“Well, is not like yuh stick aroun’ at night to see dat we been using dis tired kerosene lamp even when is not a power cut. Poor Thandi haffi strain har eye undah dis dim light—” She gestures to the kerosene lamp. Inside it, the flame is dancing. Margot focuses on it. How weak it seems, trapped inside glass. This little flame that has the potential to destroy the whole house. Margot stares and stares, her own flame building on the inside, burning and burning until it’s too hot to keep to herself. “I’ll figure it out,” she says in a low, tempered voice.
Delores is silent for a moment. The fire hisses under the pot. “How?” she asks. The liquid from the spoon is dripping onto the floor.
“I said.” Margot lifts her head to meet her mother’s gaze. “I’ll figure it out. I always do.”
Her mother lowers her spoon and her shoulders. Strangely, something flickers in her eyes—a sadness, or perhaps regret, more pronounced than Margot has ever seen it. It reaches out across the room, over Thandi’s head, to confess that despite what she had done as a mother, despite the pain she had put Margot through, they are joined as mother and daughter. Her hand half lifts with the spoon—a gesture that Margot considers might be a first attempt at an apology. As she braces herself to receive it, Delores’s voice strikes her like a cane. “Take care of what, Margot? Where di money g’wan come from if it not coming already?” Delores laughs, her eyes wheeling over the room as if in desperate search for the shadows. “Yuh see me dying trial? She say she will tek care of it as if money fall from sky. Or grow pon tree. Di chile done lose har mind!”
“I’ll be up fah promotion any day now,” Margot says.
“Promotion?”
“Yes. A promotion.”
“To be what? Head servant?”
Delores’s derisive laugh drives Margot back into Thandi’s hair. But even her sister, in her stiff-backed silence, seems to be agreeing with their mother. Margot turns Thandi’s head this way and that way like a rag doll.
“Ouch! Ouch! Margot!” Thandi yells. But Margot doesn’t oblige. This time, as exquisite pain courses through her, propelled by her mother’s disdain, Margot pulls at her sister’s hair. The last thing she wants is to hurt Thandi. But Thandi’s pain is different—the type that comes with relief like a balm over a scab, a needle drawing splinter from skin. Margot’s stays. Delores’s voice rushes at her, flogging her with its taunt: “Tek care of what? Bettah yuh go set up shop as a market vendor at craft market than tell people yuh work in a hotel.”
They stare at her when she walks into school wearing the oversized sweatshirt, her hair newly straightened. Thandi ignores the attention, seeking the refuge of her desk in the back of the classroom. Heads turn as she makes her way down the row. Along with the speculation she hears her classmates whisper.
“Why is she wearing that dreadful sweatshirt? It’s like she has AIDS or something.”
“Or hiding a you-know-what!”
“No way!”
“Well, yuh know what they say. It’s always the quiet ones. Even her hair change. They say when you swallow, it’s extra protein. Good for the hair and skin.”
“Says who?”
“I read it somewhere.”
“But you think she has a man giving it to her on the regular?”
“Like I said, it’s the ones you least expect.”
Not since Kim Brady got slapped by her mother in front of the entire school for insulting one of the nuns has there been anything as gossip-worthy. Thandi keeps her head down during devotion in the hall where Sister Shirley, the headmistress, leads the school in worship. Sister Shirley’s voice soars above the collective: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit by thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Thandi makes the sign of the cross and focuses on her polished black shoes. The girls are ushered out of the hall under the direction of the prefects, older girls who have been given duties as disciplinarians. Before each class exits the hall in orderly lines arranged by height, the prefects march down the lines like army generals, holding notepads. They mark down the names of girls who have disobeyed some cardinal rule in attire—girls who aren’t wearing slips underneath their uniform skirts, girls wearing hair clips that aren’t black and inconspicuous, girls with any form of jewelry, girls wearing braids or any ethnic hairstyles outside of the accepted bun or neatly plaited ponytail, girls with ties that aren’t tied properly around the collars of their blouses with the short end of the ties tucked away or pinned down, girls with skirts that are too short or socks that are too long, girls with heels that are over two inches, girls with the waistbands of their skirts not showing.
When Marie Pinta, the assigned prefect for Thandi’s class (whose real name is Marie Wellington of the Wellington family in Jamaica, but who got her nickname because of her height), gets down the middle of the line to Thandi, she pauses. “Are you sick?”
“No.” Thandi replies.