Boundaries (3 page)
“The university of where-did-you-say?” The man who interviewed her was patient. He explained that except for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which they knew something about, the ministry had no way of evaluating whether degrees from American universities measure up to the quality of a British education. She asked him about Howard. The prime minister of the island had graduated from that university in Washington, D.C.
“Howard is an exception,” he said. He was aware of the history of segregation in America. “You can’t blame black students if they won’t let them into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Howard is the Harvard for black Americans.” He handed back her diploma.
For seven months, Anna searched in vain for a job. The response of the headmasters and headmistresses from the schools was the same. An American degree, if it was not from one of the universities that belonged to the Ivy League, was not acceptable to them. In despair, Anna turned to her father for help. In two days, he arranged an offer for her from the headmaster of a junior secondary school, the third tier of an educational system that determined the fate of children by age twelve. There would be those who would make their living with their brains and those with their brawn. The children in the school where Anna was assigned were the latter. They were to be prepared for occupations in trades. For the boys: construction, cabinetry, plumbing, electrical repair. For the girls: sewing, cooking, domestic affairs that would make them good housewives and mothers. For girls unlikely to marry: secretarial education, typing, and filing. But everyone had to learn to read and write English (England was the Mother Country, after all), and so there was a place in the school for Anna. Her salary could not be the same as that of someone with a degree from a British university. If Anna wanted the job, she had to accept less money.
When by chance Anna bumped into Alice, who was on holiday on the island, she was ready to leave. She had a vague plan of going to graduate school, nothing more than that, when she applied for a green card for permanent residence in the U.S. What she felt then was an emptiness, a sense of her life going nowhere, of being stuck in a rut, teaching children who had already accepted the fate decreed to them when they failed to make the passing grade on the eleven-plus exam. Already marked, they saw no purpose in reading books or learning to write beyond what was necessary to be a good cook, a good seamstress, a cabinetmaker, a construction worker. Anna wanted more for them and for herself, but there wasn’t more for any of them in a system that was confident it had found the answer to the problem of children who threw spitballs in class.
Finding it difficult, if not impossible, to feel at home in America, Anna tried one more time after graduate school, baffling her mother who could not understand why she would want to come back now that she had a green card, the passport to the country where the streets were paved with gold. So seductive was the myth that many middleclass women on the island willingly humbled themselves to work in the kitchens of rich white Americans in the hopes of being sponsored. It took Anna just weeks to realize there was no place for her on the island. Her father cringed when she quoted Frantz Fanon to him, when she said that colonialism worked because the British had succeeded in colonizing minds—but the truth was, there were teaching jobs for expatriates from England and Canada, very few for local black women, and none again for her.
The standard explanation was that the island was in a transitional phase and needed foreign professionals to replace the British officials who had left. But the University College of the West Indies, an arm of the University of London, had long been established in Jamaica. By the time it gained independent status in 1962 as the University of the West Indies, not the “College of,” there were many qualified locals able and ready to replace the British. But the British and Canadian expatriates had grown accustomed to spending lazy afternoons at the beach in the warmth of the tropical sun. They did not want to return to dark winter days and frigid nights.
On TV, Anna once caught a glimpse of a grim-faced brown-skinned woman in her late seventies standing quietly on the sidelines of an anti-immigration rally in England. She was holding a sign that read:
We are here because you were there
.
Anna chose America, land of immigrants, those willing and those ripped from their homeland in chains, a country where every living person, with few exceptions, can draw a straight line through ancestors not born here. Now, twenty years later, her mother will see where she lives in America.
How
she lives. And Anna panics.
D
r. Paul Bishop arrives on time to take Anna to dinner. At precisely six o’clock, he rings the bell on the stone wall that encloses the house where Anna’s parents live.
It is a beautiful wall made of large sand-colored stones streaked with slate and some kind of metallic material that glints even in the softening sunlight of the late afternoon. John Sinclair scoured the island for these stones. He left much of the interior design of the house to his wife, but he had insisted on this stone wall. He had said he wanted to bring the beauty of the natural world into their home. In front of the stone wall he has planted six elegant royal palm trees. Their long, slim trunks rise gracefully to the sky like the elegant ringed legs of the scarlet ibis. At the tops, fronds form an umbrella, sheltering tiny red berries clustered in the cups of spidery brown stems. Every evening when the sun is low on the horizon, John Sinclair inspects these trees for rotting berries and fronds dangling by wispy brown threads torn away from the stems. He keeps score on his long-running competition with the gardener Singh on exactly what day the berries and fronds will fall to the ground. He usually wins and collects the fallen loot in a bundle by the gate as proof of his victory, not at all reticent to gloat when Singh arrives on his bicycle early the next morning to begin working on the gardening chores Beatrice Sinclair has left for him. It is these palm trees and the stone wall that Paul Bishop admires now, marveling at how beautifully they frame the house, how the mountains that face them rise like a curtain, blue against the darkening sky.
Lydia, the Sinclairs’ helper, has pressed the button on the wall in the kitchen that releases the lock on the electric gate and it grinds open. It is an imposing gate. Thick white iron rods run vertically to the top, each one ending in a sharp spike. The Sinclairs have installed this gate to protect themselves from the rash of violent murders, kidnappings, and burglaries that have overtaken the island since South American drug lords turned the quiet fishing villages in the south into way stations where they can repackage their illicit cargo bound for the U.S. in the bellies of pirogues manned by simple fishermen. Rather, what were once simple fishermen before they began sampling the cargo. Now they crave more, more to be sniffed and injected in their veins, more to wipe clean the guilt for neighbors they beheaded without remorse.
The Sinclairs once had dogs to protect them. That was before the stench of raw unseasoned cow bones that Mr. Sinclair boiled to a froth on the stove for them made Mrs. Sinclair vomit on the kitchen floor. But the dogs refused to eat the dried dog food endorsed by veterinarians who claimed to know what dogs liked. The next time John Sinclair boiled cow bones for his dogs and Beatrice vomited, he knew he had to give the dogs away. So he had iron bars installed on their windows and made plans to wire the house soon with an electric alarm system.
Anna has been anxiously awaiting Paul Bishop’s arrival. Her head is swimming with scenarios that tumble one on top of the other: How will she manage? How will she explain herself to her mother when they all come together to stay in her small apartment? She tries reminding herself that she has made a good life, a decent life in America. She does not live in a sprawling house like the one her parents own; she does not have a helper or a cook, just a cleaning woman whose services she can barely afford twice a month. She does not have a garden or a gardener. She must water the house plants herself. In her neighborhood music blares from boom boxes held on the shoulders of hooded young men; sirens screech at unpredictable hours. But she has a good job, a well-paying job that has made it possible for her to purchase her apartment, small though it is. She has never had to borrow money from friends; she has never had to ask her parents for a loan. Still her fears remain. Will her mother be pleased? Will she disapprove of the way she lives her life?
She has shut herself in her room pretending she has work to do, a manuscript she has to finish editing for her boss before she leaves for New York. But she has already e-mailed the manuscript to her boss with her editorial notes; she has nothing more left to do. She picks up a magazine on the table near her bed. She cannot concentrate. She reads a page and has to reread it, forgetting in a second what she has just processed. She cannot still the throbbing behind her eyes. She tries lying down and placing a wet towel on her forehead; nothing helps. She had feigned sleep when her mother knocked on the door calling her for four o’clock tea.
When Dr. Bishop rings the bell she is already dressed, sitting on her bed, waiting for him.
“I hope I’m not too early.” Paul Bishop has brought her a box of chocolates and a bouquet of white daisies with bright yellow centers. She loves chocolates. When she was a child, there was little her mother could do or say to stop her from eating too many. It occurs to her that her mother might have told Paul about her love for chocolates, orchestrating her future behind her back. Irritated by her mother’s interference, she puts the chocolates on the coffee table and is about to call Lydia to take the flowers away when Paul Bishop says, “I bet you miss them. They don’t seem to grow daisies here. Most of the flowers on the island are big and tall. Anthuriums, ginger lilies, birds-of-paradise. I wanted to bring you something that grows in my garden in New Jersey. A little bit of America. Our home, you know …”
Instantly, she is ashamed of her petty thoughts. She has accused her mother when her mother had nothing to do with the chocolates Paul has brought her. It’s the daisies he wants her to notice. She takes them from him and brings them close to her nose to conceal her embarrassment. “They are beautiful,” she says.
“Sorry, they don’t have much of a perfume,” he says.
She is glad he has stayed an extra day on the island, even if he has stayed for his own parents. He misses them, he had told her. He misses the scents of the island. But she saw the way his eyes lit up when she walked toward him and knows he has stayed for her too. Minutes ago her spirits were so low, but now she feels refreshed, energized, ready to spend a pleasant evening with him and put her worries at the back of her mind. She leads him toward the sliding glass door and out of the living room. Her parents are in their room, their absence, she is certain, conveniently staged by her mother.
In the restaurant Paul Bishop tells her how much he admired the palm trees and the stone wall at her parents’ house, and how the mountains facing them seem to him like a curtain.
“I used to think if I could draw them open, I would glimpse eternity,” she says.
His smile sends tiny soft waves across his cheeks. “Just what I thought, standing there waiting for someone to answer the bell.” He tilts his head to one side and stares at her. “How on earth did someone let you slip out of their hands?”
Did her mother tell him that she is divorced? It does not matter; she
is glad he knows.
“My ex didn’t exactly let me slip out of his hands,” she replies. “He left me for a pretty woman.”
“He must have been blind. Any man can see how beautiful you are.”
She is wearing a dress. The day before, when he came to her parents’ home to persuade her mother to have surgery in the States, she was wearing slacks and a sleeveless shirt. Now she has on a white fitted cotton sheath that reveals her figure, her perky breasts, tiny waist, slim hips. She realizes now that she must have subconsciously chosen to wear this dress, with its thin spaghetti straps that expose her smooth shoulders and the rise of her firm breasts, but when she took it off the hanger she was aware only that it was a hot day and the evening could be expected to be not much cooler. But perhaps it was what Paul Bishop said to her on that first day that made her choose to wear this dress. He remembered how pretty she was when she was just four or five. Perhaps she wore this dress to recapture that moment. Paul Bishop compliments her again and a sensation of giddy happiness sweeps through her body.
“So what happened to
your
marriage?” she asks him. He is not a young man; his hair is sprinkled with gray, more so at his temples. His body is not as muscular as her exhusband’s. His stomach rises in a slight paunch and the flesh under his chin has already begun to balloon out, but he has an air about him of man secure in his skin.
“Work,” he says. “Work happened to my marriage.”
“Your work?”
“We married when I had just got out of medical school. The hours of a resident can be brutal. I got home late and when I did, I just wanted to curl up in bed.”
“And not with her?” Anna surprises herself with this question. But the confidence he exudes is infectious.
“Are you always this direct?” Paul Bishop seems delighted with her response.
“Not always.”
“I like that in a woman. I like when a woman doesn’t beat around the bush and asks what she wants to know.”
“So?”
“We drifted apart,” he says.
Anna peers across the water. They are sitting on the deck of a restaurant that faces the sea and they have a clear view of sailboats and yachts bobbing on the shallow waves. Only one of the yachts flies the island’s flag; the flags of the others are all from foreign countries. Anna has read the complaints about these foreign yachts in the letters of local boatmen published in the newspaper. Yachties, the owners of these foreign boats are called. They dump their waste in the waters around the offshore islands and then drift inland to dine at the coastal restaurants.