Big Island, Small

by Maureen St. Clair

  Aunt Rachel ask Jared if he still in school. He say he work for a computer company. Whether he still in school we don’t know. He don’t offer much else.

  His mom try too. “Computers. Who can understand them? Magically they connect us to the world but which one of us knows how that actually happens?”

  Everyone look at Jared. Jared look out the window. Aunt Rachel and Jared’s mom talk about work, the university, their upcoming sabbaticals, which they plan to take around the same time. Jared finishes his beer, nods at me and we stand up at the same time.

  “We’re going to go out back,” I say to the two women immersed in work-related conversation.

  “You want another beer?” I grab one for both of us and we sit on the back step.

  “Sorry to hear about your mom,” Jared say.

  “Thanks. And sorry you feel so uncomfortable.”

  “Mom and I got in an argument before we arrived. I’m trying to bail from a dinner with my dad. I can’t stand the man.”

  “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  I don’t want to seem like I’m studying his business so I change the topic. “So you go to school too? Or you working full time?”

  “Full time.”

  He offer little, looking like he dreaming some kind of quick escape. I throw him a badminton racket and grab the birdie stuck to the fence. We beat the birdie back and forth like we beating the awkwardness between us loose. His bad mood, my ambivalent one, flying from side to side. I dive for one of his serves and land under the net. He laugh. He don’t look away this time when we eyes touch. There is something both tragic and giving about him.

  A week later Jared come into the Lion’s Den. That night Iris wearing a bright purple and red cloth from Ghana wrapped from hips to ankles. Colours dancing down she legs. A tight-fitting white t-shirt tucked into she skirt highlights the intricate patterns on she head wrap. I wish I had style like she. Wish I look more like Iris less like me ’cause Jared walk in with another finely dressed woman. And me behind the bar, my hair tie up in a black wrap. Black t-shirt and black knee-length skirt. To brighten myself I take my paper-beaded orange-blue necklace triple looped around my wrist and put it around my neck.

  Iris say Jared’s friend could be my sister. “She has the same colour skin as you. Butterscotch. And that nose. She mixed like you for sure. Maybe your mom have a child you don’t know about.”

  I laugh.

  When he notice me, a smile swallow Jared’s eyes. “Judith. You work here?”

  “Just start.”

  “Cool.”

  His friend never look up from she phone. He never introduce me. I watch them study the vegetarian dishes printed on the blackboard leaning against the wall. He order a vegetarian roti and a Carib. His friend order rice, peas and stewed tofu with pumpkin. I watch them from behind the bar. Both on their phones until food arrive. I place their order of drinks, a Coke and a Carib beer on the bar and Iris bring them over. By the time I come back from running an errand across the road for RasI, they gone.

  The next week Jared arrive alone and order another vegetarian roti and Carib and sit at the bar. “Hey,” he say.

  “This your favourite restaurant or what?”

  “Maybe. This is my second time though. I’ll tell you next time.”

  “How’s your mom? You getting along better?”

  “When she’s not trying to be the peacemaker.”

  Later on he tell me his mom move to the city to get away from his dad. They try to live as though they still husband and wife but then his dad pick up a next woman. “Forgot to tell us,” Jared say. “My brother slipped this in when we were playing pool one night.”

  “What did you expect?” his brother say. “There’s only so much tomato soup and corn beef a man can eat.”

  Jared say his dad pick up a young woman. “One of our childhood friends,” he say. “She used to be at our house all the time. My parents practically raised her. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been on top of her then too.”

  On top of her, I think. What a strange way to put it. One night when Jared and I hanging out he say he wish his dad dead. The worst painful death. I know there must be something else crashing around inside him, his moods unpredictable like Big Island weather. He start coming around the bar regularly. My head start to swing toward the front door whenever I feel a swoosh of cold air, hoping to see Jared in his red plaid flannel jacket. I feel nice knowing he come looking for me. He say I put him in a frame of mind that is quiet and easy. I start to feel nervous every time he walk or don’t walk through the restaurant door. When he does walk in I wonder if my shirt too tight, my skirt too long, my head wrap too constricting, my face too plain, my body too thick.

  One weekend he doesn’t come at all. On Monday night after class I look for him. I know the apartments where he live. I pass by them before. I check his last name on one of his visa bills. He let me in the front door. I skip every second step to the third floor. He leave the door open for me. He there at the stove stirring tomato soup. He smile. We make love that night.

  I drop Jared’s name to Sola a few times, drop it like he just another person I meet at the restaurant or school; drop it too many times for she to believe we just friends. “So you sleeping with him?” she say.

  I hold the phone between ear and shoulder while I crack ice into my glass and sit down.

  “So?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I put my glass down and hear the ice clank, a car horn outside, the clock spitting seconds louder than usual. I rub my eyes and feel Sola’s breath through the phone. I imagine Sola wearing she pine green t-shirt and knee-ripped jeans. I smell sandalwood and coconut. My hands on both sides my head, the phone balancing while I stare into a bowl of rice and black beans.

  “What happened Judith?”

  “I don’t know what happen, I don’t fucking know. This guy stuck in my head like gum stuck to my shoe. Really he mean shit to me. Just a guy. A pretty boy I can’t stop thinking about.”

  “You sleeping with him?”

  Tears tripping down my cheeks.

  “I don’t get it Judith if he means nothing to you why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “What do you know?” Sola’s voice rising.

  “We watch movies and have sex. That’s it. That’s all. Movies and sex. No deep conversations, no nothing. He live on top of a fucking movie rental. He come into the Lion’s Den and then we hang out after. I don’t know why he taking up so much of my head. I frustrated.”

  “Whatever Judith. You and Drey aren’t married. Maybe Drey is doing the same. Anyway Judith, I got to go. I’ll call you later.” She hang up. But she don’t call later. She don’t return my texts either.

  SOLA

  THE NIGHT JUDITH TELL me about Jared I think of Kat and her friends gulping handfuls of cashews while studying. I am reminded of Ma Tay’s cashew tree and collecting the fruit each day, twisting and pulling the one nut from its fruit until it loosened in our hands, throwing them in the black bucket by the back door, watching them pile up throughout the week. On Sundays we parched the nuts over an afternoon fire. We carefully cracked the shells and peeled the nuts whole. Ma Tay kept the fire going so she could parch cocoa and roast breadfruit. She bottled up the nuts in recycled Heineken bottles and sold them with her coconut oil at Friday and Saturday Market. I couldn’t stand watching Kat and her friends pile those nuts in their mouths while flipping through study notes. Sometimes half a bag sat in the cupboard for weeks until being tossed in the trash. After hearing about Jared, I begin to imagine Judith chomping on those nuts too.

  Judith calls on Halloween. She calls in the evening to tell me about Jared, to tell me she doesn’t know what’s wrong with her, why she’s so obsessed with this guy, why she can’t just w
alk away. Kat and Greg are pouring mini chocolate bars, small bags of chips and rolled sour candies into two large silver bowls. I walk into the bedroom with a Kit Kat half unwrapped. Judith sounds like she has a cold but she doesn’t. She’s crying. Crying for what? Crying because she has too many things on the go: school, work, sex? Crying because she can’t understand why she has another man on top of the man she has already? What does she want me to say? Spoiled. That’s what I want to say: spoiled. You is spoiled. I hear myself tumbling into the language of back home. Spoiled Judith. You don’t know what you about. You don’t want school full time you want work full time. You don’t want Big Island you want Small Island. You don’t want Aunt Rachel you want Dolma and Shy. You don’t want one man you want two. You want and you want and want and want. And still you never satisfy. Damn you Judith school is what you should be calling me about not man.

  The next day Judith texts me incessantly. “Where are you? You ok?” “What happen to you? Call me nah.” “If you mad just say. Why you leaving me out so?” And the last one, “Can I come visit next weekend? Iris say I can take the weekend off.”

  I sink my hands into my pockets and walk back home from the pool. Eyes tearing from the first bitter wind, half the autumn oranges and reds clinging to trees, the other half slapped onto wet pavement. The dark early evenings I will never get used to. My walk widening on empty Sunday streets. I think of Judith kissing this guy. I imagine them outside the Lion’s Den at the back of the building. I imagine Judith leaning in kissing him, her hands to the side of his face like they were mine. I pull out the red-knit hat Shy gave me for Christmas last year. I pull it over my ears and walk into the chill.

  First scent of burning wood, stars popping beneath clouds and a curve of a moon like those French-style nails. I drop my bag below the steps and walk a little longer in the cold, not ready to face Kat and Greg and have their weekends summarized and highlighted, expecting me to do the same. The lights are on in both their rooms, the TV blurred behind the thin-laced curtain. I walk up onto the highway and run across. Headlights shining miles away. I cross over to where the graveyard sits. I can see the graveyard from the bathroom window. Makes me think of the celebrations on the cemetery back home. All Souls. All Saints. The white smear of paint on my new jean jumper. Dolma pulling me hard so I don’t rub up against the freshly painted head stones. A big stupse when she realizes my jumper is spoiled. Candles melting puddles of soft mountainous wax. The smell of rum dashed on graves then shot back into throats. Swarms of people walking to find their loved ones, mingling with graveside neighbours. Music billowing from DJ sets at the entrance of the dead. Popping bamboo and the sweet grinded corn, sugar licked from palms of hands. The whole hillside flickering in candlelight.

  I wonder why All Souls isn’t celebrated, honoured on Big Island, why people don’t come together to pray for their dead, clean the gravesides, light candles, paint headstones and celebrate together. I never understood Halloween. Never understood people getting off on making homes, storefronts and vehicles spooky and terrifying. Like nooses hung from trees on front lawns, fake dead people swinging or bloodied hands and legs sticking out of car trunks or severed heads sitting on top of convenience store counters.

  Every time I see the joke of a severed head I can’t help think of the time a man from Small Island dismembered the heads of his two friends in the garden where they were cutting bush for their goats. He placed the two heads in a bucket and walked them down to the police station, dumped them onto the counter after the police officer told him to sit down. I wonder what the lady officer thought watching these two heads roll off the counter and onto the floor. Did she think she was in one of those Big Island movies, fake heads and body parts ripped, torn, chopped and butchered by chainsaws or teeth or demonic hands? Or did she think Halloween had come to Small Island? She must have known exactly what they were because she fainted and didn’t get out of bed for two days. She refused to leave the hospital. Never went back to work. I wondered if Judith knew any of the people involved in that gruesome act as she lived not far from the police station. I thought of the story, more recently here on Big Island, of a middle-aged man going off on a young man with a knife, repeatedly cutting till the young man’s head almost came off in the middle of a city-to-city public bus. Halloween is the most ridiculous holiday, poking fun of horrific acts of violence.

  I message Judith. “Yes come.”

  When she arrives the next weekend I swing the door open to see her walking up the stairs, framed by the sun. She wears a shorter-than-usual khaki skirt over black tights, a red hoody and her hiking boots. This is the third time Judith has worn her hair down since we met. The wind is swirling loose strands above her head. She reaches the top of the stairs with quick uneven breaths, smiling. We embrace while her backpack slips from her shoulder and falls to the ground. The drop of her bag shakes the verandah.

  “Look at your pepper-seed hair,” Judith says touching my head. “What a place.” She looks over the fields to the right of the highway. “Look at that.” She points at the brown-patched horses grazing in the sun. Judith inhales. “I didn’t realize the university was in such a pretty small town and so much farmland.”

  “The university is over there.” I point to the cluster of old Victorian buildings poking out from the horizon like a small town hoping to be noticed.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Judith says.

  “You just reached.”

  She leans against the outside wall, slides down knees to chest, arms wrapped, head resting to the side, staring out onto the fields, the typical red barn, the horses.

  Kat comes out and reminds me we have a meeting about the game tomorrow and asks Judith if it was a long ride. And if this is her first visit.

  “Damn I forgot about the meeting,” I say.

  “You have practice and a game this weekend?”

  “Yep, she’s the star,” Greg says coming out of the house next.

  “This is the other roommate,” I say.

  Judith smiles, greets Kat and Greg. Then her phone buzzes. I see her hesitate before shoving her hand in her pocket and turning off her phone.

  I know it’s him.

  JUDITH

  SOON AFTER I REACH Sola’s place, Jared message. His messages boring like “have a nice time” or “late for work” or “out of cat food,” nothing that make sense to why I in this friendship. I turn the phone off. Sola watch me.

  Sola live in a flat upstairs. Look like a fixed-up old farmhouse. Dark bluish grey like a sky full of storm, with white border windows and door, stairs on one side leading up, creaking and squealing like they getting ready to put me in a serious accident. Why she couldn’t live downstairs with the wrap-round veranda, the yellow rope hammock swinging? Look like it could be made from the rope down by the bay that gets washed in with the tide. Out back a field with three painted horses grazing. Sola’s eyes bright. Like she willing herself to stay open, stay light, easy. I don’t think she know how threatening beauty and sternness can be all tied up in she eyes, all tied up in she ability to delete me if she don’t like the way I move.

  Like this thing with Jared. I’d never tell she if I knew she’d get so vex, cutting me off just so. And she main argument is Drey. “Well maybe Drey doing the same thing. Are you and Drey married?” she say.

  What does Drey have to do with it? She don’t even know the type of relationship Drey and me have. Drey don’t own me. I don’t own Drey. We don’t subscribe to Babylon system. But she don’t know that. She don’t ask. She just assume. She assume this is about Drey not about me. I don’t know how Sola get she self so caught up in Big Island ways, like she more Big than Small.

  Once in the house Greg she roommate say all the wrong things like “cool hair,” and “I thought people from the Islands looked more like Sola,” and “I went on a cruise once with my family, friendliest people I ever met.”

  Kat smile a lot. S
he tell me how Sola give up basketball for rugby. She ask me if I play any sports, what school I go to and she tell me she picture me taller. Ten minutes later everybody gone. Sola and Kat for their meeting and Greg I don’t know.

  I feel to walk but instead I stretch out on Sola’s bed. I study she room like I studying for exam. Faded orange and green bedcover, a large white-chipped dresser with small black hair elastics scattered on top, a sticker of our country’s flag on the first drawer, a large jar of cocoa-scented Vaseline, a pink-painted vase with a stick of incense, a picture of Dolma and Shy posing beside Shy’s white Chevrolet. On the ground three milk cartons stacked with textbooks and colourful note binders, a pair of long blue socks, an article by Noam Chomsky, a teacup with a teabag string hanging over the side, a notebook facedown, a journal I think. Sola’s desk up against the wall, bed on next side. Laptop open, a photo of the willow tree by the river, blue sky behind soft olive green branches. Photos tape to a mauve wall, an elder woman, a boy and Sola holding up a dead bird, children posing behind. I fall asleep watching Sola’s photos. A cream-colour board house and a younger Dolma beside a puppy in a bucket of soapy water, the sea and a jetty like a finger pointing, a group of boys drinking coconut jelly leaning against a peach-colour community centre and a tall boy straddling a pink bike.

  I dream of home. I dream Sola riding the hill on my blue BMX, the one Fabian brought home from work one day causing heat between he and Mom. “Who in the Village the age of Judith has a bicycle?” she say to Fabian. “Why are you making her stand out even more than she does already? She has so much she doesn’t need a bicycle.” Me and my fancy BMX I can’t ride and Fabian too busy to teach me. Sola riding the bike in my dream. And she pedalling up Village hill like there’s no hill at all and people calling she out, people praising Sola for strength and balance. And there I am up in the plum tree and same people telling me to come down ’cause I’ll hurt myself. And Fabian saying Pauline going to beat you if she see you up there and I telling Fabian Pauline dead. My mother dead. She dead. Sola smiling. Me sucking green plums top branch. “You lie,” I say to Fabian, “she dead.” And Sola pinching the flesh under my arm saying stop cry. Stop cry. The wind shake all green plums from tree, doop doop doop noises on the ground. Phone ringing, the dogs barking, Sola handing me back my bike.