by Donna Hemans
In Greenbelt, there was nothing to explore—no caves, or murky ponds, or abandoned wells—just a few children staring back at her from their own balconies and sometimes from the too-green grass between the buildings. She turned inward instead of outward, and, along with learning how to be an American—the required words and phrases and attitudes, remembering to say “on vacation” instead of “on holiday” for holiday was a specific day not a week- or month-long event—she learned how to be a girl, to like gold hoops in her ears, bangles that jangled when she moved, shoes with a bit of a heel, polka dotted tights, and boots that ended midway up her calf. She became a little more like her stepmother, finding use for the mirror, befriending the girl who stared back at her. She morphed into someone else: a girl who cared that her colors matched, who preferred dresses to pants, fashion magazines to comic books, every shade of nail polish and shiny lip gloss.
Lenworth looked at her as if she had been reborn, a newborn shedding her birthday wrinkles and mottled skin, growing each day into her own. Seeing how she became a life-sized wax doll or commemorative figurine of Plum that haunted him. Seeing how he had managed to make every woman and girl in his life seem inconsequential and small.
And then he looked away. He didn’t exactly pretend that Opal didn’t exist at all. But it was close. He did it subtly, turning down her third grade photos. In them, she had smiled instead of staring back at the camera stubbornly, defiantly refusing to smile. He removed Opal’s photos from the wall and replaced them with photos of the boys caught in the midst of a mischievous antic, surprise or amusement oozing from their faces.
Opal didn’t notice it then, not at ten or eleven years old, not until much later, after he had finished with the seminary and his training as an Episcopal priest, not until they moved to Brooklyn, not until the ladies from the altar guild came to help the new priest and his family settle in and decorate, not until one woman said, “So where are pictures of Opal? You must have some pictures of your daughter. Such a pretty smile too. And those eyes . . .”
That Opal, with skin the color of a coffee bean, didn’t resemble him was clear. That she didn’t look like Pauline was clear. To look at the family—Lenworth's milky-brown skin, heavy eyelids, and thick, bushy brows running across his forehead; Pauline and her sons, who, like her, had light brown skin; and Opal, a darker-skinned other with unusual topaz eyes and eyebrows so thick, so wide the outer edge dipped low and down toward the outer corner of her eyelid—it was hard to tell Opal physically belonged to them. And she knew it because people stared at her eyes, at her complexion, at her family’s eyes and complexion, the strangers’ awkward glances calculating and minds deciphering the ancestral line that could have made it so, and concluding without being told and without concrete evidence that one of the two adults—her father or stepmother—wasn’t genetically hers.
That he called her his daughter was all that mattered to the churchwomen. They didn’t question her true parentage. She belonged in the photos and on the wall. Which is how Opal came to realize that her own school photos had been turned away or down, and one, still in the frame, had been put away in his desk drawer. Which is how she came to believe that he no longer saw her but saw someone else staring back at him, someone he preferred not to see.
Yet, she wanted to be his. His daughter. His offspring. His family. His ballerina at the front of the stage, on her toes, lifting her arms as gracefully as a butterfly fluttering its wings, leaping like an acrobat suspended in air. But as far as Opal knew, he never came to the recitals, or if he did, he sat in the back, invisible to her on the stage, or snuck out early before the other parents excitedly mobbed the stage, throwing roses at their girls, regardless of whether they danced or simply stood shyly on the stage staring back at the audience.
She wanted to be wanted and seen.
Lenworth knew that, but he couldn’t and wouldn’t grant her wish, couldn’t face the life-size reminder of the gravity of his mistake. And he couldn’t send her away as she also wanted. Instead, he left Opal waiting to belong to him again.
2
At last, Plum had become the daughter her parents wanted her to be—responsible, settled, successful in her own way, a model her parents could even hold up to wayward cousins and neighbors’ children. She had gone on to become a specialist in blood banking, and worked now in a university lab alongside a team of researchers studying cancers of the blood. Plum had done better than her parents ever imagined and her success had earned her a belated gift: a family trip at her parents’ expense to Disney World.
The congress of six—Plum’s parents, Nia and Vivian, Plum and Alan—sat now in the resort’s lounge area, three of the four adults cooling coffee, Plum sipping tea and the six-year-old girls, who were too anxious to eat or drink, bouncing from chair to chair. Plum and the girls wore Minnie Mouse ears, and the girls had matching tutus. To see Plum then, relaxed, teasing her daughters, it was hard to imagine that she had fought vociferously against the trip, against her parents’ gift, against the premise of princesses and unrelenting beauty and magic and fairy dust that turned evil into good. Underneath it all, Plum was against pushing on the girls the idea of a happily ever after and setting them up for the ultimate heartbreak.
Plum would have preferred a Caribbean vacation, a week on either her island or Alan’s—Barbados—or even another place altogether that was wholly new to them. She would have preferred a few days on a rustic family farm, a hike up a riverside to the place where the water emerged from the ground. Ultimately, Plum wanted her girls to learn early on that life sometimes disappointed. And she wanted the girls to have the tools to deal with their disappointments, whether the loss of a playground game or an early love or failure to achieve a dream.
But now Plum smiled and pretended that she hadn’t objected at all, pretended that the magic of Alice’s Wonderland or Cinderella’s Castle was true to their lives. To soften it, they planned the trip around a fiftieth anniversary celebration in nearby Kissimmee for Alan’s grandparents.
In truth what Plum’s objection hid was the stark reality that her life revolved around three distinct buckets: the twin girls, Alan, and her work. She had come back from her last trip to Jamaica, the disappointment of Anchovy, with a keen focus on mattering, on not being a person so easily discarded and left behind. Plum hadn’t let up at all. She became the perfect wife, mother, daughter, and employee, anticipating everyone’s needs and meeting them, and setting aside her own.
Outside the peach walls, the heat was like a thermal blanket they couldn’t remove. Plum scrunched her face against the sun and sought a bit of shade. But the girls would have none of it. They ran to the car, spreading their enthusiasm like pixie dust on the adults, an enthusiasm that didn’t let up throughout the entire afternoon in the park.
Later, when the girls were sufficiently tired and morphing into alternate versions of themselves, fiends really, Alan and Plum slipped out of the rented townhouse for the anniversary party in a beachfront mansion.
“I have a surprise,” he said.
“I’m too tired for surprises.” Plum flipped the passenger mirror and looked at the made-up alternate version of herself.
“You’ll love this one.”
“What is it?”
“I got us a hotel room. It will be just you and me without the girls.”
“No, no, no, no, no. No. Cancel it.”
“You need it. We need it.”
“Cancel it,” she said again.
“One night, Plum. You think the girls can’t live without you for one night? You think your parents will run off with them?”
One, two. One, two. Plum concentrated on breathing, stemming the panic rising in her. “You’ll never understand.”
“They’re not babies anymore. You have to let them grow.”
Words mixed up and tumbled around her mind. Plum was quiet for much too long, picturing the sleeping girls in one room and her parents in another, also asleep. The moment lengthened and Plum missed yet
another opportunity to tell Alan about how she lost the other baby and why even now after six years she hadn’t left the girls alone for even a single night.
“The girls will be all right.” Alan stopped the car, and held her chin. “You decide. We’re going in or going back to the house?”
“Let’s go in. We’ve come this far.”
Plum’s legs trembled, and outside the car, she reached for Alan’s arm to steady her gait. The din of laughter and voices carried through the beachfront mansion. In one corner was a caricature artist, and in another was a jazz pianist whose music rose and fell like waves in the background, a splash of sound and a shush repeating. The long room dripped with red and gold highlights.
Plum stood on an upper landing, looking down on the vibrant party, at the beaded cocktail dresses shimmering under the light, organza and silk fluttering without a breeze, and at the costumed mime artists serving hors d’oeuvres and teasing the guests. Everywhere there was something red: neck ties, roses, napkins, drapes. The party was perfect, more extravagant than she would have imagined.
Alan came up beside her, resting his arms on the banister and leaning forward. “Imagine us,” he whispered.
Plum smiled. “When I think of myself, the picture in my head is me at twenty. So I can’t even picture myself that old.”
“I know.” He paused. “Let’s dance.”
Plum caught his hand and moved down the stairs, slowly, cautiously, allowing her body to move to the beat. She hadn’t danced in public in years, not since her wedding nearly eight years earlier.
“Relax,” Alan whispered in her ear. “The girls are all right.”
“I should call,” she said.
“No. They’re all right. After today, they’re fast asleep.”
“Yes,” Plum said. Silently she repeated his words, “The girls are all right. Nia and Vivian are all right.” She closed her eyes and willed it to be true and to remain true. She imagined them in the morning running back to her, throwing their arms and legs around her, branding her as theirs and she doing the same. There was a way to truly live without her. Plum simply had to embrace what she had, Alan and Nia and Vivian, and believe that the way her life had turned out was exactly the way it was meant to be. It would have to be sufficient.
3
Pauline approached arguments like a construction toy set, returning to attach new pieces to the foundation, building up and out with a single goal in mind, which meant that Pauline and Lenworth were arguing about Opal again. Pauline had returned to the idea of the boarding school, this time holding up two recent immigrant girls from their church, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, as an example. One of the girls had just been accepted to an Ivy League university. Lenworth picked the new pieces off, one by one, shutting down her arguments, sometimes with reason, sometimes with silence.
“Ivy League. And they just got here. But that’s what I mean about discipline.”
Lenworth chose silence this time. He sat at the head of the dining table like a king at court. Around him, the rest of the family moved. Pauline brought hot serving dishes. Opal brought the plates, and the boys set out the cutlery and glasses.
With everything in place, the family sat like monks at a retreat, platters and bowls moving around the table in an unchoreographed but practiced dance that ended always with Pauline standing with the bowl of untouched vegetables, walking to each member of the family and distributing the salad or steamed vegetables among the plates. As always the boys traded the vegetables they tolerated for the ones they simply wouldn’t swallow. Pauline hovered then with a spoonful of blood red beets, the juice dripping onto the rice on Opal’s plate, staining it. The boys held their hands above their plates, protesting uselessly. Pauline, undeterred, scooped the slices onto Lenworth’s plate and moved round the table robotically.
Nobody traded the beets.
And then the full silence descended, not so much a comfortable one, just familiar to each of them. Lenworth and Pauline’s argument hung among them, incomplete, and the children sat waiting for the next piece of it to fall into place.
Lenworth sat with his eyes closed as he chewed, concentrating on chewing or just blocking his family out. Pauline, who insisted on this daily routine of eating together as a unit, looked up occasionally to correct a bad habit, to glare at whomever slurped loudly. The boys, warned over and over about misbehaving at the table, simply sat in near-total silence for the duration of the meal. Opal chewed, waiting for the moment when she could push her chair back, wash the dishes, and retreat to her room.
Much later, the five left for a bowling alley, the family, together, but barely so. They were like three distinct groups, three points of a triangle connected by a thin thread: on one side was Opal; on another, the boys played with toy cars; and on the third, Pauline and Lenworth stood near each other but definitely apart.
In the lobby, he was simply a father in blue jeans and a button-down shirt on an outing with his children and wife. Opal picked at her fingers, scraping peeling polish from her fingernails. In another corner, a woman looked at them, hand over her mouth to hide her whispering to her partner. Then “You from Trelawny?” a hesitant question from the stranger, her face scrunched up and head tilted. “No.” Lenworth spoke quickly. “You must be mistaking me for someone else.”
“You look just like someone I went to school with. Same complexion and all.”
“Wrong coast. I’m from the south coast. I must have a twin out there.” He laughed, a bubbly uncomfortable laugh.
“I must know you from somewhere else then. But, man, I look at you and all I could think of was my classmate. Can’t remember his name. But I can picture him even now. Couldn’t figure out what happened to him. He sat right beside me in class. Middle of the school year and he just never came back. Desk sat there in the middle of the classroom empty for the rest of the year. We imagined all sorts of things about what happened to him.”
“Maybe he just moved away.”
“Maybe. But, man, you surely have someone out there who look just like you.”
The woman stepped back. Across the room, the woman looked on, shaking her head, muttering to her partner presumably about the similarities between the person she remembered and the stranger nearby. Lenworth stepped back in place, back to the triangle, shifting slightly to make an aisle for other patrons to pass through.
He could have said yes, though technically he wasn’t from Trelawny. He had lived in the parish for a little while, and he could simply have said so. But he saw Pauline looking on, the question in her eyes. And he saw his future, he and Pauline continuing to live like strangers, one suspicious of the other, and he, cautious, living with the fear of recognition and the life he had built tumbling down around him like a house of sticks.
PART 4
Tea by the Sea
1
Brooklyn, East Thirty-Third Street. The air was a little bit cooler and smelled of rain. Plum polished windows, both the inner and outer sides of the glass, with a crumpled newspaper and a mixture of vinegar, lime, and water. She whistled, thinking at the same time of the uselessness of her chore: polishing the exterior windows when rain had set up to fall. But she didn’t stop, simply moved her arms like a wound up doll powerless to stop itself. Behind Plum were her girls—Nia and Vivian, seven-year-old twins—one doing cartwheels, the other watching, both girls lingering really and waiting for Plum to finish and turn to them. They were clingy girls. Or perhaps it was the other way: Plum was an overprotective mother, preferring to have her girls with her, underfoot, within reach. Except for work, she didn’t leave them. All these years, she hadn’t been able to shake the fear that her girls wouldn’t be there when she returned.
But they were there—Nia, the acrobatic one, contorting her body through the air, and Vivian, a quiet observer with a book on her lap, stealing glances at Nia. Nia took risks. Vivian weighed consequences. Together, the girls balanced each other, and often, when Plum imagined them older, teenagers, she saw Nia trea
ting life like a tightrope and Vivian holding the net beneath her sister.
Even if Alan had been home at that very moment, the girls would still have been nearby waiting for her to finish and turn to them.
Nia stumbled and crashed and Plum turned to see her sprawled on the hardwood between the coffee table and the couch, water from a cup pooling, magazines from the rack scattered on the ground like shattered glass and the storage bench flipped over on its side.
“You all right? Where did you hit? Did you hit your head?”
Nia, giggling instead of talking, looked at her sister and the pool of water spreading fast toward the rug. Vivian laughed too, their laughter loud, uncontrollable. Plum moved her daughter’s shoulders and arms, watching for a wince, waiting for a shiver of pain, but again got only uncontrollable giggles.
“Enough of the cartwheels.”
“She was trying to flip onto the bench and back down,” Vivian said.
“Enough.” Plum hadn’t heard their discussion at all, hadn’t heard the usual, “watch me.”
Plum shook her head, moved toward the spreading pool, newspaper in hand and layered it on top of the water sheet by sheet.
And drew her breath. It was a hiccup, really. She looked again, closer this time, back bent, water dripping from one half of the newsprint. She ripped the sheet in half, dropped the wet half to the floor, then moved toward the window, sheet in hand, for a closer look in the natural light.
Unmistakable.
Lenworth.
She hadn’t forgotten the face, the half-smile, the thick brows, the thin nose. Below the photo, a caption with his name and his title: Priest.
Unmistakably him.
Outside, the rain that had set up came with force, pummeling the plants that had withstood summer, and flooding the gutters and the nearly empty roads. The wind whipped the rain around, sprinkling raindrops against the windows like pebbles on glass. East Thirty-Third Street was otherwise quiet, with everyone, it seemed, hunkered down, waiting out the mid-afternoon downpour in place.