Here Comes the Sun(27)

Margot’s virginity was plucked like a blossoming hibiscus before its time. But this won’t be Thandi’s fate. Margot chants this to herself over and over again under her breath, the only prayer she has ever uttered.

Just then Thandi’s eyelids flutter open as if something tells her she’s being watched. She raises herself on one elbow and rubs her eyes. “Why are you watching me like that?” she asks Margot, her voice gravel-like with sleep, but with that formal diction that irks Margot. Since attending Saint Emmanuel High, her sister speaks as though she comes from money. (Her speech is even more formal, more modulated than the diction Margot uses with Alphonso and the visitors to the hotel.)

“Good evening to you too,” Margot says. She looks away to give her sister privacy as she pulls her dress over her knees.

“What time is it?” Thandi asks.

“Yuh feeling sick?” Margot asks her sister.

Thandi swings her legs off the couch to give Margot space to sit beside her. Thandi rubs her eyes again, suppressing a yawn. “Just tired. All the studying, you know . . .” Her voice trails off.

Margot looks down at the papers around them. “Right. The CXC is jus’ around di corner. You’re on yuh way to getting nine ones, ah hope.”

Thandi nods. She glimpses Margot’s overnight bag at her feet. “You sleeping out again?” she asks Margot.

“What’s it to you?”

“Who’s the new man?” Thandi asks with a smirk. “You’ve been staying out a lot lately.”

“No one special. Don’t change the subject, Thandi. I got you out of a demerit fah wearing dat stupid sweatshirt.”

“For a nobody, he’s surely keeping you out the house.” Thandi says this in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way that surprises Margot. She attributes such an innuendo to the older women in River Bank with knowing gleams in their eyes.

“It’s none ah yuh business,” Margot says, suppressing a laugh.

“Is it that Maxi guy? Yuh know he checks for you.”

“It’s not him. He’s jus’ ah taxi drivah. And ah Rasta.”

“What’s wrong with dat?” Thandi asks.

It’s the most they have ever spoken this way. It’s a side of Thandi that Margot rarely sees, if ever. The trees are barren this year because of the drought, but Thandi has blossomed.

“If yuh ever come home saying yuh deh wid a taxi man or a Rasta man, ah g’wan bruk yuh neck,” Margot jokes. This makes Thandi laugh, throwing her head so far back that Margot worries her neck might snap.

When Thandi sobers, she says, “Can people really choose who dey fall in love with? That’s ludicrous.”

“Ludicrous?”

“You know. Like foolish.”

“Yuh calling me foolish?”

“No, no!” Thandi gestures with her hands. “I was jus’ saying that the concept of choosing who yuh love is . . .” Her voice trails off. “Forget it.” The razor cuts across Margot’s belly when Thandi says this. Forget it. The way Thandi says it makes Margot more aware that they aren’t on the same level at all. But isn’t that what Margot wanted? At this very moment Margot’s ignorance seems like a fly her sister merely fans away.

“Yuh not thinking about boys, are you?” Margot asks her sister.

Thandi wraps her finger with a loose thread in her dress.

“No.”

“Yuh not lying?”

“Margot!”

“Margot, what?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend, if it’s dat yuh asking.”

“Good. Yuh books should come first,” Margot says, sounding like Delores. And Thandi, as though she hears Delores’s voice too, shuts down completely like the mimosa plants in the cove that wilt when touched. The darkness Margot is used to seeing in her sister’s eyes as of late returns.

“Now is not di time for you to be thinking ’bout boys or nuh love. Yuh hear?”

“Yes.”

“Yuh promise me?” Margot asks, softening a bit.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

There is a ditch between them on the two-cushioned couch—the very first thing she ever bought with her salary from the hotel, an asset that Delores, brimming with excitement and the fussiness that comes with big purchases like this one, had Margot wrap in plastic. Between Margot and Thandi are holes in the plastic, and the fading of what used to be beautiful upholstery fabric underneath.



“A penny for your thoughts?” Verdene says to Margot. They had set the table together. Margot helped with the placement of the mats, plates, and silverware, and Verdene carried the serving bowls. A candle glows at the center of the table.

“Just thinking how I like being here,” Margot says. “With you.”

Verdene lowers her fork and reaches across the table, and Margot lets Verdene’s hand rest on hers. Margot recognizes in Verdene the older girl she fell in love with—the teenager she once knew, with a worldliness that used to make her blush. A girl who, to Margot, was as mysterious as the force that altered the weather. At ten years old she felt her stomach jump the first time Verdene called her pretty. Come to think of it now, Verdene Moore must have been called pretty all her life. She had that good hair that touched her back and that peanut-butter skin—some would call it golden—the shade that could get her a job in those days as a bank clerk or flight attendant, or a crown on her head as Miss Jamaica. Nevertheless, when Margot gave Verdene this compliment, she smiled as though Margot’s comment were a surprise. A generous gift.