Boundaries (22 page)

When Anna demurred, Alice became more insistent. Life would have been hell for her if Anna had not come to her rescue, she said. “You’ll be doing me a favor, giving me a chance to repay a debt.” Anna reminded her that she too had few friends in school, and was indebted to Alice for her friendship. They went back and forth, each one insisting that the other had done more for her, until Alice was practically begging Anna to move in with her whenever she decided to come to New York. “I get lonely sometimes for a friendly face,” she confessed, “someone from back home who understands our culture. It would be a privilege and a joy to have you stay with me.”

Anna was reassured. Yet if she were not so desperate, so anxious to escape the claustrophobia of the island, she would have recognized the clues Alice left for her and would have known that the invitation rested on the assumption that it would take years for her to be granted a green card. Quotas for their part of the world, developing countries dismissed as the third world, were small, the backlog of hopefuls waiting to immigrate to the U.S. in the thousands. Alice could risk making extravagant promises, impressing Anna with her generosity, because it was safe for her to do so. The chances that she would have to make good on her offer were slim to none.

First, there were the unanswered letters Anna sent to Alice, three of them. In the first one Anna wrote excitedly about the miracle that had happened to her. She had been scheduled for an appointment at the U.S. embassy with an immigration officer. It was too soon to hope she would get a green card, but at least the process had begun. In her next letter, Anna gave Alice the news of the second miracle: she had indeed been approved for a green card. She had fifty days to leave the island and come to New York. Fifty days to pack her things. What should she bring? Would she need warm clothes? It was June, but she knew spring could still be chilly. Would she need a coat, sweaters? Would Alice want her to bring anything for her? Tamarind balls, mango chutney, roti skins? Alice did not respond. Anna sent a third letter, this time making excuses for Alice. Was Alice away? Had she not received her letters? The postal system on the island was not reliable. Sometimes letters get lost. She recalled all she had written in her first two letters, adding that she had booked her flight to New York. She would there by the end of the month. She would call but she did not have Alice’s phone number. She asked Alice to call her collect. Two weeks later Alice did so. Her apology was hollow. She meant to write, but things got busy at work. She repeated what she had said to Anna when they met on the island. The invitation stood. She was looking forward to seeing Anna. But there was little enthusiasm in her voice. The words were spoken as if rehearsed. They came out detached, without emotion, as if she were closing on a contract that had already been negotiated. Anna had no choice but to be optimistic. There was no turning back. She had to stifle her doubts.

The day before Anna left for New York, Alice collect called again. She said something had come up and she couldn’t greet Anna at the airport.
Something
. She seemed to think that was sufficient explanation. Anna must take a cab to the apartment. Alice gave her the address. Another clue, if Anna had had the courage to face such clues.

On the first night, Alice set down the rules. There was one bedroom in the apartment and it would be off-limits to Anna. She could sleep on the couch in the living room and use the bathroom early in the morning before Alice woke up. There was no space in the closet so Anna would have to store her clothes in her suitcase. She was welcome to use the iron and the ironing board if she needed to. Then there was the question of bills. Anna would have to pay half the rent and half the utility bills. It would be better if she paid weekly, the first payment due in advance. She knew of an employment agency where Anna could get a temporary job immediately. She would introduce Anna to the manager. She was doing all this for Anna’s own good, so that Anna would be prepared to cope with life here. “It’s pay as you go in New York,” Alice said.

But it was a New Yorker who saved Anna, a young woman in the secretarial pool at the temp agency who caught her wiping away tears and took pity on her.

For days Anna had forbidden herself to feel the slightest glimmer of self-pity. Immigrating to America was a choice she had made. No one had held a gun to her head. It was she alone, without prompting from anyone, who had decided to leave her homeland. Alice was trying to help. If not for Alice she would have nowhere to stay. She should be grateful. Yet each day became harder and harder for her to endure. Alice rarely spoke to her beyond the formalities of
Good morning
and
Good evening
. When Alice came home from work at night, she would complain about the heat, about the dust, about the grime of the city. About the hundreds of sweaty bodies pressed together in the subway. About the noise. She wanted to be alone, in the peace and quiet of her bedroom. She shut the door and ate her dinner propped up in her bed in front of the TV. Any attempt Anna made to start a conversation with her was met with a sigh and a wave of dismissal. “Not now, Anna. I’m tired.”

Anna grew more and more depressed. She felt imprisoned in the tiny apartment but she was afraid to go outside. She did not know the city and Alice had filled her head with stories of the terrible things that happened to strangers, especially to young women. “New York City is not like your small island town where everybody knows everybody,” Alice said. “There’s nobody to help you if some man pulls you in his car or behind a building and rapes you.” Anna had nightmares that such a thing could happen to her.

She had not realized that tears were streaming down her cheeks until she tasted salt at the corners of her mouth. The pretty young blond girl who sat at the computer terminal next to her reached over and touched her arm. “It’ll get better, you’ll see.” Her name was Lisa. Once Anna told her she was from the Caribbean, she wanted to know more about her island. “If I were you, I would never have left,” Lisa said. “I’d be on the beach right now, soaking up the sun.”

Lisa was in her last year of college. She was working at the temp agency to save for a trip to Grenada. Her mother was going to teach at the university there in the fall and she planned to go with her. She said she wanted to see what Reagan had done when he sent the troops to wage war on the island. She was expecting to find a wasteland. Anna did not have the heart to disappoint her, to tell her Grenada was anything but a wasteland. Hotels had sprouted up overnight and even in the countryside graffiti scrawled across concrete walls welcomed Americans.
God Bless the
Yankees
, the signs said. The gratitude was everywhere, on the sides of old wood shacks, in front of rum shops, all along the roadside.
We glad you come
. Tourists sunbathed without the least apprehension on the brown-speckled sand at Grand Anse Beach that skirted the shimmering, impossibly blue water. Americans had saved the island for them!

Lisa was a political science major; her mother was an active feminist. Her grandfather marched with Martin Luther King Jr. “Not all the people who fought for civil rights were black,” Lisa said to Anna. She was white, blond haired, blue eyed, so was her mother and her grandparents. They were ashamed of their country’s history of slavery. They wanted to do their part to make amends.

“Come stay with my mother and me,” Lisa said. “We have a house in Brooklyn.”

So Paula was wrong. She had stuck with her own kind and her own kind was not good to her. Lisa, far removed from her own kind, had been good to her. Lisa’s mother made her feel at home. She refused Anna’s offer to pay for her room; neither would she take money for the meals she provided for her. Anna stayed with them for two months until they both left for Grenada, Lisa pursuing her dream to spend her days on the beach soaking up the sun, though filled with righteous indignation for what Reagan had done.

The following week, Anna landed a job in the slush pile at Windsor.

SIXTEEN

H
er mother is serving pelau for dinner. She did not make it herself; it is her husband who has done the cooking under her direction, but when Anna comes home, her father declares proudly, “Your mother made pelau. Isn’t that great?”

Anna would not have believed her father had cooked if it were not obvious that with her left arm in a sling and the muscles in her chest weakened and more than likely causing her pain, her mother would not have been able to slice the onions and garlic, season the chicken with thyme, salt, and pepper, and caramelize it with brown sugar sizzling in hot oil. Her father brews tea for her mother, but he does nothing more in the kitchen. It is a standing joke that if his wife were not at home on Lydia’s day off, her father would starve. Her mother claims he does not know where the pots are and could not even boil rice if he found one. But he has cooked dinner, adding pigeon peas and rice to the chicken and just enough water that when Anna opens the pot she sees that the pelau is not sticky but grainy the way she likes it.

“Your father is quick learner,” her mother says. “Of course, he had to brown the chicken twice. The first time he let the sugar stay too long in the oil and it beaded up like hard little globs of tar.”

“The second time wasn’t much better,” her father says, ready to accept blame, though Anna can tell he is pretending by the glitter in his eyes. “I thought the fire alarm in the kitchen would go off. There was so much smoke when I dumped the cold chicken in the hot oil.”

Her mother shakes her head. “He wanted to call the fire brigade! I had to calm him down and reassure him that this happens all the time. But what does he know about the kitchen? All you had to do was to stir it, John,” she berates him playfully. “Then it gets nice and brown.”

They are in a good mood. Anna wants them to stay that way. Her mother does not like bad news. Anna will not spoil her day with the bad news from her office. It had only taken her first failed book for Anna to realize that the reading public is no different from her mother. Readers too, at least most readers of fiction, do not like bad news. They will reject a novel that is too grim. They want a happy ending, redemption for the sinner, and if not redemption, punishment. The good guys must be rewarded; the future must promise them a life of bliss and contentment.

Anna thinks these readers would rather live in a fantasy world, with their illusions, than face the social ills that make life difficult for so many. But how to correct these social ills, which Anna believes are correctable, without admitting them, confronting them? An impossible feat, Anna thinks.

Her father spent years in the outside world. He knows of the petty quarrels, the jealousies, the back-biting, the resentments, the power struggles. A day at work is not always a good-news day. He would listen, he would empathize, if she told him what has happened to her at work. But he is happy now, laughing with her mother. He does not need to hear her bad news.

At dinner her parents tease each other, her father still pretending to be chastised as her mother regales him with the mistakes he made cutting and chopping the seasonings, browning the chicken, measuring the rice, the water, the pigeon peas. Color rises to her mother’s face, her cheeks glow, laughter rumbles up her throat at her husband’s silly jokes.

She would not be able to recover so quickly if it happened to her, Anna is certain. If she were the one who had breast cancer, she would not be able to laugh, to chat gaily at dinner as her mother is doing now. She would wallow in self-pity; she would want someone to hold her hand, to comfort her, to reassure her. She would be stretched out on her bed, expecting to be served, pampered. She would not be sitting at the table having dinner as if her life had not been seriously threatened. Could still be threatened.

Perhaps it is her mother’s philosophy that saves her now. Her mother believes in the palliative power of forgetting.
Black Orpheus
is her favorite movie, and not because the characters are black or because they are not bug-eyed buffoons or servile maids in a white woman’s kitchen, or because she loves the Brazilian samba, but because the movie reaffirms her conviction that the past cannot be recaptured, that our survival depends on forgetting the things we cannot have again, the things that are too painful to remember. If Orpheus had not looked back, she has often said to Anna, he would have had his Eurydice.

Only once had her mother unlocked the vault where she sealed her painful past: a mother who was restrained, who did not hug and kiss her. By midafternoon she was closed-lipped again. It is the present that counts for her, the present she chooses now. She has had her miracle. The tumors are gone. She does not think of a future beyond this.

Later at night Anna settles down on the couch with one of the manuscripts that have piled up on her desk. It is almost eleven when she finally puts down her blue pencil. She is about to get up when she hears the bedroom door creak open. It is her father. He is in his robe; the belt, untied, hangs loosely at the sides and his pajamas flap through the opening. He reaches for the belt as he approaches her, but it slips from his fingers. “Your mother is fast asleep,” he says.

“You couldn’t sleep?” Anna pats the cushion next to her on the couch. “Come, sit with me.”

“The minute your mother put her head on the pillow, she was out.”

“I don’t know how she does it,” Anna says.

“Your mother is resilient.” He’s still standing. His arms are wrapped across his robe, hugging it to his body.

Anna gets up. “Can I make you tea?”

“I’d like that,” he says and follows her to the kitchen.

“I’ll have tea too.” She reaches for the canister with the tea bags and takes out three, two for him, one for her.

He is standing behind her. He coughs, swallows, coughs again.

“Can I get you some water?” Anna turns around.

He shakes his head. “She’s had miscarriages, you know.”

Frost encircles Anna’s heart. She screws the cover on the canister so tightly the tips of her fingers turn white when she presses them against the metal. “She?”