Free Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez

Its brittle surface cracked and Anna screamed. She was inconsolable for days. “Crying excessively is a character flaw,” her mother said.
    In her parents’ social circles, any weakness is a character flaw. Failure is a character flaw. Sickness is not to be discussed; death is not to be discussed. Sickness and death are the ultimate evidence of weakness and failure.
    The problem with the lower classes, her parents’ friends say, is their lack of control over their emotions, over their bodies. When their bodies fail, they cry out in pain. When family and friends die, they wail, they scream. They bleed all over each other.
    It was a source of pride for one of her mother’s friends that she did not shed a tear at her husband’s funeral. How they praised her courage! How they said doctor in that peculiar way that everyone understood did not mean doctor in the usual sense of the physician who takes care of the body. “She’s seeing a doctor ,” they said, when months later no one could persuade the widow to go beyond the gates of her home.
    Self-control is the holy grail of the upper middle class. To lose control over one’s self is to be humiliated.
    Anna thinks it is the prospect of humiliation that makes her mother speak so harshly to Lydia. In the still darkness of her bathroom, the specter of a future when her limbs and muscles could fail her must shimmer brightly before her. Fear—and perhaps resentment too—makes her raise her voice, issue orders to Lydia. Boss her around, her father says. Always in the morning Lydia is bright-eyed. Always in the morning her mother finds blood on her vest. If the Virgin Mary does not answer her prayers, the time will come when she will need Lydia, when weakened by illness she will no longer have the strength to boss Lydia around.
    Pride matters. Privacy matters. Her mother will not give Lydia the merest inkling of her fears. Her mother will make a silent pact with her husband: neither will speak of the tumor on her breast until she has given permission. Her husband will not expose her weakness, the failure of her body, even to his wife herself.
    The discovery that she is not much different from her parents disturbs Anna. She has lied to Singh; she has once again dissembled. She will not admit to him that she suspects—no, she is convinced—a horrible disease is ravaging her mother’s body. She will not admit she fears that the seed for the same disease may be lying dormant in her breasts, biding its time.
    In America she is freed from these strictures of her social class so rigidly enforced when she is home. In America, she can bleed all over someone, she can cry, she can scream, and no one will say to her, “Don’t. It’s a character flaw.”
    But with this freedom comes another kind of confinement. For in America she is black, and in America the ways of black people have been defined, set in stone.
    And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the buttends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
    “Anna’s not really a true West Indian,” her colleagues at work explain.
    Is a true West Indian the kind of person one sees on sitcoms on television, a Bert Williams with a modern-day gloss? Is a true West Indian woman one who plasters her face with makeup, layering her cheeks with rouge, her lips with bright red lipstick? Does she wear bright colors and shiny gold jewelry? Is she a dancehall girl?
    Is a true West Indian man one who dangles gold bracelets around his wrists and thick gold chains around his neck?
    Is a true West Indian one who listens exclusively to reggae, calypso, and steel pan music, one who finds no enjoyment in European classical music, who, indeed, derides it?
    Does a true West Indian speak in dialect? Does he lose his th ’s when he speaks? Does he says dis and dat, not this and that?
    Does a true West Indian own his own home, but crowds six families into the