Love Enough

by Dionne Brand

  The paragraphs gushing out of Renata as Lia set Jasmeet’s bike in motion is all about that, all about being incarcerated by the house dress, the way the waistband makes her helpless and the prints of flowers—or geese or flags or teddy bears—make her dizzy. She was not the devil, she loved Mercede as much as Mercede would allow and as much as she herself could.

  But Lia is riding away, she cannot hear that Renata loved Mercede, even loved her for her wildness, for living life as if she did not have a set place, an obligation. If it was up to her, she would have run away too, lived a life of fierce self-will and self-destruction. A woman should have that right too. She didn’t know what had kept her feet pinned to the ground. Or truly what made her go and buy the house dresses from the small stores on College Street to harness that impulse. It was a leaden part of her brain, a part that could not wake up no matter how she tried to pump blood to it. It was the civilised part where she knew for sure something like an animal slept. The feral part would never have done that, it would never have gone down to the store with the pots and pans and the house dresses hanging outside and grabbed a handful off their hangers. That part of her brain, the animal part, would have run away with Mercede. She told the girl biking away all this, she told her it wasn’t any justification, it wasn’t any excuse, it was what happened. Lia was dragging this account away, it trailed behind the bike in a long streamer, and Renata kept talking along this lingual trail. And where is the boy? she shouted after her. Where is your brother, Germano?

  Her declarations seared her throat but they kept her attached to the girl, and maybe the girl would take them away with her along all the streets. Tell everyone. How long Renata stands there is indeterminate. How long does anyone stand where they have to, in order to explain incidents in their life and exonerate themselves? How could she know that today the girl would come and unpin her? Someone could make a painting of this, the older woman standing near the house with the words coming out of her mouth, stretching to the wheel of the girl riding away. It would be a vague summer day, a slight wind would turn the long streamer into waves. The house dress would dissect and hold one of Renata’s arms aloft. Her face would be young. Lia’s face would be an owl’s with glasses. The bike would lift off the street as Renata’s news takes air. Lia won’t look back but she can hear the rustle of explanations. A surrealist painting. A Varo painting perhaps. It redraws events. There are possibilities here that neither the girl nor her grandmother have thought of yet, though they may desire them.

  When Nonno died, Mercede arrived at her father’s graveside weeping and yelling, “Figlio-di-puttana!” Renata fainted. Mercede continued screaming hoarsely. Lia and Germain, fourteen and thirteen, were stricken, they began pulling their mother away whereupon she wrenched herself from them and sprang at Renata, choking her until they were able to drag her off.

  Mercede lives in Hamilton now, Lia takes comfort in that—close but far. At the head of the lake, at a distance, enough rope between them, she had thought, until Jasmeet asked her to travel with her to another world all together. Mercede said Toronto had too many temptations, but the truth was Mercede had run out of temptations in this city. She wanted, she said, peace—though, Lia thought, sooner or later Mercede finds noise. But at least in Hamilton it would be less. It was smaller, Mercede said, and she was sick, sick of people in Toronto. Lia had no idea who these people were but she was glad of them, she liked the new location of Mercede sixty-six kilometres away. And it was strangely soothing hearing Mercede’s scrambling half-there voice on the phone every two weeks or so saying, “Yeah, you okay, sweetie?” As if Mercede could do anything if Lia wasn’t okay. “Yeah, Mum,” Lia would reply. “You okay?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah, can’t keep me down. You know life is never easy, you know. You know, figlia, anyway … Eh, you seen Germain? He’s not here, eh. Took off, you know that. That boy … Whatever did I do …?” Mercede would peter out this way. Lia would stay silent. Everything between her brother and Mercede was incendiary. He had moved with Mercede to Hamilton but as usual it had blown up between them. Lia stayed out of it because though the two of them fought like bees, they would turn on you if you attacked one of them. Finally Mercede would begin again cheerily, “Anyway, so you’re doing well? Good for you, sweetie. You were always the smart one. Always the smart one. You take care, you take care. Talk to you soon, eh? Nice. Nice …”

  Life is never easy. Funny, Lia thought, how she could hear the sound of love slowing down in Mercede. And funny how it was that sound that kept her roped.

  ELEVEN

  Summer. Kerria japonica near the front steps, in full aureolin bloom. It’s Sunday morning and on the living-room couch June has just come awake. Outside, across from her house, in the west end of town, is an ubiquitous alleyway. It’s Sunday there too. Though you wouldn’t know it. There are three guys jittering around and for them, specific days don’t really matter. One day flows into the other. They decide when it’s morning or evening by the foot traffic of customers or the sirens of police or something more subtle than that—something most other people don’t think about or know about. They inhabit another kind of diurnal, where the prickly feeling of reality, of the real, jerks you awake. The sensual nature of days, their dimming and lighting, don’t concern them. Neither does the Gregorian calendar: the body is its own calendar. A certain weather of the blood claims them, a circadian alarm clock depending on the chemical composition of the blood, but not just ordinary blood, blood augmented and accustomed to whatever drug has been ingested for however long. So it is that kind of a day.

  The living room is lit by daylight. There is a brown rocking chair, a television dominating the room, June’s body on the couch. Her lower extremities are still asleep, her brain struggles to be awake. Outside the light is shimmering bright, blinding. It’s summer, though it is winter in the alleyway. The three guys shivering there can attest to this. No, it isn’t the sun glaring off snow. No, there isn’t snow on the pavement. The alleyway is not an icebox as they will swear to you it is. Their weather, winter, is tingling under their skins. There’s a medicine for the weather in their bodies and they are waiting for it.

  June slept on the couch because there’s a young man in the bedroom upstairs. She’s known Bedri for a year and a half now. June loves children and children love June. She thinks of them as children but the kids who hang out in the Drop-in aren’t really children, they’re teenagers with little room at home and less on the street. June can’t help but feel, as with her friends in the dance troupe all those years ago, that she doesn’t know half of what goes on in their lives. Bedri’s not a child but he’s a child to her. She made him learn Xavier Simone’s “Love Poem 17” when he tagged the Drop-in doorway with the Arabic letter for ‘b’. Then she had him recite it to the heckling crowd of his peers. She knows he wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t wanted to.

  The thought of Bedri makes her swing her legs to the floor. But the room seems dark to her until she realises she has her sleeping mask over her eyes. She giggles and lifts the mask off. The room is bright and blinding just as the day outside. June lifts the window curtain. Across the street in the alleyway, three men are leaning on the railing looking down the street. They’re early today, they’re waiting for their dealer. Jesus, June thinks. What time is it? She switches the television on to the weather channel. Nine-thirty a.m., 22 degrees. She turns the TV off, peers out the window again. The three men are pacing now, a fourth man in a grey and red windbreaker has arrived. He passes out small bits of aluminium foil; he seems jovial, brisk. The four men hurry deep into the alley and stoop down, the fourth man leading. I should call the bloody police, June thinks. But she remembers Bedri upstairs. Not that they would know that he was upstairs, but perhaps they’d want to come in and she couldn’t let them. She’d drawn the story out of Bedri little by little over the evening, clarified it with what she’d read in a garish column in the newspaper about inter-gang violence. She had been unable to condemn him, or tell h
im to leave. She made an ethical decision and that was that. It would be a betrayal on two fronts, she’d told the kids her door was always open, always open—she’d been warned not to cross this line but she had, fine. Second, she had no intentions of enabling the police state in any way. As Emma Goldman said, as long as people were living a life they loathe to live then crime was inevitable. She only saw a sweating boy last night through her screen door, a young man others in the city would see as threatening because of his height, his sullenness, his lurching walk, his clothes, baggy. “Self-protection!” she said, “Can’t you see, Sydney? They themselves are afraid for their lives!” She was naive, that’s what Sydney said. “You have absolutely no filter. It’s as if your skin is some kind of litmus.”

  “Well what is your filter? I’d like to know.”

  At a street festival last summer—it was going on evening, it was a Sunday—she and Sydney saw a small family, a woman, a man and their daughter. It was only a short moment but June caught them looking into a shop window, and it was the way they stood, more than anything, and the face of the small girl. She had some stringy shoes on and a pink dress and June caught a certain look in her face. It was a desire that would not be satisfied, as if the man and woman had made a vain promise to the small girl, a promise they would never fulfill. So the girl has a future happiness on her face, but even she understands the futility of it. It didn’t matter what was in the store window. It could have been a pair of shoes or a doll or a dress. It was an object potent with their inability to have it. June was immediately pained and perhaps it was this pain that made the family weak and desperate too. They turned away from the window as June passed and they all looked at each other, they seemed caught out, as if June’s presence had exposed their poverty, their weakness.

  She remembered her own childhood and just such a store. The store was no bright place either, just a discount place, not a posh window. People like them did not have posh tastes, they had shiny tastes or practical tastes and neither could be satisfied. Someone was always taking desires and making them expensive and out of reach, making you linger at the store window on a sad street and long for nothing. When she was a child she had stood at such a store window and seen a black pair of patent leather shoes with a strap over the instep. And so catching sight of this small girl she felt a melancholy. She had quickly looked away from the family, but that moment lingered with her all day and for some days to come. Sydney would tell her that anyone can be sad at such a thing, and then move on to better thoughts. Not June. Something such as that builds in her. Perhaps she’s misinterpreted the moment. Those people were, Sydney told her, happy. She said, “I saw them too. That’s not sadness. It was hope. They were happy.” But June’s impression stays within June, inconsolable, irreconcilable and sharp.

  “You make a trophy of it,” Sydney said.

  So when Bedri arrived at her doorstep she saw only the overgrown kid. Then his clothing askew, big smile, saying with exaggerated hand movements, I am going with you, love/ I hope you remember the passports, red/ with our names/ let us arrive, our arms genuine like guitars/ let us meet in frantic traffic/ let us meet in airports devastated with our love/ let us lie down together in pungent sheets. He loved saying that last line, he and his seventeen-year-old friends broke out laughing at the delinquent and the erotic. Now. He was desperate and inaudible, the tears flooding his eyes, water running from his nose. A story about someone named Ghost and a Beemer.

  She wasn’t judgmental, but Sydney was, obviously. And so, Sydney had retreated to her condo on the lakeshore and would probably not be heard from for days. But she knew Sydney wasn’t vindictive, so she would not call the police.

  “You always see things as political,” Sydney had needled her.

  “That’s because they are.”

  “Sometimes things are just plain, June. You always have to find something that isn’t there.”

  “And when did you gather these insights? Selling shit to people that they don’t need!”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. He’s just a little thug, June. Not one of your … revolutionaries.”

  “You have absolutely no compassion, none. And for your information everything is political!” June was hissing.

  “I know a little thug when I see one.”

  Sydney gave June a leather jacket for her birthday last year. June was appalled. The world Sydney lived in was full of “things” … leather jackets, shoes, flat-screened TVs, etcetera. June tried to appreciate the jacket but Sydney had seen the look on June’s face. She didn’t want “things,” June said eventually. She told Sydney she wanted one embrace each day and one kindness each week. Sydney said, “Okay, that’s easy. You’re sure?” June said, “Yes, what I want is very simple.”

  But an embrace each day and a kindness each week can be very difficult. Nothing simple about it. Anyway, June found out Sydney could not do it. People can’t be mindful constantly. Sydney started missing days, missing weeks and tried to make up again with “things.” June of course was disappointed. She reasoned that perhaps, if someone could not give her an embrace a day or a kindness a week, perhaps there was something wrong with her. That Sydney couldn’t do this made June sad. June thinks small things are deep and big things are shallow. So a little hole opened in her heart. She has a complicated system of feeling. She thinks if someone is so unaware of hurting someone, it stands to reason that if you tell them about it they’ll be hurt themselves, since it will be a shock to them, they will crash when they understand how callous they’ve been. That would be a mountain of pain, June thinks, so she said nothing to Sydney, as she goes right on missing more and more days of embraces and more and more weeks of kindnesses.

  No use going over that fight, June thought. She felt a small excitement. She could help Bedri, hide him, help him to leave town. It never occurred to her to tell him to go to the police himself. What good would that do? But regarding the thugs outside, in a minute she would open the front door and pretend to be dusting a mat. She folded her duvet, settling it beside the couch. She was wearing Sydney’s shirt and a sleeping sarung. The Sri Lankan lover had given her one thousand sarungs, then he’d gone back to being a Tamil Tiger. Only last year she heard that he was in London giving someone else one thousand sarungs. He was writing a Sociology of Everything, and would send her e-mails on irrelevant matters concerning this every week. Each e-mail subject line ended with an exclamation point. Well, she had one thousand sarungs and if only for that he had not been a complete waste of time, they were a presence, an extravagant after-image of a fact. Love is love. It wears off. At the end there is a certain wonder at how you had become caught up in the domestic drama of it all—the immediate thrust and parry, the minutiae of emotional pain, plus a feeling as if you were once mad or as if you now need a transfusion of some kind of rare blood. At least she felt this way after each lover, needing some sort of rare blood to recover, as she first did when she was twenty, with the subway lover.

  And that time with Beatriz. Beatriz sleeping was the rarest sight. June might have seen it only a few times. Then the sheets were alive and secretive. A skin. Beatriz turned the sheets into skin. A thin translucent skin, some trembling substance June could touch but not enter. June wanted her to open the sheets and let her into what must be the incandescent atmosphere of this skin. So in those few moments when she came awake in the night, she wavered between watching the anomalous event of Beatriz sleeping and waking her with teeth in her back and rough hands tearing away the sheets’ skin, between Beatriz’s thighs.

  To unravel that skin and to look at Beatriz, June was not quite sure what would happen. Would she catch her raw and even more dangerous, lethal perhaps? Beatriz did not look vulnerable in sleep like most people, she looked more of herself, more cool, more smoky, more clandestine as if she did not even allow her dreams to tell the truth. “I have held many people’s lives in my hand,” she told June. “I have held someone dying. Death is nothing and living is everything.”


  Sex with Beatriz was wordless and bruising. June felt every area of her body touched and scraped with Beatriz. Sydney talked throughout. June would stamp her lips or her fingers on Sydney’s mouth in an unaccountable remembering of that brief time with Beatriz. She had returned to Estelí. Was she killed by the Somocistas or was she now a bureaucrat, or a politician? Beatriz may not have even been her true name. When the Sandinistas won, June had searched the newspapers for the face of Beatriz riding into Managua in a jeep. She had not found her.

  June chose dramatic lovers. Perhaps they expressed some drama going on inside her. It absorbed her how her lovers seemed to live in the world so immediately, as if all depended on the present moment that they were living. As if there was never a moment of contemplation needed. Meanwhile all she did was contemplate.

  She opened the front door and shook the front mat just to let the dealer and his customers across the street know that they had been noticed. Perhaps that would make them move along. The windbreaker looked across at her, then went back to his business. She stared at him trying to cut his shiny, bubbled jacket in two with her look. Behind her she heard steps on the staircase. “Thanks, Miss June,” she heard as Bedri rumpled past her going out the door. “Wait!” she managed to get out but he had run down the stairs and onto the pavement. She thought of calling him again as he hustled up the street but she didn’t.