Precious withdrew to her room, leaving Mildred reigning over the drawing room in which the first blow had just been struck.
Mother-in-law blood was spilled on the floor. Eyeball could not see it, but it seeped there from a grievous belly wound.
That night Mildred explained the argument to Harold, pointing out the viciousness of slouching, saying that it was nothing personal and she hoped Precious didn’t take criticism to heart, but she was a woman who just had to rule her own roost.
Then to sweet him up, to show Harold who was who and make sure he took her side in the quarrel, she gave his bamboo a friendly little rub.
Since it was the first unbegged-for rub his bamboo had got in a long while, Harold quite forgot himself, grabbed his bony wife, and eagerly French-kissed her.
She pulled back and yukked. “Lawd Jesus, Harold!” she said with disgust, running to the sink to rinse out his nasty and unasked-for man mouthwater flooding her back teeth.
Remembering that she had had good reason to rub the bamboo, she sidled back into the bedroom to mollify him.
“You know I can’t stand a tongue-suck unless I’m prepared,” she said with a sniff.
Then she went off to ride her stationary exercise bicycle, leaving her husband, who was himself unridden for well over a fortnight, standing there stewing in backed-up bamboo juice.
He sulked in the drawing room and tried to read a dental journal. Precious was nowhere to be seen. The children were doing homework in their bedrooms. A single moth bobbed and darted neurotically around the blazing hallway light.
Harold rapped softly on his mother’s door. “Mummy, you don’t have to lock up all night, you know,” he said plaintively.
“I not lock up,” the faint reply drifted from behind the closed door.
“Come out and talk to me, nuh, Mummy?”
“I have a headache, Harold,” came the halfhearted lie.
He went back to his journal.
The next day as he was jerking out a molar, a poor fat countrywoman wriggled in the chair, grabbed onto its armrests for dear life, and bawled bloody murder, “Sweet Jesus, Missah Dentist! Who trouble you, sah?”
Household war number two was fought over contraband pudding.
Precious cooked up a creamy pudding for the children, who went mad with joy over this unaccustomed treat. Mildred came home and went on a rampage. She did not want her children being fed nasty pudding, which had neither grain nor fiber and was bound to cause acne and running stomach. Why must she-tolerate overrule of standing orders under her own roof? She had a good mind to fire the maid.
“But me don’t do nothin’, mum!” yelped the maid.
“You know I don’t allow pudding in my house! How many times you hear me say dat pudding is worse dan cockroach poison? And you sit dere and let Mrs. Higginson, who don’t know better, brew pudding in my kitchen?”
“Me never know she goin’ feed it to de children, mum!”
Precious tiptoed away and hid in her room while domestic tirade raged in the kitchen. There was a soft knock on the door, and her grandson timidly peeped around the dusky doorway.
He sat on the bed beside Precious in the dimness and put his small arms consolingly around her neck.
“Grandma, when I grow up,” the boy vowed fiercely, “I having pudding with every meal from breakfast to supper. Some meals, I goin’ eat nothing but pudding!”
In the boy’s eyes Precious saw smoldering the stubborn defiance she had grown to love in her own Theophilus. She chuckled and gave him an impulsive hug.
That night Mildred explained to a harassed Harold that rule could not abide under the same roof with overrule. One must stay and one must leave, for either rule prevailed or overrule ran amok and spread rebellion. Harold did not understand, but he did his best to listen magisterially while his wife related a skein of intricate and aggrieved detail about the quarrel over pudding.
“You same one say dat sweets cause cavity!” Mildred fumed piously.
“True,” Harold nodded, solemn as a judge. “Sweets do cause cavities.”
“Sugar is as bad as rat poison!”
Harold balked at this, and snidely remarked that sugar was as bad as rat poison only to American yuppies.
Sensing that he was turning contrary on her, Mildred wriggled up beside him on the couch and began to fondle the bamboo.
There was nothing erotic or loving to her touch, for she was a hardheaded wife who over the years had evolved economical action for repulsing Harold’s annoying sexual begging. Moreover, she was one woman who only touched up the conjugal bamboo when she wanted something. But this was war to the death. On the one side was old Mummy who commanded the respect that came from nostalgic memory of cradle rocking and batty wiping; on the other side was lawful wife entrusted with custody and control over the household bamboo, with plenary power and authority to quell its periodic uprisings.
Mildred pursed her lips grimly. She would show once and for all that the hand that held the bamboo was ten times mightier than the one that had once wiped the batty. It would be pen against sword all over again.
Harold lay back on the couch panting weakly while his wife sternly shucked out his love-starved, neglected bamboo from a thicket of drawers flap, pants fly, and crooked zipper.
When she was done with him, Harold wore a pasty look of stupefaction and pleasure on his face that said he was primed for twirling around her finger.
She twirled him as she stuffed the dead bamboo limply back into its gabardine dungeon.
“You know I like you mummy, Harold. It’s just dat she must not overrule me.”
Sprawled on the couch, Harold could only give a piggish oink of happiness. “If you would only do dat to me once a week,” he whimpered.
“You see how you stay! De more you get, de more you want! Instead of being grateful for what you get, you want more!”
“I don’t want more,” he lied weakly.
“All I ask is to be able to rule me own roost. Is dat too much?”
“Mildred, Daddy just dead. Mummy all alone. She need us.”
“Did I tell him to dead? Don’t everybody must dead when deir time come? Don’t even I must dead one day?”
“Mildred, please try to understand.”
“I do understand. Is my fault that you daddy dead. I must pay for his reckless driving.”
Harold squirmed and gave up. He muttered that he would have a heart-to-heart talk with Mummy.
Precious endured three months of this loveless treatment, feeling like a barefoot urchin in Mildred’s kingdom. For the sake of peace she even made an effort to sweet-up Queen Mildred, to show that she was ready and willing to bow down before the lawful ruler and mistress of the household, but even this harmless bowing and scraping backfired.
Mildred had cooked up a batch of stringy dried-out muffins and, biting into one, Precious had behaved as if she were eating heavenly manna.
“Dey’re dry,” Mildred growled sourly, curling lip at her own muffin.
“No,” insisted Precious politely, “dey well moist.”
“How can anybody in deir right mind call dis muffin moist? Taste this muffin, Agnes,” Mildred commanded the maid. “Tell me dat dat muffin not dry.”
Agnes nibbled on a muffin rind and winced. “It well dry, ma’am,” she announced distastefully, washing down the pebbly crumbs with a tumbler of water.
Backed into a corner by her own inept attempt to kowtow, Precious shoved half the muffin into her mouth, chomped down hard on it, and felt it crack against her teeth like rinsed gravel. “Dis is a moist muffin,” she persisted cheerfully.
“If you think it so moist, why you don’t eat another one,” Mildred challenged, a malevolent fire ablaze in her eye.
“Gladly,” Precious murmured, picking up another and attempting to bite heartily into it while the maid watched and shuddered.
“See!” Precious lied, swallowing another slab of muffin masonry. “This is a moist muffin. Very tasty.”
Grimly trying to bore a hole in the concrete kitchen floor with an impatient tap of her high heel, Mildred scowled as she watched Precious chew. “So eat another one den, if you think dem so tasty!” she flung.
“Lawd Jesus, Miss Mildred,” Agnes protested, “you goin’ bind de poor woman bowels with you dry-up muffin.”
“
Me
bind her bowels?” Mildred snapped shrilly. “Don’t I say de muffins are dry? Don’t she insist dey’re moist? How I binding anybody’s bowels? You see me holding open her mouth and stuffing dry muffin down it?”
Precious tried to scoff but found that she could barely open her mouth, for her teeth were temporarily cemented together by muffin plaster of Paris and her tongue wriggled vainly in a body-cast of gummy muffin batter.
“Mmmmooiissst,” she lied determinedly.
She staggered out of the kitchen with as much dignity as she could muster, closed the bedroom door behind her, and sat-down on her bed, certain that her days of carefree, unmedicated doo-dooing were gone forever.
For two weeks after that Precious lived on magnesia and epsom salts as muffin bone took its own sweet time about scraping through her large intestines. She drank copious quantities of water, went on long walks, even lay flat on her back and exercised, all in a desperate effort to unbind her system. Agnes seemed to understand her torments and sympathize, for one morning as Precious stood by the sink drinking her second tumbler of water, the watchful maid shook her head sadly and muttered, “When Miss Mildred bind a belly, dat belly well bind.”
Precious stared at her with indignant astonishment.
“What you talking about, eh?” she asked, refusing to acknowledge that a domestic possessed insider knowledge about her bowels. “I’m fine! I just went!”
As she sallied off to her room she added acidly over her shoulder, “That is, if it’s any of your business!”
There would be other skirmishes later, rear-guard action, ambush, blitzkrieg raid. The issues would vary – wasting expensive electricity knowing fully well that money didn’t grow on tree; quibbling with maid over established household procedure; countermanding garden-boy standing watering instructions for rosebushes – but it all boiled down to two-woman under one roof, wife against mother.
Precious could not cope with the incessant clamor. She got so that she was afraid to make a move in the house for fear of sparking a row. She walked on tiptoe around the mistress of the house. She tried her best to make friendly small talk with the maid but always ended up feeling like a meddling colonial power.
One night she wept quietly in her bedroom while gazing at a wallet-sized picture of Theophilus dressed in his Sunday finery, his head tilted to one side as he glared stonily at the birdie with his usual tutorial grimness. Stifling and breezeless, the lowland stagnation typical of a Kingston night resounded with a cacophony of yapping neighborhood dogs, the occasional wail of a siren, the malcontent rumble of a foraging truck. Her airless windows were laced with ugly wrought-iron burglar bars filigreed into whorls and smothered under a bank of crinkled nylon curtains.
“What I goin’ do, Theophilus?” Precious whispered bleakly to the photograph. “I not welcome here.”
Just then the phone rang and the maid bawled for Miss-Precious to come take a long distance call.
Four harrowing and busy weeks followed Shirley’s call, during which Precious endured buffet and setback with a cheery countenance and unshakeable faith. Her dignity suffered numerous nicks and scratches from the American Consulate, whose staff, it is widely known, is globally trained to behave scornfully toward prospective immigrants, especially those whose grovelling is regarded as halfhearted.
But once it became clear that the interloping former battywiper was to be sent packing to Miami and that there was soon to be only one woman under her roof, Mildred displayed a more hospitable frame of mind and actually started holding friendly chats with Precious at the breakfast and dinner table. She even confided that ever since the birth of their son, Harold had contracted a sickly obsession with tooth extraction that sometimes drove her up the wall.
Precious remarked innocently that she didn’t know Harold had any obsessions. Why did she think Harold had founded twelve clinics over the countryside? Mildred asked pointedly. It-was for the sole purpose of providing him with countrywoman tooth to pull, which he accumulated in a shoe box like he was some kind of bizarre hobbyist. Precious said she didn’t know that Harold collected teeth, so Mildred went rummaging through Harold’s den and returned with a Bata shoe box that rattled when she walked. She pried off the lid to reveal hundreds of rotted teeth that stunk like old fish-bait.
“My heavens!” Precious gasped, peering into the box in which teeth of every shape, size, and state of decomposition were strewn in an untidy mound.
“Can you imagine? Dis is your son’s hobby!” Mildred shook her head sadly in a manner that implied faulty mothering.
“I never tell Harold to pull anybody teeth,” Precious mumbled in her own defense.
So things were better at the Kingston household and the time flew past quickly. There were a hundred little chores to tend to and a clutch of petty details to contend with. Precious made periodic trips with Harold up to the mountain house to pay Maud, brush dog head when White Dog and Red Dog came scampering to greet her, and generally check on her property. But she could not make up her mind about what to do with Theophilus’s dream house. When she strolled around the grounds and fondly recalled Theophilus’s love for mountain peak, she simply couldn’t bring herself to sell it. Plus she did not think there was another person mad enough in the entire parish to want to live in such isolation.
One day during an infrequent visit to the house, Precious idly asked Maud, “What I goin’ do with dis house, eh?”
Maud squinted and pursed her lips with deep thought. “If fire start up here, God willing,” she suggested with a crafty glint in her eye, “no amount of fire brigade goin’ reach dis hill before de house burn completely down.”
“I goin’ to write dat remark down in a book,” Precious snapped.
Maud’s eyes widened with alarm. “What book?”
“I don’t know. I only know dat dat is de very kind of remark dat need to write down in a book. I goin’ to buy an exercise book and write it down. What’s de date today?”