Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

by Shani Mootoo

  I could sense then that you had seen something new in him. He had embarrassed himself, yes; but worse, his ignorance meant that I had felt shamed by him in front of you. You told me later that he called you up and pleaded that he had meant no harm by his questions. He was just playing, teasing. That is what real men do, he told you—they tease and heckle each other. I should have been able to take it. He said that he couldn’t understand how a woman who was a lesbian could be “just friends” with another who was not; it was nearly impossible, he said, for a straight man and a straight woman to be nothing more than good friends.

  I looked up from the notebook at this, thinking of my own struggle to understand who Sydney had once been, and who he had become.

  When had I first become aware of the variety of identities Sydney had embraced during his existence? It might well have been during those evenings when he and I had sat out on the veranda, or during those afternoons in the garden by the wall. Perhaps I had begun to expect, and even look forward to, hearing about these variances when I sat beside him on his bed in his room, as a son might well have done, and listened while, propped against pillows, he regaled me. Was it in the dining room, eating Rosita’s dinner: curried duck, channa, and dhalpuri roti—the heat of the slight pepper in the curry causing me, to Rosita’s and Sydney’s amusement, to sweat profusely and drink copious amounts of soothing coconut water? Was it when Sydney remarked how unusually hot it was that day and Rosita muttered from the kitchen—reminding me for the umpteenth time that she listened to everything and missed nothing—that this was earthquake weather? Sydney lowered his voice and confided to me that people here always said that, but of course, there was no such thing as earthquake weather; earthquakes occurred miles beneath the surface of the earth and had no regard for what was happening—heat spells, extreme cold, endless rain, or dry weather—on the surface of the earth. What interested him, he piped up opportunistically, were changes of seismic proportions that took place—or, despite conditions being ripe for such changes, that did not take place—in the minds, hearts and bodies of people, not beneath the surface of the earth. And this was enough of a preamble for Sydney to launch for the next hour or so into the story of his walk to the Irene Samuel centre.

  Or was it a different occasion—during my third visit when I took him for a drive to the Queen’s Park Savannah? I had not yet received any hint from him that he understood the hurt he had caused me. We sat on one of the park benches drinking coconut water we’d bought from one of the nearby vendors, and Sydney said, out of the blue, “There used to be, Jonathan, two or three snowfalls every year that brought the city of Toronto to a standstill—hardly ever for more than a few days, but the city was always ill-prepared. Is it still like this, Jonathan?” he asked. He remarked that side streets had always been low on the priority list of those to be ploughed. I wouldn’t be surprised, he said, if it is still like that. You know, I have been noticing how the sea—and he pointed across the city, in the direction of the Gulf—seems to have risen more each year even as it has become hotter and drier in the dry season. Yet there is much more rain nowadays in the wet season. This may well be the beginning of another ice age, you know, Jonathan, he said, for it has been scientifically noted that ice ages have always followed not cold weather, as is usually assumed, but abundant rainfall. It is the rain that comes first. Then the cold.

  I tossed off an answer, almost dismissing this topic, saying lightly that I didn’t doubt it at all. The weather had indeed been rather strange in Canada these last few years—it could be cold or even hail in June, and there were now unseasonably high temperatures at the height of the winter season.

  Sydney did not respond right away. He was pensive for so long, in fact, that I assumed this topic of conversation had been exhausted. But just as I was about to suggest we move along, he turned to me rather suddenly and asked, as if it were the most important question of the moment, Have the Toronto winters become colder, or have they become milder, Jonathan? Has there been a change? He paused again—waiting for my response, I thought at first. But he was clearly uninterested in any rejoinder from me, for I had barely begun to talk, excited at the prospect of sharing some details about my own life—in particular, to elaborate on how the winters had indeed become so tedious that there were years when, at the first hint of cold, I took off to the south of Spain, where I met artists and writers and beautiful interesting women, and where I spent time thinking and writing and did not book a flight back to Toronto until after the famous groundhog in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and the less-famous one closer to home, Wiarton Willie, had made their prognostications; a digression which, I was hoping, would allow me to interject some lightness into our morning by imagining a similar annual Trinidadian celebration, held perhaps at a beach, with grand marshals in skimpy sequined and feathered costumes and food and music and speeches, where everyone would observe the behaviour of a crab emerging out of its crab hole, noting whether it came right out and took off down the beach in its sideways canter, or peeped out and retreated, thereby foretelling the timing of the rainy season—when he took advantage of my pause to jump back in and tell me about the particular morning that had been forever seared into his memory.

  There was a winter in Toronto, he said, when one snowstorm followed another, and after weeks of this, the snow ploughed off the streets was piled so high on the sidewalks that you couldn’t see the road over the top of the bank or the cars passing there. The city couldn’t clear away the snow fast enough.

  Seemingly unaware of any effect his words might have on me, he continued: But thankfully, the supervisor of the building, the same building into which I had moved immediately after, had done an adequate job, given the circumstances, of cutting a path that stretched across the full width of the stairs, right down to and including the sidewalk.

  Sydney’s use of the word after was like a blow: it immediately blotted out images of my Crab Prediction Day party, not to mention everything that he himself was saying. After. The way he used the word assumed—demanded—a what. After what? And it was an admission of time on the other side of after: Before. The same building you had moved into after what? What had happened before you moved into the building? These questions twisted around each other in my head. I thought about how I had curtailed my trips to Spain and begun coming to Trinidad for this moment precisely: for Sydney to explain the time before, time that he had just so nonchalantly condensed and dismissed in that one word, after. I wanted him—I wanted her—Sid, Sydney, whoever, whatever—to complete the phrase the same building into which I had moved immediately after with the words I left you. You here being plural. And although no explanation would have sufficed, I wanted him to fully elucidate why he had left my mother and me. A sweat broke on my temples. But wary of exposing myself, I remained quiet, and Sydney carried on.

  It was extremely cold weather, the kind of weather you and I know, he said. He gave me a complicit smile and mused, Had a person never experienced such temperatures, such wind, she or he would have a hard time imagining it.

  He carried on, but I was disheartened at his obliviousness. He and I were like the ships in the Gulf sailing past each other in different lanes.

  I was grateful that the sidewalks had been cleared too, Sydney said (passing my ship none the wiser). For you see, he said, I was about to embark on a walk from my apartment on Bergamot Avenue in the city’s east end to the Irene Samuel Health and Gender Centre twenty minutes or so away. The heat register inside the glass-walled entrance of the apartment building thrummed. The area of the glass door around which my mitten-covered hands were pressed had frosted a size larger in two perfect splayed-hand shapes. My hands, he remembered, were already hot in the thick wool gloves I had pulled on the instant I closed my apartment door, and the cold off the glass had been welcome. I would have liked to stand there all day imagining, he said, that the heat of my body, so infinite, so powerful, could melt away snow and ice, and warm, if not the city, at least the entrance on Bergam
ot Avenue. I felt invincible that day, he told me, adding that Eastern philosophies teach us that a change in a single person can create a change in that person’s entire environment. And knowing, he carried on, that I was on the verge of personal change—change of seismic proportions—I entertained fantasies of myself as the catalyst that would halt your Canadian winters in their track. But your winters are unstoppable.

  Sydney laughed at himself for the audacity of such a dream, and despite my defensiveness and disappointment over his earlier unfinished sentence, and now at how he was shoving winters over onto me when I knew that Sydney held dual citizenship, Canadian and Trinidadian, and therefore winters and all that come with them were as much his as they were mine (the making of such distinctions is petty, of course, but I was not above pettiness in matters concerning Sydney), I was reminded of how he used to encourage me to wish for and to dream of the impossible. The implication was that the act of wishing and imagining was of equal value to—and sometimes of greater value than—the realization of dreams. I recalled how, when I was a boy, my mother would often be in her third-floor study writing, while Sid and I entertained each other downstairs in the large room that made up the dining and living areas. Sid would tell me, convincingly, that people could fly. She could teach me, she’d say, and with a swimming-like gesture—the breast stroke, I would later understand—we would thrust our heads up and our chests forward into the room, and with our arms we would slice through the air, catch it in our turned-out palms and sweep it back, and I do remember the air felt as thick and leaden as water might have felt. We would make our way through the rooms as if we were half swimming, half flying, me expecting liftoff any second.

  A change in Sydney’s voice brought me out of my reverie. He was speaking matter-of-factly now. The door had sealed between the warmth inside and the cold air outside, he said, and I had to shove hard to open it. It popped open against the seal, and cold air was rashly whipped up and sucked into the entranceway. Snowflakes somersaulted in, and upon hitting the ground transformed instantly into puddles of wetness in front of the heater. Cold air slammed like a hand against my face and nose and I gasped, unable for a couple of seconds to breathe. It was as if, in a flash, there had been a mini death, and a rebirth. If you understand, Jonathan, that I felt that day as if I were on a journey of death—a small death, and one of rebirth too—you would also understand why I saw the same in all of this cold and snow. I suppose I was looking for a rhythm and a pattern in the world around me to confirm the correctness of all that I had taken into my own hands, and all my pending actions. If you think I am speaking in riddles, Jonathan—and here Sydney turned and looked at me full-on—it is because I don’t know how else to speak, having been trained to hide my unease beneath the more natural desire to be. To simply be. What luxury! As if he saw behind the mask of my stillness he patted my knee and said, Please try to let me tell my story as I must, in the only way I know how.

  And, Jonathan, he added, you must understand that I am not trying to whip up unnecessary suspense. It is already there, always, but of course one wants relief after suspense, and I must admit that in a life like mine, there seems to be constant suspense and little relief, even now. Back then, I pulled the hood forward on my down jacket, yanking it low to protect my forehead, pulled on the straps of the knapsack to ensure its snugness, and stepped outside.

  ———

  Women’s voices in the kitchen brought me out of my room. I reluctantly went to see who was there.

  Rosita’s sister Carmen had arrived, and the two were preparing food. With the back of her hand Rosita was wiping away tears that were pouring down her cheeks. She had already chopped a large mound of onions, and was chopping yet more. Carmen had her hands in batter inside an oversized basin. The air in the kitchen stung my eyes and skin and was bitter on my tongue. Lancelot, groomed and dressed in a white shirt and black pants, came in from the garage carrying a case of soft drinks.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, bringing them all to a halt.

  Rosita said simply, “The wake.”

  Emotional fatigue had no doubt got the best of me, for things that should have been obvious were clearly not. I was fumbling through the aftermath of Sydney’s death and felt as if the immediate future was unpredictable, being revealed to me one event at a time. I was the only one, it seemed, who had never before experienced the death of someone close. And so my words slipped out, unfiltered.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” I corrected myself clumsily. “I mean, is that what all the food is for, and that pop?”

  “What you think, Mr. Jonathan? Is a wake tonight,” Rosita said.

  “Here? At the house?” It seemed I was unable to control my surprise and displeasure.

  Carmen stopped kneading and turned to look at us. Lancelot had been stocking the fridge with the drinks. He, too, turned.

  It was Carmen who, with a tone of amiable curiosity, broke the tension that had so suddenly arisen. “Oh, all you don’t have wake for the dead in Toronto.” It was a statement of understanding.

  The bitterness in the air now stung my eyes and I began to tear up. The others continued to look at me, and rage surged in my voice before I had time to check it. “So, who invited people over?”

  Rosita said, with more impatience than I had heard from her before, “You don’t invite people. Is not a party. They come.”

  “Yes, they just come,” agreed Carmen. “That kind of news does travel fast, and if people know the person who dead, or a relative of the dead, or somebody who know them, they does come. Is so it is. They just come.”

  “How many people are you expecting?”

  The others chuckled, not with good humour but in disbelief, and talked over one another.

  “You could have five people or you could have a hundred people.”

  “It depends if the person was a good person or not. If he popular, or if he is somebody.”

  “People does come to maco too. Some of them just farse. But not every body. Most people come to pay they respects.”

  The telephone rang. Lancelot answered it and handed it to me. It was Gita, calling from England. I pulled myself together as best I could. She came straight to the point: she and Jaan had decided that they would return for the funeral. They had already booked the flights. They were, however, unable to get sensibly priced flights immediately, and would arrive in three days’ time. She said that she was sure that the pundit would agree that the funeral should be postponed to accommodate the arrival of the deceased’s only relative. Gita ended her call by saying, “Siddhani said, a long time ago, that she considered you to be a relative of hers. That being so, I imagine you will look after everything. We will come, but please understand that we won’t be involved in the ceremony itself.”

  I had hardly put the receiver down, and was still reeling, when Rosita said that she and Carmen were going to finish up the cooking and then they would get dressed. Did I have any clothes I wanted ironed to wear that evening?

  “What do you mean? Do I have to dress up?”

  Rosita, without looking at me, said, “Well, is a wake.”

  “What time are you expecting people, and how long will they stay?” I asked.

  “They will start coming all now so, and they will come every evening until the funeral,” Rosita answered.

  Every evening until the funeral. I thought of Gita and Jaan, and how they would not arrive for another three days. The funeral would, of course, not take place on the very day of their arrival. So, did that mean that there were to be three full evenings of people dropping by?

  “And what about me?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do? I am not sure about this. Is there somewhere else they can go? Aren’t wakes usually held at the funeral home?”

  No one responded to this, but Rosita’s mouth pursed and Carmen turned back to her kneading.

  I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts. It was important to show a little amicability; perhaps I could do so by inquiring if th
ere was enough drink on hand. “What do people drink? Where is Sankar? Tell him to get the car ready. I’ll go and get a bottle of rum, and perhaps a couple bottles of wine.”

  There was a charged pause, followed by a chorus of “No!”—the word inflected with horror and incredulity.

  Carmen took it upon herself to say, “Hindus don’t drink alcohol at wakes, Mr. Jonathan, and don’t eat meat. We can’t cook no meat in the house until one week after the day of the funeral.”

  I was not, at the best of times, a big meat-eater, yet I received this last as if it were an indication that all control over my own life had been taken from me. I had not asked for any of these responsibilities, and for a moment I fantasized about saying to hell with it all, to hell with you all, and leaving. I could pack my bags and have Sankar drive me to the airport and wait, regardless of how long it took, for the next flight out to Canada.

  Instead I sheepishly responded, “I see,” and backed out of the kitchen. I retreated again to the sanctuary of the bedroom.

  8

  As far as I know, time did not slow or stop that first day of Sydney’s wake. Nonetheless, I constantly felt as if one minute might stretch on forever, even as, in that same minute, an hour’s worth of events seemed to happen. By the time I left the kitchen, Sydney’s room had already been cleaned, the bed remade not just with clean bedding, but with a new set of sheets fresh out of their packaging. I closed the door and sat at my desk. I pressed my hands to my ears against the sound of noise coming from the kitchen, multiplied now by the roar of the vacuum cleaner in the passageway that runs between the bedrooms.

  I thought again about sitting on that park bench in the Queen’s Park Savannah when Sydney had said to me, I was about to cross into a future that out of necessity would obliterate much of my past. I wanted to walk to the health centre that winter morning, he explained, because it would give me time to reflect on my past. I wanted to confirm what pieces of that past I wished to take with me into my new life.