Again the wife showed up at the house. The pale freckled hand with its gold wedding band up against the window. Karl had made no provision for Miss Christie or for Denise in his will. In fact, there was no will, and the apartment and the car were in her husband’s name. As for the furniture and the bank-book-full-of-money, that Miss Christie could keep, for that would go so quickly from a woman who only knew how to work on her back. The wife stood guard at the door with six police officers as Miss Christie was forced to move out of the apartment. This was how she eventually ended up in the yard. Miss Christie was crying by the time she finished telling my mother the story, and my mother was quiet for a long time, no doubt recalling a similar incident with my own father. Mama reached over and took Miss Christie’s hand.
“It happens to the best of us,” she said, sighing. “At least you knew there was a wife. Some of us didn’t even have that luxury.” They said nothing else the rest of the night, and I don’t know how long they stayed out there like that, because, after a while I stopped my eavesdropping and fell asleep.
Everyone expected my mother and Miss Christie to become firm friends since they were the only two women in the yard to have gone to high school, but this friendship never came to fruition. For one thing, Miss Christie was always in some kind of competition with my mother, always trying to one-up Mama in conversations. She kept insisting she knew more about everything than anyone else in the yard. After all, she had travelled abroad a few times, thanks to Denise’s father. To make matters worse, Miss Christie had taken an instant and total dislike to me, because of how bright people said I was.
When I was younger my mother sometimes left me with Miss Christie when she went to work. Miss Christie took away my lunch and put me to stand in a corner for the stupidest reasons.
“You might be a little princess for your mother,” Miss Christie would say, “but you are not any princess for me!”
If she happened to be watching several other children, Miss Christie would organize a reading or spelling contest. It always came down to a race between myself and Denise, who, truthfully, always seemed bored with these contests. I always ended up winning, much to Miss Christie’s dismay and once she left me standing under the tamarind tree where red ants bit me all over my legs, causing them to swell up badly. By the time my mother came home my legs were so swollen they looked like two tree trunks. That night, when my mother asked me what happened, I told her everything Miss Christie had ever done to me in my life, and my mother stormed out of the house and gave Miss Christie a good cursing out! That was the end of their blossoming friendship.
The other woman, Nadia Blue, lived at the front of the yard, across from the mad woman who collected bottles and cans on her daily trips around the city and hung them on the shrubs growing wild in front of her house. Nadia lived with her man, Jesus, and their five children. Jesus and Nadia were forever quarrelling and fighting because of all the other women Jesus had. It seemed every few months someone was either pregnant or just had a baby for Jesus.
Jesus’ dream was to make it to America, to New York, where he would make so much money he could live like all the foreigners and drug dealers who flocked to the island during the Christmas holidays. Jesus would buy a car; no, more like a whole fleet of cars with the money flowing like milk and honey on the streets of New York. He would drive around in style and be treated like the don he really was. He would take care of Nadia and all his other baby mothers. Nadia wouldn’t have to take in other people’s clothing and scrub and wash them until her back ached and her fingers were pale and wrinkled from constantly being in the water; the children would have everything they needed. He would lavish special attention on Nadia, for even though he had several other baby mothers, Nadia was his main woman. She was the one he worked the hardest to get, they’d been together the longest, and they’d been through the most together.
“I don’t care how pretty a woman thinks she is,” Jesus was fond of saying, “she can never come before my Nadia. Nothing in the world can ever separate us, for no matter what, my Nadia not leaving!”
And he was right about that; for all they quarrelled and fought, Nadia would never leave Jesus. She had been with him from the time she was sixteen years old when she’d moved out of her mother’s house just to be with him.
The last woman was Miss Sarah who lived in the yard before it was a yard, had lived there when the place was open land where stray goats pastured. She was an old woman with thinning gray hair, but still surprisingly sprightly for her age. She knew everybody’s business: which young girl was pregnant even before she started to crave green mangoes with salt, and who the girl was pregnant for even when she was trying to keep the man’s name quiet. She had a daughter in England who regularly sent her money and kept promising to visit but never seemed to make it. It was rumoured that Miss Sarah had this daughter with a sailor-man, that in times gone by she had been no different from Rachel, but Miss Sarah vehemently denied this. Her daughter’s father, she always insisted, was a respectable white gentleman with whom she’d lived for several years. When they broke up, he took the child back with him to England.
“Good evening Miss Sarah, Miss Christie, Nadia.”
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the little bright spark who passed her examination,” Miss Sarah said. “I stayed clear round the back and heard your mother this morning.”
“What school you pass your examination for?” Miss Christie wanted to know.
“All Saints,” I mumbled. Miss Christie always made me nervous and uncomfortable.
“Oh,” she could barely conceal her surprise.
“That is good, really, really good,” Nadia started smiling down at me. “I hope one of my girls will get into a good school like that. Perhaps Nilda will go to a school like that. She didn’t pass this time, but there’s always next year ...”
Miss Sarah began shaking her head in amazement when she heard the school I was to go to. “You so bright! So very bright!” I could hear the affection in her voice.
“These girl children,” Miss Christie sighed heavily, “they can be such a disappointment. Such a disappointment. If Denise had been studying her books instead of studying how to get a baby I am sure she would be going to that school today. But they are such a disappointment these girl children, and you can never tell what will eventually become of them, even when they start out young and full of promise.”
Miss Sarah took the chewing stick she was munching on from her mouth and sent a stream of white spittle flying out in front of her.
“Stop all this right now, Miss Christie! Your Denise was always too force-ripe for her age. And everybody know she not nearly as bright as our Gloria here. I have no qualms about saying Gloria is the brightest child in this yard, maybe even the brightest child around these parts. And she well-behaved and mannersable too, even if we don’t like some of the friends she keeps.” Miss Sarah winked at me and the other two women started laughing. Miss Sarah reached down in the pocket of her housedress, pulled out a bill and handed it to me.
“I’ve been waiting to give you this all day. Give the money to your mother to put in your piggy-bank for you. She pass here not too long ago with a bag of pig tails and red beans, so I know she cooking stew peas and rice for dinner tonight!”
Immediately I was hungry. Stew peas and rice was one of my favourite meals. One I hadn’t had in a long time.
“Thanks for the money, Miss Sarah,” I said, walking away.
“It’s nothing at all. Nothing at all. You a good child.”
“And you must come and help Nilda when her time come to take the exam again next year,” Nadia Blue said after me.
Not a word came out of Miss Christie’s mouth.
As I approached our house the smell of pigtails drifted out into the yard and enveloped me. I could make out the thyme, pimento and escallion Mama put in the stew. I stepped into the house and Mama smiled over at me from the tiny kitchen.
“Guess what? Mean old