“I can talk to Margot. Jullette told me everything. Charles, yuh listening to me?” She’s tugging his shirt, but he only holds his head in his hands. Thandi stands up and looks down on him. From this vantage point Charles appears shrunken, hopeless. Like a fisherman with an empty net. Thandi exchanges glances with Jullette. “Yuh not going to just let him give up hope like this, are you?” she asks Jullette.
“We might have more options. Right now I need to get dressed. I have to be somewhere. Mama already staying here wid we. You can’t stay.” She doesn’t look at Thandi.
“Please,” Thandi says, standing up. “I have nowhere else to go.”
“I don’t think you can be trusted,” Jullette says.
Charles raises his head. “Jus’ cool it, Jullette. She’s my girl.” Thandi looks into his face. She takes his hand in hers and turns to Jullette. Jullette is regarding her with the same meanness Thandi saw earlier. “Okay. I’ll be back soon,” Jullette says.
When she returns two hours later, she’s carrying two shopping bags full of clothing items. She throws a dress at Thandi and tells her to get dressed. “If you love Chucky as much as you say, then this should be easy.”
39
THE TAXI PULLS UP TO THE VILLA, ITS LARGE BLACK AND GOLD gate, the manicured hedges and the waving palm trees in the front yard poised like hula dancers welcoming them. The place sits like a castle overlooking Montego Bay and seemingly the entire island. Thandi turns to Jullette. “What is this place?”
“The headquarters.” Jullette pays the taxi driver.
Once they set foot on the property, the lights come on in the yard. Jullette knocks on the oak door, lightly at first. Then harder. A woman finally opens the door and peers at them. “Can I help you?”
“We here fah Alphonso,” Jullette says to the woman, whose brown neck and chest are covered with talcum powder. She has on a long denim skirt and a red top. A simple black leather bag is slung over one shoulder. In one hand she carries a maid’s uniform on a hanger, covered by a garment bag. In her other hand is a black plastic bag that she holds delicately at her side. The smell of some kind of a stew — maybe oxtail or red pea soup with pig’s feet — follows her. Her shift must be over. Her face contorts with a smugness that communicates to Thandi the fact that they are unlikely guests. She lays eyes on Thandi. Thandi tries to straighten herself, since she’s propped up like a rag doll with her right arm around Jullette’s neck, unable to walk in heels. “Don’t I know you?” the woman asks Thandi. Thandi is surprised. She has never seen this woman before. She might be younger than she looks. Maybe not a day older than Delores. But she appears tired. Not so much in a physical sense; it’s a fatigue Thandi knows too well, for she herself has felt it. The woman’s blackened lips don’t curve upward into a smile to match Thandi’s uncertain one. Thandi can’t tell if the woman is wearing black lipstick or if that’s her real lip color. A pair of large hoop earrings soften an otherwise hard, chiseled face.
“I don’t think we ever met,” Thandi responds.
“Hm.” The woman regards Thandi. “I’m good wid faces. That is one t’ing me pride me self on. I remembah t’ings you’d normally forget. Like di clothes ah person was wearing, dem shoes, di color ah dem socks, whether dem slip was showing, what dem request di first time me serve dem. But ah remembah mostly faces. Me mind tek pitcha like camera an’ store dem,” she says to Thandi.
But Thandi cannot remember her. She turns to Jullette, who says to the woman, “You’ve seen har sistah.”
Though Thandi knows why she’s here, the thought of Margot makes her want to turn back. Jullette kept telling her to wait and see. That Margot has no idea about their plan. Thandi imagines a string being pulled from her, unspooling every ounce of life left in her. She feels sick all of a sudden, the imaginary thread that reels from inside her taut.
“So di both ah oonuh is nothin’ but misguided girls like all di res’,” the woman says to them. “These girls who would do anyt’ing fah money. Yuh mother know yuh out here in di street, doing dese t’ings?”
“If she knew, she would ask for her cut,” Thandi says.
“It’s sad and disrespectful to speak of yuh own mother that way.”
“Clearly, yuh never met mine.”
Thandi thinks she sees a veil of sadness descend over the woman’s face. She fidgets with the black plastic bag containing the food, adjusting it, then readjusting it. Finally, as though finding the right words, she says, “Go home. Di both ah you. If oonuh know what’s good fah oonuh self, go home.”
Jullette holds the door, her movement swift. “Not before we see Alphonso. Him expecting we.”
Just then a shiny silver Mercedes pulls up, crunching stones under its wheels on the driveway. The woman closes the door behind her and walks toward the car. She lowers her things onto the paved walkway, her handbag, uniform, and plastic bag with food abandoned. Thandi watches her bend to the driver’s side, furiously knocking on the window with her knuckles. The driver rolls down his window as she gesticulates widely with her hands, pointing at Jullette and Thandi. “Dey claim dey looking fah you, sah!”
There is something magnificent in her movement. Thandi could watch her all night. The light from the car has become a stage light. In different circumstances she would have tried to capture the wild strokes of this woman’s arms in her sketchpad, the impassioned annoyance and disbelief that shake her body like a mighty wind shakes a tree. “Look at har,” Jullette says next to Thandi, staring straight ahead with a stricken look on her face. “Actin’ like she own di place. Is like she nuh know seh she’ll pass through dis godfahsaken life without a donkey hair to har name. She spen’ har whole life cooking, cleaning, an’ protecting dese people, t’inking what belongs to dem is hers too. But is bare crumbs she scrape from dem dinnah table fi build di pride wah she ’ave. A pride weh hide di truth dat she will always deh pon har black knee, scraping.”
Two white men get out of the car. One is wearing shades even though it’s night. The silver-haired one is dressed in an army-green general’s uniform, complete with epaulets.
“You’re sure that Margot won’t be involved in this?” Thandi says to Jullette in a whisper between clenched teeth while observing the people in the driveway.
“She’s not,” Jullette says with a smirk. “Dis is your show.”
“No need to worry, I’ll handle it, Peaches,” the man wearing the shades is saying to the maid. “You can go home now.” The woman gives Thandi and Jullette a final glance before picking up her things and hobbling toward the front gate like a bird, her neck long as if to match her annoyance. Thandi could have sworn that she was looking up into the woman’s flared nostrils earlier at the door; but her fading, small, off-kilter frame makes her seem less intimidating. Once she steps through the gate, Thandi lets out a breath. The two men make their way from the driveway toward the front door. The man wearing the shades jingles his keys in his pocket. Right behind him, the general takes stiff, measured steps.
“You’re early,” the man wearing shades says to Jullette, his tone as casual as his gait. “And I see you’ve brought a friend.”
“Yes.” Jullette gives the man a toothy grin. Here she doesn’t seem like Thandi’s friend at all, but someone who came to do business. Her demureness is a tool. “My friend is new. I’m here wid har to mek har feel comfortable,” Jullette says. Thandi cringes at Jullette’s inability to switch from backward patois to standard English in the presence of these men. Its cadence clashes with the beauty and elegance of the setting. Like two Dutch pots banging into one another. Thandi imagines the smirks on their faces when they turn away. But Jullette doesn’t seem to care about the way she sounds. She seems confident, like she owns some part of them. They laugh with her, not at her. Thandi doesn’t get the joke.