A Private State: Stories (25 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

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BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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fruit for you today?'' It's the rhythm of a known relationship: waiter to guest, precise as musical notation. His pencil hovers.
"Well, let's see, yes, what shall I have?" Mrs. Pritchard muses, glancing at him. Why does he work for the nasty owner, a woman still proud to call herself Rhodesian? She has stumpy legs and raisin eyes, like those Jack Russells that snarl around her ankles. All those dogs of hers: a pair of setters and an arthritic Doberman, stiff but vicious. Mrs. Pritchard spent an hour last night looking at the creature asleep on the patio, its claws rasping on flagstones.
"Fruit or juice, Mrs. Pritchard?"
"Actually, I was wondering what your last name was." The words sound plucky, casual, as if she's said simply, "Why, that guava was so delicious yesterday. I'll have some more of that, thanks."
He pauses and frowns, and the same disdainful look he gives the sly, glossy blonds steals over his face. He says, "Watson. My last name is Watson. Would you care for juice?"
"No, thank you, nothing. Thank you." How stupid of her! Why did she intrude like that? He will stare at the sea now instead of looking her in the eye. That is what she has earned by barging in. And he will make her accountable for her mistake, of that she's certain. She roots vaguely in her canvas bag, groping for the protection of dark glasses.
Abruptly she's aware of the sound of feet churning across the beach, impossibly fast. The sound comes from two island boys, black and thin as burned sticks. They run at the lip of the ocean, a streak of fear. The setters tear after them. The dogs are open-mouthed and gaining.
"Good Lord!" cries Mrs. Pritchard, helpless in her beach chair. She shouts, "Dominic, stop them! Stop them!"
"Which ones, Mrs. Pritchard?" he snaps and looks straight at her.
At lunch, Mrs. Pritchard wants to catch a glimpse of Dominic but can't bring herself to remove her sunglasses. She can hear him
 
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behind the patio's partition, chiding the other waiters about extra plates for table nine and who ordered the grouper, it's getting cold. Sometimes he raps out orders in patois. That was what he used when he collared the two boys. He held them like a brace of dark birds above the reach of the dogs. Dominic also shouted at the dogs in dialect, and when they wouldn't stop snarling kicked the largest in the chest. It made a padded thud, the heavy shoe meeting bone under dark fur. The animals slunk off and Dominic put the boys down, speaking to them loudly, flatly. They rubbed their toes in the sand, one boy's hand tucked into his armpit, their heads bent. Dominic pointed toward the main building, and, Mrs. Pritchard assumed, the driveway past it, lighted at night by lamps the shape of pineapples.
She wants to turn to one of the other guests and say, "Those dogs were trained!" The animals were ready to rip those little boys to pieces, but they've sniffed and nuzzled Mrs. Pritchard, all tongue and tail.
For a moment, everyone on the beach went completely still. The women let their fat books droop. Teenagers stopped short, surfboards nose up. A man, leaning over to poke seaweed with a branch, watched the whole encounter bent at the waist. It wasn't until Dominic ordered the pair of boys from the beach and strode toward the hotel, kicking sand as he went, that the shouts of the young people rang again in the air. Women smoothed on their creams. The man with the branch flipped a dark, clawed thing up from the beach and started back in surprise.
Mrs. Pritchard's body had frozen, but her skin responded, in its usual, hectic way, flushing the pink of old bricks. She had seen the stain begin on her chest and felt it wash upward to her scalp. Dominic hadn't been able to stay detached either. He had snapped; he'd been fierce. It was not something that happened to him very often, she supposed. Why with her?
Mrs. Pritchard still feels mottled from the morning and accepts
 
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more ice water with a tilt of her head, a crescent of a smile. The slim waiter returns it, just as cool. How hateful that things like polite smiles slipped into place when something else entirely was happening inside you. Mrs. Pritchard wraps her cotton sweater more closely to her body.
Carrothers has found Dominic behind the partition. Her dog is limping. What had he done. His voice is taut with patience, strung on the narrow border between the coldly correct and the surly. "Don't use that tone with me, man," the woman shouts. "How dare you abuse my dog!" Mrs. Pritchard cringes. "How dare you?" she cries again. Carrothers couldn't have chosen a better spot in which to humiliate the man. The air on the patio shimmers in silence, just as on the beach. Not a piece of silverware knocks against a plate, not a ring taps a glass. The whole white crowd with its itchy new layer of brown skin pays full, mute attention to Carrothers dressing Dominic down behind the lacy trellis that hides the tubs of dirty china.
When it's over, Mrs. Pritchard retreats to her room. The light that comes through the blinds slices the rug in delicate stripes. Her thoughts feel more ordered here than in the glare of the patio with all its stupid, complicit whites, all its silent, cautious blacks. Invisible, raging Dominic.
To have Dominic snap at me. To have heard that awful woman. Mrs. Pritchard feels lightheaded. To be terminally ill. She says it again to herself: I am terminally ill. It makes her stomach clench as if she were about to get on stage and recite, in a reedy voice: My poem is called "When I Learned I Was Going to Die." She imagines the applause as thin, confused, the lights very bright.
When Mrs. Pritchard wakes up, she feels hollow but solid, like an empty wine bottle. But not as if she's drunk the wine. She feels full of clear, light attention. Her body has granted her the chance to leave the beach. It is time to see some of the island. It strikes her as far-fetched but necessary to find a church. It is Sunday; there
 
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may be evening services. She remembers one near the airport: a crumbling foundation, a tin roof that flashed white in the sun. She will take her rental car.
The engine turns over and the tires crackle along the driveway. It's a sound that seems to rattle with possibility. "Ciao," she says to the lot attendant, who looks surprised. She's off to church, for the first time in years.
She must go slowly here; they still drive on the left, an inheritance of British occupation. And while the Jamaicans govern their country, she's read it is the descendants of the old colonials who still own companies here: the Coca Cola plant, the last aluminum refineries. Cars that pass her are sagging American pick-ups, with steering wheels on the left, making right turns something of a production. As she nears Ocho Rios, restaurants familiar from home pop up along the road. But even through the window, she hears the ping of reggae and calypso, sounds that no one has imported. Inside a cloud of dust, children play hopscotch.
She will, she realizes, have to drive back alone in the dark. If she hit someone, it would mean so much more than one casualty. Not only do people crowd the edges of the road, the cars and trucks are stuffed full. There are knots of arms, heads, and elbows popping from the windows. Mrs. Pritchard remembers how she and her sister had crammed red grapes in their mouths, to see who could fit the most. When they exploded with laughter and the grapes burst out, to everyone's disgust, her mother had shrieked, "You frightful pigs!"
"Oh stop," she tells herself. She's leery of memories and of luring an accident by imagining one. I am going to church, I am trying to see something of the island, she says and corrects her steering to avoid an empty gasoline canister in the middle of her lane. She hears a snatch of music from the courtyard of a restaurant. The Blue Parrot. St. Anselm's, the church she remembers, stands directly opposite.
The church has a bell that starts to swing as she crosses the
 
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road. It rings a slow five times, a richer sound than Mrs. Pritchard expects. It wavers up and down the road, up the hills and down to the sea. Parishioners politely jostle their way into the church, which, she can see from the yard, has rows of stiff pews painted dark yellow. A wooden sign hangs on the door and announces two Sunday services, one at ten and one at five.
Providence. She got the time right. But as she climbs the stairs, she wants to put her sunglasses on again. She is the only white person, which comes not as a surprise but as a sudden impropriety. She shouldn't be disturbing the things this way. Her skin feels like a disruptive force, the sign of an invasion. She tucks herself in the last pew and makes herself busy with her purse, trying to occupy as little space as she can.
No one else seems to notice her. Nothing ripples outward from the crowd of people come to worship with the Reverend Wilkins. His name, too, was on the sign. As the people ease into their seats and settle their hatsmany of the women wear hats with brightly colored veilsMrs. Pritchard watches the crowd and listens to the pianist, a bony woman in coral, bang out some Bach on the spinet. Women wreathed in fat angle their hips down the aisle. Long young men wear shirts buttoned at the wrist. A troupe of school girls, clutching prayer books stamped with gilt crosses, block the entrance as they look for empty seats. They bend their heads and whisper to one another, the shade of a giggle in their voices. Mrs. Pritchard can't get enough of the girls, the polka-dot handkerchief one of the young men uses to mop his face, the tilted, gauzy row of hats in the front pew.
The pianist has stopped and the Reverend Wilkins steps up to the altar, a heavy wooden table draped in white cloth. Some barely budded gladioli sit in two blue glass vases at either end of the table. The flowers, vivid red, dust the Reverend's white robes with thin, moving shadows. The frames of his glasses wink gold as he lowers his head in silent prayer. A brass cross hangs on the back wall. When he starts to speak, Mrs. Pritchard realizes she can't
 
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understand a word. He speaks in English, but the Jamaican lilt is so strong that all the familiar rhythms are disguised. Words like God, sayeth, amen, boom out abruptly from the welter of sound. At least she sits in the back row where no one can see that her lips do not move with the prayers.
If she can't understand the Reverend's words, all she has to do is sit here and watch the light stream through the tall sheets of pale green glass. Church has fallen from her life in bits and pieces, but she discovers as she watches the Anglican service unfold, she has missed it, which makes it even better to be in church and not to understand, to give in to the sweep of ritual. Would she have been a better Hindu or Catholic, with their reservoirs of pageantry? It doesn't matter now; all she is, is Episcopalian, and a lapsed one at that, making the presence of a cool, dim religion in her life even dimmer. Too diluted to earn a service in a church, and she has secretly been planning an opulent memorial buffet, while Gershwin, Porter, and Armstrong play briskly on the stereo.
The pianist has started thumping the spinet again. It is time to sing, but there is no hymnal available. Happily, it is "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" and by the time she's reached the end of the second phrase, a bulwark never failing, people have turned their heads to see the white woman with the rich dark alto. Oh yes, she can still do it. How nice it feels to let loose a column of sound. The church rings with the hymn. The congregation faces back, their voices swelling toward the altar. The pianist pounds. Reverend Wilkins's white robes stir as if shifted by wind. A spear of gladiolus shivers in its vase.
When the congregation sits again, Mrs. Pritchard strains to hear what is being said. The words still roll past her. She lets herself drift, and an old habit of churchgoing returns to her. She has always had a tendency to remember moments of pure, physical experience in the middle of the most solemn ceremonies. When she and Charles were courting, he dressed her in his roommate's clothes to sneak her into his college library. It was a lark for
 
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him and his friends, which they'd found funnier than she had, but she liked the starchy cuffs of the roommate's shirt; she felt almost chic in the fedora.
Once they sneaked past the guard, Charles lost his edgy gaiety and turned reflective. He showed her the carrel where he kept the barricade of information amassed for his thesis on the Crusades. Charles spoke of the books with a reverence she hadn't seen in him before. We are in the Holy Land she felt and was suddenly incredibly interested in being kissed, even ravished in this chilled and scholarly place. It was the first time she had reached to touch him. Weekends when he came to her muddy campus up north, he was the one to take her hand from her glove and massage the blood back into each finger. In the late afternoon light, she took his.
He pulled away. With the jacket slipping over her cuffs, she leaned over to kiss him. It was odd to feet the warmth of his mouth against hers, to smell his wintergreen breath, to have his body so piping, his hands so icy.
It was the act of a brazen woman then, inviting not just a kiss but a man's hands on your body. She would have let him map out the angles of her ribs, the warm hills of her breasts right there under
Life Among the Saracens
. Right there in his sainted library, and it was precisely because it was the sainted library that she wanted this to happen. He pulled away. Someone might see us here, he said. Anyone could come.
Yes, she said, that's right and kissed him again.
He'd said, ''Emmy, we should go," and led her back to his room to change. She wondered then if she had lost him, and decided that if he did react badly or didn't think the whole thing sort of funny, he wasn't worth it. But a month later, he proposed, in front of a fire in the library at her parents' house. The red wool of a new sweater itched her collarbone terribly. The memory of the moment so stuns her that when the second hymn starts, "All Spirits That on Earth Do Dwell," she cannot sing.

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