How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  Afterwards, her first time back to Jamaica, Shirley had been nervous. In life, then and now, she is only afraid of one person. As soon as she walked through the door, her mother paused the show she was watching to take a long look at her daughter before asking, “Why yuh trouble yuh nose?” Later Diane would ask, with pity in her voice, “Who tell yuh fi trouble yuh nose?” It was as though her mother’s questions gave Shirley the permission she needed to truly regret. She’d never imagined, though she could see what people meant when they said that she’d become more beautiful, that her nose had meant so much to her. It was, after all, only a nose. But it had been hers. It was the same nose that the women on her mother’s side carried.

  “Wha’ happen to yuh nose?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened to it.”

  “Yuh going fi look inna mi face an’ lie to me like seh mi ah idiot?” Diane shook her head at her daughter, and for a few moments looked deep in thought as though she was trying to remember something. Finally, she turned from Shirley and her nose, and returned to the forensic psychology show she had been watching.

  * * *

  —

  When Shirley opens the bathroom door, she sees energetic hands, tongues, and Yaheem and Heidi hurriedly pulling apart. She is too tired, bored, and repulsed to ask the obvious questions. “No wonder you two were so quiet,” she says, before reclosing the bathroom door and sitting back down on the toilet seat. Could she fire Heidi for this? Technically, she hadn’t done anything wrong. If Shirley was honest with herself, she would admit that she never liked her assistant. From the way Heidi shook her hand the first day, it was obvious that she would take her job too seriously. She acted as though she was curing cancer or saving babies or doing something much more profound than assisting a pop star. She wore stylish frames and fashionable vintage clothes, but her face was pale and plain and the red lipstick she wore daily only ended up looking too harsh against her skin tone, revealing the imposter she was, a girl from a Midwestern farming town who moved to New York. They had this in common—the both of them from places important to those who inhabited them, less so for those who had moved away, and beyond the stretches of the imagination for those with other places on their minds. Shirley had considered this commonality whenever she overheard Heidi talking in an exasperated way about her hometown. Whenever anyone asked Heidi where she was from, she told them and then she would say, “But I’ve been in New York for thirteen years,” as if that was all that mattered.

  The job used to belong to Kerry-Ann, one of Shirley’s childhood friends from back home. They were sometimes photographed in matching outfits—the both of them in high heels and that season’s shade of lipstick. Shirley had industry friends but genuine intimacy and a shared history were harder to find, and so she clung to old friends. When it was revealed that Kerry-Ann had been stealing Shirley’s clothes and selling them, she looked the other way for as long as she could. When Kerry-Ann started taking jewelry, there was a confrontation. At the end, it wasn’t the stealing that had broken Shirley’s heart but that her best friend wouldn’t admit to what she’d done. Shirley had one of her security guards trail Kerry-Ann to a high-end secondhand store because otherwise she wanted to doubt that her friend was capable of stealing from her one moment and smiling into her face the next. It wasn’t about the clothes and jewelry. They’d fought, told each other how they really felt. Kerry-Ann said that Shirley treated her as though she was her servant. “What the fuck do you think I’m paying you for?” Shirley had asked. “Do you think I’m paying you to be my friend?” That was four months ago and they hadn’t spoken since.

  * * *

  —

  Ten minutes later, when Shirley reopens the bathroom door, both Yaheem and Heidi are gone. She runs her eyes over the loftlike room, a temporary living space since her own place is being renovated, as though there is anywhere for them to hide. There are white floral arrangements on tables, high windows revealing a New York City skyline that looks like a postcard, and designer clothes lying in puddles on the floor. After a long day on set, this aloneness is a relief to her. She hopes that they don’t come back from wherever they’ve gone to. Shirley plops back onto the bed. She picks up her phone from where she’d left it on the bed. The rapper wants to come over. She ignores him.

  Now asleep, she is still wearing the purple extensions—waist-long, a color vibrant and living, the shade of purple like the inside of a star apple from back home. Recently, in a documentary about the sea, Shirley had seen purple coral, and she’d been surprised that such a thing of beauty existed at the bottom of the ocean. Water frightened her—when it was deep and stretched far. When she was a little girl, there was a river close to where she lived. There was a day when Shirley swam too far out into the river. The water was above her head before someone pulled her out. For a long time afterwards, her mother would say that it was God why Shirley survived. Diane had brought up the almost drowning recently. Shirley had posed nearly naked for another magazine and Diane had called to put her daughter in her place, finally telling her, “Yuh neva drown dat day fi ah reason. I don’t see why yuh can’t sell music wid yuh clothes on.”

  What her mother didn’t understand and what Shirley couldn’t explain because it would reveal the slackness of her thinking, how far she really had come, was that she found that she could get used to plenty of things, including feeling comfortable, even bored, with her own nudity. At first, when the industry had been new, when the people in charge wanted her ass and her breasts to do what the music couldn’t, she feigned comfort with her sexuality. Diane thought that Shirley should do a gospel album. It had seemed such a random suggestion until Shirley remembered that when she was a little girl she had wanted to use her voice to lead people to Christ. Now, it was a dream that seemed a lifetime ago and so well meaning that it might as well belong to another dreamer.

  In a few days, Shirley would take time off to go to Jamaica, the only place in the world where she could truly relax. Everywhere else, whether she was sipping a beer in a bikini on a yacht in St. Tropez or dipping out of a club in the early hours of a New York morning with a rumored new boyfriend, someone could snap a photograph of her, and the moment would be taken from her and turned into something other than what it was. Jamaica was the place she went to feel unburdened. Maybe because it was the only place she ever felt as though she truly belonged. She would stay in the big house she had bought for her mother in a neighborhood where wealthy islanders lived and foreigners kept vacation homes. Diane would cook meals for her, all of her favorite things to eat, and she would care for her only daughter, babying her and reminding her not to allow fame to turn her mad. It hadn’t all been recognition, awards, and money made. There was the high-profile, tumultuous, and at the end dangerous relationship with Huzzah the Rapper—the relationship had nearly broken Shirley, and the whole world had seen the bruises on her face. The image was reprinted again and again as though it was something the world needed to be reminded of. There was the period of time when Shirley regularly got high. There was the abortion that had to be had. And there was that surgery that made her more beautiful. Most of what happens to Shirley is unknown to her mother. It comes to Diane not in details but in a foggy sense of knowing, a shadow of everything her daughter has lived—the way a mother intuits her child is lying but may not know the reason for the lie or what the truth is. Nevertheless, Shirley’s career, the highs and lows of fame, have been far better and far worse than both mother and daughter could have hoped for. Shirley is only twenty-seven.

  Part 2

  The first day back home, Shirley lies in bed, sometimes sleeping and other times just lying there, rubbing the whole business in her mind so that every detail remains shiny. Finally, when the day is coming to a close, Diane demands that her daughter sit up and eat the dinner that she has prepared for her: chicken foot soup, Shirley’s favorite. She sits up and takes the bowl from her mother, and realizes for
the first time today that she is hungry. It seems that she hasn’t been so hungry in a long time. She looks down at the thick soup for a long moment—yam, dumplings, and chicken feet swimming in a pumpkin broth.

  “Something wrong wid di soup?” Diane asks.

  “Nothing, Mommy,” Shirley says, and then before another wave of hunger can hit her, she eats so quickly that the soup burns her tongue.

  “Di soup taste good, Mommy.”

  “Yuh like di yellow yam? Di helper find ah nice piece ah di market day ’fore yestideh. I use di rest ah it inna di soup.”

  “Mi love it. Mi nuh know when last mi eat chicken foot soup.”

  “Why yuh nuh have di ’oman who cook for yuh mek it? Yuh paying her plenty ah money—yuh can tell her what fi cook. What she cook give yuh? White people food?”

  “Mi nuh want anyone but you or some other Jamaican cook Jamaican food fi me. Waste of time to put up wid di disappointment. One time I was craving curry chicken and rice and peas and I told Meghan to mek it fi me. I mek sure to tell her to make it Jamaican-style because one time I ordered jerk chicken at this expensive restaurant in Manhattan and it taste like dem fling some jerk sauce pon di chicken and call it jerk chicken. Mi couldn’t eat it. When Meghan bring di food, I saw that she put mango inna di curry chicken, and the rice and peas ah two separate dish. Mi almost bawl. Mi could only ask her, why she put mango inna di curry chicken?”

  Diane laughs energetically, and Shirley laughs with her, though less impressed by the old joke. It isn’t the first time that Diane has heard about the chef’s failures to cook satisfying Jamaican food. It pleases her that she can still provide for her daughter in this way—that even now after all the money Shirley has made, there is still this opportunity to care for her.

  After Shirley finishes eating, Diane takes the bowl from her and watches as she crawls back under the covers. She is petite—like a little girl under the covers. Even Diane is constantly surprised by how much larger and more womanly her daughter looks on television, in magazines, and even in person when she is all dressed up in her makeup and high heels. Oh, how it would surprise the millions of fans all over the world to see Shirley now—her weave a natty mess, her skin free of makeup and a few pimples sprouting here and there, lying in bed in her panties and a T-shirt as though anything is wrong, as though she isn’t one of the most blessed people in the world. Diane briefly considers that it’s possible that Shirley can’t help a certain sadness—after all, Diane’s own mother used to lie in bed sometimes when the world got to be too heavy, and it was said that her mother’s mother did the same thing. The sadness is a family thing, it seems—somehow it had gone and skipped Diane and her sisters, all of them women who refuse to lie down on a problem. Shirley had told her mother that a man she knew was killed by a drug overdose, but further questions had revealed that Shirley had just met the man, had never been romantically involved with him and in fact he was gay, and so Diane didn’t understand why her daughter was so affected by the whole thing, and whenever she broached the topic, Shirley didn’t have much to say. Diane takes one more glance at the small figure under the covers, and for a moment has the desire to pull the sheets off her daughter and demand that she face life, and warn her too that she didn’t come into success to become one of those miserable rich people. Instead, Diane leaves the room, closing the door a little harder than necessary.

  * * *

  —

  “Satan is aftah you,” Diane had said, and the words had seemed so true and so absurd that Shirley had wanted to cry. That night when Yaheem and Heidi snorted the cocaine, that night when Shirley came out of the bathroom to see that the both of them had left, Heidi had gone home and Yaheem had gone, according to what Shirley would find out later, to a gay club where he would go home with a man. Later, they would find several drugs in his system. He was so briefly known, only just coming up, that his death had come and gone quietly. Night after night when sleep betrayed Shirley in that city they say never sleeps, there was little information to be acquired from the Internet. One of the few places that covered Yaheem’s death was a newspaper in Louisiana—a local newspaper in a town that Shirley had never heard of before. “Yaheem was the son of a minister and a schoolteacher, who were shocked to learn about their son’s lifestyle and drug use. He filmed a music video with pop singer Shirley but in light of his recent death it’s unknown whether the music video will be released.” Shirley had arranged for Heidi to send flowers to the funeral. She had wanted to go, had wanted to travel to that little town in Louisiana, but she was afraid to face the grieving relatives. How to own even a little slice of grief for a man she’d only known for a day? She wouldn’t belong.

  A shame that the biggest thing he was to do was the music video they filmed together and that could never be released now. Shirley had fought—somehow it seemed important for the world to see it—but the people above had refused. Pick another guy, they said. Film another video, they said. But Shirley didn’t want another guy and she didn’t want another video, and eventually the people above had asked her, “Weren’t you supposed to take some time off?” Oh, she said, remembering, because she really had forgotten. It had been hard to leave for a place so much farther from where she’d last seen Yaheem. She wrote down a line in her journal, “I am being haunted by a man I barely know.” Maybe the words would work in a song. Once in a while, she wrote down song lyrics for someday. She’d long wrestled with the idea of attempting to write her own music in an effort to become the kind of artist with a stronger hold on her career instead of the pop star robot she at times felt like.

  “Satan is aftah you,” Diane had said, and when her mother leaves the room holding the bowl with the bones from the chicken foot soup, Shirley begins to cry, gentle sobs that grow louder so that it feels as though her entire body is crying, and finally, she exhausts herself and falls back asleep.

  * * *

  —

  Diane is addicted to crime documentary shows because American crimes disturb her in ways that beckon for her attention. Of course, Jamaicans could be violent—after all, it was said that the worst-behaving slaves were sent to Jamaica, which accounted for the island’s high murder rates. But killings in Jamaica lacked the imagination of the white men and women Diane watched on the Investigation Discovery channel. White women stole babies and poisoned lovers for health insurance, and white men brought guns into schools and killed their wives for the love of another woman. When she was a little irrational, she feared that she would lose Shirley and her remains would be discovered in some lonely corner of New York City. Diane didn’t doubt that Shirley surrounded herself with questionable characters, and now that she and Kerry-Ann were no longer talking, there was no one she trusted to protect her daughter.

  Even now, eleven years later, Diane wonders if she should regret sending Shirley, then sixteen, to America, where a music career was promised to her. The promises had been kept, more than kept, as it became evident that Shirley’s potential for stardom was more than anyone thought it to be. But what had been lost? What kind of mother allows her daughter to leave at such a vulnerable age? Who had wanted fame more—Shirley or herself? It was a question she was always asking herself. Because if she had wanted it less, could she have sent Shirley away?

  * * *

  —

  When Shirley enters the living room and sits next to her mother, she pulls some of the thin blanket her mother is using onto her own legs in the easy way of two people accustomed to sharing. Shirley had never quite understood why her mother never married or had more children—how sad that she watched so much gruesome television by herself.

  “Yuh done sleep?” Diane asks, looking at her daughter only briefly before she turns her attention back to the television.

  “What’s dis one about?”

  “A couple say dem ’ave open relationship an’ di husband get jealous an’ kill di wife other man.�
��

  “Wow,” Shirley said, looking with surprise at the photograph of the couple because the man looks like he might wear khaki pants to work and the wife has a haircut reminiscent of a suburban mother.

  “Tell me ’bout it. Di husband ask her fi stop see di other man and she continue fi see him. I neva understand why people can’t understand dat wha’ happen in di dark mus’ come out in di light. It may tek a while but it a go ’appen. Always ’appen.”

  Shirley couldn’t help feeling a little bit reprimanded. There was so much her mother didn’t know. Ironically, the song that elevated her career, bringing her worldwide recognition, was the single “Don’t Tell My Mother,” from her third album, eight years ago. It was a reggae pop song that told the story of a young girl who wanted to do the kinds of natural, inevitable, and mildly dangerous things that call to young girls. Ooh. Ooh. Shirley had made rapturous eye contact with a boy who was really a man and danced in the music video in a bikini top and tiny denim shorts, the kind of clothing her mother would have never allowed her to leave the house wearing. But Diane had been in Jamaica when the music video was filmed, and later when she saw it and spoke to Shirley on the telephone, she had said, “Mi neva dream mi would see mi child pon TV like dat,” but it had sounded like and unlike a reproach at the same time, as though her mother had already accepted with a dull reluctance the fact that fame came with expensive entry and maintenance fees. Shirley had been disappointed to be unchallenged.

  “So when yuh an’ Kerry-Ann going to mek up back?” Diane says, turning from the television now that the show is finished.

  “Mi nuh know,” says Shirley, already regretting this conversation and the fact that she didn’t return to her bedroom after using the bathroom.