Free Lucy: A Novel by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

figure of authority among my peers. A nurse, as far as I could see, was a badly paid person, a person who was forced to be in awe of someone above her (a doctor), a person with cold and rough hands, a person who lived alone and ate badly boiled food because she could not afford a cook, a person who, in the process of easing suffering, caused more suffering (the badly administered injection). I knew such a person. She was a friend of my mother’s and had delivered me when I was born. She was a woman my mother respected to her face but had many bad things to say about behind her back. They were: she would never find a man; no man would have her; she carried herself like a strongbox, and from the look on her face a man couldn’t find a reason to break in; she had lived alone for so long it was too late to start with a man now. But among the last things my mother had said to me, just before I left, was “Oh, I can just see you in your nurse’s uniform. I shall be very proud of you.” And I could only guess which nurse’s uniform she meant—the uniform made of cloth or the one made of circumstances.
    As I sat on that bed, the despair of a Sunday in full bloom, I thought: I am alone in the world, and I shall always be this way—all alone in the world.
    I had begun to suffer from violent headaches, exactly like the ones that used to afflict my mother. They would come on suddenly, as if I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, last for a while, and then disappear. They frightened me because I did not know when one would come on, and they frightened me because they reminded me of my mother. One day, in the midst of an argument I was having with her in which I was trying to assert my will and meeting defeat again, I had turned to her and said, “I wish you were dead.” I said it with such force that had I said it to anyone else but her, I am sure my wish would have come true. But of course I would not have said such a thing to anyone else, for no one else meant so much to me. Her desire not to please me was greater than my desire to erase her, but it so took her by surprise—my wish for such a thing—that she got a headache, a bad one, and it caused her to take to her bed. This lasted for days, and at night I would hear sounds in our house that made me sure my mother had died and the undertaker had come to take her body away. Each morning when I saw her face again, I trembled inside with joy. And so now when I suffered from these same headaches that no medicine would send away, I would see her face before me, a face that was godlike, for it seemed to know its own origins, to know all the things of which it was made.
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    My friendship with Peggy was reaching a predictable stalemate; the small differences between us were beginning to loom, sometimes becoming the only thing that mattered—like a grain of sand in the eye. She did not like to read books of any kind. She did not like to go to the museum. Going to the museum had become a passion with me. I did not grow up in a place where there was such a thing, but as soon as I discovered it, that was the only place I liked going out to visit. It was Mariah who had taken me there; she had wanted me to see some paintings by a man, a French man, who had gone halfway across the world to live and had painted pictures of the people he found living there. He had been a banker living a comfortable life with his wife and children, but that did not make him happy; eventually he left them and went to the opposite part of the world, where he was happier. I don’t know if Mariah meant me to, but immediately I identified with the yearnings of this man; I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven. I wondered about the details of his despair, for I felt it would comfort me to know. Of course his life could be found in the pages of a book; I had just