Sic Transit Wagon

by Barbara Jenkins

  In my new life I was on the other side of the shop counter with a new family. The six children ranged in age from fifteen to nine. I moved in with a cardboard box and a folding canvas camp-bed which the boys set up in the girls’ room, between Suelin’s bed and Meilin’s and Kanlin’s double-decker. One of the boys hammered two new nails behind the bedroom door where my clothes would hang alongside the girls’: a Sunday dress, two outgrown school overalls as day clothes and another for the night. That first night, I closed my eyes and saw pictures running behind my eyelids. I saw my cousins at my grandmother’s climbing trees, picking and eating chenette, mango, pommerac, playing in the rain and the river. Without me. I saw Miriam, chief rival as my grandmother’s favourite, brushing Granny’s long silver hair until she fell asleep at siesta-time. Perhaps, with me not there, Uncle Francois was choosing Jeannie to help him pack the panniers of gladioli and dahlias to take to the flower shop. I felt red heat rise and fill my head at my mother for cheating me of what was mine by right. Then I remembered her face when she was leaving me. I wondered why she wouldn’t look at me. Did she feel bad about leaving me where I didn’t want to be? I felt a tugging tightness in my throat about being glad for spoiling her best dress. I had looked at her downcast face and promised I would be a good girl and not give Auntie Marie any trouble.

  Life in my new home seemed one of plenty – the whole grocery to choose from, a shower with a door and latch, toothpaste not salt, their own latrine. I felt lucky. All these luxuries were mine too. On dry days, Meilin and I scrubbed clothes in a tub and spread soapy garments on a bed of rocks in the backyard to bleach in the sunshine. Next day, two of the boys rinsed and wrung out the clothes, draping them over hibiscus and sweet lime bushes to dry. Between us we swept and mopped the floors of the two bedrooms and the common living and dining space at the back of the shop where Auntie slept at night in a hammock of bleached flourbags. After closing the shop at night, Auntie cooked dinner, my first experience of strange food: grainy rice or noodles infused with the salt and fat of chunks of Chinese sausage, patchoi, cabbage, carrots fragrant with thin slices of ginger steamed in a bamboo basket above the simmering pot, meat slivers flashed in a wok. Auntie spoke Cantonese to her children; they answered in English. I listened to tone, looked from face to face, followed the thread and joined in.

  The bigger children helped in the shop; I wasn’t expected to, but I often sat on a bench, watching and listening and learning. I could fold brown paper so that the edges were straight and, inserting a long, sharp knife, cut to size for half-pound, quarter-pound, two-ounce dry goods and farthing salt, but two tricks of the trade defeated me. The first was twisting a sheet of paper up at two sides around dry goods to make a firm, leak-proof package and flipping the whole over to close the top in a fold. The second was unpicking the ends of the stitching across the top of a crocus bag so that, when you held the two loose ends of string and pulled, the top of the bag fell open to expose sugar or rice, like Moses unzipping the Red Sea to reveal the dry land below, leaving you with a long zigzag piece of twine, perfect for flying kites.

  I had long idle spells when I would read – anything, everything. On the narrow shelves along the shop’s back wall were goods we seldom had at home. I would pick up these luxuries, hold them, read the labels: Carnation evaporated milk, Libby’s corned beef, blue and gold tins of fresh butter, Andrex toilet paper, Moddess sanitary napkins. My hands caressed things from England, Australia, New Zealand, USA and I felt a current connecting me with those places. The boys had comic books that they hid under their beds. I would borrow a comic and steal away to read it quickly and borrow another. Comics pulled me immediately into their unambiguous graphic world where I had the power to do anything. I could save the world from alien invasion, rescue beleaguered innocents from danger, fight forces bent on destroying civilisation. With just Kryptonite, a Batmobile, a two-way wrist radio, Hi-Ho Silver, I leapt over skyscrapers with a single bound, stopped speeding trains with bare hands, deflected bullets to ricochet onto the bad guys, big things, real things. When I stopped reading, I looked at my world, hoping to find some disaster I could avert, but I saw no Martians, missiles or maverick trains, so I opened another comic, and another. I lived in so many other worlds that, for much of the time, I moved through my real world as if it was just something else I was reading and had got lost in. Each new thing I read added to my world, making my own life something I had to let happen, like a story whose pages I was turning, not something I could shape myself.

  For the people I lived with, reading brought them the world they had physically left but had carried with them in everything they thought and did. The Chinese community had an informal circulating library of magazine-type papers from China, “Free” China. Auntie and Suelin would read the Chinese script from the back page bottom right corner and work their way up the columns to the front page. From the synopsis in English, I learnt about Sun-Yat-Sen, saw pictures of Chiang-Kai-Shek with the glamorous cheongsam-clad Madam Chiang-Kai-Shek, and read about Mao-Tse-Tung. The first two were revered, the last hated – he and the Communists had driven them out of China, stealing all they had and then seizing their family. I wondered whether the Communists had captured my mother, forcing her to give us away and if this was so, how did she know that the people she left me with could be trusted not to give me to the Communists in exchange for their own captured family? I didn’t think they would do this because they were taking care of me, just as if I was one of the children of their family. But then, maybe they were fattening me up like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, because sometimes they had big gatherings and feasts.

  When fellow shopkeepers, laundry owners and restaurant proprietors came to visit on Sunday, the white-shirted men and their jade-bedecked wives would sit round a table quickly assembled from an old door and packing cases, covered with a white sheet. Competing chatter in passionate, high-pitched Cantonese – sounds like frantic trapped birds crashing into glass panes – would rise to a clamour, and just when I thought a fight would start, there would be explosions of laughter, the brandishing of magazines, and the pointing at one another with raised chopsticks, still pinching slick black mushrooms and floppy white wantons. There was a constant flow of china bowls and platters bearing translucent rice noodles and bright green chopped chives floating in clear broth, shrimp and pork fried rice, meat, soybean curd, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, glistening roasted duck, rice wine poured from a ceramic bottle into matching thimble cups, sweet and sour prunes hidden in layers of paper, preserved ginger. I had never been to a restaurant, had never imagined such plenty of food and noise. I had never before seen this close-knittedness, this exclusiveness of clan bonding. I stayed on the edge, watching. I felt I was both in and at a movie.

  On a normal weekday I found other entertainment, watching bar customers. Men came in from mid-morning, ordered shots of rum and single cigarettes, sat on long benches at the wooden table to drink, smoke, play cards for small stakes, talk, argue. On payday they would buy nips and flasks, pour on the dusty concrete floor an offering to those gone before, and lime as long as they could until their women sent children to rescue the residue of the family funds before it was all smoked, drunk and gambled away. We in-house children served the orders, cleared up glasses and ran our own riotous card games in a corner with burnt matches as our stakes.

  But best of all was the radio in the bar, a novelty for me. It was kept permanently tuned to WVDI, beamed from the American base at Chaguaramas. The call signal, “This is station WVDI, the armed forces radio station in Trinidad”, was said in that cool, confident, leisurely, Yankee drawl that conjured up other lives entitled to Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum, soda fountains, high school sweaters emblazoned with huge single letters, driving on the right side of the road in a convertible, hair blowing in the wind. That year, Perez Prado and his Cuban Orchestra dominated the airwaves with his number one hit, “It’s Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”. Twenty times a day or more, a trumpet wailed the
opening bars, that long sustained waaaaaaah, a puppet string of sound, pulling me to my feet, making me forget who, what, where, lifting me into that upswelling blare. I was Scarlett O’Hara, smooth thick black hair curling round shoulders, long slender fingers curved into back of the neck of someone like Rhett Butler, his smouldering eyes scorching mine; my True Romance magazine figure was draped in a V-necked cowl with a flared skirt which swirled and lifted as we two, entranced, mamboed across the dance floor lost to the admiration and applause of all.

  When the song was over, Meilin and I, panting with exertion, would collapse on a bench and she would tell me about her school. She had been in high school since last year, when a neighbour brought the newspaper to Auntie Marie to show her that Meilin’s name was there, that she had passed the Exhibition exam. Auntie Marie couldn’t read English, and she called Meilin to read her own name, to make sure. I wondered if my name would be on the list when the results came out. I wondered how I would know, how my mother would know, as we didn’t buy papers. As we talked about Meilin’s school, I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of it – Bishop’s. Their uniform had a funny hat with pointy corners that made them look like the soldiers in history books about Napoleon. St Joseph’s Convent girls wore floating white veils and looked like they were little nuns already on their way to heaven. Also, Bishop’s girls had gym twice a week and afterwards showered together. This bothered me.

  “Does that mean people could see your punky and totots?”

  “After a while, people don’t bother to look. You get accustomed.”

  I’d have to do very well in the exam to win a free place at either school – if I only passed, my mother couldn’t pay fees like Meilin’s. We made a pact. If I won first place, I told her, I would choose her school. We hooked the little fingers of our right hands to seal this pledge. At times like those, Meilin shared with me her burgeoning knowledge of life. She told me about her monthly bleeding and I said it wouldn’t happen to me. She told me what men and women did in secret and I didn’t believe her. She told me that babies came out through their mothers’ punkies and I knew then that she was just making it all up. We danced through that long holiday, we and Perez Prado singing, “It’s cherry pink and apple blossom white, when your true lover comes your way”. It was about flowers we had never seen, emotions we were too young to understand.

  I had seen or heard nothing about my family for a long time, when, one day at the end of August, my Uncle Francois raced up on his bicycle with a bunch of purple and white dahlias in the basket. He gave the flowers to Auntie Marie and the two of them whispered together, glancing towards me while they shushshushed. I wondered what I had done wrong. He called out, “Get ready. Your mother coming for you.” Auntie gave me one of her precious brown paper carrier bags. I put my clothes in it and waited. When I first saw my mother, I thought it was my aunt, her twin sister. Her long hair was gone; she looked older, more nervous than I remembered. She looked at me, said, “You got bigger,” squeezed me tight, patted my head, sat me in the back seat of the waiting car. We were taken to La Seiva, where my grandmother had moved without my knowing. Two men were waiting there for me: a photographer and a reporter. The results of the Exhibition exam were released to the newspaper and my mother had been tracked down through my Uncle Francois, whose flower-growing business everybody knew. I was to be photographed and interviewed for the next day’s Guardian because I had come first in the College Exhibition exam. Afterwards, Uncle Francois bought a jug of coconut ice cream from a passing vendor’s bike-cart, a special treat for me.

  The news must have reached our father somehow, because that night he arrived in La Seiva. He and my mother spoke in the gallery for a long time. I don’t know for sure why they decided to get back together. Maybe the people to whom we children had been sent had agreed to keep us only for the school holidays. I also think that when the news of my success became public, our father would have felt ashamed among his friends and co-workers, shown up as a man who didn’t take care of his children. Our father said he had found somewhere for us to live. He took my mother and me to see the place.

  It was in Belmont, two bare rooms at the back of a house. The partition walls of wood with open slats at the top allowed air, sound and smell to circulate freely between the rooms, already home to two other watching, listening families. Standing in the backyard, I took in the dank open-air shower, its door hanging on a single hinge. In the kitchen-shed, coal-pot charcoal sparked red eyes through black smoke; from the sink, grey water splashed into a mossy open drain where, in a crack, a cluster of ambitious tomato seedlings had rooted. My nose trailed the pit latrine to its location, under the silhouetted tracery of branches and leaves of a guava tree at the back of the house. I could touch the neighbour’s crumbling house over the sagging galvanised fence; I could hear the wail of a child, a hot, heavy slap – “Here is something to cry for!” – the heightened wailing. My mother looked straight ahead, silent, hewn. I do not think she saw, heard or smelled anything. I saw her shoulders straighten; I felt mine straighten too.

  Next day, we separated children were re-gathered. As silent as strangers, we moved into our new life in the open tray of a Ford truck alongside my mother’s other possessions: a two-burner pitch-oil stove, an iron cooking pot, two cardboard boxes of clothes, one of crockery, and her girlhood treasures – a foot-pedal Singer sewing machine and a grand matching bedroom set of solid mahogany: bed, dressing table, stool and wardrobe. All, like us, had been looked after somewhere. My picture was in the papers. I was soon to go to big school. I was a big girl now.

  MAYBE TOMORROW WILL BE BETTER

  The girl dashes out of the room as soon as Miss dismisses class. She is so fizzing with excitement at the news Miss just gave that, as she skips along the pavement on her way home, she breaks into a spontaneous hopscotch, step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Miss said, hop-one-two, Miss told the class, three-four-five, that next week Friday, six-seven, they would be having, jump-and-spin-around, a party, hop-back-again, a Christmas party. Seven-six, five-four-th… mid-hop she stops, puzzled. A Christmas party? Is there such a thing as a Christmas party?

  She thinks she knows all about Christmas. It’s her favourite time of the year. Christmas is fixing up the house nicely with fresh paint, new curtains and cushion covers, neighbours, friends and family in new clothes visiting to eat Mammy’s black cake, drink sorrel and ginger beer, laugh, tell jokes, play games and enjoy themselves, children singing carols around the crèche and Father Christmas coming. But that’s not having a party. That’s just what happens at Christmas. She knows about having birthday parties, like her own.

  Last Sunday was her birthday. Mammy invited the neighbours for ice cream and cake. The big girls turned the handle of the ice cream churn while the little ones ran around, sticking out their tongues to catch the cold chips, sparkly like diamonds, that sprayed from the shilling-block of ice as Mammy stabbed at it with the forbidden ice pick, chiselling out bigger, glittering chunks, packing them between the metal churn and the wooden bucket, then pouring salt, a fine, white stream, onto the ice. Miss Gibbs, who had a modern gas stove with built-in-oven, baked a sponge cake and put ten tiny yellow-and-white candles on it. The cake was iced in white and edged with a frill of green leaves and pink icing-sugar roses, roses that were too precious to eat, and were kept in the wire-meshed food safe. (Some months afterwards, Mammy followed a thick trail of red ants along the floor, up one leg of the safe, through the mesh to their feast: pink, melted, sticky puddles, no longer looking like roses. But that was long after.) At the birthday party, the girl stroked with a hesitant fingertip, the clean, sharp edge of a curled rose petal, lost in wonder that such perfection could come from the hands of an ordinary person, someone whom she knew. At the party, people ate cake and ice cream, sang Happy Birthday To You; children played musical chairs, chased one another in hoop until it was too dark to see and Mammy called them in from the yard for their mothers to take them home. Would a Christmas party be l
ike that? As she continues along the pavement, the regular clack-clack-clack of her ruler, dragged along the high cast-iron railings that surround the big houses on the street, keeps time with her thoughts.

  She supposes that a Christmas party would really be a birthday party for Jesus. How many candles would the cake have? Jesus died a long time ago. It seems strange to have a birthday party for someone who is dead. Her grandpa is dead. He died before she was even born – she doesn’t know what day his birthday is. How is it that she knows, that people everywhere know, when Jesus’ birthday is, who died hundreds and hundreds of years ago and she doesn’t know her grandpa’s birthday and he died only a short while ago? She will ask Miss tomorrow. Then she remembers that Miss had said something else. Something so important that she had said it twice to make sure everyone heard and understood. Miss said that everybody, everybody, had to buy a present and wrap it in pretty paper. All the presents would be put together in a big bag. Miss said each girl would then pull out one present, not the one she brought, from the bag, like from a bran tub in the bazaar. The whole thing is most strange. A Christmas present that doesn’t come from Father Christmas? And a present before Christmas Eve night?