A Little Piece of Light Read online

  She softens, relaxes, smiles coyly at my choice of words. “It’s fun for me, too, Donna Patricia.”

  When the first snow falls at Christmastime, I turn my palm up for the weightless crystalline flakes to fall into it. They melt into water as soon as they touch the pink of my palm. “What’s it doing?” I ask Mother.

  “This is snow,” she says. “I suppose you’ve never seen it before, have you? You see, Donna Patricia, snow is water that’s frozen. It precipitates from the sky…” She continues with her scientific explanation, but now the snowflakes are cooling my tongue and catching in the curl of my eyelashes.

  Roy does not share in Mother’s fondness for this time of the year. One evening, she plugs in the Christmas lights as the tree topper begins to sing its mechanical carols. Roy storms into the room and shoves me to the side before he throws Mother against the wall. He grabs the orange-handled scissors from our temporary craft table and holds them to her neck. “Shut that fucking shit off right now,” he hisses through clenched teeth. “Do you understand me?”

  When he backs off, she releases herself slowly from the wall. He glares at Mother as she smooths herself over, then calmly crouches down to unplug the Christmas lights. “Fucking Catholics,” he says, retreating down the hallway, where he was watching television in their bedroom. Suddenly, he stops and turns. “And your fucking books, too!” he yells to her. “You love those books more than you love me!” He slams the bedroom door behind him.

  “Just be quiet,” she whispers, shutting off the lights in the living room. Across the expanse of the dark room, she suggests, “Let’s not upset him any more.”

  What any little girl needs to know most at this and every stage in her life is that she’s so important that a parent would go to any lengths to protect her. Instead, as Roy’s problems begin to surface, Daphne will deny that it’s happening. To her, emotion is something we can dwell on or not, something we can shut off with as effortless a gesture as unplugging the Christmas lights. Inside the home of a woman who spent her entire career analyzing and diagnosing strangers, there was a disorder happening that would indicate a reality she could never—or, perhaps, simply would never—acknowledge.

  This deficit in parenting, in guidance and protection, would go on to have more of an impact on my life than anything my adoptive mother taught me about foreign language, literature, the proper way for a woman to style herself, how to make clothes, or anything scholastic. In the months and years to come, the damage of what happens here will spur me into a spiral of choices that will become the devastating start to the story of my life.

  The summer of 1974 marks two years since Roy brought me to New York. Daphne has taken me on a trip to Montreal to experience French culture, but, these days, there is no more talk of Disneyland. Daphne continues to dress me in outfits that match from my shoulders to my toes, like a green coat with a matching blouse underneath, and green corduroy pants. Adults always comment that I look “nice,” but all I want is to look like other girls my age with their ribbons and shiny shoes. When we take the subway down to Macy’s and Bergdorf Goodman, Mother always seems to catch me eyeing the Mary Janes. “Those shoes are unacceptable, Donna Patricia,” she says. “Not even a tiny heel.” She insists that my hair is braided to look “like a little girl,” but from my blouses to the hem of my polyester slacks to the lessons on art, philosophy, and music that she presents to me in our home, it seems that her biggest goal is to make me into a miniature version of herself.

  I go along with this because I will do anything to have her attention. Daphne doesn’t hug me or tell me that she loves me, but emotionally, I need any interest she’s willing to show me. I’ve taken to permanently calling her “Mother” because I need that nurturing figure in my life. When we sit together at the sewing machine or she asks me to summarize a book I’ve just read—“Speak in French, please”—I absorb her attention as care for me. And when I begin to experience the growing pains that come along with early puberty as I approach age ten, I need her, or someone, to explain what’s happening to me. “Mother?” I ask her shyly. “My body hurts.”

  “Where on your body?”

  I point delicately toward my chest.

  “Oh, alright,” she laughs. “You’re getting breasts, Donna Patricia, that’s what girls experience. As a young lady, there are certain things you’ll need to do now. You’ll be sure to go to bed with panties on. If you keep your bra on all night, it will help to keep your breasts firm.”

  Both of these tips puzzle me. My adoptive mother is rarely personal with me, and I can’t understand why these details about how I should take care of myself would matter. They make me feel embarrassed, more isolated in my uncertainty. As my body and my awareness about the truths of being female begin to change, there’s still a great deal about my life here that I don’t understand.

  During my summer break from school at age nine when I’ll be skipping from third to fifth grade, Roy brings me along on his outings. I follow him around his flea markets and thrift shops, peering at dolls and beautiful old clothes and furniture.

  I like to explore the city in this way, but it’s here that I begin to pick up on the quiet conversations Roy has with people in our neighborhood and in different parts of the city. I stand on our balcony, watching the children on the playground and overhearing the men who come into our apartment in the afternoons to meet with Roy. In the living room, they speak confidentially to him when they want a young, beautiful wife who will cook, clean, and do whatever they want. The men pay him even more to arrange all the necessary “paperwork” to have women brought in from Jamaica, since, as I understand, the United States is much stricter about letting people in than Jamaica is about letting people out.

  I have yet to understand that my living here is the result of just this kind of arrangement, which I’ve heard them refer to as an “adoption.” My natural mother used to tell me that the Hyltons had a lot of influence and connections in Jamaica and different parts of the world, and now I’ve learned that they have a lot of relatives in different places, too. When Roy’s cousin comes from England to visit in the summer of 1974, two years since I arrived here, I finally start to understand how and why they really brought me here.

  The summer that I’m nine and about to skip fourth grade to go directly into fifth, Roy and Daphne instruct me to move out of my bedroom so that Roy’s cousin can use it for a couple of weeks. I spend these nights on the living room sofa bed, always making sure my bedroom is clear of their guest when I need to go in for clothes or other belongings. Then I slip into the bathroom to change. “Be careful not to take too much time in the bathroom while our guest is here, Donna Patricia,” Mother says.

  I’m always careful not to take too much time in the bathroom; after all, I still feel like a permanent guest here myself. One morning during this visit, I wake up on the sofa and feel terrible pain across my chest, the same kind of aching that I told Mother about. I check my bedroom to see if it’s available for me to get some clothes out of the drawer, but Roy’s cousin is inside with the door closed. In a state of agony that makes me want to double over, I turn and walk into the bathroom, hoping that maybe the heat and steam of a shower will relax the pain. But by the time I finish and dry off, the aching in my chest has grown even worse.

  I wrap my towel around my body tightly and tiptoe back into the hallway. I knock-knock on Roy’s bedroom door. He opens it partway and stares down at me. “Where are your clothes?” he says.

  “I can’t get in my room!” I tell him. “The door is closed. I’m sorry, I just…” I feel tears break over the brim of my eyelashes. “I hurt.”

  “You hurt?” he says. “You mean you’re in pain?”

  I nod.

  “Come in,” he says. He opens the door wider so I can walk in. Then he gestures for me to sit down on the bed. “Where does it hurt?” he asks.

  Sheepishly, I hesitate. I feel him waiting for my answer, so I point to my chest area.

  “It hurts
there?”

  I nod.

  He pauses for a moment. “Do you want me to make you feel better?”

  I look up at him, hoping he knows of some medicine I can take, or maybe just that he’ll arrange with his cousin to let me rest in my bedroom. He asks me again: “Do you want me to make you feel better?”

  I nod.

  He opens the door to the walk-in closet that he and Mother share. “Come in here,” he says. When I look into the closet, it’s dark. I don’t understand what he’s doing, but I follow him inside.

  He pulls the closet door behind him. After my eyes adjust to the dark, I notice a little piece of light—a combination from the bedroom light and the sunshine coming through their window—that’s breaking through the crack underneath the door.

  Roy pulls my towel aside. “You’re beautiful,” he whispers in my ear. Then, he begins to touch me with his hands. My breasts sting at the pressure of his touch, and my stomach has suddenly gone sick. He rubs harder, not caring at all that I just told him I’m in pain.

  He’s hurting me.

  After a moment of this, he begins to touch my breasts with his mouth.

  He’s hurting me.

  It’s too much for my mind to understand what’s happening.

  He’s hurting me.

  I don’t want to upset Roy; I know there could be a knife or a pair of scissors hidden anywhere within his reach. I remain still, the air around us growing heavy in my belly with the smell of moth balls, old shoes, and the floral-spice smell of Daphne’s signature fragrance, L’Air du Temps.

  The air of time.

  Almost as if in response to my thoughts, he whispers: “Don’t tell your mother. You’ll make her upset.”

  The entire time we’re in the closet, I keep my eyes fixed on that little piece of light from the bedroom window that’s slicing through the crack at the bottom of the closet door.

  By the time Roy’s cousin leaves to return to England, he’s begun to take me into the closet every day. When I move back into my bedroom from the living room, he tells me not to close my bedroom door whenever I change. When it’s just the two of us in the apartment, he stands in the doorway, licking his mustache and making suggestive grunting and kissing sounds while I discreetly try to dress with my back toward the door. At home, there’s never a moment when I don’t feel vulnerable and exposed.

  If I felt isolated before all this began, the way Roy hurts me every day solidifies the fact that I can never have friends or confidantes here, or anywhere. “This is our secret,” he reminds me on occasion. “Your mother will be very angry with you if she finds out.”

  However, as this secret between us carries on, Mother seems to be less present than ever, and more absorbed by her own pursuits whenever she is home. His secrets seem to drift him into his own separate world, while her studies pull her further outside. I remain some piece of currency—some pawn somehow between them. As I recall my very first interaction with them in Jamaica, I remember that Daphne expressed some aggravation about the length of the adoption process. It grows clearer to me that she wasn’t fully on board with this arrangement; she didn’t want to be bothered to mother someone else’s daughter. Roy was the one who wanted to bring me here, and now, this innocent child’s mind is beginning to understand the complicated reasons why.

  I’m careful to do nothing to provoke his attention, but knowing that I run the risk of upsetting them both if I speak, I keep everything inside of me. I stay by myself. At nine, ten, and eleven years old, I take to the activities in school that don’t call me to interact very much with my classmates. I pay attention in class and stay focused on my work, spending recess by myself, studying or reading. In phys ed class, I run fast, I run hard, as if my legs could save my life. On the school’s running track, some of the other girls hover in groups and giggle about the boys. But I run. I zone out and lose myself, imagining my legs fast as the Jamaican hummingbirds’ wings, until it’s time to change back into my dress clothes. In the locker room, I shower inconspicuously—quickly—with the front of myself turned toward a corner, ashamed of my body and fearful of any visible way the girls in my class might discern that I’m different because of what my adoptive father does to me each day.

  In music class when our teacher instructs each of us to try out an instrument, I take up the clarinet and learn the notes with concentration. In time, I practice some of the songs that I hear on the radio by the New York Philharmonic Symphony. I follow the notes on the page closely, practicing Shostakovich’s happy folk dances, then Prokofiev’s upbeat marches, then Igor Stravinsky’s more disciplined, staccato Symphonies of the Wind Instruments. My fingers move rapidly among the rings; my breath blows steadily into the mouthpiece. With all this focus on the music, I find that I can escape into the melodies in the same way I escape into running and the little piece of light in Roy’s closet. When I’m playing music, I can forget my life.

  In the fall semester of seventh grade, my music teacher praises my skill and invites me to join the school band. I’m unsure of whether my mother will let me participate in an extracurricular activity. When I ask her, she says, “Perhaps it could promote your potential for university scholarships.”

  On afternoons when I’m not practicing the clarinet in the school’s music room, I continue to spend afternoons locked out of our apartment. “May I please get a key?” I ask Mother, time and again. “I don’t have anywhere to go after school.” Mother finally tells Roy it’s OK to arrange for me to have a babysitter in the afternoons. Roy sets this up, hiring an older woman, a mother of grown children, who lives nearby. I’ve seen her inside our apartment on occasion speaking alone with Roy.

  One afternoon a few weeks after she’s started babysitting me, I’m watching Magilla Gorilla on her sofa. She comes and sits down next to me and begins to chat with me about school, my homework, whether I like the TV show. She puts her arms around me and I hug her back, loving the warmth of this scarce embrace.

  The next thing I know, her hand is on my breast. “You’re beautiful,” she whispers. She begins to caress me, and I’m instantly frozen. It feels like my stomach has dropped through the floor; I’m so devastated I think I might throw up.

  She lifts up my shirt and begins sucking my breasts, and then she puts her hand between my legs.

  I don’t know how to ask for a key from Mother again without getting in trouble.

  The next day after school, I sit silently on the edge of the babysitter’s sofa and watch TV. She picks up on my discomfort and leaves me alone, but it won’t be the last time she touches me. A couple of weeks later, Roy comes to her apartment to take me home, and the two of them make small talk before he takes a seat on her sofa while I’m sitting in the chair next to it, waiting for him to say it’s time to go home. Instead, I watch as the babysitter sits down right next to him, and the two of them begin to kiss. I drop my eyes, horrified again. They rub each other, and from the way they touch, it’s clear to me that they’ve carried on like this together before. For a moment, Roy turns and looks at me. I know I have to do what they want, or it will be my fault and I’ll be in trouble. Life in the apartment could turn from uncomfortable to very violent.

  I search my mind, trying to understand how someone as sharp as my adoptive mother, who has made a career of studying mental health and understanding patterns of behavior, doesn’t know that something’s happening whenever she’s not home. Even if her intuition isn’t enough to suggest that strange things are going on, doesn’t she find things rumpled or out of place in the closet? Doesn’t she wonder what the neighbors say about Roy and his odd business operations in our apartment?

  However, I’m aware there are two sides to my mother: the sometimes-attentive side she allows me to see inside our apartment, and the proud, intellectual side that she wants people outside to see. Anytime we’re doing an errand in the neighborhood, she keeps her chin held high and refuses to make eye contact with any deli worker or cashier who waits on her. She doesn’t speak warml
y with the women who live in our building or on our block. On the infrequent occasion they stop her to speak, she stares down the straightness of her nose at them and responds with brisk answers. As I keep up alongside her on the sidewalk, I’m the only one to whom Mother speaks. She tells me about her many accomplishments, the fact that she’s a member of Mensa, the international society for people with high IQs. She continues to advance her degrees and receive promotions at her job, she says, and she works out of a number of state offices around the city. Downtown, in the World Trade Center, her office is on the very same floor as the governor’s office. I can see she’s pleased to maintain her image as the neighborhood genius—for her, intelligence and image are everything.

  By now, I’m only eleven years old, but as Roy shares information about small pieces of their life with me, the more I understand the two of them as individuals. As much as I ache to be loved as someone’s child, the truth in all this is that we are not a family. They are not my parents. The two of them share a bedroom but live very separate lives, and Roy begins to see me as his live-in child mistress. “If I were younger, things would be different,” he tells me one day. “You’d be my wife. Then I wouldn’t have to put up with her and all those books.” Everything he says to me, everything he does, creates a complex struggle inside of me. The result is that even as the child in this, I blame myself for all of it. “No one will ever love you the way I do,” he says.

  I raise my eyes from the ground to look up at him. In the silence of my heart, I can’t understand what I did to deserve this confused kind of love.