Patsy

by Patsy (retail) (epub)

  Music floats from the upstairs window. Shamar’s violin plays a beautiful melody. Downstairs, Cicely is drawn to the mantel. Patsy watches her friend pick up the photographs, dust them, put them back. Then in walks Marcus like an actor in a stage performance. Patsy didn’t see him waiting in the wings. He’s wearing a robe too, much thicker than Cicely’s, over his pajamas. He holds Cicely from behind and pulls her to him. He bends and kisses her neck. She edges away a little, her eyes still on the mantel. Her fingers touch his arms lightly. He turns her gently and kisses her, not like a man who would hit his wife, but like a man who knows his woman belongs to him and only him. From a distance, it appears that Cicely is kissing back with passion, her neck bent too far backward. Marcus pauses to look down into her face. He uses one finger to blot something from her lips, maybe crumbs or a wine stain from the glass she pours herself with dinner. They don’t move. They simply stare into each other’s faces.

  Patsy feels herself crumbling inside. She loves him after all. She looks away from the scene. She makes her way back to the subway station and boards the train. In the darkened window of the train, her face is a mask, all the emotion seemingly drained from it. She has never felt so lonely. She notices that the people on the train are Jamaicans, most looking like they’re heading home from jobs this late at night, exhausted; two women talk animatedly in patois, recounting their day—”Lawd, me tyad suh till! Suppose yuh see how di pickney dem spoil. Jes’as Christ, me neva see pickney suh bad an’ hard-ears in me life! American children got no discipline, an’ yuh can’t even spank dem!”

  A man in construction gear stares at Patsy from the seat opposite hers. He too looks Jamaican. He smiles a gentle smile, one Patsy imagines as pity. She remembers Vincent and how he stared at her at the bank. How being with him had been a good distraction, a way to delay what was waiting for her at the end of the day—the slow-moving darkness that could knock her down and slip its sadness deep inside her. A sudden wave of sexual urge comes over her. When she gets to the studio, she sees Alrick waiting outside, leaning against the door with his arms folded across his chest, his gym bag slung over his shoulder. Fionna is working a late shift tonight at the Applebee’s, where she also cleans, and won’t be off until midnight.

  “Ah t’ink she’s avoiding me,” Alrick tells Patsy. “She don’t answer my calls.”

  “You can come inside and wait,” Patsy says to him, swallowing the resentment she has been harboring toward him.

  Patsy knows that Alrick has already looked her up and down as he always does, his eyes, without Fionna there, liberally sliding over her body, which is getting chubbier with her steady diet of McDonald’s fries, hamburgers, and chicken nuggets. When Alrick follows her inside, she offers him a glass of water. He looks at her over the rim as he drinks. Lust wells inside her. Not the usual lust to nibble on Cicely’s creamy earlobes and leave a crimson mark on her neck while tasting the sweetness of her flesh, but something primal, animalistic—an urge she hasn’t satiated in the months since arriving in America, one that grips her now at the sight of Alrick’s Adam’s apple moving up and down, and his tongue licking his full lips. She wants to fuck.

  She doesn’t ask permission, nor does she apologize when she drops to her knees and begins to unbuckle Alrick’s belt. A bit of laughter sounding like a gasp erupts from his throat. Her aggressiveness excites him, giving length to his penis. He doesn’t protest when she takes him into her mouth.

  Patsy, wanting desperately to feel anything but grief, pants as he fucks her from behind, his fingers digging into her hips. She stares dead in the eyes of sorrow as her body relieves itself with each thrust. As the creeping chaos stirs in her hips, she slips a hand between her legs, her fingers rabidly trying to free her from Cicely’s grasp—the life she imagined with her, the life she now has. But it’s a hopeless, stubborn struggle, which impels her to cry, “Harder!”

  The enormous thrust Alrick makes causes her to let out a deep, ear-shattering howl, letting go and giving in to the hurricane force of pleasure that annihilates—for a quivering few seconds—everything else. Her loneliness resumes when he pulls out, the sexual desire falling away, leaving in its place only guilt. Patsy is conscious now of their naked lower halves, their wet, mingling scents, the Statue of Liberty globe on the table. She turns away, waiting impatiently for Alrick to slip off the condom, zip himself, and leave. She sobs then.

  21

  THE CARD WITH A GLITTERY SILVER SNOWFLAKE AGAINST A bright red background is confirmation for Tru that her mother still thinks of her. When the card came, the last of the Christmas ham had already been used up in the ackee and salt fish and callaloo; the fourth pint of sorrel Marva made for the season was gone; the rum cake devoured; the doll Tru received as a gift from Marva and Roy abandoned; and the pepper-lights that Roy had strung around the veranda grille and the mango tree in the front yard taken down and put inside a box. Yet it feels to Tru like Christmas has finally come. She sits on the highest limb of the ackee tree she likes to climb up to be by herself in the backyard and presses the card to her nose. She inhales it to see if she can smell her mother—the flowery fragrance she used to wear. But all she smells is the bland, factory scent of the card. She’s kept it safe and sound inside her drawer, only pulling it out once each day to look at it.

  She stares at the words. Allows them to form sandcastles in her mind—ones the sea and time cannot destroy. Your mother, Patsy, with love.

  It’s late Saturday morning. Roy is inside sleeping and Marva is moving furniture around, mopping the floors. Instead of hair grease and dry heat, the whole house smells like Pine-Sol and floor polish. Tru and her brothers aren’t allowed inside until she’s done, and mostly because Roy must not be disturbed. Tru and her brothers are slapped when they disturb him. He’s the man of the house and is treated as such—with respect and attention. His opinions are regarded with importance and his needs are met immediately, even if Marva has to drop whatever she’s doing. Mornings and nights, she brings him his dinner and massages his shoulders with one of the oils she concocts herself. Sometimes she massages his feet, bending and stretching his big toes. Roy responds well to these massages. Only his voice, his groans of pleasure, fill up the house.

  The washerwoman Marva hired is mutely scrubbing clothes between her fists in the backyard. Her name is Iris. She doesn’t talk much. She’s a young girl from the country, about seventeen or eighteen years old, who just came up to stay with her aunt, Miss Burgess. Miss Burgess sells fruits out by the taxi stands on the main road. All Tru knows is that the girl has a troubled past and has come to Kingston to turn her life around (whatever that means). Though Miss Burgess is responsible for Iris, she cannot afford to feed Iris. So Marva took the girl in, gave her a cot to sleep on inside the shed in the backyard and food to eat. In return, Iris washes clothes for the family and sometimes cleans the house now that Marva is pregnant. Tru is Iris’s responsibility too. When Marva tires of running after Tru now with her big belly, it’s Iris who chases Tru with the speed of a sprinter. Usually the chase happens when it’s time for Marva to comb Tru’s hair—a thick mass of kinks that breaks all the combs. But today everything is calm. Even the two mongrel dogs are napping, oblivious to the roosters high-stepping in front of them. Tru is holding her mother’s Christmas card and staring up at the sky, where heat and sun give the illusion of a haze. She likes to imagine her mother reaching toward her out of the sky, her hand, her fingers, poking out of the clouds to touch her. If this were to really happen, Tru would be prepared to hold on to the hand, pull on it like she would a kite string, and snatch her mother out of the clouds. Tru often gazes at the sky for a sign, and whenever she’s busy doing something, like putting her head down on the desk like the teacher asks, or concentrating on schoolwork, she worries that she misses the sign. It makes her fidgety—a constant distraction in class. She gets walloped by Mrs. Powell—”Keep yuh eyes on the board!”—though she has begun to come first again in class, surpassing Dwight Evans, who is
the smartest boy in her grade.

  Looking down into the yard, the Christmas card in her hand, Tru quietly accepts the world down there for what it is—a temporary arrangement until her mother comes back for her. The card doesn’t say so, but the gesture of it does. Tru doesn’t need words to fill this blank space. She can feel the coming of her mother in the breeze that rustles the leaves.

  She climbs down to the lowest branch and leaps boldly onto the dusty ground, landing flat on her feet. She still has a Band-Aid on her right knee, which she cut open the last time she jumped. Jumping out of trees has become a favorite pastime for Tru, since she loves to climb them. She can climb the highest coconut tree all the way to the top—an ability that has won her the respect of boys at school and in the neighborhood. Nothing beats the sensation of leaping boldly off a branch, high above everything, caught in the brief stillness of suspension. In the air, she feels free, away from Marva’s surveillance, Roy’s sternness, her brothers’ farting odors even after they bathe, and Iris’s sad eyes.

  Iris doesn’t stir from her intense scrubbing to look Tru’s way when she lands. Tru runs toward the house, suddenly thirsty. She pauses at the entrance, scratching an itchy ankle with the toe of the other foot. She listens to her father’s loud snores coming from the bedroom. Her hands trail the walls, then the doorframe. She can barely make out the slap-slap of Marva’s house slippers. It might be safe to enter, she thinks. For a second, the house seems to cease breathing. The palm trees outside do all the thrashing in the easy breeze. This is a silence that occurs in between her father’s grunts. As Tru makes her first step into the house, she feels a strong pull on her blouse. When she turns, Kenny is standing behind her, his arms folded across his chest.

  “What yuh did dat for?” Tru asks her brother.

  “Mama said not to go inside di house while Papa sleep,” Kenny replies. He’s a combination of various unfortunate physical characteristics. He’s very thin, with big ears, and a big head that is shaped like an egg. He plays in the house, spending his time drawing or making trains and cars and buses with empty cartons and cans. Jermaine and Daval pay him no mind. Thirteen and fifteen respectively, Jermaine and Daval have taken on the mannerisms of grown men. They guzzle water from big glasses with handles, they wipe their mouths with the backs of their hands, they chew on toothpicks and play with blades from pencil sharpeners under their tongue, they talk to the television during soccer or cricket games. Every Saturday, if they’re not at the shooting range with Roy, they’re helping Marva carry heavy grocery bags from the market, and every Sunday they uproot weeds from the fences with bare hands and wield cutlasses over their heads as they chop grass or whack overgrown tree limbs. Jermaine shaves the two scrawny hairs from under his chin in the bathroom mirror like Roy, and Daval sprays a can of deodorant under his armpits every morning before school. Kenny is an enigma in this family of rough-and-tough boys.

  Tru puts her hands on her narrow hips. “Let me be,” she says.

  “Yuh disobeying Mama’s rules. Yuh heard what she said. Papa need him rest.”

  “And I need wata.”

  “Yuh can drink it outside by di standpipe.”

  She glares at her brother. Though they are the same age, he’s shorter. If Tru were to fight him, he’d be defenseless against her. Kenny is not rough like a boy should be. Roy says so too. He and Marva argue all the time about how Marva raises Kenny under her frock. Knowing how much their father’s criticism hurts Kenny, Tru bares her teeth and says the word that will shut him up for sure: “Sissy!”

  A shadow crosses Kenny’s face, his downturned mouth quivering at the attack. In a second, Tru and Kenny are on the ground, wrestling each other. They roll around on the dirty concrete path near the back entrance, overturning potted plants and waking up the sleeping mongrels, which start to bark. Kenny is warm on top of Tru, the heat of his anger matching the blood heat of his body. “Who yuh calling a sissy, yuh ugly troll?”

  Tru pushes him off her and straddles him. That’s when Kenny, lying on the ground, his head dirtied and eyes dark with malice, says, “Dat’s why yuh mother don’t want you. Dat’s why she hang up when she call. I answered di phone an’ dat’s what she tell me! She tell me you was a ugly baby! Dat yuh favor duppy! Dat you’s a blood-sucking vampire!”

  Fury clogs Tru’s throat. For Kenny still has that over her—the fact that he answered the call, which she was denied. Kenny wouldn’t have known how important this call was to Tru had she not badgered him for weeks after it happened. At night, lying in the dark on the bed inside the room they share, Tru would ask, “What did she soun’ like? Did she soun’ American? Could you hear anyt’ing in di background? Did she say she was in snow? Did she say how cold it was? Did she . . . did she . . . did she?” Kenny eventually discerned Tru’s weakness and taunted her, pretending to hold back facts or divulge fabricated stories. Out of the blue he might say something like, “She mention working as a clown at Disney World.”

  Instead of pinning Kenny’s head against the ground or jabbing his sides with her knees like she wants to, Tru hacks and spits in his face. A whimper comes from beneath her as the spit lands between Kenny’s eyes and runs down his cheek. He stiffens.

  “Get off me!” he yells. Tru sits on top of him, staring at his agony, his disgust. She laughs. “Serve yuh right for calling me a ugly troll.”

  But she’s not comforted by Kenny’s defeat. Tru remembers her mother’s card, and her parting words—“Be a good, obedient girl an’ I promise I’ll be back fah you”—and stops. She snatches up the card, which had fallen out of her hand during their scuffle.

  Just then Marva steps outside and sees Kenny lying on the dusty ground, his face wet, both him and Tru dirtied. She looks from Kenny to Tru. “Is what kinda foolishness oonuh going on wid?” she asks.

  “Him call me a ugly troll,” Tru replies.

  “You started it!” Kenny retorts. “You called me a sissy!”

  Marva throws up her hands, her big breasts, and her newly forming belly on top of the one she already had, lifting with them. Because of her stature, Marva’s pregnancy wasn’t apparent to Tru at first. Not until she began to lose customers. Usually on Saturdays the kitchen area is filled with a handful of neighborhood women who come to Marva to do their hair. From early Saturday mornings to evenings, women would be bent over the kitchen sink or sitting underneath dryers, the high soprano of their laughter and chatter filling the house and carrying a feel of merriment that sets Tru at ease. But all that stopped suddenly. Many of the customers believe that it’s bad luck for a pregnant woman to do their hair. “Mek dem g’weh!” Marva told Iris one morning when Miss Paula, one of the women who had been getting her hair done by Marva for years, called to cancel last minute. Tru hid in the tree and eavesdropped on the conversation between Marva and Iris. “All ah dem backwards-like!” Marva said. “Yuh know what di woman tell me? Dat she not comfortable wid me doing har hair in my current state. Dat she t’ink har edges falling out because of me! Me! Dat woman had no edges to begin wid! An’ di other one, Miss Yasmine, going around telling people I ruin har good hair. Good hair? Dat woman born wid pickey-pickey head! She favor peel-head john-crow! Which good hair me ruin? She shoulda thank me fah having di patience wid dat course bush of hers!”

  Now Marva unleashes her frustration on Tru and Kenny. “Listen! Oonuh behave oonuh self, yuh hear? Yuh see yuh father sleeping peaceful inside. Oonuh coulda wake him, carrying on like hooligans out here. What yuh have to say fah yuhself?”

  Kenny begins to cry. One thing he hates even more than Roy’s criticisms is his mother’s admonishment. “She push me dung ’pon di groun’ an’ start to fight me. Then she spit in me face.”

  “It nuh give you di right to fight back!” Marva says. “She’s a girl. Yuh shouldn’t hit girls.”

  “Why yuh always defending her?” Kenny cries. “Is like she can do nuttin wrong!”

  Roy, who must have woken up to the commotion, comes outside in time to see what’s goin
g on. His tall, dark frame fills the entrance. He appears well rested, his eyes no longer red like they were last night when he came home and went straight to his bedroom to lie down in his policeman uniform. He comes outside just in time to hear Kenny say Tru pushed him. Tru is sure she will get in trouble now, but when she looks up at her father, he’s smiling down at her, something hidden under his smile. To Kenny he says, “Yuh mother know best. Yuh shouldn’t be fighting girls, especially yuh sistah, when yuh can’t handle it.”

  From her father’s smile and the way he winks at her, Tru knows she has somehow appealed to him. Meanwhile, something darkens in Marva’s eyes and Tru feels a strange uneasiness in this moment. Marva turns away without saying anything more, and walks back inside the house, the slap-slap of her slippers echoing with each step. Roy follows her, his laughter hurtling through the house. He stops only to catch his breath. “Ah tell you. Dat boy is somet’ing else. Is where yuh get him from? Might as well yuh did give me a girl.”

  The strange uneasiness remains, prompting Tru to turn to Kenny, who is quiet, his eyes fallen to the shadow at his feet.

  “You’re not a sissy,” she says to him. “I only said it because ah was upset.”

  But anger flashes in Kenny’s eyes with bloody depth.

  “I wish you didn’t come here. I wish you’d jus’ go back to where yuh come from,” Kenny says to Tru, burrowing his face in his hands.

  22

  THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF DEVIL’S COLD—ONE IN WHICH YOU cannot bring yourself to leave the room, much less the bed, to do the simplest things, and the other in which you go through the motions in a constant stupor. Patsy lies in bed, turned away from the dark heavy thing that has returned, its shadow dimming the room. With the cover over her head, she closes her eyes, not wanting to see it. God knows how long she’s gone without eating. She could die, she knows. Though death doesn’t seem that scary after all. Not as scary as the dark thing. Here in America, there are no bush teas for it. No bitter mix of Ramgoat roses, rosemary, lemongrass, bissy, and other herbs. No pastor to come with a bottle of sanctified olive oil. No neighbor from the country who can wring the neck of a goat and sever it with a machete for you to bathe in its blood. No time to lie down and let it run its course. She’s powerless against it.