Lucy: A Novel

by Kincaid, Jamaica

  COLD HEART

  ALL THE WINDOWS in Lewis and Mariah’s apartment had outside them iron bars twisted decoratively into curves and curls, so that if somehow the children should climb up on the windowsill and slip out, they would be unable to fall down from the tenth floor and land on the sidewalk. It was a reasonable thing to do, protect your children’s lives, but all the same I was confounded: Couldn’t human beings in their position—wealthy, comfortable, beautiful, with the best the world had to offer at their fingertips—be safe and secure and never suffer so much as a broken fingernail?

  I was standing at one of those windows in the living room, looking down at the street. It was a cold day in October, and the wind was blowing small bits of rubbish about. As a child in school, I had learned how the earth tilts away from the sun and how that causes the different seasons; even though I was quite young when I learned about this, I had noticed that all the prosperous (and so, certainly, happy) people in the world inhabited the parts of the earth where the year, all three hundred and sixty-five days of it, was divided into four distinct seasons. I was born and grew up in a place that did not seem to be influenced by the tilt of the earth at all; it had only one season—sunny, drought-ridden. And what was the effect on me of growing up in such a place? I did not have a sunny disposition, and, as for actual happiness, I had been experiencing a long drought.

  From where I stood at the window, I could see into the apartment across the way. A man and a woman and some children lived there. I had observed them before at various times. I had seen them in bathrobes, in evening clothes, and in ordinary, everyday wear. I had never seen these people do anything interesting—not exchange a kiss, not have what looked like a quarrel. They were always just passing through this room, as if it were a way station. Now it was empty of people. I could see a sofa, two chairs, and a wall of books. How luxurious, I thought, to have an empty room in your house, a room that nobody really needed. And isn’t that what everyone in the world should have—more than was needed, one more room than you really need in your house? Not a question I would put to Mariah, for she felt just the opposite. She had too much of everything, and so she longed to have less; less, she was sure, would bring her happiness. To me it was a laugh and a relief to observe the unhappiness that too much can bring; I had been so used to observing the results of too little. This reminded me that lately I had been having the same dream over and over: There was a present for me wrapped up in one of my mother’s beautiful madras head-kerchiefs. I did not know what the present itself was, but it was something that would make me exceedingly happy; the only trouble was that it lay at the bottom of a deep, murky pool, and no matter how much water I bailed out I always woke up before I got to the bottom.

  It was a Sunday, and I was alone in the apartment. Mariah and Lewis had taken their children somewhere in the country to pick apples. The way they looked as they were leaving—if I had not known, I would have said, “What a happy family!” The children were well dressed, their stomachs filled with a delicious breakfast of muffins that Mariah had made from specially purchased ingredients, and bacon and eggs from what could only have been specially cared-for pigs and hens. As they waited for the elevator to come, they were laughing. Lewis was in the role of the amusing and adorable father today, and so he had put on a lion’s mask and then said and done things not expected of a lion. The children, in response, shrieked and laughed and fell down on top of each other with pleasure. When the elevator came, it was hard for them to just calmly go into it, and Mariah gathered up their coats and gloves and hats and “shoo-shooed” them, mocking the gesture of a farm wife to a brood of chicks. All of them, mother and father and four children, looked healthy, robust—everything about them solid, authentic; but I was looking at ruins, and I knew it right then. The actual fall of this Rome I hoped not to be around to see, but just in case I could not make my own quick exit I planned to avert my eyes.

  I was waiting for a call from Peggy. Since it was a Sunday, she had gone to church with her mother and then to visit an old relative who insisted on living alone. Peggy was going to call to let me know what time we should meet in the park. It was our custom on Sunday afternoons to go for a walk in the park and look around, then pick out the men we imagined we would like to sleep with. We would pay careful attention to their bottoms, their legs, their shoulders, and their faces, especially their mouths. If all passed muster, though, Peggy would put a stop to our making an approach. She would look closely at their hands and say that though everything else seemed acceptable, their hands were too small. She had said to me—with such sincerity I almost thought it something taught to her in catechism class—that if a man had small hands, it meant he had a small penis to match. When she first said this to me, it came as a complete surprise: I had never dreamed that such a thing as a penis did not come in a uniform size. When I then asked her what could a small penis mean to me, she raised her eyebrows and said only, “Disappointment.” It soon became clear that I was a failure at judging the size of a man’s hand, and so it was left up to Peggy; whenever we went to the park we came home alone, just the two of us.

  I did not like Sundays, and this one was not an exception. I could not believe this feeling about Sundays had followed me halfway across the world. I could not explain it, this feeling. What exactly was Sunday meant to be? Always on that day I felt such despair I would have been happy to turn into something as useful as a dishrag. When I was at home, in my parents’ house, I used to make a list of all the things that I was quite sure would not follow me if only I could cross the vast ocean that lay before me; I used to think that just a change in venue would banish forever from my life the things I most despised. But that was not to be so. As each day unfolded before me, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see the present take a shape—the shape of my past.

  My past was my mother; I could hear her voice, and she spoke to me not in English or the French patois that she sometimes spoke, or in any language that needed help from the tongue; she spoke to me in language anyone female could understand. And I was undeniably that—female. Oh, it was a laugh, for I had spent so much time saying I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother—I was my mother. And I could see now why, to the few feeble attempts I made to draw a line between us, her reply always was “You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me.” How else was I to take such a statement but as a sentence for life in a prison whose bars were stronger than any iron imaginable? I had, at that very moment, a collection of letters from her in my room, nineteen in all, one for every year of my life, unopened. I thought of opening the letters, not to read them but to burn them at the four corners and send them back to her unread. It was an act, I had read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another, but I could not trust myself to go too near them. I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.

  Peggy did not call me from a telephone; she came to the apartment directly. She couldn’t wait to get away from her family, she said; they were a bunch of absolutely nothing. How I envied the contempt in her voice, for I could see that her family held no magic over her. We went to the park. As usual, no men with large hands could be found. We went our separate ways, but made plans to speak to each other on the telephone the next day. I went home to my room in Lewis and Mariah’s apartment and sat on my bed. I thought of the summer I had just spent. I had come to see the sameness in things that appeared to be different. I had experienced moments of great happiness and a desire to imagine my own future, and at the same time I had had a great disillusionment. But was this not what life should be—some ups and downs instead of a constant dangerous undertow, capable of pulling you under for good?

  Right after we had returned from the summer at the lake, I decided I would not attend school at night anymore or study to become a nurse. Whatever my future held, nursing would not be a part of it. I had to wonder w
hat made anyone think a nurse could be made of me. I was not good at taking orders from anyone, not good at waiting on other people. Why did someone not think that I would make a good doctor or a good magistrate or a good someone who runs things? As a child I had always been told what a good mind I had, and though I never believed it myself, it allowed me to cut quite a figure of authority among my peers. A nurse, as far as I could see, was a badly paid person, a person who was forced to be in awe of someone above her (a doctor), a person with cold and rough hands, a person who lived alone and ate badly boiled food because she could not afford a cook, a person who, in the process of easing suffering, caused more suffering (the badly administered injection). I knew such a person. She was a friend of my mother’s and had delivered me when I was born. She was a woman my mother respected to her face but had many bad things to say about behind her back. They were: she would never find a man; no man would have her; she carried herself like a strongbox, and from the look on her face a man couldn’t find a reason to break in; she had lived alone for so long it was too late to start with a man now. But among the last things my mother had said to me, just before I left, was “Oh, I can just see you in your nurse’s uniform. I shall be very proud of you.” And I could only guess which nurse’s uniform she meant—the uniform made of cloth or the one made of circumstances.

  As I sat on that bed, the despair of a Sunday in full bloom, I thought: I am alone in the world, and I shall always be this way—all alone in the world.

  I had begun to suffer from violent headaches, exactly like the ones that used to afflict my mother. They would come on suddenly, as if I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, last for a while, and then disappear. They frightened me because I did not know when one would come on, and they frightened me because they reminded me of my mother. One day, in the midst of an argument I was having with her in which I was trying to assert my will and meeting defeat again, I had turned to her and said, “I wish you were dead.” I said it with such force that had I said it to anyone else but her, I am sure my wish would have come true. But of course I would not have said such a thing to anyone else, for no one else meant so much to me. Her desire not to please me was greater than my desire to erase her, but it so took her by surprise—my wish for such a thing—that she got a headache, a bad one, and it caused her to take to her bed. This lasted for days, and at night I would hear sounds in our house that made me sure my mother had died and the undertaker had come to take her body away. Each morning when I saw her face again, I trembled inside with joy. And so now when I suffered from these same headaches that no medicine would send away, I would see her face before me, a face that was godlike, for it seemed to know its own origins, to know all the things of which it was made.

  * * *

  My friendship with Peggy was reaching a predictable stalemate; the small differences between us were beginning to loom, sometimes becoming the only thing that mattered—like a grain of sand in the eye. She did not like to read books of any kind. She did not like to go to the museum. Going to the museum had become a passion with me. I did not grow up in a place where there was such a thing, but as soon as I discovered it, that was the only place I liked going out to visit. It was Mariah who had taken me there; she had wanted me to see some paintings by a man, a French man, who had gone halfway across the world to live and had painted pictures of the people he found living there. He had been a banker living a comfortable life with his wife and children, but that did not make him happy; eventually he left them and went to the opposite part of the world, where he was happier. I don’t know if Mariah meant me to, but immediately I identified with the yearnings of this man; I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven. I wondered about the details of his despair, for I felt it would comfort me to know. Of course his life could be found in the pages of a book; I had just begun to notice that the lives of men always are. He was shown to be a man rebelling against an established order he had found corrupt; and even though he was doomed to defeat—he died an early death—he had the perfume of the hero about him. I was not a man; I was a young woman from the fringes of the world, and when I left my home I had wrapped around my shoulders the mantle of a servant.

  I was having a thought not unlike this when, unexpectedly, Mariah came up to me. The look on my face must have shocked her, for she said, “You are a very angry person, aren’t you?” and her voice was filled with alarm and pity. Perhaps I should have said something reassuring; perhaps I should have denied it. But I did not. I said, “Of course I am. What do you expect?”

  * * *

  Peggy took me to a party in a neighborhood that I had never visited before. There were fewer streetlights there, the buildings were uncared for, there was rubbish all about, and there were almost no people walking around. None of this frightened me; on the contrary, I found it quite thrilling. We went into a building and climbed up some cement stairs, and then we were in a large room lighted by candles and filled with plants that I knew grew in a rain forest, for I had seen them growing there. The room smelled of myrrh and marijuana. It was a party given by someone she knew from her office, a man from whom she often got the marijuana we smoked. Whatever he did in her office was not what he planned to do for his whole life. He was a painter, and some of his paintings were hanging on the walls. They were paintings of people, some of them women without their clothes on, some of them just faces. None of the paintings was straightforward; instead, the people all looked like their reflections in a pool whose surface had just been disturbed. The colors were strange—not the colors any real person would be, but as if all the deep shades from a paintbox had been carefully mixed together in a way that still left them distinct. Peggy had told me about him. She had told me that he was a pervert. I did not know exactly what she meant by that, and she never told me what he had said or done to make her think so. He might have tried to kiss her; she hated men to kiss her unless their mouths tasted of cigarettes. When we were introduced, he took my hand and kissed me on the cheek. It was the way he greeted women.

  His name was Paul. I said, “How are you?” in a small, proper voice, the voice of the girl my mother had hoped I would be: clean, virginal, beyond reproach. But I felt the opposite of that, for when he held my hand and kissed me on the cheek, I felt instantly deliciously strange; I wanted to be naked in a bed with him. And I wanted to see what he really looked like, not his reflection in a pool whose surface had just been disturbed.

  It was a party of ten people, including Peggy and myself. Peggy knew the others in one way or another. I had never met any of them before. This was a part of her life I did not know, and I could see why. They were very chatty people, chatty in a way she did not like: they were talking about the world, they were talking about themselves, and they seemed to take for granted that everything they said mattered. They were artists. I had heard of people in this position. I had never seen an example in the place where I came from. I noticed that mostly they were men. It seemed to be a position that allowed for irresponsibility, so perhaps it was much better suited to men—like the man whose paintings hung in the museum that I liked to visit. Yes, I had heard of these people: they died insane, they died paupers, no one much liked them except other people like themselves. And I thought of all the people in the world I had known who went insane and died, and who drank too much rum and then died, and who were paupers and died, and I wondered if there were any artists among them. Who would have known? And I thought, I am not an artist, but I shall always like to be with the people who stand apart. I had just begun to notice that people who knew the correct way to do things such as hold a teacup, put food on a fork and bring it to their mouth without making a mess on the front of their dress—they were the people responsible for the most misery, the people least likely to end up insane or paupers.

  I had smoked quite a bit of marijuana and was feeling quite happy and otherworldly. I was sta
ring at some plants that were growing in pots on a windowsill, plants I knew by the names of cassy and dagger. The cassy I used to eat with fungy and salt fish; it was said to be a vegetable good for cleaning out a person’s insides. The dagger we used to pound with a stone until it became stringlike and then plait so that it resembled a long braid of hair; at Christmastime it became part of a clown’s costume and would be lashed in the air to make a sound frightening to children. These two plants grew so plentifully where I came from that sometimes they were regarded as a nuisance, weeds, and were dug up and thrown in the rubbish. And now here they were, treasured, sitting in a prominent place in a beautiful room, a special blue light trained on them. And here I was also, a sort of weed in a way, and across the room Paul’s eyes, a sparkling blue light, were trained on me; his eyes reminded me of a marble I used to have, my lucky marble, the one that, when I played a game with it, always won.