by Olive Senior
Ashley was still chattering away. “Imagine, I could have been born a Rasta Queen. Hail me up, nuh Sista! But guess what? Dad’s father had a heart attack or something, the poor man was so mortified, and my little old Gran—did you ever meet her—a proper little lady with her gloves and hats and all, like the Queen Mum, you know—well, Grandmama just marched on right up there to that commune and dragged her son back home.” She paused. “Actually, I don’t know if that’s exactly how it happened. But ol’ Herms gave up all that nonsense and went back home and settled down to being the nice little middle-class boy.” I could hear the satirical note creeping into her voice. “Who in time met your nice little middle-class daughter and married her. And here I am. Miss Criss!”
Half the time I wasn’t sure whether Ashley was being serious or mocking, but right now, she seemed to find the whole thing incredibly funny and was giggling so much she even forgot to turn on any music at all, for which I was very grateful.
If I hang around Ashley I’ll find out everything. All the things Celia would never tell me. Or would she? If I asked her?
104
ISN’T MY LIFE JUST like our country, hills and gullies, up dale and down, like riding on the true-true natural version of a mechanical roller coaster? So it was this plunge into the trough with Celia when she came back, and she ended up telling me far more than I wanted to hear. She came at night, as she usually did, after her day’s work, so she found me up in my room, back at the sewing machine, altering some clothes. That in itself was probably a reflection of the mood that persisted after my granddaughter started to visit, for before that I had decided to give most of these clothes away. Ashley was shocked when I told her that, and urged me to do no such thing. For she is as confident in her opinions as Morveen is in hers and not at all hesitant about giving me advice. She went straight to my wardrobe when I told her I had to decide what to take, a few things only was all I would need in the country, for—though I didn’t tell her this—I was still in that mood of wanting to shed my new-found vanity. She ignored what I said and started to take out dresses, holding them up against me and saying, “Oh, Grandma, you have to take this. The green is awesome. It looks great against your skin … Where’s that blue scarf again, see, it goes perfectly with these beads … awesome with your beige dress, and this striped blouse too. These shoes, oh, you can’t leave them behind … neutral colour … go with everything.” Exactly as if she was my fashion consultant.
Ashley wore the most extraordinary high-heeled sandals, the type you see on models coming down the runway, the type that makes you wonder how on earth they walk in them. But she had no difficulty whatsoever. She had the body of a model, too, but covered, not like some of the ones who are all skin and bones. Not like her mother. I banished that thought. I let her prattle on, for she was making me smile inwardly. I was beginning to enjoy the attention of someone else in my business. How easy it is for these young people to cut through all the nonsense and get straight to the point.
Like the day she was occupying herself, colour-coordinating my wardrobe, moving her body to a beat only she could hear as she hauled out beads and shoes and scarves and laid them out on the bed, standing back to look at them, holding something up against her body and looking in the mirror, snatching up a belt and choosing something else to lay down beside the pants. She stopped suddenly and looked at me and said, out of nowhere, “Hey, Gran. Mom said you ran away from home when you were fifteen and rode off with Grandpa on horseback. Is that true?” She turned to me, her eyes sparkling, but in her usual way not waiting for an answer. She had turned back to her task and continued to shift my wardrobe around as she spoke, putting to one side those items she thought I could dispose of. “That is way, way too cool. I want to hear all about it. Every single detail. My girlfriends think it is so awesome. Like the movies. Gone With the Wind or something like that. They’re dying to meet you. What was Grandpa like? I don’t remember him at all. I guess he died when I was little. From his photos he was one handsome dude. Mom said he sure had an eye for the girls, but … oops!” She caught herself there but recovered without missing a beat, “You were divorced by then.”
I didn’t say anything, keeping pasted on my face the smile that her first words had evoked, thinking how different people’s visions can be of the same event.
I had learnt that when Ashley asked questions, she didn’t expect answers right away. But she would come back to those questions, so that sooner or later she would be asking me about Sam and myself and really listening this time. I knew that while she acted like the butterfly, flitting from one thing to the next, at heart she was really like her mother, more like a tick, never letting go once she had attached her mind to something. I knew I should start preparing answers on the subject of Sam and me. Prepare, for there was no way I would be telling this child any of the truth surrounding our so-called romance and marriage. Mark you, I rather liked the idea of seeming a romantic figure myself to this generation. O the things I could think of telling Ashley! Perhaps after all, half a lifetime spent reading romances would not be wasted.
But, as it turned out, it was Celia who found the way to shatter my new-found sense of self and silliness.
105
THE FUSS WITH CELIA—which I haven’t talked about yet—at least brought one good thing in its wake: it gave me back my ability to sleep. I mean just plunging into sleep as a way of getting away from the world. Ever since Mr. Bridges’ death, I’ve had great difficulty sleeping. Now I’m willing myself into sleep again. Willing myself back home, really, but we still have a few weeks to go. When Celia came back, she told me most of the work on the house was finished, the electricity was connected, but Junior wanted to paint, inside and out, a house that had never had a coat of paint in its life. I was secretly pleased to hear it, though—a sign of my continuing vanity, as if a painted house was more in keeping with the new way of viewing the world that I’d grown accustomed to.
I was seated at the machine, bent over a hem I was basting. Celia was sitting in the armchair beside me. She reached for her handbag. “Junior wants you to choose the colours, he sent a whole bag of paint chips. I have them somewhere …” She kept on talking as she bent over and dug around in the bag. “I could take you one day next week to buy material for curtains and cushions and stuff. That should be fun.”
As she bent down all I could see of her was the hair like a golden, wiry halo that hid her face from me. She was dressed in clothes that did not reveal much either, a creamy silk blouse with a high round neck and long sleeves and tailored trousers that fitted loosely, so it was hard to see anything of her body but her thin brown hands and her half-hidden face. I thought back to the times I had seen her and realized that she was wearing clothes as a disguise, to create the illusion that someone of far more substance occupied them. In a way she was like Ruby inside her clothes now, but Ruby was an old woman.
She broke into my thoughts as she held up her hand triumphantly and shook something that made a racheting, clicking sound. I now know rationally that it was only a heavy ring with plastic cards attached with the different paint colour samples, but at the sound of them clicking together, something seemed to burst in my mind.
Bones, I thought. A feeling of horror and revulsion sweeping over me. Why is she carrying bones around? I couldn’t help it, I had this vision of bones—Mr. Bridges, my father’s, all the dead people in my life—and bones that were hers lying among them. I was seeing her now as nothing but skin and bones. I couldn’t stand it. All my years of keeping silent fled in this one flash of the irrational, for her movement made me jump.
“Bones,” I said aloud. I might have shouted it, for I remember her eyes opening wide as she sat up and looked at me, the ring with the paint chips dangling from her hand.
I don’t remember all the things that were said after that, I guess I was babbling, but I know I finally said, “What are you doing to yourself? Why are you killing yourself?”
She tried to calm me down th
en, I could see she was genuinely shocked at my outburst, it was so unlike me, like my rushing into Mr. Bridges’ room to ask him to dance. But I didn’t want to be calmed or reassured. It was if some other self had taken over.
“Look at you,” I said. “What is it? Anorexia? Bulimia? What exactly is your problem? Why are you doing this to yourself?”
She was immediately defensive, I could tell, but she never raised her voice. “Doing what to myself?”
“Oh please. Don’t do this to me. I’m your mother. Can’t you be honest with me, just this once?”
She laughed then, not her usual modulated laugh but a high, artificial laugh.
“Me,” she said, “be honest with you? Now isn’t that a joke.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Exactly when have you ever been honest with me? With any of us? I don’t think you have been honest with me since the day of my birth.”
I looked at her, stunned, thinking, where is this coming from? Why are we discussing me? I couldn’t bring myself to speak. It was she who finally broke the silence that stretched between us.
“Do you know how uncommunicative you have been to me throughout my whole life? How you have told me nothing, given me nothing. Even now, you cannot bring yourself to speak to me. Even something as simple as telling me why I went to live with the Frasers that I asked about the other day. All the things I have been trying to puzzle out, my whole life.” She paused, then flung out, “I don’t know why you ever bothered to have children, you cared so little for any of us.”
She broke down then, crying silently, burying her head in her hands while the clicking of bones turned into the beating of my own heart against my ribs.
“Junie, Junie,” I said, dropping the garment and turning around to face her fully. I wanted to reach out to her and hold her, but I was too terrified to move.
She took her hands from her face and looked at me, her face puffy, her eyes red and spilling over. The image of perfection shattered.
“Junie?” she said in a wondering sort of voice. “No one called me that since you sent me away.” She was silent for a while, her eyes looking faraway, her face indescribably lonely. Then it was as if she was getting up steam again, for I could feel the heat in her voice, “You never even bothered to tell them what name I answered to. They didn’t know that name. They didn’t like the name I answered to at school, my first name. So I became Celia then, my middle name, a name I have always hated. And I heard Celia so often that when I went back to visit you, I told you I was no longer Junie, I was Celia now. I wasn’t really, I wanted to go back to being Junie, if only you had let me. But you started calling me Celia, too. That’s how I knew then that you didn’t care. Only Papa … Papa still called me Junie … when it was just the two of us together.” She broke down into tears again. I didn’t say anything, there was nothing I could say. My mind was too churned up.
I did care, I wanted to say out loud. I did care, but I could never find ways to show it. It was as if I myself was always on the edge of things, barely managing to hold on. The first time you came back after you’d been away for a year and they were sending you to that expensive school, you were so much bigger that I hardly recognized you when you came out of the car. They had cut your hair too, very short. It curled all over your head. You looked so different from the child who had left. Polished. Your clothes were expensive. A crisp little white organdy blouse with blue forget-me-nots embroidered on, puff sleeves and a Peter Pan collar, a plaid pleated skirt held up with two broad straps, white socks, and sensible-looking brown oxford shoes. I remember you had a tiny handbag of your own, which made me smile, a yellow fabric one with green plastic handles that you gripped tightly in your right hand, like a grown woman. You were already beginning to look as cleanly washed and ironed as your keepers.
The Reverend Doctor came out of the car carrying a nice little brown grip. His wife held your Jippi Jappa hat dangling by the elastic. This time they came onto the veranda and I offered them lemonade, as we had been expecting them. Sam was home to do the greeting and talking. He took them around, past the granadilla arbour and down to the cocoa walk to show them “our little plantation,” as he humorously called it, letting them think all the while I’m sure that it was his doing.
I didn’t mind; I stayed behind watching them, holding the baby Lise. I didn’t want to talk to them. It’s you I wanted to talk to. But you were gone, too, your left hand in your father’s, your right still clutching your handbag, Junior and Shirley excitedly following behind, chattering, skipping, laughing. As you vanished into the cocoa walk, the sounds of your voices came and went, all of you together in this joyous group. I stood there, feeling not that you all were moving ahead, but that I was falling, falling further and further behind.
106
I DON’T THINK I would have been able to write any more if Celia hadn’t come back the following night, to “have it out.” But she said it in a playful way, and I could see she was in a far different mood from the one in which she’d left. She had abruptly taken up her bag and gone through the door, without another word. I was left to sit all night, the words she threw at me clicking around inside my head—“cold,” “indifferent,” “spiteful,” “don’t care.” I was so taken aback that I resorted to my former technique. I said nothing. I had nothing to say.
In the morning, I was still feeling rotten, but I did something I would never have done in the past. I phoned her. I only got her answering machine, but at least I was able to leave a message to say how sorry I was. I apologized. I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for, but at least I was taking some responsibility for my actions and not simply getting into a huff.
Our outburst, hers and mine, must have stirred up something, for she came over later that day, threw her handbag on the bed, and, smiling, stood with both hands up like a boxer and said, “Okay G. No more tears. Let’s have it out.”
I was feeling humble and still confused about a lot of things, but that stance made me laugh. We both laughed. I no longer felt hopeless. When she sat down in the chair and kicked off her shoes, I felt even better. I took that as a sign that she was staying for a while.
“Well, first of all, let’s get one thing clear, G,” she said. “I don’t know where on earth you’ve got this idea that I’ve got an eating disorder. That’s just not so. I’m thin, yes, but I can assure you I am perfectly healthy. I go to the gym every day—well, as often as I can. I can’t help it that I’m the type who doesn’t put on weight. I take after Papa’s family, I guess.” She laughed, “You have no idea how envious some people are of me.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, “I honestly don’t know where it came from.” But I was mentally seeing the cover of Miss Pitt-Grainger’s magazine in my head and feeling quite foolish. How could I have thought Celia looked like those skeletal creatures? What was wrong with me that I could so easily fall victim to every passing trend?
“All of us on that side of the family are skinnies, all of my cousins—Gina and Simone and Uncle Jeff’s daughter, Janice, and Uncle Mark’s as well.”
She must have seen the blank look on my face, for she said, “I keep forgetting you never kept up with any of Papa’s family.”
“You seem to know them all.”
“Well, Janice and Uncle Mark’s daughter, Kayla, came as boarders when I was in high school and we are still close. You must have known Gina and Simone, though. They were at your wedding. I remember them telling me that, though they would have been little at the time. They’re the oldest of the lot. Uncle Johnnie’s girls.”
John, I thought, the man who tried to rape me. I said nothing, but Celia must have picked up something from my face, for she said “G, what happened with you and that family? Between said, you and Dad for that matter; I mean, why did you split?”
“He never told you?”
“Not really. I don’t think I ever asked him. But I always got the impression that you were the one that—”
“That what
?”
“Wanted out, I guess. I mean, you never even told me that you had separated. It was some time before I found out. Papa never told me, either. At least not directly. He wrote and told me he had a new address and I was to write him there. When I wrote and asked him why, he only wrote you had finally got fed up and kicked him out. But he wrote ‘smile’ after it, so I was never sure. I mean, did you kick him out?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What happened?”
“Your father walked out and left me with three children to look after. He never gave me a reason. He never told me to my face. He simply sent someone to come and collect his things.”
“That can’t be true!”
“Why?”
“I can’t believe Papa would do a thing like that. He wasn’t that kind of person.”
“Oh really? What kind of person was he?” Not the type, I said to myself, to slam my head against the wall, not the type to beat me when I was pregnant, not the type to humiliate me with other women from the moment we were married. Not the type to leave me and his children with nothing.