Tea by the Sea Page 5

  Remembering that moment and the immediacy of her loss, led to this: Plum stood, gathered her things and walked toward the baby and her mother. She jostled the stroller hard enough to push the handle back into the child’s mother and wake her.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the mother, her face red and puffy, screamed at Plum. “Look where you’re going! Can’t you see?”

  “Sorry,” Plum said. “Sorry.” But jostling the stroller worked as intended. The child’s mother leaned toward the baby.

  Plum stood in front of the train door, willing it to open, unable in that moment to see through the blur of tears, to make out the names of the local stops printed on white tile. The express train rattled on. The passengers behind Plum, who initially looked on at the commotion Plum caused, had already looked away and wrapped themselves back into their lives. They had already moved on.

  Plum couldn’t go on, couldn’t even go into the building that day and face the other undergraduates with their petty concerns—manufactured slights; Alan’s wistful looks at her; Allison scheduling study sessions around a work schedule; Melonie giggling about a crush on Sean and prolonging cafeteria breaks to coincide with his break; the group hashing out the details of yet another party in a stuffy, dim basement. Most of all, it was Alan’s plaintive looks—how she simultaneously pulled him to her and pushed him away—that she didn’t want to face. Like a cat toying with a mouse, giving him hope and pulling it away just as quickly. She hated herself for that. But she wasn’t ready, couldn’t yet imagine having a boyfriend or building another relationship.

  Above, students and staff moved through the pedestrian bridge, their concerns at the moment so remote from Plum’s. Plum turned away from the building and went back the way she had come, back to the subway, the dank underground smell. Even among the strangers on a relatively crowded train she was alone. Plum shut her eyes and willed her mind to think about something other than the baby girl’s birthday. The train rattled out of Manhattan and back into Brooklyn, screeching and clanging.

  Plum didn’t go home, but rode the train like a bum, looking out on the stations the train rattled past—Prospect Park, Church Avenue, Newkirk Avenue, Kings Highway—below ground at first then above ground. The brownstones and apartment buildings—red brick, beige or grey stucco—rolled by in a blur. Sheepshead Bay. Brighton Beach. Coney Island. From the train and in the sunlight, the lights on the amusement park rides were dim, almost useless. And nearly empty. Past its peak summer days, it looked like something trying to relive a glorified past. But it drew Plum anyway and she walked toward it, past the open-mouthed clown heads set up for patrons to squirt water into the clowns’ mouths, bypassing the opportunity to win a stuffed animal.

  Plum rode the Cyclone over and over, before switching to the boat that swung back and forth, higher and higher each time, screaming to keep from crying. But she did cry uncontrollably on a boardwalk bench, her back to the park’s neon lights and the rides that seemed to go on forever, her eyes to the dark sea. She remained there all night, slept, but not for long, waking after only a few minutes and crying again when she remembered the significance of the day, her baby girl who was probably pulling herself up and taking her first steps. Bawling when she thought of all the milestones she had missed: the first voluntary smile, the first tooth, the first sound that resembled a word, the first step with help, the first step without help, the simple word “Mama.”

  Coney Island wasn’t safe. Not then. It was overrun with drug addicts and dealers, prostitutes and pimps, the homeless and the insane who made their home beneath the boardwalk. But Plum survived the night and the elements, got up in the morning and walked away, hungry and grimy and cold, walked back across the deserted park, across Surf Avenue, and up the steps to the subway and a ride back toward Prospect Park. By then her emotions had flatlined and she sat like a discarded shell unaware of the other passengers, the conductor calling the names of the stops, the train screeching and shrieking through the borough.

  Plum’s feet, programmed to walk home, took her up Prospect Park West and on to President Street and the brownstone where her parents, more frantic than they had been when they discovered her bed empty, pulled her to them, then quickly pushed her away when they felt the particles of dust and sand and smelled her unwashed body.

  “My God, child, you want to give us heart attack. Where you been all night?”

  Later, Plum would think how ironic it was that the very parents who, upon hearing of her pregnancy, hadn’t wanted her to return to their house and who took her in only because she was returned to them by her former landlady in Jamaica, those same parents worried about her not returning home one single night. But at that moment, confronted at the door by an angry and concerned mother and equally angry and concerned father, she wept again, fell to her knees, and cupped her head in her palms. “Today’s her first birthday. I should be celebrating her birthday.”

  Until then, Plum hadn’t spoken directly to her parents about Lenworth or the baby, hadn’t given them the details of how he disappeared with their child. They knew, of course, because Mrs. Murray had told them. When they asked, Plum had skirted the issue, too pained to talk about the greatest loss of her life, how the memory of what she had lost sometimes overwhelmed and blossomed like algae in a stagnant pond, spreading out and taking over her whole being.

  “Hush, hush.” Her mother stooped, pulled her prostrate child up and into her arms. “Hush. Everything has its time, child. Everything has its time.”

  That, of course, was not what Plum wanted to hear. No matter what transpired, Plum couldn’t reclaim the lost year, couldn’t recreate the firsts that she missed—babbling and footsteps and smiles. Plum couldn’t see beyond the immediate loss to that time her mother hinted would come. She pulled herself up, whispered, “I need a shower,” and walked away from her mother who was saying, “I’m going to make you some cornmeal porridge.” A hot meal was her mother’s, and perhaps every Jamaican woman’s, way of giving comfort and showing love.

  Without looking back, Plum nodded. “Yes, thanks.” She didn’t say what she thought: that porridge was baby’s food and her mother had long given up the role of babying her. That food could do little to erase the ever-present thought: your daughter is gone. That she feared she would live the remainder of her life with the gnawing hunger for the answer to the simple question: why?

  PART 2

  How to Hold Back Grief

  1

  From the beginning, it was nearly impossible for Lenworth to calm Opal. She cried as if she already knew that what surrounded her was inadequate. She cried as if she knew precisely what and who was missing. When she first learned to focus her gaze, she looked at his eyes and then away at the space near his ear as if looking for something next to him, as if she knew that another face should occupy the space that immediately surrounded him.

  So it was no surprise to Lenworth when Opal, at one year old, looked at Sister Ivy and called her Mama, and at four, when she started attending the Anchovy Basic School, asked, “How come I don’t have a mother? How come I only have a grandmother and no mother?”

  They were in Lenworth’s workshop, the converted fowl coop, Opal playing with a doll in the sawdust and feeding the doll bits of the curled ribbons of shaved wood that lined the floor like carpet, and Lenworth fiddling with an old tricycle with rusting steel, a redand-white checkered seat, and green tassels hanging from the handles. Even at four years old, Opal was a wisp of a girl easily mistaken for a two-year-old, a wisp of a girl who was always a step behind the growth and development charts. He wanted to think she would grow up to be as lithe and thin as his mother rather than into the stocky frame he had inherited from his father.

  Lenworth, with his back turned to Opal, pretended not to hear. He had known this question would eventually come. Yet he hadn’t exactly prepared for it. All the other stories he had told about Plum had come without prompting. He always suspected that when Opal asked he would know instinctively what to say.
He waited for the moment to pass, for Opal to move on to something else.

  But, as if she knew he wanted her to let it go, she dug in, holding on to the topic like she would the end of a rope in a tug-of-war. She moved closer to him, grabbed hold of the green tassel and shook it. “What happened to Mommy?”

  Lenworth looked down at Opal, away, and down again, then he stooped so they were eye to eye and gave her a fairytale. “Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a bird woman and he kept her like a parrot in a cage so she wouldn’t fly away. Every day when he went off to work, she cried. He didn’t understand why she was so sad all the time. He tried everything he could think of to make her happy. He bought her new toys. He painted her birdcage. But nothing made her happy. One day he found her crying and she told him she wanted so very much to see the world. She said flying again would make her happy. And he wanted her to be happy. So he opened the cage. He wanted to test whether she loved him enough to stay if he set her free from the cage. As soon as he opened the door to the cage, she flew away. And when she flew away, she left you behind so that I wouldn’t be alone after she was gone. Your mother flew away, Opal, and she left you behind.” He turned back to the tricycle with the bent wheel spokes.

  Opal turned away too, lifting her dress as she moved, looking beneath to confirm what she already knew: she didn’t have wings or feathers.

  Getting up and stepping away from Opal, what struck Lenworth was how much his daughter looked like her mother. He already knew it, but the resemblance was even more striking now. Opal had lost the pudginess around her face and eyes. The distinctly almond shape of her eyes was more prominent now and her irises were more like topaz against her dark skin. Plum’s eyes. Plum’s smile. He hadn’t missed the features as he wanted to believe. He had simply buried his guilt so deeply that he forgot that he hadn’t created his child alone.

  He imagined Plum now, a university student in the midst of her studies in anthropology or archaeology, or going on to a career studying the past and reconciling it with the present. Not in Brooklyn, though. He didn’t imagine she would have returned there, or, if she had, she wouldn’t have stayed with the parents she believed had abandoned her. He pictured her instead in Washington, DC, at Howard University perhaps, even though he knew nothing about the city except for what he learned from grainy images on the news. But a university as iconic as Howard, rich with history and culture, would have suited her well. He pictured her as he had last seen her, her head thrown back, eyes closed, a finger against her lips. Except she was in a library surrounded by books, moving on as he hadn’t been able to.

  Sister Ivy came upon Lenworth quietly. Now, she came in the mornings to get Opal ready, picked up Opal from school and stayed for a part of the afternoon to watch Opal as he finished up in the workshop.

  “Mobay High needs a carpenter,” Sister Ivy said. “Fixing desks and such.”

  Lenworth, who had been sweeping sawdust into a corner of his workshop, stopped. He hadn’t told Sister Ivy of his history with the girl’s school and he didn’t want to bring it up. This work, carpentering and making useful objects out of discarded scraps, was far removed from the adult life he had imagined for himself, an engineer building inspired projects and branding the world with his creations.

  In four years, he hadn’t been near a high school, had stopped thinking about equations and formulas. He measured the depth and length and height of wood and cut necessary angles, but he didn’t think about theorems and calculations, algebra or geometry, just the bare shape and size of things. What Sister Ivy dangled before him would bring him much too close to the type of place where he had lost everything—the job and the dream and ultimately Plum. Not that he thought what had happened between him and Plum would repeat itself; there was no other like Plum, no one who could have taken her place.

  “I can’t,” he said, and pointed to his workshop. “What about this?”

  “More stable for you and Opal,” she said. “And you have weekends and evenings to do your little tinkering.”

  He hated that she called his work tinkering.

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Don’t take too long. I told the principal you wouldn’t miss such an opportunity and he’s expecting you to come this week for an interview.”

  Lenworth couldn’t think of a way out that didn’t involve a revelation of his secrets. All evening he waited for his mind to settle on an excuse that he could give, but nothing he thought of was good enough.

  Up on the verandah, Opal played with a one-footed doll. She held the doll on the railing and made it do cartwheels. Sooner or later the doll would tumble ten feet or so to the ground, and Opal would retrieve it and start again. Sometimes he thought she dropped the doll purposefully, part of an ongoing experiment to figure out the purpose of such inanimate things. He watched her now, the cloistered girl with only a doll, an old lady, and him as companions. He did his best with Opal. He was sure he could have done even more. But there was no certainty that a full-time job at a school would open up large possibilities for his family of two.

  In the morning when he woke, he grated a ball of cocoa and set chocolate tea on to boil with coconut milk. Sister Ivy drank it most mornings and he left it on the stove for her and Opal, then went into the planted fields in the flat below the house, telling himself that he wasn’t hiding from Sister Ivy, but simply pruning parasitic vines from the fruit trees and reaping bananas and plantains and cocoa to supplement the day’s meals.

  In the damp and overgrown plot of land, he waited out his time. But Sister Ivy, always punctual, didn’t come.

  Lenworth dressed Opal himself, brushed the plaits Sister Ivy made the previous morning, scrambled an egg and buttered toast, and walked her up to the basic school, where already the children romped on every empty space outside the school, and their squeals and laughter lit up the morning.

  And on to Sister Ivy’s house. Even before he knocked and got no answer, circled Sister Ivy’s barking dog and held it back with a crooked stick, he knew that everything was not all right. There were lights on in the house that she would have turned out before going to bed. The curtains fluttered. She would have closed the shutters to keep out the bugs and mosquitoes and the drafty night air. Before he went in and found her stiff body, he knew one thing: the axis and balance of his life had once again shifted.

  2

  As if mothers were dolls one could pick up in a store, not long after Sister Ivy’s death and Opal’s question about her absent mother, Lenworth came back with one: a mother without wings, a new mother for a motherless, wingless child.

  He’d met her—Pauline—at a bus stop as she waited for a bus going past Anchovy and on to Black River on the south coast. They sat together on the crowded bus, his legs pressed against hers, and her tangy sweet breath near his ear.

  “Not even sardine pack up so,” Pauline muttered, referring to the number of passengers already jammed in the bus. “Pack us up like sardine, and ‘cause sardine don’t cry, they think we won’t cry too.”

  “How you know so much ’bout how sardine feel?”

  Pauline smiled and shook her head. “You take serious thing make joke. All joke aside, there should be a limit on how many people the driver and conductor can pack up in a bus. It no right to pay you money and can’t get no comfort.”

  “True.”

  “All the way to Black River pack up so. That no right.”

  The bus pulled away from the stop, the passengers lurching forward and back, and the tires screeching.

  “See it there now. We not even lef’ Mobay, and he want kill we already. He going kill we today. And me not even live my life yet.”

  “Yet?” Lenworth asked. “What you waiting on? Young girl like you.”

  “Young? Thirty-three,” Pauline said. “Seven girls my parents have and I am the only one who not married and don’t have any children yet.”

  “Seven girls?”

  “Seven girls. My father wanted to try again for the bo
y and my mother say no, take what God give you and give thanks. By the time she was thirty-three, my mother had had her last child. So by that standard, I am old.”

  “You aren’t old,” Lenworth said, and he let his gaze drop to her bosom, her ample breasts straining against her shirt.

  She smiled. “You too rude.” She tapped at his arm, playfully.

  A week later, they met again, Pauline timing her trip and her departure from Montego Bay to coincide with Lenworth leaving Montego Bay High School, where he had indeed taken the job as carpenter and general handyman. She knew he left at 4:30 and she waited till he arrived, smiled, and said, “So we meet again.” And so began their courtship on the bus ride between Montego Bay and Anchovy, Pauline finding reasons to journey from one coast to the other, Lenworth looking out day after day for a glimpse of her, until at last Lenworth said, “We have to stop meeting like this. Make it more permanent.”

  “But I barely even know you,” Pauline said.

  “That’s not a hard problem to fix.”

  “How you plan to fix it?” She looked at him with her brows raised. A half-smile stretched her lips.

  “Give me a chance to show you.”

  “I’m not living with no man who isn’t my husband,” Pauline said.

  “So we’ll get married.” Lenworth spoke as if marriage was a simple thing.

  “I’m not marrying a man who my family don’t know.”

  “Saturday then. I’ll come meet your father. If you promise he won’t chase me off with a stick or set his dogs on me.”

  But Pauline turned shy again, and by then the bus was in Anchovy, slowing at the railway crossing, and Lenworth was scrambling to extricate himself from the middle of the bus, away from Pauline and his newfound dream.