The Meeting Point (17 page)

Estelle was trembling. Bernice knew that her victory was now worth something; and straightway, she left to go downstairs to do her work. “Heh-heh! I got the bitch with that story, now, though!” But before Bernice got to the bottom of the first landing, Estelle shouted behind her, “But Bernice. I don’t see
why you’re so worried.” And because she herself could not see
why
, she went back into the apartment, and broke down in tears. She remained alone in the room; and in the world: and she promised herself right then, to get out from under Bernice as soon as she could.

Bernice could think of no better way to introduce Estelle to her new environment, than to take her to church. It was her first Sunday in Canada. Church to Bernice, was one of the great diversions which was able to seep into her life, and disrupt the iron-gloved triangle of her existence. No matter how sweetly the voices from over the Andes Mountains cooed; no matter how many sins and evil thoughts she confessed to the invisible, washed-in-the-lamb preacher over there in the Mountains; no matter how her imagination placed her in the
front
pew of that other gospel-singing radio church in Alabama, or in Mississippi, still something was lacking. She had to go down to Shaw Street to worship with her other West Indian co-Christians, men and women. Going down there, in that immigrant street, dressed as if she was going to a cocktail party in Forest Hill; and sitting on the seats that drove pins and needles up through her body, she felt, she
knew
she had a little cornerstone of involvement in this community of people. It was a community of immigrants: immigrants who were not Anglo-saxon. Like her, these immigrants had suddenly realized they were lost in a foreign land. And like her, and her West Indian friends, they came together like seaweed on pieces of drifting wood, in a sea with a current that went no way. Bernice knew there was something closer than social ties, and acceptance based on the largeness of your car: it was colour. And it was blood. Dots had said, once, about this street, “This is the only street in this place, this Shaw Street, where people talk and
walk in a million and one different nationalities and languages, and nobody doesn’t stop talking the moment I walk by, or you walk by. And one thing on this street I notice: nobody don’t look at you with wonder and scorn.” Bernice had to confess too, that, “Yuh know, Dots, I don’t feel that I am either a black person or a white person. Not on this street. This is like home in Barbados.”

After church, Bernice took Estelle into the basement. There were many other West Indian women there. Most of them had not seen home in many years. Most of them had not read a West Indian newspaper for as many years. But they were expressing opinions about the West Indies, as if they had just come up. Estelle noticed this; and wondered what else they could talk about. They talked about Barbados and Trinidad and Jamaica, and sometimes about the smaller islands. Even the women from these smaller islands, like St. Vincent and St. Kitts, kept silent or talked about Jamaica and Trinidad. Bernice asked somebody, “Who come up lately?” and without waiting for a reply, she asked, “You hear who getting married?” And a young woman from St. Lucia, with the heavy burden of her life reflected in her face said, “But tell me,
oui
. Which one of us have a chance of finding a decent man in a place like this,
oui
?” And all the women (including Estelle) laughed; and the laugh was cut in half by someone saying, “Doris from Trinidad five months pregnant. She come by my place yesterday, moaning and groaning, saying how she don’t want no baby, she don’t want no Canadian baby; and that she going try and get a nabortion because her line isn’t getting babies: her line is making Canadian money.” And the women ripped Doris apart, limb by limb; and they talked about all her family history and her boyfriend-history. There was a tall thin red woman from
Jamaica who said, “Oh-ho-ho, a worthliss bitch like Doris, stupid enough to let a married man sleep with her, and foolish enough to get herself pregnant! Christ, and this place is so hard, as it is.” And it seemed that this was the same thing as taking Doris bodily, and throwing her into a den of hens. Each West Indian woman took a peck at Doris’s flesh and Doris’s reputation and when they were finished, Doris was like a piece of dried rotten cod fish.

After Doris, they talked about home. Bernice asked another Barbadian, if she knew the Deep Water Harbour had been built; yes, said the woman, it built three years now, child. And then somebody asked about somebody’s island, and was told that “things not too bright, soul; not as bright as here”; and the person who asked, relaxed, and seemed to feel happier. It was a sort of madness which gave them strength and moral fortitude to return to their various domestic jobs, and as Dots said, “to fight the fight a next day, and a next night, heh-hehhh!”

Estelle remained aloof but attentive as the conversation turned to the white families for whom these women worked. Bernice was the cheer-leader in this. “My missy tight tight tight as a damn kettle-drum.” And the women bawled. “Man, she so damn tight, that once I caught her in
my
kitchen counting the blasted rice grains.” The women laughed as if they were hitting all the various missies in Forest Hill, Rosedale, Richmond Hill, all over. It was a field day; and no missy, no matter if she was “Mrs. Queen” from high society, could erase the abrasions of this spiteful flogging.

“But you didn’t hear ’bout the one I works for?” asked another woman. “She does not have any decencies, whatsoever. I really do not see how she could be so great, with big maid,
cook, and cleaning-woman, when … and this is the gospel-truth, as what Rev Markham just preached about … it would make you puke to see the way she splatters tomato ketchup all over the nice, expensive steaks I cooks for her. God, it is enough to make you bring up your guts!”

“Yes, they ain’t no good,” Bernice said. “They are not any damn good.”

“… one I work for, have money …” somebody was saying.

“Yes, money,” Bernice said, having to raise her voice to be heard.

“But they only have money.”

“But that is money, honey.”

“But listen to me!” Bernice was shouting now: it was
her
revivalist meeting. “Listen to me,” she said, shouting less, because she noticed that Estelle was embarrassed by her manner. “Money do not make the man. Money do not make a person into a lady. Money is only dollars and cents. And that can’t buy, nor purchase what I call
breeding
.”

And a very black, thin, beautiful and proud Jamaican woman said, in distinct and venomous clarity, “All-you tell all of them for me, that all of them could kiss my sweet arse. It is only money, as Bernice said, that give them the right to be called missy. It is only the lack of money that give them the opportunity to call me maid. But as long as there is a will, there is a way. I mean to pull out from this arse country as one big millionaire-woman, hear? Or in the very least, as a woman with a few thousand Canadian dollar-bills in my pocketbook.”

When the talking stopped, Estelle was jarred. And when the last laugh and the last giggle had died, and the last trace of the hymn
Abide With Me
, which had closed the service, had faded from Bernice’s memory, she and Dots and Estelle and
two other women from Grenada walked out into the cold winter afternoon. Some others lingered behind (writing reports for church committees): some of them married, but without husbands with them, because husbands are hindrances; some husbands playing dominoes with the “boys”; or old-talking about girls, with the boys; and some husbands still in the West Indies, waiting for passage money, or a money order, or a birthday card from their wives, or permission from the Canadian immigration department … and some letters written back as periodically as a menstruation period … and others, middle-aged, and unmarried, like kippers through neglect, like virgins on pensions, but still looking and still lonely, they would crawl back on their frustrated way into the suburbs of wealth and loneliness, and long hard work, along Bathurst Street, and along the various street-car tracks of cold, parallel lines of steel and restrictiveness. And Bernice (before Estelle came up) like the others, would close her apartment door behind her, every night; and make certain that the door was locked, and that she was secure inside. She would make certain to make herself damn safe and sound from men (she always thought of men as Mr. Burrmann); and from the nightmares of men, which haunted and hunted and raped her during the nights of long tension and insomnia. “This is our life, child,” she told Estelle, returning this Sunday afternoon from church. “Child, it is a life o’ snow and whiteness.” By this time, Estelle knew what she meant.

Bernice saw the great threat that was about to change her life, through having her sister with her, and she said, “Life is a funny, funny thing.” It was some time before she realized the degree of the threat. She did not know, that despite her age,
and her set ways before she came to Canada, she would still be flexible enough to adjust her West Indian puritanism to the new Canadian puritanism.

One day Estelle dropped a hair comb, by mistake. Bernice then realized that she herself had never dropped a comb since she had lived here. And she screamed so hard at Estelle, that Estelle began to shake. But when Bernice caught herself, she was even more fightened than Estelle: (she remembered that once she had dropped a spoon in the kitchen on the tiled floor, and Mrs. Burrmann came screaming into the kitchen, with her hands at her temples, complaining about the din!) It was living alone for so long that made her almost completely independent; and that fashioned her into a tight, selfish orderliness.

Estelle began to smoke. She liked the local cigarettes very much. She began to smoke about fifteen a day. Estelle began to drop specks of ash on the edge of the table. Estelle became less careful, and some ash dropped — by mistake — on the floor. Estelle began to be sloppy with her clothes, and dropped them on the floor. Estelle began to neglect washing her underclothes (she would cram them in the clothes hamper, and Bernice would have to wash them) as frequently as Bernice thought she should. This was the beginning of the trouble.

On Estelle’s part, she was a bit peeved by having to wait, sometimes as late as ten o’clock in the morning, for her breakfast. Mrs. Burrmann knew that Estelle was living in Bernice’s apartment; but Bernice had not openly asked, nor had she been given permission to have Estelle stay. So the longer Mrs. Burrmann lingered over her breakfast, the longer it took for Bernice to sneak upstairs with the two strips of bacon, a fried egg, a piece of toast (the colour of which was proportional to how close Mrs. Burrmann was to the kitchen) and a teacup of
coffee. But when Mrs. Burrmann found out what Bernice was doing, she was mad. “Do you imagine that I am such a cheapskate, eh, Leach? That you could not bring Estelle down here, to have a proper breakfast with us, instead of sneaking up and down?” Bernice was ashamed. “But Mistress, I didn’t mean to give the impression …” Estelle preferred to be served in bed, on the chesterfield. She was spending all day and night in the apartment, alone. It was becoming a telling experience: a new country and boredom. She knew all the radio programmes by heart; all the commercials by heart; and many popular songs by heart. In a way, she knew Canada by heart. She would see Brigitte playing with her kids across the street, and Brigitte would wave and say hello; and she had seen the two men with the two dogs; and life had almost become unbearable, when one cold afternoon, she saw this white woman walking towards her (she was at the window), and then she heard her steps coming up to the apartment; and then she heard, “that I was just passing in the car when I happened to remember that you are still here, and I know how dull it can be, in a house by yourself, so I thought we might go downtown, nothing fancy, just to the campus and the library, and have a cup of coffee.”

That was the beginning of a great, true friendship between Agatha and Estelle. Together they went to the Museum, the Public Library, the O’Keefe Centre of the Performing Arts to hear Harry Belafonte sing, and the Russian Ballet dance, and to the Park Plaza Hotel to have a drink (“But you-all Canadians are funny people. Imagine going to a hotel to have a drink! Back home we have drink in a rum shop. But I won’t like to tell you what people back there go to a hotel to do, heh-heh!”) and then walked across the street to the Yorkville Village, which was really a shattering experience for Estelle: the
freshness about this place, and the young people like rebels and the women who looked as if they were really alive and fresh. Bernice could not understand this excitement. “I don’t want to hear nothing ’bout no long-hair beatniks, with lice in their heads, eh!” The only thing Bernice knew about Yorkville Village was what a reporter of
The Globe and Mail
said about it: that a lot of marijuana was smoked there. Like the reporter, Bernice did not try to find out more. Yorkville was to her, irrevocably, a den of iniquity.

Sometimes, in the kitchen, Bernice would think of her life in Canada: how it had changed; the clothes she was now wearing; the broadness of her knowledge about subjects and people she never knew existed. She was very impressed by Brigitte, who told her many interesting things about Germany, about Hitler and the Nazis. To hear Brigitte talk about so powerful a man, made it very real to her, because in the West Indies, during the heyday of Hitler, she was a small girl interested in Frank Sinatra, and Hitler was no more than the swastikas of chalk she used to draw on the church wall. She never imagined Hitler to be a man. She was also very impressed by the wealth of the Burrmann’s. Once, Mrs. Burrmann sent her to the bank with a cheque. When she saw the cheque made out to Mr. Burrmann, for three thousand dollars,
exact
, she almost dropped the cheque. And this made her think of Mr. Burrmann as a very powerful man, even more powerful than Hitler was. She did not know him as intimately as she felt she knew Mrs. Burrmann. He never spoke to her affectionately; but he was never rude. It seemed he kept her at the distance a servant ought to be kept: with coldness and civility. He regarded Bernice the way he regarded his secretary: as a machine, to
perform certain well-defined jobs. It was also difficult to get to know him, since he spent little time in the home. He was always working. On weekends, he was in the study, studying or preparing briefs — so Bernice imagined, until one day she found him lying on the floor, with his head almost touching the speaker of his record-player system which he had built into the wall; and with the lights out. As she remembered it, he was listening to jazz, a kind of strange noise, with lots of drums and cymbals and screechings. That afternoon, he seemed completely relaxed by the “damn noise”; and when he spoke to her, she noticed that his eyes were red and tired and distant. “That damn man is far from here!” she commented.