Krik? Krak! (18 page)

'At the store," Ma said, "I told them your age and how you would be having this type of a shower. A girl there said that this would make a good gift for such things. I hope it will be of use."

"I like it very much," Caroline said, replacing it in the box.

After Caroline went to bed, I went to Ma's room for one of our chats. I slipped under the covers next to her, the way Caroline and I had come to her and Papa when our dreams had frightened us.

"That was nice, the teddy you got for Caroline," I said. "But it doesn't seem much like your taste."

"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 for us in his office."

"So much like America," Ma said, shaking her head. "Everything mechanical. When you were young, every time someone asked you what you wanted to do when you were all grown up, you said you wanted to marry Pélé. What's happened to that dream?"

"Pélé who?" Caroline grimaced.

"On the eve of your wedding day, you denounce him, but you wanted to marry him, the Brazilian soccer player, you always said when you were young that you wanted to marry him."

I was the one who wanted to marry Pélé. When I was a little girl, my entire notion of love was to marry the soccer star. I would confess it to Papa every time we watched a game together on television.

In our living room, the music was dying down as the radio station announced two A.M. Ma kept her head down as she added a few last stitches to her dress for the wedding.

"When you are pregnant," Ma said to Caroline, "give your body whatever it wants. You don't want your child to have port-wine marks from your cravings."

Caroline went to our room and came back wearing her wedding dress
and
a false arm.

Ma's eyes wandered between the bare knees poking beneath the dress and the device attached to Caroline's forearm.

"I went out today and got myself a wedding present," Caroline said. It was a robotic arm with two shoulder straps that controlled the motion of the plastic fingers.

"Lately, I've been having this shooting pain in my stub and it feels like my arm is hurting," Caroline said.

"It does not look very real," Ma said.

"That's not the point, Ma!" Caroline snapped.

"I don't understand," Ma said.

"I often feel a shooting pain at the end of my left arm, always as though it was cut from me yesterday. The doc-tor said I have phantom pain."

"What? The pain of ghosts?"

"Phantom limb pain," Caroline explained, "a kind of pain that people feel after they've had their arms or legs amputated. The doctor thought this would make it go away."

"But your arm was never cut from you," Ma said. "Did you tell him that it was God who made you this way?"

"With all the pressure lately, with the wedding, he says that it's only natural that I should feel amputated."

"In that case, we all have phantom pain," Ma said.

When she woke up on her wedding day, Caroline looked drowsy and frazzled, as if she had aged several years since the last time we saw her. She said nothing to us in the kitchen as she swallowed two aspirins with a gulp of water.

"Do you want me to make you some soup?" Ma asked.

Caroline said nothing, letting her body drift down into Ma's arms as though she were an invalid. I helped her into a chair at the kitchen table. Ma went into the hall closet and pulled out some old leaves that she had been saving. She stuffed the leaves into a pot of water until the water overflowed.

Caroline was sitting so still that Ma raised her index finger under her nose to make sure she was breathing.

"What do you feel?" Ma asked.

"I am tired," Caroline said. "I want to sleep. Can I go back to bed?"

"The bed won't be yours for much longer," Ma said. 'As soon as you leave, we will take out your bed. From this day on, you will be sleeping with your husband, away from here."

"What's the matter?" I asked Caroline.

"I don't know," she said. "I just woke up feeling like I don't want to get married. All this pain, all this pain in my arm makes it seem so impossible somehow."

"You're just nervous," I said.

"Don't worry," Ma said. "I was the same on the morning of my wedding. I fell into a stupor, frightened of all the possibilities. We will give you a bath and then you lay down for a bit and you will rise as promised and get married."

The house smelled like a forest as the leaves boiled on the stove. Ma filled the bathtub with water and then dumped the boiled leaves inside.

We undressed Caroline and guided her to the tub, helping her raise her legs to get in.

"Just sink your whole body," Ma said, when Caroline was in the tub.

Caroline pushed her head against the side of the tub and lay there as her legs paddled playfully towards the water's surface.

Ma's eyes were fierce with purpose as she tried to stir Caroline out of her stupor.

'At last a sign," she joked. "She is my daughter after all. This is just the way I was on the day of my wedding."

Caroline groaned as Ma ran the leaves over her skin.

"Woman is angel," Ma said to Caroline. "You must confess, this is like pleasure."

Caroline sank deeper into the tub as she listened to Ma's voice.

"Some angels climb to heaven backwards," Caroline said. "I want to stay with us, Ma."

"You take your vows in sickness and in health," Ma said. "You decide to try sickness first? That is not very smart."

"You said this happened to you too, Ma?" Caroline asked.

"It did," Ma said. "My limbs all went dead on my wedding day. I vomited all over my wedding dress on the way to the church."

"I am glad I bought a cheap dress then," Caroline said, laughing. "How did you stop vomiting?"

"My honeymoon."

"You weren't afraid of that?"

"Heavens no," Ma said, scrubbing Caroline's back with a handful of leaves. "For that I couldn't wait."

Caroline leaned back in the water and closed her eyes.

"I am eager to be a guest in your house," Ma said to Caroline.

"I will cook all your favorite things," Caroline said.

"As long as your husband is not the cook, I will eat okay."

"Do you think I'll make a good wife, Ma?"

"Even though you are an island girl with one kind of season in your blood, you will make a wife for all sea-sons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter."

Caroline got up from the tub and walked alone to Ma's bedroom.

The phone rang and Ma picked it up. It was Eric.

"I don't understand it, honey," Caroline said, already sounding more lucid. "I just felt really blah! I know. I know, but for now, Ma's taking care of me."

Ma made her hair into tiny braids, and over them she put on a wig with a shoulder-length bob. Ma and I checked ourselves in the mirror. She in her pink dress and me in my green suit, the two of us looking like a giant patchwork quilt.

"How long do I have now?" Caroline asked.

'An hour," I said.

"Eric is meeting us there," Caroline said, "since it's bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding."