Minding Ben (9 page)

T
uesday was a gaping yawn that swallowed me whole. Micky and Derek went to school, Sylvia went on assignment from her agency, and it was just Dame and me alone to spend the day. Dame fell asleep, and I looked out the window for a while and then did some sit-ups on the carpet. I turned on the TV, but the screaming women on
The Price Is Right
just made my day more meaningless. I sang the Trinidadian national anthem and then tried to recite the pledge. I tried singing the American anthem but couldn't go any further than “by the dawn's early light.” I recited multiplication tables. Finally I got my letters out and, despite myself, smiled at the familiar fountain pen strokes of my mother's handwriting. I reread the letter about Henry cutting down the coconut tree and I should come home, the one where she told me that Mr. Logan had died and I should come home, and the one where she just said I had to come home. That was the last letter that I had read. Three weeks had passed, and now I was to ready to face my mother again.

Dear Gracie
,

Hoping these few words reach you by the Grace of God. I make up my mind when I sit down to write that I am not going to tell you to come back home. Even though you are not yet a woman, not till the end of this month, you was always biggish and I have no right to try and force you to do anything. All I could do is give you my blessings and wish you luck.

Something was wrong here. For the one year and two months I had lived in America, every last letter I received from my mother had begged, threatened, demanded, and cajoled me to come home. She had even promised to sell the piece of land she inherited from her own father to get some money to send me to the island university. Only come back home.

Everything here going good. I don't know if you heard from Rhonda. She ask for your address and say she going to write. Na doing fine. I still going in the garden everyday, trying to see what I can't get from the Lord and the Land. The little change you send for Christmas was a good help, but you need to save your money to do your business. Helen doing very well without you. I know she still miss you, but I won't tell you that because I already say that this letter is not about getting you to come back. All I will say is that she studying hard for exams. Mr. Haggard expects that she will do very well. Maybe not as good as you did, but she is a hard worker and we expecting her to get some passes.

My mother wasn't even aware that she compared us so.

On the daddy front, well he not doing too well.

There it was. “On the daddy front.” “Come home” in code. My mother had a special gift for manipulation. I was mad, and I wanted to cry at the same time, because I missed him and because I knew when I left home that there was a good chance I would never see him again. But that she would use that against me?

On the daddy front, well he not doing too well. He went clinic the other day and his pressure was up and the sugar sky high. I don't know what else to tell him. Is like since you gone he give up hope. I cook food without salt and he putting in he own salt. He know he not suppose to drink and he drinking the worse rum, that nasty
babash
Hamil make in the bush. Is only you who could get him to listen, Gracie. I don't know what to do. Helen don't know what to do. If we had a phone well then you could call and talk to him, but with the one foot he can't even go by the lady on the hill. So I don't know. Okay, hoping these few words reach you in the best of health and strength. Try not to be too rude to Sylvia. I know you say she could be hard to take, but sometimes you are not the easiest person in the world to get along with either. Write soon or when you have some extra change give us a call. The lady on the hill will give us the message. I know you have it but I will put her phone number at the bottom.

May the good Lord bless and keep you and don't forget to pray.

Your Loving Mother
,

Grace

I stretched out on the carpet and closed my eyes. My mother had never had any hopes for Helen and me, not that she'd told us about. One day when she was bent over the tub, I had asked her what, when Helen and I were babies, did she dream for us? What did she want for her two daughters in this world? My mother had stopped scrubbing. With her wet fingers she'd pinched my arm hard, wringing my flesh, and told me she wished that neither of us would have a child before we were married to bring shame on her house.

I was Daddy's girl. I visited him at hospital every day for the month he was there before the rot spread so far the doctors decided they had to cut. After the operation I refused to go back. Helen went and my mother went and all the neighbors in the village went, but I refused to go. Finally my mother said enough was enough. My father was looking out for me every day. So I went. I walked into the ward and thought for the first time the air smelled like the abattoir in Penal market. I couldn't look at the faces in the other beds. I looked straight ahead to my father's bed. He was propped up against the thin hospital pillows, and he followed me with his eyes as I walked toward him. I was crying by the time I got to him, and he was crying too. I couldn't look down. So what going to happen when I come home, he wanted to know. The foot not going to grow back, Grace. I said it might, and he laugh-cried a little but shook his head. It won't. So I looked. I got off the bed, turned around, and lifted the cheap white cotton sheets stamped
PROPERTY OF GENERAL HOSPITAL—DO NOT REMOVE
and saw bloody bandages crisscrossed around a swollen stump resting on a halo of bright red blood on the bedspread. The abattoir filled my nostrils again, and I fell to the white-tiled floor.

When the chance came for me to leave the village, our house was split down the middle with the logic of King Solomon: he wanted me to go and see the world, and she wanted me to stay. Helen said I'd be crazy to stay. And besides, if I went then I could send for her. I left. And for fourteen months my mother had been trying to get me to come back.

BY 6:00
P.M.
I was frantic. The Bruckners hadn't called. They weren't going to call. They would have called already if I had got the job. I toyed with the idea of calling to confirm that I hadn't got the job but didn't because the possibility existed that maybe just maybe they were still going to call. This morning I had bought another
Irish Echo
, and there had been nothing. Not one single ad to fit my size. It was Sol who'd screwed up my chance.
Look at Grace's long legs.
How stupid could one man be? Especially if I was right and Miriam was pregnant. And Ettie too.
Are you sure you want to be a nanny, Grace, and not a fashion model in New York City?
The phone rang, and I screamed, making Micky jump and Derek snap his head and Dame smile. It rang again. “You answer it, Mick.” Derek reached for the phone, and I grabbed the receiver before he could get it.

“Hello?”

It was Kathy. “Any news yet?”

I was relieved and disappointed. “Nope. I thought you might be them, actually.” I felt I owed Micky and Derek an explanation. “Kathy. Keep working.”

“Minding your stepchildren?”

“Uh-huh. Home lesson around the kitchen table. There wasn't anything in the
Echo
today.”

“I saw. And you didn't renew your ad, right?”

“Righto. Anyhow. What you up to?”

Kath inhaled. “I'm actually calling to ask you for a favor next week.” She wasn't talking like a Jamaican.

“Sure, Kath. What you need me to do?”

“Babysit.”

“Babysit who?”

“This little boy here.”

“All right, stop the shorthand. Tell me what's going on.” I got up from the kitchen table and walked into the hallway.

“Okay, next Monday we going to City Hall to get the license, and I need someone to watch this child. It won't be for long. I'll pay you.”

I stopped pacing. “Oh, my God. You and Donovan, Kath?”

“No, idiot. How it could be Donovan? Is the man he find for me.”

“Oh.” I did feel like an idiot. “Oh. You don't have to pay me, Kath. What time you planning on going?”

“Around nine-thirty.”

“It doesn't sound like a problem to me.”

“And Sylvia?”

“It should be okay. I can always bring Dame. But hey”—I expected her to be a little more excited—“you're well on your way, Kath.”

“I guess so, but, Grace, this means for sure that Donovan not leaving his wife anytime soon. If I'm married to someone else, he has an excuse to stay married to her for years.”

I didn't know that Donovan had promised Kathy to leave his wife.

“You think I should do it, Grace?”

“I can't tell you what to do, Kath. But what more important to you? To be Donovan's wife, or to get your papers and start living your life?” I didn't mean to rhyme.

She laughed a little. “Well, still tell Sylvia you need to come to the city Monday.”

“Okay. The other night Bo and I were talking—”

“Grace, somebody coming. I have to go, bye.”

In the kitchen, Derek and Micky were fighting over a pencil. “Give it back, stoopid. Is mines.”

“Nuh-uh”—Micky yanked hard—“my mother buy this pencil for me on Pitkin Avenue.”

“Nuh-uh, my father buy this pencil for me at the corner store,” Derek said.

“You lie, Derek. Your father in the G Building.”

“You lie, Micky. And you don't have no father.”

“Grace.”

I walked back into the kitchen and, in an act that would horrify King Solomon, snapped the pencil in two. “Happy now?”

SYLVIA DIDN'T COME IN
alone that night. As if belatedly answering my wish for company, she came in around seven-thirty with Dodo, Bo, and Nello, Chinese food, two six-packs of Bud, and a bottle of red rum. Bo and Nello were already drunk, and Sylvia, after telling Nello to keep his hands in his pockets, went to the kitchen to dish out food. As soon as Dodo walked into the living room, she changed the channel.

“Come on, man,” I said, “you can't just come and take over the TV.”

“Watch me,” she said and clicked around the stations.

I got off the couch and grabbed the remote.

“But what the ass is this? Child, give me back that remote. Well, I never see more. Sylvia!”

I changed back to our channel, and she tried to wrestle the remote from me. She laughed while she did it, and I laughed too, but I knew she was mad.

Nello clapped and did a James Brown dance. He was a little mouse man with big front teeth who swore his grandparents had been Grenadian. Sylvia said any West Indian he had in him had already washed away and that he was pure black American. But Nello claimed the Caribbean. Now, in early March, he wore a hibiscus-splashed shirt and baggy linen pants.

“Look fight, boy,” he said to Bo. “Ain't nothing I like more than to see two woman fighting. Place your bet, man. I betting on Black Beauty.”

“Dodo and Grace,” Sylvia shouted from the kitchen. “Stop playing the ass in front my children.”

Her children were loving it. Derek said, “Grace, Grace, throw it.” And Micky, bug-eyed and dancing on tiptoes, sucked her two middle fingers and laughed.

Bo studied us from the entry. “You see Dodo looking
maga maga
like she don't have no strength, but don't trust skinny woman, boy. They have hidden depths.”

Sylvia shouted again. “Dodo and Grace, don't make me have to come and slap the two of you. Stop it.”

Dodo wouldn't let up. She dug her long, nasty nails into my ribs, and I whacked her head with the remote. Her hard face hardened. “Oh, you serious now? Is fight you want to fight?”

“You can't just come from where you come from and take over.” I wanted to hit her again. “Bo, I wrong?”

Nello put both hands on his hips. “No, Black Beauty, you not wrong at all.”

Dodo, breathing like a bull and pocketbook hanging from her side, faced me. Calmly, she said, “Grace, give me that fucking remote control right now.”

“I didn't know church ladies could cuss.”

Nello adjusted his balls. Bo said, “The two of you is real ass for two big woman. Dodo, I find you wrong, you know. You can't just waltz in and change channel.”

She unstrung her pocketbook and, before I realized what she was doing, swung it hard at me.

“Bitch!” I dropped the remote and reached for her. Bo, sensing the joke was done, grabbed me from behind.

Nello didn't like that. “Leave them let them fight, man.”

“Put me down!” I was kicking him. “Bo, put me down!”

Sylvia came in from the kitchen. “Grace, I expect better from you, man.”

“What? Tell your ugly sister that. I thought she was a Christian.”

Sylvia walked over to the couch and took the remote from Dodo. I laughed, “ha ha,” thinking she was going to give it to me. Instead she aimed and turned off the TV. Then she walked over to the breakfront and switched on the radio, filling the room with loud calypso. She put both her hands in the air as if in surrender, turned her head Egyptian profile sharp, and swung her huge hips from side to side. “Okay, everybody win. We come up the road to party tonight, not for foolishness.”

I was only a little satisfied. “She still start it.”

“And I finish it. Go in the kitchen and take some Chinese food and a beer. Bo and Nello, come on, man, we say we having a nice lime tonight. Bring the rum. Grace, you not eating?”

“I can't eat Chinese, remember?”

“Oh shit, yes. I forget. Well, heat up some turkey curry in the michaelwave.”

“Okay, Sylvia.” I didn't want to spoil her good mood.

I decided to be magnanimous to Dodo. “Can I get you anything from the kitchen, Dodo?” You could see in her face she wanted to say something nasty, but instead she crossed her skinny legs, drew extra long on her cigarette, and said, “Thanks, I'll taste a little rum when them boys bring it.” She rattled some phlegm and got her spitbox. “It good for the cold on my chest.”