Here Comes the Sun (11 page)

John-John releases Delores. “Yuh mek har know who is in charge, Mama Delores! A good fi har,” he says. “Nuh let har get to yuh dat way.” Delores ignores him and plops down hard on her stool. She fans herself with the
Jamaica Observer
again as John-John surveys her table, checking to see if she sold any of his carved animals since the last time she saw him.

“Notin' at'all?” he asks when she tells him. He sits down on the old padded stool in Delores's stall and runs one hand through his dreadlocks, visibly puzzled. Delores is the best haggler out here.

“Yuh see people come in yah from mawnin?” she asks John-John in defense. “Sun too hot.” She doesn't tell him that she hasn't been in the mood to do the regular routine—linking hands with tourists, courting them the way men court women, complimenting them, sweet-talking them, showing them all the goods, waiting with bated breath for them to fall in love, hoping they take a leap of faith and fish into their wallets.

John-John shakes his head, his eyes looking straight ahead. “We cyan mek di heat do we like dis, Delores. No customers mean nuh money,” John-John says. His jaundiced eyes swim all over Delores's face. “Wah we aggo do, Mama Delores?”

“What yuh mean, what we g'wan do? Ah look like ah know?” Delores fans herself harder, almost ripping the newspaper filled with the smiling faces of politicians and well-to-do socialites. She wants John-John to leave her alone to her own thoughts and feelings. But the boy can talk off your ears. He would sit there on the stool and talk all day if she lets him. Sometimes this interrupts Delores's work, because tourists see him in the stall and politely walk away, thinking they were interrupting something between mother and son. “Well, Jah know weh him ah do. Hopefully him will sen' rain soon,” John-John says.

“Believe you me,” she says to John-John, who squats to diligently paint one of his wooden birds. “Tomorrow g'wan be a new day. Yuh watch an' see. Ah g'wan sell every damn t'ing me have.”

“Yes, Mama Delores. Just trus' an' Jah will provide fah all ah we,” John-John says. The pink of his tongue shows as he works on perfecting the bird's feathers. He has been working on that one bird since last week. Usually it takes him only a few hours. When he finishes the bird, he separates it from the rest, which he wraps one by one in old newspaper to place inside the box. Delores picks up the bird he's just finished. It's more extravagant than all the others, with blue and green wings skillfully outlined with black paint, a red and yellow underbelly, and a red beak. The eyes are sharp, the whites in them defined with the small black pupils. It looks like it will be a popular item, expensive. Delores already prices it in her head. She guesses fifty U.S. dollars.

As Delores examines this new bird she thinks of the parrot she once saw at Devon House in Kingston—a colonial mansion with a beautiful garden that had just opened up to the public. The year was 1968. It was her first trip to Kingston and she was eighteen years old. She left four-year-old Margot with Mama Merle and rode on the country bus to town all by herself. Initially she went to look for temporary work as a helper; but on a whim, she decided to visit the new attraction. Delores wanted to see it so that she could brag. So she wandered from Half Way Tree, where the country bus dropped her off, all the way up the busy Constant Spring Road. With a few wrong turns and stops to ask for directions (“
Beg yuh please tell weh me can fine Dev-an House?
”), she made it. It took a while for the nice Kingstonians she asked to understand her heavy patois and point her in the right direction. The mansion was just as beautiful in real life as it was in the papers—white paint glowing in the sun, big columns and winding staircases, a water fountain. But more amazing than the house were the parrots. They seemed suited for their habitat—flying from tree to tree with colored wings through a lush garden with so many different trees and flowers, Delores saw many she hadn't known existed. She followed the birds until she got to the courtyard, where genteel Kingstonians sat enjoying the outdoors under the shade of fancy umbrellas and broad-brimmed hats. As if caught in a limelight onstage, Delores fidgeted with her Sunday dress—bright yellow with lace and puffed-up sleeves. She felt like Queen Elizabeth in that dress, especially because she had a pair of frilly green socks to match and a shiny pair of flats with buckles on the sides that never showed any specks of red dirt. The only things missing were a pair of gloves.

And the Kingstonians must have thought so too, for a hundred pairs of eyes followed her when she walked by, frowning pale faces transforming into amusement. They covered their mouths as though to suppress a laugh or a sneeze. Slowly, Delores backed away. She didn't notice the pile of dog mess. She stepped right in it, and in her shock, stumbled into the path of a group of Catholic school girls on a school trip, who were gliding in a straight line across the courtyard like swans being led by their mother—a nun who walked with her head tilted confidently to the sky. The girls gasped when Delores stumbled in their path, immediately corking their small noses with delicate pale hands. The way they snickered as their eyes scanned Delores's dress made it seem as if the dog mess were smeared across it. Right then Delores hated her dress. But it was her shoes and socks that caused the most laughter. And then the nun, as polite as she thought she was, smiled at Delores, her pinkish face glowing like a heart. “You must be lost. Are you here with the group from the country? They're by the picnic tables.” How did she know Delores was from the country? That morning Delores thought she did a good job putting her outfit together in preparation for a day in the big city. But the girls were all snickering, shoulders hunched and pretty ponytails in white ribbons jerking back and forth. Delores should have listened to her mother. “
If me was suh big an' black, me woulda neva mek scarecrow come catch me inna dat color. Yuh bettah hope di people inna Kingston nuh laugh yuh backside back ah country.
” Mama Merle was right. Maybe bright colors weren't for her. The girls' laughter followed Delores all the way back through the gate like the smell of dog mess she never stopped to get rid of. The humiliation was worse than the swarm of flies.

It was as though a veil had lifted from her eyes. When she looked down, all she saw was her black skin and how it clashed with the dress. With her surroundings. With everything. It had collided with the order and propriety of the colonial mansion that day, and the uniform line of those high-color Catholic schoolgirls. Something about that trip changed her, and on the bus ride back her home looked different: the sea-green of the nauseating sea, the sneering sun in the wide expanse of a pale sky, the indecisive Y-shaped river that once swallowed her childhood, and even the red dirt from the bauxite mines caked under her worn heels, seemed like a wide-open wound that bled and bled between the rural parishes.

Delores looks at this bird John-John has created—a creature of the wild that he too had probably seen and fallen in love with. Delores frowns. John-John looks up and sees her staring at the bird. He gives her one of his clownish grins, his front teeth lapping over each other like the badly aligned picket fences around Miss Gracie's pigpen. “Ah see yuh admiring me work, Mama Delores.” He's only a boy, Delores decides. In time he will begin to see the ugly.

He raises the bird to Delores and she takes it. “Yuh didn't have to,” she says, her heart pressed against her rib cage. She always wondered if she'd ever see anything like those parrots again.

“Is fah Margot,” he says. “Tell har is a gift from me. Ah made it 'specially fah her. It's the prettiest one in di lot.”

Delores's hand shakes and the bird slips from her fingers and drops with an impact that breaks its beak. She's not sure if it slipped or if she heard Margot's name and flung it. The grin fades from John-John's face. He says nothing. He only sits there, his shirt open, his hands on his knees, with his legs wide. He looks down at the de-beaked bird on the ground.

“Me nevah mean fi bruk it,” Delores says. She bends to pick it up, but John-John stops her.

“Is okay, Mama Delores. Nuh worry 'bout it. I an' I can mek anothah one.” But the shadow hasn't left his face, and his eyes barely meet hers. She knows he has been working on this one for a while. She knows it probably took him a long time to choose the colors.

“Ah can always mek anothah one,” John-John says again after a while, his eyes focusing intently on something in front of him. “Maybe if ah start now ah can give it to you tomorrow.”

Delores is silent. She knows if she agrees it would give him too much hope. Delores lifts her tongue and tastes the dry roof of her mouth. She takes a sip of water from the plastic cup that has grown warm sitting on the table. A wave of exhaustion comes over her. Like all other things that slow her down, she thinks this too will pass. Only this time she's not certain what exactly she hopes will pass first—the drought, the fatigue, or that dark, looming thing that has been present inside her since the trip to Kingston and has recently risen to the surface. She has held on to her anger all these years, knowing very well what she would say to those girls if she ever saw them again.

“She can come collec' it herself,” Delores finally says to John-John. “Ah can't speak for Margot. Margot is a big 'ooman. She know what she like an' what she nuh like. If yuh want my humble opinion, not a bone in dat girl's body is deserving of anything yuh can sell fah good money.”

7

M
ARGOT COMES HOME LATER THAT EVENING AND SEES HER SISTER
curled on the couch. She's in a faded housedress with balls of paper scattered around her. Margot doesn't wake her. She wonders how long Thandi has been lying there like this on her side with her dress hiked up, hands between her thighs. And those damn drawings. It's four o' clock; shouldn't she just be getting home from extra lessons? Margot hardly knows her sister's schedule anymore, since she's never around much. Thandi's education means more to her than her own well-being. Just last week Margot had to march down to the school to beg that condescending nun to change Thandi's demerit status. Though her sister shouldn't be wearing a sweatshirt to school, Margot still argued on her behalf. Margot remembers herself at that age—how she had to be pried open like a lobster, though she had no choice.

At the school, Margot had flashed the Wellington name like a badge, her association with Alphonso her best asset. If she's good enough to sleep with, then why not exercise the little bit of clout it gives her? The nun didn't have to know that she's only his mistress and hotel employee. “Either you erase it from her record or else,” Margot said. This
or else
carried a lot of weight. The Wellington family donates a lot of money to the school. It's their wealth that built the hall in which the students worship, the new gymnasium—the only one on the island to have an indoor pool—and even the vocational block that houses all the typewriters, an art studio, and Singer ovens for baking classes. When Thandi got into the school and couldn't afford to pay, Margot got Alphonso to write a check for her tuition under the guise of a scholarship. This carefully cultivated relationship pays her tuition each year, and Margot will never let this opportunity slip away for Thandi.

The innocence of her sister's face holds Margot in place. Margot wonders what she's dreaming. Maybe she's running through a field of marigolds, the sky arched above her like a billowing blue sheet hanging from a clothesline—stretching from the beginning to the end of time. Margot knows she should cover her up with a sheet, but instead she sits and watches. Her sister is turning into a woman. Her breasts have swollen as though pumped with air from her breathing. And her hips have formed, filling out the dress. She's even getting lighter, the mild discoloration evident around her nose and mouth. Maybe she'll be the same café au lait shade as her father—a coolie Indian with nice hair and just enough pocket change for Delores to bring him to the house one day and introduce him to Margot. People called him Jacques. Margot was fourteen when Delores met him. He liked to give Margot sweets—gizzadas, tamarind balls, coconut drops, plantain tarts, icy-mints. As an adult, Margot gags at the smell of those sweets.

Margot's virginity was plucked like a blossoming hibiscus before its time. But this won't be Thandi's fate. Margot chants this to herself over and over again under her breath, the only prayer she has ever uttered.

Just then Thandi's eyelids flutter open as if something tells her she's being watched. She raises herself on one elbow and rubs her eyes. “Why are you watching me like that?” she asks Margot, her voice gravel-like with sleep, but with that formal diction that irks Margot. Since attending Saint Emmanuel High, her sister speaks as though she comes from money. (Her speech is even more formal, more modulated than the diction Margot uses with Alphonso and the visitors to the hotel.)

“Good evening to you too,” Margot says. She looks away to give her sister privacy as she pulls her dress over her knees.

“What time is it?” Thandi asks.

“Yuh feeling sick?” Margot asks her sister.

Thandi swings her legs off the couch to give Margot space to sit beside her. Thandi rubs her eyes again, suppressing a yawn. “Just tired. All the studying, you know . . .” Her voice trails off.

Margot looks down at the papers around them. “Right. The CXC is jus' around di corner. You're on yuh way to getting nine ones, ah hope.”

Thandi nods. She glimpses Margot's overnight bag at her feet. “You sleeping out again?” she asks Margot.

“What's it to you?”

“Who's the new man?” Thandi asks with a smirk. “You've been staying out a lot lately.”

“No one special. Don't change the subject, Thandi. I got you out of a demerit fah wearing dat stupid sweatshirt.”