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

when Jackie’s father’s uncle phoned up and said, “Come on out here, boy. It’s a happening town,” they got on the train in their psychedelic pants and cocked hat and Indian blouses and came just like that because they were still young and still in love with each other and themselves and the world. What’s wrong with that kind of narcissism? So they didn’t envision, no, they thought that they were young and beautiful, and it wasn’t a lie, and it ought to have been enough. It’s enough for a lot of people, why not them?

Jackie heard all this when her mother and father were trying to keep their arguing low and when they were so mad they didn’t care to spare her. Between her parents and Vanauley Way, she wondered what she was going to do. She did them all a favour by making a plan. If the city didn’t have the good grace to plant a shrub or two, she would cultivate it with her own trees and flowers. And so she did. In her mind.

Every day she walked down paths of magnolia trees and lilac bushes; wisteria hung over the arbour and doorway of 113½. In the spring she walked around complimenting the tulips: the parrots, the Rembrandts, the triumphs, the double early, the viridiflora, the double late, the hummingbird, the clusiana. She loved lobelia at her feet and just the names helianthemum and habranthus. All these and more she found in a book called The Expert’s Flowers by Dr. N. T. Humphreys. She walked from Vanualey Way to Harbord Collegiate in tumbling, arching cream shrub roses. And if her mother and father couldn’t love one another or could only love one another in this reckless, undefined, unreliable way, she would love them with a passion but with a discipline.

It was riding the tip of his tongue; it was hovering in his brain. He knew it wasn’t simple. Jackie hadn’t left Alexandra Park. She owed a loyalty to her mother and father. That faithfulness didn’t mean that she wanted to have it burn her as it had them. Hence, the white boy. Oku knew this logic. He knew that to Jackie he probably looked like so many burned-out guys in Vanauley Way. Young, but burned out, so much wreckage. How could he tell her that he wasn’t wreckage? How could he, when he was depending on her to tell him that? What could he tell her then? Number one, that he wasn’t a player. He would have to shed any ambivalence about that. Number two, he wasn’t her father. He would never allow that look to come into his eyes, the wry look, the defeated look, the bitter look. He was going to work the rest of the summer, the rest of the year, then go back and finish the master’s. Why? Because he loved that, and what he loved he wasn’t going to have taken from him or give up. Next, he had held her, he had felt her, he was certain, he simply had to be there. Jesus, who was he promising all this to? All right then, himself. He was promising this to himself.

TWENTY-ONE

TUYEN HAD GONE to the market with Oku, and she had joked around with him in their way, teasing him about Jackie, discussing John Coltrane’s “Venus,” but her brain felt lit. She was frightened of the face in the photograph she had taken. Could it be him? After all, the only photographs of Quy she’d seen were of him as a baby. His face would have changed. And she had never ever seen his real face. Perhaps she was hallucinating. He was a ghost in her childhood, the unseen, the un-understood, yet here he was, insinuating himself in a simple meeting with her brother that she had foolishly photographed like a spy. Throughout her childhood Quy had looked at her from every mantel, every surface, and now she thought she had looked at him. And there at the end of the roll of film was her own face too, wet, her hair clinging to her cheek, the flash of the camera making her seem startled. She was so frightened she’d ended up in the doorway of Pope Joan, longing to be seduced.

She’d thought briefly of talking to her sisters, but that idea came and went quickly with the memory of her last encounter with Lam when she was home. She had little contact with either of them, and besides she didn’t care what they thought. They were older, it seemed, by millennia and simply didn’t see the world the same way as she did. Yet she was always surprised by the venomous passion that jumped out at her from her sisters each time she was in some kind of trouble with her mother and father. When she was little, they always suggested to her parents some much harsher punishment than her parents had settled on. Far from enhancing their power over her, it diminished them, but the intensity of their hatred always surprised her. Even when she tried to be helpful to one of them, whoever it was would spin around and attack her.

Like a year ago, when Ai wanted to go to Montreal to live and their parents objected, swearing to cut her off, screaming that she was breaking up the family. Ai seemed determined to go despite this, she seemed to blossom in the drama all around her. Until, in a moment of sisterly conspiracy, Tuyen had said to her, “Ai, it’s gonna be great for you.”

“You little whore!” Ai had spat at her. “Who asked you? You would like me to go, wouldn’t you? Then Binh would have no one to support him.”

Tuyen was stupefied. What intrigues had she missed, and how did her family really see her? That last, she thought, she didn’t care about, but obviously she was not immune to their opinions. Recovering herself, she had said to Ai, “Oh, do whatever the