The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [58]
“I went to school with his brother,” she says. “His father and mine were friends.”
WEEK 9
We fail our practice tests, except Rézia, who gets seventy percent, enough to pass.
“It’s not normal,” I complain. “We studied as much as you.”
“Listen to the baby funeral singer,” Mariselle says, wrapping her manicured hands around the neck of her dark green wine bottle. “You have so much time ahead to redo these things, retake these tests, reshape your whole life.”
WEEK 10
We drink too much and stay too long at the restaurant. Mariselle and I have grown used to the idea that we may never get diplomas out of the class.
Mariselle uncorks her second Pinot Noir of the evening. Rézia and I stick to the rum. We like the fiery, bitter taste and the way it makes us foggy right away. I know I’m ruining my voice, but who cares?
The people inside the little paintings are beginning to sway back and forth for the first time. Or is it my head that’s dancing? They walk past the borders and merge with our shadows on the wall.
“Let’s talk about something cheerful,” Rézia says. Her voice is slurred and she sounds sleepy. She’s the most drunk of the three of us, consuming more spirits in celebration for passing yet another practice test that Mariselle and I have failed.
“How does a person become a funeral singer, anyway?” Mariselle asks. She throws her hands across my shoulders. Cigarette ashes rain on my orange Salvation Army dress.
The first time I ever sang in public was at my father’s memorial Mass. I sang “Brother Timonie,” a song whose cadence rises and falls, like the waves of the ocean. I sang it through my tears, and later people would tell me that my sobs reminded them of the incoming tide. From that moment on I became a funeral singer.
Every time there was a funeral in Léogâne, I was asked to sing. I would sing my father’s fishing songs and sometimes improvise my own, right there, next to the coffin, in front of the family, at the funeral home or at the church. At other times, I would sing “Ave Maria” or “Amazing Grace,” if the family requested them. But I was always appreciated and well compensated.
“Tell me something cheerful,” Rézia objects with a mouth full of rice. “Enough about funerals. Enough!”
“Jackie Kennedy came to Haiti last year.” Mariselle perks up. She drops her empty glass on the table, breaking off a chunk at the bottom.
“Who’s she?” Rézia picks up the piece of glass and tosses it behind her.
“The wife of President Kennedy,” Mariselle explains. “The President Kennedy that all the used clothes in Port-au-Prince are named after.”
“Oh,” Rézia says, now taking swigs directly from the rum bottle. “He was so handsome.”
“She’s pretty too,” Mariselle says. “She spoke French. She lost her husband and two babies, yet she remained so beautiful. She made sadness beautiful.”
Pushing the damaged glass aside, Mariselle describes her encounter with Jackie Kennedy. Jackie Kennedy’s first husband, the president whom all the used clothes in Port-au-Prince are named after, had been dead for more than a decade when she came to Haiti. Her new husband was a Greek billionaire who’d had some business with our president. Mariselle’s first sighting of Jackie Kennedy was on the pier at the Port-au-Prince harbor when Jackie Kennedy walked off an enormous yacht, wearing pink Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt, a massive straw hat, and wide-rimmed sunglasses to guard her well-chiseled face. The wind almost blew her hat away. Almost blew her tiny body away, Mariselle recalled, but she held herself up and disembarked.
“My husband went to the pier to paint her portrait,