Not for Everyday Use

by Elizabeth Nunez

  My parents seemed happy when I saw them in the bucolic setting of Gregory’s home in Mississippi. The tall leafy trees, the green grass, the gently undulating hills, the intermittent whistle of birds as they glided through the warm, turgid air must have reminded them of tropical Trinidad. The first morning I was there my father wanted me to go walking with him. He wanted to show me the birds he had identified in the woods on either side of the road that sloped gently down from my brother’s home and then steeply up before descending again. I trailed behind my father, huffing and puffing with every ascent. Even at eighty-three my father was a brisk walker. He could climb to the top of a hill without pausing for breath.

  The year before, my father had driven me up the winding road to the Asa Wright bird sanctuary in the dense rainforest of the northern mountain range in Trinidad. The area, once known as the Spring Hill Estate, used to be a thriving cocoa plantation, but the cocoa industry had dried up when oil was discovered in the south of the island. Asa and Newcombe Wright, the owners of Spring Hill, turned the estate into a sanctuary for wildlife. It became particularly well known for the rare birds that nested in the forest trees. At one point 159 species of birds were recorded there. My father loved going to Asa Wright. The day I went with him he shamed me and a group of bird lovers, some half his age, by trotting up the inclines while most of us had to take breaks to catch our breath. I discovered my father had gone to the bird sanctuary so many times the workers there knew him well enough to address him by name. We had lunch in the dining room and the cook came out of the kitchen to greet him. “Red beans and rice again, Mr. Nunez?” the man asked. As far as I could see there were no red beans and rice on the cafeteria-style counter, but stewed red beans and rice are what my father had for lunch.

  My father loved birds, his interest ignited by his forest warden father who was himself influenced by his Portuguese father who had chosen to work on the cocoa plantation rather than follow his Portuguese compatriots into the dry-goods business. So intimate was my father’s relationship with the birds in Trinidad, he could call out to them in their distinctive whistles and they would respond in kind. In the early days, my father used this skill to trap the birds. He would whistle to them, luring them to the branch of a tree he had lined with laglee, a gluey substance. When the birds alighted on the branch, they would get stuck and my father would pluck them out and cage them. I had grown up with birdcages dangling from wires attached to the ceiling of our porch. Then, surprisingly, when I returned home from college, the cages were no longer there. My father had set the birds free. He did the same with his fish, though the empty tank still remained where it was, a reminder I presume he wanted of the thoughtlessness of his youth. The disappearance of those cages and that empty fish tank would be a lesson to me. Though my father did not give me an explanation for what he had done, his unspoken message was clear: we had no right to take a living creature out of its natural habitat just to serve our pleasure.

  In those days, as now, my father’s joy came from looking and “talking” to the birds, he in his habitat, they in theirs. All along that country road in Columbus, Mississippi, my father whistled to the American birds, as he had done with the birds in Trinidad, and they whistled back to him. My father seemed vigorous and alert, in full control of his enormous intellect. I was certain my mother was right. The butter in the tea was my father’s call for attention. Nothing was wrong with his brain. Confident that he had been simply toying with me, I decided to seek his help with a problem that had been troubling me. Gregory was a chain-smoker. Nothing I said or did seemed to convince him that he should stop smoking, not my alarm at his constant dry cough, nor the statistics I recited to him on lung cancer and heart disease.

  “Gregory’s house is practically blue with smoke,” I complained to my father.

  I had said the same to my brother and he countered, “When we were children, our house was always blue with smoke and we survived.”

  It was true. We had survived, and all of us apparently in good health. My father was a chain-smoker too. For sixteen years growing up in my parents’ home, I rarely saw my father without a cigarette. We lived in the tropics, so our windows were always open, yet our house was suffused with the stink of cigarettes; it was embedded in the furniture and in our clothes. Cigarette ashes were piled up everywhere in saucers and ashtrays. I still remember the colorful plastic ashtrays I bought for my father for Christmas and his birthday. They were the best gifts I could think of giving him.

  “Dad is eighty-three,” Gregory reminded me. “Statistics don’t tell the truth for everyone.”

  But our father did not wake up every morning with a racking cough.

  Now, as we climbed the incline toward Gregory’s house, I pleaded with my father to speak to him. My father slowed down and faced me. “I am to blame,” he said softly. “I set a bad example.”

  I tried to convince him he was wrong. “But you stopped. Gregory could have learned that from you too.”

  “Gregory was already a man when I stopped,” he replied.

  This was not accurate. Gregory was not yet a man when my father stopped smoking. He was fourteen, still a child, when he first began pilfering my father’s cigarettes. The ones he stole from my father were not the filtered type; those had not yet reached our island. There was no wad at the bottom to dilute some of the poisons that would course through the smoker’s lungs. The cigarettes my father inhaled, sucking the dark smoke deep into his lungs, were unfiltered. I know because I bought cartons of unfiltered cigarettes for him in the duty-free shops every time I returned to Trinidad on holiday.

  My father stopped smoking in his mid-fifties, abruptly and without forethought, though he would say that he had tried to stop years before then. He was on the sea this time, in an open pirogue with his godson, a young man in his early teens. They were out fishing. The sun was beating down on their heads, and my father, perhaps to ease the sting of the sun burning his flesh, sought comfort in the familiar pleasure of smoking. He dug into his pocket, took out a cigarette, and lit it. According to his version of the story, his godson turned to him and made this innocent request: “Uncle, why you don’t throw that cigarette in the sea?” And that is exactly what my father did. He threw the lit cigarette into the sea and never touched another one again.

  “It is the one major regret in my life,” my father said to me as I quickened my pace to catch up with him. “I taught my sons to smoke.”

  I reminded him that his sons were men now. If Gregory wanted, he could get help to break the habit.

  My father shook his head sadly. “I would be the happiest person in the world if Gregory would quit. He is such a good son to me.”

  I did not see then that my father’s eyes had become misty, or notice, as we approached the house, that the jauntiness had gone out of his stride. I was too distracted by the presence of my brother’s car in the driveway, thrilled that he had come home for lunch. If my father had set a bad example for his sons with his cigarette habit, he had set a good one as a man who put his family before his ambitions, for I had no doubt that Gregory had to reschedule his patients’ appointments to be here with us in time for lunch.

  My father did not have patients, of course, but he was an ambitious young man, a junior officer at the Ministry of Labour, with his eye on the top of the ladder, a not unfounded possibility for a non-European in the days just before independence, and yet he risked that ambition to have lunch with his children almost every day when we were in school.

  My father eventually made it to the top of the ladder. He was in his early forties when he was appointed commissioner of labor. The previous commissioner, Solomon Hochoy, was the first nonwhite British governor of Trinidad and Tobago. Later, when our island gained independence, he was made governor general and knighted by the Queen of England. Though Sir Solomon had not achieved this status when my father worked in the ministry, the signs were already there that he was favored by the British. It was also likely that if any local man was to
rise in the British colonial government, it would be someone attached to the Ministry of Labour, which was the first of the ministries the British colonial government had more or less entrusted to locals. Two world wars, the failing sugarcane economy, and the persistent drumbeat for decolonization across the globe had made the British skittish. If problems came, they would come from the labor force. Better to have one of the people’s own in charge of the labor ministry when the onslaught rumbled through the island.

  So it was not at all far-fetched for us to assume that our father’s future looked very bright indeed. Yet every day my father left his office at lunchtime to pick us up from school. I was at Tranquility Girls School then, the equivalent of American middle school. Yolande and Richard were in high school, she at the prestigious St. Joseph’s Convent for girls, and he on scholarship at the equally prestigious St. Mary’s College for boys. David and Jacqueline were in elementary school. At around noon, soon after my school broke for lunch, I would see my father turning the corner in his sky-blue Rambler, one of the perks of his position as commissioner of labor. He would already have picked up Yolande and Richard, and after getting me, he would go for David and Jacqueline. How he managed to do this, I have no idea. I cannot imagine that all his affairs at the ministry ended just before noon, or that a meeting with a superior would be conveniently scheduled to allow him to go home at exactly that time. It must have been risky for him to leave his office, and yet he rarely failed. Sometimes he was late, but always I knew the Rambler would be turning the corner and soon I would be having lunch with him, my mother, and my siblings.

  Family comes first, my father said. And so Gregory was following in his father’s footsteps. He would drop everything, reschedule his patients’ appointments, and have lunch with his mother and father.

  The house was thrumming with happy voices when we came into the dining room. My sister-in-law Beverly, who is Jamaican, had made pelau for lunch. Pelau is a quintessential Trinidadian dish which locals contend only they know how to make properly. My mother had apparently just complimented Beverly on the tenderness of the chicken and the graininess of the rice, and Gregory, who was sitting at the head of the table, was grinning from ear to ear with pride. Next to his hand was a lit cigarette resting on an ashtray, already burned halfway down and sending a thin trail of smoke across the table. As he got up to greet our father, Gregory reached for the cigarette and was about to put it to his lips when I pounced on him. “Do you know how miserable you are making Daddy?” I yelled. “He said the greatest regret in his life is that you are still smoking. My God, don’t you care about him?” More accusations flew out of my mouth like venom.

  My father sat down heavily in his chair. “I am to blame,” he murmured. And for the first time I noticed the moisture in his eyes.

  Gregory put down his cigarette, threw me a scathing look, and then turned his back on me. “So, Dad,” he began as if I had not said a word to him, “how was your day? Catch any birds? Picoplat? Chikechong?” He smiled at my father adoringly.

  In an instant my father’s mood changed. “I saw one today,” he chirped. His face brightened.

  “A picoplat?”

  “No, a semp. A really nice one. Bright yellow feathers on his breast. Black streaks too.”

  “And the wings?”

  “White. The brightest white you ever saw.”

  “Did you whistle to him?”

  “Yes. And he whistled back.”

  I simmered with indignation. There were no picoplats, chikechongs, or semps in Mississippi. Those were tropical birds. But I stifled my anger. My father looked too happy, and I was loathe to extinguish the light shining with increasing brightness in his eyes.

  Back and forth my brother and father went talking about semps, picoplats, and chikechongs, about which had the brightest feathers, which made the sweetest music. Then suddenly my father turned to me. “You saw the semp too, didn’t you, Elizabeth?”

  What could I say? Could I deny him the joy of remembering his days in the forest singing with the birds? Before I could think up an answer, he began to whistle, an exact imitation of the song of the yellow-feathered semp. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I gestured to my brother for help. He whistled back as if he were a semp too, and for a while he and my father continued this way, with call and response, until abruptly my father stopped waiting for my brother’s response. Now his whistles became shriller, louder, more frantic.

  “Dad.” My brother moved closer to him. I could tell he was getting nervous. “Dad.”

  My father continued to whistle.

  “Dad!”

  My father pursed his lips to whistle again, but this time no sound came out of his mouth. “It’s my fault,” he murmured. He hung down his head. “I’m to blame. My fault.”

  My mother placed her hand on his arm. “Come, Waldo.” She tugged his arm gently.

  My father glanced over at her.

  “Waldo,” my mother crooned. “Come now. Let’s go. It’s time for a nap.”

  So she knew. So my mother was aware that my father was drifting away. Her anger with me when I tried to still his hand as he reached for the butter to put in his tea was really her terror, her fear that she could be losing her partner in life, the man who had traveled with her through all the sorrows, joys, failures, and triumphs of their more than sixty years together. She had said my father made a conscious decision to give up. He would not allow himself to be taken by surprise; he would be ready when the Grim Reaper came. My father was pretending to be weak, she said, shuffling back and forth through the house like a senile old man, but I know now she was the one pretending, hoping against hope she was right.

  My father wanted my attention, but he did not know what he was doing, not when he reached for the butter to put in his tea, not when he began unraveling a tale about seeing picoplats, chikechongs, and semps in the forest near my brother’s house in Mississippi, not when my brother led him down this path and he could not find his way back to what troubled him so deeply: he was to blame for my brother’s nicotine habit.

  * * *

  My brother did not spare me from his fury when he returned from the bedroom where he and my mother had talked my father into taking an afternoon nap. “See what you’ve done!” He waved his finger at me. “You’ve put bad thoughts in Dad’s head. You! You have done that! Dad needs to be peaceful. He needs to have happy thoughts. You have upset him.”

  How am I to give my father happy thoughts now when his wife has just died? How can I give him peace?

  I call the funeral parlor. As a special favor to the family, the receptionist tells me, the owner has agreed to arrange a showing for my father. A showing, she says, as if my mother is already an artifact in a museum. “We can’t have all of you,” she informs me. She knows we are eleven, and with our spouses, partners, and children, we make up a crowd. “Just you and your father.”

  Just me and my father. I do not know if I can hold up with just me and my father. If I can be strong enough for him.

  10

  My three doctor brothers say that our father does not have Alzheimer’s. If he had Alzheimer’s he would not recognize us. And there is no denying that ten years after I watched in increasing alarm as past and present got mangled in my father’s head, he has not entirely lost contact with reality. He knows who we are, all eleven of us. He addresses us by name. More amazingly, for it’s a feat that stumps me, my father recognizes our voices even when he cannot see us. It takes him just a heartbeat to know who I am when I call from New York. “Elizabeth! How are you, Elizabeth?” he warbles happily.

  Gregory informs me that Alzheimer’s is one of the diseases associated with dementia, the most extreme, he says. Our father is on the low end of the dementia scale. He knows who he is, he knows where he lives, he can take care of his bodily functions without assistance. Skills of a four-year-old, I think when Gregory produces this evidence of our father’s mental acuity. I remain unconvinced. Impaired acuity, I say to myself. By a
ny name, my father’s decline has been precipitous.

  My uncle John says that my father has simply chosen to withdraw into himself, a position my mother often articulated, though I know now she did so out of fear. According to my uncle, the two most brilliant of my grandparents’ nine children were my uncle George and my father. When George was killed, my father inherited the mantle alone, without competition from his other siblings. “He is a genius,” my uncle concedes, and then adds with what I detect is a hint of bitterness in his voice, “or was.”

  Uncle George was killed flying a British bomber over Germany. He was one of hundreds of young men from Trinidad and Tobago who volunteered to fight for the British in World War II. Loyalty to the Crown was not their primary motive. Ulric Cross, a mathematician, who later became a sought-after lawyer and respected judge, told me that he and his friends volunteered when Pope Pius XII gave his blessing to Mussolini to kill Africans in Ethiopia. The men from T&T were fighting with the British, Ulric explained, but their real reason for joining the war was to avenge the slaughter of Africans. Most of the men from our twin islands wanted to be in the Royal Air Force, either as pilots, navigators, or bombardiers, but only an elite few were chosen. They were the ones who excelled in mathematics and science. Uncle George was one of the 252 men who were chosen. On one of his missions, his plane was shot down.

  “If you ask me,” my uncle John says, “pride is your father’s downfall. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and when he was no longer as quick on his feet as he used to be, he decided to withdraw rather than have people see he was losing his memory and his prized cognitive skills. But age does that. We all lose some memory as we get older. We all are no longer as quick with answers as we used to be. But pride—pride got the better of your father.”