Underwater
The day Ba died, I had just finished my last ever high school exam and was celebrating the graduating class of 1987 at McDonald’s with my best friend, Nida Patel. We were debating the merits of tampons versus pads.
“Using tampons means you’re not a virgin anymore,” Nida asserted, using her best authorial voice. She dipped a french fry gingerly into a pool of ketchup.
“You know jack shit,” I mumbled with my mouth full of a quarter pounder and cheese.
“Jack shit? What kind of shit is jack shit?” Nida waved the red-tipped fry at me. We liked to swear when we were together.
Feeling very much like a woman of the world, I persevered in my impassioned defense of the tampon. “You insert it, and you forget about it. Well, you don’t forget about it. You know what I mean. You just don’t have that big chunk of brick between your legs all day. You can run around, do things, even go swimming. And who cares if you’re no longer a virgin. That’s good. Then it won’t hurt the first time.”
“Ew. That’s so gross. Anyway, my Ma would freak if she saw tampons in the house!”
We both cackled at the thought of Mrs. Patel coming across a box of tampons. She would likely bang down the basement steps, slide open the storage closet doors to where her pantheon of Hindu gods resided, and spend the rest of the day commiserating with them.
It was at this exact moment when I saw my neighbour Stan Knowles through the large glass window facing Warden Avenue. He was running through the parking lot directly towards us. I hoped I was wrong, that he was there to see someone else or he just needed a burger really, really bad, but when we locked eyes, I knew he was there for me, that something was horribly wrong.
“There’s been an accident,” he huffed when he got to the table. “Come with me.”
I didn’t think about how he had always creeped me out with his jogging suits and combed over hair; we just jumped into his car alone together. I tried to ask him questions while we ran to the car, but he was too out of breath. All I knew was that it involved Ba. In the car, we sat in silence the whole way to the hospital.
Ma was there. Sophia and Darwin were at home. Ma had sent someone to find me. She sat in a private waiting room with some of her friends who had come immediately. They were praying. I entered and knew. I felt it. He was already gone.
I pieced together what I was told by the police. I constructed my own scene of the accident. In my replay, I always started with Ba leaving his office, saying goodbye to everyone, walking towards the subway. I saw him pass the travel agency where the Disney World brochures are lined up like soldiers. He boarded his train, his old briefcase by his side. In the train, I imagined him looking up at the ads, searching for more Canadian things we could partake in. Then his stop arrived and he transferred onto his bus. The Scarborough landscape passed him - the wide road, the shopping malls, the early summer day. It was a gorgeous day, I remembered, marked by gentle breezes and an impossibly blue sky. Maybe he hummed. Sometimes he did that. A familiar tune that made him sentimental. He loved the Platters. So he was humming Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. He got off on his stop at Dewey and Birchmount, and instead of walking the extra 100 metres to the crosswalk, he decided to jaywalk.
As he waited on the curb, he probably thought about the word "jaywalk" as he often thought about the origin of English words. He wondered if the term ‘jaywalk’ referred to a bird, perhaps a jay? Did jays take shortcuts? Maybe he felt like a bird caught in a stream of prey when he found himself crossing the street on his way home. He ducked and weaved through the in-between four lanes of cars, running and stopping.. I imagined he loved how his body knew to twist and turn. In these few moments of his 9-5 cubicle day, living in the precarious state between life and harm, I think he must have felt wholly free. This was my only explanation because no chiding from Ma could ever stop him from taking that short-cut.
The moment he stepped off the curb, a baby blue '78 Firebird, emblazoned with red flames threw him 8 feet into the middle of the road. The two birds came in head-to-fateful-head – a dodgy jay and a bonfire of feathers.
# # #
So he died and I plunged underwater. My senses became gurgled and dulled. The voices of adults asking if I was ok came in murmurs. Everything I ate, including the casseroles that neighbors I didn't know dropped by and the wok-fried vegetarian meals my mother’s friends cooked, all tasted like grounded up shells. The light that came through the sheer curtains of the house threw everything in a ghostly grey-blue sheen, and I swam through it in slow-motion. Numb and chilled. Ma stayed in her room for days, attended to by a clutch of her mah jong/church friends who all came out shaking their heads. No sounds emerged from this room, no crying, no talking; just a cold, jagged silence.
Without school to occupy us, Sophia, Darwin and I didn’t know what to do with all the hours. Darwin played Space Invaders on his Atari while Sophia played static-ky discs on her record player. Sophia liked to play everything either too fast or too slow which annoyed all of us. Her Flashdance single, played in 331/3 speed, escaped under our bedroom door and seemed to moan quietly through the house. I re-read my stacks of True Confessions magazines, thumbing through the well-worn pages of cheating spouses, incest survivors and middle-class housewives who were kleptomaniacs. It calmed me, knowing there were fucked-up things happening in other houses with closed doors.
Sometimes, we found our friends tapping lightly at the door, kicking awkwardly at the ground. We knew they were only there because their parents had made them. We would spend an hour in awkward conversation, and maybe play some games on Darwin’s Atari before they would leave. Soon, they stopped knocking. Even Nida made excuses that there was a lot to do to prepare for her move to attend university in the fall, even though London was only two hours from Toronto. I thought about the alternate universe, the one where Ba was not dead, and wondered if that other Miramar would be preparing to go away to school too. I had been accepted at Carleton University in Ottawa just two months prior. Now, I wasn't sure if I would go.
The casseroles eventually stopped coming although we had plenty in the freezer that we would occasionally microwave. Ma's friends didn't come as often and only stopping in for quick visits in her bedroom. Silence fell. On our own, the three of us kept the house clean and still poured our Lucky Charms cereal in the morning. We obeyed the eerie hush that had descended, tiptoeing around Ma and Ba’s closed bedroom door. We raised our voices only occasionally to fight over the TV before the rush of events that brought us to that moment returned and muted us.
The day after he died, I reached for the first thing I could see that belonged to Ba. I took his blue scarf from the hall closet and though it was hot and humid outside, I was cold. I wrapped it several times around my neck to hold what warmth I needed in.
Darwin then donned Ba’s fishing hat. It was beige, with a tartan ribbon around it and was too big for Darwin’s head but he didn’t seem to mind constantly pushing it off his face. Sophia chose Ba’s green cardigan, the one that smelt like mothballs, which we all associated with Hong Kong. She rolled up the sleeves three times and it hung on her like a bathrobe. We didn’t talk about our new attire. Wearing pieces of Ba just felt like the right thing to do.
I started to worry about money when the cash ran out of Ma's wallet. We had been using it to buy things we needed like dishwashing liquid and Coke. I found her cheque book and Sophia forged her signature so we could cash the cheques. The bank teller didn't even blink as she shoved the bills at me. I had to wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans in order to take the cash. So I started to also pay the bills and balance the account. Judging from my estimation, we only had a month's worth left. After that, I wasn't sure what we would do.
# # #
At night, we spoke in whispers, and we talked about “it”. Sophia and I shared a room, but when we found Darwin whimpering under the covers one night alone in his room, we dragged his mattress between our two beds. He had said he was just teary as a result of his allergies - ragweek season, ya know.
One night in the middle of Ma’s retreat, lying in our beds, Darwin revealed that he had seen Ba. The darkened room was illuminated by the plug-in night-light. It cast shadows on the posters of Duran Duran (my side) and Madonna (Sophia’s side).
“What d’ya mean, dummy?” Sophia hissed. She had a low tolerance for nonsense.
“I mean, Baba woke me up. He was standing right there,” Darwin pointed at the foot of his mattress. “He said he just wanted to say hi, and to tell you guys not to worry because he’s gonna take care of everything. He has big plans for us.”
“Shut up. It was just a dream,” Sophia still sounded annoyed, but her tone softened.
“You shut up, stoopido. It was real. I even heard you and Mir snoring, so I knew I was awake. He said not to wake you guys - that you wouldn’t believe it. And he’s right. You don’t believe anything I say,” Darwin sulked in the darkness.
I heard the familiar clip of his nail, which meant he was picking his nose and even though it was dark, I saw him flick a piece of snot at Sophia.
“What else did he say, Dar?” I asked gently.
“Nothing. He just said we were gonna be ok. Things are going to change, and that it’s all part of the plan. Then he played Transformers with me, and ate some of the tuna casserole that Mrs. Norway from the down the street brought us. He said too much Velveeta.”
Sophia snorted, but I didn’t. I believed in ghosts.
“Do you think Mom’s ever gonna come out?” Darwin gazed at the wall, and asked Madonna. Darwin still needed Ma in those pragmatic ways. Meanwhile Sophia had a much more difficult relationship with her, locking horns over what she wore, the friends she chose, and the music she listened to. For me, I loved Ma, but Ba had always been my best friend.
“Yah, Dar. I think she’s gonna come out soon.” I replied, without much conviction.
Ma worked in extremes, which made her hard to predict. Sometimes she was all organization and efficiency, whirling through cooking, shoveling the neighbours’ walks, and hosting her mah jong group, and she’d keep all this up until she and her nerves crashed, like a wind-up doll that slowed down to a standstill. Then she would stay in her room for days until Ba would bundle her up in her robe and carry her to the car. They always did this late at night, after he was sure the neighbours were all inside. He would return a couple of hours later, looking edgy. His usually neat hair would look like his fingers had raked through it over and over again. He would smell a bit sour, and his eyes were usually red.
We all knew the routine after having gone through it a dozen times. Ma would go away to a hospital (Not a real hospital, Ba assured us. A place to rest. That’s all) and come home in one week. She would return with dark circles under her eyes and thin as a grasshopper, but she would be better. Another week and Ma was back to the mah jong table and making the Pope proud with her good deeds. She would go back to clipping the National Enquirer and show us the latest miracles. She had especially been impressed with the image of Jesus on a piece of grilled toast found in Texas. Ma loved her some miracles.
Now with Ba was gone, Ma would be in charge. This thought made me feel like I was falling from a tall building. Every so often, I found myself taking a large gulp of air, realizing that I hadn’t breathed in awhile.
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