When I was around twelve years old or so, I was given three yards of cloth as a present. It was an ugly piece of cloth; it had printed on it a design of brown boxes with the word “Pandora” written across each one and a black-haired beast emerging from the open lid. With my mother’s permission, I had it made up in a dress not appropriate to wear to church but appropriate to wear to a fete: no sleeves and a sweetheart neck. One day I was putting on that dress, and while my arms were raised high above my head I saw this amazing thing—a brownish, curly patch of hair growing under each arm. I was shocked at this sign of something I thought would never happen to me, a sign that certain parts of my life could no longer be kept secret from my mother, or people in general; anyone could look at me and know things about me. I got a washrag and rubbed hard under my arms, but the hair just stayed there; it would not go away. I had known that, but I could not prevent myself from trying. I then thought that if I had hair growing in one place, perhaps I had hair growing in other places also, and I put my hands in my underpants and felt. My worst fears were true; I had hair growing there also—a patch of small, short curls, like hair on a baby’s head. Sometimes, when I would find myself in a mess that left me very disturbed, I would say to myself, I am going to wake up now, and I would wake. But this was not a dream, this was my real life. I was undergoing a change, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Not long after, I was about to take my bath in preparation for school. I had been feeling odd while going about my morning chores, and had complained to my mother about an ache in my stomach and a chill. I got undressed for my bath. I removed my underpants. My underpants were stained with a rust color, but I didn’t recognize this color as blood. It frightened me all the same, and I immediately cried out for my mother to come and help me. When she saw my predicament, she laughed and laughed. It was a kind laugh, a reassuring laugh. And then she said that finding blood in my underpants might be something one day I would get down on my knees and pray for.
I did not spend the next two weeks worrying about my period. If it did not show up, there was no question in my mind that I would force it to do so. I knew how to do this. Without telling me exactly how I might miss a menstrual cycle, my mother had shown me which herbs to pick and boil, and what time of day to drink the potion they produced, to bring on a reluctant period. She had presented the whole idea to me as a way to strengthen the womb, but underneath we both knew that a weak womb was not the cause of a missed period. She knew that I knew, but we presented to each other a face of innocence and politeness and even went so far as to curtsy to each other at the end. The only thing now was that if I did need those herbs, they did not grow where I was and I would have to write to my mother and ask her for them. That would have been hard to do; just my asking for these particular herbs would let her know exactly what I had been up to, and I had always thought I would rather die than let her see me in such a vulnerable position—unmarried and with child.
For the first time in a long time, I began to look forward. It wasn’t that I thought each new day would bring unlimited pleasure and happy surprises; I just had a feeling, a wonderful feeling, inside of me. If someone had asked me, I would have had to say, Yes, life isn’t so bad after all. It was Mariah who asked me if the source of all this was Hugh—she had caught me whistling—and when I told her no, I could see that she did not altogether believe me. What made sense to her was that if you liked being with someone in that particular way, then you must be in love with him. But I was not in love with Hugh. I could tell that being in love would complicate my life just now. I was only half a year free of some almost unbreakable bonds, and it was not in my heart to make new ones. I could take in all of this very easily. Just thinking about his hands and his mouth could make me feel as if I were made up of an extravagant piece of silk; yet if I were told that he had left unexpectedly on a trip and would not be back for a long time, I would have to say too bad, for I had not yet grown tired of him, and accept it with no more than a shrug of my shoulders. For already I could see ahead to the fifteenth of September, the day when I would bend my knee a little so that I could kiss Hugh’s cheek, step into a car, and then wave and wave as it drove away, until he was out of sight. To latch on to this boy—man, I suppose—who liked the way the tightly curled hair on my head and other parts of my body trapped his fingers was not for someone my age, and certainly not for me.
* * *
Mariah and Dinah and other people they knew had become upset by what seemed to them the destruction of the surrounding countryside. Many houses had been built on what they said used to be farmland. Mariah showed me a place that had been an open meadow, a place where as a girl she went looking for robin’s eggs and picking wildflowers. She moaned against this vanishing idyll so loudly that Louisa, who was just at the age where if you are a girl you turn against your mother, said, “Well, what used to be here before this house we are living in was built?” It was a question I had wanted to ask, but I couldn’t bear to see the hurt such a question would bring to Mariah’s face.
Mariah decided to write and illustrate a book on these vanishing things and give any money made to an organization devoted to saving them. Like her, all of the members of this organization were well off but they made no connection between their comforts and the decline of the world that lay before them. I could have told them a thing or two about it. I could have told them how nice it was to see them getting a small sip of their own bad medicine. Some days she would go out from early morning until late afternoon sketching specimens of all sorts in their various habitats; she gave me the impression that everything was on its last legs and any day now would disappear from the face of the earth. Mariah was the kindest person I had ever known. Her concern was not an unexpected part of her; it could be said that her kindness was the result of her comfortable circumstances, but many people in her position were not as kind and considerate as she was. And that was the reason I couldn’t bring myself to point out to her that if all the things she wanted to save in the world were saved, she might find herself in reduced circumstances; I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to examine Lewis’s daily conversations with his stockbroker, to see if they bore any relation to the things she saw passing away forever before her eyes. Ordinarily that was just the sort of thing I enjoyed doing, but I had grown to love Mariah so much.
* * *
Mariah and Lewis had been having a disagreement over what animal was eating the new shoots of a vegetable Lewis had planted in a small patch of dirt that he had turned over and made good for growing vegetables. Lewis really had nothing to do when he was here; he read papers he had sent from the office, and all sorts of books, but being here in a house that overlooked a lake was not his idea. I never got the feeling from him, as I did from Mariah, that this was the only place in the world to be from the middle of June to the middle of September. And so, I suppose to amuse himself, he had made a little garden, and he grew in it green beans, spinach, lettuce, and some tomato plants that bore fruit the size of grapes. He had done this for years now, and always he had enjoyed all the fruits, so to speak, of his labor. But this time, as each little shoot of something made an appearance, an animal would come at night and eat the shoots. Lewis built a fence around the garden, but the animal got under it and ate everything down to the ground. Lewis was sure it was a family of rabbits that Mariah and the children had grown fond of and encouraged to come up into the house.
We were sitting at the dining table, all of us, just finishing a delicious pie of red berries that Mariah had made, when Lewis mentioned again the destruction of his vegetables. Mariah, trying to turn the conversation away from the rabbits, said that a certain sort of bug will slice off the tops of young shoots, but that of course Lewis should avoid pesticides and find a natural antidote, an enemy of this bug. A minute or so went by, allowing the subject of destroyed vegetables to pass from everybody’s mind, and then Mariah told, with actual jubilation in her voice, of a sighting of yet another family of rabbits living near the entrance
of the driveway; how astonishing and incredible they were, she said, coming up to a few inches from her and looking her right in the eye as if they meant to say something, to tell her the secrets of their existence. Lewis said, “Jesus Christ! The goddam rabbits!” and he made his hands into two fists, lifted them up in the air, and brought them down on the table with such force that everything on the table—eating utensils, plates, cups in saucers, the empty pie dish—rattled and shook as if in an earthquake, and one glass actually tipped over, rolled off the table, and shattered. We all looked at Lewis; in the long silence that followed, that was all we seemed able to do—just look at Lewis. In the silence, a world of something must have appeared; the children were too young to get to the bottom of it, and I was too unfamiliar with a situation like this. But it made Mariah force both her hands into her mouth as if desperate to keep something from coming out. I thought, In the history of civilization, they mention everything; even the water glass shattered on the floor—something is said about that—but there is not one word on the misery to be found at a dining-room table. We all sat there locked up in that moment, and without a doubt it meant something different to everybody, none of it good. The spell was broken by Miriam, who started to cry; she cried and cried, the way children will when they know something is wrong but not exactly what. I picked her up to comfort her, and kissed her little head, but I might as well have been doing all that to myself, for I felt as if I were about to lose something I had just found. I gathered the children, and we went upstairs to my room and played a game of gin rummy.
One day Mariah persuaded Lewis to go to the marshlands with her. This was the day I received the tenth letter from my mother to which I would make no reply; as with the nine others before it, I would not even break the seal on the envelope. I believe I heard them drive away; I believe I heard the sound of the car’s wheels on the dirt road; I believe so, but I could not really say for sure; it’s possible that I just took those things for granted. Later, I wondered if just the way the car door had sounded as it slammed shut, or the way the car’s wheels sounded as they ran over the dirt road, should have told me to expect something. The children and I were getting ready to go to the lake when we heard a scream, and we ran to a window that looked out in the direction from which the scream came. We saw Mariah running back toward the house, crying, her hands moving about in the air as if she were conducting a choir. She ran into the house, and just as we were about to go downstairs to see what was the matter, Lewis came into view. He was walking slowly, and in his hands he carried the limp body of a small animal, a rabbit. He had a funny look on his face; he looked like a boy in a picture, a boy who had placed a live mouse under his mother’s saucer and, on getting the desired result, pretended not to know what all the commotion was about. Lewis walked along in this way, and then something made him look up, and he saw our five faces framed behind the large glass-paned window. He stopped for a moment; whatever he saw in his children’s faces I do not know, but I suddenly felt sorry for him. He looked lost, unhappy, as if he might remember this as one of the most unhappy days in his entire life.
They buried the rabbit in a ceremony I could not bring myself to attend. The ceremony was another one of those untruths that I had only just begun to see as universal to life with mother, father, and some children. I had thought the untruths in family life belonged exclusively to me and my family, with my mother’s unopened letters representing evidence of the most important kind. Mariah and Lewis told the children that the car had run over the rabbit by accident, and they said it in such a way that I could only think they wanted the children to believe the car was driving itself. But when the children were out of the room Mariah would accuse Lewis of running over the rabbit on purpose, and Lewis would say that it really had been an accident, that the very path he took to avoid hitting the rabbit was just where the rabbit ran. Then Mariah would say, “But you aren’t sorry that you did it?” and he would say, “No, I am not sorry that it happened.” It was an important difference, but in a situation like that, how could Mariah be expected to see it?
* * *
Everything remains the same and yet nothing is the same. When this revelation was new to me, years ago, I told it to my mother, and when I saw how deeply familiar she was with it I was speechless. One day, Louisa said to me, after reading a letter from one of her school chums, “My mother and father love each other very much.” She said it with such force that I looked at her closely, for I thought she would reveal something. And what made her say that—something in the letter, or something in the air? Hours before, I had walked into a room and heard Mariah say to Lewis, “What’s wrong with us?” Then their friend Dinah came in; she was on her daily walk and was stopping by to say hello. Before Dinah came in, Mariah and Lewis had been standing there like two beings from different planets looking for evidence of a common history and finding none. It was horrible. As soon as Dinah came, Lewis’s mood changed. He was no longer in the same room with Mariah; he was in the same room with Dinah. Lewis and Dinah started to laugh at the same things, and their peals of laughter would fly up into the air wrapped around each other like a toffee twist. Mariah could not see this and tried to join in, but every time she started a sentence about one thing, they started on another, completely different subject. This all happened very quickly, and probably if I had not disliked Dinah so much I would not have noticed it. But I did notice it, and it seemed important, like a small part of a map, isolated and blown up large in the hope that it might yield a clue. Mariah and I left that room together, but I had forgotten to take with me what I had gone there to get in the first place, and so I went back. I saw Lewis standing behind Dinah, his arms around her shoulders, and he was licking her neck over and over again, and how she liked it. This was not a show, this was something real; and I thought of Mariah and all those books she had filled with photographs that began with when she and Lewis first met, in Paris in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower or in London in the shadow of Big Ben or somewhere foolish like that. Mariah then wore her yellow hair long and unkempt, and did not shave her legs or underarms, as a symbol of something, and was not a virgin and had not been for a long time. And there were pictures of them getting married against their parents’ wishes, behind their parents’ backs, and of their children just born in hospitals, and birthday parties and trips to canyons and deserts and mountains, and all sorts of other events. But here was a picture that no one would ever take—a picture that would not end up in one of those books, but a significant picture all the same.
A woman like Dinah was not unfamiliar to me, nor was a man like Lewis. Where I came from, it was well known that some women and all men in general could not be trusted in certain areas. My father had perhaps thirty children; he did not know for sure. He would try to make a count but then he would give up after a while. One woman he had children with tried to kill me when I was in my mother’s stomach. She had earlier failed to kill my mother. My father had lived with another woman for years and was the father of her three children; she tried to kill my mother and me many times. My mother saw an obeah woman every Friday to prevent these attempts from being successful. When my mother married my father, he was an old man and she a young woman. This suited them both. She had someone who would leave her alone yet not cause her to lose face in front of other women; he had someone who would take care of him in his dotage. This was not a situation I hoped to take as an example, but I could see that, in marrying a man, my mother had thought very hard not so much about happiness as about her own peace of mind.
Mariah did not know that Lewis was not in love with her anymore. It was not the sort of thing she could imagine. She could imagine the demise of the fowl of the air, fish in the sea, mankind itself, but not that the only man she had ever loved would no longer love her. She complained about the weather, she complained about all sorts of things that ordinarily she would not have noticed; she criticized my behavior, and then she criticized herself for criticizing me.
* * *
I said goodbye to Hugh, though he did not know it. It was late at night, and we were lying on the shore of the lake without any clothes on. A large moon was overhead; it was in a shroud, and so rain would fall the following day. As I kissed Hugh, my tongue reaching to caress the roof of his mouth, I thought of all the other tongues I had held in my mouth in this way. I was only nineteen, so it was not a long list yet. There was Tanner, and he was the first boy with whom I did everything possible you can do with a boy. The very first time we did everything we wanted to do, he spread a towel on the floor of his room for me to lie down on, because the old springs in his bed made too much noise; it was a white towel, and when I got up it was stained with blood. When he saw it, he first froze with fear and then smiled and said, “Oh,” a note too triumphant in his voice, and I don’t know how but I found the presence of mind to say, “It’s just my period coming on.” I did not care about being a virgin and had long been looking forward to the day when I could rid myself of that status, but when I saw how much it mattered to him to be the first boy I had been with, I could not give him such a hold over me. Before that, there was a girl from school I used to kiss, but we were best friends and were only using each other for practice. There was the boy I used to kiss in the library and continued to kiss long after I had ceased to care about him one way or the other, just to see how undone he could become by my kisses. One night my friend Peggy and I, on our rounds in the city, met a boy in a record store and we both thought he was quite interesting to look at, for he reminded us of a singer we liked. We invited him to have a cup of coffee with us, and he accepted, but over the coffee all he talked about was football. Peggy hated sports of any kind, because they reminded her of her father, and I only liked cricket, which was the sport my father played. We were so disappointed that we went back to my room and smoked marijuana and kissed each other until we were exhausted and fell asleep. Her tongue was narrow and pointed and soft. And that was how I said goodbye to Hugh, my arms and legs wrapped tightly around him, my tongue in his mouth, thinking of all the people I had held in this way.
Lucy: A Novel Page 5