The Best American Essays 2015 Read Online Free Page B

with geography does not know how to define any one place. That summer in Barbados: I could only make sense of it through the character of the people, various someones I could touch or sit with at the foot of a stunted coconut tree, people who smelled of themselves, their island. Nevertheless, the homesickness my brother and I felt in Barbados (our first long trip away from everything) could not be assuaged by anything, nor was it in the least modified by knowing one another. Our loneliness cast us further apart than we had ever been and could ever be again. We were guests, charges, therefore our behavior had to contain a certain forced humility. This further emphasized our separateness. The only way we could be in the least bold was to reject one another. We refused to share any experience and agree on its value. The dust on the road rising and settling on concrete walls, on the fronts of houses and in our hair, did not affect us the same. When we had to accompany one of our mother’s relatives to market to buy blowfish, or pork for stew, or something equally foreign, one of us resolutely “liked” this experience while the other did not. Until we arrived in Barbados, my brother and I had wanted to be as much like one another as two people can be. In Barbados, one thing in particular was different: my brother did not dream of one of our older male cousins swallowing my tongue whole and then spitting it out on a plate, then commanding me to lick my own tongue up, which I couldn’t, being tongueless. In short, my brother abandoned me to myself on that island, he who knew what an island was, as though I did not, starting and staring at the water. At home, our mother and sisters had protected our natural timidity. On this trip to that place neither of us could ever call home, my brother had to be as different from me as he could allow. He became less timid and more afraid to be thought unconventional. On that island—where blue, really violet-colored seawater stretched to points east, west, north, and south, points I had seen written in various books but could not make any sense of—he became what he is now: mindful of the fact that he cannot look his girlish brother in the eye. Before Barbados, I had never seen so many black people who disliked one another, or who did not have photographs in their homes. The people we saw quarreled with one another in the streets, in front of their homes. They kicked skinny dogs that hung around their yards with heads bowed; the dogs took as much hurt as those hurt people took from one another. Their fucking sounded like hurt, too. The fucking my brother and I heard those people do occurred after lunch, after they had eaten their strange food and the sun was so hot it was ugly. My brother and I sat not-together on opposite sides of whatever house we were staying in, listening to their bodies breed more misery. There was nothing else for those people to do in that place except dissect one another in the cruelest language imaginable, and breed more people who would behave the same way everyone else did. My brother’s hairline hair was a dark blond that was nearly the color of the sand shifting beneath my feet at the mouth of the bay I stood at so many years later. In Barbados, my brother wanted to join that community of men who talked their sex as much as they performed it. At least in Barbados, his thinking went, he would be recognized as a male (and overvalued as such), not just as the brother or son of so many girls (in Brooklyn we lived with our four sisters, our mother, and Mother’s mother), girls who talked and talked to men as if they weren’t there. Late into our stay, my brother invited two girls into our aunt’s home, where we were staying. My brother invited these two girls in when my aunt was out being unkind to people. I can recall the two young girls looking as thin and vulnerable as my brother and I must have looked then. My brother demanded