by Olive Senior
I was as mesmerized by her language as by the revelation of her “baby faadas.” Good grief! How many children did she have? No wonder she was so free with advice. She wasn’t finished with me yet. Not that I understood half of what she’d just said, for Morveen seemed to switch into a different language when she was excited.
“No, no Miss. Is when your heart is low that you must have high ambition. And I know you is no paa-paa, you is the kind of lady that pick up yourself when you batter down and rise again in glory.”
The two of them were so earnest that I didn’t have the heart to turn them away completely, and they had made me aware for the first time in weeks of how awful I really looked, as I’d barely glanced in the mirror.
“Okay,” I said in my firmest voice. They broke into smiles. “But none of this hair colouring business and all that fancy stuff, Morveen. I won’t have anyone to look after it once I get back to the country. So there’s no point in starting now. And Kyisha, all I want is for you to cut my nails short short short. Nothing more.”
They both nodded and left smiling happily. A few minutes later I had my head bent over Morveen’s basin downstairs. At lunchtime, I came out of their little room with my hair in a very short, stylish shag with blonde highlights, my nails painted cappuccino and my face fully made up and tingling with pleasure after a steaming and facial.
I knew that once I put myself in the hands of those two there was no turning back. And I didn’t want to. Morveen was right. I was the type of woman who picked herself up again when battered down. Now I couldn’t wait to rise in glory.
Though I wasn’t sure how to take Kyisha’s parting remarks as she gazed at my hair. “Lord, Miss, you look like that singer there, what she name again, Morveen? She have hair just like Miss Sam. You know, she very old …”
I saw Morveen’s elbow snake out to give her a hard nudge, before she said, “You mean Tina Turner. And she not so old…”
“Thank you, Morveen,” I said.
But Kyisha would have the last word. “Well, she not so old as Miss Sam, but is same so her hair stay …”
“And you, too, Kyisha.”
As I entered the dining room all eyes swivelled in my direction. I thought, Mrs. Margo Haynes-Crosswell-Bitch, eat your heart out.
100
I WAS SHOCKED AT how upset Ruby was when I told her I was leaving. Her eyes actually filled with tears that spilled over, making no difference to that mascara that was already smudged over half her face. She blinked and tried for something of her old bullying tone: “Of course you can’t go.” But, as I passed her a tissue, we both knew it was a done deed.
“They’ve finally repaired my house, Ruby. From the hurricane. Almost two years. I can’t stay away forever. You know I was only stopping here for a while.” I couldn’t resist saying with some pride, “My son’s down there looking after it for me, he’s finally found the time,” although I hadn’t heard anything further about Junior’s involvement.
I’d pulled up a chair beside hers on the veranda where she was sitting alone playing solitaire, the cards spread out on a tray across her lap. Poor Birdie was so decrepit she could no longer hold the cards and her eyesight was almost gone. There were times when she couldn’t hold her spoon or fork at table, her hands shook so much. Ruby had to take over and feed her like a child, Ruby herself having difficulty manipulating knife and fork. Now Birdie sat nodding in an armchair slightly to the left of Ruby, and I had to go right up to her so she could see who I was when I greeted her. It was clear that Birdie should be in a place where she would get nursing care, but Ruby was determined to soldier on for the two of them. She walked now with her arm around Birdie’s waist, almost dragging her along, though she herself was tottering. Watching the two of them slowly making their way down the corridor was the most powerful signal that as long as Ruby was alive, Birdie would never pass on alone to an Old People’s Home. In the middle of our little chat, Ruby leaned over and confided that she and Birdie had made a pact. She gave me an arch look, as if I should know what she meant. But I hadn’t a clue.
“A pack of what?” I leaned over and whispered back.
“No, no! Caramba! Are you deaf? Pact! Agreement. You know. Together.” And she used her index finger to made a cutting motion across her throat.
“What! You wouldn’t!” I was truly aghast. For her gesture had conjured up an insane image of throat slitting and blood spurting, though between them they could hardly hold a table knife steady.
“Pills,” she croaked. “We’re saving up.”
I sat there with my mouth open, trying to get my head around the idea. I truly didn’t know what to think, it was so foreign to me.
“Best thing for both of us. Look at her!”
We both looked at Birdie, who was now loudly snoring with her head on her chest, her mouth wide open. Unlike Ruby, she no longer bothered about her appearance, and her pink scalp showed through her snowy white hair, cut short and feathered around her head. Her face was sunken in, pale and colourless. I was amazed at how quickly she had passed to this stage.
“You think I want to be left alone with the likes of that Running Water?” Ruby asked, for so she referred to our talkative table-mate. “I’d rather die first.” She paused to light a cigarette, although she already had one burning in the ashtray, and she gave her little signature cough after the first puff.
She looked defiant, then just old and sad as she angrily stubbed out the butt of the old one. “Life’s no fun anymore.” Then, recovering some of her old feistiness in a more accusing tone, “And now you say you are going too.”
I didn’t respond. She took that as a sign to continue. “At least you brought a little life to the place. All your vegetables. Now I won’t get a chance to plant my roses.”
“Winston…” I began.
“Winston!” she said. “That ram goat! All that man knows to plant is one thing. I’m amazed he hasn’t worn it out by now!”
“Ruby!”
“You and that Ralph Bridges made such a pair, brought a little excitement to the place. You know Matron …”
“But Ruby, we were not a pair,” I protested. “We were just …”
I was glad that she interrupted. for I found I was having difficulty getting the word friends out of my mouth.
“Oh, I know that, dear,” Ruby said airily. “But I wouldn’t make anyone the wiser. Their silly speculation was so delicious.”
I didn’t quite know how to take that remark, so I fumed for a few seconds, until the next one brought me fully back to listening.
“I think it was so stupid of him wanting to marry that awful Margo Frome, or Cresswell, or whatever she calls herself. A little hurry-come-up, she’s done more climbing than a passion fruit vine. She’d have sucked him dry, for that’s her style, for God’s sake. Two down so far, he’d have been the third. But then men …”
I didn’t even bother to listen to Ruby’s little diatribe, I was both shocked at her knowledge and elated at her description.
“Ruby,” I interrupted. “How did you know? About Mr. Bridges and this lady?”
“Oh, sweetheart, just because you see me here looking like an old cabbage, doesn’t mean I don’t know what goes on. I’m still plugged into that Florida circuit, you know. For months she’s been busily telling everyone about her trousseau, at her age, for God’s sake! And pestering them with her plans for home decorating. Why she would want to come back here …”
“Mr. Bridges didn’t want to go and live in the States,” I said and almost bit my tongue, for I had vowed to forget about the two of them.
“Well, if he knew what was good for him, he would have been much better off with you, my dear.”
Despite myself, I felt a wave of gratitude to Ruby for her endorsement. “Except,” she continued, “I don’t know about you, but the idea of living with a man with a brain like a filing cabinet is too appalling. Like Birdie’s first husband.” She leaned over and whispered this, though Birdie was still asleep
. “He used to run a factory so everything with him was assembly line. He had to take off every item of clothing and neatly fold or put away each piece before jumping on top of her. You can imagine how exciting that was.” Ruby cackled loudly at the thought. “My Jorge, now, was a man of terrific spontaneity. I can’t tell you all the places we tried it. Caramba!”
“Ruby!”
“Okay, okay, I won’t shock you. But you yourself could loosen up a bit you know, Mrs. Samphire. Although I have to say you’ve made a three-hundred-degree improvement in your social skills since you came here. You really couldn’t stand us, could you? I could see you mentally wanting to chew us up and spit us out.”
I didn’t say anything to that, I just smiled, amazed how over the time I had come to know her I had had to constantly revise my opinion of Ruby.
“I don’t know,” she said, changing tack. “The turnover in this place is getting too fast for my liking. First Bridges, then that old man Turner, then the Pitts. Now you leaving …”
“Miss Pitt-Grainger?”
“Yes, didn’t you know? Just keeled over one day. They all seem to be doing that. No lingering anymore. Nowadays, everything quick, quick. Not like my Jorge.” She cackled at my raised eyebrows. “Geez, when was it? Quite a few weeks now. It must have been when you were sick, so I guess no one told you. She had this huge write-up in the papers and everything and you should see the turnout at her funeral. Still, I wonder where all those Old Girls were when the old girl herself was sitting here, so lonely.”
“Yes,” I said, for I’d had the same thought when she was sick, and I felt guilty now that I had been so full of myself I hadn’t even noticed her absence.
“She wasn’t a bad old sort really. Just set in her ways. But boy did we love to tease her!”
Ruby picked up her cigarette that had been burning in the ashtray and waved it around, dropping ash everywhere. She suddenly looked happy. “That’s what the three of us always loved to do, Birdie, Babe, and me. Take the mickey out of people. The Three Musketeers, they called us. Until we got married, we were always together, hatching up plots. Birdie and I have been friends since we were born. Our families lived next door to each other. Babe was my cousin. We were always in and out of each other’s houses. I don’t know why we hit it off so well, we three were closer than they were to their own sisters. I was an only child, so you bet your life I wasn’t going to let go. I have to say, I have been so fortunate to have had such good friends. There’s nothing to replace that, really.”
She fell silent, and I said nothing, weighing my life against hers and finding it wanting, for I have never had a single friend. I was never allowed to have friends in my childhood, and by the time I was married and having children, there was no one around to be friends with. Well, nobody around that was good enough, for I certainly considered myself a cut above the women in our neck of the woods. Never mind our poverty, they all knew where I was coming from. Or so I thought, though I am a little embarrassed when I consider that self now. But I had certainly been injected with pride and prejudice by my father’s family. Those were the very elements of my upbringing that I hadn’t managed to shell off. I had friendly encounters and neighbourly exchanges, all right, but nothing that went beyond that, except perhaps with Millie—though the social divide was always there. Never mind that Millie was one of the women whose children had done so well she has not only taken to travelling but has learned to drive and has her own car to boot. Now she’s way ahead of me. Of course, I never went out socially or to church, which is where women seemed to get to know one another. Marriage did not bring the opening up of my life that I expected. All it did was reinforce my isolation.
I looked at Ruby again and I thought, this is the closest I have come to having a friend. She must have picked up something of my mood, for she stretched across the tray, scattering her cards, and took my hand in hers. Then she turned it over and began a fake reading of my palm. “I see a road. I see a house. I see a tall, dark, handsome stranger.” She must have felt my hand tighten up, for she quickly added, “‘Tall,’ I said. Tall handsome stranger.”
Still holding my hand, she peered at me and said, “You really liked him, eh, chiquita?”
I nodded and felt tears come to my eyes. I thought, this is the moment, this is where I confess to someone and shed my pain. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Ruby held on to my hand without speaking, then she squeezed it and smiled at me. I knew she understood.
She turned my hand over again and said, her voice bright and teasing again, “What happened to your rings?”
“Rings?” I laughed. “I’ve never had any. I lost my wedding band years ago.”
“You know,” she said, “in the old days men left rings to their male friends in their wills. Mourning rings they called them. Even that old pirate Henry Morgan did it. I am not quite done for yet, but I know that once you leave here I won’t see you again, so I am going to give you my friendship ring now.” And much to my astonishment, she eased off one of her rings, the very one that I had so secretly admired from my first day at her table, and she took my hand and placed it on my finger. It was the large sapphire surrounded by a circle of tiny diamonds, the whole seeming to form a strange constellation of tiny stars in the blue night sky like the one I used to gaze at. How had Ruby, whose hands were covered with rings, known that this was the one that always caught my eye?
It slipped off her finger easily, for she was mostly skin and bone, and it slipped easily onto mine, which made me realize she must have been a large woman in her time. The gesture made me too stunned to speak. But I finally did, and I pulled the ring back off.
“Ruby, no. I am utterly grateful. But I couldn’t accept something so valuable. I really couldn’t.”
“Of course you could,” she said, waving her hand at me. “And you will. It’s mine to give, and I want you to have it to remember me by.”
“Ruby!”
She sat back and paid no more attention to me. She had this little smile on her face, and I knew she had wandered away from the present, as she sometimes did. I held on to the ring and turned it over and over, admiring its sparkle.
“It was my grandmother’s ring,” she said. “All the ones I like to wear were.” She turned both hands over and over to look at the glint of diamonds, rubies, emeralds. “But that one was the first one my grandfather gave her, she told me, so it was very special. She gave it to me because she couldn’t stand my mother. But I don’t have a daughter or a granddaughter and my son is about to get divorced from a wife whom I couldn’t stand myself. So I’d rather give it to someone I like.”
I was mesmerized by the ring and still trying feebly to protest, but Ruby was paying no attention to me.
“It was funny about my grandmother, my father’s mother,” she said. “She was just a little coolie girl from the canefield, you know.”
I jumped as if she had sent a jolt of electricity up my spine. But she wasn’t paying any attention to me.
“Well, her father came over from India as an indentured worker, as they did in those days, so he was in the canefields. My grandfather saw her one day and they fell instantly in love and that was that. You can imagine the scandal; he the scion of the plantation owner. Of course, the scandal wasn’t that he had taken up with this little Indian girl, for that would have been seen as him exercising his droit du seigneur, you know. But when he insisted that he wanted to marry her! His family literally threw him out of the house. They ran off together anyway. His parents eventually came round to forgiving them, for they were the only ones to produce grandchildren. Very important in the planting classes, my dear. And his mother took her under her wing and trained her up and she became this very grand chatelaine. Actually, she looked a bit like Louella Dune, but much grander. And nowhere as silly. She was a very smart woman. Her husband showered her with love and jewels. The story had a happy ending.”
I’m glad that Ruby didn’t seem to expect any kind of response from me, for I would
have found it difficult to speak. That she had used the exact phrase “from the canefields” to describe her own grandmother, as my mother had been described, but in so loving a fashion, with none of the scornful implications of the Richardses, was a revelation. I had no difficulty about accepting the ring then, for it took on a whole new meaning for me. I put the ring on my finger and I got up and leaned over and kissed Ruby on her cheek.
“Thank you, I will treasure this, and wear it to remember you always.”
Ruby seemed pleased at this. I wished I could have told her what I was really thanking her for, about my own mother. But, despite Mr. Bridges’ attempts to unravel me, the knots that bound up the secrets of my heart hadn’t been loosened enough.
101
SHORTLY AFTER THIS, I had an unexpected visitor. I was out in the garden with Winston when Maisie called out from the back of the house, “Someone to you, Miss Sam. I tell her to come round there.”
I called out, “Who?” but she didn’t answer, so I started walking around to the front of the house, quite curious.
I saw this young girl walking towards me, at first glance not too different from Morveen, very slim as they all seemed to be these days, with very long legs and a very short skirt, a tiny blouse, and—as she came closer—several earrings in each ear. But there the resemblance ended, for even at a glance I could tell this was a child from a different background entirely, just from the way she moved, as if she owned the world. As she approached, something about her looked vaguely familiar, and my attention was caught by her hair, which was long and very, very curly, its lightness contrasting with her cocoa brown skin. She gave me a brilliant smile as she came nearer, and from the way her mouth turned up at the corners, I knew right away who she was.