Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (22 page)

I remember feeling proud that people would ask about me at the parties, and was confused, too, because it seemed to me that these people were sensible to ask Sid rather than my mother. Sid, I thought, could tell them stories about me. India couldn’t.

India interrupted Sid’s rant. “This is so unnecessary, Sid. It’s so boring. You’re overreacting. You take offence much too easily.” A little later she said, “You’re so goddamn
serious. Has it ever occurred to you that you might not put people at ease? No one wants to be made to feel as if they’re forever on the verge of saying something wrong or inappropriate.” India had a tendency to roll her eyes when she was exasperated, and in my imagination, from behind the sofa, I saw her do this when she cut Sid down with the most effective of all her put-downs: “You’re simply too sensitive.” I heard these words and saw how they crushed Sid and brought the conversation to its end.

I witnessed the effect again when the elation of being called out in a review—the very review he had only days ago spoken of to me—turned to despair. Sid took umbrage with the reviewer’s classification of her work as
folksy
and
naive
. India insisted the adjectives were not an indication that the reviewer could only appreciate the work by evoking Sid’s third-world heritage, but rather were compliments.

Sid’s frustration with the reviewer was slight compared to how India’s lack of empathy and understanding affected her. She brooded for several days, sure that the review marked the end of a career barely begun as a serious “Canadian” artist. When India could take Sid’s frustration no longer, she reminded her that immigrants and minorities had unprecedented advantages, access to funding and opportunities to publish and exhibit their work. Sid should just get over herself and be grateful.

Sid’s defeated response was “You will never understand, will you? But what’s worse is that you don’t even try to defend me.”

I now know that whenever India tries to be conciliatory, she delivers a small lecture that is a mix of pep talk and reproach. This she did then: “Sid,
you
know who you are and where you’ve come from. If only you carried yourself with the confidence of that knowledge. It shouldn’t matter that people here are unable to read who you are. That’s ignorance, and you’re smart enough to rise above it. But you insist on seeing in every situation an opportunity for discourse. Racism. Immigration. Classism. Sexuality. Gayness. Homophobia. Perhaps these are all things that affect you, even when you’re with well-meaning friends, but you won’t change anyone or anything by being so easily offended and defensive. Can’t you just enjoy yourself and others, and let others enjoy you? You’ve got a lot to offer. Just get on with living, Sid, and good God, just be grateful for the call-out.” She ended her exhortation with “You’re so easily offended.
You’re simply too sensitive
.”

When the three of us lived together as a family in Toronto, Sid brought up the idea numerous times that we should all visit Trinidad so that we could be introduced to her parents, who were alive then, and her younger sister, Gita. India was not excited by the prospect of a visit to a tropical country that lacked the reputation of a grand tourist destination save for during its carnival season. I, on the other hand, was eager. Sid promised starfish and jellyfish, and even lizards that took up residence
almost
like pets inside the houses: lizards
this
big, she told me, her eyes popping wide, chopping her left arm at the crook of her elbow,
this
big, and sometimes they fall off the wall and land right in your hair. Fully imagining the plop of the house lizard, its weight and wriggle, I remember doubling over, shaking my head and my air-filled cheeks. I swiped at my hair with both hands. After much persuasion, India relented and we did go to Trinidad. But India’s mix of apathy and passivity when we were finally in Sid’s family’s house embarrassed me, and I remember wishing, even at such a young age, that I could distance myself from her, while wanting also to make excuses for her.

It was shortly after that visit and our return to Toronto that Sid left my mother and me, and departed from my life.

———

I turned off the shower, towelled myself dry, and sat naked on the edge of my bed. I did not want any part of this funeral business. I was abysmally incompetent in the face of loss and death. Sydney’s world had been made small by the changes he’d made to himself—to his body—and consequently, my own Trinidadian world was narrow. I knew only Sydney and his house staff and members of their families. A wake was bound to bring strangers—at least they would be strangers to me. I did not want to be the subject of their scrutiny. I did not want my grief on display. I sank onto the bed, ruminating on how
I
had come to be in this situation. It wasn’t just the physical situation that confounded me but something larger, and I eventually leapt from thoughts of
my own fate to wondering again what had made Sid do to herself, to her body, the kinds of things that were affecting me today—affecting how I felt, that is, about my place in this house, on this day, among people I did not know. I see now that Sydney had been trying to explain it to me through his various stories, but I wondered then how, as a child who was so close to her, so adoring of her, I had not seen or intuited the changes that would come. Children, after all, see more than they are given credit for. What had I seen, but not paid attention to?

For instance, I recalled a time when I was fourteen: India had been dating a man I had not taken to, and I asked her what it had been like between Sid and her. This was not so bold a question as one might imagine, for I was well aware then—and exploited the fact—that it pleased my mother to see herself as a liberated parent who was able to engage in frank and adult conversations with her child. If my memory is to be trusted, the very first comment she made began with a drawn-out, ponderous “We-ell,” quickly followed by, “Sid was short. Two inches shorter than I.” And I remember my embarrassment and disgust, for I was at that age where everything that I experienced was imbued with thoughts about sex.

My mother carried on. “When we placed our hands palm to palm, my hands were bigger than hers, my fingers longer. But in that small brown body was an electric power and confidence that captivated me.” In my mind she rolled her eyes as she added, “But that electricity dimmed within
months.” After I was born, India said, she got back to the novel she had been working on, and Sid stayed on, fawning over me as if Sid were the one who’d given birth. “It irritated the hell out of me,” she said, laughing. “But at least I got to finish my novel—and good thing, too, for it was one of the best.” Even as a teenager I was aware of the import of her words, their severity, the refusal to understand. She continued, “When I was finished with the book, when I looked up from it, there was this person in the house with you and me, this person who was no longer confident in public, this person who had somehow become dissatisfied with her appearance, with the fact that her hips and breasts were, as she put it,
so visible that they betrayed her
. There was suddenly a lot of nonsense about how her outward appearance had nothing to do with how she felt inside. She began dressing differently, wearing obviously masculine clothing, and, well, I suppose I just lost interest. Some of the very things she did at the beginning, which I’d found charming then, began to irritate and, quite frankly, to embarrass me.”

Like what? I had asked.

“She greeted our men-friends not with an embrace, but rather with such a firm handshake that there would be comments about it. She’d step ahead of me at a door, for instance, open it and stand aside to allow me through first. She didn’t smoke, but was always ready to light my cigarette. You know, in private these things are tolerable, desirable even, but when she did them in public, whether with me or with other women, I was embarrassed. Not
embarrassed to be seen with her, but embarrassed for her. That is, of course, worse.”

I do remember how Sid was before she left us. I can’t say that I thought of her manner as being the result of or related to anything in particular. Sid was simply Sid. And I had looked up to her.

Sid and my mother remained in touch—although not amicably—for a while after their breakup. Sydney told me that “she” knew my mother was dating. Sid knew that my mother went out immediately after their breakup with a woman—a white woman—who was taller than India, and who had passed in public effortlessly as a man. She didn’t elaborate, but by now I understood the significance of this.

Sydney once told me that it was when she was in Canada with her gay and lesbian friends, before meeting India, that she’d had a sense of what most closely resembled “family.” The short-cut of shared experiences and vocabulary meant that they knew how and when to be there for one another.

But when Sid got together with India, she gradually distanced herself from these people. My mother expected Sid, her live-in lover, to be, as she said, “discreet” about their relationship.

The doorbell rang at 6 p.m. on the dot, and for an hour I was obliged to sit on the veranda with Sydney’s tailor, who introduced himself to me by saying that his sister was like Sydney. He called Sydney by his last name. “When Mahale
needed a suit,” this man said, “he came to see me because I am famous as a tailor.” His sister had wanted to wear tailored suits from the time she was a teenager. No one took her on, but she was his favourite sister and he had wanted her to be happy. So he went all over Trinidad looking for someone to sew a suit for her, and of course, there was not a seamstress or tailor who would outfit her in this way. So he taught himself to sew a man’s suit for a woman so that you couldn’t tell from her clothes whether she was Jack or Jackie, Bobby or Barbie, Tommy or Tammy.

Mrs. Allen, the guava cheese lady, arrived just as the tailor was leaving. She brought a tray of guava cheeses, because, as she said, people will come, and at a time like this a few sweet things can make a person feel just a little better. Mrs. Allen also, thankfully, did not stay long. When she left, I sat on the veranda and waited. But no one else came that evening, and soon Carmen and Rosita wrapped the rotis in tea towels and packed them away in Tupperware containers.

After Carmen left and Rosita and Lancelot had gone to their rooms, I once again felt horribly alone. I needed someone with whom I was close; I needed Catherine. Yes, I decided, I would telephone her. And regardless of tradition, I made myself a drink first.

I measured a robust jigger of Scotch into one of the thin-walled heavy-bottomed tumblers that Sydney used to use, tossed in two cubes of ice and filled the glass with coconut water. I splashed Angostura bitters on top and shook the glass, rattling the ice cubes to mix it all up. I had made
myself a fine drink. I polished it off in one go and fixed another.

Usually when I called Catherine, I would lean against the counter where the phone was. This time, though, I was compelled to heave my ass onto the counter, sit on top of it, and speak to her as I perched there. I would not have considered doing this before. Before.
Before
Sydney’s death.
After
Sydney’s death. Or should that be
his passing
,
his going away
? In any case, the house was now mine, and I could damn well do in it as I pleased. I put down the glass gently, although I was tempted to bring it hard onto the tile countertop, smashing it, cracking the tiles and summoning Rosita and Lancelot from their rooms. The glass was mine. The tiles that might have broken were mine. The trouble to have them repaired would be mine too. But I was too adept at standing outside of myself, watching, commenting, analyzing, to execute an authentic tantrum. Rosita and Lancelot would have come running out of their rooms, and I would have had to admit to an episode of indulgence or grief-induced insanity.

I could garner social points back home by owning a house in the Caribbean, couldn’t I? I reasoned. But did owning the house, and knowing how a Scotch and coconut water cocktail was made, and watching a very special man die in a hospital here, make me Trinidadian? Did saying
I know Trinidad
take on new and heightened meaning now? In that moment of grief, I saw the bequest of the house as shameless bribery:
Here, Jonathan, have this house instead of me, who, you might notice, you’ve never really had. Take this, and in exchange for it forgive me for my absence, for my
self-absorption, for destroying the vessel that held images of all that you were as a child. I will give you this house, but I can’t give you myself. Ever
. Pressure mounted behind my eyes, my jaw tightened and the top of my head felt as if it would explode, scattering my brain on my new ceiling. Looking up, I realized I hadn’t paid attention to the fan on the ceiling before. The wide wood blades were furry with old dust. I could now order Lancelot to clean them, I mused. I could tell Lancelot to clean this house from top to bottom, to get down on his knees and scrub this place from one end to the other. To scrub the shame from all my useless longings and expectations that, for nine years, had built up, and dried up, here. I imagined launching my glass across the room, putting my fists through every cupboard door in the kitchen. This inanimate thing, this house, mocked me with Sydney’s betrayal of the closeness he and I once, long ago, had shared.

The room spun, and my head felt light. I lifted the glass to my mouth and emptied it. Sweat rolled down the sides of my face and neck. What was I supposed to do with Sydney’s damned stories and the other bequests implied in them? I had three more days before Gita and Jaan arrived. And then there would be the funeral. Catherine was right. I had been unfairly put-upon.

I mixed another drink. Two jiggers went into that third round. One sip and I knew that I was not going to get from Catherine what I needed—the fortitude to endure this time. I called my mother instead. She told me that I was drunk and quietly said goodbye.

I retreated to my room exhausted, but I could not rest. I was tempted to turn again to Sydney’s notebooks, to the letters and the childhood notes from Zain. But I knew the stories they contained intimately. And every single time I read an entry from one of Sydney’s notebooks, I had the sense that he was doing more than keeping a record of his life and of his thoughts. I sensed he imagined a reader—me. If anything confirmed this for me it was the last entry he’d made, written just before he stashed away the three little books in his safety box at the bank. That one, I believe, must surely have been written
to
me. I could almost recite it by heart: