Patsy Read online

  Patsy retreats, her back hitting the chair hard like Roy has just shoved her with his suggestion. She blinks several times, her thoughts firing in rapid succession, from light to dark. She had counted on Roy. All the planning and paperwork she had done was with the expectation that Roy would step into his role as parent to their daughter. For Patsy knows that, as hard as he tries to portray himself to be, their disagreements on any matter come from the same place that once moved him to whisper, “Birdie,” in her ear.

  His question remains suspended between them. Through that hazy distance, they glare at each other, two strangers over a life.

  “I’d rather ask Pope to raise our dawta than Mama G,” Patsy says, her chest aching after expelling those words with all the breath she could muster.

  “Don’t you dare bring up dat criminal when it comes to our dawta.”

  “Yuh give me no choice. All I’m asking for is yuh help. If yuh was half di man ah t’ink yuh was, I wouldn’t have to beg like dis.”

  “You didn’t care who I was,” Roy says. “Ah shoulda left you alone fi roam di wild. Jus’ admit it, Birdie. Yuh don’t belong in a cage.”

  She knows that he despises her as much as he admires her for the easy way she gave herself to him the first time. More than anything else, she remembers, with embarrassment, the panic that coursed through her at the sight of his semen on her red sequined dress, not because this had never happened to her before, but because the dress belonged to Mama G—a dress she found in a pile of discarded clothes that Mama G had stopped wearing when she found Jesus. Roy dipped inside his back pocket like a gentleman and handed her a handkerchief. His voice was soft, like the wings of the moths bombarding the single light that shone from a pole behind the school. “Yuh didn’t have to do it.” How Patsy felt ashamed, wiping herself, her back turned to him. But she relaxed when she heard the smile in his voice—”Ah neva expected anyt’ing, really. You’re a sweet girl.” Like the scar on his right hand, it tugged at something inside her. And to think it all started by him whispering, “Birdie, ah t’ink I’m in love,” over the boom box. His words made her cheeks warm as though someone had taken two sun-baked stones and pressed them against the sides of her face.

  Now, in his office, when Patsy lifts her head to look at Roy she sees a glint of affection lance his eyes—a burst of passion similar to the one that created Tru long after they had broken up as boyfriend and girlfriend, and long after Roy had moved on and started his own family. But just as quickly, his resentment shades all the tangled emotions. Patsy sees his eyes hardening and his face shutting like a slammed door. “Ah will talk to Marva to see if she’ll be all right wid taking on yuh responsibility,” he says.

  Patsy gathers herself and all her regrets. Her responsibility? What about his? And how could he let Marva determine whether or not he takes his own daughter? Patsy shuffles out of the small, sterile office, managing a faint goodbye, afraid she might say something that could ruin her chances. But Roy stops her:

  “Yuh know, Birdie. I’m not di one yuh g’wan have to answer to at di end a di day.”

  Patsy pauses by the door—where red-faced Johnny and droopy-eyed Lieutenant Raymond are probably listening. She doesn’t dare to look back at him. She doesn’t want to give him the gratification of seeing the pain rippling across her face. Without another word, she opens the door and closes it softly behind her.

  PATSY STANDS OUTSIDE WITH THE THIN STRAP OF HER PURSE slung over her shoulder. She stares at the marquees at Carib Cinema, which faces the police station. She considers taking a robot taxi from Cross Roads to work, but decides against it, since she is in no mood to be piled into an old, smelly Toyota Corolla with ten other people by a desperate taxi driver. She needs to clear her head anyway. She walks east, down the busy stretch of Slipe Road, past Tivoli Gully, toward Heroes Circle. The late afternoon sun squats above her head, exacerbating the smells, the heat, and the humidity. Deaf to the horns, Patsy slows midstride near the roundabout at Heroes Circle—a dry open field with nothing but stray mongrel dogs and roaming goats nuzzling brown grass and weeds that spring up near the monuments of the country’s heroes. Big black flies maul the rotting carcass of a mongrel dog. The pedestrians on the sidewalk hold their collars or handkerchiefs to their noses to avoid the foul smell.

  At work, she stares at the blank partition that separates her cubicle from Ramona’s, unable to concentrate. She pulls out the envelope containing Cicely’s latest letter and runs her fingers along the crease and each line. Cicely writes often, asking Patsy about her days working at the Ministry. Patsy writes back, telling her about her coworkers; her supervisor, Miss Clark; the case of the missing lunches from the office kitchen. No one ever catches the gluttonous thief. Patsy suspects that it’s Aubrey, the skinniest woman in the office, who sounds like a mouse when she talks. Those are the ones to watch—the sneaky ones. The stories flow out of Patsy like an open tap. She laughs out loud as she writes—something that would’ve been pitiful had it not felt like she was talking to Cicely in person. Cicely replies eloquently, as if she takes her time to agonize over each sentence, thinking long and hard about each experience she thinks Patsy would find amusing. She shares entertaining anecdotes that make Patsy laugh even harder when she reads them at her cubicle or at the dining table under a dim lamp when Mama G and Tru are asleep. Like how the old white woman she once worked for insisted on calling her Eunice, though Cicely corrected her many times. Or how in her biology night class Cicely falls asleep to the drone of the old professor, who also puts himself to sleep. Patsy keeps each letter safely tucked inside the briefcase on top of her wardrobe with other things, like Tru’s birth certificate and rent receipts. Cicely’s letters always end with, “There’s so much here that I want to experience with you. I miss you so much. Yours, Cicely.”

  Patsy puts down the letter and surveys the manila budget folders piled on her desk, stacked precariously like Jenga blocks. All the budget records, which Patsy deals with since she’s good with numbers, are hard copies despite the new Microsoft computers the supervisors have at their desks. Patsy should be the one with the computer, since she does all of Miss Clark’s work for her. Miss Clark has been promising to send her to a computer course, but every time Patsy asks about it Miss Clark brushes her off: “It’s not in our budget.” Perhaps the woman thinks Patsy is stupid enough to believe such a lie, when she’s the one crunching the numbers for her. Mr. Crawford, who is head of the finance department and who is Miss Clark’s boss, praises Miss Clark for her sharp mind and even gave her a raise (which Patsy noted in the newest budget proposal). Yet Patsy has the same salary she started with and is told the computer course is once again on hold.

  As she folds Cicely’s letter and puts it back inside her purse, she overhears Ramona cooing on the telephone at her cubicle. She has been on the phone for at least forty-five minutes. Miss Clark’s door is closed. She has been out sick with the flu for the past couple days, and for that Patsy is grateful. “When can I come over?” Ramona whispers, thinking no one can hear her. Patsy doesn’t have to look over her partition to know that Ramona has slipped off her pumps and is wiggling her stockinged toes as she sips Tetley tea from her bright red mug. Patsy wishes she could be as content and comfortable at her small cubicle. She wishes she could constantly decorate like Ramona, accepting that this is her place—a cubicle where she will spend most of her prime years working, appeased by employee-of-the-month stickers—until it’s time to collect a pension. Patsy glances at the stack of folders on her desk, feeling like the walls of her cubicle are closing in on her. She gets up, grabs her purse, and leaves.

  AN HOUR LATER, SHE LIES ON THE BED, LISTENING TO THE SOFT sounds of Vincent’s clothes dropping to the floor as he undresses. He never has to hide his wedding ring with her. He’s a local businessman who works at an insurance company downtown. They have passed through the stages of formality and seduction and come to a kind of easy intimacy, though Vincent is older than Patsy’s mother. Vincent is sixty-th
ree—thirty-five years older than Patsy—but in good shape, except for the loose skin around his once-sturdier muscles. What single mother in Kingston wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to share an extremely generous man like Vincent? He was the one who gave Patsy all the seed money she needed to convince the American Embassy that she has assets to return to. It had surprised Patsy a little and saddened her a good deal when she found herself in his car, heading over the Causeway Bridge to a hotel on Backroad in Portmore.

  It’s habit that keeps her coming back. The sounds they make in bed whenever he takes her from behind—she on all fours, her loosened hair clumped inside his fist like he’s riding a racehorse. Their sounds remind Patsy of worship—of the shouts of spirited men and women in church, caged within an angry maw of judgment, their shrill cries shafting the air, pleading for something, someone, to save them before it destroys them. For Patsy, sex is a reenactment of fantasy, a rebellion against the fear of impending doom that has shaped her. She cannot help but echo those cries, boisterous and uninhibited, bursting full as a hand mercifully reaches from the air, raw with the smell of sex, and relieves her.

  When they’re done, the heavy silence, which loomed earlier in Vincent’s Lexus on their way over the bridge to the hotel, returns. Patsy gets up from the queen-size bed to relieve her bladder. She covers herself, mostly her belly because of the scar she’s had since as long as she can remember. She touches it, coarse, dark, alive, her fingers on the slightly raised flesh shaped like a branch with no fruits. She has managed so far to make love to men, and before that, boys, making sure to keep light from hitting her belly, or keeping it covered. Most times she lets them take her from behind without an explanation. Though sex with boys was horrid, daunting, and a little demeaning, with no warmth, no closeness, no pleasure, she got used to it. It was attention she got, and not because of Cicely. Cicely, whom all the boys used Patsy to get to; Cicely, who never had to give herself for boys to like her more; Cicely, who stood up first when Roy approached: “Birdie, can I have dis dance?” Schoolboys were the worst, since they gossiped about Patsy’s freakiness, waiting for her after school or church so she would prove what their friends had already told them. She welcomed the attention, and the associated label, since it was better, safer, than the truth.

  When she returns from the bathroom, she sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the canary-yellow wall. Except for the one frame of a green banana leaf, the walls are bare, blank canvases intended for the murals of lovers’ silhouettes mounted on them daily when the sky goes purple and the sun glows blood orange. The small hotel, which looks like a two-tiered wedding cake on the outskirts of Portmore—twenty minutes away from downtown Kingston—is called Lovers’ Paradise for this very reason. Patsy grapples with whether or not to ask Vincent for help with Tru’s school fee like she has done in the past, but today the words won’t come. She knows Vincent watches her back—the horizontal lines from the sun’s rays squinting through the louvered windows cutting her in parts. Half of a woman. In the faint shadow created on the wall, her shoulders rise with each breath she takes. She’s careful not to breathe in too deeply, fearing sorrow might slip sideways beneath her rib cage.

  “Care to say what’s on your mind?” Vincent asks in that studied university diction of his. Sometimes he speaks that way, but then slips into patois unannounced as if he’s two different souls. After graduating with a bachelor’s in economics from the University of the West Indies, Vincent studied business at Harvard (the only American university Patsy has committed to memory) on a scholarship.

  “Haaarvard,” she repeated, imitating his nasal emphasis on the first syllable.

  “Did you like it?” she asked him.

  “How yuh mean? Loved it!” he replied.

  “What was it like?”

  “What? You interested?”

  When she nodded shyly, he laughed so hard that he nearly choked on his own spit. His return to Jamaica was a triumphant one, since he became the poster boy for success—country boy turned business mogul. He laughs whenever he tells Patsy the story, with a glint of nostalgia and something sad veiling his eyes. Patsy met him long after the buzz, but at the height of his success with the insurance company. She spotted him four years ago in the bank. She liked how he stared. But unlike other big men, who only pick up young girls like her to impress them with nice things, Vincent has confessed that Patsy makes him feel less out of touch with the type of people he grew up with. When she asks him what type of people he’s referring to, he reminds her that he used to eat tin mackerel for dinner, study under a kerosene lamp, and walk barefoot to school every day because he didn’t own a pair of shoes. “Yuh mek me remember di good ole days. When ah didn’t take anyt’ing fah granted.”

  Though slightly offended, she held on to his admitted dependence. Replayed it in her mind every chance she got—the way Mama G meditates on her favorite Bible chapter, her crooked index finger caressing each word. She never asks Vincent about his two grown children or his uptown wife—a woman much lighter than him, she’s sure, whom she imagines sits like a preening bird inside his big house on the hill. However, he has a tendency to ask her what she’s thinking, as if her silence is something he fears.

  “Ah got a visa yesterday,” Patsy blurts out despite her intention to get dressed and leave. She sits still, glancing at their rumpled clothes on the carpeted floor.

  “Congratulations,” Vincent says softly. She feels him move closer to her on the bed, but doesn’t respond as he kisses her right shoulder. “You’ve always wanted this.” He nuzzles her neck. She tenses.

  “How long did they give you?” Vincent asks, pausing.

  “Six months.”

  “Yuh don’t look too happy ’bout it.” He turns her gently to face him.

  He seems to be looking right through her now. She hears him cracking his toes beneath the sheet—a habit that makes her cringe, though she’s not around him much to complain to him about it. She busies herself with covering her breasts with the sheet. “I plan to leave at di end of summer.”

  “And when yuh coming back?” Vincent watches her with a frown.

  “I’ll be leaving fah good.”

  “What?” He sits up so that there is enough distance between them.

  Patsy is reminded how small and aged he looks without his sharp tailored business suits. “Couldn’t dat create problems wid U.S. Immigration?” he asks. “And what about your daughter?”

  He never calls Tru by her name, which makes Patsy believe that her life is an abstract portrait to him—evasive yet attractive from a distance. She takes in his face—the broad nose, the thick eyebrows peppered with gray like the coarse coils on his head, the contours of angular bone under deeply browned skin the color of coffee beans—and determines that even with his blackness, his well-molded status has created a void between him and the past he describes so fondly. A past which by now is a strange, unfeeling world that he continually seeks in the well between her thighs, but imposes himself somehow on its stilted image. How many nights has she lain in bed, staring at the hills, at the mansions looking like tea lights in a sea of black in the sky, thinking of him in his big house, sleeping next to his wife in his big bed?

  “Vincent, ah didn’t come here to t’ink ’bout dat,” Patsy says, feeling cold all of a sudden even with no air-conditioning inside the room. At some point it stopped working. Patsy thinks there might be a power cut. JPS has a tendency to cut the electricity at odd times of the day.

  “I come here to tek my mind off t’ings,” Patsy continues, pulling on the sheet to cover more of herself.

  “All right.” Vincent holds up both hands. “Ah jus’ want you to be careful. They turn down a lot of Jamaicans for visas because of dat. You know how many guys I can’t send to training because the embassy won’t even grant them a work visa? Also, can you imagine how many students are denied scholarships like what I got because half of them neva return back to the island?”

  “Dat’s not my problem,”
Patsy says.

  Patsy is a little hurt that Vincent’s main concern is potential problems she faces with U.S. Immigration. He doesn’t beg her to reconsider because of how much he would miss her. Can’t he see that she’s doing this for better opportunities? That if she doesn’t leave now she might end up like her mother—hopelessly clinging to a distant glimmer of salvation?

  She should shower and leave. It’s nearing the time for her to pick up her daughter from school anyway. God knows she’s not looking forward to seeing Miss Gains again, but what can she do? In a matter of months, it will be fine. For the first time in her life, she feels somewhat hopeful—that all the loveliness and beauty of life is at arm’s reach. Vincent pulls her close and rocks her back and forth. “I didn’t mean it dat way. I’m very happy for you. Whatever you need me to do to help . . .”

  He pulls the sheet off her and she doesn’t protest. She tilts her head back, seduced by promise.

  4

  THE NIGHT PATSY TELLS TRU THAT SHE ISN’T TAKING HER WITH her to America, there’s a power cut. Mama G went to a night service, leaving them alone. It’s one week before Patsy’s departure, which means she cannot delay telling Tru any longer. She holds her dream in a tight clasp at the dining table as the child peers at her in the dimness of the flame from the kerosene lamp. Patsy can vaguely make out the expression on her daughter’s face. “It will only be for a few months,” she says to Tru, unable to look straight at her.

  “Why?” Tru asks. “Why yuh going without me?”

  Patsy sighs. She quietly praises JPS in this moment. The darkness is helpful as she struggles to find the words behind the veil. What can a young woman on the brink of defeat say to the questioning face of her five-year-old daughter? Where is the honor in her daughter knowing she owns nothing? Not her dreams. Not her life. Not herself. What can she give her? What could her repression of desires, which she has resisted for so long, achieve other than resentment that could potentially destroy Tru?