Simone – who is always well turned out because that is the type of girl she is and because Mrs Johnson expects her team to maintain a certain standard – hates my Goodwill jacket. She thinks it’s appalling. I don’t care. It was clean and barely worn when I bought it – even if it is ugly. Most importantly, it is utilitarian. It is warm and when it comes to matters of heat and cold I have absolutely no vanity.
So, in spite of my worries about Mrs Johnson, I settle in next to him on the couch and we flirt. I flirt. Jason – who doesn’t know how to flirt, really – is just himself. The charming, best version of himself.
Four o’clock comes and Jason asks to come along. He gathers his things and asks, ‘What’s for dinner?’
Simone and I exchange looks. She feigns irritation but she can’t sustain it because he is very handsome and neither of us can fully believe that he’s prepared to just hang out, to just chill with us with all his languid beauty.
As we cook dinner Jason teases Simone. He calls her Nose In The Air. Later, Genevieve – who is like a little sister to us – comes home. He sees her and again his eyes widen. She is curvy and pretty and it is hard not to look at her like that. Something shifts. He is no longer interested in only me. Yet he is not interested only in her. He wants both of us. He is not embarrassed. This is how it will be with him. There are never any games, so our relationship proceeds in this way. His honesty impresses me; the truth hurts me. Jason refuses to be conventionally polite. He doesn’t pretend to be a regular guy who plays by regular rules.
There is something about the intensity of his affections that makes me feel as though I am in uncharted territory. Falling for him feels both necessary and reckless.
Jason is unemployed, and unemployable. He tells me this on the first night. He says it without bitterness or pity. It is simply a fact. He doesn’t want a job where people tell him what to do and how to be. He collects a disability cheque. He is twenty-seven. He is an open book and yet he is the most mysterious man I have ever met. He is on medication because he is bipolar. He tells me this immediately but of course I have no idea what it means. Even if I had known I wouldn’t have chosen any differently.
In the years that follow Jason teaches me about loyalty and love and yes, about madness and living on the edge of what everyone else thinks is safe and straight and proper.
When Jason moves in Genevieve is displaced. She has to go back to her bed. He occupies me. He settles into my life. From the minute we meet he acts as though he has a right to my love; as if he is entitled to my heart. Gen does not like Jason – but her reasons are deeper than simple displacement.
Suddenly though she is back in the alcove. Suddenly she is the third wheel. She goes from being my best friend and confidante to being an outsider – a little sister watching as her big sister becomes someone she no longer recognises. I hear her unasked questions and listen to her silent admonitions. I keep quiet because I don’t know how to answer her. She watches me go deeper and deeper into a relationship that makes little sense.
Jason spends his days writing rhymes and drawing because he is a poet and a rapper. The poems are not as good as I want them to be but he is magnetic and so intense in his delivery that I forgive him his lack of talent. He fills up our lives, talking at us and thinking around us and sometimes brooding but mostly just occupying what had until then been our house with his energy and his constant words. He raps loudly in the shower. He sits on the edge of my bed memorising lyrics and reciting them at a manic pitch. I go out to school or work and come back and he is where I left him: in a trance of rhymes and beats.
He flirts with Gen and tells her as often as he can that he wants to sleep with her. He is not joking. He does this in my presence. She rolls her eyes and I smile because I know it is true but I also know she would not do that to me. He would, but he is unconventional and that is his thing. I am trapped in the logic of his world. This is how it begins.
When I am alone I repeat what he says to me: that I should be happy that he is not lying about his desires, that he is telling the truth unlike other guys. I pretend I am pleased but deep inside in those alone moments (which are rare because he is always there) I wonder why he doesn’t simply crave me and only me. My desire for him is singular. Why does his heart have to wander; why can’t I be enough?
After a while I tire of Jason always being at home cooped up with the heat turned high. I want him to go out – to be busy, to record his songs.
So when he says one morning, as I am getting ready to leave, that he wants to use the library, I am thrilled. I give him my campus card.
I regret it. He looks for me on campus. Then he is on campus every day. On campus, he pages me. He wants to know when my classes will finish. I find myself wanting a bit of peace – a few minutes without him wanting to be with me. I don’t realise it at first but this is the beginning of the end of my freedom.
Gen and Simone and Sharon start worrying. ‘Everything is moving too fast,’ they say, like a chorus in an ancient Greek play. I get angry. You just don’t understand, I respond, like some cursed maiden – Persephone abducted by Hades. I am lovesick. The abduction is not against my will. I am not sure if there is a word for this. Some days I resent him but there isn’t a single day when I don’t want everything he has to give me. His attention, and the long hard talks where he tells me how unevolved I am spiritually, how much I need to grow. ‘Why do you need people so much?’ he asks. ‘Why do you care what people think?’ I have never been an especially needy person – never the one to be swayed by the crowd. This doesn’t matter, though. Compared to Jason, I am vulnerable and tied to convention – to meeting the expectations of my parents and my friends.
So Jason and I spend almost every night crying in each other’s arms. I am always the first to cry – big silent tears so Gen and Simone won’t hear me. I cry in frustration and hurt. Why does he have to be so critical of me? Why is nothing I do ever enough? And he gets angry. ‘You don’t have to protect yourself. Don’t defend how you are – just change,’ he says. ‘You’re holding onto ego, to how you want to think of yourself, not what is true about yourself. Let the truth in,’ he says. And this sets me off even more. I can never win.
It is a cycle. Every night, after berating me, he consoles me. He is never remorseful about what he says. He never retracts. He is moved – by himself mainly but also by my tears – but he is not repentant. And so he cries too, and he holds me and says, ‘I love you Booboo. I just want you to get stronger. The world is full of enemies who won’t tell you what I’m telling you.’
At first I don’t see the enemies. I don’t understand what he means. In time, I will. I will learn to see the world through his eyes because that is the only way for us to work: on his terms. Every night I am exhausted, worn down by the emotional energy it takes to be examined like this. Still, I get from Jason what Baba couldn’t give me because he was gone so often. I get the undivided attention of a man. I get the scrutiny Baba only applied to homework, but never – once we were adolescents – to our hopes and dreams and to our hearts. He couldn’t have given us this, being who he was – a man of a certain time and place who did his best otherwise. But our hearts want what they want. Our hearts sometimes lack logic so they find what they want, regardless of the costs.
Jason gives my heart what it had wanted for so very long: to be examined and engaged. He looks at me and finds me to be flawed. He names every flaw. He wants me to be better or different, to be some version of myself that is impossible for me to become. Still, there is a wondrous, unmistakeable truth I cannot escape. Through all the drama, having looked at me and found me wanting, still, he wants me.
* * *
Mummy and Baba fly to Minnesota for my graduation. It is May and finally Minnesota is warm. I have spent the winter smothered by him, feeling less and less like myself but also oddly safe. I come up for air occasionally but in general we stay in bed. Most days I don’t make it to class. My grades are terrible. He raps and draws and I
figure out ways to avoid going out too much.
As graduation day looms, I get nervous. I have made arrangements for Mummy and Baba to stay in a hotel close to campus. As usual Mummy has taken care of all the payments. She has been putting money aside for their travels for a few months – planning as she has always taught me to.
I have fallen deeper into the Jason trance. He isn’t manipulative with money – he just doesn’t really need to think about certain things if I am going to take care of them. So Mummy had taken care of all the deposits – calling the hotel with her credit card details all the way from Durban.
I can hear the growing excitement in our own phone calls as we get closer and closer to the date. Their first-born is about to have a degree from America. I imagine Mummy showing off to her friends – calling Aunt Tutu to say nonchalantly, ‘Oh, sorry my dear, I won’t be able to phone you next week. Me and Mavuso are just flying to America next week. Yes, Sonke has finished her degree.’
* * *
We throw our caps in the air and hug. It is over. Simone and Sharon and Genevieve and Mummy and Baba are here. More magically, as a surprise – Uncle Stan has flown in. The sky is blue and the air is moist and America has given me what I came looking for – and more. I have a degree and I have spent four years making friends and learning how to breathe fire and rage and to manage myself and to develop a politics steeped in identity and analysis. I am supposed to be ready for the world.
After the ceremony we drive to dinner. I am proud too – of Mummy and Baba and Uncle Stan. I am amazed they are all here. Jason doesn’t join us. He decides to skip my graduation dinner. In fact, he wanted me to stay at home with him; he didn’t understand at all why I needed to go out. This sort of thing happens all the time. It made perfect sense to him that I would forgo the dinner, and let my parents down. Who cares that they have travelled around the world to see me and to mark this moment? I am too invested in pleasing people, he says as I walk out the door.
He scrutinises everything I do, forcing me to think about whether I am motivated by desire or convention. It is thrilling and exhausting. No one can understand it but I know I need it. Everyone else sees a bully because Jason is always difficult, always arguing with everyone, always making me choose and I usually choose him.
This time of course I can’t choose him. I can’t abandon my own graduation dinner and leave Mummy and Baba who have flown all the way from Durban. I can’t let them eat with Gen and Simone while I sit in our cramped bedroom and cradle Jason’s face and listen to him beatbox and tell him I love him.
When I get home from dinner Jason is still angry. We have another screaming fight. Within the logic of Jason’s love, my decision to go out to dinner with Mummy and Baba is a betrayal and he is strangely right. Given what we have become – a cocooned universe unto ourselves – he is right. And this is always the problem. Jason only wants the bubble – is incapable of living by the rules and expectations of the rest of the world. He is not capable of trying to be polite – not even for one night can he sit and smile with my parents and pretend to be happy because he has no idea how to compromise and why should he? He is the yin to my yang. I have smiled and sat when I was told to sit and stood when I was told to stand and moved when I was told to move – this has been my life.
This is what I love most about him: this absolutism, this unstinting refusal to bend. Jason is committed, not just to me, but to himself and his way as the only way. It is selfish, yes, but it is free.
That evening, as crazy as it seems, Jason is at his most lucid.
* * *
A few days later, Mummy and Baba and Uncle fly back to South Africa. Before they leave they try to talk about my plans for work. Next steps. I am evasive. I mumble responses and give jumbled-up answers about my visa being extended. I change the subject.
‘We’ll see,’ I keep saying.
The truth is, Jason is tired of Minnesota and he wants to go back to California. We have hatched a plan to move to California. In fact, Jason has not really asked me, he just knows I will come. So I do. I put off South Africa. I am now truly free to move home and I don’t. I move to California. No plan. No job. No ticket home to South Africa. Just Jason.
* * *
Mummy is flabbergasted when I tell her I’m not coming home. ‘What do you mean?’ she asks. I am not really sure what I mean so the conversation is awkward.
Baba says that he will speak to me when I come to my senses because he can’t understand how, when South Africa is free and Nelson Mandela is the president, I can be in America not even working at a proper job or having a plan.
He asks what my intentions are with ‘this person’. He cannot even bring himself to say his name.
‘I am not sure,’ I respond. Scared, now that it is him on the phone.
‘Sonke, there are certain things that we don’t do in this family. This is one of them. You do not just live with someone – just like that. Before marriage.’
There is something here, something in the edge in his voice that tells me he is sniffing around me, trying to determine whether I have already fallen from grace, whether I am already a ‘certain kind of woman’.
He thinks what I am doing will ‘tarnish’ me. This is rich given that I was born only five months after he and Mummy married.
So, this is what it feels like. The blood pounding in my ears, my legs slightly wobbly. This is what it feels like to defy him.
After all these years of being the good daughter, my moment of rebellion has come.
There is no screaming. I simply say, ‘I’m doing this, Baba.’
He hands the phone to Mummy and I am furious.
‘Mummy, tell him to get back on the phone.’ I am seething.
‘No, my girl. You have made a decision, now you live with it.’
We end the call.
I cry and cry. My eyes are red for three days. I am angry that they didn’t even give me the benefit of screaming at Baba.
Still, my actions are clear and his refusal to engage doubles my resolve. I will not be the one to break the silence. I come out of the tears more resolute. I will do what I want – or, rather, I will do what Baba doesn’t want me to do – regardless.
This one long act will make up for all the times I nodded and swallowed my words and bit down on my resentment. It will make up for my silences when I should have been crying – from Lusaka to Nairobi to Ottawa and back again.
My heart is a jagged edge but my chest is full of pride. Jason does not understand what the big deal is. He knows how it feels to be forsaken and cast out, but he does not know how it feels to choose yourself over your tribe. He cannot understand what it is to be an African daughter who simply wants to be her own person, to make her own mistakes. He doesn’t know what it means finally to be defiant because for him defiance has always come so easy. I envy him this, his natural-born polarity.
Folie à deux
Some days I wanted to kiss his forehead before he opened his mouth because he was a poem and a love song and a dirge. We used to wrestle on the black carpet in the crazy apartment we rented in Oakland but the fights were always pointless because he was stronger than I was and was only letting me pummel him. He never fought back so eventually I would collapse and hold him as though he hadn’t been the source – the very creation – of my pain and it would all be better for a little bit as our tears mingled then disappeared into that over-plush shag.
Everyone says it doesn’t matter what someone looks like on the outside but you know and I know and every woman on this Earth knows that beauty can be blinding. And when you are the beauty – well, that is fine – but when you see a beautiful man and that man sees you too, that is intoxicating and begins to mean more than it should. And he was that beautiful man who looked back and smiled and he had caramel skin that made my brown look sallow and that brow and a nose slightly too large and straight that seemed both incongruous and sexy on a face so finely drawn. He was an American invention with that long slow sweet smile
, that boppety-boppety-bop that bounced his walk and defined the cadence of his voice and so I loved him like I loved black America.
Jason never lied to me. He told me straight away that he was manic which didn’t mean anything to me. I had never heard of it and so I loved him. When I realised that it meant that he was wired differently, that his ups were higher and his downs were lower and that in between he was headstrong and convinced of his own righteousness, I began to love him with a deliberateness and a certainty that was the opposite of blind.
He was meaner to me than any man had ever been although not in a way that was meant to hurt – only in a way that was meant to teach me something that I could only understand through him yelling and contradicting me. That’s what he said and all these years later I still believe he believed that. I believe it too some days, when I remember him in the right way.
Like once he said that I wasn’t pretty because my face was lopsided but that I was still nice to look at because the kindness in my heart made up for it and I cried and cried and he was not sorry he said it because it was true.
It sounds worse now than it felt at the time, like some sort of bad movie every girl has seen – a movie smart girls avoid – but it wasn’t cliché, it was thrilling and I was never really in any danger since all he did was slap me with rough words and sometimes not even that, just sharp and brutal meanings.
And here’s the thing; the thing is that every single one of the seven hundred and thirteen days between our meeting on that winter afternoon in Minneapolis and our parting on that cool Oakland morning when I kissed him goodbye and got on the plane with a one-way ticket Mummy bought me, every, single, day, was, that, intense.
But no one else understood. Mummy didn’t care about existentialism, she just wanted her daughter back and Baba was too angry to speak. Angrier than he should have been and being right fuelled my righteousness and made it harder to leave. I didn’t want to be wrong. I wanted to be right. I wanted us. To be right.
Always Another Country Page 18