“I didn’t say—”
“I know exactly what yuh didn’t say,” Delores says through clenched teeth.
Verdene opens and closes her mouth. Delores sees through her. She knows. Has always known. It’s obvious in the way she looks at Verdene, her nostrils flared and eyes ablaze. A sneer creeps up Delores’s black ugly face.
“Margot has a moneyman,” Delores says. “A man who can provide for her. So g’weh wid yuh foreign accent an’ yuh inheritance. G’weh wid yuh nastiness! She’s not like you!”
Verdene backs away from Delores’s stall.
“She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you!”
The woman’s screams get louder and louder the farther Verdene runs. The other vendors peer from their stalls to see the commotion. They see Delores screaming, Verdene hurrying away, bumping into things and people. She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you! She’s not like you!
She runs into a young Rasta fellow who is holding a box of carved birds. She has seen him selling them on the corner. The box falls, the birds crashing to the ground, breaking. The Rasta man raises his hands to his head, his eyes wild. “Yuh bruk me t’ings dem!” He catches Verdene by the arm, his grasp tight. Her basket falls and the fruits burst open on the pavement. The overripe breadfruit, when it hits the ground, sounds like a fist punching the soft, fleshy part of a body.
“Yuh haffi pay fah di birds!” the Rasta man says, glaring at Verdene.
“Let. Me. Go,” Verdene says through clenched teeth. Her chest heaves painfully as her heart presses against her rib cage. “I said let me go!”
But the Rasta refuses. “Gimme di money fah di birds.”
“Hol’ on pon har, John-John,” says one of the other vendors. “She was messing wid Delores earlier too. Come talk ah ’bout how she love Margot.”
“What yuh do to Mama Delores?” the man asks Verdene. “What yuh do to my Margot?”
His Margot? Verdene looks into his yellow eyes. “Who are you? You let go of me, or else.”
“Or else wah?” The man draws back his fist. Behind him, the vendors chant, “Do it! Do it! Do it! Punch di sodomite in har face!”
“Only a coward hits a woman,” Verdene says in a low voice that only he can hear. “My Margot would never want you.”
The Rasta man pulls Verdene’s face to his fist or his fist to her face. Verdene — who used to block fights between her parents, and who once felt the hard knuckles of her father’s hand in her left jaw to prevent it from fracturing another bone in her mother’s petite body — has perfected a self-defense maneuver that enables her to block the man’s fist and twist his arm behind his back. He grits his teeth as she holds his hand in place.
“When a woman says to let her go, you let her go!”
These words come from someone else. Must be from someone who is standing in the crowd, watching this taking place. For Verdene no longer recognizes her own voice.
“You heard me?” the woman — that other woman — says.
The Rasta man lets Verdene go, his eyes wide with fear. He watches Verdene pick up her basket, which is empty. He says nothing. Neither does the crowd that has gathered. Verdene suppresses the urge to cry. Not in public for all of these people to see how humiliated she really is. One by one she gathers the contents of her basket, knowing she will never return to buy produce from these people again. When she thinks she’s done, someone hands her an apple. Verdene looks up, from the clawlike fingers with blackened nails clutching the apple to the face of the woman.
“I believe this belongs to you,” the woman says; her face is a web of lines as though someone had taken off her skin, crumpled it like paper between fists, then put it back on.
Verdene hesitates before taking the apple, meeting the woman’s cataract-blue eyes. Miss Gracie grins with all her rotting teeth.
“Yuh mek Eve bite di apple,” Miss Gracie says, the accusation like the jab of a needle. “Now tek it back! Tek it back an’ go to hell weh yuh come from, yuh serpent!” She flings the apple at Verdene, hitting her in the head. Verdene drops her basket and runs, aware of the crowd stirring again with victory. “Yes, Mama Gracie, show har who run t’ings! Lick har backside! Buss har head!”
The Rasta man, who has suddenly regained his voice, shouts, “Next time me see yuh, you g’wan pay!”
Verdene hurries out of the market, realizing for the first time that Delores had been standing there in the crowd, her eyes red like the devil. It’s as though she had orchestrated the whole thing.
“G’long, yuh blasted sodomite! An’ nuh come back!” Delores says.
Delores’s final words hit Verdene like a rock in the back. Verdene picks up her pace and runs.
24
DELORES WATCHES THE WOMAN FLEE. THE EVIL THE SODOMITE has brought to the arcade makes her shudder. Of all the days, Verdene picked today to come to harass her.
“But what is it yuh want from me, Lawd Jesus?” Delores asks, her head tilted to the steel-blue sky. It must be a sign. An omen. Miss Ella’s daughter has never been up to any good. She poisoned Margot all those years ago, made her sick in the head for months. Margot was never the same after she became friends with that Verdene girl.
Margot was ten years old when Delores came home from work one day and saw her beaming. Immediately the muscles in Delores’s chest tightened at the sight of white teeth peering through brown flesh. Something seemed odd about it. For some reason, the joy and innocence in her daughter only infuriated her. Had Margot known what life could become for girls like her, she would never grin like that. And the wider the little girl grinned, the more Delores’s muscles contracted within the cavity of her chest.
“What is it yuh so happy ’bout?” Delores asked the little girl the day she saw her in the yard, putting a red hibiscus behind her ear.
“She said I’m pretty,” Margot responded.
“Who said so?”
“Verdene.”
“Verdene who?”
“Miss Ella’s dawta,” Margot said, pointing in the direction of the bright pink house.
When Margot was born, she cried and cried and cried, as though she had inherited Delores’s wails from childbirth. The baby was a burden, a living proof of something stolen, mangled, and destroyed. The man who was Margot’s father had called Delores pretty too. Had pinched her fat as a young girl who was barely thirteen and told her one day to sit on his lap. When she didn’t, he made her. He pinched and pinched and pinched her fat until Delores couldn’t take it. The final pinch was one so deep that Margot came wailing from it nine months later. And Delores wanted to silence it. Even the baby’s gentle breaths as she played or fed or snored were loud, and Delores fought the urge many times to stop her breathing with a pillow over her head.
When she saw Margot smiling that day, Delores wanted to crush the thing she saw in her daughter’s eyes: that new thing that sparkled and shone like that ungodly sun Delores yearned to rip from the sky. She clenched her fists. “Tek off yuh dirty clothes,” she told the little girl. Delores watched the light disappear from her daughter’s face; but not even that eased the pain inside Delores. “Me say tek off yuh clothes, gyal!”