, the set of his face. When you turn sideways I can really see your father. But not only him. Many different people in our family I can see in your face.”
Mama rarely spoke about my father and, the few times she did, always hesitated before talking about him. Mostly she spoke about him only when she was upset about something I had done, or the difficulties she was having in raising me by herself. Then she talked about how my father had abandoned his responsibility and left her alone to raise me.
“Lying, conniving wretch!” she would always begin. “I wonder if he even still with that so-called wife of his! The years of my life I wasted with that man! Lying, conniving wretch!” This would usually suffice for a few months – until she added something else to what seemed to me an unending list of all the bad things my father had done to her.
“A man,” my grandmother was always saying. “Your mother needs herself a good man. Someone to come home to in the evenings. Someone, other than you, Gloria, to fuss and bother herself over. You can’t yet understand it, Gloria, and I can’t begin to explain right now the difference a good man can make to a woman’s life. All I can tell you is things would be very different if your mother had herself a nice gentleman-friend.”
And Grandy was always on the lookout for a man for Mama. Every time she came to visit she would tell Mama which one of her “schoolmates” in Lluidas Vale was still single, and which one asked after her lately. If Grandy was there when a man she considered eligible was visiting Mama, she would go out of her way to try to make the person feel more comfortable, and always ended up doing just the opposite. Grandy would heap praises on Mama, about how well she could cook, how neat and tidy she was, how kind-hearted and giving. Grandy continued like this until Mama excused herself from her guest, and called Grandy into the back room. A hushed quarrel would follow.
“Stop it! Just stop it!” Mama would whisper. “It’s not what you think! He’s just a friend.”
“Friends make the best husbands,” Grandy would reply, loudly enough for the visitor to hear.
“For Christ almighty’s sake,” Mama would say, “stop it! It’s nothing like that. I tell you, he’s just a friend.”
“All right!” Grandy lowered her voice in defeated anger. “I just hope one of these days someone other than your “friend” walk through that door!”
Mama would go back to her visitor on the verandah, and Grandy would sit down inside seething. If Grandy happened to look over at me, she would start on what a disappointment my father had been; she was sorry the day my mother ever set eyes on that-man-your-father. She would say all of this very loudly, as if she’d forgotten Mama had a visitor on the verandah.
“Rotten good-for-nothing scoundrel. Mash up my daughter life. Give my daughter a child and run away
