Read Online Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez - Free Book Online Page A

I didn’t read Jane Austen on my own. We were made to in school back home. Pride and Prejudice , that’s the one we studied. I remember thinking it was the British plan to make us passive colonials. Give us their stories, tell us how admirable their people are, and we’d be lulled into forgetting our stories, forgetting our histories, forgetting how they stole our island. All we would want is to be like them.”
    “Don’t spoil Jane Austen for me, Paul,” Anna says, swinging her legs out of bed.
    “How do you think they built those mansions they lived in? The famous Darcy! How do you think he got so rich? The slave trade. That’s how.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “What I know is that it’s how England got rich.”
    She has not seen this side of him, and though it irritates her that he has poked holes in her fantasy, she cannot say she hasn’t had similar thoughts herself.
    “Well, I like Jane Austen.”
    “Watch it,” Paul says, but he is laughing now. She laughs too. Would she have laughed if Tony had criticized her in this way, warned her of the perils of admiring the old colonizers? They have taught you self-hatred, Tony once said to her. But she and Paul share their island’s history of negotiation rather than confrontation. Their compatriots may have adopted British customs, but they did not give up their own. They have passed on their stories to their young; they have maintained their rituals, their dance, their art, their music. They are the creators of the only significant musical instrument invented in the twentieth century. Their steel pan is played all over the world, outdoors to the beat of soca and calypso; indoors at stately concert halls, mesmerizing audiences with symphonies by some of the masters: Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bach.
    “I’m careful,” she says.
    “About last night …” His tone has changed. It’s softer, warmer. “I meant what I said. I called to wish you good luck. With the book,” he clarifies quickly.
    She is pleased he hasn’t forgotten. “I think I’ll stay home today,” she says.
    “They haven’t beaten you down, have they?”
    “I need to get the apartment ready for my parents,” she says. But she does feel beaten down. She had closed the book long before the telephone rang, Elizabeth Bennet’s cool defiance in the face of Darcy’s arrogance no longer boosting her confidence. She knows the story will end well: Elizabeth will see her error; Darcy will apologize; together they will ride into the sunset. This morning the happy ending is not enough to raise her spirits. She has been cornered. Paul says she must fight, but it is far too late. The die has been cast; Tanya Foster has made up her mind.
    “Good idea,” Paul says. “In the final analysis, family is what counts.”
    Family. Hers is so small she must do her best to preserve it. Grandparents on both sides dead, aunts and uncles in England, cousins she wouldn’t recognize if she met them in the street. She must make her parents welcome, do her best to ensure they will be comfortable.
    She begins with the den—a second bedroom, the real estate agent claimed when she showed her the apartment. A bedroom fit for a child, she would agree, but Tony has left her, and she is thirty-nine, unlikely to have a child even in the unlikeliest chance she would find someone to marry again. She has made the child’s room into an office of sorts, shelves against the wall piled with books and manuscripts for work. A desk more neatly organized: inbox, outbox, a ceramic jar filled with pencils and pens, an electric pencil sharpener, a cordless phone on its base, a monitor on a stand, the computer on the floor next to a printer. Opposite the desk is a folded futon where she sits when she wants to be more comfortable. She has put a pillow and a thick quilt on the futon. Some nights she has fallen asleep there, her head on the pillow, the quilt drawn up to her neck. She opens the futon now. She will sleep here