Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

seat four, the only car he would ever have, than was Mr. Hall with his brand-new car, his second brand-new car that could seat five.
    And that car’s secondhandness vanished from Mr. Shepherd’s mind, he treasured it so, and if it had been brand new he would not have loved it more, he would
not have known how to love it more. Mr. Shepherd had not expected ever to own a motorcar, he had a bicycle, a very good one; even when it became rusty, its rustiness was a part of its very goodness. Mr. Shepherd loved his car so, and this was a new experience, this love, this feeling he had for his small used car that could seat four; for he did not love Mistress Shepherd, he did not love their four children, his four sons, who wanted to be nothing at all but whom Mr. Shepherd knew was meant to dominate a small group of people who were vulnerable in a way Mr. Shepherd had not yet settled on. Mr. Shepherd did not love Mistress Shepherd and he did not love his children, but he knew unwaveringly how important they were to him, like his eyes and his mouth and his heart and his feet, and if he lost any of those things, he would be broken, not heart-broken, just broken, and could not be put back together again in the way he had been before he lost them. And he did love his car and sometimes he would awake himself on purpose just to see how it looked nestled in the deep, deep sea blue that was the color of the night sky, right before midnight; and he loved to see it standing in the rain, its shiny gray permanent coating the color of a skin he could not have imagined, resisting the sudden ferocious downpour, a downpour that had been the object of longing for days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years; he did love his car and wanted to sit in it and be driven
in it, so that the labor of driving the car would not interfere with his love for his car. And Mr. Shepherd taught Mr. Potter to drive, and in teaching Mr. Potter to drive, Mr. Shepherd had to reach not too far within himself to find ugliness and cruelty. He called Mr. Potter stupid, he compared him to invertebrates of every order, he compared him to the indiscriminately growing members of the vegetable kingdom who were of no use (as far as Mr. Shepherd knew) and who had created much nuisance (as far as Mr. Shepherd knew), and he brought to life the sad specimen that Mr. Potter became (but it was Drickie really, for Mr. Potter had not been placed in his care). And Mr. Potter took it all in, cruelty and ugliness, with silence and indifference and as if it were breath itself. And Mr. Shepherd did not become happy, even as he had been granted the luxury of expressing his own ugliness without the slightest retribution; he only became certain of the futility in everything: a small and private obsession that might lead to revelation and joy; love itself; the unknowableness of who or what made him; the mystery that he was to himself; the emptiness of spaces and then their being filled up; the beautifully soft white Egyptian cotton handkerchief he carried in his pocket only on Sundays; Mistress Shepherd, his wife, who did not have to strive to be his wife, she was so simply his wife, and her general disapproval of her immediate world and the people who occupied it had a perfection,
like a glass figurine from somewhere far away and completely unfamiliar, somewhere he had read of in a book, and the mere reading of it came to be a personal experience (that would be London). And when Mr. Potter took in Mr. Shepherd’s cruelty and ugliness with silence or indifference, all of it—cruelty, ugliness, silence, indifference—became a skin, not like a skin, but a skin; and when his mother Elfrida Robinson walked into the sea after leaving him with Mr. and Mistress Shepherd and he longed for her and then forgot that she had abandoned him to people he did not know and then walked into the sea, the sea which she did not know, all this too became a skin, not like a skin, but a skin itself, a