“I know it’s not easy to bounce back from failure, but a true champ neva stay down aftah di first blow. A true champ try even harder,” her father is saying. “Even if it means ah have to take out another loan fah our mortgage or work more shifts at di police station to pay fah dis extra school year an’ yuh CXC subjects. I’m up fah promotion anyway. So, believe you me, it g’wan work out.”
For a long time, there is silence. The chirping birds make the only sounds. Tru averts her eyes. When she looks at him again, he’s looking at her. He hasn’t examined her this way since that day he showed her how to kick a soccer ball. A cooling breeze rustles the trees around them. Finally, Roy looks at his watch. Tru swallows her courage to tell him that she wants to transfer schools—even after all the trouble Roy went through to keep her enrolled at Wilhampton; and even though there is a high probability that it’s too late, since it’s October and the next CXC exams are a term away in June. Maybe if she speaks up now, she can re-take the exam at Roman Phillips. She feels insane trying to fit in at Wilhampton Girls High and cannot see herself getting through another school year. There’s also the shame of seeing her former classmates—the ones who sat the CXCs with her and passed—now in sixth form as prefects, giving detentions and demerits. What’s the use of continuing to wear a Wilhampton uniform when her mother will never see her in it?
“Race me back down to di house?” Roy says.
Tru doesn’t move.
“What?” Roy asks.
“Did she . . .” She searches for the right words. “Did Mama ever love me?”
Roy sighs. “Yes, she did. Don’t evah doubt dat.”
“I want to hear more. About Mama.”
He blinks.
“What is it yuh want to know?”
Tru shrugs.
Roy sighs. His chary glance leaps from the hill toward the peak of the Blue Mountains behind them. “She was . . .” he begins, then pauses. For the first time Tru notices that his eyebrows are slicked with sweat. “There is no one word to describe yuh mother. She always used to seh death will come fast. Before we know it. She wanted to be free. To fly . . .” He chuckles. “Ah always used to tease har an’ call har Birdie. Because she neva belong in a cage.”
Tru pictures the woman in the faded photos in that dusty album she found in Mama G’s whatnot. Tru kept the photo of the woman whose smile never touched her eyes. Even in the one photograph where she is holding a baby girl, whom Tru recognizes as herself, the young woman’s smile is tentative, unsure, her arms positioned the way one might pose with a stack of textbooks.
“Di only one who did know Birdie bettah than anyone else was—” He stops himself, scowling deeply as though he’s suddenly sick from the memory.
“Who?” Tru asks.
Shaking his head, he wipes sweat from his upper lip and spits in the dirt as if to curse the land.
“No one,” he says, looking down at his right hand clenched in a fist—the one with the ugly scar Tru had been afraid of when she was little. How it seems to slither across the back of his hand, shiny. When she was younger, she once asked her father if he ever killed anyone. Roy had looked at her, a bit startled. Then his face dimmed as though his own soul had left him to wander the vaults of memory. “Do you know what it’s like to risk yuh life every day?” he asked, answering her question with a question.
“Before me an’ yuh mother break up she told me, ‘Ah can’t promise yuh love. Ah can’t promise yuh me.’ Those were her exact words . . .” His voice trails and he squeezes Tru’s right shoulder with his other hand. “But she gave me you.”
30
PATSY PUSHES BABY TOWARD THE PARK, THOUGH HE’S OLD enough to walk. Baby’s real name is Thomas, but Patsy prefers her nickname for him. He loves to look up at the trees along the path, branches stretched above their heads, crooked limbs pointing toward the sky. He also likes to look at yellow cabs sailing in traffic along Central Park West. It’s the vibrant yellow that he likes, squealing at them while Patsy pushes him. “Mommy! Mommy!” They must remind him of the rubber ducks he bathes with—the ones his mother meticulously lines around his basin. Regina likes order. Sweaters, dresses, suits, and shoes are color-coordinated and neatly organized inside the Rhinebecks’ walk-in closet. Dishes and crystal glasses are stored behind glass cabinets. Books are alphabetized on the large oakwood bookshelf in the home study where Regina works for hours at a stretch.
“Mommy is at work,” Patsy reminds Baby in her best American English. “She’s not in the cars.”
“Yes, she is!”
“Okay, if you say so.”
“Can I wave?”
“Be my guest.”
Patsy stops pushing and allows the redheaded boy to wave at the passing taxis while she stands next to him.
“Wave with me! So she can see us!”
Patsy glances sideways over her shoulder before raising her right hand. Of course, this wouldn’t signal a taxi to stop. Definitely not for her. When Baby grows tired of waving, Patsy resumes her stroll, taking an alternate route down Columbus Avenue by the boutiques and jewelry stores that stretch before her like smug faces with glass eyes. She doesn’t look at them. They seem in league with one another to make her feel like an outsider, a landless wanderer.
Yet, here she is on the Upper West Side, pushing a stroller like it’s her baby inside it, and as if she belongs in this kind of neighborhood where there is a store that sells gluten-free pastries and yogurt and a market that only carries organic fruits and vegetables. If Cicely could see her now. One time Patsy tried to shop at the market and had to drop the bag of apples like she had seen worms crawling inside when she saw the price. “Organic me r’ass. People really pay ten dollah fi two likkle dry-up apple?” She wished she had Cicely around to ask this. Cicely might have shrugged and suggested Patsy try one and see. “White people eat healthy. That’s why dem live so long enough. Look how many ah dem in nursing homes,” she might have said. And Patsy chuckled inside the market, drawing the stares of the workers and customers.
These imagined conversations with Cicely are more real to her than the details she sees about her friend’s life on television or in the local newspaper as wife of Republican Councilman Marcus Salters, for the Thirty-fifth District of the New York City Council, which includes Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, portions of Bedford-Stuyvesant, downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Vinegar Hill—almost the entire borough of Brooklyn. After 9/11, Marcus’s business boomed. His real estate ads were all over the place, it seemed. He made a mint, then ran for New York City Council and won.
The borough is now dealing with more foreclosures than the market has seen since the Great Depression. To Patsy it seems like a plague, the foreclosures moving like a dark cloud over the borough, taking with them families that have lived inside these brownstones for generations and leaving behind empty houses, the windows and doors sealed with wooden planks. Marcus Salters’s New York City Council platform is to enact legislation to help landlords evict squatters and allow eligible landlords to apply for loans to help them with foreclosure and repair in order to attract the right kind of tenants, which for Marcus Salters means wealthy, and usually white. For Patsy, it means that her days living in Brooklyn are numbered. She fears that this project, which Marcus Salters calls the New Brooklyn, could attract the majority of landlords, especially in Crown Heights, like Mr. Fagan, who are immigrants themselves, and who have opened their homes to undocumented immigrants. Although this is a long way down the road, Patsy hates to think the day might come when she’d get priced out.
The ads are everywhere. The first time Patsy saw one, she stopped in an intersection and looked up at Marcus watching her from the huge billboard on the side of a building on Bedford Avenue, which read WELCOME TO THE NEW BROOKLYN. MARCUS SALTERS, YOUR FAVORITE NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL MEMBER. Patsy looked away from Marcus’s seemingly omniscient, mocking gaze, feeling as naked beneath it as the day he saw her in the basement. Patsy stood still, unable to
move until angry drivers beeped their horns.
Yuh did good, Cicely. Yuh did good. Ah jus’ hope yuh happy now.
PATSY CROSSES THE STREET WITH BABY TO THE SIDE WITH LESS snow, perhaps looking like a big scandal bag floating over the sidewalk. The only thing missing on the back of her bubble jacket is a smiley face like on the scandal bags she gets from the Chinney restaurant in her neighborhood. It was a rare find at Goodwill, with fur on the hood and cuffs. She wears it even when it’s supposed to be sixty degrees. Ten years in America hasn’t made her any less resistant to winter weather. To Patsy, cold is cold.
New York got some snow last week and again this week. Not even November yet, and the limbs of the trees hang dangerously low with leaves still on them. “Global warming,” Regina had said to Patsy. It was the only explanation for this crazy weather. Last week a woman died when a branch fell on her. Instead of cutting down dangerously leaning branches, the mayor’s only solution was to warn people to be careful. The man wouldn’t have gotten Patsy’s vote, if she could vote. Patsy sucks her teeth when she has to take the stroller into the street to avoid any leaning branches. It’s midday, so there’s more room on the sidewalk for strollers than at rush hour, when she’s forever maneuvering between women with briefcases, wearing tailored suits and high heels with red soles, even in the snow. Privately, Patsy admires them—the high heels with devilish red soles and the women wearing them.
Often she finds herself stopping in her tracks or dodging well-dressed pedestrians to avoid an accident with the massive stroller. Regina told her to guard it with her life, because she spent almost two thousand dollars for the thing that doesn’t even fold properly. Two thousand dollars to push a boy who can walk. She surely doesn’t budget this much for Patsy’s paycheck.
Regina is somewhat of a recluse, staying in her study all day, directing all her maternal instincts to the people inside her head—some of whom she mentions to Patsy, following Patsy from room to room as Patsy dusts, sweeps the floors, washes the dishes, cooks, or tends to Baby. Sorting and matching his socks, collecting his scattered board books, scrubbing remnants of Cheerios from the soles of his shoes, Patsy goes about the business of raising a child while his mother watches, unseeing, rambling through intricate plots that only exist in her head. “So, what do you think?” And Patsy would say it’s a good idea, though she only half listens. The stories have managed to win Regina awards, which she rests on the bookshelves inside the house. They outnumber the family photos. Meanwhile, Mr. Rhinebeck gets paid to stare inside people’s mouths and convince them to give him loads of money for things like invisible braces and veneers. Patsy remembers how he bragged about an old woman who got veneers at ninety years old and wondered why a woman that age, who had lived her whole life just as she was, would spend so much money on appearance when she only has her casket to look forward to.
Now, just as Patsy makes her way into the street, a bike messenger comes out of nowhere. He swerves around Patsy and nearly collides with a yellow taxi. The taxi driver presses on his brakes and his horn. “Why don’t you move out the way, fatso!” the bike messenger, a scrawny man with heavily gelled hair, yells at Patsy over the roof of the taxi. “I could’ve gotten killed!”
“Yuh riding ’pon di wrong side!” Patsy says, gesturing at the sign on the bike lane that indicates that he should be riding on the other side. “You nearly kill me!”
The bike messenger flips his middle finger at Patsy. “Black rhino!”
He pedals away on the wrong side of the street. Patsy fumes, feeling warmth spread from her neck to her face. If it weren’t for Baby she would’ve had a few choice words for the man. For the rest of her stroll she’s preoccupied with what she should have said. Who yuh calling black rhino, yuh scrawny yellow mongrel? It’s lunchtime, but her appetite is gone. No longer does she want to sit at the regular pizza place to rest. Worse, Baby, who witnessed the whole thing, extends his legs—which he does when he wants to walk—revealing tiny white Velcro sneakers. “Miss Patsy, why did that man call you a black rhino? You’re not black, you’re brown!”
Patsy doesn’t answer him right away. She pushes the stroller for two more blocks, feeling her stockings ride up and her thighs rub together. She slows her pace once she gets to the playground and stands by the marble benches and tables facing the swings. The snow hasn’t stopped children from being children. At least there are distractions, Patsy thinks.
The park is divided: housewives versus nannies. The housewives stick to themselves; they quietly monitor each other’s choice of snack, leggings, preschool. If they do acknowledge the nannies, they do so smugly, their eyes roving over the children foisted by their mothers onto strangers. It’s different from the looks Patsy gets from young black women on the street who glance at her stroller and see Baby inside it, their faces darkening as though their heads bumped on something that swung out of nowhere into their path.
The nannies are divided among themselves too, each group a faction of the United Nations. They sit in their respective circles to swap gossip, recipes, information on bargains, immigration lawyers, and the latest news from home. On any given day, a nanny can be heard pondering in her native tongue the state of corruption in her country while pushing toddlers on swings or helping them down the slides.
Patsy hopes she won’t see Beatrice, Judene, and Shirley, members of her posse, today. If left alone she can buy a salted pretzel from the vendor who parks his cart nearby and eat in peace, dipping the pretzel in extra mustard—a taste Patsy has come to like while being in America. In Jamaica she only ate mustard on frankfurters on trips to Hope Zoo.
Patsy helps Baby out of his stroller. She bends and pulls his hat over his ears before he bolts toward the monkey bars. He waddles on the beams, awkward in the bulky coat Patsy bundled him into earlier. Patsy buys a pretzel and eats while she observes Baby and the people at the park. Dog walkers stand still outside the fence, patiently waiting for their shaggy animals to urinate or shit on the curb; midday joggers, covered from head to toe, are huffing and puffing air that visibly curls from their mouths. She spots an older woman with hair as white as the snow-covered pavement and skin as dark as the ice-slicked roads. Beatrice pushes her stroller into the park, her nose in the air. Beatrice spots her and waves. Patsy only smiles with her lips, showing no teeth.
Beatrice is the first to speak. “Wha g’wan, Patsy? How yuh look suh?”
“How me look?”
“Like s’maddy wid di weight ah di world ’pon har head. An’ why yuh wearing dat terrible wig?”
Patsy sucks her teeth and wipes mustard off her fingers with a napkin.
“Not every day we can wear a smile. Some of us don’t ’ave di luxury of a vacation in America, you know,” Patsy says, eyeballing Beatrice.
“Where all dis coming from? Yuh soun’ a likkle salty.”
Patsy remembers when she first met Beatrice and the other nannies she hangs around. Their dark eyes, sunken and tired, had stared—as though basing their self-importance on the children they push around—scanning her face to see if she was worth speaking to. Patsy, on the other hand, was glad to see other Caribbean women pushing white babies—all except Beatrice, whose baby was darker than the others on the playground. Patsy had taken one look at the child and said, “Oh, him adopted?” The other women were silent, a resounding hum resonating from their throats. Patsy suddenly had the feeling that she had said something wrong. Her first day in the park and already she had offended someone.
“Why yuh say that?” Beatrice asked Patsy. She was wearing a turban on her head that hid her snow-white hair. But her high cheekbones gained more prominence.
“A lot ah rich white people adopt black babies from other countries like Africa,” Patsy said. “Can’t even comb dem hair.” The first time Patsy saw a black baby with a white family, she thought it might have been one of Miss Foster’s children—the ones Miss Foster sold to the mysterious visitors who parked their nice rental cars at her gate in Pennyfield at night. H
owever, in America Patsy had seen more black babies from third world countries with white people than with black parents. It’s as if they graduated from colonizing countries to adopting babies from those places, training them to be like them.
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