Here Comes the Sun(38)

“You hate swimming.”

“I was hot.”

“Thandi, look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Margot’s face is illuminated by the light of the kerosene lamp. Thandi never sees her during the day. She forgets what she looks like in daylight. Tonight her eyes and lips are dark, and in this lighting, her glare is ferocious, the charcoal she draws above and under her eyes making her look like a dog with rabies.

“Sit.”

“You okay?” Thandi asks, concerned. Her sister looks as though she has been crying.

“Don’t ask me anything. I said sit.”

Margot gestures to the chair at the table. Thandi hesitates. Her clothes are still wet and she needs to take them off. She sits anyway. Margot’s eyes fall to Thandi’s dark nipples. They stand erect through the thin material of the dress. She covers herself by folding her arms across her chest.

“Who were you with?” Margot asks.

“No one.”

“Thandi, look at me.”

Thandi raises her eyes. Margot appears to swallow something small, the base of her neck pulsing. “What’s going on, Thandi?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Margot walks to the kitchen and fishes several balls of paper out of the trash. The crumpled papers with the sketches that Thandi had ripped from her sketchpad.

“Can you explain this to me?” Margot asks, pushing them forward.

“What were you doing in the trash?” Thandi asks.

“Never mind that. Answer me. What is this?”

“An art project.”

“Thandi, all these years we’ve been sending you to school, and you’re wasting time and paper on ah lousy art project and disappearing to do god knows what? Do you know how much ah sacrifice!”

Thandi clamps her hands over her ears and shakes her head. “Just stop! I don’t want to hear this speech.”

Margot reaches over the table as if to smack her, but instead pulls Thandi’s hands from her ears and holds her wrists so tight that Thandi yelps. “You listen to me, an’ you listen to me good.” Margot lowers her voice into a hiss. “You have no idea what I do to make this happen. No idea.” She’s talking through her teeth, the words like strings being pulled through the tiny gaps. Thandi has never seen this glint in her sister’s eyes. It burns into her with more force than her sister uses to squeeze her wrists. “Do you know the sacrifices I’ve made so that you don’t end up . . .” Her voice trails off, but not before Thandi hears the tremor in it. She blinks it away, then releases Thandi’s hands.

“What has gotten into you, eh? What is all dis?” Margot scatters the crumpled papers with Thandi’s drawings on the table. They bounce off each other like balls on a pool table, some falling to the floor. “I thought yuh dropped art last term to focus on science for the CXC. Is dis what I’ve been paying for?”

“None of your business,” Thandi says, using one hand to massage a wrist.

Margot slaps her across the face. The slap echoes inside the empty house, reverberating against the walls, the ceiling, out to the veranda, where Grandma Merle sits, mystified by the night sky. “If it was Delores who found this . . .” Margot rattles one of the papers for emphasis, without apology. “You’d be dead. You have no idea what that woman is capable of. None whatsoever! Yuh don’t feel pain yet.”

Thandi clutches her cheek and runs out the back door, into the darkness. She sits on one of the steps with her knees drawn to her chest and her head resting on them as she cries softly. How could she have gone from the most exhilarating thing that has ever happened in her life to a moment filled with pure humiliation? She tries to conjure up the light that skipped in her veins earlier when Charles held her. But it only fades in the familiar darkness.

A few minutes pass and Thandi hears Margot’s footsteps approaching her from behind. She looks away when she feels the warmth of Margot’s body next to her, the jelly of Margot’s hips pressed to her bony ones. Margot has brought the kerosene lamp outside. They sit in silence, Thandi’s sniffles being the only sound. Margot finally speaks. “In the real world, drawing cannot get yuh anywhere.” She puts one hand on Thandi’s shoulder, then very gently cups her chin so that she meets her soft gaze. “I still have that heart you gave me. Remember it? It was the first an’ only time that someone ever gave me a heart.” She chuckles softly. “You know, by the time I was your age I was working? I started at fourteen years old. Had no time to think about what I like and didn’t like. I jus’ had to work. I learned the value of making money. Is our only way to survive. An’ even though money can’t buy everyt’ing like class an’ common sense, it can buy acceptance. That’s when people pay attention to yuh, accept yuh as you are. Yuh could be half ah donkey or ugly as a mus-mus, but every man, woman, and child would show yuh respect wid a likkle money in yuh wallet. When yuh work hard, something good would come of it.” The sides of her lips twitch, forming a smile or a scowl, Thandi doesn’t know which. She looks up at her sister in the faint light as she continues to speak. “But if yuh not careful, yuh lose yuh own shadow. Yuh sense ah purpose. So that day when you gave me that heart I folded it up and kept it. Because ah remembered why I work so hard doing what ah do. You gave me something I never knew could come from a person without strings attached to it. I didn’t have to do anything for it.”