How to Escape From a Leper Colony

by Tiphanie Yanique

  I fear that the sickness will take over when I am sitting down to dinner with my wife and daughters. My wife of twelve years will serve groundnut soup and gari with the spices that my mother could never get in Britain. I will remember how my mother would explain all the cooking to me, not just my sister, because she felt a man should also know how to take care of himself. I will be thinking of how I love my mother but of how my wife’s cooking is better. Then, without being able to help it, I will be wondering about Sally. I will be thinking about my fingers in her flat slippy hair and I will feel bad for thinking this. I will say out loud that I am glad we do not have sons. Then I will be staring into the bowl unable to move. My daughters will go on chatting and I will be hoping the soup will steam up at me, push into my skin and move into my pores. Move me.

  After my family was sent back to Ghana, I decided against becoming a professional football player. I had the sickness that I felt wouldn’t really ever let me play. I had to concentrate on my studies so I could have a chance at university. A chance to still fulfill the role of the firstborn and the only male. During the A-level exams I would whisper to myself like a mantra—Discipline. Discipline. In Accra it was hard to run. People would shout at you as you went past. You were a spectacle. Instead, I would juggle the football in some dusty corner of our neighborhood park. Reciting lines of Shakespeare to the beat of the ball hitting the ground.

  I got an upper-level degree in college. A lecturer had encouraged me to go on but then my sister married an African American and my parents moved to live with them in Ohio City. It wasn’t so easy for her to get her brother over, so I had to get a job in Accra. I married a Ga woman my mother and father would have approved. Now I look at my daughters, their hair processed straight like my wife’s, and I think that someday I will tell them the story of how I was going to represent us in the World Cup, as a star defender on the national football team.

  WHERE TOURISTS DON’T GO

  Mason spots the Downtown Little Catholic Chapel during his first month in Texas. “That’s strange,” he says out loud and tugs at Robin’s hand. But Robin sees the train ahead and tugs harder in the opposite direction. Mason looks back at his discovery. The so-called chapel is connected to the buildings beside it like so much of American downtown. A CVS on one side and a bakery with a cartoon of a baker making an OK sign on the other. It’s not even a stand-alone. Mason is thinking that it can’t really be a Catholic chapel at all, as he and Robin board the Houston Metro without purchasing their fare. They sit toward the front and try to act natural. The conductor doesn’t come aboard to check anyone’s ticket.

  Mason is an architect and he has always wanted to be an architect. He works for a large firm that promoted him with this transfer from New York to Houston. His new employers seem to like him—they smile at him a lot, though he hasn’t been given a raise. He works hard, he does. He doesn’t join the other guys for happy hour on Fridays and he only smiles and says thank you when the women ask him to join them instead. He’s never been a bar kind of guy so the first rejection is easy. But Mason is good looking and Americans croon over his Jamaican accent, so passing on the women is harder. But of course there’s Robin now.

  Two months after the move an acquaintance is passing through the city and Mason agrees to meet him for a late lunch. Mason and the friend hadn’t been close when they were in college in New York and they hadn’t even known each other in Jamaica. The acquaintance, however, would have called Mason a friend because they studied together often and were in many of the same classes. They’d played some dominoes once at a house party but that was early in freshman year before Mason’s father had called him long distance to ask about his grades. Though the friend is from Jamaica, he’s from the countryside and not the big city of Kingston like Mason. Mason has always thought the friend was a bit naive. The guy had been the only male on the Caribbean dance squad. Mason remembers cheering him on as he bubbled on stage. Even through his whistling and whooping Mason had felt a little bad for the guy, up there making a poppy show of himself. But he’d also been a little jealous. He’d never learned to dance like that.

  Now they are eating what this café calls a po-boy, but previously in New York, Mason had known it as a sub and back in Jamaica it was just a sandwich on French bread. The friend tugs gently on the coming in of a beard. Mason puts his hand to his own smooth face as if in demonstration. The friend tells him he is into clean energy consulting.

  The friend leans forward over his po-boy. “I building a house back home in Portland parish. Totally solar powered. My wife with a pickney on the way.”

  “No joke?”

  “No joke, man. It’s an experiment. The house, I mean. I designed it myself.”

  The friend pulls out sketches and lays them like a gift across the table. “This is my newest thing, right here.”

  Mason looks at the sketches but he can’t see it. He turns them slightly at an angle but it doesn’t look right. He shifts them again but now it looks upside down. Mason nods, trying to place himself. “So, why you branching out into architecture now?”

  “Well, I did engineering and architecture in school.” The friend smoothes his sketches protectively. “You don’t remember?”

  “Yeah. I remember now.”

  “And you? I don’t see no ring.” The friend holds up his left hand and wiggles his ring finger to emphasize his own gold band.

  “I have me a little sweet thing.” Mason shifts and considers putting his suit jacket back on. It’s tailored, something he’d gotten in Kingston. “She’s a good woman,” he says finally.

  “From Yard?”

  “Nah, she’s from Chicago. We met in New York after school. But a good woman, you know.”

  The acquaintance had finished every bit of his sandwich and fries. Had pinched up the straggling pieces of lettuce. Had slurped down his cola until there was no ice left to rattle. Now Mason stands to shake the friend’s hand as the friend leaves with his drawings, promising to look Mason up when next he’s in Houston.

  Mason heads toward the train. He is eating and walking—something his mother has always scolded him against. But it is something he has come back to since moving to Texas. Like reading at the dinner table. Like talking on a cell phone in a restaurant. It is the kind of thing he would never do at home. But Robin, his girlfriend, is an inadequate mother. And now Mason should be looking for the train but instead he is letting the liquid mayo drip onto his suit jacket. “Look you there,” he whispers out loud.

  The banners stretch down from the narrow third floor to the first and spell “The Downtown Little Catholic Chapel.” The banners are a dark red and the letters are in black. There are windows big enough to stand in.

  Mason has not once desired to attend Mass since leaving Jamaica years ago; his family is part of the rare race of Kingston Catholics, but now he wonders what’s behind those windows. Is it really a chapel? Maybe it’s a nightclub with an exclusive guest list. In New York there had been things like that. Maybe the third floor is the champagne room and there are strippers there on Saturday nights. Behind Mason water shoots up from the fountains, announcing the train’s arrival. Houston is not like New York. People don’t jostle Mason to get out of the way. There is space here. Wide open space. Mason walks backward for a few steps, without bumping into anyone, until he feels the grid of the light rail under his feet. He throws the remains of the sandwich into a garbage can and boards the metro without purchasing a ticket. The metro goes only goes north and south. It is the end of a workday and so Mason is headed south toward the apartment in the manicured Museum District where he and Robin have set up house.

  As the train glides through the city Mason thinks of the black leather couch that Robin has chosen. She is looking for white accents. She wants them to have an Asian-themed living room. “This is stupid,” Mason had said. “We’re not Asian.”

  “So what? I’m African American and you’re Jamaican. You always remind me that those are two different things. I�
��m not having this place all islanded out and you don’t want my African American things … so we’re choosing a neutral ethnicity.”

  “What are your so-called African American things?” he asks.

  “The African shawl. The praise woman sculpture …” She begins to list off her prized possessions.

  “How does African imitation become African American?”

  “And the Caribbean is so perfect? You Jamaicans just imitate everything black Americans do and put a reggae beat on it.”

  Mason wanted to shake her but he shook his head instead. “Your sculptures are tacky.”

  “You would say that. Your parents’ little prince. But we’re a couple now, Mason.” And she twirled her wrist to the ceiling as though casting a spell. “Asia is a compromise.”

  So they had compromised. But now he wasn’t sure they had it right. The bonsai tree and the little water altar. It all seemed so adopted. No, worse—it felt stepchildish. But these analogies weren’t right at all. Robin would yell at his insensitivity if he said them out loud. She’s a teacher. High school. And she thinks Asia is very enlightened. Since moving to Houston she’s also discovered that she likes fajitas and tacos—so the kitchen will be in Mexican style.

  The metro stop is so close to the apartment that Mason can walk. It’s even closer than his stop was in Brooklyn. His suit is stained now and so he carries his jacket over his shoulder. He puts his free hand in his pocket. It’s hot but he still walks with his back straight and he doesn’t relax until he’s in the door. “Robin, baby. I’m home.” He knows she’s there. Her car is parked out on the street. But she doesn’t answer him. He passes through the living room where his architecture books are laid out like art pieces on the coffee table. Her books for school, things like Jane Eyre and Robinson Crusoe, are lined by height on the bookshelf.

  When Robin is mad at Mason she says things like “my friends warned me against dating crazy Jamaican men.” When she is happy with him she calls him “my little island boy.” Mason feels oddly proud of both accusations. Today she’s in the bedroom watching a vain reality show too loudly. Mason goes to the kitchen and pulls out a beer. He holds it to his neck like he sees in the commercials. Then he pops it open on the counter. This, too, is something he gets from TV. He drinks the entire beer right there, standing. He lifts two more from the fridge and goes to the bedroom. Everything in there is flowery. Robin even has a purple imitation silk canopy that she wants him to install properly. Right now it is spilling ungracefully from the bedposts to the floor. She chose a violet canopy because it was a compromise—she’d wanted a black bedroom and he’d wanted white or orange. But now he hates the whole thing. He pushes the canopy aside and sees that she’s grading but that she’s also in her nice underwear … not the kind she wears to school. Her hair is wild as though she’s washed it and just let it go without pressing it straight or blow-drying. He sets the beers down on the plastic side table that looks like wood. He takes his pants off. She giggles and calls him her little island boy.

  But Mason hadn’t been able to finish his po-boy. And here now with Robin he isn’t able to finish up either. She had. She always did. After some time he just keeps moving and pushing until she grimaces and holds him tightly. “I’ll be sore,” she says with apology. He relaxes. It’s all too much work anyway.

  They had been in Houston for three months when the I-Festival came around. They’d seen the billboards: “Come back to Jamaica!” But Mason thought that his country was doing a vigorous tourism campaign and ignored the signs.

  “I-Fest,” says Robin like a local. “Every year they do it. Last year was China. This year is Jamaica. We should go.”

  “Some fakeness, probably.”

  “Well, I want to go. I want to see what Jamaica is like. The place you’re from …” She goes to touch his face but he pulls away. She pushes up her mouth and balls up her fists. “Just hit me,” he thinks. “Just give me a reason.” And then he can’t believe what he’s thinking. He takes her fisted hands in his. “Okay, baby. We’ll go.” He feels the madness in him slink off to the walls like a ghost. The walls are still white.

  They go on the last day of the festival. When Mason holds the schedule in his hands he only stares and stares. He’d waited. He’d procrastinated. He hadn’t really wanted to come. And now look. He’d missed out on two really big and really good Jamaican bands. Bands he hadn’t seen since he was in high school and had snuck out for because his mother had scoffed when he’d asked permission. Now he wants to rip up the schedule. He passes it to Robin instead. She looks it over. “I know you probably don’t want to see ‘fashions of Jamaica’ but that’s all that’s on stage right now.” He nods, wanting to scream. There is still a crowd and they have to meander through. They are downtown, not far from where he works. He can see his building. That’s his window way up there at the top like an attic. He turns from it.

  It is the smell that he recognizes. Jerk and curry. He hates to be a stereotype but he’s missing food. Food-food. Food from home. They buy their tickets and stand in the long line for jerk chicken and curry goat. He searches for a Jamaican accent among the others in line, but mostly Texan inflections come to them. He thinks with amusement that some of these people must be tourists to Houston—visitors from San Antonio or Austin or even more exotic places like Waco or El Paso. Mason wonders now if the food will be authentic. He longs to taste Jamaica.

  While they stand in line Robin moves so that she leans into his chest. They inch forward in the line like one body. His arms wrap around her shoulders. They don’t talk. He stands there with the smell of Jamaica and the longing for home and his woman in his arms. At that moment he loves Robin more than he ever will.

  They move toward the fashion show with their Styrofoam plates of food. They pass the booths that claim “History of Jamaica” or “Fortune Telling—Rasta Style.” The food is already a disappointment because it isn’t much and now Mason is almost afraid to eat it. They rest their food on a wall and watch the show that isn’t a fashion show after all. It is a dance routine. Young people blasting the latest dancehall and bucking and rolling in “100% West Indian” T-shirts. The crowd is too thick for Mason to see below the dancers’ waists but he imagines that the girls wear batty riders and the boys pedal pushers. That would be Jamaican fashion maybe. All he can see is their heads snapping and their hands flaying like whips over their heads—common, his mother would have called it. He is lifting his fork to his mouth when Robin makes a face.

  “I can’t eat this.”

  “What’s that, Robin baby?” He rests his fork down.

  “It’s too hot. Too much pepper.”

  “Here. Drink some coconut water. Cut the curry spice.”

  “Are you listening? I can’t eat this at all. I can’t even taste anything but pepper. My mouth. I can’t taste my own damn mouth.”

  “So, what you want me to do?”

  Robin turns away from him and walks her dish to a garbage bin. She dumps it with aggression. Mason watches her do this then turns away toward the dancers—his chest inexplicably tight.

  “I’m going to get some funnel cake.”

  He nods to show that he’s heard her but he doesn’t look her in the face. Her hair is pulled back so that her cheekbones stand out.

  When he finally turns she has disappeared into the crowd. She looks like everyone. He eats his jerk chicken without tasting it. He leaves all the sauce on the plate without sopping it up with the cocoa bread like he would have if things were different. He goes to throw his plate away. He touches his waist to feel his phone. It’s on buzz. If Robin needs him she can call. He walks around.

  He passes the clothing stands and the booths of jewelry. Every stand has a boom box and they all compete into the air. A brackish noise follows him. Every booth boasts a true-life Rastaman doing the hustling. But when the dreads call out to him to come check their goods their accents sound like New York or maybe one of those small Leeward Islands. They’re selling perfume
oils and shea butter and “Come Back to Jamaica!” T-shirts. Mason fingers a pair of mini–boxing gloves. They are rearview mirror ornaments. Things to swing back and forth as you drive. He buys the ones with the X of the Jamaican flag and daps the dread as he moves on. But then he remembers that the car is not his but Robin’s. Then he buys a real flag. A huge green X in a black bed. But he thinks that it won’t fit in with any of their décor. So he buys a workout wristband with the Rastafari colors, but then he knows he will never wear it. And so he buys a sticker, and a T-shirt and a ball cap all with “Jamaica” sprawled in red, yellow, and green. He keeps walking. He moves past the platform shaped like a boat’s hull: “A Tribute to Piracy and Port Royal.” Past the kiddie stage where there’s a puppet show going on—one of the puppets has dreads. The other is a dog. The dreaded one might also be a dog. He goes through Artists Lane, which leads to a roped-off exit. There he stops to look at the photography wall. “Emerging Artists of Jamaica.” The one that he stares at bears only an honorable mention ribbon. It is a black-and-white close-up of a young girl. She looks as though she is pretending to be angry—as though any minute she will burst into laughter. Vex Pickney. That’s what it’s called. The sign above all the photos reads “Originals available for delivery from Jamaica.” Each print is stapled into its mounted wood.