she would reach into her bosom for a handkerchief, look around the two tiny, crowded rooms Mama and I called home and shake her head.
“Not that I have anything against you, Gloria,” she’d say when she saw tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. “You know I love you more than life itself, for you is my own flesh and blood, and somehow we always manage to love our own flesh and blood. But your father, Gloria, your father – I cannot lie, I cannot stand the man!”
I remembered him vaguely. My father. When I was younger he would visit on Sundays, sit me on his lap, and try to talk and play with me, but everything was so stilted, so out of step, he would just give up. He was someone who wandered in and out of my life, and expected me to be cheerful whenever he was around. Then there was the bothersome change in my mother when he visited. She seemed to lose her voice and could not speak. He had to keep asking her to repeat everything she said. Worst of all was the fact that she always seemed to be trying to get rid of me when my father was around, sending me out to play in the yard, (something she did not ordinarily do), telling me to go visit one of the women in the yard (again, something she did not ordinarily do).
If my father happened to stay for dinner, my mother took down her best plates for him to eat on, gave him the biggest and best pieces of meat and piled on layers and layers of rice and peas, potato salad and lettuce and tomato until he had to tell her to stop. He would look down in embarrassment at the huge mounds of food on his plate – although he always managed to eat everything up and sniff around for more. If my mother happened to look at me at meal times during his visits, it was always with a look of disapproval at the many rice grains scattered around my plate. I, of course, always made sure there were lots of rice grains scattered around my plate to keep my mother’s eyes busy.
These visits came to an end one Sunday afternoon when a woman turned up in the yard looking for Mama. She arrived just after my father left and had obviously followed him. Mama and this woman ended up in a terrible fight. This woman told Mama she was my father’s wife, that they lived together in Vineyard Town with their four legitimate children, and why didn’t my mother and her bastard-child leave her husband alone!
My mother almost died from the shock of it all. My father had told her he lived with his parents, strict Christians, in their home on Red Hills Road, and as soon as he got his own place, we would all be living together. The one good thing that came from the incident was the friendship between my mother and Rachel. For while everyone else in the yard gathered around the two women, spoiling for a fight, Rachel had sense enough to realize Mama had never fought a day in her life. When the woman pulled out a long silver butcher’s knife out of her bag and started brandishing it in my mother’s face, she didn’t know what to do. She just stood there, mouth open, looking at the woman. I started crying loudly and Rachel pushed through the cheering crowd and grabbed the woman by her neck as if she was nothing but a peel-neck fowl she was about to skin.
“Listen to me, and listen to me good. You cannot just walk into this yard where this woman live, pulling knife against her and expecting to get away with that.” The crowd stopped their cheering and quieted down, and you could tell some of the people were beginning to feel ashamed of themselves.
“Now I want you to get out of this yard before I have to do something to you. Make sure you through the gate and up the street by the time I count to three. One …”
“Tell her to leave my husband alone!” the woman said, struggling in Rachel’s arms.
“No,” Rachel said, through her teeth, “you tell your husband to leave her alone. Two ..”
Looking around her, at all the faces now turning sour, the woman dropped the butcher’s knife in the dirt and fled. I never saw her again. And I never saw my father again.
But just now there was the problem of the pink dress. Yes, I would get Grandy to take the dress. Another tug-of-war would begin. For Mama was convinced Grandy was spoiling me, and Grandy was convinced Mama didn’t know what she was doing. Mama often reminded Grandy I was her child and she had given birth to me. Grandy would laugh and say she had given birth to Mama in the first place.
“Why, for example,” Grandy wanted to know, “you have this child bathing in cold water in the mornings, I will never understand. Don’t you know she can catch chronic in her bones and die? Don’t you know you should warm the water for her to bathe in?”
“Warm water!” Mama would point to the small gas stove in the kitchen. “If she need warm water, she can warm it herself! There is the kettle! There is the stove!”
“Nonsense!” Grandy would reply. “Is something you should do for her. It was something I used to do for you, even when you were a big girl, big enough to go get yourself pregnant! Come Gloria,” Grandy would say, “I warmed this water for you. Come let me give you a bath.”
Grandy started by pouring the hot water from the kettle into the plastic basin in the bathroom. Then she added cold water, testing the water with the tip of her finger until it was just the right temperature. She then dropped a piece of bluing into the basin and watched it spread through the water, until it was the colour of the deepest parts of the ocean.
“Step in,” she would say softly.
“She not a baby, you know!” Mama would shout. “You only put bluing in the water when you trying to keep ghosts off of babies and Gloria not a baby any more!”
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Grandy would say. We were now two half-circles coming together to form a perfect whole.
Once I was in the water Grandy began by soaping my rag into a creamy lather, then started washing down my back, my arms and chest, my legs, my fingers and toes, inside and outside of my ears. “Stand up,” she would say, and, very gently, she would wash between my legs. Often as she did this part, Grandy talked to me in a hushed voice, telling me all sorts of fanciful tales.
When she was done giving me a bath, Grandy told me to stick out my tongue. She examined it, and my teeth, rubbing my tongue with a clean rag. When she was satisfied everything was as it should be, she wrapped me up in a towel and held me in her arms. Mama’s eyes would roll up to the sky.
Yes, I would let Grandy take the dress. By the time I came back home Mama would be so happy to see me she would forgive whatever I’d done to the dress. And, I would take extra good care of the dress so as not to get any stains on it.
I got up and followed Grandy into the house, changed out of my school clothes and came back out on the verandah with two star-apples. Before long Nilda came over and sat down beside me.
“Here,” I offered her a star-apple, but she shook her head. Something was bothering her. It seemed lately something was always bothering Nilda.
“They’re at it again,” she said quietly.
“What for this time?” I could just hear Nadia’s and Jesus’ voices rising in their house.
“The usual.” Nilda was using her toes to toy with a piece of dried leaf at her feet. After a while she stopped doing this and let her head hang down in front of her. “Aren’t you happy you don’t have a father, Gloria? Aren’t you happy you don’t always have to deal with all that arguing? That you can have peace and quiet in your house? Aren’t you happy about that?” She sounded so hopeless I didn’t know what to say.
“No, you don’t want one, believe me. You don’t want a father. You don’t want that cussing and fighting every day. Believe me, you definitely don’t want that.”
Both
