Not for Everyday Use

by Elizabeth Nunez

  I write and write, the good amanuensis, taking notes from my siblings but all the time battling a darkening fog gathering in my head. Did my mother continue to love my father as he continued to love her, even more through the years? Did she forgive him for his infidelities? Then, later, when I am alone, faced with the task of fashioning the notes into readable prose, the fog clears. I have remembered an afternoon in 2007, the year before my mother died.

  I am on holiday from New York. It is late morning, an hour or so before lunch. The sun is making its ascent to the middle of the sky. In a very short time it will scorch the grass and burn the petals on the roses that line the walkway. Some will wither and die; some will fold into themselves and bloom again when the sun moves on. The birds are searching for shade in the cups of branches hidden behind a canopy of leaves. I hear the flutter of wings, the drone of flying insects. Then all is quiet outside. Inside the house, my mother is in her bedroom, saying her midmorning prayers. The TV is on, tuned to a religious channel. A priest leads the rosary and my mother joins the congregation, responding to the second half of each Hail Mary. Petra is in the kitchen. I hear the banging of pots and pans, the loud thud of the meat cleaver against the cutting board as she breaks through the bones of the meat we will have for lunch.

  My father is in the backyard, occupying himself with his favorite pastime. He is picking up leaves that have fallen from the fruit trees. He does not have to do this. My parents employ a gardener. If the gardener needs help, they can afford to hire extra men. But my father likes being in the garden. He does not have much interest in the flowers; it’s my mother who is the horticulturalist. My father likes the big trees. I think they remind him of his youthful days in the forest, though the trees in their yard are surrounded by skirts of pristine lawn. Still, leaves and rotted fruit fall from big trees at unpredictable times, times when the gardener is not there or before my mother can call for additional help. So every morning, after breakfast, my father gathers the oranges and limes on the ground near their bedroom window. He walks over to the spreading sapodilla tree that shades the nursery, where my mother supervises the planting of seedlings and tends to the shoots of the most delicate flowers, and he picks up the rotting sapodillas, already pockmarked by birds in their early-morning feast. He throws them in the ravine behind the wall at the side of the house and moves on to the mango tree. He is ninety-two, skinny as a lamp pole, the muscles on his thighs and legs taut as wires. He is descending into dementia, willed, my mother insists; but if willed—if it is possible to will dementia—the habit of withdrawing from the world is beginning to solidify in him. Yet when he reaches the mango trees—one tree, it seems, until you taste the fruit—he calls out to me. “Elizabeth, which do you want, the sweet or the juicy?”

  Many years ago, when I expressed surprise that one tree would bear two kinds of mangoes, a small, sweet mango starch and another larger, seemingly different kind, my father explained: “It’s not one mango tree, but two, you see. And both are the same kind. Both are mango starch.”

  Originally both trees grew just a few feet from each other, then one got diseased so my father had it chopped down, but in the next rainy season it sprouted shoots that grew thicker and taller each year until its leafy branches wound themselves so tightly around the older and sturdier tree that it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended.

  A metaphor for my parents’ love for each other? “I guess it does look like one tree,” my father had conceded, and then added enigmatically, “but, of course, the mangoes are different.”

  A metaphor for the children he and my mother produced? Both mangoes were sweet, but the pulp in the smaller one was denser, the effect of the sweetness in the mouth immediate. The larger one demanded more, more time, more effort—two or three mouthfuls—but its sweetness was just as intense.

  My father handed me a mango. It was the small, sweet one. I am the shortest of their children. Am I also the sweetest, the most loved? I hardly got the chance to savor my victory when my father bent down again and gave me another. It was the larger, juicier one. “I like this one too,” he said.

  Now, on my way to the covered veranda with a book in my hand that I plan to read before lunch, I tell him that I will have both kinds, the sweet and the juicy, but for dessert, after lunch. He waves to me and resumes his morning work. He bends down, collects a few dried mango leaves, straightens up, puts them in a pile, and starts the process all over again. His younger sister Jean, who lives in England with her well-to-do English husband, is in Trinidad on holiday. She came to the house the day before, and seeing my father at his daily task was awestruck. “I am fifteen years his junior,” she said, her mouth slack-jawed with admiration, “and if I tried to do that all that bending and rising that Waldo does, I’d be unable to get out of bed the next day.”

  In the veranda, I stretch out on a chaise lounge. My book slips to my lap. I am lulled by the deepening heat and the midmorning sounds drifting off to a comforting silence. I am drowsy. Soon I fall asleep. In minutes, though, I am awakened by urgent shouts. “Mr. Nunez! Mr. Nunez, wake up! Dr. Elizabeth! Mrs. Nunez! Something happen to Mr. Nunez! Come out quick! Come quick!”

  I fly out of my chair and rush to the backyard. My father is slumped down on the bench under the mango tree. Petra is holding him up. Her arm is around his shoulders. By the time I reach them, she has managed to get my father on his feet. He wobbles a bit and smiles weakly at me. I tuck my arm in the crook of his elbow; Petra does the same on the other side.

  “What happened, Daddy?” I ask. “Are you okay?”

  He nods and makes an effort to steady his feet.

  Petra tightens her grip. “I take you, Mr. Nunez,” she says. She seems to know where, to know what he wants. She signals to me to move forward and I follow her lead.

  My mother has not noticed the commotion outside, but she hears when we open the bedroom door, and when she sees her husband, walking more upright now, though Petra and I still have our arms locked around his elbows, she rushes toward us and we release him to her. Holding my father by his hand, my mother takes him to the armchair on her side of the bed. My habitual irritation at her kicks in: Why not to his armchair, on his side of the bed? You know he’ll be more comfortable there. I almost say these words, but something holds me back, something I cannot name or explain. A feeling. I am not wanted here. These are my parents but at this moment they are husband and wife. They do not need me. My father does not need me to defend him. My mother knows what he wants.

  I go to the bathroom, and fill a glass with water, and bring it to my father. He drinks. Little by little his shoulders rise from where they were sunk into his upper back; life returns to his eyes. He sits up and moves to the edge of the armchair. My mother sits on the bed facing him. They are so close together their knees touch. I ask my mother whether I should call the doctor. My father shakes his head. Without turning to look at me, my mother waves me away. I feel helpless, useless.

  “What I should do?” I ask Petra. She has been their housekeeper and companion for twenty years. She would know best if I should send for help.

  “Come, let’s go. Leave them,” she says.

  I follow Petra out of the room, but at the doorway, I hesitate. I turn around, intending to ask my mother if she’s sure my father is okay, intending to insist that I call the doctor. What I see and hear convinces me that I am wrong on two counts. They do not need the doctor, and the doubts I have harbored for years about my mother’s capacity for forgiveness were badly misplaced.

  “Una,” my father whispers to my mother. They are huddled together, foreheads grazing each other. “One minute I was here and then I wasn’t.”

  My mother places her hand tenderly on his. She squeezes it. “Were you afraid?”

  “That’s the thing, Una.” He utters his characteristic guffaw, a gurgling in his throat, innocent, almost childlike surprise in his eyes. “I wasn’t afraid at all. When I woke up and remembered, I wasn’t afraid.”

>   “So you see, Waldo, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” she coos.

  I hold my breath. They are talking about death. She is eighty-nine; he is ninety-two. They know soon they will both face death. My mother has been comforted by her faith in an afterlife; my father has loved life too much to surrender to the inevitable. Do not go gentle into that good night. Dylan Thomas could have written these words for him.

  “If this is what it means to die,” my father says, “it’s not bad, Una. I’m okay. I’m ready.”

  This is what I wanted when I married; this is why I ultimately left my husband. I wanted to die in the presence of someone I loved, someone who loved me, someone who had been kind to me, who had cared about me, who had supported me through good times and bad. Someone with whom I had history.

  “Yes, Waldo,” my mother responds. She keeps her eyes fixed on her husband; she soothes him; she speaks to him with great tenderness. “It won’t be bad. You have been a good husband, a good father. I could not have wanted more. God knows the good man you are. He will reward you in the next life.”

  How I envied my parents at that moment! I needed no other proof. My mother loved her husband; she had never stopped loving him. He was comforted by her enduring love for him. If he had died that day, he would not have died alone.

  My father was never afraid. Death never held him in its grip, in terror of the void. He was angry. Resentful. He wanted more time, everlasting time. But now, soothed by his wife, he remembers what he has known since he was a boy hunting in the forest, fishing in the seas. Humans too are part of the great scheme of nature, like plants, animals, and fish, to be born, to live, to die. To pass the baton to another life. “Everything in nature dies,” he says to my mother. “But I’ll live again in my children.”

  I find out later that my father had a minor stroke. It is the first of several strokes, none of which will debilitate him seriously. He will continue to clear the lawn of leaves from the mango trees; he will continue to pick up rotting oranges, limes, and sapodillas from the ground. He will sit on the bench under the entwined mango trees and whistle to the birds. They will answer him and he will whistle back. Life will go on. All will be well. Acceptance is all.

  After All These Years

  21

  I have been tough on my mother. Resentful. I cannot seem to forgive her for turning me out of the house before I was old enough to understand the workings of the world. For turning me out of the house is what she did. I was just sixteen. In 1960, in colonial Trinidad, a girl like me was still a child, sheltered by her middle-class family and shielded by nuns in her convent school who knew next to nothing about the evils lurking in the world except what they had read in the Bible. I had never kissed a boy; I had never gone on a date. When the sun descended and the sky darkened, I returned home from wherever I had gone. I was always chaperoned: in the day by parents, relatives, teachers, and neighbors, at night by my brothers and older cousins. But my father had landed a big position at Shell, and my parents were moving to the south. They sent me to live with my grandmother in the north, in Diego Martin. Three years later, I was on my way to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, on a scholarship from Marian College.

  What an opportunity! What a better chance you’ll be getting than the chances your mother had when she was your age! That was what the neighbors said, what my relatives said.

  I am eternally grateful for that scholarship from Marian College. It set me on the path to my careers as an academic and a writer, professions that have given me much satisfaction. But the singular dream that persisted from my childhood until it was shattered irrevocably late into my adulthood was to have a loving family, a husband who shared my values and hopes, happy children we raised together. I have the child, a son who more than makes up for the happiness I could have had from children I denied myself when shortly after his birth, painfully aware that my marriage was doomed, I instructed my doctor to implant an IUD in my womb which I did not remove until I entered menopause.

  A better life? Nothing could make up for my despair, my utter loneliness, at the time that should have been the happiest of my life, the time before and after the birth of my son. What can compensate me for the feeling of being set adrift in a strange and hostile land with no one to rescue me, no family in America to support me? I will skip the details of the actual birth of my son. I will go straight to the night before the morning I fully expected to take him home.

  It is 1976. I am in Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Though I have no concrete proof, I suspect my husband D— is having an affair, has been having an affair for months now. He was angry when I told him I was pregnant. We had been married just over a year. I was thirty, he was thirty-seven. He had been married before; his wife had died, leaving him with a small son. He wasn’t ready to be tied down with another child and he made me feel guilty for burdening him with the added responsibility. He wanted to have fun, he said, and rumors swirled in my college that he was having fun with one of my colleagues.

  I went into labor on August 10, in the middle of a stormy night. D— drove me to the hospital and stayed by my side until I was taken on a gurney to the delivery room the next morning when my son was born, on August 11. I see D— once later that day, but he seems restless, anxious to leave. He will come and help me pack the next night, he tells me; we can take the baby home early in the morning. The next night, August 12, a nurse’s aide brings me dinner; she clears my tray after I eat. I wait. I’m not worried. The nurse will bring my son to me soon so I can feed him. D— will be there for the feeding; in the morning we will take our baby home.

  Half an hour later I hear footsteps, two sets; they are approaching my room. A woman enters. She is not a nurse. She is dressed in civilian clothes, a pretty bright blouse under a fashionable suit jacket. She is holding a clipboard in one hand, a pencil in the other. Behind her, in the shadows, I see a doctor. He is not my doctor. He is too young to be my doctor, and he is white. My doctor is middle-aged, and he is black.

  I sit up. My heart sinks. I think the worst. “My baby! Is something wrong with my baby?”

  The doctor steps forward. He is wearing a white coat; his stethoscope dangles professionally around his neck. “Mrs. H—, we know what you have done.” His manner is that of judge pronouncing the verdict of the jury.

  My jaw drops open. “Done?”

  “No time for games, Mrs. H—. We have the proof.”

  The woman with the clipboard speaks up. Her tone is gentler, soothing, but her words unequivocal. “We have given the baby something, Mrs. H—. It will help him with the spitting up.”

  “Something?” I repeat foolishly.

  “To counteract the effects of the methadone,” the young doctor says sternly. He has other patients to see; he does not have time for niceties.

  “Methadone?” I am in a nightmare. Soon I will wake up, I tell myself. I repeat my question. The doctor does not answer me.

  The woman with the clipboard begins to write something on what I can see is some sort of official form. “Of course, you can’t take your baby with you,” she says. “You’ll have to leave him with us. We have already reported the situation. That’s why I’m here. I’m a social worker. I’m here to help you.”

  The room begins to spin, faster and faster. I am in a whirlwind, voices bouncing and swirling against each other. I hear the words heroin, needles, baby spitting up, methadone. I am a wild woman now. I strip off my gown. I do not care who sees my body, my flabby belly, my pendulous breasts. “Where? Where?” I stick out my arms; my nails scratch long ashy lines across my veins. “Where are the needle marks? Where have I injected heroin into myself?”

  The well-dressed, perfectly coiffed social worker is taken aback. She pulls her clipboard to her chest, armor to protect herself from the crazy woman I have become.

  “Where?” I slide my hands down my bare legs. I am trembling all over.

  The woman brings the clipboard closer to her chest. It is her heart she wants to protect now, the
heart I can see is bleeding for me. “It’s a mistake,” she whispers to the doctor. “I think we made a mistake here.”

  D— arrives later. I am shaking, not so much with anger as with fear. What have they done to my son? Why haven’t they brought him to me? I cannot speak. D— has to grab me roughly by my shoulders and shake me to get me to speak.

  “They have given him methadone.” I force the words through clenched muscles tightening my throat. “We have to stop them.”

  “Calm down, calm down,” D— says.

  My husband’s girlfriend is waiting for him. He is impatient. This incident—that his child could have been given methadone—is an inconvenience for him. Though I do not know this now, the day we bring our son home, he will disappear for week. So he does not need my craziness, my paranoia (he seems to believe) interrupting his plans. “Calm down. Calm down,” he repeats. I cannot calm down.

  We go to see the director of the hospital. He has heard from the social worker and the doctor, of course. He is ready for us, ready with his lies.

  —No, not at all. We haven’t given your son methadone.

  —But the doctor said—

  —He’s an intern. He misunderstood. Misspoke.

  —And the woman who was with him?

  —She apologized. It was a mistake. She went to the wrong room.

  —Then I want to take my son home now. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

  —Well, we can’t do that. Hospital rules.

  —What rules?

  —We have to get permission from the pediatrician.

  —I’m his mother. I want to take him home now.

  There is silence. I wait. The director shuffles some papers on his desk.

  —Mrs. H—. His voice is syrupy, patronizing. Mrs. H—, I know how you feel. I would feel the same way if I were in your situation, but I can assure you that we did not give your son methadone. As I said, the doctor misspoke. He is young, he didn’t understand. We will take perfect care of your son, I promise. We have to be sure that nothing is wrong with him. The spitting up, you know . . . He shuffles the papers again. He avoids my eyes.