Authors: Jamaica Kincaid
I did not like Sundays, and this one was not an exception. I could not believe this feeling about Sundays had followed me halfway across the world. I could not explain it, this feeling. What exactly was Sunday meant to be? Always on that day I felt such despair I would have been happy to turn into something as useful as a dishrag. When I was at home, in my parents’ house, I used to make a list of all the things that I was quite sure would not follow me if only I could cross the vast ocean that lay before me; I used to think that just a change in venue would banish forever from my life the things I most despised. But that was not to be so. As each day unfolded before me, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see the present take a shape—the shape of my past.
My past was my mother; I could hear her voice, and she spoke to me not in English or the French patois that she sometimes spoke, or in any language that needed help from the tongue; she spoke to me in language anyone female could understand. And I was undeniably that—female. Oh, it was a laugh, for I had spent so much time saying I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother—I was my mother. And I could see now why, to the few feeble attempts I made to draw a line between us, her reply always was “You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me.” How else was I to take such a statement but as a sentence for life in a prison whose bars were stronger than any iron imaginable? I had, at that very moment, a collection of letters from her in my room, nineteen in all, one for every year of my life, unopened. I thought of opening the letters, not to read them but to burn them at the four corners and send them back to her unread. It was an act, I had read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another, but I could not trust myself to go too near them. I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.
Peggy did not call me from a telephone; she came to the apartment directly. She couldn’t wait to get away from her family, she said; they were a bunch of absolutely nothing. How I envied the contempt in her voice, for I could see that her family held no magic over her. We went to the park. As usual, no men with large hands could be found. We went our separate ways, but made plans to speak to each other on the telephone the next day. I went home to my room in Lewis and Mariah’s apartment and sat on my bed. I thought of the summer I had just spent. I had come to see the sameness in things that appeared to be different. I had experienced moments of great happiness and a desire to imagine my own future, and at the same time I had had a great disillusionment. But was this not what life should be—some ups and downs instead of a constant dangerous undertow, capable of pulling you under for good?
Right after we had returned from the summer at the lake, I decided I would not attend school at night anymore or study to become a nurse. Whatever my future held, nursing would not be a part of it. I had to wonder what made anyone think a nurse could be made of me. I was not good at taking orders from anyone, not good at waiting on other people. Why did someone not think that I would make a good doctor or a good magistrate or a good someone who runs things? As a child I had always been told what a good mind I had, and though I never believed it myself, it allowed me to cut quite a figure of authority among my peers. A nurse, as far as I could see, was a badly paid person, a person who was forced to be in awe of someone above her (a doctor), a person with cold and rough hands, a person who lived alone and ate badly boiled food because she could not afford a cook, a person who, in the process of easing suffering, caused more suffering (the badly administered injection). I knew such a person. She was a friend of my mother’s and had delivered me when I was born. She was a woman my mother respected to her face but had many bad things to say about behind her back. They were: she would never find a man; no man would have her; she carried herself like a strongbox, and from the look on her face a man couldn’t find a reason to break in; she had lived alone for so long it was too late to start with a man now. But among the last things my mother had said to me, just before I left, was “Oh, I can just see you in your nurse’s uniform. I shall be very proud of you.” And I could only guess which nurse’s uniform she meant—the uniform made of cloth or the one made of circumstances.
As I sat on that bed, the despair of a Sunday in full bloom, I thought: I am alone in the world, and I shall always be this way—all alone in the world.
I had begun to suffer from violent headaches, exactly like the ones that used to afflict my mother. They would come on suddenly, as if I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, last for a while, and then disappear. They frightened me because I did not know when one would come on, and they frightened me because they reminded me of my mother. One day, in the midst of an argument I was having with her in which I was trying to assert my will and meeting defeat again, I had turned to her and said, “I wish you were dead.” I said it with such force that had I said it to anyone else but her, I am sure my wish would have come true. But of course I would not have said such a thing to anyone else, for no one else meant so much to me. Her desire not to please me was greater than my desire to erase her, but it so took her by surprise—my wish for such a thing—that she got a headache, a bad one, and it caused her to take to her bed. This lasted for days, and at night I would hear sounds in our house that made me sure my mother had died and the undertaker had come to take her body away. Each morning when I saw her face again, I trembled inside with joy. And so now when I suffered from these same headaches that no medicine would send away, I would see her face before me, a face that was godlike, for it seemed to know its own origins, to know all the things of which it was made.
* * *
My friendship with Peggy was reaching a predictable stalemate; the small differences between us were beginning to loom, sometimes becoming the only thing that mattered—like a grain of sand in the eye. She did not like to read books of any kind. She did not like to go to the museum. Going to the museum had become a passion with me. I did not grow up in a place where there was such a thing, but as soon as I discovered it, that was the only place I liked going out to visit. It was Mariah who had taken me there; she had wanted me to see some paintings by a man, a French man, who had gone halfway across the world to live and had painted pictures of the people he found living there. He had been a banker living a comfortable life with his wife and children, but that did not make him happy; eventually he left them and went to the opposite part of the world, where he was happier. I don’t know if Mariah meant me to, but immediately I identified with the yearnings of this man; I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven. I wondered about the details of his despair, for I felt it would comfort me to know. Of course his life could be found in the pages of a book; I had just begun to notice that the lives of men always are. He was shown to be a man rebelling against an established order he had found corrupt; and even though he was doomed to defeat—he died an early death—he had the perfume of the hero about him. I was not a man; I was a young woman from the fringes of the world, and when I left my home I had wrapped around my shoulders the mantle of a servant.
I was having a thought not unlike this when, unexpectedly, Mariah came up to me. The look on my face must have shocked her, for she said, “You are a very angry person, aren’t you?” and her voice was filled with alarm and pity. Perhaps I should have said something reassuring; perhaps I should have denied it. But I did not. I said, “Of course I am. What do you expect?”
* * *
Peggy took me to a party in a neighborhood that I had never visited before. There were fewer streetlights there, the buildings were uncared for, there was rubbish all about, and there were almost no people walking around. None of this frightened me; on the contrary, I found it quite thrilling. We went into a building and climbed up some cement stairs, and then we were in a large room lighted by candles and filled with plants that I knew grew in a rain forest, for I had seen them growing there. The room smelled of myrrh and marijuana. It was a party given by someone she knew from her office, a man from whom she often got the marijuana we smoked. Whatever he did in her office was not what he planned to do for his whole life. He was a painter, and some of his paintings were hanging on the walls. They were paintings of people, some of them women without their clothes on, some of them just faces. None of the paintings was straightforward; instead, the people all looked like their reflections in a pool whose surface had just been disturbed. The colors were strange—not the colors any real person would be, but as if all the deep shades from a paintbox had been carefully mixed together in a way that still left them distinct. Peggy had told me about him. She had told me that he was a pervert. I did not know exactly what she meant by that, and she never told me what he had said or done to make her think so. He might have tried to kiss her; she hated men to kiss her unless their mouths tasted of cigarettes. When we were introduced, he took my hand and kissed me on the cheek. It was the way he greeted women.
His name was Paul. I said, “How are you?” in a small, proper voice, the voice of the girl my mother had hoped I would be: clean, virginal, beyond reproach. But I felt the opposite of that, for when he held my hand and kissed me on the cheek, I felt instantly deliciously strange; I wanted to be naked in a bed with him. And I wanted to see what he really looked like, not his reflection in a pool whose surface had just been disturbed.
It was a party of ten people, including Peggy and myself. Peggy knew the others in one way or another. I had never met any of them before. This was a part of her life I did not know, and I could see why. They were very chatty people, chatty in a way she did not like: they were talking about the world, they were talking about themselves, and they seemed to take for granted that everything they said mattered. They were artists. I had heard of people in this position. I had never seen an example in the place where I came from. I noticed that mostly they were men. It seemed to be a position that allowed for irresponsibility, so perhaps it was much better suited to men—like the man whose paintings hung in the museum that I liked to visit. Yes, I had heard of these people: they died insane, they died paupers, no one much liked them except other people like themselves. And I thought of all the people in the world I had known who went insane and died, and who drank too much rum and then died, and who were paupers and died, and I wondered if there were any artists among them. Who would have known? And I thought, I am not an artist, but I shall always like to be with the people who stand apart. I had just begun to notice that people who knew the correct way to do things such as hold a teacup, put food on a fork and bring it to their mouth without making a mess on the front of their dress—they were the people responsible for the most misery, the people least likely to end up insane or paupers.
I had smoked quite a bit of marijuana and was feeling quite happy and otherworldly. I was staring at some plants that were growing in pots on a windowsill, plants I knew by the names of cassy and dagger. The cassy I used to eat with fungy and salt fish; it was said to be a vegetable good for cleaning out a person’s insides. The dagger we used to pound with a stone until it became stringlike and then plait so that it resembled a long braid of hair; at Christmastime it became part of a clown’s costume and would be lashed in the air to make a sound frightening to children. These two plants grew so plentifully where I came from that sometimes they were regarded as a nuisance, weeds, and were dug up and thrown in the rubbish. And now here they were, treasured, sitting in a prominent place in a beautiful room, a special blue light trained on them. And here I was also, a sort of weed in a way, and across the room Paul’s eyes, a sparkling blue light, were trained on me; his eyes reminded me of a marble I used to have, my lucky marble, the one that, when I played a game with it, always won.
This is usually the moment when people say they fall in love, but I did not fall in love. Being in such a state was not something I longed for. It was true that I had seen so little of the world that I hardly knew what I really thought of anything. In any case, as I looked at this man whose eyes reminded me of my winning marble, the question of being in love was not one I wanted to settle then; what I wanted was to be alone in a room with him and naked. He came over and sat next to me; he asked me where I was from; he touched my hair, and I could tell that the texture of it was new to him. I laughed a laugh that I could not believe came out of me; it was a gurgly laugh, a laugh shot full of pleasure and insincerity; it was the laugh of a woman on whom not long ago I would have heaped scorn. It was understood that when everyone left, I would not leave with them.
At that moment I looked up and saw Peggy staring at me with her own blue eyes; they were sparkling also, but with anger. She gestured to me to follow her into the bathroom, and when we got there she said to me, “I told you he’s a creep, I told you he’s a pervert.” When I said, “But I like him,” an enormous silence fell between us, the kind of silence that is dangerous between friends, for in it they weigh their past together, and they try to see a future together; they hate their present. It is never happy. Peggy lit a cigarette. Some of her hair had fallen forward into her face; she pushed it back, but it fell forward again. She placed her teeth together and sent a mouthful of smoke toward me. This had never happened before. We had never quarreled. I had never chosen the company of a man over hers. I had never chosen anyone over her. She said, “Can’t you see from his hands he’s bound to have a small prick?” I wanted to say, “Well, it should fit very nicely in my mouth, then,” but I could not bear for that to be the last thing we said to each other, and surely it would have been. I immediately imagined our separately going over the life of our friendship, and all the affection and all the wonderful moments in it coming to a sharp end. I made no reply.