“You know, Lydia, I don’t like the way Mummy speaks to you. I want you to know that.”
“I don’t mind, Miss Anna,” Lydia murmurs.
“I heard her giving you orders in the kitchen.”
“I ’customed to her ways, Miss Anna. I know how she like.”
But Anna insists. “I want you to know I appreciate all you do for them. I’m so far away. I can’t be of much help. It’s a comfort to me knowing you are here.”
“I tries, Miss Anna.”
“Mummy appreciates what you do. It’s just that …”
“She belong to the old school, Miss Anna. I understand.”
Anna looks away, humbled by the simplicity and purity of Lydia’s generosity. The old school was not kind to people like Lydia and yet she has room in her heart for compassion.
“The water okay?” Lydia is still standing next to her.
Anna thanks her again, but Lydia does not leave. She is twisting and untwisting the ends of her apron over her leathered hands.
“I’ll bring the glass to the kitchen when I am done,”
Anna says, but Lydia remains where she is. “You don’t have to wait for me.”
Lydia sighs, a deep release of breath that collapses her chest. “She not well.” Anna knows immediately that Lydia means her mother. “I don’t say nothing, but I see her.” Lydia’s voice is heavy with worry. “Sometimes she does have to lean on the wall to keep from falling. Sometimes I have to take her tea in the bedroom for her. Is four o’clock and she still resting in her bed.”
“And did you ask her what’s the matter?” Anna keeps a tight control on the pitch of her voice. She will not panic.
“Oh no, Miss Anna. I can’t do that. Is not my place to do that.”
Not her place
.
Anna cannot place blame for
Not her place
solely at the feet of the English colonizers. Not just the English and the Europeans, but Africans and Asians as well subscribe to social hierarchies. Even in hell, Dante tells us, there are stratified circles. In heaven, the best are nearest to God; in purgatory, the least without sin are on the mountain top.
Lydia, unlike Singh, will not call Mrs. Sinclair
madam,
as the old school required her to do. She will not call Mr. Sinclair
boss
or
bossman.
She will refer to Anna’s parents by their proper titles.
Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair,
she calls them. But she remains aware of her place in relation to Mrs. Sinclair, and given her place, she cannot ask Mrs. Sinclair questions that touch upon the intimate parts of her life, that refer to the unclothed areas of her body. She cannot say to Mrs. Sinclair, I notice that your hips are not as wide as they were a few months ago. She cannot say, I see a strange swelling on one of your breasts. She is not privileged to observe Mrs. Sinclair’s body. If she wants to know about Mrs. Sinclair’s health, she must wait to be informed.
“You ask her, Miss Anna. You find out. She need help.”
Help is on her father’s mind when he comes out of the bedroom for his four o’clock tea. Mrs. Sinclair is sleeping, he tells Lydia. He takes the chair next to Anna.
Lydia serves them in the veranda. On a tray, she brings a pot of tea, two cups and saucers, two teaspoons, two knives, two dessert plates, a stack of paper napkins, a silver bowl filled with brown sugar, a small jug of milk, six slices of coconut sweet bread baked with cherries and raisins she made in the morning, a small dish of guava jelly, and a slab of white cheddar cheese. With slight variations—cake one day, butter biscuits another—she serves the Sinclairs this tea at four every afternoon. She puts the tray down on the coffee table.
John Sinclair tells Lydia that they won’t need her for a while and she returns to the kitchen. When she is gone, he gets up and pours a cup of tea for his daughter. “No sugar, right?” he says. “Just like your mother.” His face is drawn; he looks worn out, wrung dry. He passes the milk to her. They use evaporated milk in their tea. When Anna told her parents that in America people drink hot tea with lemon, they wrinkled their noses in disgust. On their visits to her in America, they refuse to use the fresh milk that comes in cartons. Only canned evaporated milk will do for them, Carnation Evaporated Milk to be exact.
John Sinclair waits until his daughter drinks her first cup and has eaten a slice of the sweet bread. When she is done, he broaches the subject of his wife. “What do we do now?” The space between his eyebrows folds, the canals deepen.
“She should come back with me to the States,” Anna says.
John Sinclair puts down his cup and rubs his eyes. “She won’t do that.” He slides his hands down the sides of his face.
“There are doctors who can treat her there,” Anna says. “There are good hospitals in the States.”
He shakes his head. “She’s afraid.”
“It doesn’t look good, Daddy. I think the cancer has advanced pretty far. It’s in her lymph nodes too. And the blood.” She lowers her eyes as she says this, trying hard to hold back the accusation on the tip of her tongue. He saw the blood on his vest and he didn’t do anything, he didn’t say anything.
“She won’t go.”
“Breast cancer does not have to be a death sentence,” Anna says, struggling to keep her voice even.
“She saw her mother suffer.”
“There are new medicines, better surgeries …”
“That’s not it,” he says.
“Then what is it?”
“She wants to be treated here.”
“They can’t help her here,” Anna says.
“Your mother won’t go anywhere else. She says we have good doctors here.”
“There are better doctors in the States.”
“Your mother has faith in our doctors here.”
“I’m not saying the doctors here are bad,” Anna says, “but they are not familiar with the latest research.”
“Your mother does not think so.”
“And even if they have kept up with the research, you know the conditions of the hospitals here, Daddy. They use newspapers instead of sheets, for God’s sake.”
“We can bring sheets to the hospital.”
“Patients are left in the corridors on gurneys for days.
They don’t have beds!”
“I can arrange that.”
He is speaking to her in the patronizing tone of a manager subduing an overly anxious new employee.
Anna glares at him wild-eyed. “You don’t mean to let her have surgery here?”
“Your mother says we have the best oncologists here,” he says.
“Oh God!” Anna buries her head in her hands.
Her father reaches out and winds his fingers around her wrist. “She’ll be all right, Anna. Don’t worry so much.”
It is more than Anna can take. She pushes away his hand and bounds out of her chair. The words that earlier had trembled at the tip of her tongue come flying out of her mouth. “You are responsible!” she shouts out at him. “You let it go this far. You and your mumbo-jumbo about privacy.”
“Anna, Anna,” John Sinclair says soothingly.
“If you cared, if you really cared, you would have done something.”
“I love your mother.”
“Love her and you do nothing? You tell me something about privacy, respecting her privacy? Were you planning to respect her privacy until she died?”
“Your mother and I have no secrets from each other.”
“No secrets? What do you call her not telling you about her tumor? What do you call your saying nothing? I mean, how do two people sleep next to each other, night after night, for more than forty years, and one of them not say a word about a tumor he can clearly see bulging from his wife’s breast? And the blood? Oh, Daddy, how could you?”
“Clearly bulging? It was not clearly bulging to me as you seem to say, Anna.”
“I saw it, Daddy. Even a half-blind man would have seen it.”
“Your mother knew I saw it,” he says softly.
Yes, that was what her mother had implied. “It’s time we faced
this,” she said. As if she had planned this all alone. As if the plan was
first prayers in the darkness of her bathroom, and when prayers did
not yield the results she hoped for, then time to get the aid of her husband,
time for both of them to confront what they already know.
“Your mother is modest,” her father says. He brings his cup to his lips. The steam rises and shades his eyes.
“Modest?” Anna’s tone is biting. She will not camouflage her anger. He cannot have forgotten that he told her how he met her mother. A modest woman does not sway her hips like a stripper.
Badoom, badoom, badoom
. “What do you mean, she’s modest?”
“Privacy is not the same as intimacy, Anna,” her father says quietly.
She does not understand.
“You make a mistake if you think I meant intimacy. Your mother and I are intimate.”
Unexpectedly, she is embarrassed. Even when children become adults they still prefer the story of the stork to the truth about how they were conceived. She turns away from him. “What do you want me to say to you?”
“Don’t oppose her. She has made up her mind. She will be treated here, in our country, in our homeland. She is proud of our doctors.”
“And you? What do you say?”
“I support your mother, Anna. That is what I’ve always tried to do.”
“You are giving her a death sentence,” Anna says.
“You live in America. We live here. We don’t think everything in America is good. She doesn’t think everything in America will necessarily be the best for her.”
T
here is, her father says, a difference between intimacy and privacy. Her mother is modest, he says.
Intimacy:
the condition of being intimate.
Intimate
: relating to one’s deepest, innermost nature.
Privacy
: the condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others.
Modest:
a disinclination to draw attention to oneself, retiring, diffident.
In the intimacy of her parents’ marriage, she was conceived. In the privacy of their bedroom, her mother and father protect each other’s secrets with such fervor that neither will acknowledge what the other knows. Her mother will not admit to her father that she knows he knows about the lump on her breast and the blood on his vest. He will not reveal that he knows she knows.
Anna does not doubt her parents are privy to each other’s deepest, innermost nature. But it strains credulity to think of her mother as modest. At breakfast, Anna was her father’s ally as he threw darts at her mother, accusing her of bossiness, arrogance, snobbery, suggesting a lack of modesty. Now he has turned the tables on her, his daughter, hinting that she is the one who is immodest, the one who is the snob, the one arrogantly listing their island’s inadequacies. But Anna is convinced her mother will die if she remains on the island, if she is treated by the doctors here, who are not as informed as the doctors in America. Her mother will not survive surgery in a hospital that does not have sufficient sheets for its insufficient beds, a hospital with equipment that is decades old, that is supported by a technology which has barely kept pace with the inventions of the previous century.
Why does her father give in to her mother? Why does he always submit to her will, to
her
plan, not his plan? For surely it was not his plan to wait, to simply stand by silently for a miracle, to find out if six rosaries said in the night would shrink the tumor on his wife’s breast, make it disappear.
The lump on her mother’s breast is as large as a lemon, the one under her arm not much smaller. Both of the tumors have festered for months. Years, perhaps. At what stage is the malignancy? Anna is certain it is close to the last stage, not far from terminal. Yet her mother refuses to have surgery in the States where she can be saved and her father says he supports her. It is all he has ever tried to do, he says.
How much penance is one required to do for one’s sins? She knows bad things have happened between her parents. Her father was to blame. But how long will it take for him to earn absolution?
“Miss Anna, you speak to madam?”
Singh has come so quietly upon her, she is startled. Her shoulders jerk upward, her back stiffens, and her eyes skate down to the machete at the side of his leg. He is holding the handle loosely in his palm. The blade glints in the sunlight.
“I frighten you, Miss Anna?”
A reflex response she has learned from America. She is embarrassed, flooded with shame.
“You thought I was somebody else, Miss Anna?” Singh’s eyes reflect puzzlement, but Anna detects a glimmer of amusement playing on his lips. “De bossman lock the gate. Anyhow, I have this.” He lifts the machete, and with his other hand draws his finger along the thin sharp edge of the blade.
She is not in America, but there is crime here. NAFTA has made fishing and growing bananas and sugarcane in the Caribbean almost futile. Islands cannot compete with continents. There is oil on her island, under the sea, under the earth, but for the displaced fishermen and for the ones who cultivated the land, there is no work. The drug trade brings income. The islands are a strainer. Drug lords bypass the sentries at America’s borders by shipping marijuana, heroin, and cocaine from South America here, packaging and smuggling them in domestic cargo bound for America. The most vicious of the drug wars get filtered out here. The crimes that happen in America are the remnants. Two weeks ago, a whole family—mother, father, and four young children all under the age of twelve—were beheaded, their heads cemented on pillars in their backyard, their bodies hacked to pieces. The Sinclairs protect themselves with electric gates, bolts on the exterior doors, and a wrought iron gate double-locked at night between their living and sleeping quarters. Anna fears these are not sufficient.
“People respect de bossman,” Singh says. “Dey safe. Nobody do dem nothing.”
“Singh.” Anna says his name with a gaiety that does not fool him.
“Don’t be frighten, miss.”
“I knew it was you, Singh.” Anna pulls down the edges of her shorts, which have bunched up on her thighs, and faces him.
Singh grins at her.
“You’re worried about Mummy, no?”
“You speak to she yet?” Singh asks.
“Oh, Singh.” This time she says his name with gravity. “We’re going to need your help. She’s sick, Singh.”