Eight #2
Adele bites her lip. Grimaces. “There’s something I should tell you.
Once, Claire and I were out shopping together on Miracle Mile.
You were home with Rudy and Clément. I was pregnant with the twins.
” My life before working at the plant. Wiping small fingers.
Mashing bananas for Clément’s baby food.
Keeping Rudy from climbing the furniture and drawing on the walls.
My sisters returning home with shopping bags.
“Claire and I went into Robinson’s. Delphine was there. ”
The words hover outside my body. “Go on,” I say.
“There isn’t much to the story. We were in the shoe section. She called to us and waved. She was pushing a pram. It took us both a second to place her—she looked different and she was all out of context. And that was all.”
“What do you mean that was all?”
“Claire took my arm and steered me away. I barely had time to think and then we were outside on the street again and it was over. We argued all the way home over whether we should tell you. Finally, we decided not to. We thought it would just stir up old hurts. We didn’t see a reason to do that.”
A ringing in my ears. “But all these years, I’ve been wondering.”
“We made the wrong choice. I see that now. With Delphine and with you. It’s all wrapped up with this thing with Maman somehow.
These rules we’re supposed to follow. The idea that there’s a right way and a wrong way to be.
That the wrong things can’t even be looked at.
Aren’t allowed to exist. I acted like Delphine didn’t exist. I wish I’d stayed and talked to her.
But I didn’t. I wish I’d gone straight home and told you.
” She pulls her robe tighter. “But I didn’t do that either,” she says.
The whole next day there’s a tightness in my chest, an anger that intensifies as the hours go on.
We come home from work and it’s time to have dinner but I can’t sit still.
I leave without explanation, walk the three doors over to Claire’s house, pound on her door so hard I hurt my knuckles, draw my fist back in pain.
She swings the door open, pale. “Why aren’t you at dinner? Bernard’s there. I wasn’t feeling well so I stayed home.”
“Adele told me. About Delphine in Robinson’s,” I say.
“Oh.” I storm past her into their living room. “Can we sit while we talk?” she asks. “I’m not feeling right today.”
“She isn’t worthy of a hello? You hate her that much?”
“I don’t hate her,” Claire says. “She made a choice. It hurt me, and I was angry, especially because of you. All your lives, you two were inseparable. You don’t just abandon people. Forgive me if I won’t tolerate small talk in a department store when she chose to cut us out.”
“But she didn’t want to,” I say. “She didn’t want the laws to be what they are. That’s not her fault. Bill choosing to live in the neighborhood he wanted isn’t her fault.”
“Odette,” Claire says. “What’s gotten into you? You’re picking a fight with me. I never said any of that was Delphine’s fault. Now please just wait a minute. I have to … I don’t feel…”
She turns down the hall, lets herself into the bathroom, and I want to follow her, to scream at her from the other side of the door.
I want to make her cry. But a sound comes—a gasp, then a wail, and I turn the knob and find her standing under the bright ceiling light, risen from the toilet, her skirt bunched around her waist, streaks of red blood in clots down her legs.
“Did this…” she says. “Did this ever happen to you?” Her eyes are wide and full of tears.
“You’re pregnant?” I ask.
“The doctor didn’t know if it would stick. But I was about to tell you. We were going to tell you all on Sunday.”
I step into the room with her. The toilet bowl is scarlet, opaque, as though there’d never been water in it. Her whole body’s quaking. “Sit down,” I say. “Sit back down, my love.”
“I’ve read there can be bleeding,” she says, lowering herself carefully onto the toilet. “That a certain amount can be expected, even.” Her voice is so faint.
I kneel next to her, rest my cheek against her cheek. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and she bends forward and sobs.
On the drive to work on Monday I listen from the back seat while Al asks Bernard questions. How far along they were, why they didn’t tell us sooner.
“It’s been a hard road for us, you know that,” Bernard says. “She’s sensitive about it, how difficult it’s been for her when her sisters haven’t struggled at all.”
I wonder if he’s forgotten I’m here. I look out the window, let them talk.
Remember a night back home in the blue house, Papa and Bernard still overseas, the rest of us around Maman’s dinner table.
Jambalaya, beer bottles, tapers in the candelabra.
Adele clinking a glass with a knife, a hush following.
“Al and I have news.” They were going to have a baby, the first grandchild.
Shock and sorrow across Claire’s face, a flash.
How quickly she masked it, exclaimed and smiled, rose from the table to embrace them.
On my lunch hour I borrow Bernard’s car and drive to Bullock’s.
I want to give Claire something. A barrette catches my eye.
Swiftly, a shopgirl reaches for it, fastens it to my hair.
It sparkles in the hand mirror. Incongruous against my work clothes, far too expensive.
Another salesgirl takes my wrist and spritzes.
“Calypso, by Robert Piguet,” she says. It’s floral. Claire prefers musk.
I want something soft. A scarf maybe. And then I find the perfect thing: black suede slippers, lined in sheep’s wool. The cashier wraps them for me in flower-patterned tissue and a white box with a gold bow. Bernard promises to deliver it that night.
A few days pass and Claire still doesn’t come to dinner. After a week, I walk over to her house in the early evening but she won’t see me. “It’s nothing personal,” Bernard says at the door. “She just needs her rest. She doesn’t blame you.”
I storm back to Adele’s. She’s in the yard, pruning her camellia. “Blame me?”
She sighs. She has shears in one hand and a collection of stems in the other. “It isn’t rational. But she’s been so hard on herself for so long. Maybe it’s what she needs—to think it might be someone else’s fault, just this once.”
“I feel terrible, of course,” I say. “But the doctor had already told her.”
“She’ll come around.” She turns back to her shrub, keeps pruning.
I sit down on the grass. “It wasn’t wrong for me to be angry.”
“I know. You can be angry at me, too, if you need to be.”
“I’m not. All I want is to know more about Delphine.”
Adele crosses to the garbage pail and tosses the clippings in.
She comes back, sits with me. “She seemed well. It was so quick, but I noticed a few things. She was more mature, less girlish. If she hadn’t said our names, I might not have even recognized her.
Not that her face or her body looked all that different but …
How do I put this?” She leans back on the grass, closes her eyes.
And then: “Take Delphine as we knew her. Dreamy and serious, a free spirit, beautiful but bordering on feral. Wouldn’t you say?
” It’s a good distillation. I smile through the ache.
“Now give her a husband. A white older businessman.”
“An artist, though.”
“A studio portrait photographer. A business owner.” My perception of him shifts.
Everything Delphine told me, she told me through the haze of new love.
“She has to play the part of a professional man’s wife.
A white man’s wife. She has to be a white woman, in Los Angeles.
An entirely different world than where we came from.
So she changes the way she wears her hair.
Not down and tangled but up, in an elegant twist. And she gets rid of those airy dresses.
Trades them for tailored looks instead.”
“What was she wearing?”
“I can’t remember exactly, but I do know she had diamond studs in her ears. They caught the light. And her pram was the very expensive kind, nothing like what we had.”
“Did you get a look at the baby?”
Adele takes my hand in hers. Softer than mine, always, even with all the chores she does. “The baby was wide awake. Very fair and pretty. All in pink.”
“A girl,” I say. And the image from a long time ago comes back. Delphine and me, holding separate ends of a long string. Our parallel lives. Singing the same lullabies in different dark rooms.