An Untamed State (7 page)

We always stayed with my mother’s favorite sister. Tante Lola married well and owned lots of property. There was a guesthouse with its own pool behind her house and we installed ourselves there for weeks at a time.

This is the Haiti of my childhood—summer afternoons at the beach, swimming in the warm and salty blue of the ocean. We ate grilled meat and drank Coke from green glass bottles, biting the rim, enjoying the sound our teeth made against the glass. We played in the sand and my sister and I chased my brother up and down the beach while our parents cheerfully ignored us. There is a picture of me sitting on the beach. I am fourteen, skinny, just starting puberty, late bloomer. I am wearing the first bathing suit I have ever been allowed to choose for myself. It is blue, one piece, cut high at the hips but modestly. There is a strap around my neck that reaches down to a threaded knot between my collarbones. I am wearing sunglasses because I want to look sophisticated. I want to stare at cute boys as they come out of the water, without admonishment from my parents. My knees are pulled to my chest. I am also wearing a straw hat with a matching blue band, a gift from my father. I saw the hat while we were driving through the city on the way from visiting one relative to another. A vendor had what seemed like hundreds of hats displayed on a large tarp. I started tapping the window with my hand excitedly. I begged my father to pull over and suddenly he did and I grinned like a crazy person. We all piled out of the car and hovered around the display, each trying to decide on the perfect
chapeau
. I would wear the hat every day for the rest of our trip and back in the States I would wear my perfect hat for the rest of the summer until school started and a classmate teased me about my sombrero and then the hat found its way to the back of my closet, crushed by sneakers, a black sock, a softball helmet.

In another picture, my sister and I are standing on the beach, arm in arm. Behind us, my parents’ beach house in Jacmel is being built and the concrete frame of the house stands, windowless. My mother is on the long veranda, already finished. She is waving, her arm midair, her fingers curled toward us. I am fifteen. Mona is eighteen. It is Mona’s last summer before college. She is radiant. She can taste freedom, which is all we ever wanted, freedom from our parents, from the endless trips to Haiti, from our parents’ rules. Our ingratitude, in the face of our happiness, was fairly staggering. In the picture, we are both wearing two-piece bathing suits, matching. Mona convinced my parents it would be fine to allow us to wear bikinis because we were good girls. Mona was not really a good girl. I knew that, always waited up for her when she snuck out at home in the States to drive around in the backseats of cars with American boys. When she came home, she smelled like beer and cigarette smoke and my mother’s perfume, which she sprayed behind her ears and knees and under her elbows. Mona taught me about kissing and going to third base and wrote silly words on my back with her fingers as she taught me everything important. She told me about kids who didn’t have to be home by eight, who didn’t have to spend their Saturdays in a stupid basement surrounded by other miserable Haitian kids. In the picture, Mona’s lips are nuzzling my ear. She’s whispering, “You’ll be free soon too.” My childhood was very different from that of my brother and sister. By the time I was old enough to want to feel free, my parents had relaxed many of the strict rules they enforced for Michel and Mona. Michel is not in the picture because he was already in graduate school. When he went away to college, he never really came home. Sons are different, my mother says. They always look for home somewhere else. Daughters, though, a mother can count on. Daughters always come home.

This is the Haiti of my childhood—my father building toy boats and pointed hats for us from palm fronds. He taught us how to eat sugarcane, how we had to peel the thin bark and suck on the fibrous core. He took us to an old woman’s house and bought
dous
, a sugary fudge, wrapped in wax paper. We ate so much of it our mouths wrinkled. Back in the States, he was always serious, always wearing suits and shiny shoes, rarely laughing, rarely home because he had to build and outwork and outthink the white men he worked with. In Haiti, my father was a man who eagerly removed his shoes and rolled up his slacks to climb a palm tree to gather coconuts. One by one he would throw the coconuts down. My mother held the fruit high over her head and slammed them down on a sharp rock and when the hard shell cracked open, she would pull the coconut apart and peel the coconut meat from the shell, handing each of us large pieces. We hated coconut but we ate it anyway.

This is the Haiti of my childhood—my mother sitting with her sisters, gossiping about everyone they ever knew, their childhood friends and where those friends were now, their current friends and neighbors, former lovers, the people they worked with, their husbands, their fathers. My mother always glowed, her fair skin tanned, eyes bright, hair hanging down past her shoulders. Only in Haiti do I remember her laughing nakedly, talking openly, easily, in a way that was so foreign to us. Mona and I always hid nearby trying to hear every word of the adult conversation. Listening to my mother and aunts talking made us feel like we knew her.

Driving through Port-au-Prince is a precarious affair. There are more people than room on the road. There is no order, no patience, no civility. Anytime we climbed into the backseat to go somewhere, I felt wound up with nervous energy. I sat between my brother and sister gripping their thighs as they held on to their door handles, their knuckles white. It wasn’t the wild driving that scared me, though. It was the angry mobs swarming our car whenever we slowed at an intersection or to make a turn from one narrow street to another. No matter where we went, our car was always mobbed at street corners by men and women and children, hungry and angry and yearning to know what it might feel like to sit in the leather seats of an air-conditioned luxury sedan. My father saw himself in those people. As we grew older, we saw ourselves in those people. The bones of our faces were the same. My father would open his window just a crack to throw out
gourdes
and sometimes, American dollars. He would try to pull away in the wake of the desperate clamor to reach for that money. I remember seeing a man with one leg and an enormous tumor beneath his right eye disfiguring his face and the way he slammed his hands against my window and stared at me with such disgust. I waved to him and he spit on the window, a thick globule of white saliva slowly sliding down the window. He shouted something I didn’t understand. My sister turned my head, held me in the crook of her arm. “Look straight ahead,” she said, and so I did. I looked straight ahead at the backs of my parents’ heads and the crowded street before us and I tried to forget how brightly the rage and frustration pulsed off the man with the broken body on the corner.

We loved Haiti. We hated Haiti. We did not understand or know Haiti. Years later, I still did not understand Haiti but I longed for the Haiti of my childhood. When I was kidnapped, I knew I would never find that Haiti ever again.

I
n the cage there was no time. I don’t know when I fell asleep. There were only the walls threatening to close in on me and the heavy stillness of the air. I lay alone on the narrow mattress, my body lonely for my husband. We had not slept apart in years.

Michael and I met in graduate school—he was getting his master’s degree in civil engineering and I was attending law school. There was no reason for our paths to cross, but there he was, standing outside my office, looking for Kendra, the woman I shared a tiny office space with. Mutual friends set them up on a blind date and she was running late on her way from the law library to meet him. Michael leaned in the doorway, his large frame filling the space.

He smiled, asked why he had never seen me before. I said something about the improbability of billions of people in the world. He asked me out right then.

I couldn’t help but laugh. I said, “Are you really that guy?”

“If it means getting to take you out, yes, ma’am. I am that guy.”

I was lonely. I was not good with men or dating or interactions of any kind with other people. Until Michael, my hardly romantic history consisted of four men who were not memorable in any way. I leaned back in my chair and took my glasses off, set them on my desk. I pointed to the stack of books on my desk. I said, “I’m in law school. I don’t date.” My hands grew sweaty so I slid them beneath my thighs.

Michael stepped into my office and leaned against the edge of my desk, close. Too close. I smelled his cologne and the soap he used. A strange warmth rose up through my neck. I looked up. “Have you heard of personal space?”

He crossed his arms across his chest. “You are feisty.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s what men always say when women don’t fall at their feet swooning.”

“Do women still swoon?”

“If you have to ask . . .”

He laughed, a full, throaty laugh that filled the small office.

Before we could continue our banter, Kendra appeared, looked from me back to Michael and raised an eyebrow. Michael stood, awkwardly, hovering near my desk, but he never stopped looking at me or through me. He and Kendra introduced themselves, made small talk while she packed her bag so they could leave for their date. I was irritated. He still kept staring at me.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

He gave me a
look.
I turned away. I thought about his hands, what they might feel like on my arms, against the small of my back, elsewhere. My irritation grew. Michael and Kendra left and I stared at the door for a few moments thinking about how his laugh and his smell lingered. I decided he had an unnaturally large head. Suddenly, he appeared in the doorway again. “I have to make this fast. Go out with me. There will be swooning.”

Although most everything about him irritated me, from his arrogant smile to his Republican style of dress—a button-down shirt and sensible khakis—still, I accepted his invitation, said, “I will give you one evening to make me swoon.”

He tugged on my elbow and took my hand and kissed my knuckles. His breath warmed me.

I pointed to the door. “Go away. Your date is waiting.”

He disappeared again, quickly reappeared once more. “I like that you are already jealous.”

Hours later, I called Mona and told her about the arrogant American who asked me out while picking up another woman for a date. She laughed, said, “You’ve finally met someone you actually like. I hear it in your voice.”

“I have not,” I said, stuttering.

Mona laughed harder. I wished she would stop. “I’ll remind you of this conversation, someday,” she said.

I ignored the fluttering in my chest and hung up on her. Ending phone conversations abruptly is a bad habit of mine.

At the end of our first date, dinner, movie, ridiculous conversation, I stood just inside my front door. Michael stuck his foot between the door and the jamb, leaned in and kissed me. His breathing was loud and heavy, his breath warm on my face. He clasped my neck. His pulse throbbed against my throat. I sighed and he whispered, “I do believe you swooned.”

Mona told me not to play hard to get when I told her about the date. “Girls have to put out, these days,” she said. “You know what to do, don’t you?”

My tongue grew dry. “Of course,” I said. “I know lots of things about men and women.”

“Miri, shut up. You are not seriously a virgin.”

I hung up on my sister, my face burning hot.

Michael and I had our second date at a popular bar downtown that used to be a theatre after I ignored him for a few days and he suggested I was playing hard to get and I tersely informed him I was not familiar with that game.

As we sat waiting for the waitress to bring our drinks, Michael said, “You never confirmed whether or not there was swooning.”

I patted his chest. “Again, I say, if you have to ask . . .”

I drank my first drink quickly—a stiff gin and tonic with a splash of grenadine for which Michael teased me mercilessly. “You’re basically drinking a Shirley Temple,” he said. When I tried to kick him beneath the table, he grabbed my ankle. His hand was warm. My eyes widened. He nodded smugly, said, “I have lightning-fast reflexes.” I tried to kick him with my other leg. He grabbed that ankle too.

We sat there, my ankles in his hands. I continued to sip my drink, making enthusiastic noises. Finally, I said, “This is awkward.” Michael released my ankles. I immediately felt colder. We continued drinking and I looked Michael up and down, stabbing a plastic sword in his direction. “I bet you’re one of those guys whose bedroom at home is still decorated with all the trophies you won in high school, playing some macho sport like football. And you were the big man on campus, and you dated hot girls, and you’ve never been unpopular a day in your life.”