Anna In-Between (27 page)
“You and Daddy have lived together almost all your lives. You can’t shock Daddy now,” Anna says.
“Oh, I suppose he’ll be as shocked as I was when I looked into the mirror.” Her mother reaches for one of the magazines at her feet. “But as you say, we’ve lived a lifetime together. He’ll recover. As a matter of fact, he’ll forget I had hair at all.”
Has she misread her mother’s mood? Anxiety, she thought, had put that blank gaze in her mother’s eyes, but her mother’s tone is flippant. He’ll recover, she says. She does not seem at all nervous that her husband’s reaction to her shorn, almost bald, head will be any more lasting than her own. He will love her no matter how she looks, she says. “I know your father.”
“When I came in the room, you seemed miles away.”
“I was thinking,” her mother says.
“About you and Daddy?”
“I suppose, but mostly about you and Tony.” Her mother opens the magazine. Her eyes are lowered on the page in front of her but it is obvious she is not reading.
“About Tony and me?”
“Why can’t you find it in your heart to forgive Tony, Anna?” Her mother looks up at her.
This sudden shift from her mother’s pain to hers momentarily unhinges Anna. She flops down on the armchair next to her and barely manages an answer. “Mummy, you know about Tony and me. You know we are done. Finished.”
“I forgave your father,” her mother says.
“I’m not you, Mummy.”
“Do you think it was easy for me to forgive your father?”
“I don’t know. I just know you forgave him.”
“I didn’t forget.”
“You forgot enough to be able to live with him,”
Anna says.
“And you can’t put your husband’s indiscretion aside for the sake of your marriage?” Her mother has not taken her eyes away from her.
“It wasn’t an indiscretion. Tony betrayed me.”
“Is that what you think your father did? You think he betrayed me?”
“I don’t know what happened between Daddy and you.”
“Yes,” her mother says. “You don’t know. You think a small thing like hair can damage our marriage.”
“You said—”
“I know what I said. I wasn’t speaking about our marriage. I meant at our age change is hard to accept. We like things to be the way they were. I wasn’t speaking about our commitment to each other.”
Anna squirms under the sting of her mother’s dismissal. “What Daddy did was not a simple indiscretion.”
“Men will be men. They cheat on their wives.”
“I can’t accept that,” Anna says.
“Adultery is not the worst sin. Cheating on you is not the worst thing a man can do. There’s friendship, companionship, love.” Her mother puts down the magazine. “You don’t throw those things away.”
“There’s trust,” Anna says.
“Trust?”
“Your belief in your husband. Your confidence in him.”
“I believe in your father. I have confidence in him. I trust him.”
Anna will not let her off that easily. “I’m not like the women here. I can’t have a husband who has women on the side.”
“So that is it? You think you’re better than the women here?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What
do
you mean?”
“The women here take it for granted that their men will be unfaithful. They let the men get away with anything.”
“
Anything
?” Her mother’s eyes are flashing. “Is that what you think?”
“I’m not like that. I’m not like them.”
“You are so American, Anna.”
Her mother’s words are daggers in Anna’s heart. “Don’t, Mummy,” she says quietly, her voice lost in a sob that comes without warning, tightening her vocal cords. “Don’t.”
“Oh, Anna,” her mother groans. She presses her fingers against her lips, genuine regret brimming her eyes. “I didn’t mean … I’m sorry.”
“You always want to cut me off,” Anna says, fighting tears.
“You have American ways, but you’ll always be a Caribbean girl, Anna. You know that. But …”
“But what?”
“Things have changed since you lived here.”
“It’s still the place where I was born, where I grew up. My memories are here.”
“I know, I know,” her mother says. “But the island is different now.”
“You always do that. You always take every chance you get to tell me I don’t belong.”
“Anna, Anna,” her mother coos, but she does not reach out to Anna. She does not attempt to touch her.
“You cut me off from my country. From you.”
Somewhere in the back of Anna’s head there is a voice reminding her that her mother is not well. This is not the time to agitate her. Her hair has fallen out. Soon she will be completely bald. But the voice is not strong enough to dull an ancient pain, still fresh, insistent, tensing the muscles in her stomach, making it impossible for her to be charitable, to be selfless. “You say I’m American because
you
don’t want me here.”
“I? How can you say such a thing, Anna? Of course I want you here.”
“You’ve never asked me to come back.”
“I’ve never asked you to come back because America can give you more than we can give you here. You have a big job in America. You are an acquisition editor. You work for the largest publishing house in the world. You wouldn’t have a job like that if you stayed here.”
“I work for Equiano,” Anna murmurs.
Her mother wrinkles her forehead. “What?”
Anna raises her voice. “I work for Equiano.”
“Equiano? What’s Equiano?”
“Equiano is a small imprint of Windsor.”
“A small imprint?”
“We publish books by people of color.”
“People of color?”
“We are a specialty imprint. We publish only people of color.”
“Not other people?”
“No. Not other people.”
Her mother passes her hand across her forehead. She swallows down hard. “Equiano? Not Windsor?”
“No, I don’t work for Windsor proper.”
“A small publishing company?”
“An imprint of Windsor,” Anna says again.
“I told my friends. I boasted to poor Mrs. Farrell.”
You
told them. I didn’t tell them,” Anna says. “
“And all the time you were lying to me? Letting me lie for you?”
“You wanted me to lie to you. I am important to you because of what you can boast to your friends about me. Not because of me. I am a trophy for you to put on your shelf, to dust off when you are entertaining your friends.”
There, she has said it at last, words she has held in her heart for years. There! She waits for her mother’s answer, but her mother slumps down on the sofa. Her shoulders collapse. “I’ll take a nap now,” she says.
She has won. So she has won. So she has taken advantage of her mother at her weakest point, when she is most vulnerable, when she is terrified that the disease blooming inside of her will kill her. Anna flushes with shame. “It’s a new imprint, Mummy,” she says, remorseful now. “Well-respected. We publish major writers. That man who won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize last year, we published him.”
Her mother is not so easily cheered. She is tired, she says. Her husband will be home soon. She needs to rest so she will be ready to greet him. “Tell Lydia I’ll have my tea when your father comes.”
Anna tries again. “You did the right thing sending me away, Mummy. I would never have had the opportunities I have in America. By now, I could have been a frustrated housewife with a husband who drinks.”
Her poor attempt at humor gets lost on her mother.
“You are separated, Anna,” she says flatly. “You still have a husband.”
“Had,
Mummy,” Anna replies, doing her best to soften her tone. “Tony and I are divorced.”
“Divorced?”
“Last year.”
“Oh, Anna.” Her mother’s head falls back on the sofa. “Oh, Anna,” she whispers.
“It’s not that bad, Mummy. I’m happy.”
“Did he blame you? Your father blamed me.”
“Daddy was wrong.”
“Men always blame the women. At least, in the end, your father said he was sorry.”
“Tony never apologized.”
“Oh, Anna,” her mother says again. “Who will look after you when you’re old like me? What would have happened to me if I had left your father? What will happen to you if you get ill like me?”
S
o in the end it is her mother who wins. What indeed will happen to her when she gets as old as her? What will happen to her if at her mother’s age she has cancer?
Her mother goes to her room to take a nap and Anna heads outside to the garden. Singh is crouched at the edge of a flowerbed, digging the earth with a metal trowel. Sweat drips from his forehead and courses down the sides of his face. His black T-shirt is soaked across his back and under his armpits. His bare legs glitter in the sunlight. The brown of his skin is the brown of the earth. His black rubber clogs barely mark the difference.
Salt of the earth
. Singh belongs. No one says: You are so Indian, Singh. Or if they do, they do not mean: You are so Indian from India, Singh. They know, Singh knows, he is an Indian from the Caribbean. He is Caribbean. He is Indo-Caribbean, it has become fashionable to say.
The dry leaves crackle and crunch beneath her feet and Singh swings his head around in her direction. He waves. She waves back and moves on. She is in a dark place. She does not want to talk to Singh. She must build a wall, a fortress to protect herself from yielding to the downward slide into the bottomless pit of self-pity. For who will rescue her after she leaves, when she is no longer on her island but there, in New York, alone, in a country still alien to her in many ways?
Her mother has her husband. Her mother has her country. Her mother has friends she has known since childhood. Her mother has a child, a dutiful daughter.
In the city where she lives, in New York, Anna has looked into the eyes of immigrant mothers of American children and seen incomprehension registered there. They sit on park benches, these mothers, fingers nervously plucking the edges of their skirts, silently measuring their distance from their squealing children running and jumping merrily through the grass, their little faces bright with carefree joy. Flesh of their flesh, yet a chasm yawns between these mothers and their children. Born in America, the children belong to America. The hearts and souls of their mothers were forged in other lands.
What will happen to you if you get ill like me?
Singh shouts out her name and forces her to stop and acknowledge him again. “If you want, Miss Anna,” he says, “you could sit on de bench under de mango tree. Dem ants ent go climb up de concrete.”
Even Singh pities her. Singh knows she has no husband.
Yes, she says, she will sit awhile on the bench under the mango tree.
“Is me dat build it for de bossman,” he says, reminding her, establishing his right to a place in her parents’ home.
Her mother wanted a bench made out of wood, with a back and armrests. Singh convinced her to compromise. “Mango go fall on de bench, bird go poop on de bench, ants go climb de bench to eat de mango and de poop dat fall on de bench. Den de ants and termites go eat de wood on de bench,” he said to her. So the frame and arms of the bench are made out of concrete, the slats on the seat out of wood. Singh has painted the concrete frame and arms white, the slats bright green. “To match de grass, as madam did tell me,” Singh will say to anyone who admires his handiwork.
Dried bird droppings smear the slats and arms of the bench. At the bottom there is an anthill and climbing up the trunk of the mango tree is a black trail leading to an enormous termite nest in the cup of a thick branch. But in over fifteen years, the wood on the bench has survived. Termites and ants approach the concrete frame and, finding no food there, turn back.
Anna has sat on this bench, under this mango tree, many times before. The sunlight here is filtered and yet if she looks up, she can see the sky twinkling through the leaves, today made radiant blue by a dazzling sun. In front of her the green lawn is punctured with blooming flowerbeds, Singh’s pride and joy. But the lawn itself belongs to her father and the boys he employs to mow it. After he is done with his fish, feeding them or clearing the pond of frogs, her father scours the lawn for weeds. No matter how hot the day, he crouches down on the grass and plucks out every weed he finds.
Anna sits here now and recalls a past, Tony complaining: “Work, work, work. All you think of is work. You’re too ambitious.”
They met when they were both in graduate school taking classes at night, she for her Masters in English, he for an MBA. They got engaged when they graduated and married two years later. She was twenty-eight, he was thirty-two. He wanted to start his career right away. He said they had time enough to have children. He got a job trading stocks for a brokerage house, then the place collapsed and he was unemployed. For one year he floundered, moving from brokerage firm to brokerage firm. Finally, he gave up and went to work as an assistant to a manager in a department store. The pay was ten times less than what he formerly earned, a third less than what she was making at Windsor.
“Work, work, work,” he said. “All you think of is work. That’s why you can’t make a baby,” he declared.
She knew he spoke in self-defense, out of feelings of inadequacy. He was ashamed. Without her income, they could not meet their monthly mortgage payments. Without her income, he could not keep the Mercedes-Benz he had bought when he worked at the brokerage firm.
He wants a child, he told her. If she were any kind of a woman, she would give him a child.
And yet they could not afford a child. They could not afford weeks without her income while she stayed at home to care for a child; they could not afford the cost of childcare when she returned to work. Not if they wanted to keep their duplex, not if he wanted to keep his Benz. Young, talented, aggressive junior editors were nipping at her heels. She could not risk losing her place on the ladder to the top. There was the promise of Equi-ano, a Windsor imprint that would be hers to direct. At nights she fell asleep with manuscripts scattered on the bed, her reading glasses sliding down her nose.
Should she have blamed Tony when she found a phone number in his jacket pocket with Crystal’s name next to it? Crystal did not read manuscripts into the night while Tony lay, ignored, on the other side of her bed.