An Embarrassment of Mangoes (26 page)

“Let’s not bother calling first,” Steve had said. “Gennel will be home from school by now.” So we had bypassed the pay phone outside Nimrod’s and headed directly up the road.

But the house is silent as we turn into the drive. No familiar voice sings out hello, and no noisy gaggle of little girls plays under the fishnet-strung carport. The only person we can see is “Gennel’s father,” as Dingis introduced him to us once, and only once, who nods hello and continues sharpening his cutlass. The quiet is broken only by the menacing scrape of the cutlass on the sharpening stone. This, plus several goats tethered just outside the carport, makes me think we’ve arrived as the animals are about to be dispatched to the stewpot. I start to walk away. “I don’t want to see this.”

Steve takes my arm. “He’s just cutting their tethers.” Then, to Gennel’s father: “Is Dingis here?”

He shakes his head no. Gennel, still wearing the pleated gray skirt and short-sleeved white blouse that are her school uniform, appears from the house, having heard our voices. “Mommy down in deh bay,” she says, and then explains why the house is so subdued. Dwight had an accident while diving for lobster—the bends, it sounds like—and Dingis had to have him flown to Barbados, the closest decompression chamber. He’s doing okay, but the strain on the household—loss of the breadwinner, the exorbitant cost of out-of-country medical care, daily long-distance phone calls—is clearly enormous.

G
ennel’s father helping out,” Dingis says, when we’ve again climbed the hill, this time calling first, “but still I had no money to get Gennel a birt’day cake.” She has shown us a letter from the hospital in Barbados: The bill for Dwight’s care is going to cost thousands, dollars that Dingis clearly doesn’t have. The good news is that he will recover, though it will be a slow process; however, his days of diving for a living may be permanently over. Dingis’s face shows the strain of the last week.

For the first time, she invites us inside the house to talk. Spotting the lineup of flip-flops at the top of the steps, we pull off our sandals before stepping inside. A TV on a small table dominates one end of the living room; a wall phone, the other; a few chairs are arranged around the perimeter, and a couple of inexpensively framed prayers and religious pictures hang on the walls. Several rooms are directly off the living room—bedrooms, I assume—their doors pulled most of the way shut. Gennel is wearing her bracelet; she had thanked us when we arrived, just as soon as she could politely break in on her mother’s account of Dwight, but a little later, when she leaves the room to get a photo album to show us, Dingis says, “Gennel even sleep with her bracelet on.”

Her musical voice is mournful. “But I couldn’t do anything on her birt’day.” Steve and I exchange quick glances. “Come to
Receta
for dinner on Sunday with Gennel and the girls and Allan,” Steve says. “We’ll make it a belated birthday party.”

On the way back down the hill, we stop at Nimrod’s to say hello and buy a loaf of bread. Before we even realize what he’s doing, Hugh has two cold Caribs open and in front of us on the counter. Saying no thanks would be rude and out of the question. The problem is, we spent longer with Dingis and Gennel than planned, and it’s almost sunset. When the sun drops below the horizon 12 degrees above the equator, it’s day one minute, night the next; there’s very little twilight. And with no flashlight, opening
Snack
’s combination lock on the unlit dinghy dock will be a little tricky.

We drink up quickly. I leave Steve to pay, run to the dock, and spin the lock in the last remaining minutes of daylight. But Steve doesn’t appear. I wait. And wait some more.

The hazard of being considered a regular at the local rum shop: Before letting him out the door, Hugh had shanghaied him into a shot of rum. “Welcome back to sweet Grenada,” Steve announces, grinning broadly, when he finally arrives.

T
he cockpit and cabin are decorated with balloons from a store in St. George’s. I’d made a last-minute visit to Mr. Butters’s the previous afternoon, my first since we returned from Trinidad. The fields looked more neglected than they had two months earlier, but he was still there. So was the bulldozer—still composting nicely.

“How are things, Mr. Butters?”

“Dey still makin’ me leave. Maybe tomorrow. Most of my stuff finished.” He had the tomatoes I needed, though.

The menu has been carefully planned. No way I’m going to attempt island fare with Dingis at the table—and, in any case, I figure it will be more fun if the food is typically North American—so pots of good-old North American–style spaghetti and meatballs and sauce are simmering on the stove. Remembering the finicky tastes of my niece and nephew, about the same age as the girls and Allan, I’ve toned down my cooking: The sauce has only a little garlic and no hot stuff in it; one loaf of the homemade bread that’s warming in the oven is slathered with garlic butter, but I do a second loaf with plain butter, too. And, figuring it will be the least popular part of the meal with my younger guests, I’ve made only a modest amount of salad.

It’s instantly clear I’ve made a gross cross-cultural miscalculation. As Steve and I hand plates around the cabin table, each one with a hefty meatball perched on top of a mound of spaghetti, I explain which loaf of bread has garlic butter and which has plain.
Everyone
—the little girls included—digs into the garlic bread. They only move on to the plain buttered loaf when the last crumb of garlic bread is gone. “This is grated cheese.” I point to a bowl of my freshly grated top-of-the-line Parmesan.
Everyone
spoons it on. Except for Allan, who carefully piles it next to his pasta, like a scoop of mashed potatoes, and proceeds to eat it with gusto, like a side dish.

“Do you have any hot pepper?” Gennel asks. I deliver a bottle of hot sauce to the table and
everyone
—again, the little girls included—sprinkles it liberally on the sauce.

Oh, dear. So much for toning down my cooking. I’m sure Dingis is by now convinced I don’t know a thing about proper spicing. But she kindly tells me how delicious everything is, how it’s the first meal she’s really eaten since Dwight’s accident.

And the kids: By the time Steve and I clear the table, they have each consumed two large meatballs. Beef is not a big part of the local diet—and certainly not in the form of meatballs. But these kids don’t turn up their noses at unfamiliar foods. They’ve cleaned their plates, salad and all. There are no parents here urging them to eat or they won’t get dessert. They eat with enthusiasm, taking real pleasure in my cooking.

And once Gennel has blown out her candles, of course everyone finishes a big square of chocolate cake thick with chocolate icing.

After lunch, “Uncle Steve” takes the kids and Gennel on a fast ride in the new
Snack
to Mt. Hartman Bay, the next bay to the west, then back to the Hog Island beach for a swim, this time with a wave and a welcome from Phillip. Dingis and I stay on board to talk—about Dwight, of course, but also, as always, about food. Despite the turmoil in her household, she had once again arrived bearing a gift: green coconuts from a tree on her property. “Do you know coconut water?” I assure her we both really like coconut water—leaving out that I particularly like it mixed with gin. I also omit that we’ve yet to open a green coconut onboard ourselves.

We’ve watched the coconut vendor in the St. George’s market on every trip to town, however. He wears bib overalls woven entirely out of coconut palm fronds, with the bib top usually pushed down around his waist. A high-crowned hat, also woven from fronds, shades his face. Holding a green coconut in one hand, he gives the top a couple of quick whacks with his cutlass, its 20 inches of curved blade flashing in the sun. He slices off just enough of the shell to create a small opening in the end, small enough that none of the coconut water spills out before the customer tips it up to drink.

Coconut water—not to be confused with coconut milk—is found in young or green coconuts that haven’t yet developed their hard, hairy inner brown husk and firm white meat. Green coconuts are also called “water nuts” and, in some places, “jelly nuts,” because of the soft, quivering flesh inside, which can be eaten with a spoon. A good-sized young nut will have as much as three cups of almost-clear thirst-quenching water. “Very good for you,” Dingis tells me. “Very nutritious.” She neglects to mention its other local claim to fame: Coconut water is reputed to be an excellent hangover cure.

As the nut ripens, the flesh thickens and hardens, and the hairy brown husk develops. The smooth green or yellowish outer shell of the young nuts turns tan or brown; but this outer shell is usually removed before the coconuts are exported, so what you see in North American markets is just the hairy brown inner husk. These mature “flesh nuts” have a lot less water inside, the space now filled by dense white coconut meat—which the island women grate and soak in boiling water to make coconut milk and coconut cream. On islands such as Grenada, where there are many more coconut palms than cows, they take the place of dairy milk and cream in everyday cooking.

As I tuck the green nuts under our canvas spray dodger where they won’t roll around, Dingis warns me to open them soon. “Deh water go sour if you leave it in deh coconut.”

S
teve’s bought himself a cutlass—less than $6 at Arnold John’s hardware store in town—so he can open coconuts and clean lambi the way the locals do. But, now, eyeballing the wicked blade and its proximity to the fingers holding one very smooth, very hard green coconut, we agree that using it seems like a very bad idea indeed. I substitute the Chinese cleaver from the galley, the 8-inch blade of which seems downright modest.

The guy in the market made it look easy. After losing a good portion of the sticky liquid from the first nut on
Receta
’s cockpit cushions, we decide opening a green coconut is a two-person operation. For the next one, we both lean overboard, Steve with the nut and cleaver, and me, holding our biggest bowl underneath. He thwacks and I catch the water that splurts out. Then I break out the ice cubes and Clarke’s Court rum (“cabin table, aft compartment: good for mixing”), to put a proper Grenadian spin on the gin drink we loved in the Bahamas.

I mix the clear coconut water with the Clarke’s Court, then stir in a couple of teaspoons of sweetened condensed milk. The translucent mixture immediately turns a lovely opaque milky white. Poured over ice into tall glasses, with one of our own nutmegs grated on top, it is a seductive, dangerous concoction: barely sweet, slightly coconutty, and very refreshing. Steve votes it a permanent place on my sundown repertoire.

S
teve’s parents are coming from Canada to visit next week, meeting us in Bequia. It’s time to leave Grenada for good. Dingis insists we come visit once more. “You need more coconuts,” she says, “and the golden apples are ready.”

When we arrive, she has already filled one large canvas sack with golden apples. Slicing one for us to try raw, she tells me I can also stew them with sugar. Following Gennel’s lead, we dip the wedges in a saucer of salt: A type of citrus fruit, the golden apple is tart and sweet at the same time, and full of sharp fibrous slivers that have to be cut or pulled away—a world removed from the apples we know. Meanwhile, one of the older local boys is shinnying up the trees to get coconuts, Dingis tells us, and a sack of them soon arrives.

But she also has several surprises, and she is almost girlish in her excitement as she presents them one at a time. “Merry Christmas,” she sings, holding out a carefully wrapped package decorated with a plastic long-stemmed rose. “Open it on Christmas. But dis for tonight.” She holds out the plastic container I had sent home with her from
Receta
, after Gennel’s birthday party, with the leftover meatballs, spaghetti, and sauce. Now it’s full of homemade chicken curry. The foil-wrapped package she hands me next contains still-warm roti breads. “If you could only stay, I could show you how to make them,” she says wistfully.

Steve has a last errand in Mt. Hartman Bay and promises to return and meet us in an hour at the jetty—which gives Dingis a little more time to load me up with more essentials.

“You need seasoning peppers.” It’s a statement, not a question, and she plucks some off the bush in front of the house. “Do you like grapefruit?” She doesn’t wait for a response before picking a few off that tree. She also gathers passion fruit and celery stalks as we go, to add to the pile under the carport.

Finally, laden with sacks and bags, we start down to the jetty: me, Dingis, Gennel, the ever-present Stinky, the four little girls, and Alisha’s mother, who has also come to the house to say good-bye. Even as we walk, Dingis is cramming me with a few last-minute bits of info. “Those are pigeon peas.” She points to a bush covered in delicate yellow blossoms. “Dey will be ready at Christmas. If you could only stay.” It is so very tempting.

About halfway down the hill, we pass two cruisers, strangers to me, heading up. They don’t raise their eyes from their feet. They don’t say “good afternoon,” as local custom demands. In fact, they don’t say a thing, don’t acknowledge our presence in any way, just push the rambunctious Stinky aside and continue climbing. The Grenadians might as well be invisible—a fact that is not lost on them. I am appalled by the cruisers’ behavior—they are
guests
on this island—and say so, loudly, to Dingis and the others. They just shrug. Unfortunately, I get the feeling they’ve seen it before.

Steve is waiting at the jetty, and Gennel immediately climbs into the dinghy. She’s coming with us, she says. Dingis continues to admonish us, as she has all afternoon. “Take care of yourselves. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

We hug good-bye, and I slip into the dinghy as Gennel reluctantly returns to shore. They all stand at the very end of the jetty, waving good-bye, as the dinghy pulls away. They continue waving, waving, waving, arms outstretched overhead, silhouetted against the green hillside of Lower Woburn, for as long as I can see them. I wave madly back as we cross Clarke’s Court Bay, my vision blurred by tears.