The saleswoman dumped a wad of almond paste onto the sugar-dusted surface while people asked questions. Then she patted it down and picked up a rolling pin.
“Any of you here ever watch that English woman on YouTube? The one who’s always talking about different ethnic foods? You know the one I mean, right? She does some interesting shows on local traditions around the world. She claims that black cake is not an authentic Caribbean recipe.”
She tips her head to the side and raises an eyebrow. Laughter bubbles up from the crowd.
“She says we wouldn’t have black cake without the Europeans dem coming over to this part of the world and bringing certain foods over here. She says the recipe comes from a mixing of different cultures. Different cultures? Well, what does she think the Caribbean is, anyhow?” Someone kissed their teeth and a buzz of comments went around the group of onlookers.
Eleanor breathed in the almond smell, remembering the kitchen in her childhood home, the marzipan spread out on the kitchen table, Mummy and Pearl gossiping and tittering. Eleanor tried not to think back to those days too often, to the days when she was still Covey, to the days before her mother went away. But on this day, she let herself imagine what it might be like to go back to the island today.
What if she could wander through her hometown unseen, past the old school grounds, past the swim club, toward the house where she grew up, with its white cement walls and corrugated tin roof and red hibiscus blooming at the corner? What if she could stop to pluck a naseberry from a neighbor’s yard, stop to snap and strip a frond from a dwarf coconut tree? What if she could step into the backyard where her father used to play dominoes with the men and stand just behind him, and simply be his daughter again, before his weaknesses had gotten the best of him?
What if her mummy were still there?
What if Eleanor could return without having to explain where she had been all these years? Then, yes, she would go back, she would gather tamarind pods from the floor of the backyard and sit on the concrete steps of the veranda near the orange spikes of the bird of paradise. She would show her children how to crack open the pods, pull off the strings, and roll the pulp in a bowl of sugar. She would take them down to the cove to swim in the sea.
But you didn’t just disappear for five decades and then go back as if nothing had happened. She wouldn’t try to go back, anyway, if she couldn’t take all three of her children with her. And after fifty years, Eleanor still had no idea where one of them was.
Decency
What would Byron think of her if he knew the whole story?
Eleanor hugged her son before he walked down the driveway toward the car. She looked at him, bright-eyed and straight-backed like his father, and knew that nothing else she did would ever be as important as this, this raising up of a decent young person and sending them into the world. Because the world needed decent, even more than it needed brilliant, which her son also happened to be.
But this beautiful man had a weakness. He could be obstinate. With Benny, for example. He’d had an attachment so great to his baby sister that he had never really seen Benny for the young woman that she had turned out to be. Benny had grown up and asserted herself and Byron had resisted her evolution, just as, admittedly, Eleanor and Bert had. He had grown cooler to Benny over the years, though Benny had continued to follow him around the room with that puppy-dog look. Byron was like his father in that way. When he couldn’t control or understand something, he would distance himself from it.
Would Eleanor lose her son’s esteem if she told him the truth?
Eleanor’s husband had always known part of the truth, but not all of it. Bert had covered for Eleanor for years because he believed that he was protecting their family, because he understood that the woman he loved had been robbed of her destiny. But he never did learn how much she had lost. He never knew about her first child. Eleanor had lied to her husband for all those years because she understood that if you wanted someone to keep loving you, you couldn’t ask them to bear all of your burdens, couldn’t risk letting them see all of who you were. No one really wanted to know another person that well.
Unless, of course, a person could say, See? Here she is, my long-lost baby girl. I’ve found her. I’ve made everything all right.
While her arms were wrapped around her son’s rib cage, Eleanor felt his heartbeat tap-tap-tapping at her through the weave of his shirt. She felt this life-of-her-life in her arms and thought of her first child, a pale, wailing baby calmed by her breast, then pulled out of her arms at six weeks. Eleanor now felt that other child’s heartbeat murmuring under her skin, rapping at the inside of her head.