It’s quiet inside the dry cleaning place, except for the radio tuned to an American news station. The Mr. Chin at the dry cleaner’s is laid-back, with a friendly round face. He eases out of his chair, where he sat with a newspaper, to greet Patsy. He adjusts his glasses on his nose and takes the clothes without question. There is no mesh partition between them. Neither is there any of the bulletproof glass that Patsy notices in the Chinese restaurants in her neighborhood in Brownsville. Just a wooden counter. A porcelain cat figurine sits on it. Numerous clothes are hung inside plastic on racks behind the man. Patsy is surprised by his personable manner.
“How are you today?” he asks.
“I’m fine, thank you,” Patsy replies, watching him sort the clothes with short, stubby fingers, one of which has a Band-Aid wrapped around it. He takes Esther’s information and hands Patsy a piece of paper with the price and the day Esther can come back for them and pay. “Have a good day,” he tells her. She says goodbye, almost bumping into the door on her way out, still unable to believe that in this neighborhood she is seen by a Chinney man as a person, and not just as an outstretched black palm.
OTHER HOUSEKEEPING POSITIONS OPEN UP AND PATSY TAKES them. She realizes that she learns faster about Americans by being in their most intimate spaces. Some are cautious at first, seeing a black woman show up at their door wearing a Magic Maid T-shirt. But then she speaks, and they hear her accent—which seems to lower their shoulders and melt their faces into smiles. “Oh, yes, yes! Please come in.” Patsy discerns recollections of palm trees, sunshine, and white-sand beaches which they often eventually bring up, asking her if she knows this hotel or that beach somewhere in Negril, Ocho Rios, or Montego Bay where they once spent an anniversary, birthday, honeymoon, vacation.
One of them got so comfortable that she told Patsy that she likes hiring immigrants, because they work harder. Said her parents hired American blacks back in Georgia, but then they began to ask for “too much.” Patsy didn’t ask what that meant, but somehow that “too much” stayed with her, incited her to go above and beyond—even staying later than usual to scrub crayon stains off a whole wall inside a grandmother’s apartment. She didn’t tip Patsy. And Patsy knew better than to ask.
She prefers when clients leave her alone inside their apartments to go jogging, grocery shopping, to brunch, or wherever they go to give her some space. She examines bookcases, runs her hands across the surface of expensive-looking furniture, peers at family photographs, sifts through closets, tinkers with keys on pianos, studies the names on bottles of wine, perfumes, soaps, shampoos, and lotion. She moves from room to room, dusting and cleaning, cleaning and dusting. Sometimes she sifts through trash in a study. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, but likes to find handwritten notes or to-do lists. There’s something personal about them, human. Other times she sits at desks, or at the head of tables, imagining them hers.
25
TRU LEARNS TO DISCERN SILENCES. THERE’S HUSHED SILENCE—the silence that feels like the whole world has ceased breathing—one that accompanies Marva and forces Roy into seclusion. There’s still unresolved tension inside the house. It behaves as though it were a newborn that grew into a toddler: rambunctious and moody. Roy only buries himself in work, coming home later and later every night. Yet Tru is often awakened by the quaking noises in Roy and Marva’s bedroom. Recognizable to Tru are the sounds Roy and Marva make without having to speak.
On Sundays when Roy is home, he turns the television up to a high volume or buries his face deeper in the Sunday Gleaner, his sudden bursts filling some kind of hopelessness: “No child deserve to be born in dis godforsaken world. Dis country wid its senseless murders an’ corruption is going to di dawgs.”
In these instances when Roy mentions the word child, Marva, reeking of the garlic she has taken to carrying in a pouch around her waist, turns from her cooking by the stove and glares at Roy in his armchair, her nostrils wide, her smooth black skin glistening as her facial bones seem to harden with her eyes. Roy only ruffles the newspaper louder above Marva’s stirring.
THIS SILENCE FOLLOWS TRU TOO. OR PERHAPS SHE IMAGINES IT, when she visits Mama G in Pennyfield and greets her old neighbors, whose demeanors change, their gazes pitching on the faded dresses they’ve surely seen her in before, with their frayed collars and loosened hems. It’s as if they’re searching for something—a sign, perhaps, that her mother really left for America; that it’s not a lie covering the fact that she’s cooped up in the countryside somewhere like Albino Ricky’s father, who is rumored to be living in Clarendon, penniless and barefoot among cows and pigs, thinking he’s one of them. The children at school laugh about it, because everyone knows that Albino Ricky’s father is a madman, though the boy swears his father emigrated to England.
The hush-hush becomes more apparent to Tru when Roy allows her to accompany Mama G to Pennyfield Church of God Assembly for the Righteous on Easter Sunday. Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best except Tru, whose pink church dress with the bow in the back has gotten smaller since last summer when she last wore it to the airport to bid her mother farewell. The shoes are smaller too, squeezing Tru’s big toes. “Yuh growing like ah stalk,” Mama G says, patting Tru’s head of pressed curls. There’s a slight tinge of resentment in her grandmother’s voice, as if she didn’t expect Tru to grow so quickly, her knobby knees exposing the fact that her mother hasn’t done so much as write, much less send anything. “Dat good-fah-nuttin’ father of yours don’t got no money fi buy yuh new church dresses?” Mama G asks, though something in the way she looks away makes it known to Tru that she means her mother.
Tru hangs her head, unable to tell Mama G that Roy and Marva don’t go to church. She senses the hum of questions underneath the gaze of the church folk. It gets worse when Pastor Kirby, who looks like a shriveled chocho with his green robe sweeping the floor, uses Mama G as an example of an exceptional servant of God. “When we put God first, all di blessings will come down,” he says. “Look at Sistah Gloria. She could have chosen to hold on to her pension like some stingy souls in here, buying new frock an’ hat an’ shoes fah Easter, an’ not give to di church. She could’ve even chosen to give up hope aftah har dawta guh farrin’ with not even a word if she alive or dead—” Tru feels the warmth of the sudden attention, a pulse throbbing like a fever at the side of her neck, and something—she cannot pinpoint what—shifting like sand beneath her. Pastor Kirby continues, “Sistah Gloria coulda rely on Pope like all those lazy, godless people in our community who line up to eat outta him dirty hand middle like those dirty politicians. Sistah Gloria could’ve decided to lay dung in har bed an’ lock harself inside di house, heartbroken an’ discouraged, aftah all she did fah dat girl.” Tru almost looks around. What girl? Surely Pastor Kirby couldn’t be talking about her. She’s right here. Can’t he see me? Can’t he see me sitting here? I’m right here!
“But no, Sistah Gloria comes to church faithfully every day ah di week, knowing dat dere’s someone more important than earthly possessions an’ disappointments. God! How many of you have chosen God as yuh soul mate? How many of you hypocrites love yuh husband, wife, children, money, or even Pope, more than yuh love God who gi we Him only son?”
People shout, “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” Mama G sits quietly, her chin up, hands folded in her lap. Her lips are parted, and eyes remind Tru of the black gold of the sun—their pride, joy, or both. Suddenly she rises from her seat, her head flung back, hands in the air, her mouth moving as she speaks in a foreign tongue Tru cannot understand.
When Pastor Kirby instructs people to bow their heads to pray away the dark, sinful ways of the selfish, Miss Belnavis doesn’t close her eyes. Instead, she keeps looking down at Tru with a tender gaze. And even when Tru mistakenly steps on Miss Richardson’s toes in an attempt to escape to the bathroom, Miss Richardson doesn’t cuss her out like she does the schoolboys who steal mangoes off the tree in her yard. Instead, she says, “Is all right, baby. It g’wan be all right.
”
Mama G’s eyes are shut so tight in prayer that she doesn’t notice when Tru returns and sits back down to hide from the talking eyes. It’s exactly how the teachers at school looked at Olivia Moore when her mother died of cancer. How their heads bow slightly in her presence and their chatter quieted. Here, in the atypical silence of the church, and in spite of Mama G’s status as a martyr, Tru begins to perceive her woeful existence as a motherless child.
THE SILENCE PERSISTS. JUST LAST WEEK MARVA BROUGHT TRU and her brothers with her to the supermarket. She ran into an old friend. “Yuh looking good, Marva! Last time ah saw you was graduation at HEART! How yuh do?” The boys went off to the snack aisle, leaving Tru. The woman, who reminded Tru of one of the ladies at Mama G’s church with roving eyes masked with too wide of a smile, looked from Marva to Tru. “She’s so adorable. Ah didn’t know yuh have a dawta. She look jus’ like you!” But before Marva could speak, Tru responded with, “She’s not my mother. My real mother is in America.” An awkward silence fell between the two women. Marva didn’t say another word to Tru, even in the taxi home, and even when they returned to the house and she pulled out bags of onions to season the meats she bought. Marva chopped up so many onions that night, the knife banging and banging on the cutting board, that tears streamed down her face and into the food.
MOST TIMES, TRU FINDS HERSELF ALONE WITH THE LONG, everlasting silence of her mother. A silence that hums like the light poles in the evenings, resonant and consistent.
It is during one of these heightened silences that the sounds from next door waft up toward Tru on the ackee tree branch where she sits. She hears the laughter and shouts of boys playing soccer in the open lot next door. They’re a little older than Tru. On that branch, hidden from view, she watches them play with a makeshift soccer ball. They bounce it from knees to toes and kick it between two long bamboo sticks they use as goalposts. Their feet are dirty from kicking up dust, their faces sweaty and scorched by the sun. When they take a break, they pour water from a bottle over their heads and take off their shirts to wipe their brown faces. They play for hours. They high-five each other and jump on each other’s backs, their kinship apparent and walled off from Tru. As she peers at them through the tarnished light of dusk, jealousy thicker than mucus fills Tru’s mouth. She wants to play with them. But more than that, the quiet desire that rises up above all desires in the soundlessness—she wants to be them.
ONE DAY, WHILE SITTING IN HER HIDING PLACE HIGH ABOVE everything, Tru spots the makeshift soccer ball hidden between the rusted zinc fence and a moss-green tree trunk. It had rained the whole week. The limbs of trees are bowed with the weight of water from the heavy rain showers. Forlorn hibiscuses hang their heads, oblivious of the glittery sunshine that now peeks its head out—a golden apology for floods that destroyed some people’s homes in nearby Windfield and in the countryside. The yard turns a deep shade of green with all the weeds sprung, and running Marys wind themselves around tree trunks and fling themselves across flower beds. The mongrel dogs lick water from newly formed potholes in the street. And there, in the thick grass in the open lot by the fence, is the abandoned ball.
Easily Tru leaps from the lowest branch over the fence, landing in mud. She gets up and brushes herself off, too excited to care that her shorts and T-shirt now look like she rolled around in a pile of dog mess. There is no one here to claim the ball. The other house is across the lot, its windows closed and its back door boarded up. There is a shed storing the materials and tools that will be used to build a new house on the open lot. Tru overheard Marva talking to Miss Ellis, their neighbor, about the old man who will be returning to Jamaica from London after living there for several years. His wife just died and he’s moving back home. But no one appears to be inside. The crickets are screaming and the birds are chirping in the thick wet grass. A glistening diamond cobweb stands in Tru’s path and she knocks it down, crunching sticks with her house slippers to get closer to the ball. Bending into the overgrown shrubs, she grabs it.
Up close, there is nothing spectacular about the ball. It’s made from a Juciful juice carton, the color faded. The mud gives it an earth-brown color, and the inside is filled with scraps of paper, cloth, and some sand. But in Tru’s hands it feels powerful, the mud-brown no different from a wild red burst of color. In her fingers, she can feel her pulse—a faint jumping under her skin when she caresses the ball. She holds it as if it’s a gift. Something still and small. She looks at it in her hands, suddenly feeling the urge to kick it full-range. The first kick is a weak one, barely making it past the two bamboo sticks, which are still in place. She does it again, this time with a deliberate force that sends the ball flying through the air, a slanting brown arc, plowing into a wild, overgrown garden. A bullfrog leaps out of the bushes when the ball lands and a few lizards disperse, darting through the leaf-strewn field toward the nearest tree. Tru kicks the ball again and again, sending it sailing through the air each time. She remembers all the moves from watching the Reggae Boyz on TV, keeping the ball off the ground without touching it and doing the wiggle dance the athletes do every time they score a goal. She spends the whole day amusing herself with the ball. When she kicks it once more, she hears, “You have good force. But yuh need a target.”
Tru stiffens at the sound of her father’s voice, convinced he has come to reprimand her for not being at the dinner table on time. Marva likes to share Sunday dinner early and prefers everyone to be at the table.
However, Roy doesn’t seem angry. His face isn’t set in stone like it has been since he brought her to his house, and he doesn’t chastise her for being muddy or for playing with something that isn’t hers on the abandoned lot. Instead, something else softens Roy’s rigid cheeks, extends the circumference of his pupils. He’s standing there dressed as he would to go jogging at the break of dawn, in a T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and a pair of sneakers. Slowly, Tru’s fear recedes.
“Give me,” he says gently. He extends his arms, the scar on his right hand visible. Tru tosses him the ball. “Now watch,” he says. He balances the makeshift soccer ball from toe to toe. She watches him kick it squarely between the bamboo sticks. He makes it look easy.
“Try dat,” he says gently.
Tru tries again, but misses.
“Focus on where yuh want di ball to land,” Roy coaxes. He puts his hands on Tru’s shoulder. “See dat right dere?” He points at the posts. “Jus’ shoot. Imagine it’s somet’ing yuh really, really want. Imagine dat yuh whole life depend on it. Dat di only way yuh g’wan get it is to kick dat ball wid all yuh might between dem poles. Give it yuh best shot.”
This time, Tru assesses the distance between the ball at her feet and the bamboo sticks. She thinks about the thing she really wants—the only thing she ever wanted besides the other thing that has taken shape in her heart. She can feel her father’s eyes on her back, warm like the sun that fully surfaces from the clouds before it thins, leaving lovely ribbons of fuchsia and violet. She feels herself being pulled into view, examined for the first time with interest. Her fear dissolves, and from it emerges a faint confidence imbued inside her like tea from a tea bag. When she kicks the ball, she floats near but outside her own body, the intense force carrying her away from gravity. The ball shoots like a bullet between the bamboo sticks. She hears only the loud bang of the zinc fence it hits before it lands. It startles her. More assuring is the pride that comes over her when Roy applauds from behind. “Dat’s my champ!”
Tru looks back at her father, who seems to stretch into infinity in the last light, a radiant sepia halo surrounding his head.
She wants to tell him about Marva’s sisters and what they said about her mother. But he’s smiling so bright at her. She doesn’t want words about Marva to crush this fragile thing between them. So instead she says, “Yuh want to know what ah wish for?”
“What yuh wish for?” he asks.
“I wish for Mama to come back. She’ll be back soon, right?”
Roy’s
smile dims. After a long pause, he says, “It’s time to go. Dinner will be ready soon. Drop dat ball an’ wash yuh hands.” He sounds like his old, hardened self again. Then quickly he turns, taking long strides toward the house. Tru follows behind him, confused and searching the backs of her father’s mud-crusted heels for the faded light.
26
PATSY HASN’T GOTTEN USED TO DOMESTIC WORK. HOWEVER, domestic work, like the cold, is something she has to tolerate. Just for the time being, until she can save up enough to send money home to Tru and get her own place. She’s gotten so good at it. Clients depend on her to show up and clean their houses, appreciating how she knows exactly where and at what angle to place their favorite slippers, how to vacuum the folds of their drapes where dust gathers and wipe down furniture until it looks brand-new. Clients leave her alone in their homes with bank statements in full view on top of kitchen counters or desks and expensive-looking jewelry on vanities.
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