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  I return to my parents’ room with tea for my father. He is lying curled up, facing the side of the bed where my mother sleeps. One arm is under the pillow that is at the top of the line of pillows he has placed along the bed, the other arm over it. His legs are intertwined around the pillows at the bottom.

  The pillows are her, the body he has embraced for sixty-five years. How stupid I have been! How little I have understood him! How little I know of enduring love! He was not building a barrier against my mother. He wanted to get closer to her. He was hugging her.

  I put down the cup on his bedside table. My fingers are shaking when I touch his shoulder. “I brought you tea, Daddy.” He does not move. He does not utter a sound. For he does not want tea. What he wants is to hold his wife. I withdraw my hand. “I’ll stay here until you fall asleep,” I say. He tightens his arms and legs around the pillows and draws his body closer to my mother’s side of the bed.

  The owl returns. It hoots softly this time, a melody it seems to me that ripples through the room. My father opens his eyes and smiles. The owl hoots for a last time and flies away, its wings grazing the window. My father closes his eyes. In seconds he’s asleep.

  The night gets deeper. I sit down on the armchair next to my father’s side of the bed. Soon I am asleep too. When Jacqueline calls my name, I am startled.

  8

  Jacqueline used to be a bank manager. She had the reputation of running the most efficient of her bank’s branches. She has taken charge of the funeral arrangements with the same efficiency and urgency. Now she has come to order me into action. “Wake up, Elizabeth!” She tugs my arm.

  I put my finger to my lips and incline my head toward my father who is breathing evenly on the bed. “Shush,” I whisper. But my father has not stirred. His sleep is so deep he does not hear when Jacqueline calls me again.

  “Come, Elizabeth!” She raises her voice and beckons me out my parents’ room. “We have to select a dress for Mummy.”

  I get up from the armchair but I do not want to follow her. For years I have bought my mother’s clothes. Whatever dress we select for her will surely be one I had chosen for her from the racks of the department stores in Long Island where I usually bought her clothes.

  Jacqueline notices my hesitation. “You have to come now.” Her voice is stern. She will brook no objections from me. “The funeral parlor needs the dress tonight. Tonight, Elizabeth.”

  I think I bought my mother her first ready-made dress. I had asked her for her measurements, and with the help of a saleslady at Macy’s, I figured out she was size 14 and bought her a beautiful royal-blue linen Jones New York dress. It fit her perfectly. With her exquisite sense of fashion, she wore it with a string of white pearls over the thin gold chain with the gold crucifix pendant she never took off. The effect was an aristocratic elegance. But then my mother, even in the years when my father’s salary was barely enough to feed, clothe, and shelter us, always managed to look like an aristocrat.

  When Yolande, Jacqueline, Mary, and I were children, my mother used to sew our clothes on an old foot-pedal Singer sewing machine. The stores in Trinidad did not yet sell ready-made clothes—but even if they did, my parents could not afford to buy them, not with eight children at that time, four girls and four boys. We could always measure our mother’s anger by the furious drumbeat of the iron pedal on the sewing machine slamming back and forth against the wood floor, and the sounds of fabric ripping and tearing with the mistakes she often made. We knew to stay far away from her at those times. My brother Gregory was not easily intimidated, however. He was a mischievous boy and loved playing tricks on our mother. He once called her from a pay phone and, imitating a thick American accent, told her that she had been selected to win a new refrigerator. Before she could get her prize, however, she had to answer four questions. “Who discovered Trinidad?” That was his first question, and, of course, my mother knew the answer. “Christopher Columbus,” she said. This was in the days before people began voicing their indignation that an island already populated with people could be said to be “discovered.” My brother went on: “What is the capital of Trinidad?” “Port of Spain,” my mother answered excitedly. “Name the two bodies of water on the west and east coasts of Trinidad.” My mother was on a roll: “The Gulf of Paria on the west, and the Atlantic on the east.” “Now, madam,” my brother continued, measuring out his words in long syllables, perfectly imitating the guttural rolling sounds we heard from the Yankees who lived on the military base on our island, “here comes the last question. It’s a hard one, madam, but if you can answer it . . .” My mother began shooing the rest of us to be quiet. “Here is the question, madam. Why did Columbus give our island the name Trinidad?” At that point my mother was jumping for joy. She knew that answer too, as did every schoolchild in Trinidad. “He named it for the Holy Trinity when he saw the three mountain ranges in Trinidad—the northern range, the central range, and the southern range.” My brother let out a loud whoop. “Tonight, madam, you will get your prize. A shining new refrigerator will be delivered to your home. Look out for it!”

  Night fell and the skies darkened and yet the promised refrigerator did not arrive. My mother had told all her neighbors about the contest she had won; she had cleaned out a space in the kitchen for her grand prize. At last, taking pity on her, my brother confessed. My mother’s punishment for him, as for all the tricks he continued to play on her, was to have him kneel on the floor next to her while she was sewing. With each mistake she made, she would take out her frustration on poor Gregory. Whack! We would hear the sound of her hand on his bottom.

  My sister Karen does not like to revisit tales of the days when our mother could not afford to hire a seamstress to sew our clothes or the times when butter was a luxury for us, or when we had to cut a hole at the tip of our watchicongs, the canvas shoes we wore, to fit our growing feet, or when at Christmastime our mother finally threw out our pee-soaked mattresses and had the local tailor sew new ones for us out of canvas sheeting he filled with fibers from dried coconut husks, or when she raised chickens and turkeys to sell to our neighbors. Karen thinks somehow these tales are part of my imaginings, a fiction I tell to unsettle her romantic notions of our parents’ rise up the ladder of Trinidad’s high society.

  Of all my sisters, Karen was closest to my mother. She is as tall as my mother was and has her same broad, shapely hips and narrow waist, but she does not so much resemble my mother as she shares her sense of social decorum and her fierce vigilance of the closet where our family’s skeletons were firmly locked. But I remember those days well when money was scarce for our family. I remember the sickening smell of chicken excrement in the drawing room and the peck, pecking of the baby chicks, like the tapping of a Morse code, echoing throughout the house.

  Karen is not to be blamed, however. She can have no memory of those days. By the time she was four, the ninth of my parents’ eleven children, our fortunes had changed dramatically. My father had accepted a managerial position with the Shell Oil Company and money was no longer the constant problem it had been for us. But before then, before the days when having chicken for dinner was a luxury our parents could barely afford—and then, just once a week on Sundays—my mother turned our drawing room into a nursery for baby chicks and baby turkeys. The morris chairs were pushed to one side to make room for rows of wire cages on wood stilts, where my mother put the baby chicks and turkeys when they were hatched. She lined the cages with newspaper, and it was my job to remove the excrement-filled newspaper and replace it with clean sheets. I date my revulsion for callaloo from the day I was assigned that chore.

  Callaloo is Trinidad’s national dish. Every red-blooded Trinidadian loves callaloo—callaloo with crabs, callaloo with pig tails, callaloo with coconut milk. The main ingredients are the broad dark green leaves of the dasheen plant and okra, both boiled to a pulp. The effect is a dish that to me looks not unlike the droppings of chickens: green and slimy. Had I not already thought so, my brother Da
vid, fifteen months my junior and the bane of my existence when we were children, would have pointed out the similarity to me, as he did one day when we were having our big Sunday lunch where callaloo featured prominently. He turned to me with his spoon dripping with callaloo—slimy, green, dotted with okra seeds like the tiny pieces of grain the chickens had consumed—and smiling wickedly, he addressed me by my nickname, which to this day he still calls me: “Betty, look. Chicken crap.” He slurped the slime down his throat.

  My brothers were responsible for slaughtering the chickens and turkeys my mother sold. Slaughtering poultry then was not clean, sanitized work. My bothers would lay the poor things on a slab of wood or stone, pull them by their heads until their necks were stretched taut, and then slice the heads off with a machete. Blood would splatter everywhere. Sometimes the poor things would not realize their heads were cut off and would run in circles, each the proverbial chicken without a head.

  I would be revolted, but David seemed inured to all that blood. He would become a skilled surgeon years later. My older sister Yolande, who became a midwife and later often supervised nurses in the surgery unit, told me that residents flocked to the OR when my brother was operating on a patient. They said he was the best OB-GYN surgeon in all of New Jersey.

  My mother sold eggs as well as poultry. Still, the money she made to supplement my father’s salary was not enough to feed us. So my father’s hobby became a necessity for us. We depended on the game and fish he caught when he went hunting or fishing with his friends on the weekends. My mother was always generous. She would share my father’s catch with our neighbors who, like her, had many mouths to feed. In the weeks after my father returned from his fishing expeditions or from the hunt, we ate like royalty. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I discovered that the wild meat we had eaten could have killed us. At the World’s Fair in New York I was attracted to an exhibit that boasted the largest rat in the world. The largest rat in the world turned out to be an agouti. My father hunted agouti. I had eaten it stewed, I had eaten it curried, I think I had even eaten it barbecued.

  I don’t know if it was around the time of my father’s fishing and hunting days that my mother began wearing the gold chain with the gold cross pendant she never took off, whether she was in her day clothes at home or going to the fanciest party. Perhaps it was that time. I know she always lived in fear of something happening to my father, either in the rainforests in the interior of the island or on the rough seas. Both were dangerous. Our Amazonian forest, cut off from the South American continent in an ancient seismic shift, was darkened by thick looping vines that entwined themselves up tall trees and was crowded with all sorts of wild animals and long, undulating snakes. Our seas to the north and south of the west coast were cemeteries of pirates’ ships, no match for the roiling currents.

  Once, when he was hunting in the forest, my father stepped on a macajuel snake he thought was a thick log. “Was it huge like a boa constrictor?” I asked. I was ten years old and already a voracious reader. I knew about the boa constrictor in Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. It had eaten an elephant. “Could a macajuel snake eat an elephant?” My father humored me. “Yes, if it was hungry.” And in fact it could—a baby elephant—for macajuel was our name for the boa constrictor, many of them stranded on the part of the Amazon that formed our island.

  I had nightmares for weeks after my father had barely escaped being swallowed whole by a macajuel snake and never protested when my mother called us to pray for him, a rosary every night, five o’clock Mass on Saturdays, and nine o’clock Mass on Sundays. And when my father returned, more prayers to express our gratitude to God. Of course, little did I know that even after my father returned from hunting, he was still in danger, and all of us too, even more so. Bush meat is how the meat my father brought home is referred to today. It can be the source of all sorts of insidious viruses. We were lucky. None of us fell ill from touching or eating the flesh of the wild animals my father hunted.

  I loved that chain with the gold cross my mother began wearing around her neck when my father went hunting in the forest, and had visions of owning it one day. As I follow Jacqueline now to the room where my mother stored her better dresses, I wonder if my siblings will insist that we bury her with the gold chain. I want the gold chain, I feel I deserve it, but all these thoughts leave me when Jacqueline reaches into the closet and pulls out a rose-pink dress. I had bought that dress for my mother. The tags are still on it. I had given it to her two months ago. The fabric is soft, flirty. In spite of many pregnancies that had broadened her hips, my mother had a relatively small, well-defined waistline. I had imagined the top of the dress draping down to her belted waist. I had imagined the skirt falling smoothly from her hips and fluttering around her legs.

  “This will look good on Mummy,” Jacqueline announces.

  The dress is to become our mother’s shroud, and one of my sisters will claim the gold chain with the crucifix.

  9

  I wake up early the next morning to the sound of dishes crashing onto the hard surface of the terrazzo-tiled kitchen floor. My eyes skid to the clock on the bureau in the bedroom. Five ten. It was past eleven when Jacqueline left, taking the dress for our mother with her. When I checked on my father, he was still in a deep sleep, curled up on the bed, still hugging the pillows. I shut the door quietly behind me and went to the girls’ room.

  We call the bedroom where I slept the girls’ room though it has been years—eons, it seems—since either I or any of my five sisters have been girls. There is also a boys’ room where some of my brothers, two of them already grandfathers, stay when they visit our parents. I stumble out of bed, shaken roughly from my sleep by the clatter in the kitchen. The sun is beginning to rise, but there is not enough light outside my window to distinguish the colors of the fruit trees and flowers in the garden. All are dark silhouettes against the shimmering dark-blue sky. It is too early for Petra to have arrived, so the noise I heard in the kitchen can mean only one thing: my father is awake.

  He apologizes as soon as he sees me. “I dropped the cup,” he says. “I didn’t intend to wake you.” I help him pick up the shards scattered across the floor. His hands are shaking slightly. I avert my eyes. When we have swept up the fragments, he offers to make a cup of coffee for me. I tell him I only drink tea. He shakes his head. “Coffee keeps you alert,” he says.

  He wants to be alert. He wants to be in full control of his senses when he sees his wife.

  “It’s too early.” I do not have to say more. He knows what I mean.

  “Oh, we can go after breakfast,” he says. “I was just making coffee.”

  He makes coffee every morning for my mother and takes it to her in their bedroom. I notice he has removed only one cup and one saucer from the cupboard. I take this as another sign he has accepted that my mother will not be coming home, will never be coming home.

  “I’ll call again,” I say. “I’ll find out what time we can go.” To the funeral parlor, I could have added, but I do not. My father’s eyes warn me to say no more. He knows to the funeral parlor. His cup rattles against the saucer when he shuffles back to his room.

  * * *

  When did my father begin his gradual decline? He had retired early from the Shell Oil Company, when he was only fifty-seven. Our island had gained its independence from Britain, and the oilmen from England, Holland, and America who owned the company had begun divesting their holdings, aware that it would only be a matter of time before the island would take control of its natural resources. They gave my father a generous severance package, but he continued to work as a labor consultant for decades afterward, representing private and public interests in the Industrial Court in Trinidad and at the International Labour Organization in Geneva, where he was already well known during his years working for both the colonial government and Shell. Then one day he was putting butter in his tea. I was there to see him do it.

  We were having breakfast and I asked hi
m if he wanted more sugar. “I’ll get it,” he said, and stuck his spoon in the butter dish.

  I reached to help him but my mother stopped me. “He just wants your attention,” she said angrily. “He knows perfectly well what he is doing.”

  Did he?

  Ten years ago I made the trip to Columbus, Mississippi, to see my parents. They were visiting my brother Gregory and his wife Beverly. My mother had passed the five-year threshold for breast cancer survivors, and she wanted to travel again. She chose to visit Gregory, I think not only because he is a doctor, and she felt more comfortable being in his home in case her illness flared up again, but also because she had a soft spot for this son of hers who had endured the blows she had rained on his bottom and legs. No longer in constant fear that my father’s paltry salary from the colonial government, together with the little money she managed to eke out from her domestic poultry farm, would be enough to feed her ever-expanding brood, my mother became more relaxed as she grew older. At the same time, however, she was tortured by guilt that she had been too hard on us, especially on Gregory. I think especially Gregory because, unlike the rest of us, he never got angry with her, he never pouted; he never gave her the silent treatment for days, my specialty.

  Gregory took his blows without rancor but he continued to play tricks on my mother. After the ruse of the fake contest for a new refrigerator, there were others. My mother was always fooled. She never seemed able to detect Gregory’s voice under the foreign accents he used, but in her defense I would say that my brother was a master of vocal disguise. He also made her laugh, particularly when she got frustrated with the mistakes she constantly made trying to sew dresses for my sisters and me. Somehow she rarely seemed able to fit sleeves in the armholes she had cut out from the fabric; either she made them too big or too small. Gregory would help her out of her predicament. “Rip them out, Mum, rip them out,” he would say, joining forces with her. “Your machine telling you it too hot for sleeves.” My mother would burst out laughing and together they would start pulling seams apart. Pieces of cloth would go flying into the air.