What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  The day Tuyen moved out of the house, Binh stood outside the kitchen door waiting for her. She was heading down to the garage to borrow her mother’s car.

  “I didn’t think you’d make it,” he said, grinning at her.

  “Well, I did.” She was surprised by the almost complimentary sound in his voice.

  “Hey, I can drive you if you want.”

  She felt a softening toward him and a relief. At least he understood her need to live on her own.

  “Thanks, I can drive myself.”

  “Ma said I should drive you, no big deal.”

  She didn’t feel like struggling any more, she’d withstood the crying and the badgering and at least Binh hadn’t tried to dissuade her, so she let him take her, and her garbage bags full of clothing, to her new place above the store.

  On the drive downtown they said nothing to each other, and Tuyen was grateful for that. It occurred to her that the silence between them was more than silence. It was a leave-taking. It would be solely up to him now to carry out whatever other duties of translation remained.

  “This is a dump,” he said when they arrived.

  “No, it’s not. It’s great. Look at the ceilings.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Don’t go saying it’s a dump, okay, Binh? I don’t want them going more crazy about it.”

  “You should stay home, save some money, and get a condo. That’s what I’d do.”

  “I’m not you.”

  “Guess not. So, later. I’ll take the car back to Ma.”

  He handed her the last garbage bag and picked his way down the staircase, squeezing past an old stove on the first landing. Tuyen felt the faintest stirring of fear watching him go. Then she realized with a kind of joy that she was about to be alone, and with unusual friendliness, she called after him, “Bye, Binh!”

  Today he still lived at home devotedly. In fact he, unlike Tuyen, had no feelings of restriction at home or urges to find himself. He was himself under the adoring eyes of his father and mother and the watchful knot of his two older sisters. He came and went as he liked, he bought a BMW, and if he had girlfriends, he stayed at their place when he needed privacy. His spiritual motivation, if he was aware of a spiritual side, was to so please his father and mother as to seal that opening in their hearts left by his mythic brother. Yet over the course of his life so far he had not been able to come to that project without a deep-seated resentment. That their love was not given wholly and unadulteratedly, he felt, made him return it in kind. Then too, his lost brother had been a child, and as a man now he felt shame about his resentment for a child. How could he match such perpetual innocence? How could he compete?

  Neither he nor Tuyen, nor Ai nor Lam, could say that their parents had ever fully declared them second-rate to their lost child. Cam and Tuan were parents in the way they knew—dutiful, authoritarian, good providers. And certainly Ai and Lam, who were the only other witnesses to that loss, did not think in those terms ever. They were born in the old country and understood their positions before Quy’s loss, understood as a matter of culture; and surely if they had harboured any hopes of changing that, of living out their fantasies of the North American teenaged rebellion, with Rolling Stones concerts and independence and free sex, Quy’s loss squelched those hopes.

  It was Binh and Tuyen who were in a position to feel second-ratedness as a visceral marker. Their culture was North American despite their parents’ admittedly ambivalent efforts to enforce Vietnamese rules, and in North American culture they knew it was de rigueur to love children equally and for children to claim that kind of love as a right. Binh picked up on that lost right and made all efforts to collect it. Tuyen, on the other hand, was made merely curious by its absence. She preferred to explore other aspects of North American birthright, such as independence, free love, and artistic irrelevance.

  Tuyen had never felt the need to keep an eye on Binh’s dealings, but as she left her father and walked along College Street toward her apartment, she felt a deeper stirring of uneasy interest. About her family she had taken a superior view. She considered them somewhat childlike since her power over them in the form of language had given her the privilege of viewing them in this way. And her distance from them, as the distance of all translators from their subjects, allowed her to see that so much of the raison d’être of their lives was taken up negotiating their way around the small objects of foreignness placed in their way. Either they could not see the larger space of commonality or it was denied them.

  But superiority aside, she was still broke. Watching her mother, she’d had second thoughts about breaking into her sleep to have her mother force money on her. She had become so preoccupied with having hurt her father and wanting to apologize to him, and her sister had put her off with the threat, despite her cool response. She had, as usual, become confused and tangled up in their presences. Some day she wants to mount an installation of the characteristics of her family, if only she could imagine the science with which to do it. It would be a hundred boxes of varying sizes made of a transparent translucent material floating in a room, suspended by no known element. The floor of the room would be water, and she would walk through the room bumping into the boxes, which would not be discernible to the naked eye. As she collided with the boxes, things would fall out, spikes and keys and mouths and voices.

  She would have to go to the restaurant later and borrow some money from her father; though she hated giving him another opportunity to scold her and lecture her about dropping out of school, about living downtown, she was desperate and would have to endure it. Or she might take Binh up on the offer of money for keeping the store, which would also give her a chance to scope him out; to see what he was up to. She had told him she wanted nothing to do with his idea of digging things up, but she had no illusions that that would stop him. Admittedly, she had abdicated to him her role as arbiter between the outside world and the family, but she might have to intervene if his scheme—she was sure there was a larger scheme behind it all—placed them in jeopardy.

  But her father was shrewd, she assured herself as she neared the apartment. She and Binh might have been the translators, but her father ran things. He determined from which version to abstract the family’s course. Still, her parents had a vulnerability that she had known for as long as she could remember, and it made her feel protective of them; it had sometimes motivated her interpretations of the exchanges between officialdom and her family more than self interest.

  Stopped at the light, she laughed at this partially disingenuous assessment of herself. She remembered her child self, her teenaged self, impatient with her mother’s repeated attempts to get accreditation, tired of making phone calls for her, writing letters of explanation and not mailing them as she was instructed, knowing that her mother’s letters were so convoluted that they likely would only prove her unqualified for consideration. Bureaucrats, Tuyen knew, were not impressed by long letters containing life stories. There were forms that had to be filled out with no addendums, no laminations. Anyway, she had been a petulant child, thinking her parents incompetent and wishing they were different, similar to some perfect parent she had in mind who was not Vietnamese and for whom she did not have to translate the world.

  “Hey, what’re you laughing at?” Carla had come up to her on the street, caught her laughing to herself.

  “Oh, Carla!” Tuyen snapped around. “I was so worried about you last night—and this morning. Where’d you go?”

  “Walking. What’s funny? People will think you’re mad or something.”

  “You didn’t talk to me this morning, what do you care?”

  “I’m sorry …” was all Carla offered.

  Seeing her about to dive back into the morning’s mood, Tuyen said, “I forgive you. See how easy I am?” She brushed a hand over Carla’s left cheek. “Jackie was over this morning and Oku. They came for coffee. They might check by later.”

  Tuyen chatted the rest of the way to the apartm
ent, trying to keep the mood light. She was happy simply to be in Carla’s company again. She didn’t mind caring for people who were not her family—it was so much easier; they actually did not expect it and were more than grateful for it. With other people you could begin from the beginning, together you could create your own forces, your own stories. Love was easier, it was unexpected, pure. Because it was unasked for, unsolicited, yes, unexpected. Like Carla. She loved Carla.

  With her friends, Tuyen could be lavish. They took it as a gift. They took each other as gifts. They were marvellous each time they met, bringing each other messages from the realms of their families and poring over these messages like found jewels, turning them over in the hand and listening to the sounds of them as they clinked on each other. Now that they were older, the details of their families lives loosened on their tongues, becoming fantastic when they lay together on the ratty couch at Tuyen’s, examining them. This was Tuyen’s interpretation, at any rate.

  Now, walking toward home with Carla, the uncomfortable feeling she’d had observing her father seemed already to belong to another world. The fear she felt—no, she would not call it fear—the presentiment she had now appeared as just another secret box for examination.

  ELEVEN

  THEY WERE ON THE STAIRCASE up to the apartments when they smelled the cooking coming from Carla’s place. “Oku!” they both said together. Oku was a great cook and he would often come to their place and cook elaborate meals from their scanty cupboards. They loved those visits, when he would throw together what to them were impossible ingredients and come up with sumptuous meals. They each had an aversion to cooking. Tuyen’s was easy enough to understand. Throughout her childhood she’d spent from four o’clock in the afternoon to midnight in a restaurant, falling asleep on the table to be awakened and taken home half walking, half dragged. She could count the days since her father acquired the restaurant that there had been a meal cooked at home. If they didn’t eat at the Saigon Pearl itself, they ate leftovers from the Saigon Pearl. Tuyen made every effort not to learn cooking and developed a dislike for what was called Vietnamese food.

  “Why can’t we eat like normal people?” she used to ask when she was little; when she was sent to school with minty soups and bean curd.

  “Don’t you see normal people coming here to eat, Tuyen? They like our food,” her father would point out, but Tuyen was never persuaded. She only felt exposed in the restaurant when European clientele were present, and when the customers were Vietnamese or Korean or African or South Asian, she hated, then, the sense of sameness or ease she was supposed to feel with them.

  It took her years to admit to friends that her family owned a restaurant, and she was still not comfortable taking them there. Tuyen’s favourite food was potatoes, cooked any style, but mostly just plain boiled potatoes with butter. They were easy to cook, took no attention whatever, and to her taste they were the most delicious things. She could eat potatoes any time of day or night, huge bowlfuls. Potatoes were perfect, neutral, and glamorous. Meaning not at all like her family. And milk. She loved milk. Despite the fact that her stomach reacted violently to it. But she insisted on drinking it. Or now buying it at least. She thought of this violent response as something to be conquered, like learning a new and necessary language. If nothing else, her tiny fridge could be counted on for storing putrefied sour milk that she had not had the courage to consume.

  Both their childhoods, Tuyen’s and Carla’s, had been of navigating different and sometimes opposed worlds. At every turn it had been treacherous. And food was the dead giveaway. On Saturdays Nadine, Carla’s stepmother, would take her to Kensington Market, where laden with bags Carla would wait and wait, her body in an impatient and resigned burning, as Nadine talked to the storekeepers, haggling an extra piece of fish, an extra lime, an extra pepper, mistrustful of the weighing of every item. Her stepmother’s happiness in contrast to her unhappiness and discomfort was most evident at the Saturday market. Carla stood waiting, her nose rejecting the smells, her throat gagging on rotten fish and rotten vegetables, her face turning away from the appalling blood stains on butchers’ aprons at European Meats, her whole being wishing to be elsewhere. Carla hated Nadine’s exotica. She was uneasy among the pawpaws, soursops, plantains, goat, fish, gizadas, and cans of ackees. “Your father likes this,” Nadine would croon. She’d taught herself how to cook Jamaican just for Derek. Carla despised the smell of the stores that carried dried cod and fresh thyme and mangoes. Her ears registered discomfort at the sound of accented voices pausing in self-derision, in boastfulness, or in religious certainty. She hated this language that she made herself unhear, unthink, and undream. She never actually learned it except to understand her father, Nadine, and their friends, and to translate it to her teachers and anyone official. She had been a translator herself, knowing a language the way a translator whose first tongue is another language knows. She did not live in it. She considered her father’s customs foreign, embarrassing oddities that she would try to distance herself from in public. Nadine would take her to the patty store, bestowing on her a patty in cocoa bread and a cola champagne as a treat. Carla stood uneasily eating while Nadine insisted that it tasted good. She found the floury depth of the two breads distasteful. The centre of meat and spices burned her and set her tongue on fire. The cola champagne added heat where she wanted coldness, water. So overwhelming was the whole market that the taste in her mouth was sweet and sickly at the same time. She vowed never to come here when she grew up.

  So food was not their specialty, nor cooking. If not for the potatoes, which Tuyen shared freely with Carla and had in abundance, Carla would be bone thin. And so they both fell on Oku, hugging him, when they got to the top of the stairs.

  “If I was straight, I would marry you,” Tuyen said.

  “You’re a dream, Oku.” Carla hadn’t eaten since the day before. The smell from his cooking made her notice how desperately hungry she was.

  “Oh, you don’t want to marry me too? Still noncommittal?” Oku teased her.

  “Closest you’ve come.” She moved to the sink compulsively. “You’re a great cook, but you use every pot, pan, dish, and spoon in sight. Everything’s dirty.”

  “Oh, Carla, leave that. Let’s eat first.”

  “We need dishes to eat on, Tuyen. Girl!”

  They were sitting now on the floor in Carla’s apartment, savouring the meal Oku had cooked. He had no culinary antipathy registered in childhood discomfort. He loved his mother’s cooking, he loved his father’s cooking. He learned to cook lovingly what Carla had rejected from her stepmother. The graffiti crew from across the alley was there too, scattered around the floor: Kumaran, Keeran, Abel, and Jericho. They had smelled the cooking across the way and asked Oku if they could come over. He bargained with them for rice and cardamom and cloves and chilies, and now there was a curried chicken dish with the odour of cardamom, cilantro, and burnt cumin. Then there was rice, saffron-coloured, with peas and raisins. Oku hadn’t learned to cook rice this way from his mother but from the graffiti crew—well, not the whole crew, but Kumaran, whose parents were from Tamil Nadu. He had also crushed a papaya and tossed it into a vanilla ice cream for dessert, and he had brought from home one of his father’s precious eighty-eight-proof bottles of Wray and Nephew rum. He had taken his mother’s training and augmented it along the way with all the training of all the mothers of the friends he had. His father would probably not approve, preferring the monoculture of Jamaican food, but Oku’s tastes had expanded from this base to a repertoire that was vast and cosmopolitan. On their lucky days Tuyen and Carla would come home to fried snapper in a mole sauce or cassava frittes with burgers, or chicken’s feet soup. Odd that the same foods they were averse to in their childhoods they now revered in Oku’s hands.

  Today he was really hoping that Jackie would return as they had loosely agreed, for Carla’s sake. But so far she hadn’t shown up. He wanted to make some type of amends for that ineffectual, rude remark he
had made to her on the corner. He wasn’t sure really what her response had been, but he’d taken it as dismissal; in his long unrequited approach to Jackie he had always been able to balance himself between meaning and not meaning. He was waiting for her to take him seriously, but when she didn’t he prided himself on being able to laugh it off as she seemed to do also. He had watched carefully over her different relationships with men, knowing that if he was snide enough about them, they would disappear. He thought that it was his doing—their disappearances. The German boyfriend, however, was proving difficult, and he was getting slightly panicked.

  “Jackie said she was coming, right?”

  “Oh, and here we were thinking this was all for us, Carla.”

  “Oh, come on, of course it was. I’m just asking. So she should be coming, right?”

  “She’ll show up, I guess. You know she’s got the store now.”

  “Ab und Zu! What the fuck is that anyway?”

  “Here and now, honey. Or is it now and then, Tuyen?”

  “Now and then, I think. They’re doing well, Jackie says. Reiner’s living at the back of the store to save money. And the band is practising in the basement.”