Anna In-Between
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2009 Elizabeth Nunez
ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07018-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-84-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922936
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
For Jordan and Savannah Nunez Harrell
TABLE OF CONTENTS
M
orning. Seven twenty-seven. The bell rings, calling the family to breakfast. Anna makes a quick, final check in the mirror. Three more minutes. Everything is in place. Her hair is brushed back smoothly across her head and gathered at the nape of her neck with a brown tortoise shell clasp. No need for makeup. After a cold winter in New York, the heat from the Caribbean sun has stirred her blood to the surface and left her face flushed, her brown skin glowing, her lips fiery bronze. One year short of forty she still attracts attention, a second look, though not necessarily an admiring glance. Her facial features set her apart from most of the native-born blacks in New York who trace ancestors to West Africa. With her long nose, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and red-tinged toffee brown coloring, she is often mistaken for an Ethiopian, sometimes an Indian. A visible immigrant.
The bell again. Another number drops on the minute column on the digital clock. Seven twenty-nine. She runs her fingers around the waistband of her white shorts, tucks in the light pink–collared knit shirt she has chosen carefully, twirls, adjusts, checks herself in the mirror again, bends down, tightens the straps on her brown sandals. She is ready. Prepared.
Another bell. The last. Seven thirty. She leaves the bedroom and walks down the corridor toward the family dining room. Her parents are already seated, her father at the head of the table, her mother at his right.
At the right hand of the Father
. The lines of a remembered childhood prayer flit across her brain. A little girl, too young to understand place, she had climbed into her father’s chair. “Sit down, Daddy. Sit down.” She pointed to a vacant chair. But her father kept moving, pacing back and forth behind her, scratching his chin, his forehead furrowed. Her mother came to his rescue and lifted her out of the chair. “That’s Daddy’s place,” she said.
“Anna!” Her mother has heard her footsteps. “How lovely you look!”
As if the spoken word were a tangible thing, Anna feels
lovely
spread across her face and pull her lips back into a broad smile.
Her mother is impeccably dressed—as she always is. This morning she is wearing one of the American dresses Anna bought for her, a beige linen shift with large white buttons that run from the neck to the hem. On her mother the dress looks elegant, much more than had ever seemed possible to Anna when she picked it out from the sales rack at Bloomingdale’s.
“Your complexion was sallow when you arrived,” her mother says. “But look at you now!”
At seventy-one, Beatrice Sinclair is still as beautiful as the picture Anna has carried in her head from the first time she left home more than twenty years ago. In that uncanny way that husbands and wives grow to resemble each other, her mother resembles her father. The color of their skin is butterscotch brown, their features an amalgam of the aboriginal, the conquerors, the enslaved, the enslavers: the Amerindian people who first lived on the island, the Europeans who for centuries claimed it, the Africans brought there on slave ships, Indians and Chinese who exchanged indentured labor for the hope of land ownership; others, like the impoverished Portuguese, who came seeking their fortune. But in the nineteenth century the island was not yet El Dorado, though there was money to be made in cocoa and sugarcane. One century later the Spanish explorers would be proven right. Not yellow gold, but black gold—oil—lay in abundance in swollen pockets under the island’s coastal waters and across its southern lands.
Objectively, the resemblance between Beatrice and John Sinclair ends there, with this combination of Amerindian, European, and African blood that runs in their veins. But husbands and wives who have lived together this long often unconsciously mimic each other’s expressions, softening objective differences, molding distinctive features so that one barely notices that the shapes of the faces are different, that the noses, eyes, and mouths are not the same. Beatrice’s face is rounder than John’s, her eyes deeper and darker, her cheekbones raised high like those of her Amerindian aboriginal ancestors. The shape of their lips is inverted, Beatrice’s top lip fuller than her bottom lip, John’s top lip thinner. Indeed, both of John’s lips, the top and the bottom, are quite thin. When he clamps his mouth shut in anger, his lips disappear. His nose is long, bent at the tip; hers flares slightly at the end of her nose bridge. Yet the impression they give is that of relatives who share a similar lineage.
“The bell was for us,” Beatrice Sinclair says, a sort of apology directed to her daughter. “You needn’t have come out.”
But Anna is in her mother’s house and she knows that as long as one’s parents are alive, one is still a child,
their
child. If one returns to the house where they raised you, where you were a child, a dependent, you show respect, you obey their rules, no matter if you are nearing forty, no matter if you have a big job, with big responsibilities, as she has, as a senior editor at the Windsor publishing company in New York City, head of the company’s imprint, Equiano Books, with the power to say yes or no, to fulfill or dash the hopes of writers. So she holds her tongue. She does not say,
How did you expect me
to sleep through three bells?
She does not say,
You wanted me
up. The bell was to make sure I would be here on time for breakfast
. She has not forgotten the rules: breakfast at seven thirty; lunch at twelve thirty; tea at four; dinner at six.
“I was already awake,” she says. She greets her parents formally. “Good morning, Mummy. Good morning, Daddy.”
In her parents’ house, in the home of Caribbean parents, the child says, Good morning, Mummy. Good morning, Daddy. At night before she goes to bed she says good night to her parents. This is the custom, the respect that is expected even of grownup children, even of adults nearing forty.
“I heard you when you got up, Daddy,” she says to her father.
He was wearing pajamas when she saw him through her bedroom window at dawn, the fabric at the top of the pants bunched together in his hands like a bouquet of flowers, the two ends of the string drawn through the loop of waistband dangling loose at the opening. She had given him the pajama set and the bedroom slippers he was wearing, both she had bought in winter, conscious even then that the sleeves and pants of the pajamas were too long, the slippers made of velvet, too thick for this tropical climate. Her chest tightened when he bent down, releasing one hand to pick up the rolled up newspaper the paperboy threw over the gate. So much dignity. An old man in his pajamas, wearing velvet slippers to please her, holding the top of his pants in one hand to keep them from falling. He is not in pajamas now, but he has on the same shirt and shorts he wore the day before, a sea blue cotton shirt that is wrinkled, khaki shorts that are stained. Her mother has long given up her battle to change this habit he has of wearing the same clothes day after day. The logic of his defense has left her frustrated. “Wasting water in a drought,” he says in the dry season when she tells him that Lydia, their helper, would happily wash his clothes. In the wet season he takes the offensive, challenging her to criticize him. “Do I look untidy?” And in truth John Sinclair never looks untidy. Even in a wrinkled shirt and stained pants, he is stately, a gentleman in retirement.
“Oh, yes, Singh,” her mother says drily and glances at her husband.
Singh is their gardener. He has worked for them for more than forty years. Singh will be seventy-eight this year.
“I let him in,” John Sinclair says. “He’s waiting in the garden for you, Beatrice. Something about the orchids.”
It was the insistent ringing of Singh’s bicycle bell that woke her that morning and drew her roughly out of a deep sleep, leaving her in a daze until the scent of oranges and dew-soaked grass cleared her head and brought her to the present, here, the place of her birth, the Caribbean, once her home. And after the bicycle bell, there were the familiar sounds she had memorized: the key turning in the lock of her parents’ bedroom door, the soft patter of her father’s slippered feet along the corridor, the jangle of the house keys as he searched for the right one to unlock the wrought iron gate that closes off the sleeping quarters. Then the loud thud, metal hitting the stone pillars, when he pressed the button on the kitchen wall that opened the electric iron gate. The gate is there to protect them from thieves, from the rash of criminals spawned overnight by huge profits to be made from illegal drugs. All, to Anna’s mind, useless, for a schoolboy can scale the iron railings with ease.
“I don’t know why you keep having Singh come,” her father says to her mother. “I can’t see what he has to do. We hired two boys to cut the lawn and trim the hedges. What’s left for Singh to do?”
“He weeds.” Beatrice plucks invisible threads from the skirt of her dress.
“The boys we hired can weed,” her father says tersely.
“He weeds my flowerbeds. I don’t want those boys to weed my flowerbeds. They don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between a weed and a seedling for one of my flowering plants.”
“Then train them, Beatrice.”
“Singh is already trained. He knows what to do.”
“I just don’t see the need for Singh, that’s all.” Her father mumbles these words; he does not say them with conviction.
Her mother shakes her head. Her expression is one of pained forbearance.
Anna wants to distract them. She asks her father to pass the bread to her.
“Lydia made it,” her mother says. “Your father and I are really lucky to have her as a helper.” Her tongue lingers on the last word. Ever since the island became a nation, helper, not maid, is the term she must use when she refers to Lydia. She smiles coyly as if waiting to be commended for complying. Her husband looks up at her approvingly.