The Green Card

(First appeared in The Indiana Review, Volume 12 winter 1988: 38-48)

by Brenda Flanagan

     Loris wanted to go home bad. For weeks, that was all she had been talking about to her friend Velma. This day was no different. From the minute Selina had come through the back door, Loris had started moaning about home, home.

     "Is a funny thing, you know," she reflected. "I in America eight years. I never feel homesick. Not one day as God send I ever wake up wishing I was back home. I meet Carl, and what happen? Bap! I want to go home bad, bad."

     "I warned you more than once about that man," Selina reminded her. "From the time I set eyes on him, I could see he is a sagaboy. Every word come out his mouth have to do with fete, Carnival, fete Carnival. It's like he just realize fete exists. He's behaving like a real never see, come see. What's wrong with that man?"

     "He's a real Trini, girl," Loris smiled. "And with Carnival coming, all he talking about is home, home. Every time the man call me he's talking about going down for Carnival. He's making me remember a whole batch of memories I shoved to the back of my head."

     "Well, girl," Selina declared, "you could go back if you want, but I never want to see that backwater place again. You can't pay me to go back there."

     "You see how the Yankee dollars does make you West Indians turn your back on your homeland?" Loris laughed. "Not me, girl. I not selling my heritage for nothing. Not even a Green Card."

     "I could go back home if I want to," Selina said. "I get my green card long time. But what I going back down there for?"

     "You have a green card?" Loris' tone stung Selina, and she responded angrily. "What you mean asking a question like that? My Madam sponsor me since 1972."

     "Your Madam sponsor you?" Loris laughed. "What madam sponsor you? Girl, why you like to lie so, eh? You don't have to lie to me. I not going to report you to the immigration. You is my homegirl."

     Selina wanted to insist that she did have the Green Card. She wanted to convince Loris that she was one of the lucky ones who didn't have to panic every time they saw strange men coming up the Madam's driveway. The ones who didn't live in constant fear of being caught, placed on a plane, and sent back home with only the clothes on their backs.

     She wanted so much to be able to prove that she was a Permanent Resident, but she knew if she kept insisting that she was, Loris would dare her to produce the Green Card. Instead, she picked up the big silver handbag she had purchased in Macy's basement for $3.95, and said she had better go to the bus stop and wait for Sally Ann "before the white lady's child have to walk home by herself, and some man come by and snatch her, and I get my arse in trouble,oui."

     "Then you'll really have to run back home in true," Loris laughed as Selina hurried out. But she didn't laugh long. Who was she to laugh at Selina, anyway, she thought. My position is no better than hers. I can't go home either.

     That evening, as she prepared the Ames' dinner and during those two hours as she cleaned up the kitchen, wiping out the oven with a Brillo pad, scrubbing the burners, mopping the floor with bleach, sometimes getting down on her knees to wipe up the sticky jelly stains that the Ames' children had dropped under the kitchen table, then taking the trash out to the large bin by the garden shed, Loris thought about home, about mass in the Savannah, fete down Wrightson Road, going down Saint James for a roti, oh God! Help me!

     Later that night Carl called her from Brooklyn where he lived with his brother, Knolly, to tell her with incredible joy that he had booked his passage. "I flying Pan Am, girl. Ticket cost me $700 round trip."

"But why you buy such a dear ticket?" Loris had half‑hoped he would say he had bought one for her too, not because she knew she could go, but because it would show how much Carl liked her. She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice as she talked. "I hear you could get excursion fare for $395."

     "You think I want to get stuck down there?" Carl told her. "Excursion fare is only bacchanal, oui. Knolly went down by excursion fare last year, and you know what happen? He couldn't get on a flight to come back for four days! They overbook! Knolly almost loose his job. I had to call and tell his bossman that Mama dead, and Knolly have to stay for the funeral. Not me, girl. Is a lot of smart men who running excursions from New York. You pay your money, have ticket in your hand, but when you get to the airport, they tell you the plane full up. I have my work to come back to, papayo. I can't risk no excursion thing."

     "So when you leaving?" Loris asked him, still hoping that the question would offer him an opening to say something about her accompanying him. But Carl was a man who would stump his toe on a big stone right in front of his eyes. He didn't take the bait. Instead, he went on to boast about how he was leaving on the Friday before Carnival in time to catch Panorama, Dimarche Gras, and to jump up Jour O'vert morning with San Juan All Stars. He wanted her to go but he had no intention of paying her fare. To Loris, this realization was like a stab in her heart from a sharp icepick, so she consoled herself that she couldn't go anyway. Yet, with each mention of a Carnival celebration, of a fete that she would miss, of a steelband she wouldn’t hear, of mass she wouldn't see, her temperature rose, her blood boiled, her head ached, until finally, she couldn't stand the tension anymore, and she told Carl that she had to hang up because Madam was calling her.

     She wished that she had never met Carl. She was okay before she met him. It wasn't that she had never thought about going home. She had often thought about it, but she had never longed for it. She hadn't heard before, as she had been doing for weeks, the sounds of Desperadoes steelband playing "Ting Tang Darling" in her ears; she hadn't seen, flashing before her eyes, blinding her with color, Beryl McBurnie's dancers doing the belle on stage at the Queens Park Savannah; and it was a long time since she had remembered, with pleasure and a little embarrassment, the way she had shook her bottom down Frederick Street behind Solo Harmonites, rubbing up against Mervyn, her old boyfriend, drinking rum in the town, and how her picture had appeared on Ash Wednesday morning in The Guardian above a caption that said: "Trini Women Get On Bad For Carnival." Oh God, she didn't want to remember! But Carl was bringing everything back, and she was getting withdrawal pains. She should have known not to get involved with him.

     When she had met him at a West Indian house party in the Bronx, the first question she had asked him was whether he went home for Carnival. That was what she called her "sizing up" question. If a Trinidad man said he usually went home for Carnival, she knew right away to start looking in another direction. But even after Carl had laughed and boasted that he had missed only two Carnivals in the twelve years he had been in the States, something kept her from walking away. Maybe it was his shoulders, she thought. He had wide, strong‑looking shoulders, and she liked men with shoulders like that. On top of that, Carl was short and dark, two features that she fell for in men. "The blacker the berry, the sweeter the taste, " she would tell Selina when her friend wondered why she liked dark skinned men.

     "I believe in lightening the coffee, girl," Selina said. "And besides, you so tall. Why you like them short shortarse men?"

     "I figure like this," she explained patiently, "If a short man want to take me out, it must mean he doesn't have a short man complex."

     "But when you dancing, you can't even rest your head on his shoulder. And you can't wear high heels when you go out with a short man," Selina complained. She considered herself a first class dresser, and first class meant wearing heels several stories high even if she had to inch her way across a room looking like Marilyn Monroe on a tightrope. the heels were especially hard on her feet after a tough week's work in Mrs. Duant's kitchen in New Rochelle but she wore them anyway.

     "Carl doesn't mind if I wear high or low heels, girl," Loris had assured Selina after she had been out with him a few times. "My height doesn't bother him at all. He's a man of stature."

     Carl was indeed different from the few men she had gone out with in America. He didn't drink and he didn't smoke. And he liked to dance, a factor that made him even more appealing. And on top of that, the first time he had come up to New Rochelle to see her, he had brought her flowers. Never mind that they were half dead by the time he got off the subway. They were flowers, and no man had ever given her flowers before. Not even Thomas, the Black American from Alabama she had married.

    The marriage was not something she liked to think about, but it came rushing to the surface of her mind as she thought about Carl and home and Carnival and how much she longed to bathe in the sea down Carenage, to taste the salt water, to feel it washing off the blight. 

     She felt a longing to go for a walk in the Botanical Gardens to see the lily ponds. She and Mervyn used to sit on the rocks near to the lily ponds and talk about how they would go to New York together. That didn't work out. All the while she and Mervyn had been making plans, he was seeing Thelma, her best friend, behind her back. She should have known better than to get involved with Mervyn. When she heard the report, Thelma was pregnant. And brassface Mervyn had had the gall to ask her not to leave him. She had left. She left the following month for America alone, and before she was six months in the Yankee man's country, she had met and married Thomas.

     She didn't love Thomas. She had married him so that she could stay in America. Plain and simple. Thomas, a janitor at the YMCA on 135th Street, just down the way from the apartment building she lived in back then, had expressed his appreciation of her body several times as she had passed by the "Y" to and from the subway. Alone in New York, in the height of the summer of '68 with heat rising all over the country, Loris had seen, in Thomas' interest, opportunity for a little romance and more importantly, an extension of her holiday visa, a legalization of her status.

     She accepted his invitation to come up to his apartment to look at his TV. When she got there she was not surprised to find that not only did Thomas not have a TV, he didn't even have a radio. His "apartment" was a two by four room that was a sweatbox in summer and a freezer in fall. In winter, the landlady put so little heat that Thomas had to sleep in the men's locker room at the YMCA.

     Loris didn't embarrass him about the TV or the room. She sat on the bed‑he didn't have a chair‑and they spent that first date talking, eating barbecue ribs and white bread that Thomas had run out to get from the rib joint on 125th Street, and sipping gin. Early the next morning, before she went to the communal bathroom down the hall to sponge off, she confessed to Thomas that she really liked him, yes. And Thomas, not too long out of Tuscaloosa, forty two years old, a country boy, he called himself, with little experience in fondling anything but old Chevy engines, seemed in awe of this nice woman with a pretty accent who had come all the way from a land surrounded by water, but who, he was amazed to hear, didn't know how to swim. He said he wanted to teach her to swim.

     They got married two months later. She had insisted that the marriage had to take place in a church, so one Saturday morning she and Thomas took a taxi over to the Anglican Church near Central Park. It was raining that morning and she thought the rain might be showers of blessings, but later, after Thomas did what he did, she realized that the water was a bad sign. Manzy, the taxi driver, had to be their witness because Thomas' friend, who had promised to stand up for them, was too drunk to make it. As it was, Thomas himself could barely put on his shirt and tie, and that was a bad sign too. She should have known better than to marry him. He couldn't even swim.

     The man seemed to stay drunk. Why hadn't she noticed that in him before? Maybe she had. Maybe that was one of the reasons she had thought her plan would work: Marry him, get him to sign the papers, get fixed up, then disappear before he could open one eye. Later, she would file for divorce. But life doesn't always work out the way you want it.

     Thomas lost his job at the YMCA after repeated warnings about excess chlorine in the pool, and too much soap on the tiled floors. Loris had to take care of him after that because he couldn't stay sober long enough to get another job. He came constantly to her work‑she had taken a sleep‑in job in New Rochelle‑to get money, and when she didn't have it to give him, he would get abusive.

     When she asked him, on a visit to his room three months later, to go with her to an immigration lawyer to sign some papers because her holiday visa was about to expire, he refused.

     "I know about you West Indians," he told her. "You want to marry American men so you can stay in this country. Mah friend told me about you all. But you gonna have to pay for this, baby."

     She realized then that it was time to make the best of a bad situation. "How much you want?" disgust slipping like slime off her tongue. Thomas did not seem to notice.

     He was in his element. "How 'bout some pussy?" he laughed. "You ain't give me hardly any since we been married. Come on, sugar. Give your old man a piece."

     She backed away, revolted by the stench of his whisky breath. Jesus, she thought, the things this country does make you do!

     His anger flared. "Bitch!" he spat. "I ain't signing no fucking papers unless you give me some pussy. You West Indian girls think you too good. Mah buddy warned me about you. He said you only wanted marriage to get your papers fixed. You . . ." He raised his hand to slap her but she ducked. He tried again, but she stayed him by unbuttoning her blouse quickly. His anger began to cool as she reached into her bra. He pulled her down on the bed but she smiled for him to wait as she pulled out a twenty-dollar note and dangled it in front of his eyes.

    She tried to be sweet. "Why don't you go buy us a bottle? I feel like having a drink."

     He wasn't immediately taken in. She had to caress his cheek and allow him to put a hickey on her neck before he would take the money. As soon as he was out of sight, she grabbed her bag and fled from Harlem.

     Her agency got her another sleep‑in position in New Rochelle. She paid a lawyer in Chinatown $500 to file the papers for her without Thomas' signature, but she never heard a word from the immigration people. The lawyer kept telling her that these things take a long time.

     A year went by, then two. She waited, hiding out, moving from one sleep‑in job to another. She wrote home and sent money, but never knew if they had received it because she was too afraid to put her return address on the letter. She had heard that that was one way immigration traced illegal aliens. She kept trying to call the lawyer, but the last time she tried to reach him, an operator told her the number was disconnected.

     Then one Saturday, just before Christmas, she was on the IRT on her way to Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn to buy some mauby bark and a few packs of dried sorrel when she saw him. Thomas. He was hanging on to a strap at the other end of the subway car and she, scanning the area for a vacant seat, met his eyes. As she stared, wanting to turn away and yet not being able to, she saw recognition spread across his face. He lurched toward her in surprise, calling out her name. The train braked to a stop and she rushed out. He followed her up the steps, calling her name, shouting to people that she was his wife, that he hadn't seen her in a thousand years. Loris wanted to die.

     He came after her, up into the street, onto Eastern Parkway. Looking around frantically, she saw that she was on Church Street, miles from Nostrand Avenue. What should she do? She kept on going, hoping that he would falter, that he would be too drunk, as usual, to keep up. But it was she who faltered. She slipped on the icy pavement and fell, hitting the back of her head. By the time she had managed to get up and get to a bench on Eastern Parkway, he had caught up to her.

     "What you want?" she demanded, the angry words spewing out as she grimaced from the pain in her right ankle and her head.

     "I want mah baby," he said, breathing down on her. "You mah pretty West Indian baby." He reached out to touch her, and she slapped his hand away.

     She was cold, angry, hurt. "Drop dead, Thomas! Just go hide yourself in a hole and leave me alone."

He moved closer to her, his body shivering, his teeth chattering, words sputtering out on his dry icy breath.    "I ... I been looking for you, babe. I looked all over. Even ... even went up to New Rochelle. Why you treat me so bad?"

     She looked at him, then stared at him as if she were seeing him for the first time, as she tried to fathom the insanity that had led her to marry him. And suddenly she laughed. A sad, crying sort of laugh. A laugh at herself. At the lies she had written home about her American husband. She would have to write one day to tell them he was dead.

     Thomas shook his head, not comprehending her mood. He reached up again and touched his icy fingers to her cheek, and something, something in that pathetic gesture, touched the rock in Loris' heart.

     "Why you out in this freezing weather without gloves?" she said.

     "I don't need no gloves," he rubbed his hands together. "I got you, babe. You mah baby. Why you run out on me?"

     A strong wind ripped by and Thomas pulled his jacket about him and Loris noticed its thinness.

     "Can't you buy a decent winter coat?"

     He shook his head. "What makes you think I don't got one? I could show you plenty coats. I even got me a leather jacket."

     "Sure," Loris nodded. "And you got a television, and a...”  She winced as a sharp pain tore through her ankle. "God," she moaned, "I need an aspirin."

     He pointed to a drugstore at the corner. "We can get some over there. Want me to go get it for you?" She nodded and he got up, but he hadn't taken two steps before he looked back. "You not gonna run away again, are you?"

     Loris tried to smile. He came back. "Why don't we both go? Then you can get a cup of coffee to swallow the pill with." He stretched out his hand. Loris hesitated but the pain in her foot was getting worse, and the wind was picking up. How long could she stay on a cold bench on Eastern Parkway? She held his arm and hobbled over to a booth in the back of the drugstore.

     He ordered two coffees and a small paper pack of painkillers and she swallowed three. Slowly, as the minutes passed, the pain in her ankle receded and her head, too, began to feel better. Thomas, braced by two more cups of coffee, and a pack of cigarettes that Loris paid for, told her he was living in Bedford Stuyvesant. She wrote the address on a napkin, while he begged for hers.

    She lied. "I living in Brooklyn too. I staying with a friend. You know how some people funny. She mighten like me giving out her address. Anyway, I moving out early in the new year. I could give you the telephone number, though." She wrote the number of a West Indian record shop in Brooklyn on another napkin, and Thomas folded it carefully and placed it in his jacket pocket. Then, probably because she felt a little guilty, probably because it was Christmas, she wasn't sure why, Loris bought him a pair of cheap gloves and a scarf from the drugstore, and gave him ten dollars. An hour or so later, she allowed him to lead her back to the subway entrance with a promise that she would bring him something more for Christmas.

     The following Monday she went to a lawyer in New Rochelle, paid him two hundred dollars, and received some forms for Thomas to sign. She took them to Brooklyn.

     Thomas lived in a run‑down welfare hotel. Loris felt saliva gathering in her mouth and she wanted desperately to spit as she waited in the urine‑soaked hallway for Thomas to come to the door. When he finally did, she told him she couldn't stay long. She had to fend off his advances, but finally she managed to get him to sign the forms for a hundred dollars and her promise that she would come back to see him. Her heart beating lighter, she smiled practically all the way back to New Rochelle. She took the forms straight to the lawyer's office and he promised to file them the next day.

     "You'll get your Green Card," he promised. And Loris believed him. He had told her about a number of West Indians whom he had helped. He had shown her their letters of thanks, and she was impressed.

     "Anyway," she told Selina, "you have to trust somebody sometime. I can't believe God will make me go through this misery again."

     The day before Christmas Eve, feeling happy and free for the first time in years, Loris wanted to do something nice, something to say thank you, Jesus. She packed a paper bag of food and took it to Brooklyn for Thomas. She had to knock persistently before a woman in a dirty housecoat and pink curlers answered the door and demanded to know who she was and what she wanted.

     Loris told her she was an old friend of Thomas'.

     "He ain't here," the woman snapped. "And you can't be that old a friend 'cause I ain't never seen you before."

     "I've known him since 1968, " Loris, regretting her impulse to come, felt foolish.

     "And I've known him since 1958. We been married that long."

    "Married?" Loris asked. "You say you're married to Thomas?"

     "You heard me," the woman said. "Thomas is mah husband. I just come up from Alabama to spend Christmas with him. Don't you come here. . ."

     Loris dropped the bag of groceries and fled.

     She didn't remember much about Christmas that year. The holidays passed in a gray blur. She did her work mechanically, her mind on little else but the possibility that the immigration people would find out Thomas had been married before and would charge him with bigamy. She would be sent back home for sure. What would she tell her mother? How could she ever hold her head up in the road again?

     Right after the New Year opened, she went to see the lawyer.

     "Don't worry," he told her. "The immigration service is not that thorough."

     But Loris was frightened. She had decided to leave the area. Could she get her two hundred back? Sorry, the lawyer told her. The papers had been filed. She'd just have to wait and see.

     Loris went a little crazy after that. She figured the immigration would catch her sooner or later so she may as well have a happy time in America. She started going to West Indian parties in the Bronx with Selina, and that's how she met Carl.

     Carl. She wished she had never danced with him, never listened to him whisper in her ear that he wanted to roll naked on the beach in Manzanilla with her, never promised to go home for Carnival with him. He called her all the time, talking about going home, pressing her to make her reservation for the trip. He had never asked her if she had her green card, but she knew he thought she had it. How could she be in this country so long and not have it? How could she have gone home on holiday two years before (as she had lied and told him), if she didn't have it?

     Finally, to make him stop pestering her, she told him she had made a booking on Eastern to fly out on Carnival Saturday.

    Carl was ecstatic. "We breaking down Port‑of‑Spain, girl," he laughed. "We dancing all night! And on Carnival Sunday, before Panorama, we going down by the sea."

     But at night, as Carnival time got close, Loris, lying in bed, was worried. What would she tell him when he came back? He would demand to know why she didn't meet him at home. What lie could she make up? She knew she had to concoct a convincing story, and finally, she got one. She would tell him that when she went to the airport, Eastern told her the plane was full. They had overbooked. She was mad. She had her ticket. She had demanded a seat. They told her they would put her on the next available flight. She waited in the coldarse airport all night. Sunday passed and the airline gave her a chit for dinner at the hotel but still couldn't put her on a flight. Monday morning came.

     Carnival Monday. She thought about him jumping up in steelbands all over town while she's sitting in Kennedy airport with a ticket in her hand. She could hardly stand it. When five o'clock came and she still couldn't get on a flight, she cussed out the ticket agents and went back to New Rochelle. How could Carl doubt her?

     On the Friday he was to leave, he called from the airport to say that he would meet her the following night in a fete at Sparrow's Hide‑Away in Petit Valley. She promised to meet him.

     On Saturday morning, Loris, feeling more depressed than she had ever felt, called Selina and asked her to go to Kovets in the White Plains mail with her. Selina agreed to come by about twelve and Loris busied herself cleaning the madam's house.

     Just before twelve the doorbell rang. She switched off the vacuum cleaner, wondering how Selina had managed to come so early. The bell rang again before she could reach the door, and she shouted, "You think we have a butler here or what?"

     She pulled the door open but it wasn't Selina. The postman stood before her, holding a registered letter.

"Sorry," he smiled. "Want to get finished before the snow comes. You Miss Loris Salandy?"

     Loris nodded her head reluctantly. Only bad news ever came in a registered envelope. The immigration!

     "Sign here," the postman told her. She took his pen and scribbled her name, her hand trembling. He ripped off the return receipt, pushed the letter and the rest of the mail into her hand, and was gone.

     Slowly, Loris closed the door and made her way back to the kitchen. She placed the Ames' mail in a basket and put her registered letter on the table. She sat staring at the white legal‑looking envelope before her, too frightened to open it, her mind conjuring up the terrible specter of deportation. She didn't hear Mrs. Ames come into the room until the madam had called her name twice.

     "Was that the mailman, Loris?" Mrs. Ames was saying. "Did he bring a box?"

     Loris came out of her stupor. "No. I mean yes, Madam. Was the postman. But he didn't have a box. He had this registered letter for me."

    "Well, aren't you going to open it?" Mrs. Ames was flipping through her own mail. "Might be important."

     Yes, Loris thought. It's important. Immigration and Naturalization Service was stamped clearly on the white envelope.

     Mrs. Ames, sensing that something was wrong, took up the letter. "I can open it for you if you'd like," she said kindly. "Whatever the news, you'll have to know sometime." She slit open the envelope with the scissors she carried in her gardening apron. Loris could not watch as Mrs. Ames withdrew the letter and began to read silently.

     "But this is excellent news, Loris!" Mrs. Ames said. "The immigration service has written to tell you that your application for a permanent visa has been approved and you are to go to Montreal on March third for an appointment with the American Counsel. Look. It says here you're to bring some documents . . ."

    "What document?" Loris cried. "I don't have any...

     "Oh, nothing much. They want to see your passport, of course, but if you don't have that, your birth certificate will do. And they want you to show evidence that you are gainfully employed and that you've been paying taxes."

     "But 1. . . ." Loris stammered.

    "Mister Ames and I would gladly give you a letter confirming your employment," Mrs. Ames was saying. "Hum ... mm. Says here such a letter has to be notarized. Well, no problem. We'll get that done." She handed the letter to Loris.

     "Now put this away carefully. You must take it with you to the Consulate. There's a number on it. Your number." She picked up her scissors and went back to the sunroom to her plants, leaving Loris lost in wonder.

     They had approved her application! The lawyer was right. She would get her green card. Oh God! She would get her green card! Next year she would be able to go home for Carnival. She and Carl....

     And slowly, as the meaning of the letter registered on her consciousness, a smile spread across Loris' face, a radiant smile, filling up her eyes, bursting through her cheeks, and she felt like making her own calypso to thew tune of Kitchner's Ting Tang. "Ting Tang Darling/Is Loris and Carl coming..."