In America, my mother reinvented herself, using the aliases Annie or Annalisa for her babysitting jobs. She embraced her fierceness, stepped out of her husband’s shadow, began working full-time again after twelve years, and planted a life for herself and her two girls in stubborn soil. I wondered also if this was punishment for him, one of the only ways she could castigate him for cheating on her. We left our home, our family, and our sense of security—of knowing our place in the world.
In the wake of my father’s deception, I thought of my Uncle Avinash. I wondered if my mother ever reevaluated her feelings about my grandfather’s unfaithfulness, now knowing firsthand the emotions that came with being deceived. Did she forgive Rebecca for her harshness toward Avinash now that she knew the bite of betrayal?
—Is diffrant, Krys, says my mother, when yuh make meh tink bout it like dat. Ah know it was moh complicated foh Mammy, boh she was meh muddah and so ah di hol she toh ah diffrant standahd.
We called my father often by way of phone cards, and I begged him to come and get me. Ah wish ah could, meh chile, he said. Eventually, the visas we acquired to legally enter the US expired, and we became undocumented. If we went back now we’d never be allowed to enter the States again.
My aunts and uncles also lived here illegally, but years ago when my grandmother became a resident, they filed their paperwork with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. With this in motion, their status was pending, and they were protected under an amnesty granted by Bill Clinton for undocumented immigrants residing in America who were waiting for a status shift. We had nothing, no papers to speak of, no safety net. My grandmother was willing to sponsor us, but my mother held off on filing our legal immigration paperwork; I could see uncertainty settle around us on whether or not America was a permanent move. In that crucial period, we lost precious time and wouldn’t gain legal status in the US for ten years.
WHEN WE ARRIVED at my grandparents’ American doorstep, we traded places with my grandfather, who’d been living with Rebecca for the past year. Shiva’s home, along with his farms, had been rented out. With nowhere else to go, he decided to vacation with my father, leaving room for us in the apartment.
—Dey couldn’t stay togeddah long eh, my mother says. E come long aftah she done settle een hyah, so de place was she own now. When e feel de itch toh goh back is by we house e gone een. Yuh faddah din seem toh mind.
Angry, and uncertain of how to direct it, my father yelled at my mother for leaving him behind with Shiva yet again. As overbearing as my grandfather had been with our family, my father didn’t seem to mind when he would stay at our home. What troubled him was his family not being there with him. Shiva and Dharmendra had a deep respect for one another, and my grandfather treated him like a son. What my father didn’t realize was that his temper reinforced my mother’s will, and so instead of returning home, we lingered.
We were lonely. The transplant was jolting and strenuous. We missed our father, our home, our friends, the comfort of our relaxed tongue. My mother was not yet bringing in enough money for us to survive outside my grandmother’s apartment. The entire family gathered at my grandmother’s at the end of the day, and aunts, uncles, and cousins treated everything as though it was theirs. We had nothing. Not even the room my mother paid for had any semblance of privacy. When they left, we had to clean.
I picked dishes up off the floor, side tables, kitchen counter, and chairs. People were wasteful here, leaving behind chunks of stewed meat or fish, and clumps of pigeon peas. They’d forgotten how to clean the meat off the bones and suck the marrow from within, and they didn’t teach their children to do the same. They left no bite marks on the bones the way my sister and I did, chewing until we splintered them. Tender gristle lay forlornly for the taking. Often, my cousins took mounds of food only to leave it behind and run away to play. It all ended up in the garbage. Because my mother felt as though she’d invaded everyone’s territory, she made an obligatory dinner every day from the dwindling funds we had. Her family offered us no help; neither did they care where or how dinner got placed in front of them.
Babysitting jobs were plentiful in the suburbs, but the requirement for a live-out nanny was a car, and we didn’t have that yet. We scoured the newspapers together, and whenever she had an interview, she depended on one or another sister’s generosity to get there. But that required favors, and so on the weekends, while her sisters went out gallivanting and drinking, they left their children for my mother and me to babysit. For free.
Ten years later, we gained residency in America. On traveling back to Trinidad, I sifted through dust, diaries, old schoolbooks, and paperwork in our library. Beneath it all, tied together with rubber bands, I found letters my sister and I wrote to my dad, telling him how much we missed him and how well we were doing in school. I also unearthed postcards and letters from my mom.
In the postcards, from the early days, she says, Hi Dharmendra, I miss you very much and am thinking about you. I do hope you are taking care of yourself. Please see the doctor if you are not feeling well. The kids miss you a lot. I love you, Arya.
Eventually my mother found work. Her boss, Caitlin, was a kind Polish woman with an eight-month-old girl and a five-year-old boy. She sometimes asked my mother to work on the weekends, even told her she should bring us. Caitlin rented movies for my sister and me, and left money so we could order dinner. I discovered Caitlin’s library and devoured her books while I was there. Once she realized I read the same novels she did, she loaned them to me when she was done. Being in her open, split-level house and roaming her gardens fragrant with blushing roses was the closest thing to Trinidad I could find, and it afforded me a break from the chaos at my grandmother’s.
While at work, my mother wrote letters to my father on paper with Caitlin’s letterhead embossed at the top. After one of my father’s short visits to us in 2000 she wrote this: So what’s new with you? How are you coping with my dad? Please stop the smoking and do some exercise for your stomach. Avoid drinking soda. I would like you to live a healthy long life. We all hope you will come back in April. It is very cold now but haven’t seen any snow as yet. Everything is fine here. If you need anything please call me and I am thinking about you all the time in my heart. I will always love you forever my love. Please reply.
But everything was not fine. My sister and I were not enough to keep our mother grounded, and she felt as unstable as the country she left behind. Her siblings were strangers to us, to her, and the room we stayed in became our island where we shut the door and tried to forget. Colette and I had school, made friends, inhabited a world outside of ourselves, and as much as I didn’t want to, hoping for a long time we’d return to Trinidad, we began to put down roots in American soil. I found a best friend, and a boy was interested in me, the it boy of school, the one all the girls were swooning over. But my mother was alone and lonely, and with the prospect of us staying that way indefinitely in the US, she turned to the man she had fled. Tears dredged up emotions she’d squelched, and she printed words on paper that, if reciprocated, could pull us from the place we now called home.
Several nights I awoke to use the bathroom and it was locked. I waited, and a woman emerged, a towel not large enough to conceal the rolls drooping down her back and on the insides of her legs. She giggled when she saw me and edged into the narrow corridor, her bleached dreadlocks slapping the wet skin on her neck and back. Her cellulite-ridden buttocks flapped up with the towel, and I just stood in the short corridor as she opened my uncle’s bedroom door at the back of the apartment and was enveloped by the darkness.
Many different women paraded in and out of my uncle’s bedroom, and I learned to recognize the sharp smell of alcohol prevalent on their breaths. They snuck in late at night with him after work and left with the dewdrops when light touched dark. My mother didn’t want us around his night women.
—E was disgustin, Krys, my mother says. Ah couldn’t wait toh move out and geh ah place ah meh own w
hey ah could put dung some rules but we din hah enough money yet. Yuh tink meh wahn meh chilren seein dat kinda nasty behavior? And from meh own bruddah.
Because of my uncle’s behavior but also because of my own, my mother wrote to my father saying: We started going to church every Sunday because I have to get them involved in something before it’s too late. How is my father doing? I still did not receive any letters from you. Still waiting. I bought Rahul’s car for $800, it is working good, just good for me to go to work and take the kids around. Love, Arya.
After school each day, twelve years old now, I walked through the back compound and across the street to what appeared to be a secluded block, my boyfriend’s hand in mine. He teetered on the edge of the curb as we kissed, our hands straying beneath our jackets. We became frantic, swallowing each other’s faces, often drawing heckles from the passersby.
En route home one day, my uncle recognized me tucked into this block right by the firehouse. He related this information to my mother, landmark and all. I tried to deny it but in the end told her the truth. I was a disappointment now, and I heard the whole immigrant-mother spiel about sacrifice and studying, while all I wanted to do was kiss a boy and have him feel me up.
Without my father as her reinforcement, and this added territory of boys, she turned to church. We started going to the Presbyterian church my grandmother attended every Sunday, because my mother didn’t know what else to do with me. It was a semblance of what she grew up with while going to school, a place where she smiled when reciting the prayers along with everyone else, a peaceful calm settling on her face.
She was able to drive us there and back in the car she had bought off her brother, but the windows and air didn’t work, so we were stifled wherever we went. I treated the church as I did anything else I was bored with—I showed up, talked to no one, and read a book until we had to leave.
After about a year of being gone, my grandfather returned to the US, and instead of coming back to the apartment to live, he moved in with my Auntie Pooja, about a five-minute car ride away. It was an elegant building with a doorman and vast, spotless floors. My Auntie Pooja needed my grandfather there because it was a senior citizens home. She’d swindled her way into the building with a sob story about my grandfather until he could come back and be there physically. Soon after, he realized his daughter was trying to take credit cards out in his name for her own personal use, so he ended the lease agreement and went back to Trinidad, leaving her to find another place.
I found out the house we rented was being put up for sale by the owner’s children as I eavesdropped on my grandmother’s conversation one day. Lisa, the wispy-haired old woman who owned the house, lived on the second floor above us and often sat on the front porch smoking cigarette after cigarette with my grandmother.
Sorry, Rebecca, she said to my grandmother. I didn’t want this, but I can’t take care of myself, and my children won’t take care of me.
It’s not that way in my culture, Lisa, my grandmother replied. The children are supposed to take care of their parents.
Companions, they both sat rocking, shaking their heads. My grandmother wouldn’t have to put her words to the test for years to come. She would never have guessed the children she bore, birthed, and raised in the face of violence would pledge their allegiance to their father, the man who tormented them all.
WITH HIS FARM STILL UNDER LEASE, my grandfather stayed with my father in Trinidad. And so my mother found herself writing: Recently you are so mad with me and I really don’t know what to do. Honey, words can’t express how I and the girls miss you. I told my father we are renting out the house, in this way he can remove his stuff. Tell him your niece got a doctor from India to rent. Anything else is your business. Please don’t let him push you around. I love you, Arya.
Shiva had started stockpiling things at our house, and as respectful as my father was, his things had to go. The only way my mother could think to handle this was by telling my grandfather we were renting out our house.
Over the summer, my mother and my Uncle Amrit found a run-down apartment to rent close to the water in downtown Jersey City. It was a much quieter area, a place where you could occasionally hear the birds in the trees.
—Ah din wahn allyuh chilren rung im wid e behavior, my mother tells me, boh ah had no choice. Ah couldn’t pay de bills on meh own, so we geh ah two bedroom—one foh e and one foh we. Ah tawk to im bout de night oman an dem and e geh rheal vex, boh e had toh know.
When my grandfather came back, he stayed with my Aunt Chandini and her husband. They tried to swindle money out of him, and when that didn’t work, Chandini told her husband to kick my grandfather out of their house. My grandfather stood at the curb in the cool night air, waiting for someone to come and pick him up.
—It was one o’clock eeh de morning, eh Krys, says my mother. Dat bitch was so nasty. All because e din wantah gih she e own money.
My grandmother was in the process of finding an apartment in a senior citizens complex. I didn’t know if she was given a choice, but my grandparents ended up living together again.
MY FATHER NEVER WROTE MY MOTHER BACK.
—E nevah did, my mother tells me. Wah dat tell yuh?
The only letter I ever found from him was a cream and gold Hallmark “I Love You” card. It was filled with the clichéd gush of romantic feelings. In it my father wrote, To Arya my loving wife, for all the pain and suffering you went through for the past few weeks. From, Dharmendra. Love you.
It was not dated.
My mother never received it.
IN PERSON AND ON THE PHONE, my parents fought about my grandfather needing to learn his place, that my father was not his personal driver. But my mother couldn’t stand up to her father, had never been able to, and so she allowed her father to gnaw away at what was left of their marriage. In turn, to punish her, my father refused to pick up the phone when she rang and never, not once, answered the letters she wrote to him.
We all knew my mother never asked for her father’s help the way his other children had. My father provided for her from the moment he took her as his wife. They were indebted to Shiva in no way, something my grandfather didn’t seem to comprehend, as everyone he’d ever known had owed him something at one point or another. His days of dominance had officially come to an end, but people still remembered him in all his supreme glory, especially his family, and I was sure it was hard for him to let go.
CRUSHED
WE PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY of Chandini and Matthew’s house around eight one summer night. Chandini migrated to America when she was eighteen, six years older than I was when I came. Because her husband was a successful garbageman, they could afford a house in suburban New Jersey. It had a back and front yard, even an aboveground pool. As usual, her husband yapped about landscaping this and that as though I understood what he was talking about. He didn’t walk me through his yard this time because it was too dark, but with their new installation of lights, I thought he might. We had to do things a certain way at her house—tread carefully, not eat in the living room, not touch anything. Once I grew up and saw other houses, I realized her place was small, cramped, not even in what was considered a good suburb. But compared with my grandmother’s dank apartment, it was grand and spacious.
After living in Trinidad without us for four years, my father forfeited his retirement money and finally moved to America to be with us; he’d now been living with us for some time. Chandini invited us over for dinner, yet when we arrived it was to a kitchen full of stuffed grocery bags she’d gotten for free from the local store she worked in as a clerk.
I’d never lost my accent, and when I spoke, Chandini said in her forced American way, Oh Arya, look how cute she sounds. My mother tittered. In her family, it had always been a race to see who could lose their accent the fastest, who could sound more “white.”
My mother started clearing the countertops.
Oh no Arya, keep those out, they’re for the salad and that
’s for the chicken. My mother held up a bag and said, Dis ting? before catching herself and switching to her American accent. You didn’t start dinner yet?
My mother raised her eyebrows. Chandini either ignored or didn’t notice my mother’s incredulous look, and continued on about the kitchen. Arya gyul, Chandini said, you cook so well, how do you make your fried rice? Show me nah. And with that, Chandini plopped her generous backside on the couch and filed her claws while my mother took over the kitchen. When she was out of earshot, my mother muttered, Yuh mean toh tell meh she invite we ovah foh dinner and is make ah hah toh make it foh meself? Bettah we di stay hwome.
Exasperated with my aunt’s routine of show me how to make this, or teach me how to make that, I set out to help my mother to get this night over with as quickly as possible. While Chandini kept up a constant stream of gossip about everyone in our family, my mother slaved in her kitchen. I couldn’t help but appreciate how beautiful my mother was, the ferocity of her movements, calculated yet graceful, sweat enhancing the umber color of her face.
My parents had been fighting this week, so I was surprised that my father had come along. Matthew and my father, despite what happened years ago, were now on friendly terms, and they retreated to the basement, where Matthew had set up a bar.
In the kitchen, I chopped and diced, julienned and sliced, sautéed and fried, mashed and mixed until I was a sweaty mess. Having arrived fresh from a shower, I gave Chandini the evilest eye I could muster as she sat yapping away at the table, first filing then polishing her long fake nails. My mother slammed pots and pans around the kitchen, but her frustration was lost on my aunt, who fanned herself with flaming tips of hot pink.
Secrets We Kept Page 26