Boundaries (28 page)

“Is that what you want, or is it what you see?” Habits die hard. As much as she tries, Anna cannot keep the hurt from breaking up her voice. Her words are unsteady when they leave her mouth.

“Oh, Anna. Not again,” her mother whimpers. “Your father and I would be happy to have you home anytime you want to come back. I was just saying—”

Paul moves swiftly to Anna’s side. “She was teasing you, weren’t you, Anna?”

She is ashamed of herself. She needs to let go. She is too old to be holding on to childhood resentments. But she is an outsider in America. When disasters befall Americans, when they celebrate their victories, they close ranks. They fly the red, white, and blue from their porches and cars and she is left on the outside, a foreigner, an alien. To surrender her past, her beginnings, is to be set adrift with no moorings in sight. She has made a home for herself in America, but she does not fit in. Tim Greene has made that plain to her. “You don’t have a feel for our readers,” he said. Tanya offered what she thought was a compliment, but she too opened a gully, Anna on one side, Americans on the other. “You’re different from the average black reader,” Tanya had said. Anna didn’t need her to elaborate, to say that she didn’t mean Anna’s tastes are the same as the white reader’s.

Paul draws her to him. “My parents tell me the same thing. They say I can come home anytime, but they know, and I know, I can’t. It’s too late for Anna and me. We’ve become hybrids. Caribbean-Americans. Isn’t that so, Anna?”

Anna manages a weak smile.

“The mosquito knows,” Paul says.

“The mosquito?” Beatrice raises her eyebrows and queries her husband, the laugh lines on her face spreading with her relief that Paul has broken the tension that was threatening to spoil the gay evening.

“We have yet to hear the mosquito speak,” John says jokingly.

“It bites,” Paul says.

“Only you,” Beatrice chimes in. “Anna always complains when she comes home. We have to burn cockset for her.” Cockset, the mosquito coils her mother burns to repel the insects. Anna remembers how her mother fusses whenever she has to bring them out of the closet for her. “Mosquitoes? What mosquitoes? I don’t feel a thing. Do you, John?”

“Exactly,” Paul says. “It smells our foreign blood.”

It takes a second for his point to sink in and when it does, Beatrice shouts out, “You’re a match!” Her face is glowing; she is beaming at Anna.

Her enthusiasm embarrasses her husband. He stands in front of her and holds out his hand. “Shouldn’t we be turning in, Beatrice?”

“The dishes,” she says.

John Sinclair tightens his grip on her hand. “Come. Tonight we will leave the dishes in the sink.”

TWENTY

T
he small French café near Anna’s apartment where Paul and Anna have gone for dessert is sandwiched between a bodega and a three-story walk-up with a broken concrete front stoop. Outside, a cluster of teenagers, most of them black or Latino, two of them white, are trying out the latest hip-hop dance to music blaring out of a boom box. Inside, the pastry chef who greets Anna is a Frenchman, his wife an Algerian. A Chinese girl and a white male teenager, both with tattoos, hers on her right arm, his on both arms and another on one side of his neck, are waiting tables. Anna and Paul are the oldest customers but also the only exclusively black couple in the café. There are other black customers but none paired with another black person. A black man (he seems an African) sits opposite a white man, obviously his lover; a Latino girl is talking animatedly to a black man; a black girl is sharing a raspberry tart with her white boyfriend.

Paul looks around and observes to Anna that immigrants are changing the color of America. “Soon whites will be a minority. At least in Brooklyn.”

“It’s what Tim Greene fears,” she says, opening the way to answering Paul’s question when he dried her tears.

“Tim Greene is African American, isn’t he?”

“Oh, Tim isn’t worried about Americans becoming browner. He’s afraid African Americans will be displaced by Caribbean immigrants. He seems to think we’re taking advantage of the opportunities African Americans achieved with their blood, through years of slavery and lynchings.” She tells him of Tim’s promotion, about the merger, about the end of the Equiano imprint, about the new TeaHouse Press, about the appointment of Conrad Hilton, about her demotion. About the reason why she was removed from her position.

“Was that his explanation or yours?” Paul asks.

“He said I didn’t have a feel for his people.”

“Were those his exact words?”

“Pretty much.”

Paul rubs his temples. His fingers make circular motions folding his skin over the corners of his eyes. “Did you discuss this with your father?” he asks. He releases his fingers and slides them down the sides of his face.

“Yes.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said I should accept the changes. He said there is a history here, in America, that we weren’t part of.”

Paul presses his fingers against the tip of his chin. “Your father is a wise man.”

“You can’t be agreeing with him?” Anna says this so loudly she startles the young waitress who is about to fill their glasses. Water spills over the table. The waitress mops it up and after she leaves, Paul says quietly, “It doesn’t make sense to spin your top in mud, Anna.”

He means she has lost. He means she should accept her loss as her father has advised her to. But she cannot give up that easily. “I’ve put in time in the company,” she says. “Windsor has made money from the books I found for them. Many were best sellers; they made millions for Windsor. What has Conrad Hilton, or Tim Greene for that matter, done for the company?”

“You’re missing the point, Anna.” Paul keeps his voice even, devoid almost of emotion.

“What point? Everyone wants to be appreciated. It doesn’t matter if they are black or white, or what ethnic group they belong to. It’s in our human DNA to want—no, to expect—reward for our hard labor.”

“It’s the price of the ticket, Anna,” Paul says softly.

“What ticket?’

“For the green card. For being allowed citizenship.”

The word
allowed
stops her. So that is it? She was in their power; she had no rights.

“They didn’t have to give it to us.” Paul reaches for her hand. She is still simmering with anger, but she does not pull away. “If it’s in the universal DNA to expect reward,” he says, “it’s in our DNA, too, to expect gratitude.” He reminds her of the connection between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the amendment to the Immigration Act that came one year later, in 1965, striking down country of origin as a criterion for immigrating to America. “The proximity of those dates is not accidental.”

“Still,” Anna murmurs, “it isn’t fair.” And suddenly she remembers a line from Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
.
What’s fair
ain’t necessarily right
. Beloved has returned from the dead to persecute her mother, Sethe, for taking her life. The community sides with Beloved, not Ella, the wise one, the leader of the community. Sethe is on her deathbed, her body reduced to a sack of bones; Beloved is plump, bursting with the food Sethe, tortured by guilt and love, has fed her. “What’s fair ain’t necessarily right,” Ella says. She chases Sethe’s tormentors out of the house.

“It may not be fair to you,” Paul says, “but it’s fair to Tim Greene. Look, Anna, I agree that in a just world, a fair world, you should keep the position you earned with your hard work. But this has not been a fair world or a just world for Tim Greene’s relatives. Your father is right: we have not lived their history. They have had four hundred years of suffering and hardships.”

“And we haven’t? They picked cotton and we planted sugarcane. The lash on our backs was the same.”

“This is their country, Anna. Their suffering happened here, in America. To Tim Greene it isn’t right that his friend should have to be put at the end of the line again in his own country.”

Rosa Parks refusing to sit at the back of the bus
. The image looms before Anna and silences her.

“Tim Greene may have had to wait until whites got theirs, but he’s not prepared to wait until immigrants get theirs too.”

The waitress is back. She taps her pencil impatiently on her notepad, anxious to get their orders. Anna opens the menu. She is glad for this break, for this chance to cool down. She needs to be more sympathetic. Even Rita has pleaded with her to be more understanding. Tim Greene’s life was not easy. Her father has always been in her life; his father abandoned him. It must have been painful for Tim to know that his mother was dependent on a man who had no intention of marrying her, who kept her in the dark, hidden away, while he romanced his wife in public. Hard for him, too, to be dependent on that man, even if he paid his way to Cornell.

She does not want to fight with Paul. Not now. She cringed when her mother attempted to show her off, as if she were a commodity up for sale. She is a decent cook, but not an excellent cook. Her taste for spicy Caribbean food has diminished. She rarely cooks curry. But deep down she was glad her mother made this clumsy attempt to push Paul to declare his intentions. She is not young. She does not have the time this tattooed waitress has; she does not have years left to try out dates, this one and that one, to camouflage a tattoo on her arm if her new lover so desires. It would be good to know now, to know if they are to remain lovers, or if he intends a deeper commitment. Marriage. She would like marriage.

Their desserts arrive. Paul has ordered sweet potato pie; she, apple pie á la mode. He wants to share, but she says, “Not the ice cream.” She is teasing him and they laugh over her secret passion that she claims she has inherited honestly from her mother, whose fattened hips are attributable to her craving for coconut ice cream and Julie mangoes. “But not
your
hips,” Paul says. “They are just right.”

They are still laughing when she inserts her knife into her pie to cut it in half. Paul reaches for her wrist and holds her hand still. “Anna,” he begins. He is looking deeply into her eyes. Her heart skips a beat. “I didn’t mean to say I don’t feel for you.”

She does not want to go back. Tim Greene has won. She will accept his victory. She does not want Tim Greene to spoil her personal life too.

“I don’t have to be the boss,” she says. “Senior editor is good enough. I like editing books.” It is true. She loves the partnership she has with writers. She loves unearthing emotions buried so deep in the conscious mind of the writers that though the evidence is there in the stories they tell, they are barely aware of the feelings that propelled them to create worlds, characters, plots. She prods and their stories open up again. Suddenly they are aware of patterns, motifs, tropes that had little personal significance to them before she led them to dig deeper. They begin again; they revise and revise. Yes, she says to Paul; she loves the work she does. It fulfills her.

“Then keep on doing it. Be the best editor at TeaHouse Press.”

His hand is still on her wrist and she feels a tremor running through it. His fingers press deeper at her pulse.

He must feel the quickening of her heartbeat too.

“Anna.” He says her name with such tenderness, she wants to hold him. She places her other hand over his and squeezes it.

“This may be too soon, but we don’t have much time.

We are grown adults. We know what we want. I’ll be fifty next month.”

“I’m almost forty.”

“Not too late to have children.”

Her heart races.

“This isn’t the place. This isn’t where I wanted to ask you.” He looks down on her hand covering his. “I had planned something nice. Dinner at a fancy place, dancing afterward.”

“We don’t need a fancy place or dancing afterward.”

He looks up, his eyes meeting hers. “You’ll make me the happiest man in the world if you say yes.”

Yes, yes, yes
. In the distance, an echo. Her father’s voice.
Carpe diem
. She may have to wait; it may not be her turn, but it will be her children’s turn,
their
children’s turn.
They
won’t have to wait.
Yes.