But they do not speak this way again. All day they pretend as though nothing has changed between them. Her mother goes about her usual chores. She gives her usual instructions to Lydia about the meals for the day. She makes her usual inspection of the house. She passes her fingers across the furniture to check for dust, she sniffs the air in the bathrooms. Later in the morning she has Singh unearth a row of red impatiens and replant them in a shady part of the garden. She does not rebuke him when he mumbles under his breath, “Last month you did tell me to plant dem somewhere else.”
She is tired after lunch. She naps, has tea at four, dinner at the usual time, listens to Bach with her husband, and turns in to bed at eight. It begins to seem to Anna as if their early-morning talk had been part of her dream the night before, the better part, the part with the ending the little girl had always yearned for. Then, late at night, as she is walking toward her bedroom, the door to her mother’s room cracks open.
“Do you know what I pray for?” Her mother is standing in the darkened narrow opening. The whites of her eyes seem whiter in the dark, larger on a face buttressed by bones that fan out to the smooth hard shell of her almost bald head. Through the nightgown she is wearing, Anna can see the outlines of her breasts and the dark triangle beneath her belly. Her mother scans the floor. “I pray every night that my child will come back to me.”
She does not say
my daughter
. She does not name the child. She does not say
Anna
. She says
my child
.
Anna opens her mouth to speak, though she doesn’t know what words will come. Then her mother closes the door. She does not wait for her response.
Anna wants to be more understanding. She wants to be forgiving. Her mother belongs to other times, to times before a world war deflated England’s dreams of Empire, when, still puffed up with its victories in its colonies, England trained its colonial subjects to serve the Mother Country. Then the kings and queens of England were the models to be emulated; kings and queens who did not hug and kiss their children, at least not in public.
An old man’s prayer reverberates in Anna’s ears.
Change ah we heart, O Lord. Change ah we heart.
Change ah we heart like mongoose kinna change he skin
under rock bottom.
H
er father has already opened the gate for Singh when she wakes up the next morning. From her bedroom she hears her mother fussing with Singh in the garden. “I don’t care what you say, Singh. The plants need watering. The beds are dry.”
“Madam, I tell you it go rain today.” Singh’s voice is syrupy. It is clear he intends to stand his ground.
“You’re a hardhead, Singh.”
Anna peeps through the window. She cannot see her mother’s face, only her back. Her mother is in her housecoat, a bright pink cotton shift edged with white piping. Her blue nightgown flutters beneath it. In her hand is the garden hose.
Singh is facing her mother. Anna is struck once again by the color of his hair, how black it is, how thick. How it shines! How starkly it contrasts to the thin wisps and tuffs on her mother’s head, to the bald spot in the middle!
Her mother hides her hair from her bridge friends, but not from Singh. Singh has been with her for forty years; she does not need to hide her bald head from him. Singh understands illness, the failure of the body, the inevitability of death.
“If you just wait an hour, madam,” Singh pleads with her, “you go see how it go pour.”
Anna looks up in the sky. To the west, dark clouds have gathered, but to the east, where the sun has just risen, the sky is a brilliant blue.
“You see de clouds over dere?” Singh points to the west. He is standing in front of the flower bed, his head cocked, his weight shifted to one side of his body. The expression on his face is one of pure forbearance, but of affection too. His eyes twinkle and his lips slant upward.
“I’m turning on the water, Singh,” her mother announces. Her hand is on the nozzle of the hose. “If you don’t move, you’ll get wet.”
Singh remains standing where he is. “Madam, I’m telling you it go rain.” He shakes his head. His hair, slicked back with coconut oil, does not budge.
“I’m warning you …” Her mother marches to the faucet at the edge of the garden. “I’m warning you, Singh.”
“I ent moving, madam.” Singh’s feet are planted firmly on the dry ground.
“I’m turning it on, Singh.”
“I ent moving, madam.”
Anna thrusts her head further out of the window. She cannot believe her mother will make good on this threat.
“Have it your way, Singh.”
Water fans out from the hose, long translucent sprays that catch the sun and sparkle with rainbow colors. Singh, true to his word, does not move. Water splashes on his T-shirt and shorts. It wets his bare arms and legs.
“So that’s what you want, eh, Singh? You didn’t take your shower this morning. Is that it?”
Singh’s laughter rumbles up his throat. Her mother is laughing too, a girlish peal that rings across the garden and drifts through the window.
“Is me or de flowerbed you want to wet dis morning, madam?” Singh hops from one foot to the other. Her mother continues to spray him with the hose.
“Okay, madam! Okay, madam!” Singh scampers across the grass toward the back of the house, his makeshift clogs slapping against his bare feet. Incredibly, her mother runs behind him, still wetting him down. Their laughter is that of children in the playground. It ripples through the air.
An overwhelming wave of sadness washes Anna. She slumps down to the floor.
How comfortable they seem with
each other! How easily their quarrel dissolved into play!
Long after she can no longer hear their voices, Anna wrestles with questions this all too brief scene has triggered in her: Will she be always on the outside? Will they, the ones who stayed, the ones who did not emigrate, always be on the inside, even Singh and Lydia?
She has made the effort but her mother remains an enigma to her, a bundle of contradictions, her relationship with Singh, Lydia, and her husband too difficult for her to comprehend. For how can she comprehend this woman who is ever observant of her social status, ever insistent on demanding acknowledgment of her class superiority, and yet protects her helper from abuse, and yet gives money to the poor, and yet pranced through the rain forest to help her husband build a shed so he could catch birds with laglee, and yet is now skipping through the grass, squealing joyfully after her gardener?
As if this isn’t enough, as if it isn’t enough that her mother’s laughter continues to ring in her ears, mocking her, later in the day Anna is confronted again with fresh evidence that there is much she does not know, much she does not understand. That in spite of forty years, though not all of them spent in her parents’ house, she may have misjudged her mother.
The rain Singh promised arrives after lunch. It falls out of the sky in bucketfuls, in intermittent torrents of water that explode on the concrete and carve out miniature craters in the dirt. It comes suddenly and forcefully and then, just as abruptly, it ends. The sun blazes forth, its rays stinging, radiating heat. But the air is heavy with moisture and the sun is not strong enough to evaporate trails of water weighing down branches on the trees, clinging between the shoots of grass pooling in crevices. Anna is stretched out on an armchair in the veranda, the book she has been reading turned over on her lap where it has slid from her hands. Her body feels bloated, surely an illusion of the oppressive heat. She can barely breathe. Her parents are in their room, sensibly taking a nap. She thinks of doing the same. She lifts herself up and makes her way to the sliding glass doors at the entrance of the dining room. The television is on in the den. She hears voices, American voices. A soap opera. Perhaps her mother is not taking a nap. She approaches the den. It is Lydia who is there. She is sitting on the floor, her legs extended to one side, her body stretched out on the other, her head propped up on the palm of her hand, her arm anchored to the carpet. She is a figure in a painting, the woman lying supine. The mistress of the house.
Anna clears her throat and Lydia spins around, pulls down her skirt, and sits up. “Miss Anna, is something you want?”
An offer of service; there is no guilt in her tone. Anna may have caught her by surprise, but it is the suddenness of her arrival that causes Lydia to change her position on the floor, not fear of rebuke.
“Is
As the World Turns
,” Lydia says when Anna asks about the program she is watching. “Madam and I does talk about it.”
“Talk about it?”
“She does look at it in her room and I does see it here.”
Anna finds this hard to believe. “But I never saw you in here before,” she protests.
“Well, I know you visiting and I think you must want to use the den, so I don’t come. But then I see you in the veranda. And it hot in my room …”
They talk. Lydia watches the soaps in the den and afterward they talk. What else do they do? What else do they talk about when she is not visiting? Her mother claims she learned restraint. Restraint is not natural to her— this is the implication. But she is restrained with her daughter, unrestrained with Lydia. Where else do she and Lydia have their little chats? Is Lydia permitted not only to sprawl on the floor of the den but also to sprawl on the floor of the sanctuary of her mother’s bedroom?
Her mother cracks open her bedroom door. Her eyes are misty when she utters her soulful prayer:
I pray every
night that my child will come back to me
. But she does not wait for her daughter’s answer. She leaves. She closes the door.
A
nna sits on the garden bench in the shade of the mango tree. At her feet is the stack of manuscript pages she has finished editing. She is making notes for the presentation she intends to deliver at the meeting of the editorial board. She is planning a vigorous argument for the acquisition of this novel and a decent advance for the writer, something in the range of advances offered to literary novelists at Windsor. The last literary novel she presented from Equiano was approved reluctantly, but with such a meager advance and no budget for promotion that the writer refused the offer and took his novel elsewhere.
It is just past one in the afternoon and the sun is high in the sky. Every sensible person has sought shelter from the stinging sunrays, but in the foreground her father is stooped down low on the lawn plucking out weeds from between the blades of grass. He clears one area and then moves to another, each time piling up a small mound of weeds that quickly wilts in the torpid heat. He gets up, stretches, and then stoops down again. It would tire her to get up and down like that and she is far younger. He has made twelve tiny mounds before he stands up and claps his hands together. Flecks of dried grass flutter down to the ground.
“Finished?” Anna calls out to him.
“This area. I have more to go.”
“Why don’t you let the boys who cut the lawn do this for you?”
“Too lazy. They tell me they have pulled out all the weeds, but after they’ve gone I see weeds all over the place.”
“Then get other boys to cut the grass.”
“Easier said than done. I had a hard time getting the boys I have. Young people aren’t interested in doing physical work these days. They have better alternatives.”
He means the drug trade. He means that young people can make a hundred times more money being mules for the drug trade than they could in a month of cutting grass in the burning sun. He wants to remind her that drugs have made them prisoners in their old age, locked behind iron bars in their own house.
“What about Singh?” she asks.
“Singh belongs to your mother. I don’t interfere with Singh.”
He is standing close to her now. Sweat glistens on his balding head. “You should wear a hat,” she says.
He passes his hand over his head. Sweat rolls down his neck. “What for?”
“To protect you from the UV rays.”
“The UV rays had more than eighty years to do something to me. My skin is too thick for the UV rays.”
“Still, you should cover your head when the sun is this strong.”
He sits on the bench next to her and casts his eyes over the bundle at her feet. “Not done with the manuscript?”
“I’m making notes.”
“For your boss in New York?”
“Yes. I have to make a presentation to the editorial board as soon as I get there.”
“And there’s no changing your mind?” he says softly.
Pain shoots through her heart. He is begging her. A father should not have to beg his daughter.
“She is terrified, you know,” he says.
He has quoted Yeats to her mother.
Sailing to Byzantium,
he said. She thinks now of Eliot.
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
“She needs you, Anna.”
Much is different since her mother reached for her hand, squeezed it:
You cannot imagine, Anna, how many times
I have wanted to tell you much I love you.
She could have kissed her mother then, she could have hugged her, but they kept their usual distance.
Her mother’s father was not her mother’s biological father and her grandmother did not love him. Wasn’t that too much for her mother to bear? And he was a gambler and a drunk, the man who claimed to be her father. Wouldn’t her mother have had to learn restraint to survive those years?
Why can’t she, Anna, be more forgiving? Is it the habit of resentment, engrained over the years, that stiffens the muscles in her arms though she longs to be touched by and to touch her mother? Always a vise closes on her heart, always it leaves her no room to choose.
She is an adult, not a helpless child needing her mother’s care. Why can’t she unlearn what she unwillingly learned?
The Child is father of the Man,
Wordsworth reminds her.
“Just until the last chemo session,” her father pleads.