Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,21
in Brooklyn.
She doesn’t stop talking, doesn’t stop asking. She makes the roti, someone named Mary fills it, and I handle the cash. All the loneliness she must feel living here by herself seems to be gone now with my stellar presence.
I turn my phone on after the first day and it starts buzzing right away.
Where are you? Noor.
Another buzz. Amanda. Sparring 2nite?
Jason, who got my number off the list at fight camp, sends me a photo from the demo where I dropped his ass. Rematch? Fight prep? Where you at?
Got a new gf so don’t cry for me. Columbus.
Haha, I text him back. Make sure you use a bike pump to inflate her or else your jaw’ll get sore.
That’s what she said.
I know. I did.
Then I look at Jason’s text. What do I say? I don’t know, so I just tell him I’m in New York for the holidays. See him when I get back.
He sends me a thumbs-up. It could mean nothing. I mean, it probably means nothing. Right?
I work my ass off for these couple weeks. This is no Foot Locker, I’m telling you that. You think retail is bad? Try working at a roti shop in Brooklyn for less than minimum wage. Ma calls every day, but I refuse to talk to her. She put me here, left me to work under the table, washing dishes and coming back to a lumpy sofa bed every night with shitty soca songs looping in my head and smelling of Grade-B curry. Nothing I do can get the odour out of my hair. Nothing but the garbage that piles up out back when I haul out the restaurant trash. Garbage and curry are my life this break, and I know exactly what got me here.
I should have kept my mouth shut, like Ma told me. I should never have talked to Pammy about the night Dad died.
I feel my muscles slackening, going soft, turning to jelly, so I start running in the mornings. New York is going through the same kind of seasonal madness as Toronto, where there isn’t a flake of snow to be found anywhere. It’s…hot. Thank you, global warming. I go for runs so early the sun isn’t even up yet. Aunty K bought me two rape whistles. Two. Just in case I get attacked and no one comes, I can chuck one at the guy and still have one to spare.
Aunty K likes books about Trinidad, is constantly talking about going back, though why she would ever is beyond me. A more fucked-up country I never even imagined. Thank God for Canada. I mean, we’ve got problems, but not Trinidad-level problems.
Now I know more than what could fill an A-cup sparkly bra with tassels. I’m up to a B-cup, at least. Aunty K’s knowledge matches her actual cup size, which is bordering on an H. Christ.
“Richest country in the Caribbean,” Aunty K says, shaking her head. Her hair has long streaks of grey that she doesn’t bother to dye brown anymore. “Pitch, sugar cane, natural gas. Always drilling offshore. It’s a curse. So much money there and everybody wants some. They don’t care about nobody back home.”
And don’t get the roti-shop Trinis talking about the Venezuelans. The moaning about the effect of Venezuela’s collapse on island life is almost a pastime. As if the Venezuelans did it on purpose!
On the top shelf of her bookcase are the family photo albums. Ma doesn’t keep any at home because Aunty K started hoarding all the photos a long time ago. I take them out at night, one by one, and go through them. They’re filled with images of life in Trinidad. By day I go to the roti shop and am surrounded by the West Indian diaspora and their shit talking, the way they sling acronyms like PNM, UNC, DDP, ILP, et cetera. The only thing I understand from the conversations is that Trinidad is the most dangerous place in the world, but also there is nowhere sweeter. In the minds of these immigrants, both of these things are true. The tabanca is real.
Tabanca, if you don’t know, is a Trini way of saying you love something that doesn’t love you back. The island pushed them out, but they still love it.
Nowhere else in the world you can walk to the corner and get a hot doubles, eat it right there on the road. Wash it down with an Apple J.
Where the women are so thick and beautiful