Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
When I finished telling Mariah this, she looked at me, and her blue eyes (which I would have found beautiful even if I hadn’t read millions of books in which blue eyes were always accompanied by the word “beautiful”) grew dim as she slowly closed the lids over them, then bright again as she opened them wide and then wider.
A silence fell between us; it was a deep silence, but not too thick and not too black. Through it we could hear the clink of the cooking utensils as we cooked the fish Mariah’s way, under flames in the oven, a way I did not like. And we could hear the children in the distance screaming—in pain or pleasure, I could not tell.
* * *
Mariah and I were saying good night to each other the way we always did, with a hug and a kiss, but this time we did it as if we both wished we hadn’t gotten such a custom started. She was almost out of the room when she turned and said, “I was looking forward to telling you that I have Indian blood, that the reason I’m so good at catching fish and hunting birds and roasting corn and doing all sorts of things is that I have Indian blood. But now, I don’t know why, I feel I shouldn’t tell you that. I feel you will take it the wrong way.”
This really surprised me. What way should I take this? Wrong way? Right way? What could she mean? To look at her, there was nothing remotely like an Indian about her. Why claim a thing like that? I myself had Indian blood in me. My grandmother is a Carib Indian. That makes me one-quarter Carib Indian. But I don’t go around saying that I have some Indian blood in me. The Carib Indians were good sailors, but I don’t like to be on the sea; I only like to look at it. To me my grandmother is my grandmother, not an Indian. My grandmother is alive; the Indians she came from are all dead. If someone could get away with it, I am sure they would put my grandmother in a museum, as an example of something now extinct in nature, one of a handful still alive. In fact, one of the museums to which Mariah had taken me devoted a whole section to people, all dead, who were more or less related to my grandmother.
Mariah says, “I have Indian blood in me,” and underneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?
I now heard Mariah say, “Well,” and she let out a long breath, full of sadness, resignation, even dread. I looked at her; her face was miserable, tormented, ill-looking. She looked at me in a pleading way, as if asking for relief, and I looked back, my face and my eyes hard; no matter what, I would not give it.
I said, “All along I have been wondering how you got to be the way you are. Just how it was that you got to be the way you are.”
Even now she couldn’t let go, and she reached out, her arms open wide, to give me one of her great hugs. But I stepped out of its path quickly, and she was left holding nothing. I said it again. I said, “How do you get to be that way?” The anguish on her face almost broke my heart, but I would not bend. It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.
THE TONGUE
AT FOURTEEN
I had discovered that a tongue had no real taste. I was sucking the tongue of a boy named Tanner, and I was sucking his tongue because I had liked the way his fingers looked on the keys of the piano as he played it, and I had liked the way he looked from the back as he walked across the pasture, and also, when I was close to him, I liked the way behind his ears smelled. Those three things had led to my standing in his sister’s room (she was my best friend), my back pressed against the closed door, sucking his tongue. Someone should have told me that there were other things to seek out in a tongue than the flavor of it, for then I would not have been standing there sucking on poor Tanner’s tongue as if it were an old Frozen Joy with all its flavor run out and nothing left but the ice. As I was sucking away, I was thinking, Taste is not the thing to seek out in a tongue; how it makes you feel—that is the thing. I used to like to eat boiled cow’s tongue served in a sauce of lemon juice, onions, cucumber, and pepper; but cow’s tongue has no real taste either. It was the sauce that made the cow’s tongue so delicious to eat.
At the time I was thinking of Tanner’s tongue, I was sitting at the dining table with Miriam, the youngest of Lewis and Mariah’s four children, feeding her a bowl of stewed plums and yogurt specially prepared for her by her mother. She did not like this, and so to make her eat I told her that she was not really eating stewed fruit and yogurt but a special food that grew in wildflowers and was very much sought after by fairies. I told her that if she ate enough of it, eventually she would be able to see things that other people could not see. This was just the sort of thing my mother used to say to me when I would not eat my food, and just as I did not believe my mother, Miriam did not believe me; she ate, but it was a long, drawn-out process, just as it was a long, drawn-out process when my mother used to feed me. It was in those times when my mother used to feed me that I first began to notice her, really notice her, as if she were a specimen laid out in front of me. I was not Miriam’s mother, and, in fact, whenever I fed her and told her these stories, a sort of bribe to get her to do things my way, I always did it in a low voice, so that Mariah would not overhear. Mariah did not believe in this way of doing things. She thought that with children sincerity and straightforwardness, the truth as unvarnished as possible, was the best way. She thought fairy tales were a bad idea, especially ones involving princesses who were awakened from long sleeps upon being kissed by a prince; apparently stories like that would give the children, all girls, the wrong idea about what to expect in the world when they grew up. Her speech on fairy tales always amused me, because I had in my head a long list of things that contributed to wrong expectations in the world, and somehow fairy tales did not make an appearance on it.
It was the beginning of summer and so we were in the house on the Great Lake, the house where Mariah had spent her summers when she was a child and where now, with her husband and children, she spent her summers as an adult. We had all come here right after the children’s holidays began. From where Miriam and I sat at the dining table, we could see Mariah standing over the kitchen sink. The dining room and kitchen were all part of the same enormous room, and we were far enough away from Mariah so that if we talked softly all she could hear was our muffled voices. She stood in front of the sink, studying some herbs she had grown in pots on the windowsill. The sun came in through the window, but only as far as the faucets, so that Mariah was in the semidark, looking at the plants in the sun. What Miriam might have seen was her beautiful golden mother pouring love over growing things, a most familiar sight to her five-year-old eyes; but what I saw was a hollow old woman, all the blood drained out of her face, her bony nose bonier than ever, her mouth collapsed as if all the muscles had been removed, as if it would never break out in a smile again. Mariah was forty years old. She kept saying it—“I am forty years old”—alternating between surprise and foreboding. I did not understand why she felt that way about her age, old and unloved; a sadness for her overcame me, and I almost started to cry—I had grown to love her so.
But then Lewis bounded into the room. Lewis was a lawyer, and I suppose that’s why he was always reading something carefully. Now he carried in his hand a large newspaper, the pages parted to the financial section; either he had just gotten off the telephone after having a chat with his stockbroker or he would soon do so. He made a mock animal sound to Miriam and waved the newspaper at me, and he walked over to Mariah and embraced her from behind and licked the side of her neck with his tongue. She leaned her head backward and rested it on his shoulder (she was a little shorter than he, and that looked so wrong; it looks better when a woman is a little taller than her husband), and she sighed and shuddered in pleasure. The whole thing had an air of untruth about it; they didn’t mean to do what they were doing at all. It was a show—not for anyone else’s benefit, but a show for each other. And how did I know this? I just could tell—that it was a show and not something to be trusted.
I did not feel that I knew Lewis well at all, and I did not want to. I liked him; he told me jokes, he liked to make me laugh. I think he felt sorry for me, because I was so far away from home and all alone. Whenever he heard me speak of my family with bitterness, he said that I spoke about them in that way because I really missed them. He spoke to his own mother every day, but I could not tell if he really liked her. Sometimes he treated me as if I were another one of his daughters, and he would tell me fantastic stories just to see my face as it formed in belief and then fell apart in disbelief. If I said something he thought interesting, he would ask me all sorts of questions and then later bring me books, books that I did not even know existed. He surpassed the usual standard of handsomeness, and his features in profile looked as if they belonged on a coin or a stamp. What was nice about Lewis was that he did not draw your attention to how handsome he was; he didn’t draw attention to anything about him. This was a nice trait in a man, and I made a note of it right away. I was not in love with him, nor did I have a crush on him. My sympathies were with Mariah. It was my mother who had told me that I should never take a man’s side over a woman’s; by that she meant I should never have feelings of possession for another woman’s husband. It was from her own experience that she spoke—the experience of having women who had loved my father, and whose love he had not returned, try to kill her, while they left my father without so much as a singed hair on his head.
After Lewis licked Mariah’s neck and she leaned against him and sighed and shuddered at the same time, they both stood there, as if stuck together. It was one of those times when you know the events of a lifetime are passing through a person’s mind. It’s possible that they were thinking about the same things; it’s possible that in thinking about the same things they even came to the same conclusions. But to look at them, they seemed as if they couldn’t be more apart if they were on separate planets. The room was not exactly filled with silence; I was still feeding Miriam and had just told her that her bowl of stewed fruit and yogurt was really a “potage,” and she seemed to like the word as much as I did when at five years old I first found it on a bottle of Marmite. But when the phone rang we all jumped, for the noise filled up the room and had the quality of an alarm, as if it was a warning to leave a building, quick. It was Mariah’s best friend, Dinah, reminding her to come to a picnic in honor of some endangered marshland. It must have been my age, but I could see no reason to be so worked up over vanishing marshland.
For a long time I had understood that a sigh and shudder was an appropriate response to a tongue passing along the side of your neck. After I could find nothing unusual in sucking on Tanner’s tongue, I noticed that his hands on my breasts, first rubbing delicately and then very hard, produced an exciting feeling. I do not remember how I knew to do this, but I pressed his head down to my chest, and as he licked and sucked my breasts, I thought, This must never stop. At the time, my breasts were the size of droppers, the small dumplings my mother would put in pumpkin soup, but they felt as if they took up my whole body. I thought I could have this feeling only with Tanner and I had to be careful when I thought of his lips on my breasts, for just that, a thought, would make me forget what I was doing. I would sit at my desk in school, I would lie in my bed at night, I would walk down the street, and all the time I would go over and over, very slowly, the times Tanner’s mouth would crawl back and forth across my chest. Then I began to think not just of Tanner’s mouth on my breasts but other boys’ also. One Saturday afternoon I was in the library behind a tin cupboard, looking at some old periodicals that contained articles I needed to read for a botany class. A boy I knew very vaguely—his mother and mine were in the same churchwomen’s fellowship—had been sitting at a table nearby, and suddenly he got up, walked over to me, and pressed his lips against mine, hard, so hard that it caused me to feel pain, as if he wanted to leave an imprint. I had two reactions at once: I liked it, and I didn’t like it. But after he pulled his head away I did the same thing to him, only now I placed my tongue inside his mouth. The whole thing was more than he had bargained for, and he had to carry his school-bag in such a way as to hide the mess in the front of his trousers. We met this way for a few Saturday afternoons, but he wore his hair in a pompadour style, imitating a popular singer of the time, a singer I did not at all care for, and I eventually found the smell of the brilliantine he wore to keep his hair in place unpleasant. It ended just as it began, without words. I stopped showing up at the library on Saturday afternoons, and when we passed each other on the street he never stopped to ask me why.
* * *
The day we arrived at the lake was a very hot day—unusual, everyone said, for that time of year; but for the first time since I had left home I felt happy. It had been six months now, and I knew that I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born. I had also grown to love the idea of seasons: winter, spring, summer, and autumn. What wonderful names—and, as far as I could see, appropriate. The heat of summer was different from the heat I was used to. That heat made everything in its path long for the shade; the sun was always overhead, as if you might reach up and touch it. It was a heat that bore down on you, first as a warning, then as a punishment, for sins too numerous to count. But this new heat seemed blessed; it was a pleasant conversation piece; it was a contrast to the six months just past. And the days were so long. I was not used to seeing the sun set after eight o’clock and dusk lasting for over an hour after that. It was as if the earth were a character with many different personalities.