Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Donna Hemans
girlhood. We’d been to Rome, São Paulo, Paris, Panama. My mother
always said one should learn new things and stop relearning the old, so
we’d visited new places instead of the old one she grew up knowing. My
father used to come here to Jamaica now and then, but Mom said her
family was long gone. She sent barrels upon barrels though. Brad and
I never fully believed her, though there certainly are lots of cousins in
England. As teenagers we made up stories of what must have happened
to create such ambivalence. On the one hand, she was raising us in
New York as if we were Jamaican children, but never allowing us to
see for ourselves the island on which the rules we lived by originated.
Even though Jamaica isn’t like Haiti with its coups or Cuba with a longterm
dictator, we lived as if we were exiled in America. So we made up
our own stories with reasons deeply personal rather than political. We
imagined our parents were first cousins who married against family
wishes, both at first deliriously happy and then guilty because of what
they’d both lost. We imagined Mom as a young girl stealing her sister’s
lover, or Mom running off to marry the son of her older lover. None of
this we knew could be true, but still we imagined.
And nothing explained my mother saying always, “You’re
squatters in this house,” and her expectation that we would abandon
her. Yes, children leave their parents and start lives on their own. But
that wasn’t what she meant. It was as if she expected us to forsake her
for some reason or other.
Marriage completes you, they say; yet my mother then was so alone.
“Are we still near the water?” Brad asked.
“Yes, man, the sea right over there. You can walk. Three, four
minutes and you’re at the beach.”
Brad nodded then carried the bags across the grass, bending to
avoid the branch of a coconut tree, skirting two children playing in
the yard.
The man who greeted us said we could have any room we
wanted for no other visitors had yet arrived. The cabins were similar
wood buildings with balconies on both the upper and lower levels,
hammocks on the two upper levels.
“That one looks good,” my mother said. “You and your brother
can sleep upstairs. I’ll stay downstairs.”
I’d expected a hotel, of course. Perhaps a villa. Brad and I looked
around. There were candles on bookshelves, on the night stand, and
boxes of matches next to the candles. A delicate mosquito net hung
suspended from the thatch roof. A breeze flowed from the rear balcony
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