No Hills Here

No Hills Here Catherine-Esther Cowie (bio) Canada is breaking Maeve's hair—relaxed, long black strands plume the bathroom floor of the tiny dark apartment. The back of her head looks like a field of elephant grass someone has hacked their way through. Marcie, Maeve yells for the middle child. The responsible one. From her bedroom she could hear Adé, the youngest, singing along to the television, I'm blue, da ba dee da. The girls are watching that music channel again. Gardé, gardé. She pulls the hair towards the crown and front to show off the massacred hair at the back. She instructs the child to send her father a fax message that she has written out on blank paper. We're all going bald, she'd begun. It was true. Every time she passed the comb through her daughters' hair, the ends broke off in her palms. The note continued: What hell on earth you brought us to? And then you just pack up and head back to sun and cool breeze and leave us for dead. Damn you! Carro had returned to the Caribbean after a year of looking for work in his field. You don't have Canadian experience, made the interviewers' litany. They both raged. What duh hell dem think we are? Monkeys who kah operate computer? Who kah add divide and multiply? Small island don't mean dumb. When they complained to the people at the immigration service, they said that the next best move was to go back to school. Employers can't say no to a Canadian degree. But the money running thin-thin. Paying for rent and a mortgage back home. And Carro think it's foolishness. A damn degree from a European university, almost twenty years in my field and I have to go back to school to learn what I can recite in my sleep? It's a money-making thing. Maeve had chorused. You spend big money to come here, then when you arrive, you have to spend how much money to go back to school just to find a job so you can live. [End Page 215] Then Carro would launch into a tirade about how all the immigrants he meets from India and Africa have master's and PhDs but driving taxicab, working security, or in a nursing home. Why they bring us here if all they want is chauffeurs and for us to wipe old people bum bum? You should have just left us back home. Is you the hoteliers were after, not us. You shoulda come up here and get settled … before bringing us. How you know? How you know they wouldn't harm you or the kids? Couldn't the government … Government? Carro sucked his teeth. Government want my life too. Nothing has changed. Same masters. Same people pulling strings. And their title eh change, still call themselves, owner. So they decided. No, Carro decided to go back to the Caribbean on a contract project. A different island. And leave her here. Maeve surveys the bedroom, the ugly pink carpeting, the cheap wallpaper and the linoleum in the bathroom. Bondié, she mutters to herself. She'd had real tile in their house in St. Montigue. Real wood. A thirty-feet by fifteen-feet wall of US pine. And stair railings and a ceiling made of expensive greenheart imported from Guyana. They had a jacuzzi and a pool. A garden bursting with soursop, mango, passion fruit, and paw paw. She would go out at six pm and pick orange leaf, bay leaf, and what not to boil tea. Carro had a vegetable garden of spinach, dasheen, lettuce, and cucumber. Now, she lives in a two-bedroom apartment with a view of an overcrowded parking lot. Her three daughters share a bedroom that is the size of her storage room back home. Some days she hates Carro. She never had a Canadian dream. Marcie, who's thirteen, looks out the bedroom window. Some kids from the apartment complex lie in the snow pulling their arms and legs together and then out again. Their long straight hair catches the snowflakes. She almost suggests to...

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