Here Comes the Sun(18)

“I have to go back to the kitchen,” Verdene says, untangling herself. “You must be hungry. Eat.”

She pulls herself away and Margot lets her. Margot reaches for the cover again as if to hide. Verdene knows that she slept in the nude hoping Verdene would come into the room during the night and slip under the covers. But that didn’t happen.

“Can’t we just—”

“Not until you’re ready,” Verdene quips, sensing where the conversation is headed.

“Ready? I’ve been ready,” Margot says.

Verdene looks down at her hand on the doorknob. She’s squeezing it and letting it go. Her knuckles are shiny like marbles under her skin. “I don’t want what happened last time to happen again,” Verdene finally says in a whisper that comes off like a sigh. “I just can’t—”

“I already apologized. What else yuh want me to do?” Margot grabs a pillow from the foot of the bed and puts it between her legs. It’s another habit of hers, as persistent as the urge to bite her nails.

“Sweetheart,” Verdene says, more softly. “I can’t push you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Margot moves the pillow and sheet away from her body and gets up from the bed. She moves closer and pushes Verdene against the door. It closes behind her. Up close her eyes are a pair of glistening onyx like the stone Margot gave her. Margot takes Verdene’s hands into hers. “I’m ready.”

Verdene fights the urge to follow her to the bed, for deep down she knows, for her, sex is a drug. She’s tempted to let Margot do to her whatever she wants. But what happens afterward? It’s the after that Verdene fears more than anything else. What if Margot’s renewed willingness to be seduced is nothing but curiosity?

She remembers how Margot leapt off the bed in the middle of their lovemaking the first time, and wept. When they began seeing each other, Margot refused to do anything more than kiss and cuddle. She wanted to be courted first. So Verdene acquiesced, grateful for Margot’s insistence that they should know and explore each other in other ways. But after six months of waiting, Verdene had enough. She made her move and Margot gave in, though reluctantly. She wept as if lamenting every wrong done to her in her life. She wept as though their intimacy were happening against her will. She stayed, but she wept. Verdene, stunned, asked if Margot was all right. Margot responded by shaking her head, her body trembling and shuddering. “I’ve never felt this way with anyone,” Margot said.

“It’s okay, Margot. It’s okay.”

“It’s like that dream where I’m drowning.”

“You’re not drowning, baby.”

“I have no control whatsoever.”

“Just let go.”

But Margot wasn’t ready to see herself this way, wasn’t ready to give herself this label. She told Verdene that when she saw Verdene at the market after her years away, Margot began to understand something about herself. Margot described it in detail: How she gasped, because Verdene snatched her breath away. How she was transfixed by Verdene’s smooth, peanut-butter skin against the sea-green dress. How she was taken by the dark unruly mass of hair with the patch of white in front. How the vision of her perfect silhouette convinced Margot she was in need of something else at the market—more cyan pepper, pimento seeds, more soursop, lime, and cauliflower, more ginger, cocoa, and yam. But the more Margot added to her already full basket, following Verdene down an aisle of vendors, the more she realized what she was really in need of.

Verdene herself remembered only the market vendors. How they watched her, turning to give her their full unfriendly stares. One by one they scrunched their noses as though the smells from the nearby fish market had finally gotten to them after thirty years of selling. Verdene, pretending to be untroubled by this, filled her basket with fruits, handed crisp bills to hesitant hands, and left. But once outside the market, she suddenly turned her head sharply to the right, meeting Margot’s stare.

Months later Verdene was pulling a weeping Margot into her arms to comfort her. But Margot jumped up, got dressed, and fled as if Ella had stepped from the photo and chased her from the house. She ran all the way home in the pitch-blackness of the night.

Verdene leans in to kiss Margot on the base of her neck, then on her mouth.

“I’m ready,” Margot repeats, her eyes caressing Verdene’s face. They are a deeper brown than her skin, with the sun in their centers.

“No, Margot. Don’t confuse desire for love. Maybe for you this is a—”

“I’m not confusing anything. I know what I want.”

“Do you?”

Margot drops her gaze.

“Just as I thought,” Verdene says softly, swallowing the edge in her voice. She gently pushes Margot off and cuffs her wrists with her hands. “I have something on the stove. I don’t want it to burn. My mother left me that pot.”



Verdene looks out the window of her kitchen and watches people go by dressed in their Sunday best—men wearing their good button-up shirts and shiny black pants ironed too many times. Women in their church hats and bright pastel colors, Bibles clutched in their hands like purses, each pausing to make a sign of the cross as they pass by the house. Verdene rolls her fists, her nails digging deeply inside her palms until the violent tremor rumbling inside her subsides. Sunday is the only day of the week that these people take the liberty to parade in front of her property, dressed in their holier-than-thou costumes. Verdene pauses in the stillness of the kitchen, turning on the faucet full blast to take her mind off them. But then she sees Miss Gracie, the old woman who lives next door. Her bearded chin is thrust forward, jutting from beneath the broad white hat that covers the rest of her face; her wilted body that once towered over men and women in River Bank is draped in an off-white dress with lace trimmings. A very handsome young man, whose face Verdene doesn’t recognize, is walking next to her, supporting her weight as though the woman cannot walk herself. She too stops to make the sign of the cross as she passes by Verdene’s house, instructing the reluctant young man to do the same. Had she been holding something other than her Bible, she would’ve flung it. Like that tree limb she wrapped in a bloodied cloth and threw in Verdene’s yard last week.