How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  “Dat woman,” he begins, but is distracted by a forkful of food.

  We are waiting for him to continue. He barely talks about his wife. He always calls her “dat woman.” The woman he left for the young girl. We’ve heard him complain about her—the money she wants, how miserable she is, and his belief that she is turning the children against him by calling him “dat slack man” in front of them.

  “Dat woman really knew how fi love a Jamaican man.”

  “Why yuh sey dat, Ugly?”

  “Because wat a man need more dan good food in him belly, a clean house, and someone fi hug up wid at night?”

  But apparently this is not enough. Look at me, look at my father, who my mother cussed all the days of her life.

  “Den yuh regret leaving her?”

  “Too late fi tink ’bout dat.”

  Now that we’ve finished eating, Ugly leaves as quickly as he came. Jacinth goes to lie down, leaving me to wash up the dishes and the pots. When she climbs out of bed an hour later, I am sitting on the couch with my eyes closed, the newspaper spread out on my lap. I listen as she moves around the bedroom, changing her housedress to outside clothes, pulling a brush through her wig. Finally, she is climbing into her shoes that are sitting outside of the door. I open my eyes to see that she is looking at me.

  “You want anything, Wally?”

  “Yeah, bring me a cream soda.”

  When I hear her footsteps going down the steps in front of the house, I pull my cellphone and the phone card out of my pocket. My son answers his cellphone and his voice sounds newly mature to me. When he says, “Hi, Daddy,” I hear in the music of his words that he is happy to hear from me. I don’t have to ask where he is—the sound of many voices coming through, beneath his voice, paints a story for me. I see a tall, handsome boy, who looks barely anything like me except that we have the same feet and hands but his still glow with youth. He has his mother’s face, a narrow, angular face that is more beautiful as a man’s face. People have said he should look into modeling. I see my son floating through the school gate with the end of school crowd, his six-two height bobbing above the sea of teenagers. The school year has just started and he tells me that it’s going well. He wants to hear me confirm that I will be back in New York in two weeks.

  This is our second year coming back to Blackwoods. For as long as we can, our plan is to spend six months of the year on the island. This was always Jacinth’s retirement dream, though now it feels crucial to her in case she doesn’t have many years left. I told her I was happy to no longer deal with anyone else’s business during my time off, by which I meant that I was happy we were closing down the free childcare service our two daughters were accustomed to using and abusing when school is out for our grandkids. But in the back of my mind, I worried about my son, about leaving him for six months in the year. When he said, “It’s okay, Daddy,” I listened and was disappointed to not hear resentment in his voice.

  I’ve walked to the edge of the front of our yard to look down the road for Jacinth. I see her walking back up the hill, a plastic bag in her hand. Every day, she walks down to the shop to buy a gizzard and to chat up Mrs. Old Henry. She will eat one half of the gizzard while she cooks dinner, and the other half she will eat with a cup of ginger tea while we are watching the evening news. My son tells me that his mother and his stepfather are taking him for dinner and a movie tonight. He thanks me for the money I sent and then he is explaining that he has to go because his friends are waiting on him so that they can all take the train home together. I say, “Happy birthday,” I say, “Bye,” then I am putting the cellphone back into my pocket and walking down the road to meet my wife. When I reach her, I will take the bag from her and put my arm through her arm and we will walk home together.

  ON SHELF

  Glenroy mentioned marriage the first time they talked on the phone, and at first Doreen had been flattered. He had said, “Yuh look like di type ah woman mi wan’ fi marry,” and Doreen had wondered how he knew this, when mostly all he knew about her was what he had gleaned from Facebook. It was true that her profile was in itself quite modest—only a few pictures: of her on an apple-picking trip with colleagues in her department, holding the branch of an apple tree heavy with fruit and smiling into the camera; with her best girlfriend (the two of them looking a decade younger); another with her mother, who looked into the camera unsmiling in her house clothes and her head tie, as though she was cooking and someone had pulled out a camera and her daughter had wrapped an arm around her neck, and all of it happening without her permission. Sometimes Doreen shared a Bible verse as her status. Last week: “Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised—Proverbs 31:30.” Fifteen people, including Glenroy, had liked her status. Sometimes she shared her triumphs: “I FINISHED the first chapter of my dissertation!!!!!­!!!!!­!!! Praise God.” Eighteen people, including Glenroy, had liked her status.

  She hadn’t seen him in the ten years since she’d left Jamaica, and she hadn’t known him when they’d lived in Jamaica. He’d only been a man she knew in passing, who she had seen with mutual friends. At the time, he had been married to Crystal, the woman who did Doreen’s hair—a light-skinned woman with small hands, breasts that looked too big for her frame, and whose voice was high and sweet and kind. Doreen had come to see Crystal as the type of hairdresser she could trust—the kind who wouldn’t cut too much off her hair because she was envious of customers with good hair. Doreen’s last hairdresser had always cut too much hair, and too much off a woman Doreen knew, and had explained to the woman that long hair didn’t fit fat women. Crystal played gospel music in her salon, which Doreen had admired as an excellent way of ministering to customers. They seemed ill matched to Doreen—Glenroy and Crystal did. He taught physical education at one of the local high schools, and looking at him a woman could tell that he spent time at the gym lifting weights. Doreen didn’t understand how Crystal could believe that a man with arms like that could remain faithful to her. It didn’t help that he was light-skinned with light-colored eyes, a color Doreen decided was what they called hazel. She’d overheard mutual friends talking about the high school girls who threw themselves at Glenroy, and how Glenroy had laughed when he told them about a recent incident as though the attention pleased him. “Of course he’s fucking the young girls dem,” one of the mutual friends, a man who sought after young girls, reasoned.

  And so Doreen had been surprised when Glenroy sent her a friend request on Facebook, after he’d seen her profile on a mutual friend’s page. He’d messaged her, “What’s going on Doreen?” as casually as though they had ever been friends. She clicked through the photographs on his profile, wondering why she didn’t see any of Crystal, when she remembered hearing that they had divorced. One message led to another: she was completing a PhD in Iowa City; he was working and living in Kansas City. It wasn’t long before he suggested that they talk on the phone.

  * * *

  —

  The last time Doreen was home, her friend’s husband looked at her for a long moment and asked why she allowed herself to get on the shelf. “You’re a good-looking woman,” he told her with such conviction that she wondered if he believed that she needed to hear a compliment. She’d wanted to ask him if he really believed that she was the type of woman who wanted to be tied down with three little children and a worthless, bullfrog man like himself. Instead, she smiled and asked teasingly why he was troubling her. She knew that the husbands of her friends looked at her and desired her, or if they didn’t desire her, they found her to be a more surprising woman than the ones they’d chosen to spend their lives with. When she should have been giving in to marriage and childbearing, she had left a good job at a bank to pursue a master’s and then a PhD in America. Doreen believed that because they wanted to remind her of her place, they brought up marriage. Or they brought up the exhausted status of her womb
. Or they knew someone, an unmarried friend or a cousin, looking for a good woman to marry. Doreen couldn’t help drawing satisfaction from comparing herself to her girlfriends back home. Many of them had grown fat after producing children, and all of them were overworked women who complained about their husbands. Doreen had kept her body right—she was hardly any bigger than she was in her twenties. People were always saying that she could easily pass for a much younger woman, which pleased her because beauty seemed more crucial than ever at her age.

  * * *

  —

  It was a question she asked herself often: How had forty come and gone and she, Doreen Josephine Henry, was still unmarried? At 2 a.m. on a given weekday, when she was to teach at 8 a.m. that morning, it was the biggest mystery in the world. At her most optimistic self, she really did believe that eventually she would meet a man worth marrying and would have the daughter she had prophesied about from when she was a girl. She had long picked a name for the daughter: Samantha. Could it be, she asked herself on these introspective nights, that she’d been too picky? When she lived back home, before she left to study in America, there had been many men who wanted to marry her. There was Alrick from church, who stuttered his affection to her. There was Gavin, who was shorter than she was, and she had reason to believe that he had a small penis. There were men like Winston, who drove a taxi and would be satisfied all the days of his life doing so. She hardly considered herself a superficial woman but she believed it important for a woman to have standards. All the men she had denied were long married with children.

  * * *

  —

  The next day Glenroy called again. This time he seemed to have an agenda, asking question after question as though he were trying to fulfill some kind of interview process. He asked what Doreen had for dinner and that led to questions about the quality of her Jamaican cooking. He was pleased to hear that she’d cooked curry chicken recently, and then he complained, “Mi cyaan tek di pasta business. Dats why mi cyaan tek Yankee woman.” Later, Doreen would know about the white woman he had dated and about the child she had miscarried. He had met the woman on the Internet, and had left Jamaica to be with her. She would learn that the woman liked to prepare bottled spaghetti sauce over noodles. And one day, out of curiosity, she will look the woman up on Facebook and be surprised to discover that she is very fat. This will surprise Doreen because once when she and Glenroy were watching a movie together, he had turned to her to say, “Yuh know, mi cyaan tek fat women,” when the costar appeared on the screen. He had made up his face as though he smelled something bad, and Doreen had only looked at him. He turned his attention back to the television, but Doreen felt silently protective of fat women though she herself was not and had never been fat.

  * * *

  —

  Doreen sometimes considered that what she needed to do was to find a nice white man to settle down with. The world found biracial children more beautiful than black children, and white men, though she’d never been involved with one, seemed sweet. They seemed like the kind of men to start preparing dinner if she came home late from work. But how to acquire one? In Iowa City, she had polite and at times vibrant conversations with white male classmates, but none of them had pursued her. The men in Iowa City—the white ones at least—were weird. If a Jamaican man wanted a woman, there was never any mystery about his desire. But in America, men, particularly white Midwestern men, often carried a less aggressive brand of approaching a woman. She’d shaken her head observing female classmates pursue men, or the halfhearted attempts of men too shy to boldly tell a woman that they wanted her.

  And Doreen was well aware that she was a statistic—in America a highly educated black woman was the most likely demographic to remain unmarried or uncoupled after thirty. This gave her comfort—it was a reminder that there was nothing wrong with her, that it was just that there were obstacles against her beyond her control. Maybe she hadn’t been too picky. When she explained to two girlfriends in her PhD program that this statistic was one of the strikes against her, they had looked at her with the wide-eyed innocence of white privilege.

  * * *

  —

  Two months after the first phone call, Glenroy drove up from Kansas. By then, Doreen had graduated from her PhD program and was offered a one-year teaching appointment with the university. He’d wanted to come sooner, almost demanding to come for her graduation, but Doreen made excuse after excuse, thinking it unwise to have a man she barely knew meet her aging mother, who had flown from Jamaica for the ceremony. She also didn’t want him to think that she was easy. When she opened up the door for their first meeting wearing a new dress and sandals that showed off her freshly painted pink toenails, she was underwhelmed, but she fixed her face into a smile so as not to show it. The years of their absence from each other, as well as flattering Facebook photographs, had allowed her to anticipate a more beautiful man. In person he looked older, shorter, and though his arms were still muscular, he now had a slight beer belly. Fortunately, his face was still handsome. He was one of those Jamaicans whose European blood was evident in his hazel-green eyes, straight nose, and fair skin. He even had freckles scattered over his nose. His English was horrible, and this was one flaw Doreen couldn’t overlook—she had to ask him again how long he had been living in America, because seven years seemed too long to be unable to speak a sentence without patois. That first day when he misunderstood something she said and picked her up and took her to the bedroom, she had been so aroused that she almost let him undress her. But she worried that if sex happened, she wouldn’t be the kind of woman he wanted to marry. And what a bore he was: he didn’t want to go into town to eat what he called “white people food,” he wasn’t interested in going to see a movie because it was a “waste of money,” and when Doreen finally convinced him to let her show him around town, he thought that the pair of shorts she put on were too short. “Yuh wear dem kinds of tings?” he asked her, and later she would regret her decision to change into a sundress that hit her knee.

  * * *

  —

  Glenroy was open about the kinds of women he didn’t like: loud women, it seemed, were the worst type. “A woman no have fi huff an’ puff fi get a point across,” he once explained. There was a show Doreen enjoyed watching that starred a loud black woman, and Glenroy suggested that she change the channel, saying he couldn’t stand listening to the woman. It seemed personal, this dislike for loud women, and so Doreen wondered where he had encountered such a woman. She couldn’t imagine that Crystal had ever spoken too forcefully to him. From what she was able to gather about his mother, she was a no-nonsense hurricane of a woman, so perhaps it was a similar force he was running from. He also didn’t like slack women—the kind of women who behaved as though they were men, freely giving in to fucking and baby-making as though it was all an afterthought. His sister was this type of woman, and he was always, as Jamaicans say, crying shame after her. “Di last time mi go a Jamaica,” he once explained to Doreen over the phone, “I look at her an’ ask her two questions. I asked her if she ’ave sense and then I asked her if she ’ave a ting name shame.” “What did she say?” Doreen wanted to know. She expected to hear that a fight broke out between them. Glenroy made Peggy seem like a brute of a woman with her four baby fathers, and, once, she had fought another woman for a man in public. Glenroy explained, “Wha’ she could a sey? All she couldah do a cry.” He didn’t like women with false hair, false eyelashes, or false nails.

  Doreen wondered how much of herself she could divulge to him. She had been with more than a few men. She didn’t consider herself promiscuous, but she had long accepted that she liked having sex. And she knew that if she had told Glenroy any of this, told him about the African custodian who cleaned her department and who she let fuck her on her desk a few times, he would think her a different kind of woman. During their first conversation on the phone, he’d told her, “Yuh seem like a decent
woman,” and because it was a compliment, she was flattered. But she wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by “decent,” and if she asked, it could betray her for who she really was. When Glenroy had asked how many men she had been with, she responded with, “I’ve had two boyfriends,” which was and wasn’t a lie. When she turned the question to him, he thought about it for a moment before he confessed, “You know, I don’t know.” And he had smiled slyly, as though he might as well have been flexing his muscles or showing her the length and width of his penis.

  * * *

  —

  And on a sleepless weeknight, say 3 a.m. on a Monday, marriage itself was a mystery to her. She could barely think of any of her friends who were happily married. Even the ones who pretended to be happy would slip and betray their unions for what they really were. Her mother, who had in the last year looked at Doreen and asked if she was “one ah those woman who say dem dey wid woman,” had raised Doreen and her siblings by herself when her common-law husband left them for another woman he would eventually follow to England. Doreen knew that her brother wasn’t faithful to his wife. When she really thought about it, what was marriage besides a savior from lifelong loneliness? And one could marry and still remain lonely.

  Sometimes at 3 a.m., thoughts of marriage were less interesting than this thing people called love. How were people, she wondered, so sure that what they felt was love? And what did love feel like? She watched reality dating shows in part to understand, but besides feeling entertained by the heated exchanges between the tanned, thin women and the conventionally attractive men, all the contestants white, all of them so hungry for a soulmate, love only seemed desperate and kind of sad, because although there was the lucky man and woman and the diamond ring purchased by the network, there were all the other contestants who went home empty-handed.