Dancing Lessons (34 page)

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.

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.

“Grandma,” she said, and leaned in to give me a kiss on the cheek. Her name didn't come to me right away, but she helped me immediately.

“Ashley,” she said.

“Of course,” I said as if I had known, for she truly had grown out of my sight. “How are you, dear?”

“Fine, Grandma, how are you? You're looking awesome. Love your hair,” and that brilliant smile again. Then, without waiting for me to answer, she hurried on. “Mom had to go away, so she asked me to pop by. I would have come anyway, now that exams are over. I hope you are feeling better. Anyway, I came by to see if you needed anything. I have Mom's car, so I could take you someplace. But I don't know what you'd like to do.”

“Whoa!” I had to laugh, for she hadn't paused for breath. Unlike her mother, she was very animated. “Let's go in for a moment and sit down.”

On the way to the lounge I got caught up on her doings and the doings of her brother, who was at Harvard. She had just finished high school and had been accepted at the University of the West Indies. I was really happy to see this girl. I couldn't stop looking at her, trying to unravel the combination she revealed of her father—nose, dark skin, dark eyes—and her mother—mouth, hair. Her high spirits enchanted me. I didn't even have time to revisit my guilt at how my own blindness in the past had prevented me from my really seeing her and my other grandchildren. Though if truth be told, the few times I had been to Celia's house the place always seemed filled with young people who all looked the same to me and who never seemed to stop talking or moving long enough for me to figure out who was who.

When Ashley leaned over and said, “Grandma, let's go out and do something. Let's go to a movie,” I said yes without thinking. As I stood to go upstairs to change, she lightly took hold of my hand.

“Love your ring. Wicked!” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, “it was my mother's.”

I honestly don't know where that came from, and as soon as I said it I could have bitten off my tongue, but I didn't want to break the mood of the moment. I thought: I'll explain to her some other time. As I walked up the stairs, I couldn't understand why I was feeling elated, whether it was from my granddaughter's presence or the fact that I was about to visit a cinema for the first time in my life. Of course, I would never have shared that fact with her or anyone else, for wasn't it a shameful thing?

Had they known, people would be surprised at how little practical experience of life I had, though I had a vast knowledge from reading and just paying attention to what was happening around me. I had never travelled abroad, for instance, never until I came to town eaten in a real restaurant—meaning not an ice cream parlour—never worn a bathing suit or sat on a beach. That's so astonishing now, when I think of it, but that's what living in the country was about for me.

I knew that all the other women with children in town or overseas had readily taken to the latest of everything, like Millie. Even the old grannies would be seen wearing Jheri curls or bright red wigs or whatever was the fashion of the moment, sporting cell phones and designer track shoes. They had been to Disney World and New York City and Toronto. Ridden trains and roller coasters. Flown on airplanes. But I had so buried myself that I knew nothing of the things that made the modern world go round. I averted my eyes when people flaunted them at me, worse when they flaunted the children and grandchildren who came to visit. I had stayed deliberately ignorant of makeup and the latest fashions, though these were the things I had yearned for in my early life. If I couldn't have them, I didn't want them, I decided; my decision, like everything else, hardening into a kind of scorn for those who did. But I was a fast learner. For once I was exposed to all the fashion or home decor magazines lying around Ellesmere Lodge, I began to treat them with the same studious attention I gave to everything. I became knowledgeable about brand names and the latest styles, and quite curious about people's choices in scent, makeup, or lipstick, even the colours, because of what I felt these choices were saying about them.

Listening to the Pancake Sisters, of course, was an education in itself as to what was fashionable and what was not—at least in their eyes, which was at least one generation removed from reality. I was lucky that this was counterbalanced by the endless information on the topic of fashion and makeup imparted by Morveen and Kyisha when they worked on me. It was from them that I also managed to extract information on their other clients' preferences, including Matron, who apparently went to a real beauty parlour where the girls normally worked, as they came to Ellesmere Lodge on Mondays when the parlour was closed. All of this was when I first came and had the feeling that knowledge was power and that the more I knew about my enemies—Matron, the Pancake Sisters—the more I could prepare myself against attack. Those days are long gone, of course, but what I haven't lost is the insecurity, the fear of being found out as an ignoramus.

My husband never took me anywhere, preferring to escort other lady loves even before he bought a car. I wasn't one of those mothers who did things with their children; it was as if they walked away from me once they left to go away to secondary school. After that, they did things with their friends, occupying a world in which I had no place. I might have had to visit their schools once or twice on business. I went to the town at least once a term to buy school supplies and whatever else I needed, but entertainment was never a part of these. Money was always tight, but it really was that I had a profound fear of going out, of being in crowds, surrounded by or interacting with other people. I think it was always because I felt too ashamed of how I looked, how far my clothes, my hair, fell from the internal standards I had set myself. For, thanks to my grandmother and Aunt Zena, I knew what I was supposed to be. But it seemed I had fallen a long way.

It was as if I was always two people. The one who was visible: plain, awkward, and shy. And the other inside my head: well-dressed, fashionable, and in command. For that, at least, is what Aunt Zena always was, which makes me think now that the scenario of her having travelled, living in the United States, having a husband and a fashionable wedding dress, seems plausible. Having heard some of her story from Ma D I could think of her in another way, as a woman who, in another life, would have been attractive. She wore makeup—at least by the modified standards of the country, powder and lipstick—and who knows what else in the jars I saw sitting on her vanity top when I scouted it out. There was, hidden in her clothes cupboard, a curling iron—which, by the time I came along, she probably never used—jewellery never worn, smart hats in boxes, and beautifully pleated and beaded dresses I never saw her put on. But there must have been considerable vanity in her makeup that I hadn't recognized, of a woman who saw herself as attractive and attracting male attention, or who had at some time in the past.