Karlene Morgan
I used to watch people's eyes when they entered this house for the first time. There would be a flash of awe, and then they would quickly put on a mask for the rest of the visit. I enjoyed watching them try to look nonchalant. But I always caught them in the end: surreptitiously rubbing fabric between index finger and thumb to see if it was really silk, running hands over mother-of-pearl-inlaid tables, standing on my balcony looking through jaundiced eyes at the most magnificent view in the world. They didn't like me, but what did I care? I was married to Patrick and they couldn't change that.
When Angela won the Miss Jamaica pageant, we hosted 300 to a party. Amid the toasts and congratulations, I watched Margaret Ho-Choy, Angela's mother-in-law-to-be, grind her cigarette into the ornate frame of the painting we had commissioned for the living area. When Patrick saw it next morning, he was livid. He wanted to take it down right away, but I said no. I liked that burnt-out hole. It was like looking at a sore that someone had tried to hide but which had oozed out from layers of bandage and soiled the clothes for all to see.
Everybody has sores; that is what I tried to teach Angela. It's just that some people are better at hiding them.
I always liked the hot tub. Patrick designed the house, but the hot tub was my idea. It's down the hillside, away from the house. I got men to bring the rocks in from St. Mary. Huge boulders. They sweated and cursed every inch of the way and charged extra, but it was worth it. I liked the tub best when I was there alone, two, three evenings a week. I would close my eyes and let the warm water take me back to another place where sulphur springs bubbled out from among the rocks and people came to get healing.
Sometimes as I sat there in my little private space, I would hold my hand up in the dim light and look at the keloid scar running from the bottom of my little finger, almost to my wrist. "Everything about you is perfect," Patrick used to say, "except for that scar. How did you get it?" But I never told him. The scar is from that other place, with the river and the sulphur springs.
"You lucky. You don't know how lucky you is." Ms. Pearl grabs my arm and drags me down the hillside to catch the bus. I scramble behind her, waiting to make my move. A stone gets caught in the heel of her shoe and she stoops to remove it. I drop the cardboard grip right there on the track and go tearing back up the hill to the house where Mama and me and Myron and Shelia and Titta and Clarence live. Is only a room, but one summer me and Patsy paste up picture on the wall from an old fashion magazine that we find and make it nice. But that was before Patsy get send away to live with another lady.
I pound the door and I call out 'Mama, let me in, I don't want to go!' But nobody answer. I know Mama inside for is she just hand me the grip and take an envelope from Ms Pearl. But she bolt the door and won't answer, and I start bawl. I hammer that door till the sharp point of the nail that Myron put on the inside to hang up his clothes rip my hand come all the way down from my little finger, and it start to bleed. Something tell me if I don't wash my hand with the spring water and bandage it, it going turn into a sore and leave a mark. But I don't care no more, and when Ms. Pearl come and ask me if I finish cry, in a mocking kind of way, I wipe the blood on the side of my skirt and follow her to the bus line. That year, I turn 13.
"Talk to the man them nice and do what they ask you," Ms. Pearl say. 'Woman luck deh a dungle heap ... you never know when fowl gwine scratch it up. Talk to the man them nice ....' It hard at first, but I learn. Every time I look at Serene and Dianne, getting old, working extra hard to get a customer, I remind myself that I can't wait on fowl to come. I have to scratch my own dungle.
New York is a great place - nobody know you, and if you good-looking and know where to scratch, you can get money, go to school, learn manners, and make up any story you want about you life. The first chance I get, I gone to New York. That's where I meet Patrick.
There is a security guard at the gate; at my gate! Only, this time I am on the outside. The guard doesn't want to let me in, but I see old man Griffiths working in the yard and call to him. They talk. The guard keeps gesticulating and shaking his head, but Griffiths prevails and finally he swings the gate open. My heels make a hollow sound as I walk through the living area. Some of the furniture is gone; other pieces are corpses, shrouded in white cloth. The pond and waterfall had been a nice touch. 'Bringing the outdoors in' was how the Home and Style magazine had put it. But the koi that used to swim about lazily are gone, and the water is green and slimy.
I stand in that dead living room for a long time, hearing Angela's voice, accusing. 'Do you know what this is doing to Tony's political career? Do you know what is like to be dropped from list after list because everyone knows that your mother was nothing but a common ...? She spluttered over the word she couldn't pronounce and I filled it in for her, my mouth, dry as sawdust. She's pregnant, I told myself. It's the baby inside that's making her so hysterical.
Patrick, on the other hand, wasn't given to emotional displays. He was a deliberate man.
"Ma'am, you can't stay long. I will get into trouble with Mr. Patrick." It's that damn security guard again. I tell him I will be gone in a minute.
"Funny thing about the hot tub. They forget to turn off the filter. Every day it there running, water clear as anything," Griffiths says.
I make my way down the path to the tub and the water is indeed clear. Down below, the lights of Kingston come on one by one and I begin to strip, slowly. I am smelling again the beer at Ms. Pearl's lounge, and the urinals, and the smoke. I slowly step out of my skirt and I hear the soft, indrawn breaths of men in New York, Chicago, Boston. I raise my arms above my head and invite them to my breasts.
The security guard is watching me from the hill. I know he won't stop me now. I lower myself into the tub, still warm from the St. Andrew sun. Then I close my eyes, dream of sulphur springs and wonder: How many times do they say that you go under before you drown?
