Grace (25 page)

“You keep toys upstairs?” he asks her.

“You know I always keep a few for Giselle. I bought her a doll last week. I meant to call you to come for it.”

“And why didn’t you?”

“Oh, you know. You and Sally. I didn’t want to disturb …”

“You worry too much, Mother,” he says and pulls out a chair. “Come sit with me.”

She sits down opposite to him at the kitchen table. “That little girl of yours is so precious, Justin,” she says. “I can see why it has to be hard for you to let Sally take her.”

Jason bristles. She would remember. He will not let Sally take Giselle away from him, he said to her the last time he was here.

“I think things are getting better for Sally and me,” he says.

“She’s come around to seeing things your way?”

He tries to keep his voice calm. “Sally and I have been talking,” he says. “Like you suggested. We are trying to work things out.”

“So what’s this that Giselle was saying about Sally taking a bus?”

“She went away for the weekend. To an ashram.”

“An ashram?”

“A kind of retreat. You don’t talk, you do yoga, you meditate.”

“And why didn’t you go with her? I could have kept Giselle.”

“It’s something Sally needed to do by herself.”

“When you get married you don’t do things by yourself, Justin,” she says.

“There are things Sally has to work out alone and things I have to work out alone. We are not doing things separately to be away from each other. That’s not why Sally’s away. We are doing them separately so we can be together.”

She sighs. “The new generation,” she says.

“It makes sense for us.”

She puts her hands on the table and pushes back her chair. “Good,” she says. She gets up.

“Sally wanted to go alone,” he says.

She is already next to the stove. “I was worried that you two would start fighting over Giselle.” She does not turn around to face him. “That poor child will suffer if you two do that. She’s so happy now.”

“And we want her to be happy all the time,” Justin says.

“Good,” she says again.

They are silent now. An awkwardness comes between them, the ancient dance between mother and son. When he needed her, he became a boy, but he does not want to be reminded. He has found his footing again. He can work out this problem in his marriage.

“Sally and I are doing fine, Mother.” His tone is conciliatory when he says this.

She smiles. “Pelau is okay for lunch?”

It’s a digression, but he lets her to take it. “That would be great if it won’t be too much trouble.”

“No trouble. Anyhow I bet you don’t get much of a chance to eat pelau at home.”

He responds cautiously. “Sally’s never gotten the taste for pelau,” he says.

“She doesn’t like chicken and rice?”

“You know what I mean, Mother.”

She takes a can of pigeon peas from the cupboard. “You may both be black,” she says, “but you come from two different places. The culture is different.”

“I’ve gotten to like collard greens,” he says defensively.

“Good.” She speaks over the whirring of the electric can opener.

“I like candied yams, too.”

She seems not to hear him. “I finally figured out how to thaw frozen meat in a hurry,” she says. She opens the freezer. “Do you know how, Justin?”

He shrugs.

“I put it just as it is in cold water. It thaws out in a hour.”

He is still wrestling with the need to defend his marriage, but he stirs his tea and waits patiently while she puts a bag of frozen chicken parts in a pot and fills it with water, all the while talking nonstop about the perils of bacteria. “If you leave meat to thaw on the kitchen counter, it can thaw unevenly and then before you know it, bacteria,” she says.

He makes assenting sounds; he sips his tea, but when at last she returns to the chair beside him, he stops her. “Do you really think we are so different from Americans?”

As if (as he thought) the subject of Sally has never left her
mind, she says, “You mean you and Sally? Yes. That could be a problem.”

He drains his mug and puts it down firmly on the table. “Anna said to me that the difference between us and Americans is that they are optimistic and we are pessimistic.”

Is this the reason he has come to see her, a nagging doubt that was there years before Anna said it, a fear that the source of his quarrels with Sally is this difference in how they see the world? Is this why the clichés Sally has begun to use, the teas she drinks as panaceas, the talk shows with their Pollyanna solutions to the most debilitating problems, are so unbearable for him?

“Anna? Sally’s friend?” his mother asks.

“Yes, Anna. Giselle’s godmother,” he says.

“Well, if she means that we don’t go around seeing everything through rose-colored glasses, I guess she’s right.”

“She says, to quote her, it’s because we come from a world of disappointment and hardship.”

“That, too. But I sometimes think that Americans see the world all rosy because they’ve never had a war here. Oh, I know about Pearl Harbor, but I’m talking about the continent: New York, Massachusetts, California, Wisconsin, Mississippi, places like that.”

“We’ve never had a war either, Mother.”

“You think so because your memory is short. What did Anna say? Hardship? Yes, we know about hardship. Our history was built on hardship. First the Spaniards wiped out the Carib Indians. Then the English brought us as slaves from
Africa. You want to talk about babies burned alive? You can’t imagine the horrors.” When she says this, she shakes her head and presses her lips tightly together. Justin is not certain—for he has never heard his mother utter a profanity—but it seems to him she mutters,
Damn bastards
, before she speaks again.

“Our history was built on wars, and worse than wars. And all those bloods run in your veins, Justin.” She points her finger at him. “You have African, Carib, French, Spanish, and English in you: the slave and the slave master. Just like me.”

She is giving him a lesson in history he already knows. He has a typical Trinidadian face, he is constantly told, but it is the face of the torturer as well as the tortured, of the oppressor as well as of the oppressed, of the exploiter as well as the exploited, of the conqueror as well as the conquered.

“You’re different when you have that kind of history inside you,” his mother is saying. “America is a young country. Most people here act like adolescents. They want to have fun and be happy. If you talk to them about death, they shun you. You are depressed, they say. You are pessimistic.”

“Yes,” he says. He agrees. To most Americans death is an obscene word.

“Still, you have to say that in this country hard work pays,” his mother says. “You work hard here and you can get a dollar, and if you get a dollar, you can buy a house.”

“Anna says that working hard is all immigrants think about.”

“What else is there?”

“I think she wants to say we don’t know how to have fun.”

“We face the fact we are going to die,” she says. “That is the difference. We know life is not meant to be easy.”

It is what Justin also believes. He believes that he can achieve whatever he sets his sights on, but only through hard work, only through struggle. It is a triumph over the inevitability of gravity, though a transitory one.

Sally had threatened to surrender. When trouble rose between them, she thought of Anna. A new place, a new page to start over again. He thinks of the trenches. Of waging his battles there and winning.

He finishes his tea and goes over to the sink to put down his mug. “Do you ever look at those talk shows on TV, Mother?” he asks her.

“You watch those shows? A Harvard Ph.D.?”

“No, but Sally does. It amazes me how they simplify the most complex situations, how they pretend the most difficult problems can be solved in a heartbeat.”

“Those shows do some good, Justin. I can’t say they’re all bad.”

He comes to sit next to her again. “I think,” he says, “they’re symptomatic of that difference I was trying to explain to Anna. But I suppose optimism is ingrained in the character of America. You’d have to count us out, of course. Black people I mean. But the whole idea of America is based on people fleeing from persecution, running from a bad situation hoping to find a better one. The Pilgrims. Immigrants.”

“Don’t forget that’s what we are, Justin.”

They have boxed themselves in a contradiction. His mother glances in the direction of the staircase. “I wonder if Giselle is hungry,” she says.

Before she can call out to her, Justin says, “But we don’t go around wearing rose-colored glasses.”

“Yes,” she says.

“We are optimistic about the rewards of hard work.”

“I suppose.”

She calls Giselle and Giselle answers immediately. She comes bounding down the steps toward them. “Nana, I love it. I love it. Thank you, Nana.” She is clutching the doll her grandmother bought.

His mother turns her attention to her. “So what shall we call her?”

Justin leaves them huddled over the doll and walks into the living room.

Nothing much has changed since he used to come here on semester breaks from Harvard. His mother has modernized the kitchen, but she has left the rest of the house just as it was when she lived here with his father. The furniture in the living room is as unattractive as he remembered it, but it has sentimental value to her and she refuses to change it. The sofa is upholstered in blue crushed velvet and the two armchairs next to it are covered in a plush white fabric with a busy floral pattern that matches the blue in the sofa. The coffee table is made of pressed wood painted dark gold. It has scalloped
edges and curved, ornate legs. The only contemporary-looking piece of furniture in the room is the plain white bookcase. The books there tell his father’s story: the Greek tragedies and comedies, volume after volume of Shakespeare’s plays, the Neo-Classics, the Romantics. African American writers are on the second shelf, West Indian writers on the top, the great Trinidadian intellectual CLR James placed prominently in the middle. V. S. Naipaul is given a special place, too, for Naipaul had not yet regretted his origins when Justin’s father was alive. Walcott is not there, but his father had not known of Derek Walcott, who was just beginning to get recognition for the poetry that would earn him a Nobel Prize. From the row of anthologies that contain his father’s poems, Justin picks one. He is reading a long poem when his mother comes into the room.

“I’ve given Giselle a sandwich and she’s taking a nap with her doll. You don’t mind a late lunch, do you?”

“I’m fine, Mother. I’m not hungry.”

She glances at the book in his hands. “Your father’s poetry?”

“Yes,” he says.

She sinks into one of the armchairs. “Why do you stay here, Justin?”

The question catches him by surprise. “In America?”

“Yes. In America.”

“I stay here because I am married to Sally and Sally is an American.”

“But before you were married, when you finished at Harvard, why didn’t you return?”

“I guess I lost touch with my friends back home,” he says. “Like you did.”

“Ah,” she says.

“And you were here.” He is standing close to her. He shuts the anthology with his father’s poems and holds it against his chest.

“Yes,” she says.

He is unsure of this strange mood that seems to be settling on her. Her eyes have drifted back to the book in his hand. She is staring dreamily at it. “It’s true, Mother,” he says. “I stayed because you were here.”

“But you didn’t want to come back with your father and me when we came for you.” She turns away.

“Dad died,” he says.

“I didn’t.”

He sits in the armchair next to her. The book rests on his lap. “We both agreed, Mother, that it turned out better for me, right? I mean the scholarship and all that. It was better that I stayed, right?”

She sighs. “There is something else we can learn from those talk shows on TV. Americans don’t keep secrets as much as we West Indians do. We hide our dirty laundry.”

He braces himself. “And isn’t that a smart thing to do?”

“Dirty laundry stinks after a while,” she says.

He knows there is more to come.

She bites her lower lip. “You never asked about me. You never asked if it was easy for me. I don’t mean after your father died. I had a job then, a real job as a nurse. I had American credentials. The hospitals hired me. I am talking about before. Before, when your father was alive.”

Before, when his father was alive, she was happy.
Sophie Anderson and James Peters: Ah, there was a marriage made in heaven.
Wasn’t that what everyone said?

“Your father had a life beyond me. I had nothing beyond him,” she is saying.

Did everyone also know there was another woman, an American girlfriend?

“Dad loved you,” he says.

“Oh, I know he loved me,” she says, “but he didn’t understand what I needed. He was a celebrity. People loved him. I had to work. Poetry didn’t put food on the table, you know.”

Justin knows. “Dad was grateful,” he says. He knows it was her money that paid for their house.

“Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mind being the one to bring home the money. I never reproached him for that. But he thought I was happy being a caretaker for that rich old man. He thought it was the same as nursing. But it was baby-sitting; that’s what it was. It wasn’t nursing. He didn’t know how unhappy I was.”

Justin is taken aback by this admission. He does not know how to respond.

“Being a wife is not enough for a woman,” she says before he can find his voice. “Not even being a mother.” She leans forward and surprises him again. “That’s also true for Sally.”

She knew. That was why she had not asked him what Sally meant when she said she wanted more. Still, she had clicked her tongue and murmured disparagingly,
These modern women.

“In moderation, Justin,” she says. “That’s how we can have it all, a career and still be a wife and mother.”

She has not been inconsistent. On his way back home, Justin acknowledges this. A year ago when a female student complained about his insensitivity, accusing him of being a macho man, a chauvinist pig, a woman hater who had no place in a college where there were women, she had taken his side and said the same thing: in moderation. Everything in moderation. That’s how women can have it all.