What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (phonics story books txt) 📕

through the Greek section of town, turn down a small street off the Danforth and another twisting street and then another and come to the house. A family lived there. A man, a woman, a teenager as tall as her father. Angie came here to watch them. They were not anyone Carla knew. Except the man, her father. She saw him kiss the woman once on leaving the house; they said goodbye to each other and waved. He got into his car and drove off. The woman stood at the screen door until he drove off. Carla and her mother simply watched. Angie tried to remain invisible at first, but sometimes she didn’t care and stood on the opposite sidewalk, watching. Sometimes she muttered to herself. Sometimes the man looked across the street to where they were. He seemed not to see them. Carla thought he would come over, but he didn’t; he went to his car and started the engine.

In the summer or in the winter, whatever season, her palms sweated in Angie’s. She didn’t mind going in the summer, but she did not like the winter, standing there, watching with Angie. Standing in the falling snow, arrested like trees unable to move, they neither of them brushed the snow away. Her balaclava damp and warm, her breathing visible, she waited for Angie to turn and leave as usual. They must have seemed like statues humped against the weather. There was some timing to it. They would be there for what seemed like hours or what seemed like minutes depending on the season. Then Angie would squeeze her hand slightly, not a squeeze but a pressure, and they would turn and leave.

Some days the blue house across the street seemed empty. No one came out or went in. Those days Angie was restless, unhappy. Carla could sense the fine difference in Angie’s unhappiness, the fluctuations in intensity, that the dead look of the house produced. This she was learning even before her mother’s death. The calibration of happiness and unhappiness. Somehow she understood as one understands air the changes in the people she lived with, her mother, her sometimes father.

They were already a family of quietness. She was a watchful child, not a child of too much exuberance. She would come into a room and know to be quiet just by the look from her mother or her sometimes father, just by the location of their bodies around the room. Even when they were in pleasant conversation, the tenor of a word or a pause would alert her as to someone about to misunderstand someone else. For that reason she was a slender child, a child who made room with her own body so that she would not occupy so much space that she would be unduly noticed. Or call too much attention to herself. She cultivated a reediness to intercept their tones, their changes in chord. The efforts to hone this faculty became physical in her. There appeared no room for her despite the fact they all seemed sometimes to be fighting over her.

When Jamal was born, she felt a small relief in his wailing cries, his sudden tantrums that would throw the apartment into a panic. That is when she had fallen in love with him. He screamed and kicked and would not be shushed. He woke up at odd hours and woke everyone else up. He misbehaved, if a baby could misbehave.

The man crossed the road once, walking slowly toward them. Carla could not make out the emotion of the man’s body, if it was threatening or not. He seemed to be looking at them. Her hand slipped in Angie’s. Angie held it tighter. Her sometimes father came, stood inches from them. No one said anything. She felt rather than saw Angie’s body grow erect. Carla’s own head seemed to receive a blow, though she had not been hit; she felt weighted down. Her slippery hand was held in a stronger and stronger vice. Then her sometimes father turned and crossed the street again toward his car. She heard Angie gather phlegm from her throat, she heard it land softly in the snow.

From then on when they came, the man ignored them, and Carla thought she had probably made up the confrontation because life went on, sometimes there was even a festive feeling about their journey. Angie would pack a ham sandwich for Carla, she would stop on the Danforth and buy her an orange pop. Only the woman at the screen door seemed irritated. Though she never approached Carla and Angie, she stood at the door for a moment longer after the man’s car took off.

Carla heard the wheezing and gargle in Angie’s throat when the man appeared. The sounds boiled and gathered but then subsided when the car left. At times she suspected some strength in her mother, some purpose that if unleashed would devastate the man. Carla always anticipated Angie, suddenly agile, leaping at the man who was both not her father and her father. And then at other times there was a weakness: just after he left, for a moment Angie seemed on the verge of tears or falling.

Even when the house seemed empty, Angie still went. Carla felt an anxiety in her. In fact, Angie went more frequently then. More than once a week. She seemed agitated, hurrying, not stopping to buy Carla an orange pop or an apple, muttering to herself about hiding. He had ruined her, she said, lied to her, hurt her. When the family stayed away from the house, Angie seemed to burn. She became more and more voluble. She hurled sentences at the house. He took her for a fool, he was a liar, he promised her; her mouth thin, exhausting on her words until her lips were ash white. Then Carla felt a sweat around her neck and covered her eyes so that people passing would not see her.

When they returned on their next visit,