Not for Everyday Use Read online

  Valsayn is where my parents built their last house, larger than they needed; nine of their children had already left home and the other two adult children were at university. My father is a family man. He was as devoted to his parents as he is to us. I once asked him why he took total responsibility for the financial support of his parents when he had eight siblings who could help. He answered: “Whether they do or not, that is their business. I want to be sure my parents have enough to live on.” When he asked his friend, a famous architect in Trinidad, to design his house in Valsayn, he envisioned his children returning for holidays, his grandchildren spending long swaths of time with him. The house has four large bedrooms, and wide manicured lawns in the front and back, ample space where his grandchildren can play.

  “Do you think Daddy knows?” I ask my sister.

  “I’m not sure,” she says.

  We continue the drive to Valsayn in silence. Once or twice I look over at Judith. Her large eyes have widened to saucers. A deer in the headlights. I’ve seen that expression on her face before, too many times when her first marriage ended. I know my sister is terrified. I slide closer to her on the backseat. Our thighs touch.

  I remember when Judith was born. My mother was forty-five. She would have fourteen pregnancies and nine live births by the time she reached menopause. We are eleven, but my first two siblings, my sister Yolande and my brother Richard, are not my mother’s biological children. My father’s first wife, Denise, died in childbirth. Two years later, my father married my mother, and ten months later I was born, so that within one year of her marriage, my mother was parent to an infant, me; a three year old, my sister Yolande; and a two-year-old, my brother Richard. The closeness in our ages made it easy for Yolande and Richard, as it did for the rest of my siblings, to think we were all children of the same parents. And we looked uncannily alike, features from my father apparent in each of us. Some of us had his long nose, some his thin lips, some his piercing dark eyes, some his small bones, narrow hips, and flat backside. Only my mother’s children had dark circles under their eyes—raccoon eyes, my son calls them, as he too has inherited the genes passed on to my mother by her Carib forebears. My mother’s eyes, though, were large and expressive and some of my sisters are lucky to have her eyes, not my father’s, and her hourglass figure and not my father’s slim frame. But when we were young and our bodies had not yet developed, there were sufficient features common among us that we did not question our parentage.

  Indeed, we all had another mummy, Mummy Denise. Every night we prayed for her. On All Souls Day, we put candles on her grave. I had no idea who she was. I thought perhaps she was an older, special friend of my parents who had died, though it was strange that we would refer to her as Mummy since we called all my parents’ adult friends Auntie or Uncle. Yolande and Richard seemed uncertain of her identity too, or if they knew who she was they didn’t reveal the truth to me. I was eleven years old before I knew otherwise. Some resentful relative on my father’s side made the observation that I resembled my brown-skinned mother and Yolande resembled her “white” French Creole mother. I had certainly been aware that Yolande and Richard were light-skinned and I was butterscotch brown, but then I gave no special significance to that distinction, for my brother Wally, my mother’s child too, was also light-skinned. Later, my father sat me down and explained the difference.

  Though Judith is the last of my siblings, she was not the last of my mother’s pregnancies. A rigidly orthodox Catholic, my mother was in mortal fear of God’s punishment should she disrupt in His plan to populate the world. The rhythm method was the only means of birth control that the church approved, and, disastrously, still does, though only in the developing countries—in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean for example—does anyone pay much attention. The constitutional right to pursue their own happiness is far too ingrained in the psyche of most Catholic Americans. They reach for the loophole the church grudgingly admits: ultimately one should be guided by one’s conscience. In countries like mine, however, the church has leeway to be dictatorial. After all, slavery and colonialism thrived for hundreds of years by exercising a stranglehold on the people.

  I can still recall the chill that went through my body each time I saw my mother doubled over the sink and heard those retching sounds that continued morning after morning, year after year, as she vomited her insides. Another nine months of my mother irritable, frustrated, short-tempered with us, dark blue veins popping frighteningly along her legs. And after nine months, sleepless nights of a baby screaming in the room next to mine, diapers to wash, another child to babysit keeping me away from playing with my friends in the backyard.

  My father found it impossible to convince my mother to use another method. The possibility of damnation in hell for all eternity terrorized her. I used to be frightened too of committing the smallest infraction on the interminable list of offenses the church had defined as sin, which could cause me to spend hundreds of years in purgatory or an eternity in hell. I was not quite seven, preparing to make my First Communion, when I found myself envying the cockroach. At least when it died, it died; there was no life for it after death, no possibility of burning in the fires of hell. Even at that young age, my list of sins was mounting: I had told a lie; I had stolen my brother’s pencil; I had not done my chores. Already I was beginning to lose hope of heaven. I wonder now, as my sister Judith and I make our way to Valsayn, if in her last hours my mother found comfort in knowing she had faithfully obeyed God’s commands as the church had dictated to her; if she found joy in believing that soon she would have her reward in heaven.

  Three times my mother almost died. The first time she miscarried the doctor gave her a choice: the baby’s life or hers. If the baby, she would bleed to death. The priest said the baby. The church said the baby. My mother, good Catholic, said the baby. My father was in the forest hunting with his friends. By God’s grace, ironic as that sounds, he arrived back home in time. “My wife!” he yelled at the priest. “Have you all lost your minds?”

  The rhythm method was too complicated for my mother. She was too exhausted at the end of the day to calculate the number of days before and after her period, to check her temperature for the right and wrong times to have sex with her husband. At first she improvised, devising a birth control method of her own. After my brother Roger was born, the tenth in the line of eleven, my mother found multiple reasons to have him sleep in her bed wedged between her and her husband. There was colic, there was the fear that my brother could suffocate in his crib in the sheet she had wrapped around him; my brother’s constant crying only seemed to abate when he was snuggled against her warm skin. But this method could only be temporary. In a very short time my brother’s limbs grew long. (In fact, at over six feet, he is the tallest of my siblings.) Soon his elbows and knees were digging into my father’s side. My mother had to choose between a sleep-deprived, grumpy husband who was the only breadwinner of her family, or a spoiled child who could be easily subdued with another bottle of milk.

  She tried abstinence, paradoxically almost as damning as artificial birth control, for she had been taught by her church that to deliberately deny her husband his conjugal privileges was also a sin. But she calculated that abstinence would only be a venial sin, some years of punishment in purgatory and then reprieve. On the other hand, had she used a contraceptive, she would have been condemned to eternal fires. I am convinced this was my mother’s reasoning because one night I happened to overhear an argument between her and my father. My father had come home late, as he’d taken to doing for some months. He was drunk, or I think he was. I could hear my mother accusing him, shouting that she smelled perfume on him and it was not her own. “How could it be your own?” my father hissed. “You do not touch me.”

  My father never resented us though. He adored us. He celebrated each time one of us was born. He would brag to his friends, who wondered when the “string band of children” would end, that he had perfected birth control. The
pattern of daughter followed by son had never failed, right through the eleven of us, notwithstanding the two children my mother had not given birth to or her five miscarriages. First there was Yolande, a daughter, and then Richard, a son; then Elizabeth (me), David, Jacqueline, Wally, Mary, Gregory, Karen, Roger, and Judith. My father would take bets when my mother went into labor. Every time he won.

  Judith was named after St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. My mother had feared she would die giving birth to her. In the years between my birth and Judith’s, my mother had had four miscarriages; the last miscarriage, like a previous one, had almost killed her. Still, following Judith there was another pregnancy. My mother was only months away from fifty by then. She had not had her period for three months. She was elated. Finally, menopause! Or so her women friends had told her. My father had to attend a business meeting in Canada and she decided to go with him and make a holiday of the trip.

  My mother began bleeding the moment they got to the hotel. Within hours her condition was critical. The medics in the ambulance told my father that had he waited five more minutes to call them, they might not have been able to save her. It took liters of blood to get her pulse beating normally again.

  Much has changed in the world yet women still die, or, like my mother, barely escape bleeding to death, because churches continue to terrify them with the fires of hell if they use artificial birth control. In times when AIDS wipes out almost entire villages in Africa, the Catholic Church continues to prohibit the use of condoms. There are places in the world where marriages are arranged to secure the financial stability of families, and young women, faithful to the church, are sent like lambs to the slaughter at the sacrificial altar to wed rich men who have indiscriminately indulged their desires for sexual pleasure and are likely to be carrying the virus. Today the women’s movement has loosened much of the strangling control the church has had on women’s lives, and few on my island have as many children as my mother had. My mother observed this turn of events with amazement. How was it that, with the exception of Yolande, who had three girls and one boy, none of her daughters had more than three children?

  When I came to Trinidad, I always went to church with my parents on Sunday. We had just returned home from church one Sunday when my mother pulled me aside to ask me whether I had noticed that almost everyone at Mass had taken Communion. At first I thought her question was intended as a swipe at me. I had not taken Communion. I had remained sitting while the entire row in my pew stood up and walked to the altar. I was divorced and not celibate, sins according to the church for which, after years of agonizing, I now felt no guilt. Without repenting, I thought it would be both disrespectful and hypocritical to participate in a sacrament that requires repentance as well as belief in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

  “Oh, no,” my mother said. “I wasn’t talking about you. I meant them. Some of them have only one child.”

  How had they been so lucky? I could almost hear the question rumbling through my mother’s mind. She had had no such luck. Her sex life had been constantly constrained by the fear of pregnancy.

  In the 2012 US presidential elections, one of the candidates seeking the nomination of his party ran on a platform of social conservatism. Among his positions was his contention that birth control opened the door to promiscuous behavior. Without the controlling fear of pregnancy, women, he seemed to imply, would have a sexual field day whenever and with whomever they wanted. It seemed to me, though, that his argument had more application to the prohibition of premarital sex and adultery than to birth control. For if indeed artificial birth control opens the floodgates to wild unbridled sex, then for married couples I say: Let the games begin! But my parents had no such option, at least my mother did not, not with the full force of the Roman Catholic Church closing in on her.

  Of course, my mother reassured me that she would not have wanted her life to be any different. She was grateful for every single one of us. We were all precious to her. But still.

  “Could it be that there was something causing them to have miscarriages?” she asked.

  I laughed. “You know better than that, Mummy.”

  And of course she did. Yet as farfetched as it was for my mother to entertain the possibility that there was an epidemic of miscarriages on her island, it was far more difficult for her to accept that the women in her church had used artificial birth control and yet had no qualms about receiving Communion.

  * * *

  “Mummy is in a better place,” I say to Judith now, but I can think of no better place than the world we live in. I cannot imagine my mother ever consciously wanting to leave it.

  O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying.

  I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another

  man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on,

  than be a king over all the perished dead.

  So says Achilles, arguably the most ruthless of the great Greek warriors.

  Judith smiles when I talk to her of a better place. She knows I am simply trying to console her. Like me, Judith is divorced from her first husband. Like me, Judith did not remain celibate after her divorce. Like me, when she went to church with my parents, she did not receive Communion. She embarrassed our mother as I embarrassed our mother when I remained seated as it seemed the entire church walked up to the altar.

  According to our church, my sister is living in sin with her second husband. Thusly, too, her three beautiful daughters are bastards, a word I find difficult to roll off my tongue. Yet there it is, in the Oxford English Dictionary. Bastard: a person born to parents not married to each other.

  Judith is not the only one of my sisters who was divorced and has remarried. Karen and Jacqueline also divorced their husbands and remarried, though Karen, like Judith, wanted children and had a child with her second husband. Technically, however, in the eyes of the church, Jacqueline was married only once. While her first marriage lasted twenty years and produced two children, the church found sufficient reason to declare the marriage contractually flawed and granted her an annulment so she could marry again as if for the first time.

  I do not know if the decision of the church was influenced by the fact that Jacqueline had once joined a convent and was preparing to be a nun. She left the convent before she made her final vows and within months married her childhood sweetheart.

  Better to marry than to burn, said Paul. Perhaps this was reason enough for the church’s decision to annul Jacqueline’s marriage, which seemed based on fear rather than commitment. I cannot be certain, for my sister has never discussed her annulment with me.

  A better place. I return my sister’s smile, but soon we turn away from each other and I can feel tears stinging the backs of my eyes. How is it possible to believe that the God who required my mother to bear more children than her womb could tolerate, who would have asked for the life of her unborn child in exchange for hers, how could I believe that this Catholic God who condemned two sisters’ loving unions with their second husbands and bastardized their children while ironically bastardizing the children of another sister’s first marriage by declaring that marriage null and void is the same God who so loves my mother that He has come to take her to a better place?

  3

  My father comes to the gate to greet us. His step is firm, spritely even, though he seems agitated, but there is no sign of that old man’s shuffling he has adopted recently. Perhaps unfairly I say adopted, for he is ninety-three; he’ll be ninety-four in less than three months. At his age he cannot be expected to control his ever-weakening knees. Most men at ninety have trouble even lifting their feet off the ground, and yet I say this resentfully. For my father has become Coetzee’s slow man, one day pedaling his bicycle—I have a photograph of my father riding a bike at ninety-two—the next shuffling his feet through the corridors of his house. But my father has not suffered an accident. No one, nothing, has sent him flying up in t
he air to land stretched out on the ground. No one has carelessly lopped off a limb, a leg, because he is old and the old are practically useless. My father’s limbs are intact. He has full use of them. Indeed, for a man of his age, my father is quite strong. Only two years ago, he would walk briskly to meet me at the iron gate that opens up to the driveway. Before my fingers could curl around the handles of my two suitcases, he would grab hold of both of them and carry them into the house, one in each hand, the muscles straining against his wiry leathered brown skin. “Leave him,” my mother would say when I tried to help. “Your father is a strong man.”

  What made my father suddenly slow down? For many years there were signs that his mind was wandering, but still he remained a vigorous old man. Now he is a slow old man. What caused this change in him?

  My mother claimed he woke up one day and decided he would not be a pawn in life’s game. He would not give the Grim Reaper the upper hand. When the Grim Reaper came for him, he would be waiting. The Grim Reaper would not surprise him.

  Perhaps she was right. Ever since he was a boy, my father depended on reason to find his way out of the most difficult of situations, but ultimately reason failed him. Reason could not answer the question that perpetually hounded him: Why does human life have to end? His life have to end? No matter how hard he tried, he could find no reasonable explanation. It made no sense to him that after years of working hard, gathering the wisdom that comes with experience, that his life should be snuffed out, come to a screeching halt. “So he decided to give up,” my mother said, as if it were up to my father, to the power of his will, to determine how and when he would die.

  On my recent visits back home—home being the place where my parents live—my father did not come hurrying out of the house to greet me. He walked toward me slowly, though his eyes twinkled with his happiness to see me. He did not bend to pick up both my suitcases at once. He took them one at a time. “Leave it there,” he would say when I reached for the other one. “I’ll come back for it.” Old, tired, too often depressed, he was still a gentleman. “Humor him,” my mother would say, sighing. “He’s strong. He’s only pretending to be weak.”