Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab

by Shani Mootoo

  And so I hurriedly excused myself, assuring Sydney that I wanted to hear the rest of his story but that I had indeed become quite sleepy, as if I’d been bitten by a sleep-inducing bug. He said, Yes, of course, of course—and I felt oddly accused, but of what I didn’t know.

  As I was going to my room, Sankar, who was in the kitchen, stopped me. It is going to be a nice afternoon, he said, as if he knew my mind. He suggested that the two of us—he and I—take a trip to the Caroni Swamp to see the scarlet ibis flying in at sundown to roost on the mangrove islands. We would have to leave immediately to beat the traffic and get to the site by four o’clock, which was when the boats for hire took off down the canals into the wide, caiman-infested lagoons.

  A cup of coffee and a crab-back later, and I was like a boy ready to go off on an adventure to see swamp lizards that were, as Sid had once, a long time ago, promised, “this big.”

  At the Swamp, our pirogue anchored in the cover of overhanging trees. Over the course of half an hour, as the sun went down, thousands of brilliant scarlet ibises glided in, alighting on the tops of the blackened mangrove trees. Our return through the narrow channels took place in the dark. Owls swooped and hooted, followed by a flutter too close, a rush of wind above our heads: bats. A pair of brilliant dots of light skimmed the black water as it passed our pirogue—the eyes of a caiman.

  I recalled all this as I sat at the desk in my room that first day of the wake and imagined, with some wistfulness, that it was now unlikely I would make another such trip to the Caroni Swamp. I remembered how, upon returning from our excursion, I had revelled in my brief escape, my freedom from talk. I knew that when Sankar and I returned, Sydney’s story would continue. And it did, not just when we came back from the Swamp, but over the course of years and several visits to the island. However, I do think back now on those times when my mind would drift—when as he spoke on, I would plot escapades and too-quickly jump at chances to leave the house—and I feel remorse and regret in equal measure.

  And now, months later, having listened to the essential parts of that same story, particularly the kernels Sydney had guarded until the last hours of his life, and having finally heard and understood what he’d been wanting to tell me, I cannot but wonder why the writer in me—if not the man—had not from the beginning seen and been curious about the threads, had not spotted the unravelling of a larger story.

  This grand omission rattles my idea of myself as a writer. And if one of the essential marks of being human is the ability to feel compassion, what kind of a man was I who instead of being able to listen to Sydney’s words and hear and feel beyond their meaning, instead of being able to hold his life’s story in my heart and mind, instead of being the witness he clearly trusted I could be, spent so much of my time hoping and waiting for the smallest mention of my name?

  Yes, I eventually stayed and listened to every word he spoke. But that was at the end. And it was then, when it was much too late, that I heard and understood the whole story.

  If only I could do it all over again.

  PART THREE

  9

  At first, I ignored the knocking at my door. But when I realized that the door was being pushed slowly open, I shouted out that I was inside. Lancelot replied, reminding me that people would soon arrive.

  I had not showered yet, and hastily roused myself to get ready. When the tepid water hit my face, I cried until I was doubled over with the pain of it. I did not turn off the shower, but leaned into the tiled wall, pressing my face and belly against it, and long after there were no tears left I remained there, my body spent, frightened as if I were a three-year-old who had been left in cold dark silence.

  “You’re too sensitive,” I chided myself. “You’re much too sensitive.” It was of course India I’d heard use those words, and they came to me once again in her voice. I must have been eight when I heard and truly understood their effect. My two mothers had gone to a party, and I’d stayed home with Tanya, my babysitter. When Sid and India returned, India brushed past Tanya and me. She kicked off her black red-tipped high-heel shoes and went briskly upstairs, and from this I knew that she and Sid had been quarrelling. When Sid ruffled the hair on my head and asked if I’d been good, I knew that it was she who was on the defensive.

  The bedroom door upstairs closed with some considerable force. Tanya gathered up her belongings and left. I followed Sid into the kitchen. Preoccupied with whatever was transpiring between her and India, she made no attempt to send me up to bed. When the door to the bedroom re-opened some time later and I heard my mother approach the top of the staircase, I left Sid in the kitchen and went quietly to my play corner behind the sofa in the living room. India, thin and tall as she was, could stomp heavily down the stairs, and this she did. I plucked a colouring book and crayons from my toy chest and busied myself. Save for India saying as she passed me, “You should be in bed by now,” and asking Sid in the kitchen, “Why is he still up?” neither paid me further notice; but I was more aware of them than of the book and crayons before me.

  India threw the first hook: “It’s always you. You, you, you. Always about you being a foreigner. You’re more aware of it than anyone else is, for God’s sake. What is wrong with you?” I hadn’t needed to look at Sid to know what she was doing. I imagined her, legs parted and firmly planted, arms folded across her chest. She left the kitchen and came into the living room. With exaggerated calm, and displaying tedium at having to explain herself again, she intoned that the evening had been yet another example of the fact that no matter how long she lived in Canada she would always be a foreigner among my mother’s friends. My mother strode past me and threw herself into a corner of the plush green sofa behind which I was crouched. I guessed that she had stretched her legs across the length of it. Adopting her signature unwavering and ultra-rational manner, India countered that she, like Sid, was a foreigner in this country, but she didn’t harp about it in public the way Sid did. Sid, clearly incensed by this accusation, reminded my mother that while she—India, that is—might be an immigrant, her skin was white, and she had come not from Poland, Greece, Russia, Spain or the Ukraine, but from Great Britain. And the British, regardless of background, were to white Anglo Canadians always more authentic, more grand, than they.

  At the time, it had not been of any consequence to me that my two mothers had different skin colours. India was among the first single women in the city to choose to be artificially inseminated, and while it was rather obvious from the way I’d turned out that the sperm donor must have been white, it wasn’t until well after Sid left that I realized that Sid and I were of different races.

  Sid continued: India might be an immigrant, but she couldn’t possibly know the prejudice felt by most immigrants. That cut-glass English accent of hers put her above even her white Canadian friends, who, easily seduced, compared themselves to her and concluded that she was the real thing. But, Sid snapped, she was not seduced by any of it.

  Gradually I pieced together what had precipitated this fight: at the party everyone had been served wine by the host in tall crystal glasses. Except for Sid. She had been offered her wine in a stocky glass of such poor quality that the thick lip had a bubble on it. India snapped that Sid was petty and went looking for such things, to which Sid responded that one didn’t have to go looking, and India should become more aware. India countered that if things were as Sid had said, then surely it was simply the luck of the draw—the host must have run out of the better glasses, and whoever was served last had just happened to get that one. To which Sid barked, So why was I served last? People only seemed to pay her attention at these parties, Sid said sharply, in a voice that had by this time escalated in pitch and volume, to ask after India’s progress—the great writer’s latest writing project—or after Jonathan. She was always being put in the deplorable role of handmaiden to the creative genius. And, worst of all, her relationship with Jonathan went unacknowledged: she was seen as a nanny to the creative genius’s son.
r />   I remember feeling proud that people would ask about me at the parties, and was confused, too, because it seemed to me that these people were sensible to ask Sid rather than my mother. Sid, I thought, could tell them stories about me. India couldn’t.

  India interrupted Sid’s rant. “This is so unnecessary, Sid. It’s so boring. You’re overreacting. You take offence much too easily.” A little later she said, “You’re so goddamn serious. Has it ever occurred to you that you might not put people at ease? No one wants to be made to feel as if they’re forever on the verge of saying something wrong or inappropriate.” India had a tendency to roll her eyes when she was exasperated, and in my imagination, from behind the sofa, I saw her do this when she cut Sid down with the most effective of all her put-downs: “You’re simply too sensitive.” I heard these words and saw how they crushed Sid and brought the conversation to its end.

  I witnessed the effect again when the elation of being called out in a review—the very review he had only days ago spoken of to me—turned to despair. Sid took umbrage with the reviewer’s classification of her work as folksy and naive. India insisted the adjectives were not an indication that the reviewer could only appreciate the work by evoking Sid’s third-world heritage, but rather were compliments.

  Sid’s frustration with the reviewer was slight compared to how India’s lack of empathy and understanding affected her. She brooded for several days, sure that the review marked the end of a career barely begun as a serious “Canadian” artist. When India could take Sid’s frustration no longer, she reminded her that immigrants and minorities had unprecedented advantages, access to funding and opportunities to publish and exhibit their work. Sid should just get over herself and be grateful.

  Sid’s defeated response was “You will never understand, will you? But what’s worse is that you don’t even try to defend me.”

  I now know that whenever India tries to be conciliatory, she delivers a small lecture that is a mix of pep talk and reproach. This she did then: “Sid, you know who you are and where you’ve come from. If only you carried yourself with the confidence of that knowledge. It shouldn’t matter that people here are unable to read who you are. That’s ignorance, and you’re smart enough to rise above it. But you insist on seeing in every situation an opportunity for discourse. Racism. Immigration. Classism. Sexuality. Gayness. Homophobia. Perhaps these are all things that affect you, even when you’re with well-meaning friends, but you won’t change anyone or anything by being so easily offended and defensive. Can’t you just enjoy yourself and others, and let others enjoy you? You’ve got a lot to offer. Just get on with living, Sid, and good God, just be grateful for the call-out.” She ended her exhortation with “You’re so easily offended. You’re simply too sensitive.”

  When the three of us lived together as a family in Toronto, Sid brought up the idea numerous times that we should all visit Trinidad so that we could be introduced to her parents, who were alive then, and her younger sister, Gita. India was not excited by the prospect of a visit to a tropical country that lacked the reputation of a grand tourist destination save for during its carnival season. I, on the other hand, was eager. Sid promised starfish and jellyfish, and even lizards that took up residence almost like pets inside the houses: lizards this big, she told me, her eyes popping wide, chopping her left arm at the crook of her elbow, this big, and sometimes they fall off the wall and land right in your hair. Fully imagining the plop of the house lizard, its weight and wriggle, I remember doubling over, shaking my head and my air-filled cheeks. I swiped at my hair with both hands. After much persuasion, India relented and we did go to Trinidad. But India’s mix of apathy and passivity when we were finally in Sid’s family’s house embarrassed me, and I remember wishing, even at such a young age, that I could distance myself from her, while wanting also to make excuses for her.

  It was shortly after that visit and our return to Toronto that Sid left my mother and me, and departed from my life.

  ———

  I turned off the shower, towelled myself dry, and sat naked on the edge of my bed. I did not want any part of this funeral business. I was abysmally incompetent in the face of loss and death. Sydney’s world had been made small by the changes he’d made to himself—to his body—and consequently, my own Trinidadian world was narrow. I knew only Sydney and his house staff and members of their families. A wake was bound to bring strangers—at least they would be strangers to me. I did not want to be the subject of their scrutiny. I did not want my grief on display. I sank onto the bed, ruminating on how I had come to be in this situation. It wasn’t just the physical situation that confounded me but something larger, and I eventually leapt from thoughts of my own fate to wondering again what had made Sid do to herself, to her body, the kinds of things that were affecting me today—affecting how I felt, that is, about my place in this house, on this day, among people I did not know. I see now that Sydney had been trying to explain it to me through his various stories, but I wondered then how, as a child who was so close to her, so adoring of her, I had not seen or intuited the changes that would come. Children, after all, see more than they are given credit for. What had I seen, but not paid attention to?

  For instance, I recalled a time when I was fourteen: India had been dating a man I had not taken to, and I asked her what it had been like between Sid and her. This was not so bold a question as one might imagine, for I was well aware then—and exploited the fact—that it pleased my mother to see herself as a liberated parent who was able to engage in frank and adult conversations with her child. If my memory is to be trusted, the very first comment she made began with a drawn-out, ponderous “We-ell,” quickly followed by, “Sid was short. Two inches shorter than I.” And I remember my embarrassment and disgust, for I was at that age where everything that I experienced was imbued with thoughts about sex.

  My mother carried on. “When we placed our hands palm to palm, my hands were bigger than hers, my fingers longer. But in that small brown body was an electric power and confidence that captivated me.” In my mind she rolled her eyes as she added, “But that electricity dimmed within months.” After I was born, India said, she got back to the novel she had been working on, and Sid stayed on, fawning over me as if Sid were the one who’d given birth. “It irritated the hell out of me,” she said, laughing. “But at least I got to finish my novel—and good thing, too, for it was one of the best.” Even as a teenager I was aware of the import of her words, their severity, the refusal to understand. She continued, “When I was finished with the book, when I looked up from it, there was this person in the house with you and me, this person who was no longer confident in public, this person who had somehow become dissatisfied with her appearance, with the fact that her hips and breasts were, as she put it, so visible that they betrayed her. There was suddenly a lot of nonsense about how her outward appearance had nothing to do with how she felt inside. She began dressing differently, wearing obviously masculine clothing, and, well, I suppose I just lost interest. Some of the very things she did at the beginning, which I’d found charming then, began to irritate and, quite frankly, to embarrass me.”

  Like what? I had asked.

  “She greeted our men-friends not with an embrace, but rather with such a firm handshake that there would be comments about it. She’d step ahead of me at a door, for instance, open it and stand aside to allow me through first. She didn’t smoke, but was always ready to light my cigarette. You know, in private these things are tolerable, desirable even, but when she did them in public, whether with me or with other women, I was embarrassed. Not embarrassed to be seen with her, but embarrassed for her. That is, of course, worse.”

  I do remember how Sid was before she left us. I can’t say that I thought of her manner as being the result of or related to anything in particular. Sid was simply Sid. And I had looked up to her.

  Sid and my mother remained in touch—although not amicably—for a while after their breakup. Sydney told me that “she” k
new my mother was dating. Sid knew that my mother went out immediately after their breakup with a woman—a white woman—who was taller than India, and who had passed in public effortlessly as a man. She didn’t elaborate, but by now I understood the significance of this.

  Sydney once told me that it was when she was in Canada with her gay and lesbian friends, before meeting India, that she’d had a sense of what most closely resembled “family.” The short-cut of shared experiences and vocabulary meant that they knew how and when to be there for one another.

  But when Sid got together with India, she gradually distanced herself from these people. My mother expected Sid, her live-in lover, to be, as she said, “discreet” about their relationship.

  The doorbell rang at 6 p.m. on the dot, and for an hour I was obliged to sit on the veranda with Sydney’s tailor, who introduced himself to me by saying that his sister was like Sydney. He called Sydney by his last name. “When Mahale needed a suit,” this man said, “he came to see me because I am famous as a tailor.” His sister had wanted to wear tailored suits from the time she was a teenager. No one took her on, but she was his favourite sister and he had wanted her to be happy. So he went all over Trinidad looking for someone to sew a suit for her, and of course, there was not a seamstress or tailor who would outfit her in this way. So he taught himself to sew a man’s suit for a woman so that you couldn’t tell from her clothes whether she was Jack or Jackie, Bobby or Barbie, Tommy or Tammy.

  Mrs. Allen, the guava cheese lady, arrived just as the tailor was leaving. She brought a tray of guava cheeses, because, as she said, people will come, and at a time like this a few sweet things can make a person feel just a little better. Mrs. Allen also, thankfully, did not stay long. When she left, I sat on the veranda and waited. But no one else came that evening, and soon Carmen and Rosita wrapped the rotis in tea towels and packed them away in Tupperware containers.