The Meeting Point (7 page)

“Dots, he is a good man to her, Mr. Burrmann is, a damn good man,” Bernice said, shaking her head from side to side, to let Dots know how good a man was Mr. Burrmann. “Good man. She ain’t lacking in clothes, pocket money, mottor car, fur coats, nothing. The broadlooms in this house is enough to hide a man in.…”

“Like a dog …”

“He kisses the dirt that bitch walks on.”

“But you can’t buy love, gal. You could maybe buy anything saving
that
!” Dots yawned. She stretched, and while stretching, she tickled herself under her left arm; and smiled. Bernice smiled too. “Well, gal, what about tonight, and Estelle?”

“Child, everything fix up already,” Bernice said. “Observe how I plan to operate on that princess down there! I have already pinch three bottles o’ Haig-and-Haig scots whiskey,
and I put it under my bed, three months ago, when I first knew Estelle was coming up. I have a big piece o’ ham left back from last Christmas. That hide away too. A half dozen bottles of her nice Jewish wine that helps to make her face red as a beet, well, that Jewish wine will have to help give me some thrills tonight! Even though I can’t turn red as a beet when I drink it, heh-heh-heee! … and some eatables and delicacies, deli-deli-delicacies, that I been hoarding up on her arse, on the sly.” Dots convulsed into laughter. “Look, you have to use your head with these people, man. I telling you, you have to sit down a long time, and think how to outsmart these bitches and bastards living in this world with you.” Bernice noticed that Dots was suddenly very quiet; and when she looked back, Dots was getting her coat from the cupboard. “You going, child?”

“I am going, gal, I going.”

“What about tonight? I having something for Estelle.”

“I don’t know if I coming,” Dots said irritably. “I ain’t coming. And I going tell yuh why. Gal, I am tired sitting down and looking at a bunch o’ damn frustrated women who don’t have no man, and can’t find no man. Usually, I am the only one who bring a man. And he is my husband, Boysie. Every woman in the place always have her eyes on him, and I tired as hell always having to watch my husband.” After this, Bernice was silent. There wasn’t anything she could say to change Dots’s mind. You could hear the snow falling, it was so silent in the room. Dots gathered up her things; said, “I going, gal,” once more, and then walked towards the door. When she turned the doorknob half in its circle, she held it there for a moment. She looked back at Bernice; said something very awful about Bernice in her thoughts; and left. Not yet arrested
and handcuffed by this desertion, Bernice watched the doorknob as it moved back throughout its circle.

Bernice didn’t know how long it was since Dots had left. She could hear the music climbing the stairs; but not Mrs. Burrmann’s music. And this made her feel even more displaced. The music was what Dots liked to call, “White people’ music, gal!”

A little blue light, twinkling like a star, said the snow was going to fall and fall, as if winter had decided to compress itself into one day, and drown the land. Bernice experienced a sensation similar to strangulation: things were moving, but moving slowly and only with the permission of the snow, which held life itself in a cold neck-tie. The blue star of light, of night (although it was not yet eight o’clock), brought a melody to her mind. She sang it until her memory snowed the words from her tongue; and she had to begin again at the beginning, and come to that same snow bank which she could not climb in the first instance; and then the melody was buried. The light of blue, the night star, was the star of light on the snow plough which passed under the window of her memory; and it passed once more; and just then, the melody returned to her:

“
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
,

How I wonder what you are …

Up above the … so high
 …” and when the melody died finally, and the snow plough left Marina Boulevard, unreality returned. She began to talk in conversation with herself. She began where the reality of her earlier conversation with Dots had ended:
You have to learn how to use your head, Dots; and how to sit down at a window and think, and focus your attention and thoughts on things above; and learn how to out-smart them
bitches and bastards, and use them the same way they uses you; and you have to learn how to use the same weapons they use on you; and you have to understand what them weapons is. Lemme tell you: them weapons is brainpower and brainwashing; and I know, ’cause I come across it in a magazine I got in Harlem, when I was visiting there. Brainpower and brainwashing …
“Come here, Dots,” she said aloud, in her make-believe conversation, “come and let me show you something.” … 
you see them things running ’bout in the trees, looking as if they is big big mice? there, on Mrs. Burmann’s lawn and all over the sidewalk? What you think their name is, Dots? …
“Squirrels, gal.” … 
you’re blasted right, they is squirrels. And I wish that you, Mister Squirrel, you dark-brown one down there, had the sense to read my mind when I throw you a piece o’ stale bread; and I wish too, Mister Squirrel, that I could, some day, come down there and talk with you, ’cause you have open up my eyes to many mysteries of this place …
“Gal, are you telling me there is something important with a simple thing as a damn squirrel? Christ, a big woman like me, and wasting time talking ’bout squirrel? I must be going mad as hell!” … 
you ain’t going mad, child; and if you going mad, you going mad only to learn sense. Don’t forget every mad person is a sensible person in some way. I come across that in a book, in Harlem, too; a lot o’ things and mysteries I come across in Harlem … but Lord, at this moment, that isn’t a damn use to me, because there ain’t one man I could call on to ask for a favour from. Not one blasted person, white, black or blue, or pink! the only person I could think of, is Brigitte; I inviting Brigitte tonight, that German girl from ’cross the street; never mind she is a, a-a-a, what Mrs. Gasstein boy called Brigitte?
… and the steam in the breath of her conversation melted, and the glass in the window returned to the window; and she looked down and saw it. And
she called Dots to watch. Since the steam in her conversation had polished the glass in the window, and she could see, and she knew she was seeing, there was no need to pretend that Dots was still in the room with her. She had to see the act for herself: there were two men, standing beside a tree, while their two dogs (Bernice didn’t know the pedigree of the dogs) were bent stiff as icicles, in their shivering act of easing their bowels. A brown, dotted line of spaghetti, dit-dotted and dot-ditted out, into the cloud bank of snow. The men stood nearby, like landlords. They were pretending: they were pretending their presence was based on the pretences of the past, and all the time, the endless sausage was coming out of the two dogs; and they pretended they knew it was going to end. They were jerking their heads, up and down the street, at second floors and bottom floors, to see if anyone was going to raise a window, and screel down at them,
Take your goddam dogs, and scoot, or!
But the dogs, both white, continued to shiver and to strain from the exercise and the exertion of their deliverance. A smile came to the faces of the men, as they saw the faeces of the dogs, still bent like two skeletons of a dinosaur, curved backs, still in the position of the act, although the act itself was now only wind, and air, and gas. “Now, watch,” Bernice told the presence of Dots, which she felt in the room. “You watching, Dots? Watch something now.” The dogs were finished now. One of the men, the tall one, with wisps of grey hair at his temples, raised the left side of his winter coat, and pulled out a piece of tissue paper, the colour of snow and blood mixed, the colour of pink. And he was about to bend down to the snow and to the dog that was his dog, when Bernice turned away her eyes. (She made Dots’s presence turn away her eyes, too.) And she said to Dots’s presence, “Jesus Christ, no! No, no, no! he don’t
intend to do what I think he intends to do! No, he couldn’t be such a …” But the man did what she thought he was not intending to do. He reached down. Down to the dog and the snow. And he wiped the dog’s behind. Twice. Clean. With the tissue paper that was pink as dirty snow, mixed with blood. He looked up sharply, like a man caught stealing. He tried to wipe the other dog. But that dog wouldn’t have any of it. He pranced off, as if ants were stinging his balls. He pranced and shook and scratched many invisible, stinging ants out of his balls and his ears. (Bernice thought of Putzi kissing Mrs. Burrmann with his pink tongue; and of the times, when eating alone, she would put Putzi on the table, to lick, wash, rinse and dry her plate.) When the man was satisfied that his dog was a clean dog, he looked anxiously up, to see whether anybody else knew his dog was a clean dog; and then he lifted the left side of his black winter coat with the black fur-trimmed collar, and he pushed the pink tissue paper back into his pocket. “Jesus Christ!” The shock was so great, that Bernice really thought Dots had seen the act.
Now, you have seen
(Bernice was not only talking to Dots, now; she was addressing the world and the room, which was the world),
now you have witness with your own two eyes the manner in which this world does spin round, from this window. I have seen them two niggermen pass here, and I have wonder if, because o’ the things I see, they aren’t two she-she men. What you think? Nobody can’t convince me that when two young, clean, strapping gentlemens walk ’bout the place, holding hand in hand, something ain’t wrong! As soon as darkness fall, they holding hands, as if one frighten for the darkness, and the other, for the Lord. And they think nobody don’t know? Christ, I been seeing them in this incidence days on end …
“Jesus God!” … 
and it resting heavy on my
mind, Dots; heavy, heavy, heavy. When I tell you that one day I see those two sammy-geese pass ’cross here with their two dogs, and the two o’ them four-legged dogs dressed off in clothes. They were dressed off, and their two dogs were dressed-off, too, to suit. Man matching dog and dog matching master. Man, master and dog matched-up. On another occasion. One afternoon. Catching my breath before going back down in that steaming kitchen. When, I ups and see them two missy-missy men, standing up and waiting till their dogs did their number one, and number two, next to Mrs. Burrmann maple tree. Number one and number too, I tell yuh! Then. They bend down, both o’ them men. They bend down and wiped them two dogs …
“This is an advanced place, gal!” … 
They wiped those two dogs as how you or me or the next human being would cleanse ourselves after going to the bathroom, and …
“They say this place is a civilized place, gal!” … 
but a man, any man at all who does a thing like that to a dog, who is only a animal, that man isn’t really and truly a human being anymore. No, Dots; that man cease to be a man and become a dog, too. And if I had never seen a dog back home in Barbados, and if I had never witness how people back there treats their dogs, which after all is only animals, now that I’m in this country, this civilize place as you refer to it, I couldn’t discern a dog from a human person, at all! heh-heh-hai, looka Dots, I licked my mouth long enough, so let me crawl back downstairs and see what Princess Burrmann calling my name for
.

The night Estelle arrived in Canada it was cold. As cold as a dead man, dead a long time ago. Estelle filed past the Chinese stewardess, while jets of white fire came from the mouths of the other passengers, and from her mouth, as if she was a dragon. She looked at the shining macadam of ice, and at the
words of the aeroplane attendant, spoken in cold vapours; and she wished she had never left Barbados.

“Have a nice holiday, ma’am,” the Chinese woman said, “and goodnight.” She smiled, and took Estelle’s parcel from one hand, and placed it under Estelle’s armpit. She was now able to negotiate the shaking cold iron steps better. Half-way down, she looked back up at the Chinese stewardess for moral support, and the smile on the latter’s face carried her safely down the steps. But still, Estelle was not in a good mood. In her mind she carried the face of a small boy, who had looked at her during the flight, and had then looked at his mother and shouted, “Aunt Jemima.” It could have been that the woman was not his mother; that she was his aunt, Jemima. But Estelle assumed immediately that he was calling
her
Aunt Jemima. After the incident, the Chinese lady (Estelle felt she was the only lady on the plane) had given her some chewing gum, and a copy of
Maclean’s
to read. The Chinese lady had winked at her, when the other stewardesses were not looking, and had nudged her and said, “Never mind.”

She was walking in the dead-man night, in the long line of passengers, filing like crabs, shuffling and scratching; silent as monks and nuns going to vespers. The line was going towards a door at which a man in white coveralls was standing. He held a torchlight in his hand. The bulb was red. He was the same man who had brought the plane to a stop, with the same red-bulbed torchlight. Now, he held the light, the bulb off, pretending that it was nothing at all for him to bring a big jet aeroplane safely from air to ground. He didn’t even smile himself a pat on the back! “This way, please, this way, please,” he was saying. When Estelle drew alongside him, he stared at her; and a puzzled look came to his face. Estelle
became tense. Looks are so deceiving, Estelle, so deceiving … the man was staring at her because the temperature was
ten degrees below zero
; and he, a born Canadian, wrapped in two pairs of longjohns, three sweaters plus his insulated coveralls — and she, from the tropics (“Hey! look at that goddamn lady, from the south! Well, goddamn!”), was wearing a silk dress, with no coat; walking as gaily as a nightenbird, goddamn and I’m clapping my hands on my shoulders one crossed over the other, like a goddamn penguin, hey! Bill, look at that goddamn broad! And Bill, who had already seen her, and had looked and had disbelieved, was himself like a penguin, flapping and breathing from his mouth like a humidifier, whispering, this is a bitch! — meaning the cold. The crabs before her were walking too slowly. The two men remained outside, like ice sculptures, clapping with vigour and vapour, pounding themselves and the cold which sneaked into their bodies, while they watched Estelle. But Estelle was boiling inside.