dad, girlfriend, mother

     Ever since a Hindu yoga class held in a park's gazebo awakened him to maintain good posture, he sits up straight in his chair, hands resting in his lap to hold the little glass. As I prop my feet up on the banister, he prompts me to do the same. We attend the class every Wednesday evening in our linen tunic and pants. There, he's a charming, quick-witted Southern man surrounded by middle-aged, Indian-Tiny ladies who giggle at this piece of work. His short spiked hair is almost entirely gray. Only his hazel glazed eyes signal the whiskey and the toll. His Hindu girlfriend, Cindy, aged halfway between my father and me, is sleeping inside. On Sunday afternoons, she manicures her nails, prepares my father's nasal wash or massages his feet. Cindy wakes up early on weekdays for work in Port of Spain an hour away; rarely does she make weeknight meals. "Boy, was your mother a good cook. All those meals…18 something years. Every day," my father muses. "She just said to heck with it at the end." For all the years that my mother and father were a monolithic force, it is strange to hear one talk about the other in retrospect. "Your mother," he says or "Your father," she says are titles of dissociation. Together they used to pray for me and my siblings in the mornings with their cups of 8 o’clock coffee. Now one calls me to ask if the other will be in town for Christmas. When you are raised by two, loved by two, who grow to be a union of one to the child, despite the rifts between them, how do you divide the cell of your parents to yield separate, equal halves without losing completely the architecture of home?