Notes on a Banana

by David Leite

  She slid her hand into my field of vision and rapped her index finger on the table. Tac, tac, tac. I ignored it, so she inched it closer and rapped harder. TAC, TAC, TAC. I looked over at my grandmother, who had begun to worry the last bits of her Portuguese bread into little white rosary beads.

  TAC! TAC! TAC!

  “Whaaaaaaaaaat?”

  “Are you going to eat or not?”

  I stared at her.

  “Well?”

  “Elvira . . . ,” my father said, low. A junkyard dog trying to warn off an intruder.

  It could have been the slimy texture of the greens. Or maybe I overheard someone say something about Portagee food in a way that made it sound not much better than eating swill. Whatever the cause, I turned my nose up at it. I longed to eat things like hamburgers on buns that looked like tan mittens, and chocolate cake with swirls of Betty Crocker chocolate frosting, a bottle of milk alongside. My last name means “milk” in Portuguese; it seemed my birthright. Chocolate layer cake with a glass of milk so cold it makes your throat hurt is so iconically American that it’s even called “American-style cake.” I wanted to be American by consumption.

  I could outlast my mother. I knew it, and so did she. I’d done it before, with stalemates in just about every store we shopped at and with staring matches behind my father’s back in church, as she tried to get me to stop yammering as I pretended to read aloud the prayers in the missal.

  “For the last time: Eat your soup.”

  I looked at her and prayed for a lightning bolt to pin her to the floor.

  “Querido, coma,” said my grandmother, concerned. Sweetheart, eat.

  “Momma, if he doesn’t want to eat, he doesn’t have to,” she said to my grandmother, then turned to me. “Right, baby?” Her voice was suddenly filled with the warmth of my favorite TV moms. She yanked my bowl away. I had thrust both fists out to my father, as a sign of yet another victory, when I felt a thunk on my head. Cold broth beaded on my eyelashes. Potatoes plopped into my lap, and slippery greens hugged my face as they slid down and over my cheeks.

  My father looked like a goldfish that had fallen on the floor, all goggled eyes, his mouth bobbing open and closed. My grandmother stopped midbead.

  I was stunned. The first convulsions of a howl shuddered in my belly. I looked at my mother. One hand was on her forehead, the other on her hip. She was clearly the most shocked of us all. Then a caterpillar of a smile started to wriggle across her face. I stood up and looked pointedly at all three of them.

  “I think I’ll go to my room now,” I said. I turned, bowl balanced on my head, and walked across the kitchen to my room. Behind closed doors, I clamped my hand over my mouth to prevent my sniggers from curling themselves under the door and into the kitchen. But there was no need, because they never would’ve heard it over their own laughter.

  “Good night, Son,” my father said later that evening, tucking me into bed, my hair still damp from my bath. My mother came in, as she always did, and sat on my bed as I said my prayers. When I was done, she leaned over and kissed me. He, too.

  “Ma banse. Dad banse.”

  “God bless you,” they said in unison.

  Just before she turned out the light, she said, “We okay?” I nodded vigorously. And we were. It’s our way.

  In the dark of my room, I tuned into the television show in my head, the program already in progress.

  “Yup, right on my head!” I say as I sit in the guest chair on The Mike Douglas Show, my legs too short to reach the floor. Mike’s snorting so hard he can hardly speak. “I didn’t give in, though. Not me!”

  “Is this kid something?” he says, clapping, motioning the audience to join in. They erupt into a riot of applause.

  He tells me to move over a seat to make room for Totie Fields. She thunders on like a sumo wrestler. I put my hand out to greet her, but she grabs me and buries me in her chest: “You’re so freaking adorable!” After she squeezes herself into her chair, she says, “Let me tell ya something, kid. If they ever make a movie of your life, I gotta play that mother of yours. She’s a real spark plug, that one.”

  Spark plug. Firecracker. Loose cannon. You name it, she’s been called them all. Some Azoreans have a word for it: veneta. It’s hard to translate exactly because it’s slang, but it’s this indomitable force of nature that you damn well want on your side. It’s a capricious temper, an irrational obsession, a fierce determination that uncoils through some families and detonates every so often. Some members have it; others don’t. My mother does. So do I. My father, not so much. (Let me take that back. Aggravate him long enough, or threaten any of us, and he could come out swinging, but his veneta was always provoked, unlike my mother’s and mine, which were at best unpredictable.) How I loved her veneta, when its crosshairs weren’t trained on me.

  With just a look, she could wither cashiers to a stump and cow bank presidents. It was a superpower, like being able to command the wind or bend forks with your mind. There was that time we were driving home on the highway in the old tan Pontiac, and some guy cut in front of us. “You sonofa—!” she screamed at taillights that were getting smaller by the second. She gunned the car and weaved in and out of evening traffic until she caught up to him, and then she turned the wheel hard. There was a chorus of squealing brakes behind us. “How does it feel, you sucker?!” she said into the rearview mirror. We were delirious with victory. And when he came up alongside us and leaned on his horn, she just waved him off like a queen and took the next exit home.

  Veneta was often whipped out of her holster in the name of child-rearing. One afternoon I ran into the house with my first spelling quiz, shaking it over my head like a pom-pom.

  “Look, Ma!” I said proudly. She laughed as she smoothed the paper against the table. I looked at her face, then down at the quiz filled with my oversize scrawl, then back up to her, just waiting for it.

  “You got a forty.”

  “I know!” I replied. “A forrrrrteeee!” I whispered, drawing out the word.

  “Well, Banana, that’s failing.” I could feel low, cold clouds swirling around her.

  “Failing?” I searched her eyes for a hint of a joke. There was none. Failing? Mrs. Conforti, my first-grade teacher, hadn’t explained that my grade was forty out of a hundred—a number my father was still helping me count to.

  “Go,” she said, nudging her chin toward my room. I knew better than to argue. After dinner I watched the circle of light from my Jesus candle flicker on the ceiling and heard my parents shouting. “Well, not my kid, Manny,” she said. “Not my kid.”

  The next morning when I got to the table, a small box was sitting on my plate.

  “Open it up,” my mother said, her voice all honey again. I looked at my father, then back at her. I didn’t like surprises. I pulled off the top. Inside was a pile of what looked like large confetti cut from manila folders. On each was a block letter in my mother’s handwriting. “We’re going to sit here every day after school until you spell like a champ,” she said, banging her finger on the table for emphasis—tac, tac, tac. And every day was a test of will—with me refusing, her demanding. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t easy, and it sure as hell wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with my afternoons. Bottom line: I’m one damn good speller.

  Sometimes, her veneta was an impulsive ballsiness. The day Paneen was giving rides on his motorcycle, for example, she suddenly grabbed the hem of her dress, wadded it up in front of her, and hooked one leg over the back of the seat. “Ellie! Get your ass off of that thing!” Joanne brayed in her smoker’s voice, her cigarette jabbing in my mother’s direction. Mercifully, her reply was drowned out by the muffler. The neighborhood huddled on the sidewalk and watched them go the few blocks down Brownell to the river, turn around, and pause. All of us were silent, just waiting to see what would happen. The bike lurched, and a ripping sound followed, like thunder after lightning. They flew up the street, my mother honking with laughter, her head tossed back, her mouth opene
d so wide, I swear I could see her fillings.

  4

  I’M NOT GOING TO BE IGNORED

  Up and down Brownell Street, my mother’s whistle was famous. Even people who never met her knew who she was. I could be playing five blocks from home, and when she let loose, it was like the noon siren. The other kids would lift their heads and freeze, a bunch of startled chipmunks. Then they’d all turn to me. That’s when some mother would put it together. “Hey, you the Whistle Lady’s kid?” she’d ask. I’d nod, secretly thrilled by our celebrity. The farther away from home, the more pitying my friends’ expressions. They knew I had just minutes to make it back. If she whistled again, I was tempting fate. A third? Well, let’s just say I wasn’t stupid enough to find out.

  Her whistle was her signature. When she went full throttle at the fireworks or at Seekonk Speedway, cheering my godfather as he climbed into his car, everyone around her would turn and stare, impressed. Even Paneen would stop and swivel toward the sound. That’s my mother, I’d think. She’d give them all a wink and do it again. But for me, her whistle was an invisible tether. If I was in earshot, no matter how far away, I was never lost.

  One afternoon, she navigated the big boat that was our Buick into a parking spot at the Truesdale Hospital up in the Highlands and turned off the ignition. The building, a squat yellow-brick affair, had the dejected, slumped look of an orphanage.

  “Who’s sick?” I asked.

  “No one.” She rolled down the driver’s window, put her two pinkie fingers into her mouth, and blew. Whirrr-iiiiit! Whirrrrrrrrrrr-iiiiiiiiiit! She looked at me and winked. Then once more, even louder.

  She pointed to the top of the building. Standing at a third-floor window was Dina. She was cradling something and waving. She made big, exaggerated pointing motions to the bundle in her arms.

  “What’s she holding?”

  She turned to me as if to make sure there wasn’t an axe sticking out of my head. “Your new cousin, Banana.”

  “What’s its name?”

  “It’s not an it, it’s a him. His name is Wayne, but I think I’m going to call him ‘Chipper,’” she said, examining her rings. “I’ve always liked the name Chipper. What do you think?”

  “But that’s not his name.”

  “Well, it is now.” And just like that, she never called him Wayne again.

  “Can we go see them?”

  “Kids can’t go in the maternity ward.”

  “Why?”

  “You could have the flu or the plague or something, and you could kill him,” she said. “And you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  I had to think.

  For as long as I could remember, I’d managed to keep the spotlight of our family trained squarely on me. It was simple economics, really: I made them laugh, and they praised me—or, in the case of Dina’s brother Norman, paid me. Whenever he was particularly amused by my antics, he’d pull quarters from behind my ears and let me pocket them. I felt seen and heard.

  I don’t know how hilarious I actually was, but with my mother in the audience, it didn’t matter. She had an infectious laugh that began as barely audible squeals and built to convulsing guffaws and, finally, loud, percussive screams. She was always pulling off her cat’s-eye glasses, the ones with the rhinestones, to wipe her eyes with the nearest dish rag. Her laugh had power—to lift a room, to make the people in it forget about everything for a moment. As long as I had her, I was a riot.

  After Wayne made his entrance on the family stage, everything changed. Overnight, no one cared about my perfectly executed pratfalls or impressive presentations of my grandfather’s favorite saying about determination—Um gafanhoto foi no buraquinho e trouxe para fora de um grão de trigo. (“A grasshopper went into a small hole and came out with a grain of wheat.” It’s more poetic in Portuguese, trust me on this.) Instead, I was met with a quick nod of the head and a distracted “Uh-huh,” as everyone leaned in to coo at the swaddle in Dina’s arms.

  Trying harder was my only option. I rehearsed and rehearsed Tommy James and the Shondells’ song “Hanky Panky,” choreographing the number with two of the neighborhood girls as backup singers. We practiced the dances we saw on Saturday afternoon TV—the Monkey, the Frug, and the Watusi. Their arms oscillated double-time, legs kicked, asses wriggled.

  “YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!” I screamed, as their faces grew big with saucer eyes, trying not to cry.

  When family, neighbors, and Paneen’s friends—tough-looking men with knots of muscles wrestling under their T-shirts, and their skinny wives with lipstick the color of pink cake frosting—arrived carrying gigantic wrapped presents for Wayne, I ran to the front of the porch, sending the girls to the back.

  I started: “My baby does the hanky panky!”

  “Yeah, my baby does the hanky panky!” The girls repeated.

  As I sang, I walked down the stairs, arms out, touching each step with my toe first like I’d seen on TV. They all just waved and hurried past, the women’s high heels clicking Morse code on the pavement—“S-o-r-r-y, n-o-t t-o-d-a-y, D-a-v-i-d.”

  From then on, the house became suffocating. What had begun as just Barry and me, and then Wayne, crowded to include six more cousins on the Costa side. At the same time, I discovered that I had not only another pair of grandparents, Vu and Vo Leite, but a whole other set of cousins who lived near Boston. Every time a newly emigrated aunt or uncle visited, there was another damn kid in tow. By the end of the Great Exodus out of the Azores, I had a starting lineup of ten cousins.

  The worst, though? TJ and Jeffery from Michigan. They belonged to my mother’s brother Uncle Tony and his wife, Auntie Vi.

  While I was lying on the parlor rug watching TV, someone kicked my shoe. I rolled over on my back. Both of them were standing over me. It must have been time for their summer visit, which I dreaded. We stared at each other for a long time.

  “Hey,” TJ said finally. Several years older than Jeff, who was my age, TJ was the leader. And the bully.

  “Hey.”

  He made a scraping sound in the back of his throat. A small ball of spit formed on his lips and grew bigger, until it dangled like a pendulum over my face. Jeffery elbowed him to stop. I rolled out of the way in time, but it was TJ’s way of making sure I knew they were back and he was in charge.

  With them here, everything shifted. It felt like the apartment was squinting against the glare of the light, throwing everything into shadows as dark as my bedroom. The air sounded hollow. The more they wedged themselves between Barry and me, the more something swarmed inside. He’d already quit me for Brother, a smudge of a boy his own age with a huge bowling-ball head who lived on the other side of us. But when TJ and Jeffery descended, I was completely ignored, even at home. On top of it, they were all-boy. Where was the fun in mooning traffic on Davol Street, or getting into fistfights with the thugs over on Lindsey Street, or holding cats by their legs and dropping them from the porch to see if they landed on their feet?

  What made it worse was both of them, especially TJ, possessed a radiating charm that protected them no matter what they did. The turds. And even though all three of them got into more trouble than Barry and I ever did, TJ and Jeffery were always spared The Strap—a beast with five long fingers that my grandfather had cut out of leather and could turn Barry’s or my ass into two pink grapefruits with just a few wallops. Auntie Vi wasn’t Portuguese, and that meant she was “progressive,” as my mother called her, and didn’t believe in doing things the old-fashioned way, which to my grandfather meant anything biblical.

  I withdrew and grew sullen. Even Barry found it hard to rouse me after TJ and Jeffery had gone. Finally he dragged me outside, and we began wrestling near the mulberry bush my father had planted his first year in America, a sign of hope for the family and the future. As we steamrolled back and forth over each other, reason unlatched and fell away. Consequences didn’t exist; Barry’s size, twice mine, didn’t register. Something ferocious unfurled to its full dimens
ion, and I was suddenly feral. He had me pinned, straddling my chest, his knees digging into my upper arms. I bucked and fought harder, which made him laugh. It was because of that moment, his small lapse in attention, that I was able to hurtle myself at him.

  I bit him on his chest. I bit harder, still harder, until I tasted the rustiness of blood. Barry started slapping me on the side of my head and then punching me, but I didn’t let go. The pain felt good. It was my way of proving to him how much I loved him. I loved him enough to let myself be hurt because he was turning away from me. Would TJ and Jeffery let him do that? He yelled for Dina. I heard her running out of the house, the screen door slapping closed. She tried to position herself between Barry’s fists and my head. She pulled me off. I hollered something long, hard, and guttural, then ran upstairs crying. My mother looked at me, terrified, and the wooden spoon in her hand dropped.

  That’s when she began screaming. “What the hell is wrong with you?” She grabbed my mouth and pried it open with her thumbs, looking inside for lost teeth or a missing tongue. I was sobbing too much to tell her.

  Still wild with hurt, I jerked myself away and flung open our apartment door. “You fucking bastard!” I screamed, repeating the words Barry had hurled at me. I didn’t know what they meant, but they stung and felt good in my mouth, like Red Hots. I ran down the stairs. “You’re not my cousin anymore!” My grandfather poked his head out of his apartment and was about to lunge for me, but my mother dragged me back upstairs. In the parlor, I put my mouth on the carpet just above where I heard Dina yelling at Barry, and I continued screaming. I was heaving so heavily I began gagging on the dust from the rug.

  My mother yanked me up on the couch and held my head in her hands, searching my face as if she didn’t recognize me. I burrowed into her, and she held me hard, even when I tried to wriggle free, which I liked. In time, exhaustion claimed me. She led me, limp, to my room, and for once I was happy it was dark. I could hide in the dark. I looked at my Jesus candle and cried. Lying beside me, my mother ran her cool fingers through my hair, kissing my forehead until I fell asleep.