Anna In-Between (31 page)
“What did you get me into, Beatrice?” The corners of her father’s lips twitch in the beginnings of a smile.
“We have to make lunch for the priest tomorrow,” her mother says.
“But I took lunch for the priest on Monday.”
“Claire Matthews is not feeling well, so you have to pick up the food carrier from the rectory this evening.”
Once a week her mother prepares lunch for the parish priest. There are seven ladies in all who do this; each takes a day in the week. The night before her turn, each of the ladies picks up the empty food carrier from the rectory and brings it back filled with food the next day. But in the case of Anna’s mother, her husband does the picking up and the dropping off for her.
“Can’t we have dinner first?” he asks.
“Lydia has been waiting.”
Lydia is standing at the entrance of the kitchen, her face impassive. She has taken off her workday clothes. She has on a neatly pressed white blouse and a dark-colored skirt. She is wearing shoes not slippers. Her handbag, the latest style in America, a gift from her son in New York, is slung over her shoulders.
“I don’t know why you and Anna had to run off so late in the afternoon. It’s dark already,” her mother says.
John Sinclair slaps his hand to his forehead. He is immediately apologetic. “How could I have forgotten? I’m so sorry, Lydia.”
“Your father’s memory is not the same,” Beatrice says to her daughter.
“I’ll take you to the bus stop right away, Lydia,” John Sinclair says.
“So then you might as well continue on to the rectory, John. I’ll call Father Jim and let him know you’re coming.”
When they leave, her mother takes the phone with her into the house. She does not return it to its cradle. “Your father may call,” she explains.
“But he just left.”
“He always forgets something or thinks he’s forgotten something. Watch if he doesn’t call to ask about the basket. Of course, he has to bring the basket. Where else would I put the carrier? He knows I always put the carrier in the basket, but still he calls.”
Her patronizing tone irritates Anna. She thinks her mother exaggerates her father’s diminishing memory to remind him of his dependence on her, to remind him he needs her. That there can be no more Thelmas.
And why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t her mother arm herself against home-wrecking Thelmas, against firmfleshed girls sent by grocery managers to seduce her husband, to tease him into purchasing chocolates from Switzerland he does not want?
“You don’t know your father,” her mother says.
A declaration of ownership. A challenge. Her husband is her exclusive domain; she alone has access to his mind and heart.
Why does this bother her? Could she be envious of the security her mother enjoys with a husband who loves her, will do anything for her? Does she wish she had someone—a lover, a husband—who felt the same way about her?
A mother
?
“Daddy tells me your old boss at the Treasury didn’t want to let you go,” Anna says. Ill will lurks beneath her words.
Her mother is momentarily startled. “He told you about my old boss?”
“Daddy said that you used to edit his reports for him.”
“He said that?”
“That’s what he said.”
They are in the TV room. Her mother sits down on the couch and puts the phone on the low table in front of her. “It’ll take your father to say something like that,” she says.
“Well, did you?” Anna sits on a chair adjacent to the couch.
“I suppose you could say that’s what I did.”
“He said you checked his reports for grammar and spelling.”
“Oh, I did more than that.”
“He said your boss never sent out reports before you had a chance to review them.”
“I suppose you could say I was a sort of editor. Yes, I suppose you could say I was an editor before you were an editor.”
Anna notes the acknowledgment. She has referred to her as an editor. It seems she has overcome her disappointment, resigned herself to the fact that her daughter is an editor at Equiano, not, as she would have wished, at Windsor. Regardless, it must please her that her daughter is an editor in New York, the world’s capital of the publishing industry.
“You inherited my talent, Anna. Yes, that’s right. You didn’t become an editor by chance, you know. Editing was in your blood.”
Inherited from her?
I am an editor!
Anna wants to shout to her. Writers depend on me to help them shape their ideas, create their stories. You were a secretary, correcting grammar and spelling for your boss.
Her mother adjusts the folds of her dress on her lap. “The Treasurer used to have me rewrite even his personal letters. He used to say I could fix any bad sentence and make it sound like poetry.”
Like poetry?
“I was good at it,” her mother says with unaffected authority.
“You never said …”
“Anything?” Her mother shrugs. “You know I love to read. But you never want me to talk to you about what I read.”
Each time she returns to the island Anna brings books for her mother. Usually they are books she has edited, but she has noticed that even before she leaves for New York, her mother has read them all. So she has begun to bring her other books, all kinds, ones from the
New York Times
best sellers list. They never talk to each other about these books she brings. Anna talks to her friend Paula about them. She especially loves to talk about the books she acquired, the books she edited, the writers she found. But she and her mother never discuss books.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about what you did when you were working at the Treasury?”
“That was my life. This is your life.”
“You and Daddy, you keep so much away from me. From each other.”
“Not from each other.”
“You didn’t tell him about your breast,” Anna says spitefully.
“I didn’t need to tell him,” her mother responds.
Outside the dark grows deeper. The moon is yet a crescent low in the sky. Through the glass sliding doors, Anna can glimpse the outlines of trees, silvery in the dull moonlight. She wishes her father would call, say that he has forgotten something, ask about the basket. She wishes that this time he would prove her mother right.
Why don’t they discuss the books she brings her mother? The answer comes unbidden: good fiction takes one through the corridors of the human heart. She is afraid to travel through the corridors of the human heart with her mother. She has never brought her Morrison.
“Come.” Her mother stands up. The skirt of her dress unfolds and falls below her knees. “I want to show you something. Come.”
Grateful, relieved to break through the dark cloud that has descended over her, Anna bounds out of her chair. “Where to?”
“Where I am standing. I want you to come over here.”
“Over there?”
“Yes. Come nearer to me.”
Anna takes two steps forward.
“You need to come closer.”
Anna comes closer.
“Closer.”
“What is it, Mummy? What do you want to show me?”
“I want you to look at my face.”
Anna looks at her mother’s face.
“Don’t you see? Gone. All gone.” Her mother burst into giggles.
Anna does not know what to do, what to think.
Her mother swipes her hand across her chin. “Here. Feel, Anna.”
Does she want her to touch her skin?
“Do it, Anna.”
Anna extends a finger. Her mother’s breath brushes her lips.
“Touch it, Anna.”
Anna withdraws her hand. Her heart is pounding in her chest.
“Touch it, Anna.”
Anna lifts her hand and draws her finger across her mother’s chin. The skin is smooth. Silky smooth.
Her mother giggles again. “I don’t have to shave,” she says. “Every little bit of it, gone. Every tiny stubble!” Her mother is laughing so hard, tears roll down her cheeks. “The chemo!” She can hardly get the words out of her mouth. “The chemo has destroyed the follicles!”
Her mother is still laughing when her husband returns.
T
he immigrant survives by forgetting. The immigrant erases from her consciousness the past that is too painful for her to bear. The immigrant fantasizes. The past the immigrant chooses to remember is the past of an imagined home where the sea is always turquoise, the sand is always white, the grass is always green, the sky is always blue, the sun is always golden. In memories the immigrant has stored, home is always waiting in the brilliant colors of her remembered youth, in the greens, golds, blues, and whites she has left behind. There are no dark days in the immigrant’s fantasies, no black skies, no stormy waters. Only in dreams do dark memories return. And this night a dark memory plays and replays in Anna’s dream. She tosses and turns, but the memory persists. She is in elementary school, in Standard Two. They have not yet moved to the hill. Every day her father picks her up in his car and they go together to have lunch with her mother at home. This day her father has asked her to do something for him. It is a little thing. He should not have to ask. But they both know that if he does not ask, and if she does not agree, it will not be done.
What her father wants her to do is to kiss her mother when they arrive at home. Isn’t this what all children do when they greet their mother? It isn’t what they do at her home and her father knows this well. But he insists. “Kiss her.” Her mother recoils. “What’s this? What’s this, John?” She points an accusing finger at her husband.
Anna wakes up shivering, her teeth chattering. She shuts off the air conditioner, opens the windows, and inhales, filling her lungs with air damp with morning dew pearled on the leaves of the trees outside her room. Dawn is breaking. The sun still lies below the horizon, but a pink streak ripples across the sky staining the clouds above it purple. Soon the sun will rise. Soon the memory will fade. Soon,
What’s this? What’s this, John?
will be buried along with the other images she cannot allow herself to remember.
Feathers flutter in the trees, birds quarrel, fruit fall, the garbage man’s truck trundles by. Morning noises. The world is normal again. Then, oddly, a peculiar quiet. An angel passing, old people on the island say. And after the quiet, the sound of tapping on her bedroom door.
Tap, tap.
One more time, a pause, and then again.
“Anna?”
It’s her mother.
Anna tiptoes to her bed and slides under the covers.
“Anna, are you awake?”
She shuts her eyes; she covers her ears with her hands.
“Anna, are you up?”
The voice does not go away.
“I thought I heard you moving around in your room, Anna.”
Her mother stores clothes in the closets in the room where she stays when she visits. Perhaps her mother is here for her clothes and for no other reason.
Tap, tap.
Anna squeezes her eyes so tightly they hurt. She presses her hands against her ears.
Tap, tap.
She is being childish. Her mother will not go away. She opens her eyes and releases her ears. She removes the pillow from under her head and places it against the headboard. She sits up and readies herself. “Come in,” she says. “The door is not locked.”
Her mother enters the room and approaches the bed; her steps are tentative. “I don’t want to disturb you if you’re still resting,” she says. But her mother has already disturbed her. “If you want to sleep some more …”
Anna fixes the hem of the sheet around her thighs and legs. “No, I’ve had enough sleep.”
How long will it take for her to get the clothes she has come for and leave? Anna wonders.
“May I sit down?” Her mother is standing at the foot of the bed.
Not,
can
. Not,
Can I sit down
? She is asking permission.
“Of course, of course,” Anna says. What else can she say? There are no chairs in the room. If her mother sits, she will have to sit on the bed next to her.
Her mother is in her nightgown, a thin blue silky garment that falls to her knees. She clutches the opening at the neck, drawing the fabric in a bunch to her throat. The rest of the silky garment gathers around her hips, and Anna can see she is not wearing panties. When her mother lowers her body on the bed, the mattress sinks slightly under the pressure of her weight. Anna feels its undulation in her most private parts.
Mother and daughter. She has come from her mother’s womb.
She has slid down her vagina.
A chuckle rumbles up her mother’s throat. Anna waits. “That was funny, wasn’t it?” her mother says. “What I showed you yesterday?”
Anna does not believe her mother has come here, this early in the morning, in her nightgown, to sit on her bed and say this.
“Not even a stubble on my chin.”
But the hair that sprouted on her mother’s chin had not mattered to her husband. Her husband had not cared that she shaved. He placed his razor next to hers and sympathized.
Tony cared. Tony was embarrassed when she plucked out the strands that grew on her chin.
“It was good to laugh. I haven’t had much to laugh about since this.” Her mother touches the lump on her breast.
Should she seize the opportunity now to say to her:
You’ll have more days to laugh if you go to the States, if you let Dr.
Bishop do the surgery?
Is that why her mother is here? To be persuaded to go to the Bishops’ anniversary party? Should she tell her now that she needs to speak to the Bishops’ son, the doctor?
“You and Daddy should go out more often. Have fun,” Anna says.
Her mother is not so easily fooled. It takes her an instant to guess Anna’s intention. “No!” she says firmly. “I don’t want to talk about Dr. Bishop. I’ve made up my mind. Your father and I are not going to the party.”
A muscle twitches across the back of Anna’s neck. She lowers her head and massages it.
“Don’t turn away from me, Anna.” Her mother touches her arm, but lightly and briefly.
Anna lifts her head.
“I have something to tell you. Something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a very long time.”
Instinctively Anna’s back stiffens, her body building its habitual armor to protect itself. She leans back against the headboard.