Read Online Soul Siren by Aisha Duquesne - Free Book Online

intellectual stimulation. And on weekends, I rang the bell to the house and once I was quickly inside her short foyer, we kissed like lovers reunited after I’d been gone on a trip.
    I celebrated graduating high school with dinner out with my parents and brother, and I celebrated again that weekend with Karen when she took me away to a bed and breakfast in the Ottawa Valley. I told my folks I had won an essay contest to visit the Canadian Parliament under teacher supervision—you don’t have to guess who my chaperone was. Looking out the window at the rolling hills of the valley and feeling the silkiness of Karen’s golden skin, I knew I had proved her wrong. I was in love with her. And we had cleared the hurdle. I was a graduate, our relationship no longer a risk for her professional career. But I had also been accepted at Yale (Fisk as well, but I wasn’t crazy about college in Nashville). My parents were adamant that I should go to a prestigious American university and not settle for Queens or Carleton, or God help me, the University of Toronto, none of which could open as many career doors for me.
    “Go learn something,” Karen told me at the airport, smiling bravely.
    “I’ll email you plenty,” I promised, hugging her close.
    “Look, you have to do this, it’s all right,” she said, using these words instead of
I knew I would have to give you up one day.
    When they called my flight, I said softly close to her ear, “I love you, Kamala.”
    Her eyes were moist with tears, and she couldn’t speak, her pose of detachment reduced to an emotional fiction. If she hadn’t broken in that moment, I do think I would have moved on. Not that I didn’t take other lovers, but I always came back to Karen when I visited home, staying at her place, in her arms, briefly picking up where we left off and then parting again. It’s why it was so much harder for us later.

Mentor
    I
n the month
that I flew out to Connecticut and accepted my room at the dorm in New Haven, Erica boarded a Greyhound bus and rode for about twelve hours on a bumpy seat with shedding upholstery to the Big Apple. The bus wheels turning as she softly sang along with Bob Marley through her earphones:
Open your eyes and look within. Are you sat-is-fiiied—with the life you’re living? Uh!
    She stepped into New York at Grand Central Station with her demo tapes and a grocery list of maybe five contacts in the city and no booked hotel room for the night. She says she walked for hours with her pack slung over her shoulder, amazed at how compact Manhattan was. From American television beamed across the border into Canada, you never got the impression that the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were so close together, the extent that those lions of the public library commanded a great swath of Fifth Avenue, or how you could look down from the low hill of Madison somewhere between Midtown and the upper sides and see the Twin Towers, because they were still standing back then. Erica Jones was here, but she hadn’t yet arrived.
    I’ve always had trouble trying to convey to Americans what it’s like to be a black person growing up in Canada, what an interesting milestone it was in Erica’s life to come to New York—or in mine. Hell, it’s hard enough trying to convey what it’s like to come from Canada. There’s an old joke that a Canadian will pick up his Coke from a vending machine and say, “Thank you.” They think of themselves as middle-class, polite, moderate people. For a long time, my Dad tells me, the most right-wing Canadian politician was still left of any American Democrat. After all, we’ve got a national health care scheme borrowed from the British. The founders were British and French who never really got along, and the music…The music is so painfully
white
.
    Bryan Adams and Shania Twain, the Crash Test Dummies and Rush, Céline Dion and Avril Lavigne and Nelly Furtado and Nickelback and the patron saint of Celtic