Rouge(96)

Last Sunday, Grand-Maman took me to church and introduced me to the priest, whose watery eyes kept going to my forehead. They talked in a fast whisper behind me while I sat in the pew, staring at Jesus on the cross. I heard the word troubled. I heard the word Mother. I heard the word devil and I heard the word touched. Mother never wanted me baptized out of respect for your father.

“But Mother—” I say.

“French,” Grand-Maman says, “is your mother tongue even if your own mother is too proud to speak it to you. Your mother forgot herself and where she came from when she moved to this city. But I never forget. It’s time you spoke French and it’s time you were baptized. You are not an English girl and you are not a godless girl, and if your mother hadn’t raised you the way she did, we wouldn’t be here.”

“But my father—”

“Your father was a gentle soul,” Grand-Maman snaps. “Very agreeable. He agrees with me, under the circumstances.”

How could Father agree? And then I remember Grand-Maman talks to the dead. Every Sunday after church, she lights a candle at the dining room table and talks for hours while she plays solitaire. She does it in quick, quiet French, while she lays out the cards. She talks to my grand-père and my grand-tante Shirley, her sister, and her own mother and father. And now my father, too, I guess.

“He agrees?”

“You know your father knew French before he knew English. He would be disgusted that she sent you to an English school. As for religion, your mother likes to paint him as such a Muslim, but he’s really far more agreeable than that.”

I have a flash of a man in her doorway nodding and smiling. Agreeing very politely with whatever Grand-Maman said.

I stare at the television. My scars suddenly hurt again though the bandages are long gone. The doctor says I healed beautifully. Very beautifully, in fact, and he stared at me awhile. All that’s left of the Day We Don’t Speak Of is my forehead bruise. But it doesn’t glow like a star anymore. It’s just a bruise. Now is the time to bury, Grand-Maman said. To put it away like jewelry in one of her many boxes. So many boxes she has of very dark wood on her dresser, each one with its own lock. The Wheel of Fortune is turning now. Vanna is clapping lightly. She’s always clapping lightly. I wonder if she’d clap lightly if the wheel caught fire. Isn’t Mother ever coming to get me? Has she forgiven me? Can I go home?

But I don’t ask if I’m ever going to California with Mother. I don’t say anything to Grand-Maman but Okay.



* * *




The priest whispers French words, dribbling water onto my forehead from a golden cup. School is a sea of staring faces I drown in. They all seem afraid of me for some reason, I don’t know why. There is whispering in French, but the whispering is too quick and slippery for me to catch. I keep my eyes on the blackboard or on the ground. I do homework in the beige guest room. Stacey calls to ask why the hell aren’t I back in school? I’m going to the Catholic school on the island now, I tell her. Stacey says that’s terrible. Now there’s no one for her to talk to because everyone around her is a fucking child. She asks me if I can come over. I remember the dark basement. Stacey in her black bodysuit spinning for me to “Maniac,” her blond hair flying around her like a golden cloud. How I watched her leap and turn until she collapsed on the plaid couch beside me breathless and flushed. Looked at me, her dark mirror, waiting for whatever rating I’d give her. It was the only time I ever felt power. That I had something she truly wanted.

“Well, Belle?” Stacey says. “Can you come over or not?”

Grand-Maman, playing solitaire nearby, hears Stacey’s question through the phone. She shakes her head at the cards. “I don’t know,” I say.

“Don’t you at least want your bracelet back?” she whispers.

“What?” My heart. Suddenly pounding inside me.

I feel her smiling on the phone. “I saw you,” she says. “That night in the garden.”

“What are you talking about?” A flash of red petals. My feet in the cold black soil. My heart beating hard in the dark, like it’s beating now.

“My mother’s really fucking pissed at you, by the way.” She sounds happy about this. “What were you doing out there, anyway?”

I see myself running under a low red moon, the slick grass sinking beneath my feet, while a voice called after me. I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Never mind, I know.”

“You do?”

“Sure. You were trying to see me.” She lowers her voice again. “Weren’t you?”

I close my eyes. “Yes.”

“I knew it. Look, just come over, okay? We’ll just have to plan it for when she’s not home. Because if she sees you, she’ll fucking freak. She doesn’t want me dancing for you anymore.”

“I have to go,” I tell Stacey, and the phone makes such a click when I hang it up.

And Grand-Maman nods her head. Thwack go her cards on the table. Whisper, whisper to the dead.

I never see Stacey again.



* * *




The air grows colder. I watch the flies disappear from the window. Then the leaves are the color of fire and they’re falling. One by one by one. At night, the wind makes a howling sound and the air smells like smoke. I close my eyes. Sometimes I see Mother. Sometimes a man made of smoke. When I open my eyes, the trees are bare and snow is falling slow and fat. It falls forever. And the ground glitters cold and white like Mother’s skin. Christmas comes and Mother sends me a card with a palm tree covered in Christmas lights. Happy Holidays, it says. XO, N. Mother’s first XO. A good sign, Grand-Maman says. For Christmas, Grand-Maman gives me a Good News Bible, a necklace with a little gold cross, and a brush that works on my hair. She brushes it for me while we watch the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The gold cross glitters on my neck. It makes me remember my bare wrist, where Father’s eye bracelet used to go. And in my mind, there’s a rose garden. A bed of black soil. A flash of gold glinting there. Now is the time to bury, I think, watching the snow fall thick and slow. Now is the time to forget. And for a long time, the world stays white and shimmering and cold.