“Mama,” I said, committing the crime of interrupting her, “Can I just please take the dress with me to the country? Just please? I promise to take extra good care of it!”
She looked at me as if I was crazy. “No,” she said with finality, “you cannot take the dress with you.”
I’d stood there just looking at her. Why didn’t my sad face move her? I never seemed to get away with anything with my mother. It was then I decided what I would do. I even convinced myself it was Mama’s fault that I had to resort to my plan. After all, I’d asked her up front to take the dress and she’d refused. Now she was forcing me to get Grandy to take the dress for me.
My mother was still talking as I schemed. “By the time you come back home that dress will be fit only for the garbage! Mango stain, guinep stain, all sorts of stain will be on that dress.”
Grandy always said if Mama had more children, or if she had a man to come home to in the evening, then these little things would never bother her so much.
“She only fuss so much with you because you’re the only one. She focus all her attentions on you. It wouldn’t be the same if she had other people in the house…”
Sometimes I did wish Mama had something or someone else to attract her attention, especially when I wanted to go outside and play and she refused to let me. But in truth, I really could not see Mama with a man or with any more children. I could not see Mama with anyone but myself. There were the times when she took my face in her hands and just stared and stared down at me. She would straighten out my eyebrows and kiss me on the tip of my nose and I knew I was the centre of her universe.
“I can see everyone in your face,” she would say. “I can see Mama, Aunt Clara, I can even see your father…” she always paused when she mentioned that-man-your-father, “his bones, his eyes, the set of his face. When you turn sideways I can really see your father. But not only him. Many different people in our family I can see in your face.”
Mama rarely spoke about my father and, the few times she did, always hesitated before talking about him. Mostly she spoke about him only when she was upset about something I had done, or the difficulties she was having in raising me by herself. Then she talked about how my father had abandoned his responsibility and left her alone to raise me.
“Lying, conniving wretch!” she would always begin. “I wonder if he even still with that so-called wife of his! The years of my life I wasted with that man! Lying, conniving wretch!” This would usually suffice for a few months – until she added something else to what seemed to me an unending list of all the bad things my father had done to her.
“A man,” my grandmother was always saying. “Your mother needs herself a good man. Someone to come home to in the evenings. Someone, other than you, Gloria, to fuss and bother herself over. You can’t yet understand it, Gloria, and I can’t begin to explain right now the difference a good man can make to a woman’s life. All I can tell you is things would be very different if your mother had herself a nice gentleman-friend.”
And Grandy was always on the lookout for a man for Mama. Every time she came to visit she would tell Mama which one of her “schoolmates” in Lluidas Vale was still single, and which one asked after her lately. If Grandy was there when a man she considered eligible was visiting Mama, she would go out of her way to try to make the person feel more comfortable, and always ended up doing just the opposite. Grandy would heap praises on Mama, about how well she could cook, how neat and tidy she was, how kind-hearted and giving. Grandy continued like this until Mama excused herself from her guest, and called Grandy into the back room. A hushed quarrel would follow.
“Stop it! Just stop it!” Mama would whisper. “It’s not what you think! He’s just a friend.”
“Friends make the best husbands,” Grandy would reply, loudly enough for the visitor to hear.
“For Christ almighty’s sake,” Mama would say, “stop it! It’s nothing like that. I tell you, he’s just a friend.”
“All right!” Grandy lowered her voice in defeated anger. “I just hope one of these days someone other than your “friend” walk through that door!”
Mama would go back to her visitor on the verandah, and Grandy would sit down inside seething. If Grandy happened to look over at me, she would start on what a disappointment my father had been; she was sorry the day my mother ever set eyes on that-man-your-father. She would say all of this very loudly, as if she’d forgotten Mama had a visitor on the verandah.
“Rotten good-for-nothing scoundrel. Mash up my daughter life. Give my daughter a child and run away and leave her to deal with it alone. This was never the life my child was meant to live.” Grandy’s eyes would cloud over and fill with tears. Her chest would heave, she would reach into her bosom for a handkerchief, look around the two tiny, crowded rooms Mama and I called home and shake her head.
“Not that I have anything against you, Gloria,” she’d say when she saw tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. “You know I love you more than life itself, for you is my own flesh and blood, and somehow we always manage to love our own flesh and blood. But your father, Gloria, your father – I cannot lie, I cannot stand the man!”
I remembered him vaguely. My father. When I was younger he would visit on Sundays, sit me on his lap, and try to talk and play with me, but everything was so stilted, so out of step, he would just give up. He was someone who wandered in and out of my life, and expected me to be cheerful whenever he was around. Then there was the bothersome change in my mother when he visited. She seemed to lose her voice and could not speak. He had to keep asking her to repeat everything she said. Worst of all was the fact that she always seemed to be trying to get rid of me when my father was around, sending me out to play in the yard, (something she did not ordinarily do), telling me to go visit one of the women in the yard (again, something she did not ordinarily do).
If my father happened to stay for dinner, my mother took down her best plates for him to eat on, gave him the biggest and best pieces of meat and piled on layers and layers of rice and peas, potato salad and lettuce and tomato until he had to tell her to stop. He would look down in embarrassment at the huge mounds of food on his plate – although he always managed to eat everything up and sniff around for more. If my mother happened to look at me at meal times during his visits, it was always with a look of disapproval at the many rice grains scattered around my plate. I, of course, always made sure there were lots of rice grains scattered around my plate to keep my mother’s eyes busy.
These visits came to an end one Sunday afternoon when a woman turned up in the yard looking for Mama. She arrived just after my father left and had obviously followed him. Mama and this woman ended up in a terrible fight. This woman told Mama she was my father’s wife, that they lived together in Vineyard Town with their four legitimate children, and why didn’t my mother and her bastard-child leave her husband alone!
My mother almost died from the shock of it all. My father had told her he lived with his parents, strict Christians, in their home on Red Hills Road, and as soon as he got his own place, we would all be living together. The one good thing that came from the incident was the friendship between my mother and Rachel. For while everyone else in the yard gathered around the two women, spoiling for a fight, Rachel had sense enough to realize Mama had never fought a day in her life. When the woman pulled out a long silver butcher’s knife out of her bag and started brandishing it in my mother’s face, she didn’t know what to do. She just stood there, mouth open, looking at the woman. I started crying loudly and Rachel pushed through the cheering crowd and grabbed the woman by her neck as if she was nothing but a peel-neck fowl she was about to skin.
“Listen to me, and listen to me good. You cannot just walk into this yard where this woman live, pulling knife against her and expecting to get away with that.” The crowd stopped their cheering and quieted down, and you could tell some of the people were beginning to feel ashamed of themselves.
“Now I want you to get out of