How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  Wilma wipes her hands and points at the head and shoulders of a mannequin sitting on a chair in the corner. Lala recognizes it – it is the stand that Wilma uses to fluff her wigs and repair her hats, but this mannequin also has fine brown hair of its own.

  “For you,” says Wilma. “You can plait her hair.”

  Wilma has noticed how Lala turns the hair of her dollies into elaborate braided creations, how she experiments with her own hair when Wilma will let her, how she sneaks into Wilma’s room and runs her fingers through the silky wigs Wilma keeps there. Lala says thanks.

  Carson farts from the pantry off the kitchen, which Wilma has turned into his room to spare him having to walk up the stairs. The stench that follows is familiar. Lala knows that Wilma will wash Carson by wheeling him into the backyard, cutting the clothes off him with her sharp, sharp scissors, and turning the garden hose on him so that he screams under the blast of the water, the shock of the cold and the bite of a wind that wails at 6 a.m. Wilma will lift Carson like he is cotton onto a wooden chair with a low back, to which she has had the neighborhood handyman affix wheels repurposed from a child’s tricycle salvaged from the dump. Wilma will wheel him over the kitchen’s flagstone floor, down a piece of plywood fitted like a ramp, onto the gritty dirt of the backyard. When the pipe creaks on and the hose stiffens, but before Carson has been stung by the shrapnel of icy water in the verdant green shade of breadfruit trees his ancestors planted with their own hands, Carson will scream. He will scream in high-pitched exclamations reminiscent of the way the men who play dominoes by the streetlight effuse after a joke or a sweet six-love, except that Lala will not miss the undertone of terror in Carson’s hollering. It is something she sometimes hears in her nightmares at night:

  “Woi! Woi! Woi!” Carson will scream, but in Lala’s dreams he is asking, “Why! Why! Why!” – a rhetorical demand to know what evil he has committed to deserve these insults, this cruelty in his old age. On this, the morning of her thirteenth birthday, Lala will tell him.

  Wilma’s wiry hands throw the ladle into the sink, unhinge the apron from her neck and waist, and hang rigid by her side as she walks into Carson’s bedroom.

  “You is one dirty old man is wuh!” protests Wilma. “You mean you ain’t know yet to find the potty, Carson?”

  As recently as the previous birthday, when Lala was younger and still innocent enough to think Carson faultless in this whole sorry business of his ignominious shits, Lala had explained them away by telling herself he couldn’t help it. Until Wilma showed her how, if promised a beer for keeping the bed linen clean, there would be no such spontaneous soiling of himself. Wilma had shown this to her the last time that Lala cried when Wilma had hosed Carson off to his hollers of “Woi! Woi! Woi!”

  The porridge that Carson will eat starts to burn and the sweet scent of hardspice becomes the smelly scorch of any burning bark. (“Woi! Woi! Woi!”) Wilma drops the hose, rushes in, replaces her apron before lifting the saucepan with her bare hands (because Wilma is a woman of order and the apron comes first), burns her fingers, drops the little copper pot she knew was bad for porridge but used anyway. Wilma slaps her arms against her sides, stamps her feet, calls for Jesus, asks for the Lord’s mercy, receives neither, and snaps at Lala to please wash Carson while she remakes his porridge. Wilma is now also worried that she will be late for work.

  Lala rolls her eyes when Wilma’s back is turned and her grandmother’s bony hands are scraping the charred and gummy cornmeal from the bottom of her new copper pot while an iron pot of water awaits the new porridge. She pushes back her chair so the legs rake against the stone floor and she looks with longing at the two bites of salt fish still sitting on her plate. (“Woi! Woi! Woi!”)

  The skin of Carson’s back is rashed with goose bumps when Lala picks up the hose. This skin is paler than it used to be and it has started the slide toward the grave that is characteristic of the gravely ill, the dying, and the elderly – and that is most pronounced in those who are all three. Lala goes to the pipe, turns it so far left that it locks into full force and she cannot turn it back again, even if, somewhere deep inside her, she wanted to lower the water pressure. She does not.

  The fine-featured girls in Enid Blyton get birthdays with something called blancmange that sounds delicious even to say. They get frosted cakes and sandwiches with pink and yellow cheese-pastes and friends who come around with presents and freshly washed faces at 3 p.m., thinks Lala, but she gets to hose shit off her crazy grandfather, whose wilted totie worms from a nest of patchy pubic hair that resembles the coat of a dog with mange. (“Woi! Woi! Woi!”) She gets to squander a beloved breakfast because she is suddenly aware of how its color matches the feces speckling Carson’s slashed-up clothes and the tricycle wheels on his makeshift wheelchair. (“Woi! Woi! Woi!”) This is what she gets. She tightens her fist around the hose. She aims.

  “Woi! Woi! Woi!” screams Carson, “Woiiiiiiiiiiii!”

  “Why? Because you is a nasty, dutty old man,” spits Lala under her breath. “Because you is a nasty, shitty, muddacunt old man.”

  When Carson is bathed and bedded again, and Wilma has shoveled him as full of freshly made cornmeal pap as she can before she is forced to leave, Wilma and Lala and the half-mannequin head to work. Work, when it is not making dresses for women and girls, when it is not raising and slaughtering and selling her chickens, when it is not feeding Lala or caring for Carson or cleaning the house, is cooking for a madam named Mrs. Kennedy in one of the big houses on Baxter’s Beach.

  Wilma isn’t fond of the idea of taking Lala to work with her, but Lala is already too big-boned and -breasted to be trusted alone at home. Auntie Earlie has died, and there is no other relative with whom Wilma can leave her granddaughter while school is out for summer. The memory of what happened to Esme prevents her leaving Lala at home with Carson, even if he is old and feeble and cannot remember his own name sometimes now. Wilma realizes that it cannot be helped and therefore settles into stoicism. It is the first day of the summer holiday. She has cautioned Lala to be quiet, to make Mrs. Kennedy forget that she is there, to make sure and not speak unless spoken to, and not, under any circumstances, to use the people’s bathroom if she has to make number two. While they wait at a big wooden gate, Lala watches the veins that web the back of her grandmother’s knees, the softness of her ankles above the slap-slap of her slippers as she taps her impatience and waits for the door to open, the tumble of curls under her hat, the highlights in her wig glistening like the strands of gold Rumpelstiltskin spun for the king. Lala wonders what Wilma will do now that she has given her the mannequin, how her grandmother will fluff her wigs into fullness.

  The gate swings open and Wilma smiles at a white-haired woman with the soft, slightly wrinkled skin of a rich woman who actually wears the expensive creams sampled in the magazines, a woman who buys those bottles by the dozen.

  “Wilma! We were wondering what happened!” exclaims the woman in a voice that does not move a single register above or below politeness. They are under a pagoda festooned with purple bougainvillea and the buzzing of bees and Lala’s hand is heavy in Wilma’s as she is tugged into the house – she does not want to be stuck in this house every day of her vacation. For this reason she broaches the welcome mat reluctantly, wishing she could stay under the pagoda and be stung and stung and stung on the big bones of her face, just so she will have a good reason to scream. The thought of having to watch Wilma do chores during the eight-hour wait until they can go home again is worse than the fact that she did not get the something she wanted for her birthday.

  Mrs. Kennedy is wearing white linen culottes and a pale-gray denim shirt with a crisp collar and diamonds at her ears and her neck and her wrists and her fingers that look like they have captured rainbows inside them and are not the dull white of the stones in the costume jewelry Lala persuades Wilma to buy her from the itinerant vendors when they come.

  “Little issue at home,” explains Wilma. “All fixed now .
. . I sorry.”

  “Not a problem, Wilma,” says Mrs. Kennedy. “And whom have you brought with you?”

  Lala nods hello with a joylessness the woman does not seem to notice.

  “Mrs. Kennedy, this is my granddaughter, Stella.”

  “Stella! How delightful to meet you!”

  Lala believes that it is her homemade gingham dress, gently flared to a perfect tea length and bordered in anglaise, the matching ribbon that restrains her pressed hair, her cheap Chinese slippers worn with socks – it is these things that make this woman think that she is younger than she is, that make her think it is okay to speak to her as if she is some little child. So she does not return the greeting, even if she knows that Wilma will wring her ears for it later.

  “Come in and make yourself comfortable,” says Mrs. Kennedy. She starts walking Wilma through the menu for the afternoon, when Wilma will clean the house in preparation for Mrs. Kennedy’s party and Wilma will bake a cake that Lala would kill for and Wilma will remember to ask the gardener to cut the pink roses to decorate the table because they are Mrs. Kennedy’s favorite and she will make and serve green-banana pickle because it is Mrs. Kennedy’s favorite thing that Wilma makes. And it is not even Mrs. Kennedy’s birthday.

  Lala finds the boy at lunchtime. She has taken her mannequin head with its straight brown hair and she has drifted out of the garden and up the beach and then into a cool alcove covered by coconut palms and sea-grape trees. She is looking for a quiet place to sit and plait her mannequin’s hair, and the comfortably breezy spot is the perfect respite from a very hot day. This is where she finds the boy. He lies on his belly adjacent to a stone gutter, where plastered cement restrains a dribble of green wastewater from soaking into the earth before it reaches the sea. The water smells horrid. She can’t understand why the boy would hold his nose so close to it, can’t believe there is something so valuable to him that bearing this stench would be better than suffering its loss.

  This is how Lala meets Tone, neck over the edge of a gutter like he is looking for something he has lost, pants below the swell of his buttocks. Heavy with the guilt of what she’d done to Carson just that morning, she feels her heart move at the sight of him, the thought of what could have happened to end with him there, ass exposed and bleeding. The boy is crying, letting the snot stretch down into the algae below. Lala has never seen a male cry before, except for a fat little baby at Wilma’s church. Even in his moments of anguish, Carson screams but his eyes remain dry as bone. It is one of the reasons her grandmother ignores his screams – the dry eyes betraying the lack of emotion behind the bellowing. He does it for attention, is what Wilma says when Lala pleads with her to stop, you don’t know what he is really like.

  Lala watches the boy cry a few minutes before she can bring herself to speak to him.

  “Hey,” she whispers, “you good?”

  He doesn’t reply, she wonders if maybe he is high, one of those paro teens who lets mature tourist men buy them with money. Wilma has told her about this type of sale and purchase, warned her that it is the worst kind, a horrible thing, although she has not deigned to describe exactly what it is that the paro teens offer and the mature tourist men buy.

  “You okay?”

  Still nothing.

  Lala considers leaving to call someone – the police, maybe, or someone at the Kennedy house – but she fears that in so doing Wilma will find out that she hasn’t, after all, stayed in the room to which Wilma has exiled her for the day, hasn’t observed her strict admonitions to remain indoors, reading, out of sight of Mrs. Kennedy, her guests, and Wilma, serving dainty desserts on silver platters.

  Lala looks at Tone, takes in his exposed behind, blood drying in iridescent swaths of brown that crack and peel under the gaze of the sun. She puts down her mannequin head and her beads and runs the few yards to the sea and catches some seawater in an empty soda bottle and comes back and washes away the evidence with salty beach water and worries that there will be sand in her socks, which she will have to explain to Wilma later. And, unlike Carson, with Tone she warns him first that the water is coming, that it might be cold, that it might smart. With Tone she pours gently and holds his hand to help him to his knees and wipes his eyes with the edge of her skirt. She asks him to just stay there, says she’ll be back with some salve and a towel. The boy doesn’t say anything, but he makes muffled gurgling noises like he’s trying to swallow his own tongue. Tears continue to pool at the corners of his eyes and drizzle onto his cheeks, although his expression doesn’t suggest that he is crying at all. Lala knows that kind of crying – it is crying born of anger rather than hurt.

  When Lala comes back he has pulled up his pants, the water bottle is empty, his face is clean, and he is throwing stones into the canal. Lala has found an antibiotic cream in one of Mrs. Kennedy’s cabinets, has stolen a leaf off an aloe plant from her garden, and now she sits next to him, pounding the two together with a smooth sea stone because that is how Wilma tends Carson when he gets a sore that will not heal and she believes that this will help this boy.

  “You want me to call somebody?”

  He shakes his head No. The stones ping when they bounce off the concrete walls of the canal, plop and sink when they land in the wobbly moss leeching onto its middle. Lala can’t tell whether he is trying to hit the concrete or the moss. She finishes pounding. The sea-grape trees do not cackle, the waves do not whisper near the shore, the seabirds do not squawk.

  “You want me to put it on?”

  He looks at the potion. He is crying again.

  “I won’t look,” she explains. Then, when he is still sullen: “Or my grandmother know a nurse-lady live near town. You could go there, I . . .”

  “Don’t need no nurse!”

  He is so fierce in his refusal that Lala jumps and wonders whether coming back to tend him was a good idea. She’d guess his age at fifteen if pressed, although his height and build mark him as younger. There are all sorts of stories, she belatedly remembers, about girls who do not follow the warnings of good elders and find themselves in the company of males they do not know. Stories Wilma has told her. She begins to worry that she is not safe.

  “Help me up.”

  She stares at him, suddenly unable to move. He sucks his teeth, wobbles onto his hands and knees, grabs a branch, and pulls himself up until his body weight is borne on his right knee.

  “Don’t tell nobody ’bout this, you hear?”

  His voice is menacing and she recoils and nods, mute.

  “Please,” he says, softly.

  He stands without the branch. He starts to limp away.

  The salve stays on the stone beside her.

  The next time she sees him is a few days later when he is working in Mrs. Kennedy’s garden, using a cutlass to hack at a sweet-lime hedge with the savage ease of a man free of concern for his own safety. He is wearing several layers – a long-sleeved polo shirt that might have once been green but has been washed into gray, a pink T-shirt, and above that a bright blue polyester button-down. He is wearing long green pants and rubber garden boots, and nothing in his walk suggests that he is the same boy from the beach. But it is him. Somehow it makes her indignant that he does not look up when she speaks to Wilma, does not acknowledge the source of the shadow that falls on him when she walks past on her way to the beach with her mannequin, does not seek a few seconds when she is unaccompanied to give her the thanks he denied her that day by the gutter.

  Chapter 22

  21 July 1979

  Carson falls off his bed and is hospitalized. As a result, every evening when she has finished the housework for Mrs. Kennedy, Wilma boards a bus to Baxter’s General and Lala is alone. On these evenings she does not go straight home like Wilma warns her to do. She walks toward the house as long as Wilma is watching and then, when the bus is almost a speck in the distance and Wilma is no longer watching, she makes her way to the beach and sits and plaits the hair on her mannequin. There is something about the b
each – about the quiet crash of water – that soothes her, something about the wide expanse of blue that makes her feel she is free. On these evenings at the beach, she watches Tone skim the surface of the sea on a silvery board while her hands work their magic. At first he does not acknowledge her, but one evening a few weeks into the summer as she starts to make her own way home, she accidentally leaves her mannequin head on the sand. He calls after her, runs to her holding the perpetually smiling head in his hands.

  After that he grunts hellos each evening that he passes her seated on the beach in inappropriate gingham dresses, plaiting and beading the hair of the mannequin with glassy eyes. And a few weeks later he asks if she would like to visit his mother who sells the best beads, better even than those sold in town. His aunt sends them in from America, he says, some of those beads have not reached Baxter’s Beach yet. By then, a few tourists have stopped beside her to admire the patterns in the braids of the bodiless mannequin, one or two have asked whether she would do their own. Lala is flattered – the professional hair braiders litter the beach, women whose false nails clack clack clack as they descend the plaits they weave, like spiders, out of air. She is now beginning to think of braiding and beading as something she could do to get away. Something that will earn her enough money to escape Carson’s awful shits and Wilma’s suffocating guardianship for good. The best and brightest beads might be a beginning.

  Lala is doubtful of his motives and doesn’t have money to buy beads, but agrees.