Krik? Krak!

caroline's wedding

It was a cool September day when I walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom holding my naturalization certificate. As I stood on the courthouse steps, I wanted to run back to my mother's house waving the paper like the head of an enemy rightfully conquered in battle.

I stopped at the McDonald's in Fulton Mall to call ahead and share the news.

There was a soap opera playing in the background when she picked up the phone.

"I am a citizen, Ma," I said.

I heard her clapping with both her hands, the way she had applauded our good deeds when Caroline and I were little girls.

"The paper they gave me, it looks nice," I said. "It's wide like a diploma and has a gold seal with an official-looking signature at the bottom. Maybe I will frame it."

"The passport, weren't you going to bring it to the. post office to get a passport right away?" she asked in Creole.

"But I want you to see it, Ma."

"Go ahead and get the passport. I can see it when you get it back," she said. 'A passport is truly what's American. May it serve you well."

At the post office on Flatbush Avenue, I had to temporarily trade in my naturalization certificate for a pass-port application. Without the certificate, I suddenly felt like unclaimed property. When my mother was three months pregnant with my younger sister, Caroline, she was arrested in a sweatshop raid and spent three days in an immigration jail. In my family, we have always been very anxious about our papers.

I raced down the block from where the number eight bus dropped me off, around the corner from our house. The fall was slowly settling into the trees on our block, some of them had already turned slightly brown.

I could barely contain my excitement as I walked up the steps to the house, sprinting across the living room to the kitchen.

Ma was leaning over the stove, the pots clanking as she hummed a song to herself.

"My passport should come in a month or so," I said, unfolding a photocopy of the application for her to see.

She looked at it as though it contained boundless possibilities.

"We can celebrate with some strong bone soup," she said. "I am making some right now."

In the pot on the stove were scraps of cow bones stewing in hot bubbling broth.

Ma believed that her bone soup could cure all kinds of ills. She even hoped that it would perform the miracle of detaching Caroline from Eric, her Bahamian fiancé. Since Caroline had announced that she was engaged, we'd had bone soup with our supper every single night.

"Have you had some soup?" I asked, teasing Caroline when she came out of the bedroom.

"This soup is really getting on my nerves," Caroline whispered in my ear as she walked by the stove to get some water from the kitchen faucet.

Caroline had been born without her left forearm. The round end of her stub felt like a stuffed dumpling as I squeezed it hello. After my mother was arrested in the sweatshop immigration raid, a prison doctor had given her a shot of a drug to keep her calm overnight. That shot, my mother believed, caused Caroline's condition. Caroline was lucky to have come out missing only one forearm. She might not have been born at all.

"Soup is ready," Ma announced.

"If she keeps making this soup," Caroline whispered, "I will dip my head into the pot and scald myself blind. That will show her that there's no magic in it."

It was very hard for Ma to watch Caroline prepare to leave us, knowing that there was nothing she could do but feed her.

"Ma, if we keep on with this soup," Caroline said, "we'll all grow horns like the ones that used to be on these cows."

Caroline brushed aside a strand of her hair, chemically straightened and streaked bright copper from a peroxide experiment.

"You think you are so American," Ma said to Caro-line. "You don't know what's good for you. You have no taste buds. A double tragedy."

"There's another American citizen in the family now." I took advantage of the moment to tell Caroline.

"Congratulations," she said. "I don't love you any less."

Caroline had been born in America, something that she very much took for granted.

Later that night, Ma called me into her bedroom after she thought Caroline had gone to sleep. The room was still decorated just the way it had been when Papa was still alive. There was a large bed, almost four feet tall, facing an old reddish brown dresser where we could see our reflections in a mirror as we talked.

Ma's bedroom closet was spilling over with old suit-cases, some of which she had brought with her when she left Haiti almost twenty-five years before. They were so crowded into the small space that the closet door would never stay fully closed.

"She drank all her soup," Ma said as she undressed for bed. "She talks bad about the soup but she drinks it."

"Caroline is not a child, Ma."

"She doesn't have to drink it."

"She wants to make you happy in any small way she can."

"If she wanted to make me happy, you know what she would do."

"She has the right to choose who she wants to marry. That's none of our business."

"I am afraid she will never find a nice man to marry her," Ma said. "I am afraid you won't either."

"Caroline is already marrying a nice man," I said.

"She will never find someone Haitian," she said.

"It's not the end of creation that she's not marrying someone Haitian."

"No one in our family has ever married outside," she said. "There has to be a cause for everything."

"What's the cause of you having said what you just said? You know about Eric. You can't try to pretend that he's not there."

"She is my last child. There is still a piece of her in-side me."

"Why don't you give her a spanking?" I joked.

"My mother used to spank me when I was older than you," she said. "Do you know how your father came to have me as his wife? His father wrote a letter to my father and came to my house on a Sunday afternoon and brought the letter in a pink and green handkerchief. Pink because it is the color of romance and green for hope that it might work. Your grandfather on your papa's side had the handkerchief sewn especially in these two colors to wrap my proposal letter in. He brought this letter to my house and handed it to my father. My father didn't even read the letter himself. He called in a neighbor and asked the neighbor to read it out loud.

"The letter said in very fancy words how much your father wanted to be my husband. My son desires greatly your daughter's hand, something like that. The whole time the letter was being read, your father and I sat silently while our parents had this type of show. Then my father sent your father away, saying that he and my mother wanted to think about the proposal."

"Did they consult you about it?" I asked, pretending not to know the outcome.

"Of course they did. I had to act like I didn't really like your father or that at least I liked him just a tiny little bit. My parents asked me if I wanted to marry him and I said I wouldn't mind, but they could tell from my face that it was a different story, that I was already desperately in love."

"But you and Papa had talked about this, right? Before his father came to your father."

"Your father and I had talked about it. We were what you girls call dating. He would come to my house and I would go to his house when his mother was there. We would go to the cinema together, but the proposal, it was all very formal, and sometimes, in some circumstances, formality is important."

"What would you have done if your father had said no?" I asked.

"Don't say that you will never dine with the devil if you have a daughter," she said. "You never know what she will bring. My mother and father, they knew that too."

"What would you have done if your father had said no?" I repeated.

"I probably would have married anyway," she said. "There is little others can do to keep us from our hearts' desires."

Caroline too was going to get married whether Ma wanted her to or not. That night, maybe for the first time, I saw a hint of this realization in Ma's face. As she raised her comforter and slipped under the sheets, she looked as if she were all alone in the world, as lonely as a woman with two grown daughters could be.

"We're not like birds," she said, her head sinking into the pillow. "We don't just kick our children out of our nests."

Caroline was still awake when I returned to our room.

"Is she ever going to get tired of telling that story?" she asked.

"You're talking about a woman who has had soup with cow bones in it for all sixty years of her life. She doesn't get tired of things. What are you going to do about it?"

"She'll come around. She has to," Caroline said.

We sat facing each other in the dark, playing a free-association game that Ma had taught us when we were girls.

"Who are you?" Caroline asked me.

"I am the lost child of the night."

"Where do you come from?"

"I come from the inside of the lost stone."

"Where are your eyes?"

"I have eyes lost behind my head, where they can best protect me."

"Who is your mother?"

"She who is the lost mother of all."

"Who is your father?"

"He who is the lost father of all."

Sometimes we would play half the night, coming up with endless possibilities for questions and answers, only repeating the key word in every sentence. Ma too had learned this game when she was a girl. Her mother belonged to a secret women's society in Ville Rose, where the women had to question each other before entering one another's houses. Many nights while her mother was hosting the late-night meetings, Ma would fall asleep listening to the women's voices.

"I just remembered. There is a Mass Sunday at Saint Agnes for a dead refugee woman." Ma was standing in the doorway in her nightgown. "Maybe you two will come with me."

"Nobody sleeps in this house," Caroline said.

I would go, but not her.

They all tend to be similar, farewell ceremonies to the dead. The church was nearly empty, with a few middle-aged women scattered in the pews.

I crossed myself as I faced the wooden life-size statue of a dying Christ, looking down on us from high above the altar. The chapel was dim except for a few high chandeliers and the permanent glow of the rich hues of the stained glass windows. Ma kneeled in one of the side pews. She clutched her rosary and recited her Hail Marys with her eyes tightly shut.

For a long time, services at Saint Agnes have been tailored to fit the needs of the Haitian community. A line of altar boys proceeded down the aisle, each carrying a long lit candle. Ma watched them as though she were a spectator at a parade. Behind us, a group of women was carrying on a conversation, criticizing a neighbor's wife who, upon leaving Haiti, had turned from a sweet Haitian wife into a self-willed tyrant.

"In New York, women give their eight hours to the white man," one of the worshipers said in the poor woman's defense. "No one has time to be cradling no other man."

There was a slow drumbeat playing like a death march from the altar. A priest in a black robe entered behind the last altar boy. He walked up to the altar and began to read from a small book.

Ma lowered her head so far down that I could see the dip in the back of her neck, where she had a port-wine mark shaped like Manhattan Island.

"We have come here this far, from the shackles of the old Africans," read the priest in Creole. 'At the mercy of the winds, at the mercy of the sea, to the quarters of the New World, we came. Transients. Nomads. I bid you welcome."

We all answered back, "Welcome."

The altar boys stood in an arc around the priest as he recited a list of a hundred twenty-nine names, Haitian refugees who had drowned at sea that week. The list was endless and with each name my heart beat faster, for it seemed as though many of those listed might have been people that I had known at some point in my life.

Some of the names sent a wave of sighs and whispers through the crowd. Occasionally, there was a loud scream.

One woman near the front began to convulse after a man's name was called. It took four people to drag her out of the pew before she hurt herself.

"We make a special call today for a young woman whose name we don't know," the priest said after he had recited all the others. "A young woman who was pregnant when she took a boat from Haiti and then later gave birth to her child on that boat. A few hours after the child was born, its precious life went out, like a candle in a storm, and the mother with her infant in her arms dived into the sea."

There are people in Ville Rose, the village where my mother is from in Haiti, who believe that there are special spots in the sea where lost Africans who jumped off the slave ships still rest, that those who have died at sea have been chosen to make that journey in order to be reunited with their long-lost relations.

During the Mass, Ma tightened a leather belt around her belly, the way some old Haitian women tightened rags around their middles when grieving.

"Think to yourself of the people you have loved and lost," the priest said.

Piercing screams sounded throughout the congregation. Ma got up suddenly and began heading for the aisle. The screams pounded in my head as we left the church.

We walked home through the quiet early morning streets along Avenue D, saying nothing to one another.

Caroline was still in bed when we got back.

She wrapped a long black nightgown around her legs as she sat up on a pile of dirty sheets.

There was a stack of cards on a chair by her bed. She picked it up and went through the cards, sorting most of them with one hand and holding the rest in her mouth. She began a game of solitaire using her hand and her lips, flipping the cards back and forth with great agility.

"How was Mass?" she asked.

Often after Mass ended, I would feel as though I had taken a very long walk with the dead.

"Did Ma cry?" she asked.

"We left before she could."

"It's not like she knows these people," Caroline said. Some of the cards slipped from between her lips.

"Ma says all Haitians know each other."

Caroline stacked the cards and dropped them in one of the three large open boxes that were kept lined up behind her bed. She was packing up her things slowly so as to not traumatize Ma.

She and Eric were not going to have a big formal wed-ding. They were going to have a civil ceremony and then they would take some pictures in the wedding grove at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Their honey-moon would be a brief trip to the Bahamas, after which Caroline would move into Eric's apartment.

Ma wanted Eric to officially come and ask her per-mission to marry her daughter. She wanted him to bring his family to our house and have his father ask her blessing. She wanted Eric to kiss up to her, escort her around, buy her gifts, and shower her with compliments. Ma wanted a full-blown church wedding. She wanted Eric to be Haitian.

"You will never guess what I dreamt last night," Caroline said, dropping her used sheets into one of the moving boxes she was packing. "I dreamt about Papa."

It had been almost ten years since Papa had died of untreated prostrate cancer. After he died, Ma made us wear mourning clothes, nothing but black dresses, for eighteen months. Caroline and I were both in high school at the time, and we quickly found ways to make wearing black a fashion statement. Underneath our black clothes we were supposed to wear red panties. In Ma's family, the widows often wore blood-red panties so that their dead husbands would not come back and lie down next to them at night. Daughters who looked a lot like the widowed mother might wear red panties too so that if they were ever mistaken for her, they would be safe.

Ma believed that Caroline and I would be well protected by the red panties. Papa, and all the other dead men who might desire us, would stay away because the sanguine color of blood was something that daunted and terrified the non-living.

For a few months after Papa died, Caroline and I dreamt of him every other night. It was as though he were taking turns visiting us in our sleep. We would each have the same dream: Papa walking in a deserted field while the two of us were running after him. We were never able to catch up with him because there were miles of saw grass and knee-deep mud between us.

We kept this dream to ourselves because we already knew what Ma would say if we told it to her. She would guess that we had not been wearing our red panties and would warn us that the day we caught up with Papa in our dream would be the day that we both would die.

Later the dreams changed into moments replayed from our lives, times when he had told us stories about his youth in Haiti or evenings when he had awakened us at midnight after working a double shift in his taxicab to take us out for Taste the Tropics ice cream, Sicilian pizzas, or Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Slowly, Papa's death became associated with our black clothes. We began carrying our loss like a medal on our chests, answering every time someone asked why such young attractive girls wore such a somber color, "Our mother makes us do it because our father is dead."

Eighteen months after his death, we were allowed to start wearing other colors, but nothing too bright. We could wear white or gray or navy blue but no orange, or red on the outside. The red for the world to see meant that our mourning period had ended, that we were beyond our grief. The red covering our very private parts was to tell our father that he was dead and we no longer wanted anything to do with him.

"How did you dream of Papa?" I asked Caroline now.

"He was at a party," she said, "with all these beautiful people around him, having a good time. I saw him in this really lavish room. I'm standing in the doorway and he's inside and I'm watching him, and it's like watching someone through a glass window. He doesn't even know I'm there. I call him, but he doesn't answer. I just stand there and watch what he's doing because I realize that he can't see me."

She reached into one of her boxes and pulled out a framed black-and-white picture of Papa, a professional studio photograph taken in the nineteen fifties in Haiti, when Papa was twenty-two. In the photograph, he is wearing a dark suit and tie and has a solemn expression on his face. Caroline looked longingly at the picture, the way war brides look at photographs of their dead husbands. I raised my nightshirt and showed her my black cotton panties, the same type that we had both been wearing since the day our father died. Caroline stuck her pinkie through a tiny hole in the front of my panties. She put Papa's picture back into her box, raised her dress, and showed me her own black panties.

We had never worn the red panties that Ma had bought for us over the years to keep our dead father's spirit away. We had always worn our black panties instead, to tell him that he would be welcome to visit us. Even though we no longer wore black outer clothes, we continued to wear black underpants as a sign of lingering grief. Another reason Caroline may have continued to wear hers was her hope that Papa would come to her and say that he approved of her: of her life, of her choices, of her husband.

"With patience, you can see the navel of an ant," I said, recalling one of Papa's favorite Haitian proverbs.

"Rain beats on a dog's skin, but it does not wash out its spots," Caroline responded.

"When the tree is dead, ghosts eat the leaves."

"The dead are always in the wrong."

Beneath the surface of Papa's old proverbs was always some warning.

Our Cuban neighbor, Mrs. Ruiz, was hosting her large extended family in the yard next door after a Sun-day christening. They were blasting some rumba music. We could barely hear each other over the crisp staccato pounding of the conga drums and the shrill brass sections blaring from their stereo.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine their entire clan milling around the yard, a whole exiled family gathering together so far from home. Most of my parents' relatives still lived in Haiti.

Caroline and I walked over to the window to watch the Ruiz clan dance to the rumba.

"Mrs. Ruiz has lost some weight since we saw her last," Caroline said.

"A couple of months ago, Mrs. Ruiz's only son had tried to hijack a plane in Havana to go to Miami. He was shot and killed by the airplane's pilot."

"How do you know such things?" Caroline asked me.

"Ma told me."

When we were younger, Caroline and I would spend all our Sunday mornings in bed wishing that it would be the blessed day that the rest of Caroline's arm would come bursting out of Ma's stomach and float back to her. It would all happen like the brass sections in the Ruizes' best rumbas, a meteoric cartoon explosion, with no blood or pain. After the momentary shock, Caroline would have a whole arm and we would all join Mrs. Ruiz's parties to celebrate. Sometimes Sunday mornings would be so heavy with disappointment that we thought we might explode.

Caroline liked to have her stub stroked. This was something that she had never grown out of. Yet it was the only part of her that people were afraid of. They were afraid of offending her, afraid of staring at it, even while they were stealing a glance or two. A large vein throbbed just below the surface, under a thick layer of skin. I ran my pinkie over the vein and felt it, pulsating against my skin.

"If I slice myself there, I could bleed to death," Caro-line said. "Remember what Papa used to say, 'Behind a white cloud, a bird looks like an angel.'"

Ma was in the kitchen cooking our Sunday breakfast when we came in. She was making a thick omelet with dried herring, served with boiled plantains. Something to keep you going as if it were your only meal for the day.

"Mass was nice today," Ma said, watching Caroline balance her orange juice between her chin and her stub. "If you had gone, you would have enjoyed it a lot."

"Yes. I hear it was a ball," Caroline said.

"You two have been speaking for a long time already," Ma said. "What were you discussing?"

"This and that," I said.

"I've been jealous," Ma said.

That night I dreamt that I was at a costume ball in an eighteenth-century French château, with huge crystal chandeliers above my head. Around me people were wearing masks made from papier-mâché and velvet. Suddenly, one of the men took off his mask. Beneath the mask was my father.

Papa was talking to a group of other people who were also wearing masks. He was laughing as though someone had just told him a really good joke. He turned towards me for a brief second and smiled. I was so happy to see him that I began to cry.

I tried to run to him, but I couldn't. My feet were moving but I was standing in the same place, like a mouse on a treadmill. Papa looked up at me again, and this time he winked. I raised my hand and waved. He waved back. It was a cruel flirtation.

I quickly realized that I would never get near him, so I stood still and just watched him. He looked much healthier than I remembered, his toasted almond face round and fleshy. I felt as though there was something he wanted to tell me.

Suddenly, he dropped his mask on the ground, and like smoke on a windy day, he disappeared. My feet were now able to move. I walked over to where he had been standing and picked up the mask. The expression on the mask was like a frozen scream. I pressed the mask against my chest, feeling the luxurious touch of velvet against my cheek.

When I looked up again, my father was standing at the foot of a spiral staircase with a group of veiled women all around him. He turned his back to me and started climbing the long winding staircase. The veiled women followed him with their beautiful pink gowns crackling like damp wood in a fire.

Then, the women stopped and turned one by one to face me, slowly raising their veils. As they uncovered their faces, I realized that one of them, standing tall and rigid at Papa's side, was Caroline.

Of the two of us, Caroline was the one who looked most like Papa. Caroline looked so much like Papa that Ma liked to say they were one head on two bodies, let koupé.

I started screaming at the top of my lungs. Why were they leaving me out? I should have been there with them.

I woke up with my face soaked with tears, clutching my pillow.

That morning, I wrote down a list of things that I remembered having learned from my father. I had to remind myself, at least under my breath, that I did remember still. In the back of my mind, I could almost hear his voice saying these things to me, in the very same way that he had spoken over the years: "You have memory of walking in a mist at dawn in a banana jungle that no longer exists. You have lived this long in this strange world, so far from home, because you remember."

The lifelines in my father's palms were named after Caroline and me. He remembered everything. He re-membered old men napping on tree branches, forget-ting the height of the trees and the vulnerability of their bodies. He remembered old women sitting sidesaddle on ancient donkeys, taking their last steps. He remembered young wives who got ill from sadness when their men went to the Bahamas or the Dominican Republic to cut sugarcane and were never heard from again. These women lived in houses where they slept on sugar sacks on the floor, with mourning ropes around their bellies, houses where the marital bed was never used again and where the middle pillar was sacred.

He remembered never-ending flour fogs in the country marketplace, fogs that folks compared to the inside of a crazy woman's head. He remembered calling strangers "Mother," "Sister", "Brother," because his village's Creole demanded a family title for everyone he addressed.

My father had memories of eating potato, breadfruit, and avocado peels that he was supposed to be feeding to his mother's pigs. He remembered praying for the rain to stay away even during drought season because his house had a hole in the roof right above his cot. Later he felt guilty that there was no crop, because he thought that it was his prayers that had kept away the rain.

He remembered hearing his illiterate mother reciting poetry and speaking in a tongue that sounded like Latin when she was very ill with typhoid fever. This was the time he tried to stuff red hot peppers into his mother's nose because he was convinced that if the old woman sneezed three times, she would live.

It was my father's job to look for the falling star that would signal his mother's impending death, and when he saw it crash in a flash behind the hills above his house, he screamed and howled like a hurt dog. After his mother died, he stuffed live snakes into bottles to imprison his anger. He swam in waterfalls with healing powers. He piled large rocks around his mother's house to keep the dead spirit in the ground. He played King of the Mountain on garbage heaps. He trapped fireflies in matchboxes so he would not inhale them in his sleep. He collected beads from the braids in his mother's hair and swallowed them in secret so he would always have a piece of her inside of him. And even when he was in America, he never looked at a night sky again.

"I have a riddle for you. Can you handle it?" he would ask.

"Bring it on. Try me."

"Ten thousand very large men are standing under one small umbrella. How is it that none of them gets wet?"

"It is not raining."

"Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the very last place you look?"

"Because once you find it, you look no more."

He had a favorite joke: God once called a conference of world leaders. He invited the president of France, the president of the United States, the president of Russia, Italy, Germany, and China, as well as our own president, His Excellency, the President for Life Papa Doc Duvalier. When the president of France reached the gates of Heaven, God got up from his throne to greet him. When the president of the United States reached the gates of Heaven, God got up to greet him as well. So, too, with the presidents of Russia, Italy, Germany, and China.

When it was our president's turn, His Excellency, the President for Life Papa Doc Duvalier, God did not get up from his throne to greet him. All the angels were stunned and puzzled. They did not understand God's very rude behavior. So they elected a representative to go up to God and question Him.

"God," said the representative, "you have been so cordial to all the other presidents. You have gotten up from your throne to greet them at the gates of Heaven as soon as they have entered. Why do you not get up for Papa Doc Duvalier? Is it because he is a black president? You have always told us to overlook the color of men. Why have you chosen to treat the black president, Papa Doc Duvalier, in this fashion?"

God looked at the representative angel as though He was about to admit something that He did not want to.

"Look," he said. "I am not getting up for Papa Doc Duvalier because I am afraid that if I get up, he will take my throne and will never give it back."

These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.

Caroline's wedding was only a month away. She was very matter-of-fact about it, but slowly we all began to prepare. She had bought a short white dress at a Good-will thrift shop and paid twelve dollars to dry-clean it. Ma, too, had a special dress: a pink lace, ankle-sweeping evening gown that she was going to wear at high noon to a civil ceremony. I decided to wear a green suit, for hope, like the handkerchief that wrapped Ma's marriage proposal letter from Papa's family.

Ma would have liked to have sewn Caroline's wed-ding dress from ten different patterns in a bridal magazine, taking the sleeves from one dress, the collar from another, and the skirt from another. Though in her heart she did not want to attend, in spite of everything, she was planning to act like this was a real wedding.

"The daughter resents a mother forever who keeps her from her love," Ma said as we dressed to go to Eric's house for dinner. "She is my child. You don't cut off your own finger because it smells bad."

Still, she was not going to cook a wedding-night dinner. She was not even going to buy Caroline a special sleeping gown for her "first" sexual act with her husband.

"I want to give you a wedding shower," I said to Caroline in the cab on the way to Eric's house.

There was no sense in trying to keep it a secret from her.

"I don't really like showers," Caroline said, "but I'll let you give me one because there are certain things that I need."

She handed me her address book, filled mostly with the names of people at Jackie Robinson Intermediate School where we both taught English as a Second Language to Haitian students.

Eric and Caroline had met at the school, where he was a janitor. They had been friends for at least a year before he asked her out. Caroline couldn't believe that he wanted to go out with her. They dated for eighteen months before he asked her to marry him.

"A shower is like begging," Ma said, staring out of the car window at the storefronts along Flatbush Avenue. "It is even more like begging if your sister gives one for you."

"The maid of honor is the one to do it," I said. "I am the maid of honor, Ma. Remember?"

"Of course I remember," she said. "I am the mother, but that gives me claim to nothing."

"It will be fun," I tried to assure her. "We'll have it at the house."

"Is there something that's like a shower in Haiti?" Caroline asked Ma.

"In Haiti we are poor," Ma said, "but we do not beg."

"It's nice to see you, Mrs. Azile," Eric said when he came to the door.

Eric had eyes like Haitian lizards, bright copper with a tint of jade. He was just a little taller than Caroline, his rich mahogany skin slightly darker than hers.

Under my mother's glare, he gave Caroline a timid peck on the cheek, then wrapped his arms around me and gave me a bear hug.

"How have you been?" Ma asked him with her best, extreme English pronunciation.

"I can't complain," he said.

Ma moved over to the living room couch and sat down in front of the television screen. There was a nature program playing without sound. Mute images of animals swallowing each other whole flickered across the screen.

"So, you are a citizen of America now?" Eric said to me. "Now you can just get on a plane anytime you feel like it and go anywhere in the world. Nations go to war over women like you. You're an American."

His speech was extremely slow on account of a learning disability. He was not quite retarded, but not like everybody else either.

Ma looked around the room at some carnival posters on Eric's living room wall. She pushed her head forward to get a better look at a woman in a glittering bikini with a crown of feathers on her head. Her eyes narrowed as they rested on a small picture of Caroline, propped in a silver frame on top of the television set.

Eric and Caroline disappeared in the kitchen, leaving me alone with Ma.

"I won't eat if it's bad," she said.

"You know Eric's a great cook," I said.

"Men cooking?" she said. "There is always something wrong with what he makes, here or at our house."

"Well, pretend to enjoy it, will you?"

She walked around the living room, picking up the small wooden sculptures that Eric had in many corners of the room, mostly brown Madonnas with caramel babies wrapped in their arms.

Eric served us chicken in a thick dark sauce. I thrust my fork through layers of gravy. Ma pushed the food around her plate but ate very little.

After dinner, Eric and Caroline did the dishes in the kitchen while Ma and I sat in front of the television.

"Did you have a nice time?" I asked her.

"Nice or not nice, I came," she said.

"That's right, Ma. It counts a lot that you came, but it would have helped if you had eaten more."

"I was not very hungry," she said.

"That means you can't fix anything to eat when you get home," I said. "Nothing. You can't fix anything. Not even bone soup."

"A woman my age in her own home following orders."

Eric had failed miserably at the game of Wooing Haitian Mother-in-Law. Had he known-or rather had Caroline advised him well-he would have hired a Haitian cook to make Ma some Haitian food that would taste (God forbid!) even better than her own.

"We know people by their stories," Ma said to Caroline in the cab on the way home that night. "Gossip goes very far. Grace heard women gossip in the Mass behind us the other day, and you hear what they say about Haitian women who forget themselves when they come here. Value yourself."

"Yes, Ma," Caroline said, for once not putting up a fight.

I knew she wanted to stay and spend the night with Eric but she was sparing Ma.

"I can t accuse you of anything," Ma said. "You never call someone a thief unless you catch them stealing."

"I hear you, Ma," Caroline said, as though her mind were a thousand miles away.

When we got home, she waited for Ma to fall asleep, then called a car service and went back to Eric's. When I got up the next morning, Ma was standing over my bed.

"Did your sister leave for school early again?" she asked.

"Yes, Ma," I said. "Caroline is just like you. She sleeps a hair thread away from waking, and she rises with the roosters."

I mailed out the invitations for Caroline's wedding shower. We kept the list down to a bare minimum, just a few friends and Mrs. Ruiz. We invited none of Ma's friends from Saint Agnes because she told me that she would be ashamed to have them ask her the name of her daughter's fiancé and have her tongue trip, being unable to pronounce it.

"What's so hard about Eric Abrahams?" I asked her. "It's practically a Haitian name."

"But it isn't a Haitian name," she said. "The way I say it is not the way his parents intended for it to be said. I say it Haitian. It is not Haitian."

"People here pronounce our names wrong all the time."

"That is why I know the way I say his name is not how it is meant to be said."

"You better learn his name. Soon it will be your daughter's."

"That will never be my daughter's name," she said, "because it was not the way I intended her name to be said."

In the corner behind her bed, Caroline's boxes were getting full.

"Do you think Ma knows where I am those nights when I'm not here?" she asked.

"If she caught you going out the door, what could she do? It would be like an ant trying to stop a flood."

"It's not like I have no intention of getting married," she said.

"Maybe she understands."

That night, I dreamed of my father again. I was standing on top of a cliff, and he was leaning out of a helicopter trying to grab my hand. At times, the helicopter flew so low that it nearly knocked me off the cliff. My father began to climb down a plastic ladder hanging from the bottom of the helicopter. He was dangling precariously and I was terrified.

I couldn't see his face, but I was sure he was coming to rescue me from the top of that cliff. He was shouting loudly, calling out my name. He called me Gracina, my full Haitian name, not Grace, which is what I'm called here.

It was the first time in any of my dreams that my father had a voice. The same scratchy voice that he had when he was alive. I stretched my hands over my head to make it easier for him to reach me. Our fingers came closer with each swing of the helicopter. His fingertips nearly touched mine as I woke up.

When I was a little girl, there was a time that Caro-line and I were sleeping in the same bed with our parents because we had eaten beans for dinner and then slept on our backs, a combination that gives bad dreams. Even though she was in our parents' bed, Caroline woke up in the middle of the night, terrified. As she sobbed, Papa rocked her in the dark, trying to con-sole her. His face was the first one she saw when Ma turned on the light. Looking straight at Papa with dazed eyes, Caroline asked him, "Who are you?"

He said, "It's Papy."

"Papy who?" she asked.

"Your papy," he said.

"I don't have a papy," she said.

Then she jumped into Papa's arms and went right back to sleep.

My mother and father stayed up trying to figure out what made her say those things.

"Maybe she dreamt that you were gone and that she was sleeping with her husband, who was her only com-fort," Ma said to Papa.

"So young, she would dream this?" asked Papa.

"In dreams we travel the years," Ma had said.

Papa eventually went back to sleep, but Ma stayed up all night thinking.

The next day she went all the way to New Jersey to get Caroline fresh bones for a soup.

"So young she would dream this," Papa kept saying as he watched Caroline drink the soup. "So young. Just look at her, our child of the promised land, our New York child, the child who has never known Haiti."

I, on the other hand, was the first child, the one they called their "misery baby," the offspring of my parents' lean years. I was born to them at a time when they were living in a shantytown in Port-au-Prince and had nothing.

When I was a baby, my mother worried that I would die from colic and hunger. My father pulled heavy carts for pennies. My mother sold jugs of water from the public fountain, charcoal, and grilled peanuts to get us something to eat.

When I was born, they felt a sense of helplessness. What if the children kept coming like the millions of flies constantly buzzing around them? What would they do then? Papa would need to pull more carts. Ma would need to sell more water, more charcoal, more peanuts. They had to try to find a way to leave Haiti.

Papa got a visa by taking vows in a false marriage with a widow who was leaving Haiti to come to the United States. He gave her some money and she took our last name. A few years later, my father divorced the woman and sent for my mother and me. While my father was alive, this was something that Caroline and I were never supposed to know.

We decorated the living room for Caroline's shower. Pink streamers and balloons draped down from the ceiling with the words Happy Shower emblazoned on them.

Ma made some patties from ground beef and codfish. She called one of her friends from Saint Agnes to bake the shower cake cheap. We didn't tell her friend what the cake was for. Ma wrote Caroline's name and the date on it after it had been delivered. She scrubbed the whole house, just in case one of the strangers want-ed to use our bathroom. There wasn't a trace of dirt left on the wallpaper, the tiles, even the bathroom cabinets. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then whenever we had company my mother became a goddess.

Aside from Ma and me, there were only a few other people at the shower: four women from the junior high school where we taught and Mrs. Ruiz.

Ma acted like a waitress and served everyone as Caroline took center stage sitting on the loveseat that we designated the "shower chair." She was wearing one of her minidresses, a navy blue with a wide butterfly collar. We laid the presents in front of her to open, after she had guessed what was inside.

"Next a baby shower!" shouted Mrs. Ruiz in her heavy Spanish accent.

"Let's take one thing at a time," I said.

"Never too soon to start planning," Mrs. Ruiz said. "I promise to deliver the little one myself. Caroline, tell me now, what would you like, a girl or a boy?"

"Let's get through one shower first," Caroline said.

I followed Ma to the kitchen as she picked up yet another empty tray.

"Why don't you sit down for a while and let me serve?" I asked Ma as she put another batch of patties in the oven. She looked like she was going to cry.

When it was time to open the presents, Ma stayed in the kitchen while we all sat in a circle watching Caroline open her gifts.

She got a juicer, a portable step exerciser, and some other household appliances from the school-teachers. I gave her a traveling bag to take on her honeymoon.

Ma peeked through the doorway as we cooed over the appliances, suggesting romantic uses for them: breakfasts in bed, candlelight dinners, and the like. Ma pulled her head back quickly and went into the kitchen.

She was in the living room to serve the cake when the time came for it. While we ate, she gathered all of the boxes and the torn wrapping paper and took them to the trash bin outside.

She was at the door telling our guests good-bye as they left.

"Believe me, Mrs. Azile, I will deliver your first grand-child," Mrs. Ruiz told her as she was leaving.

"I am sorry about your son," I said to Mrs. Ruiz.

"Now why would you want to bring up a thing like that?" Mrs. Ruiz asked.

"Carmen, next time you come I will give you some of my bone soup," Ma said as Mrs. Ruiz left.

Ma gave me a harsh look as though I had stepped out of line in offering my belated condolences to Mrs. Ruiz.

"There are things that don't always need to be said," Ma told me.

Caroline packed her gifts before going to bed that night. The boxes were nearly full now.

We heard a knock on the door of our room as we changed for bed. It was Ma in her nightgown holding a gift-wrapped package in her hand. She glanced at Caroline's boxes in the corner, quickly handing Caro-line the present.

"It is very sweet of you to get me something," Caro-line said, kissing Ma on the cheek to say thank you.

"It's very nothing," Ma said, "very nothing at all."

Ma turned her face away as Caroline lifted the present out of the box. It was a black and gold silk teddy with a plunging neckline.

'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."

"If the groom is not supposed to see the bride, how do they get married?" Ma asked.

"They're not supposed to see each other until the ceremony," Caroline said.

Caroline dressed quickly. Her hair was slicked back in a small bun, and after much persuasion, Ma got her to wear a pair of white stockings to cover her jutting knees.

The robotic arm was not as noticeable as the first time we had seen it. She had bought a pair of long white gloves to wear over the plastic arm and her other arm. Ma put some blush on the apple of Caroline's cheeks and then applied some rice powder to her face. Caroline sat stiffly on the edge of her bed as Ma glued fake eye-lashes to her eyelids.

I took advantage of our last few minutes together to snap some instant Polaroid memories. Caroline wrapped her arms tightly around Ma as they posed for the pictures.

"Ma, you look so sweet," Caroline said.

We took a cab to the courthouse. I made Ma and Caroline pose for more pictures on the steps. It was as though we were going to a graduation ceremony.

The judge's secretary took us to a conference room while her boss finished an important telephone call. Eric was already there, waiting. As soon as we walked in, Eric rushed over to give Caroline a hug. He began stroking her mechanical arm as though it were a fascinating new toy.

"Lovely," he said.

"It's just for the day," Caroline said.

"It suits you fine," he said.

Caroline looked much better. The rouge and rice powder had given her face a silky brown-sugar finish.

Ma sat stiffly in one of the cushioned chairs with her purse in her lap, her body closed in on itself like a cage.

"Judge Perez will be right with you," the secretary said.

Judge Perez bounced in cheerfully after her. He had a veil of thinning brown hair and a goatee framing his lips.

"I'm sorry the bride and groom had to wait," he said giving Eric a hug. "I couldn't get off the phone."

"Do you two know what you're getting into?" he said, playfully tapping Eric's arm.

Eric gave a coy smile. He wanted to move on with the ceremony. Caroline's lips were trembling with a mixture of fear and bashfulness.

"It's really a simple thing," Judge Perez said. "It's like a visit to get your vaccination. Believe me when I tell you it's very short and painless."

He walked to a coat rack in the corner, took a black robe from it, and put it on.

"Come forward, you two," he said, moving to the side of the room. "The others can stand anywhere you like."

Ma and I crowded behind the two of them. Eric had no family here. They were either in another state or in the Bahamas.

"No best man?" Ma whispered.

"I'm not traditional," Eric said.

"That wasn't meant to be heard," Ma said, almost as an apology.

"It's all right," Eric said.

"Dearly beloved," Judge Perez began. "We are gathered here today to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony."

Caroline's face, as I had known it, slowly began to fade, piece by piece, before my eyes. Another woman was setting in, a married woman, someone who was no longer my little sister.

"I, Caroline Azile, take this man to be my lawful wedded husband."

I couldn't help but feel as though she was divorcing us, trading in her old allegiances for a new one.

It was over before we knew it. Eric grabbed Caroline and kissed her as soon as the judge said, "Her lips are yours."

"They were mine before, too," Eric said, kissing Caroline another time.

After the kiss, they stood there, wondering what to do next. Caroline looked down at her ringer, admiring her wedding band. Ma took a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to the judge. He moved her hand away, but she kept insisting. I reached over and took the money from Ma's hand.

"I want to take the bride and groom out for a nice lunch," I said.

"Our plane leaves for Nassau at five," Eric said.

"We'd really like that, right, Ma?" I said. "Lunch with the bride and groom."

Ma didn't move. She understood the extent to which we were unimportant now.

"I feel much better," Caroline said.

"Congratulations, Sister," I said. "We're going to take you out to eat."

"I want to go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to take some pictures," Caroline said.

'All set," Eric said. "I have a photographer meeting us there."

Ma said, "How come you never told me you were leaving tonight? How come you never tell me nothing."

"You knew she wasn't going back to sleep at the house with us," I said to Ma.

"I am not talking to you," Ma said, taking her anger out on me.

"I am going to stop by the house to pick up my suit-case," Caroline said.

We had lunch at Le Bistro, a Haitian Restaurant on Flat-bush Avenue. It was the middle of the afternoon, so we had the whole place to ourselves. Ma sat next to me, not saying a word. Caroline didn't eat very much either. She drank nothing but sugared water while keeping her eyes on Ma.

"There's someone out there for everyone," Eric said, standing up with a champagne glass in the middle of the empty restaurant. "Even some destined bachelors get married. I am a very lucky person."

Caroline clapped. Ma and I raised our glasses for his toast. He and Caroline laughed together with an ease that Ma and I couldn't feel.

"Say something for your sister," Ma said in my ear.

I stood up and held my glass in her direction.

"A few years ago, our parents made this journey," I said. "This is a stop on the journey where my sister leaves us. We will miss her greatly, but she will never be gone from us."

It was something that Ma might have said.

The photographer met us at the wedding grove at the Botanic Garden. Eric and Caroline posed stiffly for their photos, surrounded by well-cropped foliage.

"These are the kinds of pictures that they will later lay over the image of a champagne glass or something," Ma said. "They do so many tricks with photography now, for posterity."

We went back to the house to get Caroline's luggage.

"We cannot take you to the airport," Ma said.

"It's all right, Mother," Eric said. "We will take a cab. We will be fine."

I didn't know how long I held Caroline in my arms on the sidewalk in front of our house. Her synthetic arm felt weighty on my shoulder, her hair stuck to the tears on my face.

"I'll visit you and Ma when I come back," she said. "Just don't go running off with any Brazilian soccer players."

Caroline and I were both sobbing by the time she walked over to say good-bye to Ma. She kissed Ma on the cheek and then quickly hopped in the taxi without looking back. Ma ran her hand over the window, her finger sliding along the car door as it pulled away.

"I like how you stood up and spoke for your sister," she said.

"The toast?"

"It was good."

"I feel like I had some help," I said.

That night, Ma got a delivery of roses so red that they didn't look real.

"Too expensive," she said when the delivery man handed them to her.

The guy waited for her to sign a piece of paper and then a bit longer for a tip.

Ma took a dollar out of her bra and handed it to him.

She kept sniffing the roses as she walked back to the kitchen.

"Who are they from?" I asked.

"Caroline," she said. "Sweet, sweet Caroline."

Distance had already made my sister Saint Sweet Caroline.

"Are you convinced of Caroline's happiness now?" I asked.

"You ask such difficult questions."

That night she went to bed with the Polaroid wed-ding photos and the roses by her bed. Later, I saw her walking past my room cradling the vase. She woke up several times to sniff the roses and change the water.

That night, I also dreamt that I was with my father by a stream of rose-colored blood. We made a fire and grilled a breadfruit for dinner while waiting for the stream to turn white. My father and I were sitting on opposite sides of the fire. Suddenly the moon slipped through a cloud and dived into the bloody stream, filling it with a sheet of stars.

I turned to him and said, "Look, Papy. There are so many stars."

And my father in his throaty voice said, "If you close your eyes really tight, wherever you are, you will see these stars."

I said, "Let's go for a swim."

He said, "No, we have a long way to travel and the trip will be harder if we get wet."

Then I said, "Papa, do you see all the blood? It's very beautiful."

His face began to glow as though it had become like one of the stars.

Then he asked me, "If we were painters, which landscapes would we paint?"

I said, "I don't understand."

He said, "We are playing a game, you must answer me.

I said, "I don't know the answers."

"When you become mothers, how will you name your sons?"

"We'll name them all after you," I said.

"You have forgotten how to play this game," he said.

"What kind of lullabies do we sing to our children at night? Where do you bury your dead?"

His face was fading into a dreamy glow.

"What kind of legends will your daughters be told? What kinds of charms will you give them to ward off evil?"

I woke up startled, for the first time afraid of the father that I saw in my dreams.

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and went down to the kitchen to get a glass of warm milk.

Ma was sitting at the kitchen table, rolling an egg between her palms. I slipped into the chair across from her. She pressed harder on both ends of the egg.

"What are you doing up so late?" she asked.

"I can't sleep," I said.

"I think people should take shifts. Some of us would carry on at night and some during the day. The night would be like the day exactly. All stores would be open and people would go to the office, but only the night people. You see, then there would be no sleeplessness."

I warmed some cold milk in a pan on the stove. Ma was still pressing hard, trying to crush the egg from top and bottom. I offered her some warm milk but she refused.

"What did you think of the wedding today?" I asked.

"When your father left me and you behind in Haiti to move to this country and marry that woman to get our papers," she said, "I prepared a charm for him. I wrote his name on a piece of paper and put the paper in a cal-abash. I filled the calabash with honey and next to it lit a candle. At midnight every night, I laid the calabash next to me in the bed where your father used to sleep and shouted at it to love me. I don't know how or what I was looking for, but somehow in the words he was sending me, I knew he had stopped thinking of me the same way."

"You can t believe that, Ma," I said.

"I know what I know," she said. "I am an adult woman. I am not telling you this story for pity."

The kitchen radio was playing an old classic on one of the Haitian stations.

Beloved Haiti, there is no place like you.

I had to leave you before I could understand you.

"Would you like to see my proposal letter?" Ma asked.

She slid an old jewelry box across the table towards me. I opened it and pulled out the envelope with the letter in it.

The envelope was so yellowed and frail that at first I was afraid to touch it.

"Go ahead," she said, "it will not turn to dust in your hands."

The letter was cracked along the lines where it had been folded all of these years.

My son, Carl Romélus Azile, would be honored to make your daughter, Hermine Francoise Genie, his wife.

"It was so sweet then," Ma said, "so sweet. Promise me that when I die you will destroy all of this."

"I can't promise you that," I said. "I will want to hold on to things when you die. I will want to hold on to you."

"I do not want my grandchildren to feel sorry for me," she said. "The past, it fades a person. And yes. Today, it was a nice wedding."

My passport came in the mail the next day, addressed to Gracina Azile, my real and permanent name.

I filled out all the necessary sections, my name and address, and'listed my mother to be contacted in case I was in an accident. For the first time in my life,,1 felt truly secure living in America. It was like being in a war zone and finally receiving a weapon of my own, like standing on the firing line and finally getting a bullet-proof vest.

We had all paid dearly for this piece of paper, this final assurance that I belonged in the club. It had cost my parent's marriage, my mother's spirit, my sister's arm.

I felt like an indentured servant who had finally been allowed to join the family.

The next morning, I went to the cemetery in Rosedale, Queens, where my father had been buried. His was one of many gray tombstones in a line of foreign unpronounceable names. I brought my passport for him to see, laying it on the grass among the wild daisies surrounding the grave.

"Caroline had her wedding," I said. "We felt like you were there."

My father had wanted to be buried in Haiti, but at the time of his death there was no way that we could have afforded it.

The day before Papa's funeral, Caroline and I had told Ma that we wanted to be among Papa's pallbearers.

Ma had thought that it was a bad idea. Who had ever heard of young women being pallbearers? Papa's funeral was no time for us to express our selfish childishness, our American rebelliousness.

When we were children, whenever we rejected symbols of Haitian culture, Ma used to excuse us with great embarrassment and say, "You know, they are American."

Why didn't we like the thick fatty pig skin that she would deep-fry so long that it tasted like rubber? We were Americans and we had no taste buds. A double tragedy.

Why didn't we like the thick yellow pumpkin soup that she spent all New Year's Eve making so that we would have it on New Year's Day to celebrate Haitian Independence Day? Again, because we were American and the Fourth of July was our independence holiday.

"In Haiti, you own your children and they find it natural," she would say. "They know their duties to the family and they act accordingly. In America, no one owns anything, and certainly not another person."

"Caroline called," Ma said. She was standing over the stove making some bone soup when I got home from the cemetery. "I told her that we would still keep her bed here for her, if she ever wants to use it. She will come and visit us soon. I knew she would miss us."

"Can I drop one bone in your soup?" I asked Ma.

"It is your soup too," she said.

She let me drop one bone into the boiling water. The water splashed my hand, leaving a red mark.

"Ma, if we were painters which landscapes would we paint?" I asked her.

"I see. You want to play the game of questions?"

"When I become a mother, how will I name my daughter?"

"If you want to play then I should ask the first question," she said.

"What kinds of lullabies will I sing at night? What kinds of legends will my daughter be told? What kinds of charms will I give her to ward off evil?"

"I have come a few years further than you," she insist-ed. "I have tasted a lot more salt. I am to ask the first question, if we are to play the game."

"Go ahead," I said giving in.

She thought about it for a long time while stirring the bones in our soup.

"Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it?" she asked finally

Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.