Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

I am in my mother’s room. He turns the handle on the door, then leans back against the wall, perusing me from head to toe. I’m caught between him and my reflection, and he watches me lasciviously from both sides. I do not yet have hair between my legs. I am still a girl, uncomfortable in my flesh. Water dripping onto the floor; Parker is blocking my path to the cupboard. His mustache twitches as he funnels his fingers through his hair, his slanted eyes smug beneath bushy eyebrows. I scream out for May, who is putting on her makeup. “You should stop leaving your towel in this room,” she says without turning. Minutes pass. I am crying as I stand between them, one seated by the dresser, one standing by the cupboard smiling casually.

Half-Chinese, half-black, a drizzle of Indian. More than a drizzle of pervert and five years younger than my mother. It is the playful giggle he lets escape that irritates her. My mother steupses loudly, her half-Trinidadian, half-Chinese accent crashing together. “Why you always trying to make me jealous, boy?” She shakes her head and turns to me. “As if you are anything compared to me. Next time, bring a damn towel with you. You know the man have keys. He could come at anytime and you wouldn’t know.” My stomach turns.

She turns to him. “Parker, is this little girl you watching? Don’t let her get to you.” And just like that he slips outside. No spectacle.

He just oh-so-slowly disappears behind the door, saying, “You getting big fast.” Making a subtle sucking noise, “Aye, Marie?”

May’s mention of Parker is purposeful. She sucks the curve of her teeth. It is Friday, her night for cooking and washing his clothes. Parker will leave his mother’s house in Debe seeking the services of our home in Palmiste. He craves a house away from the main road, away from the greasy air of the doubles stands. Away from the restlessness. He will come bearing baskets of laundry, then perch proudly like an overstuffed pigeon at our dining table. As if by magic, bowls of Chinese noodles, lemon chicken, and fish in black bean sauce will appear. When the pigeon is full to tipping, May will usher him to her room.

When they have gone, I will sneak into the kitchen with my plastic containers and metal spoons. I will hide the food I have stolen and then leave the house to eat with my neighbors. Swapping the roofs of these friends each evening, I leave no chance for them to tire of me too quickly. They shake their heads and gossip about strange Chinese people , pitying me my shop Chinee mother who, they whisper, keeps both money and man in her underwear.

Until the next Friday, dishes will sit in the sink, recline on countertops, and stink behind cupboards. Mounds of pots filled with water, week-old food floating in its sour. The air is stained with a stench of unclean habits.

“This blasted waste-a-time child I have! No cooperation. None, none!” I am evading her eye, watching movement behind her. A solitary cockroach slips behind the door. I think of all the roaches and mice I have seen in this room, this room that smells like the kitchen sink. I should be happy we are selling this house. But a tiny insect burrows deeper into my heart, ripping away at flesh and chewing through soil. It scurries through my veins, leaving dust inside my blood. Flattening itself at the corners of my mouth, turning the red in my lips to purple.

I do not tell her I am pregnant. The scandal would crumble her standing at church, my eighteen years proving me a middle-class slut. Four months and a flat stomach. Thank God. I want badly for it to be my boyfriend’s child. He is my first lover. The uncertainty is worrying.

Getting pregnant was rough. One day I was his girlfriend, the next a knocked-up bitch. After years of waiting to have sex, he was disappointed this could have happened on the first try. He was even more disappointed I didn’t bleed.

My boyfriend sees our new burden as something I have caused. Yet he is willing to afford me the comforts of air-conditioning and sterilized instruments. He says that I will escape the back-room experience and the refusal at the public hospitals. And that I owe him for this proof that he really does love me. “You won’t have to go San Fernando General,” he declares, “or alone to St. Clair Medical or Westshore.” He says that terminations are on Thursdays only. Awed at his own generosity, he watches me and smiles.

I dream of a baby with the face of my mother. I want to kill the unwanted. Using a metal hook, the large type they use for kingfish, I pierce my belly, round like a balloon and slippery like jelly. Slipping through easily like a pin into Jell-O, I wiggle the hook around to snag her. She slips away from me, digging her elbows into the inside of my skin. She is fully grown and heavy. Laughing, she sings, I am here inside you. And I will always be your mother . When I awake screaming, soaking in sweat, my boyfriend cuddles me to his chest. He cuddles me until he finds out that I am weak. That I was scared and canceled our Thursday appointment.

“And you call yourself an independent woman! A liberal woman! Suddenly you playing virtuous and want to go fuck up our life?” My sky is falling, and he insists that his will fall harder. I wish I could rip him from within me. But I have begun to love the hardening jelly, the eyeless, legless, squirming thing. Finally my boyfriend leaves. He does not know I have already said goodbye.

“You think I stupid ah what?” May asks suspiciously, as I survey the mess around us. “I know you want these things. But is mine.”

I think about Ma Sheila, my father’s grandmother, whom May cared for when she went senile. Fed her daily and washed her face, all the while moving out her antique dressers and heirlooms. Our house became storage for stolen objects of love which May will not let his family have, not even her own sister Carol, whose children came all the way from Rio Claro to board with Aunty May to go to school. Paying one day late, Carol found her children with their empty lunch kits standing in the hot sun outside our house.

People say my mother went crazy after her husband died, but Aunt Carol says she showed signs before that. When she was in her teens, she ran after her mother with a knife. When I was born, she started talking to herself. May has no friends. No family left. But Carol lingers. She says she does it for me.

I have abandoned our cleaning. Sidling toward my bedroom, I slip inside and lock the door. The erratic pulsing begins, beating against my temples with water forming and slipping beneath my chin. My eyes get dry, then misty. Heat like anger, like passion on the verge of unmanageable, rises within. But outwardly there is only a slight twitching of the lips and a dimming of the eyes. A fleeting image of what grows inside me leaves slime in its squirming, with feelers for eyes...

“Maria, what the hell you doing in there?” May screams.

A poster with Keep Out crayoned against intruders grazes her face. I know she’s pissed, cheek pressed against the wood. I can lock her out, hide the tins of corned beef I have stolen from her bedroom, and clean my room till it looks like someplace else.

“Maria! What the ass you doing, you stupid little bitch?”

I ignore her. Scribbling lines on photographs I keep hidden under my bed, I leave the father, the two smirking children eating tamarind and standing aside. I blot out the pregnant woman, gouging her face with crayon and marker, darkening the belly where I once was.

“I was happy before you came,” I hear. “I should have gotten rid of you. But I was the one who wanted you. A girl. A girl!”

I picture her tears that do not slip from their pockets.

“He told me he didn’t want any children. He probably didn’t want you so he could go fuck Alyssa! Get some other woman pregnant.”