St. Thomas: 1953-1958
In St. Thomas we live in a Danish colonial house next to Blackbeard’s Castle on Blackbeard’s Hill. My bedroom is at one end of the house with three separate entrances. One can enter it from a wood porch which wraps around the mountain side of the house and overlooks the Caribbean. Or one can enter it from the stone terrace on the opposite side of the house, the land side, next to Blackbeard’s Castle and a dead-end street. Or one can enter my bedroom through my sister’s, although she keeps the door between our rooms shut tight.
The bed in which I sleep is mahogany, a four-poster with a mosquito net that drapes from ceiling to floor. At night, trade winds ruffle the Caribbean, skim the sea, then drift ashore to rustle the leaves of coconut palm and sea-grape trees before sweeping up the mountain to the porch door of my bedroom, trailing scents of the island and of the sea, and disturbing the marquisette netting over my bed before continuing their journey across savannahs and up volcanic mountains beyond.
From the start, I believe I belong on this tropical island in the Antilles, in the West Indies. This island—immutable, drowsy, swollen with heat—seems familiar. I also believe I belong at All-Saints Parish, an Anglican school where I complete second grade. I must belong here because the religious rituals enchant me as much as I am enchanted by my images of the Egyptian princess. They transform me. Now I imagine the Egyptian princess is decorated with Christian symbols. My fingers grasp a garnet rosary. A cross hangs from my neck.
At school on Good Friday our foreheads are marked with charcoal. Even though all the children at school have identical crosses on their foreheads, I believe this mark distinguishes me. I believe mine is different. I am the Egyptian princess who has been specially chosen to soothe angry gods—not the other children. My Egyptian body, adorned with Christian amulets, is needed to end a drought, to enhance a bountiful harvest. My body has been selected to save Mankind. With this mark I am anointed. I want it branded into my skin. That night I refuse to wash the mark from my forehead. By morning the cross is a faint blur. I try to darken it with a pencil.
A few days after we arrive on the island, we learn many islanders believe that the bank my father has come here to open is for his gain, not for their own, as he claims. They organize a demonstration—a march from Market Square to Emancipation Park—to burn my father in effigy. He decides to go to the park to address the crowd and alleviate their fears. He will remind them that, while still with the government, he helped pass the Home Rule Bill for the Virgin Islands. He will tell them the next step toward economic independence for the islands is this bank, the West Indies Bank and Trust Company. Before, blacks had kept their money at home, not earning interest, not receiving loans. My father’s bank is to encourage tourism, to give loans to islanders who want to start small businesses, to sell stock to the islanders at low rates.
For protection during the demonstration, my sister and I are locked by ourselves in Riise’s rum warehouse on Main Street, a thick brick and stucco building constructed to withstand hurricanes, fires, and pirates. My sister and I press our ears to the arched metal door. Shouts, the pound of drums echo against the walls. The smell of smoke seeps across the threshold. Through the keyhole I glimpse fiery torches. Nevertheless, I believe I would feel safer outside than in this massive warehouse, dimly lit by a few bulbs dangling from the high ceiling.
“Do you think they’ll be okay?” my sister asks—meaning our parents. I stare at her, stunned, confused. I didn’t know my sister felt fear. I nod, suddenly transformed into the older sister. “Of course,” I say, nodding to reassure her, then not even afraid of the warehouse.
Soon there is silence; soon we grow tired. We wander to the rear of the warehouse, full of mahogany rum barrels. The sweet smell of rum and mahogany, the lingering scent of smoke, make us dizzy. We sit on the brick floor propped against a rum barrel.
“You want me to rub your back?” my sister asks. She knows I hate to have my back rubbed; rather, I know she is the one who finds it soothing.
“How about if I rub yours first,” I say, knowing this is what she intended. She lies down, her face on my legs. My fingers trickle across her back, round and around. My legs go to sleep, my arm is cramped, but I continue, not wanting to lose my sister. If I stop she’ll pull away from me, and I love my sister.
Later, in the distance, I hear cheering. Of course my father is a hero. His bank will be a success. Most who know my father respect and admire him. I am proud of him. He is my father. I am grateful for how much he loves me.
Almost every night my parents dine at the Virgin Isle Hotel, entertaining potential investors for the island. While it is now possible for me to be away from my mother during the day, this is not true for night. The more nights I am scared by night, the more nights I need her, need her to protect me from it. I don’t want her to go. Dusk in the West Indies is fleeting and as soon as the sun sets, the fear begins. So to try to keep my mother from leaving me, I throw myself against the wall, I scratch myself, I cry. She can’t console me. She rushes out the door behind my father and doesn’t hear me say good-bye.
After their car drives down the mountain, I silently lie on my bed, listening, waiting. The folds in the mosquito net cast shadows. At the base of the mountain, I believe I hear the murmur of waves. I close my eyes. I know what will soon come. For even though I seem to be alone, I am not. Now, just past dusk, it is the moment, it is the time, when the sighs and tremors of Caribbean spirits begin. Some spirits are as gentle as white petals of ginger flowers. Others are as dark as a long Caribbean night. For at night these dangerous spirits extinguish the sun, cloak the moon, snuff out the stars, veil the sky. This is when, if I’m not careful, these spirits—with their red-red mouths and whispering fingers—might discover my drowsing body. So every night I must believe, truly believe, my body is swaddled in soft ginger and hibiscus petals, slowly curling inward for night, protecting me from dark spirits of night.
Later, much later, my restless body senses my parents driving back up the mountain. Even in slumber my body snuggles deeper inside its petaled armor.
For third grade I transfer to the Antilles School. After school I take the bus to town. There, I either wait for my father to drive me up the mountain or else I, like my sister, begin to wander the island, drifting farther from home. I explore fields of guinea grass and royal poinciana trees. Sometimes I attend movies at the Center Theatre. I see The House of Wax, Mojave Firebrand, The Man with the Steel Whip, Fury of the Congo.
Other afternoons I play with my friends, kids of different ages from the Antilles or All-Saints Parish schools. Patti, with silky red hair and blue eyes, lives with her divorced mother. Always, there are whispered rumors about her mother and married men, and dust from these rumors seems to settle on Patti as if she is as involved with these men as her mother. When I spend the night with Patti, we trail our fingers across black negligees, red slips, lacy bras found in her mother’s dresser. We inhale the scent of mimosa and frangipani perfume and decorate our faces with crimson lipstick and violet eye shadow. I don’t associate these colors or scents of sex with my father. In fact, if asked what I know about sex, I would blush and say, “Nothing.” To me, this would not be a lie. I never define my relationship with my father. The secret we share is given no word. I would never have called it “sex.” To me, this would be the lie.
Maria’s house hides other secrets—hides her mother, who drinks silently, seldom leaving the house; hides her father, who, when he drinks, beats his children. Maria and Mike, her brother, shrug off their bruises. I know Maria from All-Saints Parish School, and when I spend the night with her, her mother, whom I see only at prayers, makes us pray on our knees before sleeping. The room is in dark green shadows. Her mother smells of incense, of rum, of sleep. In low voices we mumble “if I should die before I wake …” I believe this could be true.
Inga and I spend hours reading on her cool stone veranda. I hear the rustle of lizards, the turning of pages, the flutter of dove wings in the bushes. Inga tests our reading skills to determine who can read the most pages in ten minutes. She always beats me, except when I cheat, turning two pages at a time, feeling a need to win, to beat this girl who seems perfect with her curly blonde hair and her silent home, a silence that reflects the cool, frosty blue of her eyes. I crave this cool, this frost, and dread the moment her mother drives me home. Sometimes I stay for dinner. We eat in a formal dining room with a large mahogany table, a table set with blue Wedgwood plates and cut crystal. Her father wears a dinner jacket and bow tie; her mother, spotless, unwrinkled linen. She tinkles a small glass bell when the maid is to serve platters of food around the table. If her father doesn’t like the food, he makes no mention of it.
My friends and I meet in the deep curve of horseshoe-shaped Magens Bay. Maria and I chew bitter sea grapes and dribble wet sand into castles. Inga lies on a towel, reading. Patti, in her red suit, stares out to sea, watching for the Danmark, a training ship of young Danish sailors. Every year it sails into port, and every year a dance is held with local schoolgirls. We are too young to go, but still Patti waits. Not far from shore, Skip and Billy splash and toss a beach ball.
Late in the afternoon we explore the rocky peninsula jutting into the sea. Spindrifts crash against limestone boulders, spraying us with salty water. Sunlight skates across the lavender, azure, turquoise surface of the sea. Although we move slowly, mindful of sea urchins hiding in shallow tidepools, I pretend I am racing toward the horizon, that I’ve just spied a pirate ship—Blackbeard—his galleon skimming the waves. I am marooned—no one can find me—he has come searching for me, to rescue me. I call to him. I beckon. Even from here I see sunlight glancing off the ruby earring he wears in the lobe of his ear. His gold sword sparkles. And I will sail away with him in his galleon, with the scent of rum, with wind smacking the sails. Climbing these rocks, in the shadow of towering mountain peaks, I do not notice the endless, deserted horizon, the empty, empty sea.
Soon dusk slides from these mountaintops into this sea. The sun punctures the water. We glance toward shore, by now almost too tired to trek back on rocks that are slippery and uneven. We are too hot, too thirsty. No one has remembered to bring fresh water. We are ill-prepared in the nurturing and nourishment of our bodies. When we finally reach our towels we are angry and sullen, too exhausted to speak. Always, I believe my friends suffer from the same exhaustion as I. Always, I am disappointed no pirate has sailed to the island for me, that I will not wield a gold sword or wear a ruby earring in the lobe of one ear. I will not feel thick hemp rope in my calloused hands. These images are neither fantasy nor daydream. This habitat of truthful magic is where I live. It is a secret that is mine.
The Antilles School is high on a mountain. Its veranda and classrooms overlook the entrance to the harbor, drenched in tropical sunlight. White sails billow. Seagulls wing across the blue vault of sky. I am restless. School is boring. While I want to concentrate, I can’t. I have trouble listening in school, for these are not the voices I want to hear. I gaze out paneless windows until this magical power I possess finally gusts me outside and I am flowing into newly discovered scents and sounds of the West Indies. The flutter of hummingbird wings. The drip of frangipani leaves after a tropical rain. This soothing language is one I believe belongs only to me. I am with these scents, of these sounds, while able to leave my dull, dull body far behind.
Yet I wonder: Is this body alone or is it with Dina’s? If it’s with Dina, are two bodies actually present? Sometimes I feel as if strands of her black hair are braided tight with my own. She must know what I do; I know what she does. Even so, we aren’t the same. There is a difference. For at other times our hair unravels and we are attached by the thinnest of membranes. It unravels at night—when she is the one who waits for my father—while I grasp filaments of a spiderweb and climb a silken ladder to the most distant planet or star. These are the times I’m able to watch her from a distance, the times I don’t have her feelings, the times her experiences don’t have to be mine.
So who is it—Dina or me—this afternoon on the school veranda? I’ve been the one playing volleyball, and I am the one now holding a white paper cup, waiting in line with my friends at the bubbler. We are allowed only one cup of water, far from enough, and I am the one who is thirsty. Now, on this particular day, I am also exhausted from heat and faint after finishing my water.
At first, upon waking, I feel the cement floor beneath my legs. Then I hear the voice of the school handyman, a black man, fanning me with a palm-leaf fan and offering me a second cup of water. Through the thin paper cup I feel the cool water against my fingertips. I am so grateful I’m almost afraid to drink it, not wanting, ever, to finish it.
“Go on,” he tells me. “It’s for you. Drink it.”
I do, and after I finish he helps me to the far end of the veranda, where I sit at a table to rest.
Two older boys come and sit across from me. Tough, sullen, they say, “You let that native man see down your blouse, but you don’t let us, you know what they’ll say about you?”
I recognize something familiar in their eyes and I know I am not supposed to answer.
“Nigger lover,” they say.
I collapse the paper cup in my fist and stare at it. They laugh at me and say: “Nigger lover, nigger lover, suck your nigger titty. You let us look, we won’t tell anyone what we saw that nigger do.”
Of course I know nothing happened while I fainted. Even without looking I know my jumper is safely snapped. But I have this fear I’ll never be able to speak again or explain anything. So when they tell me to lean under the table, I do. They unsnap my jumper and stare at my flat child breasts. At first they laugh nervously, but then they simply stare. They don’t touch me.
It is now that I know—this is the moment—I am no longer me. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, my hazel eyes fade into Dina’s black ones. It is Dina’s gaze that shamefully turns from the boys to blankly watch the ground.
The headmistress catches us—catches me. I am ordered to the bathroom, where she washes my mouth with soap. She calls to tell my mother. When I get home my mother takes off my pants and hits me with a belt, but by this time I know she is right, know my body deserves to be punished. I believe everything she says about my body is true. I expect to be punished. I relish it, even believe that with her strikes my body is purified. I believe my mother is the only one capable of cleansing my body.
My mother tells my father: Sue was caught showing her breasts to the boys at school.
His jealousy shows me how much he loves me. That night he bites my nipples until they bleed, tells me they belong to him, that I am never to let another man see them or touch them, that he will kill me next time, that he can make my body into a body no man would ever be able to stand to look at. My body can only be his.
Yes, Daddy, I believe you, for I know it could never be mine.
He is right. For in the heat of St. Thomas my father, too, is thirsty. He, too, doesn’t have enough to drink, so he must drink my sweat, my blood, my saliva. He must drink and drink and drink.
My mother throws a pair of my white cotton underpants at my feet. There is a stain on them, she says, and she will not give them to our maid, Sylvanita, to wash. She would be embarrassed. I should be embarrassed. She orders me to wash them until every trace of stain is removed. We have no hot water in St. Thomas, and I stand at the bathroom sink for over an hour scrubbing with cold water. The bar of soap melts to a nub. My legs ache from standing. My fingers are numb. I don’t know what the stain is. It is slightly yellow, murky, a shameful leakage, an evil discharge from my body—no, Dina’s body, I tell myself. And I know my mother is right that it must be removed.
At dinnertime my mother checks on me. I show her the progress—really there is none—and I’m told I will wear these underpants to dinner, that we don’t have money to be buying new underpants. Throughout dinner I sit in cold wet pants. I don’t know if she has told my father or my sister, but I am too ashamed to eat. Too exhausted. My father is the only one who ever talks at dinner, telling us about his day, his work, his career. No one listens. Surely, we all are too tired. We are all, in our different ways, all of us, worn to a nub.
Soon afterward my back begins to hurt. It feels like a weight, as if my lower back is too swollen to move. I believe it is permanently chilled from the wet underpants.
In fourth grade a new teacher comes to the school, an Englishman, Mr. Gerrard. Since St. Thomas was owned by Denmark before being bought by the United States, there are no British accents, and we are not tolerant of his differentness. Besides, his body smells sour, and he is, in the opinion of my class, quite homely. We tease him mercilessly. We disrupt class. We hold our noses when he walks by. We laugh at him. We ignore his authority as a teacher. Surely it is upon this man, this lonely stranger, that I act out the rage my family deserves. I sense the vulnerability of a newcomer, sense his timidity. I have learned the art of being a predator from my parents. Surely he receives the wrath that is nightly implanted into my body. I scorn his weakness—not wanting to see my own in him. My classmates and I shame him from the island in less than a year. But I am the one who is truly, forever, shamed.
One evening when my father is in the States on business, my mother spends hours helping me memorize the multiplication tables. 4 X 7? 8 X 3? 6 X 7? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. The hour grows later. I manage to remember a few correct answers, but I am far away from knowing them all. For a while I stand on my head, thinking the extra blood in my brain will help my memory. Then I climb a doorway, a trick I learned from my sister. By putting a foot on either side of the wide jambs, with palms also pressed to the jambs, I shinny up to the top, quite high, as the ceilings are high. Maybe I can think better from up here. I can’t. I slide halfway down, then jump, waking our dachshund, Oscar. He begins to bark and we put him out on the porch. 7 X 9? Sevens are the worst. My mother keeps drilling me, and it is close to midnight when we become hysterical. Soon we are laughing so hard we’re crying, she as hard as I. I will never learn these numbers; I will never be able to stop laughing; I will never be able to stop crying. Oscar continues to bark. No one in my family will ever be able to stop.
My mother receives the following letter from my father, still in the States on business:
Dear Precious,
I have your long letter. I am very sorry you were hurt about my asking Morris to hold all the mail for me. I did tell him specifically only to hold the office mail—to give you all other mail. I told him to do so because heretofore I found on my return all the mail which had accumulated during my absence strewn all over my desk as well as in the box on my desk. I never know who in my absence is looking at the mail and there might be letters which arrived in my absence which I did not find. I therefore asked Morris to be sure to keep all the mail for me, that is official mail until I returned. I am sorry that was misunderstood and I am sorry that it added to your troubles. I have no secrets and you know that I do not have any. There is nothing that I need hide from you.
I write a letter to my daddy:
How are you? I am just beautiful, darling. I’d like you to bring me a string of blue popit beads, and I would like the smallest size bead there is and a long string of the beads. Is it cold up there? did it snow? We took our dancing lesson today, it was good. We got Oscar a new collar. Oscar sends his love.
Maria looks pretty for her birthday party, wearing a white dress with crinolines. A white hibiscus is pinned in her short dark hair. I place my present on the table and sit beside her, waiting for the others to arrive. Sandwiches, crusts trimmed from the sides, are on china platters surrounding a birthday cake with white icing and pink roses. Coke and 7-Up bubble in crystal glasses. The maid has prepared this food and set the table before going home. Maria’s mother will be in her room, drinking. Her father? Maria shakes her head. Mike, her brother, has eaten one of the pink roses off the cake and her father is punishing him. Her brother has been taken to his room.
Even after the kids arrive I sit beside the table. I notice the spot where her eight-year-old brother plucked the pink rose neatly from its nest of white icing. But since I believe he surely hasn’t eaten enough, I decide I must bring him another piece of cake. I cut a huge slice from another corner, where there are two roses, and wrap it in a napkin.
I slip away, carrying the cake in both hands. Inside the house, my buffalo-hide sandals slap across the vertivert rugs on the wood floor of the living room. Slowly I climb the stairs to the second story. All the doors off the hall are shut. Behind the door of her parents’ bedroom, her mother sits with closed hurricane shutters. I wonder if she knows there’s a party; I wonder if she knows it’s her daughter’s birthday.
I want to race down the hall, banging on doors and shouting. I want to wake up this house. But I creep silently. I will make no sound. I feel light, as thin as air, and I believe myself invisible. I must not get caught, because if I do, the cake will be taken away and I must feed Mike more cake. When I reach his shut door I’m afraid to set the cake on the floor, afraid to relinquish it for even a moment, so I hold it against my chest, even though it’s getting squashed. With my other hand I turn the glass knob. The door gives. I push it inch by inch, feeling warm air seep toward me over the threshold. The room is dim. A ceiling fan barely stirs sweaty air. Mike lies on his bed, on his stomach. His back has been cut by a tamarind switch that is now in the corner. I sit beside him. He doesn’t open his eyes.
I break off a small piece of cake and press it to his mouth. Nothing happens. I don’t move, just wait, wait for him to smell it, wait for him to understand it is for him, and it is all right for him to eat it. When his lips finally part and my fingers nudge the cake inside, he waits a moment before chewing. As soon as he swallows, I break off another piece, then another. He chews faster now, not once opening his eyes. When he is finished, I let him lick my fingers to soothe him, because I’m worried he is still hungry. I want to feed him more and more, fill him, nourish him, nurture him with food.
The Virgin Isle Hotel looks like a gigantic white bird nesting atop a volcanic mountain. The hotel is owned by Billy’s family, and on Sundays he and I swim in the turquoise pool until the skin on my fingers puckers. After, we lounge on the terrace sunning ourselves while waiters bring us hamburgers, chocolate milk shakes, and Cokes. No one monitors us or asks for money. Billy simply signs the check. We play Hide and Seek down corridors and along terraces, in the cool marble lobby, behind cabanas. Sometimes we enter the woods, breathless, sweaty, but young, safe with each other. In the distance a donkey brays. Mongooses scurry in the undergrowth. I hide behind mimosa and royal poinciana trees, waiting for him to find me. When he does, we laugh. His skin smells of limes and the sun. And I want … I never want to lose his smell of limes, I never want to lose it, and don’t understand the urgency to stay with him here in the woods, to make his smell, just by playing games with him, mine.
But later, tired from the afternoon sun, we sit in the Foolish Virgin Bar. Fish nets, filled with green and blue glass floats, hang from the ceiling. We order ginger ale and bowls of maraschino cherries and peanuts. I alternate—cherries and peanuts, cherries and peanuts, sweet and salt—until my lips and fingers are stained red and dotted white with salt. I stay with Billy until dusk, when we lean against the wrought-iron rail surrounding the terrace and watch the sun, the color of a crimson hibiscus, stain the Caribbean red. Far below, ships in the harbor rock in currents. The mound of bauxite on the pier darkens. The massive volcanic mountains seem thicker, more opaque, in evening darkness. Soon Charlotte Amalie, below us, is sprinkled with lights. Stars spike the sky. Then Billy leaves for home. I watch him go. It is time for me to meet my parents and my sister for dinner.
For dinner, at the hotel, tables are set with white cloths and polished silver. Magenta and yellow tropical flowers scent the room. Men wear white linen jackets and women in elegant gowns smell of expensive French perfume. The wooden dance floor gleams. The steel-drum band, wearing calypso shirts, plays on a raised stage. There will be a show. Usually professionals teach tourists how to dance the calypso, the merengue, the limbo.
Later, my father and I dance together. I am crisp and starched, my skirt bouyed with crinolines, my patent-leather shoes shining. Rarely does he dance with my mother, and never with my sister. We twirl around. He holds me tight and I smell his bay rum aftershave. Everyone smiles at us, dancing. I am a good dancer and everyone thinks I’m cute—this young girl dancing with her father. And later still, much later, this scent of bay rum will be on my skin, on Dina’s body. But while we dance I wonder what my mother thinks. Are you jealous, Mother? Are you hurt? Or maybe you’re relieved, relieved to have relinquished your duties as wife to your daughter.
Always, my mother kisses me good-night, tucking the marquisette net under the mattress to protect me while I sleep. Then the shudder of net as my father opens the door leading from the porch, the quiver of net as he gently untucks it and slips onto my white sheets. I am always the lover he seeks on his nightly journey to my bed, too far away from his own. He kisses me and eases off my underpants and nightgown. He decorates my body with strand after strand of blue beads. He caresses my body, wanting me to love what he does as much as he loves it, wanting my body to desire his body—now, right now, when he can no longer delay, when he must enter me, when he can no longer wait. Except sometimes, these moments, he must notice my true-true body: cool as granite; rigid as rage. With incomprehension, lost in his own rage, desperately needing just one part of my body more than he needs sanity or love, he begins to hurt me … unless … quickly, quickly I metamorphose. Quickly silky black hair whispers across my shoulders and quickly I offer him Dina. Dina, whose body supplicates, whose body desires. Dina, who will be his childlover forever, his nightdaughter, whose body is never cool, never granite. I give my daddy the gift of Dina. Dina. Dina. Never, even once, will she refuse.
At the outdoor market I buy a slice of sugarcane and examine crates of papaya, mango, pineapple, plantains. I sit on an old rum barrel and dig my teeth into yellow, pulpy cane and chew it until only the skin remains. In my red French madras playsuit and buffalo-hide sandals, I am an island girl wandering through town. At Katz’s Pharmacy I, along with other patrons, tap dimes on the counter until we are waited on. I buy a scoop of chocolate ice cream from Mr. Katz’s daughter, several years older than I. Her eyes are lined with black and she wears her long ponytail braided. She is beautiful. I decide to braid my ponytail as well. I explore shady, brick-lined alleys of Beretta Center, where duty-free shops sell jewelry, perfume, Sea Isle cotton, cashmere sweaters, Madeira linens, doeskin cloth, French madras dresses, carnation and lavender Morny soap, West Indian rum. I follow tourists and wonder what it would be like if they took me home. I linger in front of Mr. Beretta’s jewelry store, gazing at rows of amethysts, emeralds, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, pearls. I want to hold these cool, smooth jewels in my hands. My sister is inside with Mr. Beretta, sprawled on a wicker chair as if she’s been there for hours. My sister always spends more time with acquaintances than with anyone who might grow close to her. She knows the shopkeepers far better than I, and one day Mr. Beretta gives her a ruby ring, her birthstone. Then, perhaps as an afterthought, he gives me a diamond ring, my birthstone, in the shape of a flower.
I visit Little Switzerland, next to my father’s bank. It is the only place on the island with air-conditioning, and I love the blast of cold as I enter. I wander aisles of Wedgwood, silverware, watches, cuckoo clocks. All the jewelry, all the bottles of rum and liquor, all the imported tablecloths, all the perfumes soothe me. I am soothed by the cool perfection of cut gems. I am soothed by perfect-ticking Swiss clocks. The merchandise in all these stores is ordered, arranged, controlled. Everything smells new and unused, which is how I feel here, the way I wish I could always be.
One day in fifth grade I sit with my legs apart, showing my underpants. This act is willful, compulsive. I feel as if I have to do it, even as I know I don’t want to do it. I feel as if I have to show someone—anyone—what I know how to do, even as I don’t want to be noticed. In front of the class Miss DuVall tells me young ladies should never sit like that. I lower my eyes and don’t want to return to school.
Besides, I don’t quite understand school. We are given books to read, lessons to memorize, and while I vaguely understand that I am supposed to read the books and learn the lessons, I do not believe they are important. How can this knowledge help me? How can teachers teach me anything? Doesn’t my father teach me all I need to know? Doesn’t he always tell me so?
Why, then, do I lack words for what I know? At school we are taught French, but still, even in this language, I learn no words for what I know, for what I am taught at night. So if words don’t exist, if definitions don’t exist, if signs and symbols don’t exist, then maybe people and actions don’t exist either. None of us exists. Night doesn’t exist. Bodies don’t exist. I don’t exist, for surely I know no language that might prove otherwise.
What is the definition of “father,” “mother,” “sister,” “daughter,” “soul,” “family,” “love”? Do I ever learn? Maybe all the definitions I learn are wrong.
I do learn, however, one of the most important lessons of my life: Contradictions never startle or surprise me. I am capable of living with irreconcilable contradictions.
I am a Brownie for one day, attend only one meeting, then refuse to return. Immediately I notice the badges the girls have sewn on their uniforms, badges proclaiming skills at which they excel, goals accomplished. I know the skills at which I excel. Even lacking words, I believe these are my only skills. But the badges worn by these girls don’t portray beds, sheets, bodies. Does this mean my skills are useless? How do I know, though, lacking words, symbols, definitions, that no girl wears these badges because no badges are even designed that portray beds, sheets, bodies? All I know is that I can’t return for the next Scout meeting. I couldn’t bear to be the only Brownie with no badge sewn on her brown uniform.
One day at school we are served corn fritters for lunch. I know I cannot eat them. I know the moist, chunky pieces of corn embedded in a soggy white mass will make me sick. I stare at the plate, at the two fritters I am required to eat. Just from the smell my throat feels cold, my forehead sweaty. The headmistress says if I don’t eat both of them I will be taken to the bathroom and punished. I am afraid of her, afraid of her bony fingers. I imagine them punishing me, imagine them scrubbing my mouth with soap. Billy whispers he’ll eat mine if I slide them onto his plate, but the headmistress doesn’t take her eyes off me. I hold my breath and slowly begin to eat. I take tiny bites, drinking milk between bites to wash away the taste. I am determined not to be sick at school—not in front of everyone. The milk is gone long before the fritters, and as the others file back to class I am left alone on the veranda with the headmistress and my fritters. My sister passes and refuses to look at me; I embarrass her. I know I do and would eat them for her sake alone if I could. It takes the rest of the afternoon—through French and math and recess—before I eat the last bite of fritter.
The school bus drives us down the mountain. Today I don’t stay in town but climb the 99 Steps up to Blackbeard’s Hill, up the hill to our house, to my bedroom. In the cool, silent house I lie on my bed, my skin sweating, my stomach freezing, waiting to throw up. I throw up for hours, on and off, unable to stop. My mother brings me ginger ale and presses damp washcloths to my forehead. I vomit every kernel of corn into the bucket she has placed on the floor next to my bed. I must get rid of it all. My mother disdains fried food and calls the headmistress in a rage: I am never to be forced to eat corn fritters again. But her rage is deeper: Our family is insular. No one from the outside world is allowed to interfere. It is she, she and my father only, who control what enters my body.
It is late at night before I finish being sick. I had fallen asleep and when I awake my father is sitting next to me. Through the windows the breeze feels cool and fresh. Fronds of coconut palms rustle. In the distance, a goat is bleating. When I move and my father realizes I am awake, he wipes my face with a wet cloth. This is all. He wipes my face and brushes hair from my forehead. I whisper to him I was sick. Gently, he squeezes my hand, then holds the glass of ginger ale to my lips. Slowly, I sip it. I want him to stay here, holding the glass, wiping my face. He has placed a small copper bell next to my bed and tells me to ring it if I wake up sick. He tucks the mosquito net under the mattress and I watch him leave. I want to say to him: Stop, Daddy. Come back. But I say nothing. He might ask why, and I’d have no answer. I will have to wait for years, until I am an adult, before I know what I would have said to him if I’d called him back. I would have said: This is all it takes, this is all I want, this is how easy it is to be a father.
Summers, we spend in the States. My mother takes my sister and me to New York City to visit her sister, my Aunt Patsy, and Uncle Evan. My father will join us later. I am particularly fond of my Uncle Evan and call him Esey. They have no children, and he spends hours playing with me. For a living, Esey writes jokes and books about jokes. He makes up word games and teaches me to play. His office is in their small apartment and the room is crammed, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves. I lie on the cranberry-colored carpet and gaze up at the green, brown, tan, black spines of the books. I love the way the room smells of old dusty paper and ink. The solidity of the books, the thousands and thousands of well-ordered words creating sentences, creating paragraphs, imparting information and knowledge, is reassuring, even though I don’t yet have the desire to read the books, don’t believe I would understand them. For now, I simply love being in the company of these books because Esey loves them.
Uncle Esey lets me distract him from his work when I am bored. I poke through cubbyholes of his rolltop desk, which is stuffed with notecards, bottles of ink, boxes of paper clips, rubber bands. I sit on his lap and peck at the keys on his black typewriter. He tells me funny stories. He has a soft smile and gentle hands, and I follow him around the apartment and go out with him to run errands. He takes me to the Museum of Natural History and spends hours with me when I discover the ancient Egyptian exhibits—the jewelry, the pottery, the artifacts. I am mesmerized by the display. I imagine her, my Egyptian princess, wearing silver and gold and smelling of the mysterious green water of the Nile.
Patsy and Esey take us to my first Chinese restaurant. My favorite part is the fortune cookie and Esey gives me his. I’m amazed that one’s fortune can arrive serendipitously in a cookie. I save my slips of white paper as proof of a bright future. I believe in this, in the future, more than the present, certainly more than the past.
At dusk I stand at the window in their living room and watch lights bloom across Manhattan. We are high in a skyscraper, and I think of the mountains at home, standing on the terrace of the V. I. Hotel and gazing down at Charlotte Amalie. The island seems unreal and far away. I try to imagine my father alone up at the hotel while we, his three little girls, as he still calls us, are away from him. I wonder if he misses us. I know he does. He has to. He must. Before I left he whispered to me how much he would miss me, me, his most special, precious little girl. But maybe he’s not alone at the hotel, I think. He hates to be alone. I feel slightly scared when I think of him dancing with another precious little girl.
I lie on the leather couch. Light from the rest of the apartment filters into the living room. From Esey’s study comes the sound of typing. My sister is in the bedroom reading. She loves to read, to be alone, and I know better than to ask her to play with me. In the kitchen my mother talks to my aunt. Earlier in the day I had discovered a toy, a Hawaiian dancing girl, stuffed into a drawer in a bureau. It is about three inches high. The Hawaiian girl, made of rubber, wears a grass skirt, but her breasts are bare. She stands on a wood base and by turning a small lever her hips and breasts gyrate. I am entranced by this motion. I know my daddy must have bought this present for my uncle, for he is the one who traveled to Hawaii.
My father arrives in New York to take us to Monhegan Island in Maine. On his first night in the city he holds me on his lap while telling us all the news of St. Thomas. He is stroking my knee, and suddenly I am filled with dread when I think of the trip to Maine. I thought I had missed him, had been waiting to see him, but now I want to stay here with my Uncle Esey. Later I take the Hawaiian doll to bed with me, hiding it under the sheet. My father turns off the light after he kisses my sister and me good-night. His bay rum aftershave smells too foreign here in the city. It reminds me of there, back there in my four-poster mahogany bed in our house next to Blackbeard’s Castle.
After my father leaves the room, I see her again, the Egyptian princess. It’s night. She’s running across the sands of the desert. An orange slice of a moon dazzles the water of the Nile and reflects on the gold and silver bangly bracelets encircling her arms and her wrists. Reeds slash at her ankles as she runs faster, fleeing an angry pharaoh. She hides in the shadow of the Sphinx, waiting for an Egyptian prince to save her. But the prince doesn’t come. I can’t sleep. I still hold the Hawaiian dancer, but she’s no longer Hawaiian. She’s the Egyptian princess. I don’t understand why I grip her so tightly, my thumb against her throat. Nor do I understand why I must bite off one of her nipples.
By the time we reach Monhegan Island my father is in a rage. Nothing has gone right on the trip: the food, the car, the maps, the directions, the roads, the ferry ride, his children, his wife—all are wrong. My mother, sister, and I are sullen. So even though the white wood hotel is lovely, the island is lovely, no one wants to be here. We all want to be back home where we are more comfortable in our own small private furies. As we unpack, my mother makes a final stab at a vacation and suggests we all change immediately and head to the beach. But this beach is not like the Caribbean. The water is frigid, the shoreline rocky. My mother will not enter this water and sits on a rock to sun herself. My sister wanders off down the shore. My father marches into the ocean. Even though water is scary to me, I follow. I must. I know he wants someone to be with him, and I must be the one.
The cold water stuns me, but I pretend to love it, knowing this will please my father. My mother calls to me to come out—that I will catch pneumonia or polio. My father tells her to leave me alone, the water is fine. She persists. He screams at her to shut up, shut up, to leave me, leave him alone, if she doesn’t stop bothering us, he’ll…
I sink below the surface of the water. Their voices fade. All I hear is the deep throb of the ocean, connecting me to all oceans … and if I loosened my moorings I would be able to float back to the Caribbean, float to New York City to see my Uncle Esey, float…
In this murky water I see nothing. The sodden cold weighs me deeper and deeper. I close my eyes and expel my breath in a slow rush of bubbles. It is here, now, I lose my fear of water. It is here I discover its soothing lap, lap against my skin, rocking me. In this body-numbing water I can let go and float to a deep basin of the sea. My seaweed hair will drift about my shoulders. My skin turns to phosphorescence. My fingernails are delicate pink shells. My teeth are pearls. And I will dwell forever beneath a warm blanket of sand on the ocean floor.
But then I feel his hands on me, those hands, on my arms, yanking me. When I surface, all I hear are tattered remnants of words from my mother. “There, now, you satisfied—” By the time I open my eyes she has turned from us and is walking back to the cabin.
I shiver so much my legs feel wayward and useless. My father carries me from the water and arranges towels on the rocks, placing me on them. He rubs my arms and legs to warm me. Heat from the rock feels as if it radiates my skin, seeping along my spine to the backs of my limbs. At first this feels good. As he breathes deeply, though, I begin to feel as if I’m back under water—this time fighting for air. He pulls my hand under the leg of his bathing suit, but my numb hand has trouble gripping him there. I feel his tension: We’re outside, hurry up and do this. If I don’t do this correctly and quickly he will be angry. I try to concentrate. I must remember what he has taught me, how he has taught me to do this. Yes, you Dina, you weren’t in the water, you ’re not shivering, you can do this.
But her small hand, too, at this angle, has trouble. We, Dina and I, are lying on the rock and we can’t turn. Her elbow is rigid against stone, but Dina, you want to do this for him. You want this as much as he does. She rubs him as hard as she can, but it’s not hard enough. Perhaps he’s worried someone will see us. We’ve never done this outdoors before, and I—my body is shamed. I feel stripped, exposed, naked. His tension grows. He hasn’t seen me in several weeks, and if he doesn’t get what he needs soon he will hurt us. He yanks aside the crotch of my suit but doesn’t even bother to touch me, just stares, stares, stares at me. No, not at me, at it. He stares at it. Yes, do this, Father, do this. If this will make it happen quicker, do it. Do whatever you want. Just do it.
His voice is hoarse, whispering: “Open your mouth. We can’t get any on the towel, open your mouth. Damnit. Hurry.”
My mouth is frozen shut, but he’s pulling up the leg of his suit farther as he moves up and over me. Someone will see, I think, someone will come walking along the rocks. My sister will return. My mother. I shut my own eyes, not wanting to witness this. It is Dina, Dina is finally able to open her mouth, and he shoves it against the roof of her mouth just as he ejaculates. But she can’t swallow fast enough. Damn her, damn her. What’s wrong with her? Maybe she’s not used to sunlight either. Before, it’s always been dark … Dina disappears, and now it is my throat. I can’t swallow. I spit it out all over the towel. He lies back, and I think about lifting a rock and smashing him … No, I think, no. I must be perfect, and he will love me. I must clean up this mess I have made, do nothing to make him angry. I take the towel to the edge of the ocean and scrub it with sand. I scoop water into my mouth and swallow it, but still I taste it, that taste, and I put a handful of sand in my mouth and scrub it across my teeth and my tongue with a finger.
It is then I see my mother. My legs buckle and I sit flat on the sand. She’s walking toward me over the rocks, and I don’t know whether she saw us or not. My body feels as if she did see—it is weak with shame—and I believe that even from this distance she can smell that stuff in my mouth. I look down at my body. My father has not properly arranged the crotch of my suit, but my arms are unable to move in order to fix it. I am without will. And as I sit here, I think I see myself floating away, rising up from the shoreline, as if the ocean opened its mouth in a curl of a wave and released me in a spindrift. I float higher and higher, so by the time my mother reaches the spot where my body once was, I know it is not me she touches. It is not my mouth her fingers probe as she scoops out sand. It is not my ears threatened with her words. It is not my arm her fingernails puncture as she yanks me back to the cabin, passing my sleeping father without a word or a glance. Again, it is not my ears that hear her say I have sand in my crotch; if it’s not properly cleaned, it will become infected. I am in a bathtub of icy water—icy, she says, to kill any germs that might cause infection. She separates my legs and washes the sand away with her hand. Yes, do this, Mother, I think. Wash it away. My mother will make me better. She is calmer now. The bottom of the tub is gritty with sand, but as soon as she pulls the plug it will disappear forever. Everything will be fine, she tells me. We ’11 just get you cleaned up. We’ll wash the sand from your hair. You have such pretty hair.
By the time I am clean and dry and dressed, my father has returned to the cabin. He, too, is now calm. Yes, my mother is right: Everything will be better now. I know this. He just needed to do that. Then he is calm and better. We’re all better. He sits in a chair reading the New York Times and barely glances at us as we enter.
I leave the cabin and go to the lobby of the hotel. Through a picture window overlooking the ocean, I see my sister far down the beach jumping from rock to rock. If she tripped and fell … I want her to, but not because I hate her. I want her to fall so I can rush out and save her. She would be indebted to me forever. She would love me forever, love me more than she loves to be alone. Except my sister will never trip. Insistently, her ramrod body will refuse ever to stumble, ever to waver, ever to fall. So why, then, do I feel so sad watching her?
I wander into the dining room where college kids on vacation set tables for dinner. I watch a girl with shiny blonde hair pour water from a pitcher into a glass. Her skin looks healthy and scrubbed. She wears lipstick the color of pink pop-it beads, and she smiles at me with white-white teeth as she wanders over. I want her to like me. I want to be her friend. She says her name is Trixie, and immediately I love the solid sound of her name, the way her tongue ticks the roof of her mouth when it hits the hard “x” and “t.” Solid, yes, and I wish I had a solid name, not the too-soft, too-weak whisper of a fading vowel. To myself, I say her name over and over and smile back. She asks if I’m hungry, and when I nod she brings me a piece of chocolate cake. When I finish, she brings me another. I want her to invite me to go with her to college.
That night at dinner she is our waitress. What luck, I think, as I see her bring us menus. But now I’m worried my father won’t like the food, that he’ll raise his voice at Trixie, that he will send food back to the kitchen. I’m so scared I can’t eat much dinner. Besides, I’m full of chocolate cake. All I eat are a couple of rolls and another piece of cake. But my father likes the food. He also likes Trixie. He jokes with her, asks where she goes to college, asks if she has boyfriends. “You must have loads of boyfriends,” he says, smiling. When she pours him a cup of coffee he pats her hip, and the three of us, his three little girls, sit hunched inside ourselves, silent.
For two weeks I only eat cake and rolls. Trixie feeds me cake between meals as if she knows I’m hollow and she will be the one to fill me. So I eat and eat and eat. The more cake I eat, the more ravenous I become, and could eat even more cake than offered but am too shy to ask. I eat until I am drunk on sugar. Later, all I can do is sit on the rocks or sleep. I don’t go for walks. I can’t go swimming—I am too bloated. Too dizzy. Too stuffed. When I awake I feel hungover and must return to Trixie to feed me more and more cake, until no longer do I remember what my father and I did together on the beach.
I get sick. My skin and my eyes yellow. For days I lie in bed, finally completely stuffed and unable to eat one more bite of cake. I want my mother to comfort me, sit beside me, tell me she loves me. She doesn’t. She can’t. She doesn’t seem to know how to love me, but of course who could possibly love this bloated yellow body? Trixie visits, but just seeing her I think of sugar and I wait for her to leave. When my father talks to her he stands close to her and puts his hand on her arm when he smiles. She tells my parents a newly arrived hotel guest is a doctor. My mother asks him if he will see me. The doctor gives me enemas, but this strange man touching my body doesn’t scare me. My body no longer feels shame. Finally, I feel nothing.
From Maine we stop in New York for a few days to see my aunt and uncle before returning to the West Indies. It is late September. The Antilles School will start soon. In this early fall, the leaves in Central Park are red and yellow. I remember the fall in second grade, in Maryland, when I couldn’t attend school and try to think back to that time, try to remember why I stayed home, but that seems like another little girl afraid of school, another little girl afraid to leave her mother.
I’m not yet old enough to attend the dance at the Grand Hotel for the young Danish sailors who sail to port aboard the Danmark, but I want to meet a sailor. I must go. Earlier in the day my friends and I watched the square-rigged training ship glide around the point by Hassel Island. The bow gently plowed and furrowed the blue water. Wind puffed the rows of square-rigged sails. As the ship neared port I saw the blurred outlines of sailors swabbing the deck, getting ready for the islanders who would come aboard to visit. The Danmark dropped anchor next to the yellow bauxite on the pier, the silver flecks in the bauxite reflecting tiny wands of sunlight till it shimmered. I must meet a sailor. I want to dance with one.
Without letup I beg my mother. She keeps saying no. I will leave early, I say. She can fetch me any time she wants, but I must go. “I have to go,” I say. “I’m going.”
Finally she relents. My father puts on his linen jacket and says he has to work late. Since the bank is only a block from the Grand Hotel, he says, he’ll pick me up afterwards.
My mother helps me dress in my red and black dress with tiny black buttons and black patent-leather shoes. I slip a long strand of white pop-it beads around my neck. I ask her to braid my ponytail, and she does. When I am ready, I walk carefully down the 99 Steps, scared I’ll scuff a shoe, rip a hem, mess my hair. I have to be perfect. I have to be asked to dance, for this will make me perfect.
At first, though, I don’t think about dancing, because all I can see is the dance itself. It is perfect, exactly the way it should be. The girls’ dresses look like butterfly wings fluttering across the dance floor. The sailors’ uniforms are as white as the foam on the waves at Magens Bay, with the word Danmark embroidered in gold on black cap-bands. Their unfamiliar accents circle the whorls of my ears. I feel as if they’ve traveled the world, yes, and brought all the world with them, here to this dance, here to me.
From across the room I notice a sailor watching me. Most of the sailors are blonde, but this one isn’t. His black hair, I know, will smell like the mysterious depths of the sea. I glance away from him, down at the floor. I step back. For a moment I remember the way Billy smells in the forest: of fresh lime trees and the sun. The sailor is different. I know this. And then I understand that if he is different, I must be, too. I am not like these other girls. So as much as I want him to ask me to dance, as much as I want to dance, I don’t want him to know me, know I am not like these other girls, in their soft pastel dresses. I am in red and black. I should not have braided my ponytail. I should not have worn this long strand of plastic pearls. I am … I am another kind of girl, and I believe he must know it.
He walks toward me. I hold my breath. He doesn’t ask me to dance, but he takes my hand. Even though he doesn’t hold me tight, still, with his hand pressed to my back, I feel stifled and trapped. My chin brushes his starched uniform and feels as if it’s been burned. Yet if he leads me from the dance, if he leads me to his ship, I will have to follow. I will go with him, even though if he touches my body my father will know.
I see now I should not have come to the dance. No longer can I hear music. The girls’ dresses, the sailors’ uniforms, the dancing couples seem flat, muted. I am too far away to see. With the sway of his body the sailor edges me outside to the second-story veranda overlooking Emancipation Park and the harbor where the Danmark is anchored. Still we are dancing, but slower. He is dancing with Dina, and he must know it. From the moment he saw me he knew who I was: a girl who would dance outside with a stranger. He pauses by the rail and brushes a strand of hair from my forehead. No, don’t do this, stop. But he can’t hear the words. From his pocket he removes a white and blue silk handkerchief with an image of the Danmark on it. He gives it to me, a present, but I believe it is payment—I understand what is expected, what I am supposed to do in order to be able to keep it. Still, I take it. I want it. I smile at him. He bends to hold me again, and I must let him. I don’t know how to stop. He is bending closer and closer—and maybe it’s only to dance with me, but…
It is now, at this moment, I feel him, the other him, leaving the bank, my father, who knows now is the time he must come to get me. He is turning off the lights in the bank. He is locking the wrought-iron grill behind him. He is walking toward the car. He will be the one to save me—the only one capable of saving me. And as the sailor bends closer I believe I see, from the corner of my eye, headlights from my father’s car beam up the street toward the Grand Hotel, searching for me. He knows I am calling to him, knows he must come for me. The only way I can stop dancing with the sailor is with the help of my father. I have promised my father that nothing would ever happen to my body, which is me.
I pull away from the sailor. Back away. Immediately he lets go, doesn’t force me to stay. Instead he is smiling, asking if he has done something wrong. I shake my head and hold out the handkerchief, returning it. He says, no, keep it, it’s for you, I want you to have it. I’m not sure I understand. I thought the present meant… Maybe he only wants to dance. But I feel the headlights, closer. I turn and run.
Driving up the mountain with my father, I watch the harbor. The moon, or perhaps it is the bright headlights of my father’s car, weaken the lights outlining the masts of the Danmark. The horizon from which the ship sailed is lost to the sky. Then the road winds around the mountain, and the harbor is no longer visible. My father holds my hand and squeezes it. He pulls me closer, trailing his fingers up my leg to the beginning of my thigh, there, and without hesitation I do what I’ve been taught, separate my legs, and he can’t can’t can’t wait until we get home. His fingers touch my underpants and he must… He stops the car on the dark street. He pulls off my underpants and unzips his slacks. He edges me down on the seat, on my back, and leans over me. He is so close to me, he is all I can see, and that part of him that he wants me to love is hard against me, not yet in me but against me, pinning me to him, and I can’t move. “Tell me you hated it,” he says. “The dance.”
“Yes, Daddy, I hated it.”
He kisses me and touches my body. “You want to be with me.”
“Yes, Daddy,” I whisper.
And then he is pinning me deeper. The top of my head bangs the door handle as he does what he does when he has to be inside of me. I concentrate on that, on the top of my head hitting metal as he loves me loves me loves me almost more than either of us can manage. He does it, and as he does it the ship, the clipper ship from Denmark—I feel it sailing far away from me. But wait, I think. It has to wait: I realize I forgot to thank the sailor for the present. I have to thank him. But he is gone, and I scream, “Daddy, stop it”—and I mean the ship. I think I mean the ship, that I want him to stop the ship from sailing away, want him to bring the sailor back. But my father doesn’t hear me. And he will never be able to stop it.
The next morning my mother comes in my bedroom and throws the silk handkerchief on my bed. I had dropped it in the car the night before. She asks who gave it to me. I tell her a sailor—just a sailor—I don’t know his name. Did you dance with him much? she wants to know. “No, only just once,” I say. Did he try to kiss you? she asks. “No, Mom, of course not,” I say, laughing. Did he hold you? He must have kissed you. “No, Mom, no, no, no.” I begin to scream—but no, it’s a laugh. I laugh harder. “Nothing happened.” She insists something did, I must have done something or he wouldn’t have given me such a present. But all I can do is pound my fists on the bed and laugh.
At least once a week, when my mother is not watching, I steal a penny out of her wallet. Back in my room I retrieve my Chinese puzzle box that I keep hidden under my doll clothes. The box has a secret chamber that releases the lock. I spring it open. And each week I add another penny to my collection.
My mother is too sick to get out of bed. I hurry home from school every afternoon to sit with her while she listens to her radio, waiting for the news. I press cold washclothes on her forehead. I stroke her hand. Nothing I do helps her feel better. The doctor, she says, must be called. For days, every day, he comes to see her, even though every day she worsens—with an illness given no name or explanation. Only when the doctor is examining her, are her eyes brighter, bluer. On his way out the door, I hear her thin voice urging him back tomorrow.
My father views illness as an unwelcome intrusion into his need for order and control, so he spends less time at home, eating most of his meals at the hotels. In the emergency my sister spends more time at home, baking chocolate cakes for our breakfasts and cream puffs, in the shape of swans, for our dinners. She arranges the swans on a mirror while I set the table, using our best linen, china, and silver. I light candles and we sit across from each other, just the two of us. Slowly, we pluck swans off the mirror. Slowly, we disassemble each one. With small, delicate bites we munch wings, necks, heads, tails, before slowly licking cream from the bodies. When the mirror reflects no more swans, my sister and I gaze at each other, stuffed and satisfied by this quiet dinner, by this quiet house, by this quiet night. I drift asleep, dizzy on sugar. I wake up dizzy, go to school dizzy, after eating a slab of chocolate cake, craving this dizziness, this distraction, which helps me to forget everything else.
The movie Limelight, with Charlie Chaplin, plays at the cinema. It is the story of a young ballerina who suffers hysterical paralysis and tries to commit suicide. An older man, Chaplin, saves her, then continues to nurture her, love her, cure her. After the movie my weeping is uncontrollable—/am. I am inconsolable. This man Charlie Chaplin must be my savior, even though it is far from possible for me to voice from what it is I need to be saved. This, this older man, is the man who must be my father, my lover, my … I barely know what I want or need from him, but the need is boundless. I am restless. Anxious. I can’t eat. I’m unable to sleep. For days I can’t leave the house.
Even when I finally go outside again and lie in a field shaded by tamarind trees, he is with me. He never leaves. I hear him in the rattle of pods on the trees. I feel him in the grass beneath my legs, hear him as spiders strum their silky webs. I feel safe here, with him in this field. He will keep me safe—my savior.
One evening while my mother is still sick and my father is out Maria calls to tell me she is running away from home. She wants me to meet her in Emancipation Park and bring her food. I gather the remains of a chocolate cake, a loaf of bread, and a couple of 7-Ups before hurrying down the mountain. She waits for me on a wrought-iron bench. Light from the Grand Hotel spills across the park, and immediately I see that her nose is bloody and beginning to swell. I know her father has hit her. She has been crying—she’s not now, but her lashes are wet. I tell her the first thing we must do is clean off her nose, and I lead her across the park to the harbor.
She’s not feeling well and lies on the dock. I’d wrapped the cake in a dish towel, which I remove and dip into the water to clean her. When I dab at her nose she winces from the pressure. We need help. We need ice to stop the swelling, but there’s no place downtown to get it where I won’t be questioned. Billy is the only person I can think of who might help us, but I’d have to go to the Grand or the Hotel 1829 to use a phone and, again, I would be questioned.
Maria says she’s going to be sick. Quickly, I try to open the 7-Up for her but realize I’ve forgotten an opener. I feel terrible, angry at myself for being so stupid. She rolls onto her stomach and vomits into the harbor, careful not to make a mess. I tell her I have to get help—maybe the police or a doctor—that she can’t run away with a bloody nose, and there’s nowhere to run anyway. On an island, where would she go?
She wants to stow away on an ocean liner, she says. Sometimes, she says, she sits in her bedroom window for hours staring at the horizon, imagining herself crossing it, crossing to the other side. “I hate it here,” she says. “I don’t know why we have to live here. I wish we could go back to San Juan.”
But I don’t see how she can leave. Tonight no cruise ships are in port. Except for lights from the Grand and the faint sound of music from its bar, the downtown is deserted.
“What’d you do?” I say, motioning toward her nose.
“My daddy goes through my stuff and found this math test. He was mad I only got a B. And—I don’t know—I guess I got mad back at him. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Is he still mad?”
She shrugs. “I mean he just slapped me—and I kind of tripped and fell. You know how clumsy I am.”
I know her father is still mad. And I know she shouldn’t return home until morning. So I ask her if she has any money, thinking we can take a taxi to the hotel, where Billy might be able to sneak her into one of the cabanas.
But Maria has no money. So I say I’ll have to risk going to the Grand to call Billy, see if he’ll come down the mountain and get us. After all, we can’t stay on the dock all night.
She shrugs okay, that I can call Billy.
I cross the park to the Grand, but run into my father. He is under the canopy in front of the hotel saying good-night to a man and a woman who work for him. As I approach, the two move off toward Government Hill, and my father puts his hand on my arm. But we have nothing to say. We stare at each other speechless, almost shyly, it seems, or embarrassed. Because of who we are to each other? What can he say to this girl who’s his daughter, but isn’t—this girl who’s a stranger? He has no idea who I am or what I might do, or be, when I’m away from him. So at first he doesn’t even know how to ask why I’m here, perhaps suspecting I’ve met Billy or one of the boys from school. I don’t want to tell him about Maria, but—my mind races—the truth or a lie?—which would be safer? With his hand on my arm, I feel immobilized. He will not let go until I tell him something; I know this. Maria is sick, I finally say.
I lead him to the harbor where he kneels beside her. While one hand holds her chin, he gently examines her nose with the other. I see her neck strain from his touch, but only barely. I know she won’t tell him to stop either. I look away from them—see only night. At night the horizon is lost to opaque space. I know Maria will never be able to reach it, not even during the day when she can see it. The island is too still. Banana boats gently knock against the dock, but this is the only sound.
He asks who did this to her. She shakes her head. She won’t say. “One of the islanders,” he guesses, even though he sees himself as their champion, the one to come here to “save” them from poverty. “Which one? I’ll have him arrested.”
Maria shakes her head harder. “No,” she says, “nothing like that.”
“Tell me,” he says. “I’ll take care of this. It was one of the boys from school?”
“No,” I say, my voice angry. “It was her father. That’s who did this.”
His look of disbelief is sincere, I know this. He rocks back on his heels before standing. “Her father would never do this,” he says. There’s not a shred of irony on his face or in his voice, and once again I know that I have no idea who this man is. It is this that scares me, at the moment, more than anything. “I know him.”
“Why not?” I say. “Fathers—”
He whirls toward me so fast I think he might hit me. “What?” he says. “Tell me.”
But my throat is stuffed with the hard, cold sound of his voice and I look away from him, saying nothing.
“I know you girls. You got into some trouble with boys and you’re lying. Tell me.”
He wants a name. He wants a lie. If I could have thought of a lie, a lie without implicating others, I would tell it, just to get this over with. But short of saying I’d bloodied Maria’s nose myself which, if I thought he’d believe, I would have, I think of nothing.
“Anyway, what difference does it make what happened?” I say. “She needs a doctor.”
“That will be up to her parents. It’s not our place. Of course, they’ll call the doctor.”
He says he’ll take her home. She doesn’t object. She, as well as I, knows the futility.
Maria and I silently wait at the dock while my father brings the car around. She lies in the back seat, I sit in front, and we drive deserted streets past Market Square, past French Town. At Maria’s house all the lights are off. No one has waited up for her; no one has gone looking. I know there will be no call to a doctor, but I say nothing, no more suggestions, abandoning her, yes, I know this. As soon as she is out of the car, my father drives off, not waiting to see whether she makes it safely inside. But of course that’s where the danger is, inside. So why wait?
My father is angry—I know this, too. Angry because he believes I’ve lied? Or is his anger darker? Does he think I’ve just judged him, not Maria’s father? But perhaps he doesn’t think about this. Perhaps he doesn’t think about himself and me at all. Perhaps he’s more truly lost even than I.
But my own rage is now emerging—although I don’t understand it as rage. Rather, it feels like suffocation. I can barely breathe. I can’t swallow. As the car curves up the mountain, I am silenced by the strength of this feeling. We both are silenced. But I can feel my father’s hands grip the steering wheel, feel the force of his hand shifting gears, hear the grating of metal as the engine strains against the incline all the way to our house.
Tonight he doesn’t wait for me to go to bed first, doesn’t pretend he comes to my bedroom simply to say good-night. Tonight I will be punished for what I have done. There is rage in his hands as he yanks off my shirt, rage in his heart as he yanks off my shorts. He will see no contradiction. No inconsistency. Soon, neither will I. This makes perfect sense to him. Even in his rage he calls this love and believes this, this, and only this will absorb and blunt the rage exploding out the tops of our skulls. And he is right. In terror my rage peaks, and my rage, now mine, knifes away into Dina, lovingly transmogrified into desire, and she, oh how she craves him. His hand grips her ponytail, slamming her head up and down, her mouth around his penis. And I … I float far away from Dina and am blessedly safe, safe with my daddy who loves me.
It is morning. Early. No one is yet awake, but my father is still in bed with me. I am naked; we are both naked. Perhaps because my mother is sick, this is the first time he stays the night. It is like the time at Monhegan Island when we were outside on the beach. Again I feel too exposed, too shy. Sun terrifies me. All night I thought I heard the spinneret of a spider weaving a marquisette net to hide us. But it is too flimsy. The harsh sun will melt it. I have no will and nowhere to hide. As my father wakes he pulls me toward him. And when he enters me I feel as if he seeps through every vein beneath my skin.
After school I climb Government Hill that leads to the 99 Steps and Blackbeard’s Hill and Castle. I zigzag steep slopes, easier than walking straight up. Magenta bougainvillea vines droop over whitewashed stucco fences with wrought-iron gates. I press my palms flat against the whitewash, then lean against the wall to color my skin and clothes chalk-white, pretending I am invisible, that my only existence is the imprint of my body in the whitewashed wall.
Finally, by summer, I no longer believe in my existence and believe I am disappearing, deep inside sleep. In my whitened image I am fading, am almost asleep. My diminished, whitewashed body is will-less, unable to withstand the physical force of sleep that seems to drift toward me like the trade winds, slowly, as if gathering velocity from across the sea. I am powerless. I want to be powerless. I welcome sleep, its massive, numbing presence flowing toward me from the horizon. I watch it daily, motionless at one end of its gray, engulfing path. Every day I am more drowsy and soon all I can do is lie in my bed and wait.
When it arrives I feel as if it is lifting me, transporting me on wind currents until I am no longer here. Voices grow hazy. Faces and objects blur. Does someone call, searching for me? No longer do I recognize the sound of my name. In this sheer strength of sleep—as profound as a language of utter silence—all other movement, all other sound, all whispers of dark Caribbean nights are deflected. I am unable to hear. I am carried too far away from my mahogany bed even to see my sleeping body veiled in marquisette netting.
Yet those moments when I skim the surface of sleep I feel our maid, Sylvanita, dampen my arms and face and neck with a cool balm scented with khuskhus. It doesn’t wake me. The scent only seems to deepen with sleep.
After three months I awake. I awake slowly, sluggishly, not refreshed from sleep, still groggy, struggling to breathe. I stand outside on the terrace, stunned by sunlight. It sears the rims of my eyes. I gaze at the fathomless, indecipherable sea: It is still here. The yellow-orange sun still blisters the Caribbean sky. Right before sunset, limestone dust seems to converge high in the air, blocking cool trade winds for just that moment. Tiny particles burn the sky red with heat.
All year I wait for Carnival, when the island itself seems decorated with masks and feathers and flowers. The park is crisscrossed with colored lights, while Carnival booths are adorned with crepe and palm fronds. I watch the dancers, hear the rush and rustle of madras skirts, the pong of steel-drum bands. I pass booths selling coconut balls, fried plantains, orange wine, stewed cashews, sugar cake. I buy a guava ice and stand under a lignum vitae tree licking it, watching the moko-jumbis, invisible spirits who walk on stilts. They wear mirrored costumes so no one can see them. When you look at them you see yourself. I imagine my own body camouflaged with tiny glass mirrors.
After I finish the ice I cross the park to a beautiful booth draped in silver scarves and gold lights. An old woman, her hair wrapped in a head tie, leans against the counter next to a hurricane lantern. The sign tacked to the booth reads: CUP OF SNAKE WEED TEA/.25—GLASS OF CLAIRIN/.75.
I place four quarters on the counter. “Can I have some?” I ask. I’ve never heard of the drinks, but I like the sound of the names.
She takes only one quarter, telling me I’m too young for clairin but she’ll give me a cup of the tea.
From a pitcher she pours a dark liquid into a tiny china cup. Drinking it, I seem to taste tree roots after a tropical storm. At first the taste is mild, but at the bottom of the cup is a thick, rich residue. And I wonder if this is a black magic potion. I think it must be, and I wonder if I will now have secret powers.
Returning the cup to her I smile, thanking her.
“You like it?” she says.
“Yes.”
She nods and tells me I have a pretty smile.
My fingers rush to my lips as if to feel this smile. This concrete information seems overwhelmingly important. A pretty smile. On my own face. Now, I don’t so much want to be a moko-jumbi as I want to be able to look at a moko-jumbi, at his mirrors, in order to see this smile, one I myself never noticed.
Slowly I move past thinning crowds. This last night of Carnival, booths are being dismantled, decorations folded for next year, and I realize I don’t want Carnival to end. I want to live here in this Carnival with moko-jumbis and with steel-drum bands. I want to live with the woman and her snake weed tea. If she feeds me weed tea every morning I will smile. But Carnival is over. I fear I’ll never see this woman again. She has given me a special tea that has given me a special, secret power—my special smile. Is she the only one who can see my true-true smile?
Why does my father see something, someone different? I have a special smile that my own daddy can’t see, even when he is very close to me.
My mother’s illness continues, and my father finally arranges for her to see a doctor in New York City. She will love this, I know; she will love to be able to see a new doctor, let a new doctor see her. My parents will stay in my Aunt Patsy and Uncle Esey’s apartment while they come to the island to care for my sister and me. But I am told of these arrivals and departures only the night before. Terror that my mother will never return becomes rage, becomes a tantrum. What I don’t know is that this is the last tantrum I will ever have. By the time my parents return, I will have outgrown them. But I must have this last one, for I believe if I scream loudly enough my mother will hear me and won’t leave me. I believe if I fling myself against the bureau and cut my forehead, this will keep her home.
Nothing will keep her home.
After my parents are gone, I am quiet. The house is quiet, recovering from my kicks and punches. I lie on the couch and watch a shaft of sun sprinkle my sister’s canary in light. On the table beside the cage are my mother’s watercolor paints and unfinished paintings. They are very good. They are almost her life. But they aren’t enough for her life. Neither am I. Or my sister. Or my father. We are not enough to hold her attention. It is her illness she nurtures, that she watches develop and grow.
Without my parents my own life feels diminished, even though Esey tries to cheer me. He reads to me and tells me stories. He plays marbles with me, listens to my make-believe games. The marbles are pirates saving maidens in distress. The pirates rescue me and sail me to New York City. Esey and I play with my dolls, my five Annettes, dressing them in hats, plastic shoes, frilly dresses. We pack their tiny cardboard suitcases for their trip to New York to visit my parents—which is where / want to be. So even my Uncle Esey can’t truly cheer me as I wait for my parents. Every day I write letters to tell them I miss them.
At night, Esey tucks me in my bed and tells me a story. I’m afraid to let him leave me, and I make him promise to stay in my room until he’s positive I’m sleeping, protecting me from spirits that hide in folds of mosquito nets, that hide behind shadows in the darkest corner of the room.
But Esey isn’t strong enough to protect me from these spirits. Esey can’t hear the danger in the flap of bird wings that shatters the quiet of night. Only my own father truly knows how to watch over me, knows where my body is and how to protect it…
It is late afternoon when I walk to town for the mail to see if there are letters from my mother and father. At the bank, where our mail is delivered, I stop to talk to the people who work for my father. There is a letter from my parents, but I will wait to read it, postpone the excitement until I am home. By waiting, I will imagine all the wonderful things the letter will say: how they miss me and love me and will be home soon. When I leave the bank I run into Patti, who invites me to Katz’s for a Coke—her treat. Then we pause to admire the display of lipsticks on the counter.
By the time I head back up the mountain it is dusk, and under the trees, almost night. Partway up is a low cement wall fencing an overgrown park. Because I feel bouyant, happy with the letter, which I stick in the elastic waistband of my shorts, I jump up on the ledge and do a few ballet steps, balancing, knowing I can’t fall. My arms are outstretched, bent at the elbows, as I bend and weave.
I do not see the man, nor do I hear him. A cool hand, high up my thigh, stops me. A friendly voice offers assistance: I might fall; he will catch me. His arm has a blue tattoo. A sailor. At first I think to smile my special weed tea smile. But, no, he would not see it. He is switchblade thin and unsmiling, and I stand rigid, staring into pale, frosty eyes.
His fingers are beneath my underpants now, and all I can think is that they’re cold. I feel as if I have stood here forever, but it can’t be—it’s just that the island night is slowing toward sleep. I feel this warm sleep of the island at my back, pressing against me like a sultry wind. I am lifted from the ledge. I am carried into the underbrush. My shorts are pulled from my body. And the sailor, his lips against my ear, whispers harsh words unheard before that describe my body. He is angry—the rape is too smooth for him, too easy—this girl’s body is not what it first seemed. No obstacle leads into her body, so she is a cuntcuntcunt. Yes, sailor, you are the only one who knows my secret: You are not my first lover.
He is gone. I pull on my underpants and shorts and walk home. My walk is different, though. I can feel it—the slow-slow movement of my legs. My knees are looser. My hips feel slightly broader. I am molting. With every step, pieces of Dina slough from my skin and slip to my feet. I step past them, leaving them, walking away from this childbody that now seems nothing but useless trouble. In the raw tissue remaining on my skin from where Dina has eroded, the first cells of Celeste form.
Back up the mountain, I push open the rusty gate to Blackbeard’s Castle. I follow the overgrown path that leads to the round stone fortress and sit on the stoop. Through tree branches and bushes I see the lights from my house, but I am hidden. My aunt and uncle don’t know where I am. No one knows where I am. The night is lit with a tropical moon, but even the moon can’t see me.
No one can see me. For now someone else breathes inside my chest. I feel a small throb in my temple. I lean back and press my head hard against the metal door of the fortress to steady myself, a self that seems to be shifting, evolving, moving, flowing. My hands, loose in my lap, curl into fists.
It is Celeste’s hands that are strong, hands that make fists. Silky blonde hair billows down my back. My own pale lips turn the color of garnet, as Celeste slowly usurps my childhood body … and I know that with one strong breath Celeste is the one who can banish danger. With one blow of her fist she can smash the metal door and take possession of the stone fortress. For she is stronger than pirates, stronger than sailors who prowl the island at night. Stronger than my uncle. Stronger than any father. Stronger than any weed tea or secret potion. She is the one who now protects me. When my father returns he will find her, find Celeste, a girl unafraid of night spirits. She is a cunt. She is a slut. Much bolder than Dina. Celeste will look all rapists straight in the eye and smile.
I stand up and head toward my house. I touch the waistband of my shorts. The letter, that I no longer need to read, has vanished.
My sister is in eighth grade. Now too old to attend the Antilles School, she leaves the island to attend a private school in the States. Although she spent little time at home, the house seems lonely without her. Always I waited for her to explode into the house, if only to change her clothes, before again exploding out. Her energy awed and overwhelmed me. The more she raced across the island, the more I felt immobilized, waiting for her to come back. Now, after she’s gone, I search every desk and bureau drawer in her bedroom, believing I’ll find a memento that will reveal my sister’s heart. Kiki, what are your secrets? Who do you become when you so easily slip away from our house? In some unswept corner of her room I want to discover her secrets as if I can discover her, an essence of her—to steal, to know, to understand, to become.
I find nothing. No secrets. No clues. Her room is swept bare. The dresser drawers are empty. Her closet holds only a thin rattle of hangers.
At first my mother seems better after her return from New York, but she’s still not well. While some days she paints for hours before returning to bed, other days the paints are untouched and the shutters in her room remain shut. Finally, she decides it is the island that causes her illness, and we must return to the States right away. Besides, she believes Kiki will be better off living with her family. So six months after my sister leaves, we prepare to follow. My father arranges for the bank, the West Indies Bank and Trust Company, to be sold to Chase Manhattan.
As much as I once wanted to leave the States and live in the tropics, I now, just as much, want to leave the tropics and live in a cold, cold climate. I want to wear cashmere sweaters. I want to watch swirling snowflakes and skid on ice. I have an unshakable confidence in new homes, new environments, new habitats, new beginnings. I am also excited about seeing my sister. Surely she has missed me and will be happy to see me, although her letters give no indication. Besides, I am tired of my island friends, or so I pretend. Most truly I am afraid to feel close to them. I later learn I will always be relieved to move, especially away from people and things I most care about.
Still, I spend long hours saying good-bye to my friends. I say good-bye to guinea grass, hibiscus flowers, coconut palms, royal poincianas. Flying away on Caribair from St. Thomas to Puerto Rico, I sit by the window and watch the Caribbean flash viridian, aquamarine, turquoise, amethyst: blue. I say good-bye to the Caribbean, to red flowers, to green volcanic mountains. I am sad, after all. I believe I see a small girl standing on the shoreline, waving. She waves to me. She beckons. Wait. She stands alone, the hem of her skirt, strands of her hair swirling in the wind. Sunlight pushes against her back, and she runs down the beach, following the shadow of the plane. The plane veers north. Soon she is left far, far behind. I press my nose to the window, but the beach is deserted. The island vanishes. I don’t want to lose her. But I already have.