Everything is arranged carefully in the bedside drawer, the items lined up perfectly next to each other. Beside the table is a blue-upholstered chair with wood arms and legs. Sometimes her father sits on this chair to read his letters or rearrange his drawer. More often than not he sits on his bed, his legs outstretched on top of the covers. Visitors, though only close friends and family, sit on the chair.
Her mother has a matching chair on her side of the bed. Like her husband, she prefers to sit on the bed. Unlike him, she sits on the edge of it with her feet on the floor when she phones her friends or reads the books Anna brings for her. Only when her back hurts will she sit on the chair. She keeps the phone and the telephone directory on her bedside table. Next to it is a crucifix, about eight inches tall, held upright on a stand, and next to the crucifix is a worn prayer book. Anna notices that the silver rosary ring, usually next to the crucifix, is not on the table. On their visit to Europe three years ago, her father brought back a painting and her mother the silver rosary ring which had been blessed by the Pope. It is one inch in diameter, surrounded by ten silver beads crested with a small crucifix. Anna guesses her mother has taken the rosary ring with her to the bathroom. She presses her ear against the bathroom door but hears nothing. No sound of water running out of the faucet, no splash of the shower against the bathroom tiles. Her mother is praying. She will not disturb her.
Should
not. She is about to leave when her mother calls her name. Her voice is muted, almost a whisper. “Anna? Is that you, Anna?”
Unaccountably, Anna feels a pressing urge to escape. “I can come back later,” she says. She is already at the bedroom door.
“No,” her mother says, in the same muted voice. “Come. Come in. I want to talk to you.”
Anna wants a peaceful morning curled up with her book in a cushioned wicker chair on the veranda that faces the lawn with a clear view of the two orange trees, their branches bowed down with the weight of fruit. She wants to be lulled by the twittering of birds squabbling among themselves for the sweet juice of the oranges. She does not want to talk. To talk with her mother is to stir up old wounds, to be reminded that at thirty-nine she is childless and single, to be reminded that it was she who chose to leave the island, to turn her back on all that could have been hers.
“Anna, can you hear me? Open the door, Anna.”
But isn’t this why she is here? She is here to talk, to reconnect, to be with them, with her father
and
her mother.
“Anna.”
She turns the doorknob and enters the bathroom. Her mother is seated at her dressing room table, facing the door, her back to the mirror. Anna clasps her hand to her mouth when she sees her. Her mother’s eyes are watery pools and the skin is ashy around her mouth.
“Mummy, what? What is it?” Anna steps quickly toward her.
Her mother brings a trembling finger to her lips. “Not a word.” She is holding the rosary ring. It dangles on the crook of her thumb. “I don’t want you to say a word to your father.”
Anna comes closer to her. “What is wrong, Mummy? Are you sick?”
“Close the door,” her mother says.
Anna stretches out her hand toward her mother, but she does not touch her.
“Do as I say, Anna.” Her mother gestures toward the door. “Please, Anna.”
Anna walks over to the door and closes it.
“Is your father here?” Her mother’s voice is strained.
Anna’s heart drops. “Is it something Daddy has done?” But her father is an old man.
“No,” her mother says. “This is not about your father.”
Why should she have thought otherwise? And yet the relief Anna feels is palpable. “Do you need a doctor?” Her heart has resumed its normal rhythm.
“No,” her mother says. “I don’t need a doctor. I need to know if your father has left.”
“He’s gone.”
“Are you sure?”
“He found a frog in the pond and took it to the river.”
“Good.” Her mother stands up and puts the metal rosary ring on the dressing room table. Slowly, she pushes one and then another button through the buttonholes at the top of her dress. “I want to show you something.” She frees another button.
Anna sees flashes of her white cotton bra in the opening under her dress.
“Unhook me,” her mother says. She twists her body around, her back toward Anna.
Anna remains where she is, a safe distance away from her mother. She does not move. In their household, they do not expose their bodies, not to each other. Husbands and wives may have to bare their naked bodies to each other, but not mothers and daughters.
“Here. I’ll help you.” Her mother lowers her head. One by one her mother undoes more of the buttons on her dress, stopping just below her waist. She slides one side of her dress off her shoulder and down her arm and does the same on the other side. The top of the dress drops in folds at her waist.
“Can you reach the hooks on my bra now?” She is wearing a white half-slip. The exposed skin above it is creamy brown, not a single mark or flaw on it. The texture resembles leavened dough, soft, smooth, pliable.
“Go on, Anna. Unhook my bra.”
Her lips have brushed her mother’s cheeks, her hands have touched her body, but her hands have not touched the parts of her mother’s body covered by clothes.
“Go on, Anna.”
The panels on the bra have cut into the sides of her mother’s back, pulling the flesh together. A canal forms along the path of her spine. Anna pinches the metal hook between her fingers and struggles to ease it over the eye of the fastener. Her fingers scrape against her mother’s skin.
“Is it too tight? Do you want me to do it?” Her mother looks over her shoulder, but Anna has managed to unfasten the bra; the canal along her mother’s spine spreads, relaxes. The leavened dough on either side deflates.
Her mother removes her bra. She turns around. “This is what I want you to see.”
Nothing has prepared Anna for what her mother wants to show her. Nothing has prepared her for the lump pushing out beneath the skin on her mother’s left breast or for the thin trail of partially dried blood beneath it. Anna gasps. Instinctively, with no time to think, she throws her arms around her mother’s neck and buries her head in the well of her shoulders.
“Shhh.” Her mother pulls her closer.
The muscles on Anna’s throat contract. She cannot speak.
“Shhh.”
They stay this way until self-consciousness returns— seconds later—both suddenly aware of what they have done. They have not embraced each other this way before, not within Anna’s memory.
Anna is the first to back away. Her mother does nothing to stop her. “How long?” she asks. “How long have you had this?”
Her mother, calm now, lifts her arm. Under her arm is another large lump, her lymph nodes swollen, pushing against her skin.
“Oh, Mummy!” Anna clutches her neck and squeezes her skin to stop her head from shaking.
“I haven’t told your father.” Her mother rubs the spot on her shoulder where Anna had sunk her head. It is the only acknowledgment she gives of the intimacy that has just occurred between them.
“But Daddy … ? Didn’t Daddy see it, both of them?”
“I prayed every night for it to go away.” Her mother flops down on the bathroom chair. She does not cover her breasts. They hang down, two pendulous sacks against her chest, except in one a lump bulges out, hard, sturdy, full-blown. “The one on my breast just got bigger and bigger.”
Anna averts her eyes. “Daddy must have seen it,” she says.
“I wake up at night. At two in the morning. Your father is still asleep.”
Anna stifles a moan. Against her will, her eyes are drawn back to the lump on her mother’s breast.
“Every morning at two o’clock I come here. I pray. I say the rosary. It’s on my mind all the time. In the day, I am busy and I forget sometimes, but at night I’m alone.”
“But Daddy …”
“He sleeps like a rock. He doesn’t hear me when I get out of bed. I say my rosary. I ask the Blessed Virgin to take it away.”
“You need a doctor,” Anna says.
Her mother shakes her head.
“I’ll take you to the doctor.”
“A doctor can’t help me.”
Her mother’s mother died at fifty-six of breast cancer. In those colonial days on the island there was no chemotherapy, not for those without money, not for locals without connections. The tumor on her grandmother’s breast just grew larger until it broke through her skin. It was bloody and ugly.
The prevailing wisdom among the women was that the tumor was a hungry beast eating away the flesh of its victims. If they fed the beast, if they satiated its ravenous appetite, it would eat the food they gave it instead of the woman’s breast. So they put slabs of raw meat on the tumor on Anna’s grandmother’s breast. The tumor preferred human flesh; it kept on eating.
In the sweltering heat of the tropical sun, the raw meat decomposed and filled her grandmother’s room with the putrid scent of decaying flesh. Beatrice Sin-clair was revolted. She could not enter her mother’s room without vomiting. The women gave her handkerchiefs soaked in cologne to press against her nose. The handkerchiefs were useless. She fainted at the door. Her mother died calling her name.
“Today,” Anna says. “I’ll take you today.”
“A doctor was no use to my mother.”
“Things are different now,” Anna says. “Doctors know more. They can help.”
“I pray every night. Sometimes I say six rosaries. Sometimes the sun is rising before I get back to bed.”
“Last night?”
Her mother nods. “I couldn’t sleep last night.”
“Daddy must have …” Even if her father had not heard her mother’s footsteps along the bedroom floor, twice he must have felt the mattress shift beneath him, once when she left the bed, the second time when she returned.
“Your father has his own way,” her mother says.
Singh noticed. “Something wrong,” he said. But her father did
not blink, he did not show the slightest concern when she told him
that her mother was not in the garden as he had assumed. And what
about her? She had seen the dark circles under her mother’s eyes.
“It doesn’t hurt,” her mother says.
Not yet. Not yet
. Anna’s stomach churns, the muscles in her chest tense, but no tears come. She does not cry.
They are a family who keep a firm rein on their emotions. Not all emotions, to be sure. Not indignation, outrage, anger. Pride gives rise to indignation; justice cries for outrage and anger. But the sadness that overcomes Anna now, the empathy she feels for her mother’s suffering, the fear she has of losing her, these are emotions too close to the heart. Such emotions lay bare one’s vulnerability, they threaten to loosen the control one deludes oneself into thinking one has over one’s life. She will not cry.
“You’ll have to tell Daddy,” Anna says.
“Yes,” her mother replies. “It’s time we faced this.”
“Faced?”
“Admitted it. Tell him it’s time, Anna.”
He knows?
“You tell him for me, Anna.”
They are husband and wife, not mere acquaintances. They have lived with each other for more than forty years. They are not strangers.
“It’s time,” her mother says. “Tell him it’s time.”
B
ut her parents love each other. Her father can recall the first day he saw her mother. He can recite with impressive exactitude the date, the time of day, the weather, the exact spot on the street. He remembers what she wore, how she walked, every word she said.
He was walking on the sidewalk toward the black, marble-façade Treasury Building where Beatrice worked, in those days the property of the colonial government. It was ten past noon on the 10th of April, a particularly hot day in the dry season. The glare of the sun was so strong he had to pull his hat down low over his forehead to shield his eyes. That was why, before he saw Beatrice’s face, he saw her legs, the backs of them, for she was ahead of him, having just left her office. He saw solid calves, tiny ankles, feet sliding in black pumps. Impressed and intrigued, he pushed back the brim of his hat to get a better view. The sight of her voluptuous hips swaying rhythmically to music he alone heard made him decide there and then he would have to speak to her.
A man in his part of town was either a breast man or a hips man. John Sinclair was a hips man. Breasts for him were functional objects that swelled with pregnancy and deflated once the baby was weaned. He had been breast-fed. He had seen his mother breast-feed his younger sibling. He had seen his aunts breast-feed his cousins. Now the wife of one of his friends was breast-feeding her son. It was hard for him not to think of breasts as not much different from the udders of the cows he saw in the fields, their calves sucking and pulling at their nipples. So breasts did not arouse desire in him. Not that John Sinclair did not appreciate an hourglass figure on a woman. It was just that the bottom half was the part that made his head spin. And to John Sinclair, Beatrice Forneau was endowed with a perfect bottom half, hips that flared from a narrow waist, a backside that rose and curved in a smooth arc behind her.
Never in his life had he seen a woman move her hips more seductively than Beatrice, he declared. He demonstrated her stride for his daughter. Placing his hands akimbo on his waist, he strode across the living room floor, swaying his hips from side to side while beating out a stripper’s drum through his tightened lips.
Badoom,
badoom, badoom
. Beatrice laughed so hard, tears rolled down her eyes. “No more, no more!” She had to struggle to recover her breath.
“That was how she walked,” John Sinclair insisted. “
Badoom, badoom, badoom
.”
Her mother begged him to stop. “Enough, John!” But Anna could tell she liked this recounting of her first meeting with her husband-to-be.
“I almost knocked a man down following those hips,” John Sinclair said. “I was a man on a leash.”
“What leash?” Beatrice rolled her eyes and protested unconvincingly. “I didn’t have a leash.”
“Those hips! I was tethered to them,” he said.