Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat [18]
She laid out a comforter on the floor and stretched her body across it.
"I want you to know that this will change soon when I find a job that pays both for our expenses and for my mother's and Atie's."
"I wish I could help you do one of your jobs," I said.
"But I want you to go to school. I want you to get a doctorate, or even higher than that."
"I am sorry you work so hard," I said. "I never realized you did so much."
"That's how it is. Life is no vacation. If you get your education, there are things you won't have to do."
She turned over on her back and stared direcdy into my face, something she did not do very often.
It had been a month since I had seen Marc. I wondered if he had gone away, but I didn't want to ask her in case he had and in case it was because of me.
"Am I the mother you imagined?" she asked, with her eyes half-closed.
As a child, the mother I had imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men. She had gorgeous dresses in satin, silk, and lace, necklaces, pendants, earrings, bracelets, anklets, and lots and lots of French perfume. She never had to work for anything because the rainbow and the stars did her work for her. Even though she was far away, she was always with me. I could always count on her, like one counts on the sun coming out at dawn.
"Was I the mother you imagined? You don't have to answer me," she said. "After you've seen me, I know the answer."
"For now I couldn't ask for better," I said.
"What do you think of Marc?" she asked, quickly changing the subject.
"I think he is smart."
"He helped me a lot in getting you here," she said, "even though he did not like the way I went about it. In Haiti, it would not be possible for someone like Marc to love someone like me. He is from a very upstanding family. His grandfather was a French man."
She began the story of how she met him. She talked without stopping, as though she were talking on one of our cassettes.
She got her green card through an amnesty program. When she was going through her amnesty proceedings, she had to get a lawyer. She found him listed in a Haitian newspaper and called his office. She was extremely worried that she would not be eligible for the program. It took him a long time to convince her that this was not the case and, over that period of time, they became friends. He started taking her to restaurants, always Haitian restaurants, sometimes ones as far away as Philadelphia. They even went to Canada once to eat at a Haitian, restaurant in Montreal. Marc was old-fashioned about a lot of things and had some of the old ways. He had never married and didn't have any children back home—that he knew of—and she admired that. She was going to stay with him as long as he didn't make any demands that she couldn't fulfill.
"Are you going to marry?" I asked.
"Jesus Marie Joseph, I don't know," she said. "He is the first man I have been with in a long time."
She asked if there was a boy in Haiti that I had liked.
I said no and she smiled.
"You need to concentrate when school starts, you have to give that all your attention. You're a good girl, aren't you?"
By that she meant if I had ever been touched, if I had ever held hands, or kissed a boy.
"Yes," I said. "I have been good."
"You understand my right to ask as your mother, don't you?"
I nodded.
"When I was a girl, my mother used to test us to see if we were virgins. She would put her finger in our very private parts and see if it would go inside. Your Tante Atie hated it. She used to scream like a pig in a slaughterhouse. The way my mother was raised, a mother is supposed to do that to her daughter until the daughter is married. It is her responsibility to keep her pure."
She rubbed her palm against her eyelids, as if to keep the sleep away.
"My mother stopped testing me early" she said. "Do you know why?"
I said no.
"Did Atie tell you how you were born?"
From the sadness in her voice,