“When Miss Mildred bind a belly, dat belly well bind.”
Precious stared at her with indignant astonishment.
“What you talking about, eh?” she asked, refusing to acknowledge that a domestic possessed insider knowledge about her bowels. “I’m fine! I just went!”
As she sallied off to her room she added acidly over her shoulder, “That is, if it’s any of your business!”
There would be other skirmishes later, rear-guard action, ambush, blitzkrieg raid. The issues would vary – wasting expensive electricity knowing fully well that money didn’t grow on tree; quibbling with maid over established household procedure; countermanding garden-boy standing watering instructions for rosebushes – but it all boiled down to two-woman under one roof, wife against mother.
Precious could not cope with the incessant clamor. She got so that she was afraid to make a move in the house for fear of sparking a row. She walked on tiptoe around the mistress of the house. She tried her best to make friendly small talk with the maid but always ended up feeling like a meddling colonial power.
One night she wept quietly in her bedroom while gazing at a wallet-sized picture of Theophilus dressed in his Sunday finery, his head tilted to one side as he glared stonily at the birdie with his usual tutorial grimness. Stifling and breezeless, the lowland stagnation typical of a Kingston night resounded with a cacophony of yapping neighborhood dogs, the occasional wail of a siren, the malcontent rumble of a foraging truck. Her airless windows were laced with ugly wrought-iron burglar bars filigreed into whorls and smothered under a bank of crinkled nylon curtains.
“What I goin’ do, Theophilus?” Precious whispered bleakly to the photograph. “I not welcome here.”
Just then the phone rang and the maid bawled for Miss-Precious to come take a long distance call.
Chapter 6
Four harrowing and busy weeks followed Shirley’s call, during which Precious endured buffet and setback with a cheery countenance and unshakeable faith. Her dignity suffered numerous nicks and scratches from the American Consulate, whose staff, it is widely known, is globally trained to behave scornfully toward prospective immigrants, especially those whose grovelling is regarded as halfhearted.
But once it became clear that the interloping former battywiper was to be sent packing to Miami and that there was soon to be only one woman under her roof, Mildred displayed a more hospitable frame of mind and actually started holding friendly chats with Precious at the breakfast and dinner table. She even confided that ever since the birth of their son, Harold had contracted a sickly obsession with tooth extraction that sometimes drove her up the wall.
Precious remarked innocently that she didn’t know Harold had any obsessions. Why did she think Harold had founded twelve clinics over the countryside? Mildred asked pointedly. It-was for the sole purpose of providing him with countrywoman tooth to pull, which he accumulated in a shoe box like he was some kind of bizarre hobbyist. Precious said she didn’t know that Harold collected teeth, so Mildred went rummaging through Harold’s den and returned with a Bata shoe box that rattled when she walked. She pried off the lid to reveal hundreds of rotted teeth that stunk like old fish-bait.
“My heavens!” Precious gasped, peering into the box in which teeth of every shape, size, and state of decomposition were strewn in an untidy mound.
“Can you imagine? Dis is your son’s hobby!” Mildred shook her head sadly in a manner that implied faulty mothering.
“I never tell Harold to pull anybody teeth,” Precious mumbled in her own defense.
So things were better at the Kingston household and the time flew past quickly. There were a hundred little chores to tend to and a clutch of petty details to contend with. Precious made periodic trips with Harold up to the mountain house to pay Maud, brush dog head when White