At first, when Tiffany realized that she couldn’t gain the affection of her brother, she carried her complaints to her parents, who made Kareem play with her. But this never really worked; it just made her brother resent her even more. So she started fighting him. When he called her Coconut Head, she called him Fat Head. And when he looked at her as though he would have stepped on her if she was a cockroach, she laughed in his face. But underneath her laughter, she still yearned for her brother’s love.
Early one evening, Tiffany’s mother sent her to call Kareem from the schoolyard where he was playing with his friends, because it was almost dinnertime. The school was a short distance from their house, so she ran all the way there. Those days, if Tiffany could run somewhere, even when it was preferable that she walked because she was, for example, wearing church shoes, she ran. That day, once she got to the back of the school, a large grassy area where students took recess, she expected Kareem and his friends to be playing cricket, but instead she saw that they were about to race. Their bodies were bent in the starting position she’d seen people on the television take. One of her brother’s friends was a distance away from the rest, so she assumed that he was the person who would say, “On your mark, set, go!” As she walked across to where her brother and his friends were crouched, they started running, and without thinking about it, she joined the race. When she beat all of them, Kareem and his friends looked at her as though although they’d known her for a long time, they’d only just thought to really look at her. One of them asked Kareem, “Mek yuh neva tell me seh yuh likkle sistah can run?” After that, Kareem often called upon Tiffany to race his friends and classmates in order to prove that he wasn’t lying when he said that his little sister could beat anybody.
* * *
—
When Tiffany wakes up, the ghost of Jia Yi is on the front and the back of her mind because while she slept, the ghost had drawn near to whisper in her ear, so close that Tiffany could have touched her. She wakes early to the winter sun streaming through the window, and to her roommate’s loud snoring, always a surprise considering the girl’s petite frame. Sometime during the night, Tiffany became overheated, and her comforter is lying on the ground. She lifts it onto the bed, enclosing her body in a darker cave of morning, willing herself to fall back asleep to see if Jia Yi comes again to whisper her killer’s name. The name had felt on the tip of Tiffany’s tongue because it had been one of those dreams that touched the living world.
Jia does come back, though this time they are sitting across from each other in one of the Chinese restaurants in town. Jia is eating a dish that looks more traditional than the chicken and broccoli in front of Tiffany, which means that she must have ordered from the traditional menu. Jia is eating quickly, sometimes pausing to look at her phone, and she isn’t paying any mind to Tiffany. It isn’t until she picks up her bag and brings her tray to the garbage bin that Tiffany realizes that she was mistaken in thinking that they were eating together when in fact they were strangers sitting across from each other in a restaurant crowded during lunch hour. Jia’s hair is long and black, hanging to the middle of her back. Before she leaves the restaurant, she looks behind her in the direction of where she had been sitting, presumably to see if she left anything behind. Looking at her face, Tiffany remembers that the news anchor said that she was twenty, but she could have passed for sixteen.
* * *
—
Tiffany’s roommate, Taylor, is shaking her awake, asking if she plans to miss the 8 a.m. class they have together. Tiffany considers this: the Introduction to Psychology class allows one absence, which she hasn’t used as yet. “I’m tired,” she lies. “Take notes for me?” Taylor agrees easily, her heavily lined eyes appraising Tiffany because she’s never skipped class before. Taylor is a white girl from a small town in Iowa, and Tiffany suspects that besides Taylor’s boyfriend, she is the only other black person she’s had close contact with, and definitely the first foreigner she’s known with any kind of intimacy. Taylor is kind but annoying. She would take off her Victoria’s Secret sweatpants with the word PINK on her ass to lend to Tiffany, but she’s chattier than Tiffany would prefer in a roommate. She teases Tiffany that she is a Jamaican who won’t smoke marijuana with her, and who won’t let her smoke in their dorm room. “I didn’t come to America to smoke ganja,” Tiffany says, even though she knows that Taylor won’t understand what she means. She doesn’t add that she’s never smoked weed, because she knows that Taylor is stupid enough to be shocked by this fact.
Taylor gets her weed from her boyfriend, Kevin, a tall black guy from Chicago, who Tiffany thinks looks too sleepy-eyed to be a biochem major. Mostly he ignores Tiffany and she ignores him, when she isn’t looking at him through the corner of her eyes. She’s decided that he’s almost handsome from the right angle. White men on campus look through and around her, so it hurt her to meet this black man who behaved as though she wasn’t anyone to get to know. This is how come Tiffany was surprised when, as usual, she came into the room to see that Taylor had gone to class and left Kevin on her computer, and when she grunted hello and closed the door, he was behind her, then he was pushing her against the door, and looking down at her as though it wasn’t anything, as though he didn’t have a girlfriend and Tiffany wasn’t his girlfriend’s roommate, and soon they were naked and tangled in her bed, and it was hot, and she had thought: So this is what they call fucking. She’d only ever been with one other man, and sex with him had been an affectionate, cautious introduction. Taylor came back to see that Kevin was still using her computer and Tiffany was taking a shower. Later, Tiffany was surprised to remember that it had been she who initiated things, reaching up to kiss Kevin, wrapping her legs around him.
She lies in bed now, listening to Taylor bustle around the room, then go into the bathroom, emerging out of it with glossy lips, reentering and then reemerging with her hair pulled into a ponytail. Tiffany realizes that the dream of the restaurant had felt as sharp as a memory. And couldn’t it have happened? Couldn’t she have sat across from Jia Yi and it wouldn’t have meant a thing? Tiffany would have barely looked at her, registering her as another Asian student on campus, forgettable, invisible, not like how she would have taken her in had she been a black girl she didn’t know and she’d maybe even have spoken to her. America, the land of diversity, where people talk to who they think it’s safest to talk to.
As soon as Taylor leaves, pulling the door shut behind her, Tiffany buries herself again under the comforter. But sleep won’t come to her. Jia Yi won’t come back.
* * *
—
Tiffany was sure that God made her to run. Running made her feel as though the world carried her on its wings. Whenever she suffered some social atrocity, like the time the boys in her class made a list of the prettiest girls and hadn’t included her, she reminded herself that someday when she won a gold medal at the Olympics, Jamaicans would dance in the streets. So what if her first boyfriend left her for another girl? He returned to his ex-girlfriend even though he had held her hand and promised that the loss of her virginity to him would be a safe thing. So what if her father’s affair led to an outside child and the dissolution of her parents’ marriage? She could not look at either of her parents without feeling sorry for them. But she had running and it belonged only to her.
She never imagined that she wouldn’t be good enough. Four years in a row, she tried out for the island-wide youth competition, the same competition that the Olympians she admired had raced and won. Every year, she had come last in her category, girls ages 14–18, tears running down her face when she crossed the finish line. People said she had potential. Two trainers offered to work with her to see how she would improve. She asked herself: What is the point if I’m not the best? It wasn’t that she was cocky, but it was a purer feeling. What she’d felt for all those years, how far she believed that her running would take her, is what people call faith.
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Later, when the recruiters from American universities came to Jamaica, her mother pushed her to try out. Tiffany wasn’t surprised to hear that she was good enough for an athletic scholarship. And her family, especially her mother, had been so thrilled that running could take her so far, that it seemed her only option was to smile as though she too was proud.
* * *
—
Midday Tiffany wakes from a different dream. She had been leading in a race against Kevin, Taylor, and Jia Yi, but at the finish line her teeth started to fall from her mouth. She leaves the dormitory for a frappe at one of the coffee shops downtown. Wearing her team sweatshirt, which is almost too warm for the sunny mid-March day, she jogs past students walking to and from classes. She figures that sugar, that cure-all, will calm her nerves. In the last few months, she’s become addicted to frappes because Taylor works as a barista and occasionally brings drinks home. Tiffany is looking into the window of the Taiwanese tea shop when Duane taps her on the shoulder, which causes her to flinch dramatically.
“Everything all right with you?” He looks her over carefully. She’d felt someone come up behind her. But she hadn’t seen anyone. She’d only felt the person bump into her, and then for some reason she was certain the person had entered the tea shop though she had no reason for thinking so. But she can’t tell Duane any of this, can she?
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asks.
“Ghosts? Why are you asking me about ghosts?”
“I had a weird experience at home, and just now someone I didn’t see bumped my shoulder.”
He laughs. “Tiffany, yuh no memba when mi say you fi be’ave yuhself?” He’s referring to a recent time when he saw her and her fellow underage teammates downing shots at a bar downtown.
“Mi nah play! Yuh believe in duppy?”
“My professor was saying that most of the universe is dark matter, which means that we really don’t know what’s out there,” he says, talking in his serious way that is adorable to Tiffany. “So if yuh saying that yuh being haunted by a duppy, it no matter wah mi believe.”
“It’s Jia Yi.”
“Di Chinese girl dem find dead?! You knew her? I had a class with her.”
“You had a class wid her? What was she like? Mi neva know her.”
“She was nice. One time we ha’ fi work together. She laughed nuff. She didn’t like Invisible Man. Are you sure that the situation nah mess wid your head? Maybe the fact that everyone a talk ’bout her?” He was watching her carefully. He was the only person who knew about the pills the psychiatrist prescribed.
“Dat must be what’s happening.”
“Yuh sound doubtful. Listen, mi ha’ fi run. Let’s touch base later.”
Tiffany turns to watch him go. His mother, who is of Chinese ancestry, runs a small grocery store back home with his father, a black man. People on campus never believe that he’s Jamaican. Before she started hooking up with Kevin, they almost hung out romantically. Duane would cook curry chicken, they’d watch a movie, and inevitably the night would end with kissing. He’d been recruited to run too, but he had no passion for it, which Tiffany envied. It was merely a means to what he wanted and it had worked, as he was off to medical school in Cuba in the fall. There was a girl back home he wanted to marry when he was old enough. He felt that too many Jamaicans were quick to forget their country, relocating to foreign economies. He wanted to earn his degrees and return home.
* * *
—
The last time Tiffany spoke to her mother, she lied and told her that the team won their most recent meet. She also told her mother that she has decided to become a nurse, because this seems like an honorable enough profession, but really she can’t think of anything else to become. Before Tiffany decided on a major, her mother would say some variation of, “Tiffany, I know yuh wan’ fi run but yuh cyaan guarantee dat.” To quickly steer the conversation elsewhere, so she wouldn’t be drawn into lying any more than she had to, Tiffany would tell stories about Taylor’s family. Her mother likes to hear stories about white people almost as much as Taylor likes to share them. There is the fact that Taylor’s sister and her husband are getting divorced because her sister was having an affair with a woman. There is also the fact that Taylor discovered a sex toy in her mother’s chest of drawers, which surprised her because her father is such a conservative man. Tiffany’s mother would ask some variation of, “Mi wonder if all white people mek it a habit fi chat dem family business like dat?” Tiffany described the coffee shop where Taylor was a barista—by opening time at 5:30 a.m., people started to line up at the door. “Coo yah!” her mother said, surprised to learn about the caffeinated destiny of that treasured Blue Mountain coffee that Jamaica exported. Tiffany also described the cold weather she could barely manage, but how the snow made everything quiet, like Sunday mornings.
But there is plenty Tiffany doesn’t tell her mother. She doesn’t tell her mother about her first few months here, when running couldn’t save her, when it couldn’t do a thing for her. The cold weather depressed her, the dark mornings kept her spirits low, and she craved a fulfilling plate of food. One restaurant in town served what the menu called a “jerk burger,” and Tiffany had been so excited by the idea of Jamaican food that she hadn’t considered that the menu’s definition of jerk could be a beef patty that came covered in jerk sauce and mango salsa. She was so disappointed she almost wanted to cry. She missed Champion, her overfed dog, who licked her feet when she sat on the veranda. And she missed sitting on the veranda, where she loved to idle, sometimes clipping and filing her nails, other times reading one of the romance books a friend loaned her, and she would call out to neighbors as they walked past. The daughter of two secondary school teachers, she had been raised on middle-class pride in a house her parents built from the ground up. But that upbringing where she was raised neither poor nor rich was no more, now that her father lived with the other woman, her brother had moved to another parish, and her mother rented out the bedrooms so that she wouldn’t have to live alone.
In America, Tiffany yearns for someone who understands her. Duane tries, but inevitably they misunderstand each other. He doesn’t understand why she isn’t happier at the chance of an American education, and she doesn’t understand how he’s assimilated so quickly to American life. He has a friend, Jamal from Philadelphia, the other black guy on the team, who translates things for him. Once, Tiffany heard Duane say to Jamal, “Tell me about African Americans.” Most of the other girls on the track and field team are white, plenty of them Iowan or from places that to Tiffany might as well be Iowa. There is another black girl, who had been recruited from Kenya, but she wants to forget where she came from. She pays Tiffany little attention, preferring to hang out with the white girls, and speaks as though she is trying to strip Nairobi from her voice.
Tiffany would have stopped going to practice if it didn’t mean that she would lose her scholarship, and she knew that she would be ashamed to return to Jamaica empty-handed. But her lack of interest showed, and the coach reprimanded her. He advised her to see a counselor and warned how easy it was to lose an athletic scholarship and be sent home. He was a man with a warm, open face and a receding hairline, and at first he had seemed like an ally, but sitting in his office, Tiffany believed that he was serious about sending her home. When she went crying to Duane, he let her on to the unspoken expectation that international athletes were supposed to carry the team—to train harder, to run and jump farther. Later, when Tiffany saw the school psychologist, she was referred to a psychiatrist, who wrote a prescription for pills that helped with the daily task of living.
Tiffany was sure that she was meant to be famous. She was sure that the time would come when Jamaicans would memorize her first and last name when they watched her on their televisions representing Jamaica at the Olympics. Instead, she is in the middle of a country that isn’t home to her, a country where wo
men like her are more memorable dead than alive. That’s the only way she’ll end up on anyone’s television. Her body would be flown back home and her mother, who believes that America is where young girls come to die, would be quick to tell everyone that this is exactly what she expected to happen, all her fears realized.
* * *
—
Once, Tiffany and Kevin went on a date together. It was at the beginning of the semester in late January, when they’d first started sleeping together. Taylor was with family for the weekend, so they’d driven thirty minutes in a car Kevin borrowed from a friend to a bigger city, where they were to meet up with his cousin, Wayne, who was visiting his child. Kevin kept the radio turned up high, and at stoplights he’d rub Tiffany’s thigh. They ate in a restaurant that served Chinese food on pizza crust. She was disappointed to discover that they had little to say to each other. He was quiet by nature, and she didn’t know how to open him up. They talked about classes, their birth order, and the weather, before she had the right idea of what to say when they returned to the car.
“Why didn’t you stay in Chicago for school?” she asked, buckling her seatbelt.
How to Love a Jamaican Page 11
