JANICE LYNN MATHER

Mango Summer

Bahamas

It was a fruitful summer. People tend to forget that. Everyone was giving dilly away. The boys sold guineps at all the big intersections, straight from their hands. Dollar for a big bunch, then fifty cents, then twenty-five. Too many guineps to waste money bagging them. The boys pocketed the quarters and spent them on candy. No one made a profit. Sugar apples melted off trees and lay open on the ground, splattered buffets left for the rats. People were stacking up mangoes on the grass at the edge of their property to be taken away, and leaving unmarked brown bags of sickly ripe fruit on other people’s doorsteps.

The air was slick with August humidity from the first week in May, and so tight with the smell it hazed orange. It did something to people. Abe Pratt, who used to beg bareback all morning and drink all afternoon, was so changed that, by mid-July, he appeared (sober) at New Roots Baptist Church’s revival week in reasonably clean pants, a crinkled blue shirt no one knew he owned, and his hair trimmed so low everyone was surprised that his actual head was so small.

* * *

I was ten that summer. Theresa was eight. Both the perfect errand-running age, small enough not to talk back too bad, big enough to carry boxes to and from Sweet Mouth, who we were supposed to call Miz Liza even though no one else did, not even Mummy, when she forgot to be respectful herself or thought we weren’t listening. The boxes went as fruit and came back as jam, twice as heavy. Theresa told Mummy this was because Sweet Mouth put ground-up rocks inside everything she made, and we shouldn’t carry any more fruit to her to cook. And plus, didn’t we have enough mangoes around already? Couldn’t we throw them away? Weren’t there hungry children somewhere around who wanted them? We didn’t need jam.

She had a point. The backyard’s sweet reek leaked through into the bathroom, because its window faced that side of the yard, so that it no longer smelled like soap or bleach or pee, as a bathroom should, but like a large, rotting fruit salad. The freezer was crammed with purée. All forms of dessert were suspected carriers. It was mixed into the pound cake. There were orange streaks instead of black flecks in the banana bread. Dinner rolls took on an unwelcome, fruity taste.

We weren’t the only people on earth, Mummy reminded us. We didn’t know what she was going to do with the jam. And why were we here, talking? Too much talking, not enough work. Hurry up, take those boxes, so Sweet—so Miz Liza can get them made up. And we better stay behind long enough to find out if she needs help peeling and dicing.

Theresa and I knew better. The jam would be with us every day for the next six years. It would cover our bread. It would sneak into our cookies, it would appear swirled into muffins, glaze baked chicken, replace cheddar in the macaroni cheese. It would be an integral part of our diets until Theresa or I got married, when Mummy would send us away with so many cases of mango jam there’d be no space in the new house for the husband. Perhaps, we agreed, as we turned down Sweet Mouth’s street, the filled jars would have an accident on the way back.

We got to Sweet Mouth’s house just as Nay, the girl from nine houses down, was leaving. Her wide-set eyes slid toward us, suspicious.

“Hey, Nay, you got cookies?” Theresa could pick out a sugar-filled foil package anywhere, particularly if it didn’t have mango chunks in it. The crumbs around Nay’s mouth suggested the package she held was of that sort. Nay said something that was probably meant to be “No,” tightened her grip around the precious bundle with the earnest greed of a girl with four brothers, slammed the gate shut, and ran off. I set down my box so we could open the gate again while Theresa stuck out her tongue at the girl’s back.

At the door, Theresa dropped her burden. “Miz Sweet Mouth!” she hollered through the screen door, in a way that would have infuriated our mother. Nudging her with my elbow, I banged politely on the wooden frame. Through the grey mesh, we could see the tiny woman washing a huge mound of plums at her sink.

“Brenda, that’s hog plum she washin?” Theresa asked. I was sceptical too. No one washed hog plums in a sink. They were eaten outside. The seeds were spat out in the grass. They weren’t even in season yet. No decent person had hog plums until late summer. It was May.

“Come in,” Sweet Mouth called over the running water. Theresa opened the door, skipping in empty-handed. I followed, placing my box down on the floor. The kitchen was stickily hot, and smelled of syrup.

“What you makin?” Theresa asked, as Sweet Mouth scraped the small green fruit into a large pot. I rammed my sister with my elbow again.

“Miz Liza, Mummy say bring these to you for jam,” I announced.

“Hmph. How many that is? Two boxes?” She stirred at the improper plums. “Go look in the dining room and see if I have any empty jars for this jam y’all want me make.”

“What you doin?” Theresa was on tiptoe, practically climbing into the pot. Standing like that, she came up almost to the woman’s shoulder.

“Boiling them for punch. Missy, you ain gone yet for those jars? Look by the chairs, I have some clean ones in there somewhere.”

Scowling, I retreated into the dingy inner sanctum. How come I had to do the scary stuff? Theresa was the one always sticking her nose into things when she shouldn’t. I scolded myself. I was older, I should be responsible.

“An’ your ma pregnant again?” Sweet Mouth was asking in the kitchen. I hoped Theresa wouldn’t say anything dumb.

I looked over the things on the dining table: a dog-eared phone book, a dusty vase with four plastic flowers, their petals thick and waxy-red. My eyes darted around the dim room. Sweet Mouth’s white brocade sofa was covered in thick plastic, even though she had no children. No one had sat on it for years; it still looked new. I wondered if she was saving the sofa for something. On the floor next to it, in paper bags, were four huge plastic jars.

“. . . new baby in October,” I heard Theresa saying. I grabbed up the jars and turned back to the kitchen before she blabbed out all our family business.

“These?” I held the containers toward Sweet Mouth.

“Glass, girl, glass. You know what happen if you put hot jam inside plastic? Go look again. I need to send your baby sister to help you look?”

In the dining room again, I peered under the table, then started back. Not only brown paper bags full of packages of sugar, but a huge spiderweb was woven from the wall to the table’s front right leg. The dusty owner of the web skittered away before I dropped the tablecloth. Finally, my eyes lit upon a closed box next to the plain chair that stood awkwardly beside the table, its back pressed against the wall. I gingerly opened the box, and the rims of twelve jars winked out at me. I lifted it carefully.

“. . . like little girls,” Sweet Mouth was saying into the pot as I came back in. “Took you long enough,” she said, her back to me. “Put them on the counter.” Theresa was draining the last of something from a little pink cup. “Y’all go, leave me, let me do my work.”

I dragged Theresa out. When we were a few houses away, I cuffed her in the back of her head. “You stupid, eh? What you was drinkin?”

“Coconut water.” Theresa rubbed her head, glaring at me. “You just jealous you ain get none.”

“You too greedy. Anyway, when you get poison, that’s your business.” We walked on another few minutes before I asked, “What she said about girls?”

“I ain tellin you.”

I knew I’d get it out of her. She wouldn’t stay mad long. She’d tell me that night, I knew, when we stretched out in bed, hoisting the sheet above us then letting it float down, falling light and cool over our arms and legs and heads, giggling over Mummy’s halfhearted calls for us to shut up and go sleep. But I fell asleep first that night. And long before dawn, someone was banging on our window, yelling for Mummy to come, because Nay was missing.

* * *

We went to see Nay’s mother, a lumpy woman who smelled of sweat and usually shouted a lot. The two mothers were great friends. “That girl was such a help to me. What you think this country comin to?” The mother’s voice was strangely quiet. “House full a boys. What I go do? My one girl child missing.”

Theresa and I exchanged a look. Nay was known for never missing anything. She didn’t miss it if anyone opened a bag of chips. She didn’t miss it if anyone had a new pack of Now and Later. Hand always out, always whining, “Oooh, gimmie piece?” And she had certainly not missed those cookies. Missing? We knew better.

We talked it over in bed, and decided she had gone off somewhere to a big party on the beach that we had not been invited to, with red and purple balloons and chocolate cake and sandcastles and plates and plates of Sweet Mouth’s cookies. We fell asleep with the taste of envy sugary in our mouths.

I was sent to help Nay’s mother hang out laundry first thing in the morning.

“Why her own children can’t help her?” I muttered, shoving my feet into my slippers.

“You don’t see the woman daughter gone?” Mummy glared at me, and it seemed like not such a good idea to tell her that Nay was really on her way back home, salty and sandy and full of dessert which we hadn’t had. Nay’s mother still had four boys who always had plenty of energy to throw pebbles at me when I went past their house. Mummy didn’t look like she was in the mood to explain why they couldn’t help, so I didn’t ask. When I was done, I came back and lingered by the front door, waiting for Theresa, who was going back to Sweet Mouth’s to collect the first batch of finished jam. She didn’t look at me as Mummy raked the brush over her head. I pushed the door open and stood outside, where the air was moving at least.

“You wanna go down to the playground?” I asked as she came out.

Theresa plopped the empty box she was carrying over her head, shading herself from the sun. “Yeah.”

“I’ll go with you if you tell me what Sweet Mouth said.”

“She ain say nothin.” She grabbed up her box again and ran down the street, skinny legs flying. Nay’s brothers celebrated her passing with a cloud of tiny stones.

* * *

Before anyone could spit up in the air and run, another two girls left. One I didn’t know. Theresa was the other. They both went that same night.

They say three is the number of completion, so I’m glad she was the third to go. She knew it would happen, I think. But she didn’t tell me that afternoon, just like she didn’t ever tell me what it was Sweet Mouth said. In the nights after, when there was so much extra room in the bed and no one to talk to after I was sent there anyway, I went through seven or eight mundane possibilities before settling on, Something coming what like little girls. I could hear Sweet Mouth saying that. Better sleep with one eye open. Better sleep in your ma bed. Something coming, something what like little girls.

I like to think Theresa would have told me if she’d known she was going away for such a long time, though. Would have told me at least that night. Held my hand as we dozed off. But she didn’t. Her last night at home was uninspiring. She lay on her belly, one arm thrown over into my side of the bed. I had been asking her, “So you ain go tell me what she tell you?” steadily, every three minutes for about fifteen minutes before I realized how regular and quiet her breath had become. When I sat up and looked at her face in the light coming through the half-open bedroom door, I saw she was half-smiling, her head turned away from me and toward the window. She was dreaming.

And then there was sleep, and then screaming, except now close, and what was far away was the fist banging on someone else’s window yelling, “Come quick!” and it was Theresa who was gone.

I like to think her dream was a sweet one. She, being gathered up in soft arms, an even softer breeze kissing, kissing, kissing her forehead, kissing, kissing her nose. She must have known that Sweet Mouth was right, that there was something what loved little girls. Very much. Never before, not when she twirled around in her favourite yellow church dress with the wide skirt that stood out like puffing curtains, that used to be mine, not with her head on Mummy’s lap, waiting for the baby inside Mummy’s belly to kick, smelling faint lavender bath wash and scented powder and lime peel, never before had Theresa felt so loved. And so she picked up and went away.

* * *

Before the screaming woke me and the world shifted a little bit to the left, I was standing on the wharf and not even scared of the deep water. There was a boat with a covered space for people to lie down under or sit and eat or play games and music and dance if they liked to get away from the sun or out from beneath the stars. It was about six in the afternoon with the sun just low enough to be behind the boat and just high enough to be right in my eyes. The top deck of the boat was crammed with people I hadn’t seen in forever. Mamma Rosario, who I recognized from old photos, was there, and Granny Davis, whose funeral was the first I ever cried at. At the railing was a whole load of little girls in yellow dresses, laughing and waving through the bars. They were blowing me kisses. Nay was there in a coral-pink skirt, and right there in the centre, four heads above everyone else, was Theresa, in a great big straw hat with a brim so wide it shaded her face and shoulders and some other peoples’ too. The brim would have been knocking other people in the face if it weren’t for how tall she was. I couldn’t figure that out either, cause she was three inches shorter than me that morning. If Sweet Mouth had been on that ship, Theresa would have been two heads taller than her.

Theresa was waving too, one long dark arm far above everyone else’s. She wore a sapphire dress with buttons down the front and no seams at the side, and she was calling, “See you, Brenda! See you, see you next time!” She sounded so grown, and she wasn’t mad that I wasn’t waving back. I wanted to, and wanted to run up to the gangplank onto the boat, cause she’d never gone anywhere that far without me before. But my feet were heavy-heavy and my arms couldn’t move. She just kept on waving, blowing kisses and waving with one arm. Her other arm was crooked around a huge peacock, sapphire like her dress. I couldn’t figure out where she stole or borrowed it from; we never had nothing more exotic than a long-beaked crane in our backyard, and once, some stray Abaco parrots. And she’d never liked birds.

I wondered how she could leave me, and the boat was sailing out, sailing, sailing, sailing, though I never saw anyone pull up the gangplank—never really saw one at all, now that I think. None of those big men, either, who stand on the edge of the boat and loosen it from those green wooden poles on the dock, and push off, then hop into the boat like falling into the water would be nothing. I never saw none of that, and the last thing I could see was Theresa’s long arm, and the last thing I knew was that she wasn’t mad, but had left me alone and gone with other people. And when I looked down I saw that my ticket for the boat was still in my hand, and while I stared it turned into a sapphire-blue peacock feather with a bone-white eye and I woke in a pant and sat up in the bed and there was a quiet, no crickets or dogs rustling outside. Nothing. And the bed next to me was cool and smooth, the sheets tucked in and empty. Not even a feather left behind.

* * *

On August Monday holiday, Emancipation Day, the last little girl left. Most everyone down our street was heading to the beach or some cookout or both. The people in the house in front of ours were rowing, like usual. The man was just in from working late down at the hotel and the woman had been up since before dawn. I didn’t hear what they were rowing for, but soon they were slamming doors, and she was wailing, pouring out sorrow like sweet-stink fruit punch from week before last, heaving and wailing almost like a laugh, the way some women cry when no one’s doing them anything and they just want attention. Then the back door opened and their older girl came out.

She was a year younger than me, just a bit older than Theresa. I heard her open the car door. I can see her getting into the backseat, leaving the door open, legs dangling out, scratching a bite on her knee. Inside the house, her mother was hollering: “I gone call my mother an’ ask her if I could move back home, I can’t take it anymore. What you want from me?” Then the yelling stops, and after a while the back door opens, closes quietly. Just as soon as they started, they have stopped and are laughing. I remember thinking that adults are dumb. They walk to the car, the idea of calling her mother’s number vanished from the woman’s head. They find the girl gone from the car. Not in the front yard, or on the swing out back. Or in the tree. Hasn’t come over to see us, or the people next door, or the next or the next, or the next. And there is a wail in the air again, and in it no sweet. Only stink.

* * *

The papers lied. The girls were not gone at all. Just relocated. There is no gone girls can go in one little community on one little island.

Anyway, what would one person do with all those little girls? Because it wasn’t just four. They reported four, but I know there were more. Maybe twenty. Maybe fifty. Maybe a hundred more. I used to hear their voices in their calling hours, after the neighbours had finished their love and the air-conditioning had gone to sleep. On a night without thunder or sirens, they would sing in that silence, throwing their voices up to the ceiling and down into dark corners. Enough for a chorale of little girls freer than wishing can give. Without lessons to learn or rooms to clean, bush to rot under, maggots to feed. They could play all day, all night, mouths full of cookies and songs.

* * *

And they all went so neatly. I imagine them all together, all at one time. Playing twee-lee-lee on the playground in fours, standing in circles, hand overlaid on hand. Someone could come into the playground easy. Someone short and dark, like them, someone with something sweet in her hands. They would scatter at first, like pigeons, then resettle, one by one. The person could ask them if they wanted to learn a new song. Little girls like songs. The little girls could stare, a few nod, a few blink. One could say, What song you know?

Come, then, she would say, when I call, and I’ll teach you. It’s a song made for sweet things. Sweet things like you.

Their little hands clapping, voices tinkling and clattering, round glass beads in a jar. This person has them smiling as never before. Then, she says, I will take you on a trip, her teeth glinting pretty. The little girls begin to skitter and disperse, pigeons again. They settle, this time faster.

You would like a trip, wouldn’t you? She smiles and the little girls are thinking of rocking ships and soaring planes and dancing, dancing in clouds.

I dreamed of it often, the song I mean. I could never catch the tune and always woke up to find no one there, just that strange feeling when you’re sleeping alone and know someone’s in the room with you, pressing down on the foot of the bed.

* * *

There was an arrest. An appearance in court, mothers and sisters hissing and shouting as Sweet Mouth, a small thing who could never wrestle little girls away against their will, was hustled past the crowds, sandwiched between two police officers. She was certainly not as tall as Theresa was in my dream. I am not sure I remember Theresa’s real height after all. The woman was thinner too. She looked like she hadn’t had a good meal since before the start of the summer. I can’t figure out why. Especially with all the rampant fruit. The cookies. All that jam. She must have been so unselfish, brewing plum punch, boiling sugar and fruit, for money and other people, baking little girls cookies while her bones ate her body flesh up in her dusty dark house with plastic-covered furniture no one ever sat in.

She could not have been so bad, especially since they never found any bones or anything. Just bits of fabric in a clearing, from clothes no one recognized, and rows of little folded shirts. And four pairs of small shoes lined up underneath her bed.

The school year after that summer was a hard one. In my class, one seat was empty. For the first month, no one sat next to me on the bus. I wanted it that way. Kept my bag next to me, saving the seat for Theresa. Mothers had it hardest, I guess. Nay’s mother had a child in November, a month after Mummy’s stillborn. Another girl, Nay’s mother had said, when her own baby came. Mummy’s hand had tightened around my shoulder. Nay’s mother saw it, and started talking about Abe Pratt’s amazing comeback at church, which was very old news by then.

In our own house, Mummy began taking down Theresa’s dress that used to be mine to iron every morning. It’s a shame the dress was yellow and not red, with tips of green and purple strokes, or orange, like the outside and inside of good mangoes. Or peacock blue.

When I see that dress in Mummy’s curling fingers, I like to think of Theresa on the boat. How she floats and weaves and bobs above them. I like to think of them all that way, crowded together, playing twee-lee-lee, our great-grandmothers watching over them while Theresa, a full head taller than the rest, waves and blows kisses and I stand on the shore.

It’s a shame to think of them any other way. It would waste them.

And why waste little girls?

They are, can be, such nice things.