Black Cake(9)

No, Mathilda had never appreciated her good fortune. Some of the merchants had wives on the far side of the ocean or women on the other side of town, but not Lin. Still, she was the kind of woman a man tried to tolerate. All that skin billowing out of the top of her shirt. The way she would march their daughter straight into the waves without hesitation, aggravating Lin and exciting him at the same time.

In the tired but hopeful years after the end of World War II, a lot of the fellows who came back to the island after serving in the Royal Air Force and such would talk of nothing but going back to Britain. Some of the Chinese lads from the capital were leaving the island for Florida. But Lin didn’t want to immigrate again, he wanted to improve his lot right where he was. Mathilda, two years younger than Lin, said she liked his attitude. When they were alone, she would run her hand over the top of his head and say that she liked that funny hair of his, black and straight and coarse as a brush.

Lin could have married someone else. Lin’s mother had been fussing with him to take up with the “right sort” of girl, one of the new ones who had come over from China. Someone who would know the proper way to clean the house for the Chinese New Year. Someone who would know how to prepare the small envelopes of Fung Bow for the children. Someone who knew what to cook for good luck, whose presence would make the family proud when important people came to visit for the holiday feast.

And he knew that Mathilda would not have sat idling for long. All she had to do to find someone who was better off was to train her eyes on some hotel owner farther up the coast or even one of those movie stars who had managed to get rich despite lounging on the beach half the time. But then Mathilda told him she was pregnant and he understood that this was what he wanted. To live with Mathilda and their child.

Love was a mystifying thing and the way it could corrode, doubly so. Yes, Lin needed to accept the fact that it was just him and his daughter now. They had been abandoned.

Within three years, Covey’s shoulders and chest had puffed up and she was taller and swimming faster than any girl and most boys in the parish. Her eyes took on an edge that Lin recognized as his own. This girl was like him. It wasn’t just a matter of talent. She wasn’t just having fun. She was driven to win.

Covey kept winning, but Lin kept losing. The funny thing was, Lin knew better. He knew better than to gamble without taking a break. He knew better than to spend all that cash on liquor. Lin never forgot a number, had entire armies of them in his head, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember the date on which he stopped being able to stop himself.

At some point, Lin began to think, again, about the men who had moved away. He considered selling what was left of his belongings and going back to China.

“What China?” his one remaining brother said. “Yu belong to dis island now. What China?”

Then there was Covey. Lin knew he couldn’t take her with him, not with her mother’s brown face and long nose and her English talking. Probably, he hadn’t said more than a word or two to Covey in Hakka since she was still in nappies. She would never find herself a husband over there. Cho! He was wasting his time, he knew, fretting over a girl-child who was already getting fresh with him. Talking back in that modern way, instead of doing as she was told. He suspected that Covey was already a lost cause. Still, he stayed.





The Bay





Until the bay became famous, they had it all to themselves.

Pull, pull, pull.

No self-respecting islander would go out there on a weekday without a boat or surfboard, only Covey and her friend Bunny.

Pull, pull, pull.

From time to time, the movie stars and writers who kept homes farther up the coast would come by with their glamorous friends and stretch out on the sand, but most afternoons, the beach was deserted when the girls arrived.

Pull, pull, pull.

On Sundays, Covey and Bunny behaved like the other fifteen-year-old girls, strolling along the shore in their matching two-piece swimsuits, poking sticks into beached jellyfish, burying each other up to their necks in sand, eating fresh snapper and cassava cakes cooked on an open fire by Fishie and his wife, and washing off their fingers in the breakers afterward.

Fishie was an institution around there. He’d been selling lunches made with his freshly caught fish since Covey’s and Bunny’s own fathers had been young boys. He’d seen Bunny’s father go to war for Britain and come back across the oceans to raise his two children, unlike some of the others who’d turned right around and gone back to England or Wales or what-have-you. He’d seen Covey’s pa grow from a skinny likkle ting, as he’d told Covey more than once with a chuckle, to a skinny big ting. And now, these boys were men, holding court around Fishie with bottles in their hands and arguing about the island’s independence from British rule.

Some weekends, when Covey’s pa wasn’t full of drink, he would drive the girls and their friends up the coast to the falls. They’d run under the cascade, yelping from the cold rush of the water. Look at me, Pa! Covey would shout. Look at me! It was a good day when she could get him to throw back his head in laughter and slap the side of his thigh. It was a good day when she could feel that she was still more important to Pa than a bunch of smelly roosters fighting to the death.

Then on weekdays, Covey and Bunny would pull on their swim caps and Covey would revert to her truest self.

Covey was in the water at the swim club when she first saw Bunny. Covey had been treading water, going over the lines of a passage she’d memorized to recite at school. Just then, Pa’s friend Uncle Leonard walked in with his daughter, Bunny.