“Keep your mouth shut,” someone mimics the nun.
“Who spoke?” Sister Bernadêtte wants to know.
“Yseult Joseph,” the other girls in class chorus.
Sister Bernadêtte is not convinced. “Flora Desormeau, what did you say?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.” I know what’s coming.
“Both of you,” the nun says to Yseult and me, “to the wall. On your knees. Now!”
“Dog shit,” Yseult mumbles under her breath, but I hear her clearly.
“Dog shit,” I mumble under my breath too.
“You two little piglets are disrupting my class!” Sister Bernadêtte shrieks, shaking menacing fists. “Face the wall, dumb mules. I don’t want to look at monkey faces anymore today.” The other girls in class cover their mouths as they laugh.
Sister Bernadêtte’s face is a fluffy pink pillow with big blue buttons for eyes. Her cheeks are red like the roses that grow around the grotto with the statue of the Virgin in it. Her lips are communion-wafer thin. Her large round eyeglasses make her head look like a full moon.
“Imbéciles,” she says. “Do not move until I tell you otherwise.”
Yseult and I have served this sentence countless times. Our knees are best friends with the cracked cement floor.
“C’est vraiment dégoûtant!” The nun’s French is so beautiful. It doesn’t even sound like she’s insulting us; her French is like a song—a fierce and passionate song overflowing with regret. Nostalgia.
“Imbéciles!” Yseult does her best imitation of the nun’s accent. My “C’est vraiment dégoûtant” doesn’t come close to sounding as pretty as Sister Bernadêtte’s.
Yseult and I practiced our French for years, but we’re nowhere near Sister Bernadêtte’s native-speaker timbre. The easy, unforced cadence will never dance off our tongues as it does hers.
The other girls in class, the ones who speak to their parents and their maids in French, they’ll sound like Sister Bernadêtte one day. Some of them already do. Not us. Yseult and I speak only Creole with each other and at home. Now, we gladly face the wall. The nun doesn’t realize that this punishment is sweeter to us than a hundred tito candy sticks rolled up into one. If she had any idea how much we loved it, she would think of something else. Of course, we never let on that we’re happy to stay on our knees for hours, watching the goings-on in the hotel below.
“Idiots!” The nun throws in one last insult in her pretty French.
Yseult and I look at each other and smile again. Now we have complete access to the tourists behind Cabane Choucoune’s tall wrought-iron gates. We are like angels watching over them, seeing everything they do.
Cabane Choucoune is exactly one hundred and twenty-six paces away from the school. But from our position in the classroom, it may as well be right below our window.
Even though the tourists never vary their routine, the scene around the pool is always worth Sister Bernadêtte’s wrath. When they’re not splashing around, the men-tourists stretch out under the sun until their backs turn boiled-lobster red. Then they flip over and do the same to their front sides. The women-tourists wear enormous hats and bathing suits emblazoned with giant sunflowers and ferns. There aren’t any children-tourists. Maybe tourists don’t like children.
Maybe children don’t like to be tourists. Even if they did, Manman says, Cabane Choucoune isn’t a place for kids.
The tourist-wives, in their enormous hats, sit at the edge of the pool, reading magazines and dipping painted toes into the sea-blue water. Sun-seared servers, in head-to-toe karabela accented with yards of multicolored ruffles, shuffle in and out of a revolving door. Each one balances a tray heaped with glasses that have little umbrellas in them (to keep the drinks from getting wet, should all that splashing around in the pool get out of control).
The little umbrellas are pretty, but the tourists pull them out of their glasses as soon as they snatch them off the servers’ trays. They destroy the pretty umbrellas while they sip their drinks. They break the tiny wooden poles, the ribs, and then they crush the colorful paper covers between their fingers.
The house where I live is fifty-three paces from Cabane Choucoune. I can see the sweetsop trees in our yard from Sister Bernadêtte’s classroom. Our house is a two-story A-frame with slender windows that have white shutters on either side. The floor creaks. Otherwise it is a very quiet house. The other place where we used to live was not quiet at all. We had to leave it after Papa went to New York. Manman could not live there with Papa gone. She said a bad spirit moved in the day he left. The bad spirit refused to let her sleep at night. It was in the air, under the floorboards, behind the walls, on the roof, but mostly inside Manman’s head.
Manman likes our new house better. The staircase that leads upstairs curves like a capital S. The banister looks like it belongs in a fairy tale. The wraparound porch is a good place to sit and watch hummingbirds flutter their wings as they feed on soft blossoms. The pantry is large enough for a flock of chickens, but only one lives in there. We bring her in at night from the yard. She gives us one egg every morning.
There are two bedrooms upstairs, but we occupy only one. The other stays locked all the time. The landlord says he lost the key to that door. We cannot open it. A doll lives in the locked bedroom. She sits in a high chair. Her hair glistens in the sunlight that streams in through a hole in the roof. Her lips are like a dried rosebud. Her face is pudgy, round, and pink like Sister Bernadêtte’s.
“You can almost see the doll room from here,” I whisper to Yseult.
“Shut up, little serpents!” the nun yells.
I wait for Sister Bernadêtte to choose another animal in her menagerie of insults, but she does not. Her jowls shake and she scrunches up her lips hard as if she’s trying to keep the words she’s not allowed to speak from slipping out. I turn my attention back to Cabane Choucoune. The tourists continue to bake themselves. The servers have fresh drinks on their trays. I try to count the little umbrellas. The tourists crush them even faster now.
When the bell rings, Sister Bernadêtte exhales loudly. “Good riddance, little bats.”
Yseult and I bolt out of the classroom like the African gazelles we read about in geography class.
Yvela is outside, as usual, waiting. She’s a few months older than Yseult and I, but looks much older. Yseult and I hold hands and skip down the street to my house. Our feet barely touch the ground. Yvela runs behind us.
Naturally, we stop by Cabane Choucoune and peep through the wrought-iron gate that separates the hotel from the rest of the island. The tourists are still baking themselves and dipping their toes in the sparkling water. The servers are still shuffling in and out of the revolving door with an assortment of drinks on their trays.
“One day,” Yseult says, “I’ll come to Cabane Choucoune and dip my toes in the pool too. I’ll sip drinks with umbrellas in them and have lots of fun too. One day I’ll wear a large hat and sunglasses that hide my eyes. One day I’ll wear a bathing suit with flowers on it too. One day after I become a famous artist . . . One day . . . Maybe after I go to New York and my paintings are in every gallery in the world and I become rich and beautiful like the tourist wives. One day.”
Yvela laughs and says, “Woy, pitit! You have a better chance of wearing that ruffled skirt and serving the tourists their drinks.”
“Close your stinky snout,” Yseult snaps, and Yvela’s face looks fifty years older. “When I grow up, I’ll be rich and beautiful. And I will come to Cabane Choucoune and do as I please. Yvela Germain, you’ll be the one wearing the servant’s skirt. You’ll be the one bringing me whatever I ask. You’ll be my personal rèstavèk—just like you are now.”
“What