“Gambling Sweets”

by Caroline Johnson (Jamaica)

Turquoise, lilac and orange doll shoes melted and pooled into a plastic pastel soup on the black tar pavement of the cul-de-sac. Four small brown birds pecked at the bread pudding crumbs in the grass near her feet. She sat with her legs akimbo on the cushioned grass under the dragon tree, named for its bent spine. From its shade, she watched the orange sun filter through the leaves, their rustling a hushed symphony over the crooning birds, the chirping crickets, the undulating wave of the cicadas’ song. Her pink flip flops were strewn across the yard, the soles rubbed off.

This was how Jasmine remembered her childhood summers, in the middle of Georgia heat, far from everyone in the world she loved, except for her grandmother.

When she and her parents had rolled into the driveway this time around, she woke with a crook in her neck, puffy face and drool on her shoulder. Her grandmother stood on the front porch waving at them when they pulled up, stomachs churning with car sickness and hunger. Her grandmother’s pixie cut wig was red this particular time, straying away from the usual brown and black ones she loved to wear. Small gold hoops in her ears, mesh slippers on her feet, a long house dress hanging over her thinning body, she held a knobby hand on her hip.

“Look at my likkle girl,” her grandmother sang, wrapping Jasmine in the soft smell of Pond's hand cream, perfume and rum chocolates. She hugged Jasmine’s father and with tight lips, pecked her mother’s face before ushering Jasmine to the kitchen. She’d made Jasmine’s favorite, a ham and cheese sandwich pressed in a George Foreman grill, the rigid bread and its crunch superior to any meal in her ten year old world. “American girl,” her grandmother kissed her teeth and laughed.

The plan was for her parents to spend a few days in the house before leaving her for the rest of the summer, but the next afternoon when Jasmine’s father had gotten an emergency call from the hospital, their dinner plans turned into packing plans. Down the stairs she walked to the kitchen, but she paused when she heard her mother and grandmother’s hushed voices.

“Don’t start.” Her mother’s voice was firm.

“I didn’t say a word.” Her grandmother didn’t have to. She was a woman who could rip apart a person and make them whole again with one look.

“We have to go back to work. Roy’s got a patient and look, he’s already packing the car, please don’t start. You know how it is. Aren’t you the same woman who worked double shifts?”

“Awoh! Look pon me now. Bent back, a dead usband, and a dawtah who ah use me fih friggin’ daycare. Yuh see, Grace? ” her voice shook. A screech and crack from the window answered instead. A black bird thrashed in the green curtains framing the window, the broken vase of one of her plants in a heap of soil on the floor. Her grandmother grabbed the glass blue swan teetering off the windowsill in one swift motion before it could shatter on the ground.

“Get the gloves on the counter!” her grandmother yelled.

Her mother hadn’t moved at all. She sifted through cabinets filled with pristine glassware, red hair dye, mixing bowls, folded kitchen towels, and bruised plantains before she found the gloves.

“Pass them,” her grandmother said with a straight face. The bird beat its wings, its glass black eyes wide and terrified. She grabbed its body firm enough to keep it still, not enough to crush its spindly bones. She set it free, shut the window and walked to the garbage can all in the time it took her mother to breathe again. Under the faucet, she scrubbed her hands raw in the cloud of sudding soap. She dragged a chair against the linoleum floors, stood atop it and reached for the paper towels, ripped the plastic open and grabbed a piece, tearing it perfectly on the perforated line. She grabbed the bowl with the thawing chicken from the fridge, oil from the cabinet, dried up ginger cut the week prior, onions and Blue Mountain Country curry powder from the cabinet. A frying pan from under the sink. The song of sharp metal cut through the air when she pulled a thin knife from its block. She grabbed one of the bruised plantains, beat it on the counter and sliced its skin open. All while Jasmine stood on the steps, and her mother turned into a sulking scolded child in the kitchen.

“Let’s eat,” her grandmother said, raising the knife in the air and bringing it down with one swift chop.

That night, after her parents left, Jasmine couldn’t fall asleep.

She paced to the bathroom, and waited for her eyes to adjust to stars of light flooding her field of vision. It was the first time she’d seen her face and become aware of its tiredness. Her face was uneven as though a ceramicist had taken the time to make two halves of the same face separately and molded them together, never checking for symmetry or texture. She closed the light and wandered down the steps to the living room, passing the plastic wrapped couches and hand-carved wooden figures with long faces. She reached into the kitchen cabinet and found the small bottle of rum her grandmother had saved for moments like these and brought it to her room. She poured a small cap full of rum and dashed it little by little into each corner of the room, a custom she’d grow more familiar with the older she became and the more insomnia became her familiar.

Jasmine and her grandmother’s days consisted of Jeopardy in the evenings, Price is Right during the days. They’d play “Who could guess the closest?”, using the rum chocolates her grandmother loved so dearly as betting currency. Although Jasmine usually lost, her grandmother would wink at her, say, “Next time,” and shine her golden-toothed smile. On good days, her grandmother painted her lips and cheeks with a deep mauve lipstick, placed shades over her eyes and strapped Jasmine in the backseat of her silver car so they could get lottery scratch offs from the gas station near Kroger’s.

She learned how to balance on a bicycle with the encouragement of her grandmother, which came out in stern words of affirmation and yelling, and immediately scraped her leg down to the white meat when she realized she could fly down the street like the other kids visiting their grandparents.

When she told her parents on the phone of her accomplishment, all her mother could hear was that she was hurt. “Put your grandma on the phone,” Jasmine’s mother said.

Jasmine watched her grandmother leave the house to pace on the porch. “It’s just a cut,” she said, using her special phone voice reserved for restaurants, banks and distant friends in England.

She bounced her legs as she stood in silence for a moment. “I don’t give a damn if he’s a docta!” Her special phone voice was slipping. “I’ve raised five children, what the hell could he know that I don’t?” When she snapped her flip phone shut, the sound alone sent Jasmine retreating from the window.

Her father arrived two days later, on the eve of her grandmother’s birthday. That morning, she sat at the dragon tree, stuffing her face with bread pudding. Her mango stained face, wrists and elbows from her grandmother’s breakfast felt sticky in the humidity.

She watched with envy as the pair of sisters across the street laughed together with sugar spun delirium. One of the sisters ran through the chhh chhh chhh of the sprinkler, the sunlight refracted into a rainbow, each color like the cobblestones leading to her grandmother’s house.

The honey lit pavement reminded her of the candles that framed the deep brown Barbie on her fifth birthday, the plastic pink dress melting under the candles’ heat. She’d have no one at home to play with. The closest thing to companionship was with the woman watching her through the window, small brown face and deep black eyes that looked like her own.

Jasmine focused on the glossiness of her grandmother’s black marble eyes. They were pooling gorges, rubber on winding asphalt roads, the moment before sunrise when the fog hugged the air, the frightening awe of a cave’s mouth.

“Come in, Jas!” she called through the window.

Her grandmother scrubbed Jasmine’s skin raw, slicked her face in coconut oil, rubbed her elbows with Pond’s cream, plaited her hair into puffs, fed her with cornmeal porridge and wrapped a George Foreman sandwich in some foil to go. While they waited for him, she laid her face in her grandmother’s lap right there in the sun stricken living room, and they watched the Price is Right. This time, Jasmine had won.

When her father arrived, it was a short goodbye. Her grandmother’s face was reserved, no pecks on cheeks, no wide golden tooth smiles. As they pulled out the driveway and her grandmother stood on the porch, she jutted her lips in the direction of her hip and patted her house dress. Jasmine rummaged in her dress pocket to find a small rum chocolate wrapped in tinfoil and smiled. When she looked up, her grandmother was closing the shadowy front door to return to her home.

She wondered if her grandmother cried the way she did. She wondered if her grandmother was upset with her. She couldn’t look at her father so she turned to the sawdust sunset painted onto a blue backdrop, the evening sky stretching over the wiry trees of the dead vineyards blurring into one another. Her father put on one of The Fabulous Five CDs trying to make her laugh.

“Last night as I walked into the bathroom, I stepped in a big pile of shhhh…aving cream,” the man sang on the track. It didn’t work.

The telephone towers were bony giants coming to life. She watched everything whir by. The small houses with cantaloupe-colored windows, weaving wires, winding hills, lone passengers behind glowing headlights, horses with bowed heads and murmurating birds pass in the night.

All she could do is think of her grandmother, who knew how to stretch a dollar for a whole family, who could make magic from nothing, who taught her of dupees and mermaids who drowned or saved people, who dashed rum whenever she felt the presence of something she did not like. Who cooked coconut gratta cake in a caste iron pot, sugar boiling and bouncing without ever burning her. She who taught Jasmine how long to wait until the coconut cooled just enough for the hardening cake to still be gooey, but not hot enough to scar their tongues. How to make curry goat and when to start so as to not rush the process and serve your loved ones tough meat that they would feign enjoying through squinted smiles. How to feel up a plantain and know it’s good for frying. Who taught her when to do a wash out and how to make the cerasee tea, how to take in the bitterness, how to wash the soap from a washcloth properly, how to clean teeth with sugar cane and how to get rid of a fishbone stuck in your throat. How to maintain a numbers book for lotto, how to scream into a pillow instead of taking it out on someone you love and how to apologize when that doesn’t work. How to dance everyday even when there’s no music and even if it meant only tapping a foot when you were constrained to a chair in old age. Where to go when you feel you could not breathe even if it was just in your mind. How to point at someone without lifting a finger, how to read the eyes of a ginnal and how to feel a lie against your skin.

When Jasmine returned, she only looked at her mother before retiring to bed.

At the first sight of light, she picked up the landline.

The first words of her grandmother’s birthday began with an “I’m sorry,” instead of “Happy Birthday.”

“Fi wah?” her grandmother’s tired voice grated through the static.

“Leaving you.”

“Nonsense mih dear. Solitude is my familiar.”

“What can we do?” Jasmine asked.“You have the chocolate?”

“One second.”

Jasmine ran to her room and found the pink dress with the mushed wrapper inside and returned. “Got it.”

“Okay. Make a wish for me. And, nyam it for the both of us,” her grandmother chuckled into the receiver.

There at six in the morning, Jasmine ate the bitter sweetness of her mushed chocolate. A black bird landed on the windowsill. She smiled, watching its black eyes.

“Happy Birthday, Grandma.”