Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [16]
“What did your mother give you this time?” my father asked.
Having watched my mother pack the bag of food, he knew. But he asked anyway, as he always did, in a half-joking manner, in part to tease my mother about her longing, which she’d perhaps carried since I was a child, to feed me from afar.
I told them between the winding, narrow lanes of the Jackie Robinson Parkway. My father’s old red Lincoln was too wide for one lane, especially at the curves, so he took up both lanes, angering the drivers who couldn’t pass him. Gripping the wheel tightly, he seemed to block the other drivers out as they honked loudly and poked their heads out of windows to curse him. As my father zigzagged around the curves with an angry army of drivers behind him, I told them. I think now that this showed a great deal of confidence in his driving. I must have trusted completely that nothing could have an impact on it.
“I have some news,” I began.
My father was sitting on a square cushion to shield his bony bottom from the painful bumps on the roads, his elbow leaning on the armrest separating him from my mother and me.
My voice cracked. All of a sudden I couldn’t help but think of an alternate scenario, making this happy announcement to an unsick father. Perhaps we might have still found ourselves driving on a curvy road on the way to an airport, but my only unease might have been the mild sense of embarrassment one feels having a sex-related conversation, however celebratory, with one’s parents.
“I’m pregnant,” I mumbled.
“Sa blan an di?” asked my mother. What did the blan say?
This was the way my mother always let my brothers and me know she hadn’t heard or understood something we’d said. The equivalent of a gringo, a blan was not just a white man but any foreigner, especially one who spoke the type of halting and hesitant Creole that my brothers and I sometimes spoke with our parents. “Sa blan an di?” in our house meant “I can’t hear you. What did you say?”
My father, however, had heard me clearly.
“Grandchild,” he said to my mother, while giving me a sideways high five.
“Oh, I knew you were pregnant,” my mother said, clapping her short, wide hands together. “I saw it in a dream.”
“More like a fantasy,” my father said. “A wish.”
“It was a dream,” my mother said, turning to me. “I saw you holding a baby and no one was asking you whose it was.”
The rest of the ride was spent on advice that both my parents would repeat throughout my pregnancy. My mother told me to see a doctor as soon as possible. My father ordered me to stop traveling, get plenty of rest and try to relax.
On the curb at the airport, my father got out of the car to hug me. He was breathing hard when he reached down to touch my still-flat belly.
“Don’t make her sad,” my mother said in a way that was partly brusque and partly playful, which was how she often spoke. “She’s going to be on that plane alone.”
“It’s not a private plane, is it?” my father teased, even while trying to catch his breath.
Not wanting him to stand much longer, I gave each of my parents a hug, then grabbed my luggage and rushed away. From the airport lobby, I saw my father slowly slide behind the wheel and lower his head to cough and cough and cough. Sometimes when he coughed really hard, tears would stream down his face that he would not even notice. Now I could see my mother reaching over and wiping his face with her palm. A strapping policeman walked up to my father’s car and motioned for him to move. As the other passengers walked to the check-in lines, I watched my father, still out of breath, drive away.
Heartstrings, Shoestrings
My father quit school in 1954 at age nineteen to start an apprenticeship with a neighborhood tailor. Not just an ordinary tailor,