by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
Our working relationship ended, Eulis and I were able relax with each other, and gradually she began to open up to me. Over sodas and water biscuits she would tell me stories about her life in Guyana, which had been a series of “great injustices.” She had been born into a large family, one of a set of twins, but the boy had died at childbirth. “I was de blackest one,” she told me. “Maybe he would have been as black as me, but I was alone with my color. My other brothers and sisters were different, more fair.”
“I was smart, ya know,” she said. “Smart! I used to write nice papers and do all ah my assignments. I passed my exams, but da man was wicked.” The Headmaster of her school had reported that Eulis had failed Maths, which kept her from graduating from secondary school. As a young woman, she had been sent to live with her aunt and uncle in the country to keep house for them. “He trouble me,” she said in a whisper, leaning forward. When she told her aunt about his advances the woman asked her to leave.
Later she had found work as a nurse in the hospital. On hearing this, I finally understood Eulis’ fixation on the shower curtain and under-bed region, and her vitriol for our cats. She had been trying to rout pestilence from our house, not just dirt. Again, this career path had led to frustration. The other nurses had turned out to be “wicked baderation,” and gossiped about her incessantly. She quit and went back to cleaning other people’s houses.
Of all of Eulis’ regrets, the greatest was not getting married. When she worked for us she assumed that every male volunteer she met was a boyfriend. “Miss Katrin, like you and de dark-hair one, Mistah Gabe, would make a fine couple!” she would tease. “Y’all must marry, don’t hesitate!” she told us again and again. Growing up she had listened to other women’s stories of difficult relationships. “Husband worries is the worst worries, they told me. Husband worries is the worst worries—so I never bother with men.” Now she regretted her decision, because she had no one to take care of her in her old age, no children, no “grands,” and no husband.
Having had my own complex dealings with Eulis, I could imagine how she may have played a part in some of the injustices heaped upon her for the past sixty years. But hers was also a familiar story of a dark-skinned girl growing up in a post-colonial society. Then Eulis had made the most counter-cultural choice she possibly could. Married or not, women her age commonly had ten or twelve babies. Though she regretted her decision, she had clearly escaped some of the ravages of extreme poverty. She was uncommonly healthy, highly intelligent, and more vibrant than many Guyanese women half her age. Although she would never see it this way, Eulis had the marks of a truly independent woman.
Toward the end of our two years in Guyana, Eulis initiated a final act of peace making, offering Maureen and me a parting gift: a serenade for future happiness. We planned it weeks in advance and Eulis insisted on having the performance taped for posterity. On a day in our last month in Guyana, she again knocked on our door at seven A.M., and tottered into the house. “HELLO! HELLO! Good mawrning! Good mawrning!” As we lounged half-awake in our pajamas, Eulis stood in the middle of our living room, her chest lifted, hands straight at her side. She explained that her song, “Where’er You Walk,” would ensure us good fortune, including marriage to respectable Christian men. I assumed it was a hymn, but later learned it is an aria from Handel’s Semele.
Where’er you walk
cool gales shall fan the glade
trees where you sit
shall crowd into a shade
Where’er you walk
Though not exactly melodic, Eulis’ voice was booming and clear. As she sang, her face became concentrated and serious, and she lifted her head and closed her eyes when the highest notes coursed through her rigid body:
Where’er you tread
the blushing flower shall rise
and all things flourish
and all things flourish
Where’er you turn your eyes
It was a benediction, the best way Eulis knew to express her hope for us in the face of a world gone wrong. In her operatic voice, she offered us a song of faith and protection, the only gift she had to give.
In a strange turn of events, I continued to hear from Eulis through my grandmother for several years after I returned from Guyana. Though they had very limited understanding of each other’s lives—Grammy had never traveled beyond Europe, and Eulis had barely left Georgetown—the two women had an epistolary chemistry. Unable to compete with my grandmother’s material generosity, Eulis compensated by writing letters twice as long. She offered a vivid picture of the politics, weather, and challenges of life in Guyana.
Granny Jamieson, whenever I write you these long letters, I do not write all on the same day, I usually start to write days before, and every day, I write a piece, and when I am finished, then I write the date of the letter.
I am person who loves to write.
At Eulis’ request, I received her letters secondhand. They are written in beautiful, even script, a remnant of her education under the British colonial system. Her grammar and spelling are Standard English, and show no trace of Creolese dialect, the only language I ever knew her to speak. On the page, you can imagine a more moderate tone, though she indicates volume and passion by underlining her main points in red ink. Multiple pages are attached with a tiny bronze safety pin, enclosed with thick packets of clippings from Stabroek News or The Guyana Chronicle. Her meticulous nature is just as evident in her writing, as it was in her cleaning.
My dear Granny Jamieson,
I received a notice which is also called a parcel slip, from a post-girl on 28th of November, and she informed me to go with it at Customs of the General Post Office (G.P.O) to uplift a parcel. On the 29th of November, I uplift the box. Thanks for sending me the yellow raincoat, with hood attached to it, but I am very sorry I cannot wear it, because it is very large for me. I think medium size would fit me, therefore I gave it away.
Other contents of the box are 1 red face towel, 1 cream hand towel with red flowers, 1 black and gold cloth, 1 calendar, 1 Christmas card with the two angels praying by Jesus’ bed, 1 Gospel of John book, 1 card with basket of flowers, 1 thank you card with a little boy and girl on it and 1 blue (please turn over) card marked Gibson Island at the back of the card. I also received a U.S. $20 note in one of the cards in the envelope, and 4 Daily Word books. I also received the little holy manger figures which are 2 angels, 6 different kinds of animals, baby Jesus, the holy Virgin Mary, all of them are very beautiful. Saint Joseph was absent from the figures. Many thanks for all your beautiful gifts. Jesus will continue to bless you abundantly for your kindness to me.
Her letters always included some strong wishes for my welfare:
I am sorry that I cannot send a Mother’s Day card to Katherine, because she is not a Mother. One of these days when she marries to the very good husband that Jesus will send, and after marriage gets a baby, then I will send her a Mother’s Day card.
And some powerful complaints about the continuing great injustices of her life:
Water is not coming in the house, and I have to fetch many buckets of water for myself and the old lady. I fetch the water from the next yard. I also have to raise my hands high using 3 1/2 buckets of water to flush one large bowel movement for the old lady, because for years the flush system of the toilet is not working properly. The Committee knows about this problem for all these very long years, and is not paying a plumber to repair it. This is also a very hard job. Sometimes she gets 2 bowel movements a day or 3. The faeces are normal stool. Therefore a lot of my time is taken up, and I am also very tired. I do not want the Committee to know that I am giving out this information about the home. This is neither a paid job, nor I never volunteered to do this job, which is looking after the old lady.
She remembered out first meeting, though somewhat romanticized from what I recalled:
I used to be Katherine’s maid cleaning the house, and I have found Katherine to be kind-hearted, loving, friendly, she sho
wed concern for me who is an old person, because when I first met her in “quick-service restaurant” standing in the queue to order things from the cashier, I approached her and asked for work, and immediately I observed that she was willing to employ me, in order to help me out financially.
In another letter, she reflected on our disagreements about her cleaning:
Katherine also showed concern for me in another way, because when I was cleaning the plastic curtain of the bathroom she told me not to fatigue myself too much in cleaning in it, but I told her that because I like to do work very clean, I do not mind if I fatigue myself. This also showed that she had a tender feeling for me, because I am old.
And Eulis had a poetic sensibility that came through in unexpected moments:
In Guyana the intermittent showers are also called the “Woman Rain.” This is because when some women quarrel, they quarrel and stop and quickly begin to quarrel again about the same thing, and then stop again, just like the intermittent showers.
Finally, Eulis told my grandmother about my departure:
The day before she flew out of Guyana, she visited me at my home, she gave me a “Thank you card,” a U.S. $20, and I think she also got a friend to take a photo with herself and me, she threw her hand around my neck, and I also threw my hand around her neck. She flew out of Guyana the next day. When the visit was over and she was leaving the yard, I stood up at the gate, and watched her until she was out of sight. I miss her very much.
My grandmother has since died and Eulis has stopped writing. I have her letters, though, tens of pages of her script on tiny, frayed notebook pages chronicling her life and the life of the country I lived in for two years. I can still hear her voice when I read them now: her operatic cadence, punctuating laughter, her strong opinions on a world that she believed had forsaken her, but to which she absolutely refused to surrender.
Katherine Jamieson is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Newsday, Ms., Narrative, Meridian, Brevity, and in The Best Travel Writing 2012, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2012 and The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volumes 9 and 10.
DAYNA BRAYSHAW
The Crap Between the Love and Us
There’s no escape on a forty-nine-foot sailboat.
The waves were as big as houses, and the wind kept picking up the tops of them and driving them sideways into the boat, their slam like cannon fire. Day seven, no sign of land, and the autopilot had just broken with one long, lumbering groan. The captain, a fifty-nine-year-old crab fisherman who looked seventy due to a life spent at sea and a recent stroke, was cursing and gripping the bucking wheel, “Well just in the goddamn go to hell perfect time to break,” he muttered as the first mate —who was also my boyfriend and also most likely a sociopath—gripped on to one side of the heaving boat and glared at me as I gripped the other side, wrestling down nausea and the white-cold growth of soul fear that comes when you think you are going to die and also, I understood later, when you realize you’ve fallen in love with a sociopath.
It has been said enough for it to be well-known by most: You will meet The One at the point when you’ve given up trying.
The lesser-known thing is what the hell we actually mean when we say “The One.”
I had met my One at a bachelorette party, just days after a colossal breakup with who I’d hoped was The One but turned out to be The Zero, much to my devastated surprise and his, also. My devastation was softened only by the comfort of knowing I would soon be far away, immersed in something that had nothing to do with Love—at an intensive, two-year dance training in Israel that I’d gotten into just barely by the grip and sweat of my own prayers. I was due to fly out in two weeks time, when The One waltzed in and changed the course of my life forever.
It was the bachelorette party of my first close friend to get married, and we were at a cabin on the beach, late afternoon, in Tacoma, Washington. She was shaky and nervous and everyone was bringing her glasses of wine until she looked close to tears with drunkenness on top of her terror. I was sipping a white wine spritzer in an attempt to quell my own nerves, ensconced as I was in a steady chatter of pedicures and wedding prep conversations, flower arrangements and “At MY wedding we. . . .” discussions amongst the pregnant bridesmaids, when the entertainment showed up. Three guys in Speedos with ukelele, guitar, and bongo drum, singing in Spanish. Contigo tenia todos y lo perdi. Their backs were to the sun and the bongo player—a tall, broad-chested guy with eyes bright as the bay behind him—noticed my squint and handed me his sunglasses in one swift movement between beats. I thought, Well, this party just got better.
He kissed me hard as the sun set over the bay. I took him home with me, and then the next day to the wedding, and all the old friends from high school looked greedily at us, and the bride said “I wish my husband would kiss me like that.”
I’d been housesitting for my parents for the summer, but they came back from their vacation sometime later that week, arriving in the middle of the night, disheveled and jet lagged as I popped out of my room, dragging The One—“Look what I found Mom!”—cause he was the type that was fun to show off, real tall with shiny dark hair and eyes that made everyone look twice, even dudes. My mom’s tired eyes missed most of that though. Her tired eyes said, “Oh Dayna, another one?” and she smiled weakly at him as he gave her his best charmer smile, all straight white teeth and love-me-I’m-a-good-person openness in the way he hugged her rather than shook her hand.
We didn’t sleep for a week. I took him through my hometown, to the farmer’s market to eat soba noodles, to the beach and the forest and the new cupcake shop, and we were stupid and happy and kissing everywhere. My world his eyes, his lips. The way we laughed. I loved the edgy quality of danger beneath his cheer and sharp intelligence. He told me of killing a mugger in Guatemala and I didn’t flinch. “If you want to have my back in a fight, you gotta come up behind him, hit him sideways in the neck . . .” he instructed me. I was Bonnie to his Clyde. The darkness of him right there, but subdued somehow, like he had a grip on the neck of some wild beast and he walked like that. His stories sounded insane, extravagant—“When I was five I’d run away from home to sleep with the homeless people in the canyon,” or “In the mountains of Colombia, when I was translating the spiritual texts of an indigenous tribe who is dying out I. . . .”
After traveling for the last four years myself, my stories, too, sounded extravagant and made up, for I was unable to tell something simple without a detail that others deemed brag worthy—“In Paris I was waiting for a table when . . .” and everyone would roll their eyes. “Oh here we go. When you were in PARIS” stars, stars, bells, etc. So I was relieved to be with someone who also had the unordinary woven into the fabric of his days, and did not need to boast about it, neither pretend that it was not there.
We walked arm in arm through the park singing “Wagon Wheel” at the top of our lungs. “If I die in Raleigh/least I will die freeeee.” He was twenty-eight and I was twenty-nine and neither of us had a cent in our bank accounts, and in the eyes of the world and sometimes ourselves we were failing miserably at being alive, but who fucking cares, we had art, we were breathing, we had love. A girl at a bar said to us after watching us dance, “I feel like punching you guys in the face.” We smiled benevolently at her but did not contradict. Yes, we are truly happy, I’m sorry you are not. We kissed so much I began to feel like I’d kissed him more minutes than I’d been alive. We danced all night barefoot to the local bluegrass band in a parking lot at sunset and then he tied a peach thread around my left finger, speaking forever with each wrapping, the sky all stars, and we were in a field. He said “I’m wrapping it cause a ring should be something you can always change, rather than a knot which is just an illusion about forever.” He kissed me long and then smiled into my eyes. “May we never stop laughing,” he said.
Then I drove him three hours north to the sailboat where he
lived, and wished him good luck and goodbye on our last night together, for he was leaving the next morning to sail around the world.
Except for then he said, “Please. Come with me.”
And I realized with great astonishment that no amount of those horrific, heart-death breakups where you realize you’ve been wrong about everything—Togetherness, full-body Certainty, Attraction, Need—no amount of those had managed to weaken in any way my complete soul-following of this illusive concept of LOVE when it crashed into my course like a wayward unicorn and beckoned me to climb on.
For no matter how many times I have fallen off the back of that unicorn, burning and bruising and breaking myself, I seemed to be incapable of refusing the wilderness of the offered ride.
“There is no remedy for love but to love more,” Thoreau said.
So that September I let my plane ticket go, apologized to the dance program in Israel, and climbed aboard a forty-nine-foot sailboat, headed an indefinite due west.
On Labor Day we set sail. It was early morning, the sun just over the horizon and hanging. Pink light on the water. Marina silent. A scarf of fog around the islands. When they pulled the sails up and the wind caught, my heart shuddered, and lifted. I thought: Finally. Free.
It was the water, and the rocking of the boat. The leaving so much behind and blending into what was quiet, and more true. I thought this is it, from now on my only job is to say yes to the heart, this is all there is, and yes I want to be more everything in the fiber of the world. May I do nothing but live the life of an artist now, I decided, and should I burn up there, then so be it, but god forbid I leave this earth doing what so many others seemed to be doing—feeling half, being half, doing should, trying wrong.