“Who’s Nadine?”
“Remember? From school?”
Hair knots were the closest I could get to looking like the guys from De La Soul. I told Nadine I didn’t want to look like this half-breed something or other. I detested the wideness of my nose as much as I detested the soft angle of my eyes. Between my dark skin and my plump lips, I looked like a mutt with a capital M. More than anything, I wanted my hair to decide which side it was on. I wanted to be Black. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t want me at all.
“You look dirty.”
“That’s my hair.”
“Did you try the thing I got you?
“What thing?”
“The . . . ano . . . the thing. The hair thing.”
“The conditioner you got from Mrs. Robles?” I laughed. Mrs. Robles had a granddaughter who, like me, was living evidence of her son’s bed-jumping.
“What?”
My voice cracked from puberty and indignation. “It’s conditioner. It’s not some magic potion that will change my hair straight like yours, Ma. This is just my hair.”
Every night from then on, she tried. I sat on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror, a shivering sixteen-year-old skinny Black boy with my right hand holding a towel draped around my shoulders as she applied layer after layer of this supposed magical conditioner that was to transform me into the son she always wanted. Lock after lock, she slathered on the jaundice-yellow cream, then attempted to run her rat-tail comb through the tangles of curls. Thick curls forced to pass through such thin slots of unkind plastic. She would stop only after seeing blood on my scalp. The sound of her Christian radio channel, full of static and praise, would fill the void between us, this Brown woman at odds with her mistake of a child. This child at odds with his body. Shame kept my arms still. Duty to my mother kept my voice from screaming. I never fought back.
After washing my hair of cream and blood, I cried myself to sleep, praying myself into another body, another life. Sure enough, I would wake up the next day, still as Black as I was the night before, my mother tsk-tsking at the sight of me. Perhaps she didn’t apply enough. Perhaps she didn’t wait long enough before rinsing. Perhaps she should have never.
These ten fingers, these ten toes, this head of hair were the product of Ma’s one-night stand with a man she met at Aristocrats Bar and Lounge. Back then, Ma was working as a live-in caregiver for the Edelson family at Bathurst and Eglinton, another upscale enclave. Twin infant girls with red hair. Both were lactose intolerant and had explosive poops. “Live-in caregiver” was another name for night-and-day-whenever-I-need-her nanny. This meant being on call throughout the night to change, feed and soothe the twins into sleep and getting up at the crack of dawn to care for the twins at various playgroups. “Live-in caregiver” was another name for all-the-time mom to cover for the twins’ absent wealthy mom who loves her sleep.
On her only day off, Ma wrestled her winter coat on in the Edelsons’ mud room while the twins, now toddlers, embraced her legs, begging her not to go. If she hadn’t been working towards her Canadian immigration papers, Ma would have kicked those two brats to the wall like misbehaving humping dogs. But alas, she had no choice but to gently remind them that the maid, a Guatemalteca woman by the name of Luz, would arrive just in time to cook them dinner.
Ma headed out the door, not looking back at the twins, whose noses were pressed against the glass window, crying out Ma’s name.
“Ah-tay Gabby! Ah-tay Gabby!” The twins butchered the Filipino term for “big sister.”
Ma swore under her breath, looked behind her briefly to give a weak wave goodbye to those thankless kids, then trampled through the snow towards freedom. She loved how fast she could walk without those horrid girls wandering about, sucking on broken glass they found in the sand or crying over rocks in their shoes.
At that time in the late seventies, a new phenomenon had broken out called karaoke. Straight from Japan, it was the biggest craze among the Filipino community that gathered every Friday night at Aristocrats Bar and Lounge. Ma wanted to have her song choices prepared before entering. She had managed to steal a couple of the request chits for future visits and filled them out with her favourite ditties. Before taking off her winter coat, she made a beeline for the karaoke host, Lex, and handed him her chits.
“You got it, Gabby.” Lex wiped his bald white head with his sleeve and placed Ma’s requests at the top of the pile.
“Put your hands together for Gabby, who is going to sing ‘Summertime.’” Everyone in the bar cheered. They knew Ma could sing, and for the next three minutes and forty seconds, at least, they could enjoy a nice voice instead of a drunken off-tune one. But to one person, my father, this was news. He had never been to this bar before and just happened to tag along with his Filipino friend, Benny, from the automobile demolition centre. My father watched as this diminutive Filipina removed her winter coat while the intro music began. She didn’t even need the screen; she knew the lyrics. She tried to suppress her accent, but the over-pronunciation of consonants and overuse of diphthongs revealed that she was new to Canada. And that was okay. So was my father. Keith Watson Smith, Jamaican born, had teeth so white that Ma remembered his smile widening in the dark of that bar many years ago.
The song that Ma sang that night on the karaoke stage was the same song she sang into Keith’s ear after they both made me on his springy mattress. The length of his body tented over the smallness of Ma. She attempted to kiss him on the lips as he did his business, but he was so tall he could only manage to kiss her forehead. Ma remembers watching Keith, capped by the globe of his Afro, smoke a cigarette afterwards, staring down at the bleakness of Eglinton West on a winter morning. His second-storey apartment sat above an Orthodox Jewish wig boutique.
“You should stay. It looks like there’s a blizzard coming.”
“All snow looks like blizzards to us,” Ma said, laughing about their tropical origins. “I have to go back to the twins.”
Ma never saw Keith again. Benny, his friend from work, informed her that he had been arrested. His work permit was false despite his contributions at work being true. Benny had no other information about Keith other than a mailing address clumsily scribbled onto a chit of paper. When Ma wrote to the address to inform my father of my impending birth, she received no word back. She grew in belly and worry. She gave birth at Women’s College Hospital on November 2, 1977, in the presence of strangers.
Another Filipino family shared her hospital room. The woman had given birth by C-section to a baby girl. The father, dressed in a tan leisure suit and matching wide tie, had rushed from his job as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas Corporation to hold his new child while the mother slept painfully in recline, nursing her stitches. Once the mother stirred and the medication wore off, Ma watched as the father took the baby girl, still swaddled and swollen in the face, towards the pleading mouth of the mother, who kissed the baby and whispered sweetly into her ear.
I, on the other hand, with my dark-brown body and slick curls, lay in my bassinet screaming and flailing for attention because I was hungry and wet. My mother refused to look at me, as she did not have answers or the heart to carry on.
From hungry and wet I grew to be lonely and confused. When I was in grade four at St. Joseph’s Catholic Junior School, our teacher, Mrs. Rossi, set us up into pairs. Nadine rolled her eyes at the sight of me, cursing her luck for being stuck with the most awkward boy in class.