The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [43]
These last few words seemed to clarify nothing, just as they never did for Aline’s parents, who ran their church’s day-care center in Somerville, Massachusetts, so Aline became quiet. She didn’t want to tell Beatrice that she’d simply taken the newspaper internship because it was the first paid job she was offered after she’d been dumped by her girlfriend, needing important-sounding work to report to both her ex—should they ever speak again—and her folks.
“When you were studying this, what was it, French, did you learn anything useful?” Beatrice asked offhandedly.
Aline’s common sense and her recollection of Marjorie Voltaire’s caveats told her that she was losing control of the interview. However, it had been such a long time since anyone had spoken to her with such interest that she frankly welcomed it.
She was finding it hard now to remember anything from any of the hundreds of books she’d read in school. What instantly came to mind, aside from her former professor, was a film of a depth-perception experiment she’d seen in a Psych 101 class, in which an infant cried when he was made to crawl over a glass surface with an image of a deep gorge below. Much had been made of the fact that the infant had displayed fear of falling into the gorge, despite not knowing what a gorge was or what it meant to fall. Aline had thought the experiment cruel and had been unable to watch most of the class film, though she’d never been able to forget what little she’d seen.
It was after she babbled the story of the gorge experiment to Beatrice and got no response that she noticed the sewing kit on Beatrice’s lap, a cedar box divided into several sections, each filled with thimbles, bodkins, pin-cushions, and chatelaines that looked as though they were from another era. Beatrice was searching for something in the box and let out a sigh of relief when she found it. It was a gold thimble with her name carved in microscopic letters on the base and a wreath of tiny wildflowers on the rim.
Beatrice moved the thimble closer to Aline’s nose ring, then took turns capping each of her ten fingers with it.
“What are you going to do after you retire?” Aline asked, trying to complete the interview.
“Move, again.” Beatrice pressed the thimble between her palms, rolling it up and down as if to warm it.
“Why?” Aline asked.
Beatrice put the thimble back in the box, then set the whole kit down on the ground. She covered her eyes with both hands, then gradually removed her fingers as though to slowly take in the world again.
“We called them choukèt lawoze,” Beatrice said, the couch’s plastic cover squeaking beneath her. “They’d break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away. He was one of them, the guard.”
Beatrice removed her open-toed sandals and raised her feet so Aline could see the soles of her feet. They were thin and sheer like an albino baby’s skin.
“He asked me to go dancing with him one night,” Beatrice said, putting her feet back in her sandals. “I had a boyfriend, so I said no. That’s why he arrested me. He tied me to some type of rack in the prison and whipped the bottom of my feet until they bled. Then he made me walk home, barefoot. On tar roads. In the hot sun. At high noon. This man, wherever I rent or buy a house in this city, I find him, living on my street.”
Beatrice got up and collected the empty coffee cups, piling them on the tray. Aline reached over to help her, but Beatrice gently pushed her hands away.
It was the inevitable question, maybe insulting, but Aline felt she had to ask it. “Are you sure it’s the same person?”
Beatrice removed her bronze wig, revealing a line of cotton-white cornrows, curved toward the back of her neck. She raised her hand to her head and scratched her scalp as though to quell a flame there.
“You never look at anyone the way you do someone like