When the bottom falls ou.., p.13
When the Bottom Falls Out, page 13
Cislyn hasn’t been lucky in love. The only fellow she ever stayed any time with, a Vincentian, had got her to empty her bank account on the pretext that he was going to set up a business, and then he took off and she never saw him again. Imagine, taking all of that girl’s life savings. I would o’ hunt the bastard down and kill him. I don’t know how she didn’t go crazy. That girl went to school in the day and work in a nursing home at night until she get her diploma in nursing, and was saving up that money to buy a condo, and that scoundrel just come from wherever the wind blow him from and clean her out. I would o’ kill him, as God is my witness, I would o’ kill him. Benita thinks Cislyn has soured on men since. A few of Olivier’s friends would like to have a go at her. They ask Benita and Olivier to set them up. But Cislyn is indifferent.
“A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Cislyn was a friend indeed. She’s known her from the time Cislyn was five. Benita was six when her mother and stepfather and her sister Roberta moved to Savanna de la Mar. Cislyn was their next-door neighbour. In her memory there’s still the image of the little half Indian girl in frilly frocks, her long hair worn in two side braids. Now Cislyn keeps her hair bobbed short. At age ten she began wearing glasses. A week after Benita moved to Savanna de la Mar, a hurricane blew the roof off Cislyn’s house, and Cislyn, her two brothers, and their parents had slept on the floor of Benita’s parents’ house for two weeks until the roof was repaired. In 1988 Gilbert blew the roofs off both their houses, and they stayed almost three weeks in the Baptist Church. During that time her stepfather was in hospital with a broken clavicle from a beam that struck him on the shoulder. Hilda thinks he never fully recovered. He died three years later.
Her friendship with Cislyn makes Benita uncomfortable at times. Cislyn knows too much about her. One incident in particular. Cislyn was going on about Benita-the-Blessed, and Benita asked her, “How you so taken up with calling me that? Where you get it?” They’d run into each other in the food court at Alexis Nihon Plaza.
“You don’t remember when I take you to meet the lady at the employment agency—the one that did get you your first sleep-in job in Westmount—you don’t remember she did say that your name mean blessed?”
Benita didn’t want to remember. It was right after she’d arrived only to find that the job she’d been promised had been given to someone else. Cislyn had taken her to this agency that placed domestic workers. It wasn’t all that the woman had said out loud. The rest had made Benita very nervous. Cislyn heard it too, and Benita’s hope that Cislyn told her the truth when she asked her if she had related her business to her friends. It won’t matter now. Too late.
“Well, when I think of all the crosses and trials I done gone through”—she’d hesitated. She’d been on the verge saying it looks more like cursed. And then she saw why she’d hesitated. “Yes, blessed if you think of what I done gone through and I is still here.”
Cislyn was insistent. “Look at it this way. I come here with me landed, and you come here illegal and stay illegal for twelve years—twelve years in which you never see the two gal pickney you leave back in Jamaica . . . ”
Benita looked at her watch. She knew Cislyn was going to ask her about her daughters back home and tell her about her man troubles, and she didn’t want to hear them. “Cislyn, I go catch up with you later, girl. I have to hurry home. A plumber coming to fix something in the bathroom.” Of course there was no plumber coming to fix anything. Benita did not like to talk about her daughters back home. In fact, she was very uncomfortable with the name Benita. It wasn’t the name in her passport. Moreover, whenever she could, she avoided places where Jamaicans gathered. But she couldn’t avoid Cislyn, and she knew she had to treat Cislyn well because Cislyn knew her business. She hoped—dearly hoped to Almighty God—that Cislyn hadn’t been publicizing it. Hilda used to say that “if you making poo-poo in the bush and you see a Jamaican coming, sit on it, ’cause they will go and tell the length and breadth o’ Jamaica that they meet you making poo-poo in the bush.” But Cislyn was the friend she came to, and all things considered Cislyn has treated her well. Once they had quarrelled, and she’d thought Cislyn would put immigration on her trail. But no, she hadn’t done that. She knew so many people, who as soon as they quarrelled with the friends who had helped them, received a knock from immigration, were put in detention, and were deported shortly after.
In fact when immigration did come looking for Benita, Cislyn knew where she was, and didn’t use her house phone to warn her. She used a payphone in the street. It was a complicated story. She was desperate and had latched on to Rafik because he had promised to help her straighten out her papers. He was Guyanese, forty-eight years old, eighteen years older than she. She’d suspected correctly that he had other women. One of them found out about her and reported her to immigration. Rafik had promised her that he would say he was her common-law spouse. The lawyer who was looking after her case—he’d charged her seven thousand dollars, and she had already paid him half—had given her the form for Rafik to fill out. He had also advised her at the very least to leave some of her clothes at Rafik’s house just in case immigration sent someone there to investigate.
However it happened, one of his other women found out everything about her. Rafik must have told her. Some Caribbean men can’t resist vaunting their virility—fantasizing was closer to the truth. They say that the more women they have, the more women flock to them. Apart from Cislyn, Rafik was the only person who could have known the telephone number at the TMR home where she worked then (she’d only lasted six months on the Westmount job.) He sometimes called her there. And how did his woman get Cislyn’s address? Half an hour after she’d fled her employer’s house the immigration police showed up at Cislyn’s place. Well, I guess that is one way I am blest. I wasn’t supposed to be still here in Canada.
She’d phoned Cislyn from a coffee shop downtown, and Cislyn came and took her to stay with a Grenadian friend of hers. She’d begged Cislyn not to tell this friend her business, not even where she was from in Jamaica. The next week she went back to the placement agency, this time on her own, and the woman got her a job in another home. She told the woman, “I had to leave that job; wasn’t anything I did wrong. Just that I had to leave. My boyfriend know I working there and he threaten to come there and kill me. I begging, you please not to tell Mrs Macmillan where I is.” The woman frowned and Benita knew she didn’t believe her.
For a while she’d got nervous about her status and even stopped communicating with the lawyer and Cislyn. Before the immigration incident she’d divided her days off between Rafik and Cislyn, now she stayed in her room. A little more than three months into the new job she ran into Cislyn one Sunday on the 124 bus. She’d vowed never to take it, but that Sunday she’d waited and waited for the Jean-Talon bus and had finally given in. Cislyn was on her way to Union United Church.
Cislyn had turned her head away and pouted when she saw her. Benita went up to her and said, “Good morning, Cislyn.”
“Don’t good morning me. You too damn ungrateful. Don’t talk to me.”
There was a vacant seat beside her, and Benita took it. After about ten minutes of silence, she asked Benita how things were and a conversation ensued. Benita explained that she was afraid the calls might be traced and that was why she hadn’t called. That was in part true. Cislyn gave her a cellphone number and their contact was renewed.
That was nine years ago, and between that time and two years ago, during which Benita met and married Olivier, she had changed at least four employers—two she had quarrelled with, a third because the husband had come on to her, and the fourth because at first the woman seemed nice-nice and Benita begged her to sponsor her, and so the woman discovered that she was undocumented, and made her work for nothing on her days off, and began paying her twenty dollars less per week, saying that it was because the utility costs had gone up and she had to charge her more for room and board.
She comes back to the present, to her current dilemma, and doesn’t see any blessing in it. Will her marriage survive? Olivier saw the change in her once she got back from Jamaica. His first statement after hugging her at the airport, was, “You look tired.”
“I come down with food poisoning a few days before I left. I didn’t tell you on the phone because I didn’t want to alarm you.” She’d come up with this explanation while on the plane, so that he would think that she needed time to recover, time for her nerves to settle.
She’d panicked when Olivier had proposed going to Jamaica with her. A good thing she was at the sink and he couldn’t see her face. He wanted to meet her family, he said. He’s puzzled that, apart from Cislyn, she has no friends. He’s the opposite: a total extrovert with friends everywhere, in all classes and in all races. He loves to give parties, and to go to parties. There’s hardly a Saturday night they aren’t having one or going to one. She complains that their one-bedroom apartment is too small for the thirty-plus persons who come, but he ignores her. On party-giving Saturdays he wakes her up early, and together they head down to Plamondon to buy West Indian foods. Josephine, his Antiguan ex-wife, got him hooked on them, and he in turn got his Canadian friends hooked. When they return home, he gets out the two roasting pans—they are the only containers big enough to hold the meat they bring back: chopped up oxtail and goat—and they begin the cooking. She would have already baked cassava pone the day before. That man loves cassava pone. By then she would have put the breadfruits to roast in the oven and would be helping him to chop garlic and grind spices. While the pressure cookers hiss away, he washes and dries and puts away all the utensils they used. A neat man. One of the many things she loves about him. She told Cislyn about his many qualities, and hinted at the ecstasies in the bedroom. Undoubtedly what Cislyn was referring to yesterday when they talked on the phone, and she again called her Benita-the-Blessed.
She met him three years ago, at a bus-stop of all places. She’d noticed him ogling her. He wasn’t the first to do it. There were always horrible looking white men propositioning black women all the time. She and Cislyn sometimes joked about it. Cislyn told her the stories other black women had told her. After chewing her up with his eyes, Olivier eventually introduced himself. At the time he was 38, three years older than her. He told her he’d been married to a woman from Antigua, a nurse, who’d left him. He said he’d supported her decision to take leave of absence from her job to upgrade her qualifications, and after she’d done so, she felt she was too good for him. Benita was sure it was more complex than that. He said he would like to take her out for coffee and get to know her better, and he gave her his telephone number.
She’d waited a week before calling him. Cislyn had told her she had nothing to lose. And indeed that was true. It was eleven years she’d been living undocumented here, and she was sure that one day her luck would run out. He took her to the cinema on Sundays. On occasion, they went for walks on Mount Royal. They’d been doing this for at least two months before he attempted to go to bed with her. He lived in a studio basement apartment on L’Acadie. The apartment was neat, everything in place. About ten months into the relationship she told him she was undocumented. He wanted to know how she could become documented, and she told him he could change her status by marrying her. Three weeks later they went to the court house and got married.
If she’d thought that Cislyn hadn’t heard what the woman at the employment agency had said out loud, after the wedding, Benita couldn’t doubt that Cislyn knew that she had come to Canada using her sister Roberta’s identity. Roberta was the name mentioned when she took the marriage vow. She’d already told Olivier that Benita was a nickname she’d been given by her grandmother. At the restaurant later, where all of Olivier’s friends were gathered to celebrate the occasion, Benita spent a great deal of time studying Cislyn’s face for signs of alarm, but she saw none.
In the days following, she thought things through and decided that she should have a candid talk with Cislyn. She not only had to set the record straight about the name she was using, there was also the question of her daughters. She had to know whether Cislyn had told her business to anyone. Moreover, Cislyn would now be coming to their apartment, and Benita did not want her blurting out embarrassing information. A week after the wedding, she arranged to meet Cislyn on one of her days off. Benita offered to pay for the lunch, and Cislyn objected and advised her to spend her husband’s money cautiously. Olivier had stopped Benita from working and told her to wait until she could do so legally. They went to a West Indian Restaurant in NDG, and from the time they got there until the main course came, neither said much to each other. Benita noted that Cislyn was looking at her warily. She recalled that when she’d told Cislyn that Olivier had offered to marry her, Cislyn had replied that she would sooner turn lesbian than marry a white man. “What you will do if your mother-in-law call you nigger?” But when Cislyn met Olivier, she admitted that “him look alright, “and after a pause added, “anyway you need him for get you outta the fix you in.”
Benita picked up her knife and fork and saw that her hands were trembling. She saw too that Cislyn was staring at her hands.
“Why you so nervous?”
“Cislyn, you know why I nervous.”
Cislyn too picked up her knife and fork and did not answer.
“Cislyn, you think I was right to come to Canada the way I come?”
Cislyn didn’t answer. She continued to eat.
Benita waited a while. She’d put down the knife and fork. She hadn’t yet touched her food.
“Cislyn, you didn’t answer my question?”
“Benita, what you want me to tell you? I don’t know. I did warn you ’bout that criminal record. Where your sister Roberta is now?”
“She living in Port Maria with her husband. He does go to the States every year to do farm work.”
“They have children?”
Benita nodded and indicated three with her fingers.
Cislyn continued to eat. “Your food getting cold.”
Benita suddenly felt nauseous and had to excuse herself to go to the bathroom. In there she vomited. Her stomach had felt nervous all morning, and all she’d had was a cup of ginger tea.
When Benita resumed her seat, Cislyn said, “Benita what bothering you? I know you invite me here to tell me something important. What is it? First, I did think you going to tell me you pregnant, but now I see is something else, something that troubling you . . .”
The hiccupping sobs came then. Cislyn went over to Benita and led her into the bathroom. When they came out, Cislyn told the waiter to pack their food and to call a taxi for them. The taxi soon came, and Cislyn gave the driver her address on Dupuis.
They got to the apartment and Cislyn made Benita a cup of ginger tea and gave her a gravol. “Now tell me what you have to tell me.” She said, sitting across from Benita.
“Cislyn, when I filled out my application for residency I put down that I don’t have no dependents, and I told Olivier that Bridget and June is my nieces. I tell him that I help my mother out with them because they is orphans.”
Cislyn said nothing.
“Olivier don’t have no children. His first wife was a career woman and didn’t want children to hold she back. She studying for her master’s in Ottawa. Maybe I should o’ tell him the truth. He might o’ like to adopt mines. What you think, Cislyn?”
Cislyn opened and closed her fists and stared at the floor and said nothing. She took off her glasses and wiped them with the tail of her blouse and put them back on. Finally she spoke.
“So you don’t want me to ask you about your children when your husband is present? That is what I think you telling me. I get it. I won’t ask you. I won’t even ask you about your nieces. Did you notice: I never ask you about your sister? Never. After I heard the receptionist at that domestic workers’ agency say out your name loud. She was questioning it. Doubting it. That is what she was doing. She probably knew that a lot of the girls don’t use their real names.”
“Cislyn, you think I should o’ come here in my sister name?”
Cislyn frowned and shrugged.
“Well, I wasn’t going to sacrifice my future ’cause of a stupid mistake I make in my youth.”
Cislyn said nothing.
“Cislyn, I been thinking that when I get citizenship, I might have to leave Olivier. I hope to God he don’t find out the truth before and leave me.” She stared hard at Cislyn.
“Don’t look at me like that. I don’t go around prattling off my mouth.”
“Cislyn, you tell anybody that I come to Canada in my sister’s name?”
Cislyn didn’t answer right away.
“Answer me. Lawd Jesus! Answer me, Cislyn.”
Cislyn raised her arm, gesturing calm. “No, not directly, but I was at a party one time, and I met some people there who knew you or knew about you—they talked about the prison sentence in Jamaica—and they were wondering what your status in Canada was. One of them was an ex-girlfriend of Rafik. I don’t know if she was the one that we think tried to get you deported.”
“You mean they got people here that know me!”
“Lawd, child, stop your foolishness. You think you and me is the only Jamaicans that come here?
“You told them anything?”
Cislyn shook her head. “Nothing at all.”
“Cislyn you think that that is a fair way to treat Olivier?”
“You mean lying to him?
Benita nodded.
“What you want me to tell you? I know I tell you I don’t want no white man around me, but I think that if you go all the way and marry somebody you should be honest with them. That strike me as plain common sense. On top o’ that Olivier married you to make your status regular. Otherwise is common-law he would o’ propose. He already get burned in marriage once, and by a black woman too. You should o’ been honest with him. I would o’ told you so if you did ask me about it. Why you didn’t ask me?”
