Boundaries (17 page)
Anna does not remind her that at thirty-nine, she is at the age when the descent can be predictably shorter than the ascent, the fabled trigger of the midlife crisis. Her mother does not want to be told that she is almost forty; she does not want to be reminded that at almost forty, her daughter is unmarried and childless.
“I have the same Boscoe Holder.” Her mother is standing in front of the painting of La Diablesse, the elegant seductress of the rainforest feared by mothers of boys on the verge of manhood. Holder has dressed La Diablesse in a white Victorian gown, the high collar, puffed sleeves, cinched waist, and pleated flounce flowing over a high bustle in the back, capturing in detail the repressive style deemed fashionable for women of that era. He has not painted her cloven foot, but her eyes, shaded by a white lace parasol and a hat brimmed with a large pink flower in full bloom, are ablaze with erotic desire. She stands against a background of dense forest and bright green ferns, the earth around her painted in shades of burnt orange. John Sinclair likes the muted seascapes of Jackie Hinkson’s watercolors, but Beatrice Sinclair chose this painting. Was it the cloven hoof ever more present for its absence, the elegance of the gown, hat, and parasol failing to distract the eye, that drew her in? Or was it the hat and parasol suggesting the modesty of the wearer that the smoldering eyes belied? Anna thinks it is the latter that fascinates her mother. Her mother is a modest woman, her father says, but he confesses it was her swaying hips and seductive stride that made him lose breath when he first saw her.
“She’s lovely,” Anna says. “I couldn’t resist getting the print.”
Her mother’s eyes remain fixed on the painting. “We have the same taste,” she murmurs.
“And she’ll inherit the original.” They turn around in unison, surprised by the sudden intrusion of John Sinclair’s voice. They had not noticed him standing behind them. He had been back and forth taking the suitcases to the bedroom. He had not seemed interested in what they were saying. “That’s our plan,” he says now to Anna. “Your mother and I intend to leave the painting to you.”
Beatrice steps away. “Hopefully not too soon,” she says quietly. And in that instant Anna is reminded of her illness. Her color is vibrant. Not a hint of pallor mars her brown skin. She is wearing a festive fuchsia-pink cotton dress, the fabric too light and too bright for the fall weather, but it drapes over her body and hides the bandaged wound on her chest. How deliberately she must have chosen this dress, Anna realizes now. The color warms her mother’s face so convincingly that Anna has been deluded into forgetting the major surgery just three days ago.
After lunch, Anna settles them in her bedroom. Her mother says she’ll take a nap and urges her husband to do the same. John Sinclair does not object, but Anna suspects he does so because he doesn’t want to get in his daughter’s way. “You must have work to do,” he says to Anna.
It is two in the afternoon; the workday is almost over. When Anna calls her office, Tanya Foster tells her there’s no need for her to come in. The following morning will be just fine. “There’s nothing happening here that can’t wait until tomorrow,” she says.
Anna does not detect the slightest trace of insincerity in her tone, and yet she is troubled by a nagging sense of foreboding. Perhaps it is the lively chatter and laughter in the background that make her wary; she is certain she hears Tim Greene’s voice shouting out, “Tanya! Come look at this.”
Something is happening, there is no doubt, but whatever it is, Tanya Foster seems to think that for Anna, it can wait until tomorrow.
At ten to four Anna boils the water for tea for her parents. When the kettle whistles, her mother comes out of the bedroom. Her gait is steady, her face animated. “Anna! How nice of you. Tea at four. You remembered.”
Anna is flustered, amazed at her mother’s strength and confounded by the sweetness in her voice. Since they have arrived, it is her mother who has been nice, complimenting her on the apartment, now praising her for remembering tea at four. She planned to serve them in the bedroom. She has already prepared a tray with guava jelly, slices of the coconut bread she bought in the West Indian bakery, cheddar cheese, milk, sugar, cups, saucers, cutlery, dessert plates. “You shouldn’t have come out,” Anna says. “I wanted you to have your tea in the bedroom.”
Her mother pulls out a chair and sits down. “I feel fine. The nap was all I needed. I have had enough meals in bed in the hospital. I want to sit on a proper chair and eat at a proper table.”
Anna begins to unpack the tray on the table. “Here, let me help you, Anna,” her mother says, but as soon as she extends her right hand for one of the cups, she winces and the cup clatters to the saucer. The tumor was not in her right breast, but her right arm is weak and it is too soon for her to stretch it.
Anna moves the tray away from her. “Let me serve you, Mummy.”
Her mother allows her arm to drop to her side. “In the hospital, I fed myself,” she murmurs. Anna looks away, embarrassed for her, though she empathizes too. Her mother is woman whose husband feeds her illusion that she depends on no one. She is accustomed to having full control of her household. If her father were with them, Anna thinks, he would know what to do to erase the fear gathering at the corners of her mother’s eyes.
“It’s my turn,” Anna says. “You took care of me when I was child. Let me. I’ll set the table for you and Daddy.”
Her mother yields; her face relaxes. “You know, Anna,” she says, sitting back in her chair, “I told your father that the happiest day of my life was when we got married. But the truth is, the happiest day of my life was when you were born.” Her eyes drift dreamily and out of her mouth comes a sound that is mirthless, though her lips are spread in a smile.
Anna moves the tea things from the tray to the table. The knife slips off the cheese board in her hand and falls to the ground. She bends down to pick it up and when she stands up again, the flash flood that swept through her body, heating her face, subsides. “Is that why you sent me away?” Her voice is modulated to a harsh whisper.
Her mother peers up at her, genuine surprise in her eyes. “Oh, Anna, why do you say such things?”
She says such things because she cannot stop herself from thinking such things. She says such things because she cannot prevent herself from thinking that this was what her mother wanted, that she wanted Anna out of the way so she could have her husband to herself and the social life she craved: the cocktail parties, the dinner parties, the trips around the world.
“I didn’t send you away,” Beatrice says when her daughter does not answer her. “You wanted to go away.”
“How do you know what I wanted?” Anna places a plate in front of her. “You never asked.”
“I know what I wanted for myself. I know I wanted more out of life than to be a wife.”
Anna does not believe her. An old pain gnaws at her heart. “And more than to be a mother,” she says, finishing what her mother has not said.
Her mother does not back down. “Yes. And more than to be a mother. I wanted it all: marriage, motherhood, and meaningful work. But I couldn’t have it all. Not in my day. So I wanted to give you the chance I did not have. Now you can have it all, Anna—a job, a husband …” Her eyes brighten. “Oh, I know you’ll marry again and you’ll have children. I believe that, Anna.”
And what is she to believe? Is she expected to believe that this was her mother’s grand plan? But the plan did not work. Her daughter is divorced; she has no children. Well, let her mother believe what she wants to believe. This is not the time to open that wound. There will be other times after her mother has fully healed.
“Where’s Daddy?” Anna wants to turn her mother’s attention away from her. She puts three tea bags in the teapot. She will add the boiling water when her father comes and give him an extra tea bag, for he likes his tea strong.
Her mother seems to welcome the distraction. “Oh, I told him to put on another shirt,” she says. “That shirt he wore to the hospital this morning was ripped at the pocket.”
Anna had seen the tear on her father’s shirt, but it was miniscule, so tiny she would not have noticed it if her father had not stood before her and asked, “Do you think your mother will approve?” He was asking about the color of the shirt, whether it was a match for the brown pants he was wearing. He had not noticed the rip on his shirt and Anna had not bothered to point it out to him.
“I always have to check him before he leaves the house,” her mother says irritably.
The irritation is a pretense her mother has long nurtured. The checking began after her father had an affair, after Thelma, after he said his wife wasn’t fun anymore, after she forgave him. And after his wife was fun again, John Sinclair happily submitted to her inspections.
“I should have shown him the tear at his pocket,” Anna says, “and fixed it for him.”
Her mother narrows her eyes and smiles slyly, grateful, it seems to Anna, for the part her daughter has willingly played in her game. She adjusts the folds of her dress over her knees and exhales. “I wonder what’s taking him so long,” she grumbles.
Their quarrel is over. Anna is relieved she has succeeded in diverting their slide down a precipice that surely would have ended in shattered bones on the rocks below.
“John, come!” Beatrice calls out to her husband. “Anna has fixed tea for us.”
They do not talk about her mother’s illness at teatime. They do not talk about it at dinnertime. They talk about domestic matters, about the home they left behind, about Singh and Lydia who are now in charge. Her father launches into his usual argument. It is time they retire Singh, he says. Singh hardly does anything in the garden. They hire boys to mow the lawn and weed the flowerbeds. Beatrice reminds her husband that Singh is younger than he is. John Sinclair snorts: “He is seventy-eight! Seventy-eight is not young, Beatrice. Sixty is the retirement age on our island.” Anna knows how this argument will end. Her father will give in, as he usually gives in to her mother, but not before he forces her to make a concession.
Lydia also has no work to do since her employers are not on the island. Beatrice has not been unreasonable. She has agreed to pay Lydia her full wages while they are gone, but she insists that the woman keep her regular hours. She wants Lydia to come to the house at five, as she would normally. “To do what?” John Sinclair asks.
“People get lazy when they have too much time on their hands,” Anna’s mother says dismissively. She recites the list of duties she has left for Lydia: Every day Lydia must dust and vacuum. On Mondays and Wednesdays she must mop the terrazzo floors in the passageways and in the covered veranda. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she must clean all the kitchen cabinets and the linen closets. It’s not enough work to fill the hours of the three weeks the Sinclairs are expected to be away. Still, Beatrice tells her husband, she expects Lydia to keep the same work hours.
John Sinclair seizes his chance to underscore his point. “Lydia’ll get a lot of time to sleep in the veranda,” he says, “and to watch the soaps on TV in the den.” Beatrice throws him a withering glance.
Anna is glad for the domestic chatter, glad to put a bandage on the sore that had begun to bleed moments ago. But she must ready herself for the feelings to return in the evening. For tonight, before her mother goes to bed, she must change the dressing on her chest; she must remove the drain the surgeon has inserted at the end of the sutures to release the blood and fluids that have collected there. Her mother must expose her body to her. She must touch her naked skin.
S
he has nothing to fear. Later that night, steeling herself for her duty as a daughter, Anna knocks on the bedroom door. “Come in,” her father calls out. Anna opens the door and what she sees bolts her feet to the floor.
On the island her father has the reputation for being a man’s man, admired not only for his intellect, for his quick wit and laser-sharp ability to make heads of private companies, local and English, yield to his persuasive arguments on matters of labor negotiations; respected not only for the high lifestyle he has provided for his wife, who has never had reason to work, but also because he is a man who can sit with kings and yet is at home with peasants. For years he hunted and fished with people from the countryside who could neither read nor write. There are stories about how he led his fellow hunters through a dangerous rainstorm in the forest, how he narrowly escaped being swallowed by a macajuel snake. Fishermen tell how in the gulf connecting the South American continent to the island, where an oil belt runs under the water from shore to shore, he dared to fish close to the forbidden line where Venezuelans soldiers trained their guns on islanders trespassing on the side of the gulf they claim is theirs. It was rumored her father yelled out
“
ué pasa, amigos?”
when the soldiers threatened to gun him down. With a broad grin plastered on his face, he held up a case of beer. “For you.” The soldiers pulled up alongside, and still unnerved, refusing to be intimidated, her father pointed to the bottles of whiskey and rum under a bench in the boat. “For you too,” he said, disarming the soldiers and forcing smiles across their stone faces. Few know why he stopped hunting and fishing. Few know that it was the pleading eyes of a deer within his shooting range that made him put down his rifle. Few know it was the death of his friend in his arms, in the pirogue where they had spent many happy hours on the sea, that had made him stop fishing. Anna knows these stories, yet she is still unprepared for what she sees when she steps into the bedroom.