by Dionne Brand
Carla felt weaker than she’d ever felt. As if she could not hold him up any longer. Whatever Jamal thought, however he located her exhortations to get it together, however he dismissed these and went his perilous way, he depended on her to be there. And Carla was losing faith in her ability to support him. She’d helped him find a room, staked him for two months’ rent. He’d been thrown out, of course. The nice Portuguese family, as Carla called them, did not abide the ganja smoking and the friends and the music in their rooming house. She thought afterward that she must have been crazy to imagine that Jamal would be cool and get along in that house. But they had seemed nice people who would look out for him. She was, she understood deep down, under the ridiculous fantasy that Jamal wasn’t too far gone yet, too savvy. Or that all he wanted was independence, as she did, and he would take hold of his opportunities, becoming the reliable, loving brother she needed. But that, she knew, was fantasy, though she tried often enough to impose it. Truthfully, he had only been for a short time the cuddly baby brother. At any rate it was a fiasco, and she had to forfeit the two hundred and fifty dollars surety she had left with the Medeiroses before the damage Jamal and his friends left in the room. She’d even gotten him a job with Binh, but that too had been brief when he showed up late every single day and finally not at all.
It wasn’t merely these kinds of things that she could no longer support him with, it was the faith that he needed from her that was waning. Between holding him up and mining the short memory of her mother she was exhausted—so exhausted she didn’t feel exhaustion, just an empty dryness. A distraction that made her leave packages undelivered till the next day. It made her want to wake up each morning and simply wander about; it made her want to sit at the window all day watching the street below or watching the changing light of the spring unravelling. The only one she could think of handing Jamal over to was her father. Not because he had any interest but because she could think of no one else. No one else was implicated except herself, and her dead mother, who had handed Jamal to her because her father wasn’t there. Okay, she decided, time for the bastard to take over. The venom of that last thought was half-hearted. She didn’t even have that left, though no doubt when she came face to face with her father, it was certain to renew itself.
She used to be curious about her father’s vanity. Vanity was all it could be called. How could he have survived her mother’s death and a life after of denial if not for some deep, thick artery of vanity in him. A vanity that he could not suppress even for the well-being of a baby. He had acted as if Jamal were his rival and not his child. His rival for Angie and then for Nadine and then for life. As if Jamal had replaced him. At first she had loved her father as her mother had, as a child would, in the exhilarating domestic space of her mother’s apartment—their home—where he would visit with gifts, but where she would be banished to the living room while he made love to her mother. When her mother died, her feelings turned to ambivalence. She felt the same excited joy to be in his presence, but something momentous had disrupted the bonds between them, and so she shrank from him out of uncertainty and then out of loyalty to her mother. At twenty-three, there was no longer any doubt or ambivalence in her about him. There was downright hatred. She detested him.
Going to the blue house all those years ago with Angie was a vivid memory. Even after Carla herself had come to live in the house, the memory of it, in the way she had experienced it with Angie, remained. As if it was a different place altogether. Carla’s hand was sweaty in Angie’s palm. They were walking toward the house. They stood across from the house. A blue house with rose bushes in front. It was across the bridge, toward the east of the city. They would leave their apartment on a Saturday afternoon, take the subway to Chester station, and walking through the Greek section of town, turn down a small street off the Danforth and another twisting street and then another and come to the house. A family lived there. A man, a woman, a teenager as tall as her father. Angie came here to watch them. They were not anyone Carla knew. Except the man, her father. She saw him kiss the woman once on leaving the house; they said goodbye to each other and waved. He got into his car and drove off. The woman stood at the screen door until he drove off. Carla and her mother simply watched. Angie tried to remain invisible at first, but sometimes she didn’t care and stood on the opposite sidewalk, watching. Sometimes she muttered to herself. Sometimes the man looked across the street to where they were. He seemed not to see them. Carla thought he would come over, but he didn’t; he went to his car and started the engine.
In the summer or in the winter, whatever season, her palms sweated in Angie’s. She didn’t mind going in the summer, but she did not like the winter, standing there, watching with Angie. Standing in the falling snow, arrested like trees unable to move, they neither of them brushed the snow away. Her balaclava damp and warm, her breathing visible, she waited for Angie to turn and leave as usual. They must have seemed like statues humped against the weather. There was some timing to it. They would be there for what seemed like hours or what seemed like minutes depending on the season. Then Angie would squeeze her hand slightly, not a squeeze but a pressure, and they would turn and leave.
Some days the blue house across the street seemed empty. No one came out or went in. Those days Angie was restless, unhappy. Carla could sense the fine difference in Angie’s unhappiness, the fluctuations in intensity, that the dead look of the house produced. This she was learning even before her mother’s death. The calibration of happiness and unhappiness. Somehow she understood as one understands air the changes in the people she lived with, her mother, her sometimes father.
They were already a family of quietness. She was a watchful child, not a child of too much exuberance. She would come into a room and know to be quiet just by the look from her mother or her sometimes father, just by the location of their bodies around the room. Even when they were in pleasant conversation, the tenor of a word or a pause would alert her as to someone about to misunderstand someone else. For that reason she was a slender child, a child who made room with her own body so that she would not occupy so much space that she would be unduly noticed. Or call too much attention to herself. She cultivated a reediness to intercept their tones, their changes in chord. The efforts to hone this faculty became physical in her. There appeared no room for her despite the fact they all seemed sometimes to be fighting over her.
When Jamal was born, she felt a small relief in his wailing cries, his sudden tantrums that would throw the apartment into a panic. That is when she had fallen in love with him. He screamed and kicked and would not be shushed. He woke up at odd hours and woke everyone else up. He misbehaved, if a baby could misbehave.
The man crossed the road once, walking slowly toward them. Carla could not make out the emotion of the man’s body, if it was threatening or not. He seemed to be looking at them. Her hand slipped in Angie’s. Angie held it tighter. Her sometimes father came, stood inches from them. No one said anything. She felt rather than saw Angie’s body grow erect. Carla’s own head seemed to receive a blow, though she had not been hit; she felt weighted down. Her slippery hand was held in a stronger and stronger vice. Then her sometimes father turned and crossed the street again toward his car. She heard Angie gather phlegm from her throat, she heard it land softly in the snow.
From then on when they came, the man ignored them, and Carla thought she had probably made up the confrontation because life went on, sometimes there was even a festive feeling about their journey. Angie would pack a ham sandwich for Carla, she would stop on the Danforth and buy her an orange pop. Only the woman at the screen door seemed irritated. Though she never approached Carla and Angie, she stood at the door for a moment longer after the man’s car took off.
Carla heard the wheezing and gargle in Angie’s throat when the man appeared. The sounds boiled and gathered but then subsided when the car left. At times she suspected some strength in her mother, some purpose that if unleashed would devastate the man. Carla al
ways anticipated Angie, suddenly agile, leaping at the man who was both not her father and her father. And then at other times there was a weakness: just after he left, for a moment Angie seemed on the verge of tears or falling.
Even when the house seemed empty, Angie still went. Carla felt an anxiety in her. In fact, Angie went more frequently then. More than once a week. She seemed agitated, hurrying, not stopping to buy Carla an orange pop or an apple, muttering to herself about hiding. He had ruined her, she said, lied to her, hurt her. When the family stayed away from the house, Angie seemed to burn. She became more and more voluble. She hurled sentences at the house. He took her for a fool, he was a liar, he promised her; her mouth thin, exhausting on her words until her lips were ash white. Then Carla felt a sweat around her neck and covered her eyes so that people passing would not see her.
When they returned on their next visit, Angie rushed toward him with all her intention, leaving Carla on the other side of the street. The sometimes father turned from locking his car door; he seemed not the man Angie needed to berate. He was sighing, taking a deep breath as people do arriving home, happy to have left work. His face was relaxing, his hand was reaching for his pocket to find a cigarette. Angie was disarmed for a fleeting second by his casualness. She was expecting something to be burning in him too. She was expecting a face creased in worry or sin. Surely deeds leave a mark, she thought, but no, his face was settling into placidity, into coming home like any ordinary person. She would have to figure this one out, but she rekindled what was left of herself and flew at him, saying, “How could you? You promised, you promised.”
The man raised his arms as if to ward off a blow. He felt numb from another day wondering what the hell he had got himself mixed up in. She was crazy. Angie surprised him and frightened him. His instinct was to run or fall to the ground. He did both, running toward his door, fumbling his key in the lock, putting the screen door between them, and falling into his hallway. Why he hadn’t hit her he could not make out. His instinct should have made him do so. But he had felt flushed and heartsick for a moment, a sudden dejection had washed over him. Behind the door he felt ashamed for running and thought of going back outside to assert himself, but he simply locked the door when he heard the balmy sounds of his home and family, the smells that filled the house—the roast and fried potatoes from the kitchen. Finally, he opened the door, but Angie and the child were gone. He came out farther, looking down and up the street. There was no one there, the street was as usual: his street, his car sitting outside, the darkness of early evening had greyed everything. Perhaps it hadn’t happened.
The street was quiet, a neighbour putting out garbage. He had to do something about her soon. She couldn’t come to his house like that with the child. It had been a mistake on his part. She was such a small woman, he hadn’t thought she would run him down like this. He’d promised her, no doubt, and at the time he had intended to fulfil that promise. Such a pretty woman, and she had seemed to need him and she had made him feel powerful and important. He had not looked at her clearly beyond those things and beyond the fact that a little something on the side was not unheard of with him.
When Angie first became pregnant, he did not discourage it entirely, but he told her that she would be on her own; he would support the baby, but he couldn’t be there the whole time. When she had Carla, he had second thoughts. Perhaps this was the family he was supposed to be with, perhaps he had made a mistake initially with Nadine. He moved in with Angie for six months, but then something pulled him home again. Indecision plagued him, even as facts multiplied. The fact of Nadine, the fact of Angie and the baby, the fact of a family he had already, the fact of a second family, the fact, the fact … He felt fear and self-scorn and rage and self-doubt. But he also felt excitement, passion. Another kind of rage. He was in the middle of a crisis. He was in the middle of love. Ownership. A contest for himself. It seemed as if he was always awake, always startled. He noticed everything with a brightness. There was the other side of that too. If there was a smudge on his black shoes, it made him panic, any dust and disarray annoyed and frightened him, the faint mould on the bathroom walls disturbed him.
When he saw her a week later, after he had run away from her, it settled him. He went to the apartment. He fucked her hard. He told her not to come back to his house. He told her he was going to leave Nadine. He needed time. If she didn’t leave him alone, he was going to leave and never come back, never fuck her again. He told her everything, many things, all contradictory and all true. He said he loved her; he said he couldn’t live without her, Angie; he said he couldn’t leave Nadine at this moment. He said he was staying for his boy. He said never, never come to his house. She was standing across the street the next day. It should have disturbed him, but he was relieved. He didn’t want the feeling of crisis to end.
She held the threat over him that at any moment she would kill him, betray him—she had already done that by coming to his house. They both understood. They were beyond betrayal. Otherwise he would have done something. He could easily have charged her with stalking him, with threatening him. She had established with him that he would never rest, and she thought he had accepted it. What else was this choreography between them? What else was it but his acceptance of a thing he owed.
Early one morning when Carla was still a child and Jamal was just a baby, Angie had taken them with her to the bank. On the way Angie played a game. A game where the rules shifted at every turn. After all, it was her game and a game she was making up as she went along. A superstitious game. Here’s how it would go, she told herself, if someone said hello to her on the way, she wouldn’t do it. No one said hello. If the bus came before she arrived at the corner of Church and Wellesley. The bus was already gone. If she saw a man in a yellow shirt, she wouldn’t do it. She saw no man in a yellow shirt. If, at the bank, someone seeing her with children made her go ahead. At the bank no one gave her leeway. Angie was waiting for a look that said that she existed, that her life was understandable. That was what the game meant. She tried to suggest it with her own eyes, to say, Hey, how’s it going today? I’m tired, what about you? But cold stares came back at her. Or what she thought was coldness.
She turned and walked out of the bank after taking out twenty of the fifty dollars in her account. But Angie knew that she had come for more. She had come to feel as if she were here and alive. Well, no reason to think that the teller in her own life, with a boss over her and her hopes in lottery tickets, could possibly know that she needed this, no reason at all. But she was depending on the teller anyway—as a compass. She hoped. But didn’t see the woman who sold her tomatoes and flowers at the corner store, from whom sometimes she could see a glimmer of familiarity. With what? With life, with the fact that Derek was off, perhaps, with a woman; this wasn’t the real thing, but it had caused her to look at the real thing, which was that she was of no interest to anyone. Except the children, and that was instinctive, just as Derek’s need for her was instinctive. Or perhaps his was vanity. Someone to bed, to feed him, and someone to mistreat, which she gathered was instinctive too. But all this hadn’t to do with Derek. She realized that if she was to do it, she had to be clear, and this game was cheating because she had already decided. Except today she needed a sign. A simple sign would have done it. Maybe going to the bank was the mistake. Who could expect a sign from that? But perhaps she was going at cross purposes all the time, knowing that nothing could deter her from the decision she had made. On her way back to the apartment, she still played the game. If the baby didn’t cry, she wouldn’t, if the next person she saw carried a green bag, if, if, if … When she arrived at the apartment building, all of her ifs had run out.
Angie remembered a headline in the Globe and Mail newspaper box on the corner of Parliament and Wellesley, “Breastfeeding prevents cancer in women.” She burst into a laugh. Well, fine, let the whole city get on her tits then. She had ended up being the same milk cow as her mother and sister-in-law. Soon she’d be
wearing black too, in living mourning of the sin of being a woman. What, after all, had she wanted? Passion. Not secret passion but public passion. Public red-glowing passion. And that had led her here anyway. Well, she sure wouldn’t die of cancer. The thought put her in a silly mood.
She got to the twenty-first-floor apartment, took the children’s light coats off, straightened the living room, put the baby down, gave Carla a pencil to draw with, hauled a chair to the balcony, picked the baby up again, chuckling to herself over the headline. She smoothed the baby’s cheeks, and he chuckled too. Then Angie went back onto the balcony and stood on the chair, and as if suddenly remembering herself, the baby in her hand, she called to Carla, who was singing that song she’d taught her and which Carla had sung all the way back from the bank. “Carla, stop that noise now. Come here, luvvy, and take the baby.” Carla came and held Jamal. “Put the pencil down now. Hold tight, dear, and go inside and put him down on the sofa. Stay there till Mummy comes, Mummy has to do something. There’s Mummy’s girl. There’s my baby.” Angie waited until Carla had gone into the apartment, then she stepped off the balcony.
Carla stayed singing to the baby until she was tired. The baby was screaming. She left him on the sofa and went back to the balcony to tell her mother, but Angie had disappeared. Perhaps she was in the bedroom, Carla thought. Then she noticed the chair was tipped over. She forgot about the baby. She’d always wanted to see over the balcony, but Angie wouldn’t let her. She straightened the chair, climbed up, knelt on the seat, and peered over the balcony.
A woman was lying on the knob of grass at the front of the building way down below. She would tell Angie. No, she wouldn’t tell Angie because then Angie would know that she had climbed on the chair. A skinny brown-haired girl and a man naked to the waist on a balcony below looked up at her, screaming, “Get down from there.” Carla jumped off the chair and ran to the sofa to hush Jamal. Angie didn’t come back. She heard sirens and more yelling, but she was afraid to go to the balcony again. Angie was a long time. The baby blubbered and sniffed himself to sleep. She remembered to put his comforter in his mouth. His eyes were wet, his mouth turned down in a sob. Carla sat on the sofa with him in case he woke up. Angie was taking so long. She got her pencil and sat writing squiggles to herself. A big A meant Angie, a wormy line meant said, a dash meant to, another wormy line, this time to the length of the page, meant hold the baby.