I nodded, surprised that she had drawn me into her monologue. “He’s kind to your mother,” she said. “Poor thing.”
It was a year and a half after Mama’s accident when Dad found me in the food court of the Rideau Centre. I’d bleached my short hair white-blond and pierced my nose during the two days I’d been gone; I hadn’t done much else. I was leaning back against plastic, my head aching from the rum-spiked Coke that was serving as breakfast and lunch. Diesel, the guy whose apartment I’d moved into, was selling acid to a thirteen-year-old girl he was obviously hoping to deflower. His blond dreadlocks were so thick I hadn’t realized how much dandruff they housed until the night I’d gone to his basement apartment with my backpack and, straddling him, looked down at the top of his head.
I was just wondering what I’d missed in school and was considering going to the public library for the day to sleep when I looked up to see my father standing five feet away, eyebrows raised, hands in the pockets of his Adidas jacket. His hair was getting shaggy and his beard was bushy. He was wearing old sneakers and jeans worn to threads. I was so grateful he hadn’t worn his professor clothes. I wished he’d pick me up and sling me over his shoulder like he used to; I’d fall asleep before we got to the car.
“You can either come with me,” Dad said, “or resign yourself to being a lifelong loser and victim. You’re letting this moron take advantage of your need for affection.” I caught up with him at the escalator, my already forgotten boyfriend not bothering to call after me. As he pulled out of the parking lot, Dad offered me a Tylenol and informed me I wouldn’t be living with him and Lara anymore. “If you can’t stand living with people who don’t share your DNA,” he said, referring to my tantrum the day before I left, “you don’t have to.”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said, wondering where he was planning to send me — reform school came to mind. “I didn’t mean you weren’t really my father. Dr. Steinberg said it’s perfectly understandable for me to be acting out, abandoned by both my biological parents. You don’t know what it’s like, not being related to anyone.”
“All right,” said Dad. “Acting out. Perfectly understandable.” He informed me that I would move in with Tam-Tam and go back to high school. “Your grandmother,” he said, “is undeniably related to you. Lucky girl.” My clothes were already packed into the trunk. Dad carried my things into Tam-Tam’s front hallway, my grandmother taking a break from the salon to supervise. He kissed me on the forehead, told me he loved me and said, “Incidentally, your sister’s related to you, too, and she misses you — please phone her tonight. She’ll be spending weekends with you here. Now have a sandwich and a good nap.”
Although I suspected that Lara was only too glad to be rid of me and resented her more than ever, Dad’s was an ingenious strategy. Once in Tam-Tam’s care, I realized that good grades and university were the best and only sure escape route and devoted myself single-mindedly to school work. I didn’t dare run away, skip school or even play loud music. With her air of brittle determination and restrained melancholy, Tam-Tam wielded an irresistible power without having to say a word. Finally, too late, I imagined what it must have been like having her as a mother.
One night, shortly after I’d moved into Oma Esther’s old room, I was doing my homework at the kitchen table when Tam-Tam emerged from the stairway beside the pantry; she still went up to her office each night to settle the salon’s accounts. She wore a pale blue robe and had a silk scarf tied around her head so her silver-white hairline showed. It was uncanny that this washed-out version of my grandmother should haunt the salon after it closed, replacing the rosy-cheeked, shiny-lipped Tamar all her customers knew. I remembered the night Minnie was born, how strange Tam-Tam had appeared, and realized I had simply seen my grandmother for the first time without makeup.
That night when I was ten, she had stayed on the edge of my bed after I closed my eyes. I felt the mattress shift when she eventually rose, and she remained standing there for so long I thought maybe she had left after all, so silently I hadn’t heard her footsteps. I didn’t dare open my eyes. At last she announced her continued presence by sighing loudly, “She needs so very much protection.” I pretended not to hear, kept my eyes tightly closed and breathed deeply.
Lying in bed beside Jasmine, I thought about the night she was born and wondered who Tam-Tam thought needed protection and who was supposed to supply it. I’d often thought she must have meant Mama, or maybe Oma Esther. But when Tam-Tam delivered her cryptic message, I received it as the ominous imperative of an oracle following birth. I understood that my new sister was a being of the most precarious kind, and that Tam-Tam had somehow placed this fragile life squarely in my hands.
Ask any adult to describe the worst feeling in the world, and most will say betrayal. The worst thing: to discover the one you love most is a stranger. The person you’ve been so close to, known inside out, turns out not to exist. Every cherished moment spent with the betrayer is contaminated by your new knowledge. It’s no joke, this shattering of your own self-story; if you don’t revise fast enough, it can be lethal. The truth is you can never know a person and you can never hold on to a person. You can only know how someone makes you feel at a particular time; and trying to hold on to a person is like trying to hold sand in a sieve. If your love object refuses to be who he seemed to be, don’t make his inauthenticity your albatross. The unreliable live with their eyes half closed, and their fists clutch desperately at anything shiny and new. You need not feel anything for them but pity. You, the open-eyed amnesiac, are whole and real, and no revisionist can make you doubt yourself. You know that remembering is revision, love is revision, laughter is revision. You know that all is revision, so you have learned to revise better than anyone else.
J. Virginia Morgan
The Maternal Return: An Anti-Memoir
Two
It was morning, the sun’s first, thin light overflowing her off-white curtains, when Tamar heard the lock rattle. Minutes later, the bathroom door scraped its ill-fitting frame, and then water ran through pipes, drumming against tile. It was her husband, Robert, all over again, home beyond late on Friday night. Half awake, she would hear him through the floor, coughing, clearing his throat; even his sighs were amplified by the echo chamber of running water. The sounds were Robert expelling the whole night, whatever he did when he was gone, water easing it all down the drain. In the morning he was untainted. Clean and even-tempered, he’d erased all traces, and he would hum as he ate, dropping breakfast crumbs on the newspaper.
When she heard the crash, Tamar was out of bed and running for the bathroom door, pulling the shower curtain open, nine-oneone on the tips of her fingers. Robert was a decade gone, bus-crushed and buried, the house they’d lived in together sold long ago. And Ginny was twenty-two, studying this and that on university scholarships. Throughout the winter she’d been coming home progressively later; and now, six in the morning, she was sitting on the floor of the tub with her head in both hands, dark reddish hair twisted into a soaked and fraying knot. Before Ginny seized the flowered curtain from her mother’s hand and pulled it closed again, Tamar saw that she had a bruise on one shoulder. Robert’s shoulders, too, had been bone white and flushed with freckles; Tamar would never have entered the bathroom while Robert was in there. She would never have known if his shoulders were bruised.
“I slipped, Mother,” Ginny said through the curtain. “I’m fine. Go back to bed. I’m having a private moment of angst here. I’m contemplating my near-death experience.”
“Did you hit your head? You might have a concussion again — you sound slurred.” She looked at the closed curtain uncertainly. “Do you need help?”
Ginny’s body was a shadow through the curtain. Standing, she held one hand against the side of her head. “That really hurt. Steven said that I should wash my feet with soap, and it made them slippery.” Ginny giggled, then laughed loudly. “He said that most people wash their feet with soap. Is that true?” Tamar turne
d to see her mother in the hallway behind her, cardigan wrapped tight around her small chest.
“Her feet?” said Esther. She stepped into the bathroom and spoke over the sound of the shower. “In the bath, this doesn’t happen.”
“There’s nothing inherently evil about showers, for godsake, Oma!”
“It’s hopeless.” Esther turned back down the hall, and Tamar stepped into the doorway to watch her retreat and ease her bedroom door to just a crack from closed, in case its knob got red-hot if the house caught on fire.
“Do you wash between your piggies, Mother?” Ginny’s voice rose above the drumming of the shower. “Tell me the truth, please tell me truth. I need to know if I’ve been duped.”
“You know how your grandmother struggles to get her sleep.” When it was clear that Ginny had no intention of responding, Tamar wiped her palm across the steam-clouded mirror and pressed her fingertips under her eyes, smoothing out the skin.
“Tamar,” said Ginny. “Are you still in here?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry I woke Oma Esther. Please go back to bed. I don’t have a concussion. Everything is peachy.”
Tamar lay in bed for another half hour, though she knew she wouldn’t get any more sleep, and later she’d wonder if Ginny, in the bedroom across the hall, had any inkling of what was transpiring inside her own body. “The grand miracle of life,” as Robert had called it. He’d drawn Tamar a diagram right after proposing, or, rather, declaring that they would marry. “Imagine, my little sperm wiggling its way into your ovum. Right about now, our future child consists of approximately ten cells.” And twenty-two years later, Asher’s little sperm wiggled its way. Because that was the night Ginny, for some unfathomable reason, had offered her body, dirty feet and all, to Asher Acker.
Two days later, she’d force a confession on Tamar and Esther while they sat in the living room after dinner, listening to the CBC. In their apartment, they’d recreated, almost exactly, the sitting room they once occupied in Robert’s house. Esther was crocheting and Tamar sorting lipstick samples from work. Around her shoulders, Esther wore a green and blue crocheted shawl identical to the one she was now making in beige and brown. She could never get warm enough, and she wrapped herself in woollen layers each evening. “Zij heft geen waardigheid,” she said to Tamar. “No dignity. Like her father, coming home at all hours. I tried to tell him, too, do you remember? That civilized people take baths. And now look what’s happened: shower slipped her up and cracked her head.” She tapped her temple. “You never know what a person might do after a crush on the head. The mishigas that girl brings into this house will be the end of us.”
“The new bath mat will prevent slipping,” said Tamar. “I should have bought one years ago. I don’t know why I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Crooked thinking runs in this family. Some kind of family.”
“I can hear you talking about me, you turkeys.” Ginny strode into the room, bell-bottoms flapping around her ankles. She stood by the big radio in the living room, grabbed a ball of orange wool from Esther’s basket and squeezed it hard. It matched the wide belt cinched tight around her waist. “You think slipping in the shower made me crazy?” Ginny put her free hand on the radio as though considering pushing it off its stand, then pulled away as if she’d touched something hot.
“What is she saying?” said Esther. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m crazy. Deranged! It must have been the shower that did it! Why did you think I’d take a shower after a date in the first place? Earlier that very night Asher and I committed an act of flagrant lust. What do you think of that? We did it in his car and it wasn’t at all romantic. And do you suppose he was my first lover? Until two days ago, was I an unplucked flower?” Ginny paused as though giving her audience a chance to decide on their answer.
“Please don’t yell,” said Esther. “My headache. Where are my pills?”
Ginny tossed the wool back into Esther’s basket and retrieved the pill bottle from under a pair of knitting needles. With her fist closed around it, she stood with her legs apart, clenched hands at her sides, a boxer poised to pummel the soft furniture, the cushions and the walls, all swathed in Esther’s crocheted covers, blankets and shawls. Esther stared at the red lid visible through Ginny’s fingers. “I’m moving in with Asher. Not getting married. Moving in. He wants me to, and I’m going to, so.” She took a deep breath and crossed her arms. With swift and jarring composure, as though speaking to a pair of slow-witted children, she said, “I won’t be going with you to the new place, so you needn’t worry about building that extra bedroom. You can move into your fancy new apartment together and meld into one person, just like you’ve always wanted. Free of me. I’m an adult now. Asher and I are going to be having a baby.”
“You’re not an adult,” said Tamar. “You’re a hysterical child. Look at you, my God. She’s not having a baby,” she told her mother, despite a knot of dismay in her stomach so painful it made her head light. “Ginia, don’t be ridiculous. What about Steven?”
“What do you mean, I’m not having a baby? And what about Steven? What about him?”
“Of course there’s no baby. Your theatrics are a bit much. You didn’t really — did you?” But before Ginny had a chance to flood the room with unbearable details, Tamar added quickly, “In any case, you can’t know you’re pregnant after two days.”
Ginny set down Esther’s pill bottle, turned and fled, shoulder bumping the door frame. Minutes later, Tamar heard the girl’s voice, her words indecipherable, pleading with someone on the phone. And it occurred to Tamar, as she stood to retrieve the red-lidded bottle and place two tablets into her mother’s hand, that maybe it was true after all. Despite Ginny’s beads and polyester shifts and free-bouncing breasts, despite the way she talked, she was fundamentally a throwback, an heiress to folly, credulous enough to get herself in trouble in this most old-fashioned of ways.
The next morning, in the vise-grip of a dare gone too far, Ginny bundled her clothes into two suitcases and several enormous macramé purses, carried them down two flights of narrow stairs and dumped them in Asher’s rusty Ford. The trunk was full of clothes, the back seat loaded with books. Already dressed for her afternoon — evening shift at the cosmetics counter, Tamar followed Ginny downstairs and stood on the front steps in her camel-hair coat and high heels. Asher ignored her and stood smoking on the sidewalk, his dark blond hair shaggier than ever, while Ginny pushed two more bags into the trunk and slammed it shut. Asher was gaunt and tired, the shadows under his eyes like bruises; surely he hadn’t always been quite so pallid. Tamar looked away.
Ginny wore a fitted, cherry-coloured leather jacket that clashed with her scarlet platform clogs, a bulky white scarf and one of the matching gloves. She stomped in the puddles along the sidewalk, melted snow splashing muddy streaks along her shoes and soaking the cuffs of her jeans. In her bare hand, she held a cigarette. Tamar had never seen Ginny smoke before; she watched her daughter struggle for elegance, her weight on one foot, smoking hand-on-hip until she doubled over to cough. With a violent wrist-flick, Ginny tossed the cigarette into a depleted snowbank. Asher shook his head and climbed in the driver’s side of the car as Ginny fished the second glove out of her pocket and pulled it on. She turned and ran back to the building to take the six concrete steps two at a time. Bracing herself for the collision, Tamar barely resisted taking a step backward; Ginny stopped just short of hurtling herself into her mother’s arms. Taking Ginny’s gloved hands firmly in her own, Tamar said, “You should never wear white.” The gloves were stained a shade or two darker than the scarf and streaked with dust and dirt. Ginny sighed.
“I see you up there, Oma Esther,” she yelled at the corner third-floor window. “No point hiding. Goodbye, goodbye. Don’t quit your day job to be a spy!”
“I’m not going to hear the end of this,” said Tamar. “Please phone us when you get there. You know how worried she gets.”
Ginny
’s cheeks were rosy, her eyes fever-bright, and Tamar was reminded vividly of the moment, many years earlier, before Ginny had pirouetted across the crochet-lined living room to collide with solid wood and glass. It must have been relatively soon after Robert died. Ginny had been lying on her stomach on the living room floor, a loop of yellow wool around both hands. Humming tunelessly, she wove the wool into a series of elaborate shapes with her fingers. They were alone in the room because Esther had gone to bed early with a backache.
“When I’m a doctor,” said Ginny, “I’m going to invent a new medicine that will make Oma Esther’s pains go away without making her sad.” Ginny had been obsessed for several months with the notion of following her father’s medical career. “I think it will involve sending the medicine straight to her back instead of through her brain first, relaxing the vertebrae.” She hooked her pointer fingers together, looked at Tamar, pale eyebrows raised, and wiggled her fingers against each other in an eerie impersonation of Robert explaining the workings of the human body. Yes, Ginny was speaking gibberish, but she spoke it with Robert’s mannerisms, even his facial expressions. Tamar watched Ginny create new string-shapes with mechanical quickness, clearly deep in thought. “Don’t worry, Mother,” she said with conviction. “I’ll think of something.”
“You’re old enough to hear this,” said Tamar. “Those pills your father prescribed for your grandmother’s backaches are not medicine. They’re placebos.”
“They’re addictive.” Ginny nodded wisely. “Oma Esther’s a junkie.”
“No,” said Tamar. “If I tell you a secret, will you promise never to mention it to your grandmother?” Ginny nodded, rapt and worried.
“Those pills are just made of sugar. Do you understand? There’s nothing wrong with your grandmother’s back. It’s more complicated than that. Your father said the pain was all in her head, but she wouldn’t believe him. She wanted medicine so he gave her those. No pill is going to make her happy.”
Cricket in a Fist Page 4
