Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [18]
My parents tell slightly differently the story of how they met in 1962, when they were both twenty-seven years old. In my mother’s version, they met in a Bel Air grocery store owned by one of my mother’s older sisters and where she often went to help out. Back then my mother was slender, beautiful, in a brooding, melancholy kind of way, and painfully shy. One day my father walked into the tiny, dimly lit shop, where my mother greeted him with a smile at the door. A few days later she just happened to visit the shoe store on Grand Rue to buy a pair of shoes. He helped her try on a few women’s shoes, none of which fit. She thanked him and left the store.
My father has no recollection of the first meeting at the grocery store. He simply remembers her walking into the shoe store, too shy to even look up from her dusty old sandals. He wanted to keep her in the store as long as possible, so he gave her shoes to try on that he knew wouldn’t fit her. Finally when, frustrated, she walked out of the store, he followed her home.
They were married three years later.
Before my mother came along, Uncle Joseph wanted my father to marry Tante Denise’s sister Léone, who, though she was five years younger than Tante Denise, looked like her twin. They were nearly identical, except Léone dressed more casually than Tante Denise, for whom being the pastor’s wife meant never leaving the house without her matching hat and gloves and one of her many shoulder-length wigs, which she preferred to her own shortly cropped hair. The fact that Tante Denise made her own clothes and could buy cloth at a discount from my uncle’s fabric shop made it easy for her to maintain her consistently elegant attire. Léone lacked the means and interest and thus always looked like the twin who, though just as pretty, had been abandoned at birth. Though Léone loved my father, he wasn’t interested in her.
Besides, as he told me one night during that visit after his diagnosis, when we happened to stumble on the bride-capture musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which he thought was about seven brothers marrying seven sisters, “It’s not as if your uncle and I were Cain and Abel and there was no one else in the world to marry.”
After my parents married, they moved into a small house in an increasingly packed section of Bel Air. The cement floor of their two-room rental was the same drab color as the walls. There were no windows or jalousies, just some diamond-shaped openings in the concrete, which let in some air and also plenty of water when it rained. My mother decorated the best she could, draping the walls with wide ruffled curtains she made herself. They wanted to have children right away, but couldn’t conceive, prompting my uncle and Tante Denise to constantly request prayers for them at church.
My parents were about to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary when I was born, in 1969. Twenty months later, Bob followed. After Bob and I were born, my father started sewing again when he came home from the shoe store. My mother joined him in making school uniforms and tiny flags for schoolchildren to wave on Flag Day.
One afternoon before closing the shoe store, my father was talking to his boss about the boss’s son, who was soon leaving for vacation in New York.
“You think I can get a visa?” my father asked.
Then, as now, leaving often seemed like the only answer, especially if one was sick like my uncle or poor like my father, or desperate, like both.
My father’s boss offered to write him a letter of support for his application.
Because he had a job, a wife and two children as incentives to return to Haiti, my father was granted a one-month tourist visa. But he had no intention of coming back.
I have no memory of my father’s departure, or of anything that preceded it. Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s adopted daughter, Marie Micheline, liked to tell me