The Skeleton Cupboard Read Free Page A

myself taking the hand that had been offered by the sweetest-looking woman that I had ever seen.
    â€œEdith Granville, please say hello to our fresh blood.”
    â€œHello, my dear. How are you this blessed day?”
    Edith was so small and so smiley and had eyes so sparkly that I was almost too enchanted to reply. This tiny and compact black woman had a crisp white pillowcase pinned to her head. The pillowcase, I soon realized, was an attempt at a nun’s wimple. Edith was Mother Superior.
    â€œI know what you thinking, girl, and you’s wrong.”
    â€œWhat am I thinking, Edith?”
    â€œYou’s thinking that I Julie Andrews!” Edith cackled. “Oh, Georgie Porgie! She think I Julie Andrews!”
    George was wheezing, bent over double, and coughing up many years of Player’s Navy Cut.
    â€œOh, Edith, no, I don’t think you are Julie Andrews. No, not at all!”
    â€œWell, good for you, girlie, because:
    When I’m with her, I’m confused,
    Out of focus and bemused.
    And I never know exactly where I am.
    Unpredictable as weather,
    She’s as flighty as a feather. She’s a darling!
    She’s a demon—
    â€œ She’s a lamb! ” I sang out as hard as I could. Bugger clinical training—there was nothing that an entire childhood of Christmas showings of The Sound of Music couldn’t prepare me for.
    Edith clapped her hands together as George beamed and I bowed.
    â€œThis your first day here, girlie?”
    â€œYes, Edith, it is.”
    â€œSo what you think?”
    â€œI think I don’t know what to think.”
    â€œGeorge, you say she fresh blood?”
    â€œYes, Edith, that is what I would say she is.”
    Edith threw her arms around me and held me tight. “Oh, sweetheart, you just joined. So new. Let Edith help you in.” Edith took me by the hand, linked arms with George and skipped us all into my cupboard.
    â€œAh, we called this ‘the Shithole.’ Commodes, medication—all the shit was here. Yes, indeed, I think it were better when it were a cupboard.”
    Over the next forty minutes, as I perched gingerly on my chair and George brought us all another brew, Edith initiated me into the realities of my training by telling me her life story.
    Born in Tobago in a small village by the Caribbean Sea called Black Rock, Edith was the second-youngest child of nine children. Her father, a Baptist minister, was a man of compassion to his flock, but not, it seemed, to his children. Father—that was his name apparently– traveled far across the width of the island from Plymouth to the capital, Scarborough, and the length from Charlotteville to Sandy Point. He held Bible meetings in Roxborough and Parlatuvier on the beach, and performed miracles in Moriah and on Cinnamon Hill. Father saved lives, and when he was away, the family was also at peace.
    But when he wasn’t away ministering, he struggled to contain the sin in his home. Edith told of the “whoopin’s” and “beltin’s” and beatings that had been part and parcel of her childhood. Especially for a young girl prone to daydreaming—a sin, said Father, when in church—and to singing—a sin, said Father, when not a hymn.
    Poor Edith—the youngest of the sisters and the favorite of her mother, she was the first to be sent to live with her father’s sister, Aunt Charisma, in Shepherd’s Bush. It was there that Edith was to really understand how undesirable she was. At this point in the story, Edith broke into song again:
    She’d out-pester any pest,
    Drive a hornet from its nest.
    She could throw a whirling dervish out of whirl.
    She is gentle!
    She is wild–
    She’s a riddle,
    She’s a child
    She’s a headache—
    Edith suddenly stopped singing, and as her head fell backward, her eyes simultaneously rolled up until I could only see the whites. This seemed serious; I tried not to