Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [49]
"I can't live in this country twenty-five years and not have some of it rub off on me," she said. "When will I have to buy you one of those dishonorable things?"
"When you find me a man."
"They can't be that hard to find," she said. "Look, your sister found one, and some people might think it would be harder for her. He is a retard, but that's okay."
"He's not a retard, Ma. She found a man with a good heart."
"Maybe."
"You like him, Ma. I know deep inside you do."
'After Caroline was born, your father and me, we were so afraid of this."
"Of what?"
"Of what is happening."
"And what is that?"
"Maybe she jumps at it because she thinks he is being noble. Maybe she thinks he is doing her a favor. Maybe she thinks he is the only man who will ever come along to marry her."
"Maybe he loves her," I said.
"Love cannot make horses fly," she said. "Caroline should not marry a man if that man wants to be noble by marrying Caroline."
"We don't know that, Ma."
"The heart is like a stone," she said. "We never know what it is in the middle.
"Only some hearts are like that," I said.
"That is where we make mistakes," she said. 'All hearts are stone until we melt, and then they turn back to stone again."
"Did you feel that way when Papa married that woman?" I asked.
"My heart has a store of painful marks," she said, "and that is one of them."
Ma got up from the bed and walked over to the closet with all her suitcases. She pulled out an old brown leather bag filled with tiny holes where the closet mice had nibbled at it over the years.
She laid the bag on her bed, taking out many of the items that she had first put in it years ago when she left Haiti to come to the United States to be reunited with my father.
She had cassettes and letters written by my father, his words crunched between the lines of aging sheets of ruled loose-leaf paper. In the letters he wrote from America to her while she was still in Haiti, he never talked to her about love. He asked about practical things; he asked about me and told her how much money he was sending her and how much was designated for what.
My mother also had the letters that she wrote back to him, telling him how much she loved him and how she hoped that they would be together soon.
That night Ma and I sat in her room with all those things around us. Things that we could neither throw away nor keep in plain sight.
Caroline seemed distant the night before her wedding. Ma made her a stew with spinach, yams, potatoes, and dumplings. Ma did not eat any of the stew, concentrating instead on a green salad, fishing beneath the lettuce leaves as though there was gold hidden on the plate.
After dinner, we sat around the kitchen radio listening to a music program on the Brooklyn Haitian station.
Ma's lips were moving almost unconsciously as she mouthed the words to an old sorrowful bolero. Ma was putting the final touches on her own gown for the wedding.
"Did you check your dress?" she asked Caroline.
"I know it fits," Caroline said.
"When was the last time you tried it on?"
"Yesterday."
'And you didn't let us see it on you? I could make some adjustments."
"It fits, Ma. Believe me."
"Go and put it on now," Ma said.
"Maybe later."
"Later will be tomorrow," Ma said.
"I will try it on for you before I go to sleep," Caroline promised.
Ma gave Caroline some ginger tea, adding two large spoonfuls of brown sugar to the cup.
"You can learn a few things from the sugarcane," Ma said to Caroline. "Remember that in your marriage."
"I didn't think I would ever fall in love with anybody, much less have them marry me," Caroline said, her fingernails tickling the back of Ma's neck.
"Tell me, how do these outside-of-church weddings work?" Ma asked.
"Ma, I told you my reasons for getting married this way," Caroline said. "Eric and I don't want to spend all the money we have on one silly night that everybody else will enjoy except us. We would rather do it this way. We have all our papers ready. Eric has a friend who is a judge. He will perform the ceremony