Trinidad Noir

by Lisa Allen-Agostini

  “The man dead and leave me here to mind you.” May continues unearthing her hoard. “Why you think Parker won’t marry me? Who want a woman with another man child?” Parker. Parker, who has a habit of looking at my friends. Measuring them with his eyes and saying they are growing up nicely. He used to ask me to call him Daddy. I think back to the first time . . .

  I am in my mother’s room. He turns the handle on the door, then leans back against the wall, perusing me from head to toe. I’m caught between him and my reflection, and he watches me lasciviously from both sides. I do not yet have hair between my legs. I am still a girl, uncomfortable in my flesh. Water dripping onto the floor; Parker is blocking my path to the cupboard. His mustache twitches as he funnels his fingers through his hair, his slanted eyes smug beneath bushy eyebrows. I scream out for May, who is putting on her makeup. “You should stop leaving your towel in this room,” she says without turning. Minutes pass. I am crying as I stand between them, one seated by the dresser, one standing by the cupboard smiling casually.

  Half-Chinese, half-black, a drizzle of Indian. More than a drizzle of pervert and five years younger than my mother. It is the playful giggle he lets escape that irritates her. My mother steupses loudly, her half-Trinidadian, half-Chinese accent crashing together. “Why you always trying to make me jealous, boy?” She shakes her head and turns to me. “As if you are anything compared to me. Next time, bring a damn towel with you. You know the man have keys. He could come at anytime and you wouldn’t know.” My stomach turns.

  She turns to him. “Parker, is this little girl you watching? Don’t let her get to you.” And just like that he slips outside. No spectacle.

  He just oh-so-slowly disappears behind the door, saying, “You getting big fast.” Making a subtle sucking noise, “Aye, Marie?”

  May’s mention of Parker is purposeful. She sucks the curve of her teeth. It is Friday, her night for cooking and washing his clothes. Parker will leave his mother’s house in Debe seeking the services of our home in Palmiste. He craves a house away from the main road, away from the greasy air of the doubles stands. Away from the restlessness. He will come bearing baskets of laundry, then perch proudly like an overstuffed pigeon at our dining table. As if by magic, bowls of Chinese noodles, lemon chicken, and fish in black bean sauce will appear. When the pigeon is full to tipping, May will usher him to her room.

  When they have gone, I will sneak into the kitchen with my plastic containers and metal spoons. I will hide the food I have stolen and then leave the house to eat with my neighbors. Swapping the roofs of these friends each evening, I leave no chance for them to tire of me too quickly. They shake their heads and gossip about strange Chinese people, pitying me my shop Chinee mother who, they whisper, keeps both money and man in her underwear.

  Until the next Friday, dishes will sit in the sink, recline on countertops, and stink behind cupboards. Mounds of pots filled with water, week-old food floating in its sour. The air is stained with a stench of unclean habits.

  “This blasted waste-a-time child I have! No cooperation. None, none!” I am evading her eye, watching movement behind her. A solitary cockroach slips behind the door. I think of all the roaches and mice I have seen in this room, this room that smells like the kitchen sink. I should be happy we are selling this house. But a tiny insect burrows deeper into my heart, ripping away at flesh and chewing through soil. It scurries through my veins, leaving dust inside my blood. Flattening itself at the corners of my mouth, turning the red in my lips to purple.

  I do not tell her I am pregnant. The scandal would crumble her standing at church, my eighteen years proving me a middle-class slut. Four months and a flat stomach. Thank God. I want badly for it to be my boyfriend’s child. He is my first lover. The uncertainty is worrying.

  Getting pregnant was rough. One day I was his girlfriend, the next a knocked-up bitch. After years of waiting to have sex, he was disappointed this could have happened on the first try. He was even more disappointed I didn’t bleed.

  My boyfriend sees our new burden as something I have caused. Yet he is willing to afford me the comforts of air-conditioning and sterilized instruments. He says that I will escape the back-room experience and the refusal at the public hospitals. And that I owe him for this proof that he really does love me. “You won’t have to go San Fernando General,” he declares, “or alone to St. Clair Medical or Westshore.” He says that terminations are on Thursdays only. Awed at his own generosity, he watches me and smiles.

  I dream of a baby with the face of my mother. I want to kill the unwanted. Using a metal hook, the large type they use for kingfish, I pierce my belly, round like a balloon and slippery like jelly. Slipping through easily like a pin into Jell-O, I wiggle the hook around to snag her. She slips away from me, digging her elbows into the inside of my skin. She is fully grown and heavy. Laughing, she sings, I am here inside you. And I will always be your mother. When I awake screaming, soaking in sweat, my boyfriend cuddles me to his chest. He cuddles me until he finds out that I am weak. That I was scared and canceled our Thursday appointment.

  “And you call yourself an independent woman! A liberal woman! Suddenly you playing virtuous and want to go fuck up our life?” My sky is falling, and he insists that his will fall harder. I wish I could rip him from within me. But I have begun to love the hardening jelly, the eyeless, legless, squirming thing. Finally my boyfriend leaves. He does not know I have already said goodbye.

  “You think I stupid ah what?” May asks suspiciously, as I survey the mess around us. “I know you want these things. But is mine.”

  I think about Ma Sheila, my father’s grandmother, whom May cared for when she went senile. Fed her daily and washed her face, all the while moving out her antique dressers and heirlooms. Our house became storage for stolen objects of love which May will not let his family have, not even her own sister Carol, whose children came all the way from Rio Claro to board with Aunty May to go to school. Paying one day late, Carol found her children with their empty lunch kits standing in the hot sun outside our house.

  People say my mother went crazy after her husband died, but Aunt Carol says she showed signs before that. When she was in her teens, she ran after her mother with a knife. When I was born, she started talking to herself. May has no friends. No family left. But Carol lingers. She says she does it for me.

  I have abandoned our cleaning. Sidling toward my bedroom, I slip inside and lock the door. The erratic pulsing begins, beating against my temples with water forming and slipping beneath my chin. My eyes get dry, then misty. Heat like anger, like passion on the verge of unmanageable, rises within. But outwardly there is only a slight twitching of the lips and a dimming of the eyes. A fleeting image of what grows inside me leaves slime in its squirming, with feelers for eyes . . .

  “Maria, what the hell you doing in there?” May screams.

  A poster with Keep Out crayoned against intruders grazes her face. I know she’s pissed, cheek pressed against the wood. I can lock her out, hide the tins of corned beef I have stolen from her bedroom, and clean my room till it looks like someplace else.

  “Maria! What the ass you doing, you stupid little bitch?”

  I ignore her. Scribbling lines on photographs I keep hidden under my bed, I leave the father, the two smirking children eating tamarind and standing aside. I blot out the pregnant woman, gouging her face with crayon and marker, darkening the belly where I once was.

  “I was happy before you came,” I hear. “I should have gotten rid of you. But I was the one who wanted you. A girl. A girl!”

  I picture her tears that do not slip from their pockets.

  “He told me he didn’t want any children. He probably didn’t want you so he could go fuck Alyssa! Get some other woman pregnant.”

  Alyssa was once my mother’s best friend. Alyssa would not have wanted to fuck anyone. She joined the convent when she and May stopped speaking. A slap in the face to my mother. To walk with the Virgin and turn her back on t
he Pentecostal faith—

  “I want to go back! To undo you. You remember him after you were born, but I remember what he was before that! Too late! You hear me? He loved you too late!” Mother is still trying to convince me. But once is enough to convince. Anything more is for her personal pleasure.

  I remember how I used to love her, dragging behind her, clutching at her dress. When I was a little girl, she used to try to want me. Now she thinks that I am possessed. That my rudeness and unwillingness to do as she says is a mark of the devil. You were born this way, just like your father, and no matter how much I try to beat it out of you, you remain the same. I feel the stinging from week-old beatings, and I smell his burning pictures from last month when she purged the house of the devil.

  I keep scribbling. The lines move to my arms and my thighs. I use permanent marker now, not the cheap ones I used as a child. I zigzag onto my skin, pressing hard so the pain numbs my thinking. She will try to embrace me in the morning, try to rub my skin clean of yesterday’s pain. I dig another line into the door with metal scissors and color it purple. She will ask me to say, I love you. I promise myself that these lines will prevent me. After years of forcing myself to forget, I vow to remember.

  Nothing eases me. He will still be dead. And he will still no longer want me.

  I first asked Aunt Carol what abortion meant. Four years old and I was asking the whole family. I hadn’t yet learned about secrecy. That some things paraded openly through the doors of people’s homes, and that others were meant to hide behind them . . .

  I wear black eyeliner now, thick and smudged. Don’t cry, bitch, I tell myself. I have entered a new phase of training. To bury my mother. I thumb my belly and poke at my navel. There is a small bulge now. The pounding on the door is replaced by a buzzing behind my eyes. I add to the list I have started on my wall in pencil:

  1) She grew up in the country and thought her husband was Prince Charming, frolicking his horse into the affluent suburb of Palmiste. He would place her in a pretty house and pay her to raise babies.

  2) Born into a family of nine, she was neglected by her parents, who preferred their younger English-speaking Chinese children who did not remind them that, with their slanted eyes and jarring accents, they would never fit in—“May, yuh want ah rice and ah char sue pok to tek friend in school?”

  3) Prince Charming was never home, always escaping, then he died—escaping blame.

  My pencil point snaps. So what, May? Your man died and mine ran. You remember my boyfriend. You sat on his lap asking why he was with a girl like me. Giving him the eye, dressed in your bra and shorts. The one who loved me till he met you—the famous crazy May. Like you say, all men are assholes that leave us fat and bitter. They eventually realize our biggest fear—they leave us to ourselves.

  “When I sell this house, if I have my way, you will get absolutely nothing,” May taunts on the other side of the door. Her voice simmers again and she makes a clicking noise through pursed lips. “Parker wants to move in with me,” she says dreamily, “but I have to watch him, you know. He might be after my money. Once I sell this house—is plenty money it selling for.” May’s distrust for Parker cowers next to the seething of my own. My distaste for him resembles disgust between lovers, bubbling beneath the skin, heating the blood and sharpening the eye. It resembles in its intensity and its inability to resolve. It is not love but its opposite.

  After my father died, university funds and insurance were transferred into her accounts. May enrolled me in the government school-feeding program. At night, hungry, I went to neighbors, palms outstretched, learning how to beg. All those years fed by neighbors, scantily clad and denied shelter, locked out at two in the morning, barefoot, in nightclothes, watching the wealth my father left me buy her fancy dresses, cars, jewelry . . .

  I want to forgive her. But to forgive, you must first love.

  I dreamt last night that there were earthworms in my belly. They shuddered and rumbled beneath my skin. Their bodies caressed, gnawing in darkness like creaking doors and loosening hinges. All the while they ate of themselves. I am making a plan to move quickly, to move before they travel the length of my throat and slide through my mouth.

  I think of Ma, May’s mother, who lives in Mayaro selling her preserves—red mango, salt prunes, and cherries—from her seaside shed. She does not interact with outsiders, especially since Pa died, except for one neighbor who taught her local folklore. Douens haunt her dreams—those unbaptized souls of dead children, their heels on feet that face backwards, racing toward unsuspecting children, enticing them away.

  Ma also invents her own folklore about the dead and the living. Dark nights with a full-bellied moon and barefoot walks on fish-stained sand have given her insight. When unwanted souls are born, they are born into suffering. Ma says they know their own anguish before their real misery begins. In the belly they writhe with resentment, and in the cradle they ponder vengeance. An unwanted soul will grow to destroy the hand that feeds it. She once told my mother to send me away. Three of her own children had been raised by a cousin. She warned May about my unwillingness to stop crying when my father died. She warned her about my seeming insensitivity to beatings and my stubborn resolve to grow distant.

  May once nurtured my physical likeness to her, but it became clear that I had been born with his eyes and his manner. My only likeness to her was in my growing inability to be consoled. When he died I screamed for months. Now I scratch photos, dig lines into doors, and devise a plan—a plan to purge this house of the devil.

  At the back of the house is an unfinished addition. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of concrete and wood, and an upstairs landing with no enclosing walls. May likes to climb those stairs to talk to God at night. She senses my father walking behind her, scurrying like a mouse in a box. No matter how much he hurries, he does not leave the house. I think he does it for me. May does not believe she has seen her husband. She says the devil wears many faces.

  “Honey, you know I love you, baby,” May coaxes from the hall, spit moistening the crease of her lips. “Come and help Mommy, nah? If you help me I will give you something special.” When bartering, she switches with ease from scorn to affection. “Mariiiiaaa,” she coos through the cracks in the door, “you know you need to help me or you may end up with nothing, sweetie. Come on now.”

  I exhale loudly and continue to scribble, continue to relish the sound of my markings.

  “Maria, you fucking little ingrate! Yuh better get yuh ass out here now before I break down this door. Parker coming this evening and I have to get this place cleared up.”

  It is Friday, the night before we are to surrender the house. Tomorrow morning the pudgy Indian man will arrive with his piece of paper, although unsorted boxes still line the doorway. The moment he saw the house, he said, “I’ll take it.” Crammed at the end of a flowing row of tall-stemmed houses, the oldest one, though that could be altered, it is nevertheless positioned in prestigious Palmiste.

  Doesn’t he live in Port-of-Spain? Your man will mind you. And you have man? May had snorted. Why you don’t ask his parents if they will let you live there? I know where she will live. She has already purchased a three-bedroom house by the sea in Westmoorings . . .

  I am digging in her cupboard while she is at her choir meeting. I pass my hands melancholically along the doors’ wooden panels, grieving the house . . . Gruesome were its stories, lonely were its nights . . . I imagine toppling Parker from atop the San Fernando Hill, watching him tumbling, tumbling into the city, where he becomes a barely visible dot crashing soundlessly amongst the buildings, disappearing forever.

  Parker likes to roost on the unfinished upstairs landing, his face to the moon, his back to the stairs. When overstuffed, when sitting with his legs dangling over the edge, I will approach him. While he gazes at the sky, I will show him what it feels like—what it looks like when the sky is falling. He speaks to God here too, while she prepares the room.

  I need to b
uild the courage. Enough force to push him over and enough liquor to ease my fear. If he does not die, he will break his legs. Creaking doors will be replaced by creaking bones. He will only have a glimpse before he falls—the colors of her dress and the scent of her perfume.

  These things I have already stolen. They sit beside the tins of tuna in my bedroom closet. She will probably blame the spirits. Insist it was the man on the stairs with the face of the devil.

  My palms sweat as I begin to doubt myself. He will be arriving soon. And I will be waiting in the darkness like the many times he has waited for me. I picture him falling like a stone to the earth, the worms chewing through his ears and wriggling in his pockets.

  I continue digging through her cupboard and its mess, throwing aside plastic bags and toilet paper rolls. May throws away nothing. Saving for a rainy day, that’s all. I am looking for the Coca-Cola among the groceries May hides in her bedroom. She developed this habit when I was five years old. If I did not do as she said or as well as she expected, I was left without food and given tap water to drink. Sometimes she sold me her wares at half-price—a tin of sausages for two dollars, a pack of maxi-pads for four.

  I find a letter to God on her dresser. She writes messages to Him on pieces of paper and drops them into the collection pan circling the pews. While others drop money to purchase a spot in heaven, May tries for free advice. Perusing this letter, I nearly choke on the crumbs at the back of my throat. It is not a letter to God but a letter to Carol, begging her for advice. My mother knows.

  She tells Carol I am pregnant, that Parker found my secret writings on pieces of paper inside the box below my bed. She says that I have always been a whore, I have always been unworthy, always been beyond the assistance she has offered me. That Parker spoke to my boyfriend about my scribbled confessions. That my boyfriend left because I had been with someone else. I realize now that May has taken Parker to see the pastor, to cleanse his unapologetic soul of what he has confessed. But May does not write this in her letter. Parker will blame it on the liquor. I will be blamed for leaving doors open.