Love Enough

by Dionne Brand

  “Yes!” June yells toward the bathroom door.

  People hear what they want to hear. Right then Sydney is thinking, June hears what she wants to hear, believes what she wants to believe. As if she’s not living in the same time as the rest of us.

  On a wall in the bedroom, there’s a picture of June dancing in a park among a troupe of dancers. The men are dressed in black, the women, including June, are in orange. June was sixteen then and thought she would dance on Broadway some day. She isn’t yet who she is now.

  Even back then June’s righteousness was patent. No one told her secrets, perhaps they saw perpetual virtue in her face, as if any failure would shock her. None of the women among the dancers trusted her. They had secret lives she suspected, lives secret to her at any rate. She was aware of these secrets, though not in any concrete way, but by the way conversations stopped when she approached, and how their laughter seemed to contain the esoteric knowledge of some requisite carnal pain that her laughter lacked. Her demeanour stopped anyone telling her a dirty or dark secret; no one confided any sordid material in her. She felt anxious, always, as if she were forever missing out on the details of what was happening in front of her very eyes. Her face was too reflective. It bothers June to this day. Her face is still a liability that way. She was also, back then, very impressionable, and perhaps she still is: she only has to hear a word or see an image or have a word conjure an image and she will be taken up with it for days. So the dancers weren’t entirely wrong in not confiding in her. All their confidences would have stayed with her; scored her. June cannot ignore hard things. Not June then, not June now. But June back then was in her timid life, and dancing was her greatest rebellion.

  She remembers the day in the photograph, the sun, the orange skirts of all the other women and the music. Trevor is beside June in her orange skirt. He is young too. He is bare chested. Nothing hidden or sad about him. He is open, naked. All his desires are on full display. He wants to dance through life. And he will. He parties all night, sometimes with the other dancers, the women, sometimes on his own. He comes to class with a smile saying, “Oh, I had a terrible night,” his hand over his eyes, his mouth grinning. His terrible is joyful. He is always looking for drama, for fun. He got June and the other dancers in on starting a speakeasy with him. He thought it could be a speakeasy at night and a dance studio in the daytime, and he could also live in the back room. And they did that for a while. But the dance studio didn’t work out: none of them had any money in those days, the ceiling was too low and he could not jeté around the small room. But he was saving to go to New York to try out for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He was going to leave the city because there were only small parts for him and he was going to New York, which was bigger and lighter. June remembers him so well, bright, glittery. His body gave off sound waves. You could see all the graceful mechanics of his skeleton. He was like a taut wire dressed in muscle, but his humour made him pliable. He loved himself, he loved his arms and his legs and his neck and his torso.

  He treated June like a little sister, though she thought of him as less mature. What he knew was sensual, but her budding politics told her that would not be enough for her. When he came into the dance studio he always had a wondrous story. Things always happened to him unexpectedly, he never knew why they did. But they were always extravagant. He used to live with an eighty-year-old Russian woman who said she used to be a dancer too. She never made the Bolshoi—she said, instead, she was in the ballet in Bologoye, a town between Moscow and Leningrad—but she knew everything about dance. She was small and slight but commanding, and Trevor loved her. She taught him the engineering of his body and which muscles to use and when. He thought that she was cute and funny and charming because she told him lascivious stories about life in Bologoye; about sex in the train station with strangers passing through. Galina, that is what she called herself, Galina. Galina did not like June. Galina did not like many of Trevor’s friends, or so June thought. Galina wanted Trevor all to herself. June noticed that Galina never took her eyes off Trevor. She drank vodka martinis and curled herself on a couch directing him here and there to bring her a scarf, bring her a martini, rub her poor feet, give her a kiss. Trevor teased her, telling her not to be so jealous and attention-seeking. When Trevor moved into the speakeasy June asked him what would happen to Galina. He laughed and said, “Oh, she’ll find herself another boy soon enough.”

  Here again, June did not understand the mysteries of intimacy, the mysteries of a woman like Galina, or, as open as he was, a man like Trevor. Now June would say, it’s not the mysteries that she doesn’t understand, it’s the conventions she refuses. She had first met Galina when Trevor invited June and the other dancers to Galina’s small cottage in Cabbagetown to watch pornography. June went feeling that if she didn’t it would confirm all their assumptions that she was either naive or a prude. And she was not a prude. Trevor made martinis, which June had never had. Nevertheless she drank three in a row simply to seem sophisticated. Trevor giggled and told her she was cut off. Galina chuckled in a self-satisfied way, as if June had finally proven how gauche she was. June averted her eyes from the pornographic screen when one or another of them wasn’t looking at her to see her reaction. She was embarrassed and bored at the same time. She could not feel aroused as they all seemed to be by the spectacle, and it seemed to her farcical, the pumping of penises into vaginas. When June said this aloud, the dancers all said that she was not an adult, and Galina and Trevor laughed and looked at her with pity. There was no reason, June thought, for Galina’s derision. What had June done, except be young, that Galina hated? What had she done except dance with Trevor, except have young, strong legs, except have an erect backbone where Galina’s was turning to powder?

  When Trevor broke off with Galina, June noticed all the time she had spent taken up with Galina, and how Galina had insinuated herself into June’s daily thoughts. It was jealousy of course, jealousy of an enigmatic kind since neither she nor Galina ever had sex with Trevor, but their claims on him had a sensual charge. All sex is not physical, June knows.

  June left the dance troupe because she couldn’t fly. She woke up one morning, a morning just like this morning with the radio, and thought, “The end of dance is flight and I can’t fly.” Trevor could fly. He could soar across the studio. And he was heading always to New York. He laughed at everything. June remembers his laugh, like some cascading bird laugh with a gurgle in it like a baby’s. When he left for New York she felt as though she’d lost something—a big part of the day, a chunk of air. He left her his clay dishes, his clay jug, as if giving a child a sweet to hold her until he returned. June has pieces of those clay dishes even today. In that picture where June is dancing with Trevor, and the troupe, the sky is wide open and blue to all of them. It’s summer. July. Energy is burning in their torsos. They were about to go on tour, they were about to break open the world of dance in the country, they were all beautiful, black hair, black limbs, red beating hearts. After the dance they were going to wander around the crowd and drink some wine and lie in the grass.

  FIVE

  “It’s another country.” Ghost.

  “It’s not.” Bedri.

  “Trust me, it is. I went there once.”

  “You never went anywhere.”

  “One time. I went one time. ‘You can’t just be cool, you have to know shit.’ That is the only good thing she said to me.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Yeah. Mercede. So trust, I know shit.”

  “What you see there?”

  “Things …”

  “Things! I know you didn’t see nothing. You don’t even know the way.”

  “They talk a different way.”

  “Talk a different way? Who don’t?”

  “You’re an asshole, they talk a different language. They got French.”

  “Ghost, you’re the asshole. I knew I shouldn’t have gone with you.” Bedri’s sentence hung on the windscreen. It
was the first time doubt had sprung up between them. Through everything. The first time, real doubt. Not just daring or put down, but doubt. I shouldn’t have gone with you … Their friendship hung in the sweating air of the car, rough and harmful.

  It was four in the morning. They drove west across Eglinton quietly, even carefully, after that revelation. At a stoplight, a cop car rolled up alongside. Even this they took calmly. The cop car turned right on Caledonia and they took that calmly too. No deep exhalation of relief, no triumph about how close that was. Bedri lifted his elbow to the window, his hand to the upper frame. His hand felt heavy. He looked at it. His hand was swollen. It was heavy and swollen.

  “Stop here, here!” Bedri said. They were at the intersection of Eglinton and Keele Street, nothing there except a car wash, a string of low-slung buildings ending in a convenience store, and a high school. Miss June, he thought. A small light over a door next to the convenience store showed him the tag he’d made in bold black on the door a year ago. It was a Drop-in centre. “I won’t make you scrub that off if you learn this,” she’d told him. She handed him a poem by Xavier Simone. He read the first lines and smiled. It jangled in his head now. Love Poem 17. But I am going with you, love/ I hope you remember the suitcases, fragrant/ with books/ let us meet in rain-drenched cities/ let us meet smoking cigarettes/ let us take Urdu dance lessons/ let us arrive in Arabic on Monday.

  “Why you wanna stop here? The Beast’s gone.” Ghost was glad of the broken silence, as if they’d returned to their old selves. He pulled over. Bedri opened the door, got out and walked back toward the light post near the school at the corner of Keele Street, lifting his hand to see. It seemed deformed to him. Deformed as the man’s head, and broken. There was a small smudge on the knuckle of his index finger, and his nail on the little finger, the one he kept long and polished, was broken and hanging. He hadn’t noticed that before. He pulled the rest of the nail off and felt a short pain as his right hand seemed to pull itself away from more beating. The pain travelled to his elbow and he dropped his hand, placing it between his legs, bending over.

  Ghost sat waiting, the Audi humming. He looked in the rear-view mirror, watched Bedri raise his hand to the light, and then drop it between his legs. He pressed the gas, bringing the car to a low growl; he hoped Bedri would respond to it, turn and come back to the car. The traffic at the intersection came and went, cars peeling off Keele Street heading down the hill, or gliding past them along Eglinton. But the two of them existed unaware now of the rest of the city. Unaware in the ordinary sense of being aware, of having somewhere to go, or return to, someone to call. Not that they ever had someone to call, except in an emergency, but now they had no one to call; not even in an emergency.

  Bedri turned towards the car, walked back, opened the door and said, “I’ll take it here, dude.”

  “What you mean?” Ghost said, looking straight ahead.

  “I’ll take it here, I’m gone.”

  “We ain’t nowhere, here,” Ghost said. “I’ll take you home, no problem, Money.”

  Bedri’s hand hurt. He wanted to say, sure. He heard the begging in Ghost’s offer. He saw the nub of the right side of Ghost’s neck scar.

  “No guy, it’s cool, I’ll take it here.” He shut the door, turned toward the light pole again and walked in its direction. He heard the car linger, then rev up and take off. His hand hurt, but by impulse he lifted it to wipe his face and doubled his pain. He leaned against the post. He didn’t think of Ghost. He thought his hand was broken, and how would he explain it? How would he explain it to his father? Fuck.

  A thief is always under suspicion. A coward is full of precaution. In the ocean one does not need to sow water. Poverty is slavery. He who does not shave you does not cut you. A brother is like one’s shoulder. One cannot count on riches. To be without a friend is to be poor indeed. Dogs understand each other by their barking, men by their words. A madman does not lack wisdom. A person stands next to shade, not next to words. Where I make a living there is my home. Your woman should be in the house or in a grave. His father told him these things. Now these things ran through his mind.

  His father, Da’uud, was a cab driver. He drove a taxi from four to midnight each day. Then he sat in Bilan café with other insomniac taxi drivers till three or four in the morning. Then he drove home across the Humber River to North Etobicoke and fell asleep as soon as he walked in; dropping his dead body on the couch. The living room had become his father’s bedroom. His father couldn’t sleep in the bedroom upstairs anymore since he couldn’t make it up the stairs. In any case, the bed upstairs, he complained, hurt his back. Heavy brown drapes were always drawn to keep light out of the living room. The family only saw the living room on a Friday when the father didn’t work but observed the Jumu’ah.

  Now his father would be at Bilan drinking Turkish coffee and smoking a cigarette. There would be other men there, his uncle Abdi Fateh, his cousin Ghedi. It’s where Bedri should be too. His father kept insisting that he go into business with them, drive taxis across the city; learning street names in that pharyngeal sound of their language. Bedri couldn’t bear the thought. He’d seen his father once too often sitting at the café, sleep drugged, the smoke of cigarettes crumpling every man’s chest at the counter, the brown smiles as they reminisced about some long ago thing, in some long ago country. His cousin Ghedi was a fucker. Ilkacase, they called him, lovingly. Khat-eater. Always showing Bedri up, sitting in those old men’s laps like a dog. They weren’t old men really, his father and his uncle, but they seemed old because of how their life was. It was all in the past tense. And when they told him what he should do, he felt as it they were welcoming him to some petrified life. So he had separated himself from them, separated himself from the grim warmth around the counter at Bilan. He felt left. Even more left now, now that he had told Ghost to leave him here under the light post.

  Bismillaah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem, Qul a’uudhu birabbil falaq, Min sharri ma khalaq, Wa min sharri ghaasiqin idhaa waqab, Wa min sharrin naffaathaati fil ‘uqad, Wa min sharri haasidin idhaa hasad … I seek refuge with the Lord of the Dawn from the mischief of created things … He whispered this fragmented prayer against his hand. And from the mischief of the envious one as he practises envy.

  His father told him these things. Why did they come to him now?

  SIX

  The final decision and the telling had been shitty and abrupt. “No,” Lia had said.

  “I thought you said, like, you want to. To have experiences, right, like …” Jasmeet said, surprised and disappointed. “Life was too small, you said, right?”

  “I don’t …” Lia’s reasons dried up.

  “You agreed, like we said, unlock the beautiful. Think desert! Think Machu Picchu!” And when Lia was silent, “You’ve never even been on a train ride! Come on!”

  “No, no, I really would, you know … I’d like that, I want to …”

  “Let’s go then. Ayahuasca is sacred medicine, like the sacredest, like totally, they say you see galaxies and you see your heart and it’s only the size of an atom.”

  “I can’t. Mercede might …”

  “Mercede! She’s lived her fucking life. Shit, she’s a constant emergency!”

  “You don’t know anything about my mother.” Lia had closed down the conversation with this and therefore there was pure silence after. She had found a way out. At first when Jasmeet had asked her to go with her she could not identify the tug she had felt. Suddenly, there was Mercede in her heart, like a heavy rope. How would Mercede get in touch? What would happen to Mercede? So, the inevitable word out of Lia’s mouth was, “No.” And it had sounded so awful, it had been so involuntary, it was so resolute it pained her.

  You have to survive people. You meet people and sometimes you have no control of that, and then it’s a simple matter of waiting them out. Your parents, for example, you are in no position to avoid them. By the time you meet them it’s too late.

  Lia had survived Mercede.
Mercede was Lia’s mother, Lia’s and Germain’s. Mercede was wild. That’s what Renata said. Renata was Mercede’s mother. Mercede was wild. But Mercede said that Renata hated her, did not love her, did not love her enough. (No one thinks they’ve been loved enough.) And this was why Lia and Germain had spent time off and on in foster care, and off and on in peril. Because Mercede said that Renata hated her and Mercede did not want to hate Lia and Germain. So she handed them over sometimes to the Children’s Aid Society. Off and on as toddlers they had stayed with Renata also, and Joe, Mercede’s father. And then they lived with other people too, and sometimes apart. And months would pass and then Mercede would find them; go and collect them, even if they were with the best kind of people, that is, people who could love them like foster people or as Renata and Joe did. Mercede would find them and drag them away to her ‘I-have-a-nice-place’ ugly apartments.

  Mercede tried very hard at loving them. She had dried out and gone straight, she had found new places to live, she had found religion. She would smile and cover them with kisses and with her shaking hands. And for a little while, a year at the most, the ugly apartment she’d found would feel like a possible new world. She bought them toys, stuffed toys, even after they had outgrown toys. She made a forever Christmas tree that was never put away in order to assure Lia and Germain that this time, love would last forever.

  But this was love according to Mercede, her eyes shiny and her voice bright with a tinkling sound. Mercede’s love was exhausting because it needed love back constantly. Lia and Germain were children and didn’t always know how to love back. They simply knew how to love, and at times they simply wanted to run or play and have love waiting for them when they returned. Mercede’s love was a burning, wanting love. Mercede’s love could not hold out against her panic of never being loved enough. And so she worried she did not love them enough without knowing how to love them enough according to that calculus. And feeling that she was failing, she would leave for days on end with someone who loved her. She would never bring “that stuff” home she’d say, never endanger her children, never. She loved them too much, she said, too much. Lia and Germain made do in the ugly apartment or at the neighbour’s. And if Mercede came home before the neighbour looking after them finally called Children’s Aid, Lia and Germain were in for another round of frenzied love, of Pepsi and candy, and new sneakers and haircuts and pizza.