Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [46]
Under my mother's glare, he gave Caroline a timid peck on the cheek, then wrapped his arms around me and gave me a bear hug.
"How have you been?" Ma asked him with her best, extreme English pronunciation.
"I can't complain," he said.
Ma moved over to the living room couch and sat down in front of the television screen. There was a nature program playing without sound. Mute images of animals swallowing each other whole flickered across the screen.
"So, you are a citizen of America now?" Eric said to me. "Now you can just get on a plane anytime you feel like it and go anywhere in the world. Nations go to war over women like you. You're an American."
His speech was extremely slow on account of a learning disability. He was not quite retarded, but not like everybody else either.
Ma looked around the room at some carnival posters on Eric's living room wall. She pushed her head forward to get a better look at a woman in a glittering bikini with a crown of feathers on her head. Her eyes narrowed as they rested on a small picture of Caroline, propped in a silver frame on top of the television set.
Eric and Caroline disappeared in the kitchen, leaving me alone with Ma.
"I won't eat if it's bad," she said.
"You know Eric's a great cook," I said.
"Men cooking?" she said. "There is always something wrong with what he makes, here or at our house."
"Well, pretend to enjoy it, will you?"
She walked around the living room, picking up the small wooden sculptures that Eric had in many corners of the room, mostly brown Madonnas with caramel babies wrapped in their arms.
Eric served us chicken in a thick dark sauce. I thrust my fork through layers of gravy. Ma pushed the food around her plate but ate very little.
After dinner, Eric and Caroline did the dishes in the kitchen while Ma and I sat in front of the television.
"Did you have a nice time?" I asked her.
"Nice or not nice, I came," she said.
"That's right, Ma. It counts a lot that you came, but it would have helped if you had eaten more."
"I was not very hungry," she said.
"That means you can't fix anything to eat when you get home," I said. "Nothing. You can't fix anything. Not even bone soup."
"A woman my age in her own home following orders."
Eric had failed miserably at the game of Wooing Haitian Mother-in-Law. Had he known—or rather had Caroline advised him well—he would have hired a Haitian cook to make Ma some Haitian food that would taste (God forbid!) even better than her own.
"We know people by their stories," Ma said to Caroline in the cab on the way home that night. "Gossip goes very far. Grace heard women gossip in the Mass behind us the other day, and you hear what they say about Haitian women who forget themselves when they come here. Value yourself."
"Yes, Ma," Caroline said, for once not putting up a fight.
I knew she wanted to stay and spend the night with Eric but she was sparing Ma.
"I can t accuse you of anything," Ma said. "You never call someone a thief unless you catch them stealing."
"I hear you, Ma," Caroline said, as though her mind were a thousand miles away.
When we got home, she waited for Ma to fall asleep, then called a car service and went back to Eric's. When I got up the next morning, Ma was standing over my bed.
"Did your sister leave for school early again?" she asked.
"Yes, Ma," I said. "Caroline is just like you. She sleeps a hair thread away from waking, and she rises with the roosters."
I mailed out the invitations for Caroline's wedding shower. We kept the list down to a bare minimum, just a few friends and Mrs. Ruiz. We invited none of Ma's friends from Saint Agnes because she told me that she would be ashamed to have them ask her the name of her daughter's fiancé and have her tongue trip, being unable to pronounce it.
"What's so hard about Eric Abrahams?" I asked her. "It's practically a Haitian name."
"But it isn't a Haitian name," she said. "The way I say it is not the way