Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez Page B

mother’s tests must have finished earlier than expected, as they have decided not to wait for her to accompany them back to the apartment. They are walking arm in arm, close to each other. Her mother’s head is resting on her father’s shoulder. Anna cannot recall ever having seen them display such intimacy in public before. They are private people, people who subscribe to the conviction that character is built on a person’s ability to control their private thoughts, their private feelings. They believe excessive displays of emotions are character flaws. Nobody likes you to bleed all over them, Anna’s mother once said to her. She was only eight years old. Keep your skeletons in the closet . Wash your dirty linen in private . So Beatrice Sinclair did not tell her husband that tumors were growing in her breast and under her arm, and even when they bled on her husband’s vest that she wore to bed, she kept her silence—though by then she knew he knew. Her husband too would wait until she gave him permission before admitting what he knew.
    Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.
    Vulgar was the word her mother used to express her disapproval of couples who embrace in public. Now there she is, leaning heavily against her husband, embracing him in the open where everyone can see.
    Is it age that has softened them? Fear that there may not be much more time left for them, time for proprieties now seeming foolish, inconsequential, given the brevity of life? Days and hours count for them now; they cannot waste them.
    A sudden wind sweeps through the trees. The leaves shudder and turn on their backs; some flutter to the ground. Fall will not be far away. Her father pulls her mother closer to him. Perhaps she should not have tried so hard to persuade her mother to come to this strange, cold land, Anna finds herself thinking. Perhaps in spite of the inadequate hospitals on the island, the services that can be erratic at best, it would have been better for her mother to have surgery there. Perhaps on the island with her mind more at ease, comfortable in familiar surroundings, her mother would have a better chance for recovery.
    Anna grabs her jacket and a coat she has brought for her mother. It was warmer when they left early that morning, and her mother had refused to put on the coat. “I’ll look like an old lady in that thing,” she said.
    Had she looked like an old lady in that thing when she wore it two seasons ago? Anna wonders. Is that why Tony felt justified in walking out on her? “You’ve changed,” he had said. “You used to be so …” He did not need to finish the sentence. She used to be so stylish. She used to laugh. But it’s hard to be stylish or to laugh when in the third year of your marriage your husband loses his job, when your income spirals down and you can no longer keep up with the payments for the expensive condo your husband bought, or the Benz he liked to drive. She had to work harder, to earn her way up the corporate ladder. And didn’t she win the prize with her position at Equiano? She pooh-pooh’d Paula when she waved the flag of a vice presidency before her, yet it was exhilarating for a brief second to entertain the possibility. But Tony left her for someone younger, someone prettier, and in the end, he blamed her.
    She runs out to meet her parents, the coat bundled in her arms. Her mother raises her head when she sees her and slips her arm out of the crook of her husband’s elbow.
    Her father quickens his pace. “We didn’t want to disturb you,” he says as he reaches her. “You needn’t have come. It’s short walk.”
    Her mother makes burring sounds with her lips. “My God, it’s freezing,” she says.
    It is not freezing. The weather has turned, but for the beginning of fall it is still a relatively warm day. Anna wraps the coat around her mother’s shoulders and buttons it at the top.
    Her mother