I woke up with my face soaked with tears, clutching my pillow.
That morning, I wrote down a list of things that I remembered having learned from my father. I had to remind myself, at least under my breath, that I did remember still. In the back of my mind, I could almost hear his voice saying these things to me, in the very same way that he had spoken over the years: "You have memory of walking in a mist at dawn in a banana jungle that no longer exists. You have lived this long in this strange world, so far from home, because you remember."
The lifelines in my father's palms were named after Caroline and me. He remembered everything. He re-membered old men napping on tree branches, forget-ting the height of the trees and the vulnerability of their bodies. He remembered old women sitting sidesaddle on ancient donkeys, taking their last steps. He remembered young wives who got ill from sadness when their men went to the Bahamas or the Dominican Republic to cut sugarcane and were never heard from again. These women lived in houses where they slept on sugar sacks on the floor, with mourning ropes around their bellies, houses where the marital bed was never used again and where the middle pillar was sacred.
He remembered never-ending flour fogs in the country marketplace, fogs that folks compared to the inside of a crazy woman's head. He remembered calling strangers "Mother," "Sister", "Brother," because his village's Creole demanded a family title for everyone he addressed.
My father had memories of eating potato, breadfruit, and avocado peels that he was supposed to be feeding to his mother's pigs. He remembered praying for the rain to stay away even during drought season because his house had a hole in the roof right above his cot. Later he felt guilty that there was no crop, because he thought that it was his prayers that had kept away the rain.
He remembered hearing his illiterate mother reciting poetry and speaking in a tongue that sounded like Latin when she was very ill with typhoid fever. This was the time he tried to stuff red hot peppers into his mother's nose because he was convinced that if the old woman sneezed three times, she would live.
It was my father's job to look for the falling star that would signal his mother's impending death, and when he saw it crash in a flash behind the hills above his house, he screamed and howled like a hurt dog. After his mother died, he stuffed live snakes into bottles to imprison his anger. He swam in waterfalls with healing powers. He piled large rocks around his mother's house to keep the dead spirit in the ground. He played King of the Mountain on garbage heaps. He trapped fireflies in matchboxes so he would not inhale them in his sleep. He collected beads from the braids in his mother's hair and swallowed them in secret so he would always have a piece of her inside of him. And even when he was in America, he never looked at a night sky again.
"I have a riddle for you. Can you handle it?" he would ask.
"Bring it on. Try me."
"Ten thousand very large men are standing under one small umbrella. How is it that none of them gets wet?"
"It is not raining."
"Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the very last place you look?"
"Because once you find it, you look no more."
He had a favorite joke: God once called a conference of world leaders. He invited the president of France, the president of the United States, the president of Russia, Italy, Germany, and China, as well as our own president, His Excellency, the President for Life Papa Doc Duvalier. When the president of France reached the gates of Heaven, God got up from his throne to greet him. When the president of the United States reached the gates of Heaven, God got up to greet him as well. So, too, with the presidents of Russia, Italy, Germany, and China.
When it was our president's turn, His Excellency, the President for Life Papa Doc Duvalier, God did not get up from his throne to greet him. All the angels were stunned and puzzled. They did not understand God's very rude behavior. So they elected a representative to go up to God and question Him.
"God," said the representative, "you have been so cordial to all the other presidents. You have gotten up from your throne to greet them at the gates of Heaven as soon as they have entered. Why do you not get up for Papa Doc Duvalier? Is it because he is a black president? You have always told us to overlook the color of men. Why have you chosen to treat the black president, Papa Doc Duvalier, in this fashion?"
God looked at the representative angel as though He was about to admit something that He did not want to.
"Look," he said. "I am not getting up for Papa Doc Duvalier because I am afraid that if I get up, he will take my throne and will never give it back."
These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.
Caroline's wedding was only a month away. She was very matter-of-fact about it, but slowly we all began to prepare. She had bought a short white dress at a Good-will thrift shop and paid twelve dollars to dry-clean it. Ma, too, had a special dress: a pink lace, ankle-sweeping evening gown that she was going to wear at high noon to a civil ceremony. I decided to wear a green suit, for hope, like the handkerchief that wrapped Ma's marriage proposal letter from Papa's family.
Ma would have liked to have sewn Caroline's wed-ding dress from ten different patterns in a bridal magazine, taking the sleeves from one dress, the collar from another, and the skirt from another. Though in her heart she did not want to attend, in spite of everything, she was planning to act like this was a real wedding.
"The daughter resents a mother forever who keeps her from her love," Ma said as we dressed to go to Eric's house for dinner. "She is my child. You don't cut off your own finger because it smells bad."
Still, she was not going to cook a wedding-night dinner. She was not even going to buy Caroline a special sleeping gown for her "first" sexual act with her husband.
"I want to give you a wedding shower," I said to Caroline in the cab on the way to Eric's house.
There was no sense in trying to keep it a secret from her.
"I don't really like showers," Caroline said, "but I'll let you give me one because there are certain things that I need."
She handed me her address book, filled mostly with the names of people at Jackie Robinson Intermediate School where we both taught English as a Second Language to Haitian students.
Eric and Caroline had met at the school, where he was a janitor. They had been friends for at least a year before he asked her out. Caroline couldn't believe that he wanted to go out with her. They dated for eighteen months before he asked her to marry him.
"A shower is like begging," Ma said, staring out of the car window at the storefronts along Flatbush Avenue. "It is even more like begging if your sister gives one for you."
"The maid of honor is the one to do it," I said. "I am the maid of honor, Ma. Remember?"
"Of course I remember," she said. "I am the mother, but that gives me claim to nothing."
"It will be fun," I tried to assure her. "We'll have it at the house."
"Is there something that's like a shower in Haiti?" Caroline asked Ma.
"In Haiti we are poor," Ma said, "but we do not beg."
"It's nice to see you, Mrs. Azile," Eric said when he came to the door.
Eric had eyes like Haitian lizards, bright copper with a tint of jade. He was just a little taller than Caroline, his rich mahogany skin slightly darker than hers.
Under my mother's glare, he gave Caroline a timid peck on the cheek, then wrapped his arms around me and gave me a bear hug.
"How have you been?" Ma asked him with her best, extreme English pronunciation.
"I can't complain," he said.
Ma moved over to the living room couch and sat down in front of the television screen. There was a nature program playing without sound. Mute images of animals swallowing each other whole flickered across the screen.
"So, you are a citizen of America now?" Eric said to me. "Now you can just get on a plane anytime y
ou feel like it and go anywhere in the world. Nations go to war over women like you. You're an American."
His speech was extremely slow on account of a learning disability. He was not quite retarded, but not like everybody else either.
Ma looked around the room at some carnival posters on Eric's living room wall. She pushed her head forward to get a better look at a woman in a glittering bikini with a crown of feathers on her head. Her eyes narrowed as they rested on a small picture of Caroline, propped in a silver frame on top of the television set.
Eric and Caroline disappeared in the kitchen, leaving me alone with Ma.
"I won't eat if it's bad," she said.
"You know Eric's a great cook," I said.
"Men cooking?" she said. "There is always something wrong with what he makes, here or at our house."
"Well, pretend to enjoy it, will you?"
She walked around the living room, picking up the small wooden sculptures that Eric had in many corners of the room, mostly brown Madonnas with caramel babies wrapped in their arms.
Eric served us chicken in a thick dark sauce. I thrust my fork through layers of gravy. Ma pushed the food around her plate but ate very little.
After dinner, Eric and Caroline did the dishes in the kitchen while Ma and I sat in front of the television.
"Did you have a nice time?" I asked her.
"Nice or not nice, I came," she said.
"That's right, Ma. It counts a lot that you came, but it would have helped if you had eaten more."
"I was not very hungry," she said.
"That means you can't fix anything to eat when you get home," I said. "Nothing. You can't fix anything. Not even bone soup."
"A woman my age in her own home following orders."
Eric had failed miserably at the game of Wooing Haitian Mother-in-Law. Had he known—or rather had Caroline advised him well—he would have hired a Haitian cook to make Ma some Haitian food that would taste (God forbid!) even better than her own.
"We know people by their stories," Ma said to Caroline in the cab on the way home that night. "Gossip goes very far. Grace heard women gossip in the Mass behind us the other day, and you hear what they say about Haitian women who forget themselves when they come here. Value yourself."
"Yes, Ma," Caroline said, for once not putting up a fight.
I knew she wanted to stay and spend the night with Eric but she was sparing Ma.
"I can t accuse you of anything," Ma said. "You never call someone a thief unless you catch them stealing."
"I hear you, Ma," Caroline said, as though her mind were a thousand miles away.
When we got home, she waited for Ma to fall asleep, then called a car service and went back to Eric's. When I got up the next morning, Ma was standing over my bed.
"Did your sister leave for school early again?" she asked.
"Yes, Ma," I said. "Caroline is just like you. She sleeps a hair thread away from waking, and she rises with the roosters."
I mailed out the invitations for Caroline's wedding shower. We kept the list down to a bare minimum, just a few friends and Mrs. Ruiz. We invited none of Ma's friends from Saint Agnes because she told me that she would be ashamed to have them ask her the name of her daughter's fiancé and have her tongue trip, being unable to pronounce it.
"What's so hard about Eric Abrahams?" I asked her. "It's practically a Haitian name."
"But it isn't a Haitian name," she said. "The way I say it is not the way his parents intended for it to be said. I say it Haitian. It is not Haitian."
"People here pronounce our names wrong all the time."
"That is why I know the way I say his name is not how it is meant to be said."
"You better learn his name. Soon it will be your daughter's."
"That will never be my daughter's name," she said, "because it was not the way I intended her name to be said."
In the corner behind her bed, Caroline's boxes were getting full.
"Do you think Ma knows where I am those nights when I'm not here?" she asked.
"If she caught you going out the door, what could she do? It would be like an ant trying to stop a flood."
"It's not like I have no intention of getting married," she said.
"Maybe she understands."
That night, I dreamed of my father again. I was standing on top of a cliff, and he was leaning out of a helicopter trying to grab my hand. At times, the helicopter flew so low that it nearly knocked me off the cliff. My father began to climb down a plastic ladder hanging from the bottom of the helicopter. He was dangling precariously and I was terrified.
I couldn't see his face, but I was sure he was coming to rescue me from the top of that cliff. He was shouting loudly, calling out my name. He called me Gracina, my full Haitian name, not Grace, which is what I'm called here.
It was the first time in any of my dreams that my father had a voice. The same scratchy voice that he had when he was alive. I stretched my hands over my head to make it easier for him to reach me. Our fingers came closer with each swing of the helicopter. His fingertips nearly touched mine as I woke up.
When I was a little girl, there was a time that Caro-line and I were sleeping in the same bed with our parents because we had eaten beans for dinner and then slept on our backs, a combination that gives bad dreams. Even though she was in our parents' bed, Caroline woke up in the middle of the night, terrified. As she sobbed, Papa rocked her in the dark, trying to con-sole her. His face was the first one she saw when Ma turned on the light. Looking straight at Papa with dazed eyes, Caroline asked him, "Who are you?"
He said, "It's Papy."
"Papy who?" she asked.
"Your papy," he said.
"I don't have a papy," she said.
Then she jumped into Papa's arms and went right back to sleep.
My mother and father stayed up trying to figure out what made her say those things.
"Maybe she dreamt that you were gone and that she was sleeping with her husband, who was her only com-fort," Ma said to Papa.
"So young, she would dream this?" asked Papa.
"In dreams we travel the years," Ma had said.
Papa eventually went back to sleep, but Ma stayed up all night thinking.
The next day she went all the way to New Jersey to get Caroline fresh bones for a soup.
"So young she would dream this," Papa kept saying as he watched Caroline drink the soup. "So young. Just look at her, our child of the promised land, our New York child, the child who has never known Haiti."
I, on the other hand, was the first child, the one they called their "misery baby," the offspring of my parents' lean years. I was born to them at a time when they were living in a shantytown in Port-au-Prince and had nothing.
When I was a baby, my mother worried that I would die from colic and hunger. My father pulled heavy carts for pennies. My mother sold jugs of water from the public fountain, charcoal, and grilled peanuts to get us something to eat.
When I was born, they felt a sense of helplessness. What if the children kept coming like the millions of flies constantly buzzing around them? What would they do then? Papa would need to pull more carts. Ma would need to sell more water, more charcoal, more peanuts. They had to try to find a way to leave Haiti.
Papa got a visa by taking vows in a false marriage with a widow who was leaving Haiti to come to the United States. He gave her some money and she took our last name. A few years later, my father divorced the woman and sent for my mother and me. While my father was alive, this was something that Caroline and I were never supposed to know.
We decorated the living room for Caroline's shower. Pink streamers and balloons draped down from the ceiling with the words Happy Shower emblazoned on them.
Ma made some patties from ground beef and codfish. She called one of her friends from Saint Agnes to bake the shower cake cheap. We didn't tell her friend what the cake was for. Ma wrote Caroline's name and the date on it after it had been delivered. She
scrubbed the whole house, just in case one of the strangers want-ed to use our bathroom. There wasn't a trace of dirt left on the wallpaper, the tiles, even the bathroom cabinets. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then whenever we had company my mother became a goddess.
Aside from Ma and me, there were only a few other people at the shower: four women from the junior high school where we taught and Mrs. Ruiz.
Ma acted like a waitress and served everyone as Caroline took center stage sitting on the loveseat that we designated the "shower chair." She was wearing one of her minidresses, a navy blue with a wide butterfly collar. We laid the presents in front of her to open, after she had guessed what was inside.
"Next a baby shower!" shouted Mrs. Ruiz in her heavy Spanish accent.
"Let's take one thing at a time," I said.
"Never too soon to start planning," Mrs. Ruiz said. "I promise to deliver the little one myself. Caroline, tell me now, what would you like, a girl or a boy?"
"Let's get through one shower first," Caroline said.
I followed Ma to the kitchen as she picked up yet another empty tray.
"Why don't you sit down for a while and let me serve?" I asked Ma as she put another batch of patties in the oven. She looked like she was going to cry.
When it was time to open the presents, Ma stayed in the kitchen while we all sat in a circle watching Caroline open her gifts.
She got a juicer, a portable step exerciser, and some other household appliances from the school-teachers. I gave her a traveling bag to take on her honeymoon.
Ma peeked through the doorway as we cooed over the appliances, suggesting romantic uses for them: breakfasts in bed, candlelight dinners, and the like. Ma pulled her head back quickly and went into the kitchen.
She was in the living room to serve the cake when the time came for it. While we ate, she gathered all of the boxes and the torn wrapping paper and took them to the trash bin outside.
She was at the door telling our guests good-bye as they left.
Krik? Krak! Page 11
