OFF-WHITE PLATES were prized by the ancient Chinese because they reminded them of the moon. She placed her knife and fork at the twelve o’clock position on her plate and sat back in her chair; then she immediately leaned forward and with her right forefinger shifted the tines of the fork so the cutlery hands on the china plate clock face read more like eleven than twelve o’clock. As she got up from the table she remembered that the sentence about off-white plates and the moon came from one of her textbooks on pottery-making.
‘Excuse me… the baby…’
‘You are excused,’ the hostess said.
As she left the table the hostess began to tell a joke that she had heard many times before.
She wanted to get home before the clock struck midnight. She made her way from the dining room through the living room, down a long passage to the family room where the children of the house were watching TV.
Her son was half-asleep on one of the sofas with a fort of cushions set up around him to prevent him from falling onto the floor.
‘Come on, baby, we’re going home,’ she said to the drowsy one-year-old in his yellow flannel one-piece pyjamas. She pressed her face into the flannel belly of the sleepy bundle and inhaled his delicious smell of milk spit-up, Woodwards gripe water, baby powder, pee, and clean baby. She almost burst into tears, so in love was she. Stepping in the spaces between the children sprawled out on the carpet she sang ‘Happy New Year to you, Happy New Year to you, Happy New Year to you.’
‘Happy New Year, Auntie,’ chorused the children of the house, never taking their eyes off the television screen where a cartoon Bob Cratchit was hoisting a cartoon Tiny Tim up unto his shoulders, so the sweet-faced boy could pipe in dulcet tones, ‘God bless us, everyone.’ This Christmas classic courtesy of Disney.
Not inclined to give any excuses as to why she was leaving before midnight, she bypassed the dining room by exiting through the kitchen, which had a side door that led out to the yard where her car was parked.
One of the hostess’s pointed remarks disguised as a joke made earlier in the evening had been about how ‘eccentric’ she was since she had become a mother. If she had thought of it then, she could have made a witty comeback by quoting something from Bertrand Russell about not being afraid of being regarded as eccentric. But that evening she could not remember any quotation from anybody because she suffered a lot from a condition that could be called foggy baby brain, baby on the brain, all her mental resources marshalled to cope with taking care of teething baby, colicky baby, restless baby, don’t-know-why-baby-is-crying-baby.
If that blue-skinned genie in one of those Disney movies could materialise and grant her three wishes, one of those wishes would be a week’s sleep.
She’d just sat at the dinner table and smiled and shrugged when her hostess had dropped the charge of eccentricity on her. She’d thought to herself, I’d rather plunge my arms up to the elbows in a bucket of poop-filled nappies than expend any effort defending myself against charges of eccentricity from this woman who is waiting for me to return to being the aimless single woman, always available to her friends, that I used to be before the advent of baby.
Not one more New Year’s Eve like this. Not one more New Year’s Eve pretending she was having a good time.
She lay the baby down in his wicker bassinet in the back seat of her car and tucked him in tight with his blue blanket appliqued all over with gambolling satin sheep. The car was small and rode close to the ground and the hum of the engine soon lulled the baby to sleep. She turned into her driveway at 11.20. She put the baby to bed and midnight found her raising a solitary toast to the new year with a cup of mint tea.
In the morning she got up and went to the bathroom and turned on the tap to find there was no water. There are over one hundred rivers on the island of Jamaica. ‘Xamayca’ is supposed to mean Land of Wood and Water; water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink, bathe in, cook with or flush your toilet! Here it was, the first day of a brand-new year and she had no water to wash herself, to bathe the baby, to flush the toilet. O shit!
The woman who took care of her son for her on weekdays, when she went out to work, had told her about the waterman. It seemed this man, by virtue of being put in charge of turning on and off the valves of the communal water tank, had become, almost overnight, the most powerful person in their small hilltop village.
She herself had never actually seen the waterman, but there were stories circulating in the village that, if you angered the waterman he would make sure that no water ran through the pipes to your house. They also said that if you bribed him, the waterman would make sure that your pipes never ran dry.
After a while the waterman began to assume mythic status; it was as if he was some Arawak god who had to be placated by having his name called over and over by the awestruck people of the village.
So, this morning, she woke to find that she had been caught unprepared – I mean seriously, who would expect the water to be locked off on New Year’s Day? – and that she had forgotten to fill the large plastic bottles that had become a fixture in most Jamaican kitchens, and that she had neglected to fill the bathtub the night before with enough water to bathe in and flush the toilet. She thought, I have no choice, I have to go in search of the goddamn waterman, to see if I can persuade him to turn on the water.
So, after making herself a cup of tea and fixing the baby’s morning cereal with water from one of the two bottles in the refrigerator, boiled in a pot on top of the stove, she fed the baby, wiped his round brown limbs down with a rag dampened with the rest of the warm water and then used the same rag to wipe her face. She dressed the baby, then dressed herself, feeling a little out of sorts and irritable because she really needed a shower.
She had no idea where to find the waterman, so she drove to the house of the woman who looked after her son when she went out to work. When she got there, the front door of the small wooden house was locked, and the jalousie windows shut. Only a yapping mawga dog ran out to the gate when she drove up; she honked the horn a few times and called out, ‘Good morning, anybody at home?’ but no one answered. She remembered that her son’s babysitter had a new boyfriend who lived in town. They must have gone to a dance on New Year’s Eve and stayed over at his place. That was way more action than she herself saw last night.
She decided to drive down to the town square and see if anybody there knew the whereabouts of the waterman. To get to the square, she had to drive past the house of one of her friends.
She hoped she wouldn’t see her erstwhile friend because she had stopped returning her calls. If she did see her, she would feel compelled to stop and have a pointless conversation with her for Auld Lang Syne, about things and people that no longer interested her, during which she was bound to feel at a disadvantage because she hadn’t had a shower and her car really needed washing. God, what a way to start a new year! As she approached her friend’s house she saw that there were cars parked outside and she could hear Home T-4 carolling ‘Mek the Christmas Catch You in a Good Mood’, one of her favourite Jamaican Christmas songs.
A passing glance at the laughing group on the wide verandah let her know that these were revellers who had partied in the New Year and were now keeping the revelry going at a bang-up New Year’s Day breakfast/brunch.
As she shifted into third gear, sped up and drove determinedly past the house, she wondered if she was just jealous of her friends. After all, they were bringing in the New Year in style and here she was, a sad figure searching for the waterman on New Year’s Day. Perhaps she was somewhat jealous, but she was also quite certain that she didn’t want to be back there on the verandah with her old friends because she’d done enough of that. There was no doubt in her mind that that particular phase of her life had ended, but she had no idea what form the next one would take.
Your life is supposed to go somewhere. You are supposed to start somewhere and end up somewhere, preferably in a better place than the one where you started.
One Easter Sunday when she was twelve years old, the sight of the bell-mouthed lilies on the altar dripping with ice-white lace cloths, the tall white candles burning in the brass candleholders and the smoke and scent of incense streaming from the brass thurible swung from the end of a long brass chain had propelled her up and out of herself, and for the entire service she had hovered somewhere between her pew and the vaulted church ceiling in a state of pure bliss. She remembers thinking to herself that, if she’d died then, she would surely have been taken up into heaven.
There was no sign of anybody who could be the waterman in the town square, which looked, on New Year’s Day, like the deserted streets of a town in a cowboy movie.
There was absolutely no point in asking the one drunken man – who presumably had no family, or else why would he be leaning cross-legged like Lee Marvin’s horse in the movie Cat Ballou, against the door frame of the village rum bar on the morning of New Year’s Day? The drunken man was calling out to everyone who passed by, ‘Happynewyear! Happynewyear!’
Maybe he was, despite all appearances, really happy. It occurred to her right then that the drunk was what Jamaicans would refer to as: ‘a waters man’ and she was looking for ‘the waterman.’ And that stupid lame joke made her laugh, and after she had laughed she felt a little more like herself.
She turned the car around and headed back home. She fed the baby tepid orange juice from a sippy cup and gave him two arrowroot biscuits which he gummed away at, one in each fist, like a sweet old man. She changed his diaper and put him in his play pen, where he promptly fell asleep with the biscuits mushing in his chubby fists.
She then had an idea. If she melted the ice cubes from the freezer, she’d get nice cold ice water. She opened the refrigerator to find that the ice cubes had started melting without her. Stale and flat, that was how that water would taste. Power cut. No light, no water. Happynewyear to you too.
She needed to wash the baby’s clothes. She needed to wash herself.
She needed to wash herself of what was beginning to feel like a fine dusting of sand and salt that had sifted down over her and her whole life, over her dreams of finding true love and interesting rewarding work, and good friends. She really wished she had all those things but mostly she needed access to water: cool clear water. She began to hum that song that she’d read somewhere was about a man hallucinating about finding water as he crossed the desert.
I’ll do a rain dance, she thought. I will not just hum, I will do a rain dance.
I’ll make my limbs rise and fall down like rain. I will face the Blue Mountains, which was surely what the Tainos – who she had been taught were called Arawaks – did when they prayed for rain.
So, taking off her sandals, she stepped out onto the wooden verandah and she faced the mountain and proceeded to dance while the baby slept there in the living room in his play pen.
She whirled round and round as she danced, she hummed as she danced, then she danced jumping up and down Rastafari Nyabinghi style, hopping from one foot to the other, then lunging forward, harder and harder until she realised that she might wake the baby, and with no water to wash him it was best that he slept a while longer.
She sat down cross-legged on the verandah and attempted to visualise sheets of rain dropping down from the sky, a technique she had learned when she once did some classes in Transcendental Meditation.
It had been drizzling the second time she saw him. The truth was she had been walking by his house on purpose; and there he was in the driveway, putting up the top on his sports car. He had not seemed surprised to see her; he just said, ‘Come inside or you’ll get really wet. I’m about to have lunch, you can have half my sandwich.’ She remembered that once they went inside the sun came out, and it did not rain.
Just like that. If she’d believed then in action at a distance, and using mental powers to draw people to you she would have sworn some force like that was at work pulling her to him. He was at least ten years older than her, he was a somebody. She was eighteen years old. She’d met him at a birthday party given by one of her friends the week before. He lived around the corner from her friend, who’d asked him because he was a somebody, to come to the party as the master of ceremonies.
She’d been standing over by a window, and after he’d finished his MC spiel he’d walked straight over to her and said something quite ordinary, something like, ‘God, it’s hot in here, I’m going to stand by this window right beside you.’ And she’d fallen in love for the first time, just so.
She had felt as if she were bathing in warm water all the time she was with him. He’d taken her out to see a play, and they’d met for lunch two or three times and they’d spent the afternoon together the day before he left the island. They’d talked a lot, about music, about books, about movies; he used words like unexpurgated and bowdlerised when they discussed books, and he’d given her some of his books because he was heading off to England to study law. On their last afternoon together he’d said, ‘I so want to be the first man to make love to you, but I need time, way more time than I have now.’ So he concentrated on doing two things: he gently probed the outer corner of her mouth with the tip of his tongue until he set off starbursts in her brain, and he stroked her body slowly so that she’d risen up out of herself and hovered between the floor and the ceiling just like that time she’d had the transcendent experience in church. As a farewell present he gave her his collection of books by Bertrand Russell, a copy of sayings by Nietzsche and a well-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
After he left she bought a copy of Dionne Warwick singing ‘Trains and Boats and Planes’ and played it and played it as she wept. She also stopped going to church.
The baby woke up cooing and smiling like a small jovial Buddha. He wanted to play, kicking his chubby arms and legs and blowing spit bubbles. She loved him so, she loved him so, she loved him so much. She loved him so much she knew that if she had to, she would die for him.
Later that day she paid a small boy who was walking by her house to draw water from the river that ran through the village. Sediment settled in the bottom of the plastic bottles as the river was running low, and she used the grey water to flush the toilet.
And that night she made sure to stay up until after midnight when the waterman magnanimously turned the water back on for four hours, and she filled every container in the house with water, and she had a long shower and washed her hair at 1am on January 2nd. Later that day, she went through her bookcase till she found all the books he had gifted her. On the flyleaf of each collection he had written something cryptic and koan-like in his bold hand, and he’d signed with his initials. She remembers he’d used a fountain pen. She remembers that she’d read ‘Why I am Not a Christian’, and that she’d tried hard to agree with what Bertrand Russell wrote, but somehow she could never fully get his point of view, and she’d stopped reading that book because, she’d told herself, she wasn’t bright enough to understand it. She’d felt the same way when she tried to agree with Nietzsche that God was dead.
She leafed through the books and noted that he had underlined passage after passage; she finally settled on one from Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness: ‘You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.’
And that would always make great sense to her.
She’d been only eighteen years old, and she had read those books he’d gifted her as if they were holy texts, concentrating really hard to absorb the ideas generated from the mind of an upper-class Englishman, and a hardcore Übermensch. She concluded that some of what they wrote contained great wisdom, but not much of it had ever really been useful to her. Then she thumbed through the copy of Atlas Shrugged and wondered why she’d spent so much time trying to relate to the words of a control-freak of a woman with ice in her veins, a woman who was all about WILL, and being harder than the rest. Arrrgh! She had spent countless hours bending her mind to agree to their take on life.
The time had come to really search for spiritual nourishment. She needed to read living words that would nourish her so she could nourish the baby; maybe she’d even have to write them herself. She packed the books in a cardboard box. When she moved from that house she’d leave them behind.
What she needed now, cool clear water. She needed it now more than ever, not just for herself, but for the life she had brought into the world. The world, which, when the baby boy smiled and warbled and babbled sweet baby glossolalia, was the exact opposite of horrible. The father of the baby liked poetry. They once wrote a play together. He was writing a novel, a coming-of-age story. They were trying to make it work. The world was not horrible, horrible, horrible as one of those books claimed.
Years later, when she met the man who would become her husband, his first present to her was a Waterman fountain pen.