Deborah Duperly, Contributor
SHE ALWAYS lived in her head and they worried about her, would not leave her alone to play with her friends. In her world, there were gypsies and femmes fatales, movie stars and cowboys and, reluctantly, cowgirls. Cowgirls were never enough, there was always something missing - a half-finished product. They worried because she hated dresses, caught lizards, climbed trees and played marbles. But invariably she played in her head, and that worried them most of all.
She peered over the 'veil' - a treasure stolen from the overpowering wardrobe. That wardrobe where she could curl up inside and hide amidst cedar smells and mothballs - a mysterious chest of beads and baubles, scarves that became veils and boxes, locked and impenetrable. Over the veil she saw women, old women, middle-aged women, young women, girls.
Florence, short, rotund, in deep conversation with herself, was an old black one who called the young child 'Miss'. She smelled of musk and shoe polish; Kiwi black rubbed lovingly into her hair brought forth a Mona Lisa smile. The child peeped through the crack in the door as Florence rubbed and slowly, in the dim light, the room came alive. A single iron bed pushed hard against the board wall, covered in a patchwork of colours, pieces of fabric, pieces of lives. A faded dress that had seen better days, a once bright Christmas cloth, a new blue end, hung on tacks studding the walls. Movie stars and calendar girls pretended not to notice her probing eyes from their safe wood homes. Their white faces shone in the dimness, their smiles got brighter, redder as they tried to distract her from their torn dog-eared edges that met the tacks. An oil lamp and a Bible, unread but well-handled, lay on a small wooden table close to the bed, and an old rocking chair of rush crick-cracked slowly, rhythmically, in the dimness. A chest of drawers with antimacassar completed the setting as Florence rubbed before the age-spotted mirror, below the bulb lazily swinging from the old zinc roof.
The big woman was her grandmother, the owner of the wardrobe and the family, the family of women. She was short with a large presence, and a source, at least to the child, of borrowed treasures. Instinctively, the child knew that she would always find succour within those large arms - at least as long as she was a child. From a distance of not-knowing, the big woman's face appeared stern and grim. Her wavy hair was parted in the middle and pulled tight away from the round face and dark linear eyebrows. A cigarette would never be far from the tight-lipped mouth - a mouth that would sing lullabies and bestow soft kisses, yet command the women and this world. She lived in the large front room with sash windows and wood floors buffed to a shine by Florence's coconut husk. There was a sewing machine with a tired foot pedal and a dresser with photographs of smiling women in hats. Two big beds commandeered the middle space; a lone washbasin stood, porcelain-white, in the corner.
The old woman was the big woman's mother, and she lived in the middle room off the long dark corridor where men with stiff moustaches glared down on intruders softly sidling by. The old woman had grey-white kinky hair pressured into a tight bun. She walked with a 'tree' stick, smooth and slick to the touch. She ruled the children in the day, the keeper of the corners; she also ruled the gardener and Florence and the revolving tide of washerwomen. She clacked and sucked her teeth all day long and, occasionally when a friend came to call, they would clack together in a symphony of sorts. The girl children would steal comic glances at each other across the cavernous drawing room while they served out their corner sentences. She was bush tea at four o'clock high and she was the Christmas pudding maker with her yabba bowl and large glass jar of rum-soaked fruits. She was the keeper of old time stories, of 'Dromily' days of big country houses and school trips in pony traps. At night, in the tired iron bed, she visited with the spirits of her sons and dreamt visions of those not yet born.
The middle women included the child's mother, soft and white, with a big smile and deep eyes. She was beautiful and young, but also old. Life and death shared space in her spirit. She was the driver for the big woman and the chaperone of her young women cousins. She worked; she was divorced, and, with her two girls, lived in the big house of women. The child remembered visiting a room occupied by a strange man with women hovering. She had been glad to leave; the air had been heavy and weighed on her spirit. Soon after, she learnt, the father man ran to New York. He sent dolls at first. And then, gradually, he disappeared, like sinking leaves in a pond.
The other middle women, the aunts, came and went, so they were of her peripheral world. One lived in the white snow world and always sent or came home with large boxes every Christmas, filled with excitement and foreign gifts and books. The child imagined Canada as somewhere up above her head, far away. She heard it described as colder than the icebox. From this aunt she learned about the world of books, a world perfectly suited to her head.
The other aunt was married to the smiling man who was tall and brown. He went to church late every Sunday and then went to golf. The aunt did not drive, but she always told him how to drive; he only smiled. They had two girls, her cousins, who spent the days in the woman house with her. She played with them sometimes, though there were always fights that led to the inevitable corners. But there were good times, too. One was almost her age; she had laughing eyes and dimples in her cheek, and tight curly hair. She was white, too. The other cousin was little, so the child took no account of her except to pretend she was a doll.
The child's sister was the biggest girl - not yet woman. She was plump and white and had long shining hair, and she played fairy queens and angels in school plays. Once she choked on a fish bone and the child learned that a piece of bread would find and rescue the bone. She remembered her sister always wearing glasses and reading a book, her shirt collar positioned over the tip of her nose as if to close out the world.
And she, the child, looked in the mirror. A skinny brown frame with uncontrollable curly hair looked back at her. The teeth were too large for the mouth and the eyes, bright in the mirror, would run and hide in the presence of strangers. For with strangers her magic head would shut down, her voice would strangle in her throat, and, much worse, her thoughts would lock themselves away - even from her.
In her world of women, there was Winston the gardener who came sometimes, with a machete, cutting away all the camouflage, exposing her to enemy vision. He would show up when the grasses were high, so high she could lie flat and no one would see her and she would be in a fort or in the jungle, brave and strong. He had a large nose and a simple face, uncomplicated. He was brown and wore ragged pants and a loose shirt. His feet were flat and splayed and he would rest them on the mango tree trunk as he smoked cigarettes and showed the child magic tricks: stones that would disappear up his great nose and reappear behind his ears. His laugh was a chuckle that barely escaped his throat, but it was then that his eyes lit up and pushed his bushy eyebrows up into his scraggly hair.
On a day Winston was chopping, a curious stranger appeared in this woman world. He was a white man whose skin had turned to honey, with white hair in the style of a monk. He walked slowly up the driveway, mopping his brow with a chequered handkerchief. She saw his blue eyes, blue like the sky. He beckoned to the playing child to call the big woman. His name, she learned, was thatwretchReggie. Much later she found out it was her maternal grandfather and his name was just plain old Reggie.
There was a routine to the days in this hot-weather world. The middle woman who was her mother would chauffeur them to school early, before the sun was truly burning. Life started early in the tropics.
Every first day of term the butterflies would come back, running riot in her stomach. Try as she might she could not get them to leave. The blue tie so meticulously tied pointed the way to the polished brown shoes where, for most of the school days, her eyes would live. Her hair was secured in two plaits down her back, plotting ways of escape, and her thoughts would pack their bags for the duration.
School was a haze of pink buildings and white nun-angels with stern-happy faces and noisy, scampering children playing amongst the tendrils of the Banyan tree. All women - girl women, young, middle-aged and old women, in this extension of her woman world. But magic places existed where her thoughts would peep out of hiding and hold swift intense conversations. The Banyan tree was a magic place if you could pretend the children were not there; and then the fairies would appear and slyly wink, knowing her thoughts. There was the sunken garden, off limits, filled with tropical colours into which she would gaze and know that one day she would walk it. The chapel was a quiet space and it was there that she learnt that people had made her up. She knelt and thought about the nuns. Did they have hair? Did they have bodies? She thought about her flesh friends, who moved in and out of her life like moods. By thinking, she learned to know when they would move and when they would come back. She learned that she could be like other people when she wanted to be; like changing clothes, from easy pedal pushers to sticky dresses (mostly they were sticky dresses). The thing she really learnt at school was not to say anything until she knew she was right, and then it was not always necessary to say it. She took the first part away with her for all of her life, but for a while she lost the other, more important point.
She was still too young for the buses, so after school the smiling man would take them home to the woman house, where after a quick lunch and homework the children were sent to play. She would rush to climb mango trees, run the cats under the house and chase chickens; or with her curly cousin would pretend Florence was a horse and jump on her back as she wrestled with the wood floors, a coconut husk her only weapon. At other times they would lock Florence in the big bathroom and run away with the key, giggling as the black woman shrieked their eternal damnation and called on the Lawd for help. At four o'clock high, they had to be 'tidied' and pre-sent for tea with the old woman. Kola Champagne with bun and cheese or jam sandwiches. Bush tea for the old woman.
Soon the middle woman who was her mother, and the big woman, would come home from work and survey the queen-dom, such as it was. The smiling man would come and take the cousins away, night would swiftly descend on the big house, and the night noises would begin: tree frogs, croaking lizards, barking dogs and howling cats amidst dinner sounds at the old oak table. Her most loved and hated noise was the dense tap-tap of rain pouring on the old zinc roof - a sound that both scared and comforted her, and one that emerged later in her life to signal fear and, finally, peace. Between the raindrops she listened to the BBC world news from London, that place where so many book people lived. She listened for familiar place names and tried to imagine the man talking, the one who always had a cold.
Friday nights were jumbo malts from Monty's and movie cartoons on the veranda, flickering on the screen as the reels turned laboriously. It never mattered that cartoons were often repeated; it became the game to shout out the dialogue before the characters. Saturdays were library days, the big woman going off and leaving them to story time and brightly coloured books. The stories were magical, peopled by all sorts of wondrous characters, and Anancy was king. She was allowed to take out three books, painfully and carefully chosen. And yet she marvelled at the big woman's net bag filled with big thick books that would all be read in a few weeks. As with the cigarettes, the big woman was never without a book.
Sunday mornings were painful for the child; she was imprisoned into sticky crinoline dresses and forced to wear a hat with a bow. They waited for the smiling man to pick them up she, her sister and the big woman. She envied the woman who was her mother who waved goodbye as they drove out, late as usual. When they entered the big church everyone turned to look, although they knew who it was because they were always late on time. She used church time to think, yet pretended to follow the Latin service in her little book that was filled with cards of saints with halos. All saints were white with serene blue eyes. She liked to study the Stations of the Cross and felt deeply sorry for Jesus as he laboured under his load. She studied the backs of people in the rows of benches and made up stories about their lives, stories that would continue week after week, like Portia faces Life. A hurried exit was made from church so that the smiling man would make his golf game on time, and the curly cousins were sent off to Sunday school.
That was one battle she won. They tried to send her there but she won by never opening her mouth. Ever!
Sundays at the beach were the best times for her. The sea was her friend and they talked everlastingly. Like her, the sea delighted in changing images, rough and riotous one day, calm and serene the next. Every summer, for one glorious month, she was taken to live by the sea, and the days were endless rounds of searching for shells, playing at mermaids and deep, sleep-full dreams '... up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren't go a huntin' for fear of little men...'. Life was like that in the tropics, in her zinc roof world of women.
