What Start Bad a Mornin' by Carol Mitchell

Author:Carol Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Published: 2023-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

St. Augustine, Trinidad - October 1982

In my hypnotic state, everything seemed sharper, brighter, like the first time I heard Roberta Flack’s voice digitally remastered on a CD and wondered if I had only imagined hearing her sing before. I saw myself standing under the red-roofed bus stand along the Eastern Main Road. I felt as if I were stepping forward and into the version of myself in the scene and as I did, the image blurred. The heat haze distorted my vision, the hot air hovering over the pavement, shimmering in layers of murky blue and brown. I shifted my head back and forth. The mirage shifted beneath my gaze.

My presence at the Curepe bus stop that day was a part of my normal Saturday-afternoon routine. I had recreated myself in Trinidad and part of that re-creation had led me to cut off my hair, which I had previously kept in shoulder-length, chemically-relaxed tresses. I experimented weekly at the hairdresser, trying to decide how to wear the short, soft curls that grew untreated from my head.

Brian drove me most places I needed to go. We had met during my Intro to Sociology class, in which he had been the teaching assistant. The material had been dense and the professor near incomprehensible. Many of my classmates formed study groups but I had not felt comfortable engaging in the kinds of relationships that might lead to expectations that I share information about my life before university. And so I sought help from the teaching assistant, thinking that interaction would be safe. After the year-long course had ended, we had stayed in touch and developed a relationship that teetered on the divide between friendship and something more. We spent much of our free time together, but on Saturdays, he was unavailable because his mother expected him to spend that time running errands for her.

And so it was that I was on my weekly trek to the hairdresser when I saw him … Dave.

We stood on opposite sides of the bus shelter, and were not the only people waiting there. A large woman, impossibly squeezed into a horizontally striped yellow and white top and thigh-gripping jeans, stood next to me, close enough that I felt gusts of hot air as she fanned herself with a copy of that day’s Trinidad Express. She occasionally bent to share her vain attempts to cool down with the child who stood next to her, and when she did, the smell of coconut oil wafted from the girl’s hair into my nostrils.

An elderly Indian man sat on the bench behind me, his smooth, straight hair spread over his head in thinning gray strands like the threads on a loom. Next to him stood a bent old lady with a surprisingly powerful voice that she had used to make many failed attempts to engage the elderly man in a litany of complaints about the weather, the tardiness of the bus, and the fact that the little girl was kicking at stones with her slippered feet.

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