What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

argument about happiness. His father was intolerable, couldn’t hold an adult discussion. He always had to be certain and right about everything. There were no variables in his life, no uncertainties. If there was anything he was uncertain about, he just pretended to know it. So there was no talking to him. He knew everything.

Fitz was a compact man, not a small man by any means, but compact, tight in his big body and tight in his self-assurance. Oku watched him leave the table, his face resolute. He hated him and he envied him. Often Oku, who resembled him, would find himself looking at his own image in a sudden glass window. He would see his father there in himself but with just that iota of doubt that made him himself and not Fitz. The image would catch him by surprise and not a little disappointment that that self-containment, that pig-headedness, could not be his. No doubt he would get along much better in the world if it were. And just now, as his father rose, he remembered only a few years ago, when he was a teenager, looking at his dick in the mirror and wondering if his father’s dick was the same length, the same shape. A chuckle escaped him. Fitz spun around and stared at Oku hard, making sure that he held his gaze long enough for dominance. Oku chuckled and gave it to him. “Boy …” Fitz finished, leaving the room.

Claire rose immediately after Fitz, following him down the hall and seeing him out. When she returned to the kitchen, Oku had already retreated to his room in the basement. She had wanted to ask him what was all that about happiness. Fitz might be dense, but she wasn’t. She’d been noticing some things, like how Oku hardly picked up a book any more though he left with books each day, like how he crawled into the house sometimes in the small hours of the morning, a wreath of ganja trailing him, after being dropped off by a Jeep full of men, with booming music. Then again for weeks the men would disappear and those girls would call and he would stay out nights, days. She was covering for him. Fitz didn’t notice all these things, but she did. What he was up to, she didn’t know.

EIGHT

WHAT MADE JACKIE THINK of that train ride to Toronto? She hated complications. The train from Halifax to Toronto. The memory of it came from the time when she had no control of memories—which she would keep and which she would have disappear—when she couldn’t shape them into something else. She hated complications. Anyway, she had to compose the letter to InStyle. Dear InStyle, what the fuck is up with that Bo Derek piece in October? Okay they won’t print “fuck” in the magazine. Dear InStyle, What is up with saying Bo Derek’s corn rows is an example of one of the most imitated hairstyles of all time? Are you for real? Are some of you smoking something? Did you all do some bad coke? All right, strike the last two questions. My great-grandmother, not to mention my ancestors, are turning in their graves … Would they get it? Too subtle. Stop crediting Bo Derek with something that goes back centuries in Africa, America, the Caribbean, and Canada. Maybe she should start the letter, Dear InStyle, I am a Canadian fan of your magazine. I was shocked … “Hook a brother up”—what made him think that she would be impressed by that line? Not in this lifetime, not in this frigging lifetime. She was not going to get dragged into that tired bullshit.

The streetcar was practically empty. She could have looked around to see if Oku was still standing dumbstruck at the light. Instead she remembered the train, which she tried to put aside for the letter. It had taken the longest time getting here. She could feel her parents’ anticipation. She was a little sick from the rocking of the train, or was it from their talk about how different, how exciting life was going to be from then on? She fell asleep so many times, half waking to hear her father’s rap on James Brown and Mustangs, his favourite car, or her mother saying, “You sleep, baby,” to her, or, “You know it, baby,” to her father. What was it that made her remember? It was, yes, it was the same mix of desire and revulsion, the same feeling in that train car of warmth and insecurity, damage and seduction. Standing close to Oku, his limber virility, his lips, his throat growling, “Hook a brother up.” It was just a turn in that sentence that lost her to him in that moment. Little did he know that without the accent on “brother,” without the hesitation between u and p in “up,” she might have stayed with him at the traffic light. High and having a good time at Lula Lounge was one thing. This was definitely another.

Jackie flipped through the InStyle on her lap again—ads for Tiffany, Escado, Mercedes, Patek Phillippe, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Coach. There was Michael Michele in Carolina Herrera, Halle Berry in Valentino, Lucy Liu in Carmen Marc Valvo, and there was where her letter would appear. Dear InStyle, I have been inspired by your feature on Vivica A. Fox. She is such a wonderful actress …No fucking way. He was not what Jackie had in mind. I control my shit, “brother.” There was so much more in those four words. As she had told him—she hated innocence. She had detected it as lethal way back on that train ride out of Nova Scotia. She despised people who didn’t know what was going to happen to them. Those kinds of people, she thought, lied to themselves and to people around them. She had no pity for that kind of person, and what Oku had been asking for was pity.

Tiring of InStyle, she flipped through Black Beauty