“Gotta go, Bubbie.” I pushed off. From the corner of my eye I saw displayed on her kitchen table the crumpled piece of paper that was a photocopy of my picture that had appeared in the Canadian Jewish News for winning a Jewish studies award. The paper was worn from her clutching it, from toting it around to her friends in the park, showing off how far she’d come from the world of the Judenrat, showing off me.
• • •
THE CAR RIDE home transpired as usual. Dad was quiet, seemingly intent on listening to his talk radio, so I didn’t ask for the station change. Though known to his friends as a joker, and popular on the wedding/funeral/Christmas party speaker circuit, he was reserved when he was hungry. His day before coming to get us was always long: after working at the government-run hospital, taking his sauna and attending his weekly medical lecture, he stopped on Carlton Avenue, at his parents’ house that was now inhabited by his older brother Moishe, a chain-smoking used-carpet salesman bachelor who slept on the sofa in front of blaring ESPN snooker matches. Dad still had a bedroom there; it was “his room” and he visited every day to “check up on the house,” but he never ate food at Carlton. As he drove, he complained about the insane number of stop signs on the way west, the route being the hypotenuse of the triangle of my family’s three houses. Carlton-Campden-Kildare. None of these Anglo streets were remotely posh, but the trifecta sounded like an upper-class family, or a pharmaceutical company, like the names on the polyp-shaped stationery that Dad brought home.
Our house, a 1960s white brick rectangle, was tucked into the bend of a cul-de-sac. As we pulled into our driveway, I felt a wave of discomfort in my lower abdomen. Behind “Mount Kildare,” as Dad had named the hill of snow that the snow blower dumped on our front lawn every winter, allowing us to toboggan right outside our door, I could see that the living room lights were on. Did that mean that Mom was up or asleep? I secretly hoped it was the latter. By now, it was bone-chillingly cold out, not just hitting my face but invading the stitches of my clothes, and I braced myself for leaving the car, for the one minute in which I had to open the garage door and wait for Dad to let us in. I also braced myself for the entry.
Fortunately, the house was warm. Then I noticed—all the lights were on. As were the radios. And the television.
“Hi, Mom,” I called, knowing that whatever awaited me I might as well find out right away. “Hi, Mom,” I said louder this time, also knowing that if she was up, she’d be slow to forgive me if I didn’t say hello first.
As I removed my layers of damp, cool clothes, which I draped over the rail to the basement stairs since there was no room in the closet, I heard Mom stir. “Hello,” she said. Her voice was thin and wavering, as if she’d been roused from a deep slumber.
I inhaled, exhaled, and walked into the den. “Hi, Mom.” I found her lying on piles of pillows and under several blankets on the couch. The coffee table was covered in papers; I prayed my latest report card—which still needed signing—was somewhere in there, hiding along with her. Even my success vanished in the domestic chaos. Next to the sofa stood a tower of newspapers and free magazines—“your mother’s cocaine,” my dad called them. I’d long been used to Mom’s stacks of records that overcrowded the wood shelving, but lately the bohemian aesthetic had been deepening. Now books—many severely overdue at the local library—piled up on the floor between the furniture too. Not to mention the clutter in her bedroom, the files and clothes that were slowly spreading across her bed, making it hard for me to reach her when I had a nightmare.
My father slept in a cleared-out area in the basement.
I thought of Bubbie’s sartorial stashes and my heart plunged. It was too late. Mom’s mess was metastasizing, taking over our family space.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, for a fourth time.
“Hi, Judy,” she said groggily. “I’m just taking a nap. Just a second, I’ll get up.”
She turned the other way, to face the inside of the couch. Her gray formless knit sweater peeked out from the blankets; she did not wear Roots aerobic gear like the other moms.
I carefully stepped over piles of family albums. Mom had taken thousands of photos of me as a baby, and I normally loved looking at them, proof that she had noticed me, that I was a main character in her life. But now, they too seemed in the way. I found the remote under last week’s The Suburban, and flipped channels, looking for Yes, Prime Minister, my mom’s version of Three’s Company, with Nigel Hawthorne as her John Ritter. If she would only laugh, I knew, she’d wake up and want to talk, maybe even have a snack with me as Dad ate his dinner.
I couldn’t find anything good, except for a repeat of Video Hits. “Mom,” I said, pointing at the “Land of Confusion” video. She loved the Royal Family, she loved caricature. “Look at the puppets.” I did a parody dance of the parody dance, writhing like Nancy Reagan.
“Judy,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”
I reminded myself that she woke up at five a.m. to go to work at a military school outside Montreal where she developed English curricula for French Canadian soldiers. “Sorry,” I said, and went into the kitchen.
My dad was eating dinner from behind a Berlin wall of sauerkraut and tuna cans. He ate only cold foods at home. The rest of the kitchen was similarly fortressed: stacks of Russian whole wheat loaves, half-used tissues tucked into Kleenex boxes, an army of Sweet’N Low packets amassed from coffee shops across town.
At my mom’s place at the table sat the phone and a leaning tower of coupons. I cleared coffee-stained paper towels and gestured at the clippings. Dad rolled his eyes. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” he said. “And a vacuum cleaner.”
I laughed loudly, relieved that he knew something was askew in our house, which was just when my mother came in.
“What’s funny?” she asked, serious. I froze. She was right. We had been laughing at her.
My father didn’t answer.
“Nothing,” I said, and looked away. “We were just talking about the kitchen.”
“Well,” she said, her eyes darkening, darting quickly around the room. As if a switch in her brain had been flicked, her hand movement suddenly became jerky, her breathing, heavy and staccato. “Why don’t you ask your precious father, your best friend, to take care of all the shopping?” she mocked me, and slammed the phone as she moved it to the counter. Then she tore open the fridge, threw juice onto the counter, and poured herself a pink plastic cup full. I tried to remember her better moods, the time she took me and Eli downtown to see The NeverEnding Story and we sang the Pirates of Penzance’s “My Eyes Are Fully Open” to the rhythm of our steps as we walked from the metro to the theater. “So it really doesn’t matter, matter, matter, matter . . .”
“It wasn’t about shopping,” I mumbled now under my breath. My pulse quickened, and I swiftly left the room. And my father does take care of it, I wanted to add. She was forcefully, frantically stacking plastic cups at the opposite end of the kitchen, behind the cluttered counter, as if making herself yet another shield to protect herself from me.
“It’s getting late,” she shouted after me. “Get ready for bed.”
“I have to finish my homework,” I mumbled. Of course it was late. I was brought home at only nine thirty. What, now you’re a disciplinarian? I wanted to yell.
I went to my room, closed the door, and sprawled out on the small area of carpet cramped between the four chests of drawers, trying to ignore the little crumbs nestled between the bobbles of wool. I quickly did my reading, my Hebrew, and my math, before putting away my clothes. My closet was so jam-packed—acrylic-blend hoodies with metal zippers, Ocean Pacific–style Bermuda shorts—that I had to get up on a folding chair to slot my shirt in. I checked up on my perfume sample collection that I had placed neatly—each little clear vial getting its own space—on the top of my wooden bureau, pretending it was a makeup table and I was a movie star. Then I put my books in my schoolbag
, and put it on top of the secretary desk, which my mother had loved for its rounded closing top, but which seemed to me like just too much furniture.
At least she’d let me trade my double bed for Eli’s single one, which I’d pushed lengthwise along one wall so it would take up less room, even if it meant I had nothing against which to rest my head. Pretending it was my pink trundle, I crawled in and tucked myself into the layers of unmade blankets, hugging them, as if they were throw pillows.
Then, like most nights, I had a sneezing fit from the dust that accumulated on the side of the night table.
• TWO •
FUN HOUSE MIRROR
Montreal, 1988
When Mom slept, the house could breathe. The walls exhaled, the roof slumped. I climbed into my mom’s chair at the kitchen table. It was still warm from the hours she’d spent sitting on it, on the phone to her friends, talking about their problems, winding her fingers around the phone’s coiled cord and then pulling it apart, like stretching out a strand of DNA. I marveled at the doodles she drew in pencil across the increasingly large pile of stained paper towels that covered the table. I traced my hand along her marks, following as the lead pooled in the pores of the Bounty, reminding myself that she’d been an artist, a published poet who’d trailed Leonard Cohen around Greece. I followed these incredible drawings, drawings that would never get seen if I didn’t see them, drawings of women’s faces, always in profile with dark eyes, high cheekbones and sharp features, draped in cowl necks, staring into the distance, alone and haunted.
• • •
“WHAT IS THIS?” I raised my voice the next morning. I couldn’t believe what lined my credenza. A row—a full row—of ceramic piglets. One in overalls, one in a pink party dress playing violin, one skipping rope.
The worst part was, they weren’t even cute cartoon piglets with frizzy pigtails doing step aerobics. They were old-school toys, textured so that the ceramic was grooved, accentuating their black porcine locks, making them seem country-house goyish, particularly unkosher.
“For your collection,” Mom said, smiling, her yellowing teeth showing above her thin dry lips. Her large frame overflowed in my doorway. She even hoarded calories.
“My collection?” I said aloud, rolling my eyes. I’d just used wet toilet paper to wipe my dusty mattress. Where had she gotten these pig trinkets? How much more would be coming? What was the point in my cleaning up if there was always more stuff? Two full dining room sets plus an extra buffet were now stacked in the living room. The other day, Mom had brought home an entire discount Disney wardrobe, which I had to stuff into my drawers, pushing my special Roots T-shirts into corners, creasing them.
“You mentioned you liked pigs.” Her slit eyes twinkled in hope. Above her chins, her face was red and soft like a baby’s. She had dozens of albums of me, but never let anyone photograph her. She couldn’t bear to look at herself, she explained. “You said there was a pig you liked.”
It was true. I’d mentioned a pig. A pig candle. One pig candle. I liked candles, not pigs. Besides, that pig was cuddly, like my sassy hero Miss Piggy. And, that was months ago.
I turned to stare out my window. It was afternoon, wintery dark. Over the Christmas holidays, we tobogganed with our neighbors on the mound outside our door. For two weeks, our house was a happy nucleus. But now the black crusty snow just looked like another pile that kept me hidden, that made the world hard to reach.
Mom waited for my reaction. I knew she’d had only one doll as a child, which was why I’d been showered with Barbies—a hundred of them—not to mention three fully furnished dollhouses. Pigs were the last thing I needed. I needed nothing more than to NOT add to the mess, the feeling of drowning, that I’d never be able to get what I wanted because what my mother wanted was already there and I had to use that up first. The feeling that I could never want anything.
“It’s a waste of money,” I said quietly, lowering my eyes. How could she go on about early-bird specials and liquidation sales, my steep tuition, and then, pigs? If our lives were mapped on a budget, they wouldn’t add up.
“Don’t be silly,” she answered, still on the threshold, an in-between presence. The center of everything, yet already becoming a shadow. “They were only a few cents each.”
I looked in the mirror above the bureau. “Your vanity,” Mom called it. My reflection made no sense: I was angular and round, sharp and hazy. Olive skin and red cheeks, thin visage atop rounded tummy, young eyes with old bags, my features looked like they were pasted onto my face by accident, a collage with no outline, set against a backdrop of tattered window blinds and piles of worn towels. I squinted so that my image merged with my room and my contour dissipated, as if I was a character on a TV with bad reception, streaks emanating from my head every time I moved, like my brains were leaking out. Why would anyone like me? Nothing matched. Nothing was contained. I was eleven. Prime. Odd. Awkward. Parallel lines that never met.
I squinted and squinted until all I made out was a blur of eyelash and darkness, until the whole image of me swirled and sank into the glass and I saw nothing.
“Forget it,” my mother snapped, then stomped down the hall. I closed the door, bracing myself for whatever yelling and slamming would come next by getting down to my math homework, plotting graphs that were logical and clear.
From my desk, I stared at the pigs, sitting like lonely rejects, out of place. Now I felt bad for them. Instead of throwing them away or into her room, I integrated them into my candle collection, standing them at the back like the royal family on a chessboard, wishing they hadn’t messed up my system, trying to make some room in which I could grow.
• • •
THE NEXT WEEK, I bought my first bra by myself. At the local mall. I went early in the morning. I’d locked the door to the fitting room into which I’d dashed with every small-sized lingerielike item that I could rip off the shelves while no one was looking. The saleslady kept asking if everything was all right. Yes, I’d answered, chipper. I stared in the mirror. I was alone. I had no clue. I did not know what I was even looking at. There were no clasps, no wires. Was this even a training bra? How could I be sure I needed one?
Two weeks later, on a Friday after school, I was at Lila’s house getting ready for Daniel Fishbein’s party. How I’d managed to be included was a triumph and a mystery.
In Lila’s bedroom, I pulled out from a plastic bag the clothes I had packed the night before after hours of careful selection. A blue polka-dot skirt, beige overalls, a pink-and-green sweater, a white T-shirt with a collar. Only now, laid on her bed against the backdrop of pillow shams and duvets (oh how I still craved pillows in the shape of candies, embroidered with flowing cursive JUDYS) my options seemed appalling.
Getting dressed was impossible. I could barely marshal my limbs. My tongue was dry, my ears rang. Lila effortlessly slipped on her gray Mexx sweater dress and was looking in her mirror, her head cocked to the side. “Belt or no belt?” she asked.
“Belt,” I said, because it was easier to eke out one word than two.
I was out of my depth, and my panic was building, even in this house, with its sweet grape drinks, working VCRs, and a white coiffed dog named Kibbles.
And then, salvation. Lila’s mom. She had short brown hair and a Filofax. She waterskied. “I love that blue-and-white skirt,” she said, from the door. She did? “Why don’t you put it on and come to my room? I’ll do your bangs.”
I giddily, quickly, slipped it on along with my collared shirt and pranced across the hall to her bedroom. One wall was entirely made of mirror. Next to it stood a little table lined with makeup and perfume bottles that sparkled. She led me there and I faced away from the mirror, following when she told me to close my eyes as she sprayed, blew and teased with a comb, not seeming to worry about whether my mop harbored lice. My bra strap dug into my side.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, my
voice trembling.
“Of course.”
I paused. “Do I pull my socks up, or roll them down?”
She glanced at the white pair I was clutching in my moist palm. “Roll them down.”
Then she put away her hair dryer as I dressed my feet, noting how soft and thick her rug was. I imagined what it might be like to run in here in the middle of the night. No tripping over boxes. Possible.
“Look at yourself in the mirror,” Lila’s mom said, smiling.
I turned around. I looked like an Israeli flag going to play tennis with Mötley Crüe.
But, I saw something.
I saw a collar that stood tall, socks folded neatly around my ankles, polka-dots with even white spaces in between. I saw a dark complexion, big brown eyes that perched over a large nose and thick rosy lips, all of which fit together, on the same face, even if just for an instant.
• • •
LESS THAN AN hour later, as if I’d been passed along an escalator of maturation, passed between mothers, I was being escorted by Mrs. Fishbein—her hands on my back, warm like the orange of her cashmere sweater—to the family’s basement.
I’d been so busy worrying about getting ready I hadn’t had the chance to panic about the actual party, about spinning bottles and minutes in closets. But upon disembarking the final step, I realized—terror. We were the first girls to arrive. It was one thing to spend my days joking around with these boys in class, another to see them in Mrs. Fishbein’s house (she also was a substitute math teacher), in serious beige pants and tucked-in shirts.
White Walls Page 3
