I bent to the table. Sniffed. A clean burning shot through my bones, and then I forgot. The shoes I didn’t buy, the melted cake, the phone call. The toddler sleeping in my bed at home while my son slept on the floor, just in case I’d come home and make him get on the floor when I stumbled in. Fuck it.
“Ecstatic.” I said it slow. Sounded the syllables out. And that’s when Given came back.
The kids at school teased Given about his name. One day he got into a fight about it on the bus, tumbling over the seats with a husky redhead boy who wore camo. Frustrated and swollen-lipped, he came home and asked Mama: Why y’all give me this name? Given? It don’t make no sense. And Mama squatted down and rubbed his ears, and said: Given because it rhymes with your papa’s name: River. And Given because I was forty when I had you. Your papa was fifty. We thought we couldn’t have no kids, but then you was Given to us. He was three years older than me, and when him and Camo boy went flipping and swinging over the seat, I swung my book bag at Camo and hit him in the back of the head.
Last night, he smiled at me, this Given-not-Given, this Given that’s been dead fifteen years now, this Given that came to me every time I snorted a line, every time I popped a pill. He sat in one of the two empty chairs at the table with us, and leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. He was watching me, like always. He had Mama’s face.
“That much, huh?” Misty sucked snot up her nose.
“Yep.”
Given rubbed the dome of his shaved head, and I saw other differences between the living and this chemical figment. Given-not-Given didn’t breathe right. He never breathed at all. He wore a black shirt, and it was a still, mosquito-ridden pool.
“What if Michael’s different?” Misty said.
“He won’t be,” I said.
Misty threw a wadded-up paper towel she’d been using to clean the table.
“What you looking at?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t nobody sit and stare for that long on something this clean without looking at something.” Misty waved her hand at the coke and winked at me. She’d tattooed her boyfriend’s initials on her ring finger, and for a second it looked like letters and then bugs and then letters again. Her boyfriend was Black, and this loving across color lines was one of the reasons we became friends so quickly. She often told me that as far as she was concerned, they were already married. Said she needed him because her mother didn’t give a shit about her. Misty told me once that she got her period in fifth grade, when she was ten years old, and because she didn’t realize what was happening to her, her body betraying her, she walked around half the day with a bloody spot spreading like an oil stain on the back of her pants. Her mother beat her in the parking lot of the school, she was so embarrassed. The principal called the cops. Just one of the many ways I disappointed her, Misty said.
“I was feeling it,” I said.
“You know how I know you lie?”
“How?”
“You get dead still. People is always moving, all the time, when they speak, when they’re quiet, even when they sleep. Looking off, looking at you, smiling, frowning, all of that. When you lie, you get dead still: blank face, arms limp. Like a fucking corpse. I ain’t never seen nothing like it.”
I shrugged. Given-not-Given shrugs. She ain’t lying, he mouths.
“You ever see things?” I say. It’s out my mouth before I have a chance to think it. But at that moment, she’s my best friend. She’s my only friend.
“What you mean?”
“When you on?” I waved my hand like she’d waved hers moments before. At the coke, which was now just a little sorry pile of dust on the table. Enough for two or three lines more.
“That’s what it is? You seeing shit?”
“Just lines. Like neon lights or something. In the air.”
“Nice try. You tried to twitch your hands and everything. Now, what you really seeing?”
I wanted to punch her in her face.
“I told you.”
“Yeah, you lied again.”
But I knew this was her cottage, and when it all came down to it, I’m Black and she’s White, and if someone heard us tussling and decided to call the cops, I’d be the one going to jail. Not her. Best friend and all.
“Given,” I said. More like a whisper than anything, and Given leaned forward to hear me. Slid his hand across the table, his big-knuckled, slim-boned hand, toward mine. Like he wanted to support me. Like he could be flesh and blood. Like he could grab my hand and lead me out of there. Like we could go home.
Misty looked like she ate something sour. She leaned forward and sniffed another line.
“I ain’t a expert or nothing, but I’m pretty sure you ain’t supposed to be seeing nothing on this shit.”
She leaned back in her chair, grabbed her hair in a great sheaf, and tossed it over her back. Bishop loves it, she’d said of her boyfriend once. Can’t keep his hands out of it. It was one of the things she did that she was never conscious of, playing with her hair, always unaware of the ease of it. The way it caught all the light. The self-satisfied beauty of it. I hated her hair.
“Acid, yeah,” she continued. “Maybe even meth. But this? No.”
Given-not-Given frowned, mimicked her girly hair flip, and mouthed: What the fuck does she know? His left hand was still on the table. I could not reach out to it, even though everything in me wanted to do so, to feel his skin, his flesh, his dry, hard hands. When we were coming up, I couldn’t count how many times he fought for us on the bus, in school, in the neighborhood when kids taunted me about how Pop looked like a scarecrow, how Mama was a witch. How I looked just like Pop: like a burnt stick, raggedly clothed. My stomach turned like an animal in its burrow, again and again, seeking comfort and warmth before sleep. I lit a cigarette.
“No shit,” I said.
Tiphanie Yanique
A Caribbean-American writer from St Thomas, US Virgin Islands, she lives in New Rochelle, NY. She won the inaugural Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the Fiction category with her debut book How to Escape from a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories (2010), and was one of the National Book Foundation’s “5Under35”. Land of Love and Drowning (2014) won her the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. Her first poetry collection, Wife, won the 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize. Her other accolades include the Boston Review Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has been published in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, the Wall Street Journal and American Short Fiction. She is an Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Wesleyan University.
Monster in the Middle
Listen, daughter. There is no way to know anything for sure. And thank God for that.
Thank God for that New Year’s Day, 1968. That day the monster was on my back. The monster has always been coming for me. I’m a warmblooded person. Because of where my blood comes from. Island blood. Thank God for that blood and for that island. But I had never been so cold. The monster was in the air, trying to nyam me, eat me. But there I was. The kind of boy who would come to wear sweaters in the summers of South Carolina. Let my mother kiss my forehead that morning, then climbed aboard a plane. Nothing with me but one change of light clothes, suitable for the West Indies, a toothbrush and a razor . . . the last because my mother had heard there would be no one there who knew how to cut my black-boy hair. She hadn’t thought about my needing a winter coat.
And thank God for that long plane ride where I was too excited to be scared and so watched the sky. And for that long sleepless bus ride where my sudden fear kept me from rest. Thank God for this St Thomas boy in a bus, me, not sleeping, but looking out of the window as it became winter before my eyes. Cold
monster.
Did I clarify that it was New Year’s Day? That the kiss was my mother’s last? She was dying of cancer. Breast, though no one but me and a doctor from Puerto Rico knew. Sickness of any part of the body we call private—the parts we use to love, to make life—was a shameful thing. So I boarded that plane, climbed aboard that bus, feeling that I’d likely never see my mother again. But still, thank God for her kiss that let me know it was indeed goodbye.
I could tell you more about my mother. For even she is the monster—and her mother, too. I want to explain how this goes. It’s a journey, but you’re not alone, my love. None of us is. But also you take the journey because you don’t want the loneliness. Maybe people go off to war because they want to be left alone. But alone and lonely? I didn’t want either, baby. Don’t be confused by all these lives. See, these lives are yours. Have I made it clear that I am thankful? Thank God for my memories and thank God for the memories that made me.
We can’t out-run the monster. And did they make us run that first night! The winter air like pins in my nostrils. I had a bloody nose before a mile. But kept running. Because the drill sergeant was shouting and because everyone else was running. No matter that I was in short pants in air colder than I’d ever known. Thank God for the ash on my knees that looked like a disease, for the blood in my nose that guzzled out and coated my mouth and neck and shirt and scared the sergeants just enough.
That night I shivered. So loudly that a bunk mate threw his blanket on me. Generous monster. Thank God. I slept. But it started again. Every morning the blasted running. Every night the cold. And the sweating in the cold, freezing me. And the letter in the mail before basic was even out, telling me my mother was dead.
What is at the middle of it all? Doesn’t matter. You’ll still have to do the thing to know it. So what’s there, at the middle? Myth and magic, both. We all know it takes a village to raise a child. But I can tell you honestly that it takes an ancestry to make a man or a woman. I would never have made it to my middle if it wasn’t for my mother dying and my daddy being already dead.
My father had been fighting a war his whole life. A white man, he was. From the continent. A proper American. But not white-white. “Cajun,” he insisted. Had fought in a war or two. Seen nothing but combat. Finally, too shocked in the mind and broken in the body, found himself stationed in the Virgin Islands. St Thomas. But it wasn’t sunny for him. Lived on our island like he was done dead. Away without leave in no time. Made a half-breed baby who looked nothing like him—me. Then sat on the bench outside a rum shop praying aloud to die, until he did. But even that I’m thankful for. Thank you, old monster, thank you, dear suicidal Poppy. I went to the American war to out-war him. But then my mother died and it was so cold and well . . .
That wasn’t my true middle. No. This right here is the middle. Oh, and I’m thankful. Because though everyone was heading to die in Saigon—I was not. It wasn’t that I had connections. No Rockefeller father to save my backside. My own no-choice choice. The base, cold as an ice chest. My lips frozen and my teeth knocking. No one could understand anything I said. I hadn’t learned to talk yankee yet. So I didn’t have to say a thing. All I had to do was fake sick.
I’d been living close to sickness for over a year. My mother told me she’d never breast-fed me. Baby formula just arriving on the island when I was born. Everyone thought the powder was better, best. So Mom scraped to provide it for new-born me. Even as a baby I’d never seen my mother as God created her. But as a grown man I had to face her breast. Care for it that long hot summer of love. The nipple sinking in. The huge red blister. I was there. Taking care of sickness. I knew it well. Thank you, God.
Black-boy bile, the officers called it. In America, I was the black boy, despite my half-blood history. Coughing up spit. All fake, but it fooled them. Remember, I’d bled so bad those first days. It wasn’t that I was a coward. It was just that I realized I didn’t want to war with the history of my old man, didn’t want to hold up my life to his and see if mine was more worthy. I never really knew the man. He didn’t live long enough. He was my first monster, maybe. And I knew he would follow me. But with a dead mom . . . well. I decided I wasn’t going to ’Nam. I wasn’t going to be the drink-till-I’m-dead poppy. But still. His story is mine because I lived against him. That made his life as much an influence as if I’d lived beside him. I didn’t get that then. But now I just thank God.
America believed me, even though they couldn’t always catch what I was saying. I’d been a good talker back home. Talked to the doctor. To my aunt about what to do with my mother’s things—in the event. The Army officers believed I was too sickly to shoot a gun good. Me? My whole life I’d sprained my thumb once. Sick wasn’t my thing. Until faking it so well made it real. Now that’s how you know me. That poorly, hypochondriac papa.
Well, the war for me was no walking among tropical trees that might make me long for home. No blinding light before the rat-a-tat of a screaming enemy. No warm sweat in my face and pits. My war stayed cold and quiet.
I was put to ironing the uniforms of those who came back dead. I ironed alone and in air-conditioning. Had to keep the clothes crisp, ready for funerals. Easy work on the body. Hard on the mind. Because it was Vietnam times. And so you know about the many shirts I had to iron. And so you know about the many monsters that lived with me. I never fought in that war. I ironed. And still, thank God for every collar. For every sizzle of the metal when it kissed the starch. Thank God for the dead that came home for me to dress them.
Because what’s going on with you is my fault. And my parents’ fault. And Vietnam’s fault. You are not your own fault alone. No one is.
You need to know that this monster is always coming for you. The undershirts hot from the drier? Yes. They came for me. And I was thankful for the heat in that cold-cold room. That was my whole war story. No jungle of grenades, just a landscape of stiff shirts, pants with creases that could cut you. Being sickly since is the small price I pay. And I am thankful for my wife and my boys and for you, the daughter I chose, who cared for me best. I do thank God. I’m only sick now because I wasn’t dead before. And there were so many ways to die in America that 1968.
So now it’s cancer, the doctors say. Like my mother. Mine in the private prostate. The story of the monster on my back, the monster on your back, is not just of fathers and daughters but also mothers and sons, and mothers and daughters, and grandparents and aunties and first loves and second and third loves . . . It’s all there. Meeting you in the middle, where you always are. This is how history works. And you and me and the whole of us aren’t anything separate from history.
When the government released me there was the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, the GI Bill they call it now. Pushing an iron was the only skill I’d learned. Couldn’t go back to our island of St Thomas; there was no home there anymore. So I wandered. Small jobs, medium jobs. King was killed. Then, Malcolm, too. By then I was American enough for that to matter. Took me years to get on a good path. But I didn’t want to be lonely. So, eventually, I marched to Morehouse, where the black American boys went.
Yes, this is an American love story. Because on the first day of school orientation there was a speech for Morehouse men and Spellman women. The speaker said that thing I gather now the college presidents in America always say: “The person sitting next to you might be your future husband or wife.”
I was at the end of the row. I was older than most and I’d been unsure about coming to the big meeting. I was a little ashamed at having been a solider at all. So, I snuck in late. On one side there was no one next to me. I stared at the empty space for a while. It had been so lonely ironing all those years. No buddies to grieve over because they was dead when they came to me.
But thank God for that New Year’s Day. And for all the new days. I am thankful for every bit. Because there in the great hall I turned from the emptiness at my right. And there to my left? Your mother. Looking at me like she’d been on a long
journey to get to that selfsame spot. And when she said “Good morning.” I heard her accent. Imagine. A Virgin Islander. At her feet was a baby basket. What year was it? 1989, must have been. Because in the basket? You. Sleeping. Me? I didn’t know yet how your mother could curse me like cursing could kill. How she could love like loving alone would make me live. How she could take a motherless man—me—and make a father and a husband. All I know was that I hadn’t heard those St Thomas sounds in so long. Sounded like my own mother.
And then you made a noise. Like about to holler. And me and your mother both looked into the basket. Your eyes open. Looking at me like you already knew I’d be your daddy. Like you’d been waiting.
1980s
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
She has written for the New York Times, Wasafiri, Elle, the BBC, The Guardian, Grazia, Saraba Magazine and others. She is the author of Stay With Me which was shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript Project, the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Wellcome Book Prize and the 9mobile Prize for Literature. It has also been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. It was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and others.
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