How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  What she would tell Peter, she thinks now – as Rosa’s husband gets out of the driver’s side and comes around to her door and opens it and stands there, with a little transistor to his ear so that he will not miss even a moment of the cricket – is that it didn’t matter. It was nothing he should have worried about. It should not have shadowed everything after that, it should not have been allowed to cast doubt on everything before. It just was what it was, it was all about her, it wasn’t anything he had done and he shouldn’t still be cross about it. He needn’t have tried to make her bread pudding or carry her luggage or do family things they hadn’t focused on before. He had been perfect as he was.

  She would tell Peter that she couldn’t remember what Fred looked like, for one, could not remember if she enjoyed sex with him or not.

  This is what she tells Rosa’s husband now, because he is a man and he would understand these things – that Fred did not mean anything, that she cannot even remember if she enjoyed sleeping with him or not. The fact that she cannot remember it, she tells Rosa’s husband, demonstrates the reality of that relationship because she remembers most everything about Peter. The way he ran his right hand through the thinning lock at the front of his forehead when he was tired, or flabbergasted, or angry. How his voice broke when he sang “I’m Every Woman” for her birthday because it was her favorite song by Chaka Khan. The way he patted her knee when she needed reassurance. Everything. You are a man, explains Mira Whalen to Rosa’s husband, you should understand what I mean.

  * * *

  20 August 1984

  The following afternoon, the first Mrs. Whalen comes for her children. She sweeps onto the rear patio because, in the way of these houses, the only visitors who can enter from the front patio are those who come, like salt air, right off the surface of the sea. As it happens, Mira is on the rear patio, staring at the service gate, wondering if she should change the locks or add another foot of brickwork to the top of the wall so that the house cannot be seen at all from the road, when the red Datsun crawls up the street and slows to a stop. At first Mira swallows panic, because she believes that this car means the return of the robber, but it is a muted panic, something she feels through cotton, because she is smoking a spliff, and she was never a spliff smoker before now, and this is the effect that ganja seems to have on her – this muting of painful things just enough so that she can endure them. The panic dissolves into giggles, because she is watching a woman alight from the little red car and ganja wisdom tells her this is the first Mrs. Whalen, and because it reminds her of childhood cartoons where a huge clown disembarks from a tiny vehicle for the sake of a few laughs. The first Mrs. Whalen is decidedly not huge, but her dress is large and billowy. She does not wear the paint-smeared jeans and T-shirt of Mira’s imagination. The undersides of her nails are not smeared with greasy acrylic pigments. Her hands are not coarse from stretching canvases and miscalculating the distance between her finger and the staple gun, as Fred’s were.

  The giggles coalesce into a hollowness inside her stomach.

  The first Mrs. Whalen refuses a cup of tea or a glass of mauby or to come inside. She does not want to share a piece of Rosa’s renowned great-cake or be served a square of warm cassava pone or a few slices of avocado bought for more than they are worth from the wiliest of the market vendors in town. The first Mrs. Whalen just wants her children and keeps the taxi waiting, its engine continuously clearing its throat in weak riposte to the roar of the waves. It is an old taxi, one of the ones you find if you come out of the arrivals hall, past the shirt-jacketed airport-taxi drivers with their gleaming white machines, past the buses and coaches awaiting the tour groups. The Datsun would have been one of the pack of unlicensed taxis circling the perimeter of the airport, with raucous drivers shouting their best fare offers. You would have to have been aware of the big difference in the fares between these taxis and the licensed ones to know to take one, Mira thinks, and she suddenly understands that the first Mrs. Whalen has visited the island before, that the home she is visiting was once her own. That she must have stood on this very patio in this very house, with her husband, when her husband was still Peter, and watched the very road that Mira, in clean pajamas freshly washed by Rosa, is staring at now. Mira is suddenly grateful that Rosa scrubbed her skin and shampooed her hair. Mira imagines that the first Mrs. Whalen would have been horrified to turn up and find her disheveled and smelly. This makes Mira laugh harder than ever.

  Rosa comes, her round face beaming at the sight of the first Mrs. Whalen, her soapy hands embracing her without a second thought by either of them. Rosa does not hug Mira with soapy hands. Rosa did not hug Mira at all before Peter died. The children come shrieking and join Rosa in embracing their mother, and Mira feels the old knife in her gut, only just dulled by what she is smoking.

  The reunion is long and tender, smattered with the mother’s apologies, and then Beth and Sam go to pack their things with Rosa while Mira Whalen smokes pot on the back patio, looks at the wall, at the taxi, at the cavernous doorway into which the children have disappeared, at the huge enamel ladybug the first Mrs. Whalen wears on her ring finger now, in place of a wedding ring. It is silent on the patio. Mira Whalen does not know what to say to the first Mrs. Whalen; what to say to her was generally Peter’s job. Peter is dead.

  Mira first knew the first Mrs. Whalen only by her voice. Six years ago, when Peter had called her from his hotel room to tell her that he was leaving her for an island girl he met on a business trip, Mira had sat silent in his bed and listened to this voice screaming through the receiver. The voice was more anguished then than angry, and Mira had moved over to the bathroom to brush her hair rather than listen to it, but later conversations had been filled with invective – when Peter came to the island to visit, when Mira traveled to Devon to meet his family, the morning after they married in the registry office in Greenwich. In six years she had never once set eyes on the woman. The embodiment of that voice is not what she had envisioned.

  For one thing, the first Mrs. Whalen is petite and thin, with a lilting Irish accent that yawns over her words when she introduces herself. Mira Whalen is distracted by the beauty of that accent – so distracted that she cannot hear what the first Mrs. Whalen is saying. The first Mrs. Whalen has chosen to wear a bright emerald-green dress of many layers of chiffon, with straps so fine it seems impossible for them to hold up so many layers of cloth. She is wearing a wide-brimmed yellow hat, and her skin is the kind of pale and peachy that must be smothered in protective creams or it will protest the sun by flushing deeply and flaming persistently, even after the required basting in over-the-counter sunscreen. A few stray tendrils of frizzy red hair threaten revolt from beneath the hat. The first Mrs. Whalen appears to be in the pink of health and not in the least bit bereaved, but she does not appear to be gloating or resentful. There is no sign of bitterness when she talks, the words dancing out of a slightly open smile. The ladybug travels over her cheek as she tucks an errant wisp of hair away. The waves crash from the other side of the house. The spliff blazes and crackles. The taxi coughs and is turned off, the driver realizing that the collection will take longer than his gas tank might allow.

  When Beth and Sam return with Rosa, they are carrying the little suitcases they had used for hand luggage on the trip to the island, the only bags that Peter had not tried to lug with him while they had waited for a taxi, one of the licensed ones. The first Mrs. Whalen hugs the children hard when they return, ushers them toward Mira to say goodbye.

  What Peter had said about her would be important at a time like this, thinks Mira, if only she could remember it. It would help her to understand what the woman is likely to be saying through those thin unvarnished lips, to respond in an intelligent manner. Mira knows the first Mrs. Whalen owns an art gallery in Camden, that she is a much better art dealer than the artist she first wanted to be, but not much else. Peter did not talk much about her during their initial courtship on his frequent business trips. By the time M
ira had moved to London, all traces of the first Mrs. Whalen had been removed from the house.

  Peter had not mentioned her habit of taking off for an ashram in India for two months at a time whenever he had the children for the long summer sojourn on Baxter’s Beach. Mira had always imagined her in a drafty old studio in Camden, splashing her frustration over huge canvases laid flat on the floor.

  From the woman’s facial expression, it would appear that she is offering her sympathy.

  “Thanks,” says Mira. The first Mrs. Whalen sets the ladybug to flight again. A headache blossoms from the center of Mira Whalen’s brain, unfurls behind her eyes and ears and blooms, crowding out her thoughts.

  The children hug her but their eyes betray relief. They are looking at their mother and the waiting taxi, which has coughed awake again. Beth gives Mira a kiss on her cheek and has to be coaxed into another one. Sam reaches up to be lifted and sobs into her neck when he gets there. He was only two when she married Peter, he calls her “Momma Mira,” he comes to her to be comforted when he falls, but this is his real momma, whose name does not need to be qualified when he calls her. Mira thinks she puts the spliff down and clucks comforts at him, she thinks she rubs his hair and his back. She thinks she tells him she will visit. She wonders if she can demand to see him again. She wonders whether she should be surrendering them so easily, whether Peter would have wanted her to protest that she hadn’t been given notice, hadn’t been properly informed that the first Mrs. Whalen would sweep onto the back patio and reclaim her children so soon after Peter’s death, when she knows very well that Mira Whalen doesn’t seem to be blessed with a womb that can have any.

  Rosa is the one who tears little Sam away. The first Mrs. Whalen shepherds the children across the street and into the car, says something to Rosa, who is going with her to help them settle into the first Mrs. Whalen’s hotel. They will spend a night there and leave for Camden tomorrow.

  The gate closes, the car leaves in a flurry of waving hands and grim goodbyes, and Mira Whalen is truly alone – a fact she finds funnier than ever.

  Chapter 20

  Lala

  20 August 1984

  If we were to look for Lala, and if we were to find her on the flank of Baxter’s Beach, knuckle-deep in the hair of a stranger, if we were to walk up to her and ask her whether she knows the frowsy beach bum, the one at whom our island women chupse, the one the memory of whom makes some tourist women breathe faster, we would notice first how she keeps her gaze on the head in front of her when she queries, Who? as if she is deliberately avoiding our eyes. Her fingers would not slow down, not then, they would keep weaving hair at a speed that would seem incapable of measurement: overunderoverunderoverunderover . . .

  We might describe Robert Parris (also known as “Tone”) first in physical terms, because his form – rusty, shoulder-length locks, average height, slim build, sinewy and strong – is what is first obvious to anyone who looks at him. We would explain that we are talking about the one whose toenails are washed white as surf, whose skin is salted with the fine white dust of a living made on the beach. We would explain that the hair on his head and hands has become the gold of the sun, so that, like the sun, we would not see it if we look at him straight on.

  When Lala still feigns ignorance of his acquaintance we could refer to his quirks – the shark-tooth necklace he wears around his neck and kisses before he ventures into the water, the way he slaps the surface of the sea with his Jet Ski so that the older swimmers startle and the younger ones spit obscenities, the tendency he has to take the unruly locks at the crown of his head and squeeze them to get rid of the salt water while bent over at the waist.

  And because Robert Parris is a subject that must be avoided at all costs, we would hear Lala again say Who? even as her fingers slow their speed on the hair in front of her. (Over. Under. Over. Under. Over. Stop. Over.)

  And it is only after she realizes that we will keep asking until she answers – after we have described him in such a way that it would be more suspicious if she said she does not know him – that we would find the small brittle smile of recognition.

  Oh, Tone, Lala would say. Yes – yes, I know him. And her hands would start to trip over themselves, to drop the silken strands of flaxen hair before her so that she will have to start the cornrow all over again. (Over. Stop. Over. Under. Stop. Over. Stop. Under. Overunderoverunderoverunder. Stop.)

  If we were to push further, to ask how she knows him, her eyes would fall from the hair in which she has tangled her fingers and land on her feet, where a fly would be broaching the sticky-sweet memory of a drop of sno-cone dried on her toe. And her eyes would stay there while we reassure the tourist between Lala’s legs. This tourist would now be closing her book, gathering her towel, saying she can come back when we are done, hesitating with a half-done head when we tell her it is okay, she can stay, this will only take a few minutes.

  Perhaps prior to the death of her baby, Lala’s smile would have widened and her Why you want to know? would not have led to more probing while she plaited cornrows with such tenderness that her client would have started to doze off, her hair now being plaited in the land of dreams.

  Before the death of the baby we might have said we were asking because we have seen the way he looks at her when he lands on the beach with a roar of the Jet Ski and the water only just rejoining behind him, the way she avoids looking up at the sound of this roar as every other pair of eyes on her stretch of sand does. Had we not been aware that she was wedded to another man, we might have told her, we would have taken this Tone for her husband. Were we not aware that this Tone sells his body to the tourist women on the beach, we would believe that his body is hers, so studiously does she avoid devouring it with her eyes in the way her client cannot help doing.

  But this is not before the death of Lala’s baby, this is after. This is a time when we do not talk to Lala, when our good hawkers hesitate to refer tourists in need of braids and beading to her, although we know she is our best. This is a time when we have all heard how Lala can lunge at a crab in the middle of cornrowing and try to kill it with her comb. We have heard how the wailing of babies on the beach can make her howl, and leave her too upset to finish her client’s hair. This is a time when some of us, unsure that Lala’s mind is still steady, refrain from asking her questions about anything, for fear we might further unsettle her.

  But unlike us, Sergeant Beckles is going to ask Lala his questions, despite the death of her baby and the fact that she is unlikely to be truthful in her answers. He is not everyone on the beach, after all, he is a sergeant of the Royal Island Police Force and he has conducted a covert surveillance operation and he has seen this woman kissing a man she is not married to on the steps of her husband’s house a few weeks after her baby died in mysterious circumstances. Sergeant Beckles has a job to do. This is why he persists in his line of questioning, why he takes his time with the asking. He does not allow Lala’s lowered eyes or her client’s squirming or our quiet stares to put him off in the least. This is why he takes a seat on the sand, removes his spit-shined hard-shoes, leaves his socks on and swats the fly approaching Lala’s big toe with one swift, smooth movement of his hand so that she realizes that he has killed it only when he opens his palm to reveal a fly carcass he flicks away without a hint of revulsion, because he is a policeman and he has seen much, much worse.

  “You know what I forget to ask you the other day?” Sergeant Beckles says to Lala when he is seated and smiling, despite the gnawing hunger in his stomach, despite the rumpled, slept-in uniform. “Is my fault really, is why I can’t ask you to come down to the station to answer these extra questions, you understand, ’cause is me that forget to ask you!”

  He chuckles, a chuckle that says We’re all human, we all make little mistakes from time to time, you can’t grudge a person a few mistakes.

  (Over. Stop.

  Under. Stop.

  Start. Stop.

  Stop.

  Ove
r. Underoverunderoverunder. Stop. Start. Stop.)

  “Let me tell you something about policemen,” he says. “We suppose to ask you all the questions up front, brisk brisk, and only ask more questions later if something else come up. Nobody want to be coming back to go over the same thing all the time so. But investigations go on and if there is new information . . . well . . . is you I trying to help, see? So let me ask you this question I shoulda ask you the other day.” He chuckles again, runs his fingers through some dry sand and dusts them. “How you come to know this one they call Tone?”

  Chapter 21

  Lala

  9 July 1979

  Lala meets Tone on her thirteenth birthday.

  On that day she wakes up apathetic. She feels no happier than the day before, no more comforted, no more hopeful than on any other day. She recognizes that this indifference to birthdays does not happen in the pages of the Secret Seven or Nancy Drew books she devours at the rate of three or more per week and therefore, on this, her thirteenth birthday, in recognition of the fact that she has outgrown these books, Lala stops reading Enid Blyton. It is consequently no special injury when she is not presented, at breakfast, with two installments of Malory Towers, wrapped in the slightly crumpled sepia-colored tissue paper from which Wilma cuts her dressmaking patterns. In her fervent prayers to God in the weeks leading up to this birthday, Lala has begged for these specific books wrapped in precisely this way, these books at the very least, but now she waves away the fact that God has not answered her prayers. As a matter of fact, she tells herself, it is better this way; it saves her having to explain to Wilma that she no longer reads Enid Blyton.

  When Wilma realizes that Lala has entered the kitchen, she comes to stand next to her, places a hand on her head, and administers prayers. And, on this birthday, for the first time ever, Lala performs a mental eye roll at the repeated mention of God. Lala opens her eyes on the Amen without uttering the word herself, and her gaze lands on two golden-brown bakes on her plate, awaiting a ladle-measure of salted cod to become her breakfast. She sits silent at the kitchen table, on which a square of heavy transparent plastic draws sweat from her elbows to the soundtrack of sizzling salt fish. She thinks of all the gifts she could have gotten if her mother was still alive and celebrating with her – a Walkman, perhaps, or a boom box or a pair of hot pink LA Gear sneakers.