Her mother’s bridge friends are punctual. They arrive together in a black antique Morris car that belongs to Mrs. Busby. All her mother’s friends have their drivers’ licenses but only Mrs. Busby actually drives. Mrs. Busby is a widow while the other women have husbands who drive them around.
All the women are about her mother’s age. Like many of the people in their social circles, their skin is brown tinged with that pretty rich red undertone that comes from living in the tropics. Mrs. Busby is a thin wisp of a woman who never regained the weight she lost when her husband died. In contrast, the other women are quite plump. Mrs. Farrell is short and squat. She has twinkling eyes and rather thick lips that seem always spread in a smile. Mrs. Baden-Grant is tall and big-boned. It would be both unkind and unfair to call her fat. Her breasts rise high on her chest, but her hips are narrow for a woman her size. She has a long nose that flares slightly at the tip. Her lips are thin. Like the lips of her English mother, she says.
The women are attractively dressed. Mrs. Busby has on a flower-print cotton dress with a rounded white collar. Mrs. Farrell and Mrs. Baden-Grant are wearing slacks, Mrs. Farrell tan ones with a white linen shirt; Mrs. Baden-Grant, white slacks with a greenish print shirt. Anna’s mother is also wearing white slacks, but her top is much prettier and more expensive than those of the other two women. It is a designer blouse Anna bought for her in New York, made out of breathable linen in a muted red and taupe paisley pattern. Anna’s mother stands out among these women not only because she is clearly the most beautiful, but because she is also the most fashionably dressed. Anna can tell her mother enjoys this special status. She is deferential without being subservient, confident that the women already feel their disadvantage in her presence.
Lydia’s timing is perfect. As soon as she hears the women’s voices, she removes the teapot and the creamer from the table. By the time the women have sat down on the wicker armchairs, she has brought out a steaming pot of tea and the creamer filled with Carnation Evaporated Milk.
Anna comes out to the veranda to greet the women and Mrs. Sinclair instructs Lydia to bring another cup and saucer and a dessert plate for her daughter. Anna declines her mother’s invitation to join them. She has to finish working on a manuscript, she says.
Mrs. Sinclair emits a high-pitched laugh. “Working, always working, my Anna,” she says with exasperation, which the women know from past experience to be false. She is not exasperated; she is in fact delighted to have the occasion to boast about her daughter.
“Still at Windsor?” Mrs. Baden-Grant asks, her nostrils flaring.
“Of course, Eunice,” her mother answers before Anna can get a chance to slip in a word. “Of course she’s still at Windsor. Working on a Windsor book,” she says.
“Can you tell us who’s the writer?”
“You won’t recognize the name,” Anna says. “It’s a new author.”
“Anna is an acquisition editor,” Mrs. Sinclair declares. She explains that her daughter finds books for Windsor. Agents send books to her; Anna makes the decision on which ones the company will buy.
The women are duly impressed.
“What young women are doing today!” Mrs. Farrell says in awe. “In our day, Beatrice, the most we could aspire to was to be typists. Now your daughter is an acquisition editor. You must be proud to have a daughter doing something so important.”
Anna’s mother is gracious. “You say that as if you don’t have a daughter doing something more important.” She turns to her daughter. “Did you know that Mrs. Farrell’s daughter is a judge, Anna?”
Mrs. Farrell expresses her gratitude for the compliment by elaborating on the one she had given before. “But to be an acquisition editor in New York for one of the largest publishers in the world!
That
is an accomplishment.”
Anna does not have the heart to tell her this is not exactly the truth. She will not embarrass her mother. She will not deny her this momentary victory. She excuses herself and leaves the veranda. From the living room, she hears the bursts of laughter. Her mother laughs the loudest.
Her mother has not told the women she has cancer. To talk of cancer is to stir memories of shame and defeat. To talk of cancer is to conjure pictures of rotting flesh, women reduced to stinking carcasses, raw meat leaking onto ulcerous sores. Nothing masks the stink of fungated cancer, not cologne, not perfume. Not all the roses in the whole wide world.
These women do not talk about cancer. They are afraid to talk about cancer. Cancer has no regard for class or good breeding. Cancer does not care if the blouse you are wearing was bought in New York, if the label is a designer’s. It does not care if the china you have is Wedgwood, if your maid wears a uniform and knows how best to serve tea and pastries to your admiring friends. Cancer cannot be defeated, so cancer is best kept in secret. Cancer is best hidden from the view of Mrs. Sinclair’s good company.
A week later, her mother is brushing her hair in the bathroom and when she lowers her hand she sees clumps of her dyed black hair wedged between the bristles of the hairbrush. She screams. Her husband is not at home. He has gone to the city for the monthly luncheon meeting of the Rotary Club. Anna is in the kitchen talking to Lydia. They almost trip over each other in their race to the bedroom.
Her mother is sitting on a stool before the mirror. She is in her underwear, a white cotton bra and panties that reach to her waist. Hair blankets her naked shoulder. She sees them through the mirror and spins around. Involuntarily her naked legs spread apart, exposing her crotch. In that split second her eyes shift rapidly from Anna to Lydia and the contours of her face change from terror to anger. She drops the hairbrush on the floor, grabs her robe, which is lying on the counter behind her, and pulls it up to her neck hastily covering her bra and panties.
“Lydia!” For Lydia is the object of her anger. “Knock! How many times have I told you to knock? You can’t come to my room without knocking.”
Lydia tries to explain. “I think something bad happen to you, Mrs. Sinclair. I come to help. I sorry. I knock de next time.”
Anna puts her arm around Lydia’s shoulders and leads her out of the bedroom. When her mother gets so sick she cannot dress herself, will Lydia be permitted to enter her bedroom without knocking? For when she gets so sick and cannot wash herself, Lydia, or someone like Lydia, will have to see her nakedness.
Her mother is crying freely when she returns to the bathroom. “My hair, Anna. My hair. What am I going to do?”
Anna picks up the brush from the floor and untangles the hair from the bristles. “This was to be expected, Mummy,” she says.
Her mother places her hands over her head. There is a bald spot in the middle where her hair has fallen out. “I’ll look old. I’ll look terrible.” The words come out of her mouth in gasps between her tears.
In as calm a voice as she can muster, Anna reminds her of Dr. Ramdoolal’s warning. “The doctor told us this would happen. Remember?”
But remembering the doctor’s warning does not console her mother. “What am I going to do? How they will laugh at me!”
“Don’t you see this means the chemo is working?” Anna says reasonably.
Her mother glares at her, eyes red-rimmed. “Working?”
“Killing the cancer cells,” Anna says.
“Killing me. Destroying me.” Her mother covers her face with her hands and bursts into a fresh round of tears.
This is her mother. Anna cannot watch her in this distress and do nothing, say nothing, to help her. “Cut it,” Anna says. The idea enters her head partially formed and then blossoms. “Cut it all off. You’ll look great with short hair.”
Her mother drops her hands and regards Anna with puzzlement. “Cut off what little I have? That’s what you want me to do? You want me to look worse than I already do?”
“You’ll look beautiful. And fashionable.”
“Fashionable?”
“Short hair is fashionable in the States.”
Her mother reaches for a tissue and dries her eyes. “In the States,” she says. “Short hair is not fashionable
here
.”
It is not the reaction Anna has hoped for. Still, her mother’s defiance is a good sign. Better than self-pity. “You’ll be a funky old lady,” Anna says.
Her mother wrinkles her nose.
“Nice funky,” Anna adds quickly.
“You mean a white-haired old lady.” Dye masked the visible strands of her mother’s hair, but at the roots it is white.
“So you’ll be a funky white-haired old lady. A silver fox.”
“A silver fox?” Her mother crinkles her eyes.
Anna can tell she is not displeased by the image her words have conjured. She hastens to cement the picture for her mother before it drifts away from her mind’s eye. “Daddy will get a new you,” she says.
Her mother takes another tissue and blows her nose. “Your father may not want a new me.”
“Daddy likes anything you do.”
“Yes.” Her mother is suddenly pensive. She folds her lower lip into her mouth. “Yes,” she says again, dreamily.
“With your face, short hair will be perfect for you.”
Her mother twists her jaw back and forth.
“It’s true, Mummy.”
Her mother releases her lip. “Your father is so good to me.”
“He loves you,” Anna says.
Abruptly, her mother stands up. The robe falls to the floor. She is exposed again: white bra and waist-high panties. Anna cannot see the lump under her arm, in her lymph nodes, but the tumor on her breast protrudes above the top of the bra. She shifts her eyes away from the protrusion.
“Let’s do it now, Anna. Let’s cut it now.” She says this like a child unable to contain her excitement in anticipation of a gift she is yet to open. “Now. I don’t want to wait a minute longer.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.
You
do it, Anna.”
This is not what Anna is prepared to do. This is not what she has expected her mother to ask of her.
“I’ll get the scissors.” Her mother is moving toward the mahogany cabinets in the bathroom.
“I can’t. I don’t know how,” Anna stammers.
Her mother is already rummaging through the top drawer. “Will this do?” She holds up a huge pair of scissors with bright orange handles.
Anna backs away. “I can take you to the hairdresser.”
“No. I want to do it now.” Her mother sits on the stool in front of the mirror. “I want to be a funky white-haired lady now. I don’t want to go to the hairdresser. I want
you
to do it.”
“
Me
?”
They do not touch in their house. Her mother waits on ceremony to dole out her kisses. A kiss for her birthday, a kiss for Christmas, a kiss for New Year’s Day. Cheek against cheek. Never lips on cheek. How is she to cut her mother’s hair without getting physically close to her, physically closer to her than she can remember?
“I don’t think I would have the courage to let anyone else cut my hair the way it is now,” her mother says. She points to the towel rack. “Put a towel around my shoulders, Anna.”
Anna takes a towel from the rack and drapes it over her mother’s shoulders. Her fingers graze her mother’s skin. A touch, ever so lightly. She breathes in the citrusy scent of her mother’s soap. Longing floods her being. Her knees feel weak.
“Here, take the scissors.”
She takes the scissors from her mother’s hand but her fingers become a vise. They tighten around the holes in the handle. They will not loosen. She raises her hand. It stiffens; it remains suspended in midair.
Her mother is watching her through the mirror. “What’s taking you so long, Anna?”
What has taken them so long? To touch, to feel, skin against
skin. A mother and a daughter.
“Just cut it, Anna.”
An order. It snaps Anna into motion.
What boiling spoiling, the old people say. What ent boil yet ent
spoil yet. What done boil done spoil.
“Do it, Anna.”
Anna swallows the flow of longing, regret, recrimination, welling inside of her. The past cannot be recovered.
What done boil done spoil.
She snips, she trims. Hair rains down her mother’s back, in some places it falls down in clumps.
After lunch, her father calls. The president of the Rotary Club has invited special guests from Canada to the luncheon meeting and he will be expected to entertain them. He should be home no later than teatime, he says.
Anna goes to the living room to deliver her father’s message. She finds her mother sitting on a sofa, looking out the sliding glass doors, toward her orchid garden. Her gaze is distant, blank. There is a pile of magazines at her feet. If she intended to read them, she seems to have changed her mind. When Anna approaches her, she starts, her shoulders twitch. She swivels around. “Why did you come up on me so silently, Anna?”
But Anna had not come upon her silently. She had said her name, she had called out: “Mummy!”
She is worried, Anna thinks. She is afraid her husband may not like the way she looks now. “You don’t have to worry, Mummy,” Anna says. “You look great with short hair.”
Her mother brushes her fingers lightly across her cheekbones. “Hair? I have no hair.”
There is some hair left on the front of her head and at the sides, but even there it is thin, her bare scalp visible.
“So much white,” her mother murmurs.
“It suits you,” Anna says. “You shouldn’t ever dye your hair again.”
Most women her mother’s age would look old with such scanty hair, but her mother does not. She has no wrinkles on her face, and her perfect bone structure— high cheekbones, smooth forehead, rounded jaw-line— sets off her deep-set eyes, her softly curved nose, her full top lip. That the hair remaining on her head is all white makes no difference. She is as beautiful as ever.
“Try saying that to yourself when you get to be my age,” her mother says.
At her present age, Anna is already turning gray. Once a month her hairdresser dyes her gray strands brown. She doubts she will stop dyeing her hair when she reaches her mother’s age. She doubts she will be as fortunate to look as youthful as her mother does at her age.
“Well, I hope I don’t shock your father too much.”