For the first time in a long time, Mama looked young, happy and carefree. She was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of faded denim shorts and had a big cooking fork in her hand. Her hair was not up in a severe bun as it usually was, but down around her shoulders. There was an unmistakable sparkle in her eyes.
“Come here!” She called me over to the pot, as if she had a big surprise on the stove. I pretended Miss Sarah had said nothing to me and feigned surprised when I saw the tiny white dumplings floating up over the pink pigtails and red kidney beans.
“That’s not all,” Mama continued, seeing the look on my face. “I’m making soursop juice sweetened with condensed milk and nutmeg just the way you like it. Change out of your uniform and help me set the table. Put on the white tablecloth with the gold-flowered embroidery. Tonight we celebrating!” She blew me a kiss before turning back to the pot.
Usually I grumbled whenever I was given additional chores, but not today. I put down my school bag, took off my school clothes, and started doing what my mother had asked me to do. Yes, tonight we were celebrating!
CHAPTER 2
Grandy came a few weeks later, bearing gifts as usual. This time it was star-apples, june-plums and sugar cane. Whenever she came, Grandy brought all the fruits in season and I always hurried home from school when I knew she was there. Today, as I came into the yard, I spotted her sitting on the verandah, almost hidden by the hibiscus tree, rocking in the rocking chair. She was eating a piece of sugar cane and fanning herself, and her face broke into a huge smile when she saw me.
I stood for a moment just looking at her. Mama and Grandy looked so much alike! Same high wide forehead and bushy “Indian” eyebrows. The only difference between the two was their weight: Grandy was much heavier than Mama, with an ample bosom I secretly believed was made for me to rest my head on. I made a mad dash for the verandah and stood before her.
“Just you look this bright girl that pass her common entrance examination!” Grandy said, eyeing me. “Just you look this bright girl that going to All Saints High School! Come now and give your old Grandy a kiss.”
She pulled me down into her lap and I buried my face in the side of her neck and the chair rocked harder as she laughed and laughed. Grandy had a smell all of her own. A kind of fresh country smell, doused in rosewater. Grandy handed me a piece of sugarcane from the plate beside her. The emerald streaks through its dull yellow colour gave promise of just how sweet the cane would be. I bit into it and my mouth immediately filled with the sweet juice.
“I just can’t believe it! You getting so big and all! Now you off to high school when it seems like only yesterday I was at Jubilee Hospital looking down at you curled up on your pink baby blanket. Such a tiny little thing you were, we had to pin you down on the blanket so the wind wouldn’t blow you away. A-baby-no-bigger-than-the-palm-of-my-hand. Now you’re getting ready for high school of all things!”
“Grandy,” I nuzzled even further in the side of her neck, “you forever telling me that story!”
“Well, it’s God’s own truth! I’m not lying! It does seem that way to me! Getting ready for high school!”
“Not before I spend my summer holidays with you!” I said, knowing how much this would please her. Later, when I asked her for money to buy tamarind balls and lollipops, and begged her to carry the dress my mother had bought but was refusing to allow me to take with me, I knew from experience she would agree to at least one of my requests.
“You little trickster!” she pushed me roughly away from her. “Think I don’t know what you’re doing? No tamarind balls for you today!”
“Me, Grandy?” I gave her my most big-eyed, innocent look.
“Yes, you! You’re the biggest trickster of them all! Worse than Anansi ownself! If Anansi could trick everyone and get two plantains to eat, you could do the same thing and get four!”
I lowered my eyes feigning shame.
“Ginnal!” she handed me another piece of sugarcane.
We sat together, quiet for a little while, both of us eating sugar cane. I was still on her lap and she kept rocking in the chair.
My summer holidays would begin next morning when I set off with Grandy to Lluidas Vale, the tiny village deep in the dark-blue mountains of Portland. It was where my grandfather, Grandy’s sister, Aunt Clara, and Grandy’s mother and father, none of whom I’d ever known, were all buried. It was where my mother had been born and had grown up, and where I spent every summer holiday.
“You finish packing the clothes to take with you?” Grandy wanted to know.
“I’ve almost finished packing,” I told her.
“Almost not good enough,” she gave me a push and smiled.
When she smiled, folds of dark brown skin crinkled around her dark brown eyes, and it was almost as if, beneath her skin, several different peoples were warring to assert themselves, but no one was quite winning.
“We have to make sure you’re done packing tonight, for we leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”
I smiled and said nothing. Every year there was a tug-of-war between my mother and me as to which clothes I’d take with me to the country. All my shorts would go, because I would be outside most of the time and it was the hottest time of the year. I would take the one yellow bath-suit I’d had for years – getting too tight for me, I thought, but not as far as my mother was concerned. All my old jeans and T-shirts – my yard clothes – would go, for I needed those to wear about the place. But what I most wanted to take was the sheer pink dress Mama had bought two weeks ago for my graduation from primary school. But she’d spent good money on the dress and I wasn’t to take it out of the plastic bag it was hanging in, much less consider taking it to the country with me.
Last night, when I thought Mama wasn’t looking, I’d taken the dress out and kept looking and looking it over. It had garnered oohs and ahs at the graduation. Many people wanted to take my picture. The sheer material shimmered in the lights, and the large bow at the back, with what looked like fish-scales, changed colours depending on how the light hit it. Quite a stir that dress caused. Easily the prettiest dress in the entire place.
And now Mama wasn’t allowing me to take the dress with me to the country, because I didn’t know how to take care of anything, was always ruining the things she used her hard-earned money to buy. Every year she complained Grandy didn’t supervise me enough, allowing me to have my own way, running all over the place like some wild animal, staining-up and dirtying-up all my good things. Every year when I came back home she’d say all I had in my bags were rags and she couldn’t believe Grandy was the same woman who had grown her, who would breath fire on her when she was growing up if she got so much as a spot on her clothes; here she was so lax with me now.
“Just what do you think you’re doing with that dress?” Mama demanded when she caught me with the dress on my lap. “Gloria, don’t you realize you’re getting to be a young lady now? That it’s time you started taking more care of your things? Tell me, Gloria, you really think I have the money to be buying back the things you ruin over the summer?”
I stood there, pretending to be listening to her, but what I was really doing was singing a little song in my head to drown out her ever-present voice.
“You need to take more care of your things! You need to become more responsible! Take Nilda for example. She is your age, yet the two of you are light years apart in behaviour. If Nadia is not home, Nilda takes care of herself and the younger ones, as good as her mother! Nilda don’t dirty-up her good clothes, she can even wash her own clothes! Why can’t you be more like Nilda?”
This was always her question to me. Nilda this, Nilda that, why couldn’t I be more like Nilda? Meantime I kept trying to figure out how I could take the earrings with the tiny ruby and emerald bird – as well as the dress. The earrings with the dress! Now that would show Junie, Sophie, Monique,