In her room, waiting for her father, Anna’s head
Is a little, little ting for me to take
. If Lydia could dismiss her mother’s actions as foolishness, why can’t she? reels. Why can’t she find it in her heart to make peace with her mother?
Her friend Paula was right—Paula, her one true friend in New York, an immigrant like she is, from an island in the Caribbean. Paula was not fooled by her claims of spending more time on the island than usual because her parents are growing older, because time is not on their side nor on hers. She is on a mission, Paula said. She is going there this time because she wants, she needs, closure.
Anna will admit it now. She is uncertain of her mother’s motive for asking her to stay with her in her room, but this is a chance to be alone with her, a chance for closure.
When her father comes to get her, she picks up the manuscript she is hoping to acquire for Equiano. The manuscript will distract her while her mother sleeps, she thinks, for in spite of her best efforts, she has not been able to stop the quivering growing more and more intense in her chest.
Her parents’ bedroom is freezing. Her father has raised the air conditioner to its highest level and closed the blinds. The room is dark and Anna can barely make out the shape of her mother’s body under the blanket. She is lying on her left side, on her own side of the bed. Her back is curled, her hips thrust outward. Involuntarily? By habit? For her husband’s sake? Anna’s draws in her breath. She has caught her mother in this position before, but only fleetingly. For in a blink of an eye her mother quickly uncurled her body and modestly brought her legs together.
Do they spoon? After they make love, does her mother put her backside against her father’s stomach? Does she press her naked body against his private parts?
After they make love, does her father wrap his arms around her chest? Does he stroke her breasts? And if he does, if he did in those two years (two years at least, Dr. Ramdoolal said), did his fingers touch the hardened flesh, the seed the size of a pea he had allowed to grow to a lemon, to burst open and dribble blood?
For the sake of her privacy, her father said.
Anna’s temples pulsate. She is angry, but not only with her father. She is angry with her father for what he did not do, but she is angry with Tony for what her father did do and Tony did not do. For Tony never wanted to spoon. He never wanted to stroke her breasts when they were done. He was spent afterward, exhausted. He reached for his cigarettes, not for her.
Her mother stirs, turns her head, lengthens a leg, and pulls it up again. She is deep in sleep; she does not sense her daughter’s presence. A piece of thread has unraveled from the hem of the blanket at her neck and flutters upward to the bottom of her nose. When she breathes in, the thread is still. When she breathes out, the thread quivers. Anna reaches over and removes it.
Soothing sounds envelop the room. The air conditioner hums, the blanket swishes softly when her mother moves. Anna sits on the armchair on her father’s side of the bed. She leans her head against the soft backing of the chair. The room is dark. She does not turn on the bedside lamp. She needs this respite. Perhaps all her mother wants is company, a warm body in the room while she sleeps. Perhaps it was her husband’s comfort she was thinking of, perhaps this was her sole motive for sending him away and asking her daughter to stay. Her husband has been with her when the needles were stuck in her arm. He needs a distraction. Let him feed his fish.
Anna’s eyelids feel heavy; she is drowsy. She puts the manuscript she brought with her on the floor, near to her feet. There is a shawl hanging over the back of the armchair, next to her mother’s side of the bed. She wraps it around her shoulders. She shuts her eyes. In seconds, she is asleep.
“For a moment there I thought you were my mother.” Her mother’s voice.
Anna’s eyes shoot open. Her mother is sitting up on the bed, staring at her.
“The shawl,” her mother says. “It was my mother’s shawl. You look just like her. You are as beautiful as she was.”
Anna rubs her eyes and readjusts the shawl on her shoulders. She cannot believe she has heard her mother correctly. A lump has formed in her throat that prevents her from speaking.
“With that shawl,” her mother says, “you look just like my mother.”
Anna is fully awake. Alert. Emotions, none she experiences with any clarity, none she can identify, rush through her body. Her face feels warm, her knees cold, as if drained of the blood that has risen to her face. She gets up and plumps the pillows behind her mother’s head. “Here,” she says. “Sit back on these.”
“It’s true.” Her mother tries to catch her eyes, but Anna lowers her head and busily smoothens the creases on the pillow case.
“Sit back,” she says again to her mother.
“You don’t believe me?”
“You were dreaming,” Anna says.
“I should have told you that a long time ago.” Her mother rests her back against the pillows. “I should have told you how beautiful you are,” she says softly.
When Anna was fifteen, the brother of one of her friends from school held her hand and said, “You are the prettiest of my sister’s friends.” She felt a surge of irrational happiness then. This is the feeling Anna finally recognizes in the confusion of emotions that swirl through her. Will they talk now? Will they have closure?
But the timbre of her mother’s voice changes, the softness that was there evaporates. “I’m sure I didn’t need to tell you that,” she says. No emotion, a chastisement even.
The warm sensation that has just spread across Anna’s face subsides. The irrational surge of happiness dissipates.
“Your friends. They must have told you so. Why don’t you call them up? Call Teresa.”
She has not spoken to Teresa in at least ten years. Teresa is married. Teresa has five children.
“I don’t want you stuck in the house looking after a sick woman,” her mother says. “Go out. Have fun.”
With whom?
“I came to see you and Daddy,” Anna mumbles. “I’m not stuck in the house.”
“Reading, reading,” her mother says. “That’s all you do. Was that a new book you were reading yesterday?”
“A novel by Toni Morrison.”
“Is she good?”
“She won the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
“A woman?”
“The first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.”
“What a thing,” her mother says. Her attention drifts. She looks across the room toward the window. “Your father always turns the air conditioner on too high,” she grumbles. “Lower it for me, will you, Anna?”
But her father does not turn the air conditioner on too high. He turns it on to the temperature her mother wants.
The air conditioner protrudes from a rectangular hole cut out of the wall beneath the window. Anna walks over to it and turns it down.
“That’s better,” her mother says. She takes a pillow from her husband’s side of the bed and adds it to the ones behind her back. “John is my best friend,” she announces.
Anna clenches her hands. “You are lucky, Mummy,” she says, and readies herself. The route will be a short one now from the friends she does not have to the husband who left her. First there will be a diversion.
Her mother sighs. “It takes time to build a true friendship, Anna.”
“Time and things in common,” Anna replies cautiously.
“You have things in common with your friends here.”
“I got severed from my roots a long time ago,” Anna says.
Her mother sighs again. “Call Teresa. I have her phone number.”
“I’m happy being here with you and Daddy. And I have work to do.”
Her mother peers over the bed. “Those papers on the floor?”
“It’s a new book I’m editing.”
“You must be important at Windsor.”
“Not all that important. I’m merely an editor.”
Her mother corrects her. “A
senior
editor.”
“That only means more work for me,” Anna says.
Her mother fiddles with the blanket covering her thighs and legs. “You work too hard. I worry about you. You say you don’t have friends here. Do you have friends there, where you are in New York?”
“Of course.”
Her mother considers this answer. “Of course,” she repeats quietly. An echo. No conviction in her voice.
“You should sleep some more,” Anna says.
“Yes. I think I’ll do that.”
“I’ll fix the pillows.” Anna removes them from the headboard. “You want one or two under your head?”
“One,” her mother says.
Anna shifts the other two across the bed, away from her mother. “Here. Is that okay?”
Her mother slides down on the bed. They avoid brushing against each other.
“You’re a good daughter, Anna, I just wish …”
And Anna thinks, here it comes: the end of the route, her mother’s true purpose. The saccharine sweet tone, the compliments rarely given—a good daughter, as beautiful as her beautiful grandmother—all leading to her true objective. Her mother will draw her out now, she will force her to face her inadequacies, her failures. Her failure as a woman to fulfill the role her mother has successfully fulfilled. For isn’t this the role society has prepared her for, expects of her: anodyne relationships of no substance, friendships whose purpose is to advance harmony in marriage? Children.
“What do you wish, Mummy?”
“I just wish …” Her mother inhales, exhales.
“What, Mummy?”
“I just wish you and Tony … Your father is such a comfort to me. I just wish you and Tony … You must be so lonely.”
Anna does not respond, but it takes every ounce of restraint she has taught herself in the years in the Englishman’s country, in the years she has chosen to live among people who make assumptions, who decide who she is, her likes and dislikes, the reaches of her heart, her intellectual capacity.
She steadies herself. “Sleep, Mummy,” she says. “Sleep.”
Once outside her mother’s room Anna’s legs buckle under her. She leans against the closed door and braces herself. She clamps her bottom lip between her teeth. She will not let the tears fall.
She cannot
.
You must be so lonely
.
This is why her mother has asked her to stay, why she wanted her to remain in her room. But she has friends in New York. She has Paula. She is not lonely.
I wish you and Tony
…
She and Tony are divorced. Tony has remarried. Even now Tony could be making love to the new woman he married. Why couldn’t she have said that to her mother? Why couldn’t she have said that Tony has moved on, found another to share his bed while she sleeps alone?
She does not want her mother’s pity. Her mother’s pity will take her down to a place too deep, too dark, to find the light again. Anonymity is what she sought when she chose New York, a chance to remake herself freed from the glare of judgmental eyes.
E
pluribus unum. Out of many, one. America’s boast brazenly embossed on its coins. But in New York a blind man can find his way across the city by his nose, by the odors of food rising from the streets and through open windows. His ears can take him anywhere across the five boroughs. Even when the language spoken is English, he can tell the difference in the accents. He knows he is either uptown or downtown, in African American Harlem or Spanish Harlem, in Caribbean Brooklyn or in East Asian Queens. He knows when he enters the WASP enclave, or the territories carved out by Europeans.
“You think you are the United Nations?” Tony sneered when Anna claimed ancestors from around the globe. “In America, you are black. Don’t go thinking other people see their relatives in you.”
Tony is African American. If other bloods run through his veins, he pretends not to know. His Africanness comes before his Americanness, he said to Anna. And it did not matter when Anna pointed out that except for the two who had been dragged onto slave ships from Africa, he and all his relatives, his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents going back for more than four hundred years, had all been born and raised in America.
Was he the first African American she ever dated? he asked her.
No, she said. She had dated Americans. She did not think of him as the first American she ever dated.
African
American,” Tony said. “I did not say American. Those two are not the same. You could get killed in “America if you are foolish enough to believe they’re the same.”
The O.J. Simpson trial opened her eyes. Not that she hadn’t noticed before.
People like being with people they know, people who have things in common with them, a white friend explained.
But she could not understand the bookstores, why even there American literature was separated: American literature on one side, African American literature on the other. Books are not people. Books do not choose to be with other books that have things in common with them. Then she got a job at Windsor and Tanya Foster clarified the nuances of niche marketing. Still, she finds it difficult to justify why a book that has nothing to do with cultural differences, a book on nuclear proliferation, for example, or on moral philosophy, ends up in the African American section because the writer is African American. Or why, when the scholar is African American, his exegesis on Milton is placed there.
To facilitate access, liberals say. Access, that perniciously deceptive “a” word. Does nuclear proliferation have a color? Is there one kind of moral philosophy for white people and another for black people? Does the color of one’s skin determine one’s ability to analyze literature?
Yet she is not without guilt. What hypocritical game was she attempting to play with her mother, deliberately withholding from her the fact that Toni Morrison is African American, pretending her color did not matter?
She said American. She could have said African American. She could have told her mother that Toni Morrison is the first American woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature
and
she is African American. It might have made a difference to her mother, presented her with a different image to counter the ones on the nightly news.