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

blue paint off the front porch and the window flashing. The porch sagged forward into the patch of forsythia in the yard. Lavender sprang in the rest of the yard, and rose bushes that Nadine had nurtured for years were still stunted against a small trellis near the roadside where Nadine had tried to make them into a front hedge but the snow salt had defeated her efforts. Carla remembered Nadine year after year optimistically pouring dirt and manure around the bushes, clipping and watering, encouraging reluctant branches to grow.

A surge of memory about her days in this house came over her. In her last years here Carla had hung about like a question mark. Her father told her that she had grown tall and angular, though none of his people were tall, none of Angie’s, either, that he knew of, so why was she so tall, so bony? He also noticed a hitherto allusive danger in her. Just like her mother. Carla was then eighteen, and Nadine no longer asked her to go to the market or to clean up. She did not want to be met with a recumbent defiance. To be truthful, Carla no longer needed to be asked to clean up. She did it swiftly, unasked. She did it, it seemed, as a way of avoiding trouble, avoiding contact. She took care of herself, always had, perhaps to the point of asceticism. She cleared away domestic chores with a briskness. But she took no pleasure in them as she had surely been taught.

Nadine had shown her how to cook lovingly, how to polish tables and floors as if the people you were doing it for, your family, would enjoy it and therefore that would be your joy too. She had shown her how to shop for the best fruit, the best food. Her stepmother had smoothed her soft hands over a seam, showing her how her appearance must be lovingly put together. Carla had taken all this and turned it into competence. She glided through these lessons like an impatient note taker. She completed what they both asked of her not like a daughter but like a clerk, marking off their needs, completing their emotional desires like an office manager.

All her efficiency was to make the time she had with them shorter and shorter; to reduce conversations to a minimum, to limit anything they might want from her. The only time they got an emotion out of her was when she would jump to Jamal’s defence. Though on that score she was mostly watchful, a kind of seething watchfulness that even Derek was slightly afraid of. Otherwise she had sculpted her face to passivity; cheerfulness or anger were imperceptible. She had thought that was what was needed in this house. She had learned not to call attention to herself. Outside or inside. She had stopped bringing any worry home to them. This house was full of enough hurt. Nothing could compare with what was already there. So any small trouble she took care of herself by giving it to the linden trees and the maple trees and the forsythia bushes on her way home. Lingering in the playground and park, she would stand under the bare limbs, watching the snow skiff against the bark, and recite her fear. Anyone walking by would see a girl thin and sickled against a maple, resounding its stillness and winter quiescence. From the brittle forsythia she would break off sticks to beat the pavement or run along fences, scolding like a teacher whoever had bothered her that day. By the time she arrived home her face was placid and even.

She could not bear being in the same room with her father. She noticed this strangely one day when she had turned fifteen. She walked into the living room at four-thirty and rain was falling. It was not a rainstorm, just a steady rain. The couch was wet, and the chair was wet, and rain dripped with a tinny sound into the light fixture. The ceiling was that dreary watery grey that the sky gets. Through the window she could see that it was still the sunny crisp autumn day she had left outside. But in the room rain was falling. Her father was making a list of some kind, his lips moving as if counting, his head bent over the table, and his face drenched. His shirt stuck to his skin. There were puddles of water around his feet and the chair he sat in. Water dripping from his arms. Her father looked up from his pen like a struggling swimmer and stared at her as if to say, What is it you want now? then bent his head again to the table. Carla backed out of the rain-drenched room. Water seeped to her feet at the doorway. From this moment she started calling her father Derek. He did not stop her.

After that each room in the house felt foreign, if it had ever felt like a home. She touched the furniture, looking for raindrop stains or softening of the wood. She examined the corners, looking for dampness. Though the room seemed dry when she was there alone, she couldn’t help feeling a strangeness, a peculiar chill or breeze on her skin. Carla began walking in socks on the dank floors.

She saw that her father was home—his latest car was parked in his usual spot. She knew it was his car because of its shine and because of where it was parked. The house had no garage in the back, so he commandeered a precise spot in front of the house. Derek changed cars every four years. He knew nothing about cars, but he knew about fashion. He spent hours cleaning and buffing his car on the weekends. The car sitting outside the house today was a black Audi. He had a black car, sometimes green, but mostly black. Selling that could bail Jamal out of jail. Carla tried