Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez Page A

lose the wife he has loved for more than forty years. Loves , he says now to Anna, emphasizing the tense. Loves as he had always loved her, will love her until the end of time.
    “My father was the last person in the world I expected to cheat on his wife,” Anna once said to Paula. “All that talk he gave me when I was growing up about integrity and character. And yet he couldn’t keep the vow he made to his wife before the church and the law. He expected me to empathize with him because he was unhappy, because in spite of years of happiness with my mother, he could not manage one brief spell of unhappiness. He could have turned to her; they could have worked out their problem together—whatever it was—but no, it was easier to get sympathy from a woman who had never lived with him, who had no idea what it was like to live with his flaws.
    Like a child, he laid his head on the breast of another woman instead of facing his problems.”
    “You’re too hard on your father,” Paula had responded.
    “I’ve forgiven him.”
    “It doesn’t seem that way.”
    “I just haven’t forgotten. I won’t make the same mistake my mother made.”
    “And what is that?”
    “Marry a Caribbean man.”
    “American men are no better,” Paula said.
    “At least they believe in monogamy.”
    “Serial monogamy,” Paula said. “They marry, divorce, marry again, divorce again.”
    Tony is marrying again. An affair was the reason their marriage ended in divorce. He did not deny the affair; he did not apologize. He was unhappy, he said. Unhappy as her father claimed he was unhappy. But her father apologized. He did not leave her mother. Now her father does all he can to convince his wife of his remorse, to prove to her his undying love and devotion.
    Tanya gave Tim Greene the manuscripts from Raine and B. Benton but she has not taken the others Anna acquired. By two-thirty Anna finishes the edits on one of them. It’s a story about a black surgeon in Georgia who saves the life of the wife of a prominent white official in the Jim Crow South when black doctors were not allowed to touch white women, even in an emergency. Anna is proud that she will be publishing this novel. She believes publishers should be the guardians of our culture and history. The novel about the black surgeon in the Jim Crow South is not one of those mindless books that Tanya Foster seems to think black readers yearn to read. It is a good book. It fills the missing pages of a history yet to be fully unearthed. Anna believes that if this novel is made available, there will be readers for it. If you build it, they will come. A line from a movie. It is her credo too.
    She e-mails her notes to the writer, turns off her computer, and goes to the kitchen to prepare tea for her parents. She finds cutlery, cups, saucers, and plates in the kitchen cupboard. They are clean, neatly stacked on the shelf, but she washes them, conscious as she squeezes liquid soap onto the dish cloth how she is not unlike her mother. Lydia cleans the house, but Beatrice inspects with a duster in her hand. From the basket she brought with her Anna takes out the package of Crix biscuits, the marmalade, the box of tea, the Carnation milk, and the sugar. She places them on the table. Her mother can have the tea with them but not the biscuits. She makes a place for her mother between her father and herself. She has fifteen more minutes before she leaves for the hospital. She flicks open her laptop again and logs on. There’s an e-mail from Bess Milford: You don’t mean to just give up. I hate the cover. I HATE, HATE, HATE IT. It’s insulting to me.
    She cannot deny that Bess Milford is right. The cover is insulting not only to her but to every black writer who thinks of himself or herself as a writer who is black and not merely as a black writer. Anna e-mails a response: I will do what I can.
    She closes the laptop and reaches for her jacket. Through the window she sees her parents. Her