by Shani Mootoo
Her little daughter would, on the other hand, sleep through any radio program, including the one with the audience that cackled loud and long every few minutes on Saturday mornings. Even her mother’s laughter at the ventriloquist and his sassy dummy would not awaken her.
But the sound of Dolly and her son’s voices, the moment they arrived, was enough to get her up.
The girl waddled sleepily, thumb in mouth, to the kitchen.
“How much times I tell you don’t come out here barefoot, child. You want to catch cold? You see how this child like to play? Soon as she hear you come, she wake up.” Her mother lifted her off the cool linoleum floor and wrapped her arms around her tightly. The girl rested her head on her mother’s shoulder, her face in her mother’s neck. The boy, in blue shirt tucked inside khaki short pants, the typical schoolboy’s attire that Mrs. Sangha had acquired secondhand from a neighbor for him, leaned against his mother and concentrated on picking at the scab of a sand-fly bite on his knuckles.
“Trouble abroad again, girl. Bad, bad trouble. I can’t believe what I hear on the Zenith this morning,” Mrs. Sangha addressed Dolly grimly. Every week Mrs. Sangha gave Dolly a highlight or two of the events going on in some country or the other, some country previously unknown to her and always too far away for Dolly to be interested in. These last few weeks, “abroad” was always a place called Europe—too big, too far away, and too everything for Dolly to even have a picture of it in her mind. And these days it was too full of turmoil. The recent news troubled Mrs. Sangha deeply, but all Dolly knew of Europe was that it was a too-distant land full of people who were supposed to be very important but who they were and why they were so important, she had never understood.
“BBC play right on the air, for the whole world to hear, what they call ‘live broadcast.’ A reporter was in a farmhouse in Spain, and you could hear bombs—yes, you could hear them falling as if you were there yourself. They were falling while the commentator was shouting above it for the whole world to hear.”
“Eh-eh. But why he so stupid? He wasn’t ’fraid one fall on his head?”
“He is a news reporter. That is what they do. And thank God for people like him, otherwise we wouldn’t know what-so going on in these places. God spare his life, yes.”
“So what the bombs was about?”
“Is that stupid man again. The one from Germany. Chancellor, they call him. He self had a hand in ordering aeroplanes to fly over a little village in Spain, not much bigger than Marion, you know, and bomb down the village flat-flat. The man is uncivilized, I tell you.”
Mrs. Sangha cupped her face in her hands. Dolly saw that she had been crying and was afraid she might start up again. “He pick a market day when it had plenty-plenty people in the village. Man sick, in truth, yes, Dolly. To just go and kill people so? They better watch out over there, yes, before that madman get too big for his britches. And you know they say he is a small man, short-short and ugly. Anyway, I glad too bad we living on an island unto ourselves, yes.”
“And I just hear, too, that creek flooding now-now. All you come in time, girl. Not even a Bihar car can pass on it now.” Mrs. Sangha laughed halfheartedly at her own joke and pressed her daughter’s head against her shoulder, rubbing the little child’s back. Dolly was glad for the change of topic.
“You want to pee-pee, baby? Come change clothes and brush teeth. Mammy will make cocoa for the two of you, and then you can play all you want. That is all the two of you good for is play, play, play. You mustn’t come out barefoot again, you hear? Dolly, Boss bring some shirts for you to wash. Starch them good, eh?”
Dolly nodded. She didn’t, of course, say what was on her mind: why the woman he shack up with don’t wash and iron his shirts for him? Why you does send food for him lunchtime and wash clothes for him? She sleeping with him, why she don’t look after him? You might as well tell him to bring her clothes and all her children clothes for you—well, not for you, but for me—to wash, too.
Alone in the kitchen with her son, a children’s choir on the radio performing “On Yonder Shivering Hills the Holly and the Snow” concealed Dolly’s voice as she admonished him, “Sit right here. Don’t go in behind them, you hear. Nobody invite you, so you stay right where you is and wait for me. I going to change mih clothes. And don’t forget yuh manners. What you say if somebody ask you if you want something?”
“Yes, please.”
“And if you don’t want what they have to give you?”
“No, please.”
“No, thanks. And if and when they give you something?”
“Thanks, please.”
“Thanks. Thanks, Mrs. Sangha. You hear? And you don’t have to take any and everything she offer you, you hear? Behave yourself proper till I come back.”
The girl and the boy who was her age sat next to each other on the couch—at least they were on the easier-to-clean pink vinyl and chrome couch and not on the more formal red velvet one—in the drawing room. The girl had learned to read simple words and numbers at the elementary school she attended on weekday mornings. One of several of her large picture books, some with a few words, several with torn pages, lay on the couch between them. They looked at the pictures and invented stories. The girl fingered a word, uttered it one syllable at a time. He concentrated, tried to remember its length, shape, and sound. The girl glanced about the room. No one else was with them. She tore the page slowly, so as not to make a noise. She was attempting to tear out a single letter from the words grouped on the page, but she did not yet have the dexterity required for so specific a task. She tried another page. This time she succeeded in tearing out the letter H for the word “he.” She placed it on the couch between them. She tore another. The letter E. She tried to wrap the two letters into a neat package, but the paper was too small, her fingers unskilled. She told the boy to open his mouth. To stick out his tongue. She placed the two letters on his tongue and ordered him to swallow. He tried, but the paper had stuck to his tongue. He removed the two wet letters, rolled them between his fingers, put them back in his mouth, and quickly swallowed hard, his eyes closed tightly. She handed him a cup half full of orange juice. He drank and gulped as if taking a tablet that would teach him to read.
Dolly, uncomfortable with her son’s ease in that big house, left the washing to come up and find him sitting on the couch. But his feet—never mind they were bare—were marked up, unsightly, they had purple patches from insect bites. Her jaw tightened as she quarreled to herself: What he have them drawn up so, right on top the seat for? Is vinyl couch he sitting on, is true, but if he don’t know better, I do. She would rather he didn’t even sit on the couch, vinyl or no vinyl.
To her mind, he had no right to even enter the drawing room at all. She herself didn’t like going farther into the house than the kitchen. She hastened over to him, admonished him in a low urgent voice, pulled his feet off, rearranged his body as if it had no will of its own, his feet sticking over the edge into the air.
Mrs. Sangha came into the drawing room. “Dolly, leave the boy alone, na. Big events unfolding in the world, and you have time to worry about manners? He is only a child. He have more than enough time later for behaving himself.”
Dolly’s face stung with the contradiction. How would the children know that Mrs. Sangha was only joking with her? But she stood back, expressionless, wondering what events outside of Guanagaspar could be more important than bringing up her son properly. The boy, wide-eyed and made self-conscious, drew his feet up again, grabbed the toes of one foot, and pulled at the scab of a healing sore. Dolly yanked his feet back out. Mrs. Sangha sighed dramatically and said, “Dolly, girl, he is just a child, and that is just a couch.”
Back downstairs, Dolly scrubbed the clothes against the corrugated concrete harder than necessary and fretted: That child of mine getting to be too easy in this house, and Mrs. Sangha too indulgent; is not right that she contradicting me so in front of children.
Sweating from her inexpressible ang
er and frustration, Dolly scrubbed harder and faster.
A thumping came from upstairs. She remained still and listened. A tinny, quivering note on the shiny black upright piano in the drawing room was being continuously thumped. She rushed up the stairs, her hands and arms wet, a clump of soapsuds dangling off an elbow. Thank God he was sitting on the floor, making scribbles that only he could decipher on a pad of blank paper. The girl was kneeling on the piano stool. She had added several notes, using the flat of her palm pressed down hard, one hand holding down the other. When she saw Dolly, she lifted her hands and banged discordantly. “I making music.”
She sat down on the stool as part of her motion to slide off it. She ran to Dolly and, taking her by the hand, led her to the kitchen. “I want juice. Give me some juice, please.”
Dolly eyed a jug of water in the refrigerator. A glass of it would cool her down good. With one or two ice cubes crackling and splitting in it. But her child was comfortable enough for the two of them in that house. She was not about to take liberties. She would satisfy herself with water from the stand pipe in the backyard, though she could taste its metal flavor just thinking about it.
STUPID GAMES
There was that time when the girl swirled around the kitchen table to the tune of a piece of Indian music from the Desi Radio Hour. She jutted a hip in the air in little staccato thrusts while she swivelled on one foot, one arm held high, rotating the wrist. Dolly’s son was twirling around the table, too. From downstairs she heard his laughter, crazy-crazy, no shame whatsoever. Dolly rushed up, intending to take him back down with her. Downstairs, where he belonged.
Weak and giggling, their eyes watering, noses running, they crumpled in a heap on top of each other, rolling about on the ground and carrying on much too loudly for her liking. She was about to be sharp, ready to put a good slap on him, to separate him and the girl once and for all, to take him downstairs with her where he ought to sit quietly and wait while she worked her fingers to bone. Only, Mrs. Sangha was leaning against the doorjamb, her hand barring her laughter one minute, and the next prompting her daughter and the boy by clapping to the beat of the music. They squealed and pretended to be imitating the high-pitched instruments and the voice of the singer.
But Dolly felt that the child had gone too far, was out of control, behaving like that in her employer’s drawing room. Mrs. Sangha continued to prompt them.
“Let me see you do it again. Come on, do it with your hand in the air. Put your hand up in the air, boy, like how she doing. Come, come, show him how to do it, child, show him. Yes, that’s right, that’s right.”
And then, there was that stupid game of teatime. “Teatime, my foot,” Dolly muttered under her breath, “people in Raleigh don’t have tea or time for teatime.”
Narine Sangha, returning from one of his regular visits abroad, presented his daughter one Sunday afternoon with the largest toy tea set ever seen in Guanagaspar: tiny blue-lipped white porcelain plates, cups, saucers, and table dishes, each item decorated with a single painted bunch of wispy red and yellow chrysanthemum flowers. There was a white enamel refrigerator that opened to show tiny and perfectly rendered milk bottles and plastic bunches of carrots and grapes and apples, a stove, and a sink mounted on a cupboard with doors and drawers. Part of the ritual of the game was the washing of the wares. They dragged an upholstered dressing-table stool to the bathroom sink, clogged the drain with its rubber stopper, and filled it with water, dropping in the bar of hand soap. They tipped the kitchen set out of the round milk-chocolate tin in which it was stored. Cups and saucers, plates and bowls, pots and pans and cutlery that, before sliding into the water, made a tinny clinking ruckus that pleased them. They quietly splashed water, made a game of trying to catch the large slippery bar of soap in their tiny hands. Using one of the toy utensils, a slotted spoon, they blew bubbles, too dense and ponderous to rise into the air. There on the spoon, the bubble expanded, wobbled, and slid off messily onto the floor. They were drenched, their fingers wrinkled and gray.
Dolly and Mrs. Sangha, realizing that the children were suspiciously quiet, came upon them and the mess they had made. Dolly took them away from the sink, rinsed and rubbed dry the tiny dishes and cutlery. She changed her son’s clothing; Mrs. Sangha, her daughter’s. They sent the children to the platform at the top of the front stairs to resume another phase of the game.
The girl officiously sent her little friend away with instructions to return for tea and cake at four o’clock—which time it would be whenever she determined it. By herself, she performed all the tea-making actions exactly as she had observed her mother doing. She had a child’s table, chair, and rocking chair that her father had had constructed for her by a local furniture maker, and those she arranged for the visit. She set the table using one of her father’s monogrammed handkerchiefs for a tablecloth. For napkins, she folded sheets of paper torn from a notepad taken from her father’s dresser drawer. She put out a little saucer with three cashew nuts taken from the kitchen pantry, and another with sultanas and red and green candied cherries found there also. In the meantime, in the yard, the boy picked flowers that Mrs. Sangha tied in a bunch for him with a piece of kitchen string to make a bouquet. She tied also a handkerchief around his neck, and wearing one of Mr. Sangha’s hats, which engulfed his entire head and had to be prompted back constantly, he awaited an indication from the girl that it was four o’clock and all right to knock on the door. He glanced back occasionally at his imagined horse, parked on the road in front of the house. He didn’t too much like this part of the teatime visitor game, because she, as the hostess, was the one who served the tea and put out the cakes, and she wouldn’t let him help her with anything. When he tried to talk, deepening his voice and talking about his day rounding up cattle, pitching and pulling up tents, hunting buffalo, and looking out for Indians, she became impatient, saying that he must be quiet while she poured tea. When he raised the imaginary mug of steaming tea to his parched lips, she stopped him, insisting that it was too hot, that he must let it cool, and she blew on it for him. When he reached for a cashew, she became furious, saying that if he ate the food, there would be none left for the game, and none for the other guests who were to arrive shortly. He didn’t like that other guests would arrive. He would have preferred to be the only one invited.
UP THE HORIZON, DOWN THE HORIZON
Dolly realized that all she had heard from upstairs lately was the distant drone of the radio. Mrs. Audry Talbot—who every day gave advice on everything: home remedies, dealing with willful children, force-ripening plums, killing a live chicken and plucking it, coping gracefully with untidy houseguests, buying presents for servants, for your doctor and dentist, and even on weaning pups—spoke today with a guest about roasting a duck in the Chinese manner. The volume on the radio was high, so that Mrs. Sangha, wherever she was, would hear the programs. Mrs. Sangha was not far, however. She leaned against the doorjamb between the kitchen and the dining room. A kitchen towel hung around her neck.
Dolly asked for the children. Mrs. Sangha was too busy listening to the program. She nodded in agreement with Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Talbot’s guest about the quantity of anise to be used in the seasoning. Dolly wiped her hands on her apron and hesitantly went through the house. She came upon the children in Mrs. Sangha’s bedroom and watched them from the doorway. They were standing atop the piano stool, which they had dragged in from the drawing room, peering into the top drawer of a tall dresser. The girl was whispering to the boy that the contents of the drawer belonged to her father. There was a stout blue bottle with a dented silver cap. The bottle was oily. A length of thread and a strand of black hair clung to the oily surface. There was a crumpled silver-colored tube of medicine, an eyedropper with a black rubber cap on one end, a greasy tortoiseshell comb that had short black hairs and matted gray dust wound about its teeth, a silver U-shaped tongue scraper, and several loose pennies. The girl knew which ones were from the U.K. and that a particular one was from someplace
called Canada. There was a heavy gold-plated lighter and a number of brass keys, each a different size and shape. There was a big corroded iron one. The children tried each key in the keyhole of the drawer. None worked. There was an empty silver cigarette holder with NRS etched in curly script, a stamp from the U.S.A. that was stuck to one of the drawer’s side panels. The boy tried to slip his nail under an edge of the stamp. The sound of his fingernail scraping the wood panel was all he was able to accomplish. The girl pushed his hand away from the stamp, telling him, “No, don’t do that. You will tear it.” There was a sticky blue jar, the lid of which they managed to unscrew. A faint smell of camphor and eucalyptus escaped. The girl put her forefinger in the jar and scooped up some of the ointment. She put it to the boy’s nose.
Dolly watched them, wondering what they might find, and wondering if Mrs. Sangha knew they were in her room, meddling in her husband’s dresser. She wondered if it had ever occurred to her son to ask the girl where her father was. When he picked up the lighter and attempted to open it, Dolly rushed to him, grabbed both his hands, and yanked him off the stool. She slapped him sharply on both hands. She hit him again, twice on his bottom. The little girl scrambled off the stool and screamed, “Ma, Ma. Quick. Dolly beating him.”