I tried to remind her that Aunt Jillian had short hair. Now, understand that my mother is as black as the ace of spades, just like me. For her to change color is pretty tough. But she did it; I swear she turned pale. Aunt Jillian isn’t someone you should take pattern from, she said, then clammed up and wouldn’t say anything else.
I wanted to know why not. All my life she had pointed to her sister, Jillian, as a shining example of virtuous daughterhood, the one who had done good and made their sick mother proud before Granny died. Aunt Jillian was a Canadian citizen, someone with a house and a good job and a wonderful, perfect life in the land of milk and honey—or at least the land of nondairy creamer and NutraSweet. Aunt Jillian was the reason I had to do well in school, because I had to go to the same prestigious high school and meet all the same targets she had to carry on the family legacy. My mom had not been great at school. But I was supposed to be a top student, like Aunt Jillian, be president of the French club, become a swimming champ, lead the debate team, etc., etc. I was supposed to be everything my mother had never had the chance to be, everything Jillian had been so effortlessly.
And then, all of a sudden, Jillian was not someone to take pattern from?
Now, understand that at that point I’d met Jillian once in my life. I was six when my grandmother died of breast cancer and Jillian flew in from Canada for the funeral. She stayed to visit for three weeks. I would never forget her sweetly fragrant suitcases full of clothes and shoes and other presents for my mother and me. The schoolgirl I knew from the faded pictures in my mother’s dog-eared photo album had grown up. She was a big woman with a head of short, curly, natural hair. Aunt Jillian wasn’t married; my mom said loudly to anyone who asked that Jillian wasn’t in the market for a man and would never be. The Jillian I met wore lots of shiny silver jewelry, from the lobes of her ears to the tops, around her neck and on her wrists and her fingers, and even in her nose. She never wore makeup and she was always in black jeans and a black T-shirt, no matter what the weather. She even wore that with a black jacket to Granny Rose’s funeral. Of course I asked her, in front of a group of old people and my mortified mother, “Aunty Jillian, didn’t you wear those same clothes yesterday?” My mom pinched me hard, but Jillian only laughed and laughed. I never forgot what she said: “Girl, I wear T-shirts and jeans like a uniform. I work too hard at everything else to work at style, too.” At six years old I accepted the explanation. And as I got older, if I ever gave Jillian a thought, it was People can be different, right?
Of course, when you’re a child and your island is the world and your world doesn’t include a sophisticated understanding of the real world in its entirety, none of that means anything to you. It was only when I got to Canada and moved into her house that I understood.
Aunty Jillian wasn’t single.
Aunty Jillian was gay.
When you’re little there’s a lot you take for granted. Then, I never really thought about my mother or her family. Now, I had too many other things to worry about than the family I’d never had. My grandfather died before I was born, and I barely got to know Granny Rose. We never visited any distant cousins. It was just my mom, Cynthia, and her big sister, Jillian, who was not really a part of our day-to-day lives because she lived in Canada and she and my mom weren’t all that close anymore. Yeah, they were Facebook friends, but I really hadn’t paid her that much attention. Was I completely oblivious to the fact that she was obviously, visibly queer? Pretty much. What can I say? It didn’t matter to me, not before I moved here to Edmonton.
At least Cynthia had a sister who she grew up with. I grew up alone. And though it sounds strange to say because I am an only child, I have never been my mother’s favorite. I felt she had a quiet contempt for everything about me. My hair was only one of the problems. It’s actually funny because there’s nobody in the world I resemble more than my mother. We have such similar faces, we could pass for sisters. We’re both slender and dark, with the same thick, kinky hair, which she wears dead straight. She’s shorter than me, though. I guess I got my height from my dad—my mother never talked about him, and I confess I didn’t have too much interest in the guy who abandoned us before I was born. Jerk.
What’s really weird is that my whole life my mother compared me to Jillian. It happened all the time. If I picked up a book that Jillian might have liked, my mother commented on it. When I wanted to go to the convent school after sitting my Secondary Entrance Assessment, Mom brought up the fact that it was where Jillian had gone—as if I could forget given the photos I’d seen all my life of Jillian so proud in her convent uniform. And when I failed the exam—or rather, failed to pass for the convent school—my mother never stopped mentioning it. She constantly talked about Jillian’s accomplishments, her likes and her dislikes, what she used to do as a child, what she used to say, what Jillian used to look like before she cut off her wild, curly hair. Somehow she never mentioned that Jillian was not just gay, but practically married to a woman named Julie.
All that is confusing to me.
For a ton of reasons.
But I’ve filled my five pages for the day, so I guess I’ll write more later.
I knocked on the back door before I slipped my key into the lock, just being polite as my mother had taught me to be. After all, this wasn’t my house, even if it was my home at the moment. As usual, nobody answered. Jillian and Julie were down in the basement at work.
They were trying to branch out their little web design company into ebook publishing. I didn’t know anything about ebooks—nobody I knew in Trinidad read them. We preferred macoing people on Facebook. I wondered if an ebook was the same as publishing your stories online. You could find some decent stories on the internet, like one I had read earlier that day at the library about a girl who fell in love with her neighbor and when their parents found out and broke them up, she tried to kill herself. I liked the writing, but I couldn’t believe the girl actually told her mother when she first felt suicidal. Who even does that? I never told any adults that I was sad all the time and that I would rather put an end to those feelings entirely. Who does that? Adults don’t think kids are real people anyway. My mother only paid attention to me after I started vomiting my guts out on her kitchen floor. I had no plans to do that on Aunt Jillian’s kitchen floor for now.
I liked Aunt Jillian, and the web design stuff was mad decent, though quite frankly I don’t care to know how the internet actually works, only that it does. Or I used to care. I used to have email for school, and Instagram like the other kids at my school—how else do you talk to anybody?—but when I had my troubles, as my mother refers to my recent past, I deleted all my accounts. Having Akilah on Skype was my one lifeline. Kind of extreme, but the doctor recommended I stay off social media. Maybe I never will turn them back on. I’m a Caribbean hermit in exile in Edmonton. I could disappear amidst the cookie-cutter houses.
When no one answered my knock, I went into the house. Their kitchen floor, like everything else in Jillian and Julie’s house, was spotless. Julie was a fiend for cleaning, Saturdays she’d attack dirt like she had a personal vendetta against it. She would maintain a low-grade surveillance on grime, and there would be occasional sniper fire at it for the rest of the week. My mom was a good housekeeper, but next to Julie she seemed slovenly. There was dust on our bookshelves at home! Not here. Julie even took a cloth and wiped the books themselves. The kitchen was her special domain, and it always smelled a little of pine cleaner. I’d never seen a bread crumb or juice stain on the counters, and a glass didn’t get the chance to sit in the sink for more than a minute or two before Julie swept in to wash up. That was the case this evening. From the bottle they always kept in the fridge I poured myself a glass of cranberry juice, drank it in thirsty gulps, and put the glass in the sink. I went to my room to put down my backpack and the books I had borrowed at the library, and by the time I came back the glass was washed and turned over on
the drip tray. There was no sign of Julie herself, though.
“Thanks, Julie!” I yelled from the top of the basement stairs. “I would have washed it, you know!”
“I know, sweetie!” she yelled back. In a second, I heard Aunt Jillian’s heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs. Unlike my mother, who made me feel bad for feeling sad, Jillian and Julie acted like I was a regular girl. It was an unusual sensation, being thought of as normal, but a good one. It made me almost happy.
“Hey, sugar,” she said as her short fluffy Afro popped into view. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing much. A cop tried to hit on me at the bus stop,” I said, pretending to be casual, though talking about it reminded me of my panic attack—which I didn’t mention to Jillian. Instead of telling her I was struggling, and why, I continued with arguably the least important thing that had happened to me that afternoon. “He backed off in a hurry when I told him I was fourteen.”
“Almost fifteen,” Jillian murmured automatically.
“But still fourteen for now,” I replied, winking. “Poor guy.”
“Did you tell him that your aunt would kill him too?” Jillian asked drily.
“Oh, no, we didn’t get that well acquainted.”
“Really,” she said, pouring herself some juice. “What did you do today? Go to the gym?” She peered at my sneakers, which were starting to look a hot mess. The laces—let’s say they used to be white; and the soles were decidedly un-perky. I worked out on the treadmill at the gym every couple of days on top of regularly walking all over the city and through the suburbs. It was enough to take a toll on my footwear.
“Looks like we need to take you to the mall for some runners,” she surmised.
I waved away her suggestion. “Nah,” I said, scuffing my toe in embarrassment. With Jillian having paid for my plane ticket already because my mom didn’t make that much money, I didn’t want her to feel I was taking advantage of her generosity. She was always getting me stuff, little things like music on iTunes and cute notebooks and pens and T-shirts, and I couldn’t say no if I wanted to. So I didn’t. When I’d gotten to Edmonton, she’d taken me shopping, and now, for the first time in my life, I had a wardrobe of clothes that wasn’t just soulless gray uniforms, and that I actually liked. A pair of sneakers would be just one more thing she got me, but I didn’t want to ask for them. Looking at my watch, I thought again of how Cynthia never gave me gifts for no reason. It made me feel a squishy discomfort in my belly when I thought of the contrast.
“Could you call them sneakers like a normal person, please?” I begged Jillian with my hands clasped, like it was a really huge deal that she was using a Canadian word. It was a tactic to change the subject. She didn’t bite, only watched me cut eye and sucked her teeth with a steups. I folded my arms sulkily. “Yeah, maybe I do need new sneakers. But I’m not going to call them runners.”
Jillian rolled her eyes. “Whatever, doux doux. We were going to go out to dinner anyway; we could stop at the mall on the way there.” I didn’t have time to react to the ominous feeling in my stomach at the mention of the mall. She took a sip of her juice and broke into a grin, shouting, “Guess what!”
“What?”
“We got our first contract to publish an ebook!”
“Yay, I gather?” I half-smiled.
“Yay, definitely,” she confirmed. “It’s just one, but it’s a start. A writer in California saw our ad on an #ownvoices publishing Facebook page and messaged us. She said she was glad to give her business to a fellow lesbian.”
I squirmed a little bit when she said that word. I had been living with her and Julie for a couple of months and obviously I knew that they were gay, but it wasn’t something I was comfortable talking about with them. They were amused and sometimes exasperated by my attitude but didn’t let it change the way they behaved, either toward each other or toward me. They were active members of the #ownvoices and LGBTQ communities, and I did realize enough to know LGBTQ meant “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer,” which, if you think about it, is a bunch of very different kinds of people, but still people who think they have more in common with each other than they have with the rest of the world.
At home home, I’d never given much thought at all to that community, especially as my mother never once said anything about it to me, not even while describing her own sister. Nothing prepared me to consider this topic. Or talk about it.
Frankly, unless you were personally acquainted with someone who identified in that way, odds were you didn’t know anything about their world. We didn’t have TV shows that showed how Trini LGBTQ people lived their lives, or cute Facebook videos about their families. Aside from Aunt Jillian, there was only one other person everyone knew. She was a trans woman famous for having her surgery because she was the first Trini to do it, I guess. She was on the news a lot and even ran for a city council seat in San Fernando, which she lost. But her visibility was the exception. Where I was from, anybody on the street who looked even a little bit less than straight could get harassed and threatened. The priest at home once stood on the pulpit and preached about the perils of “the sinful LGBTQ lifestyle.” Even my school principal brought in police officers to a special assembly to tell us that being gay, lesbian, or anywhere on the spectrum that wasn’t heterosexual was against the law, after a boy got beat up because the kids said he was a bullerman. I knew that was a nasty word, like if I were to be called nigger. It actually was technically against the law in Trinidad to be gay.
I was straight. At least, I thought I was straight. I had never tested the hypothesis, never having had a boyfriend, but I figured I’d never wanted to have a girlfriend either, so that settled that. Or to be somebody else’s boyfriend, come to think of it. The trans woman everybody knew about in Trinidad used to be a guy, obviously. To be honest, that was pretty weird to me. But I didn’t know what it was like to be trapped inside the wrong body, which is how some of these people said they felt when they talked about it on their Insta or whatever. Or maybe I did, in a way. Maybe I was not who I was supposed to be and that was why I was so sad all the time.
One day, I would talk to Aunt Jillian about what it was like to be a lesbian. I promised myself. Maybe. But for now, it was okay for us to just sip cranberry juice in the kitchen and look at the bright evening outside the window.
Julie came upstairs and gave me a belly noogie through my T-shirt. I didn’t care about wrinkling this shirt. I had on a white one with a frog wearing a crown. There was a speech bubble above him that said “Any day now, princess.” I knew it was really a guy’s T-shirt, but I thought it was so funny at the time that Julie bought it for me at the freakishly ginormous mall on my first mall trip, when she and Jillian took me on a shopping spree for new clothes. Guy clothes and girl clothes didn’t mean that much to me, mostly. I wasn’t really into fashion—not the look of an average teenage girl, anyway—especially since I’d cut off all my hair. I just wore whatever I wanted. People said I dressed like Jaden Smith. Needless to say, that just pissed my mother off even more; Jaden Smith is a boy.
“Why don’t you at least try to look normal?” my mother used to ask me.
There really wasn’t an answer to that, was there? And if we were to go to the mall again, I wasn’t going to be changing my habits. Maybe I’d find another frog T-shirt, this time with a prince.
Julie mussed my cropped hair and pecked Jillian on the cheek as she came into the room. “What’s happening?”
“I think this one needs new runners,” Jillian said, throwing me a teasing look; I faked a shudder and rolled my eyes, mouthing out the word “sneakers” with gusto. After my panic attacks I was often exhausted, but sometimes I acted goofy instead, wired and jittery, like now. Maybe it was another form of nerves. She talked over my head. “I was thinking we could stop at the mall on the way to dinner.”
Julie nodded, wiping
imaginary dirt from the kitchen counter.
“By the way, Mexican or Italian for dinner?” Jillian asked her.
“I don’t care. What do you think, kid?” Julie looked to me.
As usual, I had no idea. “Mexican is nice. But Italian is nice, too. And, come to think of it, so is steak,” I stumbled.
“Steak is another option,” Jillian agreed. “Mmm…red meat.” She literally licked her lips. We all laughed.
“You know what they keep saying about how it’s full of cholesterol and hormones and it’s really, really bad for you?” I teased. They ate steak a couple of times a week, but they still seemed pretty healthy. Then again, they weren’t really that old, only about thirty or so. Julie was a little bit older than Jillian, not that she looked it.
“One steak will not kill us, surely?” asked Julie rhetorically with a fake look of horror. Julie’s black eyes shined bright with withheld laughter and she reminded me of a pixie, tiny and pretty, despite her usual jeans-and-T-shirt look. Unlike Jillian, though, she sometimes wore saris and kurtas, a kind of long-sleeved man’s tunic with buttons at the neck and slits up the sides. I recognized the different styles because I had done a project on Indo-Trinidadian traditions.
Indo-Trinidadians were the largest ethnic group in Trinidad and lots of Trini Indian people wore traditional clothes, beyond just for celebrating religious festivals like Diwali and Eid. People wore them on the regular, especially Trinidadians whose grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents came from India to work during Indentureship a hundred years ago.
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