The Beautiful Anthology (4 page)

Papa is too far to hold me, too close to ignore, and when I reach over to him, bouncing the mattress, he takes my hand – just for a second or two. Then he lets go.

“My sister is visiting tonight,” Mother says.

I’m holding a bottle of perfume found on the night table. I douse Papa’s
Le Troisième Homme
on my wrist and neck, the underside of my arms, rubbing in my father’s musky scent like a salve.

“I don’t want to see anyone,” Papa says.

He is whispering. His nightly theatrics have ravaged his vocal chords. He’s been yelling again – a mean, volatile storm.

“But it’s Mom’s birthday,” I say.

A faint smile reveals a dimple in Mother’s right cheek. “It is, isn’t it?” she says.

Usually, Papa enjoys parties. He gets swept up in the festivity, becomes animated, involved, telling funny anecdotes, invariably getting the biggest laughs of the evening. But he’s the Other Papa today. I can tell he’s suddenly in one of his moods. His eyebrows join together in a frown line across his forehead. His thin face is stern, lips latched tight.

You see, one day my father is normal, calm, quiet, in control, reliable; the next he becomes a wild-eyed stranger, screaming so loud that my ears sting.

Mother says he has mood swings.

One of Mother’s hairs falls out of her curl; a piece of her life is gone without a sound. Outside, neighbors shriek out front doors, brakes squeal – people’s afternoons are unfolding. The November sun beats against the window, bounces off Mother’s vanity mirror. Shadows fall across the carpet, elongating.

I can see my reflection in the vanity mirror. It is frightening to see Papa stare at me from my own face. I have his eyes, his ears, and the line of his jaw. Just like his, my shoulders are hunched in that good-natured, non-threatening way. A deception – my father is rangy, temperamental, twitchy with impatience.

Both my parents are beautiful. Papa has an epicene quality that lends him a youthful air, even as he slips into middle age. Mother is witty and tender. His voice booms; hers tinkles like tiny bells. As for me, my acne is flourishing – I wear it with wounded pride, as though my scars hold a secret that others can’t really appreciate.

I try to tell a joke to make Papa happy. “
Tim Tim
,” I start, leaning over his shoulder. Knock-knock.

“Quiet!” he yells, shrugging off my embrace.

He was supposed to say, “
Bwa sèch
.” My mother turns and glares. I’m sure Papa hates me. I want to break out of the room, out of the hostile air that fills its every corner. But the more I try to
pouf
, disappear, the more present I feel, until, exhausted, I give in, float with Papa’s angry words. If I don’t, I might drown with and in these words. If I don’t, these words might become my own – etched in my brain, and later released from my mouth.

When Aunt G kisses me she leaves lipstick on my cheeks.
She measures my every inch because it helps her feel the flow of time, and she shakes her head as if it makes her sad. “Oh, my! We’re not getting any younger, Tita, are we? My, oh my, can you believe how fast they grow?”

Papa finally agreed to the party. He’s always changing his mind for no apparent reason.

Aunt G hugs me. “You’re so beautiful,” she says. “Looking more and more like your father.”

My mother shoots her a strange look – something like sorrow; the look you’d have if you were helpless to save your daughter. Maybe Mother worries I might become my father, rageful with misery. Maybe she’s aware of the anger sluicing through me sometimes – it can be there at the end of a sentence, startling even me like a shadow slinking by an open door. Who knows? I might explode one day. In the morning, when the sun rises, mean as a snake, even before my first thought is shaped, there is this thumping in my heart, like a ticking clock. Something inside me wants to be released. I want to reach in, grab it, and punch it against the wall. And I also want to yell – but I can’t. Because I can’t allow myself to become my father.

Papa … No one can defeat him at dominoes. Crowded around the table, the adults whoop and holler. Drinks sit away from elbows. Bids are made. My mother yells, “Ha-ha!” Aunt G grins. Papa laughs. The cookie plate for the children is never empty. The radio is on. Toto Bissainthe is singing to Papa Damballah, the voodoo god.

“Dance with me,” Papa says.

My father swoops and grabs my shoulders and I’m laughing as we spin. One foot hits the table with a dull sudden thump and my mother says, “Honey!” but I can only see her sometimes in the green blur of the kitchen.
Nou vire, vire, vire.
We turn, and turn, and turn.

“Honey, you’re making her dizzy,” Mother says.

When Papa stops, he’s smiling. He pulls me into a tight armbreaking hug and then I am free. My stomach rolls and lurches and I beam at my father who laughs at me. I am the happiest and most loved girl there ever was. I am better than anyone.

I show everyone the tooth I lost – yellow and ugly. Pitted and scarred and smooth, too. With a jagged head and a fang of a root.

Sometimes I feel like a yellow tooth inside. But not right now, when Papa is laughing again.

“Too much sugar,” Aunt G says disapprovingly, opening her mouth wide so we can see all her white teeth and her tongue, the end of her tongue, a small red bulb wobbling in the dark vault beneath her palate. She looks at me seriously. “No more candy for you,
mademoiselle.
You’re so beautiful – you don’t want to become a toothless
dan rachòt
.”

Mother cooked all afternoon, and the fragrance of roasting ham, garlic, and other spices, the family milling around, laughing and talking, makes it like Christmas. My sister Patricia and I switch on the tv, fiddle with the knobs and the antenna until the horizontal lines disappear and we can watch
Languichatte,
the Haitian comedy show. We sink to the floor cross-legged, our eyes on the screen. The sound of laughter mingles with the hissing of steaming kettles, the clink of silverware on plates, and the bell-like tones of glasses touching each other in a salute to peace.

My mother sighs, warm and filled with contentment. My father groans, for he has eaten too much and dessert is still to come.

The Other Papa is back.

Hours after the party, Mother, my sister, and I have locked ourselves in my parents’ bedroom because Papa is in a rage.

“It will be better if you open the door, Tita,” Papa says from behind the door. “I don’t want to force my way in.”

Patricia puts her hands over her ears, speaking softly to herself, shaking so hard I want to tie her down. Mother begs Papa – through the door – to calm down. The pounding stops for a few minutes or so and then begins again. “Open up, Tita, or so help me God, I’ll break the door down. Tita!” The name seems to belong to someone else, even though it is Papa’s voice calling it. A very angry voice.

My mother grimaces when she touches her eye, and the skin is turning several different colors. I’m afraid my father will break the door down. He is still out there. He’s back to calling her name. “Tita. Tita. Let me in. Let. Me. In.”

Pound. Pound. Pound.

I grab a book and throw it the door. “Go away! I hate you.”

Mother takes my hand. “Don’t be like that.” Her other hand is on her temple and she’s gazing out at nothing. I see a tear roll down the silhouette of her shadowed cheek.

Then he begins rattling the doorknob with one hand and banging at the wood with the other. The floor is going to swallow me. The bedroom walls start caving in. The rough spots on the carpet are bloody footprints and dark creatures from the corners of the room bob their huge heads as they weave and glide closer.

“Open the
fucking
door,” Papa says.

“Mom?” I say, touching her shoulder.

She rubs her face and turns to look at me. “I bet I look a mess,” she says.

“You’re still pretty,” I whisper. “Even with snot on your nose.”

“Oh, honey,” she says wetly. She takes us both in her arms, and her face is damp against our cheeks. Her fingers stroke our heads.

The doorknob turns clockwise, rattles, and quickly turns counterclockwise. Mother wedges a chair under the doorknob. She and I lean with all our might against the door, but we’re losing the battle. There are two of us (my sister is too terrified), but a very angry man is pushing the door from the other side. Papa throws his entire body weight into a running tackle that starts at the other end of the hallway and ends with a splintering
ka-blam
at the bedroom door.

Suddenly, our resistance proves too feeble and the door collapses inward, sending Mother and me sprawling, crashing the chair into the wall. Papa falls against the vanity – jeweled chopsticks and flowered pins fly to the ground. In an attempt to steady himself, he knocks over a small mirror and suddenly there is blood everywhere.

In an instant, Papa is over the rage – just like that. He will say later that the pain brought back lucidity. He sits on the bed, dumbfounded. “What am I doing?”

My reflection stares at me from the broken mirror on the floor – and for the first time I can see my mother somewhere in that face. Mother – kind-hearted and shy, far from unmanageable. I don’t have to be
that
child – savage and feral, overwhelmed by some fury boiling inside me. It is true that what’s born in me lies still for now, until I am grown and find my way. But only time will tell: that dormant nature might be something calm and loving – truly beautiful, like Mother.

STEPHEN WALTER

UPLAND FALL

September and the streamside ash

Gleams yellow in the afternoon;

They drowsily behold the flash

Of leaves against dark water, soon

Forgotten as they pass below

The ridgeline’s overarching green;

Lulled by resinous air they slow,

Then touch and shed their clothes unseen

Then sleep embowered in white pine.

Brushing needles from her sleeve

He says, I’ve never seen so fine

An early fall. Please stay. Don’t leave

Me in these mountains on my own,

Not now before the leaves have turned;

To wander the bright paths alone

Would be too much to bear. I yearned

For you all summer, now you’re here:

Why ruin splendor at its start?

At night the golden star shines clear;

He knows that she will soon depart.

October and the tupelo

Ignites into a glossy blaze;

Uphill the dogwood is aglow

With scarlet drupes set in a haze

Of dusky red as she lies slack,

Half-sleeping, head upon his arm.

He traces curves along her back

With a stray leaf; the days run warm

But mornings clot with mist until

At dawn their bare feet slide on frost;

A week of rain drives in its chill

As if in grief at ripeness lost,

Then evening takes them unawares

With sudden brightness as the sky

Clears to reveal the waning flares

Of silver maples lit up by

A parting ray against dark cloud

Like water sun-flecked over rocks,

And gusting winds flush waves of loud

Birds, scattering the migrant flocks

Like leaves as twilight turns to red.

November brings the bleakest fog,

A film of ashes in his bed.

He sickens at brown leaves that clog

The ditch downstream from a bur oak;

No birds sing in the bare-stripped tree.

He dwells upon the words she spoke:

We love the season best when we

Forget where it is heading.

Splendor has no start, she said, or chance

To stay; no use in dreading

What fades already at each glance.

What he dreads now are colder sights

Like bloody feathers on fresh snow,

Desolation of the Long Nights

Moon shining on dead twigs, the slow

Paralysis of brittle winter

Light, stubble fields strewn with decay.

He wonders if he dreamed of her,

Yet feels she left him anyway.