Banana Girl

by Michele Lee

  When she was eventually walking and giggling, I had her hoisted up on my shoulders. More giggles. She thought it was delightful to be elevated and to see my lowly face protruding from in between her legs, making silly faces at our reflection in the bathroom mirror. We danced a bit and I lost grip. Ka almost toppled off me – I heard the terrible crack, in my head I imagined it – but I caught my baby sister before she fell onto the bathroom tiles. I was shaken but she was giggling, titillated at the thrill of nearly being dropped.

  And even she was out to hurt herself.

  Ka went with Xang, the brother three years older than her, into the shed.

  Okay, now little Ka, listen.

  Yes Xang?

  It’s going to be fun. We spray. This blue spray-paint?

  Oh. Okay. That’s fun.

  Yes little Ka.

  Okay Xang. Best fun if sprayed on my face.

  When he was done spraying Ka’s face, Xang came into the house to report what had happened. He announced in Hmong to Mum, ‘Uh-oh. Little Ka looks like a monster.’

  And indeed there was a little blue monster in the shed, in amongst the poisonous snail pellets and the secateurs and rusted saw, and the redback spiders – of all dangerous things to play with, the monster had gone with paint. Mum and Dad took Ka to hospital to get her face cleaned and, to their relief, the doctor informed them that if Ka hadn’t closed her eyes, she may have been blinded.

  No wonder Mum was mad at me for wanting to create three little monsters, and when I wasn’t even old enough to be able to drive anyone to the emergency ward. Mum knew from hard-earned experience that having to handle two children was enough, seven was lunacy – what had she been thinking.

  Luckily the children grow up and leave. They’re not around so much to remind you of all the cans of spray-paint in the shed. They come back infrequently if they’ve moved away to Melbourne. And they spend the Friday night with one friend and the Saturday night at Wombo’s housewarming party.

  On Sunday morning, my last day of Family Time in Canberra, I make it up to my scowling sisters with ricotta pancakes served with double cream, poached pears and burnt caramel butter, which altogether has dear Ka beaming very cutely. Tsong drives me to Duggan Circuit to spend more time with Mum and to see Dad. We park on the front lawn and I notice how the grass has worn away in some sections to bald stripes of dirt. Xang, twenty-four, unofficially lives with his girlfriend but he usually comes over a few times a week to visit and to help Mum with her vegetables. Xang drives a hatchback. Bo, twenty-seven, drives a sedan, which isn’t parked outside at the moment. He’s the only one who still lives at home.

  Mum shows me how to make a glutinous coconut milk dessert, like the ones I’d seen on Pob Yer’s bench and the ones in shops in Cabramatta. I want to prepare this dish for my farewell morning tea at work in two weeks’ time. In Hmong we call this particular dessert koj nob, which generically means ‘sweets’. To one tin of coconut cream, Mum adds a cup of sugar. She stirs this on a low heat until the sugar is dissolved, then she takes this mixture off the stove and adds five parts of water, re-using the emptied can as a measuring cup. After the mixture has cooled, she adds one bag of rice starch and one of tapioca flour, the same brand of starch and flour that she’s been using ever since I can remember. This thickened liquid is divided between two buckets and she colours one green and one pink. She has a multi-tiered steamer on the gas stove, already puffing steam, and to each of the three tiers she puts in a heatproof cake-tin and in these she pours a layer of the coconut liquid. It takes a few minutes for each layer to set and then she adds another layer of the alternate colour. She also tells me how to adjust the coconut recipe to make crêpe mixture for savoury crêpes, and how to make the pork mince filling and sweet chilli sauce. For crêpes you need a good frypan, she points out, like the one Ka bought her.

  Dad sees that I’m here and with Mum. He decides he needs to speak with me too.

  ‘My Michele,’ he says. ‘Come here.’

  Dad takes me to the L-shaped living room and to the computer table in the corner. Over the monitor is a dimmer screen, which Dad placed there because he doesn’t want to further ruin his eyesight. He’s become blind in one eye but he doesn’t blame it on the many hours he spends on the computer. He’ll have more surgery on his eye and that should fix it.

  ‘What’s up Dad?’ I say.

  ‘Here,’ Dad says, gesturing.

  He has an email open. There are a few attachments to it and in the body text there’s a numbered list of actions for Dad to address. Someone in the Immigration department has written this email. It appears as though Mum has been offered a job to clean Defence buildings in Barton but she needs to undergo security checks, which had involved Dad contacting Immigration on her behalf to verify her identity to Defence. There’s a problem with her name though. It’s different on the different pieces of paperwork that Dad submitted and this Immigration person needs Mum’s name to be the same on every single piece, in case Mum really is a lunatic.

  ‘So … I’m not sure what you want me to do, Dad?’

  He points at the dreary email. ‘Why do they make this so difficult?’ he complains.

  ‘Well, it looks like you filled in two forms but wrote Mum’s name differently on each separate form.’

  ‘Australia is not Laos. Mummy has a different name on the papers.’

  He shakes his head, smiling at the out-of-touch bureaucracy he used to work in. He wants my sympathy. I too was a public servant in Canberra.

  ‘Dad, print off the attachments and read through them, and then reply to this email from the Immigration man in the same style he wrote to you. Address each numbered item. Okay?’

  ‘Yes, yes my Michele.’

  I suspect he already knew what to do. He shoos me away by sitting down in the computer chair and turning his Cyclopic face back to the dimmed screen.

  Despite the eye, Dad looks healthy. I must too. He didn’t ask how I am or ask how it was yesterday visiting Pob Lou. He has told me that Laos is dangerous and he wishes I wouldn’t go. He has a general belief that the world will harm us. It’s not exactly a parental fear, more so his view of the world. I’ve never seen him actually scared for us.

  Perhaps just the once.

  As a little boy, a red sports car hit Bo while he and I crossed the road near Ainslie Primary School. I turned in heart-pounding slow motion, now safe on the grassy kerb, and there was my younger brother ricocheting from a car bonnet. He bounced and settled into the gutter. The driver of the car emerged, shaky but very annoyed. Someone – an adult – organised the next events and arranged for my frightened parents to arrive. Dad with his accented English and Mum her barely useful English. Bo was okay but his spine would be forever bent.

  Years later, when I was on the cusp of hormonal adolescence, when I was increasingly angered by Bo, only eighteen months my junior, I stomped on his indolent thighs as he curled up on the carpet. When I was exhausted, Bo got up, gloating. I wanted him to limp, to shrink, but Bo was so implacable, so impossible to smite. Eventually I became nicer in defeat. Most times. Sometimes, I still got angry.

  Perhaps just the once.

  I was at uni now, the late nineties ticking over into a new millennium. I needed to use the computer in the L-shaped living room and so did Bo. I refused to negotiate, on the basis that I was at uni, the only child in our family to have done such a worthy thing and as such my essay was priority. All Bo wanted to do was defrag the computer, split it and reassemble it.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ I challenged him.

  Bo raised his arm to hit me. He was red with hate.

  Dad, alerted by his children’s rising voices, paused his Thai soap opera and lunged out from the master bedroom. He loomed his stout frame over Bo with a fierceness equal to Bo’s. Dad, once a scholar, a proponent of homework over defragging, talked of the guns that the government had taken from him after Martin Bryant massacred people in Tasmania. If not for that long-haired Taswegian then
my Dad would be armed and Bo could be shot right now, right on these living room tiles, and the better we’d all be. Dad might have been a lunatic but over the years the insubordinate Bo had probably driven him mad.

  This time, however, Bo heaved and surrendered to hot tears. I hadn’t seen him cry since he was a boy. Bo’s red, wet cheeks and deep rasps seemed to calm Dad down and with the situation oddly defused, I was left alone with the computer and my essay. Shortly after this incident, Bo moved out. It took a year or so for him to move back in; he had a stint living with Ee, who was in Melbourne at the time, and then with Mee, who was in Sydney.

  Bo has his own room now, and his own computer.

  I knock but Bo’s not in his room. He might be out. I hear that he has a Vietnamese girlfriend. I imagine her to wear size six jeans and huff about in a fiery manner henpecking Bo, who doesn’t waver. But I don’t actually know what she’s like or what she even looks like; I never talk with Bo. We’re not hostile anymore but we don’t have too much to say, even though we’re the two siblings closest in age. There was the stomping on his legs, after all. That computer incident. I sling a T-shirt on his door knob. It’s a random gift for all the birthdays I’ve missed.

  I’ve bought the same T-shirt for Xang but in another colour.

  ‘Thanks big sis!’

  Xang’s arrived at Duggan Circuit and he tries on his green T-shirt. It fits loosely though, draping over his torso in wrinkled folds. I thought he was a ‘Large’ but he must only be a ‘Medium’. I ask him how tall he is.

  ‘Ah about five eleven.’

  I thought he was six foot.

  ‘Nope. Five eleven big sis!’

  He assures me that Bo is broader and taller. Therefore the T-shirt I have bought for Bo will fit him fine.

  When I look at Xang, when I pause to study him, I see how his adult face has taken shape. I know it’s done so for many years but I see him so rarely that it still jars with me that he’s not a kid anymore. There’s a bit of acne on Xang’s cheek, a bit of facial hair. He now wears glasses.

  He asks me if I want to come to lunch. He’s picking up our niece and nephew, Beanpole and Elf, and then taking them to APK Pizza in Woden. I say I’ll come and I leave Mum to continue layering and steaming.

  ‘It’s going to be an early lunch,’ Xang says. It’s not yet midday.

  We never went out for APK wood-fired pizzas growing up. I probably ate my first wood-fired pizza somewhere during uni, when I was writing those important essays. Once in primary school Dad had won money in the lotto, a few hundred dollars, and he’d taken me, Ee and Mee to the McDonald’s at Dickson Shops.

  I pass Dad on the way out the door and I see he’s still on the computer, headphones plugged in so he won’t disturb anyone.

  It was a year ago. Beanpole and Elf were in Melbourne visiting their maternal grandparents in Craigieburn, and with my niece and nephew so close by I borrowed Sleek Surf’s car and drove out to collect them for a thought-provoking tour of my much loved northside suburbs. I drove them back to East Brunswick, where I could show them how Aunt Michele lived. Here was my room. Here was my mattress in my dungeon. Here was my laptop. That was Sleek Surf smoking a rollie. That was Fuzzy stomping about. That was an entire backyard concreted over. I promised Lygon Street gelato to my niece and nephew but first I made the kids endure a walk by Merri Creek and through Ceres, the environmental park around the corner from me. I wanted my niece and nephew to earn the gelato. I was conscious that everything I did with them had potential educational value.

  ‘Hey, what’s your name again?’ Elf said as he whooshed by me on a swing. We were at a park by Merri Creek.

  He was clearly being silly. Beanpole rolled her eyes at her younger brother and kept propelling herself into the air, on her swing.

  I told him I was his Pol Xi.

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember. Yeah, Pol Xi’s your name.’

  Alternatively, they could refer to me in English as Awesome Aunt but I hadn’t figured out how to earn that title. Time was up at Ceres. I bundled Beanpole and Elf into the car and rushed them to Lygon Street to get them the promised ice creams from Gelobar, ensuring Beanpole and Elf had contact with the Italian heritage of Melbourne. I allowed them to choose their own flavours, ensuring they experienced independence. They compared flavours, and thereby learnt analytical skills. Then I drove them back to the insipid streets of Craigieburn, creeping further and further away from cafes and bars that I liked.

  I returned to Canberra that year, on an obligatory trip home for Christmas. With some misgiving, I had bought Beanpole and Elf a joint Christmas present that I suspected would teach them to expect gifts and thus teach them not to have to earn anything for themselves, and thus undo all my good work earlier that year when they’d visited me. I had bought them Trouble, a board game I remembered from my childhood and which had been on special at Big W. I wondered what an iPod Shuffle would do for their values. Their maternal aunt had bought them one each. The iPod was smaller than a stone fruit and I noted the chunky box that Trouble came in pointedly said ‘Ages 4-7’ along one of its sides. Beanpole and Elf were not ages four to seven. Not anymore. And Trouble had been fun when I was a kid in the eighties. This was not the eighties. Clearly I was out of touch, not an Awesome Aunt.

  I gave myself one more go. It was earlier this year and I got Beanpole to myself. She’d come to stay with her maternal grandparents because she was now old enough to do so. I was so excited, I set aside a day for spending precious time with her. I made the pilgrimage to Craigieburn and then brought her back to my share-house. We were going to bake cookies (learn how to be self-sufficient, save money making our own sweets, value homemade food over mass production), go to the zoo (learn about animals, be with nature) and eat pizza (learn more about Italian heritage, value ethnic diversity). With my tertiary education and progressive values, I’d present to Beanpole a model of worldly feminism that she could emulate when she was older. And she was growing up. Next year she’d be in high school, my old high school, where I had graduated dux of year ten.

  I double-booked, and had ended up thinking it might be a good idea to have Croc, a concreter I had met on RSVP, come along to the zoo as well. Croc had a tattoo on his arse cheek with a dancing crocodile and words underneath it that dared one to ‘Get a croc up ya’: I liked his laconic sense of humour. As a loutish twenty-one-year-old, he’d had a one-night stand with an older woman and ended up fathering a little girl. He had shared custody with the mother and given I had invited Croc to the zoo, a kid-friendly place, he brought along his young daughter. Aunt-to-niece time was now an opportunity for an intercultural exchange, a chance to expose my niece to … a guy I was dating. At the zoo, I paid for a family pass, not because I was playing fake families but because it was better value than buying separate tickets. The zoo staff handed our pseudo family four butterfly-shaped cardboard crowns to construct and wear as we walked around – there was a butterfly exhibition on at the zoo that the headdresses were promoting. I wondered if the hats would reinforce gender roles while also teaching Beanpole to become a walking advertisement.

  But the hats were kinda fun. And butterflies were kinda pretty.

  The four of us meandered around the zoo, with the cardboard butterflies on our heads. Croc’s daughter wore her hat but she stubbornly ignored me because she didn’t like to see her daddy with another woman, holding that woman’s hand, brushing cheeks with that woman’s face under that woman’s imposter butterfly hat. I tried not to overdo the touchiness. Besides, my allegiance was to my niece.

  ‘Pol Xi, do you and Croc fuck?’ Beanpole might have said. Like my younger self, she may have recently discovered the weird meaning of the word ‘fuck’ and was seeking clarification from a kind adult in her life. Initially I might have grunted in indignation at Beanpole’s question, Hmong-style. Then I would have reminded myself that I didn’t grow up in a patriarchal, agricultural society like Mum had and that I grew up in Canberra and that I had been educated at the form
er Canberra College of Advance Education and that I had been Ka’s second mummy and that I of all people believed sex shouldn’t be a taboo.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I would say warmly. ‘I’m so glad you asked. But Croc and I don’t ‘fuck’. We ‘make love’, if you know what I mean.’

  Beanpole wouldn’t.

  And so I would demonstrate to Beanpole and Croc’s sulky daughter and all the thousands of other kids at the Royal Melbourne Zoo what ‘make love’ looked like and in doing so I would be treating them as adults and in treating them as adults I would prove that I was Awesome Aunt after all. I’d keep my clothes on, however; it would be tasteless to mockfuck Croc naked.

  But Beanpole wasn’t an adult, and she didn’t ask me about sex. She was a quiet little girl and other than sharing family, we didn’t have much in common. After the zoo, and after Croc dropped us off, I ate pizza with Beanpole and then drove her back to Craigieburn. Speaking of not having much in common, a few days later I broke it off with Croc and returned to my childless life.

  Xang and I arrive at Ee’s house to pick up Beanpole and Elf. Ee’s house, in Gordon, is fairly new and all the bedrooms come with built-in wardrobes; the family room is separate from the more formal dining room, and out the back is a covered patio perfectly suited for hosting summer barbecues where prawns can be sizzled and served with a garden salad. I imagine Ee and Blia doing things like that. They’ve taken Beanpole and Elf to the Gold Coast for family holidays, twice. It’s been many years since Blia was ‘kidnapped’ into the Lee family. And from those exotic beginnings, Ee and Blia have now achieved a middleclass family a world away from our parents’ chicken-swinging villages. The kind of economically comfortable family you see on car ads, the kind of complacent family that live across the road from me in East Brunswick. I feel a little defeated. There are only so many trips I can do to Ceres with Beanpole and Elf to counter all of this indoctrination. These children eat McDonald’s frequently because they don’t have to wait for the benevolence of a lotto ticket.