“Hush up, woman! I shaved, I woke up early, and I came. That’s all you’re getting from me.”
“Oh so the Lawd nuh worthy of anything else, eh? Yuh canna be nice for five minutes? Yuh canna —”
“All you do is talk, you know? Just chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick. I can’t wait to die just to get away from your wretched mouth.”
“Yuh a terrible man, George Davis. What sin must me have commit fi be stuck with a man so hateful? I —”
My mother and I rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioner. By the time they crossed over to the parking lot, we had reapplied lipstick and lip gloss, laid a towel down on the back seat to cover up the coffee stains, and turned the radio from Flow 93.5 to 680 News. It was the only station that was suitable for Nana’s Christian ears but didn’t make me and my mother want to bang our heads against the dashboard.
Nana reached the car, but my grandfather stopped walking a few feet away. He dug into his pocket and took out a cellphone — he still had the kind that flipped up — pressing a finger to his free ear to better hear whoever was speaking.
“Hi, Nana,” I said as she climbed into the back seat.
“Yes, hi, Kara.” She fidgeted over the towel, straightened out the front of her dress with her gloved hands, finally sat still, and then started shifting her weight again. “Why do I haffi sit on this towel here, suh? Yuh canna shampoo yuh car?”
“When you called this morning you said service would be done at noon. It’s one thirty,” said my mother.
“Yuh nuh know how the Spirit move, Eloise,” said Nana. “When it take hold of yuh, yuh nuh walk away from it. Yuh nuh know about these things.”
My mother closed her eyes the way she did whenever she regretted reconnecting with her parents. We were only here today because my grandfather had nearly died six months ago, and it had been too near a tragedy for my mother and me to ignore. But the near-frequent contact with them was wearing at us.
My mother tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “Who is George talking to?”
Nana kissed her teeth but didn’t answer.
“Go get your grandfather, Kara.”
I sighed and got out of the car and when I approached my grandfather, he put the phone behind his back.
“What you want, pickney?”
He still called me that, even though I was seventeen and a long way away from being a child. The only time he’d ever addressed me by name was the day I graduated high school.
“We’re all waiting for you,” I said.
“Just hold on, nuh. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Who’re you talking to?”
“That’s none of your business,” he said. “Just g’way! Go on!”
Nana was staring at us through the window, her lips pursed, her eyebrows creased, her entire face a slow collapse into resignation. I looked back toward my grandfather. He’d moved several feet away and turned his back, the phone to his ear. I crept closer until I could make out what he was saying.
“Lorraine,” he whispered.
“So?” my mother said when I got back into the passenger’s seat. I looked at her pointedly. “He might be a while, I don’t know.”
The way she set her mouth let me know she understood. She rolled down her window again and pushed the heel of her palm against the horn for one loud blare. “Let’s go, George!”
“Eloise,” said Nana, “Yuh nuh haffi make so much noise!”
“Now, George!”
His expression was one of lazy defiance as he hung up and ambled over to our car. “Just gwaan without me. I have my car at a body shop around here and it fix up. I’m going to pick it up.”
“Then you can drive Nana home,” said my mother.
“My car too messy for her and mi nuh want fi hear her mouth. It might be a while before it ready to drive out too.”
“Nah want him fi drive me anyway, him drive like a madman, like one of them Chiney.”
“Nana,” I said, turning to her. “You know you can’t say stuff like that.”
She kissed her teeth for a second time, and my mother rolled her eyes and groaned, picking at the back end of her bun.
“Eloise, yuh know yuh mustn’t fi pick at yuh head,” said Nana. I could feel her lean forward in the back seat to examine my mother’s head more closely. “Eh-eh, it sweat out! This how yuh go fi work? With the white people them?”
“I didn’t wait out in this hot car for over an hour just for you to criticize me, Verna,” said my mother.
“Eloise, me only just say —”
The need to get out of the car suddenly overwhelmed me. Staying for the drive would only mean navigating the spoken and unspoken bickering between Nana and my mother; I already knew that spending time with my grandfather wouldn’t stress me out nearly as much.
“I’ll go with you, Grandpa,” I said. “You can drop me off at Nana’s when you’re done if it’s easier.”
He pursed his lips but my mother stopped him before he could begin to protest. “You don’t want to spend time with your granddaughter, George?”
“A’right, fine — but mi nuh gwine fi slow down for yuh, yuh hear? Yuh best walk up fast.” He was annoyed. That was the only time his accent really came out, full-blown and unrestrained. I got out of the car and smiled.
“Call me if anything goes wrong,” said my mother, shifting into gear. I took one last look at Nana, who waved goodbye but kept her face toward the driver’s seat.
* * *
Despite his warning, my grandfather kept a leisurely pace and we walked to the main road in silence. That was nothing new — what little time we spent alone together was nearly always passed reading in his bedroom at Nana’s house, the door closed to her clattering in the kitchen. Sometimes he’d put on a record, Prince Buster or the Skatalites, and we’d bob our heads to it in unison. The quiet between us now allowed me to breathe and feel settled and I hated myself for how easy it was for me to be in his company.
“I won’t go into her house,” I said. “I’ll say hello at the door but I’m not going inside.”
“Fine.”
“So you are going to a woman’s house, then.”
“I nuh say that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“Nothing. You’re the one saying something.”
I wanted to punch him. He knew it too. There was a kind of jaunt to his step now, the same one he had whenever he walked away from Nana after eliciting an indignant yell from her. Like he felt pleased whenever he frustrated us. It had taken three different sleepovers at three different houses for me to realize that not all families worked this way.
“I don’t even know how you and Nana met. Neither of you talk about it.”
“Nothing to say.”
“Of course there is. Grandparents are supposed to tell their grandchildren how they met.”
“A’right. It was 1966. She was a pretty likkle schoolgirl and I called to her and she came.”
“That can’t be it. That’s not how people meet.”
“It’s how men and women meet.”
“No it isn’t, you’re just being difficult.”
“You don’t see the boys them calling out to the girls them on the street? They don’t call out to you?”
“Not really, no.”
“You’re lucky then.”
I scowled. We were almost at the main road, Lawrence Avenue, a busy street for traffic but a lonely one for walking — all of civilization was at the strip mall with the Tim Hortons and the big-box Walmart, or else inside the grey apartment buildings that stood, washed-out and faded, beside the sidewalk.
He reached into his pocket for a packet of gum and offered me a stick of Juicy Fruit. I’d told him once, years ago, that it was my favourite brand and that was all he carried
since then, wordlessly offering me a piece whenever we were around each other. I took it and savoured the sweetness only for a moment; accepting any offer from him felt like condoning his bad behaviour, a betrayal to Nana and my mother, and he had to know I was on their side. I spit the gum out.
“Did you and Nana always hate each other or did that just come with age?”
“Mi nuh hate nobody. Just want fi be left alone. Just want some peace.”
He carefully peeled off the silver wrapper from a stick of gum. The action seemed sad. Everything he did seemed sad, all of his movements, all of his gestures. Even the way the corner of his lips drooped, pulling down his already-long face, cloaked his features in a melancholy I couldn’t pinpoint. When I was younger, I thought everything he did was angry. I’d been afraid of him as a child: every time he decided to stop by Nana’s, whether it was for a day or a few weeks at a time, it seemed like he wanted to feel the house shrink in his presence. I would never get caught around him without Nana present because of that. The first time I was alone with him had been when he took me to Clarinda’s — and it hadn’t been a planned trip.
My mother had charged Nana with taking care of me for the day, but the nursing home called Nana into work for an emergency and I was left in my grandfather’s care. I’d sat on the living room carpet, my back against the plastic-covered sofa, and watched as she rushed from her bedroom to the kitchen.
After she’d left, the screen door banging against the frame, I stayed where I was, the TV my only company. It wasn’t long before I heard the bedroom door creak open and felt the floorboards sink beneath footsteps — heavy and slow. My grandfather appeared in the archway that separated the living room from the hallway.
“Come with me,” he’d said.
“Where are we going?”
“It doesn’t matter where we’re going, you’re coming.”
“Nana said to stay in the house.”
“Well, I’m saying we’re leaving for a while.”
I stared at the TV. I didn’t know him. I didn’t recognize his authority. “Mom said to do what Nana tells me to do.”
“Yuh mother nuh tell yuh sey yuh haffi respect yuh elders? I’m your grandfather, you listen to me. Let’s go!”
His car was parked at the bottom of the driveway, its rear jutting out over the sidewalk. Newspapers and screwdrivers and parts of old record players and old televisions littered the back seat, so I had to sit up front with him.
“You like ska?”
I shrugged.
“Probably never even heard ska.” He pushed a tape into the deck, and I jolted at the abrupt loudness of the trumpets.
“Derrick Morgan.”
The jaunty sway of the piano and guitar encouraged me to bounce in my seat, and my grandfather chuckled as he mimicked my movements. I grinned back and asked him to rewind the tape to the same song.
“What grade you in?”
“Grade four.”
“You like it?”
“I hate math.” I looked at him. I knew nothing about him but he still felt lonely to me, like maybe he didn’t talk much because nobody ever asked him to. “Did you like grade four?” I said.
“I was starting to work then so I didn’t go to school much.” He glanced at me and, seeing my expression, he cleared his throat. “Things were different in Jamaica back then.”
It hadn’t been too long before he’d pulled up in front of a hair salon. Black Beauty Hair Shop was printed large, pink and swirly on the plate-glass display window. Clarinda was already standing outside the store, wearing a red sundress made from a sheer material that incited in me the urge to rip and tear, to feel the fabric pull apart in my hands. Later I remembered the visit only in snatches — the way his voice smoothed out to a slyness I hadn’t heard before, the way Clarinda led him upstairs to her apartment — but the dress had been emblazoned on my mind and I couldn’t stop describing it to my mother when she picked me up at the end of the day. She yelled for details about Clarinda’s appearance, but I could only tell her that the colour of the dress had hurt my eyes.
* * *
Picking up the car only took ten minutes when I’d thought it would take at least twenty. The repair shop owner, Oliver, was a friend of my grandfather’s, and I bit my tongue when he squeezed my cheeks between his thumb and forefinger. I was old enough to drink, smoke, and vote but apparently looked young enough to pinch. I tried not to seethe.
“This likkle skinny gyal here is mi grand-pickney.”
“Oh yes,” said Oliver, looking at me as he wiped his hands with an oily rag. “The one who does the film t’ing, nuh true?”
“Why?” I said. “Has George introduced you to other grandkids?”
My grandfather looked at me like he wanted to slap some respect into me, but Oliver laughed and I laughed with him. We left in the car, a faded blue jalopy, and instead of driving down Lawrence to Marlee, my grandfather turned onto a side street and parked in front of a house with a small veranda and paper blinds covering the windows, plastic plants and silk flowers lining the sill.
He reached behind my seat and picked up a red toolbox. “Nuh go anywhere,” he said. He got out of the car and walked up the driveway to the house.
I watched as he rang the doorbell and waited. The woman who answered was tall and curvy and not young but younger. She ushered him inside and a knot choked my throat when the door shut behind them.
The situation was strange in how familiar it was. My grandfather had loved women even when I was a child, even before I’d been born, and the only consequence of his infidelities had been an eventual residential separation. But he’d still had a key to Nana’s house, still had a room, the security of a waiting meal. The apartment he rented was more like a backup plan for when their arguing got too much for him to handle. The separation was part-time and loosely enforced. Both he and Nana kept right on wearing their wedding bands like they meant something, even though it looked to me that being in each other’s company only seemed to exhaust one and enrage the other. I’d allowed myself to reconsider my opinion when they decided to renew their vows three months ago, after my grandfather had survived the car accident and realized what was important in life.
I used to think Nana didn’t know about the other women, but that changed when we went to the market one day when I was eleven. Too busy judging the mangoes with her sniffs and with her squeezes, she hadn’t noticed the woman by the oranges, looking at her from the side of her eye.
At fifty, Nana hadn’t succumbed her style to age or modernity yet. She’d still cut and cropped her hair into soft curls and sashayed out in swing dresses, like something out of a Dorothy Dandridge movie. I’d gotten used to seeing women of all ages glare at her. I thought that was all this was, too — until the woman walked up to us, a kind of vindictive determination in her step.
“Excuse me,” she’d said. “Do we know each other? I feel like we do.”
Nana had turned away from the fruit to look at the woman, her eyes doing their habitual up-down. The woman was pretty, younger than Nana by at least a few years. Her skin was smooth and dark, and her voice was punctuated by an accent I couldn’t put my finger on — neither Jamaican nor Trinidadian, but some other island.
“A what church yuh go?”
“Reverend Mitchell’s church,” the woman said. “Christ Temple Pentecostal?”
“Never heard of it.”
“Must be something else then.”
“Nuh worry, it will come to me.”
I looked from Nana to the woman and back again. I watched as a smile twisted Nana’s face, watched her stand up a little taller, raise her neck a little higher. “Yuh must be a friend of George,” she said. “Him a man with lots of friends.”
“Must be it. He’s helped me out a lot, George.”
“Yes, him a giving man.” Nana put her hand on my shoulder and pull
ed me to her side. “Him ever show yuh this likkle bright-eye gyal here? Our likkle granddaughter. Kara say ‘hi’ to this nice lady.”
The woman flicked her eyes downward to me. “Pretty girl.” She looked back up at Nana and smiled. “Well, I have a lot of errands to run. I just wanted to say hello.”
“All right. God bless yuh now.”
The woman nodded once, then walked down the aisle to the cash registers, and Nana went back to inspecting fruit, picking up and putting down mangoes, the corners of her mouth taut. I wanted to touch her, put my hand on her back, but thought about how my mother pushed me away whenever I tried that with her. So I just held open the clear, plastic bag for when Nana needed to put away some plums or peaches.
She was silent on the walk back to her house, and I skipped alongside her, kicking up stones with my shoes, doing what I could to let her know that I’d found nothing strange about the woman in the marketplace. We made it to her driveway right when my mother pulled up behind my grandfather’s car, which was parked at the bottom. I stared at his licence plate and wondered if Nana would ban him from her house.
There was a honk and I said bye to Nana, who looked at my mother in farewell, and got into the Buick.
“Put on your seat belt,” said my mother as she drove off. I did what she said and then kept my head turned to the side, looking out the window.
“You’re quiet today,” said my mother. “You usually have a few things to say to me when you come back from Nana’s.”
I started twirling my fingers around each other. “Do you think they’re lonely?”
“Who?”
“Nana and Grandpa. Do you think they’re lonely?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
My mother slowed down to a stop at a red traffic light. “Nana probably is, yeah,” she said.
“What about you? Are you lonely?”
She turned to me and curled her thumb and forefinger under my chin. The light turned green again, and she continued driving.
* * *
Frying Plantain Page 11