She threw herself down on the grassy banking. “Well,” she said very loudly, “I guess some people are not as brave as they make themselves out to be. I thought some people from Kingston would do just about anything.”
“That anything doesn’t include getting naked so some stupid country boy can walk by and see me. What do you all say?” I turned to the other girls, seeking support.
Sophie looked down intently at something by her toes. Junie was suddenly very interested in some bush close by. Monique as always wanted a compromise.
“Well,” she said, turning to Yvette, “do we have to take off all our clothes?”
“All of them!” Yvette replied, waving her arms about like some mad magician.
The sun was strong overhead and I was hot. Too hot for all of this nonsense. I’d already been in the country for two weeks and this was my first visit to the river. I couldn’t wait to get into the cool river water and wade in up to my knees. I’d scoop some of the water up in my hands and let it fall all over my hot and tired face. Yvette with her foolishness was keeping me from that water. Of course, I could have gone in without her, and I knew that chances were the other girls would follow me in, but I didn’t want to do this. Yvette might get upset and take off, and much as she got on my nerves sometimes, I did not want that. The outing just wouldn’t be the same without her, difficult as she could be.
When I’d told Grandy I was going to the river with my friends to catch shrimps, she stopped frying the plantains for breakfast and thought about it for a moment.
“Well,” she looked in the direction of the mountains, “don’t look like we going to get any rain today so I guess it’s alright for you to go.” She gave me a wide-top tightly woven reed basket she used to catch shrimps. After telling me I should set the basket on the far side of the banking, where it was cool and dark and where the shrimp congregated, she warned me about the river.
“Now you know that river has a mind of its own,” Grandy was buttoning up the back of my dress. “If it seems unruly, don’t go in. If your mind tell you not to go in, follow your mind. Should it start raining or the river starts rising, get out fast!”
Grandy and all her instructions! It seemed my entire existence was hedged around what I should and should not do; what I should be leery of: Spirits were in the bushes; I should not throw a stone at a bird, especially if it was a very pretty bird or a black-black bird because it might not be a bird at all but some spirit in animal form; I should never answer a first call but listen for my name on two or three more calls, for it might not be a person calling me at all but a ghost pretending to be a human and appearing in human form and this ghost would take me back with her to her grave and no one would ever see me again; and, under no circumstances, should I take shelter under a silk cotton “duppy” tree.
“Pure foolishness,” Yvette said when I told her about this as we walked to the river. The sun was so hot, we often had to seek shade under a tree. I was on the look out to make sure it was not a silk cotton tree, much to Yvette’s annoyance. Like Rachel, she had no patience whatsoever for anything she considered superstitious.
“I don’t know about that,” Junie whispered fearfully. “Before I was born spirits killed my younger brother and my father’s mother. I’d be careful if I were you.”
Monique and Sophie grunted their approval.
“Diarrhea killed your brother and heart attack your grandmother! Not spirits and bushes and duppy foolishness!”
“And how you know that, Miss Know-it-all Yvette?” Junie jumped to her feet, ready to fight. Junie was a good fighter, in some ways a better fighter than Yvette, despite Yvette’s mouth. “And just what was it that took your mother away?”
A fearful silence descended over the group. What would Yvette say or do? A shadow darkened Yvette’s face and her bottom lip began to tremble. For a moment it seemed she was about to cry, and if she started crying I didn’t know what we’d do. Yvette could be “hard” at times, yes, but she also spent hours and hours, crying for no immediate reason. Her mother had left for New York over three years ago and since then no one heard anything from her. Not a word. Not a letter. Nothing. No one knew if she had landed, if she had not landed, or if the plane had just been gobbled up by the infamous Bermuda triangle. Yvette’s mother simply disappeared in thin air it seemed, and the people in the district often openly speculated if she was even still alive. Sometimes I looked at Yvette, wondering how she did it, how she survived day after day, month after month without getting any information about her mother? As miserable as my mother could sometimes be, as miserable as she sometimes made me, I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with people openly speculating whether she was alive or dead. I knew I could not live without my mother.
Yvette’s face darkened some more, but this time in anger. A sneer spread across her full dark lips and I could tell she was getting ready to say something really hurtful.
“Well,” she said to Junie, “if you or your mother could read, you’d know what it said on the death certificates.”
The joke about Junie and her mother was that even if their names were on johnny cakes in front of them, they wouldn’t know it, for neither could read. This was not exactly true. Junie wasn’t the brightest girl, but she could read a word here and there, a few sentences. She certainly knew how to spell her name, fill out forms. True, she wasn’t as bright as Yvette, but then few people were. Had Yvette taken the common entrance exam, she’d surely have passed for one of the high schools in Kingston, but she hadn’t taken the exam because her father couldn’t find her birth certificate and there was no way to verify she was of the age to sit the exam. What would become of her when she finished primary school, no one knew.
“Can’t read? Says who?” Junie asked, her hurt showing, ready to fight.
“Says me and everybody else.” Yvette’s arms were akimbo, daring Junie to touch her.
“I have a good mind to punch your stinking mouth!” Junie doubled up her fists and started getting closer and closer to Yvette. “That would teach you to keep it blasted shut!”
“Just you try it!” Yvette was trying not to show she was afraid Junie might make good on her promise. “Just you try it!”
“Alright, alright, that’s enough!” I stepped in to calm things down between the two young lionesses with fire breathing out of their nostrils. Junie and Yvette eyed each other, smelling and circling each other for quite some time...
Now as we looked down towards the river, I thought if we didn’t do something to please Yvette we’d have a miserable time. I realized if we stayed near the rushes, it wouldn’t matter much if we took our clothes off, for no one could see us from way up here on the road. There were certainly enough bushes and trees sloping down to the river to hide us. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d stripped down naked in front of each other; we’d done that dozens, perhaps hundreds of times before when we came to the river. But now that our bodies were changing …
“Look, we’ll take off as much of our clothes as we’re comfortable with.”
“Coward!” Yvette mumbled under her breath.
“Will you just shut up! Will you just for once keep your big mouth shut?” I was getting really angry now. “Do we want to go to the river or don’t we?”
“Let’s go,” Monique said, jumping up and getting ready to lead the way.
“Let’s go under the bridge,” Yvette said in yet another dare. The girl was seriously getting on my last nerve! The bridge was the place Grandy had warned me time and time again not to go near. The water under the bridge was dark and it was deep. There you could not see the bottom of the river. There were sharp stones hidden in the water under the bridge, and because it was so dark it