The Meeting Point (6 page)

The two women were quiet now; silent, through the agreement of close friendship: Bernice, standing beside the window and Dots, sitting on a chair, looking into her lap to see if she could see there, the image of the white woman her husband was in bed with. Dots would look up; or pass gas, and then say, “Excuse, gal”; and Bernice would make another biting observation about her life in Canada. “Estelle coming in tonight, and up till now,
she
down there, hasn’t pick her teeth to me, saying Bernice, or Leach as she like to call me, go and meet Estelle.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not one word.”

“That is life!” She paused to allow the snow to fall, in silence. Then she added, “Estelle coming. But where she going live? With you?”

“She not staying at the Royal York Hotel! I lives here! So my sister going to stay here, and get some o’ them benefits!”

“Now you talking like a lady, with sense, gal.” Dots burst out laughing. “Don’t forget you have something on Mrs. Burrmann that you could use as blackmail. You have her, coming and going.” Bernice started laughing too, but the suggestion of blackmail made her serious. “What’s wrong with you, gal? You are
Lady
Bernice, now! You could milk her, with a stiff piece o’ blackmail, till she really turn
white
.”

“Not blackmail, though.” Bernice was cautious, and very moral about this. “Oh God no, Dots. Mrs. Burrmann
is
bad, but she isn’t so bad. And blackmail ain’t a Christian-minded thing, neither.”

“You too damn stupid.”

Here, conversation stopped. Music was playing. Bernice smiled, and leaned her head to listen. Bernice looked at the letter from Mammy, reading it to herself, all the time making facial expressions in comment, as the letter pleased, or displeased her. Bernice wondered why Mammy’s letter, dated a week earlier than Lonnie’s, had reached Toronto a day later. (“Lord!” said Dots, making a comment on her boredom, her misery in Bernice’s company and her general mental state.) The letter told Bernice,
Dear Bernice, love, I have received the money which you posted to me in March last …
it was now March again.… 
And I have been reposing myself at the front window, at which you used to sit, in the evening, waiting for the postman to knock. I remember that you used to sit down there, and sing those beautiful songs which you learned at the Fontabelle Christian Mission Church in Christ. And everytime I see Berry, the postman, pass across on his bicycle, my heart gives a shudder, and tears sometimes come to my eyes, because I know then that you have not sent me anything
.… “A year pass already?” she asked the letter.

“What you say, gal?” asked Dots, coming awake.

“I talking to myself, child.” Dots apparently went back to her dreaming; and Bernice to the letter. She threatened to let Mammy sit down at that window till the undertaker removed her, before she would send another penny to her.
You have not remembered me. You have forsaken your own mother. Don’t you know that you left a child behind you? I mean Terence. And Terence has been sick every day for the past month
.… It saddened
Bernice very much to think of home, and of Terence. She must withdraw some money tomorrow from her bank, and send it for Terence. But she couldn’t help remember that poor as Mammy was, she still raised two daughters, Estelle and herself; and that she sent them to school, and to church, plus Sunday school every Sunday. Mammy did her best to make them the two “most decent girl children in this village”; and she went further and sent Estelle to high school, which at that time was very expensive. Bernice had already decided that school didn’t like her: but it was really the other way round — she hadn’t the brains to pass the entrance examination; and she started to work at the Marine Hotel, as a housekeeper. She remembered the small, one-room leaking house; and the flattened skillets that once contained butter from Australia (which butter neither she nor Mammy could afford to eat) which Mammy nailed on the roof as shingles to keep out the sun and the rain and the wind; this house — like many others of the fifty in the village, lodged on loose coral stones — was their mansion, their castle which hid the penury from the eyes of the other poor villagers. The worst thing she remembered about Barbados, and home and the village, was the closet which always had cockroaches infesting and infecting it; with its oval hole in the middle of the seat like the hole in a coffin; and the ten-gallon galvanized bucket underneath (“What that bucket used to have in it, Bernice?”) catching everything that dropped: filth, excrement, the blood, the rags-and-the-blood; and once upon a time, something that came from Bernice’s womb, or belly or stomach (and Mammy never called it by its name) which had to be got rid of, because Mammy said so, because Bernice was too young for that … 
and although Terence has been sick, that no-good man you found yourself with, I mean Lonnie; Lonnie
does not even come round and say, Take this, to Terence, meaning a six-cent piece
. At this point, Dots came alive, to ask what time it was.

“The missy home?” she asked.

“You mean that music, eh?” Bernice asked, smiling.

“That damn rock-’n’-roll waking me up,” Dots grumbled. “She don’t know that is heathen-music?”

“My missy don’t play
that
music, darling! It is the children you hearing.” Bernice assumed great pride in defending Mrs. Burrmann’s tastes.

Dots was apparently impressed. “Oh!” she said, with great relief; and straightway, like an animal awakened from its hibernation by a small disturbance of no consequence, she retreated into her reverie. It was part reverie, and part silent appraisal of Bernice’s apartment, which she envied because it was always kept so clean; and also because it was a room larger than hers. She reached out, and touched the animals from the north of Canada, all dead, all seeming to be prancing, or grazing on grass that was the colour of green clay: animals roaming in glazed and plastic enthusiasm. They were on the centre table. Dots ran her fingers over them again; and then she touched the jungles of false trees: maples, spruce, pine; trees coniferous and deciduous. A miniature waterfall bubbled and gurgled when she held it in her hand. She turned it upside down; and was shocked by its origin: MADE IN JAPAN. “Christ!” she exclaimed, “Niagara Falls, gal!”, although it was not the first time she had seen the Falls, in artificial reproduction.

“You ever went there?” Bernice asked, noticing her interest; and coming awake from her own thoughts.

“Niagara Falls,” Dots repeated, noting the likeness.

The room was quiet again, as if a door on a noisy city
street was shut against the din of traffic. Bernice, wishing that Dots wouldn’t talk so much, returned to the letter which her wandering thoughts had interrupted.
All Lonnie comes round for, is to ask me if Bernice send the thing? I don’t know why you don’t put an end to Lonnie. Lonnie is no good for you. Lonnie, since the day you left for Canada, has been running after ever thing wearing a skirt. Lonnie does not even take Terence to Gravesend Beach on a first Sunday, for a sea bath. He passed round here once, which was a month after you left, and he took Terence to the Garrison Race Pasture. Terence came back in here at eleven o’clock at night. Terence tells me that he lost Lonnie who went drinking rum with his friends, and if it wasn’t for a police, Terence would still be lost. By luck, the police found Terence, and somebody happened to know that Terence belonged to you, meaning that you is Terence’s mother, and that you far from here, up in Canada. I had to bathe Terence in licks for doing that trick to me, because I think he is too big to say he getting himself lost
. Bernice had to laugh at Mammy: she ain’t change a bit, that Mammy. And looking up, she saw Dots inspecting her dressing table, which was the largest piece of furniture in the room, and Bernice’s priceless possession. There was a looking glass attached to it. On this dressing table, Bernice had placed every bottle which contained manufactured tricks to improve a woman’s facial beauty and personality. Some bottles contained a fluid thick as molasses, but white; one boasted, and backed up its boast with a guarantee, that it had the ability to transform Bernice’s personality and complexion in such a way that men would trip over her. And this was the bottle Dots was examining. Others contained complexion-lighteners. These Bernice had discovered in Harlem where she had recently spent two weeks, visiting a cousin. Except for her complexion-lighteners, the entire
collection of miracles were manufactured by Avon. Mrs. Burrmann had called her downstairs, and had given her this collection.

Bernice broke into Dots’s thoughts, grumbling, “Lady Burrmann expecting friends, and I expecting a sister. I have to forsake my own flesh-and-blood so that the princess down there could drink her whiskey till her damn face is as red as a cherry, and she and her guests start singing Negro spirituals and folk songs, and carrying-on … holding up their clothes in front o’ the men, and swapping mottor car keys, and …”

“No!
They
don’t do them things, gal!”

“Them?”

The room was so quiet, that the snow seemed to be making noises as it fell. Dots sighed again. “I wish I could lay my hands on Boysie!” And a lifetime of disappointment and frustration seemed to rise from her sight. “Every night, each night, Boysie comes in at three, four, five, and one morning that bastard creep in Dr. Hunter’s house, at
seven
. Christ, gal! and I was so shame in case the doctor see my husband coming in at that hour. Boysie crawls home late, like a dog, tired as hell, and saying all the time, the car break down, something wrong with the car, and be-Christ, when I call-on ‘pon Boysie to give me little loving, Boysie licked-out like a wet rag. Bernice, gal, sometimes I envies you, ’cause you don’t have no man-worries to worry you.…”

“You have a lot on your mind, too.”

“Boysie running after white woman, gal. My husband in love with white woman. But I swear to you, in the presence o’ God up there, be-Jesus Christ! let me just catch Boysie with one o’ them!”

“Lord have mercy.”

“And I telling you now, Bernice, that I don’t intend to stay in that damn place by myself, night in and night out. I am going to get myself a nice, young strapping white man and put a horning in Boysie’s backside that will learn him sense. Let Boysie take that! ’Cause he don’t know how to appreciate a nice black woman.”

“But what you saying at all?” Bernice was nonplussed.

“Many’s the night. Bernice, you know not, because a woman can’t tell everything concerning her life, not even to her closest bosom friend … many things goes on between my husband and me that I can’t break to you. Them is things I have to keep buried inside here.” She patted her breast heavily; and Bernice nodded her head, in sympathy. “Many’s the night, gal, I sitting down at the edge o’ that bed, and I watching that hour-hand as it move round from eleven, twelve, one, through two, and three and four o’clock, and my husband isn’t in my bed beside me. Where the hell he could be? In somebody bed? Tell me.”

Bernice could understand this way of feeling things, and this way of expressing them. But she was still stunned by the compromise in Dots’s words. “For a decent person like you, to say that,” she said, “is nothing but a damn surrender to the past and the past histories that used to be the way o’ life for my great-great grandmother. Mammy tell me all that happen in them days. And I telling you now, so you won’t mention no more past-tense thoughts and commit no more fornications and suicides, with those thoughts. Mammy tell me that in them black days, any excuse for a man, as long as he was white, could hold on ’pon her grandmother by the hand, or grab her grandmother by the neck, or by her behind and drag her in the nearest canefield or behind the pig pen, and
lay down flat on top o’ she, and work off himself and his unwanted substance and seed in her belly. And on the back o’ that, leave her to the four winds. Jesus, Dots, you mean to tell me that you want them days to come back? Is that why you want to go with a white man?” (Dots was twisting and turning uncomfortably.) “Look, child, I reading some serious knowledge these days, since I went down in Harlem. I think you should go there.”

“It does happen every day, gal!” Dots did not give the impression that she had been joking all along. “It happens every damn day, black woman and white man. I ain’t the first and I won’t be the last, and there ain’t nothing you could do to stop this modern trend.” Bernice remained unimpressed. Dots had to go further; and with mock exasperation, she added, “But have you never pass through Yorkville, Yorkville Village? Near by Bloor and Avenue Road. Or the Little Trinidad Club? Toronto integrated now, gal. It is a technicolour city, now.”

“Technicolour, or no technicolour, I still say what you just tell me has a damn lot to do with histories.”

“Histories, my arse! — if you would pardon my vernacular, please.”

After this, Dots flounced into silence and sulking. Bernice, somewhat humiliated by what had been said about finding a white man, went back to her letter. She got up from the chesterfield, and sat beside the window, counting the snowflakes passing her window. Dots was looking at the chesterfield, which was a couch by day, and a bed by night; and she felt very sorry for Bernice, because she knew the chesterfield had never been occupied, at night, with Bernice locked in the thighs of a man’s satisfaction. Perhaps, had there been a man, Dots thought, Bernice might not have reacted so
violently to what she had said a moment ago. Although I tell the old bitch I was joking, Dots thought, throwing a glance in Bernice’s direction.

Just then, the telephone rang, and frightened them. Dots’s expression said it was the airport calling about Estelle; perhaps the flight was delayed. But Bernice knew it was the princess downstairs. And that was who it was.

“What she want, now, gal?”

“I have to fix dinner for
he. She
going out to the YWHA, she say. Mr. Burrmann eating by himself again tonight. Four times this week, already!”

“These people ain’t have no damn respect for their husbands. Suppose you hear the way Mrs. Hunter talks to the Doctor? Christ, gal, if that was Boysie, Boysie would have lick-in my arse with the broomstick already … and Boysie isn’t even what you would call a real husband to me, neither!”