Anna In-Between (9 page)

Lydia has to make two trips. John Sinclair does not like to have his food served on his plate. He requires separate dishes, each holding the different parts of his meal, the starch in one dish, the vegetables in another, the meat in another. So on the first trip to their room, Lydia brings plates, glasses, knives and forks, napkins, and serving cutlery; on the second trip, she brings the meal. When he serves himself from the dishes Lydia brings, John Sinclair puts the starch in one corner of his plate, and separates the vegetables from the meat. He maintains this arrangement on his plate while he eats. He has taught his daughter to eat her meal this way too, and like her father, Anna has difficulty sitting at the table with people who mix up the food on their plates while they eat. But unlike her father, Anna does not eat with a knife and fork. She eats the American way now, with a fork, letting her knife rest on the side of her plate. Her mother notices this, but does not remark on it. Her raised eyebrows are the only indication she gives that she is keeping score of the many ways Anna has changed, of how different she has become from the people who live on the island. But Anna has eaten too many meals in America. When she reverts to using the knife and fork, she is conscious of acting a part, of being a fraud, and it irritates her that in this instance her mother has won.

Before Lydia arrives today, Anna sets up the folding tables in her parents’ room, in front of their armchairs. Lydia has made stewed chicken, rice, string beans, and the ground provisions that Mr. Sinclair likes: dasheen, cassava, and sweet potatoes. She says to Mrs. Sinclair, “I seasoned the chicken good. Plenty of garlic and thyme. Just a little bit of salt.”

A weak smile crosses Mrs. Sinclair’s lips.

Anna does not ask her parents if they want her to join them. They have not invited her to eat with them in their room. It is clear enough to her they wish to be alone.

Singh leaves at three. Before he leaves, he inquires again about her mother’s health. Anna tells him her father will take her mother to the doctor.

“Tell madam to let me know if dere is anyting she want me to do. I come back day after tomorrow.” He sticks his machete in his waistband, and then keeping his eyes lowered on it, he adds, “Miss Anna, I know about de orchids. Madam does tell me what to do, but I does already know what to do. I does just let madam talk. Madam like to talk.”

Madam likes to boss you around
, Anna thinks. Instead she says, “You’re a good man, Singh.”

Singh grins. “The wife say so.”

Anna allows herself a moment of levity. “How much do you have to pay her to get her to say so, Singh?”

He laughs out loud. “Oh, Miss Anna, dat is funny.” He swings his leg over the bar on his bicycle as if to demonstrate his youthful vigor. “Tell madam not to worry. I take care of de orchids for she.”

Some time after three o’clock the phone rings. Lydia is in her room taking a nap. Anna answers the phone. It is Neil Lee Pak. He tells her that the appointment for her mother is at eight o’clock the next morning. To Anna’s question about the qualifications of the oncologist, he answers curtly, “He was trained at Cambridge.”

When Anna knocks on her parents’ door to give them the message from Neil Lee Pak, her father invites her in. He is sitting on the edge of his side of the bed shuffling through a heap of papers. The drawer on his bedside table is open. Her mother is in her armchair reading a book. They both look up as she enters the room.

“Was that Neil?” her mother asks.

Anna gives her the time of the appointment.

“It would be nice if you could come with us, Anna,” her father says.

“Of course I will, Daddy.”

“Do you know where this doctor has his office, John?” her mother asks.

“Neil gave me the address.”

“Well,” her mother closes her book slowly, “it was just a matter of time. I had a long run.”

“Don’t speak like that.” John Sinclair looks anxiously over at his wife. His hand is flattened against a tidy pile of the papers on the bed.

Anna is troubled by these papers. Her father has stopped working. He has no need for the sheaves of papers he once used to spend hours poring over. If these are not connected with work, what do they concern? Her heart sinks. They cannot be her mother’s will! Now that they have finally faced the fact of her illness, they cannot be preparing for her death!

“It’s time I faced reality, John,” her mother says.

“Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come,”
her father replies.

Her mother looks at him inquiringly.

Julius Caesar
,” Anna explains. It bothers her that her “father should quote Shakespeare to her mother at a time like this. Why not say to her directly what he means?

“Oh,” her mother says.

“It’s time for both of us, Beatrice. Not just you. We both must face reality. We’re not getting younger.”

But her mother’s reality is immediate and Anna wishes she can say to her that she should have faced it much earlier. She wishes she can say out loud that they would not have this crisis if her mother had gone to the doctor instead of sitting night after night cloistered in her bathroom, praying.

She is not an atheist. Perhaps an apostate. How many times has she prayed before stepping onto an airplane. That so many tons of steel could rise in the air is baffling to her, no matter the explanations about propulsion and jet engines. There are no atheists in foxholes.

Perhaps this is how her mother feels. Perhaps as she watches the tumor rise inexorably, swelling out her breast, prayer alone dams the panic that would send her running, screaming hysterically through the house. Prayer alone keeps her from bleeding over everyone she knows: her husband, her friends, Lydia, Singh. Prayer gives her the illusion of control when she has no control. As her fingers roll over her rosary beads, perhaps she believes that she has a direct link with the Blessed Virgin. That the Blessed Virgin is listening to her and to her alone, that at that moment she is interceding for her, persuading her son to answer the prayers that one Beatrice Sinclair, residing on such and such an island, on such and such a street, offers up to her.

Anna cannot begrudge her mother this illusion, this solipsism that to the religious is humility. She too turns to solipsistic prayer. There is no logical basis for her conviction that the plane she is about to board will crash if she does not say her special prayer. That
her
prayer, and her prayer alone, will save not only herself but all the other passengers.

She prays, but she flies, she travels by airplane. She wishes that her mother had done the same: that though she prayed, she would also have gone to the doctor when she felt that foreign hardness in her breast.

At four o’clock Lydia rings the bell for tea. She has set the table with place mats, dessert plates, cups and saucers, and cutlery. The knife is on the breadboard, next to the sweet bread, which Mr. Sinclair will slice for his wife. Lydia has learned the preferences of her employers and has prepared two small pots of tea in the kitchen. She knows Anna’s father likes his tea strong so she puts three teabags in the hot water for him. Mr. Sinclair would prefer that she use loose tea, but Mrs. Sinclair likes the modern convenience of the teabags, especially since she wants her tea drawn much weaker than her husband’s.

Anna comes into the kitchen to tell Lydia that her parents will have their tea in their bedroom. Like Singh, Lydia expresses concern. “They take lunch today in their room. Yesterday too. I hope is nothing bad.”

Anna says her mother will go to the doctor tomorrow.

“I glad,” Lydia says. She will make something special for breakfast in the morning for Mrs. Sinclair, she says. She puts the pots of tea, the coconut sweet bread, the guava jelly, the butter, the cups and saucers, and the cutlery on a tray and takes it to the Sinclairs in their bedroom. Anna has her tea at the table, in the breakfast nook.

At five o’clock Lydia leaves, but not before she has made sandwiches for the Sinclairs for their supper.

It is dark when John Sinclair emerges from his bedroom, though it is only half past six. But here, in the tropics, the sun drops suddenly out of sight drawing a thick curtain over the day. For too brief a moment the sky turns red, pink, orange, and purple, but soon it is an indifferent black. The greens, blues, and whites of the day disappear as if they had never existed at all. There is no twilight here, or the twilight merges so swiftly into the night that one can miss it completely if one has not stopped to notice. In the countryside, the birds are asleep in the trees by six; parents have called their children home.

Half past six is late for her father. Every evening, unfailingly at six, he appears at the table for dinner. He is a stickler for punctuality. Usually he is dressed and ready half an hour before it is time to leave for an appointment. He walks up and down the corridor, pausing only to announce to her mother how much time she has left before they must go. Her mother has told stories of the times he drove her around for blocks because they arrived too early for some event to which they had been invited. Often he would lose his way back, she said.

Anna is amazed that her mother has tolerated her father’s obsession with punctuality. But her mother seems impervious to her husband’s neurotic anxiety. She pays no attention to him. Sometimes she will say, “John, why don’t you have a cup of tea?” Sometimes she will casually call out to him to help her with a difficult zipper. She is never flustered. She takes her time, but never more than the time her husband has told her she has remaining.

“You can never judge a marriage by what you see on the outside,” Anna’s father has said to her. “Only the husband and wife know what goes on behind the closed doors of their bedroom.”

And so it must be true. Her parents’ marriage has lasted forty years; her marriage to Tony lasted barely two.

Anna is editing the manuscript she has brought with her when her father comes out of the bedroom. She has a blue pencil in her hand and is leaning over the folding table in front of her, marking the top page of the manuscript. A smaller pile of pages is on the right side of the larger stack.

“Working?” her father asks as he approaches her.

Anna takes off the reading glasses that have slid down her nose and looks up at him. “Editing a new novel,” she says.

“Seems it’s going to take you awhile,” he says, pointing to the shorter stack with the pages turned down.

“It’s a new writer.”

“Man or woman?”

“Woman,” she says.

He sits next to her and stretches out his legs. “Seems like men aren’t writing much these days. In my time men wrote books.”

“They’re still writing books,” Anna says.

“You wouldn’t know by what’s in the bookstore.”

“The laws of supply and demand,” Anna says. She puts down the blue pencil. She can tell he is spoiling for an argument. He begins this way with her mother. His demeanor calm, his voice even, as he lures her mother into his web. “Women buy books,” she adds, “and women want to know about women’s lives.”

“Men write about women’s lives too,” he counters.

“Women know more about women’s lives.”

He shakes his head. “I think it’s all about that women’s movement. From what I can gather from the news in America, women have taken over.”

“You can’t be serious, Daddy.”

“I’m just telling you what I read in those American magazines and what I see on American TV.”

“You can’t be saying there’s some conspiracy cooked up by women to stop men from writing.”

“From publishing,” he says. “Not writing. How many male writers have you published in the last year, Anna?”

She knows if she tells him that last year only ten percent of the books on her list were novels by male writers, he would give her that self-satisfied, superior grin that usually quiets her mother. “Enough,” she says. “I publish enough male writers.”

“Ha!”

“I’m interested in good writing, whether it’s written by a man or woman.”

“What about this one? The one you’re editing now. Is it good?” He raises his eyebrows and bends his head in the direction of the manuscript.

“It will be when I am done.”

“Ha!” he says again.

He has caught her. She braces herself. He will say: If you can make this one good, why can’t you improve a book by a male writer that is not so good? But she has him all wrong. He is not thinking about the plight of male writers. His mind is elsewhere. He slouches down on his seat and looks over to her. With the sweet tenderness of a loving father, he says, “You like your job, don’t you, Anna?”

She melts.

She has not always liked her job, but she likes what she is doing now. She has pinned her hopes on this new writer. The manuscript is a literary novel and Windsor, convinced there is little profit in publishing literary work, is likely to pass on this one. But she believes she can help the writer shape her story to attract a wider audience of readers.

Yes, she says to her father. She loves being an editor.

“I used to love my job too,” he says wistfully. “Now all that’s behind me.”

“You worked too hard,” she says, her heart swelling with compassion for him. “You deserve to rest.”

“I’ll have time enough to rest when I am six feet under.”

Anna draws her hand through her hair. Her father’s comment disturbs her, but she does not betray her feelings. “How is Mummy doing?” she asks.

“She’s sleeping. She didn’t want dinner. I’m not hungry either.”

“Lydia made sandwiches.”

“I’ll put them in the refrigerator,” he says.

“No. I’ll take care of that. Sit. Rest.”

“Sit. Rest,” her father repeats after her. “I’ll be lying down, stretched out in a box, not sitting, when I rest six feet under.”

“It’ll be a long time before you are six feet under,” Anna says patiently.

“I’m eighty-two. How many years do you think I have left?”

She gets it now. How foolish she was not to see what he wanted all along. He wants her pity. He is the old man who does not have long to live. She should have been suspicious when he ceded to her. His defense of male writers was just a detour. He hardly ever reads novels. She can’t remember the last time he read fiction, except for P.G. Wodehouse, except to throw his head back and laugh at the antics of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, secretly, she has always thought, getting perverse satisfaction, a sort of vicarious revenge, for the pomposity of the British colonial officers he was forced to endure. When he withdrew from their budding quarrel, she should have been alerted.