The Heart Does Not Bend (20 page)

Rose says fate brought us together. I say it was a simple cloth bag. I should have left the bag at the clinic’s front desk for them to return to her, but her address was typed on an envelope in the bag and I decided to return it myself. I had an urge to take the bag home with me and explore its contents. Diagrams, designs of gardens large and small were scribbled on scraps of paper. Inside tiny notebooks were names of plants and flowers, some I’d never heard of. There were some university calendars in the cloth bag, too, one dog-eared at the pages listing horticulture courses. A small bottle of Japanese musk oil was in a corner of the bag, and I dabbed drops of it behind my ears.

I kept the bag for several days. To this day I still can’t explain why, but I think I’d fallen in love with its contents.

I finally phoned Rose and told her I had found her bag. I apologized for the delay, and we made arrangements to meet midmorning at a coffee shop in Kensington Market. What was to be a brief exchange of a cloth bag and a cup of coffee turned into hours of talk. She was from Grenada, the Isle of Spice. Mountainous, lush, fertile. Grenadians say, “Throw a seed on de ground and fruits, vegetables, flowers spring up.” Rose was all that: sensuous, lush, warm and generous.

That day in the coffee shop she wore cut-off blue jeans and a loose white cotton shirt, buttoned all the way down the front. Her thick, black, baby dreadlocks barely touched the
nape of her neck. Her laughter was infectious, and I immediately liked that about her, for laughing didn’t come easily to me. And her openness was refreshing.

“Did you go through my garbage bin of a bag?” she asked, laughing. I laughed, too, and avoided admitting to my curiosity. From the coffee shop we moved on to a small Caribbean take-out joint and then to Rose’s house. She devoured the food in no time, talking all the while about her island and all that she missed. I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the food as she was, and I promised her that soon I would let her sample my grandmother’s cooking. Rose had no family here, except for an older brother she was estranged from. She’d left the Isle of Spice years earlier, coming to Canada to stay with her brother and his wife while she finished high school. She’d meant to stay on with them through university.

“It never worked out that way,” she explained to me. “I finish high school with honours, but things so bad with mi brother and his wife I had to leave, too much confusion …and they never like my way of living my life.”

“You just picked up and left?” I asked.

She laughed again. “What you want me to do, wait until they kick me out? Girl, I just get up and leave, and stay with a friend until ah get my own place,” she said, waving her hand at the tiny bachelor apartment. “I couldn’t go back home. I had to finish what I set out to do. Get a university education. Aaye.” She shook her head, and despite the dance of her beautiful locks, her eyes betrayed her bravado. I learned later that she had just turned twenty-two, about four and a half years younger than I.

Lunch turned into dinner, then it was time for more
coffee. It was early spring and the evenings were still short. I called Mama to say I’d be late, and Rose and I talked long into the night. I told her about the dead-end street and my family.

Within weeks we’d become fast friends, sharing our love for plants and talking about travel, music and the Caribbean. In time we graduated from coffee and tea to rosé wine and mango-almond cheesecake, which Rose loved with a passion. We talked freely, though I skipped over my grandmother’s binges because they were a thing of the past. I told her about Justin. And I told her about Myers and our garden back home, and about Grandfather Oliver, Punsie and Petal.

There were stories in her family, too: an uncle who’d sided with the Americans in Grenada in 1983, which resulted in hush-hush deaths and shame on the family name; a sister who ran off with a half-brother; another family member, an immigration officer, who was caught taking home goods confiscated from tourists. For Rose nothing was too serious for her not to find humour in, even if it meant digging deep. Of her mother and father she spoke with respect and gratitude, and I warmed to her even more. They were close to Mama’s age.

Rose became as familiar with my household as I was with hers. Like me, Mama and Uncle Mel responded to her ready laughter. Ciboney and Vittorio loved to play tag with her, and she spent hours playing snakes-and-ladders with them. Rose was everything I had liked about Punsie and Petal. She had the same adventurous spirit. And of course there was her laughter, her scent and her flawless coffee-brown face.

With encouragement from Rose, I applied for a scholarship to study horticulture at the University of Texas. I had never
imagined myself going to college. In high school I’d dreamt of working as an assistant in a plant or florist shop, but that was before Ciboney. I had devoted myself to her, harvesting all the joy that I could. Gardening was something I did in Mama’s backyard, and I hoped that someday I would have a meadow of flowers of my own. But I had never been lucky with dreams, and if I hadn’t met Rose, I would never have believed they could come true.

She had already been accepted to the University of Texas for the following fall semester, and she convinced me to go for a scholarship and join her. I didn’t want to leave my daughter, but I knew I couldn’t take her with me. For a brief moment I understood why Glory had left me with Mama to come to Canada. Had it not been for Mama, I wouldn’t have taken the plunge; I would have stayed home and fulfilled my duty as a mother, keeping my pledge that I would never leave Ciboney in anyone else’s care. But Mama remembered how I’d played in the dirt at Myers’s elbow, and she believed in me.

Next to Ciboney, there was nothing I loved more than flowers and gardening. And so, with the promise of a better future for me and my daughter, I left her with Mama. It seemed the right thing to do and it was what I knew: to make a better life one had to go away. I made two promises to myself: that I would come back every holiday to be with my daughter, and that I would stay in Texas no longer than the required time.

I spent some of the best years of my life at university. It was my first taste of real independence. I could come and go as
I pleased. It was almost like being a child again. I was free from responsibility except to myself. Rose and I took our classes together, we ate together and shared a room. Soon we were inseparable.

Mama was still taking in children when I left for college, still cooking and tending to Uncle Mel. She visited Glory and Uncle Peppie a few times in Atlanta, and they tried to persuade her to spend more time there. She always refused. At first I felt guilty, knowing that Ciboney was part of the reason, but later I realized that Mama needed people who needed her, and her own children had long outgrown her.

I came back to Toronto for Christmas and over the summer, and even though I enjoyed the freedom and space Texas afforded me, I was always happy to be at Mama’s house, to be fed, to listen to Uncle Mel’s stories and, more than anything, to see Ciboney and Vittorio. I was glad they were growing up like brother and sister.

During the holidays I caught up on the activities of the family. Mama always had an earful waiting for me. Uncle Peppie had no guts, Glory didn’t love her enough, Freddie had abandoned her, and Mikey was on the road to destruction. Mama encouraged me in my studies and assured me that all was well with Ciboney. Each time I visited, I brought games, educational toys and books for her and Vittorio. I took them to movies, to the park and the zoo, to give Mama a little holiday.

The second year, I began to be troubled by Vittorio’s behaviour and the way Mama dealt with it. The day before Christmas I was sitting watching television with the family. The tree was loaded with gifts. An electric train appeared in
one of the commercials, and Vittorio pointed to it, yelling, “That’s what I want!” and jumped around excitedly.

“We bought you a lot of other things,” Uncle Mel said. “Next year, if that’s still what you want.” Vittorio pouted and badgered. I sat there and watched Mama hushing him, telling him not to mind. On Christmas day he unwrapped a brand-new electric train.

There were other incidents I should have taken seriously but didn’t. I trusted Mama and never questioned her judgment. One evening there was shouting in the living room and toys flying about. I heard a scream and the sound of a slap. Mama was the first in the room. “Unnu stop de fighting, what wrong wid unnu. Yuh both mus learn to live like brother and sister. Unnu clean up de mess.” I would have been satisfied had I not overheard the rest of the conversation.

“It’s not my fault, it’s not me!” Vittorio shouted.

Then Ciboney’s voice: “Mama, I didn’t start it. He hit me first.”

“Never mind, just clean up de games, don’t tek no notice of him,” Mama said to Ciboney. I heard Vittorio in the background, teasing Ciboney. Mama repeated, “Don’t mind, put away de things, ignore him.”

During the rest of the holiday I watched that scene play again and again. I reassured myself that I had less than two years to go at college, and I would make things right when I got back.

Each time I returned to Texas, I’d soon forget my worries. Rose had the ability to smooth them all away. Just being outdoors, sifting the dirt through my fingers was soothing. The campus was so beautiful, with its manicured lawns,
mature trees, nature trails to get lost in, greenhouses, decorative beds and a full research farm. Were it not for Ciboney and Mama, I could have spent my life there.

In those first years Rose didn’t come back to Toronto for the holidays. She went home to Grenada for Christmas, and over the summers she worked in Texas. Mama was fond of her and grateful that she had encouraged me to go to college. She always packed me off with a Christmas black cake, puddings and other baked goods to share with Rose. And with Rose’s mother’s cakes and jams and jellies, we had enough desserts to last us through the school year.

With each trip to Grenada, Rose came back with rich family anecdotes. I admired her dramatic flair and her openness. Though she adored her family, she did not shoulder their problems. I wished I could be like her, free of the responsibility of family history, free of its disappointments.

When did things change between Rose and me? I can’t say precisely. At some point I began to take notice of her short, stumpy toes. Her large ears, which she hid with her locks. The smell of Japanese musk and sweat next to me in the greenhouse.

When I returned after one Christmas in Toronto, Rose wanted to celebrate her birthday by going dancing. And she wanted to choose the place. Where she took me that night wasn’t really a surprise, though I would have been too shy to suggest a bar for women. Later that night, back in our apartment, Japanese musk was warm and sweaty on my tongue.
Her hands touched me everywhere. We soaked up glasses of rosé wine and savoured the taste of each other’s tongues. I let her suck on my breasts and held my breath as her teeth grazed them. I pulled her up on me, caressed the nape of her neck and her black locks, rich with the smell of spice. I tasted her nipples, then rolled on top of her, my tongue tracing her sinuous body. I knelt between her legs to sweet pleasure. Spent, I luxuriated in her scent into the morning.

In our passion we promised each other that we’d be together forever. Someday we’d open a botanical garden, complete with butterflies, exotic tropical plants, caterpillars and even lizards. When we weren’t making love or studying for an exam, we talked for hours about our future. We read up on new plants, ran experiments at the research farm and read botany as if it were poetry.

Though I continued to go to Toronto for the holidays, I was always eager to return to Rose and the world we had created for ourselves. But I couldn’t pretend that things were not changing all around me, and where I least expected it, at Mama’s house. During my third year away, she found religion and was attending the Open Door Pentecostal Church of Jesus Christ, which met in a basement around the corner from our house. That summer both Vittorio and Ciboney were going to services with her. She tried to get Uncle Mel interested, but he preferred to drink and entertain his friends. She seemed content with just the children going with her. Over the summer I went to one or two services with her, but I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm. She often sang hymns around the house, her voice rich and warm as always:

More than anything I wanted to share my happiness with Mama, but I knew better.

Ciboney and Vittorio were growing fast. They had grown close, too, and were as inseparable as Rose and I were. I wanted time to talk with Ciboney alone, to discuss things that would set the stage for my and Rose’s return. But Ciboney went nowhere without Vittorio. Whenever we planned to go out, she asked if Vittorio could come. It would have been selfish of me to say no, so I gave in every time.