“Thanks especially to Carlyle and his midsummer madness,” I said. “But where do you suppose the boy went when he left his wife?”
“To his mama’s in the Bronx,” said Simple. “He is just a young fellow what is not housebroke yet. I seen him last night on the corner of Lenox and 125th and he said he was coming back soon as he could find himself a good job. Fight or not fight, he says he loves that girl and is crazy about his baby, and all he wants is to find himself a Fifty or Sixty Dollar a week job so he can meet his responsibilities. I said, ‘Boy, how much did you say you want to make a week?’ And he repeated himself, Fifty to Sixty.
“So I said, ‘You must want your baby to be in high school before you returns.’
“Carlyle said, ‘I’m a man now, so I want to get paid like a man.’
“‘You mean a white man,’ I said.
“‘I mean a grown man,’ says Carlyle.
“By that time the Bronx bus come along and he got on it, so I did not get a chance to tell that boy that I knowed what he meant, but I did not know how it could come true. . . . Man, look at that chick going yonder, stacked up like the Queen Mary! . . . Wheee-ee-ooo! Baby, if you must walk away, walk straight—and don’t shake your tail-gate.”
“Watch yourself! Have you no respect for women?”
“I have nothing but respect for a figure like that,” said Simple. “Miss, your mama must of been sweet sixteen when she borned you. Sixteen divided by two, you come out a figure 8! Can I have a date? Hey, Lawdy, Miss Claudy! You must be deaf—you done left! I’m standing here by myself.
“Come on, boy, let’s go on in the bar and put that door between me and temptation. If the air cooler is working, the treat’s on me. Let’s investigate. Anyhow, I always did say if you can’t be good, be careful. If you can’t be nice, take advice. If you don’t think once, you can’t think twice.”
NEW YORK DAY WOMEN
Edwidge Danticat
(from Krik? Krak!, 1996)
Born on January 19, 1969, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Edwidge Danticat is the author of novels, essays, and collections of stories that have focused primarily on the lives and trials of Haitians and Haitian-Americans. Raised for most of her childhood by her aunt and uncle after her parents immigrated to the United States, she moved to Brooklyn to rejoin her parents when she was twelve. Already an avid reader, she learned English and, though challenged by an unfamiliar culture in America, immediately took to expressing her discoveries of her new world and herself through writing. She graduated with a degree in French literature from Barnard College in New York City and earned a master’s degree in creative writing at Brown University in 1993. She won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award in 2009. This story, “New York Day Women,” comes from her second book and first short story collection, Krik? Krak!
TODAY, WALKING DOWN the street, I see my mother. She is strolling with a happy gait, her body thrust toward the Don’t Walk sign and the yellow taxicabs that make forty-five-degree turns on the corner of Madison and Fifty-seventh Street.
I have never seen her in this kind of neighborhood, peering into Chanel and Tiffany’s and gawking at the jewels glowing in the Bulgari windows. My mother never shops outside of Brooklyn. She has never seen the advertising office where I work. She is afraid to take the subway, where you may meet those young black militant street preachers who curse black women for straightening their hair.
Yet, here she is, my mother, who I left at home that morning in her bathrobe, with pieces of newspapers twisted like rollers in her hair. My mother, who accuses me of random offenses as I dash out of the house.
Would you get up and give an old lady like me your subway seat? In this state of mind, I bet you don’t even give up your seat to a pregnant lady.
My mother, who is often right about that. Sometimes I get up and give my seat. Other times, I don’t. It all depends on how pregnant the woman is and whether or not she is with her boyfriend or husband and whether or not he is sitting down.
As my mother stands in front of Carnegie Hall, one taxi driver yells to another, “What do you think this is, a dance floor?”
My mother waits patiently for this dispute to be settled before crossing the street.
In Haiti when you get hit by a car, the owner of the car gets out and kicks you for getting blood on his bumper.
My mother who laughs when she says this and shows a large gap in her mouth where she lost three more molars to the dentist last week. My mother, who at fifty-nine, says dentures are okay.
You can take them out when they bother you. I’ll like them. I’ll like them fine.
Will it feel empty when Papa kisses you?
Oh no, he doesn’t kiss me that way anymore.
My mother, who watches the lottery drawing every night on channel 11 without ever having played the numbers.
A third of that money is all I would need. We would pay the mortgage, and your father could stop driving that taxicab all over Brooklyn.
I follow my mother, mesmerized by the many possibilities of her journey. Even in a flowered dress, she is lost in a sea of pinstripes and gray suits, high heels and elegant short skirts, Reebok sneakers, dashing from building to building.
My mother, who won’t go out to dinner with anyone.
If they want to eat with me, let them come to my house, even if I boil water and give it to them.
My mother, who talks to herself when she peels the skin off poultry.
Fat, you know, and cholesterol. Fat and cholesterol killed your aunt Hermine.
My mother, who makes jam with dried grapefruit peel and then puts in cinnamon bark that I always think is cockroaches in the jam. My mother, whom I have always bought household appliances for, on her birthday. A nice rice cooker, a blender.
I trail the red orchids in her dress and the heavy faux leather bag on her shoulders. Realizing the ferocious pace of my pursuit, I stop against a wall to rest. My mother keeps on walking as though she owns the sidewalk under her feet.
As she heads toward the Plaza Hotel, a bicycle messenger swings so close to her that I want to dash forward and rescue her, but she stands dead in her tracks and lets him ride around her and then goes on.
My mother stops at a corner hot-dog stand and asks for something. The vendor hands her a can of soda that she slips into her bag. She stops by another vendor selling sundresses for seven dollars each. I can tell that she is looking at an African print dress, contemplating my size. I think to myself, Please Ma, don’t buy it. It would be just another thing that I would bury in the garage or give to Goodwill.
Why should we give to Goodwill when there are so many people back home who need clothes? We save our clothes for the relatives in Haiti.
Twenty years we have been saving all kinds of things for the relatives in Haiti. I need the place in the garage for an exercise bike.
You are pretty enough to be a stewardess. Only dogs like bones. This mother of mine, she stops at another hot-dog vendor’s and buys a frankfurter that she eats on the street. I never knew that she ate frankfurters. With her blood pressure, she shouldn’t eat anything with sodium. She has to be careful with her heart, this day woman.
I cannot just swallow salt. Salt is heavier than a hundred bags of shame.
She is slowing her pace, and now I am too close. If she turns around, she might see me. I let her walk into the park before I start to follow again.
My mother walks toward the sandbox in the middle of the park. There a woman is waiting with a child. The woman is wearing a leotard with biker’s shorts and has small weights in her hands. The woman kisses the child good-bye and surrenders him to my mother; then she bolts off, running on the cemented stretches in the park.
The child given to my mother has frizzy blond hair. His hand slips into hers easily, like he’s known her for a long time. When he raises his face to look at my mother, it is as though he is looking at the sky.
My mother gives this child the soda that she bought from the vendor on the street
corner. The child’s face lights up as she puts in a straw in the can for him. This seems to be a conspiracy just between the two of them.
My mother and the child sit and watch the other children play in the sandbox. The child pulls out a comic book from a knapsack with Big Bird on the back. My mother peers into his comic book. My mother, who taught herself to read as a little girl in Haiti from the books that her brothers brought home from school.
My mother, who has now lost six of her seven sisters in Ville Rose and has never had the strength to return for their funerals.
Many graves to kiss when I go back. Many graves to kiss.
She throws away the empty soda can when the child is done with it. I wait and watch from a corner until the woman in the leotard and biker’s shorts returns, sweaty and breathless, an hour later. My mother gives the woman back her child and strolls farther into the park.
I turn around and start to walk out of the park before my mother can see me. My lunch hour is long since gone. I have to hurry back to work. I walk through a cluster of joggers, then race to a Sweden Tours bus. I stand behind the bus and take a peek at my mother in the park. She is standing in a circle, chatting with a group of women who are taking other people’s children on an afternoon outing. They look like a Third World Parent-Teacher Association meeting.
I quickly jump into a cab heading back to the office. Would Ma have said hello had she been the one to see me first?
As the cab races away from the park, it occurs to me that perhaps one day I would chase an old woman down a street by mistake and that old woman would be somebody else’s mother, who I would have mistaken for mine.
Day women come out when nobody expects them.
Tonight on the subway, I will get up and give my seat to a pregnant woman or a lady about Ma’s age.
My mother, who stuffs thimbles in her mouth and then blows up her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie while sewing yet another Raggedy Ann doll that she names Suzette after me.
I will have all these little Suzettes in case you never have any babies, which looks more and more like it is going to happen.
My mother who had me when she was thirty-three—l’âge du Christ—at the age that Christ died on the cross.
That’s a blessing, believe you me, even if American doctors say by that time you can make retarded babies.
My mother, who sews lace collars on my company softball T-shirts when she does my laundry.
Why, you can’t you look like a lady playing softball? My mother, who never went to any of my Parent-Teacher Association meetings when I was in school.
You’re so good anyway. What are they going to tell me? I don’t want to make you ashamed of this day woman. Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.
NEGOCIOS (1996)
Junot Díaz
“Negocios” is the story of the narrator Yunior’s father, Ramon, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who makes his way to New York City: “Nueva York was the city of jobs.” Yunior imagines and investigates those several years that Papi spent in New York before he finally returned to Santo Domingo to fetch his wife and children. “Negocios” is the last story in Drown (1996), Díaz’s first book. Junot Díaz (born in 1968) lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as in New York City.
MY FATHER, RAMÓN de las Casas, left Santo Domingo just before my fourth birthday. Papi had been planning to leave for months, hustling and borrowing from his friends, from anyone he could put the bite on. In the end it was just plain luck that got his visa processed when it did. The last of his luck on the Island, considering that Mami had recently discovered he was keeping with an overweight puta he had met while breaking up a fight on her street in Los Millonitos. Mami learned this from a friend of hers, a nurse and a neighbor of the puta. The nurse couldn’t understand what Papi was doing loafing around her street when he was supposed to be on patrol.
The initial fights, with Mami throwing our silverware into wild orbits, lasted a week. After a fork pierced him in the cheek, Papi decided to move out, just until things cooled down. He took a small bag of clothes and broke out early in the morning. On his second night away from the house, with the puta asleep at his side, Papi had a dream that the money Mami’s father had promised him was spiraling away in the wind like bright bright birds. The dream blew him out of bed like a gunshot. Are you OK? the puta asked and he shook his head. I think I have to go somewhere, he said. He borrowed a clean mustard-colored guayabera from a friend, put himself in a concho and paid our abuelo a visit.
Abuelo had his rocking chair in his usual place, out on the sidewalk where he could see everyone and everything. He had fashioned that chair as a thirtieth-birthday present to himself and twice had to replace the wicker screens that his ass and shoulders had worn out. If you were to walk down to the Duarte you would see that type of chair for sale everywhere. It was November, the mangoes were thudding from the trees. Despite his dim eyesight, Abuelo saw Papi coming the moment he stepped onto Sumner Welles. Abuelo sighed, he’d had it up to his cojones with this spat. Papi hiked up his pants and squatted down next to the rocking chair.
I am here to talk to you about my life with your daughter, he said, removing his hat. I don’t know what you’ve heard but I swear on my heart that none of it is true. All I want for your daughter and our children is to take them to the United States. I want a good life for them.
Abuelo searched his pockets for the cigarette he had just put away. The neighbors were gravitating towards the front of their houses to listen to the exchange. What about this other woman? Abuelo said finally, unable to find the cigarette tucked behind his ear.
It’s true I went to her house, but that was a mistake. I did nothing to shame you, viejo. I know it wasn’t a smart thing to do, but I didn’t know the woman would lie like she did.
Is that what you said to Virta?
Yes, but she won’t listen. She cares too much about what she hears from her friends. If you don’t think I can do anything for your daughter then I won’t ask to borrow that money.
Abuelo spit the taste of car exhaust and street dust from his mouth. He might have spit four or five times. The sun could have set twice on his deliberations but with his eyes quitting, his farm in Azua now dust and his familia in need, what could he really do?
Listen Ramón, he said, scratching his arm hairs. I believe you. But Virta, she hears the chisme on the street and you know how that is. Come home and be good to her. Don’t yell. Don’t hit the children. I’ll tell her that you are leaving soon. That will help smooth things between the two of you.
Papi fetched his things from the puta’s house and moved back in that night. Mami acted as if he were a troublesome visitor who had to be endured. She slept with the children and stayed out of the house as often as she could, visiting her relatives in other parts of the Capital. Many times Papi took hold of her arms and pushed her against the slumping walls of the house, thinking his touch would snap her from her brooding silence, but instead she slapped or kicked him. Why the hell do you do that? he demanded. Don’t you know how soon I’m leaving?
Then go, she said.
You’ll regret that.
She shrugged and said nothing else.
In a house as loud as ours, one woman’s silence was a serious thing. Papi slouched about for a month, taking us to kung fu movies we couldn’t understand and drilling into us how much we’d miss him. He’d hover around Mami while she checked our hair for lice, wanting to be nearby the instant she cracked and begged him to stay.
One night Abuelo handed Papi a cigar box stuffed with cash. The bills were new and smelled of ginger. Here it is. Make your children proud.
You’ll see. He kissed the viejo’s cheek and the next day had himself a ticket for a flight leaving in three days. He held the ticket in front of Mami’s eyes. Do you see this?
She nodded tiredly and took up his hands. In their room, she already had his clothes packed and mended.<
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She didn’t kiss him when he left. Instead she sent each of the children over to him. Say good-bye to your father. Tell him that you want him back soon.
When he tried to embrace her she grabbed his upper arms, her fingers like pincers. You had best remember where this money came from, she said, the last words they exchanged face-to-face for five years.
He arrived in Miami at four in the morning in a roaring poorly booked plane. He passed easily through customs, having brought nothing but some clothes, a towel, a bar of soap, a razor, his money and a box of Chiclets in his pocket. The ticket to Miami had saved him money but he intended to continue on to Nueva York as soon as he could. Nueva York was the city of jobs, the city that had first called the Cubanos and their cigar industry, then the Bootstrap Puerto Ricans and now him.
He had trouble finding his way out of the terminal. Everyone was speaking English and the signs were no help. He smoked half a pack of cigarettes while wandering around. When he finally exited the terminal, he rested his bag on the sidewalk and threw away the rest of the cigarettes. In the darkness he could see little of Northamerica. A vast stretch of cars, distant palms and a highway that reminded him of the Máximo Gomez. The air was not as hot as home and the city was well lit but he didn’t feel as if he had crossed an ocean and a world. A cabdriver in front of the terminal called to him in Spanish and threw his bag easily in the back seat of the cab. A new one, he said. The man was black, stooped and strong.
You got family here?
Not really.
How about an address?
Nope, Papi said. I’m here on my own. I got two hands and a heart as strong as a rock.
Right, the taxi driver said. He toured Papi through the city, around Calle Ocho. Although the streets were empty and accordion gates stretched in front of storefronts Papi recognized the prosperity in the buildings and in the tall operative lampposts. He indulged himself in the feeling that he was being shown his new digs to ensure that they met with his approval. Find a place to sleep here, the driver advised. And first thing tomorrow get yourself a job. Anything you can find.
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