Red Jacket (21 page)

So this is her church. She stops by almost every day, stares, considers, rails a little at Papa God. In time, she assembles a small group of four or five Caribbean folks who meet here once a week to meditate.

Grace volunteers on weekends at Myrta's Home, a women's shelter. She registers women and children, cooks and serves meals, makes beds, does laundry, cares for babies, teaches literacy classes. It is at Myrta's that she loses her diffidence, thrust past it by the unabating stream of battered women and their children.

Felicity arrives at Myrta's one Sunday at midday, holding her left eye into the socket. Somebody has broken her nose and busted her mouth, which is bleeding like Jesus's side. It's Grace's second day there. When she looks up from the desk, she gasps. “Oh, my God!” She runs to the woman and urges, “Talk to me! Who did this to you? We have to call the cops!”

People appear straight off, scoop up Felicity, and take her inside. Babs Fiorito, who's in charge, sends Grace to help with the babies.

Hours later, when Grace is about to leave, Babs calls her into the office.

“Grace, I owe you an apology. We've thrown you into things with almost no training, and that's not fair to you.”

“It's my fault, Babs. I shouldn't have reacted like that.”

“Your reaction was natural enough. Felicity was beat up bad. But when women arrive, they need to feel that they're okay now, safe. That's why reception is more like a living room than a lobby. That's why whoever meets them must communicate calm, give them a sense that we can make it better, whatever it is.”

“And I didn't.”

“No, you didn't. But you'll do fine next time.”

“Thanks for looking at it that way, Babs.”

“I've a grandma who used to say, ‘Everything tell a story. You talk soft? That's a story. Talk loud? Another story. Your children smile? A story. Always cross? Another story. The man hold hands with his wife. One story. Never touch her. Another story.' ”

“So we have to get their story right, and ours, from the beginning?”

“Quite.”

Grace writes Edgar, “Babs says it's her grandmother's philosophy — and effectively, her psychology and media theory as well. You're communicating all the time. Not just mouth, face, hands, but your whole body, and not just one body, bodies together, and their contexts. The design of a building, the order of a meeting, the layout of a city, the smell of a bathroom, they all talk. The world is one big text that we're always reading, consciously or unconsciously, and writing too, to send one message or another. Amazing, yes?”

Beside a big smiley face Edgar writes back, “You learning about tings, sis!”

In fall of 1982, near the end of her second year at the shelter, Grace starts meeting women who complain of dry coughs, night sweats, recurring fevers, tiredness that won't go away, and persistent diarrhea — a disease, but nobody knows what the deuce it is. Handling folks with an undiagnosed plague would frighten anyone, but not Babs. At U of M, Grace has ready access to computers, so she gets the job of pinning down the disease.

So it's at Myrta's that Grace meets someone other than Gramps, Pa, and Ma with a profound respect for homegrown points of view, and it is also at Myrta's that she starts acquiring the skills to track epidemiological data and spot the symptoms of HIV/AIDS, though the plague is still nameless. As she'd tell Charlie on their first all-nighter, borrowing the tagline from Anancy stories, “Is Myrta's make it.”

Phyllis is still not answering letters, although Daphne says she is making steady progress. Grace is about to make a big move, so she writes a longish letter.

111 Edgelake Ave

Ann Arbor

Michigan 48103

12 August 1982

Dear Phyllis,

Tomorrow I'm going back to St. Chris for the first time since they sent for me before Gramps died. I'll be forever grateful for that visit, though it was difficult in many ways. That was when Gramps gave me your letters, and the surprise of my life! I'm going home with some trepidation. I'm looking forward to examining the impact of Non-Government Organizations with health-related missions in the region to see how they make a difference to the communities they serve. I've developed a way of taking account of the occurrence of diseases like malaria and dengue fever so that health and related services can respond promptly, as needed. I wrote it up in a paper that was published and got quite a bit of notice, so I suspect the people at UA in St. Chris are treating me better than the average grad student. It all began with work in a women's shelter here when folks started turning up with symptoms of AIDS, which you may know as GRID or the 4-H disease. I figured that if we could identify the communities in which AIDS was likely to occur, we could make interventions that would be preventative and responsive in a timely fashion. I'm hoping to do some teaching as well. However, several people have warned me it's not like here, hence my misgivings.

I've called Our Lady of Good Hope and spoken to Sister Mary Agnes many times, for I promised to stay in touch with her. You will know that I am also good friends with Sister Mary Clement, the phone lady at Mary's Haven! I'd love to hear from you too, if and when. For sure, I will keep sending the newsletter. Meantime, work hard to get better!

Much love,

Grace

Maybe it is the ebullience of the Quad at U of M, the joie de vivre of the students, or Babs Fiorito's undiminishing hope; perhaps it is the green splash of the city, the glory of the Little Church of the Tiffany Window, the helpfulness of the people who teach her, or maybe she simply sees, as she wanders all over, to protests and poetry readings, festivals and flea markets, chorales and slams and jam sessions and jails that she has no corner on “hard life.” It boxes everyone about. Perhaps she is simply tired of the hair shirt. Whatever the reason for the sea change, in Ann Arbor she becomes someone else: Charlie's Grace.

Charlie

Grace meets Charlie in January 1984, or, more accurately, Charlie meets her, at the St. Chris airport, because Edgar can't make it. Edgar was going to the Canadian High Commission to collect his visa, which he had to get that morning, because Lindsay, whom he was visiting in Ottawa for a few days, had found a cheap flight leaving that afternoon. He's managed to get the visa just in time.

Charlie is rum red, tall, and powerful. His straight, dark brown hair has reddish tints. His blue-green eyes are the colour of the sea at Richfield. Edgar says on the phone that she is sure to know Charlie, and “Anyway, he'll know you.”

She walks out of customs, looks round, and somehow recognizes him as he says he recognized her. “How?” she asks him.

“Your aura. It's turquoise. Means you are efficient, a leader, excellent organizer, multi-tasker, resilient, really good at working with people. ”

“You're joking.”

“All the time, but not about your aura.” He laughs, and informs her that he has a yellow aura, “meaning I'm very spiritual, like Buddha and Jesus.”

“You
are
joking!”

Grace has been in Antigua for two weeks collecting data. She had to change her flight, and since the new one gets in late to the smaller international airport and she's brought a few things with her that she wants Edgar to take to Wentley, she plans to spend the night at his digs in Queenstown, leave the things there, and go to her flat at UA the following day.

Charlie takes her to her brother's tiny apartment, one of three in a converted bungalow. Another, slightly larger flat, is Charlie's. His base, he calls it. She doesn't stay at Edgar's though. She spends the night with Charlie, talking, listening to a steel band as they practise in a yard down the road, drinking fruit-and-vegetable juice in strange colours that her host concocts in a blender, eating johnnycakes she cooks when they get hungry.

Charlie is thirty-four, American born. His mother, from Louisiana, is half-black and half-Native American; his father, from Maine, is half-French and half-Irish.

“Lord! What a mixture!” She catches herself. “Sorry. I don't mean it in a bad way.”

“Didn't take it in a bad way. You look stirred and shaken yourself, you.”

“Please don't go there, Charlie.”

“There be dragons?”

“Demons more likely.”

“Never mind, sweet lady. Give me a chance, and I'll banish them.”

They laugh. From the start, Charlie makes her laugh. Because his parents are missionaries, he's been to school on several Caribbean islands.

“That must have been interesting.”

“Bloody hard on a child. I'd fly in, say hi to the kids down the road, play one game of cricket, and they'd yank me out!”

He was a late bloomer. Unmotivated at school, he hadn't done well until, persuaded by his parents who had retired to Lafayette, Indiana, he enrolled at Purdue and got acquainted with his first computer. Then he was off at mongoose speed: a degree in computer science there, then an MA at Stanford and doctorate at Carnegie Mellon, all on scholarships. On and off, during the summers, he spent time in Silicon Valley, attached to software outfits with big names.

“So what are you doing here, holy man?”

“Well, some of the time I'm at UA, setting up IT systems and teaching courses in computer science. The rest of the time I'm in Haiti. Which is why this lovely flat is
one
of my bases.”

She's learned a lot about computers and software, helping out at Myrta's. She's done courses in measurement and stats in preparation for her research, although the Real Time (RT), Real Circumstance (RC), Tailor-Made Interventions (TMI) model comes to her while thinking of how they deal with basic matters in Wentley, like what to do about mosquitoes, cow dung, and the outhouse when the rains come, the water table rises, there are breeding pools everywhere, and the
aedes aegypti
mosquito inspector is not due for another six months. Of course, she's been obliged to devise stats to support her model, and has done a good job, but what Charlie tells her about that night is at another level, a skill set that she recognizes as likely to add flexibility and versatility to approaches in her current research, as well as projects she's thought about pursuing post doc.

“So what are you doing in Haiti?”

“You know there's this idea that AIDS started there? We're trying to track how it got there, where it went after, and how.”

Grace glances at his wall clock, an enormous Mickey Mouse affair, and says, “We'd better go to bed. It's after four.”

After that she makes the one-hour trip to Queenstown to see Edgar, and do some shopping about once a month, saving her trips to Wentley, a four-hour journey, for occasions like birthdays or anniversaries. At Edgar's, she makes lunch for her brothers, for quite often Stewie is passing through to buy school materials as well. If he is home, Charlie joins them, after which they all go to a movie or for a stroll down by the harbour.

Pretty soon her visits are solely to work with Charlie. Edgar doesn't mind; he knows she is in a hurry to get her research done. As she gets further into analyzing the data, the visits become overnights and then weekend stays. If she comes in on Friday afternoon and works at Charlie's till Monday morning, she gets far more done than she does in the rest of the week, when she also has to teach. Eventually she is doing this every weekend that she isn't in the field collecting data, whether Charlie is there or in Haiti.

It isn't all work when she is with Charlie. They make lunch or dinner together, walking through the vegetable garden in back to cut kale or lettuce, pick tomatoes, pull up onions, gather thyme or parsley.

“So how come you're such a big gardener?”

“You forgetting Edgar is my flatmate, you?”

“How you talk so funny?”

“You're talking about talking funny?”

Sometimes on a clear night he teaches her about the stars, telling her stories his Cherokee grandmother told him.

“Gramps showed me,” Grace recalls. “the Little Dipper, Big Dipper, Southern Cross. And the Milky Way!” She identifies the powdery trail of stars.

“Bet you don't know who made the Milky Way?”

“Who?”

“Grandmother Spider. It's a web she spun and threw across the sky so she could steal the sun from the other side of the world and take it back to her side, where there was only darkness.”

“Ha-ha!”

“Honestly.”

She spends countless nights with Charlie before they make love. One October night with the wind lashing trees, the sky overcome by a lightning show accompanied by 3-D sound effects, she burrows her whole body, migraine head and all, under the spread on his divan. When Charlie rolls her up in it and takes her into his bedroom, her body is ripe in a second, like a flower, pistil sticky with juice.

Kissing her belly-bottom, he announces, “You smell like flowers.”

“Flowers? What kind of flowers?”

“Jasmine.”

“You making fun, Charles?”

“Always, but not about this inflorescence.”

He closes the dark blue curtains against the lightning, but like an inquisitive adolescent, it peeks in, flashing around them through cracks and crevices. Water beats on the roof in one solid, undifferentiated sound they hardly hear, but there is no mistaking it racing through gutters, crashing over paths, streaking for the trenches into which it dives, oblivious.

“Didja have fun, you?” he asks her afterwards.

“Is that what you call it?” She sits on his belly and thumps him.

“Why are you beating me up?”

“How come you kept this from me all this time?”

“We can do it again,” he says.

She drops asleep with Charlie croaking foolish love songs at her. The next morning she walks around content, Charlie having kissed her goodbye and left early for a restive Haiti. After that, they are almost always together. He helps her with the statistics related to her research, and reads drafts of each chapter before she sends it off. They talk about whether she'll be confident defending some of the statistical measures Charlie has suggested, and he runs her through their comparative advantages, insisting that the choice of approaches be hers, and one she can argue for.

Charlie is counselor in other matters too, especially when time comes for a dust-up with the powers-that-be in the matter of Vie MacMillan, a PhD candidate whom she's mentored in a small way. Vie has been assigned a thesis examiner against whom she's previously filed a sexual harassment complaint. He gives her an excellent report, but threatens to destroy it unless she withdraws the charge.

“Don't let them disturb your serenity, sweet lady,” Charlie advises. “If you plan to pursue a career in the region, think about what you do carefully. Black backra massa have long memory, just like the white one. Whatever you do, if you decide to resign, write on paper, and make clear why you're doing it.”

She resigns but, against Charlie's advice, gives no reason why. Is it going to be something that she'll regret in time? She doesn't see how. She's kept her own counsel, and it is a matter of principle. Nor is it selfish. Rather it concerns a vulnerable person for whom she feels some responsibility. If humankind has sunk into lawlessness, murder, and war, it's because people don't keep faith in small things. It's the plantation all over: the mighty doing things because they can. Frantz Fanon would weep, for in this case, though the powerful and powerless are all descendants of slaves, the mash-down is just as callous.

She leaves in time to be back in Ann Arbor for Christmas. Charlie takes her to the airport, saying he will call her from Lafayette, where he'll be with his parents for New Year.

She hasn't been able to afford weekly calls to Mary's Haven from St. Chris during the two and a half years she's been there, although she continues to write Phyllis. Daphne has been her source of up-to-date news. She reverses the calls to her grandmother, but often, when she calls, Daphne is out. When she does get her, the reports of Phyllis's health are not especially encouraging. She is still progressing, but very slowly.

Once she is back in Michigan, pinning down Daphne is easier, and she is glad to hear that Phyllis's news is good. She is still in Cohasset, but almost fully recovered. Since the community at Mary's Haven is on retreat over Christmas, Grace is to call her in the New Year. Which she tries to do, on New Year's Day and a few times after that, but with no luck.

“Probably gone for a walk,” Sister Mary Clement's wobbly voice says every time. “She likes that, whatever the weather. I'll tell her you called.” It doesn't matter if she doesn't talk to Phyllis. If she is well, that is forgiveness.

Not everything is well, though. Andrew Shelton, econo-metrician on her committee, takes issue with some of her stats, and there are harsh exchanges between him and her supervisor. Grace is puzzled by Andrew's ill will, which is in sharp contrast to his original helpfulness. Then she remembers that early on he asked her to his apartment to “discuss her statistics” — ha-ha — more than once. On further reflection, it occurs to her that she has also talked about Charlie's helpfulness in perhaps over-enthusiastic terms. Still, it is hard to imagine that he is being mean because he is jealous. It is weird and very troublesome.

In the middle of the wrangling, during the course of which Andrew becomes more and more unpleasant, Grace has a dream. She is back in Wentley. It is Christmastime, and she is baking at the Williams's next door. (Because there is no oven in their lean-to kitchen — only a small kerosene stove — when they bake, they borrow the Williams's stove.) It is a blue December day, cool breeze blowing up the frilly curtains in the small, blue kitchen. Grace is making a cake, about to break three eggs into the batter. She puts down her wooden spoon, and takes up the first egg. As she breaks the shell, it turns into a miniature Fillmore Buxton, his foul face filling up the round rim of the bowl, his body shrinking down into the batter. With a sneer, she flicks her wrist and mashes him in, and then takes up the second egg, which becomes an equally ugly Andrew Shelton. She cracks him too, blending blood, bones, and bits of body parts into the mix. Reaching for the third egg, she forces herself into wakefulness and sits shivering, never mind the day is already warm, and dry retching into the nightgown she is clutching in front of her mouth.

“It's only a dream, sweet lady,” she imagines Charlie soothing. “You're annoyed with those men. It's good you can resolve it in a dream.”

She doesn't agree. It is as alive and urgent as the current nasty heaving of her stomach. Worse, she is far too satisfied cracking the two egg-men, watching their innards fall into the bowl, grinding them into the gross mixture. It is more than just outrage. Maybe she should get dressed and head for Emergency Psych at the University Hospital right away, where she will say — what? “I just had a nightmare, on the basis of which I've concluded I'm crazy?”

She decides to take one of the tranquilizers she always has on hand because she hates to fly, and hope it will put her to sleep. She'll figure it out tomorrow.

In the end, with the other committee members bullying Andrew a bit, they all agree on changes, and she revises and hands in the dissertation. By then, the dispute has taken so long to sort out, and been so traumatic that a letter comes from Cohasset before she manages to reach Phyllis.

Mary's Haven

Easter Day

30 March 1986

Dear Grace,

How are you? I hope enjoying a rest after all the hard work. Well, here I am, back pon spot! I'm so grateful to you for all those letters, and sorry not to have answered. Happily, I can now explain my prolonged retirement from the world. I've had a psychotherapist these past four years. When I began to have some world-class nightmares and was screaming in my sleep fit to wake the dead, not to mention the folks here, the sisters arranged for me to see her. She's been immeasurably helpful! It was her suggestion that I cut off contact with pretty much everyone till we agreed I was ready for the world again. So in addition to working on my body, they've been helping me fix my miserable
soul.

Much of what I've grappled with is the result of situations in my childhood and adolescence. It's not just having a baby when I wasn't quite thirteen. There were plenty other things and it was well time that I sorted them out. One thing I know now is that it's not enough to cope, make a go of it, indeed to even succeed brilliantly. You need to believe that you are a good, worthwhile person. I pass that on for what it's worth.

When I was finally more or less functional, I asked the nuns here if I could help in any way and they let me slowly get back into the rhythm of work. It's admin, like what I did in New York. The difference is this big, old residence by the sea is a beautiful, restful place, far from hassle and botheration. Whether winter or summer, good or bad weather, it's utterly peaceful. I'll get back to New York in time, but not just now.

Daphne tells me you are set to get through your final PhD exam with flying colors. If you tell me the big day, we'll send up a noisy prayer from here.

Time for Mass! I hope you make good choices about the paths to pursue now you have the papers you need. The Holy Spirit will guide you. God bless. Much love. Big hug.

Phyllis

P.S. Bet you thought I'd forgot! I hope you had a wonderful birthday! We prayed for you especially at mass and I played the flute for the first time in a long time!