Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [33]
“How was it?” echoed my father.
Bob walked over and, ignoring my uncle completely, jumped on my father’s lap.
“Okay, I’m not going to forget this,” teased my uncle.
I leaned over and kissed them both on the cheek, making sure, after my brother’s slight, to kiss my uncle first. As I did this, my father reached into his pants pocket and handed Bob a fistful of American pennies. Some of the copper coins were bright and new, others older and darker. As my brother tried to balance them in his small hand, many of the pennies slipped and fell to the floor, rolling into unseen corners under the sofas and chairs.
Weeks, months after my father had left, I would find his pennies all throughout the house, in sunken corners of the living room floor, between the mattresses on the cot where he slept. Before deciding what to do with them, I would drape pieces of white paper over them and trace the outline of the man on one side, a man with a beard just like my father’s.
Once they’d been granted their residency papers, my parents planned to stay another week. But they had to cut their trip short when both Kelly and Karl got sick with diarrhea. My uncle took them to the neighborhood clinic where Marie Micheline worked as the head nurse. The doctor there advised my parents to quickly take the boys back to their own doctors in the United States.
This time at the airport, my mother looked anxious as she clutched a fidgety Karl to her chest. Walking to the outdoor staircase leading to the plane, my father made Kelly wave toward the second-floor patio, where Uncle Joseph, Tante Denise and Bob and I were standing. At the airplane’s entrance, my mother adjusted Karl in her arms and freed one of her hands to wave back. They hadn’t told us anything. Would they be back? Would we soon be joining them? We were never told things directly, I thought even then. That would imply that we had a say when we really had none.
At the airport, I thought I might cry, throw another tantrum as I did the first time my mother left, but I didn’t, and neither did Bob. We were much older now and were more accustomed to being without them than being with them. At least, I remember thinking, we had seen them again.
One Papa Happy, One Papa Sad
In 1980, four long years after my parents’ visit, the American consulate wrote to my uncle requesting that Bob and I take a physical to see if we were in good enough health to travel to the United States. I was eleven years old.
Usually a physical was the last step in approving an application, so everyone began to speak to me as though I were already gone.
“In New York,” Tante Denise said, “you’ll have to be good and help your mother.”
“In New York,” Marie Micheline said, “you must write me every week so you can keep up your French.”
“In New York,” Nick said, “be sure to buy me a nice watch.”
“In New York,” Liline said, “be sure to find me a gold necklace.”
I agreed to everything, of course. When I get to New York, I thought, I’ll have to become a slave to fulfill all the promises I’ve made.
Between us and New York, however, stood a list of consulate-approved doctors and the extensive examination they were required to perform.
My uncle chose a doctor whose clinic had the feel of a transitional middle world between our parents’ and ours. On the walls of his examining room were hygiene posters in Creole, French and Spanish, and diplomas and certificates from both Haitian and American universities.
The doctor was short and barrel-chested with skin the same color as his curly black hair, which he wore parted on one side. As he pushed my head back and pried open my mouth, he spoke to me in French, then repeated himself in English.
“Parce qu’il faudra bientôt apprendre l’anglais,” he said. Because you’ll soon have to learn English.
While Bob and my uncle looked on, he made me push out my tongue, palpated my neck for swollen glands, listened to my heart and lungs with his stethoscope, then hit my knees with a small hammer, making my legs rise involuntarily.