Letters from Grenada

happy belated mother’s day

I’ve been analog for four whole days. Four. Whole. Days. Weird at first, but then I got over myself and it actually felt pretty good. And it’s going to be the norm for the next couple of months or so. Some big things are in the works. I’m taking a class, self-publishing a little book and planning a major move. These are all steps forward for me, but they’ll require a lot of my attention, so I will be scarce in the digital world for a while. But only for a while.

I had a lovely Mother’s Day, and I hope you did too. I’m all personal-essayed out at the moment, but I did want to share this photo, which is one of my very favorites from Bean’s first few months. And if you’re looking to get misty-eyed about maternal love, please read the post I wrote on my mother’s birthday.

regarding tourists & short pants

Last week I wrote a post in which I described getting ready to go to work in Grenada. I included this sentence:

I wear a white sleeveless linen blouse and jeans that reach my ankles, because only tourists wear shorts, and I am not a tourist.

In response, an American friend asked:

I’m curious why only tourists wear shorts in Grenada. It seems like being cool (and holy cow, just the thought of jeans in a hot, humid environment make me break out in heat rash) would outweigh being “cool”, if you know what I mean. What’s the dealio?

The following was my response.

Grenadian locals do wear shorts sometimes, but not to work. This, like every declaration I make about the island, is a general rule and there are exceptions. *I* never wore shorts to work because as one of the only women and THE only foreign woman employed there, I needed to get a lot of things right if I wanted to be taken seriously. Most of the Grenadians I worked with took great care with and interest in their appearance. They were extraordinarily polished, even when dressed very casually. I tried to take my cue from them.

Regarding the heat? I got used to it.

Also, I really hate shaving my legs. I’m pale like my Scottish grandmother but dark and hairy like my Puerto Rican grandfather.

Speaking of whom. The shorts thing kind of reminds me how my Puerto Rican grandfather would get upset if one of us kids just bit straight into an apple, instead of peeling it and cutting it with a knife. It took me a long time to figure that out, but I think it’s because when he was growing up, that was something he associated with being poor. Eating fruit right off the tree.

But if he had grown up having money, he probably wouldn’t have cared about how we ate our apples. You know? It just wouldn’t have been an issue. And I suspect, though I have no way of knowing for sure, that that also explains why the only (non-tourist) guy I knew who regularly wore shorts to work was the owner of the place.

my bean, he likes to clean

He loves brooms, mops, the dishwasher, all varieties of soap, buckets and sponges.

Mommy, I want to wash. Mommy, I want to sweep. Mommy, why don’t you use the dishwasher? These are some of the first sentences he ever spoke.

He was about eight months old when I went back to work. Carol, whose primary task was ostensibly to take care of my grandmother who was dying of Parkinson’s, decided that her time at our house would now be dedicated to Bean. And since her third primary task was to cook and clean, Carol and my son spent many days together mopping, sweeping and doing the laundry. Since he was fourteen months old, he has been helping us hand-wash dishes.

After Carol went home for the day and before I got home from work, Bean would spend time with his grandmother. If you’ve ever spent more than three weeks in the tropics you know that the cleaning is never done. Our house had about thirty non-consecutive feet of verandah, and windows that were always open, letting in the breeze but also the insects and the salt that rose up from the bay. Always open unless it was raining, of course. The first tippling sound of rain quickly became a trigger for just jumping up from whatever you were doing and running around the house closing all the doors and windows. My mom often did it with not-yet-walking Bean tucked under her arm.

Then, on weekends, he’d watch his father clean. Bean’s daddy is Jah’s gift to laundry. So much so that I was banned from washing his white shirts. Banned! I couldn’t get them bright enough.

The point of this random Grenada memory is that right at this very moment I’m sitting at my desk, looking through the sliding doors at him in the driveway, happier than a clam because he’s carrying one of those enormous brooms that’s like three inches by three feet. And I’m thinking that because he spent so much time when he was very little cleaning with people he loved, he’s likely going to be all about cleaning for the rest of his life.

I can’t relate. I might even be a little jealous.

a bit of bean bother

The other week I was looking for my debit card. It wasn’t where I left it. I *know* I didn’t take it anywhere, and it’s not like me to put things away in a place other than the place I always put them. (Note to young people: This is a good strategy for remembering things. Do what you’d expect yourself to do. It eliminates some guesswork.)

I looked for the card for a few hours. It was nowhere to be found. (I even looked in my sock drawer.)

So I called my bank and arranged for a new one. That was on the Tuesday. It arrived early Thursday morning, which meant that this mishap did not, after all, ruin my trip to Chicago. (I don’t use credit cards. Only debit cards. Note to young people: This a good strategy for avoiding spending money you don’t have on things you don’t need.)

You wanna guess what happened Wednesday morning? (It’s totally cool if you don’t feel like guessing. I wouldn’t feel like it either.) Wednesday morning my mom found my debit card. At the bottom of her laundry hamper. Clearly that Bean was the culprit. And so it goes.

This incident reminded me of something funny that happened a couple of months ago. I left my debit card on the kitchen table. Bean grabbed it and ran off to his playroom with it.

“Honey,” I called. “Please bring Mommy’s card back. Mommy needs it.”

His reply? “No! I am going shopping.”

“Really,” I said. “And what, if I may be so bold, are you shopping for?”

“Presents for Mommy.”

morning starts early in the tropics

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.

why i call him “bean”

It started when he was newborn.

It’s funny, you know? Because you’re pregnant for nine months, waiting for the baby. Anticipating the baby. Imagining the baby. Et cetera. And then! Labor and delivery, which is basically like military basic training, except condensed and in your vagina. And then you bring home the baby!

And what does the baby do? The baby SLEEPS.

Or at least Bean did. He slept for hours and hours on end, and all I could do was sit there and watch him. I watched his chest rise and fall. I listened to him breathe. I watched his nose wiggle and wondered if he was dreaming. I saw him smile and said to myself, I don’t care what “the book” says, that’s not gas.

That phase lasted for maybe four weeks. Four weeks in which I couldn’t wait to look in his eyes, talk to him, play with him, but couldn’t because you wake a sleeping newborn like you simply walk into Mordor.

Also, because he was a newborn, his limbs were still all tucked in while he slept. I hear this is typical, that most babies spend their first weeks still sleeping the way they did in the womb, where they had to make the best possible use of the available space, and so tucked their limbs in, neatly folding them against their bodies.

Try to picture that. He WAS a bean. The same shape, anyway. And so I, in my post-birth quasi-delirium, in this weird state of grace where words were just coming to me, seemingly out of the ether, started calling him bean.

I started calling him bean, which evolved into Bean, and it stuck.

His full, complete and official nickname is Joaquín the illustrious Bean.

Lucky for both of us, he likes it.

how it all went wrong

In May of 1999 I had gotten my BA from Cornell University. I had double-majored in History and French Lit and harbored vague dreams of graduate school, but I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, or even the next five years. And so, in a sequence of events best described as coasting along the path of least resistance, I took a job at the not-for-profit health care agency where I had worked every summer since graduating from high school. I rented an apartment two blocks from my mother’s house. I got engaged.

Over the next few years I became an expert time waster. I watched a lot of TV. I took a lot of baths. I ate a lot of fast food. I did a lot of online shopping. I stopped opening my mail and answering my phone. I fell out of touch with most of my friends. My fiance and I were a perfect pair of unhappy, frustrated hermits. I knew this was, to say the very least, a profoundly unproductive way to be spending my twenties.

By the summer of 2001, I had woken up. I had made a commitment to myself. I was going to dig my life out of the rubble. I was, after all, only 24. I got well started and for the first time since college life felt promising. *I* felt promising.

Then September 11th happened, and I drowned. My lungs filled with water. I sank.

By terrible coincidence, my mother had just sold her house, moved onto a sailboat, and left for the Caribbean. She and her husband had taken an early retirement. They’d been planning it for years. For the very first time in my life, I needed her, and she wasn’t there.

Two years and all sorts of inertia later, I’m no longer engaged. I’m living in a new place, full of light and the best tasting well water on Jah’s green earth. I quit my job, and have enough savings to stay unemployed for a while. I am planning to write. Finally.

I am barely two months into this brave new world of mine, when a fire destroys nearly everything I own, including my computer and my books and every single word I’ve ever put to paper. It is far and away the worst thing that has ever happened to me, but it is only the beginning.

After that I ended up in Massachusetts. I moved in with my brother, who was a student in Amherst. I spend my days on campus, in the library, reading. I spend my nights drinking and smoking and plotting precisely how I would like to relive my life. I want a do-over.

I need a do-over, you know? Because in a few short years I’ve managed to go from promising Ivy League graduate to wannabe hippie loser. It’s earth-shattering, how far I’ve fallen. Or how far I *think* I’ve fallen, because the bottom is still leagues below me.

So. It’s now January 2004. I’ve moved back to New York. I’m living with my dad. I am employed. I am seeing friends I haven’t seen in years. I am, wonder of wonders, doing it right. But I get impatient, which is I guess why I end up getting back together with this guy I dated in college, and moving in with him almost immediately. He’s precisely the same person he was when I broke up with him in 1997, but! But when I’m with him, I am almost the same person I was in 1997. The person I was before everything went wrong.

Clearly, this is not going to end well.

journal excerpt

After she left I consciously thought to myself, OK, you can start grieving now. But I didn’t even know where to start, so I just drank myself as senseless as humanly possible. I craved oblivion.

I suddenly realized I hated my job. I hated working in the Financial District. I hated living on the Upper East Side. Everything irritated me. I had no patience, I did not care, I did not want to be bothered. Food disgusted me. Questions annoyed me. I was angry, I was empty, it was all so fucking tragic. I’d never lost a family member in my entire life, and now, in less than six weeks, I’d lost three.

Here’s what I remember about that December. I remember walking along 79th Street, mesmerized by the grinding hum of the crosstown busses, idly considering throwing myself in front of one, weighing the question the way I’d weigh what kind of sandwich wrap I wanted to order, pesto or sun-dried tomato. I remember sitting my boss’s office, slamming my hand on her desk, telling her she was wasting my time with her frivolous interruptions, adding that I would have finished that project by now if she’d only let me work in peace. I remember a rooftop party in midtown, where I stayed far from the edge because I knew I might jump accidentally, by reflex. I remember pounding can after can of sugarfree Red Bull and still feeling sluggish. I remember sleepless nights of staring into the darkness, listening to my boyfriend breathe beside me, and resenting him and his easy, careless slumber. I remember sobbing in the shower. I remember the yawn of fear in my gut. I remember thinking that if I starved to death, they couldn’t call it suicide.

That’s how I spend my days. I spend my nights drinking and smoking and reading and plotting precisely how I would like to relive my life. I want a do-over.

Leagues.

confession of a reformed tourist

My housekeeper is a champion phone-talker. All day, she does her work, one of three attached to her ear. Usually she’s just gossiping, catching up with one of her sisters, aunties, or friends. Sometimes she’s venting about her husband. Every once in a while, she’s moaning about her eldest daughter. This is the most infrequent topic, but it’s also the best time to eavesdrop. Tracie’s 15.

“You know Tracie, you know what she go and do? She got a Harry Potter book down there at the school. Can you imagine dey have dem t’ings? And they give them to children? Only wickedness comes from reading devil book. She hide it from me. Wickedness! Auntie saw her wit’ it and told me. Otherwise I don’t know when I’d a know. You remember what the pastor say about that Harry Potter? Now Tracie, she wicked. Wickedness she got from that book. And she run from me, you know? She run and she hide and for that I had to beat she.”

All while she’s talking she’s mopping my kitchen floor. Her neck, I think, must get sore, cricked to the side like that all the time.

I almost don’t say anything to her, but then I do.

I’ve read Harry Potter, I tell her. I really dig those books, actually. You see I’ve got all of them here on my shelf, hardcovers that I carried all the way from New York on the airplane? I went to that trouble because I love to read them over and over. There’s no evilness in there. It’s about bravery, and sticking up for your friends…

She’s not hearing me, I can tell. She’s grinning wide, wide and she’s looking down at the floor, her toes turned in towards each other, like she’s some lickle schoolgirl being scolded by she teacher. I can’t see her eyes.

I’m doing this wrong. Carol’s three years older than me, and the mother to six children. She can make a quarter pound of flour and a banana last for a week when she has to. And I’m standing here in front of her with my education from up the road, embarrassing her. Beating a child for reading isn’t right, but neither is this.

I take a deep breath.

“All I’m trying to say is that maybe all Tracie’s going to remember about this is that you beat her for reading. And maybe that’s not the message you want to send.”

Yes, Miss Maria, she says. She smiles at me, and then walks down the hallway to my grandmother’s bedroom. Her back is straight and her head is held high, and she sways when walks, regally.

context

I am mother and daughter, teacher and student, writer and reader. I’m woman and lover, but never have been – and likely never will be – a wife.

I am a traveler, and I am fearless. I wear flip-flops in the security line, because it saves time, and I never check luggage if I can help it. I carry my cream rinse and lotion in a Nalgene travel set. The little bottles hold 3 ounces each, and I appreciate their simple, finite shapes. My passport and tickets and cash are in a pouch that swings resolutely from my neck, and thus my hands stay free, always available.

I am sometimes surprised, but I’ll never let it show on my face.

My hair is long and thick and coarse, Aslanesque, and looks better the less I wash it. I fix it by feel. I have no need for mirrors. When my shirt gets dirty or my socks feel sweaty, I change clothes in the filthiest train station rest room, never letting my feet touch the floor. I can take a shower at a sink. I eat the local food and speak the popular slang. I collect colorful phrases, words that tickle me, and I incorporate them into my personal lexicon.

No one can ever figure out where I’m from.

I’m not rootless, it just seems that way. Give me a little time, and I’ll match the pattern of my chair’s upholstery, even if it’s paisley. Give me a lot of time, and you’ll swear I was born to sit there.