The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [56]
WEEK 2
When I was a girl in Léogâne, some days my mother and I would play telephone. We’d tie two empty condensed-milk cans to the ends of a long rope and sing to each other from far away. Sometimes I’d hide inside the house, under our cedar table, and she’d remain outside, but we could still hear each other, without shouting.
During carnival, we’d use our telephone rope for a maypole dance. We’d skip around each other and duck under the ropes, taking turns at being the maypole and the dancer. We always thought, or she always thought, we were weaving the wind, plaiting it into a braid as thick as the rainbows that were sometimes above our heads.
Whenever she got tired of playing, my mother would look up at the clouds and say, “Look, Freda, Papa’s listening to us up there. He’s eating coconut with God and he’s making a cloud for us with coconut meat.”
I thought her mind was gone whenever she said things like that. She also embroidered clouds on pieces of cloth, tiny crimson cirrus threads.
My father used to look at the way the sunset outshone the clouds to decide what the sea would be like the next day. A ruby twilight would mean a calm sea, but a blood-red dawn might spoil everything.
WEEK 3
Blue is the only color I was able to see whenever I was at sea with my father. For a while we forgot there were other colors. Oh, I remembered yellow too, yellow like the sun almost going down.
“Yellow as in sunflowers and marigolds,” Rézia observes, fanning herself with her handkerchief and smothering us with vetiver.
“Marigolds, the flower of a thousand lives,” Mariselle adds. She puffs on her long, thin Gauloises, covering the filtered tips with her mandarin-red lipstick.
“Yellow like my boyfriend,” Rézia says, “the man of a thousand lies.”
The teacher shows us a picture of a painting full of sunflowers and says, “Look how there are no dead spots in this painting.”
Life is full of dead spots.
I used to wear only new black dresses so I could blend in at the funerals where I sang. Now I wear used clothes, “Kennedys,” in rainbow colors, and a red headband around my head, to brighten my dead spots.
WEEK 4
It was Rézia’s idea that she, Mariselle, and I go to her restaurant after class. We didn’t always understand what was going on in the classroom and, being the only Haitians, we thought we might be able to explain certain lessons to one another, like the grammatical rules for present perfect, which at first I thought meant perfect presents or matchless gifts.
Flowered plastic sheaths were draped over the tables in the dining room, but Rézia would uncover one table so we could drink on the new-looking wooden surface. The walls around us were covered with bright little paintings, portraits of young boys playing with tops and marbles and flying kites, old men casting nets in the ocean, women walking barefoot to the market with large baskets on their heads. There was a dusty fan overhead that Rézia said was only turned on when the cook burned the food and she needed to air out the place. We put on the fan and sat with our knees touching because the table was so small. Only Mariselle would pull her chair away, putting a few inches between us and herself.
I was the one who started it one night over a bottle of urine-colored rum from Rézia’s pantry. Mariselle would have only red wine, small bottles of Pinot Noir, which she brought herself.
“I used to play telephone with my mother. . . . I forgot all colors except blue when I went fishing with my father. . . . I was asked to sing at the national palace. . . .”
I thought exposing a few details of my life would inspire them to do the same and slowly we’d parcel out our sorrows, each walking out with fewer than we’d carried in.
WEEK 5
Before my father was arrested, the president of the republic would drive through my town on New Year’s Eve and throw money from the window of his big shiny black car. Sun rays would wrap themselves around the brand-new coins, making them glow like glass. When we heard that the president was coming, we would