Here Comes the Sun(57)

“Yes,” Thandi responds. “It’s for you. A belated Mother’s Day gift.” But Delores returns the book to Thandi without saying a word. She resumes cooking, stirring the pot of cowfoot soup.

“I want to be an artist. Maybe yuh can start to sell my drawings to yuh customers.” Thandi continues to talk as though talking to herself. “I’m really good at it. Brother Smith says I’m really talented. He nominated me to compete for an art prize at school. He even said I could go to a school for art.”

Delores stirs and stirs the pot, Thandi’s words seeming to drown in the bubbling soup.

“Mama, yuh listening?” Thandi touches Delores’s arm. “Mama, yuh hear me? I want to go to art school and I only need five subjects.”

“I’m busy,” is all Delores says. “I’m sending you to school to learn. So yuh g’wan be something good in life. Nothing less. Don’t come to me wid dis again, yuh hear? Yuh is no damn artist. We too poor for that. Yuh g’wan be a doctor. People can’t mek a living being no ch’upid artist. Do you see the Rastas selling in di market making money wid dem art?”

Thandi shakes her head, her eyes on the floor. “But there are different types of artists, Mama.”

“Different types of artist, mi backside! G’wan go learn yuh books, yuh hear? The CXC is jus’ around di corner. Why yuh entering a blasted prize fah? Why yuh not studying? Yuh need all nine subjects to be the doctor yuh want to be. Not a ch’upid prize.”

“You want me to be a doctor.” Thandi puts the sketchpad down on the dining table.

Delores peers at her. “Thandi, what yuh saying to me?”

Thandi cowers under the weight of her mother’s glare, her heartbeat echoing in her eardrums, her face hot. “Nothing,” she replies.

“Is who filling up yuh head with all this, eh?” Delores asks.

“I have a mind of my own, you know,” Thandi says. She walks outside into the darkness that consumes her, leaving the back door open.

“Where yuh going? Dinner will be ready soon!” Delores calls after her. But Thandi doesn’t respond. She’s too tired. She leans against the back of the house and slides down to her buttocks.



When Thandi disappears outside into the darkness, she takes all of Delores’s breath with her. The girl must be smelling her ripeness, Delores thinks. Not her Thandi. She’s supposed to be the good one, different from her sister. Had Thandi not been such a good girl all this time, Delores would’ve knocked her in the head with the spoon she uses to stir the soup. Thandi’s eyes held in them the same glint of that thing Delores saw in Margot’s eyes years ago; the same glint that made Delores look away in case it struck her down like lightning.

She cannot get the sketch of the half-naked woman standing in front of a mirror from her mind. The resemblance between Delores and the woman is uncanny, almost like a picture taken of her—same face, same eyes, same mouth, same sagging breasts resting atop the high bulge of her belly. The earnestness in her daughter’s eyes when she looked at her and the hopeful grin that spread across the girl’s face—one Delores hasn’t seen in a long time, Thandi always being so serious. In the sketch Delores saw everything she thought she had hidden so well, tucked away in the folds of years, heaped upon each other like steps that she takes one at a time. In her daughter’s drawing, she saw the lines in her face, her double chin. She saw an ugly woman—an ugly black woman with bulging eyes too wide to be peered into before looking away, and nose too flat on the broad face. In this sketch she was not human, but a creature. This is how her daughter sees her—bull-faced and miserable. All Delores’s secrets and insecurities are exposed in the gaze of this child.

Margot was barely fourteen at the time. In the summers when Margot was out of school she would help Delores carry things to Falmouth and spread them out so that Delores could sell. While Delores sold items to tourists, Margot would help count the change and wrap the fragile items in newspaper. One day a tall, dark-haired man walked into Delores’s stall. He was wearing sunglasses, like most tourists. He had a presence about him, an air Delores associated with important people—white people. Like the ones who just bought out her stall. Except the man wasn’t white. A mixture, maybe. A mulatto kind. He wore a button-down shirt that revealed the dark hairs on his chest. When Delores peered up at him, she saw he was peering down at Margot. He turned to Delores, his eyes hidden behind the shades. “How much?” he asked in a voice that sounded to Delores like thunder.

“Di dolls are twenty, sah. Oh, an’ di figurines guh for fifteen U.S., but ah can give yuh fah ten. An’ di T-shirts! They’re unique, sah. One of ah kind! Only fifteen dollah.”

“No,” the man said, returning his focus to Margot. “I’m talking about her.” He used his pointy chin to gesture to a skinny Margot, who, at the time, had barely started menstruating or growing breasts. Delores looked from her daughter to the tall stranger wearing the sunglasses. “She’s not on sale, sah.”

The man pulled out a wad of cash and began to count it in front of Delores. Delores watched him count six hundred-dollar bills. She had never seen so much money in her life. The crispness of the bills and the scent of newness, which Delores thought was what wealth must smell like—the possibility of moving her family out of River Bank, affording her daughter’s school fee, books, and uniforms, buying a telephone and a landline for her to call people whenever she liked instead of waiting to use the neighbor’s phone—all these possibilities were too much to swallow all at once. “Sah—but she—she’s only fourteen.”