I knew before I’d finished the sentence. I’d known before I even started speaking — but I’d wanted him to kiss his teeth and wave me away, to tell me he was too busy to do something so carefully cruel. Instead he turned his head to look at me and then raised his eyebrows.
I climbed onto the floor, bending into a crouch. The sofa had been pushed back a few inches. I could see the sink marks from where the legs used to be. I shuffled over to look at one of the armchairs; it’d been moved a few inches to the right. The cabinet had been shifted forward.
He’d barely moved anything. He’d adjusted the furniture just enough for the living room to be exactly the same and completely different, just enough for it to look unchanged to anyone but Nana, who knew the precise location of all of her belongings. I stood up, my hands trembling.
“Don’t you have anything better to do with your time? Don’t you think you’re too old for this?”
“Nope.”
“You’re pushing sixty.”
“So?”
“Jesus Chr —”
He glared at me from the corner of his eye, and I pressed my lips together. “Give it all back,” I said. “Everything you took from her.”
He didn’t respond, and I took a step closer to him.
“Are you listening to me?”
“You tell her fi start cook?”
“You have got to be kidding.”
He picked up the remote and turned Dirty Harry back on.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “Both of you are crazy.”
“You are the one that’s crazy,” he said.
I shook my head. “George, you’re in the wrong here.”
“Things are the way things are.” I could hear his accent more clearly. He was getting angry. “Yuh nah know everything, yuh know.”
A door opened at the back of the house. Nana sauntered through the kitchen without looking at the living room. Her hair was out of the rollers and twirled into nice curls, her body snug in a patterned white-and-turquoise dress. When she made it to the foyer, she called me over again.
“Nana, what now?”
She nodded her head to the entryway closet. There had to be at least twenty jackets in there. Frocks and pea coats in shades of black and green, reefers in navy blue. On the floor, there were rows of pumps and boots lined on a two-level shoe rack, and above the hangers there was a shelf of shawls and headscarves.
“My turquoise shawl is gone. Him take all my nice things because he knows I need fi go out and he nuh want me fi look good. But everyone must see that I look good, everyone must see that I am fine!”
“They’re your things. Just demand them back.”
She ignored me. “Yuh still like that sweet drink, that Kola Champagne?”
I sighed. “Sure. Yes.”
“I’ll be back.”
Nana left the house, shutting the front door firmly behind her. The sound was swallowed whole by the silence. I didn’t leave the foyer and only turned to face the living room. The clock ticked one fifteen. It had only been half an hour since I got to this house. A scream swelled and waned in my chest.
“I guess you just always do what you want,” I said.
“Likkle pickney,” said my grandfather, turning the volume up on the television. “Why yuh think yuh know everything?”
“I don’t.” My voice was barely louder than a gasp. “Trust me, I don’t.”
* * *
Nights when my mother felt restless, either from boredom or frustration, we went out driving like we always did. Sometimes she took Yonge to Front Street and we followed Lake Ontario to the city’s outskirts. Other nights, we went past the suburbs to the boonies, cranking the stereo up to full blast as we sped down empty dirt roads. That night, we went to Sheppard and Yonge, and zigzagged in and out of crescents and avenues and cul-de-sacs. Uptown was my least favourite destination but the one my mother was most often intent upon. She’d cruise past French-style townhouses and blue-glassed high-rises and when we made it back to our studio, she’d fall into a deep quiet, the images of our sightseeing coiling in her gut until they choked her throat. I’d wake up to hear her crying in her sleep.
I didn’t want one of those nights.
I told my mother I was hungry and she found a Taco Bell drive-thru. She parked in the lot and left the battery running so we could hear the radio as we ate.
“If I had a job I could buy you dinner sometimes,” I said.
My mother stopped unwrapping her Taco Supreme. “You think you need to buy me dinner?”
“Treat you to dinner,” I said. “I just meant that if I had a job — ”
“How about you get a career in a few years and buy me a house instead,” she said.
It always came back to school. Grades. The future. We never spoke about now.
My mother started eating, the corners of her mouth tightly drawn. Bits of chicken and sour cream dribbled onto her lap, and the takeout bag joined the others papered to the floor beneath my feet. She turned off the radio. But this wasn’t the kind of silence I could settle in.
“I saw Nana today,” I said, taking a bite from my burrito.
“You went over there?” She was working her mouth, biting the inside of her lip, like she was struggling between anger and something else. “How was it?”
“Tense. Quiet. They’re not talking to each other.”
She shrugged. “Figures.”
“No, Mom, I mean they’re messing with each other’s heads.”
When she asked me what I meant, I explained everything I’d seen. She nodded her head slowly as she used her tongue to dig out a shred of lettuce lodged in the grooves of her back teeth. “I see they’ve changed their methods since I was younger.”
“They aren’t yelling anymore.”
“I guess they’re too tired for that now.”
“Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Why would it?”
“I don’t know, aren’t you afraid that they’ll kill each other or something?”
My mother chuckled and took another bite out of her taco. “I wouldn’t worry. They hate each other too much to kill each other.”
* * *
We were watching TV when a store manager called for me. Krissy from HMV. The voicemail picked up and she left a message asking me to come in for a group interview. I didn’t turn to face my mother but stared straight ahead, focusing on the little girl with black hair in the Welch’s Grape Juice commercial.
I wished Krissy would shut up. Her voice was chipper and did that thing my mother hated, that thing where everything she said sounded like a question. She left the store’s contact information on the machine and finally ended the call. I let myself breathe a little but still didn’t meet my mother’s eyes.
“Anything you want to tell me?” she asked.
“It’s just an interview.”
“I said no, Kara. I told you the way it is.”
“Yeah, but —”
“You should be focusing. You’re this close to failing math. In two years you’ll be applying for university. Think about that.”
“But, Mom.” I finally turned to look at her. “Don’t you think a job could help with tuition? I mean, when the time comes.”
“That will be handled,” she said.
“Oh. Is there money put aside?”
The corner of my mother’s eye twitched. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing. I was only asking.”
The phone rang, though neither of us moved from our spots to answer it. I wasn’t allowed to take calls on the house phone anyway, just in case a bill collector called and I didn’t know which lie to tell them. It was a rule my mother hadn’t lifted even when I became a teenager. The voicemail came on for a second time and after the beep all I heard was giggling. Gleeful. Somewhere just below manic.
It was Nana. She cackled about hiding my grandfather’s books in the garage, someplace he’d never think to look; about making enough food for leftovers and keeping them in a mini-fridge she’d bought, one she kept in the bedroom. Bringing food out from the kitchen to anywhere else but the dining room was normally cause for Nana to yell and pace the hall for hours; the image of her hoarding pots of mackerel rundown and dumpling stew in her bedroom made me bite my fingernails.
“Since when do you bite your nails?”
“I don’t really,” I said.
“Then stop.”
I put my hands in my lap and pressed my lips together. My mother shook her head at Nana’s triumphant retellings and when the answering machine clicked off, she exhaled heavily. “She’s definitely more creative now. I’ll give her that,” she said.
“This entire thing is insane,” I said. “How are you not angry?”
“There are other things that deserve my anger more than this.”
I didn’t say anything. There was no point in staying on the subject. “You know, Yorkdale is only ten minutes away,” I said quietly. “Fifteen if something happens on the subway.”
“Kara, what did I say?”
I mumbled. “I just think it would be good for me.”
My mother turned off the television. “You still have some reading to do or something, don’t you?”
I got up from the sofa without a word and sat at the breakfast table in the kitchen. My copy of Animal Farm was on the other chair with my binder on top of it. Twenty minutes into reading, my mother interrupted me, shifting on the couch to look at me from across the room.
“Go to the interview and then we’ll see,” she said.
I paused. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Why are you smiling at me?” she said. “Do your homework.”
* * *
I went to Nana’s a week later; I didn’t know what I expected to find. Every time they’d yelled at each other in the past, every time my grandfather had deserted the house to go back to his apartment, leaving with only the shoes he chose to walk out in, by the time I’d done a quick stop-by at Nana’s, there he was, back on the couch.
This time, he was still in the living room, using the coffee table as a footrest, making an exhibition out of his moth-eaten socks — displaying them to the figurines, to the bungalow as a whole. The radio remained off, the loudest sound the tick tick tick of the clock, and the television wasn’t even turned on to mute today. My grandfather had built himself a nest of newspapers and lottery tickets, once in a while singing to himself, “Oh yes, oh yes, I canna wait fi be paid and leave this wretched life behind!”
Nana was at the dining table. She had a teacup on one side of her, nestled in a saucer. On the other side, there was some bun and cheese on a plate. She was reading a bible aloud, leather-bound and gold-trimmed. It was my grandfather’s. Nana’s own bible, I knew, was small and weather-beaten; something my grandfather always mocked and something she always took pride in. “It just mean I read the Word more than yuh, nuh true?”
I stood in the archway between the foyer and living room, watching the two of them in their parallel universes connected by malicious pride. I wondered about the effort this took. I wanted to know what happened at night. Did my grandfather sleep in the bedroom next to Nana’s? Did he go to the apartment he’d rented, only to come back in the morning? Or did they both just stay in their designated sections of the house? I wanted to ask but I was too angry to speak, too tired to unscramble a logic I didn’t even want to understand.
Tick.
“Oh yes, oh yes, I canna wait fi be paid and leave this wretched life behind!”
Tick.
“‘But I tell yuh say, that everyone will have fi give account on the day of judgement, Oh yes, fi every empty word they have spoken.’ Matthew 12:36.”
Tick.
I didn’t take off my shoes before I rushed into the living room or look at either of my grandparents when I made it to the media cabinet. I seized the clock and threw it to the ground. No hesitation. I exhaled heavily when it crashed to the floor.
It should’ve smashed apart. The glass should’ve shattered into pieces. That was always what the movies showed. The dome was cracked; the gold frame of the clock was dented. At least it wouldn’t work after this.
Nana had stood up. My grandfather hadn’t abandoned his post on the couch but he stared at me with an alarmed fury. I was shaking.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I was heading back toward the foyer. “I’ll pay to have it fixed. Sorry.” And I opened the front door, walking out of the house and down the sidewalk to the street before breaking into a run.
Lovely
The boyfriend and I don’t see each other much but when we do meet up it’s at the theatre. Rochelle and Anita work concession, and I always tell my mother they’re treating me to a free movie after work but it’s been a while since I’ve gone to the SilverCity during one of their shifts.
The plan never changes. I slip into the theatre fifteen minutes before the boyfriend does and he finds me just before the lights go out, carrying a large bag of popcorn in one hand and a jumbo-sized Coke in the other. He used to grin and wave me away whenever I tried to hand him some cash for the snacks, but when he got home he’d discover a crinkled five-dollar bill tucked into the back of his shirt, some change in his back pocket. Now he accepts the money without any fuss but will find a way to give it back to me later, dropping the bills on the floor the next time we meet so I have no choice but to pick them up before someone else does.
I like the theatre, the comfort of the darkness and the intimacy of sitting next to the boyfriend, my hand on top of the armrest, his hand on top of mine, both of us facing the screen in front of us. Halfway through the movie, I always catch him staring at me with those kinda slick eyes — Anita calls them “or nah?” eyes — and sometimes I let him kiss me but pull away when he starts palming my shirt. Sometimes I eat my popcorn and act like I don’t see him.
When we spoke last, the boyfriend said he wanted to do something other than see a movie.
“Girl, I just want to look at you. You know, face to face? Let’s go somewhere.”
It was three twenty on a Wednesday. He was waiting at the bus stop outside of his school and I was walking to the subway from mine. Our commute home is the only time I can talk to him and not just message him with the phone behind my back or halfway out of my pocket.
“Love, come on,” he said.
The first few times he called me that, Love, I asked him why — it’s not like he’s British or anything. When he typed becuz ur lovely I rolled my eyes but didn’t tell him to stop. He whined for a few more minutes before I agreed to have our next date somewhere else and my knees trembled. My entire body felt like it would buckle and that was what I just did — buckle to his will.
* * *
We’re sitting in the Burger King across the street from the Eaton Centre now. The boyfriend gets a lot of attention. Girls standing in line glance back at us, bold yet embarrassed, daring him to catch their gazes but blushing at the possibility he might. He eats a bacon cheeseburger with a boyish grin. Even the ketchup in the corner of his mouth is kind of charming. He’s not from Toronto — he’s a Brampton boy, a suburb kid — and for this date, he’s asked me to show him the places his high-school field trips left out. But those places are all I really know — my mother only recently moved us downtown, after Graduate Housing accepted her application. Before that, I’d just gone to high school in the city, five subway stops away from the downtown core, and I’d always stayed within the school’s ten-block radius until it was time to ride the northbound bus home.
I’ve taken the boyfriend to the different neighbourhoods my grade nine geography class explored when Monsieur Wyatt made us do a scavenger hunt around the city. We’ve stopped here because the boyfriend needed to “refuel,�
�� and he wanted to sit by the window so he could see out to the crowds, to the Mormons handing out pamphlets and the shirtless Santa Claus drumming on upside-down buckets. His determination to be dazzled by his surroundings amuses me and irritates me at the same time. The way he acts as if a Burger King isn’t pretty much the same no matter its location makes my eyes narrow, and I cross my arms over my chest, a deep groan pushing against my throat.
“You okay? You want me to get you something?”
He’s sixteen, one year younger than me, and still asks those kinds of questions.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “You don’t have to keep asking, you know.”
I decide to end his tour with ice cream at the harbourfront forty-five minutes later. It feels like it’s some kind of summer tradition in the city, the kind of thing he’ll enjoy. When he messages me afterwards, to ask when we can see each other again, my mother is right next to me. I’ve left my braids in too long, they’ve become matted and frizzed, my natural hair knotted at the roots, and my mother is helping me comb out the tangles. My phone vibrates but I don’t answer. My mother doesn’t stop unravelling the braid she’s been working on. She doesn’t even look at me.
“Who’s that?” she asks.
“A friend.”
She doesn’t respond right away and when she speaks, her voice is measured. “Hair’s never stopped you from talking to Rochelle. Or Jordan.”
I take a minute. I can always tell her me and Rochelle are fighting, which means I’m fighting with all of the girls in our group. It’s not a total lie. Even when we’d just moved twenty minutes away to North York, I could only see the friends I had on Marlee Avenue on weekends; now that we’ve moved to a studio downtown I see them even less. But we still do talk. If I tell my mother I’m in an argument with them, she’ll ask for details. I’ll have to pretend to be sad or angry, keep my facts straight in my head. I’m rusty with active fibbing: I’ve graduated to simply keeping secrets. Still, no matter what, not saying anything feels easier than telling the truth.
Frying Plantain Page 9