Free Lucy: A Novel by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

match. When she first said this to me, it came as a complete surprise: I had never dreamed that such a thing as a penis did not come in a uniform size. When I then asked her what could a small penis mean to me, she raised her eyebrows and said only, “Disappointment.” It soon became clear that I was a failure at judging the size of a man’s hand, and so it was left up to Peggy; whenever we went to the park we came home alone, just the two of us.
    I did not like Sundays, and this one was not an exception. I could not believe this feeling about Sundays had followed me halfway across the world. I could not explain it, this feeling. What exactly was Sunday meant to be? Always on that day I felt such despair I would have been happy to turn into something as useful as a dishrag. When I was at home, in my parents’ house, I used to make a list of all the things that I was quite sure would not follow me if only I could cross the vast ocean that lay before me; I used to think that just a change in venue would banish forever from my life the things I most despised. But that was not to be so. As each day unfolded before me, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see the present take a shape—the shape of my past.
    My past was my mother; I could hear her voice, and she spoke to me not in English or the French patois that she sometimes spoke, or in any language that needed help from the tongue; she spoke to me in language anyone female could understand. And I was undeniably that—female. Oh, it was a laugh, for I had spent so much time saying I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother—I was my mother. And I could see now why, to the few feeble attempts I made to draw a line between us, her reply always was “You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me.” How else was I to take such a statement but as a sentence for life in a prison whose bars were stronger than any iron imaginable? I had, at that very moment, a collection of letters from her in my room, nineteen in all, one for every year of my life, unopened. I thought of opening the letters, not to read them but to burn them at the four corners and send them back to her unread. It was an act, I had read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another, but I could not trust myself to go too near them. I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.
    Peggy did not call me from a telephone; she came to the apartment directly. She couldn’t wait to get away from her family, she said; they were a bunch of absolutely nothing. How I envied the contempt in her voice, for I could see that her family held no magic over her. We went to the park. As usual, no men with large hands could be found. We went our separate ways, but made plans to speak to each other on the telephone the next day. I went home to my room in Lewis and Mariah’s apartment and sat on my bed. I thought of the summer I had just spent. I had come to see the sameness in things that appeared to be different. I had experienced moments of great happiness and a desire to imagine my own future, and at the same time I had had a great disillusionment. But was this not what life should be—some ups and downs instead of a constant dangerous undertow, capable of pulling you under for good?
    Right after we had returned from the summer at the lake, I decided I would not attend school at night anymore or study to become a nurse. Whatever my future held, nursing would not be a part of it. I had to wonder what made anyone think a nurse could be made of me. I was not good at taking orders from anyone, not good at waiting on other people. Why did someone not think that I would make a good doctor or a good magistrate or a good someone who runs things? As a child I had always been told what a good mind I had, and though I never believed it myself, it allowed me to cut quite a