Fight Like a Girl

by Sheena Kamal

  * * *

  After the demo I go straight home to study. I’m trying for advanced acceptance to Ryerson University for business management, and I need to have at least a B average. My grades are usually around there, but you never know. And I have to get in. Ever since Kru opened up a new gym in downtown Toronto, I don’t even want to consider the other options.

  I don’t expect anyone to be home because Dad is usually out with his friends at all hours of the day and Ma’s working day shift at the hospital, so she isn’t going to be around for sure. When she’s not there, there’s no food, and he’s not going to stick around on an empty belly.

  But there he is. On the couch, watching a cricket match on TV. Eating the tamarind balls he brought for me. His phone lights up and plays an old calypso, “Bassman,” but he doesn’t bother to answer the call.

  “What?” he says to me, when I stare at him. Or, specifically, the tamarind candy in his hand. “You wasn’t eating them, Missy.”

  Because he’s here and he’s hungry I can tell he’s waiting for Ma. It’s in the darkness of his mood. The fact that his rum shop friends are trying to reach him but he doesn’t want to answer them. So I go to the kitchen and fry up some bake, triangles of fluffy dough that I slather with butter and cheese, just the way he likes it. He doesn’t even say thanks, as usual.

  “You’re too skinny, girl,” he says, without even looking at me. “You should eat something.”

  “Okay.”

  This is a standard example of our sparkling conversation.

  “You have a boyfriend yet?”

  I think about Jason. “No.”

  “What about that boy from next door you always with?”

  Columbus? Ew. “Definitely not.”

  Dad seems as glad about this as I am. “Good. You need to focus on your studies. Where’s your Mommy?”

  I hate it when he calls her my Mommy. It’s a Trini thing, but still. There’s no reason to keep everything from the old country. Isn’t that why we came to this new country? To leave behind all the awkward crap? “At work, probably.”

  “Probably?”

  I shrug. I’m not her keeper. Dad’s phone rings just then, so I’m spared more of this quality bonding time.

  “Eat something,” he says before answering the phone and shouting to one of his friends about how cold it is up here. Surprise surprise. You’re in Canada now. Maybe put on a jacket?

  There is no way in hell I can eat fried dough post-workout, so I mix a protein shake and gulp it on the way upstairs. About an hour later I hear him leave the house. I go to the kitchen and eat the rest of the tamarind balls.

  My phone buzzes. It’s Columbus. Can I come over now? No doubt smelling the fried dough from his house. We do share a wall, after all.

  Use your keys, I’m not coming down.

  Not sure why Ma first gave Pammy keys, only that her and Columbus have had them hanging in their kitchen for as long as I can remember. Columbus uses them most often to scrounge around for food, but not usually when Dad is here. I guess we’ve both been waiting for Dad to leave, for the reprieve. I hope there’s some to spare for Ma.

  six

  Maybe the fumes from the bake and cheese went to his head, or it could be that I finally did something right, because Dad comes to pick me up from the gym the next day for some extra quality bonding time.

  I’m sparring when I see him watching from the doorway.

  He looks…proud? I mean, I’m doing pretty well if I do say so myself, so why wouldn’t he be? I guess it’s just a new feeling, is all, and it’s super freaking weird to see him there. He usually has other things to do, like…okay, I can’t really think of what else he does when he comes up from Trinidad. Whatever it is, it’s not picking me up from anything. Dad’s a big believer in using Ma’s car while other people take public transit.

  “How’s your Mommy been?” he asks, as we walk to the parking lot.

  “Good.” I can feel the sweat cooling on my body, turning sticky. I don’t mind taking the train in this stench, but I am glad for the ride. Even though I’d never say it to him.

  “She working a lot?”

  I shrug. “I guess.” Ma always works a lot, though. So it’s not been much different.

  “She going out and seeing she friends on the weekend?”

  What’s with the interest in Ma’s whereabouts and weekend activities all of a sudden? “I don’t know. I’ve been busy with school,” I say, because I’m not going to snitch on anybody. Even if Ma was missing for months, I still wouldn’t tell him.

  It doesn’t look like he believes me but suddenly he grins and puts a hand on my shoulder like we’re old pals. The thing about my dad is that when he smiles it really suits him. You’re not supposed to tell people they should smile more because they look better when they do, but with him it’s actually true. I can almost see what Ma sees in him when he’s like this.

  Almost but not quite.

  On the drive home, he asks some questions about school and I tell him about my plans to be in business management. He likes the sound of that a lot but flat out tells me I should get a part-time job to supplement my student loans for college because he’s saving for his retirement.

  I nod and say that’s a great idea but obviously it isn’t. How can I train, go to school and work? This is why I lost my job at Foot Locker. It’s like the man doesn’t even know me.

  I should ask Kru if there are any tourneys with cash prizes. Maybe when I turn pro.

  * * *

  For the next several days I just try to live my best life before I have to get a job to pay for college, on top of everything else. I tell Ma about the conversation in the car.

  “He picked you up from the gym?” she asks again. She’s frowning. I guess we’re both shook by that. “Why did he want to know about how I spend my weekends? Don’t I deserve a break, too?”

  She’s completely missing the point about how getting a job would interfere with my training. I try to explain it to her, but she waves it away. “Tell me again exactly what he asked about me. His exact words, Trisha.”

  Does she think I don’t know what exactly means? But I know better than to say that out loud. As I start to recap the whole boring event yet again, she gets a look in her eye that I don’t understand. One that I don’t particularly like. I guess I should be paying better attention.

  Toward the end of Dad’s latest stay with us, Aunty K comes to spend the weekend, all spontaneous-like.

  Aunty K lives in New York and often spends her holidays with us because she’s alone, never been married or had kids, and has no other options.

  So she’s our burden, I guess?

  Ma forces me to go to dinner the evening Aunty K arrives, even though she knows I’m trying to cut weight.

  “Ma, do I have to go?” I ask. I got a few rounds of sparring in earlier and I’m sore as hell. But also hungry. “Can you bring me some takeout?”

  “Get in the car, Trisha,” she snaps.

  You know, there’s no talking to her when she’s like this.

  I do get in the car, in my elastic-waist sweats because we’re going for Chinese food and I already know how this night is going to end. With me bloated and regretful.

  But I’m wrong.

  I mean, not really. I do end up bloated and regretful, but that’s not all.

  It ends up being the craziest night of my life.

  seven

  We’re in the car on our way back home. Outside of the restaurant, Ma said I should drive and got in the passenger seat before I could ask if she was sure. It’s raining, one of those fall showers that started in the afternoon and goes into the night. Ever since I got my learner’s permit, Ma has let me drive as much as possible, but it’s weird for me to drive in this wet darkness. Maybe she thinks I need the experience.

  We don’t speak.r />
  It feels like we’re waiting for something, even as we coast down our street, into the co-op townhouse complex, and pull into the parking lot.

  That something is at home. We can feel it, sense it. Drawing closer.

  I don’t want us to go home yet but Ma is tired. I can see it in the circles under her eyes, the set of her jaw. There’s something else, some other look that I might have put there. Nothing I seem to do tonight is right. Ma’s on edge and has been snapping at me more than usual. Aunty K starts to chatter to cut the tension, but this is just for her own benefit.

  Maybe the rain is why it happens the way it does. A screech of tires and a dull thud against the front bumper. A scream coming from somewhere. It hurts my ears, rings through my head, blurs my vision…

  “Stop,” my mother whispers. Aunty K is silent now, for once.

  The scream dies out in my throat.

  It seems like forever before Ma gets out of the car to see what we hit. Rather, who. She’s trembling. Kneeling beside Dad. Checking to see if he’s alive.

  He’s not.

  Before the police come to the crime scene, Ma leaves Aunty K for a moment while she takes me aside. I can’t speak. Now the screaming is done, I have nothing left. She gets real close and we’re now eye to eye. “Listen carefully,” she says. And then she tells me what the story is.

  “That’s what happened, okay?” she says, when she’s done.

  Why is she so calm? “Okay.”

  “Remember: you were driving.”

  I nod. It’s true. “I was driving.”

  “And you didn’t see him.”

  I look away from her. It happened so fast. I don’t know what I saw. I don’t know what anyone saw.

  We don’t have any more time to talk because that’s when the police get there. Because I’m shook and I’m babbling and Ma’s right beside me listening to every word I say, this is what I tell the cop: I don’t even think about Dad when he’s around. A long time ago I learned to pretend he wasn’t even there. I have a dad, yeah, but he could be anywhere in the world. Most likely back in Trinidad, at his house he shares with another woman.

  Where in Trinidad?

  Um, a place called Diego Martin.

  And what did he do there?

  He could be doing anything, but he’s definitely not doing anything with me.

  It sounds bad, that part, so I adjust and say that he owns a garage and he works there, too. Fixing cars. Though I have never in my whole life seen him fix a damn thing. Or get anything, or do anything for himself. He just looked at me and said Missy, pass me this or Missy, go and do that. Missy, am I talking to you? Missy, don’t you have something else to do?

  Missy, hey you. Never Trisha, my name.

  I try to listen to the cop, but it’s hard because Ma is paying real close attention to what I’m saying, and also to the things that I’m not.

  The cop asks some questions, but I start to feel real queasy. Worse than when Noor landed her teep and I threw up over the garbage bin.

  “You were driving, right?”

  I nod.

  “How fast were you going?”

  “I don’t remember. I just turned the corner into the parking lot, so probably not fast.” Dinner isn’t sitting well and I’m so nauseous after what happened that I throw up on his shoes.

  That ends the interview quick.

  The cop already talked to Ma and Pammy. I heard Pammy tell him that she’d seen the whole thing from her window. Now he moves on to Aunty K, who manages to keep all her greasy Chinese food down while he asks her questions about tonight. Questions about Dad.

  Apparently Dad had a split lip that didn’t look like it happened during the accident. Aunty K says she doesn’t know anything about that.

  He asks why she showed up inexplicably to take me and Ma to dinner. All the way from New York, closing up her roti shop for a few days. She tells him that she just wanted to spend some time with Ma and me. She doesn’t tell him that Dad didn’t come with us because he was never able to look her in the eye, on account of his messed-up relationship with Ma. Maybe that’s why he went out with his friends tonight. Could also be why he was sneaking around in the parking lot in the rain. He didn’t want us to notice him. If so, he did a pretty bad job of staying out of the way. All things considered.

  The cop thinks so, too. That he wasn’t good at dodging, especially tonight.

  What a tragic accident.

  eight

  Thank God for Columbus. His constant presence in our house can be a pain sometimes but after the accident, I actually appreciate it.

  Two days after Dad dies, I come into the kitchen and no one’s around but him. He’s making a grilled cheese sandwich, and even offers me some of it. He breaks it in two and hands me the smaller piece. “You need to fix the back door. It’s broken or something.”

  “You didn’t use your key?” He normally comes in through the front door like he owns the place.

  He finishes his half of the sandwich in seconds, still standing, and rummages through the fridge for more food. “My mom has it in her purse and I don’t know where she went. Kind of dangerous to have a broken back door in this neighbourhood, Trish. I put our door blocks in there for you guys, but you should get a new lock.”

  Like I don’t know that. “I’ll deal with it,” I say.

  But actually, I forget all about it, because it turns out that Ma wants me out of the house almost immediately. Apparently, my studies are the most important thing right now. She says. And she must be right, since she’s been watching me real close ever since Dad died.

  So I’m back at school and everyone who knows about the accident treats me like I have the plague. The lunchtime Desis don’t know how to talk to me, so we just play cards and pretend that nobody died. While we sit there eating our PB&J, they silently imply the loss of a father should be a bigger deal. I should be weeping and pulling my hair out like I’m in a Bollywood film or something. But I can’t be bothered because I have training to do and a mother to wonder about.

  I can’t stand their pitying looks during our lunchtime card games. Like I’m the broken one. Me. Not Dad.

  The only person who acknowledges something is up to my face is the school’s only guidance counsellor, Mrs. Nunez, but she’s too day drunk (as usual) to care that much. I sit in her office, which is full of psychology books I bet she’s never read. She takes her sweet time to go over my file, to remember who I am and why I’ve been sitting in her office for the past five minutes. When she reaches the part in my file where it says my dad just died, she puts on an appropriately concerned expression. I spend about ten minutes saying I’m sad. Yes, it was a tragedy. Horrible. Some other adjectives thrown in. Once, an adverb. She asks if I need help. I say no, because of the warning glances Ma has been shooting me at home.

  Omertà, Ma. I get it. My lips are firmly sealed around my mouth guard.

  My English teacher hands me a book after class on my first day back. He’s been giving me sad looks ever since he heard about Dad.

  “What’s this, Mr. Abdi?” I say, even though I can see it’s clearly a novel.

  “Soucouyant, by David Chariandy. A local Trinidadian author. I thought you might want to do your final essay on this. It’s from your culture.”

  Okay, hold up. This diversity thing has gotten out of hand. I don’t need to be racially profiled like this! Why can’t I have The Great Gatsby like everyone else? But I don’t say that, obviously. I say thanks and slip the slim volume into my bag. I’ve heard about soucouyants but I don’t know why anybody would want to write a book about some unknown vampires from the Caribbean.

  “I hope you take some English classes when you go to college. I think you have something, Trisha.” Then he looks embarrassed, like he shouldn’t have said this at all.

  I smile at him like I’m gonna think about
it, but what’s the point? I’m on my way to a degree in business management, no matter what he thinks. All this “books improve lives” BS he doles out from time to time falls deaf on our cash-strapped immigrant ears. We all know what’s up. Get good jobs, marry richer or up the colour-line, buy houses, take care of our overworked parents who keep reminding us that they put us into the world and they can take us out of it at any time. We don’t have time for this literature shit. How are we supposed to pay off student loans with an English degree?

  * * *

  There’s no training today.

  Kru is teaching at the downtown gym and I don’t want to take two buses and a train all the way over there in hopes of a short pad session, so I decide to skip it. Plus, I’ve got at least three hours of homework ahead of me.

  I walk home from the bus stop and see Pammy watching me from her window. It’s cold, the moment before winter clenches the whole city in its grip. As I take my gloved hands out of my jacket to fish around for my keys, I can feel her intensity. Pammy sends me these looks sometimes, like, I’m so sorry, boo, that your Ma still has a man in her life. Because Pammy sent her ex packing three years ago after what Columbus calls the Worst Fucking Day of His Whole Fucking Life.

  It started at Canada’s Wonderland, an amusement park they had to drive for what seemed like hours just to get to. The whole thing was set off by Columbus back-talking his father in one way or another. Maybe he didn’t say anything at all—Columbus doesn’t always remember it the same way—maybe it was just a look. But what he doesn’t forget is when his dad went off the rails and whaled on him like you wouldn’t believe, right in front of everybody. He’d just lost his construction job and was maybe looking for some energy to expend, or maybe he hated Columbus just as much as we all suspected—whatever the reason, Pammy wasn’t having it.

  She booted him out, pressed charges, bought herself a box of wine and a giant-ass container of bubble bath, and deliriously soaked him away. Columbus said she read Wild and Eat Pray Love back-to-back in the cramped, standard-issue co-op tub that we’ve all tried to fold ourselves into, and that was it.