Cricket in a Fist

by Naomi K. Lewis

  “No!” Jasmine abandoned Agatha’s sock. “God! Stop staring at me like that.” There really were shadows under Agatha’s eyes; along with her long blond hair and bright grey eyes, they had always made her look tired and mysterious, like she knew terrible things and was hardly able to stand it.

  “Remember when you ran away?” Jasmine said. “Where did you go?”

  “Oh God. That was so pathetic, Min.” Agatha shook her head and fell silent. She always did that, as if she was thinking the rest of the story but forgetting to say it out loud. But then she went on, “To this guy’s house. This grungy little apartment near the 7-Eleven on Beechwood. He looked completely baffled when I showed up at his house. I thought he was my boyfriend, but I guess that was news to him.” Jasmine asked what it was like staying there, and Agatha shrugged. “Well, I was only there for two days. There wasn’t any toilet paper.”

  “What did you use?”

  “I used my underwear and then threw it in the garbage.” She grinned.

  “No way.”

  “Way!”

  “Did you do drugs?”

  Agatha looked at Jasmine oddly. “Why? Do you do drugs, ever?”

  Jasmine shook her head. “I drank schnapps a bunch of times. A lot of it, like half a mickey. I would do drugs. I don’t care. I want to. I just don’t know where to get them.” Agatha stood up and told her to wait, then went into the kitchen, Esther’s shawl still around her shoulders, and came back with a skinny little cigarette.

  “This,” she said, “is a joint. If we smoke it together, will you promise not to do any other drugs? Anything other than pot?” Jasmine stared at her. “Well? Just have one or two tokes. Puffs.” Jasmine made Agatha promise there was no tobacco in the joint before she smoked it. She hated tobacco, unless it was in Grandpa Winter’s pipe. She knew it wasn’t logical, but there was something pretty nice about Grandpa Winter’s pipe, clenched between his teeth. It wasn’t gross like Bev’s cigarettes.

  “Come sit on the sofa,” Agatha said.

  When Jasmine stopped coughing, she and Agatha both leaned back and sat in silence for about a million years. The sofa was unbelievably comfortable, like sitting in a huge teddy bear’s lap. When Jasmine was little, she’d often fantasized about owning such a teddy bear chair. Wrapped in the crocheted shawl, Agatha looked like a little girl in an old-fashioned painting. She’d always looked as if she belonged in a dark library and seemed out of place playing in the park or riding a bike. Toronto suited her, even though it wasn’t what Jasmine had expected. “Everything here grinds along like a dirty machine,” Jasmine said, her voice echoing strangely through her head. It was true. The subway and the streetcar, the way everything rattled.

  “Our parents used to smoke pot all the time, you know,” Agatha said.

  “How do you know? Your eyes are all shiny.”

  “Your eyes are like two big shiny balls.” Agatha leaned close and grinned like a crazy person. “Where are you going?”

  “To look in the mirror.”

  “No!” Agatha grabbed Jasmine’s legs and wrestled her back onto the sofa, pinning her down. “Don’t,” Agatha said, her whole weight on Jasmine’s back. “It’ll freak you out.” Jasmine laughed, Agatha’s hair tickling the side of her face.

  “How do you know?” Jasmine said.

  “How do I know what?”

  “How do you know, uh, that thing I was asking you about before.”

  “What?”

  Jasmine laughed. “Would you get off me, you freak? Okay, how do you know, how do you know — oh yeah, how do you know our parents used to smoke pot?”

  “They did?” Agatha sat back and opened her eyes wide. “No way.” Jasmine put a hand to her forehead and shut her eyes tight, then curled into a fetal position, pressing her hands to her ears. She needed her brain to slow down. Benna said she’d smoked before, but Jasmine realized she didn’t believe it anymore. She leaned back into the sofa. Benna probably wouldn’t even have an interesting life. Virginia wrote that the opposite of love was indifference. Sud-denly, it no longer mattered. Probably that was what it felt like for Jasmine and Agatha’s mother to stop loving her own husband and children. It was too bad Jasmine had confided in Benna about so much, but at least Benna hadn’t seemed to understand the details of what Jasmine was saying, or its importance. Benna was stupid. That was the way life worked. You love the wrong person. You love an idiot.

  Agatha stood up. “Let’s go get Thai food.”

  As she always did while swimming, Jasmine took the time to ask herself some vital questions. Why had she run away? According to Dad, you don’t always know why you did something until a long time later. That’s what he said when Jasmine asked him, one time, why he married her real mother. The reasons Jasmine ran away were that she was mad because Bev was always smoking in the house and Dad let her, and also she wanted to find her real mother, who was the most selfish person on the planet. And because Benna took off after Jasmine kissed her, so going back to school would be a nightmare. Benna wouldn’t be her friend anymore, and everyone would say Jasmine was a lezzie. Agatha was so lucky to be twenty-four years old and not fourteen, so she didn’t have to go to school with Benna and a bunch of other faggots. Also, Jasmine told herself, she ran away because Agatha ran away, and their real mother ran away, and they both went to Toronto. So Jasmine went to Toronto, too. It’s not that fucking hard to go to Toronto. Anyone can do that.

  Agatha had always been like that, all of a sudden taking charge and making everything fun and crazy. Like when she made Helena microwave that grasshopper, or how she used to convince Jasmine that different places were haunted, like the wooden house in Aylmer and the stairs between Tam-Tam’s office and the kitchen downstairs.

  “I love riding around on the subway,” Agatha had told Jasmine, after they bought food at a little Thai takeout restaurant near her place.

  Jasmine loved doing that, too, on buses. This little similarity made her want to hug Agatha and maybe cry, but she pushed the feeling away. The subway was underground a lot, which meant you couldn’t see anything out the window. Just darkness and your own reflection. Jasmine waited for the parts when the train went outside. But, Agatha said, it’s the other people that are interesting. The kinds of people that ride around in the middle of the night. “Who are they?” Agatha whispered in a way that sent shivers through Jasmine’s body. “Where are they going?” She pointed out a couple of girls, one dressed all in black with chains attached to her pants and the other wearing purple pants with a pink shirt. They were holding grocery bags. “I bet those are cousins,” Agatha whispered, pointing with a chopstick. “They’re both allergic to sunlight, so their parents send them out for groceries at night. But they can’t stand each other.”

  “They’re alone in the world except for each other,” Jasmine added.

  “You never know,” said Agatha, “who you might see. Once I ran into an old friend from camp. Or, look, maybe that guy over there is your future husband. There might be someone you’re supposed to see, so you have to go places where there are people and wait for the ones that’re yours.”

  “That’s crazy.” Jasmine swallowed a mouthful of delicious, greasy pad thai. “Why is this so good? This is the best food I ever ate. Why are you laughing like that? What’s so funny?” Jasmine laughed herself and almost choked, trying to swallow another bite. “Maybe that guy is your future murderer,” she whispered, and Agatha giggled in horror.

  “Hey there, ladies. Ladies.” Jasmine looked around to see a man sitting on the long seat across from them. He wore a red baseball cap and had a large, bloody gauze bandage wrapped around his knee. “Ladies,” he said. “You girls all alone?”

  “Your knee’s bleeding, sir,” said Jasmine, and Agatha laughed out loud.

  “My sister’s right,” Agatha said. “You should listen to her. You should go to a doctor, buddy.”

  “Ohh,” he said. “Sisters. But what are two young sisters doing here? Where’s your momma?” Agat
ha leaned around, so Jasmine could see her face but he couldn’t. Her cheeks were red from laughing. “Where’s your momma,” he said again.

  “She went crazy,” Jasmine said. “She doesn’t love us anymore.” Agatha leaned her forehead against Jasmine’s shoulder, shaking her head.

  “You tell her she should keep an eye on her two young girls. This world’s a bad place.”

  “Okay,” said Jasmine. “Thanks for the warning.”

  “This world’s a bad place,” the man said again. “You girls want to come with me? You need some help, a place to stay until your momma comes back?”

  The subway pulled to a stop, and Agatha grabbed Jasmine’s hand. “No thanks,” Jasmine said, as Agatha dragged her off the train. “She’s not coming back. We’re wayward waifs,” she yelled over her shoulder. Agatha pulled her, running, down the platform and into another car just before the doors closed.

  “These seats are the colour of goulash,” Jasmine said, as they sat down again. They were alone. “Like tomato sauce and sour cream mixed together. Our mother used to do that, remember? Oma Esther’s goulash?” Agatha nodded slowly as the train gained speed. “Aga,” Jasmine said. “Why wouldn’t you write back to me? Why didn’t you tell me about the books and the articles, that you already knew all this stuff? Why did you keep it a secret?”

  “I don’t know,” Agatha said. Jasmine waited, but Agatha just shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.” She looked up as the train stopped. “This is the end of the line.” But the train started again, eased into the pitch-black tunnel, and was filled with a low, moaning metallic wail that went on for so long that Jasmine covered her ears. She closed her eyes; the subway car was shaking. Finally, the sound stopped, and the train pulled into the station. The same station, Jasmine saw, but now they were on the other side of the platform and facing the other way. She hadn’t felt the train turning around at all, and this fact struck her as horrible — that in the dark she couldn’t even detect a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Agatha touched Jasmine’s cheek with the tips of her fingers.

  Jasmine lay awake for a long time after they got home. She used to sleep with Agatha all the time, first after their mother’s accident and then at Tam-Tam’s house. No matter how different Agatha looked, she was still the same, so skinny and warm. She smelled mildly like a combination of spaghetti sauce and flowers, and, Jasmine noticed, staring up close, the expression on her face said she would punch anyone who woke her up. She slept so soundly that it was pretty much impossible to wake her anyway. One morning, in Esther’s old bed, Jasmine had sat on her sister’s chest and pulled her eyes open by the lashes. In a split second, Agatha grabbed Jasmine under the arms to toss her aside with superhuman strength. And then she put her arm around Jasmine and just kept sleeping.

  Everyone thought Jasmine didn’t remember anything. But she did. She remembered the sprinklers in the tremble park, and Mama in her green bikini, sneezing all the way home. And lots of other things, too. She remembered sitting beside her mother in the back seat of the car, and the hospital where they kept taking her back to show the doctor that she wasn’t fixed yet. And she remembered Inner Beauty’s stairs, how she was thinking about the glory of a fireman’s life and the injustice of not being allowed to watch Agatha get her hair dyed. Jasmine hadn’t known back then that she wanted to be an astronaut; she thought she was going to be a fireman, ever since she went on a field trip with her kindergarten class to the fire station to see the men sliding down poles from the ceiling, dressing in their shiny outfits, and turning on all the trucks’ sirens and lights in preparation to save the day.

  She’d been pushing her fire truck up the paisley walls and along the orange banister, but then she remembered she had to stay alone until she calmed down. Leaning against the wall, she counted to twenty in her head and kept going to thirty. She let her body go so limp her mouth even hung open; that’s how calm she was. But then Jasmine noticed one of her feet wiggling in its shiny red fireman’s boot, as if it had a life of its own, and she thought maybe she hadn’t calmed down after all. The fire truck had definitely been in her hand before she tried to be calm, which was probably when she put it down, and then the door at the bottom of the stairs opened, and beautiful Marcy, with her perfect lips and nails, came in with a cup in her hand. And some time later, Jasmine was sitting in Marcy’s aesthetics chair, having red sparkles dabbed around her eyes. Firemen didn’t usually wear sparkles, but Marcy was right when she said there was no reason Jasmine shouldn’t be the first.

  She didn’t even notice her fire truck was missing until she and Agatha had already hugged Tam-Tam goodbye and were standing at the top of the stairs, ready to go home. They were holding hands; Jasmine was trying not to look at her sister’s face with its new red lips and scary eyelashes. Agatha’s hair made her look too different, but her hand felt the same, and Jasmine held it tightly. Their mother walked down the stairs ahead of them, and that’s when Jasmine saw the truck, sitting on a stair almost halfway down, not far from the wall. She just didn’t want to have done something wrong again; she thought her mother would walk past it without noticing. She was always doing something wrong, always being sent somewhere to calm down, and though she wanted to be good, like Agatha, she couldn’t sit still and quiet for hours with a book in her hand. Within minutes, Jasmine always thought of a new idea, and soon she’d have accidentally done something bad again, like drawn a map of her veins all over her body in permanent marker or wrapped each of Dad’s ties in toilet paper so she could give them to him as gifts. It was an accident — but then Mama looked back to talk to Agatha. She wasn’t watching where she stepped; her foot, in its dainty lady-shoe, was on the truck’s roof, and Jasmine knew instantly that not only had she done something wrong, she had ruined everything, done the very worst thing.

  Mama must have been really mad at Jasmine about the fire truck on the stairs because, a year after her accident, she told everyone else she was leaving, and then she was gone. It was Jasmine’s fire truck on the stairs — that’s why all Virginia’s books were red and why she never told Jasmine goodbye; that’s why she kept the red paper birds, as a secret message; that’s why she was spiteful and cruel, and why it had to stop.

  Jasmine looked up at the clock; it was almost time. Agatha was still up in the window; Jasmine couldn’t see her clearly but knew she was there. It felt amazing to have a real plan, already set in motion. That whole thing with the pimps had been so stupid; she’d realized it even on the bus, before she entered the Toronto terminal. The terminal itself was plain and solid as a school cafeteria. She’d always known there were creatures that weren’t quite solid, that exist past the tips of fingers, like celebrities, promising something beyond the mundane. But now she knew that when you see them for real, like that pimp in the mall or the God in Aunt Hilary’s church, they fail to measure up. They become nothing. And J. Virginia Morgan was finally going to materialize, too. Hopefully Agatha would figure it out and show up in time to see Jasmine squash Virginia into the shit-stain she really was. Jasmine was doing it for Agatha as well, and for Tam-Tam, who was getting rid of all the stuff she didn’t need anymore.

  For Virginia’s readers, the American magazine said, this is a familiar story: the oppressive closeness of her household compelled her to move in with a boyfriend when she was very young; and her first daughter was born nine months later, but not before the boyfriend left the country, never to be seen again. Three years later, she married, and eventually her second daughter was born. During those years, the future guru taught piano lessons, read in her free time and, as Virginia writes in The Willing Amnesiac, “existed rather than lived, in a monotonous routine remarkable only for its lack of any distinguishing features.”

  There was no one else in Jasmine’s lane, so she swam to the middle of the pool and then sank into the water to pull down the bottom of her bathing suit. With her hands on her knees, Jasmine rolled forward and pushed her bare ass into the air. It was her patented synchronized swimm
ing move, which she’d done at least once in every pool she’d ever swum in. It was all a trick; it was all bullshit, and Jasmine wanted to moon the world.

  “What a lot of people really crave,” Virginia says, “is to observe and contemplate suffering — like a child torturing an insect. Like a public execution. If people were really concerned about the Jewish Holocaust, they would be out in the world trying to stop the genocides that are happening today. Not rehashing the past. But anyway, I’m not interested in politics and history. That’s really not my thing. I’m interested in people.”

  She finishes her cigarette in silence and says, “Why do people find the past so much more interesting than the present? The past is nothing. It’s gone. Why do you think you need to know about my family to know something about me? I’ll tell you something. These questions you’re asking won’t tell you a thing about my work, because I have nothing to do with all that crap. Let’s talk about something else. Ask me something else.”

  In her latest book, the ironically titled Accidents, Virginia insists that most so-called accidents happen for a reason. “I think that when we feel cornered, we look for ways out. That’s part of what I’m talking about in my book. We do whatever we can to make a change. Death is just the ultimate change.” She nods seriously. “People who attempt suicide don’t really want to die. They just don’t know how else to change their lives.”

  “And your own accident?” I venture. “Your head injury?”

  “Yes, well, I do think that happened because it was the only way I could change my life. But I don’t remember the accident itself.”

  “You can’t remember that day at all?” I ask, having read as much in her first book.

  “That’s right.”

  “Interview with the Amnesiac: J. Virginia Morgan

  Would Rather Not Remember,” American Dreams Magazine