Edwidge Danticat - The Dew Breaker

Indeed it was. Aline had an expensive espresso machine at home that she’d not yet gotten to produce anything nearly as delicious as Beatrice’s coffee. The espresso machine was a college graduation gift from her thirty-years-older girlfriend; she’d shipped it to Aline all the way from Miami, where she’d gotten a new chaired position in the psychology department at Florida International. On a late-night call, during finals week, she’d asked Aline what she wanted most after graduation, and still exhausted from back-to-back all-nighters, Aline had mumbled that she wanted (1) to stop drinking watered-down coffee, (2) to eat no more frozen dinners, and (3) to do something with her life.

She’d sent Aline the espresso maker and a three-hundred-dollar gift certificate for a five-star restaurant meal. “The rest,” she’d written on her newly monogrammed stationery card, “you have to figure out yourself.”

Beatrice’s coffee was beginning to relax Aline. Ignoring her editor’s advice (“Don’t get too cozy with the natives,” she’d told Aline soon after she’d offered her the internship), Aline was tasting spirits in the coffee, but couldn’t identify which. Beatrice had brewed the coffee in a way that overpowered whatever she’d added to it, but still left its effects intact.

The tips of Aline’s fingers and toes were tingling, and Beatrice was starting to seem like someone she knew or should have known better, like her college professor girlfriend, who was always looking for new conquests, in both life and career.

“You want to know my secret?” Beatrice asked.

It took Aline a minute to figure out that Beatrice was still talking about the coffee.

“You want to know why it tastes so good?”

“I’m interested,” Aline said.

“The secret is time,” Beatrice said, picking up the cup she’d poured for herself. “I always take my time, whether it’s getting dressed, making coffee, or sewing those wedding gowns.”

As she reached into her bag, pulled out a tape recorder, and put it on the edge of the coffee table between them, Aline thought that if Beatrice took as much time with her work as she did getting dressed and making coffee, her brides would be baptizing their children by the time their gowns were done. However, she simply asked, “Do you mind if I record?”

“First,” Beatrice began as though she were the one conducting the interview, “remind me again what this is for.”

“As I mentioned yesterday,” Aline said, “I write for the Haitian American Weekly . You made a wedding dress for our editor in chief, Marjorie Voltaire. Do you remember Marjorie?”

Beatrice raised both her hands to her chin, her penciled eyebrows creased in full concentration as though she were trying to channel Marjorie Voltaire into the room.

“Well, Marjorie was so sad to learn you’re retiring that she asked me to write this story.”

What Marjorie had actually said was, “I hear that the woman who made my wedding dress is giving up the trade. Go talk to her. Maybe we can get a short piece out of it.”

“I don’t remember that girl,” Beatrice said with a sigh of resignation, as though she’d given remembering her best shot and failed, “but I’ve made a lot of dresses for a lot of girls. In any case, it would have been better for you to write this when I was still working. I could have gotten a few more clients and would have stopped sooner.”

Seeing this as an opportunity to officially begin the interview, Aline leaned over and pressed a button on the tape recorder.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

“Old,” Beatrice said.

“Forties?” Aline ventured, even though Beatrice looked much older, late fifties at least.

Beatrice threw her head back and let out an earsplitting laugh, contorting her face in such a way that her skin, had it been cloth, would have taken hours to iron out.

“So you would have liked to retire sooner?” Aline continued.

“Everything happens when it’s meant to happen,” Beatrice said. “That’s what I tell my girls when they think they’re either too early or too late in getting married. By the way, are you married?”

“No,” Aline said.

“Don’t worry,” Beatrice said, taking another sip of her coffee. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you what a great institution it is.”

“Please tell me why you’ve chosen to retire now, after all this time,” Aline said. ”You’ve been making wedding dresses for many years, is that so?”

“I’ve been making these dresses since Haiti.” Beatrice arched her neck and pushed her head toward Aline’s. “In all that time, I’ve sewn every stitch myself. Never had anyone helping me. Never could stand having anyone in my house for too long. Now it’s become too hard. I’m tired.”

Beatrice stated this last part flatly, as though it were simply a fact, not a plea for sympathy or pity, which Aline couldn’t help but admire.

“Describe for me the process of making a wedding dress,” Aline said.

“Well.” Beatrice cleared her throat after a series of dry coughs, as sudden and as consistent as a smoker’s cough or a lint cough. “My girls-when I say my girls, I mean the girls I make the dresses for-they come here carrying photographs of tall, skinny girls in dresses that cost thousands of dollars. They bring those to me and say, ‘Mother’-I make them all call me Mother, it’s more respectful that way- they say, ‘Mother, this is the dress I must 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.