Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

Alyssa was once my mother’s best friend. Alyssa would not have wanted to fuck anyone. She joined the convent when she and May stopped speaking. A slap in the face to my mother. To walk with the Virgin and turn her back on the Pentecostal faith—

“I want to go back! To undo you. You remember him after you were born, but I remember what he was before that! Too late! You hear me? He loved you too late!” Mother is still trying to convince me. But once is enough to convince. Anything more is for her personal pleasure.

I remember how I used to love her, dragging behind her, clutching at her dress. When I was a little girl, she used to try to want me. Now she thinks that I am possessed. That my rudeness and unwillingness to do as she says is a mark of the devil. You were born this way, just like your father, and no matter how much I try to beat it out of you, you remain the same. I feel the stinging from week-old beatings, and I smell his burning pictures from last month when she purged the house of the devil .

I keep scribbling. The lines move to my arms and my thighs. I use permanent marker now, not the cheap ones I used as a child. I zigzag onto my skin, pressing hard so the pain numbs my thinking. She will try to embrace me in the morning, try to rub my skin clean of yesterday’s pain. I dig another line into the door with metal scissors and color it purple. She will ask me to say, I love you . I promise myself that these lines will prevent me. After years of forcing myself to forget, I vow to remember.

Nothing eases me. He will still be dead. And he will still no longer want me.

I first asked Aunt Carol what abortion meant. Four years old and I was asking the whole family. I hadn’t yet learned about secrecy. That some things paraded openly through the doors of people’s homes, and that others were meant to hide behind them...

I wear black eyeliner now, thick and smudged. Don’t cry, bitch , I tell myself. I have entered a new phase of training. To bury my mother. I thumb my belly and poke at my navel. There is a small bulge now. The pounding on the door is replaced by a buzzing behind my eyes. I add to the list I have started on my wall in pencil:

1) She grew up in the country and thought her husband was Prince Charming, frolicking his horse into the affluent suburb of Palmiste. He would place her in a pretty house and pay her to raise babies.

2) Born into a family of nine, she was neglected by her parents, who preferred their younger English-speaking Chinese children who did not remind them that, with their slanted eyes and jarring accents, they would never fit in — “May, yuh want ah rice and ah char sue pok to tek friend in school?”

3) Prince Charming was never home, always escaping, then he died — escaping blame.

My pencil point snaps. So what, May? Your man died and mine ran. You remember my boyfriend. You sat on his lap asking why he was with a girl like me. Giving him the eye, dressed in your bra and shorts. The one who loved me till he met you — the famous crazy May. Like you say, all men are assholes that leave us fat and bitter. They eventually realize our biggest fear — they leave us to ourselves.

“When I sell this house, if I have my way, you will get absolutely nothing,” May taunts on the other side of the door. Her voice simmers again and she makes a clicking noise through pursed lips. “Parker wants to move in with me,” she says dreamily, “but I have to watch him, you know. He might be after my money. Once I sell this house — is plenty money it selling for.” May’s distrust for Parker cowers next to the seething of my own. My distaste for him resembles disgust between lovers, bubbling beneath the skin, heating the blood and sharpening the eye. It resembles in its intensity and its inability to resolve. It is not love but its opposite.

After my father died, university funds and insurance were transferred into her accounts. May enrolled me in the government school-feeding program. At night, hungry, I went to neighbors, palms outstretched, learning how to beg. All those years fed by neighbors, scantily clad and denied shelter, locked out at two in the morning, barefoot, in nightclothes, watching the wealth my father left me buy her fancy dresses, cars, jewelry...

I want to forgive her. But to forgive, you must first love.

I dreamt last night that there were earthworms in my belly. They shuddered and rumbled beneath my skin. Their bodies caressed, gnawing in darkness like creaking doors and loosening hinges. All the while they ate of themselves. I am making a plan to move quickly, to move before they travel the length of my throat and slide through my mouth.

I think of Ma, May’s mother, who lives in Mayaro selling her preserves — red mango, salt prunes, and cherries — from her seaside shed. She does not interact with outsiders, especially since Pa died, except for one neighbor who taught her local folklore. Douens haunt her dreams — those unbaptized souls of dead children, their heels on feet that face backwards, racing toward unsuspecting children, enticing them away.

Ma also invents her own folklore about the dead and the living. Dark nights with a full-bellied moon and barefoot walks on fish-stained sand have given her insight. When unwanted souls are born, they are born into suffering. Ma says they know their own anguish before their real misery begins. In the belly they writhe with resentment, and in the cradle they ponder vengeance. An unwanted soul will grow to destroy the hand that feeds it. She once told my mother to send me away. Three of her own children had been raised by a cousin. She warned May about my unwillingness to stop crying when my father died. She warned her about my seeming insensitivity to beatings and my stubborn resolve to grow distant.

May once nurtured my physical likeness to her, but it became clear that I had been born with his eyes and his manner. My only likeness to her was in my growing inability to be consoled. When he died I screamed for months. Now I scratch photos, dig lines into doors, and devise a plan — a plan to purge this house of the devil .

At the back of the house is an unfinished addition. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of concrete and wood, and an upstairs landing with no enclosing walls. May likes to climb those stairs to talk to God at night. She senses my father walking behind her, scurrying like a mouse in a box. No matter how much he hurries, he does not leave the house. I think he does it for me. May does not believe she has seen her husband. She says the devil wears many faces.

“Honey, you know I love you, baby,” May coaxes from the hall, spit moistening the crease of her lips. “Come and help Mommy, nah? If you help me I will give you something special.” When bartering, she switches with ease from scorn to affection. “Mariiiiaaa,” she coos through the cracks in the door, “you know you need to help me or you may end up with nothing, sweetie. Come on now.”

I exhale loudly and continue to scribble, continue to relish the sound of my markings.

“Maria, you fucking little ingrate! Yuh better get yuh ass out here now before I break down this door. Parker coming this evening and I have to get this place cleared up.”

It is Friday, the night before we are to surrender the house. Tomorrow morning the pudgy Indian man will arrive with his piece of paper, although unsorted boxes still line the doorway. The moment he saw the house, he said, “I’ll take it.” Crammed at the end of a flowing row of tall-stemmed houses, the oldest one, though that could be altered, it is nevertheless positioned in prestigious Palmiste.

Doesn’t he live in Port-of-Spain? Your man will mind you. And you have man? May had snorted. Why you don’t ask his parents if they will let you live there? I know where she will live. She has already purchased a three-bedroom house by the sea in Westmoorings...