The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [11]
I had always thought that my father’s only ordeal was that he’d left his country and moved to a place where everything from the climate to the language was so unlike his own, a place where he never quite seemed to fit in, never appeared to belong. The only thing I can grasp now, as I drive way beyond the speed limit down yet another highway, is why the unfamiliar might have been so comforting, rather than distressing, to my father. And why he has never wanted the person he was, is, permanently documented in any way. He taught himself to appreciate the enormous weight of permanent markers by learning about the Ancient Egyptians. He had gotten to know them, through their crypts and monuments, in a way that he wanted no one to know him, no one except my mother and me, we, who are now his kas, his good angels, his masks against his own face.
SEVEN
Next month would make it seven years since he’d last seen his wife. Seven—a number he despised but had discovered was a useful marker. There were seven days between paychecks, seven hours, not counting lunch, spent each day at his day job, seven at his night job. Seven was the last number in his age—thirty-seven. And now there were seven hours left before his wife was due to arrive. Maybe it would be more, with her having to wait for her luggage and then make it through the long immigration line and past customs to look for him in the crowd of welcoming faces on the other side of the sliding doors at JFK. That is, if the flight from Port-au-Prince wasn’t delayed, as it often was, or canceled altogether.
He shared an apartment in the basement of a two-story house with two other men, Michel and Dany. To prepare for the reunion, he’d cleaned his room, thrown out some cherry-red rayon shirts he knew his wife would hate, and then climbed the splintered steps to the first floor to tell the landlady that his wife was coming.
The landlady was heavyset and plain, almost homely, with deep ridges on her wide forehead.
“I don’t have a problem with your wife coming.” She often closed her eyes while speaking, as if to accentuate the pauses between her words. “I just hope she’s clean.”
“She is clean,” he said.
“We understand each other, then.”
The kitchen was the only room in the main part of the house he’d ever seen. It was pine-scented, spotless, and the dishes were neatly organized behind glass cabinets.
“Did you tell the men?” she asked, while sticking a frozen dessert in her microwave.
“I told them,” he said.
He was waiting for her to announce that she’d have to charge him extra. She and her husband had agreed to rent the room to one person—a man they’d probably taken for a bachelor—not two.
“A woman living down there with three men,” the landlady said, removing the small pie from the microwave. “Maybe your wife will be uncomfortable.”
He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t up to her to decide whether or not his wife would be comfortable. But he had been prepared for this too, for some unpleasant remark about his wife. Actually, he was up there as much to give notice that he was looking for an apartment as to announce that his wife was coming. As soon as he found an apartment, he would be moving.
“Okay, then,” she said, opening her silverware drawer. “Remember, you start the month, you pay the whole thing.”
“Thank you very much, Madame,” he said.
As he walked back downstairs, he scolded himself for calling her Madame. Why had he acted like a manservant who’d just been dismissed? It was one of those class things from home he still couldn’t shake. On the other hand, if he addressed the woman respectfully, it wasn’t because she had more money than