Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [41]
“It does,” I said, feeling myself on the verge of tears.
Soon after he got up, Kelly climbed up on the kitchen counter and found a butter knife, which he carried back to the room.
“I can get the spy stuff out for you guys,” he said, smirking as though to prove that he was not only the oldest but the smartest.
“You can’t do it,” Bob said, closing his eyes to slowly massage the sides of his face. “No one can. What I can do to make us really brothers and sisters is to ask my friends from space to put one in your heads too while you’re sleeping tonight. Then we can talk more easily with each other without even speaking. Do you agree?”
Kelly lowered the butter knife and pursed his lips. Karl looked up at my head as if searching for some clue, some sign of disfiguration, which he might also have to carry for the rest of his life.
“Okay then,” Kelly said.
“Okay,” echoed Karl.
From that day on, we considered ourselves full brothers and sister.
I still marvel now how Bob, then only ten years old, thought of all this, but as strange as it seems, it truly gelled us, started us on our way to becoming a family.
That morning, while our new blood and spy brothers were introducing us to Saturday-morning cartoons, my father, still in his pajamas, carried in what looked like a large black handbag with a small silver latch and laid it carefully on my bed. And though his face was crumpled and there was sleep in his eyes, he seemed eager for me to open it.
Grabbing the latch, I forced it apart, nearly smashing it. My brothers turned their eyes away from the television to watch me run my fingers over my welcome gift.
It was a typewriter, a Smith-Corona Corsair portable manual. Once more, tears gathered in my eyes before I even had time to think of something to say. I remembered asking my father in one of my letters to send me a typewriter. The tellers at my uncle’s bank had them. The clerks at the Education Ministry had them. I’d asked my father for one because I thought my uncle should have one too. Not only for his school and church work, but to write back to my father.
Looking down at the perfect beige keys, lined up like big ivory teeth, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d received the typewriter too late. What would I do with a typewriter all to myself?
Then in a flash it occurred to me that I could write to my uncle, hundreds and hundreds of letters to impress him with my new skills, my new knowledge, my new life.
“This will help you measure your words,” my father said, tapping the keys with his fingers for emphasis, “to line them up neatly.”
He meant this literally. He and I both had slightly crooked cursive handwriting. Unlike him, however, I would often line up my pens against a ruler to keep a straight line. Still, they feel like such prescient gifts now, this typewriter and his desire, very early on, to see me properly assemble my words.
In the end, after becoming better acquainted with the machine, I pecked out only one letter to Uncle Joseph. It was brief, telling him that Bob and I were all right, were getting along fine with our parents and brothers and were thinking of him and Tante Denise, Nick and Liline, Tante Zi and Tante Tina, Marie Micheline and Ruth, and everyone else. My letter was really a list of names, an inventory of the people whose faces popped into my head every day and whose voices echoed in my ear every night.
My uncle did not write back, perhaps wanting to allow us some distance, some time to merge into our family without any meddling from him. He had written to my father, however, sending him a note whenever a friend traveled from Haiti to New York. After reading his notes, my father would always tell us that my uncle had told him to say hello to “Edwidge, Bob, Kelly and Karl.” Were Bob and I no longer special to him? I wondered. No longer worth setting apart?
There’s a Haitian saying, “Pitit moun se lave yon bò, kite yon bò.” When you bathe other people’s children, it says, you should wash one side and leave