Oh Rachel,
It was some treat to speak to you the other day on the phone. I am filled with joy that my stories bring you back to Bermuda. I feel a connection to you as if we were kin. To see your pain raw and exposed takes me right back to certain days and nights of my youth. Once or twice when you had fallen asleep while I was working, I came and sat with you and watched you sleep. You would stir, cry and I would whisper, ‘Go back to sleep, go to sleep, child . . .’ And in truth it brought me peace to watch your face lose its tight angles and your brow smooth in slumber. I knew from my own heartache that there was nothing I could do, apart from offer words of solace where I could and keep the house and everything in it as neat and tidy as it could be.
I know that I would have liked someone to do the same for me in my hour of desperation. Ah, but you don’t know how I reached that point, do you? I should explain.
It all started immediately after the dance. The author of my much-famed note and I, we didn’t make a formal plan, and as my daddy liked to remind me there wasn’t much permission asked, but Willard Templeton used to crop up like a bad penny. A penny I was always delighted to find! I remember him sitting in the pew opposite mine at church and loitering in the street near Grandma Sally’s and thinking it curious that he often had business within feet of where I lived. I didn’t dare hope that the reason for his proximity might be anything other than coincidence, I didn’t dare! But now, of course, I know it was. And truth is, had I known for sure, I fear I might have burst with joy. He then started to do a thousand little things to let me know that, even though we hadn’t discussed any details as such, we were progressing. And it made me happy. Happier than happy!
One evening after school Clara and I caught the bus down to Horseshoe Bay and as was our habit, we raced through the pine woods, along the path and across the soft sand into the sea. Now, as I might have mentioned, I was always a good swimmer, making headway, pulling against the current, but kicking strong. It came natural to me. I’d look over my shoulder and see Clara shrieking fit to burst, ‘Cee-Cee! Help me! I’m gonna drown!’ as she crawled about on all fours with a clump of sticky seaweed on her head, hanging down like a sea witch’s fringe.
Clara never quite made it out to the calm and it was the same spectacle every time: her being tossed around in the foam and yelling so loudly that folks would stop their bikes and get off to see what the hollering was in aid of. I was always the timid one and I have always thought that as a pair we probably put out the right level of noise into the world. It was just one of a million ways that we compensated for and complemented each other.
It was the most wonderful time of day when the sun started to dip, and the world took on that majestic pink hue – the colour of a conch’s lip – and shadows crept from the soldier-straight pines out over the sand. Clara and I lay at the water’s edge, bobbing on the salty crest, letting the shallow sea drag us out and push us in.
Friday night was always the best time of the whole week. No school the next day and apart from church on Sunday and a whole heap of chores, our time was pretty much our own. Clara stood and raised her dress to show me her cotton panties, full of sand and hanging down like a baby’s diaper at the back. ‘I’ve got half the seabed in here!’ Lord, she waddled like a cowboy along the beach with the white cotton fabric stretching down her thighs and filled with wet sand! ‘Help me, Cee-Cee!’ she hollered, as she tried to shake it out right there and then. I could only laugh and clutch at my stomach; laughing so hard I could hardly take a breath and feared I might pee.
And the next time I opened my eyes, she had gone a little quiet and Albert Romsey was walking up the beach with Willard, my bad penny, by his side. I felt my heart go boom-boom at the sight of him and sat up straight with my shoulders back. Grandma Sally told me if there were two things a man wanted in his future wife it was the ability to make a decent Bermuda fish chowder and good posture. I couldn’t yet make decent chowder, but my posture was better than most. And yes, I was, after no more than one measly dance and a couple of brief exchanges, thinking along these lines. Clara slunk back to where I sat and dropped down by my side. Our dresses clung to our wet forms and I guess my underwear might have been a little insubstantial. The boys stood by our side and the four of us looked out towards the horizon as the sun sank, almost in reverence and with the same hush we adopted when Pastor Raymond was preaching and it felt like he was speaking directly to us.
I saw Willard glance at me more than once and I watched his gaze lower to my chest. His eyes widened and I felt his longing. At the same time, I could feel the swell of something in my stomach that matched his expression and felt a lot like laughing, but on the inside. Now, I had never been proud of my body, never fully realised that these swells and bumps covered in skin had any function other than supporting all the soft and important bits that God created. This was something of an awakening and I liked the way it felt. I liked it very much. Six years before when, walking the railway track near Baker’s Hill, Moses Furbert had said, ‘That ain’t no bosom much worth considerin’’ when I’d let him peek down my frock and he let me look inside his shorts. We’d laughed then, at the absurdity of the fascination, deciding silently and I suspect mutually that the world of bodies and bits and pieces, and the mystery of what went where, could wait until we was much older. And it occurred to me right there and then on Horseshoe Bay, with every inch of my being aware of the proximity between me and Willard, that much older had indeed arrived.
And I guess this was the essence of all that pulled me towards and bound me to the boy with the reputation, the boy with an eye for the girls and a name that people spoke with a sneer. It was a powerful force, a physical thing that to this day I cannot entirely explain, but I say without shame and in front of the Lord who might be listening: it was physical and wonderful and something like magic.
The four of us walked home together, keeping to the raised inside bank along South Road. Willard hung back and I did too and, like it was the most natural thing in the world, he reached for my hand. I won’t ever and could never forget the way it felt to have my palm safe and warm against his. I could have walked a thousand miles. I was light as air and happy as a white-eyed vireo chirping day and night. But if I was surrounded by sunshine, Clara was the opposite; mired in a dark, brooding cloud, the likes I had never seen before. She went quiet, surly even, her shoulders sloped downward and her mouth set thin.
This was the beginning.
This was the first sign I had that she was going to change or maybe it was me that was changing. It doesn’t matter which, not now.
It didn’t happen overnight, but it might as well have. It was more than sulking; it was like Clara had decided that there wasn’t enough of me to go round and that if I chose Willard then I couldn’t have her too. I tried to reason, tried to coax, I believe Grandma Sally even tried scolding her over it. Until one day I realised that there was no amount of apologising or pleading that could change things. And when I stopped pleading, stopped fretting over how to fix it, that was when Eliza-Jane Clara May Brown, my Clara, my best friend in the whole of creation for more years than not, more or less disappeared from my life. Just plain cut me off like I had never existed. How could a person do that? I often wonder. What lurks inside them that makes them think that is in any way okay? Why do they think they are so superior that they can?
My questioning changes nothing – not then, not now. She holed up like a land hermit crab and retreated to that two-room shack where Momma Eula shouted at her for nothing much. My heart missed her. My arms missed her. Grandma Sally missed her – we all did. It shocked me. My world was much, much quieter. It was like some kind of grief to me; at least that was how I would have described it until real grief came along and then I realised how little I had ever cared about anything. Clara May included.
But I am getting ahead of myself, as I am wont to do, dear Rachel.
So Willard and I fell in love. I loved him. I truly loved him, longed for him, wanted to see him and, Lord forgive me, touch him too. He became everything. We married quietly in St Anne’s Church, Southampton Parish, when I was just seventeen years of age, and it was more than perfect. My daddy walked me up the aisle with a rare look of pride, my mommy cried throughout my vows and Grandma Sally wore her favoured white linen hat, but fixed fresh white oleander and purple Bermudiana to the band. They stood out to me, vivid and bright and beautiful, just like Grandma Sally herself, and truth is, if I picture that day, which I do from time to time, the first thing I see is those beautiful, colourful blooms the sight of which gladdened my heart.
On the day itself, and on the days either side, Willard looked a little sheepish, his actions a little unsure, his voice quiet, and he had specks of nervous sweat on his top lip and spittle in the corners, but I didn’t mind none. I didn’t want no loudmouth. What I wanted was to be Mrs Willard Templeton – and I was!
I remember the first night we spent together at Grandma Sally’s, lying as man and wife, giggling silently and happily while Grandma Sally sat on the terrace in her rocking chair and a big moon filled the sky and pulled the tide high just for us. I woke up the next day and I felt different because I wasn’t just little Cee-Cee Symmons; I was Mrs Cee-Cee Templeton, wife of Willard, and that was really something. The thin, gold band on my left hand gave me something I had never had before: status. I was a married woman! I also believed it gave me security, because the way we loved each other had surely never been felt before by any two people on God’s sweet earth. It was something of an obsession, powerful and all-consuming. I felt such joy. In fact, I was filled with happiness without the need for food or socialising; all I wanted was to feel Willard’s skin next to mine and to hear his soft voice whispering a thousand promises into my ear. I still hear them sometimes, those promises, dotted with words like forever . . . future . . . children . . . prosper . . . together. These words might have been easy spoken and warmly received, but they were all lies. But how was I to know that? I do believe that if anyone had told me so, I would have laughed them out of town. Oh Rachel, dear, I was many things, but mainly I was naïve . . .