All the Finest Girls (3 page)

A chapel bell, a tree full of crows, the sounds of the neighborhood clutter the air again. Mom has turned away from me, but I can see the slightest tremble around her mouth and the whiteness of her knuckles.

“I’m sorry, that’s, um, something, that doesn’t …”

She’s looking down at the blue stones in her ring. For the first time all afternoon, Mom has nothing to say.

To my amazement, Louise smiles, revealing a little gold band between her front teeth.

“Don’t trouble wit it, Mrs. Abraham,” she says. “She’ll be good if I be minding she.”

After a moment of silence, my mother raises her head and pushes a stray lock of yellow hair from her face. “Anyway,” she says, smiling again, “you were speaking of your children. I’m sure they’re lovely. You must miss them a lot.”

Louise nods, and the conversation moves on to vacation time and the school calendar. I run inside and settle on the bottom step of June’s stairway.

By the coatrack when it’s time to leave, I watch the three women. Kissing June on the cheek
Again, I’m so sorry. Remind Mr. Rubinstein about Friday
my mother turns to Louise and takes her hand in both of hers. Louise looks shyly down at the floor.

“So anyway, thank you,” Mom says. “It would be great. I think. Marvelous.” Turning to me, she raises her eyebrows up near her hairline.

“Addy? Can you thank June and tell Louise how nice it was to meet her?”

I do as I’m told, but I can’t lift my chin from the buttons on my shirt. I don’t want Louise to look at my face. I don’t want her, whom I might never meet again, to see what I know only she can see.

“Nice,” I whisper, and run out the door.

3

I
WOKE WITH A
start, drool across my cheek, when Derek pulled up on the emergency brake. Before the driveway dust settled, he and Cyril had disappeared inside the single-level, tin-roofed house in front of which we were parked. Groggy, I sat up and tried to pull myself together.

This was the second time I’d blanked out in the space of a month. It was something I used to do a lot, passing out or falling asleep at inopportune moments. People around me didn’t care much for my behavior or for my lame excuses. I’d tried hard to lick the problem, and for a long time I had actually succeeded. But now I’d succumbed twice in the space of a month. It was unnerving and, I knew, totally unacceptable. As my grandmother Edith would say, this was neither the time nor the place.

The house, at the top of a steep drive, overlooked a village on St. Clair’s northern coast. I could see a church steeple just below and a series of dirt roads running east and west of town. Jutting out from the cove, which was not sandy but studded with rock and coral, three docks tethered a jumble of wooden fishing boats. It was a world away from the unblemished beachfronts on the island’s other side. I unstuck myself from my seat and, stepping out, got a lungful of salt air, jasmine, and the rich, fatty currents of something cooking. Across the street a man with a cane watched me as if sizing up an unusual but not particularly glamorous plant.

Just as I felt the sun might bore a hole in my head, a woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on an apron. Her hair, a milk white halo, was combed back from her dark face into a tiny knot at the back of her head. This time, I had no doubts. She was unmistakably Lou’s sister, Marva.

“Well,” she said, walking up to me and putting her hands on her hips, “lemme see yah.”

She looked me up and down, ran her tongue under her lip, sucked a tooth. But for a large mole like a cough drop on her cheek, and a different, sadder curve of the brow, I was looking into Lou’s face. Images, fragments of thought, clattered and snapped in my head
I’m dreaming dem babies still, like when I left.
The sound of my own body, rhythmic fluid and machinery, was suddenly audible. Without ceremony, Marva broke away and turned briskly back toward the house.

“Derek,” she shouted, “come get dis frighty ting’s bags now!”

I’d been to the Caribbean a couple of times, with my parents when I was small. We would travel directly from the airport to our hotel, where we remained for most of our stay. I remember one dinner in town, at a restaurant on a long veranda. A calypso band had played throughout the meal, irritating my father, and I heard a parrot speak for the first time. It was that same trip, Barbados, I think, that a taxi driver taking us back to the airport pulled over and used a pocketknife to cut me a stalk of sugarcane. I sucked on the sweet, fibrous flesh until it was confiscated by a man at customs. Never before, though, had I visited someone’s home.

The cool of the entranceway was an immediate relief. I followed Marva as she moved through a little parlor at the front of the house, its dusty spareness giving the impression of a place from which life had traveled long ago. A sofa and armchair were squarely arranged on either side of a coffee table, their bowed seats just clearing the floor. At the table’s center lay a Bible and a book titled
Redemption Songs.
The bindings of both were held together with tape. Nothing but a crucifix adorned the walls, the blood of Jesus’ wounds pink from age. I found it difficult to imagine the room ever accommodating children, a family.

The back of the house was a different story. Continuing on, I found myself at the kitchen’s threshold, where sunlight and a breeze came through the open windows. An old radio played softly from its perch above the rusty refrigerator. Long and narrow, the room seemed barely wide enough for anyone to navigate between the counters and the linoleum-topped table, but Marva, her back still to me, moved about it effortlessly. She opened cabinets, reached without looking, found work space on the jammed counters. This was her kitchen.

“Gwan and sit down,” she said finally over her shoulder, and as I did so, I realized what was in store for me.

Platters and casserole dishes lined every flat surface. Boiled vegetables, fish and curried chicken, stews and compotes, all bumped up against one another. Cakes with icing running down their sides and glass bowls of carefully cut fruit. Serving plates in neat towers. It was, of course, a house to which death had come. And so neighbors had come as well, hoping to ease the burden. The smells that hung in the air were unfamiliar, intense. Marva ladled food onto a plate, and I began to feel distinctly nauseous. To my left, down a darkened passageway, I could hear Cyril talking loudly and a woman responding in a hushed voice.

“Please don’t. I had lunch on the plane,” I lied, hoping that would be enough to save me from the dish, brown and glutinous, over which Marva was now pouring a piping-hot red sauce. “It wasn’t very good. I’m sorry if I’m not hungry.”

Marva forced a disapproving burst of air through her nostrils. From the refrigerator she drew a green glass bottle and placed it, with the steaming plate, before me. Then she sat down across the table, quiet descending about her suddenly, and folded her arms. There was little question I’d have to eat, unappealing though the idea was. I wasn’t used to being a guest and remembered quickly why I didn’t accept, or receive, many invitations.

I looked down at a little dune of speckly rice. Marva jutted her chin out and poured me a glass of tea from the bottle. I drank and felt the tea travel down in a cool stream, slaking my suddenly astounding thirst. While she refilled my glass, I tried the simplest meat dish on my plate. It looked like chicken, firm and unadorned, topped with a yellow sauce that I suspected was curry. I chewed but didn’t breathe. Finally, little by little, my tastebuds connected to my brain. The food was better than anything I could remember having eaten. A long time seemed to pass before I thought to look up and say something. Marva was studying a fray in the trim of her apron.

“My condolences. For your loss,” I offered, remembering the phrase from some long-ago exchange I’d witnessed, or a movie I’d seen. The words spooled out as weightless as thread and lay there for an instant before blowing away. I wished immediately I could take them back in favor of something better, more my own. But nothing appropriate came to mind. If Marva found my sentiment wanting, she showed no sign in her reply. Neither did she look at me.

“When I told Papa, him sit up in bed all night calling Mumma’s name.
She
been gone nearly twenty years.”

“You still have your father with you?”

“Whatever yah want to call it,” Marva answered with a sigh, pushing herself up from the table. I could see the years of work in the backs of her sculptured, masculine hands.

Marva turned her back, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe Lou’s sister didn’t like me any better than Derek did. Perhaps she was just being polite. I began to imagine the worst was yet to come and felt the sudden deadweight of the situation into which I’d maneuvered myself.

After I ate, we walked out back where the roof extended over bare earth and a few rattan chairs were placed in the shade. Marva bent to pick up a piece of trash from the dirt floor. I felt compelled to say something.

“It’s really pretty, this place.”

“Dis was Lulu’s spot,” she said matter-of-factly. “Got to where I’m setting her here in de morning, retrieving her when de sun go down.”

“What was wrong with her?”

Taking a dish towel off her shoulder, Marva smacked roughly at the chairs, scaring up a small cloud of reddish dust. She sucked her cheeks as though only a fool would ask such a question.

“Well, she lost her head enough to fall in de ocean, didn’t she?” Turning her gaze out to the horizon, Marva lowered herself into a seat. I followed suit. “I don’t know,” she continued. “Cancer took at her a few years back. Dem saying dey ridded her of it. But me never trusted dem.”

I didn’t know how my mother had gotten the idea Lou had heart trouble.

“You think it had spread?”

Just at the cliff’s edge a donkey strained on a short rope, twitching his lips to nip at the leaves on a flowering bush. Marva picked up a clump of dirt and tossed it at him, and the animal lazily backed off the red petals.

“Me not saying dat,” she answered, annoyed. I nodded quickly. Marva looked at me. “Anyway, she wasn’t right past dat time.”

Below us, the town had gone silent in the midday sun. I felt the closeness of Marva’s grief, and the peculiar distance of my own. Taking a seat, I slowly rolled the cuffs of my pants.

“I should have tried to stay in touch,” I said. “When my parents divorced, I went away to school. Everything changed a lot.”

Getting no response from Marva, I continued.

“After college I moved to New York. I’m an art conservator. I fix up old paintings.”

“Dat’s nice,” she said, nodding slowly, uninterested. “Paintings.”

“Not as nice as this,” I prattled on, gesturing out at the view. “Time hasn’t changed anything here, I bet.”

Marva gave an unfocused look at the crooked hillside.

“Well. I guess not,” she said hazily. And then she pointed east. “Except de plantation. Used to have de Buxton Plantation, dere past Billy Point. Bananas used to make money for people here.”

Grainy black-and-white photos from a high school history book came suddenly to mind. Women in long skirts spread out in a field, bent over their work. A mule and a wooden cart standing by. Plantations, I thought, were a ghost of some other era entirely.

“Shut down?” I asked.

Marva laughed and sat back in her chair. “
Blew
down. De day Lulu arrive. September the fifth. Nineteen forty-tree. Lawd, dat girl would have to arrive in a storm.”

Marva’s brow lifted, revealing a more youthful face, as an intricate yarn unwound. Any trace of reticence disappeared in the focused light of her memory. Her West Indian accent bloomed as she spoke.

“Me six but gwan grow big already. Hurricane coming like
noting
we seen before.” She leaned in and made a broad sweeping motion with her hands. “We was watching it for two days already. Nineteen forty-tree. You cyan even see it now inna history books. Lawd! Went right tru here, tore up St. Vincent, St. Lucia, clear tru Martinique. It dead a lotta people, you know. Right here in Pville two men dem friends of Papa’s went under wit deir nets just off dat beach dere. Papa was away working onna freighter and nevah home but maybe once a month. Seems de baby weren’t due fi two weeks. But just when de storm gwan heading for us? Mumma started getting pains.” Marva shook her head and I got another spectacular flash of Lou. “Jes’ me and Mumma, Auntie May, and me brother, Michael. What a piece a rain! Me trew every pot and bowl onna floor but still cyaant catch all de water coming tru de ceiling.”

“May sent Michael to fetch de doctor, but it weren’t no use. De doors dey banging like a drum and de trees pulling down till everyting was darkness. May was lighting lanterns and putting water on fi boiling. Me cyan still hear Mumma screaming same like de wind outside. Den May made me go inna back room. Back dere where Cyril is now. I lay onna floor watching May’s feet and de light coming from de fire and de sheets dropping fresh wit blood. Me cyan still cry tinking about dat night!”

Marva smacked her cheek and let out a deep, rolling laugh.

“Well, she lived, yah know. We all lived. Inna morning we look out and weren’t but a few houses still standing in Pville. Water come up and
boom
— everyting washed away. De houses, de old church, mules. And de Buxton Plantation where me grandpappy and uncles worked. Big boats, for transport, yah know, lying down inna street like lazy horses. Up here was different. Here we arright. And Lulu, her quiet like a mud crab. Always was.”

“What about Michael?”

Marva sucked her teeth.

“Michael what. Him fine.”

Looking exhausted again, she stood up. When something over my head caught her eye, I turned and saw Derek standing in the shadow of the doorway. The features of his face shrank from me, sewn up tight with scorn.

“Cyril’s in back wit Floria,” he said to Marva. “I’m going down to see about de headstone.”

Derek walked around the house, and I listened to the little car whine backward down the driveway. Regaining her composure, Marva looked down at me.