Cricket in a Fist

by Naomi K. Lewis

  “Yeah,” I said, touching his greasy pale hair with my other hand. “Of course we’re friends. Of course.” I knew when I said it that it was a lie. I lay awake for hours watching him sleep, and we kissed awkwardly on the lips after I climbed back out onto the fire escape. I walked home as the sun rose.

  Ingo Bachmann faded into the background, too, along with Helena and her volleyball friends. One time, shortly before he dropped out of school, he tried to talk to me in the hallway. He reached out toward my arm and I dodged around him quickly, not looking at his face. After he stopped coming to class I found a note in my locker: You may think you can take back everything you said, but you can’t change the fact that I was inside your body. I showed it to Reiko, and she said Ingo Bachmann was a misogynist. “Stalker behaviour,” she said. But I put him out of my mind easily, focusing on my newly acquired friends, who congregated in the food court of the mall.

  My family was not as easy to ignore, especially my sister. Minnie started avoiding our mother after the accident, nervous when they were in the same room and balking at any physical contact, which only ever occurred accidentally, since Mama wasn’t eager to touch anyone either. Minnie backed away into corners of our apartment, reminding me of a dog in a werewolf movie who senses before anyone else that she’s in the presence of a body without a soul. With Dad and me, Minnie became clingier, always sitting beside Dad on the sofa with a fistful of his sweater sleeve balled in her hand. She was still in morning kindergarten, and Dad often took her to his office at the university for the afternoon. The campus was close to my high school, so I walked there after my classes were over, across the frozen canal, and took my sister home. One afternoon I found her sitting at Dad’s desk examining formaldehyde-preserved cross-sections of brain.

  “And right down here in the cerebellum, and then up here in the frontal lobe,” Dad was saying, tapping the jars with a pencil, “that’s where your mother probably incurred her injuries.” Minnie insisted on sleeping in my bed almost every night for the first few months. Welcoming the warmth of her little body curled up against me at night, I didn’t want to be alone any more than she did.

  Minnie’s fifth birthday came. Dad bought her a gift and signed the card, Love Dad and Mama. That Chanukah, we went to Granny and Grandpa Winter’s house for dinner one night, and, on Christmas, Tam-Tam came to our apartment to eat Chinese takeout and exchange small gifts. Dad bought Mama a gift certificate for a day spa and signed the card from all of us; he bought me and Jasmine sweaters and avoided attaching cards at all. By spring, when he took us to Granny and Grandpa’s Passover Seder, his face looked tired of smiling. I suggested leaving Mama at home, but he refused. She paid rapt attention to the reading of the Haggadah, and when everyone else joked and laughed she only looked more intent and serious. Dad was still trying to keep the Mama-shaped hole wide open so she could slip back in whenever she was ready, and Mama tolerated all the commotion in her strange, silent way, excluding herself from most conversations by staring at some point on the wall. Sometimes she would blink out of her reverie to stare at whoever was speaking, eyebrows quivering. She shook her head gently as though she’d heard a familiar strain of music and was trying to place it. As though she was trying to solve a riddle.

  Late in the spring, Mama left her post at the kitchen table. She cashed in her spa day, came home polished and scrubbed, and then began to bathe regularly again. She washed her hair every day, which she’d never done before, and slicked it down with gel. She easily passed her driving test, and Dad started walking to work so she could take the car to her therapy appointments at the hospital. She joined a gym and started going to exercise classes three times a week. It was a warm day in June when I turned onto our street after school to see a woman in a streamlined track suit walking ahead of me, quick-stepped, straight-backed and decisive. I only realized with a start and after a full minute that it was Mama. I could see that she was breathing hard and guessed she had just been jogging. I waited outside the building for five minutes to avoid taking the elevator with her. She was not becoming more like her old self.

  As well as family therapy once every two weeks, Dr. Manning suggested seeing me and Minnie each individually once a month, and it was during one of my sessions that he first told me I should prepare to lose her for good. “We still can’t decipher quite how her injury affected her brain,” he said. “As you know, I think your mother is suffering from a personality disorder rather than a physical one.” Dr. Manning claimed that the pain in Mama’s arm was psychosomatic. Conversion disorder, he called it. According to TamTam, Mama’s arm hurt at the elbow — the same place where she’d broken it when her father was killed — and Dad was disgusted when Dr. Manning suggested that might not be a coincidence. When Tam-Tam and Dad told Dr. Manning about Mama’s long history of accidents, her endless hospital visits and minor surgeries, he suggested that Mama had histrionic personality disorder, which, as far as I could tell, meant she was just trying to get attention.

  “But,” he told me, “the human brain is fundamentally an enigma, even to those of us who have studied it all our lives. Your father can tell you that even a rat’s brain is a thing of great mystery. And the human mind. Well.” He nodded, watching my face to see if I felt the force of what he was saying. “I’ve told your father, and I believe it’s important for you to know as well. It seems very possible that your mother, as you know her, is just not going to come back. From my time with her, from what you and your father have told me, it seems as if Ginny is undergoing a profound transformation that still isn’t fully complete. Perhaps it’s time we stopped trying to trigger her memory and stopped trying to bring her back. And just let her find herself. By herself. I’m sorry, Agatha,” he added, maintaining relentless eye contact, hands folded carefully in his lap. “I know this is terribly difficult for all of you. Is there anything on your mind that you’d like to talk about? Confusion about boys? Or social issues? Or about drugs . . .” He waited. Leaned forward. “Agatha, your dad tells me that he’s not your biological father. That he married Ginny when you were three. I wonder if you have any feelings about that. That you’d like to explore here. Because Steven is now your primary caregiver and is likely to remain so.”

  On the floor in front of the skirts, I hugged my legs. This closet had no shelves; Helena and I, when we were children, would have dismissed it as useless. Back in the Aylmer house, long ago, Helena and I used to play in Mama and Dad’s closet because it had built-in shelves perfect for playing apartment-building with my dolls. I wasn’t allowed in Mama and Dad’s room, but we never got caught. I’d known Helena since I was eight, since the first day of grade three, when the whole class sat on the floor for attendance. I was near the back, at the edge of the group. Ms. Connelly said, “Helena Jacob,” and the new girl lifted her arm fluidly over her head and back, like a windshield wiper. Flexing the toes of one foot, she flipped her shoe out, leaned back against her hand, and turned to see me staring. She had long, dark hair, sleek and shiny as vinyl, with bangs that stopped just above her eyebrows. My mother hated bangs, so I had always assumed that I hated them, too. There was an iron-on unicorn on the front of Helena’s T-shirt, and, smiling at me, she flopped the shoe back with a slap, and turned away again. Her family lived near us, but in a bigger house. The first time I went to play there after school, I heard Helena whisper to her mother, “See, look, her hair is golden.” Helena took me down to the basement and we sat inside a huge cardboard box that she had transformed into a fort. There were blankets on the floor, and a flashlight with a wrapping paper lampshade fitted over its head. A photograph of Helena’s grey cat, Juniper, that she’d left with her grandmother in Vancouver, hung on one brown-paper wall. Helena had big, black eyes, and she told me the names of all the many cats she’d owned throughout her life.

  The muggy August when Mama was pregnant with Minnie, Helena and I had shut ourselves into the big, cool closet when my parents came upstairs to argue about a stack of library books that Dad had r
eturned before Mama finished reading them. “It’s not healthy,” he told her, bedsprings squeaking as they sat down. This argument had something to do with Oma Esther and concentration camp. I pictured Oma Esther, white perm and all, playing the piano in a camp cabin. Whenever she made mistakes, camp counsellors barked in her ears, “Concentrate!” I guessed that was why Oma Esther was so meticulous with her cooking; surely it took camp-trained concentration to get all those ingredients exactly right. To keep her spice racks so organized, every jar refilled long before it approached empty. I knew there were mysteries surrounding Oma Esther that I didn’t fully understand and that were only spoken of guiltily, in hushed tones. I knew she had been married to Jozef, who had not just died, but vanished. That she invented her own versions of religious rituals even though she had never been religious, and that this upset Mama, making her yell at Dad. I knew that Mama’s father had, without consulting Tam-Tam, paid for Oma Esther to have a tattoo removed from her arm, but it left a scar. That’s why Oma Esther always wore long sleeves, even on the hottest days. I had no idea how all these facts were connected, and they lent Oma Esther an air of mystery; her history was a confusion of events I couldn’t begin to understand. I couldn’t even picture her as anything but a tiny old woman; I thought of the photograph in Tam-Tam’s office of Oma Esther in her thirties and tried to convince myself it was really the same person.

  “I don’t see how it could be healthy,” Mama told Dad, “for me not to think about this stuff. Not to know what happened.”

  “But why now?” Dad sounded frustrated and sad, strangely angry with Mama. “Whenever you get on this Holocaust kick, you withdraw, do you realize that? You stop eating as much. You lose all your sex drive, too.” I looked at Helena, mortified, and made a gagging motion. “It’s creepy, if you want to know the truth,” said Dad.

  “Of course it’s creepy,” said Mama softly. “It’s worse than creepy. Did you see that book about the trains? Did you see the photographs of those people?”

  “I’ve seen other pictures along those lines.”

  “They were being transported from Westerbork to Auschwitz,” said Mama, as though Dad was missing the point. “From Westerbork to Auschwitz.”

  “I know, Ginny — ”

  “Like my grandmother. She was one of those people. Those emaciated, desperate-looking people. And my grandfather,” she added. “And my great-aunt. Who never even got to be my grandfather and my great-aunt. I can’t believe I ever wondered how she got to be so fucked up.”

  “Ginny,” said Dad, in his let’s-be-reasonable voice. He told Mama about Grandpa Winter, who suffered perpetually from psychosomatic symptoms, who walked with a cane, his limp shifting from one leg to the other. “When I was a kid, my father polished his shoes every week, and more than anything, he dreaded stepping in dog shit. And you know what? He stepped in dog shit almost daily. That’s what worrying does.” Helena and I covered our mouths in delight each time Dad said shit. Mama laughed half-heartedly but stopped when Dad told her, “You are a highly suggestible person. Highly suggestible.”

  I could tell Mama was lying on her side, face against a pillow, from the sound of her voice. She had explained to me two months earlier that she was pregnant, and her belly was now just big enough to get in the way of lying on her front. “If I’m so suggestible,” she said, “maybe you should stop telling me how suggestible I am.”

  Dad paced the room and stopped in front of the closet. Helena’s worried face vanished as he flicked off the light. In the sudden darkness, my breathing was loud enough to wake the dead, my heart a machine gun. I held my breath and could still hear Helena. Presumably contemplating his reflection in the full-length mirror, Dad spoke to the closet door. “You know who you’re making me think of right now? I can’t help being reminded by this fixation on the gory details — the next thing I know you’ll be making grandiose statements about our people and going off to Israel to shoot an Arab.”

  “Nice, Steven.” Mama had apparently sat up so she could yell. “It’s not the same and fuck you for saying so. What are you saying, that there’s something sick about wanting to face the past? That I’m some kind of pervert for not wanting to just turn a blind eye? Anyway, you’re the one who sounds like him right now — the way he used to analyze me and call me a hysteric.”

  “Ginny. Why haven’t you told Agatha about him?”

  Mama didn’t say anything. Then she said, dismissively, “Why should I? What would be the point?”

  “Well,” said Dad. “He was her father. I’m just concerned that eventually she’ll realize how long you kept this from her, and she’ll hold it against you.”

  “How long I kept it from her.”

  I could see Helena’s eyes, as my own adjusted to the dark. She leaned towards me to whisper and I pressed my palm over her mouth, but what I wanted to do was press my hands against both her ears — stick my fingers in her head and pull out what she’d just heard. My palm was moist from her lips and I wiped it on my T-shirt, staring at her and shaking my head.

  “He was your friend, too, Steven. You knew him better than I did, didn’t you?”

  “He was always a very foolish boy.”

  “Well, he never cared to have anything to do with Agatha. He never even asked for a photograph, for Christ’s sake. So just forget it. Forget it.”

  “Doesn’t change the fact that she’s his daughter.”

  “Was his daughter. She’s your daughter.”

  “Of course,” said Dad. “She is. That’s not what I meant. I mean, Ginny, you know how I feel.” Mama said something so quiet and muffled, I couldn’t hear it, and Dad lowered his voice to match hers. Then they were quiet for a long time.

  I avoided looking at Helena and sat silent in the dark until I heard Dad go downstairs to make dinner. I could feel her looking at my face in the darkness but I didn’t turn to meet her gaze. Mama was still in the room, but we had no way of knowing if she was awake. I closed my eyes and waited. “Agatha,” Helena whispered finally, “your mother’s snoring.” Pushing the closet door open, I edged through and paused. The snoring continued. I crawled around the bed with Helena at my heels and squeezed through the barely open door. I heard her stand up behind me in the hallway, follow me down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Dad was breaking eggs into a bowl.

  “Helena needs to call her parents to come and get her,” I said.

  “Sure.” He turned, surprised. I didn’t usually ask for permission to use the phone. I lay on the sofa staring at a magazine while Helena talked quietly in the kitchen, put on her flip-flops and sat in the armchair across from me.

  “Agatha?” said Helena, horribly meek. I turned the page. “Why are you mad at me?” I dropped the magazine on the floor and turned onto my side, face against the back of the sofa. I didn’t move until Helena went outside to wait on the porch.

  Back in the kitchen, Dad was adding grated cheese to the omelettes, mushrooms sizzling in butter and garlic on the stove. “Want to set the table, honey?”

  “Sure, Dad.” I had never called him that before, always Steven.

  He reacted for a split second, holding the cheese still against the grater, then went on as if nothing had happened. He said, “Good girl.”

  That night, as we all read in front of the TV, Mama noticed a wart on one of her fingers; she held it out toward Dad, saying, “What is that?” as though he’d put it there. As her pregnancy went on, the warts multiplied, the skin on her hands bubbling in protest as if some terrible energy was trying to escape. My own skin leapt in sympathy, and I grew three warts on my left hand, two on my right. Mama painted my skin with drugstore remedies, but the warts reappeared only days after diminishing. In the bath, I locked my hands together so that my warts formed a circle and then jabbed my fingers in the air. I was a cartoon superhero, and this hand position promised sudden growth of muscle and a skin-tight outfit. I kicked water all over the floor, fighting off the likes of Skeletor. Because of her pregnancy, Mama was for
bidden to use any chemical treatments, and, despite all available natural treatments, her condition worsened until her warts numbered in the hundreds.

  Soon after Minnie was born, Mama took me to a man with black hair and a white lab coat. He opened a bucket and white smoke crept along the floor. I howled, terrified, as Mama held my wrists, and the man held an ice-smouldering wand against the five points of my magical constellation. During the next week, my warts swelled and then peeled off. The skin underneath was pink and perfect. There were no marks. Mama’s hands were smooth again, too, but a sprinkling of tiny white scars stayed behind to remind her.

  I hummed a monotonous note into the backs of my mother’s skirts and held it for as long as I could; it vibrated comfortingly through my head. I pulled the new clothes in front of my face like a curtain, an extra barrier between me and whatever was happening on the living room armchair. In the corner, at the back of the closet, was the big cardboard box where Dad and I had put all the papers my mother hadn’t taken, and I pulled it towards me. Everything was muddled, out of order: on top, I found Minnie’s first attempts at drawing, back when she was obsessed with fire trucks — big red squares with windows and wheels. Underneath, I found my own drawings of stick figures with long hair, triangular skirts modestly covering triangular crotches, and blob-like wings, my name underneath in big crayon writing. Below an identical but wingless figure, I had written “Ariella” and surrounded the name with stars.

  I remembered Ariella: she worked at my summer playgroup when I was six and she must have been about eighteen, though she seemed ageless at the time. She had soft hands and a silver smile, braces on every tooth. Ariella of the slender, sandalled toes. My mother didn’t approve of my adoration. She said that Ariella was a religious fanatic. As far as Mama was concerned, religious beliefs and behaviour of any kind were tantamount to insanity. “Those Orthodox types,” she told me in the car. “The men won’t touch their wives when they have their periods. Won’t touch them. No kisses on the cheek, no backrub, no nothing.”