What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  So when Jackie heard her mother and father talking about going to the Duke—“Well, maybe I’ll just step down to the Duke tonight,” her father said. “Yeah, think anything’s shakin’ there?” Her mother. “Gotta hook up with Gabriel, said he had some business thing.” Her father. “Well, maybe I’ll tag along. Leave Jackie with Liz,” her mother said—she knew it was the end. She had felt their restlessness for weeks, ever since the Paramount closed down. First they had been mournful. “Sheeeet, why’d they have to go and do that, man? For all the money I spent up in there, just that shoulda been enough to keep that place open.” Her father. They’d even sworn they would never go to the Duke. “Never find me in that place. Ain’t got enough room to swing a cat and they play some country shit in there.” Her mother. They held out a good few weeks, Jackie’s father stroking that particular spot in his beard, switching from the television to the stereo. He loved Wilson Pickett. He played “When a Man Loves a Woman” over and over again, saying to Jackie’s mother, “Hear that, girl! Hear that? That’s what it takes, that’s what it takes.”

  He took Jackie up in her lessons. “You gonna have a high school diploma, Jackie baby. Do better than me. Do better than your mother.”

  “Yeah, Daddy.”

  “ ‘Yeah, Daddy’? You say ‘Yes, Daddy.’ No yeah this and yeah that.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Jackie’s father didn’t get a high school diploma, not because he couldn’t but because there wasn’t time. There wasn’t time for that among the six brothers and one sister that he had. They had to work, and besides, when the older ones were ready, Nova Scotia wasn’t ready, what with de facto segregation and what with Jackie’s grandmother and grandfather needing the help. And when Jackie’s father was ready, it still wasn’t worth it for a black person to have an education. Where would you put it? What would you do with it, what good was it? What kind of job would you get with it? Jackie’s father had the kind of sense that mattered—street sense. That’s the kind of intelligence that was worth something. Here in Toronto he’d come to a feeling that it wasn’t worth passing on. It was good enough for him and Jackie’s mother. He figured they were country, they were from down home, but Jackie was going to be from here.

  Jackie liked the attention. She loved the few weeks when there was no Paramount and nothing up to standard for her mother and father to go to. It was like being on holiday. She already had a picture-postcard idea of how her family should be, and it was coming true.

  “Jackie, go over to Liz and see if she’ll take you tonight.” Her mother, testing the waters.

  “I ain’t going.”

  “ ‘Ain’t’?” Jackie’s father.

  “I am not going.”

  “That’s right now, but you going.”

  “No.”

  “Do like your mother says, girl.”

  “Can’t. Won’t. Cannot, will not. Stay with Aunt Liz.”

  “You cut a switch to beat yourself there, my man.” Jackie’s mother to Jackie’s father. “She’s telling you now. But, girl, don’t let me have to get up.”

  Much as she tried, though, Jackie couldn’t keep her mother and father away from the Duke.

  They had turned the Paramount into a liquor store by the time Jackie grew up. There’s no sign of the life it once had. When Jackie’s mother and father pass by these days, it’s all a different place. All their good times, dancing and fighting and styling, gone. All their nights with Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear” and Stevie Wonder’s “In the City,” all their youth has been jackhammered open, dug up, and cemented over in a concrete-and-glass brand new liquor store with small red-and-green tiles on the front. There’s no sign of their sweet life, the dancing—that’s what they mostly miss—the high-platformed shoes, the thrill of meeting the R & B bands after hours, the particular night when Jackie’s mother almost ran off with the bass player from Parliament Funkadelic and Jackie’s father had to stage the drama of his life—walking out the door as if he didn’t care, so she would know that if she was gone, she was gone—to get her back.

  How does life disappear like that? It does it all the time in a city. One moment a corner is a certain corner, gorgeous with your desires, then it disappears under the constant construction of this and that. A bank flounders into a pizza shop, then into an abandoned building with boarding and graffiti, then after weeks of you passing it by, not noticing the infinitesimal changes, it springs to life as an exclusive condo. This liquor store that was the Paramount will probably, unnoticed, do the same thing in three or four years, and the good times Jackie’s mother and father had here—the nights when nights weren’t long enough, when they all ended up at a blind pig on St. Clair Avenue because they couldn’t go to sleep with so much life lighting up their beautiful bodies, or at Fran’s on College, eating greasy eggs at three or four in the morning—all this, their lovely life, they would not be able to convince anyone it had existed.

  FIFTEEN

  HE WANTED TO PLAY her Ornette Coleman’s “Embraceable You.” He wanted to play her Coltrane’s “Venus,” Monk’s “I Surrender, Dear” and “Don’t Blame Me.” So he did. He called her and left them all on her answering machine. One every other day. He said nothing in case he put his foot in his mouth again. She would know, he told himself. She would know if he played Dexter Gordon blowing “Laura,” Charles Mingus’s “Better Get It in Your Soul,” and Charlie Rouse’s “When Sunny Gets Blue.” And he would’ve played her Billie Holiday singing “You’ve Changed,” except that he couldn’t play Billie Holiday without bawling his eyes out, and he wanted to be limber strong so that he could seduce her. So he sent her Charlie Rouse playing “When Sunny Gets Blue” twice. He thought that Rouse’s hoarse velvet horn best described all the levels of his love for her, the slow and quiet way he wanted to talk to her, the intimacy he wanted to evoke. And he played her “Venus” more times than he could recall because he felt that tender, that undone with her, that out in space, that uncertain of boundaries, and that much in peril if she didn’t love him back.

  After Oku did all this he felt shy, stupid. He never thought of himself as stupid, only with Jackie. It occurred to him that she must be annoyed coming home to crazy music on her answering machine. She could mistake him for some kind of freak stalking her, and he didn’t want her to think that, but he couldn’t stop. He became so engaged in this seduction, he hardly worried about his father any more. Fuck it, he thought, it all had to come to a head soon anyway, and he had to move out of the house. If he loved Jackie, he was beyond Fitz; if he loved Jackie, he could do anything. This mission to send Jackie all that he felt about her kept him up late and woke him early. When he felt desperate, he sent her Sun Ra and the Chicago Art Ensemble. When he felt certain, he sent her Cecil Taylor and Miles Davis. He wished he could play some instrument himself. Then he would go to her door and blow, like Anthony Braxton, all of the mathematical calculations of his love. More often he felt the sense of failed genius or felt simply failed, like his musician friend from the market. But even failure drove him on, as it had Clifford. So perhaps, he thought, if it really came to that, he would go to her door and play the air between them on an imaginary instrument, play the rays of the sun through the smog or the cold air, just like that Varo painting Tuyen had shown them, and then Jackie would recognize his love.

  At home the sparring between him and Fitz subsided into a seething quiet in the mornings. Fitz wasn’t the type to remain quiet long, but Fitz’s voice, querulous and grumbling, receded against Oku’s preoccupation with Jackie. When his parents talked to him at breakfast, they seemed far away. He heard them, but didn’t hear them. He dropped his usual “Yeah, Pop” into the conversations, and they both noticed that he did it at inappropriate intervals. It irritated Fitz, who became more incensed at Oku after several mornings of inattention to his dominance at the breakfast table.

  One morning in June, through the webbing of his daydreams of Jackie, Oku heard Fitz.

  “Me no know, Claire, but
me never see no report card come here. Me pay my money. Me put nuff energy in this here boy. Is a man he is, Claire. Me don’t like minding big man and no return ’pan it.”

  Oku was about to interject with “Yeah, Pop” when the meaning reached him. A fury crept up his neck.

  “Report card? Who’re you talking about?”

  “You! Who else there ’bout?”

  “Man, chill. You’re tripping. You must be out of your mind. I’m a grown man. Report card! I don’t have to answer to you!”

  His mother felt the temperature of the room rise. She said nothing.

  “Who you have to answer to then? Who put food on this table? Claire, you hearing this?” Fitz appealed to Claire as if he felt slightly off balance. She didn’t respond.

  “Your bullshit is tired, man. You should pay us for listening to you crap all over the world every morning. Jesus Christ! Listen, I don’t owe you shit, all right?”

  “Watch your language in front of your mother, boy.”

  Oku burst out laughing at this, so sweet a laugh that his mother couldn’t help the muscles of her face jerking into a smile, her shoulders perilously close to collapsing in mirth. Fitz was the last one to talk about foul language. He looked at them both in shock. He rose with a wounded look and left the house, brushing Claire away as she followed him to the door.

  “Mom, don’t worry,” Oku said when she returned. “I’ll move out. I have to anyway.”

  “What about the university, then?”

  “I’ll go back next year,” he said, acknowledging that he had not fooled her. “Promise. Just have to get my head together this summer. I’ll get a job and figure stuff out …”

  “Don’t leave until you’re ready. You know Fitzy doesn’t mean anything by it.”

  “He does, Mom. He’s so bitter, man. Jeez, he’s toxic. He’s always like pissed, you know. He should want better for me. But he just wants to drown me in that. I don’t want to live like that.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you different. Only he didn’t start out like that.”

  “You always forgive him.”

  “He’s not a bad man. He doesn’t mean half of what he says. He’s not the only one like that. Striving makes you bitter.” She was thinking of all their friends. People just like them. Perfectionists, really. People who could not look at something beautiful without finding fault. There had to be something not so good lurking behind every smooth surface. If they worked hard for something and got it, it was not good enough. People who took nothing for granted. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive, mind you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t look for better. But understand, your father was only trying to do good for us.”

  “No, he wasn’t. You worked too. You made this too, but he acts like a tyrant because … because he can. Jeez, I’m fed up. I’m not taking no stuff from him no more.”

  “Well, as you say, it’s not him you have to please. It’s yourself. We can’t want things for you. You have to want them. So …”

  “I’ll figure something out. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” He reassured her as much as himself. He didn’t know where this feeling of evenness had come from. There had been a shift in his anxieties. He examined the new feeling now, turning it over, hoping it was going to last.

  Around lunch he left the house, going … going where? he asked himself. Filling his day was suddenly no longer secretive. He’d sweated all winter over a confrontation with his father about the university and there it was. Simple. He felt relieved. He felt oddly self-conscious now that he wasn’t hiding from Fitz. He didn’t check to see if his mother was going out to the market today. He had nothing to do and he was embarrassed. All his actions so far had been against Fitz, against what Fitz represented, and now he was free and it felt strange. At least free of the pressure from Fitz. Free enough to take Fitz’s Buick sitting in the garage and drive up to Eglinton. He parked outside the barbershop and got out.

  A couple of men had been in an intense conversation on the sidewalk. One of them addressed Oku.

  “Hey, poet, what you saying, star?”

  “Chilling, you know, man. What’s up with you?”

  “Poet, brethren, tell me this. I’m trying to tell this man that communism could never work on this earth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because man is too greedy, right? You don’t see it?” He was a regular on the sidewalk outside the barbershops. Each day he had a new topic, but this was one of his staples.

  “Well, I don’t know …”

  “Look, let me give you an example. Let’s say there’s four of us, right? And we decide to … make some dumplings, okay? And we only have enough flour to make twelve dumplings, so we boil the dumplings and we leave them in the pot for everybody to share. Let’s say it’s four of us. Three apiece, right? Believe me, some man knowing all we go through for the twelve dumplings will go in the kitchen and take four dumplings. Don’t laugh. Man is greedy, that’s why communism can’t work.”

  “Righteous truths, man,” Oku humoured him, going into the barbershop.

  The barbershops on Eglinton were sites of great philosophical rumination on the world. Here everything from the war in the Middle East and genocide in Rwanda to the cost of toilet paper and the existence of God were rigorously gone over—examined from every possible angle. Oku came to the barbershops sometimes less for a haircut than for the conversations.

  “You hear that? ‘Righteous truths’!”

  He got a haircut from Paul at Castries Barber Salon after an hour’s wait and strong debate on the state of the world. The barbers were in-house philosophers. They commanded a chair and an audience—people waiting for their hair to be cut. They rivalled each other for the fineness of argument and their depth of knowledge. The barbershops were universities of a kind and repositories for all the stifled ambition of men who were sidelined by prejudices of one sort or another. And also a lock-box of the vanities of men so hamstrung. These men became pig-headed about how they thought a life like this should be handled, about the order of the sexes, the order of children, the order of everything. One moment they were radicals preaching communism, the next they were putting women in purdah, the next decrying the pope, the next rooting out the devil from homosexuals.

  Paul dusted Oku’s neck and face with a brush of baby powder. Oku slipped him a couple bucks extra with the embarrassing thought that his student loan was practically gone and he’d better find a job. He might have to haul gyproc and wood this summer after all. Fine, he would have to bite his tongue and get Fitz to hook him up to the job, but it would be on different terms. He didn’t want Fitz hassling him and berating him. That fight at the breakfast table would give him some leverage. He got the sense in that small moment that he had put Fitz in his place once and for all.

  He shook himself out of Paul’s chair and left the barbershop, walking through a gauntlet of arguers on different subjects on the sidewalk. The whole strip of Eglinton between Marlee and Dufferin was full of West Indian stores selling hot food, haircuts, wigs, cosmetics, and clothes. There were stores selling barrels for stuffing goods to send to families in the Caribbean and there were stores selling green bananas, yams, pepper sauce, mangos, and salt cod, all tastes from the Caribbean carried across the Atlantic to this strip of the city. Wrapped in oil and sugar and pepper, waxed in onions and thyme; modified, hardened, and made acrid and stale by distance; hardly recognizable if any here were to really take a trip to where they once called home.

  This was how Oku experienced his mother and father each day. As people who somehow lived in the near past and were unable or unwilling to step into the present. But then in some ways they were ahead of him, he thought. Hadn’t he been dogging behind Jackie since high school? Hadn’t she moved on? Had herself a German boyfriend, a second-hand clothes store, a life he could not enter? And he had hung on anyway to the idea that one day she would notice him and bring him into the present. And he had been passive in this, seeming to do nothing to actually get there
with Jackie; afraid that if he pushed it she would definitely say no. He had thought that if he left it like a possibility, it could still happen.