SEX AND OBEAH

You can read some of my short stories from my collection, Sex and Obeah, here. 

Smiling Lessons

Warren Tyrone grew up surrounded by women.  The family’s small concrete house, which abutted a field in the small eastern Trinidadian town of Sangre Grande, was home to his grandmother, Marion, a stocky bandy-legged dirt farmer with a love for donkey-rope tobacco.  Two aunts, who commuted daily to their jobs as sales clerks in Arima, and his mother also shared the unpainted four-room building.

            Warren’s mother was a woman well into her middle years, who shared her own mother’s physique.  She was short and sturdy, like a deeply rooted tree trunk, legs splayed far apart, feet set at sharp angles from each other.  She and her mother spent their days, from the moment of their rising at four-thirty, to their return to the house at dusk, hacking out a living from the stubborn red dirt upon which their crops squatted.  This season, they had planted eggplant.  Other seasons, there were tomatoes, ochroes or perhaps peppers, all short crops guaranteeing the swiftest possible turnover.

            His father, whom Warren had met but could not remember, had despaired quite early of the game of fatherhood, and had hopped a Canadian cruise ship as a kitchen steward, mouthing promises of foreign currency upon his return.  Warren’s mother nodded solemnly and spent her last few dollars on some warm woolen socks to give him as a going-away present.  That year she received a Christmas card with a folded ten-dollar bill in it: their first and only correspondence.

            Warren also grew up surrounded by the paraphernalia of women.  When he was five his mother deemed him old enough to bathe on his own, and ceased sponging him down at the outside pipe.  Warren began using the inside bathroom with pride, and not a little trepidation.

            The bathroom was festooned with the trappings of femininity.  Right around the railing that skirted the bathroom on three sides hung large nylon panties, damp brassieres with devilish wires poking from holes in the armpits, stockings and panty hose, whose legs the women often cut and spliced to lengthen their usefulness.  A worn red hot-water-bottle cum douche bag cum enema bag was slung perennially over the showerhead like a huge pig’s bladder, dripping mysterious fluids from its smooth white nozzle.  These items created for Warren a dense female forest that threatened to engulf him in its moist limp leaves. 

            His ablutions, therefore, consisted of a hurried sprint into the room that, because of its lack of windows, was forever dark.  He would turn the water on at full blast and for several moments contemplate getting wet, clutching the sliver of blue laundry soap in his bony hands.  Then he eased under the stream, eyeing the water bottle warily, fearful that it might pounce.  What he hated most was soaping his face, which for several seconds rendered him blind, increasing the chances of accidentally encountering one of the dreaded strips of wet nylon that clung to his skin like witches’ fingers.  For this reason Warren’s face often went unwashed.

            His mother presented her own personal version of femininity, one that Warren did not find as threatening.  He was intrigued by her smell, and when she came in from the fields he found any excuse to climb into her lap where he could lay his head on her wide bosom and inhale the scent of her dusty sweat.  His favourite pastime involved sitting in her large wooden press, the one with the tooled doors and the big brass key.  Whenever she forgot to lock it he would crawl in among the hanging dresses and sit on his haunches with his face just at crotch level, breathing in the miraculous mysteries of her scent.

            It was during such a pleasure hunt than Warren contrived to scar himself for life.  He was seated in the back of the press one evening, crouched atop several boxes of shoes, face buried deep into the centre of one of her church dresses, which afforded him not only his mother’s natural bewitching odour but a lagniappe[1] of Cusson’s My Fair Lady, with which she sprayed herself liberally before venturing out socially.  As he inhaled he emitted small groans, like a puppy at the teat.

            It occurred to him then that if the My Fair Lady smelled that good on the garment, it would surely be several times more enjoyable on his own skin, so he crawled out of his odoriferous nest and quickly hunted down the bottle.  The cap was soon off, and Warren was dousing himself with the golden liquid when his grandmother walked into the room.  He started, almost dropping the bottle, throwing spurts of the cologne into the air, sending the old turpentine lamp crashing to the ground, and setting himself fully alight.

Shrieking, he darted from the room, more concerned with the licking he expected to get for breaking the lamp than with the fact that he was on fire.  The woman pursued the streaking comet through the house, eventually cornering him in the bathroom, where she held him, screaming as loudly as he, under the merciful blast of cold water.  The ruined child fell sobbing into her arms when at last the fire was out, shreds of skin coming away in her hands, swift purple welts rising. 

Through careful attention and the agonized, whispered prayers of the women, Warren lived.

***

Rebbie Deane liked to look like candy.  As a child, she had lived above a little shop in Princes Town, where her grandmother had done a reasonable trade fulfilling the little town’s desire for home-made tamarind balls, guava sweeties, fudge, tomato balls and paradise plums.  Every afternoon after school, Rebbie had sat at the old mahogany table with the legs that looked like lion’s feet, watching her grandmother patiently roll little lumps of molten sugar into identical balls between her callused hands.  The paradise plums were her favourite; her grandmother tinted them in varying hues of blue, green, red, yellow, pink and lavender with coloring that she bought from Fodderingham’s on Henry Street and stored on the highest shelf in her spotless kitchen in old-fashioned, voluptuous Coca-Cola bottles with wadded-up brown paper for stoppers. 

            Sometimes her grandmother let her help.  So, full of her own importance, she bustled around, pressing matchstick-sized bits of wood into the molten guava lollipops, or poking brightly coloured lengths of string into the multi-coloured Kaiser balls.  The children liked the Kaiser balls especially, because they could tie the end of string round their finger and let the bit of sweet dangle idly at their side when they weren’t actively involved in sucking it.  Shaped as she was by these sugarcoated childhood days, Rebbie Deane liked to look like candy.

            Today she was dressed all in orange, like a sourball.  She wore a tight-fitting orange skirt with a matching blouse.  Orange stockings (from New York) clung to her slender legs, legs that ended in feet that were neatly clad in bright orange plastic high-heeled pumps.  Each item of clothing had been bought separately, and as a result the shades did not exactly match, but Rebbie Deane didn’t think it mattered.

            Today, Rebbie was also forty minutes late.  Cursing the caprice of the battered asthmatic taxis that plied the Princes Town - San Fernando route, she shoved her large orange plastic shoulder bag under one arm and attempted to sprint up the stairs leading to the offices of San Antonio Life, Fire and General.  Her speed and progress were hampered by the swelling of her belly which, in her fifth month of pregnancy, had begun to push urgently in front of her, as though anxious to draw attention to itself.

            Puffing, she slammed past the security guard, who took pity on her and noted her time of arrival in his ledger as being a full fifteen minutes earlier than it really was.  She heaved up a second flight of stairs, rounded the doorway to her post in the mailroom and encountered a monster.

            “Hello,” the monster said.

            Rebbie stared.  The creature was sitting at one of the two desks in the stuffy room, the desk recently abdicated by the capricious Roxanne, who had less than two weeks ago flown to Miami on a forged passport to meet with her Cuban pen-pal, a month after he finished serving a five-year sentence in a Florida penitentiary.  “Hello,” Rebbie said, which seemed a perfectly reasonable response, under the circumstances.

            “‘I’m Warren,” the creature said, clearly and distinctly, through lips that were heavy, coarsened, and seemed not to move.  He held out a rough dark hand that was roped with thick scars, a writhing mass of reddened worms.  “I started here today.”

            Rebbie stared at the hand, more curious than repulsed.  She clutched the bright orange purse to her swollen belly.  Warren remained with his hand outstretched, patient.  She shifted the bag under one arm and shook his hand with the other; it was warm, and quite soft, and somehow she was surprised, expecting something slightly sticky to the touch.  She managed a smile, which he did not return, and sat in her own chair, a few feet away. 

They sat silently and surveyed each other.  Warren appeared to her to be in his twenties, although she based her assumption more on the lean fitness of his body and the youthfulness of his voice than on his face, which was an ageless, distorted enigma.  He wore a clean, crisp, obviously brand new striped shirt and navy straight-cut trousers that drew her involuntary glance, just for a moment.  He was leaning back slightly in his chair, rocking almost imperceptibly, staring at her with the unabashedness of youth.  She stowed away her orange bag and smiled nervously.

            Warren was acutely aware of the woman’s smell.  At this distance he could separate, pin down and identify each of her many odors.  He could separate the smell of her hair with its slightly acrid hair spray from the dark warm scent of her body, the sharpness of her roll-on deodorant from the spice of her perfume, and the warm-blood smell of her recent sprint upstairs from the yellow soap with which she had most recently done her laundry.  He sat surrounded in these scents for long moments, until he realised she was waiting for him to say something.

            “I’m not in your chair, am I?” he asked politely.  He didn’t believe he was.

            “No,” she said.  She pointed at her chair.  “This is mine.”

            He nodded.  “Boy or girl?” he said, and indicated her rising belly.  He didn’t seem to think it a particularly personal question to ask a total stranger.

            “Girl,” she said.  She blushed a little, just because she felt that she would be expected to.  “I feel it will be a girl.  I’m carrying low, you know.”

            Warren nodded wisely, well versed in these women’s conversations through years of listening to those held by his mother, his aunts and his late grandmother.  Yet for some reason he felt a certain disquiet, as the suggestiveness of her swollen belly drew to his mind flashing images of her, unclothed, engaged in the twisting congress that had brought it about.  The intimacy of his thoughts caused his face to heat up uncomfortably.

            “I’ve already bought her a pink layette,” she said.

            “Suppose it isn’t?” he said.

            “Isn’t what?”  She was puzzled.

            “Suppose it isn’t a girl.  What will you do with the pink layette?”

            “It’s a girl,” she said firmly.  It would be, because that’s what she wanted.

            He nodded again, and they waited.  “Show me the ropes?” he said eventually, his sweeping arm taking in the shelves that lined the room, laden with mail to be dealt with.  She nodded and pulled the procedure manual from the bottom drawer.

***

“They put him in there with you?”  Kamla said with disgust.  “How they could put him in there with you?”  She shoved a forkful of canteen food into her large magenta mouth.  She had to shout over the din of the office cafeteria.

            Rebbie shrugged.

            “But girl, the man so ugly, and you pregnant.  They have you there looking at him all day, all day.  Suppose the baby come out ugly so?”  Kamla tossed back her thick hennaed hair.

            “Kamla, don’t be stupid.  That has nothing to do with anything.”  Rebbie shoved her rice around the plate, making swirling patterns.  “That’s a fact.”

            “But he’s so ugly!  What happened, some woman throw hot water on him?  I bet that is it.  He beat some woman, and next thing you know, he went to sleep, and she give him a bath.  I’m telling you that is it.  You can just look at him and tell.”  She shook her head.  “Men are dogs, yes.”

            Rebbie looked around to see who was listening.  “Shush, Kamla.  Men aren’t dogs.  How you could say that?”

            “Oh, no,” Kamla said, triumphantly, “what about the one who leave you with that belly?”

            Rebbie could find no answer.

            Kamla began humming an old calypso about the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  It was a song that Trinidadian children sang to torment derelicts and drunks who might happen past their yards, one that poked fun at a particularly ugly man.  "Mama look a Boo-Boo[2]", Kamla hummed, jiggling her foot so that the drinks on the table shook.  "Look a Boo-Boo dey."

            Head down, Rebbie continued to draw patterns in her food.

***

 Warren found himself growing more and more fascinated by this woman.  Her intoxicating melded odors stayed in the room after she left, hovered over her chair, and, he was convinced, clung like a signature to every piece of mail that she touched.  He endured her curious glances in his direction, heard the questions about his disfigurement rise swift in her mind, time and again, only to be slapped down by her conscience.  He loved that in her, her delicacy, her unwillingness to cause him hurt.             

***

“You watch them town girls,” his mother warned when he went home to visit.  She stood in lettuce up to the tops of her boots with the gardening fork stuck firmly into the ground and her arms folded across the handle.  As she was getting along in years, she had given up the raw tobacco that her own mother had smoked until the day of her death, and instead puffed on cheap Broadways, scorning the expensive box of Rothmans' King Size that Warren had brought her.  “You watch them.  They ain’t easy, you know.  Don’t let them treat you like no freak.  It have some that wouldn’t tell you the time, if you ask them nice, just because your face ain’t smooth like them town fellas.  Don’t take them on.  They ain’t even worth the breath it take to speak to them.”  She exhaled a plume of smoke and took a step closer.

            “But it have another kind of girl,” she persisted.  “They worse than the ones that don’t want to know you.  You listening?  What I telling you is for the sake of your dick, you hear me boy?”

            Warren shifted uncomfortably in his city shoes.  He wasn’t too keen on the idea of discussing this with her.  She was his mother, for God’s sake!

            She poked him in the chest with the hand that held the cigarette.  “Listen to me, boy.  It have girls that will chase you down because of what you look like, because it make them feel like they big, like big women.  Them women, when they was little girls, they used to spend the night in the cemetery alone, sitting on a gravestone, just so they could go to school the next day and puff up their chest and tell everybody they ain’t ‘fraid nothing.  Them girls ain’t good.  They will use you like a test, to prove they big.  And when they done with you, they will run back and tell everybody how it was with you.  You ain’t no freak in no show, boy.  You tell them that.”

            Warren nodded solemnly.  She was right.  She was always right, his mother.  He wanted to, but couldn’t, tell her about the anguish of having felt the sting of her warnings for himself.  His brief forays into the uncharted territory of sexual encounters left him with the horrible feeling of being a masked man at a ball–that the women were playing up to his mask, as to a good Carnival costume.  Then, when they lay back on their pillows, sated, they looked up at him quizzically, waiting for him to take the mask off at last, show them his real face.  When he failed to do this they left, repulsed.

            “Yes, Ma,” he sighed, wishing the conversation over.  He pulled a new leather wallet from his pocket and counted out three hundred dollars, which he handed to her with a light kiss.  His mother folded the bills carefully and inserted them down the front of her heavy masculine work shirt, safely into the yellowed right cup of her bra.  She smiled up at him.  Warren didn’t smile back.

            “Town girls,” he heard her snort as he walked away.  She spat into the dirt.

***

 “You don’t mind your father, girl,” Rebbie said to her daughter, who curled up quietly in her belly and listened.  “Don’t mind him at all.  That’s how men are.  They always full of their stupidness.  When he see you, he will change his mind.  He will see how pretty you are, especially if you favour me.”

            She moved heavily about the room.  Now that sex was becoming difficult, the man came less frequently.  Rebbie hadn’t seen him in two weeks.  When the baby was born, he would come ‘round again: of that, she was sure.  Lovingly, she folded the piles of baby clothes she had accumulated, planning in her mind which article would go with what.  The baby could wear the booties that were deep sorrel-jelly pink, with the cotton sundress that was light salmon, like candied grapefruit peel.  She had a vanilla ice cream bonnet and another like a snow cone with deep ruby and bright orange syrup swirls.

            “You going to be the best dressed baby in town,” she told the child.  “When I take you to church on a Sunday, all them women will want to pick you up and rock you.  You take what I’m telling you.  It’s a fact.”

***

 They sat watching each other across the narrow room.  Today, she was a lime-flavored lollipop, in her acid-green low-heeled shoes (lower now than before, because of her increasing weight), her forest green tights, and a bouffant polyester maternity dress striped in two shades of green.  But to him, with her ballooning abdomen, now in its eighth month, and the lush stripes of her dress, she looked like a huge cannon-ball watermelon, and he had to resist the urge to thump her for ripeness.

            They sat in their hard straight-backed chairs, staring at each other.  Rebbie leaned against the peppermint candy-striped pillow that Warren had bought her a month before.  To reduce the sensation of guilt at chatting at length rather than working, they each held in their lap a small stack of mail, which they fanned idly from time to time. 

            “He’s still around, yes,” Rebbie was saying about the man responsible for her condition.  “I...talk to him now and again.”  Her eyes avoided his.

            The obvious sexual implication made Warren shift uncomfortably.  He coughed.  “Is he giving you any money?  Has he made any commitment?”

            “He gave me three, four hundred dollars,” she said, “and a baby blanket.”

            “That’s all?”  Warren asked, and wondered how any fool could treat such a fine creature with so much disdain.  He shook his head.  “He can’t give you any more than that?”

            “Things hard all over,” she shrugged.  But in her eyes Warren could read hurt and disappointment.  “That’s a fact.”

            He was unconvinced, but chose to leave it alone.  “You choose a name yet?”

            Rebbie shook her head and put down the beleaguered bundle of letters.  She laced her fingers behind her head and stretched her back, arching like an overweight cat.  Warren watched her belly rise and something within him responded, in spite of himself.

            “So many choices,” Rebbie said.  “So many names.”  She shook her head again.

            “What about Marion?”  Warren offered unexpectedly, almost timidly, thinking of his dead grandmother.

            “Marion,” Rebbie said, and smacked her lips.  “I like it.  Old-fashioned.”

            Warren looked at her, pleased.  “Marion was my Gran,” he said.  “She was a Marion.”

            Rebbie leaned forward.  “You didn’t have a mother?”

            “Of course.  But Gran, Marion, she as the pillar that held us up.  She kept me strong.”  Flashfire-fast came a memory of himself lying in bed, skin shearing, with his grandmother hovering over, praying, drawing him back from the dead with the power of her voice.  He wished he could tell her about those dark days, when he rose again only through the love and stubbornness of that woman.  Then he remembered the mask, and held his tongue.

But somehow, Rebbie understood.  “Marion it is, then,” she smiled decisively.

            Warren’s eyes were filled with smiles that did not reach his still mouth.  He felt them darting around inside like heated molecules, whizzing about, crashing into each other and banging into the walls of his spirit. 

            “Warren,” Rebbie said, and hesitated to go further.  “Can’t you smile?  Do you ever?”

            He shook his head.  It hurt even to talk about it.  “I remember smiling,” he said finally.  He looked at his reflection in the tinted glass of the room’s single window.  The face that he saw was immobile, and with the exception of his eyes, devoid of emotion.  How could he feel so much and yet show so little?

            “I wish I could now,” he went on,  “but the nerves...” He gestured towards his cheeks.  “The nerves are gone.”  He felt again the grief of being condemned to live within his mask, and he told her a story about a little boy, a bottle of cologne and a turpentine lamp.

            Rebbie listened quietly.  He could see emotions chase each other across her face like clouds on a windy day: shock, horror, sympathy, compassion.  When he was done she reached across and gently touched his savaged cheek with her cool hand.  Her fingers smelled like ferns.  “You’re full of smiles inside,” she said.  “I can feel them through your skin.”

            He nodded.  “But they never reach the surface.”  The thought saddened him.

            “Maybe they just don’t know how,” she suggested.  “Maybe you just need lessons.”

            “Smiling lessons,” he said, watching her.  The idea amused him. 

            “Yeah.”  She brightened with the idea.  “Smiling lessons.”

            He folded his arms across his chest and watched her, happy to indulge her in the fantasy.  “So where do I get them, these lessons?  And how much do they cost?”

            Rebbie waved away the idea.  “Oh, you can’t pay for that.  You can’t pay for smiles.  You just have to find the right teacher, then you get them for free.”

            He watched her wistfully.  “The right teacher,” he said.

            “It’s a fact,” she said.

            “In the meantime, they just stay bottled up inside me.  No way to get out.”  He was suddenly weary.

            “Well,” Rebbie said, and put her hand to his cheek again.  “I know they’re there.”

            To him, that was good enough for now.

 ***

 The frantic wail of the phone woke him.  Warren leaped up to answer it.  “Rebbie?” he knew, without being told. 

            “It’s time,” she said with a gasp.

            “You’re early,” he said, “You aren’t due yet.”

            “It’s time,” she insisted.

            “I’m coming.”

 ***

She was wet, red, as exhausted as her mother, but lay in Warren’s arms without a whimper.  “Marion,” Warren said to her, and she seemed to recognize her own name.  Rebbie propped herself up on one arm to peer down into Marion’s face, the electric cotton-candy nightgown sticking to her sweaty body. 

            “She looks like me,” Rebbie said with conviction, and Warren nodded, although he thought she looked more like a fat wrinkled mouse.

            “Yeah, she does,” he confirmed, and Marion grasped his scarred forefinger with a confident, proprietary hand.  He stroked the soft new unmarked smoothness of her cheek.  She looked up at him with unfocused eyes that were endlessly dark, and her tiny pink lips parted in a smile that spread across her entire face, to her eyes and her nose and up to the roots of her hair, radiating out of her, running along her arms and legs until Warren felt like he was holding a vibrating package of freshly minted joy. 

Something deep inside himself churned up in response, like mud at the bottom of a quiet sea being thrust to the surface in a storm.  There was a burning, a heat that spread through him with such a flash that he feared he was ill.  He held onto the baby in a moment of panic, afraid he would drop her, and then all the smothered smiles of the last twenty years welled up within him and bubbled over, frothing out of him like a warm shaken-up soda spilling and spilling and spilling. 

Rebbie watched, delighted, but said nothing.