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

“What the fuck does that mean, Derek? What the fuck does that mean? It means nothing to me, it means nothing to my brother, and it meant nothing to my mother. You made her walk off the edge of a building, it so didn’t mean anything.”

“She was a crazy—”

“No, Derek!” Nadine was appalled.

“Say it, say it, ‘bitch,’ right?”

Carla flew at him, slapping his face and kicking him. He fell over onto the couch again, his raised arms warding off her blows. He’d completely lost the composure he’d tried to affect. He’d known all along that beneath Carla’s calm lay a rage, rage that she could not express as a child but that would break out somehow. He was not a man who was afraid of women. He handled them emotionally, and if not emotionally, physically, without compunction. But this was not a woman, it was his daughter, and her rage was so primal it seemed to drain his own pretensions at violence. He lay on the couch, letting her hit him; he tried to fight her off, but she seemed stronger. Then he heard himself say, “Sorry.” It was the smallest sound, and he didn’t mean it so much as it escaped him. Carla didn’t seem to hear it. She just kept hitting him until Nadine, recovering, held her. She wrenched herself away from Nadine and without another word left the house, slamming the door.

Outside on the sidewalk she searched in her jeans for her keys. The shiny black Audi sat at the curb. Beginning at the closest tail light she scored the skin of the car all the way square to the far tail light. “Fucking prick!” she yelled at the house. An old neighbour out digging up his spring garden looked at her, surprised. He and her father used to come outside on Saturdays in the summer and polish their cars together. “What are you looking at, asshole?” she screamed at him. She unlocked her bike and rode down the street and across the Danforth. She felt exhilarated. She didn’t feel worried or troubled, she felt refreshed. She had turned something on her father. What it was wasn’t clear. The ride across the city would tell her. She sped along beside the traffic over the Bloor Viaduct.

TWENTY

THE RESEARCH HE’D BEEN DOING was walking through the park. If he got to know Alexandra Park, he figured he’d know something about Jackie. So he would take the walk through the park not to run into her by chance, well, not wholly, but to gain something of her that he might have, like everything else perhaps, taken for granted. The one time that Jackie had allowed them to come to her house was when they were all suspended from high school. He only remembered vaguely. Her mother teaching them to play euchre, a glass of Southern Comfort at hand and a cigarette to her lips. Jackie was uncomfortable, he remembered. She kept emptying her mother’s ashtray and wiping the table. That was years ago, but now that he revisited the occasion in his mind, that is what he recalled. Jackie’s discomfort. None of them had thought anything of the surroundings. They all lived in houses with their parents, but Jackie’s parents’ tiny apartment did not strike them at the time as so different. His walk now told him something else. His parents weren’t rich or even well off by any means, but they obviously lived better than people in Vanauley Way. And this is where Jackie had always lived.

He knew, as a black man his age knows, that the park had a reputation. It was turf in the low-level war for such places waged by poor people. If there was history being made in the city, if history was the high-level war rich people waged for their own turf in the city—those wars about waterfront developments and opera houses and real-estate deals and privatization contracts—then the poor waged wars for control of their small alleyways and walkways, their streets and the trade in unofficial goods. Their currency was not stocks, wealth and influence peddling, but tough reputations and threats of physical damage; their gains weren’t stock options and expensive homes but momentary physical control and perennially contested fearsomeness. This war was a more volatile war, perhaps. There was no cushion of security to land on if you lost a skirmish.

Come to think of it, now that he recalled, that experience hadn’t brought them closer to Jackie, hadn’t brought him, to be exact; she had become more aloof with him. Her mother had taken a liking to him and had said to him jokingly, “You sweet on my Jackie, eh, boy? You’d make a fine man, you will,” and Jackie had frozen him out after that. Though he was so stupid, he thought now, that he’d kept asking Jackie how her mother was. He had liked her. There was a sweet drunken look in her eyes and a faded beauty to her face—something lurking that had come alive when she said, “You sweet on my Jackie, eh, boy?” A glint in her language, something smoky and seductive. Jackie had given her a hateful look and said, “Mom, puh-lease!” And the disdain gathered in that “puh-lease!” had fallen on him in some ways ever since.

Fair enough, he thought, nobody wanted to have the approval of their parents for their love life—after all, look what a mess they’d made of their own, for God’s sake. His own parents’ marriage went through seasons of emotional drought bordering on hatred, then periods of what only seemed to be nostalgia for their younger, more exciting selves. He certainly wouldn’t take a drop of advice from them about love. And he would suspect anyone they thought would suit him as a lover. But that was then and this was now. Come to think of it, he had been faithful to that moment of Jackie’s mother’s seduction. She had added her own allure