Not for Everyday Use

by Elizabeth Nunez

  I sit down next to my mother. I can feel her body tensing up. Will I play along? Or will I be her lost American daughter who is no longer on her team? I smile at her and she relaxes. “I may not be right,” I say to the group, “but this is what I think.” I give my interpretation; I talk about metaphor, symbol, allegory. I pepper my response with historical, biblical, and literary references. I elaborate. I cite long quotes by heart. The women are impressed, even the imperious one backs down. My mother is pleased. “Why don’t you stay for the rest of the discussion?” she suggests. I stay, proud that I have been there to help her.

  We are getting along, inch by inch, day by day. I go to Sunday Mass with my parents. My mother does not have to ask me to join them. I’m dressed, ready to go, when Wally pulls up in the driveway to take us to church. I sit in the pew next to them. The church is crowded; there are people standing in the back and along the sides, but the place in the pew where my parents have sat for years is empty. The usher quietly asks strangers and newly arrived parishioners to move if by chance they have seen the empty spot and have not been forewarned. That’s Mr. and Mrs. Nunez’s place.

  I have never seen my father pray, but at Mass he knows all the prayers, all the hymns. When the priest turns to the congregation for response, my father’s voice is the loudest. He sings off-key, the words warbling out of his mouth. Children giggle, parents admonish them sternly and send my mother sympathetic smiles.

  For my father, the high point comes when the priest asks the congregation to give each other the sign of peace. My father kisses my mother quickly on the cheek, kisses me, and he is out of the pew, up and down the aisles, shaking hands, greeting the parishioners. They know him by name. How are you doing, Mr. Nunez? How are your children? My mother, ever elegant, remains standing in her place, acknowledging their good wishes with a gracious smile.

  It takes my parents almost an hour to get into the car after Mass. I watch as people crowd around them, introducing relatives, visitors, children. Wally is patient. “This is the day they wait for all week,” he tells me. “At least Dad does. Mum goes out, but Dad sticks to the house all week. He won’t go anywhere, except to take long walks in the afternoon.”

  Later, as he does every Sunday, Wally drives my parents to the home of one my sisters, either to Jacqueline’s home or Karen’s. My sisters prepare an elaborate lunch. They put out their best dishes, their best silverware, their best stemmed glasses for my parents. The food they serve is beautifully prepared, color coordinated, and delicious. This Sunday, lunch is at Jacqueline’s. My sisters and brother talk and laugh with each other, they exchange memories. When Jacqueline speaks of the distant past, I am animated; I find a space to break into their reveries. “Do you remember the times we spent in Toco?”

  Every vacation—Christmas, Easter, the August holidays—my parents took us to the countryside to spend a week or more at the rest houses in Cedros, Mayaro, Blanchisseuse, Toco. The English had built these vacation cottages on the coastal villages in Trinidad, not for us of course, but for their expatriate employees, though my father could not be denied one of the perks that had been given to the Englishman he succeeded. The English, after all, took pride in their sense of fairness, especially when it was not inconvenient for them, and I had spent some of the happiest days of my youth at the rest house in Toco.

  Karen cuts me short in the middle of my reminiscences. She remembers the great times they had on the other islands, in Tobago, St. Vincent, Grenada, Barbados. What fun they had staying at the hotels on the beach!

  Hotels? I had known only rustic rest houses in the countryside in Trinidad. But I had long ago left the island; I was in America; I had missed those days.

  “Your father believed in keeping the family together,” my mother says.

  How well I know the truth of what she says. In the box where I store my most treasured possessions there is a letter from my father. The stationery is elegant, most likely chosen by my mother. It is lime green in color, the insides of the envelope a darker green. A vine of flowers in shades of green runs along the sides of heavy expensive paper. My father thanks me in the letter for making the trip from New York to Trinidad to celebrate his fiftieth wedding anniversary. In his sweeping, handsome handwriting, stemmed letters flowing confidently below each line, he writes:

  Dear Elizabeth,

  Thank you for joining with your brothers and sisters to celebrate with us our Golden Anniversary.

  We trust you will always remain together as a closeknit family caring for each other.

  May God bless you.

  Mom & Dad

  Just as I am sure, given my mother’s exquisite taste, that she was the one who selected the stationery, I am sure too that it was she, forever hopeful, forever praying we would all return to the Catholicism of our childhood, who had my father add the words, May God bless you. She signs Mom; I recognize her handwriting. My father signs & Dad. Though my brothers and their wives have taken to calling them Mom and Dad, my sisters and I continue to address them as Mummy and Daddy, and with American television beaming daily into their bedroom, my parents too eventually began signing their holidays cards to us using the American shorthand. My siblings tell me that each of them, all eleven of us, received a similar handwritten letter. The letters are dated May 1, 1993, one week after our parents’ anniversary.

  Karen is sitting close to my mother. She will not allow my father to take all the praise for keeping the family together. She has told me more than once that our mother considered her her best friend. Now she interjects: “You too, Mummy. You kept the family together.”

  “Yes, me too,” my mother concedes.

  My father nods in agreement and then slips away to an armchair near a window. Soon he is fast asleep.

  Talk turns to a past that is familiar to my sisters and brother, a past light-years ago when I was in my twenties, thirties, and forties, living in America. I have nothing to say; no memories to add. When I leave my sister’s home I am sad, slightly depressed. How comfortable they are with each other! What history they share! They speak of people I do not know, have never met, of events I know nothing about. Their jokes fly over my head. I laugh with them, but I do not understand much of the humor in the stories they tell. Sometimes I am forced to ask them to slow down, my ears no longer tuned to the accents of my homeland. I want to make history; I want to connect the line from my childhood to my present, from Toco to this moment, but my history has been broken by my years in America.

  Early the next morning, before the sun has had a chance to rise above the horizon, I am awakened by the clanging of dishes in the kitchen. I hear voices, female voices. I tiptoe to the kitchen. My mother is there, fully dressed in slacks and a loose silk shirt. Petra is next to her. They are huddled together packing sandwiches in a tin box. She is going on a picnic with her prayer group, my mother says. I run to my room and bring out my oversized designer handbag. “Here.” I give her my brand-new Louis Vuitton bag. “Put the box in there,” I say.

  She is pleased. “I’ll look real stylish today.” And she does when she holds the bag against her tan slacks.

  I ask her where the prayer group will be having the picnic.

  “At a retreat house on Salybia Bay,” she answers.

  I gasp. Salybia Bay is on the north coast. It is dark now; it will still be dark when she and her group reach the north coast and begin the dangerous trip to Salybia Bay through winding, narrow roads that plunge down steep precipices to a windswept sea hurling against gigantic black rocks scattered along the shoreline. My mother is eighty-nine, only a couple of months away from ninety. She may think of herself as young as the women in her prayer group, but she is not as agile.

  “What if something happens to the car along the way?” I ask.

  My mother, who I know to be afraid of rough seas, afraid of the dark, brushes me away. “You have such a vivid imagination, Elizabeth.”

  And I remember that in 1949, afraid of the sea, afraid of the dark, she went on
a ship by herself across the Atlantic Ocean, no land in sight for days, because she missed her husband.

  23

  There is so much I do not know about my mother. At Sunday lunch at Jacqueline’s, I had remained silent when Karen defended my mother and refused to allow my father full credit for keeping the family together. And the truth is that when I recalled the letter my parents had sent me, thanking me for celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary with them, it was my father I credited, not my mother, as if it were not my mother’s idea too, as if she were not involved in its composition.

  The images I have cemented in my mind now seem all wrong, twisted. My mother is not as fragile as I thought, nor is she a social snob or a self-righteous religious fanatic. She is as caring of my father as he is of her. I see that now. Things that irritated me before begin to make sense seen through her eyes. I begin to notice how much she worries that my father is spending too much time alone, too much time in the house, too much time dozing off.

  Every day my mother now drags me into a conspiracy with her to get my father out of the house. She sends me to the supermarket with a list of groceries she insists she needs. “Take your father with you,” she says.

  Inside the supermarket my father stops to talk to the young men and women who stack the shelves and serve prepared food from behind the deli counter. They indulge him, as do the burly men who lug heavy cases of groceries from their trucks to the store. The manager seems to know my father, or acts as if he does, and customers in line wait patiently as he chats up the female cashiers. Suffering from dementia, my father has never lost his eye for a beautiful woman.

  The next day my mother sends me out with my father again. “Why couldn’t you have put this on the list yesterday?” I complain. My mother smiles at me coyly. The same thing happens all over again the next day and the next. My mother sends me out to buy two onions and a head of garlic, and then a pound of onions and two sticks of butter the following day. I get her a pound of potatoes on Wednesday, and another pound on Thursday. My father goes with me each time, chats with the customers and the workers, and flirts with the pretty young women, who giggle delightedly. It takes me a week but eventually I catch on; I figure out my mother’s strategy. She has divided her grocery list into the days of the week so that every day my father has an adventure, every day I have an occasion to take him somewhere.

  My mother’s methods are not mine. I am wary of secrets, of subterfuge. I tend to be direct. Why not say what you mean? But my mother’s tactics work. In the supermarket, chatting with the workers and customers, flirting with the women, my father’s spirits are raised. He is in a good mood when we return home. “I’m going to check on my neighbor down the road,” he says. And off he goes. He is no longer the old man nodding off to sleep on the couch.

  One day I tell my mother that she has been lucky to have such a long and good marriage. The minute I say this, I realize I have opened myself to tripping into a quagmire. She has not approved of my siblings’ divorces, nor of mine. Marriage remains a sacrament for her, a vow never to be broken. But this time my mother surprises me. “D— was a nice man,” she says, “but he was not right for you.”

  * * *

  I spend more time with my mother now. I begin to observe her habits more closely. A week ago I fumed silently to myself at her selfishness for keeping the TV on, tuned to her religious programs, while my father shifted restlessly on the bed. Now I wonder if I have not judged her prematurely, if I have not allowed years of built-up resentment to blind me. My father has lost most of his hearing; even if she turns up the volume, he would not be able to hear the sound. Then I notice, as if for the first time, that she sits close to the TV, so close that if she were to stretch out her hand, it would brush against the screen. I remember she used to wear glasses and for many years she needed a magnifying glass to read her prayers. Now she looks at the TV without her glasses. She does not open her prayer book.

  She is going blind! The realization hits me full force one evening. That is what is happening to her! She cannot see, she cannot read her prayer book; she has to listen to the prayers on the TV. I call my sister Jacqueline. “Cataracts,” she says. “Mummy is afraid to have them removed. She’s afraid she would lose what little sight she has left.” Jacqueline tells me that no one has been able to persuade my mother to go to the ophthalmologist, neither she, nor Karen, nor Wally.

  She hasn’t been wearing her glasses, my mother explains when I ask, because they are broken. “Then we can get you another pair,” I reply. “Okay,” she says, handing me her broken glasses. “But you go. I don’t need to go.” She shifts her eyes to the floor. As gently as I can I say, “I think you’ll need to have your eyes tested, Mummy. These are an old pair; you’ll need a new prescription.”

  We arrange to have my mother’s eyes tested by one of Judith’s friends who is an ophthalmologist. We tell him of my mother’s fears so when I take her to his office the path has already been cleared. Before we go in the examining room, the receptionist shows us a variety of frames. I still have not fully processed the extent to which my mother’s sight has been diminished so I am swept into her game of choosing frames as if all that is needed is to replace her broken ones and get a stronger prescription for her lenses. “How much does this pair cost?” my mother asks me, taking the frames the receptionist hands her. Only later do I realize why she waits for my answer before choosing a frame.

  The ophthalmologist, however, is blunt: “I can give you a prescription for a new pair of glasses, Mrs. Nunez, but you’ll be wasting your money. You won’t be able to see any better than you do now. You need to have surgery on your eyes.”

  My mother does not concede that a new prescription will be useless, but she selects the cheapest of the frames the receptionist shows us, the ones she remembers from the price tags I read for her. Even as she tries to fool me, my mother will not spend money foolishly. Memories of the days when she lived in fear that my father’s salary would not be enough to feed us are hardwired in her brain.

  Little by little I manage to persuade her to have the surgery. I tell her about friends who have had their cataracts successfully removed; I tell her about the new painless techniques that have been invented. She agrees to the surgery, but only on one eye, and allows me to take her to the hospital for the pre-op tests. By the time I leave for New York, my sisters have scheduled the appointment for the surgery. “You’ll see, Mummy,” I tell her. “You’ll be able to read your prayer book as good as ever.”

  My sisters say I have managed a miracle. “She must really trust you,” Jacqueline remarks. “We tried lots of times, but nothing we said convinced her to have the surgery.” I beam.

  My mother and I laugh too. I discover she has a sense of humor; she is not as rigid as I have allowed myself to believe. I take her to the Funeral Mass for one of the last of their remaining friends. It is the afternoon she came running to me, frantic with fear from a dream portending her death, or so I believed, and made me wake up my father from his afternoon slumber. It is the afternoon she gave my father a tuxedo to wear.

  “We must leave now,” my mother commands me. I must drive my parents to the Funeral Mass. I have taken only small trips with my father, to the grocery and back, but I reason that the church is only a few neighborhoods away and I put aside my trepidation about the Trinidad roads and take them there.

  My mother directs me through the roads to the church and we arrive safely. I am confident I will be able to find my way back, but I get lost driving them home after the Funeral Mass ends. “Turn this way,” my mother says, as I mistake one street for another; so few of them have signs. “No, turn that way,” my father counters. I twist the steering wheel from right to left and back again as they direct and redirect me. Soon I am trundling down narrow, bumpy back roads, barely skating past open ravines. My parents continue to direct me. “No, not this way!” my mother shouts. “Yes, this way,” my father insists. “You’ve forgotten the roads from the church to home,�
�� my mother chastises him. “Listen to me, Waldo!” “And you can’t see the street signs,” my father says. I brace myself for a rough ride. Back and forth they go. I recognize houses and shops I have passed minutes before. We are going in circles. They have not stopped their arguments: who has the better memory, who has the better sight. Then, mercifully, the road broadens. I am surrounded by open space, no houses in sight, patches of coarsely shorn grass, most likely cut by a farmer’s scythe. My parents, who are installed in the backseat, sit forward. “Do you know where we are?” I hear my mother whisper to my father. “In some sort of forest, I think,” my father whispers back. I see a sign: University of the West Indies. My father reads it for my mother. She doubles over with laughter. She is almost choking on her words when she says to my father, “Elizabeth wants me to go to university. I think it’s a little too late for me, don’t you think so, Waldo?”

  Someone directs us to the highway. I am nervous but I am not willing to chance the back roads again. On one side of the road, as we approach their house, my mother spots the gigantic red letters on the marquee outside the KFC. “Pull in there, Elizabeth,” she says. “I feel like having some fried chicken.”

  No plates, no napkins, no silverware, my mother sits at the table in the breakfast nook and devours the fried chicken, grease running down her arm. Amazed, but delighted, I join her. My father does not say a word. He goes to the cupboard and takes out a plate, a knife, and a fork. We laugh as he maneuvers the utensils through the slippery sinews of a chicken leg, a gentleman dressed appropriately, but comically too, in a black tuxedo.

  The following week, my mother invites me to join her at a concert in Queen’s Hall. Her women friends are going—not her prayer group; these are the members of her upper-class ladies’ club. The seats in the concert hall are not assigned. My mother and I arrive first and sit in the orchestra. Her friends arrive later and get balcony seats. The concert begins and I marvel at the talent on the stage. The steel pan orchestras are amazing; some of the players are children as young as eight years old. They play with precision and discipline, eyes glued to the conductor. Their repertoire covers classical music—Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky—and transitions to compositions by local composers. They play popular pieces too, some of the calypsos that made the road march at Carnival. I shout, “Bravo!” I clap, I yell. My mother looks around her tentatively. She casts her eyes up to the balcony. Have her fancy friends witnessed my display? I stand up. I continue to shout and yell. “Bravo!” My mother takes one last look around her and up at the balcony and decides to throw caution to the wind. She stands up too and cheers. “Bravo!” she shouts out.