Krik? Krak! (16 page)

That night I dreamt that I was at a costume ball in an eighteenth-century French château, with huge crystal chandeliers above my head. Around me people were wearing masks made from papier-mâché and velvet. Suddenly, one of the men took off his mask. Beneath the mask was my father.

Papa was talking to a group of other people who were also wearing masks. He was laughing as though someone had just told him a really good joke. He turned towards me for a brief second and smiled. I was so happy to see him that I began to cry.

I tried to run to him, but I couldn't. My feet were moving but I was standing in the same place, like a mouse on a treadmill. Papa looked up at me again, and this time he winked. I raised my hand and waved. He waved back. It was a cruel flirtation.

I quickly realized that I would never get near him, so I stood still and just watched him. He looked much healthier than I remembered, his toasted almond face round and fleshy. I felt as though there was something he wanted to tell me.

Suddenly, he dropped his mask on the ground, and like smoke on a windy day, he disappeared. My feet were now able to move. I walked over to where he had been standing and picked up the mask. The expression on the mask was like a frozen scream. I pressed the mask against my chest, feeling the luxurious touch of velvet against my cheek.

When I looked up again, my father was standing at the foot of a spiral staircase with a group of veiled women all around him. He turned his back to me and started climbing the long winding staircase. The veiled women followed him with their beautiful pink gowns crackling like damp wood in a fire.

Then, the women stopped and turned one by one to face me, slowly raising their veils. As they uncovered their faces, I realized that one of them, standing tall and rigid at Papa's side, was Caroline.

Of the two of us, Caroline was the one who looked most like Papa. Caroline looked so much like Papa that Ma liked to say they were
one head on two bodies, let
koupé.

I started screaming at the top of my lungs. Why were they leaving me out? I should have been there with them.

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 you 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.