“But I didn’ know you was yearning after chick and child, Dots!”
“Gal, what chick, eh? What child? I was only licking my mouth with Agaffa. I was only talking to make the girl feel at ease, ’cause she looks so blasted tense. And I don’t intend to throw ’way all this food, like the last party we had here. If they believe every thing that a coloured person say to them, then it is their bloody business, not mine!” She laughed softly, but you could still discern her sexy throat in the laugh. “But serious now, though. I would give anything to have my own child. I could depend on a child. A child don’t let down a parent. At least, mine won’t dare! Not the child I would have. But whereas a man could wander, a child doesn’t.”
“And how Boysie feel ’bout this?”
“Boysie? Boysie want woman, not child. Boysie want fun, not responsibility. Boysie wants a good time from life, not hindrances.”
“You ever thought o’ adopting one?”
“Adopting a child? Wait, don’t I still look like a woman to you? A strong, healthy, juicy woman like me! I look so old and done-with that I can’t find a man to breed me and give me a child? If it is a child I want. Man, Bernice, you talking just like these blasted white Canadian women! I is a West Indian. And Wessindians, the women, don’t adopt no child. Rather than adopt somebody-else child I will tell Boysie, my own husband, to go outside and look for a nice clean-skin strong black woman, with nice hair, and screw her and breed her, and bring that child o’ that union home for me to mother. Because this is the way I think. That is the way I feel. I feel so strong ’gainst adopting a child, that I would prefer a child that my husband have from a outside-woman, a child that is half mine by virtue o’ Boysie being my husband, than a child I don’t know nothing about at all.”
“You won’t do that. You couldn’t live with a child in your home knowing that that child come outta an arrangement with a outside-woman and your own husband, that that … that your husband been sleeping with that outside-woman. Don’t give me that.”
“Bernice, I just told you I would take my husband’s outside-child in preference to a adopted child. I mean it.”
“Well, you brave.”
“It ain’t a matter o’ being brave, good-Jesus-Christ, woman! don’t you understand that? It is cutting and contribing. And a person does have to cut and contribe, contrive, when he can’t do no better. Life is a choosing-thing, Bernice. Yuh can’t get everything you want …”
“I couldn’t do it.”
Melda oh! you making wedding-plan, carrying my name to obeah-man, all you do, can’t get through, I still ain’t going married to you … It was Sparrow, calypsonian, singing on a record about a woman who tried to force a West Indian man to marry her by questionable means. When the record started, Bernice looked at Dots, and together they watched Agatha to see her reaction. Agatha had by now, however, been so accustomed to the way West Indians spoke, that she had no difficulty in following the words. Bernice wondered whose idea it was to choose this record, just at this time. But its irony didn’t seem to bother Agatha. (It was actually Brigitte who chose it.)
First thing, Boysie held on to Brigitte and started showing everybody the latest steps he had picked up at the West Indian club, the Club Tropics on Queen and Yonge streets. The others didn’t know it, but Boysie had been taking Brigitte there dancing every other Saturday night, when he was supposed to be playing dominoes with Henry and Freeness.
Henry wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice: of not dancing with his hostess, and with Dots. So he walked over to the table where the food was, where Dots could always be found, and he held out his arms to her, invitingly. “Let we,” he said, smiling, sure of himself this time.
Dots turned her back on him. He felt the first pricks of a long pin going through his body. He felt Agatha’s eyes on him, on them. Dots turned her back towards him, and went back to choosing some food. “You don’t see your fiancée sitting down there? You is almost a married man now, boy, so left me out!”
The things that Henry said to her, in his heart, could not be reproduced. But he could not move away. Not now. He could not let this defeat and humiliation in front of Agatha be so complete for the second consecutive time. So he turned his attention to Bernice. He put his arm round her waist, affectionately, and said, “How Estelle these days, Bernice, love?” Dots was cackling with laughter now. She knew.
But before Bernice could say a word, Agatha was across the room, behind him, saying, “Darling, come and teach me how to dance the calypso. Come.” And he did that. But when he turned in the dance, with his face to Dots, he gave her such a dirty, incisively foul look! and he winded his behind on Agatha’s body implying that that was what he wanted to do to Dots: screw her up! And Dots knew. But she couldn’t care. Sparrow was telling them in the calypso how dirty a woman Melda was;
