How to Love a Jamaican

by Alexia Arthurs

  I remember how one time I was talking to my older brother, complaining that while my mother wanted us to call her more often, she didn’t make it easy for us to want to talk to her. We were sitting at his dining table, eating the saltfish and dumplings I cooked for breakfast. His wife was on the couch, where I slept at night, breastfeeding the baby. I had been in New York for only six months. I had a brother and sister in Canada, two brothers and one sister in America, and I had a sister still living in Jamaica. I came because I didn’t have anything keeping me home. My mother had asked, “Yuh really ah lef’ mi?” when I told her that I was moving to New York. She asked, “So who goin’ tek care ah mi inna mi old age?” My sister Trisha, the only one to remain in Jamaica, lived on the other side of the island. At this point, my mother was barely past sixty. I never understood why death and old age were always at the front of her mind.

  That day eating breakfast with my brother, he told me that he was going to come clean with our mother, telling her that no one told her to have so many children. Why, he asked me, looking at me so intently that for a moment I thought he wanted an answer, would she have all these children to complain about caring for them? “No one,” he said, “tell her fi mek so much pickney.” I laughed. Many times these words had been at the tip of my tongue. But I was raised in a country where children are taught to speak respectfully to their parents, so I held my words. My brother held his too.

  * * *

  —

  Because pain, regret, and loss have a way of overlapping, a way of reminding one of the other, I think about Afia and I wonder what the term “love of my life” would mean to my mother. Or I think about my mother and I wonder what would she have said if I told her that I finally found love and with a woman. What if I had told her that after all this time and after so many men, those feelings in love songs, those feelings I had long doubted, had finally happened to me? What if I showed her how in our own way we were both deviances?

  When my mother dies, she is a little over seventy. And she is alone in that house where she raised all seven of us. The stroke came surprisingly. Luckily, she dies on a Sunday, the day I always call her. When she doesn’t answer, I worry without having a reason. It’s how people say that God whispers warnings to us. I call and call, and eventually I call the neighbor and ask her to check on my mother. It is as though my mother is taunting me from the grave—she dies alone, like she always said that she would. It’s true that my siblings and I are ungrateful, but we are ordinary, only ungrateful in the ways all daughters and sons are ungrateful. We called when we could. We sent money, gifts, even our children for summer vacations. My sisters and two of my brothers cry when we bury our mother. That mystery of a woman.

  SHIRLEY FROM A SMALL PLACE

  Part 1

  Earlier that day, she’d been a mermaid. There’d been a merman. They’d kissed underwater, wrapping their fins together, their faces pinched in agony—the director had instructed, “Look like you’re fucking!” Or at least this is what the finished product is to look like. Now, Shirley lies on the hotel bed in her bra and panties, flesh-toned—a color like peanut butter—watching her assistant, Heidi, and Yaheem, one of the most beautiful men she’d ever laid eyes on and her love interest from the music video—she’d handpicked him herself from a stack of headshots—each snort a line of coke. A few moments earlier, Heidi had offered to take a photograph of Shirley pouting in her lingerie—Shirley didn’t ask if the photo had been posted to her Instagram, but if it was, she was sure that she would read about it later when, bored and lonely in the early hours of the morning, she Googled herself. She found it an odd thing when famous people said that they never searched for themselves in the depth of remembrance that was the Internet. How could someone not be interested in what was being said about them? The key was a detached curiosity; the key was not to let it turn you crazy. Shirley had mastered this long ago. It was only once in a while that she read something that left her sore, like an article published months ago in a well-known black publication that included her name in a list of black female entertainers who used their bodies to advance their careers, which the writer called complicit racism. “Since when is journalism putting words in people’s mouth?” Shirley tweeted to the writer. But the writer had only responded coolly, asking Shirley if she would like to be interviewed for a follow-up story, and because the response had only deflated Shirley’s desire for an online altercation, she became bored by the whole thing and what had been anger was now a distracted annoyance. Besides, she was preparing for a performance, and memorizing her dance routine was better use of her energy.

  Cocaine was something Shirley had done every once in a while when life warranted an extra indulgence—the release of a new album, or after the Grammys. She was careful about overindulging. But the death of a singer whose life and career had been taken by addiction, a singer whom Shirley had admired from childhood, had frightened her away from hard drugs. Now she’d only smoke ganja. More than anything, Shirley was afraid of dying in the limelight. She had too much pride to be anyone’s cautionary tale. “I don’t fuck with that,” she said when Yaheem took the cocaine out of his bag and called her over to the coffee table. He had pouted and raised his hand to playfully flick his wrist at her. He was such a beautiful man. It was too bad he preferred men—this became clear when during a break from shooting he’d told Shirley that he was sure he’d seen the director on Grindr. Nevertheless, it was funny to think of the relationship rumors that would arise—funny also to think of how the rumors would be nurtured and encouraged before cameras for a short period of time, the attention it would bring both of them for several months, the gossip magazines having something new to report. And then there would be another man whose name would be linked with hers. Fame was a constant surprise to her, or maybe, she sometimes thought, it wasn’t a surprise but instead was the kind of thing that someone like her never became used to. It was why for a long time she was so careful with her money. She never thought—never imagined—that her career would last for as long as it has.

  * * *

  —

  Now that the coke is finished, Yaheem and Heidi are sharing stories about their sex lives.

  “I’m done with faggots,” Yaheem says. “The last one gave me gonorrhea.”

  “Ha!” Heidi says. “I wish that was my cutoff point. An ex-boyfriend gave me gonorrhea. That’s how I found out he was cheating on me.”

  “Y’all are nasty,” Shirley says from the bed, but really she is delighted by the conversation. She sits up, leaning on one arm to look at Yaheem and Heidi, who are still sitting on the rug by the coffee table even though there is a blue velvet sofa a few feet away.

  “What’s the worst thing a boyfriend ever gave you?” Yaheem asks, and it strikes Shirley again that he is such a handsome man—one of those biracial types, the kind who people believe take the best from both races.

  “Trouble,” she says.

  “That’s boring,” Yaheem says. “Every boyfriend gives trouble. I hate all of my ex-boyfriends. Tell us something juicier.”

  The truth is that the worst thing was a baby but it could have also been the best thing if both the timing and the man hadn’t been so far from ideal. When Shirley thinks about carrying Huzzah the Rapper’s child, she thinks about a baby who would have looked like him, a little girl with thick curly hair and a mouth too pink and pretty to belong to a man. But she couldn’t speak honestly because Yaheem wasn’t in her inner circle, and moreover, she couldn’t tell how trustworthy he was, how quickly he would gossip to a magazine. And besides, Heidi was the kind of white woman Shirley didn’t trust. White people who took themselves too seriously made her nervous.

  “Chicken pox,” she says finally. “When I was a little girl, the boy next door gave me chicken pox.” It was true: the boy next door had given her chicken pox—there was still a faded scar on her forehead that makeup artists sometime
s asked about as they smoothened the area with extra foundation coverage.

  “I had no idea,” Yaheem says slowly and dramatically, “that you would be so boring in person.”

  What could Shirley do but laugh? Sometimes, it fascinated her to think that so many people didn’t realize that fame, the ability to be seen and seen and then seen some more, was in itself a performance. And if people were looking and talking, why not make the performance good? In interviews she could be candid, in pictorials sexually liberated, and the images that went along with her already provocative song lyrics pushed farther and farther the longer she was in the industry, as it was the only way to compete with the other pop stars. And a part of her really liked the drama of performing a persona—a part of her enjoyed the attention. Recently, on the cover of a gossip magazine, the headline had been “Is Shirley Having an Affair with a Married Man?” alongside a photograph of Shirley and an actor embracing on a New York street. The man’s wife had been sipping coffee close by and had not made it into the photograph. Shirley had laughed long and loud when she saw the cover, which a friend texted to her, and she had told her assistant to go out and find her a copy. Heidi, prone to overdoing every task assigned to her, brought back several copies.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Yaheem asks Shirley, looking pleased that he made her laugh.

  “Her stylist and nail designer are coming tonight,” Heidi says.

  “Why? You want to go somewhere with me?” Shirley asks, winking at him.

  “You should come to a gay club with me,” Yaheem says.

  “I would love that! I love gay men—”

  “And they love you.”

  “But I have my period. Or I’m going to get it. I can feel that it’s coming.”

  “Which is why you’re lying on white sheets in lingerie.”

  “Tell me something, are you a top or a bottom?” Shirley has this game she likes to play with people; the only rule is that she asks intrusive questions. She’s been playing it for a few years now—at first it had been a way to test her power, to see if people would deny her, and over time it became a way of asserting her power. Whenever someone put her in her place, she found herself drawn to the person. The women she wanted to befriend and the men she found herself attracted to. It hadn’t happened this way with Huzzah the Rapper, but she’d wanted him anyway. He’d worn a superhero Halloween costume one time and the magazines had talked about the large outline of his penis. When Shirley met him for the first time, she’d asked, “Is it true that you have a big penis?” He’d laughed and lowered his head, and this, the fact that he could be shy, had charmed her.

  “I’m whatever you want me to be,” Yaheem says now, batting his lashes.

  “Nasty.”

  “If that’s what you want me to be,” he says, giving Shirley an exaggerated pout.

  * * *

  —

  “What’s his last name?” Yaheem says to Heidi, jumping up off the floor. “What’s his name?!” He’s laughing, excited. He starts doing a silly little dance where he’s swinging his arms from side to side and knocking his knees together.

  “I can’t remember!” Heidi says, laughing.

  “Think!” he says, shaking her gently.

  “It was so long ago!”

  “This is important! Dig into the recesses of your brain.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Shirley asks, turning her attention from the several text message conversations she was having. One of the people she was texting is a rapper she sometimes flirts with—last year, the video they shot for their collaboration was steamy and seemed to have inspired hookup aspirations on his end. She enjoyed the attention, but unbeknownst to him, she’d sworn off rappers and hadn’t recovered in a way where she could trust any man.

  Yaheem falls to the floor, clutching his knees to his chest, and all the while laughing.

  “We think we might have slept with the same guy,” Heidi explains.

  “She was talking about some redheaded guy she fucked who liked to lick cocaine off her feet and I was like, wait, I fucked a redheaded guy who licked cocaine off my feet. What are the odds, right? It has to be the same guy!” Yaheem sits up, wiping the tears from his eyes.

  “I start to cry too when I laugh hard,” Shirley says, smiling and shaking her head.

  “Pleased to have something in common with you,” Yaheem says, bowing his head.

  “I had no idea you’re such a freak?” Shirley asks, looking at Heidi with renewed interest.

  “Eh, a little,” she says, shrugging in a way that reveals that she is enjoying the attention.

  “I looked at her and knew she was a freak,” Yaheem says. It is becoming clear to Shirley that he can’t stand not being the center of attention; perhaps a hyped romance before the paparazzi cameras was a bad idea. “I saw her glasses and high-heeled Mary Janes,” he continues, looking at his nails and frowning, “and I knew that she liked to get her life. I’m not mad at that!” They all laugh, and he continues pestering Heidi to remember the redhead’s name.

  By the time Shirley climbs down from the bed and opens the bathroom door, Yaheem is tickling Heidi’s belly. “I’m going to tickle you until you remember,” he says. The last thing Shirley hears before the door muffles their voices is Heidi’s laughter between words that spill out of her mouth: “They say that redheads are becoming extinct! It has to be the same guy.” When Shirley pulls down her panties and sits on the toilet seat, it isn’t until the coldness of the seat starts to wear away that she realizes that she’s envious of the easy friendship between Yaheem and Heidi. During the video shoot, they’d gone on a smoke break together and those moments, short as they were, cemented something between them, and now the redhead was another thing they shared. Shirley has come to believe that Heidi is an opportunist—she has a way of weaving herself into the drama at hand, whether it is drugs, alcohol, or a juicy confessional by a young film star looking for sympathy in the bathroom of an exclusive nightclub on a Saturday night. And more annoying to Shirley, Heidi has a way of conquering people, connecting with them—even and especially famous people who have reason to be mistrusting of a bright hello from a stranger.

  It isn’t until Shirley grabs at some toilet paper to wipe that she notices that the seat of her panties is spotted with blood that is more brown than red—the usual way her body announces the first day of her period. Hissing her teeth, she pulls a tampon out of the bottom cupboard, annoyed that her period has come now, that it didn’t hold off for a little while longer, because in two days she’s performing for an awards ceremony in high heels and a white body suit. Shirley eases the tampon in, and, feeling that her bladder isn’t quite empty, she sits back down on the toilet seat. A little liquid leaves, but when Shirley stands again, there is once again that unfinished feeling. She reasons that it could be a phantom thing—the brain not yet catching up to the body. She considers that it could be similar to how she can eat and eat in wait of that intuitive feeling of enough but when the brain finally catches up, she has already moved past enough to too much.

  If life hadn’t called her to singing, Shirley believes that she might have become a scientist. Lala, her hairdresser, laughs at Shirley’s copies of National Geographic magazine and calls her a cornball, but when Shirley is turning the pages, running her fingers over photographs of animals, landscapes, and people, Lala will ask her to turn back so he too can admire. Late at night, especially after she’s smoked a little weed while listening to reggae music, Shirley wonders about destiny—if such a thing exists, and if one could have had a different one if only for a different turn in life. Maybe whatever happens to someone is her destiny. If she never met Anthony Star at the resort and sang for him, if she never worked at the resort that summer, if her aunt never told her about the job—it astonishes her to think how easy it could have been to live a small
life in a small place. Maybe, she sometimes decides, destiny is as flexible as a woman deciding what to wear on a given day.

  Now, looking in the mirror as she washes her hands, Shirley turns her face from side to side—there is a burgeoning pimple on her chin, that’s all. Her nose had been her former stylist’s idea, and her makeup artist at the time, never mind the fact that he and the stylist were fucking, had agreed as though it was an obvious solution he had somehow overlooked the whole time he knew her. Everyone talked about how beautiful she would feel—subtle, but it would make a huge difference, they said. The few people who knew sent flowers after the surgery, but no one warned Shirley about how raw she would feel afterwards, as though someone could look at her new nose and take every secret thing, all of her insecurities, from where they were deeply buried. It felt like such an invasion, and one personally inflicted, which made her pain all the more confusing. The voices that spoke as though they knew better—the makeup and hair people and the music executives—told her, Everyone does it. They asked her, You think so-and-so was born that way? And in a way, they had been right: Shirley’s career began to escalate in a way that mattered, her name and her face and the sound of her voice carrying into American households.