Anna In-Between (32 page)

“It’s about my father.”

Her mother’s father is dead. He was dead long before Anna was born. As the sons and daughters of dead parents often do, her mother romanticizes him. Her father was handsome, her father was kind, her father was a good man. This is what her mother chooses to believe.

“He adored my mother,” her mother says.

A lie.

“And she adored him too.”

Another lie.

“My father would have given her the world, but my mother was too proud to take anything from him.”

Her father was a gambler. When he died, his wife was left with
the burden of his gambling debts.

“The world,” her mother says. “If she had let him give it to her. Money, clothes. Whatever she wanted.”

“Mummy. You don’t have to …” Anna raises her hand to stop her.

“You don’t believe me?”

“It does not matter,” Anna says softly. “It does not matter.”

“She wouldn’t take what he wanted to give her. Pride made her not take it.” With one hand her mother plucks the skirt of her nightgown at her knees; the other hand is still at her throat.

“He was a gambler, Mummy. He had nothing to give her.”

“There’s much you don’t know, Anna.” The knuckles on her mother’s fingers protrude, sharp and pale.

“I know what he did. I know he threw away everything he had on the gambling table.”

“You are so judgmental, Anna. So judgmental.” Her mother stretches out her fingers and claws the fabric of her nightgown, gathering it tightly around her throat.

“Your mother didn’t deserve such a husband, or you such a father,” Anna says.

“He made my mother an honest woman. He married her.
That
counted for a lot in my day.”

“Counted?” Anna’s jaw drops.

“You don’t know what that meant. Being married. Marriage was important in my day. It’s still important for a woman.”

“You mean important for me?” Anna kicks away the sheet from her legs and gets out of the bed.

“Oh, Anna, I was not thinking of you at all.”

“Why are you so ashamed of me for being unmarried?” Anna spits out the words at her. “Women live alone. They are quite happy living alone. I am happy living alone.” She turns her back and walks across the room toward the window.

“You always misunderstand me, Anna. I thought last night, last night when we laughed …”

They laughed, but nothing has changed. She wants more. She
wants a daughter who is an editor at Windsor, a daughter who is
married to a successful man. She cannot boast to her friends about
a daughter who is divorced, a daughter who is an editor of a small
publishing imprint for writers of color.

“Why don’t you give up, Mummy?” Anna leans against the windowsill and faces her. “I am almost forty. I have no children. I have no husband. I have no trophy career to offer you.”

“Anna, Anna. That’s not it at all. That’s not why I am here. I want to explain … You need to know.”

“What do I need to know, Mummy?”

“Why we haven’t … you know. Why we haven’t …”

She cannot say it. She cannot say: Why we haven’t embraced.
Why it’s so hard for me to kiss my daughter.

“You don’t have to explain,” Anna says. She thrusts her head out of the open window.

“It’s about my father. I came to tell you about my father. So you’d understand about me.” Her mother pauses, swallows down hard. “My mother was pregnant with me by another man when your grandfather married her.”

Anna swivels around.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why my skin is so much lighter than your grandmother’s?”

Blood drains down Anna’s neck. Her knees buckle, the tips of her fingers are suddenly icy cold. “I hardly remember my grandmother,” she murmurs.

“You’ve seen the photographs. You know what she looked like. Didn’t you wonder? She had those cheekbones like you have. The Carib Amerindian blood in her. African and Carib she was, but her skin was dark. Didn’t you notice how dark she was?”

“Grandpa …” Anna begins, but she needs more air.

“You’ve seen his photographs too. His skin was the color of tar. Black like tar. Didn’t you notice his nose? Is my nose as flat as his? And his hair? Is the texture of your hair like his?”

She had noticed his tar black skin, his hair, his nose. She had indeed wondered: would two such dark-skinned parents give birth to a daughter with butterscotch brown skin like her mother’s? She had stifled the question whenever it rose. “I don’t remember,” she whispers now.

“You
won’t
remember. You remember he was a gambler. I remember he married my mother. I forgave him everything for marrying my mother.” Beatrice releases her hold on the top of her nightgown bunched at her neck. Her shoulders droop. “My father, my real father, the biological one, was a white man. English.”

A typical Caribbean story
. The words sear like acid across Anna’s brain. She does not voice them.

“From England,” her mother says.

Why should she be surprised? Why should her mother’s story be any different from the stories of so many other women on the island? Anna does not need her mother to tell her more. The air outside the window clears her head. She knows this story; it is common enough. It is the story of Englishmen who dropped their seeds on the island and went back home to their Englishwomen. Which is worse, Anna wonders: a grandfather who was a gambler, or a grandfather who discarded her grandmother after he sated himself?

“He loved my mother.”

“Loved her?” Anna will not believe that.

“It happens. It happened many times. It still happens on this island. Men and women love each other; it doesn’t matter their skin color.”

“He abandoned your mother.” If she wants to speak the truth, Anna thinks, let it be the whole truth.

“He couldn’t stay with my mother.”

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

“He was married,” her mother says.

“Hah! An adulterer!” Anna exclaims bitterly.

“He wanted to take care of her.”

“He wanted a wife and a mistress,” Anna says.

“He was willing to provide for her.”

“But not willing to divorce his wife and marry her. Not that.”

“We didn’t do such things in my mother’s time.”

“Yes, an Englishman would not do such things as marry a black woman when he could have her as his mistress.”

“You are wrong, Anna. He wanted to take care of me too. Then the colonial office sent him back to England.”

“How convenient!”

“His wife had reported him to the colonial office,” her mother says.

“And he tucked in his tail and went back home.”

“You don’t understand, Anna. He had no choice. He would have lost his job.”

“So he preferred to let my grandmother pay the price.”

“She didn’t want him to lose his job.”

“But he was willing to leave her to fend for herself.”

“She wouldn’t accept money from him. And then your grandfather, the one you called Grandpa, offered to marry my mother.”

“They paid him?”

Her mother groans. “Your grandfather was not a bad man, Anna. No one paid him. He knew my mother from their school days. He had loved her since then. He wanted to help her. But she never loved him.” Tears well in the canals below her eyes; they do not fall down. “No matter what he did, she could not bring herself to love him. He reminded her of what she lost, what she really wanted. She resented me too. She loved me, but she loved only that part of me that was a part of my father and her.”

Anna has no memory of seeing her mother cry. The tears, though they remain at the edges of her mother’s eyes, make her uneasy. She wishes they would go away. “Don’t,” she says.

“One day your grandpa came home drunk and tried to kiss my mother. Or I think that was what he tried to do. I was in my bedroom, but I heard them. She must have pushed him away. She always pushed him away whenever he got too close to her. She would flinch when he touched her.”

You flinched when I touched you. You recoiled when Daddy
made me kiss you.

“He must have been so drunk that day he lost his usual self-control. He began yelling at her.
When will you
stop loving him and love me? I am here. I’m your husband, but you
don’t see me.
It was terrible. Afterward, my mother came to my room. She was weeping. She said that if she could love my father, she would love him. But we don’t choose who we love, she said. She blamed Cupid. Funny, isn’t it? She claimed that when she met my biological father some mythical god of love had sunk his arrow so deep in her heart she could never pull it out.”

“And you believe that,” Anna says quietly.

“About Cupid?” Her mother swipes the back of her arm across her eyes. The tears that did not come down, that seemed as if they were refusing to come down, get squeezed between her arm and the canals of her eyes. A bubble forms in each eye, bursts, and drips to the top of her cheeks. Her cheeks are damp when she faces Anna.

“I remember how I could not resist your father though I was angry with him for following me in the street that day. So silly. Following me everywhere until I had to stop. I don’t know what it was: his sheepish look, that foolish hat he was wearing. I don’t know. I can’t tell. He came to my house every day and I couldn’t say no. Did I have a choice? Did Cupid shoot his arrow in my heart? Like my mother, I couldn’t pull that arrow out.”

Anna draws in her bottom lip over her teeth and clamps her mouth shut. Her teeth sink into her flesh. She presses down harder, focusing on the pain, anything to silence the voice that wants to ask:
If you can love him,
why is it so hard for you to love me?

“With children it’s the same,” her mother says.

Anna’s heart leaps in her chest. Her head swirls.

“It’s not an arrow; it’s the umbilical cord. I blamed you last night. I said you wouldn’t talk to me about the books you brought home for me to read, but it was I who stopped you. I made it impossible for you to talk to me. I always make it impossible for you to talk to me.” Her mother’s voice breaks and the brick wall around Anna’s heart totters.

“I learned well from my mother. I learned not to show my feelings for my own daughter.” Her mother rubs her nose against her shoulder and sniffles.

A bird sitting on a tree branch in the garden outside the bedroom window stretches out its wings and leaps. Anna follows its flight.

“Not that I should blame her. She could not have survived if she had allowed herself to show her real feelings.”

And what about me? How did I survive when my mother did not
show affection for me?

Her mother trails fingers from one hand over the back of the other. Perhaps her thoughts are the same; perhaps she too wonders how her daughter survived. “In my day,” she says, “mothers did not do that; they did not hug and kiss their children. The queen …”

Anna’s brain will not allow her to wait for the rest.
The queen was not my mother!
she wants to yell.
You are. And
you couldn’t stand the touch of my lips on your cheeks.
But she is reasonable. She says: “We are not a colony of England anymore, Mummy.”

“My mother was born in a colony of England. Her mother’s mother and her mother. I was born in a colony of England. That was all I’ve known except for these past few years.”

“Not a few. More than twenty, Mummy.”

“Yesterday. It seems like yesterday to me. The queen didn’t …” She pauses and looks up expectantly at Anna, but Anna does not interrupt her again. “The queen did not hug and kiss Charles and Anne. Yet what did it matter what the queen did?” Her mother flicks her hand in the air. “It mattered to us. She didn’t care, but we cared. If she did not hug and kiss her children, we didn’t hug and kiss our children. We learned restraint from her.”

“Restraint?” Anna almost chokes on the word.

“We were good colonial subjects. We imitated the queen.”

“She was protecting her progeny.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Lust,” Anna says.

“Lust?”

“They weren’t as lucky as we are. They didn’t have birth control. So no hugging or kissing your relatives. Not even your children. It was one way to prevent pregnancy, to keep bad thoughts out of the minds of relatives.”

“Oh,” her mother says, Anna’s meaning sinking in. “Still, I should not have …”

Anna holds her breath.

“I should not have … I should not …” Her mother looks away.

She cannot say the words. Years of restraint have calcified any impulse she may have now to say more.

In spite of herself, Anna feels sympathy for her. “It’s okay, Mummy,” she says. “It’s okay.”

Her mother’s relief is visible when she turns around. The dullness in her eyes has vanished, her cheeks have softened, her lips loosened in the beginning of a smile. “But we laughed last night, didn’t we, Anna?” There is a child’s desperate hopefulness in her voice.

“Yes,” Anna says. “We laughed.”

Then her mother surprises her. She gets up and walks toward her. She reaches for her hand and squeezes it. “You cannot imagine, Anna,” she says—it’s the mother speaking now, not the desperate child—“You cannot imagine how many times I have wanted to tell you how much I love you.”

At last. Cupid’s arrow. The umbilical cord that binds the mother to the child, the child to the mother.