Patsy

by Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn

“Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and have never been before.”

Sometimes Patsy finds herself wanting to crush the image of herself that she sees at the center of her daughter’s eyes.

“Di Lawd will provide. Remembah di loaves of bread Him multiply?” Mama G always says. But it’s Patsy who has been providing, multiplying, and dividing—dwindling to a frayed thread.

Without the drama of casting out sin, Patsy suspects that her mother wouldn’t know what to do with herself. She is wholly animated by her contempt for the secular world.

It was as though the child somehow knew, even before she had started to live, that she would have to soothe herself.

Tru’s face closes as though she has already figured out that promises are merely sweet lies.

Who does she think she is to come to a white man’s country, expecting to walk into their positions without crawling first?

“Everyt’ing happen fah a reason,” Patsy says aloud now, sounding too much like Mama G, who willingly folded herself into the arms of life to be carried by it.

A lifetime of love and friendship lost tonight in Cicely’s effort to defend the prison she has built for herself.

The smell of fish hurries toward Patsy and she begins to think it’s a mistake, being here at the mercy of a woman who bleaches her skin and cooks fish this early in the morning.

She wills herself to get out of bed, wrestling with a familiar heaviness—one that has paralyzed her in the past, smothered her inside its vast darkness. She used to be frightened of it, but now it is a companion, quiet and omnipresent. She fights the urge to give up and surrender to it.

For Cicely is from Pennyfield—a place looked at by the government and other Jamaicans alike as a dump infested with human burdens. She talked as if she had forgotten what it was like to be dismissed by her own country.

Neither does she have the heart to disappoint him by telling him that she’s not into Bob Marley; that Bob Marley was forbidden in her household; that she’d rather listen to Peter Tosh, since Uncle Curtis told her he wrote most of Bob’s lyrics anyway. She still thinks it’s unfair that Peter is the lesser known of the two. Maybe that’s how it is—maybe life favors certain people and relegates the rest to living in their shadows.

Who knew her first handshake would be with a white man who swears he knows more about Jamaican food than actual Jamaicans?

“Love?” She continues to chuckle. When she sobers, she says, “We can’t afford to love in dis country. We not at dat place yet as immigrants where we can choose love. Like everyt’ing else, we tek what we can get—grab on to any lifeboat so we don’t drown in dis place call America. Love? Love won’t get we papers.”

THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF DEVIL’S COLD—ONE IN WHICH YOU cannot bring yourself to leave the room, much less the bed, to do the simplest things, and the other in which you go through the motions in a constant stupor.

There’s a difference between wanting to die and not wanting to live. She doubts she can explain this to anyone.

But di weirdest t’ing ’bout life is dat it’s only understood backward.

MOST TIMES, TRU FINDS HERSELF ALONE WITH THE LONG, everlasting silence of her mother. A silence that hums like the light poles in the evenings, resonant and consistent.

He looks like Jesus when he wears it down, which might explain Patsy’s instant dislike for him.

To Patsy, who hasn’t dreamed in years, America is a coffin.

in America Patsy had seen more black babies from third world countries with white people than with black parents. It’s as if they graduated from colonizing countries to adopting babies from those places, training them to be like them.

Here, in a place where she’s alien, invisible, she can reach over to do this one thing—this one private thing without fear. The city has become an accomplice, making it so easy to fall in love.

In this moment, she acknowledges that though she still has strong feelings for Cicely, they aren’t enough. She had used them as fuel to sustain her over the years—but she’s found new sustenance.