And no, it wasn’t my real name.
CRAVE
Fiona Zedde
Twelve years after Alva left the island, I still dreamed of her. Those dreams were heady and ecstatic, fed by her ambiguously worded letters that gave teasing glimpses of what her American life was like. She told me of the first boy she kissed—she didn’t like it—then the first girl who wasn’t me, and after that the first time she let someone else touch her in the hidden places that I’d always treasured. I never told her that for me there was no one—no man, no woman—who could take her place in my heart or in my bed. Over the years, the tone of her letters changed. I became an observer of her desires, no longer the object of them. She put distance between us. Soon, my dreams were all I had.
Those dreams were plain, no disguised agendas, no twinned meanings. In the twilight hours, her touch immolated me. It roved with ease over my skin, setting each nerve ending alight, licking my breasts, belly and hips until I arched off the bed, gasping. Many nights I woke with Alva’s name on my lips, my fingers buried between my damp thighs, and the phantom smell of her draped over me like silk.
Weeks ago I awoke a few minutes past three a.m. Unable to sleep, I madly scribbled my feelings in a letter to her. At morning’s first light, I dropped it in the mail. Afterward, I felt as though I had broken some unspoken rule. Alva never responded. The dreams kept coming and the world itself seemed to conspire to press all its concupiscence on me. Everywhere I looked, people were falling in love and making love. It was in their soft, sighing smiles; the entwined hands, playful touches and ripe laughter as they walked past me in the streets. I even noticed the flush-red hibiscus blossoms with their sticky yellow pistils and moist, inviting insides open to hummingbirds and bees alike. I missed her. I needed her. Then I found out that she was coming.
What the gossips said was that she had been banished back to the island, for lying with American girls. Her mother thought that life back in Jamaica with her father would straighten Alva out. But wasn’t she a grown woman, twenty-six, with income of her own like me?
My sisters brought me word that she was coming back, watching my face to see what would show. Did they see my relief? The relaxing of the tension that slid into my body twelve years ago when she flew away from me? I didn’t understand then, but I do now. She got the prized passport and the sponsorship of her mother. I didn’t, so I had to stay. No amount of crying or bloodied wrists could change that. At fourteen, what did we know about love anyway? But I thought I loved her, thought I would die without her near me. I wondered what she thought now.
The first day that I knew she was mine, Alva and I had left school to play in the park and on the beach nearby. We picked up sweet-fleshed plums from under the trees growing on the path to the water. Under the incandescent heat of the afternoon sun, she shyly pressed the fruit to my mouth and I bit. The temptation was too strong to resist, so I went willingly with her under the canopy of sea grapes where she touched me and rewarded my affections with warm, fruit-flavored kisses. After that, we dreamt together. We planned to leave Morant Bay for Kingston, get jobs in the city and live in a house with plants and a kitchen full of food. We were happy. Then her mother came from New York and took her away from me.
The years passed slowly. With my job at the bank in town I was able to afford my own small place. In it, I luxuriated in the aloneness I’d always craved as a child while crushed in one house between my parents and six siblings. My new home was tiny, four rooms and a little verandah from which I could watch the world go by. Here, no one could see how miserable Alva’s absence made me. I wallowed in it, played our old songs and walked to my house, tearing open the shoebox to press her old letters to my face and drown in my memories.
And now she was here. In her father’s house, less than a mile down the road. I scrubbed myself in the bath; washed, oiled and braided my hair, and put on fresh underwear. Then I went to her. The house was filled with people, all curious to see what Alva looked like now, to see if she brought something for them from the foreign land. Cousins, friends from basic school, near strangers who walked by her father’s yard every day and waved good evening as they passed. They surrounded her, laughing, begging, entranced.
She was perfect: slim and tall, her hair straightened and tucked up in little troughs that rode on her narrow shoulders; skin the soft, teeth-tempting shade of figs and that lush, kissable mouth with the top and bottom lips that were perfect replicas of each other. Not even American MTV could have prepared me for such beauty. Her brown eyes were still quick and laughing, but I did not recognize the hardness around her mouth, the way her hands were still unless she was reaching for something. Those hands of hers used to say so much, chasing the air as she talked, lying open and receptive, pressing against my skin. I hung back, waiting to see if she would notice me, or even realize who I was. I knew that I had changed. I was softer, rounder. My teenaged slimness had disappeared under years of chocolates and bread and fried fish. My mother said that I had become another kind of beautiful. My sisters said I was fat.
In my dreams, Alva had stopped everything for me, brushed all other beggars aside to give coin in the currency of my choosing. But she never looked up, never noticed me standing there with my heart’s cup held out. After a half an hour I stumbled away, holding my tears until I walked down the dust-tracked lane where the sun sparkled green and gold on the foliage, mocking my unhappiness. The tears fell freely then. Though rich from the bounty of her new life, Alva had nothing to give me.
That night I made dinner for myself; peeled cassava, yam, and ripe plantains and dropped them in the boiling water. With each movement of the knife I kept seeing her face the last time we were together, the tears that limned its loveliness, the way she had clutched her lip between her teeth as I hovered over her, loving her and crying too. The time for tears was over. I had my life here and she had hers far away. Callaloo and saltfish simmered on the stove, releasing their rich essence into the kitchen. My thoughts of her burned.
I heard a knock at my door. Of course, it was her. She immediately became the most exquisite thing in my house.
“I got your letter.” Alva closed the door behind her and locked it. “I thought you didn’t… you couldn’t… anymore.”
“I never stopped,” I said.
A nervous smile came and went on her face. “I missed you.”
The words were clumsy on her lips, but welcome. Alva was not as poised as she seemed, and perhaps my palms were not so wet. She lurched forward suddenly and touched me. I flinched, but she was gentle, tracing the bones of my hand with her delicate fingers before reaching for more, shaping my arm, my cheeks, the new roundness of my belly.
“You’re gorgeous,” she said.
All she’d ever meant to me came rushing back a hundredfold, crashing over my senses until I staggered against her, kissing her. I drowned in the taste of her on my tongue, the silk of her skin against mine. It was too much. I pulled my hand, my self, away, but she followed. Ah, her eyes… I melted, moved toward her, this stranger with the American voice. She caught me up, pressed her cool palms against my cheeks.
“I missed you,” she said again.
Kisses like soursop ice cream melted over me, opened me. She was greedy. With her hands and silent mouth she told me what her letters did not, of her hunger for me, her thirst that the twelve-year absence had not dulled. My teeth pierced her lip, she gasped into my mouth and tugged at my dress, determined, but gentle. Her fingers plucked at my nipples, raked them to hardness.