Letters from Grenada

And with good reason. Ironing your clothes / cooking your lunch / mopping your floor are activities best performed before the rise of the day’s heat.

I sleep in on Sundays, until maybe 8:30. I get up to pee and while I’m in the washroom, he takes the sheets off the bed and puts them in the washing machine. So I have to stay up. Which is just as well, because half an hour after that, it’s too bright to keep your eyes closed.

Also I have to drink hot coffee. Hot something. It took me three years to convince Bean’s father that drinking diet Coke first thing in the morning wouldn’t give me a stroke. That coming from a cold place, my issue was the heat of the sun, not the ice in my drink.

Today is a working day, and so I bathe and then stand naked in front of a fan until I manage to dry my skin. The fan is set on high and I have to squeeze most of the water from my hair with a towel, because the water has nowhere to go. There’s no room for it in the moist air. I dress gingerly, trying not to get sweaty before I leave the house. I slick my hair back with baby oil and pull it into a high ponytail. I cover my hairline with a piece of batik. The top of my forehead is already covered with enormous, brown freckles. I don’t want it, or my scalp, to get burned, so I’ve got baby sunscreen all over my head. I wear a white sleeveless linen blouse and jeans that reach my ankles, because only tourists wear shorts, and I am not a tourist.

We walk down a dirt road, and then down the concrete road, to the gap that marks the intersection with the main road. We stand in the gap, on the curb. I watch the tethered goats, who are well into their daily verge-trimming chores and completely oblivious to the morning traffic. I know for a fact that these two goats can see just fine, and will also move out of the way if any genuine threat presents itself, but in the absence of external enervation, they might as well be blind, for all the reaction to visual stimuli they exhibit. I am wearing my prescription sunglasses and yet I’m squinting against the sun. I curl my neck, lowering my eyes and offering my shoulders to the heat. It’s heavy, like a just-ironed shirt, and feels like a vaguely angry massage.

There’s a man standing on the far side of the road. He’s butchering an enormous tuna. The flesh of the fish is intensely pink, and he uses a machete to cut it free from the dark grey skin. He holds the machete the way I hold a paring knife.

The bus crests the hill, and I signal for it to stop using a hand signal that announces – again – that I am not a tourist.

The main road is made of asphalt, and today they are patching it. The bus, which is really just a very big van, slows at the bend right before the Governor General’s house. I look to the right, where there’s a steep cliff and hundreds of feet of air between the vehicle and the valley floor. I think of Left-Eye Lopez, The story is she was the only one wearing a seatbelt.

We are packed tightly in the bus, with special cushions made to sit in the open spaces between the seats. The passengers are a team. We are efficient. We make the best possible use of the available space. I am sharing a row with three secondary school boys. They are fifteen, I am guessing, and narrower than my purse, so they fold themselves and sit two deep in the bench seats. They are in uniform, long pants that are polyester and forest green and white collared shirts that are awesomely stain-free. I am not good with bleach. I try to imagine the mothers of these boys, who are probably younger than I am yet quite good with bleach, and a million other tasks at which I do not excel.

Other days, when the bus is full, I’ll take a seat and squeeze myself into a space that’s smaller than I am. That’s just what you do. Then the bus drives for a few miles and you’re jostled around a bit. And you find yourself somehow magically sitting in that impossible-that-you-fit space.

The wet asphalt smells worse than burning tires. The scent is bigger and has more personality. It drifts softly past my face, and I think it’s not going to trouble me, but when it reaches my nostrils it grabs them with both hands and flows sharply, urgently upwards into my nose. I hold my breath rather than allow myself to inhale any more of what I picture as Tinkerbells of tar, flitting kamikaze fighters determined to interfere with the child growing inside me.

Posted on April 30th, 2010 under Grenada • Tags: caribbean, confessions of a reformed tourist, expat, Grenada, memoir, sometimes it's hard having an imagination, travel, writing. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback