Patsy

by Patsy (retail) (epub)

  But the words stall in the back of her throat.

  The night is still. Not even the sounds of gunshots cracking in the distance can fill the silent void. A moth hits the lampshade and falls on the table. Patsy watches it wiggle its way across the wooden surface. Tru is quietly watching her, waiting for a response. Their day had begun simply, shopping for school supplies at Woolworth, picking out fruits and vegetables from the market downtown, Tru counting the change from the vendor. “Good girl!” Patsy said, caressing Tru’s shoulder.

  “I will send nice t’ings. You will have dat football yuh always wanted an’ more,” Patsy tells her, unable to disguise the hesitation in her voice. “Yuh like pretty t’ings too, don’t? Girls like pretty t’ings. I’ll send yuh so many pretty t’ings dat you won’t know what to do wid dem.”

  Patsy’s tears come when she sees the soft trust in her daughter’s eyes dim. That lingering trust might have been the kerosene flame playing tricks on her. When she blinks again, it’s completely gone. Tru starts to cry, her little body trembling. “Ah don’t want pretty t’ings! You lied to me! Yuh tell me I could come!”

  Patsy moves to comfort her, but Tru shoots up from the table and dashes inside their bedroom. Tonight, Patsy’s desire turns to ash inside her. She lowers her head in her arms on the table and sobs.

  THE DAY IS WARM AND BEAUTIFUL AND ALIVE—THE KIND OF DAY Patsy has always imagined for boarding a plane to America. The kind of day when life opens up like all sensations are meant to be felt. Lived. It’s a fantasy she has kept to herself beginning before her daughter was born. And now, on the last Saturday of August—an August that seems to have flown by—when Patsy is finally getting the chance to experience the fantasy, the weather seems to mock the sorrow around her. Tru is clinging to Patsy, and Mama G is busy prying the little girl’s tiny hands off Patsy’s skirt.

  “Mommy, don’t go!”

  “Ah have to leave, baby. Or else me g’wan be late fah my flight.”

  Patsy gently nudges her daughter, who looks like a wilted flower compared to the floral pattern on her skirt. But the little girl is stronger than Patsy thought, her grief an incorrigible force.

  “She soon come back!” Mama G says to the girl above the noise of the intercom calling for passengers. Patsy wonders if her mother really does believe that.

  “But when?” Tru cries.

  “Before yuh know it,” Patsy replies. “Jus’ be a good girl. Remembah what I told you good girls do?”

  Tru nods. “Good girls keep dem self neat an’ clean.”

  Patsy smiles. “An dey are obedient. Can you promise me dat? Be a good, obedient girl an’ I promise I’ll be back fah you.”

  And just like that Tru lets go of Patsy’s skirt, the release as startling and unsettling as the whoosh of breeze outside the airport that picks up all the dust and dry leaves in a mini-tornado, forcing everyone to cover their eyes and mouths. The area of Patsy’s skirt that was crushed in Tru’s tiny fist is now wrinkled and stained with snot. Patsy doesn’t mind this. She bends one last time before Tru, who is wearing a pink dress Patsy forced her to wear with a bow—”Jus’ fah me. Jus’ dis once”—and matching pink ribbons in her two pigtails. Her brown face is open, a mysterious hope gleaming from it—or it could be the thin layer of Vaseline Patsy rubbed on it this morning.

  “I promise . . .” Patsy repeats. The wind starts up again and hair blows in Patsy’s face. She cusses. “Lawd, look at me crosses! After me done fix me hair nice, di wind guh blow it out!” She pauses to brush the loose strands back in their places. Meanwhile, Tru watches, unmoved by her attempt to sound lighthearted. Patsy bends down again to hug Tru and kiss her on the forehead.

  “Yuh father will take good care of you.”

  She uses her thumb to wipe the berry lipstick she wears—only for this occasion—off Tru’s forehead, her own eyes blurred again with tears. The lipstick won’t rub off properly. Since Tru is going to live with Roy, who eventually agreed to take her—saying that his woman always wanted a girl-child anyway—Patsy doesn’t have to worry about Mama G dragging her daughter to every church service. She fishes a handkerchief out of her purse, wets it with her spit, and wipes the stain off Tru’s face. “There. Now yuh look like my child.” She says this with a nervous, tear-filled laugh, pinching Tru’s cheeks before raising herself up. “I’ll be back,” Patsy says again, this time more to herself. “Ah promise.”

  Tru’s face closes as though she has already figured out that promises are merely sweet lies.

  Patsy quickly turns from her daughter and meets her mother’s gaze. Mama G’s mouth quivers as if she’s not sure whether to smile or speak. “You is a grown ’ooman. By now yuh mus’ know what is right from what is wrong. Can’t say ah didn’t—”

  “Mama, please. Not now.”

  Mama G nods. “All right, all right. Me dun’ preach. Jus’ let di good Lawd guide you on yuh journey,” she says to Patsy. “Nuh forget who’s in charge. An’ nuh forget yuh family.”

  Patsy nods. “Yes, Mama.”

  They don’t hug. It’s not in Mama G’s nature. Her way of showing love is pressing a small Bible into Patsy’s palm. “Dis will carry yuh through.” Patsy takes it without protest, though she knows that she’ll never open it. She puts it inside her purse and picks up the one suitcase she packed. Her coworkers have told her there was no need to bring much luggage if she’s going to a place where she can get better things. Her office at the Ministry had thrown a big going-away party, Ramona the mastermind behind it. People Patsy had never interacted with held her hand and squeezed it, saying, “Don’t forget we.” Miss Clark gave her the tightest hug, as though she had always regarded Patsy as her equal, and said, “Now I’ll have a place to stay when I visit New York!”

  It doesn’t seem so bad now, watching Tru reach for Mama G’s hand, the both of them standing there as though they’ve always stood this way, just the both of them, together. Because of the sun’s rays, a bluish orange halo surrounds the two figures. Patsy blinks. It’s hard to see her daughter’s face behind the sheer golden curtain. She thinks to herself, a good mother would have snapped a photograph of a baby girl not quite six with a mouth fixed like her father’s and eyes that seem to contain many moons that threaten to eclipse the sun. A good mother would have taken the time to use the very last second to inhale her daughter’s scent of Blue Magic hair oil mixed with baby powder. But she’s late to catch her flight. The farther Patsy gets, the more Tru fades. Until the little girl completely vanishes in the sunlight.

  Book II

  AMERIKAH

  5

  WHEN THE SLIDING DOOR OPENS ONTO THE STREET TO LET Patsy out of John F. Kennedy International Airport, her first sight is not of the tall buildings she saw when the plane was landing, but pigeons. A group of them are huddled by a lone baggage cart, picking at bread crumbs, the whites of their shit staining what Patsy imagines were once pristine sidewalks. They are not skittish and frightened, but bold, waddling like they belong among the people waiting in line for the yellow taxis driven by black and Indian men. The cataclysmic swirl of different languages spoken over car horns is jarring to Patsy, since she knows America to be mostly white and English-speaking—from the TV shows she watched back home, to the people working at the embassy, to the tourists on the island. She stands alone amid the chaos and joy of families reuniting with each other. She watches other Jamaicans who were on her flight greet their loved ones. “Lawd, me glad fi see yuh!” Standing by herself with her one suitcase, she feels more alone than she has ever felt.

  “Taxi, oh?” asks a man with a thick African accent. There are two scars on each side of his dark face. Patsy shakes her head. All she has in her purse are two crisp American hundred-dollar bills. She hopes that will hold her until she finds a job. Cicely had told her to wait inside the airport, but Patsy has been waiting for two hours since her flight landed. In those two hours, Patsy has taken regular trips to the ladies’ room, fixing this, adjusting that. Maybe Cicely is lost ins
ide the airport, looking for her. Maybe she doesn’t remember what Patsy looks like. Or maybe Patsy has forgotten what her best friend looks like and has passed by her several times. They occasionally have mailed pictures to each other, but they haven’t done so in years. The one suitcase Patsy carries is packed mostly with goods for Cicely. Luckily the immigration officer didn’t open her bag to see the cans of Horlicks, Milo, frozen beef patties from Tastees, banana chips, fried escoveitch fish, with lots of onions dipped in vinegar, ackee, frozen and wrapped carefully in newspaper and plastic to keep it insulated, Shirley biscuits, star apples (Cicely’s favorite), and Appleton rum. Of course, Patsy didn’t have to carry this much food, but since she’ll be staying at Cicely’s house, she thought it would be nice as a housewarming gift.

  “Patsy?”

  When Patsy hears her name, she turns. The woman standing behind her is dressed in a manner as close to Scarlett O’Hara as Patsy has ever seen anyone pull off in real life—in a black straw hat that covers one side of her face, a black-and-white polka-dot A-line dress that flares at the hips, red pumps, and a red handbag that she carries on her left forearm. She attracts the glances of women and men—young and old, black, white, and in between. When the woman takes off her dark shades, Patsy immediately recognizes those blue-green eyes. Cicely! She looks the same way she had looked in school, except her long hair is covered under her hat. Patsy throws herself into Cicely’s arms. Seeing her friend again makes her think of their sun-washed days as girls in the schoolyard, sitting among tall green grass, their legs folded under them, giggling with secrets. Patsy presses her face into her friend’s neck, overcome by the sheer joy and loveliness of their reunion.

  “Ah miss yuh so much,” Patsy whispers into Cicely’s neck, her friend’s perfume stuffing her nostrils and tickling the base of her throat like a sweet ache. Cicely pulls away from the embrace and holds Patsy at arm’s length. Looking her up and down, she says, “Girl, yuh need a jacket! But I’m not dat familiar wid plus-size stores!”

  Patsy doesn’t wonder at her friend’s put-down. She is quickly reminded that Cicely can be abrasive. But since Cicely is the only person who makes Patsy laugh, and the only one Patsy trusts with her secrets, Patsy has always forgiven this flaw. Patsy follows Cicely to a shiny black car and nearly stops in her tracks when she sees a man sitting in the driver’s seat as if he came with it. Patsy assumes he’s the play-husband Cicely mentioned, who still buys her things—the Yankee who made Cicely’s life as easy as the sliding doors Patsy had just walked through. The man doesn’t get out of the car to help with the suitcase. Patsy and Cicely lift the luggage inside the trunk.

  “What is inside dis t’ing?” Cicely asks, noticing Patsy noticing the man as a solid figure in the driver’s seat. She adjusts the suitcase next to a wrench and a toolbox.

  “Goodies for you,” Patsy replies. “Ah carry bulla, Shirley biscuit, Tastee patties, cocoa bread. Remember how yuh did love cocoa bread—”

  Cicely stops her. “Ah watching my weight. All dat food good fi ah army. In America thin is in.”

  Patsy hides her disappointment as Cicely holds the car door open so that Patsy can sit in the tan backseat that smells like new leather. The man appears to be cut from one of the Sears catalogues that Patsy used to browse at the seamstress’s—with a neatly trimmed mustache, smooth brown skin, and hair with a waxy gleam to it, like shoe polish. He’s older than Cicely. Maybe in his late thirties, early forties. Nothing play-play about him. He barely smiles when Patsy enters the car, his green eyes (something Patsy has never seen on a black man that shade) look right through her.

  “You must be Marcus!” she says to break the ice. “Nice to finally meet you.”

  “Same,” he says, barely glancing at her in the rearview mirror. He pulls away from the curb and cuts into a lane, inciting a chorus of screeching wheels and beeping horns. He simply holds up his middle finger, pushes hard on his horn, and keeps driving. “Damn immigrants don’t know how to drive.” He puts his right arm possessively around Cicely’s seat as he maneuvers the steering wheel with one hand. Cicely does all the talking.

  “How does it feel to finally be in America? How was your flight? Did they give you something to eat? We really need to go shopping for a fall jacket. It’s unusually cool this year for the last week of August!”

  Patsy cautiously observes the driver, who snatches his gaze away when their eyes meet in the rearview mirror. Cicely talks and talks, her chatter oddly turning Patsy off. So many words coming at her at once. She has no time to process her own thoughts, miss her daughter, or peacefully observe the loops and bridges on the highway, and green exit signs with names of neighborhoods that Patsy wishes to explore on her own someday. But more upsetting to Patsy is the strangeness of her friend’s accent. How Cicely curls her tongue when she speaks. Like an American. An accent Patsy never picked up over the telephone or the moments before they entered the car. Cicely grins a lot too, sneaking sideway glances at her husband, wholly animated by his silence. It’s as though he’s keeping tabs of her performance to reward or critique her later.

  “So, how was your flight?” she asks Patsy again with that strange accent. Its peculiar quality puts a salty taste in Patsy’s mouth like stale saltine crackers, forcing Patsy to sieve her words—to placate Cicely’s new American optimism with a filtered, surface response. “It was all right.”

  Patsy feels as though she’s answering to a stranger and not her best friend of how many years. What she really wants to say is, Ah couldn’t really tell yuh since ah sleep di whole way. The last thing she saw was the wet blue eye of the ocean as the plane took off. She stared at it until she couldn’t see anymore. Now she trains her eyes on the dove-gray sky, where the sun is only a white, distant circle. She begins to miss home. She wonders if she’s made the right decision leaving Tru. The car stops at an intersection, the tick-tick sound of the turn signal synchronizing with Patsy’s heartbeat. It takes over, the impulse to run the other way nulled by the vehicle’s steady progress in the opposite direction through a dark tunnel of uncertainty.

  THE CAR TURNS ONTO A TREE-LINED STREET FACING A PARK.

  “We’re here!” Cicely announces, glad to have broken the silence in the car.

  “This is where you live?” Patsy asks, beholding the handsome red-brown houses joined at the sides. They are about three stories tall, each with wide stoops decorated with elaborate black banisters perfectly lined in rows all the way down the street. The designs and gargoyle-looking things on the green roofs remind Patsy of mansions in vampire movies set in another century. Mama G would’ve undoubtedly linked them to the Devil. “Yuh see. Di Devil deh everywhere. Is suh Satan army strong!” A flight of black birds swirls from the rooftops like confetti onto the street. Marcus parks the car. When he gets out, he jingles the key to the house, still mute. The threads of resentment creeping toward Patsy from him are partially blocked by Cicely’s quick move to help Patsy maneuver the suitcase from the trunk.

  “Watch your step,” he instructs them, leaping, on the way to his gate, over dog shit and what looks like a discarded needle. “Damn low-class black people won’t curb their dogs or their habits!” he mutters.

  “Marcus workin’ hard to maintain di place. Him renovate it jus’ last year,” Cicely says in a whisper, sounding like herself as she lifts Patsy’s suitcase out of the trunk. Marcus waits at the gate and takes the suitcase from his wife when she approaches him. The three of them hobble up the steps together. Patsy looks around and sees Caribbean flags in people’s front windows, in front yards, and hoisted on the antennas of parked cars. One window has JUSTICE FOR ABNER LOUIMA taped across it.

  “What’s wid all di flags?” Patsy asks.

  “The West Indian Labor Day parade is coming up next week. People like to show where dey come from.”

  “There’s actually a parade like dat?”

  “Of course! It ’appen every year.”

  Patsy is surprised that Caribbean people have their own parade
and their own neighborhood in New York—a place she has always deemed high-falutin’, with its fashion and Central Park and Times Square. She first noticed this when they were driving—the Jamaican restaurants with their flags drawn on the awnings; the black and brown people with slow gestures and lingering gazes that indicated to Patsy that, like her, they had not long ago come from “home.” If they have been here for a while, it surely doesn’t look like it. Save for the paved roads and wide sidewalks and brown brick buildings, this could’ve been Half-Way Tree or downtown Kingston populated by dark, broad faces that are hard to read. Patsy doesn’t remember seeing a neighborhood like this one in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “Weh di white people?” Patsy asks.

  “You’ll see dem from time to time,” Cicely replies in patois when Marcus turns his back. “Yuh have to go to Manhattan. Dey tend to stay far from places like Crown Heights.”

  “That will soon change,” Marcus says. It’s the first time Marcus speaks to Patsy directly. She didn’t even know he was listening to them. “Mark my word. In the new millennium, Crown Heights and Brooklyn as a whole will be the place people will want to invest.”

  Cicely doesn’t say anything. She appears to grimace, but Patsy can’t tell anymore. Her friend has changed too much for her to assume she can still discern her thoughts. Once inside, Patsy is greeted by the high ceiling and spacious foyer that leads to a living room with a fireplace, just like in the movies. She is almost afraid to step inside, feeling intrusive and out of place all of a sudden. Marcus excuses himself and disappears into one of the rooms. The place looks like a display—each piece of furniture arranged just so, as though no one has ever sat on them or touched them. The shiny wooden floors seem to mock her brand-new flats, which are shabby in comparison. The glistening chandelier above her head cuts her into pieces on the inside. Her friend has made it in America after all, and she’s dragging Patsy through her castle, showing her just how far she has come from the girl who had nothing. So many pictures are displayed, but none of them showing Cicely’s years in Pennyfield. All the pictures on the mantel above the fireplace are of Cicely, Marcus, and—”Who is di likkle boy?” Patsy asks.