Douze: Opening Pages

Douze. The number of seconds I can hold my breath before Papa slaps me gently across the back of my head at the dinner table to get me to stop and I burst into a gale of laughter. Mama says he worries after us like a woman. But like a man, he doesn’t talk much, just uses his hands instead. The number of children he’ll never have. Times two: the number of seconds I can swim underwater before coming up for air, watching the little school of fish with yellow bellies dart between my body and the distant, pointy pokes of pinkish coral reef stuck below, at the bottom of the ocean. Divided in half: the number of candles Mama put on the cake last week that was short one candle for my real age because that’s all she could borrow from the neighbor woman whose children had all left her years before and never came home to see her, just sent letters and had her running from house to house in search of a phone when they put a minute card in the fold for her to call them even though they never gave her more minutes than could be used to say “hello” and “how are you,” before the minutes ran out and the line went dead, clicking in her ear. The number of cell phones they could have bought her by now. The number of eggs that sit in an open carton on Ma’Lou’s stand at the market it takes forty-eight steps to reach if you forge through the crowd like a chicken looking for her young, hoping not to be snatched up off the ground to be fried up for someone’s dinner that night. The number of eggs we wonder at with wide-open eyes but can only buy two or three of at a time if there’s money in the house that week and, if not, can only gaze at from a distance, wistfully, while Ma’Lou makes us scatter away so she can deal with real customers, the ones that come down in their cars and never even put a foot out to touch the dust, who look out onto the market stalls from their perches and squawk at their drivers to get this and that, inspect the whole dozen of eggs before purchasing it while Ma’Lou yells: “Pa manyen ze’m! Don’t touch my eggs! Pa kase ze’m! Don’t break my eggs! Ou touche, ou buy’li! You touch, you buy them!” And waits in front of her stall with hand outstretched to receive payment in U.S. dollars, ladies and gents. Ma’Lou doesn’t take grimy gouds unless she has to and there’s no reason someone pulling up in a 4x4 can’t pay her in American cash. Real dollars. Dola, pa kob. We all know they have houses in Miami and Montreal, those people. Even if they don’t, they act like they do. Ma’Lou doesn’t ask for fiv sents. She isn’t begging for loose change. She has a business to run. You want twelve whole eggs fresh from her hens and in the carton too? Five dollars, she says, and the driver comes back with the green bill and murmurs, a la pwochen, until next time, before hurrying to the next stall, mounded up with fresh produce and another Ma’ Lou tapping her foot impatiently, waiting for her money.

Douze. The number of ears of corn the crazy man who thought he was a cob had eaten after he was cured, before he choked on the thought: “I know I’m not a cob, but what if the chickens don’t know?” Papa told me that joke. It’s the number of friends I can count on my hands from school. The number of first cousins on my mother’s side. The number of pieces of blue mint candies I wish I had to make my breath tingly fresh so that I can kiss the girl I have a crush on, when...