“Here comes the bride!” Bernice sang, for the nth time. But nobody was counting. Nobody cared. She took Agatha close to her, and hugged her, and kissed her on her face. And Agatha did the same thing. “You look like something to eat, you look so good!” She spun round and faced Henry and shouted, “Looka, you! you brute, take good care o’ this child, you hear? Or all o’ we, be-Christ, will give you licks like hell … pardon me, Agaffa dear.” Boysie was smiling. There was enough to drink. Dots had pinched two bottles of Dr. Hunter’s Haig & Haig Pinch, a bottle of Tanqueray Gin, and she had eased Mrs. Hunter of a half bottle of Cointreau liqueur and a large bottle of brandy, whose name she could not pronounce. (It always made her guilty to think that the Hunter’s never missed any of the liquor she stole from them.) Bernice had spared the Burrmanns’ liquor cabinet no less. She had displayed on the table two bottles of white rum, three bottles of Scotch — the Burrmann’s drank Ballantine’s — two bottles of Gordon’s Dry Gin, and three bottles of Italian vermouth. The food, which was West Indian, and which could not have come out of either Mrs. Hunter’s or Mrs. Burrmann’s kitchen, was regally laid out in hot delicious splendour.
The ham could have come from the Rosedale kitchen; the English muffins from Forest Hill. So too did the two bottles of wine, Blanc de Blancs. White Irish linen napkins covered this equatorial beautiful board. Bernice even brought upstairs Mrs. Burrmann’s tablecloths, her incense (“You think rose suit this kind o’ party, Dots? I think so, too”), and her candles and her beautiful candlesticks which looked like hands of bananas turned upside down. Secretly, she was saying to herself, “I hope that bitch don’t come back tonight! Not tonight, Lord!” But this fear was soon forgotten the moment Dots began to dish the West Indian food. It was exactly what she had yearned for, lately, when Bernice was visiting her: black-eye peas, and rice cooked with coconut oil, and with large hunks of salted pig tails in it. There were green bananas floating like heavy logs in pools of butter (the butter came from Mrs. Burrmann’s kitchen), and juicy pieces of smoked, boiled mackerel. On one large platter there were sweet potatoes, also submerged in butter. “God, look at all this food!” Bernice had said when it was ready. And now that she was helping to serve it, she said to Dots, “I wish my sister, Estelle, was here to eat some o’ this!” And water settled in her eye. She wiped the tear away with the hand that held the serving spoon.
“Where’s Estelle?” Agatha asked her, from across the room.
Bernice swallowed hard. Dots glanced at her like a conspirator. “Estelle? Oh, Estelle out somewhere with a friend. But she coming back before we finish …”
“Estelle has gone to a party that she had to go to, but she promised that she coming back here before you leave,” Dots said, helping with the lie.
“Last time I made the mistake of calling you and Bernice born cooks,” Agatha said, laughing this time. “But not this time. I learned my lesson, man. You don’t make them mistakes with you people, twice, man,” she added, trying to talk like them.
“Child, what’s wrong with you at all?” Dots teased her.
“She is one o’ we now!” Bernice said. She was practically shouting, she was so happy. “She is one o’ we. Gal, the moment you take up with a Wessindian man, you turn into a Wessindian woman, yourself, overnight. You is one o’ we! One o’ we.”
“Thanks,” Agatha said, beaming, and losing little colour, so embarrassingly complimentary was the compliment, and so natural. “I is one of you,” she said, trying to imitate the dialect once more, the dialect which alone could throw her irredeemably into the blood of being a West Indian. (But what they really meant was that Agatha was now a black person, since her husband-to-be was black. But the occasion was too gay, too happy, to introduce this racial aspect. Agatha understood it to mean just that. Bernice and Dots said it to mean exactly that. Boysie and Henry knew. It was only Brigitte, already busy with the drinks, who didn’t hear, and who probably didn’t care.)
“What about children?” Dots asked. “You planning ’pon children, ain’t you?”
“Leave the woman!” Bernice told her. “She isn’ on the honeymoon yet. Leave Agaffa alone, please. She is my sister now!” Bernice had been tasting the Scotch since four in the afternoon, when she and Dots sat waiting for the mackerel to boil. It was now nine o’clock. She was getting drunk. But she didn’t care. She was happy. “Later on, darling, I will take you to one-side, and tell you certain ins-and-outs concerning how to deal with a niggerman like Henry. There is certain instructions you are going to have to learn, early-o’clock.”
“Have you choose your wedding things, yet, Agaffa?” Dots asked her. It was becoming a discussion among women now, three friends, almost; and only one person, Brigitte, was left out. Brigitte had actually left herself out, because she could not stomach Agatha: she had hated her from the first meeting, and she hated her now. But she had come to the party because of Henry. She was content to stand with the men and drink with them, like them. “You wearing white? I hope you wearing white, eh gal? and that you ain’t playing you is one o’ these modernt women who feel they could wear any colour, like pink or blue or turquoise, on their wedding day. A wedding gown isn’t a wedding gown except it is white in colour and long to-boot, with a nice white veil all over your face and down to your shoulders, and white satin shoes and white gloves. Child, just telling you this make me remember the kind o’ wedding gown I wore to my
