“Yes.”
“It says here that you think you may have cancer?” He’s looking at the information that the receptionist handed him, his eyes fatigued and glazed. “What are your symptoms?”
Patsy tells him about her hair falling out. She unwraps the purple scarf—a scarf similar to what her mother began wearing after she cut off all her permed hair when she was baptized. Though Patsy has taken to wearing headscarves for a completely different reason, she hates looking like her mother at thirty-eight. She shows the young doctor what’s left on her head. He slaps on a latex glove as though her scalp is contagious and examines it. When he’s done he says, “You might have alopecia.”
“Alopecia?” Patsy asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “Scientific word, Alopecia areata.”
Patsy blinks, not at the strange diagnosis, but the doctor calling her ma’am. When did she become ma’am?
“It’s an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the hair follicles and—”
“Dat can’t be right. Could it jus’ be stress?”
“I would suggest that you go to your primary care doctor, who can run some tests.”
“If I had one, I wouldn’t be here, sah,” Patsy says.
The young doctor rubs his eyes and yawns. He appears shrunken with weariness. “Arighty, then, my suggestion is to wait a few months to see if your hair grows back.”
“How long is a few months?”
“Give it six months.”
She looks at his head full of healthy dark hair, envy drying her mouth. “So what yuh expect me to do without hair?”
He shrugs, dismissive. “For a start, you can try wearing a wig.”
Patsy wants to hurl a bad word or two at him, unable to believe the audacity of this Indian man with his head full of wavy hair to tell her to wear someone else’s hair over her own. It could be his mother, sister, or niece’s hair from India, for all she knows, propped on those mannequins in the beauty stores on Flatbush Avenue.
He checks the watch on his wrist. “Any more questions, ma’am?”
“It’s Patsy.”
“Right. Patsy. Do you have any more questions?”
“No,” she says quietly. And even if she does, she decides that she can always go to the library in her area, where they started a free computer class, to google autoimmune diseases and then alopecia areata.
“Great!” the doctor says. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”
And just like that, he’s gone.
As she waits for the bus outside the hospital, the J train roaring above her head on Broadway, Patsy blames her ailment on fate. She has taken into her life the grimness of this city. And all the stress and illnesses that come with it. She exists in a colorless world now. In her mind, Pennyfield has faded like an old photograph the shade of rust—the fruit trees, the houses, the people, the sun, the bountiful hills. Everything and everyone the same as they were the day she left to chase dreams that have since dissolved.
AT HOME IN HER RENTED ROOM, PATSY SITS ON THE SUNKEN twin-size mattress, her feet flat on the cold linoleum floor, eyes fixed on the peeling wall paint. She can hear the sounds of pigeons nesting and sirens going back and forth on Albany Avenue. To Patsy, who hasn’t dreamed in years, America is a coffin. The window looks out into a vacant lot entangled with weeds and trash, surrounded by red-brown brick buildings, her own room a squalor in a boardinghouse full of other immigrants packed like sardines above a fish market. The raw, pervasive smell of fish permeates the walls, attracting large black flies that Patsy sprays constantly.
She gets up to shower in the shared bathroom down the hall, hoping to wash off the smells of sickness from being in the emergency room all day. If only she can get there before the revolving cast of shady characters whose arses warm the same toilet seat as hers and whose dead skin and dirt she avoids by wearing flip-flops in the shower. She’s relieved to find the bathroom empty. When she’s done showering, she avoids the mirror while drying off. The bathroom is small and bright. She’s aware that people can barge in at any time, so she hurries up, donning the bathrobe that Fionna had given her. They talk every day since Fionna’s move to Connecticut, sometimes twice in one day. Patsy calls her on the cheap Nokia phone she got from Mrs. Rhinebeck for emergencies and often complains to Fionna about the landlord, Mr. Fagan, the older Jamaican man who hasn’t bothered to put locks on the bathroom door.
“Di man stingy like star-apple,” she vented over the telephone to a laughing Fionna, who talks to her between breaks cleaning rooms at a Marriott Hotel in New Haven. “Him don’t fix nuttin’ a’tall, Fionna. Yet him have di nerve fi charge people three hundred a month. Yuh ever see me dying trial? Three hundred fah dis dump!”
“Sound like my husband. Cheap like ah don’t know what. Ah haven’t seen a dime from all dat money him making driving taxis.” After the first marriage arrangement fell through with the American gentleman, Fionna found her new play-husband through a friend of a friend who knew a former lawyer that specialized in matching citizens with green card hopefuls. “Is like Match.com fah illegals!” she told Patsy when she tried to convince her to enroll. But Patsy refused. Fionna still intends to marry Alrick once her divorce is finalized in a year or two. Patsy no longer questions the specifics of Fionna’s agreement with her husband—be it sexual or otherwise. All she knows is that he’s Liberian and drives a taxi.
“When yuh coming to visit?” Patsy keeps asking Fionna.
“Soon, soon,” Fionna always says. But soon hasn’t come yet. They haven’t seen each other in three years. “When yuh moving out here to Connecticut?” Fionna says in return, pronouncing Connecticut as Can-addic-ate like the Americans and not Connect-e-cut like it should sound. “Dey got lots of us here too. Plus, di houses are biggah, so more families hire live-in nannies.”
“New York is it for me,” Patsy then replies, still determined to fashion a relationship to this city of her sojourn.
Patsy turns away from the stained oval mirror above the rusted sink as she dries her body, avoiding too the ugly branch underneath her navel. Her face she doesn’t have to see at all, its visage often maliciously thrown at her in reflections in the dark windows of subway cars, fleeting, transfigured. What would Tru, Mama G, and Roy think if they should see her now? What would Cicely say about the short black wig shaped like a bob with bangs that she bought at the beauty shop on her way home? Patsy doesn’t recognize herself. But she hasn’t recognized herself for years, buried under this weight, which she wears like armor—seventy-five pounds of extra flesh, her hulk-like shadows spanning the width of walls and sidewalks. All she does for comfort these days is eat. She cannot remember the taste of food after she swallows. The fat softens her, swallows her up inside its folds to make her nonthreatening, invisible—yet visible in a way that makes it difficult for people to walk right through her on the street, or sit on top of her on the subway.
“Aye, Fluffy!” Jamaican men, who have not too long ago come from home, whisper just above the incessant hum of the city, their lingering gazes aimed right at her. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, Patsy can tell that her body is just a place where their eyes stop and their erections point, while their minds move back to the milk-scented bosoms of their mothers that nursed them into adulthood. She’d be the epitome of good health and contentment back home. But it doesn’t matter. She’s never going back home.
29
EVEN WHEN HER FORMER NEIGHBORS IN PENNYFIELD SAY SHE resembles her mother, Tru secretly prefers what she has in common with her father. It’s hard to see much of Roy these days. He has become scarcer with his intense hours at the police station. Saturdays are the only days Tru can get herself to wake up and catch him before his early morning jogs. It’s five o’clock when Roy pushes open the front door in a white T-shirt and a pair of black jogging pants. Marva and Kenny are still asleep, though Tru hears a sound in Kenny’s room and the soft click of a door closing.
“Roy, wait up!” Tru calls afte
r him, jogging to catch up. She’s wearing her T-shirt and a similar pair of jogging pants. From afar, those awake early enough to see them might think they’re a father and son, since Tru is now tall, slender, and deliberately flat-chested, her hair cut short like her father’s.
“If yuh call yuhself a champion baller, then yuh mus’ can run fast,” Roy replies, not slowing down for her. He continues to move forward, his head straight. The relationship between Tru and her father has improved enormously after Tru began to prove herself stronger and more athletic than her brothers. Roy is never the one to inquire about her homework or exams. He doesn’t know about the afternoons she plays soccer after school with Sore Foot Marlon, Albino Ricky, and their friends in that abandoned lot behind Roman Phillips Secondary School in Pennyfield. But he knows how much she loves soccer and how good she is at it. He affectionately calls her “Champ.”
Tru eventually catches up with him, their shadows elongated as the stars slip away. The only other people awake at this time are the women marching themselves to the market to sell. The sky is a brilliant navy blue with just the half-moon still shining bright. Tru is aware of their breath syncing and the sound of their light footsteps hitting the pavement. The velocity aggravates the hibiscus and bougainvillea bushes hanging over fences, wet with dew. Together they run through the sleeping lanes of the Rochester housing scheme. Dogs behind the gates and fences raise their heads and start barking at the sound of their shoes on gravel. They’re jogging in the direction of Sackston, a neighboring community where the houses—from the vantage point of the surrounding hills—look like reflections of each other, joined together with their zinc roofs, beige walls, white louvered windows and doors. Yet, upon close inspection, and depending on the lane, each house has something distinctively its own—bright pink and green and purple walls, concrete balconies on added stories, French windows, sliding doors, slab roofs, gardens with bright red hibiscuses, iron grilles with elaborate designs to keep out thieves. Here, marble lions rest on gateposts while next door elephants join together. The imagination of the homeowners, mostly higher-paid civil servants, is limitless, the designs a triumph amid the working-class clutter.
Tru is panting, wiping the beads of sweat running down her face. Meanwhile, Roy seems like he could run around the world and back hardly breaking a sweat.
“How yuh doing back there, Champ?” he asks when Tru begins to slow down.
She swallows a gulp of air and replies, “I’m all right.”
“Good. Race me up dat hill.” Roy begins to speed up, and Tru has no choice but to meet his challenge up the incline. It’s worth the time with him, she reminds herself. She runs and runs, beating her father to the top of the hill. When she looks back and realizes her victory, she holds up both hands and screams.
“Yuh t’ink dat’s somet’ing?” Roy asks when he joins her, breathing hard.
“I beat you,” she says, full of glee.
“Well, let me ask you somet’ing. You ever stood on top of a hill where yuh can look down on all of Jamaica, feeling jus’ for a second dat yuh own it?”
Tru looks at her father, confused. “No?”
He stares at her a moment longer before he says, “Turn around.”
When she does, Kingston is a sea of sparking lights before her. One by one they flicker off as the sun rises over the wharf. Tru nearly stumbles backward, awed by the beauty. Roy laughs softly from behind her. “You can’t only t’ink ’bout winning, an’ when yuh get there, can’t turn around to see what brought yuh there in di first place. Look at all dis. We tek a lot fah granted.”
Tru is unable to look away. Seeing the sky this close, she cannot help but utter, “We’re closer to God.” She turns to Roy. “Dat’s what she promised me before she left. Dat she’d move us to a house on the hill.”
“Who? Yuh mother?”
“Yes,” Tru says quietly.
“Come over here,” Roy says.
Tru obeys and stands next to him. He rubs the back of her neck with his hand. She hears him breathing softly.
“Why doesn’t she call?” Tru asks.
“Who knows?”
She’s never heard her father mince his words. She knows how he feels about her mother. She hears him and Marva arguing still about her, about money. Tru imagines America as a huge, demanding machine her mother deftly tends to. In her dreams, she cries out, “Mama!” as the machine feeds and feeds, its mouth opening to bite off her mother’s head. On those nights, Tru wakes up crying, angry at the machine, which could not see that she needs her mother. Could not spare her. “I’m sure they have telephones in a place like dat.”
“Dey got a black man running fah president now, too. Don’t mean it g’wan be easier fah black people if him win. In dis life, what you see is what yuh get,” Roy says. “Yuh see dat?” He points to where the sun rises like a newly cracked egg yolk. “Dat’s a certainty. As long as you’re alive, yuh know yuh can depend on seeing it every day. Yuh can’t place hopes on no one else, because everyone g’wan disappoint you. It’s life. Get dat right, or else yuh g’wan end up mad an’ angry fah di rest of yuh life. Yuh not g’wan have everyt’ing handed to you like dat. Yuh neva g’wan have a mansion or a nice car or a servant serving yuh ice-cold lemonade if yuh jus’ sit there expecting people to feel sorry fah you. No one will ever be sorry. No one owe you anyt’ing. Not even happiness. Nope. Neva. Yuh g’wan have to harden yuhself. Toughen up like coconut to survive in dis world. You’s not no delicate woman. So neva mek me see yuh cry like one, expecting people to do fah you. Compared to some children, you have a family. Me an’ Marva are yuh family. A family dat can provide an’ send you to a good school. Dat’s sweet. Real sweet. But yuh know what you’ll always have no mattah how tough or educated you be? A broken heart. Welcome aboard.”
“Marva cries all di time,” Tru says quietly.
“What yuh hear when we argue, is convah-sation between two grown people . . . two people who only tolerating each other.”
Tru lifts her face in time to catch a glint of something shading his eyes. “You don’t love her anymore?”
“When you get to be my age, you’ll see how complicated relationships can be. Fairy tales aren’t fah people like us, Champ. Yuh father is no prince. Ah made plenty mistakes. What me an’ Marva had disappeared a long, long time ago. It ended di day ah chose yuh mother’s needs ovah hers.”
“Is it because of me?” Tru asks.
“No. You got nuttin’ to do wid it.”
“Sounds like it.”
He turns to her. “It started way before you. Ah met yuh mother when she was sixteen. Thought she was a pretty girl, wid those dark eyes yuh can fall into.” He looks out at the sunrays spreading across Kingston City. “Ah could tell dat she was always searching fah somet’ing biggah. But ah neva concern me self wid dat, still. When yuh young an’ in love, yuh don’t care ’bout much. She was my first love. She neva stopped being dat.”
Tru blushes. She’s never heard him talk like this.
He looks at Tru again. “Ah know yuh didn’t follow me all di way up here to hear all dat. What is it yuh want to tell me? Yuh ’ave a boyfriend?” he asks.
Tru’s face flushes hotter as she peers at the ground—at the earthworms wiggling small holes in which she wishes to crawl with such a question thrown at her by her father. She thinks of Sore-Foot Marlon, who is no longer Sore-Foot. How she felt when he slung one arm around her shoulder like he does with the other guys, his breath a warm gust on her cheek. She tries not to think about how close and comfortable they are with each other. And even if she does, so what? He’ll always be Sore-Foot Marlon. She listens to him and Albino Ricky brag all the time about stripping girls of their creamy innocence, their egos as loud and pungent as the jet of urine from their stout, fleshy cocks—one dark and one pale—which they unleash anywhere to piss. Seeing their cocks doesn’t make Tru giddy, but envious. Unlike the girls at her school, who wonder about each other’s virginity, shyly and discreetly asking the most w
omanish one among them, who claims to know everything from the mysterious flow of periods to the taste of cum, “What’s it like? Does it hurt? Which is bettah . . . to do it standing up or lying down? Do you feel different? Is it true dat it mek yuh belly flat an’ yuh bottom biggah?”—curiosities Tru chooses to ignore altogether. Not that she doesn’t feel the urge, or has never allowed herself to wonder what it’d be like. She overhears her father and Marva going at it at night and even remembers walking in on them when she was younger. More than once she has tried to conjure the image of what it’d be like to be pulled in like quicksand, feeling the rush and simultaneous terror of falling into an abyss with another person. In those fantasies, she’s a completely different person. She envisions being somebody like David Beckham or Ronaldinho for the fantasy to work. For to picture herself the way she is would seem wrong. Her mind can never move past the how and the who, settling instead for just the pleasurable sensation whenever her hand travels to the moist spot between her legs, which makes her muffle her gasps with her pillow. It’s all too complicated, she thinks. Aloud, she says. “I have no time fah t’ings like dat.”
Roy visibly sighs with relief.
“Good,” he utters solemnly. But then his jawline firms, and his thick eyebrows form into a quizzical arch. Before his mouth forms the question Tru senses coming her way like a fastball, she says, “I can find a job to help. Ah know you an’ Marva struggling . . .” Her voice trails.
“Yuh have no business worrying ’bout money like dat at dis age,” Roy replies with a slight chuckle. “Focus on yuh schoolwork. Dat’s what’s going to get you far. Ah try my best to do what ah can. Dat fancy school yuh going to? Yuh making yuh mother very proud. She always used to tell me dat she wanted you to get di best education. Dat’s one t’ing she used to stress. An’ now look at you . . .” He smiles. “A Wilhampton girl. Not many girls in dis country get such an opportunity.”
Tru looks down at her feet, feeling guilty. For the first time in her life, she regrets the wish her heart formed years ago, now straining her mind to shape her parents’ dreams for her. “Be a good, obedient girl,” her mother had said, though in the dark recesses of her mind she knows there’s no place for her there, at that school. Or anywhere, it seems. She knows that her mother wanted her to be at that school. She knows she might be potentially ruining what’s supposed to be so simple, so easy, if she drops out. “Be a good, obedient girl.” When she first started there, wearing her knee-length blue tunic and white blouse, her gait was unsteady, awkward, as if she had just mastered the ability to use her feet. She knew this uniform had great significance to the larger Jamaican population and worked hard to carry this torch of perfection. Her gestures were not natural to her either. But she made herself into the girl her mother wanted her to be, her uniform a costume for the performance of her mother’s desires. She wore it so long that it almost became impossible to remove. Until recently, when she has begun to accept that her mother does not love her. In a way, that grief seems to mysteriously give her the honesty and courage of a drunk too numb to care. She is the only one in her cohort who had to repeat fifth form this year after failing the CXCs in June. She took nine subjects and failed all but math. Roy begged the headmistress to allow her to repeat the grade to take the exam over. It was either that or she leaves school to learn a vocation like most students who fail the CXC exams, unable to advance to sixth form. Once upon a time, Tru used to be the brightest and the youngest in her class. This is the first time that Tru has ever been the same age as her classmates. Now, almost two months into the new school year, when Tru walks through campus the girls part to let her through. Not only is she a repeat, but a freak. She’s nothing like them—the way they sit in their groups, backs straight, legs crossed, skirts down to their calves, hands resting lifelessly on textbooks whose contents they merely regurgitate. How her mother used to admire Wilhampton girls as ladies-in-the-making; and how Tru, lanced with guilt, knows she has never felt at home in her body to be molded as such. Where is her place, if not with them? The question forms like a small welt on her mind, inciting a slight throbbing at her temples.
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