Fight Like a Girl

by Sheena Kamal

  The thing about soucouyants is that once one of them gets her hands on you, she doesn’t let go. She can bleed you for years. When you wake up there are little scratches on your body, on your neck. You feel like your life is draining away right before your eyes. Over the years you become weaker and weaker. You stop fighting. You let her take everything you have and don’t say boo. She’s not in it for the fast bleed; she plays the long game and lives off your life force until she’s through with you and moves on to the next sucker.

  When I got a look at Ravi sitting there eating my pizza like it was his all along, I saw something in him that I’ve only ever seen in myself.

  A sucker.

  How could she even get a new man so quick, you ask? Yeah, I was wondering the same thing as I stared at him in a kinda shocked haze, until I realized where I’d seen him before.

  He’s the guy she was with in the shadows of the parking lot.

  I know it’s him, know it from the salt-and-pepper of his hair, from the bend in his nose, from the smile he flashed to her under the streetlight. Illuminated for a split second, caught in the camera flash of my memory.

  Snap.

  There you are, new man. In our lives, outside of our house, in the months before my father died under the wheels of our car.

  eleven

  It’s just a week away from Christmas holidays. Dad’s urn is side-eyeing us from the living room and I’m sitting at the table with Ravi, who turns out to be another Trini guy, because Ma’s man-barometer apparently is broken and has just one setting. He’s not tall like Dad was, but he’s a solid bulk in our dining room. His hair is slicked back off his forehead and I can’t tell his age.

  He’s looking at me and I know exactly what he’s thinking.

  He’s wondering what kind of problem I’ll be.

  I silently send the signal that I’m gonna be the biggest problem he could possibly imagine, but the main issue with that is that he doesn’t seem to have much of an imagination.

  We stare at each other like this until Ma comes in. She sets a plate of red beans and rice in front of him. I watch him eat, the beans stewed thick with tomatoes and garlic, just the way I like it best.

  “You not hungry?” he asks, nodding to my full plate, which I just pick at. These are the first words he has spoken to me. Unlike most West Indian men I’ve met, he’s not much of a talker.

  “No.”

  There’s something in my voice that makes my mother look up at me, that makes her pretty brown eyes flash a warning so dire that I have never been able to ignore it. Until now.

  “Eat your food,” she says.

  I’ve never disobeyed a direct order from her before, but I’ve had it with the two of them. This on top of Imelda and the new BJJ at our gym? Not today, Satan.

  “No.” I push away from the table and am out the door before either of them can say boo. I’m quicker than they’d ever imagined. Even though we’re just starting our speed training, I’m like lightning.

  At the gym, which is now open again, I sit on a bench in the corner and watch Jason spar with Ricky, both on the card for a tourney in Montreal.

  “What’s the matter?” Jason calls from the ring, after they do their rounds. Since I beat his ass at the demo he’s been paying extra attention to me but I haven’t taken the bait. Who wants a guy you can drop with a single push kick? I do have to say, he looks tight these days, so at least he’s learning.

  “Leave her be,” says Kru, passing by. He gives me a pat on the shoulder and hands me a bottle of disinfectant and roll of paper towels for the gym equipment. This is no Mr. Miyagi, wax-on-wax-off shit. This is because I haven’t paid membership in months and I’ve got to contribute somehow. I haven’t paid because I lost my job at Foot Locker after I missed a shift due to my last fight, and those uncompromising assholes wrote me out of the schedule. So no scratch for me right now.

  I clean instead of training, letting the sharp smell go to my already light head.

  When I get home I’m a wraith, a shadow, full of cleaning fumes and nothing else. Ravi’s gone and I don’t hear Ma anywhere. But then there she is, in the kitchen, coming at me from out of nowhere. She slaps me with her open hand, grabs the rolling pin off the counter and strikes me so hard across my shoulders I think my bones will be crushed.

  Her voice is low and sharp.

  “You be grateful for the food I cook. Be. Grateful. You don’t know what I’ve done to bring you here from Trinidad for a better life. You don’t know what they do to people over there. This is what you say? This is what you do? You can’t respect your elders?”

  She raises the pin again and whips it at my head. I duck, because I’m slippery like that. It hits the wall, which only makes her angrier. I stare at the dent it has made, like a right cross with all your power behind it, the ones you make sometimes with your chin untucked because you’re so in the moment that you don’t care about protecting your face. You know you can do damage. And there it is, cracking the sea-green paint of our kitchen, just under the cheap plastic clock that’s been there forever.

  She doesn’t cry and neither do I. Because I am grateful. Even when Dad was alive, it was always just the two of us, and everything she does is for me so that I could have the kind of life she didn’t when she was growing up. If I didn’t have Ma, I wouldn’t have anybody. She loves me the way that nobody has ever loved her. She tells me this over and over. She hits me with love and stops before I die from her blows. Even though it would be so easy to do, I don’t block her because she needs this. It’s what I get from sparring, if I’m honest.

  You okay? Columbus texts. He must have seen me come in, heard the rolling pin crashing into the wall. I don’t answer because no, genius. No, I’m not.

  After Ma disappears into her room and shuts her door, I try to fall asleep. I want to sink into the silence, let it wrap around me, pull me close and down into sleep. But silence has never been my friend. Out of it, a sound can come hurtling at me, something mean and dark, a slap across a cheek, a cry of pain. Cries of other kinds, too, which I never want to hear or think about, even less than the pain-cries.

  I wait in the silence, listening for some new shift in my existence. I don’t want to say my heart beats faster or my belly’s full of butterflies, or anything corny like that. I know better and, because of Mr. Abdi, I also know these are lazy descriptions for a feeling that I can’t even put into words. I’m not scared right now or even angry. I’m tired, but I stay up just in case. On the off chance that there’s gonna be something more waiting for me tonight.

  twelve

  The next morning is Saturday, thank God. So I won’t have to be at school, pretending that every inch of my body isn’t sore. And although I heard Ma leave earlier, there are sounds downstairs that I can’t place. When I emerge from my bedroom in shorts and a tank top, Pammy is in our kitchen, making pancakes. “Hey, Trish. Come eat.”

  She holds out a chair for me, so I slink into it and stare at the pancakes. They’re hot, and they’re there. Once I start eating, I can’t seem to stop.

  “Christopher might come over for some in a bit. I hope you don’t mind,” she says.

  I shake my head, mouth still full. Why would I mind Columbus being here? He practically lives at my house when Ma isn’t around, as Pammy well knows. But she’s being careful, and I get the feeling she wants to talk about last night, what she might have heard. But I don’t have the patience for all that. I hurt everywhere.

  “Thanks, Pammy,” I say, trying to sound okay.

  Not sure if she buys it, but she doesn’t push. “You’re welcome, hon. Your mom had to leave early, and she said I could come over and use your television. She’s got a whole season of Sherlock recorded and I need to get some knitting done.”

  Something about the easiness in her voice tells me that nobody is fooling anybody. She’s deliberately not looking at the dent
in the wall that is shining at us like a bruise. She’s here to make sure I’m fine, and that my mother is, too. Because we’re a village, in this section of the co-op. I don’t think she knows about the beating (I don’t think she’d be okay with that), but she knows my mom will fling things about when she’s good and mad. Which isn’t often, but when it happens, Pammy hears it all.

  Maybe it’s because I’m so relaxed with all the carbs in my belly (which I’ll have to work out later), but I feel like I can trust her with something that’s been on my mind.

  “Hey, Pammy?”

  “Yeah?” She turns back to me.

  “Remember that night? The night my dad died?”

  Her expression shutters closed. “I do.”

  “I saw you talk to the police when—after it happened. You said you saw the whole thing from your window.”

  She knows exactly what I mean by it. “I was in my kitchen, making some chamomile tea, and happened to look out. I heard your car pull into the lot.”

  “Right. I know about that. But did you…did you see anyone else there that night?”

  She goes still. “No. Why? Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. It’s just we didn’t even see my dad when we drove into the lot. But you saw everything and I was wondering if there was anyone else who could have seen it.”

  “I didn’t see anyone else. It was raining, hon.” She looks at me closely. “Have you been sleeping enough? You look tired.”

  “But if you could see what happened from that distance, then maybe you could see him? Dad. Did you know he was there?”

  “Nobody knew he was there,” she says sharply. “Honestly, Trisha, I think you need to try to forget about it. I think you need to move on.”

  The door to our little townhouse opens and she brightens.

  “There’s Christopher! And just in time for some pancakes, too. If you can spare a few for him, that is.” Then she winks at me, which freaks me out as Pammy doesn’t do things like “brighten” and wink. But I don’t have time to think about it because Columbus has made it up the stairs with his slow ass and he’s looking like he’s gonna fall over from the effort.

  I try not to look too glad to see him, but I’m grateful for a (semi) male presence somehow. I don’t know what’s up with the ladies in my life right now, but I’m thinking they won’t be this weird always, right?

  When Columbus finishes the rest of the pancakes, we go over to his house to compare notes for economics class.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, when I pause in his kitchen, which is a mirror image of mine. The view, let’s be honest, isn’t great. We’ve had one major snowfall this year, but the snow melted almost as soon as it touched the ground. So it looks the same as it did a month ago. There’s not much to see out that window, other than a wooded area that backs out onto a ravine. And one part of the parking lot. Their kitchen has a full, unobstructed view of the corner where we always park. Where my father died.

  “Earth to Trisha,” Columbus says, coming up behind me. He punches my shoulder. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  I open the cupboard above the electric kettle. There’s a French press and a bag of coffee beans next to the grinder that Pammy uses every morning. She puts a bit of the beans in the grinder, adds that to the French press, and pours hot (but not boiling) water over the whole thing. I’ve seen her do it a thousand times. “Where’s your chamomile tea?”

  Columbus snorts. “What are we, senior citizens?”

  Exactly. I close the cupboard. “Let’s study.”

  “Wanna make out instead?” he says, grinning at me.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “I would,” he laughs, “but it’s my house. You’re gonna miss your chance with me, you know. We’re going to college in the fall and I don’t know about you, but I plan to meet a hot foreign exchange student and have loads of mad sex with her and then move to Europe where I find out she’s rich and we’ll live off her trust fund for the rest of our wasteful lives.”

  “I have the same plan, so let’s see who gets there first.”

  I fake a punch.

  He flinches.

  What a baby. Like any hot foreign exchange student is going to go for that.

  * * *

  I spend the night thinking about my dad. The big spaces in my life where he’s never been. You would think the garage he ran in Trinidad was the Rockefeller empire or something, the way he always needed to be back there. When I was ten I spent a week with him. Ma couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come with us. He took me to Maracas, on that death-defying mountain drive, all twisty and terrifying. We had bake and shark on the beach and he laughed at my pineapple chutney. He was happy there on the island, happier than he’d ever been in Toronto with me and Ma. But he loved her, couldn’t stay away from her. I think she loved him, too. Mostly.

  The beatings didn’t start right away when he’d come up, a few weeks at a time. They would have maybe two good days, and then she’d say something, do something—little, of course. It wasn’t ever a big deal. But I guess he had that in common with Columbus’s dad. Just a little thing to set them off and then wham.

  She’s on the ground and he’s whaling on her.

  Okay, so I hated him.

  Hated him as much as I loved her. He never touched me. Never loved me enough to lay hands on me, maybe. Or maybe my mother would never let him. I think she’d die before she let anyone else beat me. That was her job alone. That, and loving me.

  Because I was always hers.

  Things were better when he wasn’t here. It’s not like I miss him or anything. Why would I? So why can’t I stop thinking about him? I only stop when I’m sparring—and it’s not like I can spar forever.

  But I try.

  * * *

  In the ring now and going at Jason hard. He wants fight prep for his tourney in Montreal? I’ll give him fight prep.

  “Whoa,” he says, wheezing. Gloved hands on his knees. His pale body is red from my blows, but he’s blocking a lot better. He looks decent. We take our mouthguards out and drink some water. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “I always kick your ass.”

  “We had one fight!”

  “And I won.”

  “You Trini?” he asks, out of nowhere.

  Here we go.

  Soon as a guy hears I’m from Trinidad, it’s all over. Bam. Falls in love. I mean, not with me. With the idea that I can shake my ass better than a Jamaican and, as much as Trinis want to believe this, who can shake their ass better than a Jamaican? As good, yes. Better? This is a matter of serious debate. If he’s looking for a dancehall queen, he better look somewhere else.

  I slip my mouthguard in and grunt something in response. Let him only think I’m shaking my ass for him. I kiss my teeth. It doesn’t have the desired effect because of the mouthguard. “Come on,” I say, around the plastic. “Let’s go another round.”

  We spar until he lands a swing kick good and proper into my ribs and I go down. Kru calls it then, looking at me all peculiar like. He says he’s closing for the night and, true enough, when I look around we’re the only people left in the gym.

  I try not to smell him. Jason. But I still do. He still smells too good to be true.

  “You look nice today,” he tells me.

  In my ripped tank top and third best pair of Thai shorts? The ones I have to roll down at the waist to get them to fit properly? Wow. Some people have no taste.

  As we leave for the night, Jason turns to me and says, all casual, “I don’t know why you lose so much when you fight. You’re really good.” Then he shrugs. “Must be a curse or something, Miss Trini.”

  I need this Mexican superstitious bullshit like I needed Mr. Abdi racially profiling me.

  A curse.

  Yeah, right.
r />   thirteen

  The day before Christmas holidays, Ma tells me that I’m going to work with Aunty K in New York for the break.

  She barely looks at me when she breaks the news. She doesn’t want to hear any backtalk from me, big surprise. The violence of a couple of nights ago is gone from her eyes, and so am I. In her mind, I’m not there right now. Not pleading to stay or anything. After the last day of class, I don’t even have time to say bye to my lunchtime Desis, or my crew at the gym.

  She’s punishing me.

  For the disobedience. For the fact that I’ve been nothing but a burden to her for all these years. For the questions that I wasn’t supposed to ask Pammy about what she saw the night Dad died.

  She drives me straight to the airport with some kind of Bollywood soundtrack blasting. She looks like something from out of a Bollywood film herself. She’s flat-ironed her hair and put makeup on, dark streaks of eyeliner that should look garish but stop just short of that with a little upward tick, like a checkmark or the Nike logo. She’s tried to teach me how to do this a few times but gives up when I inevitably look like a buff raccoon.

  Sitting there beside her, I think about the last time we were in the car together. Even though she’s doing her best to drown it all out with these Hindi songs, the sounds of a language she doesn’t even speak.

  Beyond the windshield, on the other side of the hood, is the front bumper and memories of a godawful sickening crunch that I can’t ignore.