The Pinny

By Myra Lee Virgil

It is a brisk October day in 2024. I am perched on one of four vibrant blue Adirondack chairs made of reclaimed plastic; robust, durable, and heavy, all facing a patch of Grape Bay Beach. The waves of Bermuda’s South Shore at this stretch of the beach pounce to the shoreline.

To my right a man – a stranger— sits by himself on a blanket. His greying white t-shirt is billowed by the wind.

But it is the water as it hits the shore, foaming on its approach, that claims my attention and causes me to reflect on days I’d rather not remember. From the waterline to the horizon, bands of light greys cut across its centre. The water becomes turquoise green before it hits the tan sand, so unlike the beach I last looked upon with such intensity.

The last time the sea was my focus had been two years prior in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on a summer day of August 2022. The Pacific Ocean, framed by the ceiling-to-floor glass view from the event room of the Vancouver Yacht Club, had spanned the backs of the attendees of my mother’s wake. The water had been a deeper blue, to the point of grey, despite the sun dancing over it as if to hold grief at bay.

That day as we laid my mother to rest, I had been unable to tell the truer version of a story that defined our relationship for me. I wasn’t ready. Instead, I told the story of her purchase of a pinny as though it were a humorous jaunt – a misunderstanding between my mother and me, and an example of how times and styles had shifted.

It wasn’t funny.

Now two years later, perhaps the sun’s slow dance across the water was meant to form a looking-glass mirror of sorts, revealing how my tirade on the purchase of what I still consider an inexplicable half-shirt, had eliminated laughter between us.

I needed to let time pass to allow my loss to walk with me instead of on top of me, and to take the time to watch a sun set.

***

I had always associated my mother, Gloria, with the meek — a quiet woman who had inhabited the world as if she’d rather not make waves. The strongest of her emotions were reflected in her deeper ranges of sighs. A drawn-out sigh could signify peace or relief, in the minds of the mindful. At her gravest, she’d harrumph in a way that expressed discontent. 

One day though, I learned indelibly, that people should never “sleep on” my mother – that when she takes a position, there is no moving her on it. That being quiet with a steely reserve, is something to witness, to bear witness – and from which to draw a lesson which ought never be forgotten.

***

We were not a family that grew up with allowances, neither for good behaviour nor for what was known as paying a kid a weekly sum to contribute to the household chores getting done. Instead, my parents, Lefroy and Gloria, could be counted on to buy us everything we needed. Money for school trips was easily handed over. I took swimming and art lessons. I was allowed to buy candy and records or go to a movie. I did what I was asked to do for so long that I no longer needed to be asked. We (me from the age of 10 and then my three younger siblings as they came along in the decade that followed) mowed the lawn, took out garbage, helped clear foliage to create a stunningly sizable back yard from what would now be considered a nature reserve. I didn’t notice that the interchange between us kids and my father mimicked to an extent the interplay between my father and mother.

She too, did more or less what she was asked to do until she no longer needed to be asked.

All in and on the surface, in an exchange that I don’t ever recall being verbalised, so long as everyone did what they were told and played their roles, our household appeared at peace.

***

It was early in 1987, my final year of high school. I was involved in school government, trying to graduate but also doing a fair share of nightlife-ing. Vancouver, having recently hosted Expo 86, was also host to a growing black nightlife. My childhood friend, Lori, and I were sneaking out in the wee hours of the night to head downtown to places like The Warehouse and Casablanca’s in New Westminster, even during the week. Lori and I had been out and about to such an extent that my grades had begun to plummet – making necessary an extraordinary measure so as not to put my high school year at risk.

For extra credit, I ended up registering for a 7am class entitled “Jazz Choir”, run by a man called Mr. Anderson.

Within one semester, I found myself not only on stage performing but also set to travel to a high school jazz competition across Canada in Prescott, Ontario. All of this went down in short order — from application to registration to the choir’s acceptance as a performing jazz choir aspiring to elevate ourselves to international performance standard. So much happened so quickly that it was only on the day before our departure that I realised I needed to purchase a white shirt with a collar to wear under the choir-issued sweater. Busy, stressed, packing and studying – I couldn’t get it all done.

I asked my mother if she would go buy the collared white shirt that I needed for the next day’s departure for Ontario.

And she agreed.

She returned home, hours later, it must have been at least three, with what I should have recognised as a look of triumph. From a Hudson’s Bay Company bag, which was too small to have contained anything good, she pulled out a small square of white material. She said of the material flailing helplessly from its rounded neck, connected to buttons that mimicked a shirt, It’s a pinny. I looked at her and I looked at that square portion of a quasi-shirt resting on the kitchen counter and with my stress and pressure, I felt a roar form at the base of my throat.

I unleashed on her.

What is a pinny? What is that stupid thing? Where’s the rest of the shirt? How could you buy such a ridiculous thing? The jackets we have to wear button down from the chest in a “V”? Where’s the shirt, mom? Where?

I might have mumbled to this quiet woman who rarely said more than a quiet word, How could you be so stupid?

It was this last utterance, implied if not verbalised, vicious and mean-spirited that deflated the air in such a way that neither of us took another breath.

To this day, I think of my younger self in that moment and cringe. What had gotten into me? Was I a bully? Or was my rush to fury about something far more than a pinny?

***

Around my 10th birthday, when my youngest sister was born prematurely and at risk of death, I recall my father, Lefroy, whom I both feared and admired, changing to a degree. There seemed to be a shift in his person to perhaps one who could be described as having more bite.

He became harder in his interactions with us – with me. The unstated do-si-do of “helping out” became orders; his interactions invasive. Go get my hammer, he’d say. Get ready, we’re going to the store. You’re going to mow the lawn this weekend. Perhaps, I too, started acting out more, questioning why – Why must I go now. Why must I be part of this task at all? I didn’t take to being ordered about.

In addition to her own brief exchanges of which are so deeply buried in my memory, the specifics I’ve forgotten, my mother would find herself being roped into my tete-a-tetes. For I became increasingly resistant to what I perceived as an onslaught of questions that seemed to have no point – followed by demands for my time or attention, which felt mostly about exerting control. Gloria, find out what she’s doing afterschool, I’m sick of asking. Tell her, she’s coming with me. Are you listening? Is she paying attention? And Gloria would sigh.

Perhaps upon reflection, my mother’s nexus of contention were her beliefs about parenting, personal agency and private space – with her leaning towards having and giving us more, which seemed something my father couldn’t tolerate.

Perhaps values-based debates are sometimes too big to negotiate – so she would retreat.

Also, his humour, once simply that – funny to many and meant to be, became laced with a touch of mockery of others that I couldn’t quite place or make sense of – at least not then. But I do recall that while some people would laugh at my father’s jokes, I wondered whether they also felt like he might be laughing at them as though after being coerced into believing a myth, the storyteller then asks you how you could be so gullible.

I could be your father, I’d hear him say to one of his patients who hailed from Taipei, throwing in some Taiwanese Mandarin he’d picked up over the years. Him, a black man, pressing the point with details of her hometown he had just happened to visit and a relationship he had apparently engaged in, until the woman had truly begun to wonder, Could this be true? Could this Black man be my kin? Did he have a relationship with my mother? And then, only then, would he pull back, laughing, Of course not, so that she might feel a bit like a fool for having gotten herself caught up in such a tall tale.

It was all in fun, he’d say, striking up conversations in this way, again and again – at his office, at restaurants, in the street and with almost every person we’d meet.

Some would love it, the witty remarks, the jokes, the stories, as crazy as could be.

Some would not. And if not, my mother would be there to placate and sigh, becoming a human foil for what might have been perceived as untoward banter.

Perhaps to raise a family in Canada had become harder than he’d thought and easier to manage by taking advantage of people’s gullibility with his sly sense of humour. Perhaps being the only Black doctor in the hospital and in most places he’d found himself, was stressful for reasons he didn’t have time to examine. Perhaps, with my mother managing chronic ill health following a diabetic coma that had followed the premature birth and leaving him with three kids 10 and under to make things work for a spell, did his good humour in – causing him to be amusing to bits to some people, but not so funny if you lived with him.

All I knew for sure was that something changed for us and him – and for us and my mother – when I was about 11. Everyone began to hurt, I think. For it was at about this time that I can register our decline – from a family that had had fun together, to one where its members would go into hiding to avoid a family gathering.

And I began to see my mother, who seemed to get lost in her struggles with my father, as someone I couldn’t trust to take a stand.

***

By the time I was seventeen and, on that day, when the pinny was presented as a solution to the challenge I had presented, I found myself at risk of becoming the type of person who spewed hate at the least deserved.

This is what I think now and this, to a degree, is what I thought then.

All the joy in the purchase left my mother’s face. I don’t know what she would think now. I missed my chance to know. But I think this is what she must have thought that day.

She had thought she had solved my problem with the pinny. She hadn’t been able to find a white, button-down shirt with sleeves, anywhere in my size. Not in Reitmans, nor Le Chateau or any boutique in the mall. She had scoured that mall, even after having worked a full workday in the office with my father at this stage in our lives, seeking a proper shirt without success. Finally, she had returned where she had started, at the Hudson’s Bay Company, to see if she had missed something. It was at The Bay on her second time around that she’d stumbled across this invention reminiscent of her own high school days.

It was a pinny. What an extraordinary find, she must have thought. What a coincidence for she hadn’t set her eyes on one in about 20 years.

A pinny was a way to get around having to buy several shirts. One would wear it under a school sweater – although the sweater would have to have a rounded collar, it turned out.

It’s so stupid – such a stupid thing to buy, I’d said as though I hadn’t said enough, as we watched the material attached to a collar flail about.

Gloria was a person with a sense of humour. She could even take a deserved dressing-down if she deserved it. But this, being shouted at and the implication of having made a stupid decision? It was beyond the pale. It must have been her last straw. She looked at me, her expression stone cold to match her tone — and said, If that’s the way you feel, I will never buy you anything ever again. Never.

And she walked away.

She left the pinny on the kitchen table for me to decide whether to grapple with it—and with my words. Something inside of me, something unacknowledgeable but tangible in how it sat in my being, had happened. I knew it. Perhaps it was that I had behaved in a way that felt to her too close to mean, in spirit and in deed, to let it pass. In fact, I wonder if I sounded like my father may have come to sound to her – not so much an adventurous, exuberant partner in crime as they struggled together to make the best of a life for us in Canada – but just a partner in a crime.

Walking away was her ultimate power move for a fire that can’t stay stoked if the air leaves the room.

***

Perhaps I was unleashing my anger at the interplay between my parents on the person who could reasonably be seen at that stage as both co-victim and an enabler of the situation we found ourselves in – conflicts in which “we” never seemed to win.

Perhaps these feelings built up over time for I was at once angry with both my mother and my father – her for what I perceived as her weakness, and him for always having to win – but I think I was angrier at him; my mother had simply gotten in the way.

Perhaps it was bound to happen that one day or another.

I was angry because I knew we all needed my father and to be in a relationship with him. He had always been a good provider, pretty much ensuring we had everything we needed – this, my siblings and I and even my mother, agreed. I was angry at our practicality as a family. But at what cost, I ask myself now. Was it worth having my material needs met, to live in a household where I sometimes felt under siege or threat? Was I angry because my mother had good common sense? That she chose to stay using silence as a way to pay her (our) way?

***

The incident with the pinny was the turning point where my mother decided, in her quiet way, I’m going to stop my daughter’s descent. And she made the decision to stop aiding me in speaking to her in a way she couldn’t accept – all over that semi-shirt that had no bottom. She turned away and walked out of the room, leaving me to fight – with myself.

When my father and my mother fought, he would win, but only because she stopped talking. And she only stopped talking when he wouldn’t. She only stopped talking when he told her something she had said was stupid – in front of us – a sign of his ultimate power and their mutual frustration I now suspect (although hers went unspoken). And without realising it until my late teens, I had come to view my mother as weak. Weak for giving in. Weak for sighing. Weak for not standing her ground. Weak for not standing up for us kids. Weak for not leaving – a solution to a child’s mind that may not have been required or made sense.

I was a child, though. 

What I think I missed in my youthful assessment was that Gloria was making choices. A financially comfortable life with a man with whom she had raised four children and nursed a growing career. Perhaps she didn’t view herself as cut out to be a struggling, black working mom, albeit as a pharmacist – a profession which would have tempered an ill-consequence like abject poverty. Financial and family instability, fighting for a good life in a bigger fight resulting from flight – after all she must have felt she and my father had achieved – was not a picture she could paint.

But the picture she painted for me at that time was one of a woman who capitulated — and made a form of peace that coexisted with what I now think of as strife – and sighed.

She sighed a lot.

I was so angry at her for giving in – although I didn’t know it until that day I was presented with the pinny. How angry I was at her for being so weak, so to speak. I had said, How stupid, which she took and probably knew meant, I think you are so stupid. I think we both knew I wasn’t talking about a shirt. Words count and my mother always kept her word.

She responded, I will never buy you anything ever again. 

She never did.

***

Even quiet people can be strong and are not to be under-estimated. From my mother’s choice of words, so few, so soft – and her soft but firm exit from the room — I learned to be careful with my words, especially those that are mean-spirited and which can never be withdrawn. I learned what it means to be forgiven for an act, but not to have the act forgotten. 

Ah, the potency of such an act.

With the plunging sensation I felt in my stomach – a spiritual death-knell to anyone who still has a conscience, I believed I had hurt my mother in an irredeemable way. I believe I changed the way she decided to show up in the world for me. Forever – or at least for a very long time. I would like to think that she could once again see me as all good. But I don’t think she did until I was in my early 50s. Then again, maybe I am being too hard on myself. I never said sorry – it was not what we do (in my family) – but I tried to show how much I cared by showing up. That’s what I do.

It took that long for her to trust me again – to reclaim her belief in my potential for good. I don’t think she did for a spell because she hadn’t trusted me with her deepest secrets until it was almost too late. I don’t think she felt fully safe with me until then, near the very end – when it would become apparent that for this parent, me and my sisters would keep her physically safe and fight to her death for her care, keeping and comfort.

But I don’t believe she felt safe enough to be vulnerable with me, at least not until very close to her end when she elected to share pieces of her health history and the degree to which she had lived in pain – her back botched from a surgery, cancer cut from both breasts leaving her with a permanently enlarged arm because her remaining lymph nodes were unable to do the necessary lift, her bladder burst painfully, leaving her partially incontinent – all of these lifelong, chronic health issues that only the strongest of people could make a life around.

I fear I was never able to present myself as someone who could be trusted with her deepest thoughts, from that day on when I had disparaged her purchase of the pinny. This is forever my burden to carry, only somewhat relieved by a grace extended to me when she said, I like what you are doing with these stories. Keep doing it, this writing, and took me into her confidence around her health and life experiences.

She never did buy me a physical item again. It’s important to be clear on that. She would give me money, gifting it to me all the way into my adulthood, and I know I could have asked for more at any time I wished or needed it. But to put herself in a position where I might be her judge and jury and perhaps unleash an unwarranted level of fury? Never.

What I wouldn’t give to receive a special gift, hand-picked, just for me, from the person who once knew me best.

This, she’d never risk – never again.

That is, until she gave a gift, the value of which I can’t under-estimate. I would like to believe this was her way of extending me grace and forgiveness. She gave me her stories. Her good, her bad, the situations she found herself in and the people themselves with whom she found herself in relationship. I accepted it at the time, this form of forgiveness, but I would have needed more assurance to be extended to quell the ruminations that to this day, can upend them – the beliefs I have of myself.

For, even now, I need to remind myself that I can behave badly and not be a bad person. I am not all good — but nor is anyone else. This reminder not only keeps me centred on trying to be good but gives me just enough grace to allow others to make mistakes.

If not for this lesson, I might have become unfairly critical of others, judgy and intolerant. I suppose at the very least, I can say I’m increasingly tolerant – and as critical of myself as I am of others. There’s that.

But we ran out of time, me and my mom, I regret.

I’ve buried myself on the journey, too. I’ve learned to push my rage down, so not only do I not know how to get properly mad, but I also miss the signs as to when it is appropriate and who to get angry at. And this makes me mad at myself.

I’ll have to work on that.

***

The man to my right, who remains a stranger, has donned a black sweatshirt, the hood of the hoodie hooking to his neckline. He stands to shake his beach blanket off – one which is comprised, a surprise, of every colour of the rainbow, and with which he seems to take pride as he folds it in halves and then quarters and then eighths to press neatly into his wheat-coloured cotton sack. Such joy he seems to take in what appears to be this small thing in life – his rainbow packed in a sack.

The waves continue to tumble to the shoreline, chasing each other and encroaching on the space between us. But the sun has set, the dappled dance done for the day, leaving me and my thoughts to rest and wrestle with each other in the impending darkness.

Myra Virgil is the Managing Director of a Bermuda-based philanthropic grantmaking organization, a trained social worker, and a recovered civil servant. Born, raised, and educated in Canada, she now lives, works, and writes from Bermuda, the birthplace of her father. Her storytelling draws from her coming-of-age experiences in Richmond and Vancouver, BC and Montreal, Quebec, and later, as a mother in Bermuda’s small island community.

Her first short memoir, One Word, was longlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth and Fiddlehead Prizes. The Real Canadian Superstore, a hybrid memoir, was shortlisted for the 2023 Letter Review Prize. The Journey of All Times was published in the Fall 2024 issue of The New Canadian Magazine. 

Memoir writing competes with pickleball for her spare time.