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

call as loneliness? Was it rather she who was lonely? Her affection for him had never kept him safe or close. She knew that she loved him with a possessive passion, but she had never felt that love returned. He had always felt himself disconnected. She sensed this. As a child he seldom listened to what he was told. He barrelled ahead despite warnings, through the living room, breaking Nadine’s miniatures; down tobogganing hills, breaking his leg; against traffic, causing horns to honk. He never took advice, he never ever seemed to be in the same conversations as you. His eyes always flitted to something ahead and beyond you. His body had a wiry alertness, his face a vulnerable tenderness that could be seen now only sometimes below the blank pose he had gradually assumed over the years. Carla imagined this face now, the tender one, leaning into the public phone at the jail, hiding itself from the other inmates and guards.

She had resolved to go see her father and tell him to bail Jamal out. Make him bail out Jamal. Now that resolve was strengthened by what she sensed in Jamal. And in herself. Perhaps he was in danger. More danger anyway, a different kind of danger, because danger was what Jamal was in at birth and what he had always gravitated toward. But she felt a different danger in his life now, the danger of his losing, yes, her.

Carla felt weaker than she’d ever felt. As if she could not hold him up any longer. Whatever Jamal thought, however he located her exhortations to get it together, however he dismissed these and went his perilous way, he depended on her to be there. And Carla was losing faith in her ability to support him. She’d helped him find a room, staked him for two months’ rent. He’d been thrown out, of course. The nice Portuguese family, as Carla called them, did not abide the ganja smoking and the friends and the music in their rooming house. She thought afterward that she must have been crazy to imagine that Jamal would be cool and get along in that house. But they had seemed nice people who would look out for him. She was, she understood deep down, under the ridiculous fantasy that Jamal wasn’t too far gone yet, too savvy. Or that all he wanted was independence, as she did, and he would take hold of his opportunities, becoming the reliable, loving brother she needed. But that, she knew, was fantasy, though she tried often enough to impose it. Truthfully, he had only been for a short time the cuddly baby brother. At any rate it was a fiasco, and she had to forfeit the two hundred and fifty dollars surety she had left with the Medeiroses before the damage Jamal and his friends left in the room. She’d even gotten him a job with Binh, but that too had been brief when he showed up late every single day and finally not at all.

It wasn’t merely these kinds of things that she could no longer support him with, it was the faith that he needed from her that was waning. Between holding him up and mining the short memory of her mother she was exhausted—so exhausted she didn’t feel exhaustion, just an empty dryness. A distraction that made her leave packages undelivered till the next day. It made her want to wake up each morning and simply wander about; it made her want to sit at the window all day watching the street below or watching the changing light of the spring unravelling. The only one she could think of handing Jamal over to was her father. Not because he had any interest but because she could think of no one else. No one else was implicated except herself, and her dead mother, who had handed Jamal to her because her father wasn’t there. Okay, she decided, time for the bastard to take over. The venom of that last thought was half-hearted. She didn’t even have that left, though no doubt when she came face to face with her father, it was certain to renew itself.

She used to be curious about her father’s vanity. Vanity was all it could be called. How could he have survived her mother’s death and a life after of denial if not for some deep, thick artery of vanity in him. A vanity that he could not suppress even for the well-being of a baby. He had acted as if Jamal were his rival and not his child. His rival for Angie and then for Nadine and then for life. As if Jamal had replaced him. At first she had loved her father as her mother had, as a child would, in the exhilarating domestic space of her mother’s apartment—their home—where he would visit with gifts, but where she would be banished to the living room while he made love to her mother. When her mother died, her feelings turned to ambivalence. She felt the same excited joy to be in his presence, but something momentous had disrupted the bonds between them, and so she shrank from him out of uncertainty and then out of loyalty to her mother. At twenty-three, there was no longer any doubt or ambivalence in her about him. There was downright hatred. She detested him.

Going to the blue house all those years ago with Angie was a vivid memory. Even after Carla herself had come to live in the house, the memory of it, in the way she had experienced it with Angie, remained. As if it was a different place altogether. Carla’s hand was sweaty in Angie’s palm. They were walking toward the house. They stood across from the house. A blue house with rose bushes in front. It was across the bridge, toward the east of the city. They would leave their apartment on a Saturday afternoon, take the subway to Chester station, and walking