“Lew would know. Or Boysie, he know so much these days!”
“Watch your mouth, gal! He is still my husband. Have respect.” And she laughed. “Child, what would I do without that man? He is good and he is bad.” And she went back to give the cooking her attention.
Floes and floes of angel’s hair, ice cream castles in the air …
“What the hell are you playing? Not in my house!”
Dots came out to find Bernice still searching for more records. There were none. The Judy Collins record was the only one.
“Where the records?”
“We had records upon records in here. The last time I looked, there was lots o’ records,” Dots told her. She started to think rapidly. Something was going wrong. She was beginning to feel strange in her own home. She left Bernice and went into the bedroom. She closed the door behind her. She opened Boysie’s clothes cupboard and ran her hands along the suits, counting them, and then she parted them as one would part a window blind. She felt better. None was missing. And she sensed that her heart was beating less rapidly. But still, she went next into the bathroom, and flung back half of the mirror which served also as a door to the medicine cabinet. Everything of his was there. “What are you doing to yourself, Dots? What is happening to you?” Feathered canyons everywhere … they rain and snow on everyone, I think of clouds that way.
She came out of the bathroom and went back into the kitchen. “I had such a funny strange feeling a minute ago! Like something in the pit of my stomach …”
Bernice came into the kitchen with her, completely ignoring the music since it was not what she wanted to hear. And together they prepared the food. Then Bernice said, “I am thinking of going back home. Maybe next year. Or the year after, the latest.”
“What for, girl?”
“No reason.”
“Sometimes I feel the same way. But I know I would have to go by myself. Boysie won’t think of leaving this country. He’s so successful.”
“That’s why he should go back. And take you back with him. The two o’ you could be like king and queen down there. The place progressing, it is progressing. And with money that the two of you ’cumulated up here, man, don’t you think you could open up a little guest house? The tourisses spending money like water down in Barbados. I am going to get some before it is too late. Build me a nice home outta limestone. And I intend to open a little restaurant business and get some o’ that touriss money.”
“I can’t help thinking that we should know the number o’ provinces in this country. We been living here for so long, and what do we know ’bout this country?”
“I know who the prime minister is!”
“Who?”
“Trudeau! and he is a good-looking man too.”
“Trudeau, eh?” Dots said and went off into a kind of a dream. “Trudeau. Everybody know Trudeau because he is Trudeau and because Trudeau is Canada. But I bet you that you can’t tell me who is the prime minister o’ this province we living in?”
“Well, I really never …”
“I wonder if Agaffa coming over tonight! It would be like old-times, eh? I sorry that Estelle decided to go to the country with Mr. Burrmann, but then again, it is her child-father. And she have to prepare the way for her child.” She went into her dreamlike thinking, and then she sighed. “What I won’t have given to get that child! Poor Little Janey!”
“The osteogennississ, though, Dots.”
“Yeah, the osteogennississ.”
“That’s a hard thing.”
“Osteogennississ. How are Lew and you making out now?”
“I going back home, I tell you. There must be some man down there willing to have a old woman like me. At least that old man would want me if only for my money. Money down there would mean a different thing to him, than up here to Lew.”
“You seem as if you already left.”
“My heart has left. I am only here making a little more, and straightening up things. But my heart is already there.”
“But look at we two! You and me. Right where we started from. Man-less. You, waiting for Lew, but with your mind made up to go back home; and me, waiting for Boysie, as I wait every other night, alone. But what are we going to do? This must be the fate of women like us, you don’t think so? Me and you.” Something was in her eye, and she brushed it out with her hand. “You really feel Agaffa is coming? It would be so nice to see her again. I have to confess something to her. And beg her pardon for what I said. That is years now. But it is still riding me like a horse.”
“Oh, she won’t mind.”
“Watch this pot for me. I going in now and have a bath and change,” and she left Bernice. Bernice watched the cooking for a time, and then went to sit in the living room. Through the window she could see the entrance to the subway, and from where she sat afterwards she could see the hundreds of lights in the beautiful Friday evening. They were coming from the apartments which surrounded her like a sea. Heads moved in those which were near, and lighted shadows in those further away. She was happy. She was going back home, and her man (if only for the time being) was coming over. It would be like old times. She thought of the last time there was a party in this room, Henry’s wedding reception, and she prepared herself for the fun.
Inside the bedroom, with the door closed, and with her clothes already taken off behind the door of the clothes cupboard, Dots was sitting on the bed. She was naked. That was a thing she never did. Even when she was in the apartment by herself, she never remained naked longer than it took, for a few seconds, before and after her bath. She was sitting now, in no hurry to put on the pink quilted housecoat, in no hurry to have her bath, in no hurry to move. It was as if she was too tired from her work at the hospital and was taking a coffee break in her own bedroom.
“Bernice!”
I looked at clouds from both sides now …
“Bernice!”
The screams took Bernice from her own dreaming.
… when every fairy tale comes real … so many things I would have done but clouds got in my way.
“What’s wrong, Dots?” She was standing at the door. Dots did not realize that she was already in the room with her. Naked and still on the bed, Dots looked up at her, and smiled and said, “Let us have a good big drink. Go and mix them whilst I am in the tub.”
Coming back with the drinks, which she set down on the tiled counter beside the washbasin, Bernice sat on the edge of the tub while Dots wallowed in the scented bubble bath. And when the time came, she put her hand in the foam and rubbed Dots’s back for her. She would have rubbed her front too, but the condition of Dots’s skin, the way it had suddenly become old, and with no supporting muscles … “I used to bathe Estelle when she was a child,” Bernice was thinking.
“You wish this was Boysie doing this, don’t you?” Dots didn’t answer. “And not only this.”
“Why?”
“I sometimes lie in a bath for thirty minutes waiting for Lew to come. All the bath oil and perfume I using these days for that man! I hope he appreciates it.”
“Gal, when that man of mine does come home tonight, and when this party is finished, and I get you whores outta my home, I have made up my mind that I am going to kill Boysie tonight with the best loving he’s ever had!”
“Hurrah! Hurrah!”
“Kill him dead!”
“I could see that is what is on your mind.”
“Bernice, I intend to kill him tonight, with loving. I’ve been too stupid. A woman my age, with not much left, and I am playing hard to get? That is arse. What am I getting vexed for? Wait, did you give me water, or Scotch? Pour me a real drink, gal! By the time the other guesses come, me and you are going to be stone-drunk. Stone-cold-drunk!” She laughed out loudly. “Pissed, as the Canadians say.”
“Another drink coming up! Another drink coming up, ma’am.” And playfully, as they once would be together, Bernice went for the drinks.
“You know something, I forgot exactly how to
cook split-peas and rice. Imagine that! I can’t remember what to do exactly. But what the hell? When they come and they don’t like it, they could go to hell. Tonight is my night. My night alone!” And they broke into their sensual laughter.
Boysie was satisfied with the speed the car was making. He had taken it up to over one hundred miles an hour, and it didn’t shake. He was comfortable in it, and he was relaxed. He had stopped on the main street in the city and had bought three stereo tapes, Milestones by Miles Davis, Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and of course his old favourite, “Both Sides Now” by Judy Collins. He was playing the Miles Davis tape now. The horses in the tune were matching the horses under the bonnet of the car. He was driving, as he would say, at an easy canter. He had reduced the speed when he found out how fast the car would go. There was no hurry. There was no fire anywhere. He didn’t know of any. He did not even know where he was heading, but he knew he was going to keep driving; and when the tank showed empty, or just before, he would stop, drink a coffee, a cup of black coffee, fill up, and drive on.
At the moment, he was heading towards Hamilton, on the 401 Highway West, which was the highway that led anywhere. It led out of the city, and he was glad for that. He had put nothing other than the three tapes into the car when he left after the market, and he hadn’t even looked at a map. He knew somehow that he would find his place to stop; and when it came up against his headlights, he would know it was the place, and he would stop.
He was learning so much on this drive. All the towns he had heard mentioned on the CBC radio programmes: and here was Hamilton, the home of the Hamilton Tiger Cat football team, with the black American guy who was the quarterback. That black man, the first black quarterback to take his team to the biggest football victory in the country … and the place he is passing now, where they grow grapes and make wine; for in his poorer days he had drunk some of this Canadian-grown wine. But the place slipped by him so fast … he cannot remember its name. But at least he has experienced passing through the town or the area or the fields, cut in half by the highway, and he knows. And this place, Barrie. Had he also passed Barrie already? It is showing now on the road signs. Barrie, the place mentioned every day, imagine, every day in the weather reports on the CBC. He wished he could remember all those other names, and the way the announcer read them: “Barrie, Elliott Lake, Thunder Bay Region, cold with slight drizzle, and so on and so on …” He should have written it down. “Where the hell is this Thunder Bay Region?” and he laughed aloud in his car, because nobody could hear him and wonder if he was mad or crazy, or talking to himself. Miles Davis had brought the quartet of horses into a gallop and Boysie found himself reacting with a dance in his seat, and his foot on the gas pedal. It was so beautiful. It was such happiness just to drive, just to see how long the highway was, as if the highway was a long long stretch of cotton, “Thread, they call it in this country, old man. Thread!” coming towards his headlights, and being threaded into them, without end, like a man in a plane boring his head through clouds.
He loosened his tie, and about half of the buttons on his waistcoat. His pocket watch glimmered against the light from the dashboard. He was doing fifty miles an hour. And it was now ten o’clock at night. He wondered what he had done so long in the city, why he had taken all those wrong turns before he got onto the highway, this highway that seemed to have been waiting for him for such a long time of suspended happiness and freedom. What had he done in the city all afternoon, all those other afternoons that it had taken him such a long time to reach this point …
Floes and floes of angel’s hair, ice cream castles in the air … In the apartment, Bernice is dozing off on the couch in the living room. The glasses are set for the party. So are the plates and the napkins. The food has been cooked and the candles have burned themselves down and out. The last one explodes silently into smoke, and as if Dots is the only one to hear this gasp of life, or of death, she opens her eyes, shakes her head like someone caught sleeping in the wrong place, and she asks Bernice the time.
“Two.”
“So late?”
“Well, it looks as if nobody ain’t coming.” She gets up and takes her plate, which she had used hours ago, when she became hungry from waiting, back into the kitchen. She comes back, like a woman disoriented, and takes Dots’s plate too.
“Only me and you, girl.”
“And Lew didn’t as much as call.”
The cat is sleeping. Bernice goes to the same window through which she had looked hours before, and around in the darkness outside and still surrounding she can see very little life. All the windows except a few have gone to bed. The night becomes old now, and the light in front of the subway entrance, or exit, is no longer burning. One after another, the remaining lights in an apartment across from her go out.
“What you say the time is?”
“The time, Dots?”
“Yeah. What it is?”
“The night old, Dots. Late.”
“Yeah. It will soon be light, though.”
Precisely, as she said this, Boysie reached the United States border. The Immigration officer nods to him, and waves him on. Ahead of him is more highway, and more music and more black coffee when he stops and where he stops. He can feel the bigness of the space around him, for he knows he has left one kind of space for another one.
AUSTIN CHESTERFIELD CLARKE was born in Barbados and came to Canada in 1955 to study at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career as a broadcaster, civil rights leader, professor, and diplomat, representing Barbados as its Cultural Attaché in Washington DC. His many honours include Lifetime Achievement Awards for Writing from both the Toronto Arts Council and Chawkers–Frontier College, an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from Brock University, the 1998 Pride of Barbados Distinguished Service Award and, most recently, the Order of Canada. He is, formerly, writer-in-residence at the University of Guelph, and the 1998 inaugural winner of The Rogers Communications Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize. Author of eight novels and five collections of short fiction, Austin Clarke is widely studied in Canadian universities. He lives in Toronto.
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