Fight Night(29)

So! said Grandma to the cab driver. She looked snazzy in her giant welder’s sunglasses. We were driving. Grandma wanted to get to know her new husband. She turned her whole body to look at the cab driver. How are you this fine day! she said. I fired up Beyoncé really fast and didn’t hear anything else the whole way to the airport but I saw Grandma and the cab driver laughing in the front seat. I saw Grandma point at me in the back and then the driver looked into his rear-view mirror and waved and smiled at me when he should have been keeping his eyes on the road. I took out Beyoncé to be polite and said pardon? I heard him say is it a boy or a girl? I thought he was talking about Gord. My new grandpa already knew everything about our family. The cab driver pointed his thumb at me over his shoulder. She’s a girl! said Grandma. She put her arm around the seat to the back where I was and patted the bottom part of my leg like that’s okay, nobody knows what you are, but that’s okay.

At the end of the ride the cab driver and Grandma hugged! Grandma rubbed his arm! He patted her back! They said all sorts of things to each other about hoping the future would be good to them both and then finally, finally Grandma came shuffling after me into the airport. Peoples’ stories are so interesting! she said. I pulled both our little suitcases and Grandma carried her red purse. We went to the place where they had the wheelchairs. Grandma sat down in a nearby lounge chair and I went to the long row of wheelchairs and picked one out. A man with an airport uniform walked over to me and said I had to wait in a line for the wheelchairs. I couldn’t just take one. He pointed at some people standing by a desk. Then Grandma’s diuretic kicked in. Gotta go! she said. I went back to the airport guy and asked if I could use one of the wheelchairs to take Grandma to the washroom which was forty miles away. He shook his head. I tried to tell him about Grandma’s diuretic, but he kept shaking his head and then he walked away to talk with his airport employee friend about his new transmission which had set him back three G. I took a wheelchair and pushed it over to Grandma. The guy came back and asked me if I had heard what he’d said before. You didn’t say anything, I said. You just shook your head. Well, he said, that’s a universal sign for no. Grandma laughed. I can think of another universal sign, she said. I helped her into the wheelchair. Put your little suitcase between my legs, said Grandma. And put mine on my lap. I squeezed our suitcases around Grandma in the wheelchair and started to push her to the washroom. The guy said we did not have permission to take the wheelchair. We know! said Grandma. Step on it, Swiv! I really pushed hard. I tried to run. Grandma held on to the suitcases with her arms and legs. Lean into it, kiddo! she said. The guy shouted that we weren’t authorized to commandeer a wheelchair. Oh, we know! said Grandma. There it is, Swiv! She was pointing at the washroom. That’s men’s! I said. Doesn’t matter, said Grandma. Let me out! I wanted to keep going to the women’s washroom but Grandma was already moving all the suitcases off her and trying to get out of the wheelchair. No, no! I said. Yes, yes! she said. She was laughing. It’s crunch time! Then sit back down! I said. She sat back down and put the suitcases back on her and we went into the men’s washroom past confused males washing their hands and right into the giant handicapped stall. The airport guy is gonna follow us in here! I said. Grandma was already sitting on the toilet saying hoooooooooo. No problem! said Grandma. Let him! She was trying to catch her breath. She was peeing and laughing at the same time. I leaned against the wall of the bathroom stall and looked at my phone to give her privacy. I was sweating. This was my first time in a men’s washroom. I looked at a text from Mom. It said remember to get Grandma to walk up and down the aisle every half an hour. It said she loved me and missed me already. I texted her that Grandma and I were basically under arrest and we hadn’t even gone through security yet. She texted back lol and hearts.

Grandma put her hand on my arm. Our adventure has begun! she said. Isn’t this wonderful ? She said it while she was still doing things on the toilet. She asked me if I’d ever seen this thing on her arm. She held up her left elbow. It’s the size of a large walnut! she said. She was rubbing it. It was more the size of a golf ball. It doesn’t hurt at all, she said. Look, it’s perfectly round! She was really examining it. It’s similar to the thing that Shadow had, remember? The vet said it was completely benign. Feel it! she said. No! I said. Why do you have that! Then I was worried that the airport guy would hear us and bust down the door. None of the confused men in the washroom said anything to us even though they could hear by our voices that we were females in their washroom. I’m growing another arm to hug you with, said Grandma. It’s part of my personal evolution. I heard a man outside our stall say, Awww, that’s adorable. Safe travels, guys! Was he talking to me and Grandma? We could never leave the stall now. We would have to stay until all the current men inside the washroom had left and gone far away from the washroom to their gates and onto their planes. But new ones would come in during that time. How would we escape? I texted Mom: Grandma forced me into a man’s washroom. Mom texted more hearts and happy faces. Then she texted that she was at rehearsal now but we’d talk later. She loved me this much. She sent the wrong emoji which was of a skeleton or maybe she was trying to tell me she loved me to death.



Everything else is a blur in my mind. I tried to distinguish between the voice of the ego and the actual situation. That’s one step in the process of detachment. Mom used to have all the steps written down on a piece of paper taped to her bedroom wall before she tore it down. Somehow Grandma and I got out of the washroom and the men who saw us didn’t care except for one old guy who said, My sisters, my sisters when we walked past him. Grandma told me he said that because for him it wasn’t right to be in a washroom with strange women and so he had to call us his sisters, and that way, in his mind, we would be family to him. Then at security it took eighty hours to get through with Grandma and all that rigamarole which she pronounced like it was Italian pasta with rolling r’s. The security woman discovered farmer sausage in Grandma’s suitcase and told her she’d have to check it. It was for Lou and Ken. It was their favourite food. They had eaten it non-stop when they were kids in the old town of escaped Russians but they couldn’t find it anywhere in Fresno. They’d looked everywhere. The woman told Grandma that sausage couldn’t fly internationally. Grandma didn’t want to go all the way back to check her bag so she handed over the sausage. The woman said, Oh, nice, when she saw Grandma’s nail polish. What is it again, Swiv? asked Grandma. Lady Balls, I said. That’s right, said Grandma. I could tell Grandma was super tired already because she handed over the farmer sausage without a fight and said well, there’s your lunch to the security woman. The woman said she was a vegetarian ever since she’d seen a terrifying documentary about the meat industry but she’d see if her colleague at the other conveyor belt would want it because he ate everything in sight. Grandma said it’s good sausage! She’d had to get her friend Wilda to pick it up for her in Kitchener at a black market, so tell him to enjoy it! Oh, he will! said the woman. He’s such a carnivore! Grandma said a man after my own heart! The woman told Grandma and me to have an awesome time in the raisin capital and to bring home the sunshine. She waved her scanner at us and Grandma saluted her.