“Yuh know why you are dreaming? I will tell you. I had this woman for a patient once. A woman from the States. The minute she heard my accent, she start talking to me. She spends all her holidays and good times in my island. I don’t grudge her for that. It is her damn money. And she told me she owns this big nightclub in Brooklyn, or New York, or the Bronx. They plays jazz. So she have the money to spend. But what really had me vexed as hell was the way she talked about my prime minister. That is where I draw the line. Just imagine. A little Yankee bitch like her. She could haul her self from all up in Amer’ka where there is the biggest o’ race problems, and go down there in my peaceable country, and carry-on as if she owns the place. She is down there in kiddy-kingdom, and I am up here, me and you, Boysie, Henry … God bless his soul … the whole tribe o’ us immigrants from back home are up here, and we can’t pretend that we own a cement block in this country. That is what I mean?”
“What she did?”
“Did? Well, it is not a matter of did, Bernice. It is what she thought. And the thoughts that went along with the doing, which as far as I am concern, makes that doing even more worst than it was, if it had stop at the doing.”
“Tell me what she say, then.”
“Listen to this. This would change your mind about returning-back to that damn place, which we in times o’ distress and loneliness and discrimination up here calls home. This damn Yankee woman told me, told me, that she have this big car, the English car, man, what they call that kind o’ car that the Queen and Forbes Burnham in Guyana, and that little man from Grenada does drive ’bout in? You know that big powerful car? It is the kind o’ motto-car which is the first thing a prime minister down there does think ’bout driving-’bout in, when he start feeling he is the leader of the people.”
“Rolls-Royce? You mean a Rolls-Royce?”
“Thanks. She had one o’ them. She told me that. She now sell-out every damn thing she owned in Brooklyn, and New York, and she heading down to Barbados to live. Well, there ain’ nothing wrong with that. But hear this now. Listen to this thing now. This Rolls-Royce motto-car that she have, she intends to take to Barbados with her. And she ask me if I think, if poor-arse me, me a poor-arse black woman like me, think the prime minister would buy it offa her? Do you know how much millions o’ we dollars that motto-car would cost? A car like that fit for a Queen to drive in must cost the taxpayers o’ Barbados every penny that still remain in that country. Just to clean and polish that Rolls-Royce must cost a thousand dollars a day.”
“Barrow would have more sense than that.”
“Barrow? Who Barrow?”
“Barrow.”
“That’s what I mean? Who is this Barrow?”
“Barrow. We prime minister. Errol or Dipper, as they does call him.”
“You don’t know that I am living away so long that I didn’t even know we had one’ them, a prime minister. And by the name o’ Barrow.”
“And yet, you still had them feelings ’bout the Rolls-Royce motto-car.”
“It is not a matter o’ feelings, Bernice. It is the principle of the thing. As my ex-mistress Mistress Hunter would say … God bless her soul …”
“She dead too?”
“Not really. I just say so for so. But as she would say, we have to see things through the correct sperspective o’ principles, always. So you see that when that Yankee bitch could leave Brooklyn or New York and go down there and cattawoul with a big important person like a prime minister, I am not talking about no ordinary person like a civil servant now. I mean a prime minister. A man like Trudeau or President Nixon, or the Queen. So when she could pick up her hot arse and wander down there and eat and drink with a prime minister, and then expect we prime minister to do what she wondered to me, as what she wanted him to do, Bernice there and then I write Barbados clean-clean offa my books. Barbados then becomes in importance just like a little town in the north o’ Ontario. Barbados ain’ nothing, ain’t neffing to her!”
“Those is some harsh words, though.”
“The thruth, Bernice, the truth is always a harsh thing to speak, to hear and to listen to.”
“Still.”
“The thruth, the truth, or as we say, the trute.”
“But, wait. You know how long we been licking our mouth on this telephone? And I didn’t even tell you what I had to tell you.”
“Agaffa.”
“Yes. A-gaffa told me that she found out after all these years of asking herself who was really the person who wrote that letter to her, criticizing her concerning marrieding a black man, Henry. You remember? When the letter came? From somebody who didn’t sign her name at all? And how the poor girl was upset, just before the wedding.”
“Boysie told me ’bout it.”
“Guess who that letter came from?”
“I had always thought that Henry himself had write that letter to try to get outta marrieding Agaffa. But I wasn’t sure. From Agaffa’s ex-boyfriend?”
“The mother.”
“The mother?” Dots screamed the word through the telephone. Bernice was silent for a while.
“Her own dear mother!”
“That bitch?”
“That is a mother, sometimes. When she wants to keep tie-ing a girl-child. The lady I works for have a word for it. Imbillical cords. That imbillical cord is sometimes damn hard to cut off.”
“I was thinking today that I wish I hadn’ left the domestic scheme. No, wait and let me explain. Here I am as a nurse-aide, for years, and I still can’t make progress in the things I want to make progress in. Now, just listening to you and listening to the whole conversation we having, and especially that last sperspective you mentioned. I remember during some class at the Doctor’s when I was in training, that a doctor was saying something about this same ambillical cord. He was saying something that strike me as being funny funny funny. I wish I had the knowledge to really understand what a ambillical cord stands for, you know, the ins and outs. But it sound as if a ambillical cord is a damn serious thing. Ain’t it the thing that does join-on a child to its mother?”
“It is that.”
“And does connect life with death? Is that what it is too? I think that is what it is. Well, that ambillical thing is the same thing that is connecting my lack o’ progress in being a damn nurse-aide to my progress if I had remained a domestic and had take classes at night school. And you know why I saying this? Boysie. Boysie has move-ahead o’ me in this regards. Boysie has moved outta my life, through education. He isn’t taking no night courses at night school, but I think he is learning something, some-damn-thing, to make him change so. It isn’t the money so much that he is making. And he is making a damn lot o’ that. More than I ever expect him to make. It ain’t the money. I think it will have to be the sperspective. And the sad thing is that I am the person who first mentioned this sperspective-thing to him. But he is the first to use it. The same thing with you.”
“Me?”
“You and Lew. You is a servant. And he is a lawyer-man. I gone. I going hang-up. I gone.”
Dots was tired. She would come home from work and she would always be tired. She was working less overtime these days, but there was still this eternal fatigue in her body, all through her bones, and it limited the number of things she could do in the apartment. She thought of taking a tonic. Something like Geritol, which she had seen advertised on television when she would sit alone, with the cat curled up in her lap, waiting for the hours to pass, waiting for the television programmes to get more and more uninteresting, until eleven o’clock came when she could watch the CBC news, and during the most important part of the national news go into the bathroom to brush her teeth and to look at the black circles around her eyes, and come back outside into the living room just in time to hear “O Canada” being played, with the Queen riding a horse up in England and jet planes flying overhead, and she would always remember as they sped past her on the screen that two or three of them crashed at a Canadian National Exhibition
some years ago; and then she would take the cat up in her hand, and go into the bedroom, and close the door behind her. And there she would spend her long time of night.
The cat would jump about in the bed, playing with the strings on her pink quilted housecoat, until it felt tired and purred itself to sleep in her lap, between her legs. And Dots would turn on the late-hour radio programme from CHIN, with its West Indian music, black American music, and the West Indian announcer from Jamaica who tried unsuccessfully to talk like an American from the deep South. The songs would be of love and of lovers: of love that was not returned, and of lovers who had not looked back; and somehow, it would make her feel less lonely, probably because she was sharing an eternal arrangement with the countless women out there, some of them living in the lighted apartment windows surrounding her, on floors above hers, and floors below, to the right, to the left, in front and behind. So many people in one city, so many people so close to her, and she alone, at midnight in her apartment, with the cat and CHIN radio station.
She is ready for bed now. She gets up from lying down on top of the bedspread. Tonight the newspaper is still in the bed, folded and unread. She takes off her pink housecoat, and she is surprised that she is still wearing her nurse’s uniform. “Forgetful?” she says, and she could have been talking to someone, or to the cat, or even to Boysie. She stands in front of the mirror on the wall, and she looks at herself, only for a moment or so, and then she opens her drawer where she keeps one of the two silk scarves which she uses for tying her head before she takes any piece of clothing over her head. Sometimes she would wear one of them when she is taking a bath. Or sometimes when she is vacuuming the living room. She combs out her hair, and braids it up, and ties the scarf back on her head. She pulls a hair out of her chin with a badly working pair of tweezers.
She walks to the clothes cupboard, which is beside her side of the bed, and she opens it, and hangs up the housecoat on a nail which she has herself nailed there. She unbuttons the work dress, takes it off, takes the housecoat off the nail, throws it on the bedspread, and hangs the dress on the same nail. She dresses and undresses behind this door of the cupboard when Boysie is in the bedroom with her, and she does it even when she is alone, with only the cat lying on the bed watching her. She puts on the housecoat. But she has forgotten something, so she takes it off again. It is her slip. Then she puts the housecoat on again. If she was going to take a bath tonight, she would have walked into the bathroom with these clothes on, as she does all the time. But tonight she is too tired to take her bath.
Still standing behind the cupboard door, with her cat watching her from the slits of his eyes, she takes off her brassiere, and as if she is uncomfortable with the eyes watching her, she puts on the housecoat quickly, and closes the cupboard door, and sits on the bed. She runs her hands up and down her legs, and the pantyhose comes off in her hands, like old skin. Once (Boysie was in bed when she did this undressing; and he said, “What the arse! You know what you remind me of? A fucking priest dressing in robes! Look woman, I am your husband, so why you are hiding behind that door when you are taking off your clothes, every night?”) she spent the whole night sleeping in her housecoat and her work dress.
Tonight she merely takes off the housecoat, this time for the last time, keeps her panties on, and in her nightgown, the flannel one, gets into bed, under the covers, and continues to listen to the radio.
The lights are all burning. So she gets up and puts them out, one by one, all of them, except one which burns all night like a beacon to show Boysie the way between the furniture and the tricky centre tables, just in case he comes home drunk again. Back in the bedroom she peels the bedspread off the bed, and folds it and hangs it properly over the back of a chair. She fixes her furlike slippers side by side beside the bed on her side, she cuffs the pillows on Boysie’s side, and climbs back into bed. The radio is turned down, the lights are off in the bedroom, and she lies there thinking of Little Janey. The cat yawns and suddenly there is only the voice of a singer …
The mother of two testified yesterday that a short man with a silk sock over his head forced her at knife-point last December to have intercourse in the underground garage of her apartment building. Boysie held the afternoon paper closer to his eyes as he tried to remember a story of similar details which he had read months before. He was fully dressed, it was now one in the afternoon, and the strange woman had not come out of the subway yet. He was finding it difficult to concentrate on the story and on the subway entrance-exit at the same time. He had left his car parked in the driveway of the apartment building, the first time he had ever done that, and he was waiting. The cat was fed, and it was somewhere out of sight. He had been doing things which when taken individually would have suggested a rather disorganized mind and attitude, but when taken collectively could easily be seen as a carefully thought-out plan. But he did not worry about this. He just wanted to finish reading the story, and if possible, at the same time or during his reading, see the woman, and then leave in his car on the long drive he had thought of taking. He forgot which part he had already read; the story wasn’t making much sense to him, so he began at the beginning. The mother of two testified yesterday that a short man with a silk sock over his head forced her at knife-point to have intercourse in the underground garage of her apartment building. She identified her attacker as Caufield. The woman testified that she saw Caufield two weeks after the attack. He was entering a car at a shopping plaza near her apartment. She gave police the licence number. She told the jury that a man attacked her in the garage near the apartment. She gave the police the licence number. “Did I read that already?” She told the jury that a man attacked her in the garage after she returned from doing errands. She said he sliced her finger and threatened to kill her. She ran screaming up the stairway from the garage, she testified. Her husband said she collapsed in his arms at the apartment with blood on her hand and face. It was Friday, and he didn’t have to clean offices tonight, unless he wanted to. Sometimes, in order to have a longer weekend, he would do his cleaning on Fridays, so that he wouldn’t have to go to work until Monday night. But today, he thought he would remain at home, not all day … perhaps he shouldn’t remain at home, he should leave as he always did, and just drive around the city, and leave for his trip on Saturday. But he couldn’t do that because he had agreed to have a party tonight, just for the hell of it. He had not informed any of the clients he cleaned for that he was taking a trip, and he didn’t worry about it.
Dots had agreed to the party. It was such a long time since they had had friends in to a party; and she thought it would do him good. It would cheer him up (although she did not tell him this,) and make the weekend seem shorter and more bearable. He thought of the shopping he had to do: liquor, food from the Jewish market, candles and incense (which, strangely, Dots asked him to buy) from the Cargo Canada store; and he had to call Bernice and Estelle, Llewellyn and Freeness (he had heard that Freeness was living on Jamieson Avenue), and Agatha. Inviting Agatha was Dots’s idea; but soon he warmed to it, for with Agatha present, well, after all, she was Henry’s wife, and if Henry couldn’t be present, then … and it was the first real party they had had since Henry’s death. Boysie tried not to think of Henry, and he made an effort to concentrate on the story in the newspaper. Her husband said she collapsed in his arms at their apartment. “I read that already, didn’t I?” He was losing his concentration. blood on her hand and face. The 37-year-old woman identified her attacker as being 5 feet 5 inches tall, of stocky build, and wearing a … and having a Scottish accent, and wearing a red plaid short-sleeved shirt and jeans. She said he also wore a mask, was in his early 20’s and had well-tanned arms.
He was losing his concentration, and thereby losing his strength, and his power over his patience was slipping away from him. He used to feel so strong when he was in the bathtub with the hot bath, when he would come out, and walk naked; he felt strong then. But this afternoon he could hardly read a short story abou
t a woman who was raped, and rape was such an interesting subject with him before; he had discussed it with the Canadian young fellow who had given all the philosophical reasons why men raped women; and had reminded Boysie that during the Vietnam war, thousands of American GIs had raped millions of Vietnamese women; “It is just the way of life, philosophically speaking,” the Canadian young fellow said. “Just as the American way of life, all their violence and all their wealth and all their power have become their philosophy of life.” Boysie was intrigued. And he tried to look at his own life in a philosophical way, and try to see what interpretation, in strict terms of this philosophical way of seeing things, was his waiting for the woman, his distribution of all his money to his wife, to a woman he did not love, and did no longer like, was not this also a philosophical way of doing things? But not to be able to read a short story about a raped woman, was this too such an important weakness, if it was a weakness at all, that he could clothe it in this heavy interpretation?
From the last time when he saw her with her mauve dress exposed, he had realized that a very basic mistake had been made, and he had been searching for this mistake ever since. It could have been in the manner of his life, its style, its substance, its quality; it could have been in the way he treated Dots, and it could have been manifested (had he the eyes to see it) in all the parameters of their life together, in each smile (which was not very often) in each grimace, in each sneer and each harsh word and look; he had done very little, so he told himself now, to get to know her, but she was really like a deity, set there before him so that he would never really get to know her, just her presence and her sound and the noise she made; he was not meant to know her, and because he did not, it still grieved him and caused him to think that if he ever were to be happy another day with her, he would have to lift each brick in the structure of their relationship apart, each brick, brick by brick, from the very beginning of the foundation of mistrust, of jealousy, of inferiority on his part, and arrogance on hers, before he could ever be happy, and free. It was his happiness and his freedom, freedom like that of the black American singer who oozed freedom through voice and vapour, perspiration and smile, when he sang “A Rainy Night in Georgia.” It was his happiness … his happiness.
The Bigger Light Page 24