The Meeting Point (20 page)

“It a good thing you keep this door locked, all the time. You should always keep it so, remembering what I told you Agatha told me about a girl who got raped
in broad daylight
, in her own apartment …”

“You making me nervous.”

“… and the girl Dots talked about, the Jamaican, who was working in Willowdale.” Estelle thought of something that made her laugh; and then it made her shudder: suppose what she was thinking was really true.

“You
smiling
? Estelle, how the hell could you smile at a time like this?”

“I wonder if …” Estelle began. The she had to laugh out, loudly; and this confused Bernice. “You know something? Those were a man’s footsteps out there.” And when something like shame settled over Bernice, Estelle taunted her, and said, “A man!”

“But who? Which man could be coming, smelling round me?”

Estelle laughed again. She thought she knew who it was. “Don’t get frightened Bernice, man; it is only a man.”

For days after, they were talking about it. Dots couldn’t explain it; nor could Boysie, who confided in Henry one night at the Paramount. Henry was the only one who pretended to know the explanation. Agatha was told about it by Henry; and she said it disgusted her: she still didn’t tell Henry what it was that disgusted her. Some time later, in the Paramount, eating wings and drinking draughts, Henry brightened, and gave Boysie this explanation: “There is
one
tide in the affairs of men — and woman, too — Boysie Cumberbatch.” He waited until Boysie manoeuvred a greasy bone out of his front gums. “And that tide, Boysie Cumberbatch, is pussy. Pussy provides the end-all and the be-all of life. It is the tide of life and the tide of death; the tide of love and the tide of pain. The tide of happiness and the tide of sorrowness.
That
is the tide in the affairs of men. And it don’t have nothing to do with what that man Shakespeare talked about, neither.…” Henry stopped talking, because the bone had now lodged itself at a nasty angle in Boysie’s throat; and it was causing him to cough and splutter. Boysie was glad he was choking: he didn’t have to reply to the nonsense Henry was talking. He didn’t want to smash the student-teacher relationship their friendship had recently grown into. He had carried this “explanation” around for three days. He thought of Bernice, tried to imagine himself the man going up the stairs; and without explanation, he started coughing and spluttering. The prospect choked him.

Recently Bernice had found some solace in reading
Awake
and
The Watchtower
. (An article in
Muhammad Speaks
, calling upon her, spiritually and morally, to kill the white devil nearest her — Mrs. Burrmann — had shaken her up so much, that she started to fold the newspaper in half, with the front page hidden, and to file it under her chesterfield.) But these two religious papers brought no real solution. Solutions seemed far from her comprehension. Estelle was like the snow, always around in winter, which was always in the room, “always in my footsteps, always in my arse” (these were the private unspoken thoughts, communicated in communion, to God only), like a snake around her neck. She could no longer talk for hours on her princess; she began to feel her movements stiffen with tension; she was irritable: God, it is too much, Estelle have to move out. I can’t even listen to my own church services, I can’t get a chance to lay-down on my own chesterfield, I can’t even hear the word o’ God on my own radiogram, I can’t even be private, any more! Estelle turned off my church music and put on the blasted rock-’n’-roll. It pains me right down to my guts to see how this snake come in here and is taking over in my place, but be-Christ, I intends to be the conqueror. By Monday forenoon, I putting her in a nice single room, or a furnished flat, even. If it can’t happen on Monday, then on my next day off. “It is painful,” Bernice was saying to Dots (Estelle was in the bathroom, so she had to whisper into the princess. She didn’t even know if Estelle was listening: and this made her chilly and tensed.), “to have to treat
our friend
so harsh. But I been so damn lick-out with work, lately, that I gotta do … 
our friend
coming out …” And once more she had to hang up. Only once before was she more furious because of an interruption; and that was when she had just dropped her clothes on to the floor, and was about to expire on the chesterfield
from all the hard work in the kitchen, and as she said, “Jesus, Jesus!” in relief and anticipation, the two women from
Awake
and
The Watchtower
rapped on her door, because “the lady downstairs told us we could count on you.” They had spent her entire rest hour preparing her for God and heaven and a subscription chatting away the sins of this terrible world; drinking all of Bernice’s tea. When they left, she told Dots, “You know something, I could have killed them two ashy-faced bitches, just now. What in hell they mean by telling me for one whole blasted hour, that God love me?” Later, she found out, that it was Mrs. Burrmann who staged the meeting, as a decoy to her own conversion.

The tension between Bernice and Estelle, which grew steadily after the toothbrush incident, exploded one Sunday morning. Estelle turned off Bernice’s service from the Andes Mountains, and tuned into a rock-’n’-roll piece,
Down Town
, well, be-Jesus God (Bernice was swearing a lot more nowadays), girl! you have gone too far, now. I can’t take this. But later, on the way to church that very morning, she consoled herself that Dots and she would find a room for Estelle, on Monday. Estelle had decided to go to church with her: there was nothing else to do on a Sunday morning in Canada.

“I believe in
two
things,” Bernice was saying. “In God and in clothes. Clothes clothes my outside, and God clothes my inside. So I protected on both sides. How yuh like me?” Estelle was borrowing a dress to wear to church. She had never got over the amount of clothes Bernice owned. “These clothes, all these clothes you see here, well, they each have a particular function in my life. They may be clothes to you. But to me, they is more than clothes.” And that was the truth: for immigration had
worked a substantial change in her dressing habits; and other West Indian women would praise her, and say how much she looked like a “
sophisticated coloured Canadian
.” Bernice chose a suit which was given to her last year by Mrs. Burrmann. (When Dots saw it, her mouth ran water, in envy. Bernice told her she had bought it at Eaton’s, brand new!) It was a green woollen suit, rich as guinea grass. Estelle had chosen a white dress, whose fabric and style bore no relation to the season of the year. She liked it. But Bernice was not pleased that she had chosen this dress: not because of fashion or style; but because the white dress was her best dress. Estelle told Bernice how young she looked; and Bernice laughed, and said, Thank you, Ess (while thinking Estelle a damn liar); and just then, Boysie blew the car horn, below the window. He blew it a second time, louder; and Estelle held half of her body out, and shouted, “Wait! Bernice putting on her make-up!”

“But Estelle,” Bernice said reprovingly, “it don’t sound nice to hear a person in this district get on like that, and on a Sunday”.

“Perhaps I should have
whispered
to him. You ashamed of something? Or you ashamed of me?”

“I only say that I don’t think it look good, decent, to see a person shouting through a window … Look, you had better learn one thing. We is the only coloured people in this district. We have to be on our best peace and behaviour, always. Everything we do, every word we utter, we gotta be always remembering it is a reflection on all the hundreds and thousands o’ coloured people in Toronto and in the whole o’ Canada.” Estelle didn’t know whether she ought to laugh; or pity Bernice. “I didn’t make it so. I come and find it so, so you don’t have to look at me as if I is some, some-some-some,
mad person
!”
Estelle kicked off her shoes in disgust. She threw down her handbag.

“I changed my mind.”

“You mean you
not
going to church?”

“No.”

“Merely because I had to teach you a little goodness? I, a person, a, the only coloured person in this street … trying to make you understand …”

“No, no, no! Jesus Christ, Bernice, can’t you hear I say no? No, no, no!”

Estelle’s voice was still screaming in Bernice’s ears, even as she went down to the car. Her lipstick was put on badly. It had smeared her lips, and was on her teeth. She was agitated. That bitch, that bitch, was all Bernice could say. She had wrenched the plastic curtains shut, because Estelle was now naked, except for her panties.

“I’m too young,” Estelle said, sitting on the chesterfield, “I am too young, man. I not wasting my time in no damn church. You talk to God, and let me talk to man.”

“And I hopes to-Christ that you will find one! I kiss this bible in my hand, and I pray and hopes, Estelle Shepherd, that you will find one who will full-up your damn belly with a child,
and a fatherless child, at that
!”

With a problem as serious as Estelle on her mind, Bernice would refuse to seek advice until she had first reached her own decision. Dots frequently gave her opinions, and Bernice would alter them; but by that time, she had already settled her mind on some action she was going to take. She felt that if she was going to find any solace, or reprieve, it had to come from within herself. Sometimes, problems were too large for her.
They would burden her, and then a new problem would come; and she would forget the first one. You know something? Perhaps, Estelle have a point, when she say she isn’t interested in God, only in man. Perhaps. (Dots had confided in Bernice that she had spent the first ten months in Canada, in masturbation. “Without a blasted man in my pants, gal! It don’t make you feel happier when you, as a woman in bed alone, night after night, hearing the springs in the missy’s bed. Ten months I carried the racket o’ them creaking springs in my ears and in my pants, gal, twelve months o’ loneliness I don’t ever want to live over again.” And so said; so done: Boysie was brought up from Barbados, shortly afterwards. But Bernice had tried to solve her loneliness in another way. She had seen a future, and permanence, in a young Jamaican man she met on Cecil Street, in those days when you could dance for a whole night for one dollar. It was a place managed by an old West Indian who tried to help “reorientate the islanders to the Canadian way of life.” This Jamaican was told by one of his student-friends to “grab the first piece o’ pussy, white or black, that come across, old man, ’cause winter does be cold as arse in this country!” And the Jamaican grabbed Bernice. He knew (and she knew too) that it was only temporary; but both insisted that their love affair had to last forever. She invited him to Marina Boulevard on Fridays, when Mrs. Burrmann was usually helping at the Doctors’ Hospital; and the student-man would stay the whole weekend; and once he had to jump through the second floor window, when it looked as if Mrs. Burrmann would never leave the house on that Monday afternoon, for her regular cocktails with friends, on the roof of the Park Plaza Hotel. Bernice was thinking of all these things, on the way to church this Sunday. She was in the back seat. Dots
was sitting beside Boysie; and she was grumbling about the cold weather, and about Mrs. Hunter, and about Boysie “creeping in this morning at six, but one o’ these times, be-Christ, I am going to track you down!” Bernice tried to close her mind to all this; and tried to concentrate on the memories of her student-friend of two-and-a-half years ago, when she stood at the window, black and invisible, and saw her student-man walk up and down Marina Boulevard,
five times
, waiting for her signal that the coast was clear: shhh! snow boots in hand, shoes in Bernice’s hands, stockings walking like ashes and cats on the hot broadloom; and how on that night when he ate his first square meal, and he ate her food and her body, too. And she was very, so very happy. “You don’t know this is the first time in almost a year, that I do
that
,” she said, not as tenderly as she would have liked, because she was out of the custom of being tender to a man. “I love you, bad. Me and you …” She had given him money; and occasionally, washed a shirt for him, while he waited naked in bed, in glee, under her lily-white sheets. She loved him; oppressively and possessively; and one night, she dressed in her best dress, the dress Estelle had chosen this morning, for church, to wait for him, to come, to take her out. Mrs. Burrmann was so happy about it: she lent Bernice her fur wrap, and a pair of elbow-length kid gloves. Bernice sat in front of her looking glass, waiting for him to take her to the annual variety show put on by the West Indian students at the University. Nine o’clock came. Nine o’clock went. Ten came. Ten went. Eleven came and went. Mrs. Burrmann came up to see what’s going on, and to say, “Some men are bastards, Bernice, you got to learn that, early,” and she went back down, confused and cursing men. Bernice was so frightened because of the disappointment, that she
started to count her terror in five-minute periods. She was sitting at the window when she saw Brigitte come home in the police cruiser, for the first time, with her policeman. The phone rang. She jumped up. She brushed away the dried tears from the corners of her eyes; and she smiled. Her prince had not forgotten her. She practised her greeting, and then said, “Hello, Michael.” But it was Dots on the phone. “I thought you was coming down here at the Education College with that man o’ yours.” Bernice could hear Sparrow laughing in a calypso,
Not a woman ever complain yet …
“He here, yuh know. That bastard you supporting, he here, licking out your ten-dollar bill ’pon one with long blonde hair!” When morning came, cold and bitter and with a wind, Bernice had not yet taken off the white dress, nor the wrap, nor the kid gloves, which looked as if time had withered them on to her hands — nor had she replaced the telephone receiver. She never wore that white dress again. And that was what it meant to her, seeing Estelle put it on. And never did she set her eyes on her student-prince again. In the kitchen the next morning, tired and sleepy and vexed, she heard Mrs. Burrmann make one comment when she was given back the fur wrap and the gloves:
“Men!”
) … But imagine me, dreaming so early this Sunday morning. She then realized, that in all this time, she had said nothing either to Dots or Boysie; but time was now playing tricks upon her; and so was reality. She forgot she was not at her window, waiting for her student-prince, but that she was in a car. She couldn’t remember whether it was a moment ago she had seen Brigitte (“Looka that bitch!”) taking her policeman through the side entrance; or whether it was that night she waited like Cinderella for her prince to come. She remembered (and still remembers) envying Brigitte, not for the man,
but for possessing a man
. As she closed out that part of her past (which she didn’t realize as past), she saw the south-bound traffic on Bathurst thinning out, and Boysie, driving with one hand barely touching the steering wheel. She thought she heard Dots’s voice droning, like a voice talking … “She called me last week, gal. I have ladies calling on me, nowadays. How yuh like that? I belongst to high society these days, gal.”