Here Comes the Sun (6 page)

“If yuh evah wake up an' need a man, yuh know who to call.” He winks at her.

“I won't ever need you, Maxi,” she says, waving him goodbye and walking away with her fluid stride that emphasizes everything she knows his imagination has already seen.

“Not even on a rainy night?” he asks, driving off slowly.

Margot laughs, holding her stomach and stumbling merrily to the entrance of the hotel. “We in a drought, so keep wishing.”

“See, if me mek yuh laugh dem way, then imagine what else me can do.”

“Aw, lord, Maxi, yuh nuh easy. I will see you lata.” She blows him a kiss.

Once Margot is on the property, the hush returns. She walks toward the front desk, holding her head as high as possible. The security guards, groundsmen, and concierges are not immune to her magic; but the housekeepers and other administrative staff, mostly women, are. Visitors seem to single her out to ask for directions or recommendations. She can also hold conversations with tourists longer than any other front desk clerks, who tend to be overly polite and too eager to smile, as though apologetic for their lack of knowledge. She's the best front desk clerk at Palm Star Resort. It's the only job that she has ever known. But soon this will change.

“Morning, Pearl,” Margot says to one of the housekeepers who happens to be signing in. The older woman draws her lips together. The two younger housekeepers—Pearl's oldest daughter and youngest niece, respectively—nod at Margot, then look away as though embarrassed about something. Margot has an inkling that Garfield told everyone what he saw—Margot getting fucked by Alphonso in the conference room. Though this is old news—it's one of those pieces of gossip that could easily be a myth, given how smoothly Margot plays it off. Had it not been for the mysterious occurrence of Garfield's death shortly after—serves him right—then perhaps it would have been completely forgotten. Margot carries on with her business, greeting the lower staff whenever she has to assign them to clean vacant rooms. She makes direct eye contact that forces them to look away, ashamed for their filthy imaginations. She also dares them to retort with information they have bottled up and kept for when she writes them up. But this never happens. They keep the damning secrets among themselves. Occasionally these might slip out to new employees in the middle of spreading linen, folding towels, washing pillowcases, or emptying trash—tales of Margot's bare backside making their rounds among shoulder-jerking, tear-eyed laughter that is an amalgamation of envy and disgust—boisterous, as though the brutes think that they're alone and unobserved at work. But whenever she's around, the laughter drains like the last bit of water from a bottle.

“What oonuh laughing at?” Margot had asked Pearl's daughter and niece one day. They gasped when Margot appeared from a corner by the large ceramic vase where she had been watching them. Their heads immediately bowed. “A joke.”

“What kind of joke sweet oonuh so?”

“Ahm . . . we was talkin' 'bout somebody we know.”

“What did they do?”

The young housekeepers glanced at each other, damp-faced and shining under Margot's glare. When they couldn't answer, Margot knew. And because she slips easily and stealthily into occupied rooms at night and emerges looking as she did when she entered, a spy—be it a lone housekeeper catching up on the day's cleaning tasks or Neville, the room service attendant, knocking on people's doors with food—would think she was coming from a serious business meeting. Whereas they might speculate freely about her affair with Alphonso, her late evening deeds float under their noses. Besides the one or two run-ins on the property that she has had with staff that work late shifts, no one, as far as she knows, suspects anything.

T
handi makes her way to the nearest restroom by the upper school and locks herself inside one of the stalls. It's where she eats her lunch, enduring the pungent smell of urine and womanly excretions. She takes out a pencil from her bag and draws on the whitewashed wall like she draws in the dust on furniture at home, or in mud after it rains. She pauses when she hears voices.

“Are you serious?”

“I'm dead serious. It happened aftah devotion yesterday morning.”

“I missed it!”

“You're always late for school, that's why.”

“What was she thinking?”

“I asked myself the same question.”

“It's like she lives in her own world.”

“She's just cuckoo.”

“You notice how she's been looking more and more like Casper the Ghost?”

The girls' giggles follow them outside. After they leave, Thandi stays inside the stall. She stands back to look at her drawing, then scribbles all over it, turning it into a shapeless form—the eye of a hurricane spinning relentlessly out of control. Thandi adjusts the pin on her skirt where the button has fallen off (they have been falling off her blouses too, the meager threads giving way to the defiance of her newly fattened breasts) and exits the stall. She cuts across the lawn, making her way to the Vocational Block, where Brother Smith's office is located. It's another one of the modern buildings painted bright yellow. Brother Smith is gathering materials for class, his brown robe nearly swallowing his thin frame. When he sees Thandi, he closes the
Jamaica Gleaner
and puts it on his desk. “Damn politicians. This country has gone to the dogs. Did you know that we owe the World Bank billions of dollars?” Thandi shifts from one leg to the next, her backpack weighing heavily on her shoulders. Brother Smith must sense that something is wrong when he doesn't get at least a
Really, sir?
or
You don't say
.

“You don't look well,” he says. “Come in and sit down.”

Thandi does as he says, closing the door behind her, then removing a few cardboard collages off a chair by Brother Smith's desk, which is neat despite the disarray of his office. There are prints of paintings everywhere, some he had been meaning to hang on the already crowded walls. Van Gogh, Picasso, da Vinci, Botticelli. Artists he has discussed in Thandi's art class, assigning extensive readings about their life and work. Artists whose works Brother Smith says he has seen in Europe. Thandi wishes she could go to Europe too. To exist in those places, especially those paintings of the English countryside with wide-open fields, greener than the greenest grass in River Bank, and with flowers in the softest shades of lavender and yellow. Those images don't look at all like sunny days in River Bank, where weeds grow to your knees in the brown fields, itching around the ankles; and black boys hang from trees, foraging for ripe mangoes, their dangling, ashy, sore-ridden legs attracting as much flies as the rotten fruits.

Thandi sits and regards the frame on Brother Smith's desk that reads I
CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH
C
HRIST WHO STRENGTHENS ME
. She stares at it for a while. Surely she has been working hard, doing everything to please. Jesus Christ peers at her with sympathetic eyes that mirror the nuns' and those of the missionaries. She's supposed to want this. She's supposed to be grateful.
A girl like her
should excel at school, because it's the only way out—the only way to clamber up the ladder.
I'm supposed to want this
. Yet, year after year when she walks away with all A's on her school report, a nagging persists. Like she's running a race, panting on her way to a finish line that doesn't exist.

“Thandi, what's going on? Our class starts in thirty minutes,” Brother Smith says. Though he's quite young, Brother Smith is prematurely balding. His bald spot shines in the natural light from outside like the silver plate he passes around during mass. He tries to cover it with four strands of brown hair combed to the side. He's small in stature, his fair skin interrupted by brown freckles covering his entire face like a dotted mask. But his kind, chestnut-colored eyes stand out like the languid strokes of a brush, capturing everything about a person, an object, or a setting. Currently they're steady on her face, as if trying to figure out a crossword puzzle. He leans forward to rub her arm in that paternal way she has gotten used to. He doesn't seem to hear the slight crinkling of the plastic underneath her sweatshirt. And if he does, he doesn't ask. It's here, inside Brother Smith's art class, that Thandi feels most free.

“Is it possible to be good at something even if you don't want to?”

“Yes, that's plausible. Why?”

Thandi shrugs, looking down at her hands. “I—I was thinking . . .” Her voice trails off. “I was thinking how much I love art. More than any other subject.” Brother Smith takes his hand away and creates distance between them. A distance Thandi feels, which momentarily creates an ache within her. He's rubbing his chin as though suddenly aware of a burgeoning five o'clock shadow.

“My advice is for you to love all your subjects. The CXC is just around the corner.”

“I know. And I am prepared to pass it. It's just . . .”

“Thandi, I teach art as a vocational subject.”

His response puts a sinking feeling inside Thandi's chest like the melting of chipped ice. She looks around the room, her desires springing forth like vines across the white ceiling, coloring the beige walls. “Nothing else feels right.”

“Thandi, you have a whole life ahead of you. It's too soon to be feeling this way.”

Brother Smith clasps both his hands as if he's about to pray. “Think about your family, this school. People are rooting for you. You're a straight-A student who can do more with your life than be—”

“But you said I'm good.”

“Yes, I did say that.”

He reaches across a small stack of students' work on his desk and locates Thandi's sketchpad. The students had to turn in preliminary materials for the end-of-the-year project. He opens up Thandi's. “You have skills. It's obvious,” he says. “But I'm afraid that—” He clears his throat. “I don't see a future for you there.”

Brother Smith apparently picks up on her disappointment, because his face softens and his head tilts as though he's about to reason with a five-year-old.

“Here is the thing, Thandi. I favor landscapes and have to say that yours is my
favorite
by far of all the collection that I have! But this final project should give me a better understanding of you, the artist. I don't see that. I would like to challenge you to go deeper, reveal more of yourself,” he says. “If I like what I see, I will nominate your work to be displayed in the Merridian. You can keep drawing, even if not professionally.” He pushes her drawings that she did over the last few weeks to the edge of his desk.

The Merridian is the holy grail of artwork in the school. It was named after a white nun whose favorite pastime was painting workers in the fields whenever she came on missionary trips to the plantations. She would title her paintings
Negro Picking Corn
;
Negro Under Tree
;
Negro at Sunset
. Her paintings had gotten national acclaim.

“I'd like that, sir,” Thandi says, almost falling out of her chair to rise with Brother Smith. They walk together to the studio, Thandi silently contemplating what she'll do for the final project as they pass the sewing room, where girls sit studiously behind Singer machines; the cooking hall, with its smell of cornmeal pudding; the typing lab, where keyboards take on the sound of pecking birds; and finally to the art studio. Brother Smith squeezes her shoulder firmly before they enter the class. As soon as she gets to her space around a large table that seats all six of her art classmates, Thandi pulls out her tools. Brother Smith instructs them to sketch for a few minutes, identifying objects in the room. Thandi angles the pencil in her right hand and concentrates deeply. She taps her pencil lightly on the sheet, the Merridian still on her mind. Brother Smith may say there's no future in art, but if he nominates her and she wins, who knows? But how can she reveal more of herself when she's so unsure of who that is? Her hand barely moves, though other images come into focus: the chipped ceramic vase with red roses that Brother Smith keeps at the front of the room for inspiration, the Virgin Mary figurine on the windowsill, a pair of slippers with the heels rubbed down on a side table, the defiance within the straight backs of the wooden chairs. Every object has character. Substance. A story about the people who made them, owned them.

Something slips inside Thandi, filling her with a familiar weight that presses down on her chest, holds her still, like the man's body that one time. It's a feeling of dread that causes her to pause, her pencil suspended in midair. Thandi's kept her terrible secret for years, and as time has gone on she has convinced herself that no one would believe her anyway. Like a bad dream, the pain of the experience lingers—the taste of licorice when she bit into the hand cupping her mouth, the roughness of the stones, pebbles, and sticks as her heels were dragged along the dusty path and into the bushes, the heavy weight on top of her that both blinded and numbed her. All she had was her hearing. “
If yuh tell ah soul, yuh dead!
” The words were like the blade of a knife by her temple, which she spent the days and nights after it happened trying hard to forget. Her imagination began to produce walls behind which she crouched in silence, closed off from the pain of the memory. She didn't have to leave this hiding place, for her imagination also produced its own food, water supply, and oxygen. After a while it became harder to piece the facts together. For example, how is it that she can remember the trees that she was looking at before it happened, and their names, the green of the water in the cove, but not the color of his shirt, what he had in his hand, or what his face looked like? Was he wearing red or black? Did he carry a knife or a broken bottle? Was he wearing a beard then? Or just a mustache? Something inside her collapses under the weight of the things she cannot remember. She sketches, knowingly and unknowingly turning the pointed pencil toward herself.