The Marriage of Opposites
Page 77

Jestine next took me to a stretch of beach where she said turtles came once a year to lay their eggs. It was the place where she and my mother would hide in the dark. They would pretend they were girls who were half turtle and imagine that they would swim away and never look back. The sky was midnight blue, one of the colors I loved to paint with, a shade I often dreamed of. I painted the beach and a palm tree that unfolded like a flower. In the shadows there were turtles, their shells a green-black from the depths of the sea.
Then we went to stand outside the shop, beneath my mother’s window. Jestine said, She fell in love looking outside onto this street. The street was yellow, with rose-colored blooms in the hedges. We went on through our section of town, to the big house where my grandparents had lived, where the oldest lizard on the island hid in the courtyard.
I remembered Rosalie’s wedding and the garden aglow that night. My mother had come looking for me. She thought I’d disappeared to sleep in a quiet place, but I was crouched beside the bushes, looking for the lizard. “My cousin used to do what you’re doing. He could call the iguana to him. He was such a handsome boy.”
Perhaps my mother forgot she was speaking to me. She let slip that when she had come to her first husband’s house, Rosalie had been a slave. She hadn’t been aware of this until Monsieur Petit died and the will was read. The first thing my mother had done as a widow was to have papers drawn up for Rosalie’s emancipation. But she had to wait for my father to come from France to sign those papers, because a woman hadn’t the legal right to do so. At Rosalie’s wedding a hundred candles had been lit, and it seemed as if the stars had fallen from the sky. In bringing me back to that house, Jestine reminded me of the moment when my mother and I stood in the garden. When I went home, I took out my paint and brushes and did my best to create the rooms inside my grandfather’s house without ever having seen them. The walls were in tints of pistachio and salmon and pale gold.
I practiced my art until I was ready to complete a real portrait. I chose to sketch Jestine as she worked dyeing clothes, and then to paint that image. When I sketched her I saw something in her face I hadn’t noticed before. All at once I saw that the color of grief was blue and that it radiated from her. I painted her in that shade. Flesh tones didn’t show the real substance of people, neither their physical aspects nor their souls.
Since I’d begun the painting I found I had difficulty sleeping. I thought about Jestine’s mention of a dress for her daughter, and the color of sorrow, and my mother standing in the garden watching me, suspicious, as if I was her cousin from long ago. I thought of things I had overheard when my mother and Jestine had no idea I was listening. I wasn’t really paying attention, yet still I heard bits of conversation. How could a person be so selfish? How could love turn to ash? Why would God allow cruelty in the world if he truly were watching over his sons and his daughters?
The next day I worked up enough courage to question my mother. I found her in the kitchen with Rosalie. They were discussing dinner, something they did nearly every day, and yet they seemed to find the subject endlessly fascinating. Would we have chicken or fish? Would the sauce be sweet or sour?
“Does Jestine have a daughter?” I asked.
My mother and Rosalie exchanged a look. They kept cooking the Friday night meal, slamming around cast-iron pots. They had decided we would have chicken flavored with thyme and parsley and tomatoes, along with a cornmeal porridge and loaves of hot bread. My father would say the blessing over the meal, and then my brothers and I, starving by the end of the day, would grab for what we wanted until my mother clapped her hands and told us to be civilized. Usually I would have tried to sneak a bit of the food that was being prepared, but on this day I merely studied my mother, who was clearly upset by my question.
“You’re a busybody,” Rosalie told me in her matter-of-fact way. She was always protecting my mother, telling me to hush, saying I should keep my thoughts to myself.
I didn’t back down. “She mentioned a daughter.”
My mother shrugged. “She had one once,” she admitted.
I’d had my suspicions, yet was shocked to hear this news. “And? What happened to her?”
“Ask Jestine,” my mother suggested.
I knew my mother. That was it. She turned her back and would say no more.
The next time I saw Jestine I asked if it was true, if she’d had a daughter.
“It is true. Maybe you’re too young to know about such things.”
“I’m not,” I told her.
She fixed on me with her deep-set gray eyes as if searching for something. For a moment I thought she might tell me to leave, but she didn’t. She gestured to the sea. “My daughter was stolen.”