Breath, Eyes, Memory Read online

  "Night school?"

  "She told me once in a cassette that she was going to start night school. Did she ever start it?"

  "Non."

  "The old girl lost her nerve. She lost her fight. You should have seen us when we were young. We always dreamt of becoming important women. We were going to be the first women doctors from my mother's village. We would not stop at being doctors either. We were going to be engineers too. Imagine our surprise when we found out we had limits."

  All the street lights were suddenly gone. The streets we drove down now were dim and hazy. The windows were draped with bars; black trash bags blew out into the night air.

  There were young men standing on street corners, throwing empty cans at passing cars. My mother swerved the car to avoid a bottle that almost came crashing through the windshield.

  "How is Lotus?" she asked. "Donald's wife, Madame Augustin."

  "She is fine," I said.

  "Atie has sent me cassettes about that. You know Lotus was not meant to marry Donald. Your aunt Atie was supposed to. But the heart is fickle, what can you say? When Lotus came along, he did not want my sister anymore."

  There was writing all over the building. As we walked towards it, my mother nearly tripped over a man sleeping under a blanket of newspapers.

  "Your schooling is the only thing that will make people respect you," my mother said as she put a key in the front door.

  The thick dirty glass was covered with names written in graffiti bubbles.

  "You are going to work hard here," she said, "and no one is going to break your heart because you cannot read or write. You have a chance to become the kind of woman Atie and I have always wanted to be. If you make something of yourself in life, we will all succeed. You can raise our heads."

  A smell of old musty walls met us at the entrance to her apartment. She closed the door behind her and dragged the suitcase inside.

  "You wait for me here," she said, once we got inside. I stood on the other side of a heavy door in the dark hall, waiting for her.

  She disappeared behind a bedroom door. I wandered in and slid my fingers across the table and chairs neatly lined up in the kitchen. The tablecloth was shielded with a red plastic cover, the same blush red as the sofa in the living room.

  There were books scattered all over the counter. I flipped through the pages quickly. The books had pictures of sick old people in them and women dressed in white helping them.

  I was startled to hear my name when she called it.

  "Sophie, where are you?"

  I ran back to the spot where she had left me. She was standing there with a tall well-dressed doll at her side. The doll was caramel-colored with a fine pointy noise.

  "Come," she said. "We will show you to your room."

  I followed her through a dark doorway. She turned on the light and laid the doll down on a small day-bed by the window.

  I kept my eyes on the blue wallpaper and the water stains that crept from the ceiling down to the floor.

  She kept staring at my face for a reaction.

  "Don't you like it?" she asked.

  "Yes. I like it. Thank you."

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, she unbraided the doll's hair, taking out the ribbons and barrettes that matched the yellow dress. She put them on a night table near the bed. There was a picture of her and Tante Atie there. Tante Atie was holding a baby and my mother had her hand around Tante Atie's shoulder.

  I moved closer to get a better look at the baby in Tante Atie's arms. I had never seen an infant picture of myself, but somehow I knew that it was me. Who else could it have been? I looked for traces in the child, a feature that was my mother's but still mine too. It was the first time in my life that I noticed that I looked like no one in my family. Not my mother. Not my Tante Atie. I did not look like them when I was a baby and I did not look like them now.

  "If you don't like the room," my mother said, "we can always change it."

  She glanced at the picture as she picked up a small brush and combed the doll's hair into a ponytail.

  "I like the room fine," I stuttered.

  She tied a rubber band around the doll's ponytail, then reached under the bed for a small trunk.

  She unbuttoned the back of the doll's dress and changed her into a pajama set.

  "You won't resent sharing your room, will you?" She stroked the doll's back. "She is like a friend to me. She kept me company while we were apart. It seems crazy, I know. A grown woman like me with a doll. I am giving her to you now. You take good care of her."

  She motioned for me to walk over and sit on her lap. I was not sure that her thin legs would hold me without snapping. I walked over and sat on her lap anyway.

  "You're not going to be alone," she said. "I'm never going to be farther than a few feet away. Do you understand that?"

  She gently helped me down from her lap. Her knees seemed to be weakening under my weight.

  "Do you want to eat something? We can sit and talk. Or do you want to go to bed?"

  "Bed."

  She reached over to unbutton the back of my dress.

  "I can do that," I said.

  "Do you want me to show you where I sleep, in case you need me during the night?"

  We went back to the living room. She unfolded the sofa and turned it into a bed.

  "This is where I'll be. You see, I'm not far away at all."

  When we went back to the bedroom, I turned my back to her as I undressed. She took the dress from me, opened the closet door, and squeezed it in between some of her own.

  The rumpled Mother's Day card was sticking out from my dress pocket.

  "What is that?" she asked, pulling it out.

  She unfolded the card and began to read it. I lay down on the bed and tried to slip under the yellow sheets. There was not enough room for both me and the doll on the bed. I picked her up and laid her down sideways. She still left little room for me.

  My mother looked up from the card, walked over, and took the doll out of the bed. She put her down carefully in a corner.

  "Was that for me?" she asked looking down at the card.

  "Tante Atie said I should give it to you."

  "Did you know how much I loved daffodils when I was a girl?"

  "Tante Atie told me."

  She ran her fingers along the cardboard, over the empty space where the daffodil had been.

  "I haven't gone out and looked for daffodils since I've been here. For all I know, they might not even have them here."

  She ran the card along her cheek, then pressed it against her chest.

  "Are there still lots of daffodils?"

  "Oui," I said. "There are a lot of them."

  Her face beamed even more than when she first saw me at the airport. She bent down and kissed my forehead.

  "Thank God for that," she said.

  I couldn't fall asleep. At home, when I couldn't sleep, Tante Atie would stay up with me. The two of us would sit by the window and Tante Atie would tell me stories about our lives, about the way things had been in the family, even before I was born. One time I asked her how it was that I was born with a mother and no father. She told me the story of a little girl who was born out of the petals of roses, water from the stream, and a chunk of the sky. That little girl, she said was me.

  As I lay in the dark, I heard my mother talking on the phone.

  "Yes," she said in Creole. "She is very much here. In bone and flesh. I cannot believe it myself."

  Later that night, I heard that same voice screaming as though someone was trying to kill her. I rushed over, but my mother was alone thrashing against the sheets. I shook her and finally woke her up. When she saw me, she quickly covered her face with her hands and turned away.

  "Ou byen? Are you all right?" I asked her.

  She shook her head yes.

  "It is the night," she said. "Sometimes, I see horrible visions in my sleep."

  "Do you have any tea you can boil?" I asked.

  T
ante Atie would have known all the right herbs.

  "Don't worry, it will pass," she said, avoiding my eyes. "I will be fine. I always am. The nightmares, they come and go"

  There were sirens and loud radios blaring outside the building.

  I climbed on the bed and tried to soothe her. She grabbed my face and squeezed it between her palms.

  "What is it? Are you scared too?" she asked. "Don't worry." She pulled me down into the bed with her. "You can sleep here tonight if you want. It's okay. I'm here."

  . She pulled the sheet over both our bodies. Her voice began to fade as she drifted off to sleep.

  I leaned back in the bed, listening to her snoring.

  Soon, the morning light came creeping through the living room window. I kept staring at the ceiling as I listened to her heart beating along with the ticking clock.

  "Sophie," she whispered. Her eyes were still closed. "Sophie, I will never let you go again."

  Tears burst out of her eyes when she opened them.

  "Sophie, I am glad you are with me. We can get along, you and me. I know we can."

  She clung to my hand as she drifted back to sleep.

  The sun stung my eyes as it came through the curtains. I slid my hand out of hers to go to the bathroom. The grey linoleum felt surprisingly warm under my feet. I looked at my red eyes in the mirror while splashing cold water over my face. New eyes seemed to be looking back at me. A new face all-together. Someone who had aged in one day, as though she had been through a time machine, rather than an airplane. Welcome to New York, this face seemed to be saying. Accept your new life. I greeted the challenge, like one greets a new day. As my mother's daughter and Tante Atie's child.

  Chapter 7

  The streets along Flatbush Avenue reminded me of home. My mother took me to Haiti Express, so I could see the place where she sent our money orders and cassettes from.

  It was a small room packed with Haitians. People stood on line patiently waiting their turn. My mother slipped Tante Atie's cassette into a padded envelope. As we waited on line, an old fan circled a spider's web above our heads.

  A chubby lady greeted my mother politely when we got to the window.

  "This is Sophie," my mother said through the holes in the thick glass. "She is the one who has given you so much business over the years."

  The lady smiled as she took my mother's money and the package. I kept feeling like there was more I wanted to send to Tante Atie. If I had the power then to shrink myself and slip into the envelope, I would have done it.

  I watched as the lady stamped our package and dropped it on top of a larger pile. Around us were dozens of other people trying to squeeze all their love into small packets to send back home.

  After we left, my mother stopped at a Haitian beauty salon to buy some castor oil for her hair. Then we went to a small boutique and bought some long skirts and blouses for me to wear to school. My mother said it was important that I learn English quickly. Otherwise, the American students would make fun of me or, even worse, beat me. A lot of other mothers from the nursing home where she worked had told her that their children were getting into fights in school because they were accused of having HBO—Haitian Body Odor. Many of the American kids even accused Haitians of having AIDS because they had heard on television that only the "Four Hs" got AIDS—Heroin addicts, Hemophiliacs, Homosexuals, and Haitians.

  I wanted to tell my mother that I didn't want to go to school. Frankly, I was afraid. I tried to think of something to keep me from having to go. Sickness or death were probably the only two things that my mother would accept as excuses.

  A car nearly knocked me out of my reverie. My mother grabbed my hand and pulled me across the street. She stopped in front of a pudgy woman selling rice powder and other cosmetics on the street.

  "Sak passé, Jacqueline?" said my mother.

  "You know," answered Jacqueline in Creole. "I'm doing what I can."

  Jacqueline was wearing large sponge rollers under a hair net on her head. My mother brought some face cream that promised to make her skin lighter.

  All along the avenue were people who seemed displaced among the speeding cars and very tall buildings. They walked and talked and argued in Creole and even played dominoes on their stoops. We found Tante Atie's lemon perfume in a botanica shop. On the walls were earthen jars, tin can lamps, and small statues of the beautiful mulâtresse, the goddess and loa Erzulie.

  We strolled through long stretches of streets where merengue blared from car windows and children addressed one another in curses.

  The outdoor subway tracks seemed to lead to the sky. Pebbles trickled down on us as we crossed under the tracks into another more peaceful neighborhood.

  My mother held my hand as we walked through those quiet streets, where the houses had large yards and little children danced around sprinklers on the grass. We stopped in front of a building where the breeze was shaking a sign: MARC CHEVALIER, ESQUIRE.

  When my mother rang the bell, a stocky Haitian man came to the door. He was a deep bronze color and very well dressed.

  My mother kissed him on the cheek and followed him down a long hallway. On either side of us were bookshelves stacked with large books. My mother let go of my hand as we walked down the corridor. He spoke to her in Creole as he opened the door and let us into his office.

  He leaned over and shook my hand.

  "Marc Jolibois Francis Legrand Moravien Chevalier."

  "Enchanté," I said.

  I took a deep breath and looked around. On his desk was a picture of him and my mother, posed against a blue background.

  "Are you working late?" my mother asked him.

  "Where are you going?" he asked.

  "We are just walking around," my mother said. "I am showing her what is where."

  "Later, we'll go someplace," he said, patting a folder on his desk.

  My mother and I took a bus back to our house. We were crowded and pressed against complete strangers. When we got home, we went through my suitcase and picked out a loose-fitting, high-collared dress Tante Atie had bought me for Sunday Masses. She held it out for me to wear to dinner.

  "This is what a proper young lady should wear," she said.

  That night, Marc drove us to a restaurant called Miracin's in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The restaurant was at the back of an alley, squeezed between a motel and a dry cleaner.

  "Miracin's has the best Haitian food in America," Marc told me as we parked under the motel sign.

  "Marc is one of those men who will never recover from not eating his monman's cooking," said my mother. "If he could get her out of her grave to make him dinner, he would do it."

  "My mother was the best," Marc said as he opened the car door for us.

  There was a tiny lace curtain on the inside of the door. A bell rang as we entered. My mother and I squeezed ourselves between the wall and the table, our bodies wiping the greasy wallpaper clean.

  Marc waved to a group of men sitting in a corner loudly talking politics. The room was packed with other customers who shouted back and forth adding their views to the discussion.

  "Never the Americans in Haiti again," shouted one man. "Remember what they did in the twenties. They treated our people like animals. They abused the konbit system and they made us work like slaves."

  "Roads, we need roads," said another man. "At least they gave us roads. My mother was killed in a ferry accident. If we had roads, we would not need to put crowded boats into the sea, just to go from one small village to another. A lot of you, when you go home, you have to walk from the village to your house, because there are no roads for cars."

  "What about the boat people?" added a man from a table near the door. "Because of them, people can't respect us in this country. They lump us all with them."

  "All the brains leave the country," Marc said, adding his voice to the mêlée.

  "You are insulting the people back home by saying there's no brains there," replied a woman from a table near the back
. "There are brains who stay."

  "But they are crooks," Marc said, adding some spice to the argument.

  "My sister is a nurse there with the Red Cross," said the woman, standing up. "You call that a crook? What have you done for your people?"

  For some of us, arguing is a sport. In the marketplace in Haiti, whenever people were arguing, others would gather around them to watch and laugh at the colorful language. People rarely hit each other. They didn't need to. They could wound just as brutally by cursing your mother, calling you a sexual misfit, or accusing you of being from the hills. If you couldn't match them with even stronger accusations, then you would concede the argument by keeping your mouth shut.

  Marc decided to stay out of the discussion. The woman continued attacking him, shouting that she was tired of cowardly men speaking against women who were proving themselves, women as brave as stars out at dawn.

  My mother smiled at the woman's colorful words. It was her turn to stand up and defend her man, but she said nothing. Marc kept looking at her, as if waiting for my mother to argue on his behalf, but my mother picked up the menu, and ran her fingers down the list of dishes.

  My mother introduced me to the waiter when he came by to take her order. He looked at us for a long time. First me, then my mother. I wanted to tell him to stop it. There was no resemblance between us. I knew it.

  It was an eternity before we were served. Marc complained about his boudin when it came.

  "I can still taste the animal," he said

  "What do you expect?" my mother asked. "It is a pig's blood after all."

  "It's not well done," he said, while raising the fork to his mouth. "It is an art to make boudin. There is a balance. At best it is a very tight kind of sausage and you would never dream of where it comes from."

  "Who taught you to eat this way?" my mother asked.

  "Food is a luxury," hesaid, "but we can not allow ourselves to become gluttons or get fat. Do you hear that, Sophie?"

  I shook my head yes, as though I was really very interested. I ate like I had been on a hunger strike, filling myself with the coconut milk they served us in real green coconuts.

  When they looked up from their plates, my mother and Marc eyed each other like there were things they couldn't say because of my presence. I tried to stuff myself and keep quiet, pretending that I couldn't even see them. My mother now had two lives: Marc belonged to her present life, I was a living memory from the past.