Boundaries (12 page)

“Was it something I said?”

She snuggles closer to him, boring her nose into the side of his chest.

Tenderly, he places his fingers on her chin and lifts her head. “You must tell me, Anna. You shouldn’t keep whatever it is bottled up. It isn’t healthy. I want to know. I want to help.” His fingers brush her cheek. “Are you worried about your mother? Is that it?”

She shakes her head.

“Because there’s no need to worry. The surgery was successful.”

A multitude of reasons get tangled in her head like strings wound around each other into a tight ball; she cannot distinguish one from the other. “No. That’s not it,” she murmurs.

“Then what?” He kisses the top of her head. She tries to move away and he tightens his arm around her shoulders. “Don’t be afraid,” he says.

But she is afraid. Of what, she does not know. It is a familiar fear that has taken refuge in the pit of her stomach for so many years, it refuses to be acknowledged.

“You began to cry when I said that what your mother needs now is your father’s love and your love. Why, Anna?”

“It’s all over now,” she says. “See. I’ve stopped crying.”

“Tell me.” His lips are on her forehead. “Tell me, Anna.”

One strand slips out from the mass of tangled strings. “I don’t know how to love her.” She says this quietly, so quietly he does not hear her.

“What?” He bends down, his ear close to her lips.

She repeats her words; they are more audible now.

“You don’t mean that, Anna.” He raises himself up against the headboard at the back of the couch and pulls her up with him.

She has told him what he wants to know. She does not want to say more, but he prods her. “Everyone knows how to love their mother, Anna. Babies know.”

“Babies begin with a blank slate,” she says.

“And what could have been written on your slate that time could have wiped away?”

“My mother was not very demonstrative.”

“Those were the times, Anna,” he says gently. “My mother was not demonstrative either.”

“She hugged and kissed you.”

“I was a boy. My father didn’t approve of all that kissing and hugging for his sons. He said my mother was going to make us into mamby-pamby boys if she kept on kissing us.” He pokes his finger in the fleshy spot below her waist. “And there it is; I am a mamby-pamby boy, mamby-pamby over you.” He nuzzles her neck.

She moves her head away from him. “I bet she hugged and kissed your sisters,” she says.

“Not as much as mothers do today.” His arm remains around her shoulders.

“My mother didn’t.”

“Not even when you were a baby?”

“I don’t remember her kissing me at all.”

“Not at all? You must be mistaken, Anna.”

“I would remember,” she says.

“All mothers kiss their young children.”

“Then she must have.” Anna says this in a voice thick with resignation.

Paul shakes his head slowly. “Well, you’re grown up now. You can kiss her, show her how much you love her.”

“You have to be taught,” she says.

He wriggles his nose and does not respond.

“You have to be taught to love your mother,” Anna says again.

“All children love their mothers, Anna,” he responds with strained patience. “I know you love yours.”

“I don’t know how to show it.”

“You show it just fine. Look what you’ve done. You stayed with her on the island and now you are here. You took a risk. You won’t lose your job, of course, but you were willing to take that chance. Come, don’t be so morose.” He tickles her under the arm. She squirms away from him, but he pulls her back down on the mattress. “Smile, Anna. Everything will be all right. Loving your mother is the most natural thing in the world.”

Loving. He is easy to like, easy to open herself to the possibility of loving. In five years of marriage to Tony, not once had she told him of this pain buried deep inside of her. She and Paul have come from the same place, they share the same culture. Their roots go far down in the ground on their island. He understands. His mother was not demonstrative. Those were the times, he says. You’re grown up now.

Is growing up all it takes? Should she be mature and teach herself to unlearn what she has never chosen to learn?

No one quarrels with the lyrics of
South Pacific
. No one disagrees that you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear; it’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. Why not to love?

Her mother was kind to her. She cared for her as any good mother would. She was well fed, well clothed. There were parties for her birthday. Presents. Presents again at Christmas. What more could a daughter want?

Paul does not spend the night. He has surgery the next morning. Before he goes, they make love once more. It is good again, comforting again, but when he leaves she is restless, the question their talk has raised still haunting her: what more could she have wanted?

She wanted to be touched, to be told she was loved. Only once did her mother try to explain. Her prayers had not stopped the relentless march of the malignant cells multiplying under her arm and in her breast. One tumor was the size of a plum, the other as large as a lemon. If there was ever a time to explain to her daughter, it was now, to tell her why that afternoon, when Anna was a mere child, she had turned away from her.

Anna wants to forget but that day returns to her in nightmares. She was seven years old. All her father wanted her mother to do was kiss her when she came home from school. Her mother had recoiled.
What’s this? What’s this, John?

It was only very recently that her mother confessed she had learned from her own mother not to show her feelings. Her own mother had not hugged and kissed her. She learned from her not to hug and kiss her daughter. Her mother adds more. She blames the colonial times. The Queen of England was not demonstrative. She did not hug and kiss Charles and Anne, not in public, and not in private either, it was commonly believed. Poor Lady Diana, Anna thought. How she must have disgusted her mother-in-law with all those gushy kisses she planted on the cheeks of William and Harry.

Anna wants to forgive. She fills her ears with the words of an old man’s prayer:
Change ah we heart, O Lord
.
Change ah
we heart
. Her mother tries, but the habit is ingrained. They continue the way they were before. They are kind to each other, but they do not touch, they do not say affectionate words to each other.

Paul Bishop says loving your mother is the most natural thing in the world. It is not to her. Yet this is what her mother needs now, what the doctor says will speed her recovery. So she will try. When she visits her mother in the hospital, she will kiss her.

NINE

S
he makes breakfast for her father, sardines she knows he likes. She has brought two tins of sardines with her but not lettuce, tomato, and avocado. Her father is finicky about the presentation of his meals. The eye increases the pleasure of the taste buds, he says. When Lydia serves her parents at home, their meals are works of art on a platter. Sardines covered with translucent rounds of raw onion are nestled on green lettuce leaves and surrounded by wedges of red tomatoes, the glistening yellow centers of hard-boiled eggs and slices of avocado, lemony yellow on top, green on the bottom. Anna does what she can and aligns the sardines carefully on a white plate, placing their silvery heads next to each other. She finds a basket in the cupboard and lines it with a napkin. When her father comes she will toast the bread and put the slices in the basket.

He is in the lobby when she arrives at the hospital to meet him, on his way to have breakfast in the cafeteria, he says. She tells him she has prepared sardines, his favorite breakfast, at the apartment. He doesn’t want to leave her mother alone too long, he says. She didn’t sleep well last night. “Of course she didn’t complain. But that was major surgery she had. Your mother is stoic, Anna. She suffers in silence.”

He means to praise his wife. There is no irony in his intent though he is a man fascinated with the ironic. The stories he tells of his life in the colonial days, when the Englishmen ruled the island, always begin the same way, with a low guttural guffaw gurgling up his throat. “Life! It’s so ironic,” he would say, recounting his rise from chemist assistant to personnel manager and, before he retired, to director of the island’s major oil company. In the old colonial days, skin color was a barrier to the climb up the ladder for local men. Then, when Independence loomed, his dark skin became a life raft for the Englishmen. “Better to have a local man at the helm of the company when they negotiated their exit from the island,” he used to say, his eyes dancing mischievously. But when he relates the details of his wife’s night in the hospital there is not a shred of irony in his voice. On the contrary, his voice is weighted with awe as if he has chosen to obliterate from his memory that it is her very silence that has brought them to this day. Now they must depend on the hope that aging cells are slow to multiply and that the estrogen that feeds the young breast dries up in the old.

“Stay with her until I return, Anna,” he says. “She’ll be happy to see you.”

Her mother is lying propped up on the bed, her eyes closed, when Anna enters the room. She is breathing evenly. Air moves slowly up her nose and is released quietly through her slightly parted lips. Her mother’s face, relaxed, is that of an innocent woman, a woman incapable of causing pain to anyone, especially to her daughter. Anna draws near and is immediately filled with remorse. She has behaved like a child. She has not lived her mother’s life; she does not know how much her mother has been scarred by the pain she suffered in her childhood. She needs to forget
What’s
this? What’s this, John?
How foolish she must have seemed to Paul. He is right. She needs to grow up. She needs to act as the grown-up adult she is.

Anna stands silently at the railing of her mother’s bed. She does not move, staying rigid as a statue. Only her eyes travel up and down the length of her mother’s body. Her mother is asleep; she cannot see her daughter. Then suddenly, without warning, Anna is overtaken by an impulse she is unable to control. Her head is thrust forward; her body, as if by a will of its own, bends itself at the waist, over the railing on her mother’s bed. Her mother’s breath rises and falls. Anna hovers over her, her breath upon her mother’s breath, her lips almost on her mother’s cheek.

“Anna!” Her mother’s eyes shoot open.

Anna flinches. Her spine, on automatic, is ramrod straight again. She takes a step backward, adjusts her face. There were tears that had begun to surface; she blinks them away.

“You’re here.” Her mother attempts to pull herself up on the bed and Anna places her hand on her shoulder and gently guides her back down. “Don’t, Mummy,” she says. “It’s too soon.”

Her mother settles back on her pillow. Her eyes rove seemingly aimlessly over Anna.

Anna grips the bed railing. “How are you, Mummy?” With effort, the words leave her tongue.

Her mother looks away and sweeps her left hand across her face. “I’m here,” she says. No sentiment is registered in her voice. “And the cancer is gone.”

Anna does not contradict her; she does not say that the tumors are gone, but time will tell if the cancer is gone. Her mother is a woman who looks forward; she does not look back.

“Your father?” her mother asks. “Have you seen him?”

“He’s having breakfast in the cafeteria. I made sardines, but …”

“He’s a stubborn man. I told him you’d want him to have breakfast with you in the apartment.”

“He didn’t want to leave you that long,” Anna says.

A wan smile creases her mother’s face. “He’s a good man, your father.”

Anna nods. “A good husband.”

“Eventually,” her mother adds.

Anna does not press her to explain.

“And what about you? Can you be away from work that long?” her mother asks.

Anna tells her that she can do all the work she needs to in the apartment. She has her laptop. She can e-mail, send faxes. She can call her boss on her cell phone if she has to.

Her mother fixes the sheet that has slipped below her collarbone. The bandages are visible, but there is no blood.

“Does it hurt?” Anna asks.

Her mother shrugs. “They have given me painkillers. It’s hard to know if it hurts.” She pats the sheet in place close to her neck and peers up again at Anna. “E-mails and faxes,” she says, and sighs. “What a world! When I was working we had none of those. We had to be there, in the office. We couldn’t work at home.”

Her mother was fired when her pregnancy began to show. She did not have the choice of working at home. Her boss had not wanted to let her go. She was an excellent executive assistant; she wrote his letters, edited his reports, but a rule was a rule under the colonial government. When her suits no longer fit, she would be questioned. In those days a woman was expected to submit her resignation when she got married. She had a spouse, a partner with a job. Hers could be assigned to a woman without a partner, a woman who did not have a job. But when a married woman got pregnant things were different: the expectation then became a requirement.

“It’s a different world now for women,” Beatrice says to her daughter. “A woman can be at the top of the ladder. Like you, Anna.”

“It’s only an imprint, Mummy,” Anna reminds her.

“The top of an imprint. That’s where you are.” Her eyes move past Anna to the back of the room.

Her husband has returned, his breakfast in a paper bag. His wife has just had surgery. Ten minutes away from her is an eternity for him.

The phone is ringing when Anna opens the door to the apartment the hospital has loaned her parents. It is Paula.

“How’s your mother?”

“Her usual self,” Anna says. “She was practically sitting up just hours after the surgery.”

“Your mother belongs to the old school. Women like her just suck it up. You can never tell how they are really feeling. Sucking it up is their badge of courage.”

Is that what she should have thought when her mother tried, when it took her years, her daughter already married and divorced, a year shy of forty, to explain
What’s this?
What’s this, John?
Then, for one brief moment, tears in her eyes as she remembered her own mother, remembered her own childhood, her longing for her mother’s touch, she had said:
You cannot imagine, Anna, how many times I have wanted
to tell you how much I love you.