What They Will Say

Fabienne Josaphat
Marielle’s oncologist was satisfied with her markers. But as Dr. Unger turned the computer screen away and looked directly at her, there was a different concern in his eyes. “What you need is a boyfriend. Someone kind, someone to look after you.”
A boyfriend? At her age? What an American thing to say, Marielle thought. In Haiti, women in their forties didn’t even exist as sexual beings. They were just mothers. Widows. Women who died and became ancestors and sat on credenzas inside picture frames, watching over descendants among the burning flames of candles and offerings of rum and coffee.
“I do… have a husband,” she whispered.
“You do?” Dr. Unger paused, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t know.”
“He lives back home. In Haiti.”
But the doctor, a very lovely man with curly hair and mild manners, brushed it off. Marielle was alone, as far as he knew. She came for her treatments alone, sat through the infusions alone, went home alone, swallowed her pills alone. She lived with her mother and worked as a nurse’s aide in Miami Beach. Dr. Unger also knew this. But she could see, in his pale blue foreign eyes, that he would never understand.
“You need support,” he said. “Someone to carry you through all of this. You shouldn’t be doing any of this alone.”
Anyone could see it, she guessed. When she was first diagnosed with breast cancer, Marielle had shown up at work wearing two different shoes and noticed only when she sat down in Mrs. Weiner’s kitchen to sort her patient’s pills. She was stressed, but who wouldn’t be? Between her recent mastectomy, the bills piling up, and her car, which constantly needed repairs, there was the impending, dreadful feeling that the world under her was growing smaller and smaller, and soon, she would no longer fit.
She wondered if the doctor could see her thinking about her husband. The thought of Jean-Marc visiting from Haiti, always scowling, always screwface, blaming her for working too many hours for not enough money and not devoting enough attention to his needs. The thought of him blaming her for her job “wiping old folks’ asses” and changing their diapers. The thought of him berating her for giving up her nursing degree and not breaking through the barriers of this new world made her chest hurt. “If you say so,” Marielle said. She offered a smile, too. A polite one.
After her chemotherapy infusion, Marielle sat in the car, the radio playing classical music, and bit into a chocolate bar. Outside her window, a small child ran past shouting, “Mommy! Mommy, wait for me!” The mother kept walking, and it became clear that she deliberately ignored the child as a way of pressuring her to follow. Marielle wondered how a woman could truly call herself a mother and not look back. Her own Giselle had called for her like this, back home, back when she was a mother and had a home and worked a real nursing job at the hospital and felt the world was still whole, before it all crumbled and dictators were toppled and Haitians started to flee en masse. Marielle had fled with her mother on a visa, hoping to send for her child and husband. This was before it became clear that everything moved slowly, that applications for legal residency took years, that she needed a job immediately, that she would never again be who she was. Before the world broke.
By the time she looked down, only the candy wrapper was left. A part of her felt satiated, the ravenous monster temporarily quelled with sugar and caffeine, but there was a crack between her ribs that persisted.
Dr. Unger didn’t know about Hermane.
Marielle had met Hermane in church. Both were Catholic, similar in background and carrying the same heaviness. She was lingering in the reception hall after Mass, indulging in a piece of yellow cake, when her choir friend introduced her to the new usher. Hermane shook her hand correctly, something Marielle noticed was difficult for many people to do. Either they squeezed too hard, or they just held on to the fingers for a limp handshake. His was firm but warm, and she liked him instantly for it. He was tall, slim, and tucked his button-down shirt inside his pants. Clean. When he spoke, she could tell he was well-read. He’d traveled a bit, seen the world in his younger days, and he spoke French and Creole fluidly, both languages still alive in him and not altered by uprootedness.
“I am from La Ville des Cayes,” he said. “You are from Léogane so we’re both southerners. Maybe that’s why we were meant to meet.” This made sense to her. It explained why she offered him a ride home when his car was at the shop, why she allowed him to walk with her to church. He, an ex-accountant approaching his sixties with grown children living outside of Florida, was a diabetic who had a hard time driving at night. She, an ex-nurse with a family overseas, felt her husband and child were almost fictional. Together, they made a good pair. They went out to the movies or to the theater to see a play. He took her to the store, walking through the aisles and picking out flowerpots. Eventually, he began taking her to doctor visits. He sat in the waiting chair patiently, reading a newspaper while she received her infusions, fetching water and ginger candies for her nausea.
Hermane even attended a family party once, dancing with her and eliciting glares and pinches from her sisters and cousins. And a fine dancer he was! He danced an old-school konpa, the kind that hadn’t been corrupted by a constant lustful need for hip gyrations. His skills were honed on the dance floor of clubs only the elders knew, back when men and women still circulated in the darkness of Port-au-Prince, unafraid of Papa Doc’s bogeymen. He could spin Marielle around and bring her right back into his arms with grace. “I’m an ansyen bon,” he said, and they cackled together at the joke. He was old and good. And proud of it.
Marielle’s sisters and cousins were all born with judgment in their mouths, always throwing stones at women who stepped out of line or into the fire. No one asked her questions, not with words at least, but they gave her the business in other ways. Who was this man and what was she doing with him? Was she substituting him for her husband? And she very much wanted to lie, to say yes, she was.
“So, this Hermane character, is he married?” her mother asked during the party.
Marielle rolled her eyes. “He is divorced, you know he is.”
“Well, no one asked me what I think because I’m just an old lady.”
Marielle’s mother adored her son-in-law, even though she knew his flaws. Whenever Jean-Marc came to visit, they kissed each other’s cheeks as if he were the prodigal son and she his own mother. Then Jean-Marc would open his suitcase and let the presents fall out like collected treasures from the homeland: mint candies, mountain coffee ground in a mortar and pestle by two women and a song, rum bottles that still smelled of sugarcane molasses, bottles of perfume double-wrapped in luxuriously creased paper from popular shops in Port-au-Prince. This was how he won her over.
“Aren’t you worried about what people will say?” her mother asked. “The questions they’ll ask about Hermane?”
No one questioned Jean-Marc about the women he gallivanted with in Port-au-Prince. Everyone shrugged off his behavior because “men get lonely.” Men were allowed to explore, to satisfy their needs, and women were expected to polish their behavior, to be model wives, to carry the torch of virtue. Their separation had been necessary for a green card, for the promise of a better future, but underneath that reason was a cold ugly truth.
Hermane was not her lover, but Marielle wanted to pass him off as such, if only out of spite against a world that demanded she erase herself. When the konpa music dropped, he took to the dance floor with her, elegantly and respectfully, unlike Marielle’s brother-in-law, the one who was always sweating and panting and rubbing himself against women’s crotches, or the one uncle who always got carried away with his aggressive old school mambo steps. Her family turned up their noses. “Better hope word doesn’t get out to Jean-Marc.”
Marielle’s eyes went to her cousin, and her cousin winked as if to feign complicity. But the other half of her face was stiff, Marielle noticed, stiff with reproach, and the world blurred before her eyes as Hermane led her into a spin.
When Hermane dropped her off at home, he sat in the car and looked at her. Her heart stood still. She wanted to run. “You’re a very good dancer,” he said.
“You’re not the only one acquainted with a dance floor,” she retorted, blushing. “I’ve seen Les Ambassadeurs, Shleu-Shleu on stage. I had my bands.” She left out the part where men begged her for dances, and she’d turned them down to favor Jean-Marc, who danced like he had two left feet.
“We should go dancing more often,” Hermane said.
Her skin felt hot, dewy, her blood rushing in a way she hadn’t felt in years.
“Or are you too nervous about what people will say?” He had read all between her lines, her walking around like a book she thought couldn’t be opened.
Hermane sat in a church pew and prayed while Marielle finished her adoration and contemplation in the Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre’s chamber. The chamber smelled of roses and baby’s breath, and the only sounds were whispered prayers and sobs and sniffles from the supplicants. Marielle prayed for relief, something to assuage her guilt.
Giselle was almost twelve now. But in Marielle’s mind, she was still a toddler, perpetually two, and she could hear her laugh resonate like the toll of carillons on Easter Sunday. Only when her husband visited or sent photos through traveling relatives did she remember that her baby had grown. Gone were the bows in her braids, the barrettes in every strand of hair, the round dimpled cheeks she used to pepper with kisses.
Now, Giselle was on the cusp of growing breasts, as Marielle could see in the confirmation pictures her husband sent. She had long legs and was starting to resemble her father more than her mother, and she was reading Harlequin romances. She had her first period without her mother present and was so terrified at the sight of her own blood that Marielle had to call her long-distance to reassure her.
“You’re a woman now,” she’d said, a waver in her voice. “I’m proud of you.”
“I know,” Giselle said, but her voice was almost the voice of a stranger. “It was just hard telling Papa. He brought me books.”
As if books could replace a mother, Marielle thought. What she needed was to go home to Haiti and hold her child, to lie down under the covers and reimagine their life, to go back to when Giselle was a baby and make up for lost time, to hold her little girl’s body and never, ever, leave her again. But the immigration office had been clear: once she applied for her green card, she had to stay put in U.S. territory, and Giselle and her father had to stay put in Haiti. They could not be reunited until their green cards came through. This could take a year, the officer had said. Or three. Or, with Haiti’s coups and political turmoil and embassy shutdowns, longer.
After her prayer, she sat with Hermane by the intracoastal river that ran behind the church, watching the water rise in the wake of boats. On the other side of the water, a couple danced to music streaming out of their radio. Marielle longed to do the same.
“I nearly drowned when I was younger, you know?” Hermane said, chuckling, as if the memory of his own near-death experience tickled him. “Kabic Beach. I was lucky that two brave men fished me out, just before I got swept away in the undercurrent.”
“The last time I went in the water was in Montrouis,” she said. “That was more than a decade ago. Giselle was just a baby, and I took her in the ocean. I wanted to let the salt water bless her.”
Marielle didn’t push Hermane away when he leaned in and kissed her. She hadn’t been kissed in so long, and his breath warmed her face. For a moment, she felt herself swaying in his arms, as if they were on the dance floor again. But then she remembered and tugged herself away. “Jean-Marc is coming to town,” she said. “He’ll be here for two weeks. You understand, don’t you?”
They drove home in silence. Marielle gripped the wheel and avoided his eyes. Hermane sucked his teeth and turned his gaze to the window, and although they said nothing else, she could tell that something had shifted.
“Is this what you want?” Hermane finally blurted out. “To live in fear of what they will say? If you’re not happy with him, why not ask for a divorce?”
Marielle bit her lip and stared at the road ahead. “It’s not that simple.”
Marielle squatted in Mrs. Weiner’s driveway and pulled the cardboard from underneath her Corolla, holding her breath. No stains meant the oil leak was in check, the car was running smoothly, and she wouldn’t need to worry about leaving an ugly black oil stain in the driveway like she did a month ago, much to Mrs. Weiner’s ire. It had been embarrassing for her to kneel down and clean it, and when the oil wouldn’t wash off, Mrs. Weiner had docked the expense of a professional driveway cleaner out of her paycheck.
She stopped by the grocery store on her way home, but it was not to buy food. Her mother cooked enough for everyone, even though the chemo made it impossible for Marielle to taste much of what she made. Marielle had to buy T-shirts and slippers because Jean-Marc needed things to wear around the house for two weeks and didn’t bring his own. She needed Pine-Sol to clean the bathroom since he splattered urine around the toilet bowl and onto the tile floor, and since he didn’t hydrate properly, it always smelled stronger than average urine, and she gagged while cleaning it, down on all fours at ten o’clock at night.
“You just have to take him as he is,” her mother said as Jean-Marc surfed television channels in the other room. She plated him an extra large serving of rice and beans and plantains. “Some people don’t know how to love. But at least he is kind. He’s not a wife beater, nor a degenerate.”
There was a time, a very brief time, when Marielle and Jean-Marc made memories. There were drives to beach towns on the island, excursions to historical sites, and picnic lunches at the waterfalls of Saut-Mathurine. There was their little house with the garden, the birth of Giselle, the promise of normalcy. But the dictatorship and the fear that crawled into every Haitian life warped the fabric of their happiness. The harassment by authorities, the danger of breaking curfews, the panic over being falsely accused as a spy or a dissident had changed Jean-Marc. He became easily flustered, brittle, and angry. He, like everyone else, lost his sense of control.
Now, instead of making love, Marielle and Jean-Marc lay in bed, arguing in sharp whispers. “How is your job any different from that of a maid?” he said. “Explain it to me. All I see in you is servitude. Things were supposed to be different, for the sake of Giselle.”
“I’m doing what I can.” How could she explain it? How could she translate the pain of severing roots, of changing her mother tongue, of fitting her square-peg self into holes that were not made for her, rising before dawn and watching the sun set over a land whose shape had nothing in common with hers? How could she make him see?
“This is no job for someone who’s ill,” Jean-Marc said. “This kind of labor will kill you.”
He’d finally accompanied her to a treatment session that week, watching as the nurse prodded her skin, found her port, started an infusion, and served her saltine crackers. Marielle pretended to read, but she could tell Jean-Marc was moved. And then the nurse asked jokingly, “Oh, you bring a new boyfriend today?” He wasn’t fluent in English, but she knew he understood.
Jean-Marc fell into silence, which was just as well because Marielle didn’t have the strength to argue. She hadn’t heard from Hermane since they kissed by the water. She thought of him every single day, but he hadn’t called. She’d even dialed his number, and the phone rang with no answer.
Three days later, Hermane’s son called. They’d found Hermane unconscious in his room, comatose from the diabetes, likely for days. Too late to be saved. As he spoke, the crack in Marielle’s chest widened, expanding into an abyss. It grew darker and heavier, squeezing against her ribs. “Marielle, are you okay?” his son had the decency to pause and ask. She wondered if he could hear it, all the air hissing out of her deflating lungs. “He cared deeply for you,” the son was saying. “Would you come to the funeral? We are thinking to cremate him and take him home to Haiti and throw his ashes in the sea.”
Maybe he assumed she was crying. But she wasn’t. She took the news and swallowed it. A wail had almost emerged out of her, but it caught in her throat. She agreed with the choice, yes. The sea was a wonderful idea, he would like that. He would want nothing more than to let the water take him home. When she hung up, she collapsed in her chair and stayed like that, immobile.
Driving to the airport, Marielle gripped the wheel and waited for Jean-Marc to finish his rant. “I cannot send Giselle to you in this condition,” he said, slapping his hand against the dashboard. “Even when you get your green card and she does hers, the circumstances must be different. I would hope your life and job will have changed by the time she’s ready to join you here.”
Marielle swerved into the exit lane. She’d almost missed it.
“And I would hope things would fall back into place, for all of us,” he snapped. “Unless of course, you’re no longer interested. I don’t know, at this point, if we’re still a family or not.”
Marielle pulled up to the curb and shifted the creaky Corolla into park. The flights overhead glided close to the ground, shadows angling against the windshield. She needed to be put back whole again, pick up all her pieces that were falling apart everywhere like her hair on the bathroom floor when she combed it, like her dignity when Jean-Marc wrinkled his nose at how she dressed, her skirts too long, her curves too ample, her French too rusty, her body too flaccid, her lovemaking too cold. What she needed was to find herself again.
Before Jean-Marc got out of the car, he said, “I need to know I can rely on you to help us through.” He gathered his suitcase and then turned back to her, his voice softening. “You’re Giselle’s only chance at a future. She has to make it in this world. I need to believe in you.”
Marielle drove away in silence. She didn’t even turn on the radio. At this hour, there was classical music and soft rock, both of which Hermane loved. Instead of going home, she parked in the open lot of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and walked to the water. She sat at the edge and watched the intracoastal river flow to an unseen ocean. The sunset glow was perplexing. How could it shine so much? How could it be so bright when the lights inside her had died?
The last time she was here, with Hermane, she’d explained things to him as though he were a child. She was legally married in the eyes of everyone, she told him, and the eyes were always watching, the mouths always commenting.
“Is this what you want?” he responded. “Or do you want happiness?”
But she didn’t have that luxury. There would be no redemption for her once she crossed the line. She’d known this, even as he got out of the car and said goodnight, even as she wished she’d thrown convention and expectations out the window and allowed him to kiss her again on the lips, even as she yearned to return to his arms. She had let him walk away, and she drove home with an emptiness in her bones.
The rushing of the water now made her heart swell. Marielle could see a handful of women downstream pour molasses and flower petals into the water, an offering to someone’s god. Among them, a child, a young girl dressed in white, her brown skin adorned with cowry shell bracelets. So much beauty in the world, so much of it by the water, and not enough time in the world to sit with it all.
When Marielle arrived home, her mother greeted her at the door. “You’re here! Jean-Marc just called. He missed his flight!”
Marielle stood frozen as her mother went on about how she needed to turn back right away and get him. “God didn’t want him to leave, I suppose,” she beamed, starting a pot of salt fish in case her son-in-law came home hungry.
Marielle watched her mother slice the fish quickly, despite her arthritic hands, the pungent smell filling the apartment and roiling her stomach still sensitive from chemo. “Now maybe you and Jean-Marc can work on things,” her mother said, reaching for the shallots, “after all this terrible news about Hermane. Maybe God is giving you a second chance.”
Still rigid in the doorway, Marielle spiraled in her head, thinking about the hours of traffic driving back to the airport and the hours of a long dinner and the hours needed to wash her hair and skin before Mrs. Weiner tomorrow scrunched up her nose because she could smell everything: salt fish, spoiled milk, sweat, oil leaks, and fear.
Marielle climbed mechanically back in her car and fumbled to start the engine. Outside, the Florida moon blazed overhead, spilling its milky brilliance everywhere. But all she could see was darkness. Her body felt paralyzed, and her arm wouldn’t move to adjust the gearshift. Something was erupting inside her. Her eyes pooled as a light blinked on the dashboard. The oil. Check Engine. She turned the key in the ignition and the car jostled, coughed, and roared, but there was a horrible sound and then, nothing. Marielle clutched the wheel.
Each time she turned the key, she whispered a prayer she hoped only the car could hear and understand. Come on, come on! In the periphery of her vision, her mother was headed out the door. Please, she begged the car. You have to go. We have to leave. Please. She could hear Hermane impatiently sucking his teeth, as if he was in the passenger seat next to her. Do you want happiness?
Her mother stepped off the curb, and Marielle turned the key once more, clenched her teeth, and willed the car to go.