What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  Carla approached the blue house now with some apprehension. This is how Angie must have approached the house. With a desire that was primal yet a certainty about how dangerous it was and how improbable. The house was not actually blue any more. Hard winters and neglect had scraped the blue paint off the front porch and the window flashing. The porch sagged forward into the patch of forsythia in the yard. Lavender sprang in the rest of the yard, and rose bushes that Nadine had nurtured for years were still stunted against a small trellis near the roadside where Nadine had tried to make them into a front hedge but the snow salt had defeated her efforts. Carla remembered Nadine year after year optimistically pouring dirt and manure around the bushes, clipping and watering, encouraging reluctant branches to grow.

  A surge of memory about her days in this house came over her. In her last years here Carla had hung about like a question mark. Her father told her that she had grown tall and angular, though none of his people were tall, none of Angie’s, either, that he knew of, so why was she so tall, so bony? He also noticed a hitherto allusive danger in her. Just like her mother. Carla was then eighteen, and Nadine no longer asked her to go to the market or to clean up. She did not want to be met with a recumbent defiance. To be truthful, Carla no longer needed to be asked to clean up. She did it swiftly, unasked. She did it, it seemed, as a way of avoiding trouble, avoiding contact. She took care of herself, always had, perhaps to the point of asceticism. She cleared away domestic chores with a briskness. But she took no pleasure in them as she had surely been taught.

  Nadine had shown her how to cook lovingly, how to polish tables and floors as if the people you were doing it for, your family, would enjoy it and therefore that would be your joy too. She had shown her how to shop for the best fruit, the best food. Her stepmother had smoothed her soft hands over a seam, showing her how her appearance must be lovingly put together. Carla had taken all this and turned it into competence. She glided through these lessons like an impatient note taker. She completed what they both asked of her not like a daughter but like a clerk, marking off their needs, completing their emotional desires like an office manager.

  All her efficiency was to make the time she had with them shorter and shorter; to reduce conversations to a minimum, to limit anything they might want from her. The only time they got an emotion out of her was when she would jump to Jamal’s defence. Though on that score she was mostly watchful, a kind of seething watchfulness that even Derek was slightly afraid of. Otherwise she had sculpted her face to passivity; cheerfulness or anger were imperceptible. She had thought that was what was needed in this house. She had learned not to call attention to herself. Outside or inside. She had stopped bringing any worry home to them. This house was full of enough hurt. Nothing could compare with what was already there. So any small trouble she took care of herself by giving it to the linden trees and the maple trees and the forsythia bushes on her way home. Lingering in the playground and park, she would stand under the bare limbs, watching the snow skiff against the bark, and recite her fear. Anyone walking by would see a girl thin and sickled against a maple, resounding its stillness and winter quiescence. From the brittle forsythia she would break off sticks to beat the pavement or run along fences, scolding like a teacher whoever had bothered her that day. By the time she arrived home her face was placid and even.

  She could not bear being in the same room with her father. She noticed this strangely one day when she had turned fifteen. She walked into the living room at four-thirty and rain was falling. It was not a rainstorm, just a steady rain. The couch was wet, and the chair was wet, and rain dripped with a tinny sound into the light fixture. The ceiling was that dreary watery grey that the sky gets. Through the window she could see that it was still the sunny crisp autumn day she had left outside. But in the room rain was falling. Her father was making a list of some kind, his lips moving as if counting, his head bent over the table, and his face drenched. His shirt stuck to his skin. There were puddles of water around his feet and the chair he sat in. Water dripping from his arms. Her father looked up from his pen like a struggling swimmer and stared at her as if to say, What is it you want now? then bent his head again to the table. Carla backed out of the rain-drenched room. Water seeped to her feet at the doorway. From this moment she started calling her father Derek. He did not stop her.

  After that each room in the house felt foreign, if it had ever felt like a home. She touched the furniture, looking for raindrop stains or softening of the wood. She examined the corners, looking for dampness. Though the room seemed dry when she was there alone, she couldn’t help feeling a strangeness, a peculiar chill or breeze on her skin. Carla began walking in socks on the dank floors.

  She saw that her father was home—his latest car was parked in his usual spot. She knew it was his car because of its shine and because of where it was parked. The house had no garage in the back, so he commandeered a precise spot in front of the house. Derek changed cars every four years. He knew nothing about cars, but he knew about fashion. He spent hours cleaning and buffing his car on the weekends. The car sitting outside the house today was a black Audi. He had a black car, sometimes green, but mostly black. Selling that could bail Jamal out of jail. Carla tried to suppress a surge of anger. It wouldn’t do to begin this way. Her father was vain; she had resolved to appeal to his vanity first. Anger was a last resort, and it would probably be useless anyway. And she wanted him to do more than simply bail Jamal out. She wanted him to be present. Take over the responsibility for Jamal. She didn’t know how she was going to put it. Derek would surely say he had been a father to Jamal; he would say he had rescued the boy enough. Enough for him meant only what didn’t put him out, she knew.

  Carla waited in the living room. Nadine had let her in and gone upstairs to get Derek. He came into the room, an expectant look on his face. Nadine hovered behind him, then decided to go to the kitchen.

  “I’ll get you both some lunch. Then we’ll have a nice visit.” She trailed off to the kitchen.

  Derek walked over to Carla and hugged her. As usual, she was sticklike in his arms.

  “How you doing, eh, how you doing?” He had clearly decided to meet her with bravado. “You don’t call me, you don’t come around. Don’t you wonder what’s become of your father?” He let her go, sensing her reserve. “Well, sit down, sit down, and tell me what you’re doing.”

  Which world exactly was he living in? she wondered. She sat quickly in the single chair in case he wanted to steer her to the couch with him. The living room had been done up in a springy pattern. There was an odd gayness to it. Derek dropped into the couch, reaching in his pocket for cigarettes. Nadine returned with a tray, a beer for Derek and a glass of juice for Carla. Carla watched as she served Derek. She was happy that Carla had come, she chatted in a manic tone.

  “Oh, Carla, it’s so good to see you. We don’t see any of you children any more. Your big brother is still in Montreal. Doesn’t look as if he’s coming back to Toronto. He’s got a great job there.”

  Carla bristled at the “big brother” reference. She hardly knew Anton. He had left home when Carla and Jamal arrived. There’d been a row with his father and he’d taken off. He was nineteen at the time. She only remembered scornfulness from him on his rare visits. And rudeness to Nadine about how she could stand taking care of that white bitch’s children. Nadine would say something about innocence and tell him to keep his voice down.

  Nadine gave her the glass of orange juice, her hand trembling. “Carla, darling, it’s so good to see you. Anyway, let me stop, stop fussing. I’ll get us something to eat. You used to like my chicken. I have some ready to go.”

  “No, Nadine, don’t bother.”

  “Bother! No bother. No bother at all. I don’t get to do this often.”

  She faded into the hallway. Carla took a sip of her drink. It was tepid.

  “So tell me how things are with you,” Derek said, dragging on his cigarette. “I know that boy Jamal is in jail agai
n. Nadine said she went to see him.”

  “That’s what I came to talk to you about.”

  “Carla, I’ve done my best for that boy. I have sacrificed—I can’t have him jeopardizing my home.”

  The glass flew out of Carla’s hand uncontrollably, it hit the wall on the left side of her father’s head. He was stunned, dropping his lit cigarette to the couch and ducking.

  “You’ve done your best!” She was enraged; she felt as if she had completely lost control of her body. Or rather, she thought later, gained control of her body. “Sacrificed! Sacrificed what? You vain, awful, disgusting man! You sacrificed my mother!” Carla was screaming, words tumbling out of her mouth. The same words she had told herself to hold back on. Nadine flew into the room.

  “Now, Carla, Carla, Derek, Derek, what’s the matter in here?”

  Carla was standing at her end of the room, ready, it seemed, to advance on Derek. Derek crouched, momentarily touching his face and searching for the lit cigarette in the folds of the couch. A piece of the glass had made a small cut on his cheek, another piece had landed in his collar. He gingerly removed it, at the same time trying to get to his feet. Nadine stood between them.

  “You never did nothing for Jamal. You just thought that he—me and him—messed up your fucking life. What did you do, huh? What? You’re such a fucking asshole. Let me get out of here.”

  She had to get past Nadine and Derek to leave the room; they both stood transfixed. “Move!” she screamed. She saw in her father a mix of terror and aggression. He couldn’t decide which one to act on, and she realized that she’d always found him weak at the core, there was always a cowardice there, a shrinking, under expensive shoes, expensive cars, his face shaved so precisely around his moustache and his smell of rich colognes. Today she’d noticed a small protruding gut and an old conceit that in his younger face must have seemed like daring but now was a calcified lechery. “Move!” she screamed again.

  “Please, Carla, wait a minute.” Nadine reached out to her pleadingly. “Just a minute, we’re a family. We can’t be like that.”

  This had always been Nadine’s foolish, thankless, and unrewarding project. She alone had had the right to say no, and yet she had taken it on. Carla felt a small pity for her. What torture it must have been to spend all those years raising another woman’s children and understanding her husband’s deep betrayal.

  “Look, Nadine, it’s not you, okay? I just can’t breathe the same fucking air as Derek.” Derek—she called him by his first name as if he were a sibling.

  “So why’d you come here, then?” Derek found his voice.

  “Because I was hoping I was wrong about you. I was hoping that you were human, you fucking jerk.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m your father.”

  “What the fuck does that mean, Derek? What the fuck does that mean? It means nothing to me, it means nothing to my brother, and it meant nothing to my mother. You made her walk off the edge of a building, it so didn’t mean anything.”

  “She was a crazy—”

  “No, Derek!” Nadine was appalled.

  “Say it, say it, ‘bitch,’ right?”

  Carla flew at him, slapping his face and kicking him. He fell over onto the couch again, his raised arms warding off her blows. He’d completely lost the composure he’d tried to affect. He’d known all along that beneath Carla’s calm lay a rage, rage that she could not express as a child but that would break out somehow. He was not a man who was afraid of women. He handled them emotionally, and if not emotionally, physically, without compunction. But this was not a woman, it was his daughter, and her rage was so primal it seemed to drain his own pretensions at violence. He lay on the couch, letting her hit him; he tried to fight her off, but she seemed stronger. Then he heard himself say, “Sorry.” It was the smallest sound, and he didn’t mean it so much as it escaped him. Carla didn’t seem to hear it. She just kept hitting him until Nadine, recovering, held her. She wrenched herself away from Nadine and without another word left the house, slamming the door.

  Outside on the sidewalk she searched in her jeans for her keys. The shiny black Audi sat at the curb. Beginning at the closest tail light she scored the skin of the car all the way square to the far tail light. “Fucking prick!” she yelled at the house. An old neighbour out digging up his spring garden looked at her, surprised. He and her father used to come outside on Saturdays in the summer and polish their cars together. “What are you looking at, asshole?” she screamed at him. She unlocked her bike and rode down the street and across the Danforth. She felt exhilarated. She didn’t feel worried or troubled, she felt refreshed. She had turned something on her father. What it was wasn’t clear. The ride across the city would tell her. She sped along beside the traffic over the Bloor Viaduct.

  TWENTY

  THE RESEARCH HE’D BEEN DOING was walking through the park. If he got to know Alexandra Park, he figured he’d know something about Jackie. So he would take the walk through the park not to run into her by chance, well, not wholly, but to gain something of her that he might have, like everything else perhaps, taken for granted. The one time that Jackie had allowed them to come to her house was when they were all suspended from high school. He only remembered vaguely. Her mother teaching them to play euchre, a glass of Southern Comfort at hand and a cigarette to her lips. Jackie was uncomfortable, he remembered. She kept emptying her mother’s ashtray and wiping the table. That was years ago, but now that he revisited the occasion in his mind, that is what he recalled. Jackie’s discomfort. None of them had thought anything of the surroundings. They all lived in houses with their parents, but Jackie’s parents’ tiny apartment did not strike them at the time as so different. His walk now told him something else. His parents weren’t rich or even well off by any means, but they obviously lived better than people in Vanauley Way. And this is where Jackie had always lived.

  He knew, as a black man his age knows, that the park had a reputation. It was turf in the low-level war for such places waged by poor people. If there was history being made in the city, if history was the high-level war rich people waged for their own turf in the city—those wars about waterfront developments and opera houses and real-estate deals and privatization contracts—then the poor waged wars for control of their small alleyways and walkways, their streets and the trade in unofficial goods. Their currency was not stocks, wealth and influence peddling, but tough reputations and threats of physical damage; their gains weren’t stock options and expensive homes but momentary physical control and perennially contested fearsomeness. This war was a more volatile war, perhaps. There was no cushion of security to land on if you lost a skirmish.

  Come to think of it, now that he recalled, that experience hadn’t brought them closer to Jackie, hadn’t brought him, to be exact; she had become more aloof with him. Her mother had taken a liking to him and had said to him jokingly, “You sweet on my Jackie, eh, boy? You’d make a fine man, you will,” and Jackie had frozen him out after that. Though he was so stupid, he thought now, that he’d kept asking Jackie how her mother was. He had liked her. There was a sweet drunken look in her eyes and a faded beauty to her face—something lurking that had come alive when she said, “You sweet on my Jackie, eh, boy?” A glint in her language, something smoky and seductive. Jackie had given her a hateful look and said, “Mom, puh-lease!” And the disdain gathered in that “puh-lease!” had fallen on him in some ways ever since.

  Fair enough, he thought, nobody wanted to have the approval of their parents for their love life—after all, look what a mess they’d made of their own, for God’s sake. His own parents’ marriage went through seasons of emotional drought bordering on hatred, then periods of what only seemed to be nostalgia for their younger, more exciting selves. He certainly wouldn’t take a drop of advice from them about love. And he would suspect anyone they thought would suit him as a lover. But that was then and this was now. Come to think of it, he had been faithful to that moment of Jackie’s m
other’s seduction. She had added her own allure to what he felt for Jackie.

  What he felt now was no teenaged crush but a big man’s love and lust, a powerful pull that told him he would not enjoy his life fully if she were not close to him, if he could not talk to her, if he could not always be in the orbit of her face. So he had resolved that if he wanted her, he would have to know what she knew, walk where she had walked, and figure out the things that had given shape to her. Alexandra Park was one of those things.

  He’d never met Jackie’s father, but there was a tall man, just as tall as he, coming toward him who was unmistakably him. Oku felt nervous but realized that Jackie’s father didn’t know him, so he could easily pass him by. The man had a limp to his walk, probably not a limp from any injury but from some sense of style. His head leaned to one side the way black men in sixties movies leaned their heads. A comfortable thought passed through Oku. The brother was old school. It was that lean of the head that told him this was Jackie’s father. Jackie had the same slant, the same way of sizing you up at the same time as making you know that she was dangerous. Jackie resembled her mother more than her father, but his height and that threatening lean of his head Jackie had taken from him. He limped toward Oku, and assessing him as no threat, he walked by. Oku called to him: “Mr. Bernard.”