“N. O.”

“But you always let me wear it like that?”

“You gettin’ tall now, dat don’ look good anymore.”

I was puzzled. Usually my mother said not to “hoot” about the way we looked.

“It’s only Tommy and Timmy, why should I care?”

“You pu’ on dis B’yumuda short an’ you do no’ argue wit’ me for once you life.”

I sat on my bed, staring down angrily at an ugly pair of army green Bermuda shorts she’d literally found at Gables Beach, in the sand, and now for some reason was making me wear.

“I’m not going to wear something a total stranger wore!” I bawled as my mother passed by my open bedroom door, feeling more sensitive than usual at her accumulated injustices.

“Dey belong-ged to a child. Look, child shorts, wha’s de matter wit’ you brains?”

“Yuck,” Cecilia for once took my side, picking up the pair of shorts by its zipper and dropping them back down with distaste.

“You chil’ren, you sick. Wha’ goes on in dere?”

She gave the side of her head little taps then fingered her hair back into place. Her hair reverted back to the eight original curls of her sponge rollers, no matter how often she manipulated it.

“You don’t even know if they belonged to a girl or boy,” Cecilia argued.

“If the individual did not wear underwear?” I looked as scientifically arrogant as a sob would permit, “Would that not promote leprosy?”

“My Guard, I don’ know wha’ dis world is comin’ to!” my mother stormed out of our room with the shorts.

I felt an impulse to yell something like, “Leprosy!” but I heard the cycle knob of the washing machine being violently turned as she missed the right programme each time.

“Kate?”

My mother could sense a mile away I had opened a book. I liked reading more than anything else and Stag Head was a great listener.

“Kate! I am goin’ to count three!”

She made me serve her water on demand, even if the pitcher was less than an arm’s length away and I, at the other side of the house. Domestic assistance was one of the reasons I think my mother decided to have children.

“One!”

I pushed through the lines, condemned to the staccato reading which results from loss of concentration.

“TWO!!”

From the tone of my mother’s voice, I knew it was something serious like a night-light I’d not turned off or a tap I’d left dripping.

I reached my mother’s view by rhythmical, “Three!” though she remained silent. She lay upon a lawn chair, on the dock, under the kumquat tree, wearing above the bellybutton underwear and a cross your heart bra with the familiar ball of tissue paper to absorb the beads of sweat which liked to form in her cleavage. The beads of sweat on her upper lip were disturbing her less. She thought her neighbours from across the canal were too near-sighted to know the difference between underwear and a white bikini. Her legs had razor stubble and baby oil below the knee, and the end of her curled up toes had small bits of skin missing. With a fingernail scissors, she liked to chop off all of the skin she called “dead”.