The Best American Essays 2015 Read Online Free PDF Page A

that I lie on top of one of the girls as he lay on top of the other, on the floor. He wanted me to be less the girl I had become and more of the boy he was inventing himself as, right before my very eyes. I stood over the girl my brother had chosen for me as my brother lay on top of the other girl, both of us writhing in imitation of all we had ever heard other men say to women, listening outside their bedroom windows. The young girl lying beneath me wore a green school uniform and a brown beret. I stood over her for what felt like forever, as forever as standing at the edge of the bay felt, years later. No words came out of my mouth as I lay on top of the young girl not speaking, not daring to move, since what I wanted, she wanted, which was a fatter, bigger, larger tongue that would swallow her own whole, just as I began to be afraid of this: that my brother would never leave the family we were born into, doing everything, including fucking, just as they all have, and perhaps always will. The only photographs I took back from Barbados that summer were photographs of the young girl I could not kiss, photographs I took moments after our non-exchange, since I couldn’t really touch her, she being myself. Once the photographs were developed and installed in my mother’s photograph album, I could not write this girl’s name on the back of the image. I never looked at them again. Labeling photographs was a habit I had developed in Brooklyn, where the people I lived with or my parents’ relatives kept photographs of relatives from Barbados they had never met, keepsakes that didn’t mean a thing. They kept those passport-size portraits taken in a photographer’s studio, against backgrounds meant to resemble small churches, or a bamboo grove, in plastic binders whose covers showed brightly colored flowers in 3-D, or bay water at midnight, with boats on it. The photographs were arranged by my mother in a haphazard way; she was the least sentimental person I have ever known. I wrote the names of the people I could identify on the surface of the pictures my mother had collected because I feared, somehow, that unless I did, everyone connected to my family would be forgotten, long before I began to want to forget them. There was one photograph my mother owned that never ceased to interest me, though. It was oval-shaped and framed in fake gold leaf. Originally, the frame and the image it contained had belonged to my grandmother—my father’s mother. The image was of my grandmother’s nephew, after whom I was named.
Hilton Rolston
was the name written in faint black script at the bottom of the photograph. In it, one could see his full lips and straight black hair parted in the middle. One could also see his wing collar, tie, and jacket with fairly wide lapels. It was taken sometime in the 1890s, just before Hilton Rolston left Barbados to pan for gold in California nearly sixty years after the gold rush had taken place. I don’t think he knew where he was going, except toward a dream. He was pretty. Perhaps going to California and dying in the gold rush that kept never happening for him was a way to be himself, far from the horror of feigned intimacy that defines family life in Barbados, like most other places. I don’t know a thing about him except what my grandmother told me. Hilton’s portrait is one of the few things she brought with her when she emigrated from Barbados to Brooklyn—that and another large painted photograph, of my grandmother with her father and brother, that was destroyed, along with everything else she owned, in a fire in a house she had bought for her children long before I came along. My mother was given Hilton as a gift, shortly after his namesake was born. In that portrait of Hilton, he appears to be more dead than alive, even though he was photographed and painted when he was alive. The photograph is a memento mori, really, which is a quality that all painted