The Heart Does Not Bend (11 page)

I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat and looked away.

Mama had the last word. “Conspiracy, so yuh call it. Well, mi call it life.”

He kicked one of the dining-room chairs over on its side, stomped into his room and slammed the door. Mama was unmoved. “Come mek we finish de packing,” she said.

The next day we boarded the plane for Canada.

Part Two

I THOUGHT OUR STREET
would be easy to forget and I’m sure that Mama thought so, too. It wasn’t. For the past was where we lived and dreamed our lives to perfection.

We had been living with my mother and her husband, Sid, for almost a year, and we still weren’t used to our new country, our family and our apartment.

We had arrived at Toronto International Airport in the autumn of 1971 to a wonderful welcome. I was fourteen, my grandmother a voluptuous woman of forty-seven. We had packed fried fish, roasted yam and breadfruit, cassava cakes and baked goods for everyone, as well as fever grass, dried cerasee, leaf of life and other herbs for medicinal purposes. Mama was happy and proud that night; there was no trace of the unhappiness her face had held at the Palisadoes Airport when we left. We sat in my mother and Sid’s living room and talked and talked, catching up on people we knew who lived abroad. My mother talked about her job as a nanny looking after three children, Uncle Freddie about his job as a bouncer at a West Indian nightclub. Uncle Peppie and Sid worked as mechanics at the same garage, and Val, Uncle Peppie’s wife, was a legal secretary. I
talked about school, and Mama told stories about her pastry business and about Mammy, Grand-aunt Ruth and the others we had left behind. There was no mention of why we’d come, and beyond the usual pleasantries, not much was said about Uncle Mikey.

As they sat and talked, I watched. Uncle Freddie still had his boyish charm. Uncle Peppie was everything Mama said: solid, decent and sincere.

Val was a lot like Mama, a forceful woman who hovered protectively around Uncle Peppie. That might have been why Mama took an instant dislike to her.

My mother turned out to be a beautiful woman, nothing like I’d imagined. Her skin was the colour of burnt toast, her eyes blue like Mammy’s, a nose that flared at the tip like Grandfather Oliver’s, her black, shoulder-length hair straightened to perfection. She just about took my breath away when I saw her for the first time. I’d hoped for love and tenderness, yet I knew she could never take my grandmother’s place. I also knew as I sat in the living room next to her that I wasn’t the daughter she’d expected. I’d wanted her to hug and hold me, make much of me, but it was Uncle Freddie and Uncle Peppie who fussed over me.

Glory was thirty now, tall, slender, her breasts the size of small Jamaican oranges. Her face held the same steady, unsmiling gaze as Mama’s. I stared at her all night, which only seemed to make her more uncomfortable. She hardly looked at me. I’d only seen two photographs of her, one taken years back one winter, wearing a heavy coat, standing in deep snow against a car, and the other her wedding photo, showing a small, slim woman in a white minidress with a white veil slightly lifted away from her face. In person, she looked more beautiful than in the pictures.

I was tall for my age, slim like her, but my breasts were already rivalling Sophia Loren’s, and I was very conscious of them as I sat next to my mother. Sid, my stepfather, was about the same build as my mother, tall like Uncle Freddie. There was a space between his white front teeth and he exuded confidence.

The moment we arrived Mama assigned herself to the post of housekeeper, cook and adviser. My mother welcomed it. She wasn’t a house-proud woman or interested in proving herself in the kitchen. She preferred to be out of the apartment, clubbing with Freddie and Sid. Mama didn’t mind. She wanted to be needed. She was content to hold down the kitchen and cook, iron, listen and lend advice. Glory went to her job and did the washing at the local laundromat on the weekend—that’s about all I can remember her doing. I was less content. Though Uncle Freddie and Uncle Peppie came around a lot to see us and ate with us every Sunday evening, I didn’t spend the time with my mother that I’d hoped I would. I began to wonder if she really was my mother. The fact that I didn’t look anything like her only made me wonder more.

“Nuh mind,” Mama said whenever I complained. “She is yuh mother, in time she will grow fi love yuh. Remember she still young an’ she nuh used to pickney roun’ her.” Mama’s comfort and promise got me through those months. At school I was the odd girl out and hadn’t made any real friends. I was a bright student, especially in math and science, so girls would ask me to help them with their assignments at lunchtime and before class in the mornings, but they never invited me anywhere. I wasn’t cool enough. Glory didn’t want me making friends anyway. She warned me to be careful of
Canadians and their undisciplined manners, and she had more stories to prove her point than I cared to listen to.

Glory and Mama got along well at the beginning because Mama was determined to make up for all the years they had spent apart, not just when Glory lived here in Canada but also before that, when Glory lived in Port Maria. She was also grateful that Sid had made Glory a respectable married woman. But despite her gratitude, Mama was quick to give Glory advice that was not in Sid’s interest. One Saturday morning when Sid was at work and I was cleaning the bathtub, I overheard them talking.

“Mama, Sid serious, yuh know, about wanting a baby. Ah don’t know what to do.”

“Mi dear, as much as mi like Sid, ah don’t think yuh should have any pickney now, is not a smart thing fi do. Yuh need education, yuh need fi uplift yuhself, and baby cyaan do dat fi yuh.”

“Den what mi going to tell him?”

“Tell him? Nuh tell him anything. When him ask again, tell him yuh trying. Him don’t have to know nutten.”

“Ah don’t know Mama, it not as simple as dat,” my mother worried.

“How complicated it can be, den?”

“Ah don’t want to lie to Sid. We don’t have dat kind of relationship.”

Mama sucked her teeth. “Girl, you a idiot? A nuh today mi know man, and dere is no such thing as a honest relationship, nuh care what dem tell yuh. So yuh try yuh best and protect yuhself. A three pickney yuh lef here a morning time fi look after, where yuh going to get time fi baby? And furthermore,
yuh don’t even turn mother fi Molly yet.”

Glory didn’t answer right away. After a while she said simply, “Is true, Mama. Is true.”

My grandmother gave her lots of other advice about work, about how to handle Sid’s occasional late nights out with friends and his wandering eye, and about how to take care of money.

“Mek sure yuh knot up something separate. Yes a yuh husband, but dat don’ mean all things equal. So put away some savings fi a rainy day. Things can turn, and when dem turn, dem usually turn bad. Give mi de money, mi will knot it up and save it fi yuh right here,” she advised.

Glory was also determined to make up for the years she and Mama had spent apart, and she insisted that Mama not get a job.

Every Sunday we had a full-course Jamaican dinner complete with rice and peas, fried chicken or curried goat, coleslaw salad and freshly made carrot juice. Uncle Peppie, Aunt Val, Uncle Freddie and whatever woman he was seeing at the time would join us for dinner. Occasionally a friend of Sid’s named Justin came to eat with us, too. Those Sundays reminded me of our monthly parties on the dead-end street in Kingston, but they were not nearly as exciting. Nice, yes, in an ordinary sort of way, but there was no glamour. The only one who vaguely brought any of that was Uncle Freddie, who came dressed to the nines and always had a beautiful woman on his arm. Still, the dinners brought us together, to laugh and to remember what we chose.

During our first spring in Canada, we visited Niagara Falls. Mama was awed by the natural wonder and amazed that
the United States was just across the water. We took photographs, ate ourselves drowsy with a picnic of fried chicken, fried dumplings, sweet potatoes, rice and peas, corned-beef sandwiches, hard-dough bread, escoveitched fish and bottles of juice. Uncle Freddie’s new girlfriend, Joanne, came with us to the Falls. She was a Canadian girl whose parents were Jamaican and had settled in Alberta long before Freddie or Peppie or Glory arrived in Toronto.

Joanne was a lovely woman, years younger than my uncle. She had a boyish grin that suited her athletic build. She was quiet, rather shy and a great card player. Her one weakness was a tendency, sometimes, to drink a bit too much. Freddie seemed happy and started bringing her with him whenever he visited us.

From time to time, Mama would talk to Freddie about little Freddie, telling him that he should help Monica raise the child. His answer was always the same: “Yes, ah intend to, Mama.” He never did. I know because my grandmother and Monica corresponded, and in each letter Monica asked after Freddie. Sometimes Mama would rail about him to me. “Dat boy so wutliss. Ah never know him would treat him own flesh and blood dat way, especially him first bwoy chile.”

I wasn’t the only one whose ear she held. She complained to Glory and Uncle Peppie, too. In the beginning Glory listened, but eventually it became clear that Mama’s complaints had worn thin. It was the same with Uncle Peppie, except he never let on to Mama.

Uncle Peppie came to see her every Friday after work and stayed for a few hours to talk or watch television with her. Mama would be sure to have his favourite meal cooked: stewed
red peas with pigtails and salt beef, white rice on the side. She’d sit and watch him eat and look content. She took great pleasure in cooking and baking, and always sent Uncle Peppie home with pastries fresh from the oven. She also made sure that Freddie picked up his cornmeal pudding every Saturday.

“Ah glad ah able fi do all of dis for dem pickney. It use to bother mi sometimes back home when ah consider dem over here in de cold wid no mother fi cook something fi dem.”

Mama also crocheted centrepieces for the tables, armrests for the couches, tablecloths, bedspreads, cushion covers, teapot covers, pot holders, sweaters and vests, and each of her children received these items.

Uncle Freddie was the one who protested the most. “Mama, ah don’t need all dis, mi is a bachelor, yuh know,” he’d say seriously.

“Nuh talk nonsense, den yuh don’ think one day yuh going to marry. Put dem up, yuh wife will know what to do wid dem,” Mama said with finality. Soon everybody protested that they had too many centrepieces, too many teapot covers and no place to put them, but that didn’t stop Mama. “Mi soon find other people who will appreciate dem,” she’d say to me, putting them in cardboard boxes and storing them away.

Despite her activity I began to see that she was growing bored. She was never the type to stay at home or to sit for long. Each week, Uncle Peppie gave her money for cigarettes and other small items, but she longed to earn her own money, as she had on the island. I knew she wanted to walk down the street and have people recognize her, say, “Good morning, Miss Galloway,” talk with her about the weather, or the government, or the rising cost of food.

She had her daily routine here down to a science. She tidied the house in the mornings after we all left, then she’d decide what to cook, watch her soaps on television, have a shower and wait for me to get home from school. Then we’d sit and talk until Sid and Glory came home. She especially looked forward to Friday evenings when Uncle Peppie came to visit, and on Sundays she cooked a big supper for the whole family.

My mother and I got along very much like sisters, and not close ones at that. I had never called her Mother and still called her Glory, and she never introduced me as her daughter to her friends—I was always Molly. Mama was our mother. I hardly went anywhere with Glory except to Kensington Market and the laundromat. On rare occasions Mama and I were treated to a drive in Sid’s car, but mostly we stayed home and watched the world on television. I had to be home right after school or I’d have a lot of explaining to do, especially to Glory, who figured my breasts were going to get me into trouble. I preferred Sid to Glory; he was much more easygoing and he talked to me like an equal. He didn’t order me around, or treat me like I was a walking time bomb because of the size of my breasts.

I remember buying a halter top with some money Uncle Freddie had given me when summer arrived. It was a red-and-black polka-dot halter top that I had looked at longingly in the Zellers store window for weeks. The weekend I finally bought it, we were having a few more people over for Sunday dinner. Sid’s friend Justin; a friend of my mother’s, Eileen, and Aunt Val’s nephew Jeffrey. I had bathed and combed my hair carefully and put on the halter top, feeling quite pleased with myself. Suddenly I saw Glory’s face reflected in the bedroom mirror.

“Tek it off, tek it off, Jesus God Almighty, where yuh think yuh going in dat?” she screamed at me. She had never talked to me like that, and I was quite taken aback, as were Sid and Mama. Luckily the others hadn’t arrived yet.