Verdene hesitates before taking the apple, meeting the woman’s cataract-blue eyes. Miss Gracie grins with all her rotting teeth.
“Yuh mek Eve bite di apple,” Miss Gracie says, the accusation like the jab of a needle. “Now tek it back! Tek it back an’ go to hell weh yuh come from, yuh serpent!” She flings the apple at Verdene, hitting her in the head. Verdene drops her basket and runs, aware of the crowd stirring again with victory. “Yes, Mama Gracie, show har who run t’ings! Lick har backside! Buss har head!”
The Rasta man, who has suddenly regained his voice, shouts, “Next time me see yuh, you g’wan pay!”
Verdene hurries out of the market, realizing for the first time that Delores had been standing there in the crowd, her eyes red like the devil. It’s as though she had orchestrated the whole thing.
“G’long, yuh blasted sodomite! An’ nuh come back!” Delores says.
Delores’s final words hit Verdene like a rock in the back. Verdene picks up her pace and runs.
24
DELORES WATCHES THE WOMAN FLEE. THE EVIL THE SODOMITE has brought to the arcade makes her shudder. Of all the days, Verdene picked today to come to harass her.
“But what is it yuh want from me, Lawd Jesus?” Delores asks, her head tilted to the steel-blue sky. It must be a sign. An omen. Miss Ella’s daughter has never been up to any good. She poisoned Margot all those years ago, made her sick in the head for months. Margot was never the same after she became friends with that Verdene girl.
Margot was ten years old when Delores came home from work one day and saw her beaming. Immediately the muscles in Delores’s chest tightened at the sight of white teeth peering through brown flesh. Something seemed odd about it. For some reason, the joy and innocence in her daughter only infuriated her. Had Margot known what life could become for girls like her, she would never grin like that. And the wider the little girl grinned, the more Delores’s muscles contracted within the cavity of her chest.
“What is it yuh so happy ’bout?” Delores asked the little girl the day she saw her in the yard, putting a red hibiscus behind her ear.
“She said I’m pretty,” Margot responded.
“Who said so?”
“Verdene.”
“Verdene who?”
“Miss Ella’s dawta,” Margot said, pointing in the direction of the bright pink house.
When Margot was born, she cried and cried and cried, as though she had inherited Delores’s wails from childbirth. The baby was a burden, a living proof of something stolen, mangled, and destroyed. The man who was Margot’s father had called Delores pretty too. Had pinched her fat as a young girl who was barely thirteen and told her one day to sit on his lap. When she didn’t, he made her. He pinched and pinched and pinched her fat until Delores couldn’t take it. The final pinch was one so deep that Margot came wailing from it nine months later. And Delores wanted to silence it. Even the baby’s gentle breaths as she played or fed or snored were loud, and Delores fought the urge many times to stop her breathing with a pillow over her head.
When she saw Margot smiling that day, Delores wanted to crush the thing she saw in her daughter’s eyes: that new thing that sparkled and shone like that ungodly sun Delores yearned to rip from the sky. She clenched her fists. “Tek off yuh dirty clothes,” she told the little girl. Delores watched the light disappear from her daughter’s face; but not even that eased the pain inside Delores. “Me say tek off yuh clothes, gyal!”
The little girl did as she was told. Her little arms moved slowly as she undressed. She stood naked in the backyard as Delores filled a basin with water.
“Get in,” she said. Margot’s obedience irritated Delores more. She felt the girl was silently mocking her. How vindictive could this child be, pretending to be so well behaved? Even when she was a toddler, waking up numerous times to catch Delores holding a pillow over her head, trembling, she batted her lashes at Delores as though Delores were God himself. She still trusted her. This had to be a trick. A plan to kill Delores with tenderness.
What Delores did next made the girl scream. She wanted to teach her a lesson. Delores held Margot down in the water and pinched and pinched. The little girl wailed under Delores’s thumb and index fingers all over her body. Delores made sure to warn her.
“Neva tek compliments from anyone else, yuh hear?” Delores said. “Especially not from another ’ooman! That’s sodomite ways!”