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 down, 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.
Plum roamed, looked on at a mother and a toddler on the floor paging through a picture book. The child turned the pages quickly, stopping briefly at random pages and pointing, and the mother, unable to read the actual words, made up a story to match the pictures. Plum soaked up the child’s quick and easy smile, her dimples, the dark ringlets brushing her forehead, how quick she was to reach for another book, how she commanded her mother to read, how easily she laughed when her mother quacked like a duck and mooed like a cow. And on to another book, which the child read by pointing to the pictures and telling the story she had heard before. Plum soaked up the child’s voice, the way she mispronounced wolf as “woof,” how her eyes lit up when she said “huff and puff.”
“Your turn,” the child said, and flipped to the front of the book, her eyes moving from the pages to her mother’s face. In that moment, no one but her mother mattered.
Tears welled up in Plum’s eyes, threatening to spill over at any moment. That moment should have been in her future. Instead of her, it would be Lenworth or perhaps another woman he got to take her place, who would matter, who the baby girl would look at with adoration. It was unbearable. She blinked away the tears and left that room and the building entirely without looking for career and self-development books as she should have. And walked again, up Eastern Parkway this time, past the museum and the Botanic Garden, aware of little except for the emptiness inside, and the everpresent, unbearable thought: Your daughter is gone.
Back at home, her body chilled, Plum sat in the window seat with her toes curled in socks and hands wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate. She sniffed at the steam, the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg and cocoa tickling her nose, and tried to ignore her mother and father, looking on at her, the troubled daughter they did not understand and could not reach. Neither stepped forward to hug or to hold, as if afraid their touch could break her. At the moment, that was all Plum wanted: warmth, not pitying looks, and arms around to contain and keep her from falling apart, keep her from feeling that she had abandoned her baby girl. Instead of leaving, she should have stayed in Jamaica and continued to search. She shouldn’t have accepted Mrs. Murray’s offer so quickly, shouldn’t have left the island entirely, shouldn’t be in Brooklyn attempting to rebuild her suspended life without her daughter, who was by then a cooing, babbling being, holding her head up, grasping at things—his goatee, his bushy brows, his fingers—and smiling.
“Tell me,” her mother said. “What did we do wrong?” She pointed to a chair, and Plum’s father brought it forward from the dining room.
“Nothing,” Plum said.
“We want to help you. You know that, right?”
Plum nodded, but kept her eyes down on the small bubbles and froth swirling in the mug, seeing the conversation for what it was—a planned intervention.
“You can’t go on so. You should try and get into Brooklyn College or Kingsborough next semester. You have to do something, get your mind off things.”
So simple, Plum thought. Just do something and she would forget. But she said yes.
“Everything passes,” Plum’s mother said. “No matter how unbearable it seems, you will move past it. You will.”
That was also Lenworth’s line. “Everything passes.” Including, his love and his promise and Plum.
And it angered her, even then, how easily he had left her behind. Plum conflated the two defining events of her life—her being sent away as a teenager and Lenworth walking away with their child. They were one and the same: she had been abandoned, twice by her parents at the first sign of trouble and once by her lover. At that moment, her mother’s attempt to intervene felt hollow, a little bit too late.
“I have some books,” her mother was saying. “Jobs in healthcare, nursing.”
“I don’t want to be like you. Don’t want to be a nurse.”
“Maybe not nursing. Accounting. Banking.” She put the books down, one at a time, a shallow thump rising up as she lowered each book. “You used to like to draw. No money in art. But if that’s what you want to do . . .”
“I haven’t drawn since I was probably ten years old.”
Undaunted and looking away from Plum’s sneer, her mother continued. “Anyway, you need to find a job. Do something with your life.”
“You can’t fix this, Mom. Working like you night and day, day and night, won’t make me forget. Working, always working. Two shifts, and a second job. No. Not for me.” Plum’s voice was harsher than she wanted, dismissive.
“So that’s what you have against us? We were working to feed you and keep this house. You think it’s easy for an immigrant coming to this country?”
“What I remember is this: You on the couch sleeping, Dad at work, and me in the corner playing by myself or watching TV. Or it was the other way around, Dad upstairs sleeping, you at work. Either way, it was work and sleep. You know how many birthday parties I missed because you were too tired to take me?”
Plum remembered her childhood more by her mother’s absence than her presence, the weekend dance and sports programs she hadn’t participated in because her mother and father were too tired—one parent sleeping in the daytime and the other at night—and Plum, it seemed, parenting herself. Even then, she felt like she didn’t matter, like her parents’ world would not have fallen off its axis without her in it. Indeed, their life had gone on without her in it. They had sent her away and left her there when she found trouble.
“Birthday parties? That’s what you upset about missing?”
“You know what else I remember? My pink leotards and tights that I never got to wear to a dance class. Not even one class because you could never fit it in. I found the leotards. They’re still upstairs in my drawer.”
“You know how hard we had to work to give you a good life? Never mind that you threw it away.”
“You don’t understand. All that time you had with me and you weren’t there. And me? I have nothing. No time with my child at all.”
“I can’t change what he did to you. And you can’t change it either. But you can do something about you.”
“Who says I want to?”
“You have to.”
Indeed, she did. Plum had a deal with Mrs. Murray: college or repayment of a loan. Plum swung her legs down and faced her mother.
“I’m not that girl you sent away. I’m not even the girl whose graduation you didn’t bother coming to. I’m not that girl anymore. This is who I am, sad and angry and bitter. This is me, not a robot working every waking hour to hide from my life.”
“Robot, hmmm. Hear this.” She turned from Plum to her husband sitting at the dining table with his back to it. “All the work to put this girl through school and she calling me a robot.”
“Give her time,” he said, his voice a whisper.
“This is what I have to put up with in my own house?”
Plum got up and didn’t look back. Upstairs, she stood by her bedroom door, her back pressed into it and the mug of hot chocolate that didn’t soothe still in her hand. Up there, away from her parents, it occurred to her that what bothered her more was the weight her parents—and even Lenworth—placed on ambition over personhood, attaining wealth or power or status no matter the cost to themselves or others. It was ingrained in the immigrant dream. Work three jobs if you have to. Double your shifts. Send money home. If necessary, create the illusion of success, especially for family back home. Work, and work some more, whether you love the job or not. That was Plum’s perception of the immigrant dream.
Perhaps it was also a woman’s lot in life—get up and carry on, no matter what. Plum had suffered, was still suffering. Yet, her mother’s only focus was that Plum make something of herself, be someone who mattered.
Indeed, in that room, there were still remnants of the assured teen, the girl who felt she could step out on a limb, balance herself, turn a cartwheel or two without slipping or breaking the branch. There were remnants of the girl who had a dream and a goal and a belief that she mattered. Plum stood there with her back against the door, looking for that girl who found her own way when her parents were too tired and too busy to take her to weekend dance classes. That girl joined her school’s drama club and art club. She found a way to be seen and to matter.
She understood now that sometimes that desire to be seen as successful, to matter, was all a person had or could control. That really was all Plum had. So she shifted, found a target and homed in on it as if with a laser. She focused on mattering, on not being a person so easily discarded and left behind.
Outside, clouds thickened and filled the sky like sprayed foam. Plum stood for a moment on the red brick steps and sucked in the cold air. As she breathed out, she watched the vapor trail from her mouth. No, she hadn’t missed winter at all, not the bundling up in layers of wool or flannel or down, not the cold that bit into her skin as she walked, not the way winter weather and the wind transformed the street into a tunnel with cold air rushing in. She didn’t miss the dry skin and cracked lips, the tiny cracks on the back of her hands, the way the cold numbed her toes and fingers, the way the wool scarf simultaneously scratched and warmed her skin.
Plum walked with purpose this time, past the now-quiet brownstones behind the leafless trees. Back to the library, and again a purposeful walk toward the reference desk and a librarian. And another purposeful walk to the careers section. Plum pulled random books on allied health and database management, unsure of what she wanted to do.
There was a time when she was sure of the trajectory of her life after she finished up with the boarding school to which she had been exiled. Back to Brooklyn for sure and college in Manhattan or Boston or Washington, DC, a major city instead of a sleepy college town. Once, on a beach, Lenworth had pointed in the direction of a three-hundred-year-old fort and talked about the engineer he wanted to become. And Plum had pointed west, in the general direction of an old plantation house that had been kept up to show off its glory, the wood floors and furniture polished to a shine, the expansive verandah with its view of the sea, the spacious bedrooms with massive four-poster beds and large windows that seemed to capture and release the breeze. “One out of two things,” Plum said then. “I want to be the historian or the archaeologist finding out about other people’s lives. Or I want to restore old houses so they look like that. Houses tell stories, you know? All those things that people collect say something about them. Where they’ve been. Who they love. You can walk into a room and find out so much about a person’s life.”
So grand, Plum thought now. Not even a full year had passed since that day on the beach. But that dream, that goal was a lifetime away. She didn’t care anymore about other people’s stories or past lives. She had her own stories, past and present, and now she had a firm conviction that despite her parents’ claim, the fairytale endings—the scripted Hollywood kind—weren’t really available to her. Hollywood’s movies had told her that fairytale endings weren’t available to a dark-skinned girl, or an immigrant at that. Plum believed it now, wholeheartedly. She tamped her dreams of glory down, and settled for a simple, ordinary dream, her immigrant parents’ dream—a job that paid for food and shelter. There was no need to love the work; she simply had to be efficient at it.
Plum thumbed through the books piled on the table. She had no interest in her mother’s career, nursing, or her father’s, accounting. Any career in finance or business was out. Dealing with customers and their myriad problems and attitudes wasn’t something she imagined doing.
She picked up another on careers in allied health, closed her eyes, cracked the book open, fanned the pages, then looked down at where her thumb had stopped. Laboratory technologist. Typing blood and testing body fluids in a lab. There were no complete stories there. Perhaps an indication from a virus or a parasite of where a person had been, whether a farm or forest or remote tropical village. Perhaps an indication of a diet of sugary foods or fatty meats or undercooked seafood or pork. But the samples offered no nuances of love or loss, no expectations or hope, just normal or abnormal ranges, normal or abnormal tissue and cell samples—the cold hard facts of sickness or good health.