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

always enough to support the fierce passion she expected of him in this respect. She had even taken him to where they used to live, showing him the high-rise apartment building on Wellesley, pointing to the twenty-first floor, the railing from which she and Angie had blown bubbles into the air; the balcony where they sunbathed in the summers. Angie had bought her a pair of sunglasses just like her own, and they rubbed suntan lotion on each other, giggling, and lay on towels listening to the radio, to Three Dog Night and John Denver and Credence Clearwater Revival. If she could give Jamal a memory, she thought—something like a lovely secret—he could hold it and it could perhaps make him strong when he needed it. But Carla’s own font of memories was fading, and those that she had given to Jamal were only second-hand and worn out, if not fabricated.

Carla loved these Mondays the way she loved snowstorms. The way these two things stopped the world. A city hemmed in by snow was a beautiful thing to her. Cars buried in the streets, people bewildered as they should be, aimless and directionless as they really are. Snowstorms stopped the pretence of order and civilization. The blistering winds whipped words right out of people’s mouths, they made all predictions and plans hopeless. She would abandon all warnings from Tuyen and the weathermen on twenty radio and television stations and launch out into the city in a blizzard. Identifying the direction of the wind, she would turn and turn in the blizzard and be lost, walk with it, walk against it, driving her feet through the thick gathering wall of it. Nothing like a snowstorm to calm a city and make things safe and quiet.

But there was no snowstorm today, just that same numbness about her brother. Which is why she found herself standing in front of the big apartment building where they used to live when Angie was alive. It had long become a kind of shrine for her.

Carla was thankful that she’d got a job as a courier. It gave her more time to think, and she could ignore the world where you had to fit, where you had to play some game she didn’t understand and just wasn’t up to. She probably could have if she had wanted to—that’s what her friends always said.

She was not phenotypically black either. Only on careful consideration could one tell. She looked more like her mother. She always found it odd and interesting that most black people recognized her anyway. They were more attuned to the gradations of race than whites. Whites generally thought she was Spanish or Middle Eastern. So to disappear into this white world would have been possible. But it would have been a betrayal of her mother’s choices as she saw them. Her mother was white, her father was black. Her mother must have made her choice for a good reason: good or bad she had crossed a border. Carla instinctively understood. And it must have meant something profound to her mother. It must have taken some doing and it must have cost something, because when she died no one claimed them, Carla and Jamal, no one except her father. And that reluctantly. Angie had been dead to her family since the day she started up with Carla’s father, Derek.

Though Carla had thought many times of running away from living with her father and stepmother, she never did—there was always Jamal to keep her. He had run to Yonge Street when he was fourteen. Their father had eventually found him there, standing in a doorway at the Gerrard Street intersection with two other boys. He was high on glue. That was after Carla and Nadine had pleaded with him to go get Jamal. Well, Carla didn’t plead, she hung over the house like an unanswered question. Derek, her father, could feel her brooding and her anger—he was oddly alert to it even when she was a child—so he went to get Jamal. He had been two weeks on the street and was ready to come home. He sullenly followed his father to the car, came home, and slept for a week.

Jamal swore to Carla that he wouldn’t do it again. She came to his room and reminded him that it was just the two of them together and alone in the world, and he promised without understanding. She promised him that when the time came, soon, she said, in a year or so, they would move out together. They sat in his room, dreaming of this. About the stereo he’d have and the job she would get after college and how he could finish high school while she worked and how they would be free from their father and this house. He promised the way anyone promises after a rough experience. But it was only the first time he ran away, not the last.

Carla had approached the buildings from the north, from the vista of the viaduct. Angie used to like that spot. Even in the winter and especially that last winter, she would bundle Carla and the baby up and take them to that spot. Walking up past the Castle Frank subway to the bridge looking over the Don Valley. Angie would stand there, staring and telling them how lovely it was and that it reminded her of where she was born, except for the bridge, except for the traffic, and except for the winter. She promised that in the summer she would take them down the trails under the bridge. She hadn’t done it that summer after all, Carla thought, though there were summers when she had taken Carla alone. That was before Jamal was born. The two of them, Carla and Angie, would set off on a Sunday morning, finding their way under the bridge, idling along the paths, listening to birds and the snuffed noise of the highway high above them. But that summer,