Lying Read Free

her. I hate to say it, it’s so politically incorrect, but I think if he’d been brutish, my father, she may have learned to love him.
    “Lobster,” she went around saying. “Have you ever had lobster? Dipped in butter?”
    She said it while staring up at my father, daring him to leap into the ring with her, but he wouldn’t. He had fair skin, freckled everywhere, and he spent a lot of time in the hotel, where the air conditioners shuddered and the sun came through the slats in bright chinks.
    The morning of the feast I woke early. I often did. I liked the sugar hills best at dawn. This particular morning, though, I stopped by my parents’ hotel room door. There were no sounds coming from the room, so I don’t know why I was drawn. I never went into their bedroom at home without permission. Perhaps, here, it was the quality of the silence, silence as sharp as a shout. Their room was connected to mine, and so they hadn’t locked up. I turned the handle.
    It was early, maybe 6:00 A.M . They were lying on their separate sides of the bed. My mother was curled on her side, my father on his back in boxer shorts. What was it that gave this moment its particular horror for me? They were two people in bed, bored in bed, hardly a tragedy, nothing like Northern Ireland, or Panama. But I froze. I saw the spongy pouf of my father’s stomach, my mother’s arms where theblue veins had an ethereal glow. The room was still dawn-dark, and bottles of gin stood sweating in the cooler. The room, despite her perfumes, had a sour smell, and the air-conditioning unit banged above them. The heavy hotel curtains moved in the false breeze. Slowly, my mother turned, opened her eyes. She seemed to be entirely awake, as though she’d been waiting for me. She seemed monstrous. She did not say a word. Just saw me standing there and stared, and stared, as if to say, “So now you see,” and I, well, I stepped back.
    •  •  •
    We didn’t have our lobster. It required bibs and tongs, scraping green gunk from dark places, and my mother, it turned out, couldn’t lower herself to partake. I could tell she wanted to, though, the same way I could tell she secretly longed to walk with me in the woods, to take in soil, to sleep the heavy, sweaty sleep of the rude and the relaxed. Instead she watched from the polite sidelines as men and women at other tables cracked open the casing and speared the white meat, holding it up like a tiny trophy before popping it in their mouths.
    No, in the end, my mother couldn’t allow herself that lobster. We ate chicken instead. There was dancing and colored lights in all the trees, and the patio stones were freshly washed. And maybe because it was the New Year, my brain gave me not only jasmine that night but many other wonderful nameless odors, so strong I felt sick in a sweet way.There was liquor galore. My mother had a thirst, she drank and drank. The pianist played many lovely songs, and she, elegant, waltzed from table to table, making comments. “His pianissimo’s a little off,” she said a little too loudly.
    “He doesn’t have much Mozart in him,” she announced at the end of an aria.
    “Anita, be quiet,” my father hissed, a chicken bone in his mouth.
    I, for my part, was mortified, because she was such a big woman with a big voice, and everyone on the patio could hear her.
    Including the poor pianist.
    “Play ‘Gay Tarantella,’ ” she shouted out.
    He did and when it was over she sighed and said, “Such heavy hands.”
    A few people tittered.
    “Music,” my mother announced to the patio, “is a delicate art form. It should breathe.”
    “Anita, we’re going,” my father said, spitting out his chicken bone.
    Everyone was listening.
    “Do you play, ma’am?” the pianist said, glaring at her. “Perhaps you could do a better job?”
    “Do I play?” she said, laughing. “What a sweet question. You are a sweet,” she said to the musician, who, by the by, was black. “You are