Then Grand-Maman flips the channel again to a rerun of Wheel of Fortune. She lets me cry and I do very quietly. Tears drip from my upside-down eyes to the floor full of cracked, dusty tiles.
“You’ll be starting school here next week,” she says. On the upside-down television, Vanna is turning letter after letter around. “At Sacré Coeur.”
Sacred Heart. The French Catholic school on the island where Mother never let me go. She sent me to an English public school in the city. Where there are different people from different places, with different religions, Mother said. Like Ms. Said. Like you. Do you really want to be taught by a bunch of nuns, Belle?
“But you have to be Catholic to go there,” I say to Grand-Maman.
“I’m having you baptized. I’ve made arrangements with Mon Père.”
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.