Her 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?”
“Your mother. Two years before you were born.”
“How many?”
“Four.”
The frost in her chest has turned to icicles. She empties her mind. She throws out everything—fear, hope—everything except what she is doing at that very moment. She concentrates on filling the kettle with water. She brings it to the stove, she lights the stove, she takes the two mugs to the coffee table.
“And then she had you.” Her father walks back with her to the living room.
They kept the secret of the tumor blooming in her mother’s breast hidden for years. Why shouldn’t they have kept this one? “Four before me?”
“Four in less than two years.”
“In less …” Anna trails off.
“That’s why she loved you so much. You survived. You made it. She says you are a fighter. You’re her fighter daughter.”
Air rushes through Anna’s nostrils. It fills her lungs until her chest hurts and she is forced to release it. Loved you so much?
“She almost died with the last one.” Her father is sitting on the armchair facing the couch.
“The last one?”
“Before you. She lost a lot of blood. I had to give her some of mine.” He chuckles, a grim sound that ends with a sigh. “I didn’t want her to try again.”
She is prepared for secrets but not this one. “You didn’t want me?” Her voice is strained.
He does not hear her. “She wanted to try again,” he says. “She wanted you. I couldn’t stop her.”
“But me?” It was he who saved her, giving her hugs and kisses when she was a child, telling her she was beautiful even when she was scrawny and unattractive, when her body refused to blossom with the curves that rounded the breasts and hips of her teenage schoolmates. “You didn’t want me?”
He hears her now. “Oh no,” he says. “I wanted you the minute you were born. You were a beautiful baby.”
“And before that?”
“I was afraid she would die.”
Anna has taken three tea bags from the canister, but she puts only one in each of the mugs. She lifts the kettle from the stove and fills the mugs with hot water. She hands one of them to her father. The water in it has turned light brown, not dark, the tea not as strong he would want it.
“How much sugar?” she asks. He wants two teaspoons. She puts one in his mug. “And milk?” He says he has opened a can of evaporated milk. It is in the refrigerator. She takes out the carton of milk she uses with her cereal and pours some into his mug.
Her father sips the tea she has given him. He does not say a word. She knows he has noticed the difference in the taste, but he continues to drink the tea as if it is to his liking. These are the courtesies she has been taught at home: You do not offend the host. The host has gone through a lot of trouble to please you. But she has not gone through a lot of trouble to please her father. She has been spiteful, petty, childish. He did not want her.
“Your mother is a good Catholic. She follows the rules.” Her father stirs his tea. He does not like it, but he does not complain. “To the letter,” he adds and looks up at her.
In the Catholic high school she attended on the island, abandoned to the convent by parents who could not feed them, Irish nuns had taught her mother that the doctor must save the unborn child. The mother is God’s instrument, His way of giving human life to the soul. The mother’s life does not count when she is giving birth to the soul. She is merely the vehicle.
“I am a convert.” He has stopped stirring his tea. “I did not grow up in the religion the way your mother did.
I don’t agree with all the rules. Your mother said the pope was infallible. On matters like this, he knew best, she said. But I wanted my wife. I didn’t want her to die.”
“So you didn’t want her to try again?”
“She lived. You lived. That’s all that mattered.” He sips the tea, grimaces, and puts the mug down. “After that, she was careful with you. She wanted you to be strong. Like her.” His eyes soften and he smiles at her. “A mother bird knows she has done her job well when her babies fly out of the nest on their own. We are proud of you, Anna. You have made a life for yourself. You are a fighter.”