How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  “Don’t look at me, Pops! Don’t. Look. At. Rass. Hole. Me!”

  And then the door buzzer had sounded, at two o’ clock in the morning. Two o’ clock in the fucking morning. She had almost wet herself at the shock of it, wondering what it could mean. In six years, six years of vacationing here the buzzer had never sounded at that hour. Visitors out for a drunken stroll after a night at the sleepy hotel disco, she’d thought, or local teenagers playing pranks on the tourists, or (please, God!) the police responding to someone who had reported that they’d heard something. But she’d never gotten to find out who was buzzing.

  The robber had paused. The buzzer had continued. She’d thought she’d seen her chance and she’d run and grabbed at the gun with one hand and with the other she’d clawed at the gauzy second skin the robber wore on his face. A small, a stupid thing. The robber had struck her hard on her cheek and Peter had run toward her and she’d wanted to kick him for being the fucking gallant one. Again. He was supposed to run outside, call the police, answer the door, tell the children to get out of the house – something. Something other than run straight up to the robber and try to stop him from struggling with her.

  Instead Peter had run right for the gun, pushed her out of harm’s way and she’d shouted for the children to run although they had likely not even been awake, and the gun had gone off, and the robber had yelled something which probably meant Stop! and grabbed his stocking mask out of her hand and stuffed it in his pocket and then the gun had gone off again and out of the corner of her eye she’d seen Peter, falling, while the robber looked past him to fire at her. The gun had refused, and finally the robber ran.

  All it would’ve taken were small things: remembering to buy a box of raisins so they wouldn’t have argued in the first place, for instance. Or walking the few steps into the spare room after he’d turned the light off, wearing a smile, and slipping into bed with him, so that the robber would have reached the master bedroom and found no one there. Or, in the weeks before they’d landed on the island, all it would’ve taken was the buying of a big dog or an alarm system or a decision to go to America instead. Or, in the months before that, all it would have taken was her being good, so Peter would not have suggested a trip to Paradise to try to fix what she had broken. Any of these small things and Peter would still be here.

  But instead he’d been shot and had fallen, and this is what bewitched her: that she hadn’t even looked at him as he fell, that her eyes were still trained on the blue-black hand that held the gun. What bewitched her was that her acknowledgment, her apology, her regret had not been the last things her husband had seen of her before he died.

  That they would never now have the chance to have the real argument.

  A small, a stupid thing.

  Chapter 3

  Lala

  30 July 1984

  Even now, with Baby sleeping openmouthed between the both of you, when you are reassured of reality by the chirping of birds, the swish of the coconut leaves and the roar and retreat of the waves below, even now, you can look into the face of the man snoring on the other side of that small baby and wonder who he is. You can see those thin, spiteful lips, slackened into pleasantry by sleep, and forget how they feel when he kisses you. You can look into his wide, flat features, his closed, heavy-lidded eyes and struggle to remember his name.

  Baby stirs and stretches in slow motion and settles back into sleep.

  You don’t grudge him that, three days ago, you had to take a taxi all by yourself, from Baxter’s General, to bring you and Baby home. You understand that he had to stay out of sight in case the police was looking for him so you don’t grudge him that he come only once to visit you during the whole week the both of you confined in Baxter’s General, watching the other mummies and babies get presents and flowers and visits from husbands and friends and church members. You don’t complain that nobody else ain’t come to see Baby, not even Wilma. You don’t grudge him that the one time he come he stay only a few minutes, staring at Baby, stroking her little cheeks and cooing, before hearing a siren and saying he have to leave, that things still hot.

  But you grudge him trying to stop you from braiding when he know it is the only thing that keep you sane. You born to braid like he born to breathe.

  If you is woman enough to call your own taxi from the hospital and tell it where to go, you tell yourself now, if you can mince out of that taxi with your stitched-up parts still stinging and you can pay the taximan and you can cross the sandy soil with two bags and five pounds of baby in a pink dress you buy her with money you make from the same braiding, if you can get up the same twenty-five steps you mince down that night you went to find him, with two bags and a new baby, ain’t you woman enough to decide when you will take that baby and go back to doing heads?

  How many of the women on the ward come home to nobody? is what you asked yourself when you open back the PEPSI door. He ain’t miss you and the house miss you less – the dishes done stacked same as you left them that night you went looking for him, the bed still wear the same one of Wilma’s rose-printed fitted sheets you wake up on, sweating like a suckling pig, the morning that Baby was born. The blood stay and dry on those sheets, it was there when you left the house and it still there when you get back home from the hospital. But he wasn’t nowhere to be found for a whole three days. How he feel he can come and tell you what to do now?

  This morning, only this morning, he knock and you answer and he crawl into the bed and fall into the same openmouthed sleep the baby now sleeping. Is only this morning you can tell him you have to take Baby for a walk, the nurse say to walk Baby every morning. But you didn’t tell him. He don’t know you been walking with Baby two mornings already, because those two mornings he not there.

  You is your own woman, you say when he lay down this morning, you can ease up the baby, quiet, and walk with her down the steps and you can fetch the pram from below the house and settle your baby in it and tuck your combs in the bottom, just in case. You can put one of Wilma’s old hats on your head and set off down the beach, staying on the part of the sandy soil held together by the roots of the coconut trees, so that the wheels of the pram do not find themselves stuck. You can watch the early-morning swimmers take their tentative steps into water bathed in the lilac and orange hues of sunrise, and see their wonder at why the water feels so warm. You can watch the women, especially, lay back and float so that their silky strands of hair fan around their heads and almost hear them sigh as their stresses dissolve in the caress of warm, shallow water.

  But you cannot not stop him coming down the beach to find you when he get up and Baby is not there and neither are you.

  A name, you think, is a pacifier. Like: if it is 6:30 in the morning and you are walking down Baxter’s Beach, pushing a pram and looking for a smooth rock on which you can rest a bag of bright beads and a plastic mayonnaise jar stuffed with combs of all sizes. If you are looking for a spot that will be shady enough to set down a small folding chair a customer can sit on, a spot that will provide enough room in the shade to protect a tiny new baby in an old-fashioned pram when the sun climbs the sky. If you are doing this and you pass Tall Pink Man walking his big, gruff white dog with pointed ears, and if the dog starts to growl at you, you might feel helpless, because now that you have a new baby you cannot run, not really. If the dog jumps and snarls and barks at you, and makes like it could eat you alive, were it not restrained by the warnings of its owner, you might not remember this thing about a name. But if you do remember, if you call its name, if you stop and say Betsy! the way Tall Pink Man does every morning when he throws a piece of sea-bleached stick yards down the sand for the big, gruff dog to go running, it will stop as if stunned. It will cock its head to one side and open its mouth in surprise and it will ask, I know you? (Even a dog cannot be violent to someone it truly knows.) And if you laugh – if you say, Shut up, Betsy, of course you know me, you and me is friends — it will sort of half-sit behind the sweaty legs of Tall Pi
nk Man and lower its head and make bewildered noises and Tall Pink Man will wonder what the hell is going on with his dog after he wonders how the fuck you know her name. The point is, the dog will no longer try to frighten you, simply because you can name it.

  This is my baby, Betsy! you could say, and by this time Betsy would be so calm, so quiet, somebody might think you could introduce the two of them, Baby and Betsy. Somebody might think you could bring Baby closer to the dog and hold her out and show it how pretty she is, how warm and soft and beautiful.

  But you don’t. Because same time Adan come down the beach at a trot and give the dog one look, just one, and the dog lose interest in doing you anything at all. Cha, say Adan, he tell you not to even think about working in the hot sun with his baby, yet here you are – not even two weeks good and you got the combs in your hand already.

  He not too sure about this walking thing, say Adan when he trot up to you and hold your hand and take the combs and the handle of the pram, he don’t want to draw too much attention, things still hot, he think maybe is best you and Baby stay inside. You could take the baby out on the top step for a few minutes if you need to. Come back and lay down and rest yourself, say Adan, he is a man and he will take care of you, is not like you have to go and braid the hair for the money. He ain’t that sort of man.

  His face is wearing that brand of smile that worries you, it is a small smile – the corners of his lips barely turn upward – but it worries you because above the smile the eyes are dead serious. And because you have seen that smile before.

  “Just walk the baby and come back home,” Adan repeat, “plenty of time to braid hair when Baby grow a bit.”

  And although you notice that he is looking around, checking to make sure that nobody is following him, that the police are not at that very moment closing in on him on the beach with their guns drawn, you also notice the pride that puffs him up when he says Baby. It warms you, that pride, it almost makes you forget that that smile is a signal, or that you make this baby with a killer.

  Adan, you might say then, Adan, I does get my peace from braiding people hair, you know? And it can’t hurt to do a head real quick, with Baby sleeping. All she do is nap anyway. And we need the money.

  But you don’t say that, you open your mouth to call his name, to say you are a grown woman and you can braid hair with the baby if you want to, but nothing come out. And he take that to mean you okay with him taking the handle of the old pram from you and steering it to smoother ground in the direction of the little house you just come from.

  “Come,” say this giant man with the scar on his forehead, “come let we go and lie down with she, I tired. And you know I don’t want nobody seeing me walking ’bout the beach just so.”

  His face is beginning to cloud over, like rain, so you go with him because Baby just born and little for her age and you don’t want him to frighten her with what he will do if you don’t go.

  When you are back in the house and lying on the bed, watching them sleep, this giant and his baby, you might marvel that even after two years of knowing him and one year of being his wife, the name of this flat-faced man in the bed, the one who sleep with his thigh over your hips when you lie on your side to be rid of him, the one with his arm over your shoulders while you squint at the fist he make even in his sleep, the name of this man still escape you at times, like when you are on the floor in his shadow, at the precise moment when the right holler of his name might stop him cold.

  So maybe it is now, after you already allow yourself to be led back to the house and back into the bed and after you are made to put Baby down between the two of you and to lay down yourself, fully dressed, and after you are reminded to keep your eyes open and on the door, just in case the police are coming, that you realize what you have brought her into. Maybe it is at this moment, with this man on the other side of Baby, that you understand that it is possible you make a very big mistake. Maybe it is time to accept that this man is not the laughing giant you meet riding a unicycle at a fair two summers ago. Maybe it is time you realize that this man don’t make his living rolling this way and that under an arc of bright juggling balls, for coins people drop in a jar. Maybe there is a reason that this is a man whose name you sometimes can’t remember, and it is not just that there were posters you shielded your eyes from on the way home, asking for information about a murder, with a description of a suspect you know. It is not just the newspaper you cannot stop to buy because it carries a front-page story of the robbery and the photo of a man who has died, and you cannot be faced with the details of this death. It is all of these things and it is the little brown baby asleep beside you who should not be made to feel the fear you do.

  Maybe when he stir and talk in his sleep you forget that you are grown and you are just quiet.

  “Lala?” he is singing, “Lala?”

  You can reach out and touch the loose curve of his fingers, you can splay them open to see his palm, you can trace the lines that tell his future to see whether you and Baby are still there. You can turn his hand over and see the scars on the knuckles of his fingers, the long scratches that travel up his arm. But you cannot call his name, because you cannot remember it. You cannot call him by name and say, Please, not now.

  “No,” you are saying, because you are still sore and it has not yet been six weeks. “No.”

  He tries your name on a different tune.

  “No.”

  But no does nothing.

  You can bite your lower lip and keep your eyes on the baby, you can say to yourself that what he is doing cannot be that terrible because it does not wake the baby, it does not make her cry even though she is being shaken hard in the sheets, not really. If it does not make a baby cry, but it makes you cry, then how much of a woman are you?

  You can watch the door fly open and then shut, open and shut, open and shut. You can train your eyes on the PEPSI lettering in the brilliant blues of that brand and wonder where the door came from, which shop he robbed of its own front door. You can imagine that the door is slapping the side of the house in protest, that it does not fly open merely to make a wobbly window to the sea. You can imagine, with the appearance of a very big wave, that it will come in on you, that big blue sea. You can be afraid that, despite the logic of the intervening sand and a house on stilts, you could all be a few seconds away from drowning. But you cannot call his name, cannot make him stop because, like the wave that crests and falls and disappears somewhere beneath the wooden floorboards, he is out of reach. Somehow beyond you, woman or not.

  Chapter 4

  Mrs. Whalen

  31 July 1984

  People try to be kind but it does not matter. Mira Whalen snatches the papers from the paperboy, snaps at Rosa when the toast is only slightly overdone, unleashes expletives on the gardener for mowing the lawn when she is trying to nap, and hangs up the phone on insufferable long-distance condolence calls from Peter’s business associates and friends and family in London who don’t know what to say to her after they say I’m so sorry.

  “What are you sorry for?” she asks one of Peter’s sisters when she calls in teary-voiced commiseration. “That it wasn’t me instead?”

  Mira finds herself unable to speak anything but the cold, hard truth or absolutely nothing at all.

  “Mira,” her mother complains when she telephones and Mira is still silent on the other end of the line, several questions later, “are you still there?”

  Mira Whalen says they are. Dipping daily in warm blue water. Spending nights lolling in cane-bottomed chairs with polished bottoms that rock on mahogany patio floors that do not creak. Minding exotic tropical flowers and growing brightly colored fruits that a servant makes into frothy drinks with unpronounceable names and serves with tiny pink paper umbrellas. They are there, says Mira Whalen, living a life of extreme leisure. Which, of course, they are not.

  “Well, when are you going back to Wimbledon?” her mother pleads, annoyed.

  “We are not going b
ack,” says Mira. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Martha does not understand her daughter’s sarcasm, Mira does not understand why she is being sarcastic to her mother.

  “You can’t stay there, it isn’t healthy.”

  “We are waiting on the pathologist, Mother.” Mira Whalen spits. “They are flying one in to do the autopsy. I cannot stay here but I cannot leave Peter here alone, I . . .”

  Mira Whalen makes a little choking noise.

  “What about a hotel?”

  “I don’t want a hotel.”

  “I can come over there and help you, Mira. Last time I talked to him, Peter promised me a check. If I get it, I can be on the next plane, get you and the children on your way back to London. I could send the body . . . Peter . . . whenever they release him. I can help you with everything. You can get another place, Mira, a smaller one, just enough for you to live in while you recover, you don’t need that villa, you could . . .”

  Extremes of anything are bad, and the two extremes of possession – deprivation and deluge – are especially crippling to the soul. For that reason Mira Whalen’s mother has always advocated having just enough. Enough to keep you happy. Enough to eat. Enough to drink. No more or less. There is perhaps enough diversion in seeking to ascertain what enough is to last one a lifetime.

  Mira Whalen can think of nothing worse than her mother’s meddling help, the kind that she cannot help rejecting, even if she knows it is not motivated by judgment. Mira Whalen does not want to go back to London without her husband, she does not want a small flat or “just enough.” Mira Whalen wants Peter. She wants the life with him she had before – summers in Paradise with the lacy foam of breaking waves washing their toes as they walk hand in hand on beaches of powdery pink sand. She wants sticky-fingered Sunday picnics on the stretch of sand beyond the patio, with lobster claws bursting with flesh that Rosa has basted in butter and lemon, with Beth and Sam’s sun-bronzed faces smiling back at her as if she belonged there, with them. Mira Whalen wants the regimen of the rest of the year in Wimbledon – the gym and the salon and the shopping and parties and dinners at their house hosting Peter’s work colleagues and clients, followed by nights curled up in his bed until 3 a.m., talking and laughing and mimicking the people they have met. Mira Whalen wants what she cannot have.