No Steel Drums (excerpt)
2016, Fiction
By Steph Bridges
Dany goes away to school, each item on her checklist ticked off and carefully packed away in a suitcase. A summer’s toil for the wardrobe of a New England prep school girl. A few items easy to find in Charlotte-Amalie or San Juan: white button-down shirts, khakis.
Then those things foreign to the tropics: corduroys, peacoat, duck boots, scarf, wool hat, mittens, field hockey stick. Ones that took Claire and Dany months to get hold of, calling in favors of cousins in Long Island, of friends like Flip and Christophe travelling to or via New York in July. Of hunting down packages due to arrive in the mail that went MIA in customs or the back room of the post office. These are the exciting ones.
And when the clothes and toiletries and field hockey stick have been neatly packed away, Claire adds other things too, things she thinks have the greatest chance of offering her daughter, far away, a whiff of home. Imperial Leather soap, strong enough to strip tar from bare feet. A bag of dried mangoes. Three dried Ginger Thomas blossoms, tucked into the mesh side pockets of the suitcase, carefully pressed for a month between two hardbound books on top of Claire’s chest of drawers. Their scent is not strong but if you lean close, it is there, if faint.
And all said and done, the suitcase is impossibly light. Lifting it, Claire panics. What has she forgotten? Something critical? It seems too meager, that this is all she with which she will send her daughter into the world.
Claire flies with Dany to Boston, drives her to the sprawling campus. Brick buildings line the top of a ridge; white-shingled buildings peel off to either side. Chimneys of other, invisible buildings peep from behind clusters of trees. Asphalt paths crisscross velvety lawns lined by perfectly manicured flowerbeds. At the bottom of the hill is a pond, its murky surface mottled by the shadows of tall oak and maple trees.
Blue paper signs with white lettering are attached to wooden stakes at each fork in the drive, saying Welcome Students, then directing their way.
It is early September and sunny. Mothers in cardigans, capris and ballet flats, their hair perfectly blown out and colored a blonde more ash than brass direct their husbands in the heavy labor while themselves holding token bedding or pictures.
There are other mothers too, mothers of all sorts, but it is these women of whom Claire is most aware, seeing her other life looking back at her, careful not to be caught staring.
They grumble about the heat (the heat!) and fan themselves with the school handbook each student received upon checking in in the auditorium, a room with paneled wood walls and plush red velvet seats.
Dany is a sponge, made angry or sad or happy or thoughtful by what happens to others, what happens around her. Like her father – taking too much to heart, then staggering beneath its weight. For Dany, Claire wants a good example. A place where absorbing everything will do her daughter no further harm.
Over dinner in a café ten minutes walk away (described in the Parents Handbook as ‘Mediterranean casual’) Dany asks Claire about her plans.
“Mine?”
“Yours,” Dany says, carefully stacking a piece of basil, tomato and mozzarella before gingerly lifting her three-tier bite to her mouth. “When are you leaving?”
“After dinner. Is that right?”
Dany nods. “Sarah asked to hang out then.” Sarah, the roommate. “Her parents already left.”
“What’s she doing for dinner?” Claire asks. “Should we have invited her?”
“No,” Dany says. “She knows a girl from tennis camp and they’re eating together in the dining hall.”
“Did you want to go with them?”
“No,” Dany says. “I wanted to eat with you.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“You looked sad.” Dany looks up from her plate.
“I’m not sad. I’m excited for you.”
Dany reaches across the table and lays her hand on Claire’s. Not holding, just lightly resting. “Don’t be sad, Mom.” Because of course fifteen is old enough, fully grown in some ways – not in actions or experience – but old enough to see through words. “It will make me sad,” Dany says, turning back to her plate.
And then she’s gone:
That fall, the island starts to close in on Claire. Tightening around her, constricting. Becomes stifling, claustrophobic. A small island whose smallness she now feels with every move.
Things she has lived with for twenty years begin to drive her mad.
Water. When there is enough water in the cistern to shower, the way it trickles out of the showerhead in the second-floor apartment, the walls grunting with the ancient pump’s effort to raise it from the underground cistern. The hot water disappears long before the shampoo in her hair. At the first sign of cooling, she steps out from beneath its stream and kneels on the bathroom floor, flipping her head over the tub, reading a book as she waits for the tepid water to wash the suds down the drain.
The mosquitoes that buzz about her home, coming through the gaps in the seam between doorframes and screen, where, over and over, her family has pushed the door open or caught its backswing with hands and feet pressed against the mesh itself, ignoring her pleas to please use the handle.
The quality of the fruit and vegetables in the shops – chilled and bruised and sticky with chemicals sprayed on the trip from Central America or Florida. This, on an island with soil so fertile seven countries have shed blood to fly their flags in the fort, seven countries have fought to reap what here could be sown, where sugar and tobacco and cotton can grow overhead almost untended, where to drop a mango pit in the yard is to spring a tree.
The post office, the same as always, now becomes her personal hell. The crowded corridor, the jostling. The benches along both walls on which camp the people waiting in line and others keeping them company. The same geriatric desk clerk, his glaucoma and arthritis making the confirming of an address, the looking up of the postage cost, feel like an underwater dream of frustration, a scene played out in slow motion.
Power outages. Service interrupted, telephones down. Lines swing slackly between haphazardly spaced, lilting poles. There are no back-up generators. A tree branch downs a line on a busy road by Salt River. Christiansted loses power for a week before WAPA locates the source of the problem and sends crews to make the repair. This on an island twenty-one miles square, where it is possible to drive down every road twice in a day.
And then there are the rolling black-outs, manmade, announced by a schedule neatly printed in the paper: Eight pm -midnight for Fredriksted, West End and King; midnight to four am for Company, Prince and Northside A;, etc… Except it never happens like that. They come sooner or later, last longer. It would be better if WAPA didn’t admit to having planned them at all.
The burnt-out cars. Dozens of them are parked in the brush along Scenic Drive, a sleepy dirt road that traverses the mountain ridgeline. In places, brush has been hacked back from the shoulder and rasta camps occupy the clearings, the air fragrant with the smoke of oil drum fires and weed. It is a road of switchbacks and dips but also breathtaking rises, points at which the trees fall away and the island spreads before you. This is where people have decided to leave their trash, their scrap, their rusted out rides.
She feels a pressure in her chest, a mounting panic. Nothing changes. Each day is the same as the day before, it’s been so for years. Or rather, there have been changes, but not for the better. The island gets more decrepit, more overlooked, more bypassed. And now her children are gone.
Each morning, as she has done for twenty years, she walks through town as shop owners sweep the sidewalks, as duty free jewelers roll up the aluminum grills guarding their windows. She unlocks the doors of the Stone Balloon and throws open the shutters. She spends the day on her feet, seating customers, taking inventory, looking in on the kitchen as Will sits at the bar or in the sun by the door, drink in hand, greeting locals and the few September tourists with his trademark warmth. Some days, he adds coca cola to his rum before noon in an attempt to please or appease her.
Most afternoons, Claire catches herself regarding the sky, watching for the rain that arrives every day between three and four, give or take thirty minutes but a crucial thirty minutes, the difference between the girls walking home from school and Claire going to fetch them in the Jeep. Habits are hard to break.
When the girls were born, with their loud clambering needs, she did not know at first how she would survive, how anyone survived so totally in the service of another and remained whole. There was a loss of self, sure – and of this everyone had warned her – a wholesale humbling that started with the distortion of her body, which was never again the body she had known as herself since she was a teenager, had known how to dress and flatter and use. For it is childbirth that makes the body unvirgin, that blows out the abdomen, that distends the breasts. And her mind too was forever changed, running along two tracks, always, every minute of the day – the second track constantly tracking the needs and whereabouts of her babies, her girls. And while it was easy to mourn the losses – her pre-motherhood body and mind and life – it was nostalgia, only, because whatever was lost was also replaced; the after was different, but it was not less.
But the children made things easier with Will because she spent less time wanting from him what he would not give and he spent more time doing what he thought was worth doing. He threw himself into getting the Stone Balloon as entrenched as he could in the town’s way of life through force of his personality and a generous pour.
It goes so quickly, everyone said, and, Claire has learned, everyone is usually right. It seems like just last year that whole days were filled with reading and re-reading Babar and unwinding tiny fists from the cords of lamps. Days in which she thought she would scream with boredom, where it felt like she did nothing but somehow ended each day utterly exhausted. If ever she could understand the appeal of drinking, it was during those years. But now she sometimes thinks she would give everything she owns for one more such day.
For eighteen years, the girls were the buffer between her and Will that made it possible to breathe. Now there is only Will. And sometimes she really hates him.
They close at one. For twenty years, their routine was: she opened, Will closed. She used to avoid late nights at the Stone Balloon, when the balance tips from restaurant to bar, when the air gets sticky with bodies and booze, when voices get louder and people get uglier. But this fall, she has found herself staying there late into the night, avoiding the creaks of their home’s old walls settling around a new emptiness. And tonight is no different.
It is poker night. The men are sweating, crouched over their cards. Waiting as each man pauses, deliberates, delivers his verdict. Their faces are red with drink or the heat, which is overwhelming. Not just because the doors and windows are closed: here the nights are little cooler than the days.
When she was first on the island, she didn’t know how they could stand it, this heat. People went about the business of their daily lives while even the act of getting dressed almost defeated her, as if the heat gave the air weight: to move through it was exhausting.
They close at one but it’s now three am and they are breaking the law, being open this late. Will laughs when she tells him the time, says it’s been the same each Thursday for the last fifteen years. She didn’t know. She was never here.
The bar is thick with smoke, sweet with liquor. The men wipe their hands through their damp hair and then on the lap of their shorts or on the sides of their seats, leaving oily handprints on wood she waxed just last week. Glasses sweat rings on the teak edge of the card table.
That’s the nature of things, though, undone as soon as they’re done. Unlike Will, she still believes they are worth doing.
She tilts up the slats of one louvered shutter. Weak bands of light stripe the sidewalk. Behind her, poker chips clatter as they are dragged across the table. She leans into the window, grateful for the breeze that cools her flaming cheeks, that licks dry the sweat at her temples.
When they first moved here, they slept in the back room, amongst the stock. They leaned a piece of plywood across the door to the bar and lifted it to the side when they came and went. Even so, during the day the dim back room had felt private, protected.
But at night, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, with only a window screen between them and the overgrown courtyard and beyond it the street, she had felt frightened, exposed.
Nights, she would curl towards him, away from the window and its sounds: wind sweeping through king palms, brush cracking at some creature’s passing. Radios blaring, people laughing, glass breaking. The clatter of trash bins overturned by scavenging dogs. And other sounds that were as vivid, as outsized at night as the island’s colors were during the day: birdcalls, the drone of insects. And so she would inch away from the window, towards the center of the bed and the arch of his back.
But to be too close to the heat of his body was unbearable. Even at night, even naked, the sheet kicked off the bed, she recoiled from him as if she’d pressed her skin against sun scorched, midday sand.
In the grey hours before dawn, before the first trucks rumbled down the sunken stone streets, once or twice she had heard the thunder of horses, a wild herd moving through town.
The world had felt wild then.
It is hurricane season, the doldrums. The wind is dead, the water flat. It is very quiet without the whispering trees, the pounding surf. Every time clouds pass before the sun, Claire thinks maybe this is it, the leading edge of a storm. She watches shadows fall over the town, inviting something, anything, to swell onto the shores.