I thought about that. It was kinda true that I thought of Chantal as a little Manmi. We had never played together like Jean-Claude and I did when I was little. She was always with Manmi and Granmè learning how to cook, clean and sew.
“Do you mind doing all that stuff—the cooking and cleaning all the time?” I asked, thinking about all of Jerome’s questions from the first time he had come over. Jean-Claude and I don’t know how to cook anything. Neither does Papi.
Chantal shrugged. “I used to think it was unfair but whenever I said anything Manmi would start talking about American ideas going to my head. It’s easier to just do it than fight about it all the time. All Manmi and Papi expect of me is to go to college and become a nurse and marry a good Haitian man.”
I didn’t see anything wrong with that but I didn’t say anything. Chantal kicked a pebble along as we kept walking. I remembered that Samona once told the class that she wanted to be an astronaut and Mrs. Whitmore couldn’t stop herself from laughing. Samona had been so mad, she’d gone home at lunch and brought her mother back to tell Mrs. Whitmore off. I had always thought that Chantal wanted to be a nurse too though I don’t think I ever heard her say so. Maybe Chantal was right. Maybe we don’t listen to her.
“Do you want to be an astronaut or something?” I was ready to listen.
Chantal laughed. “No. I don’t want to be an astronaut. And I don’t want to be a nurse either. Being around all those sick people would make me just as sick. I’m not even sure I want to get married—ever!”
“Well, what do you want to be?”
Chantal searched my face again. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah.” Of course I wanted to know.
“You remember anything about Haiti? All the summers we spent in Bonville?”
Bonville was where Manmi grew up. It’s hard for me to remember much else. Haiti seems so far away most of the time. When Manmi and Papi tell stories about growing up there, it’s hard for me to picture the places they talk about or the mountains they describe.
“A little,” I said, trying harder to remember. “I remember Granmè killing chickens in the yard. And I remember Carnival—’cause we all dressed up in costumes and you had a long wig on.”
“It was so beautiful.” Chantal smiled. “Everything. You remember the markets? Granmè used to wake us up really early on Tuesdays to buy fish. Don’t you remember the time we bought those live crabs and they got out of the box and you were screaming? You remember the Bouki and Ti Malice stories that Monsieur Lulu used to tell us in the dark?”
I could remember pieces of everything Chantal was saying, especially the storytelling. “I remember the story you told me about the lougawou that eats kids and I was so scared I wouldn’t go outside at night for a whole week.”
“Everything is such a mess now. You should hear the things Marie and Rochelle tell me. School is hardly ever open. I know that there were probably problems when we were there too but we were too young to know about them.” Chantal sighed and stopped walking. “I want to help Haiti. Maybe go into government and work for the United Nations. I don’t know—Jerome thinks I can do it. Haiti even had a woman president for a little while—”
“You want to be president of Haiti?” I said. My sister? President of a whole country?
“No.” Chantal shook her head. “But I could if I wanted to be.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was still in shock. Chantal had big dreams. It was hard to suddenly start thinking about her in a different way. She was looking at me like she wanted my permission or something but I didn’t know what to say.
“Forget it.” Chantal turned around and started walking the other way. “I’ll see you later, Seth.”
I watched her walk away before turning back toward Samona’s house. I needed to talk to Jean-Claude about all of this. But right now I had to concentrate on Samona. I had to tell her off so she wouldn’t think she’d actually scared me with her story about the wake. And if you can manage to put Samona aside and all, her house is fun to go to. There’s always something different going on. The last time I had to go over there, Samona’s brother Nigel had bought one of those kiddie pools and had everybody in it crushing grapes with their bare feet. He was trying to make the very first bottle of Gemini Wine. Nigel wants to be an inventor.
Samona’s house sticks out from every other one on the block. It doesn’t have grass, bushes or trees in front of it. Mrs. Gemini turned every inch of ground into a big vegetable and herb garden that goes all around the house. So when you’re walking up the steps, instead of grass and flowers you can see corn, carrots, eggplants, rosemary, sage and other stuff growing out of the ground. Samona told me her mom has a big thing about organic food, which means food that’s all natural and doesn’t have pesticides or preservatives in it.
I didn’t even bother knocking on the front door because nobody ever answers it. One time I stood out there for half an hour knocking and ringing before Leticia shouted out the window for me to stop making a racket and go through the basement door in the back of the house. I went straight there today and found Mrs. Gemini in the basement cutting pieces of cloth at her worktable.
“Young King,” Mrs. Gemini said, looking over her glasses at me. “Long time no see.”
Mrs. Gemini is very, very tall, almost as tall as Papi. She has a face shaped like a triangle and eyebrows that look like bird’s wings.
“Hi, Mrs. Gemini,” I said, putting the bag of food on the table beside her. Mrs. Gemini calls me Young King because she says I always look like I have the burden of a kingdom on my shoulders.
She shook her head, and about a million tiny braids fell out from whatever was holding them together at the top of her head. They looked like tiny snakes. “You got a number for me to play?”
“Mrs. Gemini,” I said, shaking my head too, “you know what the chances of you winning the lottery are?”
“Chances, shmances. I was born lucky, Young King. If I just focus my entire spiritual and mental being toward it—it will happen.”
“You say that every week, Mrs. Gemini, and it still hasn’t worked.” I smiled at her. “What kind of a star did you say you were born under?”
She smiled and rubbed my head. “I need a kid like you to keep my feet planted in the earth. And how many times do I have to ask you to call me Binta, Young King? How go the affairs of statehood?”
I sat down in a chair next to Mrs. Gemini. No matter how much she asks me, I can’t bring myself to call her Binta. It just doesn’t seem proper. “Huh? You mean the funeral? Manmi sent over some of the leftover food for you. She said to thank you for the wreath.”
“Good. Now I won’t have to scavenge the garden for lunch.” Mrs. Gemini went back to cutting the black and red striped cloth on the table. “Is everything okay at your place? Your grandmother feeling better?”
“I guess so. She got up to vacuum the house at six o’clock this morning. Woke everybody up,” I said, trying to sound annoyed. Truth was, I was glad to hear the vacuum. That meant everything was back to normal.
“Good. Tell your manmi that I’ll drive her to work Monday morning so we can do some woman-talk.”
I watched Mrs. Gemini do her work for a minute, then realized that she was cutting out numbers and arranging them in different combinations. She was obsessed. I looked behind her to see if her computer was on. “No poetry today?”
Mrs. Gemini sighed, and her braids shook a little. “Writer’s block, Young King. Woke up with it. Looks like I’m going to have to call up Intruder for an assignment. I think they want me to do something religious next. Nation of Islam or something. Some ex-minister with a thing for loose women. Just as long as I don’t have to impersonate a nun.”
I laughed. The last thing Mrs. Gemini looked like was a nun. She does undercover assignments for the magazine Intruder to make extra money. Mrs. Gemini says you couldn’t buy a whistle with the kind of money poets make. She’s famous, though. She’s always doing readings at th
e library and at colleges. One time PBS did a special on poets during the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement and they did a whole section on Mrs. Gemini.
“Well, Young King, I know you didn’t come here to watch me cut numbers. Go on upstairs and make sure my children are keeping their activities within the guidelines of the living,” Mrs. Gemini said, wiggling her eyebrows up and down. “I think Leticia has Samona taking calls from the psychic hot line.”
“I really came to deliver some food,” I said, starting up the stairs to the kitchen. I didn’t want Mrs. Gemini thinking I came here just to see Samona.
There was nobody in the kitchen, but I could see why Mrs. Gemini was hiding out in the basement. Leticia was singing at the top of the lungs from somewhere in the house.
“La, la, la, la, la, lahhhhh!”
I put my hands over my ears and started to go into the family room, when I noticed a piece of paper pinned to the refrigerator door. It was Samona’s application for the beauty contest, all filled out in red ink.
The Little Miss Dorchester contest is a junior beauty pageant held every year in our town. Since it’s based mostly on looks, Samona was gonna turn some heads all the way around. Each year a bunch of stupid girls sign up to be in it, hoping to win the seventy-five-dollar check and the trophy and get their picture in the paper. I still didn’t believe she would actually go through with it. Knowing her, she would probably forget to turn in the application on time.
Nigel, Anthony and Samona were in the family room, all of them talking at the same time. Samona was on the red phone which Leticia had installed for the hot line. Nigel and Anthony were sitting on the floor in front of the couch with what looked like all twenty-seven volumes of the Encyclopedia Americana around them.
“I said, a tall dark stranger is coming into your life!” Samona shouted into the phone, rolling her eyes at me. She had a stack of cards in front of her with things Leticia had told her to say.
I went over to Nigel and Anthony and sat down on the couch behind them. They were wearing the same football jerseys and sweatpants. They looked more like twins than brothers, except that Anthony had a scar on the right side of his face from a fight he got into a long time ago and Nigel was starting to grow a mustache. Nigel and Anthony are as different as you can get, though. Nigel likes to think. He’s studying to be an engineer at Boston College and he spends all his time at his computer. But Anthony used to be a hood right after they first moved to Boston. He was in a gang and carried a gun and used to get into fights—that’s where he got the scar. But all that changed after Anthony got sent to a home for juvenile delinquents for a few weeks. Last year he finished off his high school diploma and then began taking art classes at night. Anthony wants to be an architect. Jean-Claude said that the juvenile hall had helped to make Anthony take things more seriously.
“When? Sometime soon!” Samona shouted into the phone.
“I’m telling you, Tone, all the good things have already been invented. The airplane, the telephone, the whoopee cushion. Hi, Seth,” Nigel said, throwing down Volume 7 of the encyclopedia.
“I don’t know what he’ll look like exactly, lady! Isn’t tall dark and handsome enough for you?”
Leticia sang, “La, la, la, la, lahhh!”
“What are you guys looking for?” I asked, unstopping my ears. “What’s Leticia doing?”
“Opera singing lesson,” Anthony groaned, flopping down on his back. “She saw Leontyne Price on TV and now she thinks opera’s going to be her life.”
“Maybe we should watch TV. That’s where Letty gets all her ideas,” Nigel suggested. “She’s made money off the hot line.”
“Fat? Lady, I promise you he wont he fat! He will he the one you have been waiting for.”
“What about the wine?” I asked.
“Now that was a good idea,” Nigel said, rubbing his chin. “But a good wine takes years to develop its flavor.”
“Huh?”
“We gotta store the wine in the basement for fifty years,” Anthony said. “It don’t taste like nothing but grape juice right now. But, man, our kids will make a fortune off of it.”
“La, la, la, la, lahhhh!”
“That’s it, lady! Your time is up!” Samona hung up the phone and unplugged it from the wall. “And that’s it for me too. This hot line’s out of business.”
“We’re searching for something with great creative potential,” Nigel said, picking up another volume of the encyclopedia. “Something that will bear our name forever. Do you realize man has yet to land on Pluto?”
From the corner of my eye I could see Samona sneaking out of the family room.
“Something all natural—maybe we could use Ma’s vegetables. I got it! A vegetable love potion.” Nigel’s eyes lit up.
“What? Man, that’s stupid.” Anthony shook his head. “This is all Ma’s fault. Whenever she has writer’s block, our creative juices get blocked too. It’s a curse.”
I followed Samona into the kitchen before she could disappear. “Wait a minute, Samona Gemini, I’ve got something to say to you!”
Samona had the nerve to look surprised. “I know you’re not taking that tone of voice with me in my house.”
“You lied to me and Enrie about the wake,” I said, wagging a finger in her face. “I didn’t believe you for a minute, but you scared Enrie.”
Samona went to the refrigerator and pulled out a pitcher of some brown-colored stuff. “I didn’t lie. Anthony did tell me that was what a wake was. He lied to me.”
“Samona, you just can’t go around lying to people,” I said, very seriously. “It can get you in a lot of trouble—”
“Stop being such a stick-in-the-mud, Seth. I bet I made the wake a whole lot more fun for you and Enrie,” Samona said. “Want some tannia juice?”
“What is it?” I asked suspiciously. “All that stuff about your aunt Delia too—what if I told her you were telling stories about her having a wake?”
“Aunt Delia wouldn’t care.” Samona poured out two glasses of juice. “It’s root juice.”
“No thank you.” I pushed the glass away. “This isn’t a social call, Samona. I came to set you straight. You can’t just go around making up stories.”
“Why not?” Samona asked, seriously.
“You’ll get a terrible reputation. That’s why I don’t like to hang around you—”
“Okay,” Nigel said, running into the kitchen with Anthony right behind him. “Put some pots on the stove, Samona, we’re gonna cook up a love potion. And keep a lookout for Ma. She’ll kill us if she sees us messing in her garden.”
“A love potion.” Samona wrinkled her nose. “That’s stupid.”
“That’s what I said,” Anthony grunted, following Nigel out the door. “Kid stuff.”
“I want to dig, too!” Samona shouted, her eyes lighting up. She rushed out the door and looked back at me. “Come on, Seth.”
I shook my head and glared at her instead. I was still mad at Samona, and I didn’t think digging up Mrs. Gemini’s garden was a good way to prove my point.
I sighed and got up to put the tannia juice back into the refrigerator. Samona would never change. I didn’t know why I even bothered to come over here. It was best to stick to my lifelong plan of avoiding her.
I went back down to the basement to say good-bye to Mrs. Gemini. She had finished cutting the cloth and was sewing different numbers together.
“Leaving so soon? Give me a hug, Young King.” Mrs. Gemini opened her arms and hugged me. She smelled like all kinds of vegetables mixed together. “You know, Samona doesn’t have many friends.”
I started to tell Mrs. Gemini that Samona didn’t have any friends but then I realized she thought I was Samona’s friend. I decided not to break her heart.
“I think Samona would be a very lonely girl if it wasn’t for you.” Mrs. Gemini rubbed my head and let me go. “Thank you, Young King.”
“Bye, Mrs. Gemini.” I could feel my face gettin
g hot. I hurried back outside, thinking about what Mrs. Gemini had said. Samona doesn’t have any friends, I thought; she doesn’t hang out with any of the girls in our class like Bessie Armstrong or Maisie Hong. That’s because everybody thinks she’s weird, I said to myself. From what I could tell Bessie Armstrong was the kind of girl who jumps rope and plays with dolls. Samona was the kind of girl who goes to a witch’s house and gets banned from field trips for a whole school year. About the only girl stuff she ever seemed interested in was this beauty contest. If Samona would only dress normal and stop talking about weird things and act like every other girl, I thought, she’d be fine.
Papi was sitting on the steps of our apartment building when I got back home. He had on his red soccer uniform and was dripping with sweat.
“Did you beat the Saints?” I sat beside him. I wanted to talk to Papi about Samona and Chantal. But I couldn’t talk about Chantal without getting her in trouble.
“Pulverized them.” Papi kicked his leg out. “The Mighty Spiders keep spinning webs of victory.”
“You sound like Mrs. Gemini’s poetry.”
“You just came from there, right? Spending some time with Samona? Ki jan li yé? How is she?” Papi asked, still smiling.
“It’s not funny, Papi,” I said seriously. “I keep trying to tell you that Samona’s crazy. Why doesn’t anyone believe me?”
“Samona’s her own person.” Papi pulled a towel out of his gym bag and wiped his face. “Very few people can say that at her age. You see all the time how kids are trying to copy each other’s hair and clothes and style. Samona’s comfortable with herself.”
“Yeah, but nobody else is comfortable with her. She acts so different from everyone else. She’s always making up these wild stories—”
Seth and Samona Page 4
