Boundaries (16 page)

Anna knows it will not be easy to persuade her father to wear the clothes she has set aside for him. He will argue that what he is wearing is just fine for the trip to New York. She cannot disagree, but her mother will be annoyed if he is wearing yesterday’s clothes when they come to fetch her.

Paul Bishop calls later in the evening. It’s Beatrice’s last night in the hospital and he wants to take Anna out to dinner. He hesitates and then adds, “With your father, of course.” When Anna gives her father Paul’s invitation, he politely declines. He’s had a big lunch in the hospital cafeteria, he says. He doesn’t think he can fit much more in his stomach. He’ll have some Crix biscuits and tea for dinner and turn in early.

Anna is not convinced. She thinks he and her mother have talked about Paul. She thinks her mother is already planning her marriage. She is angry that her father has succumbed to this fantasy. “I like Paul,” she says, “and I think he likes me, but we are just friends.”

“Dinner together twice since we arrived?” Her father grins mischievously. “You must be more than friends.”

“Mummy has set you up to this.”

He denies her mother has anything to do with his decision not to have dinner with them. “You’re still young, Anna,” he says. “Seize your time. Carpe diem.”

Paul confesses he is not disappointed. He wants to spend the evening alone with her. He will order Chinese, he tells her, and they can have dinner in his apartment. That is, if she doesn’t mind. It is what she has secretly hoped for.

His apartment is sparsely furnished. A round table with two chairs and a leather couch are the only pieces of furniture in a fairly large space that serves as kitchen, dining room, and living room; the bedroom is in the back. He apologizes for not having a more attractive apartment. When he and his wife parted, he explains, he took only his clothes; he left everything else behind.

Anna does not think he is lying, but still she finds this difficult to believe. Tony had drawn up an extensive list before they separated. He seemed to know to the last penny what each of them had purchased in the five years of their marriage. She could have half the wedding gifts—half the china, half the silverware, half the stemware—but the furniture was all his, bought with his money when he supported her. It was futile to oppose him, to point out that though he made much more than she did when he worked at the brokerage house, he never did support her. She had a job at Windsor.

It was Tony’s idea that they keep separate bank accounts. She had no access to his and he never added anything to hers. She cannot disagree that he paid most of the bills for the mortgage, the furniture, the Benz, but when he lost his job he had to depend on her. She wanted him to give up the Benz. He could get a smaller car, something they could afford, but he refused. He said she was jealous; he had something she couldn’t use, which was true since she didn’t know how to drive. “Nonsense,” Paula had scoffed. “The Benz just made him feel like a big man.” Ultimately, it was for that reason Anna indulged him. His pride was hurt when he lost his job; she could not bear to see him suffer more. Then one day she found a phone number in his jacket pocket. She called and a woman answered. He said if she had paid more attention to him, if she had made love to him when he wanted, if she had been a better wife, if she had had a baby like he wanted, if she had … The list of ifs went on until for the sake of peace she conceded.

“My husband was more calculating,” Anna admits to Paul. “He said marriage is a business and we were business partners.”

“Marriage is not a business for me,” Paul says softly.

“That’s the way it seemed once the lawyers got involved. Tony handed my lawyer his list, but I had nothing to give to his lawyer. The whole process was humiliating.”

Paul has his arm around her waist. He removes it and walks away from her toward the kitchen. Anna remains where he left her, unable to shake the past out of her head.

“I found an apartment and moved in,” she says. “I left everything behind. I had to start all over. I remember I got a call from Fortunoff.” She chuckles, but the expression in her eyes remains grim. “They were wondering if someone had stolen my credit card. I had purchased so many things in one day: dishes, cutlery, glasses, sheets, towels. I hadn’t counted on how much I would need when all I took were my clothes.”

Paul picks up the take-out menu from the Chinese restaurant that is lying on the kitchen counter. “What would you like? This place is the best. Anything you order will be terrific.”

He does not manage to distract her. “I will say this much. It felt good to walk out and leave Tony with his petty little list.”

Paul puts down the menu. “Is that how your father sees marriage? Is it a business to him?”

“It’s different for my father,” Anna says.

“How?”

“He loves my mother.” Unexpectedly, her voice wavers and Paul reaches for her and folds her in his arms.

“That’s the way it should be, Anna.” His mouth is in the well of her neck. He draws her closer and she hears the thump, thump, thump of his heart. “Don’t you believe otherwise. We should marry for love.”

She feels, and knows she is not imagining, that an unmistakable change is occurring between them. He tightens his arms around her. Thump, thump, thump. Her heartbeat matches his.
For love, he said. We should marry for love.

He calls the Chinese restaurant and orders their food but they make love before it arrives. It is gentle love, sweet love, nurturing love. When it is over, she feels restored, the past retreating until all that remains is the present, she with her head on the shoulder of a man who makes her feel safe, whole.

They eat in bed. Paul brings the shopping bag with the food to the bedroom and they spread an old quilt on the bed and sit cross-legged facing each other. Except for two stemmed glasses Paul has filled with white wine and placed on the bedside table, everything they use is disposable. They eat directly out of the cardboard containers from the Chinese restaurant, plucking out the food with wood chopsticks. Paul has ordered chicken for himself and shrimp for her, but he insists that she taste the chicken. He clasps a piece between his chopsticks and brings it to her mouth, but when she parts her lips, he withdraws the chopsticks. She opens her mouth again and he withdraws the chopsticks again. Two more times he does this. Shivers of pleasure ripple down her back. She closes her eyes and throws back her head. He circles her lips with the chicken, the warm flesh titillating against her moist mouth. When the hard wood of the chopsticks touches her tongue, her body quivers. He pulls her to him and pushes aside the cardboard containers. They make love again.

Afterward, when she gets ready to leave, he reverts to being her mother’s surgeon. He has agreed to discharge her mother, but he tells her he will do so only on the condition that she is prepared to follow his instructions to the minutest detail. The dressing on her mother’s chest must be changed every morning and every evening. He explains that there is an intricate web of blood vessels lying beneath the breast. He has sutured them, but fluid and blood sometimes collect beneath the stitches. He has put a drain at the end of the incision. It looks like a straw for drinking soda, and it will drain the excess fluid and blood onto the dressing. So she must change the dressing to prevent infection, he says. Every morning, every evening, and whenever it is feels too wet. “Can you do this, Anna?”

She has lost her voice.

“Because we cannot take the chance of infection. Your mother is strong, but she’s not young.”

Sound rises up her throat, indistinct, neither affirming her willingness to do as he asks nor objecting.

He asks the question again. “Will you be able to do this, Anna?”

Her stomach is churning, but she forces herself to nod in agreement.

“If you can’t …”

But she must
. “Mummy wants to leave the hospital,” she says.

“I have to be sure.”

She composes herself; she masks her fears. “I’ll do it,” she says, erasing all traces of hesitation in her voice.

Her father is asleep when Paul brings her back to the apartment. She hears him snoring lightly in the bedroom. How well her mother knows him! In spite of his determination to spend the night with his wife in the hospital, insisting he would be as comfortable in the armchair as if he were in his own bed, the joints in his eighty-two-year-old body would have stiffened. In the morning they would have creaked and hurt when he tried to unlock them.
For love.
They married for love
.

It is divorce that is a business, Anna thinks. The first lawyer she hired was a woman well into her fifties. She wanted a retainer. “Just so we don’t have to talk about money until this is over.” Four thousand dollars. Anna dipped into her savings. Every time she called, the lawyer was ready with advice, none of it about the law or her rights, all of it intended to pacify her as if she were a prepubescent girl unable to control her emotions. “These things take time, Anna. Go out and enjoy yourself. Take a vacation. Leave the worrying to me.” Three months later, her lawyer was giving the same advice and by then Tony’s lawyer had added new demands. Anna was making more money now than Tony and it was only fair that she pay a small alimony until he could return to the lifestyle which he had so generously provided for her during their marriage. Her lawyer was incensed but all her vitriol was for Anna’s ears. She did nothing to counter Tony’s demands. So Anna engaged another lawyer. This one, a man, wanted a retainer of ten thousand dollars. Once he had it, he rarely answered her phone calls. Fortunately, an arbitrator eventually dismissed Tony’s claims.

She was grateful to Paula for holding her tongue, for not gloating, for not saying she was right: Anna should not have married out of her culture. “In America,” Paula had said, “skin color is identity. Skin color is all it takes to box you into a category. People here think that since Tony is black and you are black, you should understand each other, that you are a good fit. But it is culture, not color, that gives us our identity. Tony may be black but he is American, he does not share your culture. None of his forefathers were raised in the Caribbean. You are as different from him as if he were a white American.”

She is thinking of Paula now, thinking that it is only to her can she confess that while Paul Bishop was describing how she must take care of her mother at the apartment, her heart sank, her legs felt weak.

Paula says her mother is courageous. Paula says her mother belongs to an age when women rarely revealed their true feelings. It is this learned restraint that got them through the worst of times: through unfair treatment because of their gender; through the infidelity of husbands which had to be endured for the sake of the children. It is learned restraint that allowed her mother to endure in silence a tumor blooming in her breast.

Mothers, Paula says, are free to love their sons but they must raise their daughters. They must prepare their daughters for a world that may not be fair to them. They must toughen them. Too much coddling will give their daughters false expectations of opportunities that in reality will be available only to men. But Anna thinks the world her mother experienced was not unfair to her. Her husband provided for her every need; he denied her nothing. She was a full partner in their marriage, not an inferior.

“Women had to learn not to complain,” Paula said. “They had to learn to suck it up.”

But how to release inhibitions when one has been taught restraint by a mother who has learned to suck it up? How to look upon her mother’s breasts, to touch them, when her mother conceals her naked body from her daughter?

She sleeps fitfully and calls Paula first thing the next morning. “Paul says I must change her dressing. Every morning, every night. Sometimes more if it gets too wet. How can I do that, Paula?”

“You’re like your mother—squeamish,” Paula says.

Paula knows Beatrice’s history. She knows that Beatrice Sinclair could not bear to be in the same room with her mother when she was dying of breast cancer. The stench of rotting meat put on her mother’s leaking tumor revolted her. For it was the prevailing wisdom then among the women on the island that since cancer eats flesh, it will be satisfied by any flesh, even cow’s flesh.

But Anna does not share her mother’s squeamishness; she is not repelled by blood, or by a leaking wound. It is her mother she fears, though she cannot name precisely what about her: whether it is rejection, her mother turning away from her—
What’s this? What’s this, John?
—when her father insists that a daughter should kiss her mother, or whether it is habit calcified that will not loosen the muscles in her fingers when she reaches for the bandage on her mother’s breast. She does not know if longing penned up for so many years behind a façade of stoicism will explode, break loose from its dam, and leave her exposed, vulnerable, powerless.

Anna, the stoic. There: her father’s word said in praise of her mother! Is she, after all, her mother’s daughter? Has she learned the same restraint?

“I’m not like her,” Anna says defiantly. “I’m not afraid of blood.”

“Then what?”

“We haven’t been that close.”

“The heart does not recognize physical distance,” Paula says. She means the years she has not lived on the island; she means the years she has not lived in her parents’ home.

“That’s not it,” Anna says.

“So what is it?”

“We don’t hug and kiss like I suppose you do with your mother.”

Paula bursts out laughing. “You’re just afraid, Anna.

Get over it. Your mother won’t bite you.”

And her mother does not bite her. Beatrice’s compliments are excessive, over the top, when she walks into Anna’s apartment. She loves the brown leather couch and the two matching armchairs, the taupes, beiges, and offwhites everywhere; the way the colors contrast against the decorative Aztec-patterned pillows with their bright hues and geometric shapes. She loves the glass-topped coffee table. A bit modern for her, she concedes, but she belongs to another generation. Her gaze slides over her daughter. “You’re a young woman, Anna,” she says. Her gaze slides away. “Well, not young. But you are nowhere close to middle age. You have a bright future ahead of you.”