On one such night, she saw his Adam’s apple rising at his neckline, and felt him tense. He turned suspiciously to the door locked between them and Mama G. Something sad lanced his eyes and he took another sip of rum. Then drained the whole bottle without giving her any. When he looked at Patsy again, she saw something else in his eyes—something stronger, more urgent. It reached out to claim her, confessed that despite their age, despite their sneaking around at nights to make their own joy, despite him wanting to leave since the love between him and Mama G was already gone, they would always be joined by secrecy. He beckoned Patsy close that night, sank to his knees and held her. When he put his arms around her, she felt something that she had never felt before—love. Genuine, unconditional love that thrust sharp from his trousers. It made her cry out before he put a honeyed finger to her lips and kissed them softly. “It only hurt di first time. Ah promise,” he said, his own tears—or were they hers?—wet against her cheeks.
WHEN SHE WAKES UP THE NEXT MORNING, DAYLIGHT POURING through the curtainless window at half past eight, Barrington’s shirt is twisted around her neck. Any tighter, and it would have choked her.
34
IT’S NINE-THIRTY WHEN SHE FINALLY GETS TO WORK. RANSEL, THE doorman, gives her his usual mock salute. “Look like yuh wake ’pon di wrong side dis mawnin’!” In the three years she has been working for Regina, Patsy has never been late.
“Yuh see har from mawnin?” Patsy asks him in a near-whisper, not having to say Regina’s name, since Ransel knows every nanny by the people they work for. She hates making him, of all people, an accomplice. “Ah forgot to set me alarm clock.”
“Tell dat to she.” Ransel looks over his shoulders both ways, his voice as low as Patsy’s. He waves to a white man with silver hair walking his Dalmatian that’s as big as a pony. “Good day, Missah Jacob!” He grins at the man, revealing all thirty-two teeth in his mouth. The people in the building—who are all white except for the one or two black people who act like Patsy doesn’t exist when she rides the elevator with them—greet Ransel with the same stiff, thin-lipped smiles: fences of white teeth that seem to keep him at a distance, discourage small talk. When the man waves back and disappears outside, Ransel spins around to Patsy, lowering his voice again. “As far as me know, di husband left from last night wid a big suitcase,” he says, hurrying Patsy to the last of the four shiny bronze elevators in the remodeled building. Their feet slap across the checkered marble tiles.
“What?” Patsy asks. “Yuh sure ’bout dat?”
“Cross me heart an’ hope fi die,” Ransel replies, signing himself.
Patsy shakes her head, flashes of Barrington leaping in front of the train coming back. “Yuh all right?” Ransel asks, his dark face creasing with concern.
“Please don’t seh dat. Ah can’t deal wid another death right now . . .” Her voice trails.
“Yuh know is jus’ a figure of speech.” Ransel laughs. “Yuh know is what ole-time people used to seh . . .”
“Fah-get wha ole-time people used to seh. Me nuh waan hear it!” Patsy quickly presses the button to the fifth floor, relieved when the door closes on Ransel and his grin.
She run-walks down the long hallway. When Regina opens the door, Patsy can tell she’s upset. “Good mawnin’, ma’am.” Regina bristles at Patsy’s greeting. If Regina weren’t so polite, she’d probably have a few choice words for Patsy. At first Patsy never understood how the woman could be home all day yet still needed a babysitter. It didn’t make any sense. Back home, people would call a woman like that good-fah-nuttin’ and lazy. But while Patsy had profound distrust of the other woman’s ability to lock herself inside her study the whole time while she’s there, inaccessible behind the high wall of silence, her mind in another place, Patsy envies her freedom. Regina’s only complaints are about deadlines. Her next book, about the adventures of a Nigerian doula, needs to be finished and she’s having a hard time with it. As one can imagine, being that she’s a white woman from California. But then again, maybe Africans can’t write their own stories—at least not the starving ones Patsy has seen on TV with big bellies and straw limbs with flies pitching all over their oversized heads.
“Where were you?” she asks Patsy. “You didn’t call. I was worried. And Paul just up and—” She shakes her head full of red curls, her pale face flushed pink and her large hazel eyes red like she had been crying. Patsy knows not to ask questions about the personal lives of her employers unless they volunteer the information.
“Never mind,” Regina says. “You’re here now. Thomas is playing in the living room. I gave him his favorite toys.”
Regina hurries to the coffee maker brewing on the island counter before it’s done dripping and pours herself a cup of that special coffee she gets from Indonesia whose beans were eaten and defecated by cats. It’s a gift—the pounds of cat-shit coffee beans stacked in the cupboards. Patsy knows it’s from her friend—the man who goes off to these exotic places to write poetry; the Japanese man Patsy thought was gay, because he wears his hair long and silk chiffon scarves around his neck like a woman; the man Regina threw a party for because he won some big poetry prize, and continues to invite over when her husband is away on business trips. “Akio makes me laugh,” she said to Patsy once in passing after returning from one of her writing residencies in the middle of nowhere, blushed pink, girlish.
Without another word to Patsy, she disappears down the hallway and into her study. Patsy does the usual—hangs her coat inside the coat closet, removes her boots, washes her hands in the guest bathroom from palms to elbows with organic antibiotic soap—a technique suggested by Regina, who gets paranoid about germs. Patsy then heads straight for the kitchen to prepare breakfast for Baby. He likes his first meal around this time. The kitchen is newly renovated, so there are things Patsy has to search for—like Baby’s special spoon that he likes to eat cereal with. He has been eating regular food like a grown-up since he was fourteen months, forgoing his baby seat for the dining table. Maybe because his mother is up in age. Regina waited till she was forty to have him—her first and only child. In Jamaica, forty is considered way too old to have a baby, and if the woman were to get pregnant at forty, the baby would be a wash belly baby—the last child out of how many children she’s had before.
Baby also potty-trained early. One thing his mother did was teach him how to use the bathroom so that she didn’t have to go through the trouble to change him—something Patsy doesn’t remember doing with Tru. One day she noticed that her daughter crawled—or did she walk? couldn’t be!—to the toilet and sat there. Just sat there. Her daughter must have sensed Patsy’s urgency for her to grow up, because she also began walking to school by herself at the age of five, needing no help to cross the street or ignore strangers. (Granted, the school was not that far.) Miss Gains, her basic school teacher—whatevah happen’ to dat woman?—had marveled at this too, saying Tru was grown for her age.
Patsy pours whole-grain Cheerios into Baby’s green cereal bowl, and a cup of almond milk from a box. He’s looking at her with those old-man eyes while sucking on his bottom lip. He’s sitting in the middle of the living room with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, his toys spread around him like a hurricane has swept through. Regina must have given him all his toys at once to keep him occupied.
“Yuh ready to eat?” Patsy asks him, searching for his crayons and coloring book from the mess. Baby loves to color. Patsy likes to sit with him and help him decide what crayons to choose. He likes to color hills purple, the sky yellow, the sun green, and the sea red—colors Patsy once thought jarring and out of touch with reality, but has come to appreciate. However, today Baby sits slouched in the middle of his room, his eyes lowered as he fiddles with a red stuffed animal that he likes to play with.
“What’s di mattah?” Patsy asks, squatting before him. “Yuh not g’wan eat nothing?”
Baby shrugs with his small shoulders.
“Yuh feeling sick?” She presses the back of her ha
nd to his neck, her brown hand contrasting with his pink flesh.
He doesn’t respond, focusing intently on his stuffed toy. Patsy wants to take it away from him to get his attention. She has never seen him this way. She comes down on her knees, feeling a sharp pain from something hard, which makes her yelp and fall backward. Baby doesn’t laugh at this like he does whenever she trips or bumps into furniture around the house. The culprit is a toy soldier. She tosses it into the pile of toys already on the floor.
“How much time yuh mother mus’ tell you to put away yuh toys after yuh play wid dem? Talk to me,” she says to Baby. “What troubling you?”
“I want my mommy,” Baby whispers. His voice is soft and wispy.
“Mommy left fah work.” Patsy gestures toward the short hall where Regina’s study is located. “She don’t like when nobody disturb har.”
“She said she was going to play with me if you didn’t come.”
Patsy pauses before she says, “Well, I’m here now.”
“You’re not her.”
“I know.”
He takes her hand anyway and allows her to help him onto his chair. He eats his cereal quietly, still clinging to the stuffed animal with his free hand. Just then Patsy hears the door to Regina’s study open and Regina’s footsteps on the hardwood floors. “Mommy! Mommy!” Baby squeals, kicking his legs and banging the table with his spoon, nearly spilling his cereal.
“Yes, dear. Mommy is working, but she just needs to ask Patsy a question,” Regina says, referring to herself in the third person. Patsy catches herself before she rolls her eyes, knowing what sort of thing Regina is about to ask. She braces herself by holding on to the edge of the table. “I’ve been thinking . . .” Regina begins. “Ifeoma comes across a ten-year-old pregnant girl on her journey and delivers the girl’s baby? Wouldn’t she die? Is it realistic if she lives?”
“Uhm . . .” Patsy tries to think of something to say.
Regina continues, “I mean . . . gosh! How tragic is that? I want this to be a feel-good book, you know—an Ifeoma-saves-the-day kinda book. But I imagine, in places like Africa where things like that happen—all the rapes and incest . . . girls die, right?”
Patsy squeezes the edges of the table. It must be a luxury, she thinks, for Regina to make up stories without ever coming out of her study and out of her head. Regina is looking at her with an expectant look on her face.
“Ah wouldn’t know what dey do in Africa,” Patsy says.
Regina pours herself more coffee. She takes a sip, then lowers her cup, wheeling from the counter to the middle of the room, where she paces barefoot on the hardwood floors that Patsy mopped and shined two days ago. Baby’s eyes follow his mother like green ping-pong balls. “Africa is beautiful. Just like Jamaica is beautiful. Right? I’ve never been, but I’ve seen pictures. It would be terrible for me to put such tragedy in the book when my intention is to take people on a fucking safari—if you catch my drift!” Patsy glances at Baby, hoping he didn’t just hear his mother curse.
“Then don’t write it,” Patsy finally says, turning back to Regina, her voice steady, cautious. Any softer and it would’ve been a lullaby. “It’s unrealistic,” Patsy tells her, mercifully sparing the woman the disgrace of truth. Even Mama G herself had to justify such a thing as the Devil’s work. So why now should Patsy let anyone else believe otherwise?
“Unrealistic that it could happen to someone so young? Or that she lives?” Regina asks.
“Dat she live . . .” Patsy confesses, turning away from Regina’s furrowing brow to pretend to clean crumbs off the already pristine table.
“That’s it!” Regina says, laughter ringing in her voice. “I knew I was way off with that story! I don’t want anyone dying in my book. I’ll make her older.” She ruffles Baby’s hair and kisses him on the forehead before she disappears again in her study and slams the door. Baby looks as though he’s about to cry. Patsy waits a heartbeat after Regina closes the door before she apologetically touches Baby’s hand clenched around his stuffed animal. “Come. Let’s take a likkle stroll.”
“I want my mommy!” Baby says into the bowl in front of him.
Try as she might in this moment, Patsy can no longer calm him. His voice rises like the sea during a hurricane, commanding and inevitable, everything buried, dredging from its oceanic floor.
As clear as day, Patsy sees Miss Mabley’s beautiful bronze face, smells her perfume, and remembers the pain that ruthlessly cracked her open like the shell of a pomegranate smashed on concrete. “Jus’ breathe. Yuh g’wan be all right. You’ll see.” Patsy and Cicely were playing in Cicely’s backyard that day, when Patsy felt the rush of water between her legs and the debilitating cramp in her belly. Cicely ran to get help, and out of nowhere Miss Mabley appeared in just a slip and a pair of house slippers. She rushed Patsy to the hospital, cradling Patsy like her own child: “Dis child need help! Someone please help har!” Patsy wailed against the pain, thinking she was going to die. “We’re seeing di last days,” Mama G had said at the hospital, her voice low, laced with triumph as though her prophecy had come to pass. And just like that, Patsy let go. Her spirit gave way to the exhaustion she could no longer resist. It was better that way—better to exist numb, a mere husk that could float even on the most treacherous seas, than to feel pain.
When she woke up, it was over. The doctors never bothered to sew her up properly, since Patsy was from Pennyfield, and people thought of Pennyfield residents as animals fit for nothing but birthing way too many babies, blocking roads to get what they wanted from indifferent politicians, and killing each other the way ole neaggars did. The incision became infected. When it healed, it grew into a pinkish red branch under her belly. She was twelve. She’d never even known she was pregnant. She never saw the baby’s body. She was told she would never have children again.
“I want my mommy I want my mommy I want my mommy!” Baby continues to cry, knocking over his cereal bowl and spilling milk on the table. It drips onto the floor. Patsy distractedly watches each droplet, the spread of white liquid on the mahogany surface where echoes of footsteps seem far, far away. She doesn’t bend to clean up the mess.
WHEN SHE REACHES BROOKLYN, SHE SCURRIES PAST THE BANKS and salons and shops and churches and WELCOME TO THE NEW BROOKLYN signs on Flatbush Avenue. Each time she passes a glass storefront she catches a glimpse of her face, a black streak blurring into nothingness. Patsy’s dark, shapeless thing hovers close by amid the festive mood. It’s the evening of the election, polls are still open, and people are bursting into song and some into prayer that Obama will win. It reminds Patsy of the Reggae Boyz representing Jamaica in France at the World Cup ten years ago—how Jamaicans from every walk of life joined hands, sang, and cheered for their victory. For the first time in the years that Patsy has been in America, black people are overjoyed. Obama’s amicable face smiles from calendars, posters, mugs, T-shirts—anything you can find on Flatbush Avenue with the words YES WE CAN scrawled across them.
On her corner, Patsy bumps into a middle-aged woman bundled in a dark coat with just long johns underneath and a pair of Timberland boots, her hair like wires sticking out her head.
“Yuh ’ave one breadfruit me can roast tonight, ma’am?”
“No,” Patsy says, walking by her, not bothering to tell her that this is not Jamaica. And that one cannot roast breadfruit on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. In the cold.
“Me children hungry!” she calls after Patsy.
Patsy stops. She turns and looks into the woman’s glassy eyes. She sees herself peering through the crazed eyes of this stranger. She knows that the woman is not in Brooklyn, standing on Flatbush Avenue, but home. She went crazy in America, her mind halting in the loneliness, anxiety, and the soundlessness of things falling apart: a sweet surrender. What a relief it must be, Patsy thinks, to stare into the eyes of sorrow and break without the pretense of holding it together.
Patsy digs inside her pocket and gives the woman some loose change—a few
pennies and a dime. It’s all she has to give. The woman thanks her like Patsy has given her gold, before limping away, singing a Jamaican folk song Patsy knew when she was a girl, but no more.
Once inside her room, Patsy sinks to the floor, pressing to her chest the shirt of the dead man she will never get to know. What she has kept inside for years, balled up in a steeled fist, explodes as a scream, her throat releasing everything she has kept, every wrong done to her. Someone knocks at her door. A woman asking if she’s all right in there. But she doesn’t respond. She weeps finally, finally with the rage of a woman touching an earlobe for the feel of an heirloom earring and discovering it gone, not knowing when and where it fell, and powerless at this point to find it. Her castaway innocence has long been drowned by the sea, and Patsy weeps for the girl who died with it. The lifelong pain twists her into a fetal position on the floor until the sun slips from the sky and leaves it black. Worn, stripped, and hoarse, Patsy’s cries taper, and something else emerges: A voice. Barrington’s voice. “How is it fate if yuh have control ovah it?”
Patsy Page 29