Love Enough

by Dionne Brand

  June thought there was a rich vein of innocent ore running through Sydney’s mind. That’s what she called it, a rich vein of innocent ore. Meaning that there was a spontaneous space in Sydney that had not yet been dragged down by the world, neither June’s world nor the world at large. Sydney seemed always uplifted—albeit by gadgets and shoes and designer dark glasses and new cars and new watches. Not dogmatic like June. Every dinner together was therefore loaded with June’s sense of history, June’s theories on social economy. She deconstructed where the meat came from and where the asparagus. “So that’s why it tastes so good!” Sydney would mock, biting down on a breast of chicken. “Just be thankful, June.” June would be slightly chastened and shut up. Only slightly. She didn’t want to spoil Sydney. Spoil all that zeal for life. She had a feeling that she could. She was smarter, she thought, and so more brutal than Sydney. Like a starling.

  Truly, June was afraid. What should be intensifying in her was waning. She had had no particular landing spot in mind yet the Women’s History Archive was not where she thought she would end up. Her reticence had settled her there. She was afraid that all the grasp of the worldly, all the passion was leaving her. And so she was hanging on to Sydney for much more than she was willing to admit. Yes, she was more brutal. The kind of brutality that comes as it had come to her father, how to put it, with clarity. “I see the fucking world clearly, Sydney. You don’t. We are just hanging on a ball of hard mud spinning in space at a ridiculous speed. That’s us, that’s the earth. A ball of mud, hanging and hurtling nowhere.”

  “Can I drink my wine in peace? Because if it’s like that then it doesn’t matter, and I should have a little more wine to enjoy the muddy ride.”

  “It’s a muddy ride all right. Drink your wine and be unaware …”

  “But if I’m aware, what good is it? You said yourself …”

  “I just thought that meanwhile, while we are clinging to this ball of mud, the very least we could do is … is …”

  June doesn’t want to change anyone, she doesn’t want to knock anyone off their axis. At least, not in relation to her. She wants Sydney to come to understand without her persuasion. Then again, June doesn’t know if she’s being coy or calculating or if she’s being principled. So anyway, silence is the best thing. This silence is the short path from free love to love. As soon as this silence comes between them June begins to want more than she’s wanted. And since silence is so big, what she wants fills it to a far larger extent than she anticipates. If she’d said anything like, “Sydney, you are not giving me what I asked for and what you promised,” perhaps Sydney would have understood and straightened up. Sydney had no idea that the lapse, regarding the embraces, was so important. But June continued to say nothing and to let her resentment and disappointment fill an ever-expanding rift. Sydney remained chipper and cheery as ever, full of talk about people at the office, the people on the street; bringing bootleg videos, buying more shoes and gloves, more electronics. The house is filling up with crap as far as June is concerned but it is completely empty of what June wants—one embrace a day, one kindness a week. As long as Sydney’s there though, June thinks there’s that possibility down the road. But she could not help but grow slightly bitter at the fact that this is a small thing she’s asked, such a small thing. Sydney would never understand if June didn’t pay special attention to Sydney’s birthday, as a case in point. Birthdays were an elaborate event where “things” were acquired, soon to be discarded. June hated Sydney’s birthdays. Especially after the embraces, and kindnesses she herself asked for, were not given. But June doesn’t like to dwell because once an idea is in her head it bounces and bounces like a pendulum and never goes away.

  Existence is futility and smallness, June thought. Then looking at Sydney she reversed herself. Because if she, June, was right, then truly there was no hope. But if Sydney was right, even if Sydney didn’t understand, intrinsically, where or why there was hope, then it existed. She could not always abide Sydney’s optimism—which wasn’t really optimism, she thought, but consumerism. Sydney acted as if you had to attack each day with all your desires, your retail desires. She herself had big desires, she thought. Big, and high-minded. She’d been, as she said to Sydney on various occasions, in the trenches. “You wouldn’t know Sydney. You just wouldn’t.”

  Sydney tolerated June’s superiority, primarily because she didn’t respect it. She measured everything like this: first, June was poor so where did she get off being superior? Second, Sydney liked university women, women who talked intellectual talk and acted superior, especially in public. Though in private Sydney would say, “Can you get to the point quickly? Why do you always have to lengthen out a story?” And June would say, “That’s the point of a story, Sydney. If you don’t know the ins and outs, the details, what is the point of the conclusion?”

  “The point is the end,” Sydney said, “You take so long and you think what you’re saying is so interesting and you lose the thread.”

  “Those are called digressions,” June said.

  Third, Sydney’s attraction to June was ultimately carnal. She found June’s distraction and inattention carnal. June did not know that she was sensual. When she went on her rants she appeared sexually suggestive to Sydney, her political intensity physical.

  “Digressions?” Sydney said, “Let’s say you have a lot of digressions. And I want the conclusion.”

  Unconscious. That is what June thinks of Sydney. But she wishes she were like Sydney, able to place such moments in perspective or, better still, not see them at all. How many of these gestures she had kept in her—the family at the store window; the little girl passing a hand over her face like a worried old lady at a corner; the thin wrist of a girl in her mother’s hand, a teenaged boy on a wide city street that opened like a grisly maw to his future. Precariousness, everywhere June saw precariousness. That’s a gift she’d like to give back.

  Once, in Accra, among the vendors passing at the vehicle window with water, nuts, toys for sale, she saw a woman begging with her family. There were two boys, two girls and the mother. June was in a Jeep with friends from Kumasi. She’d met them casually in Lomé, and since they were driving west from Togo to Kumasi in Ghana she took a ride with them. Kumasi had been a major centre of the slave trade and June was on the great return—backpacking and hitching where she could. She would not do that today—those were the days when you could wander the world without encountering geopolitical violence everywhere. But even then, there had been an attempted coup right after she left Ghana in 1979. There was always the regular violence of rape, of course, no matter where, like a time on the subway in Mexico City in 1973 and that close call in this city when she left her second-floor window open. Violence is regular, June thinks, in general, regular. In Accra a family had come up to the Jeep’s windows and begged for money, putting their hands to their mouths to gesture that they were hungry. They were in a battle against each other as much as for each other. The friends from Kumasi ignored the family but June opened the window and put one cedi out the opening. A girl snatched it and began running and the other children took off after her. The mother kept putting her hand to her mouth and tapping at the window. The van moved off and June looked back, which was June’s fate, looking back and seeing sorrow. Sydney would see this family as surviving, striving on the streets of Accra.

  Even in sleep this faculty doesn’t abate. The time June was in a plane crash in the Comoros Islands, it actually happened in a dream. She was flying to god knows where in that plane. It had left Tanzania and was banking east towards Madagascar. The sky bent like blue aluminum on a dented roof and June reached her hand out the window to smooth it out. The other passengers were watchful, hoping that June would manage to even out the atmosphere to the east long enough to get to Madagascar. June held the long blue plate of the heavens, her fingers stroking the corrugated air. But then someone said, “What are you doing?” and June turned to answer that she was doing what she had been ask
ed, and the metal roof of the world fell onto the plane. The plane had the skin of a whale’s body and June saw its grey blood leak through a window. The next morning the radio said there had been a plane crash in the Comoros and June woke up with one side of her body bruised blue and her left eye bloodshot.

  FOURTEEN

  If you were to notice every small physical gesture of an individual person and if you observed those small gestures over the course of a year and a half, say, and if you were to lose that person you should be able to find that person. Like tracking the genome sequence, but the genome sequence of gestures. You should be able to find that person. You should.

  Lia sees Jasmeet everywhere. In glimpses and sketches she finds her chromosomes. Jasmeet’s arm. There it is in an older woman’s arm, the wrist mainly. Jasmeet’s left foot there, in a man’s foot resting on a concrete plant box on University Avenue. Jasmeet’s eyebrows, there, in the plucked eyebrows of a waitress at the Renaissance Bar. People disappear all the time, but Lia is sure that Jasmeet has returned and simply does not want to be found. That is, Lia cannot gather all her genetic observations into one solid body. That is all.

  The city is approaching daylight again as Lia looks at the lake out her new window. It would be great to live here, they had both agreed, so close to the city but so separated from it by this strip of the great lake. And just so Jasmeet knows, wherever she may be collecting herself, she’s done it, she’s moved to the island. How come we don’t collect beauty in the brain? Lia thinks. It doesn’t seem collectable. It’s fleeting. People can collect paintings, they can collect objects that may be beautiful, but this is not the same as collecting beauty. Collecting beauty would be remembering exactly, immersing yourself in the exact moment of an image or an act, and storing it in some synaptic folder in the brain to be called upon with the same effect as one recalls pain, for example. Pain collects itself like its own curator. Pain is so uncalled, so unsummoned. Beauty should have the same capacity. But it doesn’t and Lia knows why. She’s figured it out, beauty doesn’t damage. It doesn’t burn a hole right through you, an unfillable hole. It doesn’t incinerate you. It does not damage.

  The window that Lia is staring out of, thinking this thought—that beauty doesn’t damage—opens to the lake. She’s found a new room on Ward’s Island, just a short ferry ride away from the city. It is a room on the top floor of a small two-storey clapboard house and a painter with two dogs lives downstairs. The house gives her a new vantage point on the city. When she rides the ferry to this house on Ward’s Island there is a sense of pulling away; of leaving Toronto without leaving it, and of seeing the receding city whole, lined along the lake, the valleys of houses, the mountains of glass towers. Out of her top floor window now, streaks of light grey are appearing in a blue-grey sky; soon those will be followed by a pale orange hue. All these minute light changes she wants to collect. She likes waking at this hour. It’s a new thrill for her. So much goes on before the distant city fully comes awake. At first the city is misty, then phosphorescent, then it emerges skyscraping, glittering, a muted noise crossing the lake toward her.

  No place she had ever lived with Mercede ever saw these blues, or ever observed the increments of beauty seen from this window. Up at five every day, TV packaging plant at eight, home at seven. Now nineteen she had never had regularity, routine, sameness. That’s what she’d needed most of all, a life without jagged peaks, a life she could make all on her own. And when Jasmeet befriended her and invited her to her shows, her parties, her chatty philosophies, Lia tentatively, and then with something like joy, felt she had fully entered her new life. She’d found herself confiding in Jasmeet. Telling her about her mother, Mercede, about her brother, Germain, about Nonna and Nonno. Confiding so much it came as a shock and an insult when Jasmeet called Mercede an emergency. Indiscreet, that is what she had felt, indiscreet and disloyal. She’s not ready for friendships, she concludes. She doesn’t know how they work.

  Here, she spends the first wakeful hour of the day collecting these slivers of light, of tree, of water. She has a notebook. She’s drawn columns in it and here, on weekends especially she makes notes as to each incremental change of the day. She’s running out of names for blue and grey and green. Blue marrow, blue positions, blue speed, she’s written, grey snare, grey freeze, grey grain. Green terminal, green engines. She ought to buy a camera, then she could set it at the window and take shots each minute. But then again, that would not quite do for what she needs. The camera would take the picture but she needs the moment to sink into her, to somehow become chemical, to metabolise, to reconstitute, yes, reconstitute her heart.

  When she looks back at her daily jottings, she realises it’s not recordable in words. She wants a more porous surface, where beauty can come into her, metamorphose, suffuse her skin. She sits still for that first hour of the day but old anxieties erupt, like how is Mercede, where is Germain, where is your ghost? Phantom emergencies course through her blood. She misses the 6:45 ferry, takes the next dragging Jasmeet’s bike on; when the ferry docks on the city side, she rides west along the lake’s shore and then north up the main artery of Bay Street toward the city’s centre. Her nonna’s language and Mercede and Germain trail along beside her.

  The main corner at Bay and Bloor is jammed when Lia gets there. Corporate ads have overrun all surfaces, static here, moving there. The sidewalks are bursting. It’s her first season, the sweet season of summer. Everyone on the street is late for something. When you’re late you either feel panic or freedom. Perhaps you missed an appointment or a deadline; you were supposed to have stepped over some threshold, entered some doorway, sat down in some cubicle with a smile. So now everyone on the intersection is between these fates. Panic or freedom amounts to the same thing if you look at it right. When you’re late you’ve missed a moment and therefore all the others that would have followed. There’s a slight regret because back in the life you had, the life heading toward the threshold, the doorway, the cubicle, you thought it was important to cross that threshold, that doorway, or to sit down in that cubicle at this certain time. But you’re late, so that’s over. Lia watches all the latecomers confront this moment as she does too. She should park the bike at the Bay Street subway and take the train west to Kipling. Flat-screen televisions wait on the line to be packaged and sent out.

  A young woman beams from the crowd at the crosswalk and she’s got an in-between face: she isn’t sure whether to be alarmed or satisfied. To be lost or to be free. She was intending to be sensational showing up at work today. She’s wearing white stretch jeans, a tank top and a boa. Maybe she wanted to be fired, she looks like Saturday night on Richmond Street. She was looking forward to the celebrity of stepping off the elevator as if stepping out of a club, and maybe she still can. She’s late, definitely, with nothing to lose now. She glimpses Lia on the bike staring at her and determines to go up to the 19th floor anyway where she answers phones in a law firm. Who is the biker with the baggy pants to tell her what to do? She’s misinterpreted Lia of course.

  The young woman in the boa will either go up to the 19th floor or she won’t.

  “Good luck!” Lia yells at the young woman as she locks Jasmeet’s bike to a meter near the subway.

  “Thanks!” the woman in the boa yells back at her. And there’s their laughter ricocheting in the black diamonds of the intersection. The woman lifts the boa like a flag crossing the street toward the office block. She enters the elevator and is beamed to the 19th floor. She thinks of it as being beamed. She appears on the threshold of McArthur and Elliot, LLP, like a star. She turns her face up as if the fluorescent light is a camera that loves her and she lasts until the first coffee break when her supervisor asks her for a private word. She packs up the few mementos on her desk, a signed photo of Usher, a Rubik’s Cube and a coffee mug with the declaration “This Sucks!” and she leaves. The supervisor is waiting, ready with a speech about proper attire and punctuality, a speech with a heavy shovel of morality and patern
alism. He likes her, wants her to make progress in the firm. That is what he likes to think, though there’s no progress for a receptionist except perhaps to drinks with the partners, barbecues in the summers or illicit not-to-be-spoken-of late intimacies in the firm’s leather chairs. All this passes through the supervisor’s thoughts until he realises she is late again, late for their tête-à-tête and he calls the front desk. There’s no answer and he leaves his office to check on her only to see the elevator doors close and someone incandescent descending. When the building’s doors let her out she is at another intersection altogether. Transposed. She could do anything now, learn to dance, learn an instrument, study anthropology. She wants to do something that doesn’t involve other people lording over her. She’s had enough of the weight of lawyers, the weight of real-estate brokers and the weight of coffee buyers. It’s all weight. Each day she would go to the job and everyone would sit on her chest and her pelvis. Weight, weight, weight. That’s why she wore the boa this morning, for flight. Her mother and father of course would not get this. They are used to weight, they think weight is normal. They don’t mind the house getting heavier and heavier with the weight she brought home added to the weight they brought home. Oh no. They thought all this weight means she is growing up. Well, they would have enough to say when she told them that she would no longer be bringing any weight home.