What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  Claire rose immediately after Fitz, following him down the hall and seeing him out. When she returned to the kitchen, Oku had already retreated to his room in the basement. She had wanted to ask him what was all that about happiness. Fitz might be dense, but she wasn’t. She’d been noticing some things, like how Oku hardly picked up a book any more though he left with books each day, like how he crawled into the house sometimes in the small hours of the morning, a wreath of ganja trailing him, after being dropped off by a Jeep full of men, with booming music. Then again for weeks the men would disappear and those girls would call and he would stay out nights, days. She was covering for him. Fitz didn’t notice all these things, but she did. What he was up to, she didn’t know.

  EIGHT

  WHAT MADE JACKIE THINK of that train ride to Toronto? She hated complications. The train from Halifax to Toronto. The memory of it came from the time when she had no control of memories—which she would keep and which she would have disappear—when she couldn’t shape them into something else. She hated complications. Anyway, she had to compose the letter to InStyle. Dear InStyle, what the fuck is up with that Bo Derek piece in October? Okay they won’t print “fuck” in the magazine. Dear InStyle, What is up with saying Bo Derek’s corn rows is an example of one of the most imitated hairstyles of all time? Are you for real? Are some of you smoking something? Did you all do some bad coke? All right, strike the last two questions. My great-grandmother, not to mention my ancestors, are turning in their graves … Would they get it? Too subtle. Stop crediting Bo Derek with something that goes back centuries in Africa, America, the Caribbean, and Canada. Maybe she should start the letter, Dear InStyle, I am a Canadian fan of your magazine. I was shocked … “Hook a brother up”—what made him think that she would be impressed by that line? Not in this lifetime, not in this frigging lifetime. She was not going to get dragged into that tired bullshit.

  The streetcar was practically empty. She could have looked around to see if Oku was still standing dumbstruck at the light. Instead she remembered the train, which she tried to put aside for the letter. It had taken the longest time getting here. She could feel her parents’ anticipation. She was a little sick from the rocking of the train, or was it from their talk about how different, how exciting life was going to be from then on? She fell asleep so many times, half waking to hear her father’s rap on James Brown and Mustangs, his favourite car, or her mother saying, “You sleep, baby,” to her, or, “You know it, baby,” to her father. What was it that made her remember? It was, yes, it was the same mix of desire and revulsion, the same feeling in that train car of warmth and insecurity, damage and seduction. Standing close to Oku, his limber virility, his lips, his throat growling, “Hook a brother up.” It was just a turn in that sentence that lost her to him in that moment. Little did he know that without the accent on “brother,” without the hesitation between u and p in “up,” she might have stayed with him at the traffic light. High and having a good time at Lula Lounge was one thing. This was definitely another.

  Jackie flipped through the InStyle on her lap again—ads for Tiffany, Escado, Mercedes, Patek Phillippe, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Coach. There was Michael Michele in Carolina Herrera, Halle Berry in Valentino, Lucy Liu in Carmen Marc Valvo, and there was where her letter would appear. Dear InStyle, I have been inspired by your feature on Vivica A. Fox. She is such a wonderful actress …No fucking way. He was not what Jackie had in mind. I control my shit, “brother.” There was so much more in those four words. As she had told him—she hated innocence. She had detected it as lethal way back on that train ride out of Nova Scotia. She despised people who didn’t know what was going to happen to them. Those kinds of people, she thought, lied to themselves and to people around them. She had no pity for that kind of person, and what Oku had been asking for was pity.

  Tiring of InStyle, she flipped through Black Beauty to the horoscopes: “Aries—April is your time of the year romantically but you are in danger of being attracted to those who do little to brighten up your life, so don’t give up your heart too quickly …” “Not fucking likely,” she said loud enough for the few on the streetcar to look at her. “… Cash wise, gains come through investments, people, and travel. During May you seem to be saving like crazy because you are quite capable of saving more cash than a demented millionaire on occasions …” She laughed, unaware of the attention she attracted around her. She looked up to see her stop about to be passed, and she pulled the cord furiously for the driver to stop. When he didn’t, she collected her magazines and walked to the front of the car. The driver slowed to the next stop. Jackie climbed off, saying loudly, “Some people are just assholes.”

  Alexandra Park is that urban warren of buildings and paths where Jackie and her mother and father lived after taking the train to Toronto. That was 1980. Here they call Nova Scotia “down east” and “down home.” In Alexandra Park everyone is hip to the news about who else is making their way across the country, best as they can, hoping to find a job in Toronto or, better still, a way back home with some money.

  After Jackie grew up, she didn’t want to go back, but her mother and father still always talked about it as if it was a real possibility. Impossible. And they both knew it. They’d sold what little they had in the first place, which was a diamond earring belonging to Jackie’s mother from a great-grandmother who went to New York in the thirties and a car with a broken fan belt belonging to Jackie’s father. And little by little, in the years following, most of their families, except for some unknown, unfriendly cousins in Truro, most had moved to Toronto too. So there was no one to go back to, but the thought remained a fantasy, and as fantasies do, it pictured Nova Scotia, Halifax, as a paradise on earth and Toronto as a wretched hellhole. Jackie didn’t remember Halifax, Nova Scotia, anyhow. Same as any kid, a life is a room, a playground, a mother, a father, not a city by the ocean, small and undulating, not a harbour, not snow cakes out to sea, not a warm Scotch at the Brown Derby on Gottingen Street.

  Jackie wouldn’t remember Halifax except for the North End Library next to the apartment building where she lived the days of her fifth year. Half a day with her grandmother, half a day at the afternoon daycare. At the library she would linger on pictures in books from the children’s section and Miss Towney would get her and other children to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” once a year.

  Not needing a memory to take with her on a train all the way across the country, all her memorable memories were in the two people she sat between on the train ride—the one who took her to the bathroom and held her up so she didn’t touch the seat and the other one who blew on her hot chocolate before she drank it; the one who gave her his change and his rabbit’s foot to play with and the one who undid and redid her braids so she’d look nice when the train stopped almost a whole day later at Union Station in Toronto. Jackie was going to be a supermodel ever since her already long five-year-old legs twisted and scrunched themselves trying to sleep on the train coming west. She was decked out in psychedelic pants and a frilly Indian top just like her mother’s. They were five years late for that style, but they were still looking good in 1980. The father wore velvet pants and a hat with a feather.

  They came to Toronto just when the Paramount—the best dance club in the country—was about to close. They only got the tail end of the dancing and the beautiful aroma of fried smelts. That was after Marvin Gaye came out with “After the Dance,” and the Paramount had a huge painting of the jacket cover on the wall. And people were as if they had stepped right out of the painting, the slinky retro-thirties dresses, the men in hats, the saxophone player, the whole smoky intoxicating gyration of the figures in the painting melded with the figures on the dance floor and at the fish-fry tables. The smell of Avon White Linen perfume and the elegance of Chivas and all the crazy moves and all the broken hearts and the girls who were being turned out and the men who tried to look criminal and hard and the drunks who were charming and the drunks who were mean and just
the hot, urgent, dangerous feel of the place where scores were made and scores were settled. Jackie’s mother and father only tasted it all for a year or so. Maybe two.

  Jackie’s father found out that there was a crap game downstairs and you could get reefer and blow and whatever, and when the cops entered the Paramount a red light went on and off, the signal from upstairs to ditch everything, the money, the drugs, the works. He thought craps was his game, but every man down there thought that. This is how you could wake up the next day with your furniture going to somebody else’s house, all because of a bet past broke. And your engagement ring—somebody could tell you it once belonged to them. And your leather coat with the slit up the back looked just as good if not better when you watched some guy who came to the Paramount in polyester walk away from you with it on his back.

  Jackie’s mum got in with some girls who had a rivalry with some West Indian girls. Saturday nights they would settle all scores in the women’s washroom. The Scotian girls, and she was one, had a reputation for fighting. They would beat you like a man. Because their fathers beat them like men and their brothers beat them like men and their men beat them like men, so they beat each other and those West Indian girls like men. You never just fought one of them, they were all related somehow. If some West Indian girl thought she could bring it on in there and took some Scotian girl on, a crowd of cousins and aunts would be on her. “That’s my cousin you messing with, girl.” The women’s washroom was a place to show off your badness. Your bad threads or your bad fucking skills or your bad fist skills. There were some fights there. Over men, over money, over just looking too good for your own good. Everybody at the Paramount was on edge. You had to mind that you didn’t disrespect somebody’s woman or somebody’s man or just somebody.

  They knew about the Paramount from Cape Breton to Vancouver, they being a select group. Black people and a few, very few, hip whites—whites who were connected. Just as they knew about Rockheads in Montreal. And every blind pig in Winnipeg, Hamilton, and any city with more than two hundred black people. They were the first places people headed on the nights that the men didn’t hit the strip clubs. On the weekends, that is. They were the places people went to feel in their own skin, in their own life. Because when a city gets finished with you in the daytime, you don’t know if you’re coming or going. After you didn’t get the job, or got the job and it was shit, or you were tired of the job, the Paramount was a place of grace—like church. Where else could you enjoy the only thing you were sure God gave you, your body, without getting into any kind of trouble for it? Well, trouble you could handle anyway—trouble you didn’t give a shit about, trouble you went looking for. You could dance that thing around the Paramount like there was no tomorrow. You could shake it, shimmy it, let it fall out of your dress, let it step off of your high-heeled shoes, you could dress it up any way you wanted, you could fill it with booze, you could float it on ganja, chill it on coke, you could get it fucked right there on the dance floor, then you could let it fall down near the light post on Spadina or walk it up the street like it was on a loose string. What could be more perfect?

  Jackie’s mother got caught up in the Paramount on account of Jackie’s father and a West Indian girl from Jamaica. West Indian girls loved Scotian men on account of their accents, which were just like American black men’s, which meant that Scotian men were close to dream men. So Scotian men got a lot of pussy from West Indian girls on account of that. They got a lot of pussy from everybody. In the pussy line, they were at the front. Jackie’s daddy had to come into the ladies’ washroom and tear Jackie’s mother off the girl from Kingston named Marcia. Well, Marcia wasn’t from Kingston, really, but her mother was. Marcia was born in Grace Hospital on Church Street, as Marcia told Jackie’s mother when Jackie’s mother called her “island bunny” and “Jammie.” Kingston Marcia lost some hair and got a cheek almost bit off that night and Jackie’s mother found a reputation.

  Jackie got parked at Liz Dorry’s like all the other children whose mothers and fathers were out partying and hustling and drinking and dancing at the Paramount. These were early days, their first, second year in Toronto. Jackie’s mother wanted to take a course in hairdressing, a course in icing wedding cakes, and a course in nursing. She was twenty-two. Fine as refined sugar. Jackie’s father had his own set of fights at the Paramount over Jackie’s mother. Some dude with a fur coat would start eyeing Jackie’s mother or grinding her on the dance floor and Jackie’s father would have to break bad.

  The fried smelts were delicious at the Paramount, and cheap. There was the obligatory thick greasy guy of a cook with a cigarette hanging from his lips. He would pile those smelts high on the plate, then ring in the money at the cash register with the same oily hands. But man, did they ever taste good. There was the whole incongruity of the elegance on one side of the Paramount and the fish fry on the other and the mishmash of it in the centre. It was a throwback to juke joints and speakeasies, but all legal, well, some legal, right there on Spadina Avenue.

  Then there was also the Elephant Walk, where you had to be known to get in, where you had to be certifiably dangerous to get in, or know someone who was. You had to be badass or beautiful. Threateningly beautiful. The kind of beautiful that teetered on the brink of some disaster, like a tooth knocked out or a knife gash that would make the beauty even more beautiful for its gone promise and its evidence of having put itself on the line. Jackie’s mother and father were in time to see this at the Elephant Walk. It was up three flights of stairs in a building on Spadina that held a few small sewing factories. It was just south of the Paramount, and the door was barred from the inside. A bouncer would look at you through a peephole and let you in if you hit the standard. Then he would look you up and down if you were a woman as if you could be his or as if you were his when he opened the door. If you were a man, he took your measure, said, “Hey, bro.” Or was threateningly silent. Truly only the pimps and whores got into the Elephant Walk with no trouble. If you were like Jackie’s mother, fresh out of the Brown Derby on Gottigen Street in Halifax, Nova Scotia, you were out of your depth. Jackie’s father only had the look, he didn’t have the play of those dudes he imitated in their morning coats and slanted hats. And even they weren’t always the real deal. The dudes who didn’t front and didn’t talk so much about being players, they were the real deal. They looked like death. There was a nothing sound around them, not even a calm sound, just the dead sound of nothing—no compassion, no humour, no feeling.

  Jackie’s father used to be a barber down home at Al’s Barbershop and he went to work at Golden’s on Bathurst Street the second week after he arrived in Toronto. He was reckless, though, and recklessness got him into the Elephant Walk, which is where one of those dead men threw him down the three flights of stairs for trying to horn in on the action. His leg was broken, and he’d walked with a limp ever since. He really made a name for himself when he came back on crutches and sliced the man’s left quadriceps with an old-fashioned razor.

  All this took place at the Elephant Walk without benefit of police or charges. Or, at least, the police questioned but got no answers. That community was so tight that if there was a fight in the Paramount and reinforcements were needed, it would only take thirty seconds before word hit Alexandra Park a block and a half away, and five seconds later they’d be there. It didn’t matter the time. It was usually one o’clock in the morning. They had radar—advance-warning radar. And it worked well, especially if cops were in the park. Salt-and-pepper cops was how the police decided to deal with Alexandra Park—one white cop, one black cop. The black cop was supposed to smooth the way. One of “their own” to make them feel comfortable and make them talk. Only problem was that the pepper cop was from the West Indies and the cops had miscalculated racial bonds. Though not even the West Indians would talk to the West Indian cop. To everyone, cops are just another race altogether, and as far as they were all concerned the pepper cop was a race traitor. The time when they were looki
ng for Jackie’s father after he worked on that dude’s hip abductor, Jackie’s father knew before the two salt-and-pepper cops hit 113½ Vanauley Way, but he sat waiting for them. He gave them a good view of his broken leg. How could he have? it asked them. What was he—Superman?

  Ab und Zu advertised itself as selling post-bourgeois clothing. The store was just on the border where Toronto’s trendy met Toronto’s seedy. The rent was cheap, and Jackie had had the foresight to think that the trendy section would slowly creep toward Ab und Zu and sweep the store into money. Next door to Ab und Zu was a greasy spoon—Sam’s—recently taken over by other hopeful trendies—a couple of women who were anarchists. There, a mix of the old neighbourhood—the working class, the poor, the desperate—and an increasing number of anarchists—mostly friends of the two women—drank coffee in mutual curiosity. Every morning, the two women and Reiner, because he opened the store, would have to wash the sidewalk of last night’s vomit or piss. There was a pimp, Ronnie, who preyed upon the most drugged-out women in the neighbourhood and who used Sam’s as his office. When the two women took over, Ronnie menaced them into letting him stay, and in the first weeks he succeeded—until they tried to fix up his workers and get them counselling and rehab. Then Ronnie moved his crew along farther west, but not without a parting touch of vindictiveness. A broken door that the women suspected was Ronnie’s doing. No more trouble though, Ronnie couldn’t afford too much heat, just the destitute puking their stomachs out occasionally in front of Sam’s and Ab und Zu when they could lay their hands on some alcohol.