My interest in Tam-Tam’s office lay in the door across from her desk. It looked as though it would open to a closet, but it led to a steep, dark, wood-smelling staircase so narrow I could reach out and press my arms against the walls on either side. For years, our weekly visits had been redeemed for me by this secret passageway that descended from Tam-Tam’s private office into the kitchen of the apartment below. The stairs were old and unfinished but somehow clean and never dusty. The Saturday before Jasmine was born, I’d crept down, brave and adventurous, holding a make-believe candle in my fist. There was no light, so I had to leave the door upstairs slightly ajar and keep my hand on the rough handrail. I’d learned not to lean on it too hard after Mama had to gouge a series of splinters from my palm with a needle. I walked slowly, trying not to make the stairs creak; the stair treads were narrow, and there was a perilously steep drop from each to the next.
When my fingers bumped against the cigarette pack lodged between handrail and wall, I stopped to check. Each time I looked there were a different number of cigarettes. I thought with a thrill about the ghost of Tam-Tam’s father visiting regularly and sitting on the stairs with a smoke, listening to Oma Esther and Tam-Tam’s dinner conversations. I’d considered surreptitiously leaving a note rolled up like a cigarette, imagined starting up a correspondence. Jozef would leave me messages for the family, and though I couldn’t quite imagine what these messages might be, my fantasies always involved Mama, Tam-Tam and Oma Esther standing in the meticulous downstairs living room, crying and hugging each other. In the secret staircase, my great-grandfather would be listening, unburdened because the strain on his loved ones was finally lifted. Then his soul would be free. I would see him through the window and he would wave goodbye to me, smiling with love and gratitude before dispersing into a cluster of snowflakes and floating away. The others would be too distracted to notice him.
I’d written many drafts of letters to Jozef. It didn’t worry me that he never knew English, since death must surely free a person from all limits imposed by the human brain. But I could never maintain the exalted tone required to initiate contact with my haunted, haunting great-grandfather. Dear Jozef, I’d write. My name is Agatha and I am your great-granddaughter. I’m the girl with straight blond hair and glasses who goes up and down these stairs every Saturday. You’re probably wondering how I know about you. I don’t know why, but I have a special way of knowing about magical things. My letters invariably devolved into a plea for help instead of an offering. Mama’s a fat cow. I don’t know why Steven ever married her. Helena says I take her forgrantid. I wish she wouldn’t always do whatever I say, she’s so gullable. I wish she was smarter instead of so nice and pretty. Did you ever feel like this when you were alive? What kind of person, I reprimanded myself, dumps her problems on a disembodied soul stuck haunting his wife and daughter instead of going to heaven — as if Jozef didn’t have enough to worry about already. I satisfied myself by checking the cigarette pack each week. I’d lean over to smell the eternally fresh tobacco, eyes closed, and conjure my great-grandfather’s clever black-and-white face.
I knocked on the door at the bottom of the stairs before pushing it open. It didn’t have a doorknob but swung out like the door you’d find on a pantry, and anyone looking at it from the outside would have thought that’s what it was. Mama had told me that, when her father died, most of his money went to Tam-Tam, but he’d left some to Oma Esther, too. Oma Esther invested her inheritance and never spent a penny of it until they moved into this home; then she spent all her savings to create the kitchen she’d always dreamed of. “My father always loved her cooking,” Mama said. “He probably left her that money hoping she’d use it to become a world-famous chef.”
Two large bookcases stood at right angles in the corner, separated from the stove, sink and cupboards by a wide, polished wooden counter. The counter was low, built to accommodate Oma Esther’s barely five-foot frame, and the bookcases were neatly filled with her hundreds of cookbooks, organized in alphabetical order. Shiny pots and pans hung from racks over the cooking area, perilously low for the average adult. On the wall beside the counter were three spice racks, each jar labelled bilingually in Oma Esther’s surprisingly girlish handwriting. According to Mama, Oma Esther’s culinary expertise and her meticulously organized kitchen were manifestations of a creepy and unhealthy obsession. Mama always looked tense and unsettled when we ate with Tam-Tam and Oma Esther, helping herself to tiny portions of the perfect meals and pushing them around her plate like a child with a plateful of boiled vegetables. The kitchen table was at the other side of the room, in a corner near the door to the living room. Tam-Tam had assumed ownership of that portion of the room and decorated the walls with white porcelain plates, a glossy peach or strawberry in the centre of each one. A white china bowl full of pears and apples sat in the middle of the yellow tablecloth. I had learned the hard way that the flawless fruit was made of plaster.
The Saturday before Minnie was born, I found Oma Esther sitting behind her counter on one of the two art deco bar stools my parents had given her one birthday. They were chrome with blue and green vinyl upholstery. She was refilling spice jars, carefully spooning the contents of a small plastic bag into a jar marked notemuskaat / nutmeg. She greeted me with a nod as I came through the door, and I walked over to let her brush imaginary spiderwebs from my face. Instead of speaking, she grabbed my face between her plump, spice-smelling hands and squeezed affectionately, smoothing my hair. When she climbed down from her stool, I was almost as tall as she was, and standing at eye level with an adult made me feel as disproportionately huge as Alice in Wonderland.
Oma Esther’s English was much worse than Tam-Tam’s, though they’d moved to Canada at the same time. She often pronounced my name in a distorted way that made it sound like Anchor. Mama complained during one Saturday afternoon drive back to Aylmer that Oma Esther refused to speak English properly because she couldn’t let go of the past. Mama shook her head, her Saturday hairdo moving with it, stiff as a helmet. “She clings to that accent like bees to a bonnet.”
“That’s wrong,” I said. “It’s, She has a bee in her bonnet.”
“Oh,” said Mama, “she has a bee in her bonnet all right. She’s always adored you, though. She took care of you all the time when you were small — you’d have thought she’d never seen a baby before.” I knew I was Oma Esther’s favourite: every time we visited, she told anyone who’d listen that she had fed me my first solid food, a spoonful of Hungarian goulash. “She loved it,” Oma Esther claimed, describing me slurping down the tomato sauce, arms and legs flailing with joy.
“First thing,” Oma Esther said, releasing my face and putting the spice jar aside, “we pray.” Every week, she gave me two quarters to climb onto the bar stool beside her, look solemn and say “Amen” when she did. No one in my family ever prayed except for Oma Esther, and it was our secret. She could display her religious tendencies only in front of me, her born-and-bred atheist great-granddaughter. Mama would have been mortified if she knew, but she never came across us praying and I never told her. Bribed into piety, I sat uncomprehending — partly because I didn’t understand Hebrew, but partly because Oma Esther’s praying was a toothless, run-on mutter, her dentures resting in a glass on the counter.
After pocketing my earnings, I opened the cupboard under the sink to retrieve the mixture Oma Esther made earlier in the morning, now risen to fill its bowl. I loved to help her punch down the bloated dough, squeezing it, soft and buttery, in my hands. The good bread smell countered the beauty-salon stench emanating from Oma Esther’s curlered head. After forming two balls, she climbed off her stool and threw a small chunk of dough into the oven, muttering a prayer. She divided the remaining dough into six balls, stretched them into long cylinders, and braided two perfect loaves.
Oma Esther’s Saturday-morning ritual drove Mama to distraction. She avoided going downstairs, she said, because the absurdity of it made her skin crawl. “Jewish people
traditionally prepare that bread on Friday, before sunset, for the Sabbath. It doesn’t mean anything if you do it on Saturday.” When Mama was a child, Oma Esther at least used to cook the bread on the right day. “I don’t know what this Saturday thing is about,” Mama complained. “It’s just an excuse for her to be eccentric.” I didn’t understand why any of this should distress my mother and quietly ignored her incomprehensible disapproval of everything Oma Esther ever did. Still, I knew not to let her catch me during the week trying to imitate Oma Esther’s toothless, throaty muttering and flicking bits of torn paper into my Barbie oven.
With the challah safely baking, Oma Esther put on her jacket and walked through the apartment, outside to the street, and back up the paisley-walled staircase. She didn’t like small spaces and never used the former servants’ stairs. I slipped back through the door beside the pantry and tiptoed up to Tam-Tam’s office. When Oma Esther reappeared upstairs in a royal blue swivel chair to have her curlers removed and her hair combed out and sprayed, we exchanged sly smiles. She always gave me a challah to take home for Saturday dinner, pushing it, still warm, into my hands when we went downstairs to say goodbye. “So tiny,” she’d sigh, wrapping her thumb and pointer finger around my wrist. “Just a tiny Vlinderkind. Still only vegetables? Proper food she needs.” My mother rolled her eyes.
Mama wouldn’t eat Oma Esther’s challah, but Dad and I always finished the whole thing by the end of the weekend. “Your grandmother really is a wonderful cook,” Dad would tell Mama. “Come on, Ginny, it’s just food. Just really good bread. It’s nice, reminds me of my grandparents.”
“It’s not just,” Mama said, uniting me with Dad against her. “You know it, Steven. You know it’s all part of her neurosis.”
“Sometimes,” said Dad, a piece of challah emerging from his mouth cigar-style, sesame seeds clinging to his beard, “a loaf of bread is just a loaf of bread.”
The night Mama went to the hospital sitting on a towel, I watched Oma Esther sitting on our couch and tried to ignore how old and helpless she seemed. I anticipated my next visit to her kitchen, when I’d be reassured of her competence and invincibility. That next visit was never to be — my mother was in the hospital overnight, and by the following Saturday, Oma Esther was in the hospital herself. Minnie came into my life just as Oma Esther left it; my great-grandmother suffered a massive stroke and died two days later. She only saw my sister once, through the glass wall of an incubator. When my mother spoke at the funeral, she said she was going to change Minnie’s other name to Esther; afterwards, she told Dad and me that she thought of the name change on the spot, just for something to say, and that she didn’t really want to give up Minnie’s intended first name, Emily.
“It was a lovely gesture,” Dad said. They had her birth certificate changed and even gave a copy to Tam-Tam, for proof.
My new sister was a small, insistent creature, producing gurgles, shouts and farts of impressive potency, and she changed everything. The house was ever more messy, Mama and Dad tired and ragged-looking. By the time we regained our old routines and returned one Saturday to Inner Beauty, Mama looked like her old self, hair shiny and warts gone. The baby was still tiny, with a streak of orange hair down the middle of her head and round cheeks that the salon ladies all had to touch. Tam-Tam took us downstairs for tea, and I saw she’d packed most of her mother’s cookbooks away, along with all but one spice rack. My grandmother had never been one for cooking. I realized then that Oma Esther was really gone, that I’d let her death pass by unnoticed.
*
I took Jasmine home on the subway and the streetcar. Sitting beside her reminded me, strangely, of spending time with my last boyfriend, whom I’d dated for two months. I kept looking at her face, checking to see if she was noticing her surroundings, wondering what she was thinking; but she just gazed straight ahead, seemingly uninterested in the people around her, myself included. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my sister had caught me staring and said, What? What, what?
“This is where you live?” she said, finally showing some reaction to her environment as I unlocked the steel door to the square brick building.
After Mama’s accident, Minnie had slept in my bed all the time. She was so tiny then, and so trusting. There was no way, now, that she’d cuddle against me for comfort. She changed into her pyjamas in the bathroom and then I did the same, guessing she’d be horrified if I changed in front of her. I turned off the lamp by the bed and Jasmine pulled the duvet up to her chin as I climbed in beside her.
Just as I thought she had fallen asleep and was beginning to doze off myself, Minnie said, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No,” I told her. “Not right now. Do you?”
I braced myself for a confession, but she said, “No,” and rolled onto her back. The streetlight outside the window cast a sliver of brightness across her body’s shape. “Who was the first person you ever kissed?” she asked.
I sliced the light with my hand. “Well,” I told her, “you won’t believe this, but the first guy I ever kissed was this European guy with a name no one could pronounce. He wore track pants, you know? Everyone called him Indigo Blackman. I never even told Helena about him — she would have thought I was crazy.”
“Ugh,” said Minnie. “Really?”
“Yeah. He was a weird guy, too. A terrible kisser. I ate lunch with him one day and then kissed him by the trees outside the school.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen or so.”
“What was his real name?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember.”
“Oh,” said Minnie. Then she added, “Did you love him?”
“Oh. No, I guess not. I guess I would have cared less about what Helena thought, if I loved him.” I waited, then asked, “What about you? Have you kissed someone?” She didn’t say anything, just rolled onto her side, facing away from me. Finally she said she hadn’t.
“Agatha,” said Jasmine, startling me again out of near slumber. “What would you do if you met her?”
“Helena?”
Jasmine sighed loudly, as though I were being purposely dense. “Our mother.” I stared at the back of my sister’s head, her thick, reddish hair exactly like Mama’s used to be.
Jasmine, I thought, my heart pounding, willing me to speak. It was me. I would confess at last. I was the last one to speak with her. I’m to blame.
Jasmine said, “I would kill her.”
Minnie was born at three in the morning. Long after I’d been sent to bed, I was woken by the phone. I lay still with my eyes open for several minutes, until Tam-Tam stepped into the room. Eyes unaccustomed to the glow of my night light, she walked slowly, arms outstretched at her sides, a dainty zombie in beige silk pyjamas. I silently watched her progress towards a pile of books in the middle of the floor until she finally kicked it over with one gold-slippered foot.
“My God,” she gasped. “What a mess. Aga?” She stepped around the books and sat on the side of my bed. I watched her through squinted eyes so she wouldn’t know I was awake. Even without my glasses I could see there was something unfamiliar and unearthly about her face; she looked ghostly pale, skin white and shiny.
“Aga.” She tried again to wake me, squeezing my ankle.
“Tam-Tam?” I blinked and opened my eyes. “What time is it?”
“Just after three. I thought you’d like to know right away that you have a little sister. She’s very small, but she’ll be fine, and so will your mother.” She shifted her weight and wrapped her arms around her body. The posture was unlike her and, along with her pallid skin and colourless lips, made me recoil from her body as though it were radiating cold. I closed my eyes and concentrated on her voice, still unable to shake the feeling that the woman on the bed wasn’t Tam-Tam but an impostor.
“I had a sister once,” said my grandmother. I flinched at this revelation, telling myself I might well be dreaming. “Not related by blood, of course,” s
he added quickly. “A girl I thought of like a sister.” I relaxed slightly. I wanted my feeble family tree intact.
“I lived with Femke and her parents for almost two years,” Tam-Tam went on. “We had to sleep in the same bed. Can you imagine? She had a little room, a single bed. And she had to share it with me. I wasn’t allowed to go outside. I had to stay in the bedroom all day long with the blinds drawn while she went to school. She hated to share with me.” Tam-Tam wasn’t looking in my direction. I suspected she was dreaming out loud; her story made no sense.
“I waited each day for her to come home” — Tam-Tam glanced my way, as though confessing to a crime — “and she’d bring me things, tell me about the day at school. She was a year older than me. Church-going Christian. She had the thickest dark hair.”
Tam-Tam reached up and touched her own coiffure, which was squashed on the side but still retained something of its shape; her eyes were deep shadows. “After the war, of course, my mother came back and we came to Canada. We didn’t hear about the van Daams anymore, Femke’s family.” Tam-Tam was apparently trying to tell a parable about sisterhood, but I couldn’t imagine what it meant. The tone of the story, the warning it held, seemed connected to TamTam’s sickly appearance.
“Do you know,” said Tam-Tam, “even after we came to Canada, my mother believed for years that my father was still alive. That he was living somewhere and had lost his memory. She used to tell tales of his new life, imagine that he had become an engineer. A man who drives trains.” She laughed. I’d never heard her talk about Jozef before, even in passing. “Steven’s a good father,” she concluded. “Isn’t he?”
Cricket in a Fist Page 3
