“I did think so.”
“She may have to go to the hospital.”
“I did think so,” he says again.
“She’ll need you to keep up the garden.”
“Madam know she can count on me.”
“I’ll tell her you said so.”
“And de bossman?” Singh is looking straight at her. “How he taking it?”
“Daddy is okay,” she says.
“He funny, de bossman. But he does feel things.”
“I know, Singh.”
“He don’t talk, but he does see.”
Anna is moved by his concern for her father. “Daddy is with Mummy now,” she says.
“What she sick with?”
It is easy enough for her to answer,
Cancer
. The diagnosis has not been confirmed by a doctor, but the evidence is there. The lump on her mother’s breast will not be benign. One in five women will be diagnosed each year. For a woman whose mother had breast cancer, the odds increase. Is she next? The statistics are there for her to read. It is no secret: for a woman whose mother has breast cancer and whose mother’s mother died of breast cancer, the chances of her getting it as well are practically inevitable.
“You know what she sick with, Miss Anna?”
She is afraid and fear triggers the slight tremor that runs through her hands.
“Is something bad, Miss Anna?” Singh asks, his eyes on her hands.
It is something bad, but she will not say. She does not say for the very reasons her father has not said. He wanted to protect his wife’s privacy. Now Anna finds that she wants to protect her own privacy. She will not give Singh access to her fears. She will not let him know that she is afraid that not only has something bad happened to her mother, but something bad is waiting to happen to her.
“I don’t know,” she says to Singh. “We won’t know until we take her to the doctor.”
This obsession with privacy.
“Nobody likes you to bleed all over them,” her mother said. Anna had just turned eight. The doll she got for her birthday had slipped from her hands and fallen on the concrete walkway. Its brittle surface cracked and Anna screamed. She was inconsolable for days. “Crying excessively is a character flaw,” her mother said.
In her parents’ social circles, any weakness is a character flaw. Failure is a character flaw. Sickness is not to be discussed; death is not to be discussed. Sickness and death are the ultimate evidence of weakness and failure.
The problem with the lower classes, her parents’ friends say, is their lack of control over their emotions, over their bodies. When their bodies fail, they cry out in pain. When family and friends die, they wail, they scream. They bleed all over each other.
It was a source of pride for one of her mother’s friends that she did not shed a tear at her husband’s funeral. How they praised her courage! How they said
doctor
in that peculiar way that everyone understood did not mean doctor in the usual sense of the physician who takes care of the body. “She’s seeing a
doctor
,” they said, when months later no one could persuade the widow to go beyond the gates of her home.
Self-control is the holy grail of the upper middle class. To lose control over one’s self is to be humiliated.
Anna thinks it is the prospect of humiliation that makes her mother speak so harshly to Lydia. In the still darkness of her bathroom, the specter of a future when her limbs and muscles could fail her must shimmer brightly before her. Fear—and perhaps resentment too—makes her raise her voice, issue orders to Lydia. Boss her around, her father says. Always in the morning Lydia is bright-eyed. Always in the morning her mother finds blood on her vest. If the Virgin Mary does not answer her prayers, the time will come when she will need Lydia, when weakened by illness she will no longer have the strength to boss Lydia around.
Pride matters. Privacy matters. Her mother will not give Lydia the merest inkling of her fears. Her mother will make a silent pact with her husband: neither will speak of the tumor on her breast until she has given permission. Her husband will not expose her weakness, the failure of her body, even to his wife herself.
The discovery that she is not much different from her parents disturbs Anna. She has lied to Singh; she has once again dissembled. She will not admit to him that she suspects—no, she is convinced—a horrible disease is ravaging her mother’s body. She will not admit she fears that the seed for the same disease may be lying dormant in her breasts, biding its time.
In America she is freed from these strictures of her social class so rigidly enforced when she is home. In America, she can bleed all over someone, she can cry, she can scream, and no one will say to her, “Don’t. It’s a character flaw.”
But with this freedom comes another kind of confinement. For in America she is black, and in America the ways of black people have been defined, set in stone.
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the buttends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
“Anna’s not really a true West Indian,” her colleagues at work explain.
Is a true West Indian the kind of person one sees on sitcoms on television, a Bert Williams with a modern-day gloss? Is a true West Indian woman one who plasters her face with makeup, layering her cheeks with rouge, her lips with bright red lipstick? Does she wear bright colors and shiny gold jewelry? Is she a dancehall girl?
Is a true West Indian man one who dangles gold bracelets around his wrists and thick gold chains around his neck?
Is a true West Indian one who listens exclusively to reggae, calypso, and steel pan music, one who finds no enjoyment in European classical music, who, indeed, derides it?
Does a true West Indian speak in dialect? Does he lose his
th
’s when he speaks? Does he says
dis
and
dat,
not
this
and
that?
Does a true West Indian own his own home, but crowds six families into the rooms to pay the mortgage?
Does a true West Indian make education his religion but not for his self-enlightenment? Must he be a philistine, his goal monetary profit only?
“Anna does not speak like a true West Indian,” some of her white colleagues contend.
“Anna isn’t black,” some of her African American colleagues counter.
The radio in Anna’s car, the radio in her office, the radio in her apartment are tuned to QXR, the station for classical music in New York. She listens to Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Handel, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. Opera is her first love. She does not know Italian, but she can sing by heart all the words from Act 1 of Verdi’s
La Traviata
. She does not listen to reggae, she does not listen to calypso, but steel pan music fills her with nostalgia, brings her close to tears.
There are African Americans who accuse her of self-hatred, who say she is Eurocentric. Their only evidence is her manner of speaking, her taste in music and literature.
One and one make two. Two is not the same as one. She has ancestors from Africa, but from other places too.
… either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation
. So says Walcott, the Nobel laureate from the Caribbean.
Geography, Anna believes, is a big part of destiny. Even if her African ancestors had not mated with other bloodlines, surely the geography of the islands would have changed them. Surely the psyche is affected when one is constantly surrounded by water; surely one’s vision is projected outward. And if one interacts with the aboriginal Amerindians, and later with the Indians and Chinese who came as indentured laborers, one cannot be the same as one’s ancestors from Africa. The European influence cannot be discounted, either.
She is all of these: African, Amerindian, Asian, European. She is Caribbean and not Caribbean, for she has lived many years in America. She is American and not American, for she has lived many years on her island.
She is critical of her mother’s strictures, but her response to Singh troubles her. She worries that in spite of the years she has lived in New York, in spite of the years she has not lived on the island, she has not changed as much as she thinks.
H
er father is on the telephone when Anna sees him again. He is speaking to his friend, Dr. Neil Lee Pak, a specialist in internal medicine. Neil Lee Pak is Chinese, or sort of. He is part of the second generation of immigrants who came to the Caribbean fleeing tyranny and hunger in China and trusting in the promise of the British powers that life would be better in the colonies. The plan was that the Chinese would work in the cane fields that the Africans had abandoned after Emancipation, but the Caribbean sun proved an unbeatable foe for the Chinese. Under the broiling sun in the cane fields they died by the dozens. The survivors ran for shelter, built tin sheds, and made a living selling groceries. Most had arrived without female partners, so they took up with the black women. In two generations their children had gone from shopkeepers to professionals on the island: doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs.
Neil Lee Pak is one of these children. His father was Chinese; his mother was a dougla—that is, she was part African and part South Asian Indian. Neil Lee Pak’s cheekbones sit high on his face like those of his African ancestors. His eyes are attractively slanted like his Chinese forebears, his skin is a glistening brown with red undertones like his Indian grandmother. He is tall and slim, and his straight black hair is streaked with silver.
He never married, though he is close in age to Anna’s mother. Beatrice likes him. He flatters her, tells her that she is one of the most beautiful women he has ever seen. She giggles like a schoolgirl when he tells her that.
Dr. Lee Pak never flatters Anna. When she was in college, he would ask her about her studies. When she began to work in the publishing industry, he would ask her about the books she was editing. He never comments on her figure or her face, but he notices the clothes she wears and is fond of asking her about the latest styles in New York.
Anna is certain Neil Lee Pak is gay. He demurs when he is asked about marriage or when the subject of children comes up. He has never had a steady girlfriend, though he is often seen with beautiful women, rarely with any one of them twice. The island has little tolerance for homosexuality and Anna thinks this is the reason why Neil Lee Pak pretends to have romantic interests in women.
Now Anna strains to hear what her father is saying to him, but his utterances are brief, most of them not actual words. He says “Ah huh” at least five times, each time nodding his head, his voice growing sadder and softer. He says, “Okay.” He says, “Right.” At last he says a whole sentence: “We’ll be there first thing in the morning, Neil.”
Anna does not know what her father said before his utterances were reduced to grunts, groans, and single words. She does not know how he explained her mother’s condition to Neil, but her earlier anger flares up again. Neil is a friend; he is not the family doctor. In fact, her parents do not have a family doctor. They are never sick, and since they are never sick, they do not go to a doctor. Her mother has always laughed when Anna tells her that she has many doctors, that she goes to an internist once a year, that the internist refers her to an OB-GYN specialist once a year, that once a year she has a Pap smear, once a year she has a mammogram which her breast surgeon scrutinizes, and once every five years, a colonoscopy on the recommendation of her gastroenter-ologist.
“You’re courting illness,” her mother once said with a smirk, “going to so many doctors.”
And there were many occasions when Anna has indeed wondered if her mother was right. If she could have been spared the many hours of anxiety she experienced each time she waited for the results of a test to which she had voluntarily submitted herself. “Preventive medicine,” she explained to her mother.
“That’s why we have Neil,” her mother said.
Though her parents claim Neil Lee Pak is not their doctor, he is their medical consultant. Over chess games her father and Neil play religiously every Wednesday night, he is consulted about aches and pains. Without ever examining her mother or her father, he writes prescriptions. Sometimes her mother allows Dr. Lee Pak to press his thumb against the vein in her wrist or to check her pulse at her neck, but he is never allowed to examine her under her clothes, or, God forbid, without her clothes.
“Your mother is a modest woman,” John Sinclair says with pride.
This practice her parents have of limiting themselves to a superficial medical examination has worked for them so far. Until now, until the tumor on her mother’s breast ulcerated, broke through her skin, and bled on her husband’s vest, John and Beatrice have had no need of doctors.
“You’re not taking Mummy to see Neil?” Anna asks her father accusingly after he hangs up the phone. But when he turns to face her, she regrets she has spoken to him so harshly. His eyes are glazed, his shoulders are folded inward, his lips have virtually disappeared. Just a straight line appears where he has clamped his mouth shut.
“Neil recommends we see an oncologist,” he says.
No more pretense that all is well, that her mother is merely tired, that it is merely the strain put on aged bones and flesh that has worn her down. The time has come. Her mother has decreed it so. The time has come to face the truth about the uneven swelling on his wife’s left breast.
She wants to comfort him. “Neil is right,” she says. “It’s good that you called him. Did he give you the name of an oncologist?”
“He will make the appointment for us.”
“Neil is a good friend.” Anna squeezes her father’s shoulder.
“Yes.” He does not press her hand in return as he would have done at another time, under different circumstances. He does not smile.
“Medicine has advanced,” Anna says, still trying to raise his spirits. “People survive with breast cancer.” But her father has shrunk visibly before her eyes. His back is stooped; his head hangs low when he walks away.
At midday he comes out of the bedroom where he returned to be with her mother. For the second day, he instructs Lydia to serve them lunch in their room.