How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  “Mi hear seh she’s living wid a white man in Los Angeles,” Diane says.

  “Who tell you dat?”

  “Her mother.”

  “Mi know she in Los Angeles but I didn’t know she a live wid a man.”

  “Wha’? Yuh jealous?”

  “Mi jealous? No. Why yuh ask me dat?” Shirley is rising. It frustrated her that her mother could assume the worst.

  “No reason. I know seh you an’ her were like sisters an’ even fava each other an’ mi trying fi think of what could ah come between you two.”

  Shirley hadn’t told her mother about the stealing because she knew her mother would tell Kerry-Ann’s mother, and ultimately she wanted to spare Kerry-Ann that indignity.

  “Sit back down,” Diane says. “Yuh know you too miserable? Fram when you likkle pickney yuh miserable. Memba when mi use to call yuh old lady?”

  Shirley sits back down and can’t help smiling. “Mi wasn’t miserable. I was spoiled. Yuh bring it upon yuhself by spoiling me.”

  “Is not me who spoil yuh. Ah yuh fadah. ’Im neva like fi hear yuh cry.”

  Shirley’s father had left Jamaica when she was still a little girl. He’d moved to Canada, where he had family living, and though he had promised to send for Diane and Shirley, they heard less and less of him until it was evident that he had carried on with a life without them. When Shirley’s first album came out, he’d gotten in touch with Diane and she had listened for several minutes while he talked excitedly about Shirley and then she had told him never to contact her again. When she told Shirley about the phone call, she’d called him and was disappointed to realize that the man who she counted as a father was only a fan. “You should come to Canada and meet your stepbrother and stepsister,” he’d said, and Shirley had wanted to cry at how casually he treated her, this man who when she was little hadn’t liked hearing her cry. Even more hurtful, he never apologized for leaving her and her mother behind without so much as an explanation. He never even brought it up. After that, Shirley refused his phone calls, which was what her mother had been advising in the first place.

  “I don’t want Kerry-Ann fi live wid a man because dats who can tek care of her,” Diane says, scrolling through the channels. “It’s not ah good thing when ah young girl ha fi depend pon a man. Why yuh don’t mek up back wid her an’ give her back her job? You two been friends before di two ah you could even talk properly. You should mek up back wid her an’ give her back her job.”

  Shirley doesn’t respond, a desperate tactic she has learned to use with her mother. It wouldn’t bother her if Diane simply asked for favors for herself and others, but instead she has a pressuring, subtle way of tapping into her mother role by telling her daughter what she should do. Shirley hates this—hates that her mother has the capacity to make her feel like a child, and that she behaves as though Shirley’s money is their money. She’d started the silent treatment in the last year after her mother told her to hire a distant cousin as her housekeeper and the cousin had refused to work but expected to be paid, and firing her was a series of unnecessary dramas. Later Shirley found out that she and the girl weren’t even biologically related.

  Diane seems unfazed by her daughter’s silence. She yawns and settles back into the Investigation Discovery channel. She’s watching a show about a missing child who was taken as he walked home from a friend’s house in a suburban neighborhood. Shirley is half watching the show and half wondering about Kerry-Ann, because who is this man she is living with? Of course he’s a white man. Kerry-Ann loves white men. When Shirley teased her about the smaller penis size, Kerry-Ann said, “Jamaican men tink good sex is pushing a big dick into a woman. White men know how fi mek love. White men love fi eat pussy.” The only man in recent memory Shirley could think of was a music executive who told Kerry-Ann he was separated from his wife after she slept with him. Shirley had called her a “Seventh-day Adventist slut” because Kerry-Ann was religious when she remembered to be, and they had laughed and reviewed the details of the hookup. It’s only when Shirley hears light snoring that she realizes that her mother is asleep. She looks her mother over, noticing the professional manicure and pedicure, the neatly arched eyebrows, and the freshly relaxed hair that Diane would put into rollers before she climbed into bed.

  As a child, Shirley had been protective of her mother’s crossed eyes. Shirley had taken her beauty from her father—a light-skinned, green-eyed man with obvious European ancestry—and from her mother she had taken shapely thighs and a behind that was large enough to impress but small enough to fit into couture clothes. As a child, whenever any of her classmates brought up her mother’s eyes, even if it was as innocent as “Is di lady wid di cross eyes yuh madda?” she would say, “Nuh chat ’bout mi madda like dat!” And because she had come to accept that her mother was the lady with the crossed eyes, she never imagined that her mother hadn’t accepted herself. And so the request for the surgery came as a shock to Shirley. And afterwards, for a long time, whenever Shirley looked at her mother, it felt strange. It was like looking at the sky to see that something as eternal as the stars was no longer there. Shirley noticed other changes in her mother. She became more outspoken around Shirley’s industry friends, and she put more effort into her outward appearance, wearing red lipstick for the first time in Shirley’s life. She put a second hole in her ears. She wore a full face of makeup to go to the market. She traveled to New York more frequently to spend time with Shirley. She took more interest in the names of designers, the famous people Shirley partied with, and she started a Twitter account. Shirley watched, mildly entertained and horrified, and realized with a certain sadness that her mother was still a young woman, only forty-three, and had probably spent her whole life yearning to be beautiful.

  * * *

  —

  When Diane wakes up, she sees Shirley’s thin frame slipping out of the living room. Why was her daughter as thin as the white women on television? She had even lost her bottom. Diane would have to get some oxtail to make stew and some cow foot to make soup. The women in Diane’s family, the ones on her mother’s side, were known for their voluptuous figures—wide hips, round bottoms. Shirley had come like the women on her father’s side who were thin and curvy in their own way without being as shapely and fat as her mother and her sisters. It was true that Shirley had a more ideal body for couture fashion and bikinis. It impressed, bewildered, and at times shamed Diane that she had given birth to and raised a daughter who was understood to be one of the sexiest, most beautiful women in the world. It would have made more sense if it looked like the apple, as they say, didn’t fall far from the tree. Instead, it was that the apple, Shirley, was an entire other species of apple.

  It had been a strange thing giving birth to a little girl so pretty. But in the days before anyone discovered that Shirley had a voice, her beauty was less intimidating. Some days it felt like a privilege, a blessing even, but on other days it was a thing a mother couldn’t simply overlook without any resentment in her heart. A lesser woman than Diane would have taken it out on her daughter, but she had always loved her daughter. The envy was only a grating presence at the back of her mind, and one she was ashamed about. It had been strange getting attention from Shirley’s red-skinned father. He was a neighborhood boy a few years older than she was, and he had been a friend of Diane’s brothers. Growing up, he’d always paid her little mind until at sixteen he looked at her a long moment and she knew that she had him. He had been surprised that the sex was good, that Diane was such an enthusiastic participant and it was convenient sex, and so he had kept coming back until she discovered that she was pregnant. Shirley had been Rodney’s first child, and the fact that there was a living artifact of himself in the world, and one so pretty, light-skinned and green-eyed like his mother, was why he stayed with Diane for the first five years of Shirley’s life. Diane had known that during these years there had been other w
omen, but Rodney had given her and their child the dignity of returning home to them in the evenings for dinner. Those days he worked for the meat man and he would come home with the fatigue of dealing with blood and bones all day. Those days he had said that he almost wanted to stop eating flesh except that he would miss it too much. He would come home and sit on the steps in front of his mother’s house, which is where they all lived, and sitting on the steps he would hold Shirley in his lap and Diane had been very happy because it seemed that she’d made life. Here was the beautiful child, here was the man who told her he loved her, and what a surprise that it all belonged to her. She was only eighteen. At the time, as is sometimes the case with the very young, she’d wanted very little from life.

  It always seemed to Diane that Shirley could sing. She was singing for as long as she was talking, and so the fact that Shirley could sing wasn’t in itself a surprise to Diane. Her own mother sang and the only place it took her was to the church choir and to a man who enjoyed listening to her. The first time anyone made mention of Shirley’s voice was when she was five. A woman who lived several houses down the road was passing by the house where Shirley stood at the edge of the grass driveway picking flowers off the hibiscus bush and singing one of the popular gospel songs from the radio. Diane was sitting on the steps in front of the house, shelling peas. The woman looked up at Diane for a long moment as though she had to find the words. “But she can sing?” she finally said. “Like a bird,” Diane said, and hadn’t thought much of it, until the next day the woman came back and asked if Shirley would sing the special selection in church that Sunday. Diane had been taken aback but she sent Shirley because she figured that nothing bad could come out of a little girl singing a song in a church. As more and more people were astonished by the quality of Shirley’s voice, Diane came to be proud. Her daughter’s talent gave her a sense of visibility that she had never had in her life. People stopped her on the street and asked her if she was Shirley’s mother. All of this extra attention, and she started visualizing the day when people would look at her and her eyes wouldn’t call attention to themselves. She encouraged Shirley to memorize songs and she coached her. By the time Shirley was ten, it seemed a week didn’t go by without her singing in some church or another. By the time she was fourteen, she had nearly won an island-wide singing contest on television. An older woman won the competition but everyone knew that Shirley was cheated. When the music man finally showed up at the resort, the rest, as people say, was history.

  Part 3

  Shirley’s belly full of cornmeal porridge and fried plantain with bread, breakfasts from her childhood, that other life, when she had been poor. Yet food satisfying all the same for reasons so complicated and nebulous and obvious that there is no encompassing language for it. Diane had brought a tray in, and nudged her daughter awake. Shirley drank the cornmeal porridge in bed, lying on her side, blowing at the first few spoonfuls. The plantain and bread she ate standing at her bedroom window looking down at the pool. She ate quickly, hungrily, having slept through the early hours of evening and throughout the night. She’d woken up at 4 a.m. to use the bathroom, and afterwards she had considered looking for something to eat but then sleep revisited her, and with it came a recurring dream: she’s in a gay bar and she’s moving through the packed space, looking for Yaheem. There are men everywhere—beautiful men, dancing ones, ones who have drunk too much and are kissing in corners—and they are all calling to her, touching her shoulders as she passes so that she will look their way. But she can’t stop. She has to find Yaheem. That’s all she can ever remember from the dream.

  Looking down at the pool, Shirley counts on her fingers the hours she spent sleeping: fifteen. A week in Jamaica, and mostly all she’s done is sleep. After the breakup with Huzzah the Rapper, there had been a period of time—a span of months that felt longer—during which it seemed that all she did was sleep. Shirley had no idea, and barely any recollection of, how she managed to record the album that came out the following year. When she finally awoke, regaining a more normalized sleeping routine and replacing sleep with weed and cocktails, she was fifteen pounds lighter, which her stylist, Bastian, a gay black man from the South who spoke in a British accent, used to his advantage. It could be argued that it was Shirley who reintroduced the midriff from the nineties—but she wore it elegantly, not like those pop stars from back in the day who looked as though they were desperate for the easy attention their sexuality brought them. Girls like that pouted too obviously, no subtlety whatsoever, and they behaved as though they’d discovered sex, when in fact there wasn’t anything new or interesting or even surprising about how they presented themselves. It was all more than a little boring. Now, after her seventh album, Shirley has developed a coolness about her sexuality—“Ain’t no thang,” she seems to be saying in pictorials and music videos. She is rock and roll and red lipstick and long extensions. She is eyeliner and cigarettes and tattoos. All of this, and in a pencil skirt and a pair of boots made for men, with her belly button hanging out. It’s all more than a little bit clichéd but enlivened with the understanding that she’s an exotic, sun-kissed specimen from an island paradise, and in this way, she isn’t another Madonna-esque pop star. The magazines notice. Fashion designers notice. Shirley holds the world’s stare, or at least she dares herself to. Last year, one magazine dubbed her “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.” Another one dubbed her “The Sexiest Woman Alive.” She is regularly featured in celebrity Best Body pictorials, and because in interviews she could never confess the truth, that she’d gotten her body because she’d been depressed and had somehow never been able to regain those fifteen pounds, she talks about lean protein, green juice, and an exercise routine with a celebrity trainer. This, after all, is an appropriate response and, moreover, the kind of thing people expect to hear.

  There is a feeling that this day holds more possibility than the previous ones, where sleep held her in its arms so tightly and so tenderly that there was little effort to untangle from it. Maybe, Shirley thinks, God has finally answered her prayers. Or perhaps the meal invigorated her. The decision to change into a bikini isn’t a conscious one. Shirley sits at the edge of the pool, massaging her belly, admiring the fullness. A strand of wind comes to her, and with it a memory. When she was a little girl, the white children on television ate spaghetti with tomato sauce. What it tasted like Shirley hadn’t a clue, but because the white children on television desired this meal, she came to desire it too. There was a time when she decided that this meal that she hadn’t had in her life was her favorite thing to eat. Oh, how she cried whenever her mother put cornmeal porridge or boiled yams, green bananas, and dumplings in front of her. “You nuh see you too mawga?” Diane would say as tears slipped down Shirley’s face, because she wasn’t allowed to leave the table until she’d eaten a substantial amount off the plate. There was a time a relative living in the United States sent a barrel to Jamaica, and the food, clothing, and household items were parsed out amongst the family members. Included in Diane’s share were two packages of spaghetti and two jars of tomato sauce, and when Shirley saw this, she jumped up and down. Shirley was nine years old at the time, old enough to boil water herself, and so she cooked the spaghetti by following the directions on the package carefully. When it was ready, it met Shirley’s expectations—it was indeed after all her favorite thing to eat. She twirled the spaghetti on her fork, imitating the white children on the television. Diane, however, took one bite, screwed up her face, and dismissed the whole business as “white people food.” Shirley paid her mother no mind—she had long mistrusted her mother’s taste in food. This was after all a woman who delighted in eating tripe with boiled green bananas and cow foot soup. Shirley ate a large share of spaghetti, half the package, and because of the heaviness of the meal, sleep came without her realizing.

  The next morning, she learned that her mother had packaged the rest of the spaghetti to be taken to school for lunch. And how excited Shirley was
to show her friends the spaghetti, to tell them how it came all the way from America. Of course, when they begged, she would share a little, and when they asked for more, she would share a little more but not too much because it was her lunch. In the hours before lunch, she told her friends about the spaghetti but to her disappointment they were only mildly interested. Maybe, she thought, her friends weren’t more excited because they had to see what she meant. Maybe they didn’t understand. Maybe they didn’t believe her. When it was finally time to eat, she went to her desk but when she opened up the plastic container she saw that there was a large cockroach sitting in the spaghetti and tomato sauce. She almost wanted to cry. She put the container back in her desk and she didn’t eat lunch that day. She didn’t have any money and home was too far away to walk to. While playing outside with her friends, one of them asked about the spaghetti, but to Shirley’s relief another friend said something else and so the moment passed. Later at home, Shirley was angry and humiliated and she asked her mother about the cockroach in a tone that sounded like an accusation—what she wanted to know was, How could you let this happen to me? But since she was a child, since she only had the language of childhood, she whined.

  Since the cockroach was still lying dead in the spaghetti and tomato sauce, Shirley showed it to her mother, but Diane had the wrong response—she laughed. This exacerbated Shirley’s desire to cry. Diane stopped laughing long enough to reveal that she didn’t know how the cockroach got into Shirley’s lunch. Perhaps, she explained, the cockroach climbed in as she transferred the spaghetti from the pot to Shirley’s lunch container the night before school. It was an unsavory thing to happen to a little girl. Shirley knew that those little white children on television didn’t open their lunch boxes to find cockroaches. She lost interest in spaghetti after that—the remaining box of pasta and the jar of tomato sauce sat idly on a shelf until a few months later when there was nothing else to eat in the house. Diane ate the spaghetti because she could do no better, and after examining that there were no cockroaches on her plate, Shirley twirled the spaghetti with the joy and determination of reacquainting oneself with an old lover. She ate her share as well as what was left on her mother’s plate. Why this memory, Shirley asks herself, and why now? She remembers herself, her toes dipped into the water, her nipples sensitive against her bikini top—her period must be on its way.