Frying Plantain

by Zalika Reid-Benta

  “I’m sorry.”

  My mother took out a thin box of peppermint tea before saying anything. “I don’t care if you don’t like tea; this will settle your stomach so you’re drinking every last drop of it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She was about to reach for the small black pot she used for boiling water or eggs but stopped, her hand suspended above the handle. “‘Okay?’” Her voice was a warning.

  “Thanks?”

  “‘Yes, Mom.’”

  I was supposed to parrot it back to her, correct my mistake. The response had always been standard. Ingrained from childhood. But all I wanted to do was lie back down and cradle my head or hold my stomach, keep myself from falling apart.

  “Well?”

  All I could bring myself to do was repeat myself. “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for, Kara?”

  “For throwing up in the house.”

  My mother turned around and leaned against the counter. Her lips were drawn into a tight line, their fullness obscured by anger. She folded her arms across her small chest.

  “Is that it?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Speak, girl,” she said.

  I knew what the right answer was. I knew what she wanted me to say and how she wanted me to say it — but I wasn’t able to say anything else, to show her that I knew what she expected of me. When I didn’t break my silence, my mother slammed her palm onto the countertop, the rings on her middle and index fingers banging against the linoleum. After a few seconds, she slammed her palm again, and I was stricken with the image of her hand across my face. It’d been years since she’d hit me but she knew how to conjure up those memories in my head; she knew how to inflate her presence, make herself bigger with the noise she created, the shouts she bellowed.

  “You think I don’t know about rebelling?” she said. “About the ‘It’s my life’ bullshit? You think I haven’t been there? Do not try it with me, likkle gyal, you are not one of those kids at that damn school.”

  The ranting didn’t stop when she turned back around to prepare the tea. It reached that pitch it got to sometimes, when the words were garbled and incoherent because the anger had taken over and all she could do was yell. It was almost otherworldly — I used to wonder if my mother was actually here when she started screeching. Now, I put my hands to my head, pressing my fingertips to my temples, inwardly screaming at her to just shut up.

  “What was she thinking? Tell me, what was she thinking?”

  I stared at her back, at the opportunity it gave me.

  “Everyone said I was too young for this. Can you believe it? She ah come home drunk like a damn skunk!”

  I stood up and briefly touched the back pocket of my jeans, more out of instinct than intention, a habit to see if my phone was there. I didn’t care about the apartment keys. My running shoes were on the floor by the sofa bed where I’d kicked them off in my sleep the night before. I didn’t bother putting them on properly and my heels flattened the notches. My mother’s voice swelled, her screaming rising even higher, and I left the apartment, taking nothing else with me.

  * * *

  4.

  The next stop is Queen. Queen station.

  I wished for a panic attack. Hyperventilation. Tears. Anything to show the weight of what I’d done. But my body didn’t allow me any messy relief; I sat on the train dry-eyed and numbed.

  Every time the train pulled into a station I wondered if this was where I should get off, if I should leave the subway and walk the streets, wander a city I lived in but never explored. It seemed safer to stay cocooned in the invisibility that came with being underground, that came with being unreachable. But when the train reached Union Station, I made up my mind to get off, maybe visit the Hockey Hall of Fame and just ignore the unrelenting phone calls of my mother instead of hiding from them. The doors slid open with a ding and I envisioned myself walking through them but then stiffened with an abrupt dread.

  Aishani Bhakta ran into the train car before the doors slid shut, her long plait swinging at her back. She was wearing a McDonald’s baseball cap and a black-and-grey uniform, and shouldering one of those Puma cinch bags I’d always wanted. The train kept moving, continuing its course north, and I looked back out the window even though I knew she’d seen me.

  “Now I know you’re not about to pretend like you don’t know me,” she said.

  I turned my head to look at her. She stood with her hands on her hips and one of her eyebrows quirked. Her eyes were tired.

  “Why not?” I said. “You do it to me all the time.”

  Aishani sat down in the seat across from me, taking off her cap and loosening her black hair from the plait. “Anita said that moving downtown made you stush.”

  “Anita says a lot of things.”

  “You nuh lie. I heard you’re doing big t’ings, still though,” said Aishani. Even after all of these years, her attempt at a Trini accent hadn’t gotten any better. “Rochelle can’t keep your name out of her mouth,” she explained.

  I shrugged but didn’t answer. The question was a test anyway, a way to determine if Anita was right or wrong about how much I’d changed.

  I glanced at her silver nameplate. “So you’re working down here now? At Union Station?”

  “Kind of like a promotion,” she said. “I’m up for manager in a couple of months.”

  “That’s cool.”

  She kissed her teeth. “Why are you so rude for?”

  “I was being serious, Shani.”

  “Oh.” She leaned against the chair and tilted her head back so that it rested against the window behind her. She sighed heavily. “I can never tell anymore.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do, then?” I asked. “When school’s done.”

  Aishani furrowed her eyebrows and I grinned. “Rochelle talks everyone’s business,” I said.

  “That girl is going to get a box one day.” She shook her head. “I don’t really know what I want to do after school’s done,” she said.

  “You have some time left, so I guess that’s okay.”

  “Not according to my parents,” she said. “I’d be the first in my family to go to university, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s pretty big.”

  She stretched out her legs and stared at the tips of her black running shoes, looking like she wanted to dive into the floor.

  “Can we not talk about this?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Neither of us said anything after that and when the train left St. George station Aishani closed her eyes. I turned back to the window, looking out to the black tunnels of the subway, my eyes focused on nothing in particular. The hardness of my cellphone pressed against my jeans and dimpled my thigh. I shifted to get more comfortable.

  Arriving at Eglinton West. Eglinton West station.

  We were above ground now, the tunnels quickly giving way to views of yellow-green grass and speeding cars on the highway. Aishani lurched awake and was on her feet before I realized what was happening. She grabbed onto a pole and spun around to the other side of it, like we used to do when we were kids.

  “Coming?”

  The train rolled to a stop.

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  The doors opened and Aishani stepped onto the platform. “My number hasn’t changed,” she said.

  “Right.”

  Step away from the doors; the doors are now closing.

  Aishani was already halfway up the stairs when the train started up again, clattering toward Glencairn station. My phone vibrated with notifications. Twenty-five missed calls, all from my mother. Her stalkerish tenacity wasn’t surprising, but it filled me with resentment. When my call display lit up with the word MOM for her twenty-sixth call, I pressed my forehead again
st the glass of the window, squeezing the phone with my right hand. When she called me for the twenty-ninth time, I picked up.

  “Where the hell are you? Do you know how close I was to calling the police? The police, Kara? I should kill you.” Her heavy breathing made my throat tighten and my thumb itched to press the End button.

  “You can’t do this. You cannot afford to act out like this. When you get back here, I want you to write me a report telling me exactly how you got the alcohol, where you were when you weren’t at school, and a list of names of the kids you were with. Are you listening to me? You may go to their school but you cannot afford to act like them. You have to be better than this, Kara.” There was a tremor in her voice, a quiver I rarely heard. It wasn’t anger and it wasn’t sadness. It was something different, something she never meant for me to notice. Fear.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Get your ass back home.”

  * * *

  5.

  I hung up after she did. We stopped at Lawrence West station. Across from me, on the other side of the platform, a southbound train rested on the tracks, its doors open. A kid in a white shirt pulled on his mother’s dress.

  “Why isn’t the train moving? We’ve been here forever!”

  I could make it. If I got up now and sprinted across the platform to the other side, I could get onto the train and head back downtown and home. I kept my head turned to the window and stared at those open doors, at the commuters crammed into the car, frustrated and impatient. I stared at them as my train’s doors closed, as we started moving up the track. I stared at where the open doors would be even as we pulled out of Lawrence West and chugged toward the next station.

  Frying Plantain

  1.

  When Nana calls our apartment for the fifth time in the same week I am sent over to her house. The voicemail she leaves, vague mutterings about a dream she had of me, makes my mother’s eye jump and she dispatches me to the bungalow for the full story; dreams aren’t something to be messed around with. If a family member has one of another member, it’s their duty to report it — not to do so would be spiteful. But when I get off the train and push past the turnstiles to the subway’s exit, I don’t make it to Nana’s front door. I don’t even make it to her block. The thought of listening to Nana’s ramblings on the prophetic powers of vivid dreams makes me stay on Eglinton Avenue West. I get swept up in the alien familiarity of a neighbourhood I once lived in but haven’t been back to in two years, not since I was seventeen.

  Nothing about it has changed.

  It’s still the type of neighbourhood that never rests, never stays quiet. The cars that drive through take ownership of the air, their stereos blasting ragga ragga or soca, the bass so loud I can feel it in the sidewalk beneath my feet. I look directly ahead of me and move quickly past the storefronts where boys, as usual, hold court or roll dice, only ever standing up straight and curbing their catcalls when mothers and church women pass by.

  I go into one of the jerk chicken shops that plays roots reggae for the old-timers and I eat my chicken and rice at the window, watching the pedestrians amble past, watching the men slapping down dominoes. The men sit on crates, laughing loudly at the crass jokes they tell each other. I wonder if Rochelle will be one of the people I see pass by the store. It’s been ages since I’ve spoken to any of my childhood friends, but Rochelle is the one who held on the longest. She and I congratulated each other on our university acceptances, on the new lives we’d start as undergrads, and then forgot to share those lives with each other. I’m not even sure if she still lives on Hopewell Avenue or if she moved out to be closer to campus, but the possibility of seeing her makes me both nervous and excited.

  When my mother asks me what happened I tell her Nana didn’t answer the door when I knocked, a story I stick to even after she points out that Nana stays home more now that she’s retired, even after Nana calls us and says she never heard me stop by. The sixth time Nana leaves a message, a week later, my mother tells me to try her house again.

  * * *

  2.

  Sundays, when I was in primary school, I was sent to Nana’s so she could take me to church. My mother would struggle to get me into a velvet gown or a satin dress and as she sat me on the couch to force me into a pair of pantyhose she’d say, “I don’t want you to cause any trouble today, you hear me?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “I mean it, Kara. If Nana calls me and tells me you were rude, I will slap you when you get home. You understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, good. Now give me a kiss.”

  Nana lived one street over from us on Whitmore Avenue — we were still on Belgravia then — and we always met her on her veranda at seven thirty. After my mother handed me over, only nodding at my grandmother both in hello and farewell, she’d go back home to bed. She used to tell me that Sundays were the only days she could rest fully; that tutoring, office work, and school ate up her weekdays with no remorse, in the evenings I was no better, greedy for her attention, demanding of her energy. She needed Sundays to restore her soul, which was one more reason why I should behave with Nana.

  Once Nana and I were on the train northbound to her congregation, the reprimands would start spilling out. “Stop swingin’ yuh legs”; “Stop itchin’ yuh stockin’”; “Stop singin’ that song fi today is Sunday and we only sing gospel on the Lord’s Day.” I never said anything right away; it was at church that I began to act up, that I complained about how hot it was, ran around with the boys, touched the feathers and bows on every wide-brimmed hat in front of me. Whenever Nana caught me she’d say, “Nuh act like a likkle pickney, God want yuh fi be a good likkle gyal, nuh play rough with the boys them.” I’d grumble and then she’d take me over to her friends, a different group of women each time, and I’d stand behind her and stare at the boys playing tag.

  “Kara. Kara. Tell Sister Ida what yuh want fi be.”

  “A pediatrician.”

  “Hear that?” she’d say. “My granddaughter gwine fi be a pediatrician. Teachers them think she bright yuh know.” She’d look at me to smile sweetly, and I’d pout and tug on her dress to signal I was ready to leave.

  The afternoons were the only part of Sundays I liked. When church was over we’d head back to Eglinton West and Marlee, where she’d take me to Randy’s Takeout for a beef patty and coco bread. Once we were at her house she didn’t talk to me much, which suited me fine. She’d change out of her church suit and into her housedress and after heating up lunch for me, she’d start to prepare dinner and clean, her incessant vacuuming overpowering any other sound in the house.

  My mother would pick me up in the early evening, and by that time I’d have already eaten, usually curry chicken and rice, or a bowl of dumpling stew (I never ate the ackee and saltfish that came with it). Nana would send me out the door with old margarine containers filled with leftovers; my mother never asked to come in for dinner and Nana never invited her to. Soon, leaving the bungalow took over as the only part of Sunday I liked, and it wasn’t too long before I begged my mother not to send me over anymore.

  * * *

  3.

  Nana’s street is just off Eglinton West and Marlee, a little residential pocket hidden behind the stores and surrounded by maples. Everything about her bungalow is the same as it’s always been — the painted pale blue stoop, the Jesus Watches doormat, the black tarmac driveway, oil-slicked from my grandfather’s car. The only thing that’s different is the lawn. When I was younger, campaign signs from each political party littered the green and Nana wouldn’t get rid of them even after elections were over. I never minded it much, ­mostly laughed at the Conservative blue, Liberal red, and NDP orange intermingling on a lump of grass, but the signs drove my mother crazy. Every time we left the house, she’d seem to think they would disappear in our absence; when we’d com
e back to find them still pitched into the grass she would get infuriated all over again.

  “There’s just no need for this many signs,” she would say, storming into the kitchen, gesturing at Nana’s back.

  “I don’t want fi hear it, Eloise.”

  “They’re taking advantage of you! Do you even know what half of these parties are?”

  “Eh-eh, I am not schupid!”

  Sometimes my mother responded, sometimes she’d walk away.

  I only have to knock once before Nana opens the door, and when she does, she stares at me with those appraising eyes I remember so well. She hasn’t changed much. A woman dedicated to maintaining a youthful appearance, she’s been able to keep her face quite smooth despite reaching her mid-sixties. She’s a stout woman, but shapely enough for anyone to see that she’d been curvy once. Her facial expression is exactly how I remember it, too: repulsed and vaguely surprised, like she’s just bitten into a bitter lime and is starting to feel the shock of it fill up her mouth.

  “Hi, Nana.”

  “I canna believe it. Yuh came.”

  “You called.”

  “When I called yuh last week yuh nuh come visit me.”

  “I already told you what happened with that.”

  “Mm-hmm.” She leans against the doorway and pushes out her mouth, her arms crossed and her eyes slowly passing over my body. Her gaze starts at the top of my head and makes its way down to my feet, and I feel relieved by my decision to dress up for the visit, to wear a peasant skirt that reaches my ankles instead of my usual pedal-pushers.

  “Yuh need some Vaseline on yuh foot there, suh,” she says, finally. “It dry like ash.” She moves from the doorway, and I fantasize about walking away without a word, heading back to the main street, ignoring her phone calls, my mother’s expectant gazes, for the rest of my life.