by Shani Mootoo
Viveka knew better than to voice her thought that these days marriage wasn’t a guarantee, that modern women didn’t necessarily put up with all the things that women of her mother’s generation did. “What’s her name?” she said instead.
“It’s a different name. Anki, or something like that.”
“Are they coming to your party?”
“Yes, they’re on the list. Aunty Minty and Uncle Ram, and the two of them. I hope you will make an appearance and not hide yourself away as usual.”
“What are we having for lunch?” Viveka asked while contemplating an image of Nayan. Or, not an image of him so much as the feeling of his tongue in her mouth a few years ago. She must have been about fifteen and he nineteen. Several of the young people in the neighbourhood had gathered at a house to while away a long August day. They decided to play spin the bottle. On one of Nayan’s spins the bottle pointed to Viveka, and his task was to arm wrestle the person if that person were male, or to go behind the wall for one minute and kiss if the person were female. Viveka and Nayan had both rolled their eyes, and Viveka had never thought for a moment that this longtime friend, family friend, would execute the task. But he had, and she was shy to push him away, felt it would have been childish to have done so, and at the same time she was confused by his initiation. Afterwards, she learned that every girl in the neighbourhood had at one time or another been kissed by Nayan in that manner. She had never been able to look at him squarely after that. And now she had little interest in seeing him or his new wife. It was beginning to irk her, in fact, that this woman’s beauty seemed to be the only attribute people talked about.
Viveka told her mother about her stomach gripes.
“When did they start?” The question was like an accusation.
Viveka defensively answered, “Just minutes ago. I was fine when I woke up.”
“Do you realize, Viveka”— and there was that terseness again — “that every time we even suggest having a party here, you get sick? If it’s not one thing it’s another. Your head. Your eyes. Your stomach. Look, don’t start with this now. I am asking Helen’s parents. Why don’t you ask her? And I want to ask Anne and Pat Samlal to bring their son, the older one, Steve. He is such a nice young man. It is time for you to be meeting some nice men. Don’t roll your eyes like that. I am not asking him here for anything in particular. It is just time you learned to chat about things other than books and ideas. What do you think?”
“Helen is going away that weekend. She is going to Matura to see the leatherbacks. They’re laying their eggs now. She asked me to go with her.”
“Who is she going with?”
Viveka hesitated to say that Wayne was going, but the alertness in her mother’s tone, the question itself, suggested that Devika had guessed. Viveka’s response was to curl her lips while looking at her mother as if to say, You very well know, so why are you asking?
“Well, I can tell you right now. Don’t even bother to ask your father. I mean, you don’t really expect your father to let you go, do you?”
“Oh, Mom, why do you have to leap so far ahead? Did I even ask? I just told you that she invited me. I don’t want to go.”
Helen had asked Viveka to come and bring Elliot. Viveka had never seen the turtles coming ashore en masse to lay their eggs and would have liked to, but she didn’t want to — couldn’t — ask Elliot to go away with her for a weekend, and she had no desire to be a third wheel. Trudging through damp sand, buffeted on all sides by the east coast’s cold night breezes at two in the morning, or three, or however late it was that the turtles ambled out of the sea, did seem somewhat adventurous, but in effect she would be alone. No doubt Wayne and Helen would be locked together, fording the wind in unison while she trudged along hugging only herself, conversation futile because the wind would whip their voices in various directions. Never mind that she knew her parents wouldn’t consent to her going — she had no desire to be the one to make a crowd.
She picked up the thread of the original conversation. “I know Steve. He is nice enough. Sure, whatever. Go ahead, ask him if you want. It’s just that I don’t feel comfortable with so many people here, Mom.”
“When are you going to stop this? Listen, Viveka. I know you still carry in your head what happened so many years ago. None of us have ever forgotten. That entire year was a nightmare.”
Viveka could have imploded with shock at these words. Hardly a day went by without her wishing that someone in the family would bring up what had happened in the past and get it all out in the open, once and for all. And now, suddenly, she didn’t know how to react.
“But why is it that you have to act as if you are the only one who it affected?” continued Devika, oblivious. “We don’t talk about it, not because we don’t care but because we have to move on. I am going to try to explain some things to you. I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll start with your brother. Anand was sick from the time he was a baby.”
Viveka looked down into the cup of orange juice in front of her. Anand. Her mother had said his name aloud. In doing so she had pulled Anand from Viveka’s grip. To steady herself she concentrated on a partial ring of bright white light reflected on the surface of the juice. She was grateful, and yet she wanted to run away or to begin a fight with her mother again. That would be so much more comfortable for them both.
“Your father and I knew he wouldn’t survive. But you and Vashti, you were too small to understand that he was not going to make it.”
Viveka wanted to ask her mother when, exactly, the party had happened — the party she could never erase from her memory. It always seemed strange — no, not strange but horrible — that her parents had held a party in the same month as Anand’s death. Now, suddenly, it dawned on her that the party might have been held just before he died, or even long after. She was about to ask her mother but she hesitated, unsure of what it would mean to have everything on which she had based her understanding of her family turned inside out.
Her mother opened the oven and pulled out the covered dish. She set the dish on the table and peeled back the cloth. From a drawer she extracted the cloth placemat and spread it before Viveka. Viveka sat back and let her mother set before her a plate, a knife, and a fork taken from the draining board by the sink. As she reached in the fridge for butter and a slab of cheese, Devika said, “His death changed things between us all.”
Viveka wanted to shout out, No, it wasn’t Anand’s death, it was Dad’s involvement with the woman up the hill. But she had already learned her lesson regarding that one. So she gathered her courage and asked about the party, when it had been held.
“I was planning a party before Anand died,” Devika said. “Then, when that happened we, of course, shelved the idea. We didn’t entertain until a good year later.”
A year later. What had happened between her brother’s passing away and that party? Nothing came to Viveka’s mind. An entire year of her life, a blank of time.
“That is the party that caused us all so much trouble, and you,” continued Devika, “I think you saw too much for your age. I don’t know what got into your father at the party. But that was a long time ago, and he has changed. Besides, if I have forgiven him, why haven’t you?”
Viveka slit the bake and buttered both sides. How was she now to separate the image of her father lying on Pia Moretti, and of the memories that quickly followed: playing the game of fish in the car with Anand, and of Vashti slapping Anand’s hand during the game and then him crying, crying, crying, — the last memory she had of him — and of Mani Moretti in his painter overalls, and of the party? They had always collided in her memory, playing out as if they had all occurred on one long and jumbled day.
Viveka cut slices of cheese and packed them inside of the bake. She bit off the tip of her sandwich. At that her mother pursed her lips, pleased.
VIVEKA WAS GOOD AT DETAILS. HER MEMORIES WERE FULL OF THEM. But whether they were real details, or the results of an admittedly fertile im
agination coupled with the need for all the dots to line up sensibly, she no longer knew.
She sat playing with the bake and cheese sandwich, staring at it as if there was knowledge to be had from it. And she watched her mother, already busy again with her list of this and that regarding the party. In this rare moment of truth-telling, of openness, should she ask another question? Dare she? She would have to admit to prying:
She had been about twelve. It was a Saturday. Her father had gone to Maraval with his friend Saul and her mother was at the hairdresser’s. The house was quiet. Vashti was lying in bed reading a novel. The maid was in her room with the door closed. Viveka stole into her parents’ bedroom. She looked at their bed, made up with a bedspread that had peacocks embroidered in a hundred shades of iridescent turquoise on it. She had tried to imagine her father lying on top of her mother there. But she could not. Whenever she tried, she would see instead her father and the Moretti woman. He would be relaxed and easy, even as he worked himself into a sweat. She couldn’t imagine him like that with her mother. The ceiling of the house, lined in highly polished hardwood, squeaked and creaked as it expanded and contracted in the heat. Through the window of her parents’ bedroom came a strong ocean breeze, the melodious sounds of blue jay tanagers and semps in the coconut and Julie mango trees, and once in a while a car lumbering up the hill or descending carefully outside.
She stole in farther, into her parents’ bathroom. The doors of the cupboards were always locked when Valmiki and Devika weren’t at home — locked against the prying eyes and idle hands of their hired help. Viveka went to her mother’s dressing table and in a bone china dish found a hairpin. She straightened the pin and stuck it in the lock of her father’s cupboard door. She had done this many times before, to no avail, but this one time there was a surprising click and the door popped open. Her heart thumped. She hadn’t really meant for it to unlock. How would she lock it back, she wondered, trying to hold the door shut and manipulate the key in its lock again. When she couldn’t get it to relock she tiptoed hastily out of both rooms, taking the hairpin with her. Vashti had fallen asleep with her novel on her chest. The maid was now mopping the kitchen floor. Viveka slipped past her into the garden. She looked about to make sure no one saw what she was doing, and threw the pin over the fence at the back of their yard, into a section of the neighbour’s yard that was overgrown with philodendrons. Then she ran back into the house, all the while hoping, imagining, trying to transmit brainwashing messages to her mother, that her mother would simply assume she had in her haste left her father’s cupboard doors unlocked.
The phone was ringing as Viveka entered the house. The maid answered and Viveka heard her say, “I don’t know, Madam. They was in they room, reading. The house quiet-quiet. I mopping the floor. What time you coming back home, Madam? I have to call and tell my son when to come and meet me.” Viveka stayed still. “So, I could tell him come for me by three o’clock so?” Viveka could see a clock from where she crouched. It was 1:25. Her mother would obviously be away for some time yet. Even if she were to immediately leave the salon on the far side of downtown she would not make it back for at least half an hour. Viveka’s heart beat harder with a new idea. She had time, now that the cupboard was unlocked, and now that she had convinced herself that her mother would think she herself had left it unlocked, to have a look inside.
She listened for the mop’s handle hitting the metal of the pail, the swish of water in which it was washed. She eased open the top drawer in her father’s cupboard. It was full of white socks and underwear. She waited and listened again. The drag of the mop along the floor could be heard by one intent on hearing it. She was afraid to touch her father’s underpants but slipped her fingers under the socks. She felt the smooth cool bottom of the drawer. She shut that one and opened another: black and brown socks, and white vests. She reached into its back corners. In one corner there was an oily-feeling bottle and an almost empty tube of ointment. She tried to read the tube’s label, but it was too mangled from use. Under the clothing she found a folded-up piece of paper. She pried under the clothing to see exactly where and how that paper was angled and she removed it. She opened it carefully. It was lined, and torn on one of its sides. It held four numbers written in fading blue ink. They were underlined in a swift, off-hand manner, the line slightly arched. Nothing more. The writing was not her father’s. It could have been her mother’s, for the letters slanted in the way her mother’s writing did. But there was a boldness to them that made Viveka think otherwise. The numbers meant nothing to her. She smelled the paper. It smelled of the wood of the cupboard. She folded it back and placed it as she had found it. There was something remarkably empowering about knowing that in her father’s drawer was a piece of paper on which four underlined numbers were written, and that her father did not know that she knew of it.
She opened another drawer. Leaning against one wall of it, hemmed in by neatly folded pyjama tops and bottoms, was an envelope containing about a dozen black and white photographs, all so old that they were more in shades of yellows than blacks and whites. They were photos of her father’s family. Her mother had once shown them to her and Vashti. It didn’t matter to Viveka why they were now in his drawer. Next to that envelope was another with a receipt from a company called Rahamut’s Co. Ltd. What it was for had been filled in by an illegible hand. She could only make out the price of the item, $1,178.
Although she was looking for nothing in particular Viveka was disappointed. She closed that drawer and with some difficulty opened the last one. It was crammed tight with T-shirts, and underneath the piles were magazines. She withdrew one. It had colourful photos on the cover of women with their breasts bared. The breasts were strangely bulbous and the way the women sat made their chests protrude. They wore panties that looked like triangular patches on strings. She turned the pages carefully, her body perspiring, her heart racing. She felt odd sensations, like those one had swinging high up, or plunging fast down on a garden swing. There were men in the photos in what must have been a man’s version of a panty, skimpy and black. The bulges inside of the men’s underpants were large and there were little points in them. She opened the sock drawer and took out a sock. She rolled it tight and shoved it in her pants, then looked at the outcome in the mirror of the nearby dressing table. She compared it to one of the photos of the men, rearranged it a bit and compared again. She pulled out the sock, wiped it on her pant leg, and replaced it.
There was also in the final drawer a calendar, an old one, from about four years ago. It was of naked men. She looked at two of the pages, and although she did find the men’s private parts curious, in general she found the calendar of little interest. The magazine had been much more interesting, the one with the women, showing how the men held the women, where their hands rested on the women’s bodies and the women’s hands rested on theirs. It occurred to Viveka that she would have to pay another visit to this cupboard. She would not linger too much longer, only see what else was there for the future.
Under the magazines was a large manila envelope. Perhaps, she thought, full of boring bills or photos, or — and this thought made her ticklish again — perhaps another magazine of women with men. She pulled it out. But there were only documents in it: her parents’ passports, old passport photos, her and Vashti’s birth certificates. She had seen these before. But there was another paper she had not seen before. It was her parents’ marriage certificate. Her parents’ friends held wedding anniversary celebrations, but her parents never did. The children, peeved, wanting to celebrate their parents’ anniversary too, had asked more than once about the date. They were always given the same hesitant and faltering answers, each parent giving a different date, even. Now here was the certificate, with the date — the day, the month, and the year. Her heart pounded, for how would she be able to tell her parents that she knew the exact date, inform them of it, remind them of it, when this was how she had found out — by snooping? Then, suddenly, it was as if she had
been hit in her stomach. The year on the certificate was the same one in which she had been born. She tapped out months on her fingers, in almost the exact way her mother had whenever Viveka and Vashti had asked about the marriage date. She counted it out again, taking their marriage and her birth date into consideration. She did it a third time. And she concluded that her mother must have been pregnant for four months before the date on the certificate. No wonder.
Trembling, Viveka could barely hold the document in her hand to replace it. She had no recollection whatsoever of the order in which she had found it, nor could she remember how the envelope had lain on the drawer bottom. There was pounding in her ears, in her brain. Her eyes brimmed fast with tears. She fumbled the drawer shut and the cupboard closed, and ran to the washroom. She had instantly tried to think of herself as special, as the vital cause from which a family flowed, but she sensed the meaning of the forgotten and fumbled date. She shut herself in the bathroom for a good hour, her tears endless, and she pinched the soft flesh of her inner forearm until cherry-like spots blossomed there. After that she never brought up the question of her parents’ anniversary again.
Viveka glanced over at her mother. Devika was on the telephone to the caterer again, still making changes to the menu.
Although Viveka understood her own talent for filling in blanks in her memory, making sense of what didn’t easily add up in her mind, she was sure, too, that she had made up none of that memory. Every detail was real. It was the one memory she could recall in perfect sequence: the sound of the birds through the bathroom window, the ping of the mop against the pail, the water splashing on to the floor, the maid’s journey from the far part of the terrazzo floor to the part nearest the carpeted bedroom section. She remembered the moment of discovering the marriage certificate and then the moment of understanding, of wanting it to mean that she was special, and how her body had trembled after.
