Boundaries (4 page)

“If I were honest,” she says, turning back to him, “I would admit that too. Tony left me for another woman, but before that, we had drifted apart.”

“Was he from here?” Electric lanterns hang on the poles at either end of the deck and bathe them in a soft light, which bounces off Paul’s plum-colored skin and shadows his eyes.

Anna shakes her head. “No. Not from here.”

“From another Caribbean island?”

“African American,” she replies.

The dinner they ordered has not yet arrived. Paul picks up the fork next to his empty plate and twirls it between his fingers. “My ex is American,” he explains. “Italian.”

“Foreigners,” she says. “We both married foreigners.”

The small band in the corner of the main dining room has begun to play a calypso. It’s an old-time calypso that Anna remembers well:
Jean and Dina, Rosita and Clementina /
Round the corner posing / Bet your life is something they selling.
It’s a song about the American occupation of two large areas on the island. On the northwestern tip of the island the Americans had built a naval base, and an air base in the valley between the northern and central mountain ranges. The sailors and airmen wanted girls and were willing to pay for them, but now the war was over.
Yankees gone and
Sparrow take over now.

“Would you like to dance?” Paul asks. Several couples are already on the dance floor.

It has been a long time since she danced to a calypso. She fears her body will not remember the rhythms. She raises her hand to decline Paul’s invitation but he is already out of his chair moving toward her.

“Come.” He grasps her hand. “It’s like riding a bicycle.”

Paul Bishop leaves the next afternoon. He telephones in the morning to say goodbye. She is surprised how sad she feels, for she knew it was his last night on the island. But she cannot remember when she had been so happy or when she had danced so much. He was right: it all came back to her when she stepped on the dance floor. And he had been a good dance partner. He grasped her waist and held her firmly, guiding her legs. It felt good to dance again, to go out to dinner, to laugh, to talk about inconsequential matters. For after their brief exchange about spouses who had left them, they threw the past behind and allowed themselves to be swept away by the seductive beat of the music, the warm breezes wafting off a sea glistening with starlight and the rippling reflection of the rising moon, and all that existed was the present, carefree and joyous. Now he is calling to say he is leaving the island.

“I’ll see you soon in the States. When do you expect to come to New York?”

Her sadness dissipates. She will see him again soon. “In three weeks,” she says. But the truth is she wants to leave earlier. Needs to leave earlier.

“She’s a strong woman, your mother.”

“Yes, but …” Her voice trails.

“I mean it,” he says. “Your mother’s a spunky woman.”

He has misunderstood her. She tells him about Bess Milford’s novel. She has e-mailed the edited draft to her boss, along with a summary, but she hasn’t heard from her. Now she is worried. “I really need to go back soon,” she says.

“Need?” he asks. “Are you worried it won’t get published?”

“Oh, no. My boss Tanya promised to publish it. I’m worried that it may not get properly marketed and promoted. No novel sells itself without lots of marketing.”

“Then go,” Paul says. “You can leave right after your mother has her last chemo treatment. She’ll be okay. My only worry is that she could change her mind and not come to the States for surgery.”

“Oh, she won’t change her mind,” Anna says quickly, grasping the reprieve he has given her. He has also left aging parents behind to seek his own fulfillment. He will not judge her harshly. He will not think there is something unnatural about a daughter who loves her job, who wants to get back to it as soon as she can. Her mother is ill, but she has her husband with her. She is not alone.

“Because this is not something she can put off much longer.” Suddenly he’s speaking to her as the surgeon he is. “Her tumors are large.”

Her heart sinks. “Are you suggesting I should stay?”

“Only if you can’t guarantee she’ll come to the States.”

She cannot make such a guarantee, but her father can. He wants her mother to live. She has promised him she will come. She will not break the promise she made to him.

“She will come for my father,” Anna says.

He exhales. She hears the puff of breath released through his nostrils. She imagines his paunch flattening. “Good. Good. Then that’s settled. There’s no reason you can’t come back to New York earlier. Your father seems very capable of taking care of your mother, and Dr. Ramdoolal will make certain she is strong enough to travel. If you have to be in New York, then go.”

She does not need his permission, but his confidence eases the residue of guilt that had begun to nag her.

“And it would be good to see you again,” he adds.

It has been a long time since a man told her she was pretty, brought her flowers and chocolates, and took her dancing. Yes, it would be good to see him again.

When she gets off the phone, she books her flight to New York.

FOUR

N
ew York is in the throes of an Indian summer when she arrives two weeks later. On the sidewalks in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, old oak barrels, the slats banded together with strips of rusty iron, are overflowing with flowers in a brave show of exuberance, vines in variegated shades of green cascading down their sides. In weeks, if not days, the frost will come and the flowers will curl on themselves, wither, and die. Until then, they bloom in a defiant display of color. Impatiens, now at their peak, form hillocks of pink and red next to geraniums, their buds fully open, petals trembling in the slightest breeze. The planters are new to Fort Greene and still a surprise to old residents accustomed to rotted food and filthy scraps of paper spilling out of trash cans the garbagemen have barely emptied and then hurled onto the broken pavement in their race to jump back on the moving trucks. That was then. Now everything is different since the bubble has burst in the dot-com world of twenty- and thirty-something millionaires in Manhattan, and, like their ancestors before them, they have turned southward seeking a New World. In Brooklyn they discover treasures just waiting for the taking: century-old brownstones and limestones intricately carved, and in the interiors high ceilings, ornate woodwork, crystal chandeliers, marble-façade fireplaces. Giddy with excitement, they learn these were all once theirs, abandoned by parents many decades ago, racism fueling their flight out of the cities when the Civil Rights Act mandated the desegregation of housing that permitted blacks to live wherever they chose.

To be fair, the young millionaires offer inducements far more valuable than beads to the blacks and Latinos who had long settled in, making the neighborhood their own. The money they pay seems like a fortune to people who had to partition their homes and charge rent by the room to meet their monthly mortgage bills. It is their ticket out of the ghetto to a house without tenants, a backyard, perhaps a pool, and parks nearby. Too late they discover what realtors knew all along: the demand for housing is rising in the cities, not in the suburbs. The new owners clear the rubble and put a price five times as high on the houses that ensure the previous owners and tenants will never be able to return.

Anna was prescient enough to purchase her apartment before the onslaught from Manhattan. It is on the second floor of a six-story building, small by Manhattan standards but large in this area of elegant one-family brownstones. Her apartment is a comfortable size: two bedrooms, one she has turned into an office, along with a dining room, living room, and kitchen. When Anna first moved to the area it was not uncommon to find addicts slumped against the iron railing that bordered the building, needles and used condoms strewn on the sidewalk. She had been warned about muggings, and barely escaped being pummeled on her head with a thick wood plank one evening when two men came on either side of her as she was walking to her apartment. One grabbed her handbag and the other was about to hit her when his partner cut the straps off her handbag with a knife and took off. It was times like these she remembered when she panicked at the thought of her parents staying with her. Now she thinks she was foolish to have such fears. In the golden glow of the descending early- autumn sun, her street is a picture-perfect postcard of a gentrified neighborhood. Garbage cans are discretely placed behind iron railings, flowers bloom from window boxes and in planters mounted to the pavement on wrought-iron stands. There are no addicts swaddled in filthy clothes, nodding off against the railings, dribble coursing down their grizzly chins, no homeless indigents curled up on cardboard boxes under the shelter of garbage cans. No muggers on the street.

Inside her apartment, home at last, safe, happy to be in her own place and among her own things, she turns on the answering machine and her life, put on hold the last six weeks, returns to her in a rush of comforting waves: three calls from her friend Paula who was expecting her two weeks ago; warnings from a magazine subscription that is about to expire; the super in the building reminding her of an appointment for the exterminator to spray her apartment; the neighborhood bookstore telling her about new arrivals; the Brooklyn Academy of Music listing the fall events. Home. The final call is from Tanya Foster. She is breathless with excitement. She loves the novel Anna e-mailed to her. She has sent it to the salespeople. They think it could be a big success and have great plans for marketing it. Anna is thrilled, beside herself with joy. This is a major victory for her. She calls Paula to give her the news, but she barely manages to say hello before her friend lashes out at her.

“If the cost of the call was too much for you, don’t you think you could at least have e-mailed me?” Paula’s voice drips with sarcasm. Anna tries to interject, but Paula blocks her again. “I was worried that I hadn’t heard from you those two weeks. I didn’t know what happened. I kept imagining it had to be something terrible for you not to call. I finally broke down and dialed your parents one evening. Your father answered. You were out to dinner, he said. With a friend. And I thought,
Silly me
. Worrying about how you were dealing with your mother’s cancer, and there you were having a good time with a friend.”

Anna doesn’t want to tell her too much about Paul Bishop. If she tells Paula too much about Paul, she will make more of her evening out with him than she’s ready to admit. Paula is her age, single, but she has never been married. She had dreamed of a career in teaching—mathematics is her subject—but in the high school where she teaches, most of her time is spent keeping the children from fighting each other. There are bars on the classroom windows. At the entrance to the school, the children must pass through electronic security gates; they must be patted down for weapons. Their parents, many of them barely adults, cannot or are afraid to discipline them. Paula has talked about returning to the island, but like Anna, her working years have been in America. She fears she will not fit in again. She has given up hope, both for a husband and a meaningful career, and consoles herself with pounds of chocolate cake and ice cream by the quart. She is not obese, just ample. Very ample and very beautiful, her skin like liquid chocolate, not a blemish on it. She does not need makeup. Winter or summer, her complexion glows with a reddish undertone. She has expressive brown eyes; they dance when she is happy and turn almost black when she is angry.

Anna and Paula had the pleasure of sweets in common when Anna got divorced. But Anna returned to the gym and a diet that gave her back her former figure. Since then, Paula has been on a campaign to have Anna remarried. It is a wish transferred from herself to her friend. If marriage is unlikely for her, she wants it to be likely for Anna. Their friendship wards off feelings of isolation among people whose history and customs remain alien to them. Yet Anna knows Paula is afraid of losing their friendship if she remarries. Anna cannot fault her for this fear. When she was married to Tony she hardly had time for Paula. Women, Paula said, drop each other like a hot potato when a man comes into their lives. Anna is determined to prove to Paula that she will not be such a woman. Never again will she allow a relationship with a man to disrupt her friendship with her best friend. So she makes light of her dinner with Paul. She does not lie, she simply gives part of the truth and withholds the rest. She does not say that Paul Bishop is a friend, could be more than a friend. She says he is a doctor, a surgeon that Dr. Ramdoolal recommended to her mother. He thinks because of her age, and because her hormones are not as active as when she was young, her mother has good chance to beat the cancer.

“It’s likely Dr. Bishop will do the surgery on my mother,” Anna says.

“In what hospital?” Paula asks.

Anna tells her that Dr. Bishop practices in the States. He was visiting his parents and Dr. Ramdoolal arranged for him to speak to her mother. Her mother will have surgery in his hospital in New Jersey, she explains.

“Here? Your mother will have surgery here?” Astonishment, not curiosity, raises the pitch of Paula’s voice. “When?”

“She and my father will be here in a week.”

“Where will they stay?”

“With me. Before and after the surgery.”

For seconds that seem like minutes neither speaks. At last Paula says with tenderness that is comforting to Anna, “It’ll all work out. Don’t worry, Anna. Everything will be fine.”

Paula does not have to be explicit. Anna can tell she is thinking as much about her as about her mother. “It’s just that they have such fantasies,” Anna says. “They buy into the fairy tale of the American Dream and the Land of Milk and Honey.”

“They are your fantasies too,” Paula says softly.

“How can you say such a thing?”

“Don’t get mad with me, Anna, but I’ve seen how you take on their expectations. Pile them up on your shoulders.”

“I don’t send them barrels of stuff to impress them.”