Tea by the Sea Read online

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Well, listen, your father and I have arranged for you to stay and finish high school there.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. That school upon the hill we went to? Remember it? That’s your new school.”

  “But you said it was just for the summer.”

  “You can come home for Christmas. If you behave.”

  “You lied. You tricked me and you lied.”

  “It’s for the best, Plum. Too many things here to distract you. And the last thing your father and I want to see is you in juvenile prison.” A single phone call and her mother had removed any chance of her flying away, getting into the kinds of trouble teenagers always found.

  And yet, tucked away in a strict boarding school for girls, she met him, her distraction—first as a tutor arranged by her aunt, and second as a chemistry lab assistant filling in for another teacher on leave—and regenerated wings. Her Mr. Barrett in school. Her Lenworth in private.

  From the air, Plum looked down on a long, narrow strip of sand between the ocean and a mixture of squat and tall buildings. With modern civilization pushed so close up against the sand, Florida’s seaside towns had little room to spread when hurricane-force winds pushed the waves high and strong up against the shore. It wasn’t much different from Jamaica’s seaside resort towns, where rambling villas were giving way to more and more high-rise hotels and resort communities butted up against the sea. The hills outside Montego Bay sprouted ever-larger houses, and along the coast so much space seemed to be set aside for visitors rather than those who inhabited the island. But the teenage Plum had paid little attention to all of that, reveling in her moments on the sand and in the azure waters, grateful for her little bit of freedom.

  Plum changed planes in Miami and then she was airborne again, looking down on red roofs, white buildings, flamingo-pink houses, deep blue pools and murky canals. The houses were like perfectly spaced Lego blocks with little to distinguish them from a distance. The differences between Miami’s planned housing and the island she had just left were stark. In Jamaica, buildings sprouted at random, and especially in the center of towns where old and new and incomplete-but-occupied buildings commingled alongside narrow congested streets, the lack of a cohesive town plan was stark. The orderliness of Miami’s houses didn’t matter much to Plum, except for the fact that the differences underscored how much her life would change now that she was returning to her childhood home.

  And on to Brooklyn, also a world apart from island life, familiar to the child still inside her, and unfamiliar to the woman she had become. Back to parents who opened their arms and drew her in as if they hadn’t exiled her from their lives and then abandoned her when she found unexpected trouble. Plum stepped into their embrace, her response tentative, theirs full and inviting. For the moment, their embrace, this timid welcome, was all Plum had. Realizing the extent of her isolation, Plum cried, letting her head fall onto her mother’s shoulder as she had done as a child. There was desperation in Plum’s embrace, a need to belong.

  “Glad you came back home,” her father said, as if the choice to stay had been hers. “Don’t ever think you can’t come back home.”

  “Yes.” Plum wiped away the teardrops glistening on her lashes, and let the moment be what it was: an inevitable reunion.

  Plum had forgotten how bright America was, how the fluorescent lighting in the airport allowed no shadows or dark corners. Outside the terminal, even with the winter’s cold burning her fingers and toes and grabbing hold of her breath, Plum slowed her steps and looked up to catch a glimpse of a star. She had forgotten that too, that the city’s lights muted the starlight, that nightfall didn’t mute life. Two years away and Plum had grown accustomed to the quiet the nights brought, the chirps of nocturnal life rather than the incessant honking and beeping from vehicles on the road, her aunt saying, “I don’t want night to catch me on the road” as if the dark was the devil himself.

  Back to the suspended life she had grown away from and moved past. The Cabbage Patch dolls and stuffed animals, all rainbow colored, were in her room awaiting her return. There was her locked diary with its key dangling from the cover, full of petty concerns; a pink-and-white radio with a cassette tape of poorly-recorded songs and a radio announcer’s voice cutting in and out of the music; a pair of black ballet shoes; and another pair of hot pink plastic sandals.

  That first week back, Plum walked up and down the blocks, looking for familiar faces and places, recalling scents and sounds of her interrupted Brooklyn childhood. She cried when she found that what she had moved past—the smelly Utica Avenue stores with dusty and cheap plastic wares, peddling a plastic Christmas and unbearable holiday cheer; the men still hanging on street corners and looking out on a world that seemed to be passing them by—weren’t the things that mattered. The friends Plum had left behind—Dionne, Roxanne, and Walter, who were now two shiny, bubbly young women, and one confident and swaggering young man—had gone on to colleges in Pennsylvania and Buffalo and Atlanta. And Plum, the one who had been sent away to bypass the undesirable temptations of Brooklyn, had returned empty-handed to a city she no longer loved, a child’s bedroom with dusty Cabbage Patch dolls and old music on cassette tapes. She had moved past nothing that mattered.

  5

  Sister Ivy reordered Lenworth’s life, coaxed and coached him into a manhood he never imagined, but did it so subtly he thought he had done it himself. He was the son she never had, and she the mother he wished his own could have been—educated and independent and assured. Exactly what he wished for Plum. So when Sister Ivy said, “Every baby must be blessed,” Lenworth’s only reply was, “Yes, of course.”

  They were on the verandah, Sister Ivy still in her Sunday best. The brim of her hat quivered with each movement of her head and each coo directed at Opal, who lay with her head cradled by Sister Ivy’s knees. The afternoon was quiet, almost mournful and funereal. The radio played in the background, but the music—a mixture of gospel and slow songs about lost love—and the announcer’s drawl fed the mournfulness. Even the clouds, thin and wispy, drifted listlessly across the sky.

  “Not a christening or a baptism. Just a blessing. She’ll get baptized when she’s older, when she can make that decision for herself and choose to be baptized.”

  Lenworth nodded again.

  “But you going to have to come to church with me between now and then. Show them you are a Christian.”

  “Of course.” Lenworth nodded again.

  “She must favor her mother. She don’t have a thing for you.”

  Lenworth heard the unspoken question, “You sure the baby is yours?” But he brushed that aside, for he was sure that Opal was his. Opal had his chin—round where Plum’s was a bit more elongated—and toes—long and thin and the second toe longer than the first—or so he thought, but he didn’t say that.

  Sister Ivy looked up at him and back at Opal. “Dead stamp of her mother, no true?”

  He didn’t want to, but he found himself describing Plum. Unforgettable: flawless skin, like whipped chocolate batter; almondshaped eyes that turned down at the outer edges and irises a shade lighter than her dark skin would suggest. Lips softened with a dab of natural cocoa butter. She had a way of making him think ordinary, everyday things were extraordinary. Not that he didn’t already know that many things tossed aside had secondary uses. Plum made him look even more keenly at things he wouldn’t have given a second thought: orange peel that he normally tossed on a heap made a great tea; thick and hardy coconut shell, when polished and smoothed, made a unique bowl.

  He chose his words carefully, tiptoeing around what he knew to be true: Plum made him forget he was an adult and she a graduating student. Made him forget to hold himself back. He fell with head, heart, and soul, taking her with him, mixing up love and desire and loneliness with the fear of being exposed and the fear—both hers and his—of being abandoned again. And in the end, the adults would believe he led her, but the truth was
that they tumbled equally into their illicit love.

  Unforgettable. The girl in the pale peach dress, sitting in the back of the school auditorium giggling at something an adult onstage said, covering her mouth and her eyes, hiding the laughter. The girl in uniform sitting in the middle of a hired bus among girls in identical uniforms, yet somewhat different, eagerly looking out the window at the passing countryside, drinking in the hillside villages, the roadside vendors holding up bags of peeled fruit, peppered crayfish in bags, oranges tied to a stick, drinking it all in and questioning the need for the red mud lake, the logic of putting manufacturing residue that peels the skin so close to villages, the toxicity of such dangerous chemical residue so close to human life.

  “Effluent,” he said. “That’s what it’s called.”

  “Effluent.” She twirled the word around her mouth, weighing it, tasting it, and returned to the practical. “Will it ever dry up?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Then what will become of it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What an awful way to die. To fall into an acidic lake and watch your skin peel away.”

  “It doesn’t happen often. Everybody knows how dangerous it is. Plus it’s not that easy to get to it.”

  “Still . . .”

  He remembered her as the girl in the red dress on the shop piazza, waving at him, her face scrunching up into a ready smile, her fingers reaching out to grasp at his then pulling back. The girl on the beach, hiding her bathing suit and her body beneath an over-sized T-shirt, holding her head in her hands and sobbing, comparing herself to a discarded bag of old clothes her parents found and shipped abroad. She hadn’t been allowed to return to Brooklyn, to the brownstone on President Street, to the friends she hadn’t bid goodbye, to summertime hopscotch and jumping rope. A single summer vacation had turned into one long, unexpected expulsion from the only life she’d known. Expelled. Excommunicated. Exiled. Each day she had another word for what her parents had done, for how they had reengineered her life without her knowing it, for how they had sent her away as if she hadn’t mattered at all. Unforgettable.

  And forgettable: he walked out of the hospital with the baby girl and left Plum there, asleep and expecting to wake and nurse her child. Abandoned. Left again like a bag of old clothes. Liberated, was what he preferred to think. Without a baby holding her back, she would be free to pursue a fuller life—an education and a career—all the things that he had taken from her by making her a mother too early, all the possibilities his own sister, who had left home for the police academy and returned with a baby boy, hadn’t had. He could list more than a handful of girls he knew with stilted and stifled ambitions. He didn’t wish that for Plum.

  Of course, he didn’t say the latter parts, not how they met and not the truth about how he came to be Opal’s only parent.

  Monday mornings, Lenworth found himself collecting coconut shells from his neighbors. He could have gone on any day, but he knew with certainty that the red beans and rice that was a staple of most every Jamaican household’s Sunday dinner would have been made with fresh coconut milk. And so he walked from house to house with a crocus bag collecting the hard pieces of shell that his neighbors would have otherwise thrown away.

  Back in the workshop—the converted fowl coop—and Opal in the house with Sister Ivy, Lenworth broke the shells even further and polished the pieces before mixing them with resin and shaping bowls and platters and kitchen utensils and tabletops. He liked the solitude of the workshop, the smell of cedar and varnish, he liked Sister Ivy’s smile when she passed in the evening and saw the shimmer of stained wood or polished coconut shell, or the simple, clean lines of a large serving platter he had completed.

  Sister Ivy took charge of finding the wholesaler who bought most of Lenworth’s pieces in bulk. It was she who sent him the women who sold goods in various craft markets and stalls in Montego Bay, and who bought small quantities of the smaller items they knew tourists would buy.

  At another time, he would have thanked Plum for letting him see the value of discarded coconut shells, for reminding him that ordinary things were sometimes extraordinary.

  Sister Ivy took charge of every detail of Opal’s blessing as if Opal were her own grandchild. She set the date and time with the minister at the Mt. Carey Baptist Church, and saw to it that Lenworth went to service in the weeks leading up to Opal’s blessing. And now on the morning of—a cool, cloudy January morning—Sister Ivy dressed Opal in white, a dress covered with frills and lace and a large bow on the front of the bodice, socks that were also fringed with lace, and patent leather shoes—all gifts from Sister Ivy’s daughter who lived abroad. She led them down the hill away from Lenworth’s house, Opal propped on her shoulder, and Lenworth walking behind them like a dutiful son, carrying two Bibles and hymnals and Sister Ivy’s vast patent leather purse.

  An anemic sun peeped through the clouds as if it welcomed a reprieve from its job. The road through the community was a mixture of marl and stone, pockmarked with depressions where puddles from the previous night’s rain had formed. The vegetation to the right was thick and green and lush, and he suspected there was water underground that fed the vegetation in that particular area. It reminded him of home, the town where he grew up. As quickly as the thought came, he shoved it aside, for he didn’t want to think of his mother in Clarendon waiting for news of the newborn grandchild or for him to come home with his new family.

  Plum. He couldn’t think of her either. This moment, Opal’s blessing, should have been hers and his, not his and Sister Ivy’s. But he wouldn’t allow himself any regrets, not this particular morning.

  The road emptied out on the main road toward Montpelier and the south coast. A few more turns and they were there, walking uphill to the old church, which had been destroyed by fire and slave revolts on more than one occasion, and rebuilt time after time. Without the sun lighting it, the building’s gray stone and concrete walls were dull.

  Lenworth had no particular affinity for the Mt. Carey Baptist Church, or for any church, and he wanted only to get through the morning’s service, to escape the energy that infected the congregants in sudden bursts of “Amen” and “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord,” and fits of uncontrollable quaking and rolling. He was never one for those kinds of histrionics and if he had to attend any church he preferred the more staid Anglican Church with its subdued form of worship.

  For a brief moment he held Opal. It was just long enough for the minister to impart his blessing, but she squirmed and cried a full-throated howl, only settling back into a whimper and then quiet once she was back in Sister Ivy’s arms. Lenworth knew then what the pattern of his life with Opal would be like. But again, he allowed himself no regrets. Everything he had done since that September morning when he walked away from Plum had been for Opal. Everything he did on that September morning had been for Plum—his gift to her.

  6

  January 16. Four months to the day. Plum pictured the baby girl, who would be lifting her head by now, grabbing at things, cooing and smiling. Instead of caring for her baby girl and Lenworth—her little family of three—Plum was in her mother’s kitchen chopping vegetables and transforming leftover roasted chicken into soup for another threesome.

  Little scent bubbles of thyme, onions, scallion, and roasted chicken hung in the air. She peeled and chopped pumpkin, peeled and sliced yellow yam and sweet potato, and kneaded flour for dumplings. Elsewhere in the house all was quiet, except for the cricks and creaks of the house settling, the radiator hissing steam, and the machines rumbling as they worked. This was her time, free of the sad love songs her mother played, free of the television newscasters and commentators to whom her father directed his ire, free really of the human instinct to socialize.

  The soup finished, Plum left the house, timing her exit to avoid her mother and father’s return, and their instinct to cajole, like a cuckoo pushing another species of baby bird from its nest. The sun was already going dow
n, the leafless trees on the block and the brick buildings ablaze with the late-evening sunlight. The sounds—car horns and sirens and car stereos—that she’d ignored while inside the house, pressed in on her now. Plum tucked her chin into her scarf, and held her head down as if all that mattered were the steps she made on the concrete underfoot. She had no specific destination. In those early days back, Plum’s routine was simple: she cooked and she walked through the neighborhood, up and down Utica Avenue, along Flatbush Avenue, Church Avenue, through Prospect Park in the middle of the day. Each day, she took a different route. She looked in store windows at the things she couldn’t afford. She looked at babies in strollers, at the mothers caring for the babbling babies and calming the agitated ones, at toddlers in the midst of an ill-timed tantrum, at intact families walking in groups of threes and fours and fives, and at women rushing home from work, presumably to a waiting family. And she dreamt of what should have been hers. So as not to cry among strangers, she shoved the thoughts aside, and walked as if she wore blinders that were intended only to block out families.

  Plum walked this time down Prospect Park West toward the public library, around Grand Army Plaza and back to the library. Its concave front entrance and beige walls were dull in the evening sun, and inside, where teenagers and serious researchers commingled, the delicate hush broke in random bursts—a laugh someone failed to stifle, a deliberate and annoyed shush, a whispered question, a book slapping onto wood.