Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [39]
"If she keeps making this soup," Caroline whispered, "I will dip my head into the pot and scald myself blind. That will show her that there's no magic in it."
It was very hard for Ma to watch Caroline prepare to leave us, knowing that there was nothing she could do but feed her.
"Ma, if we keep on with this soup," Caroline said, "we'll all grow horns like the ones that used to be on these cows."
Caroline brushed aside a strand of her hair, chemically straightened and streaked bright copper from a peroxide experiment.
"You think you are so American," Ma said to Caro-line. "You don't know what's good for you. You have no taste buds. A double tragedy."
"There's another American citizen in the family now." I took advantage of the moment to tell Caroline.
"Congratulations," she said. "I don't love you any less."
Caroline had been born in America, something that she very much took for granted.
Later that night, Ma called me into her bedroom after she thought Caroline had gone to sleep. The room was still decorated just the way it had been when Papa was still alive. There was a large bed, almost four feet tall, facing an old reddish brown dresser where we could see our reflections in a mirror as we talked.
Ma's bedroom closet was spilling over with old suit-cases, some of which she had brought with her when she left Haiti almost twenty-five years before. They were so crowded into the small space that the closet door would never stay fully closed.
"She drank all her soup," Ma said as she undressed for bed. "She talks bad about the soup but she drinks it."
"Caroline is not a child, Ma."
"She doesn't have to drink it."
"She wants to make you happy in any small way she can."
"If she wanted to make me happy, you know what she would do."
"She has the right to choose who she wants to marry. That's none of our business."
"I am afraid she will never find a nice man to marry her," Ma said. "I am afraid you won't either."
"Caroline is already marrying a nice man," I said.
"She will never find someone Haitian," she said.
"It's not the end of creation that she's not marrying someone Haitian."
"No one in our family has ever married outside," she said. "There has to be a cause for everything."
"What's the cause of you having said what you just said? You know about Eric. You can't try to pretend that he's not there."
"She is my last child. There is still a piece of her in-side me."
"Why don't you give her a spanking?" I joked.
"My mother used to spank me when I was older than you," she said. "Do you know how your father came to have me as his wife? His father wrote a letter to my father and came to my house on a Sunday afternoon and brought the letter in a pink and green handkerchief. Pink because it is the color of romance and green for hope that it might work. Your grandfather on your papa's side had the handkerchief sewn especially in these two colors to wrap my proposal letter in. He brought this letter to my house and handed it to my father. My father didn't even read the letter himself. He called in a neighbor and asked the neighbor to read it out loud.
"The letter said in very fancy words how much your father wanted to be my husband. My son desires greatly your daughter's hand, something like that. The whole time the letter was being read, your father and I sat silently while our parents had this type of show. Then my father sent your father away, saying that he and my mother wanted to think about the proposal."
"Did they consult you about it?" I asked, pretending not to know the outcome.
"Of course they did. I had to act like I didn't really like your father or that at least I liked him just a tiny little bit. My parents asked me if I wanted to marry him and I said I wouldn't mind, but they could tell from my face that it was a different story, that I was already desperately in love."
"But you and Papa had talked about this, right? Before his father came to your father."
"Your father and I had talked about it. We were what you girls call dating. He would come to my house and I would go to