have for my wedding.’ It’s part of my job to tell them, without making them cry, that they’re too short, too wide, or too pregnant for a dress like that, even if I lose money. I don’t do this for money. When any of my girls puts on one of my dresses, everyone at that wedding is going to be looking at it. When they’re singing ‘Here comes the bride,’ they’re really singing ‘Here comes the dress.’ And the way I see it, I am that dress. It’s like everyone’s looking at me.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, Aline thought. What could she ask next that would get a similarly lengthy response?
“Have you ever been married?”
“You never ask a woman my age a question like that,” Beatrice replied.
“The readers might want to know if you’ve ever made a wedding dress for yourself,” Aline said by way of an apology. “Besides, you asked me-”
“It’s okay to ask younger women,” Beatrice interrupted, “but with a woman like me, you keep that type of question to yourself. I’ve never wanted to be asked that question. That’s why all the girls call me Mother.”
Aline wrote on her reporter’s pad, “Never married.”
Soon, one side of Aline’s cassette was near full. As she turned the tape over, Beatrice suddenly suggested that they take a walk down her block so Aline could see it.
“I don’t need to do that right now,” Aline tried to protest.
But Beatrice was already standing up and walking to her door.
It was a sunny, yet breezy afternoon. There were birds and squirrels skipping on the branches of the tall green ash in front of Beatrice’s house. Aside from the child-care center at the end of the block, all the houses looked the same, with red-brick facades, gabled roofs, bow windows on the first floors and sash ones on the top. There were steps leading up from the street to the doorways and a patch of land up front that some fenced in and made into a garden and others cemented into an open driveway.
As she and Aline strolled up and down the block, Beatrice pointed out the residences of her neighbors, identifying them mostly by their owners’ professions and nationalities. On the left was the home of the Italian baker and his policewoman wife. Across the street was the house of the elderly Guyanaian dentist and his daughter the bank manager. Further down the block was the Dominican social worker, then the Jamaican schoolteacher, and finally the Haitian prison guard.
Beatrice had another coughing spell in front of the prison guard’s house, and when it stopped, her face was somber, her eyes moist.
“Where does he work?” Aline asked, imagining a long commute for Beatrice’s sole Haitian neighbor, from some distant correctional facility in upstate New York.
“I knew him in Haiti,” Beatrice replied. She raised her fingers toward the Roman shades on the front window, accusingly, it seemed to Aline, but then refused to say anything else. Was he an old friend, Aline wondered, a new enemy, a past love?
“Do the two of you talk?” Aline asked. “Are you friends?”
“Friends?” Beatrice made a loud sucking noise with her tongue and teeth. Before walking away, she waved her hands dismissively at the house, as if wanting to make it disappear.
When they returned to Beatrice’s front steps, a few more ash leaves had fallen there. Beatrice reminded herself out loud that she needed to have the higher branches of the green ash trimmed. For she often sat on her stairs in the early evening, she said, completing some details of her work.
Beatrice disappeared into her kitchen as soon as they walked into her house. Aline looked around the living room again, this time for some sign of the mysterious jailer, a photograph, a love or hate letter, some framed memento that she’d missed.
Beatrice returned with the rest of the coffee, still warm from earlier.
“Did you study to do what you’re doing now?” she asked Aline, setting down new clean cups.
“Not really,” Aline said. “I studied French.” Then not sure that Beatrice understood or approved of her college major, she elaborated, “Books, words written by French people over many centuries.”
These last few words seemed to clarify nothing, just as they never did for Aline’s parents, who ran their church’s day-care center in Somerville, Massachusetts, so Aline became quiet. She didn’t want to tell Beatrice that she’d simply taken the newspaper internship because it was the first paid job she was offered after she’d been dumped by her girlfriend, needing important-sounding work to report to both her ex-should they ever speak again- and her folks.
“When you were studying this, what was it, French, did you learn anything useful?” Beatrice asked offhandedly.
Aline’s common sense and her recollection of Marjorie Voltaire’s caveats told her that she was losing control of the interview. However, it had been such a long time since anyone had spoken to her with such interest that she frankly welcomed it.
She was finding it hard now to remember anything from any of the hundreds of books she’d read in school. What instantly came to mind, aside from her former professor, was a film of a depth-perception experiment she’d seen in a Psych 101 class, in which an infant cried when he was made to crawl over a glass surface with an image of a deep gorge below. Much had been made of the fact that the infant had displayed fear of falling into the gorge, despite not knowing what a gorge was or what it meant to fall. Aline had thought the experiment cruel and had been unable to watch most of the class film, though she’d never been able to forget what little she’d seen.
It was after she babbled the story of the gorge experiment to Beatrice and got no response that she noticed the sewing kit on Beatrice’s lap, a cedar box divided into several sections, each filled with thimbles, bodkins, pin- cushions, and chatelaines that looked as though they were from another era. Beatrice was searching for something in the box and let out a sigh of relief when she found it. It was a gold thimble with her name carved in microscopic letters on the base and a wreath of tiny wildflowers on the rim.
Beatrice moved the thimble closer to Aline’s nose ring, then took turns capping each of her ten fingers with it.
“What are you going to do after you retire?” Aline asked, trying to complete the interview.
“Move, again.” Beatrice pressed the thimble between her palms, rolling it up and down as if to warm it.
“Why?” Aline asked.
Beatrice put the thimble back in the box, then set the whole kit down on the ground. She covered her eyes with both hands, then gradually removed her fingers as though to slowly take in the world again.
“We called them chouket lawoze,” Beatrice said, the couch’s plastic cover squeaking beneath her. “They’d break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away. He was one of them, the guard.”
Beatrice removed her open-toed sandals and raised her feet so Aline could see the soles of her feet. They were thin and sheer like an albino baby’s skin.
“He asked me to go dancing with him one night,” Beatrice said, putting her feet back in her sandals. “I had a boyfriend, so I said no. That’s why he arrested me. He tied me to some type of rack in the prison and whipped the bottom of my feet until they bled. Then he made me walk home, barefoot. On tar roads. In the hot sun. At high noon. This man, wherever I rent or buy a house in this city, I find him, living on my street.”
Beatrice got up and collected the empty coffee cups, piling them on the tray. Aline reached over to help her, but Beatrice gently pushed her hands away.
It was the inevitable question, maybe insulting, but Aline felt she had to ask it. “Are you sure it’s the same person?”
Beatrice removed her bronze wig, revealing a line of cotton-white cornrows, curved toward the back of her neck. She raised her hand to her head and scratched her scalp as though to quell a flame there.
“You never look at anyone the way you do someone like this.” Beatrice’s exasperation was spewing out with the spittle at the side of her mouth. “No one will ever have that much of your attention. No matter how much he’d changed, I would know him anywhere.”
“I think she’s a bit nutty,” Aline said to a gruff and hurried Marjorie Voltaire on her cell phone. She was sitting in her car outside the prison guard’s house with her notepad and tape recorder on her lap.
“I’m in a meeting with my photographers, have a pissed-off advertiser on the other line, and the printer’s late with this week’s edition,” Marjorie Voltaire snapped. “Aren’t we all a little nutty? I know you’re very proud of the fact that you took Psych 101, but I didn’t send you there to judge her state of mind. Come back and write what I
