Stranger in the Family by Z.Elliott

Stranger in the Family

My father is dead. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that fact, although most days I feel it quite keenly. What I do not feel is his absence. I don’t spend hours staring at my father’s empty slippers, nor do I stand in his closet inhaling the scent that still lingers in his clothes. I never come across an unruly coil of his hair while cleaning the bathroom floor, and I don’t wait in the evening to hear his tread coming up the stairs. For my father never lived in this house. We lived here alone, my mother, my older sister, and I. All three of us together. All three of us apart.

My parents separated when I was eight years old, and shortly thereafter the remnants of my family moved into this house. My mother, sister, and I crossed the Rouge Valley into Scarborough, trading our semi-rural existence in Pickering for life on the outskirts of the city. My father began his journey through the various boroughs of Toronto, and finally left the country and all of us behind in 1989. After touring the US he settled in New York, and I followed suit five years later. My father crossed the border one final time in 2004. He died of prostate cancer, in the west end of the city, a few weeks before summer arrived.

For years, my mother has lived in this house alone, but lately I have returned. After a failed teaching job in Africa, I had no choice but to go “home”—back to this house full of memories and none of them good. Back to this house with its cobwebs and hollow spaces. The décor has changed, but the feeling has not: I find the same dirt in the same corners, the old reminders of my unhappy youth. All the hurts of the past thirty years are holed up in this house. And I am holed up with them: afraid to venture out into the known, determined not to explore the city beyond these suburbs where I was raised.

My father didn’t like Toronto, and so I feel a kind of kinship with him by despising the city myself. It is a new year, and I have resolved to stop saying, “I hate Toronto,” every day. But the impulse comes over me despite my resolve, and I find myself less and less inclined to “give the city a chance.” Why should I? It never did the same for me.

A close friend from Detroit recently urged me to read Margaret Atwood’s novel, Cat’s Eye. I complied, and now that I have finished that tome, I feel no compunction whatsoever to pretend that Toronto is a wonderful place. Perhaps it is for somebody else—everybody else, even. For me it is mostly misery. Not endless or unabated, but misery nonetheless.

Reading Atwood helped me to realize that a city is really only a collection of associations. Architecture, landscapes, even people have no meaning apart from the value assigned to them by your own memory. And what I associate with the city of Toronto is a feeling of being on the outside of things—outside of my family, outside of the black community, outside of the industry in which I aspired to work, outside of the neighborhoods where I longed to live. Being in Toronto meant and means to this day being denied access to the spaces I most want to occupy.

When I dare to admit this to others, most people offer a patronizing smile and advise me to simply “work harder” to achieve the things I desire. To them, there is nothing holding me back—only my own negative outlook, my unfounded fears, and an unrealistic expectation that a life of my choosing should be handed to me on the proverbial silver platter.

I was not a child of luxury, and as a result I tend to believe that I have a diminished sense of entitlement. My parents, though they loved us, were rather laissez-faire (the less they did, the better we fared). My sister and I began working when we were both underage, and we paid our way through university and graduate school with a combination of student loans, part-time jobs, and academic scholarships. The suggestion that I expect my ideal life to be presented without any effort on my part is therefore outrageous to me. Life itself is a gift, and certainly a life spent in a wealthy, progressive, semi-socialist country like Canada is an advantage and a privilege. Most people in the world don’t have the opportunities I’ve had. But these facts are humbling; they don’t make me arrogant enough to believe that Toronto “owes” me anything.

At the same time, I don’t honestly believe that increased effort on my part would substantially improve my chances of happiness here. Like Elaine Risley, my memory of betrayals and small acts of cruelty has likely ruined the city for me. I return as an adult and feel the same helplessness and hopelessness I felt as a teen, the same despair I felt as a young college graduate with no prospects, only unrefined dreams. Toronto will always be indifferent to me: uninterested in my talents, unconcerned by my particular needs. When I leave, Toronto will not miss me. Cities only rely on certain kinds of people; the rest of us are disposable.

When I return to Toronto, I see the city as my father did: a cold, clean, barren place with bits of life and flashes of color separated by endless lengths of highway. Like him, I find myself watching television and counting the number of newscasters who are black. Or riding the subway and counting the number of black people on the train. Or attending an outdoor event downtown and wondering why the sea of multicolored faces doesn’t appease my need to outnumber them all.

Like my father I prefer the grit and bustle of New York, with its dense blocks crowded with black and brown faces, its littered streets, and blaring sirens. In Brooklyn we are not the minority. In Brooklyn there is no need for counting. There I have no self-conscious stammer, no urge to shrink within myself. In Brooklyn there are no white fingers grabbing at my hair, pressing me to explain or justify my appearance. The whites in Brooklyn know their place.

New York isn’t perfect, of course. No city is. I know this, just as I know how unfair it is to compare one place to another (and anyplace to New York). I wouldn’t say that Brooklyn is better than Toronto, only that I prefer it. I try to state my preference delicately, knowing as I do how painful it is to be the less favored one. And I try to be honest with others as well as with myself: New York doesn’t miss me. I am as inessential there as I am here. But I existed in Brooklyn in a way I have never existed in Toronto. I went to New York and started from scratch. I built a life there that was richer than anything I had ever known. Here, I have no choice but to begin at ground zero—in the footprints of my own personal disaster. I cannot start to build until I clear away the ash and rubble, the ruins of my early life.