SEX AND OBEAH
You can read some of my short stories from my collection, Sex and Obeah, here.
PLAYING DEAD
Sometimes, when she was alone, Rhonda Simpson used to pretend she was dead. Usually, she would play her game at night, when the house was quiet and Tomas was out drinking or whoring or both. She would lie on her back in her darkened bedroom with her eyes closed and her arms folded, palms down, across her chest. She would try to conjure up a look of beatific serenity, with just the right curve to her lips, smoothing out her brow and letting her entire body relax. Oftentimes, she played the game naked, letting the warm breeze coming through the transoms play over her skin.
To her, there was no morbidity in it, only a sense of peace, fulfillment and well being. As Rhonda lay on the bed she tried to imagine her own funeral, hear her mother weeping gracefully at her side, declaring Rhonda her favourite child, even more so than Rhonda’s brother, Dwayne, who was not only the youngest in the family and the only boy child, but who had been born with a shortened leg, and who was spoiled within an inch of his life because of it.
She imagined Tomas, beating his breast just like they did on TV, bellowing out his love and remorse. If only he had known! He would kiss her smooth self-abnegating brow, stroking the curls from her cold dead forehead and pronounce her a wonderful wife.
Her casket would be covered with white velvet and lined with satin. And when they were ready to put her down into the quiet hole, her family would unscrew the little brass crucifix from the lid of the coffin and fight over it, quarrel over who had the right to retain it as a keepsake, their last tangible reminder of her. As they lowered the coffin into the muddy pit, Tomas would be suitably grieved out of his mind, trying to throw himself into her grave, held back only by the strong hands of the other pall-bearers.
Rhonda was sorry that she had no children; if she had, her family would have been able to pass them back and forth over her closed casket, three times, to break the maternal bond. That way they would be sure that she would never return from death to harass them, as possessive mothers were known to do. That would have been a nice touch.
Even late into the night, when Tomas came home stinking of beer, banging about in the kitchen to consume the cold meal she had left him, she would lie in bed, trying to still the gentle rise and fall of her breasts. And after he had eaten, when he would come into the room, opening the screeching door and throwing brutal electric light on her fantasy, red light penetrating her closed eyelids, she continued to lay with her arms across her breasts. Sometimes Tomas threw her arms out to her sides and mounted her, grunting. Often he did not. Whichever route he chose, Rhonda still lay there, pretending.
Christmas came around. It was one of Rhonda’s favourite times of year; there were carols and Parang[1] music on the radio, and loud cheery ads announcing specials on ham and turkey. Rhonda liked ham more than anything else, basted with pineapple juice and brown sugar, slashed along the top and pierced with cloves. If she were really dead, she knew, there wouldn’t be any ham or turkey. Did the dead even know it was Christmas?
One evening, in the gloaming, at about the time she would usually play dead, she washed her hair and fluffed it around her shoulders, thick and black, remembering a time long ago when Tomas used to grab handfuls of it and gently bury his nose in its denseness. She put on a long bright dress, sheer cotton with impossibly red poinsettia splayed across it, then blew the dust off an old Dean Martin-Bing Crosby collection so that she could listen to the men warble on about roasting chestnuts, which she had never tasted, jingle bells, which she had never heard, and white Christmases, which she had only seen on postcards and old movies. She climbed into a heavy leatherette chair, the one they kept covered with a drop-cloth that was removed only when guests came over, and waited for her man.
A slap on the arm woke her up. Rhonda snapped her head back, eyes confused, cheek wrinkled from sleep. The old-fashioned record-player had not returned the needle to its resting position; only God knew how long it had stayed there in the final groove, hugging the faded red and green record label, noisily cutting a rut of its own. Tomas stalked across the room and with a single movement of his big hand dragged the needle back along the record and over to its rightful position. From where she sat, Rhonda could see the scratch he had dug all the way from the record’s label to its outer edge. She flinched, and mentally apologized to Dean and Bing.
He was standing over her again, hands on his heavy hips. It hurt her neck just to look up at him. His unspeaking eyes rested on the tops of her breasts, which were slightly revealed by the dress she suddenly hated. Trying hard not to be too pointed, she inched her neckline higher.
“It’s Christmastime,” she said, as if that would explain everything. She sat back on her heels and waited; maybe for him to hunker down before her and take her hand and... what? She inhaled and tried again. “I thought we could listen to some records....” Involuntarily she glanced across at the ruined disk on the turntable, and consoled herself with the fact that there were others in the cardboard box next to the player. Then she went on: “I thought we could have some rum...or something.”
Rhonda waited. Tomas still towered above her, looking down. But although his eyes were fixed in her direction, she realised with mounting horror that he couldn’t see her. His vacant stare was fixed a few inches beyond the spot where her head should be, and with cold sudden fear she became convinced that after all the nights of playing dead she had indeed become so. She was a ghost, a wraith, nothing more–at least in his eyes. She knew then that if she continued to live in those eyes she would one day cease to be, she would dissolve like smoke and become something that even the death she flirted with could not touch.
Tomas dragged his eyes through her and away, then turned. His receding booted steps were like thunder in her skull. She closed her eyes, and could tell by his loud banging exactly what part of the kitchen he was in. He tossed aside a pot cover with a crash and grunted. “Beans again?”
Wordlessly, Rhonda rose, uncurling her cramped legs, and made her way to the bedroom.
Next morning, Tomas was out–looking for work, he said. The small sepulchral house was silent. Determined as one can only be when pulled back from the edge of the abyss, she got up off her coffin of a bed and dressed with calm deliberate motions. She pulled the big blue suitcase out from under the bed, the one she bought for their honeymoon to Caracas nine years ago and had never used since.
She filled them with her things, starting with her underwear, which she folded carefully, and moving on to her dresses, blouses, skirts and shoes. She took a three-pound Danish Butter Cookie tin from the bottom of the broom closet under all the old newspapers and prized it open. It was filled with brightly colored bank-notes, mainly red one-dollar and green five-dollar notes. A few of them were gray tens and purple twenties; rarer still were the blue hundreds. She laid them out flat, each bill face up, in a thick pile, counted it and tied them together with a rubber band. It was all that she had managed to save over the past nine years. She forced the wad into her best handbag and propped it against her baggage.
She scooped up the old grey cat, who squeaked in surprise, and lugged it over to Miss Louise’s house two lots down. The old cat had cataracts and could barely see; Rhonda thought he could sun himself just as well on Miss Louise’s porch.
“Lou-eeze!” Rhonda called, rattling the latch on the gate. “Louuu-eeeze!”
Louise came out and stood at the gate, hands on her hips. Her apron was stained from the mango that she sweetened, dyed red to catch the eyes of the children, and sold at the school gate for a living.
“Take him for me, Lou-Lou,” Rhonda said. “I leaving.”
Louise looked neither surprised nor put out. She shrugged. “Is about time,” she said, and took the cat in her arms. The animal had recovered from his surprise and began to look bored. Louise paused for a moment on the porch, surveying Rhonda, nodding approvingly. Then she turned and went back inside to stir her mango on the stove.
Rhonda returned and looked quickly over the house to make sure she didn’t forget anything. There wasn’t that much to forget. Strange, she thought, how after all these years she hadn’t accumulated more things. No photos on the side table. No favorite kitchen mittens. Nothing like that. She dialed the number of a girlfriend who worked in a bank on Independence Square.
“I leaving him,” she told the friend. “Come and pick me up.”
“It’s about time,” her friend said, and hung up.
When the friend arrived they walked out into a sudden light drizzle and stowed the blue suitcase and two cardboard boxes in the trunk of the car. Rhonda climbed into the front, kissed her friend on the cheek and said, “We will drive around until I find a place to stay.”
Her friend turned and stared at her. “You crazy? You forget I have to work? Why you don’t just come by me for a while, and take your time and find a nice place?”
Rhonda shook her head. “No, we have to find a place today. That is how it have to be.” She folded her arms and stared out the front of the car, jaw set.
Her friend shrugged and started the engine.
By three o’clock they had found a small two-room annex in the village of Barataria, on the southern side, close to the mangrove swamp. The apartment was going for seventy-five dollars a week. Without blinking, Rhonda counted out the first two weeks’ rent, in fives and tens, into her landlady’s hand. The old East Indian woman pushed it down the front of her diaphanous red sari, tugged the lacy white orhini[2] back around her face and walked back up the muddy path. Rhonda and her friend lugged the suitcase and the two boxes into the house and opened all the windows to let the air in.
Her friend kissed her goodbye at the door and promised to check on her soon. “I will give them some kind of excuse at work tomorrow,” she shrugged. “I will tell them somebody dead.”
“No,” Rhonda said, “you should tell them somebody alive.” She went inside to lay out her things. When she was done she sat on the bed, not sure of what she should do next.
As the night flew swiftly upon her, she stretched out on the narrow musty bed and closed her eyes, arms folded across her naked chest, mostly out of habit. She squeezed her eyes tightly and tried to conjure up her familiar funeral, hear the weeping and smell the incense–but all she could smell was ham. With pineapples. She shifted, and shifted again, restless, unable to lie still. She kept opening her eyes and glancing about the room, taking in her surroundings. The neighborhood buzzed.
Down on the corner a small group of drunken Paranderos[3] were striking up to the accompaniment of a quatro, a scratcher-board and some maracas. The sound was bold, asynchronous, joyful. It penetrated the thin brick walls as though they didn’t exist. The insistent Latin beat of the Christmas songs, sung in a corrupted Spanish that even the singers barely understood, kept drowning out the doleful Church organ in her head.
Rhonda squirmed, sucking her teeth at the intrusion. She closed her eyes and put her hands up over her ears, but you couldn’t play dead with your hands up over your ears; it just didn’t seem right. She sat up, swung her feet down to the ground, and walked to the window. From where she stood, she could just see them beyond the huge mango tree. There were six or seven of them actually singing, and several more hangers-on were dancing drunkenly in the street, in spite of the early hour. She leaned forward, trying to see more, not caring that her naked breasts were fully outside. Two women were joining in loudly, clapping, swinging each other around in an energetic jig.
Rhonda inhaled deeply, smelling the cooling mingled odors of the night: jasmine, ducks, algae in the nearby drain, drying mud. The music blew gently through her hair like a mild breeze.
