by Tracy Quan
Dennis lives in Valsayn Park with his wife and three sons and works for his father. Of course, I would never embarrass him (or myself!) by bringing all this up. But he was my first oral breakthrough and I’ve done so much to so many with this mouth. He deserves a prominent spot in the museum. Doesn’t he?
Time to get ready for lunch with Mother! Who doesn’t know about my private museum. And never will, I hope.
LATER
Miranda looked drawn and frazzled when she picked me up at the hotel in her father’s minivan.
“You made the right decision,” she said. “Staying here. You would never survive a night in our house.”
Twelve cousins from four different countries are sleeping in different parts of the compound, along with various aunts, which makes me feel like a selfish freak. But I can’t sleep in a crowd, not even a crowd of relatives. I doubt I could sleep in a room with anyone at this point—Matt being the exception. I enjoyed the solitude of my bed last night. It’s been months since I slept alone.
“Well,” I told Miranda, “I’m a very selective sleeper.”
“I sleep like a log in New York,” she sighed. “Here, I get no rest. Your mother’s a big help though. She made coffee for everybody this morning. I don’t know how she does it.”
Mother arrived late last night and fell asleep without even calling. She must be exhausted! Grandmummy died in the front room of my mother’s B&B. It was her job to accompany the body from her half-timber guesthouse in the Welsh countryside to Chester, where Grandmummy could be properly embalmed. Then to Manchester Airport and, eventually, Port of Spain.
When we arrived at the compound, Mother was nowhere in sight. Dennis’s oldest boy, Alister, was sitting at the dining room table alone, finishing a plate of rice.
“She went to Piarco with Daddy to pick up Uncle Sebastian,” Alister told us. I found myself staring at a preadolescent ghost of the boy who kissed me more than twenty years ago. Dennis never had such a gangly appearance, though. “And she took one of the phones,” microDennis added, but he couldn’t remember which one.
“Sebastian?” I thought my brother was flying in from Toronto last night. “What happened?”
“Oh!” Miranda called from the kitchen. “He missed his flight. I forgot to tell you!”
My little brother is always running late, holding things up, subjecting us all to his hectic middle-management lifestyle.
Miraculously, as Miranda brought a huge bowl of steaming pilau into the dining room, a number of adult cousins and aunts materialized. They had been lurking in different corners of the house, waiting for someone to make the first move. The dining room was filled with people moving, talking, drinking, and eating, searching for a favorite chicken part or a pig’s tail in the pilau. Aunt Vivian was accused of hoarding all the chicken feet.
When my mother finally returned from the airport, lunch was over, the crowd of cousins had moved toward the pool, and the aunts were out doing errands.
“Sebastian missed his flight again!” Mother told me. “Did he call? I’ve been trying to reach Miranda for an hour! The phone’s not working!”
Is this how a mother normally greets her eldest child? My brother can be such a nuisance!
Although she’s the ultimate granola mom—can’t be bothered with makeup, doesn’t tinker with her salt-and-pepper hair—I make an effort to look my best when I see her. Today, she was wearing a loose T-shirt over a faded denim skirt, with light brown Birkenstocks. Despite her own fashion foibles, she appreciates my unrumpled appearance. A shining bourgeois surface deeply reassures her—something my cousins fail to understand. They think their Aunt Helen is some kind of live-and-let-live hippie because she’s an atheist. In reality, she was stricter about some things than their parents were. Even if I didn’t have to go to church.
I could tell that the sight of her only daughter’s immaculate hair, ladylike fingernails, and lightly starched summer dress briefly improved her mood. But soon she was hunting down a laptop in the hope of retrieving her absent son’s latest excuse.
“This isn’t the first flight he’s missed,” I pointed out. “He routinely misses flights. Maybe something happened at work and he can’t come.”
A likely story! If that were the case, he would have told us by now.
Mother was pursing her lips.
“But he’s a pallbearer,” she said.
“Has it occurred to you that Sebastian might not be pallbearer material? A pallbearer has to show up at the event!”
My mother scowled. Miranda shot me a distressed beseeching look, and I felt guilty. Trashing my brother’s bona fides is sooo not called for at a time like this.
MONDAY MORNING, 4/23/01
A puzzling e-mail from Robert, my strangely reliable half-brother who shares none of Sebastian’s bad habits. Though my father’s second wife wouldn’t see it this way, I can’t help thinking of their son as the well-behaved spawn of my parents’ divorce. Which is no insult coming from a “child of divorce.” It’s what connects us, since being raised by different mothers is like being raised in different countries. Still, Robert’s more at ease with my mother than I am with his:
NAN. Bummer about yr grandmom! Please tell yr mom how truly sorry I was to hear the news. I’ll call her soon. Dad told me to give Sebastian $100 so he could deal with a local florist down there and send something in our name. What wuz I thinking! Spoke to his girlfriend last night. Sebastian’s FLAKING man. CALL if you wanna know more. Dad has no idea what happened.
E-mail from Sebastian’s girlfriend in Toronto, addressed to Mother—with a cc to me:
Dear Helen,
I feel terrible having to tell you this but Sebastian wasn’t able to fly because he’s not feeling well. Don’t worry, he’s going to be okay, but his doctor advised him not to.
Love,
Erica
I’m sure Sebastian’s doctor has advised him “not to” do many things! I don’t know what my mother thinks or believes at this point but she’s going to be pissed when she sees this.
Followed by another e-mail from Erica, addressed only to me:
Nancy,
He came over this morning and fell asleep in my living room. We were supposed to go to a concert the other night and he forgot! I was waiting for two hours! I told him I would never talk to him again, then he went somewhere and got high for a few days. And showed up at my apartment this morning! I don’t know what to do. I can’t believe he’s missing his grandmother’s funeral but he can’t travel in this condition. What should I tell your mom? Maybe you can tell her he has a stomach virus? That’s what he told them at work. E.
Her follow-up, sent five minutes later, was a definite cry for help.
I’m ready to end this dysfunctional relationship, well, I thought I HAD but he just shows up on my doorstep. I want him to start going to NA meetings and eating properly before we break up for good. Do you think he’s ready to face his issues?
As boyfriends go, Sebastian’s a Fixer-Upper at best. But I don’t know what to tell Erica about my brother’s rehab potential. A self-made princess shouldn’t presume to give relationship advice to a doormat. You can’t outsmart the romantic caste system.
A hooker knows instinctively that there’s a female caste system. In business, the caste markings have to do with where you have sex: the front seat of a car or a bedroom on the Upper East Side? But there’s another kind of hierarchy that applies to business and romance alike.
Forget geography. The female caste system is really about how men treat you. If you try to befriend a woman from the wrong caste, you’ll get burned. Occasionally, a princess loses her footing and allows a man to treat her like a doormat. In that case, another princess can intervene and reprincess the errant one.
But sometimes a dyed-in-the-wool doormat reaches out to a known princess for advice. For the princess, this presents a dangerous temptation. The princess tries to help. She imagines for a brief deluded moment that she’s abolishing or subverting
the caste system. Doesn’t she owe it to the doormat? It’s a redistribution of feminine privilege. That’s when it all goes wrong because a true doormat doesn’t want to be upgraded.
Sebastian’s previous girlfriend was even more of a doormat than Erica, which made her incredibly vicious. When she tried to enlist my support, I fell for it. Somehow she managed to turn me into the wicked sister-in-law who was preventing Sebastian from marrying her…. Never again! Erica will just have to cry on Robert’s shoulder and wonder whether I’m reading my mail.
LATER
After figuring out how to work the hotel voice mail, I retrieved a message from Miranda: “Sebastian’s alive. He’s still in Toronto.”
I called her cell phone, the only safe way to converse when so many aunts are hovering near the landline.
“Did Mother get the e-mail?” I asked.
“I think so. She was talking to his girlfriend. And she heard from Robert. It looks like Dennis will have to substitute.”
“I knew Sebastian wasn’t pallbearer material!”
“Your mum says—” Miranda stopped talking for a minute. “Well, anyway, if you want to come to the viewing, Dennis is driving over there tomorrow morning. He’ll pick you up.”
“Is she there right now? Can she hear you?”
“Sort of,” Miranda mumbled. “I’m outside now. She wants to borrow my phone. I can’t talk long.”
“Does she have any idea?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What did Erica tell her?”
Robert can be trusted to cover for Sebastian, but Erica’s a different matter.
“Hard to say.” She was still mumbling. “I’ll see you at the viewing.”
Coming to terms with a son who is evolving into a middle-management crackhead: I don’t think this is what Mother needs to be doing right now. If we can get through this funeral without any traumatic disclosures, everyone will be better off.
TUESDAY, 4/24/01
Temperature was oppressive today. As I left the air-conditioned safety of the Hilton, I could feel every inch of my skin wilting from the heat.
When we got to the funeral home, more than twenty Laytons were sprinkled around the room in gossipy clusters. Auntie Viv and her daughter, Claire, were having a tense conversation about lipstick, right in front of my grandmother’s coffin.
“It’s too much red. It’s wrong for her. She would never have worn that!” my older cousin complained.
Claire was holding two radically opposed lipsticks in her hand, a deep red Shiseido and a more youthful coral pink. From Prescriptives, of course. I really didn’t want to go up against Auntie Viv.
“If you don’t mind—” Mother’s frosty voice interrupted the lipstick conference. “Perhaps Nancy would like to have a moment with her grandmother before you apply the cosmetics. If, indeed, you must put lipstick on a dead woman? Some of us think it’s quite unnecessary. A little tacky.”
Atheists can be so uptight!
“It’s only tacky if it’s too dark,” Claire objected. “This is a nice delicate color,” she added, holding up her pale pink lipstick.
My mother, who was sitting in the front row, made an exasperated sound and resumed a conversation with Miranda’s mother.
I looked into the open coffin. I wanted to liberate my grandmother from Auntie Viv’s rather questionable paint job. What would Grandmummy want, if asked? But Grandmummy’s body has become the property of her family—and it’s not a question of what color, if any, she would have wanted to wear on her lips. It’s a question of which faction among the Layton women has more power. Mother’s in a minority here and siding with her is pointless.
Claire was on the other side of the coffin, blotting the lipstick carefully with a tissue.
“Don’t remove it all,” Aunt Vivian protested.
“I won’t,” Claire told her mother. “We’ll blend the two colors.” She opened a small makeup bag and took out a lipstick brush. The gold cross she was wearing around her neck dangled over Grandmummy’s middle. “Just bring it down a few shades.”
“While retaining the vibrancy,” I added: an artful compromise that satisfies my aunt and reduces the garish effect.
My mother’s right. There’s something slightly off about applying lipstick to my grandmother under these circumstances. But Mother is too set in her ways. Disconnected from the norms of vanity, she doesn’t realize that putting lipstick on a recently dead matriarch is a profoundly thoughtful gesture.
I sat next to Mother and said, in a low voice, “I know it’s kind of tacky, but this is how some people show their affection for the deceased.”
Now I had the attention of two mothers, my own and Miranda’s.
“Oh? Really? I was there for her when she was alive,” my mother pointed out.
“I know. But they don’t think they’re imposing lipstick on Grandmummy. They’re identifying with her.” Mother was unimpressed. Maybe you have to wear lipstick to understand. “Grooming her grandmother will help Claire to achieve closure. Auntie Viv wants to have some personal contact with Grandmummy before they bury her.”
“Your daughter has a point,” Aunt Kasturi told my mother. “You spent two years taking care of your mother, so you had the contact.”
“Quite so,” Mother said. “Vivian took care of her for a grand total of three months.”
Suddenly, the room went silent. Uncle Anthony was defiant, self-conscious—and very unexpected. He was wearing a navy suit and a crisp white shirt with a dark tie—the only man in the room wearing a suit. He looked around but didn’t greet Dennis or Miranda when he passed them, the children of his enemy brother. He walked up to the coffin. Then he bowed his head and stood for a moment, isolated by the silence, meditating over his mother’s body. Aunt Kasturi became very stiff and exchanged an enraged glower with Auntie Viv. Mother gazed off into the distance, and nobody spoke until Uncle Anthony had marched out of the viewing.
“Grandmummy would not like this,” said Claire. “The way all you are behaving. He has a right to see his mother.”
“Mind your own business,” Auntie Viv said sharply. “She would have taken Gregory’s side.”
“You must forget this lawsuit until the funeral’s over,” Claire insisted. “She would never take sides like that.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dennis told her.
Suddenly Miranda collapsed into a chair and started weeping. Her face was buried in her hands.
“Look what you’ve done!” Aunt Kasturi said. “Give the child some Kleenex.” Three people, including Claire, rushed to comply. “And don’t meddle in things you don’t understand.”
Grandmummy would be horrified by all this!
FRIDAY, 4/27/01
At yesterday’s funeral mass, Miranda snuck away from her brothers and sat next to my mother—her favorite aunt. All the cousins in our generation abstained from taking Communion. Except for Claire.
When you consider the ins/outs, ifs, and buts involved in the Communion process—and the fact that Claire’s single, living on Queen Street in the center of Toronto—it’s worrying. Does it mean she’s been going to Confession? Or not getting laid at all? I could tell, from a quizzical gaze, that Miranda was wondering the same thing. How do you live in the center of a modern city, in walking distance of all the hot new places, and still manage to be eligible for Communion?
Uncle Edwin got up to speak, and these furtive sexual questions left my mind. He’s Grandmummy’s youngest brother and her favorite because she helped to raise him—and he brought home the ultimate academic trophy, the Island Scholarship.
“It has been said,” his voice was in thundering mode, “that this. Is the last time. My sister’s children will meet under the same roof.” He’s talking about all the gossip in the Trinidad Express. “Let us hope that the papers are wrong about that.”
Uncle Anthony was sitting just a few rows behind us, and I spotted him later at Mucurapo Cemetery. But he didn’t appea
r at the postburial gathering.
“It’s a shame,” Claire said to me. “But you think anybody made an effort to include him?”
“Well, he’s not making it easy,” I said. “His body language is impossible! My mother said hello at the cemetery but he scurried away before she could even think about inviting him.”
“And they were so close as children.” Claire was clearly feeling vindicated by Uncle Edwin’s lecture. But when she saw Miranda homing in on us, she changed the subject. A tall guy with Viking features, the whitest person in the room, was chatting with Miranda while carrying a plate of bite-size meat pies. “Oh, hello, Ian. Have you met Nancy? She’s our cousin.” Claire crammed two meat pies into her mouth while Miranda presented our plate bearer: “Ian wrote about Granddaddy in his first book. A study of dualism and consumption in the Caribbean. You must read it! He’s an anthropologist. And he’s been interviewing my father for…what’s the new book?”
“Haven’t got a title yet but I’m concentrating on the sweet drink industry,” Ian said. “And I want to continue my discussion about the transnational family. And creolisation.”
“Your first book’s about tuberculosis?” I asked.
“Ah. No. It’s Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad.” He turned to Claire, who was staring down the meat pies. “Have another. You look famished.”
“Nancy’s here for a few more days,” Miranda said. “Claire’s leaving next week.” She was giving Ian a rundown on all the nonresident Laytons and our departure dates. “I must find a copy of your book so Nancy can read it.”
