Krik? Krak! (14 page)

Day women come out when nobody expects them.

Tonight on the subway, I will get up and give my seat to a pregnant woman or a lady about Ma's age.

My mother, who stuffs thimbles in her mouth and then blows up her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie while sewing yet another Raggedy Ann doll that she names Suzette after me.

I will have all these little Suzettes in case you never have
any babies, which looks more and more like it is going to
happen.

My mother who had me when she was thirty-three—
I'dge du Christ
—at the age that Christ died on the cross.

That's a blessing, believe you me, even if American doc-tors
say by that time you can make retarded babies.

My mother, who sews lace collars on my company soft-ball T-shirts when she does my laundry.

Why, you can't you look like a lady playing softball?

My mother, who never went to any of my Parent-Teacher Association meetings when I was in school.

You're so good anyway. What are they going to tell me?
I don't want to make you ashamed of this day woman.
Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.

caroline's
wedding

It was a cool September day when I walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom holding my naturalization certificate. As I stood on the courthouse steps, I wanted to run back to my mother's house waving the paper like the head of an enemy rightfully conquered in battle.

I stopped at the McDonald's in Fulton Mall to call ahead and share the news.

There was a soap opera playing in the background when she picked up the phone.

"I am a citizen, Ma," I said.

I heard her clapping with both her hands, the way she had applauded our good deeds when Caroline and I were little girls.

"The paper they gave me, it looks nice," I said. "It's wide like a diploma and has a gold seal with an official-looking signature at the bottom. Maybe I will frame it."

"The passport, weren't you going to bring it to the. post office to get a passport right away?" she asked in Creole.

"But I want you to see it, Ma."

"Go ahead and get the passport. I can see it when you get it back," she said. 'A passport is truly what's American. May it serve you well."

At the post office on Flatbush Avenue, I had to temporarily trade in my naturalization certificate for a pass-port application. Without the certificate, I suddenly felt like unclaimed property. When my mother was three months pregnant with my younger sister, Caroline, she was arrested in a sweatshop raid and spent three days in an immigration jail. In my family, we have always been very anxious about our papers.

I raced down the block from where the number eight bus dropped me off, around the corner from our house. The fall was slowly settling into the trees on our block, some of them had already turned slightly brown.

I could barely contain my excitement as I walked up the steps to the house, sprinting across the living room to the kitchen.

Ma was leaning over the stove, the pots clanking as she hummed a song to herself.

"My passport should come in a month or so," I said, unfolding a photocopy of the application for her to see.

She looked at it as though it contained boundless possibilities.

"We can celebrate with some strong bone soup," she said. "I am making some right now."

In the pot on the stove were scraps of cow bones stewing in hot bubbling broth.

Ma believed that her bone soup could cure all kinds of ills. She even hoped that it would perform the miracle of detaching Caroline from Eric, her Bahamian fiancé. Since Caroline had announced that she was engaged, we'd had bone soup with our supper every single night.

"Have you had some soup?" I asked, teasing Caroline when she came out of the bedroom.

"This soup is really getting on my nerves," Caroline whispered in my ear as she walked by the stove to get some water from the kitchen faucet.

Caroline had been born without her left forearm. The round end of her stub felt like a stuffed dumpling as I squeezed it hello. After my mother was arrested in the sweatshop immigration raid, a prison doctor had given her a shot of a drug to keep her calm overnight. That shot, my mother believed, caused Caroline's condition. Caroline was lucky to have come out missing only one forearm. She might not have been born at all.

"Soup is ready," Ma announced.

"If she keeps making this soup," Caroline whispered, "I will dip my head into the pot and scald myself blind. That will show her that there's no magic in it."

It was very hard for Ma to watch Caroline prepare to leave us, knowing that there was nothing she could do but feed her.

"Ma, if we keep on with this soup," Caroline said, "we'll all grow horns like the ones that used to be on these cows."

Caroline brushed aside a strand of her hair, chemically straightened and streaked bright copper from a peroxide experiment.

"You think you are so American," Ma said to Caro-line. "You don't know what's good for you. You have no taste buds. A double tragedy."

"There's another American citizen in the family now." I took advantage of the moment to tell Caroline.

"Congratulations," she said. "I don't love you any less."

Caroline had been born in America, something that she very much took for granted.

Later that night, Ma called me into her bedroom after she thought Caroline had gone to sleep. The room was still decorated just the way it had been when Papa was still alive. There was a large bed, almost four feet tall, facing an old reddish brown dresser where we could see our reflections in a mirror as we talked.

Ma's bedroom closet was spilling over with old suit-cases, some of which she had brought with her when she left Haiti almost twenty-five years before. They were so crowded into the small space that the closet door would never stay fully closed.

"She drank all her soup," Ma said as she undressed for bed. "She talks bad about the soup but she drinks it."

"Caroline is not a child, Ma."

"She doesn't have to drink it."

"She wants to make you happy in any small way she can."

"If she wanted to make me happy, you know what she would do."

"She has the right to choose who she wants to marry. That's none of our business."

"I am afraid she will never find a nice man to marry her," Ma said. "I am afraid you won't either."

"Caroline is already marrying a nice man," I said.

"She will never find someone Haitian," she said.

"It's not the end of creation that she's not marrying someone Haitian."

"No one in our family has ever married outside," she said. "There has to be a cause for everything."

"What's the cause of you having said what you just said? You know about Eric. You can't try to pretend that he's not there."

"She is my last child. There is still a piece of her in-side me."

"Why don't you give her a spanking?" I joked.

"My mother used to spank me when I was older than you," she said. "Do you know how your father came to have me as his wife? His father wrote a letter to my father and came to my house on a Sunday afternoon and brought the letter in a pink and green handkerchief. Pink because it is the color of romance and green for hope that it might work. Your grandfather on your papa's side had the handkerchief sewn especially in these two colors to wrap my proposal letter in. He brought this letter to my house and handed it to my father. My father didn't even read the letter himself. He called in a neighbor and asked the neighbor to read it out loud.

"The letter said in very fancy words how much your father wanted to be my husband.
My son desires greatly
your daughter's hand,
something like that. The whole time the letter was being read, your father and I sat silently while our parents had this type of show. Then my father sent your father away, saying that he and my mother wanted to think about the proposal."

"Did they consult you about it?" I asked, pretending not to know the outcome.

"Of course they did. I had to act like I didn't really like your father or that at least I liked him just a tiny little bit. My parents asked me if I wanted to marry him and I said I wouldn't mind, but they could tell from my face that it was a different story, that I was already desperately in love."

"But you and Papa had talked about this, right? Before his father came to your father."

"Your father and I had talked about it. We were what you girls call dating. He would come to my house and I would go to his house when his mother was there. We would go to the cinema together, but the proposal, it was all very formal, and sometimes, in some circumstances, formality is important."

"What would you have done if your father had said no?" I asked.

"Don't say that you will never dine with the devil if you have a daughter," she said. "You never know what she will bring. My mother and father, they knew that too."

"What would you have done if your father had said no?" I repeated.

"I probably would have married anyway," she said. "There is little others can do to keep us from our hearts' desires."

Caroline too was going to get married whether Ma wanted her to or not. That night, maybe for the first time, I saw a hint of this realization in Ma's face. As she raised her comforter and slipped under the sheets, she looked as if she were all alone in the world, as lonely as a woman with two grown daughters could be.

"We're not like birds," she said, her head sinking into the pillow. "We don't just kick our children out of our nests."

Caroline was still awake when I returned to our room.

"Is she ever going to get tired of telling that story?" she asked.

"You're talking about a woman who has had soup with cow bones in it for all sixty years of her life. She doesn't get tired of things. What are you going to do about it?"

"She'll come around. She has to," Caroline said.

We sat facing each other in the dark, playing a free-association game that Ma had taught us when we were girls.

"Who are you?" Caroline asked me.

"I am the
lost
child of the night."

"Where do you come from?"

"I come from the inside of the
lost
stone."

"Where are your eyes?"

"I have eyes
lost
behind my head, where they can best protect me."

"Who is your mother?"

"She who is the
lost
mother of all."

"Who is your father?"

"He who is the
lost
father of all."

Sometimes we would play half the night, coming up with endless possibilities for questions and answers, only repeating the key word in every sentence. Ma too had learned this game when she was a girl. Her mother belonged to a secret women's society in Ville Rose, where the women had to question each other before entering one another's houses. Many nights while her mother was hosting the late-night meetings, Ma would fall asleep listening to the women's voices.

"I just remembered. There is a Mass Sunday at Saint Agnes for a dead refugee woman." Ma was standing in the doorway in her nightgown. "Maybe you two will come with me."

"Nobody sleeps in this house," Caroline said.

I would go, but not her.

They all tend to be similar, farewell ceremonies to the dead. The church was nearly empty, with a few middle-aged women scattered in the pews.