Krik? Krak!

His face was fading into a dreamy glow.

'What kind of legends will your daughters be told? What kinds of charms will you give them to ward off evil?'

I woke up startled, for the first time afraid of the father that I saw in my dreams.

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and went down to the kitchen to get a glass of warm milk.

Ma was sitting at the kitchen table, rolling an egg between her palms. I slipped into the chair across from her. She pressed harder on both ends of the egg.

'What are you doing up so late?' she asked.

'I can't sleep,' I said.

'I think people should take shifts. Some of us would carry on at night and some during the day. The night would be like the day exactly. All stores would be open and people would go to the office, but only the night people. You see, then there would be no sleeplessness.'

I warmed some cold milk in a pan on the stove. Ma was still pressing hard, trying to crush the egg from top and bottom. I offered her some warm milk but she refused.

'What did you think of the wedding today?' I asked.

'When your father left me and you behind in Haiti to move to this country and marry that woman to get our papers,' she said, 'I prepared a charm for him. I wrote his name on a piece of paper and put the paper in a cal- abash. I filled the calabash with honey and next to it lit a candle. At midnight every night, I laid the calabash next to me in the bed where your father used to sleep and shouted at it to love me. I don't know how or what I was looking for, but somehow in the words he was sending me, I knew he had stopped thinking of me the same way.'

'You can t believe that, Ma,' I said.

'I know what I know,' she said. 'I am an adult woman. I am not telling you this story for pity.'

The kitchen radio was playing an old classic on one of the Haitian stations.

Beloved Haiti, there is no place like you.

I had to leave you before I could understand you.

'Would you like to see my proposal letter?' Ma asked.

She slid an old jewelry box across the table towards me. I opened it and pulled out the envelope with the letter in it.

The envelope was so yellowed and frail that at first I was afraid to touch it.

'Go ahead,' she said, 'it will not turn to dust in your hands.'

The letter was cracked along the lines where it had been folded all of these years.

My son, Carl Romelus Azile, would be honored to make your daughter, Hermine Francoise Genie, his wife.

'It was so sweet then,' Ma said, 'so sweet. Promise me that when I die you will destroy all of this.'

'I can't promise you that,' I said. 'I will want to hold on to things when you die. I will want to hold on to you.'

'I do not want my grandchildren to feel sorry for me,' she said. 'The past, it fades a person. And yes. Today, it was a nice wedding.'

My passport came in the mail the next day, addressed to Gracina Azile, my real and permanent name.

I filled out all the necessary sections, my name and address, and'listed my mother to be contacted in case I was in an accident. For the first time in my life,,1 felt truly secure living in America. It was like being in a war zone and finally receiving a weapon of my own, like standing on the firing line and finally getting a bullet-proof vest.

We had all paid dearly for this piece of paper, this final assurance that I belonged in the club. It had cost my parent's marriage, my mother's spirit, my sister's arm.

I felt like an indentured servant who had finally been allowed to join the family.

The next morning, I went to the cemetery in Rosedale, Queens, where my father had been buried. His was one of many gray tombstones in a line of foreign unpronounceable names. I brought my passport for him to see, laying it on the grass among the wild daisies surrounding the grave.

'Caroline had her wedding,' I said. 'We felt like you were there.'

My father had wanted to be buried in Haiti, but at the time of his death there was no way that we could have afforded it.

The day before Papa's funeral, Caroline and I had told Ma that we wanted to be among Papa's pallbearers.

Ma had thought that it was a bad idea. Who had ever heard of young women being pallbearers? Papa's funeral was no time for us to express our selfish childishness, our American rebelliousness.

When we were children, whenever we rejected symbols of Haitian culture, Ma used to excuse us with great embarrassment and say, 'You know, they are American.'

Why didn't we like the thick fatty pig skin that she would deep-fry so long that it tasted like rubber? We were Americans and we had no taste buds. A double tragedy.

Why didn't we like the thick yellow pumpkin soup that she spent all New Year's Eve making so that we would have it on New Year's Day to celebrate Haitian Independence Day? Again, because we were American and the Fourth of July was our independence holiday.

'In Haiti, you own your children and they find it natural,' she would say. 'They know their duties to the family and they act accordingly. In America, no one owns anything, and certainly not another person.'

'Caroline called,' Ma said. She was standing over the stove making some bone soup when I got home from the cemetery. 'I told her that we would still keep her bed here for her, if she ever wants to use it. She will come and visit us soon. I knew she would miss us.'

'Can I drop one bone in your soup?' I asked Ma.

'It is your soup too,' she said.

She let me drop one bone into the boiling water. The water splashed my hand, leaving a red mark.

'Ma, if we were painters which landscapes would we paint?' I asked her.

'I see. You want to play the game of questions?'

'When I become a mother, how will I name my daughter?'

'If you want to play then I should ask the first question,' she said.

'What kinds of lullabies will I sing at night? What kinds of legends will my daughter be told? What kinds of charms will I give her to ward off evil?'

'I have come a few years further than you,' she insist-ed. 'I have tasted a lot more salt. I am to ask the first question, if we are to play the game.'

'Go ahead,' I said giving in.

She thought about it for a long time while stirring the bones in our soup.

'Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it?' she asked finally

Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.

epilogue: women like us

You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother. Your mother who looked like your grandmother and her grandmother before her. Your mother had two rules for living. Always use your ten fingers, which in her parlance meant that you should be the best little cook and housekeeper who ever lived.

Your mother s second rule went along with the first. Never have sex before marriage, and even after you marry, you shouldn't say you enjoy it, or your husband won't respect you.

And writing? Writing was as forbidden as dark rouge on the cheeks or a first date before eighteen. It was an act of indolence, something to be done in a corner when you could have been learning to cook.

Are there women who both cook and write? Kitchen poets, they call them. They slip phrases into their stew