Cricket in a Fist

by Naomi K. Lewis

  Seven

  J. Virginia Morgan writes that everything can change in a single moment — a breaking point. All she remembers of the day her life changed, the day she ripped herself free, is every possible shade of red filling her eyes and nose. That’s why the cover of her first book is cherry red, the cover of her second magenta, and the third a dark rose. On each, J. Virginia Morgan’s name is printed in dark burgundy.

  I was seventeen and still living with Tam-Tam when her first book came out. At the public library downtown, where I often went to do my homework, Mama’s adopted name glared in red from a shelf of new Canadian books. At first I thought it must have been a coincidence, someone else, but when I saw the author photo, I was seized with dizziness, and the stabbing pain I’d come to recognize as panic, rather than a heart attack, gripped my chest. I sat in a soft, upholstered chair near the window and waited for the spots to clear from my eyes, and then I looked at Virginia’s photo again. She was still almost as thin as when she left, her hair had grown long and sleek, and now her nose was different, too, small and straight. I opened The Willing Amnesiac to the first page and read the first line: I woke into a white room full of cut flowers, and my whole life slipped away like some epic, complex dream that leaves a formless uneasiness in the wake of its details. Virginia. I thought she’d left and was gone forever, but here she was, for anyone to find. I read the whole book, finishing it half an hour before the library closed for the night. Every word and every letter branded itself onto my brain.

  It just takes one moment out of the ordinary, Virginia wrote, and then everything changes. One moment is the border between then and now, her and me, prehistory and real life.

  “This is why she ran away,” said Steven. He was standing beside my computer desk, reading the e-mail I’d found when I got home from losing Jasmine and sneaking glances around my home. Piles of books at his feet. “This is my fault, Agatha,” he told me. “Not yours.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Well,” he said, ignoring my regression to adolescence after five minutes in his company, “let’s go to the” — he checked the printout — “Mylette Hotel. It’s in Yorkville? How far is that?”

  “It’s far,” I told him. “And it’s rush hour.”

  Steven looked back at my building as we crossed the street, but he didn’t say anything. I had never seen the car he was driving; it was shiny and new, a red sedan.

  “After Jasmine left,” said Steven, heading down Dundas Street, “I saw that she’d been reading about your mother online.”

  “J. Virginia Morgan,” I corrected him. He looked at me. “She was reading about J. Virginia Morgan.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course, yes. I see what you mean. I didn’t know that you girls knew about those books.”

  “Of course we do, Steven.” I didn’t want to look at his face, didn’t want him looking at me either. Already he had bruised my sanctuary by seeing my home, my apartment and my street. My city. He had his own life, a new lease. Jasmine had once told me that Steven and Lara jogged together and went to the gym and that they cooked with only organic food. “We didn’t know if you knew about those books,” I told him. “You could have said something.”

  He didn’t answer, just eased through a green light in silence. As we approached the point where the road forked, I told him to take College Street, but he stayed on Dundas and drove two blocks. Then he said, “Agatha, I’m going to ask you to come back to Ottawa with me and Jasmine. Lara’s mother has taken a turn for the worse.”

  “I have a job,” I said. “I can’t just leave.”

  “You work in a store.” I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes. I could feel the tension building in the back of my neck and my shoulders. “Are you working on applications for grad schools yet?”

  “A few, yes. That wouldn’t be for almost a year.”

  “Where are you applying?”

  “Here and in the States. Why did you take Dundas? The traffic will be even worse closer to downtown. College is always better.”

  “Please think about it,” said Steven. “Lara really needs her family right now.”

  It was an old, familiar argument, and I didn’t need to speak for Steven to know what I was thinking. That I wasn’t Lara’s family, was only her stepdaughter because Steven had adopted me at the last second. Once when I first moved to Toronto for school I had introduced him to my roommates as my former stepfather. He hadn’t visited me since. That was around the time I’d written to Asher Acker; according to my online search, he was practising psychoanalysis in Sacramento, California, and I found his office address. I described Mama’s accident and everything that had followed; I told him that I’d read the letter he wrote to Steven, that he’d been right when he predicted his bond with Mama and me would come back to haunt us. But he never wrote back.

  “Look at this.” The street was getting more congested by the second.

  “All right,” Steven told me. “I’m upset, too, Agatha.”

  Jasmine was already in a room with J. Virginia Morgan; it was an uncanny thought, and my stomach clenched so painfully I had to open the window to get some air. It had never occurred to me to imagine or hope that Virginia would stop, to wish that loose thread unravelling from my family snipped and tied, its destructive path cut short. Her existence and the never-ending publication of her red books were my due, a reminder of what I’d done and even a reminder of how the world works, how it rebukes and conspires and torments us with cruel justice. For nine years, I’d tried to enumerate all that led up to the accident and all that followed, and each time I was less sure at what point things began to go wrong. Sometimes I’d find it, the answer — when I should have said something different, made a different choice; but then the precise clarity of remorse would slip away again, leaving me feeling, with a relieved hiatus from my burden of responsibility, that I couldn’t have saved her, that it would have happened anyway.

  But when Jasmine wished our mother dead, she said it with such vehemence, such determination. She stared at those books on the Eternal Present bookshelf and took bloody aim, and I leapt to protect them, as though she were poised to desecrate something holy. And as I watched her from above, slicing through the University of Toronto pool, I saw how the momentum of her convictions carried her. I would never have dared, at her age, to take the bus to a city I didn’t know, alone. Jasmine looked so sleek and childlike from above, a tiny, buoyant creature carving a fearless, if reckless, path. There was nothing above or below for her to hold on to, nothing at either side. She was so different from me. How had I let go of her small hand so easily, turned and fled, barely thinking of her life without me?

  I’d phoned Dad as I watched her and tried to persuade him to turn back. He said it was impossible. “She’d have to go to school,” he said, as Jasmine backstroked. Although I was high above her, seated comfortably on a sofa, I was sure she was looking straight at me and my cell phone, suspicious and sad, knowing I was turning her in. “Think this through,” he told me. “You’d have to cook for her. You’re twenty-four years old.”

  “Maybe she could just stay for a while.”

  “I’m almost there,” he said. “I’ll see you in less than two hours, and we’ll all talk.”

  “She’ll hate me,” I sighed. “More than she does already.”

  Steven turned off his cell phone after I called him from the pool, so when I realized Jasmine was missing, I had no way to reach him. I took the subway and streetcar all the way back to my apartment, where we’d planned to meet — where he was planning to ambush Jasmine and take her back home. And as he drove me down Dundas, I knew he was right. I’d felt so competent and caring, watching her from above. I had already bought her a V8, just like I used to, for when she came out of the locker room clean and hungry. But she hadn’t come to Toronto to live with me in a one-room apartment while I worked at Eternal Present and she started high school. She hadn’t come for me at all; it was all about J. Virginia Morgan and her wo
rkshop, all about the one person who didn’t care about her. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. I couldn’t make her get up in the mornings, punish her for skipping school and worry about what she chose to wear. I couldn’t be the one to go to her parent-teacher interviews to discuss her problems, which promised to be many.

  I looked at Steven carefully. His hair was slightly shaggy, and he was clean-shaven. I wondered why he’d kept his beard for so long; he had a strong jawline, a handsome face. He was only in his late forties, and I thought, not for the first time, of how his marriage to Mama must have seemed in retrospect. A youthful mess, a foolish misunderstanding. Now, with Lara, he was living his real life.

  We shared the house in Aylmer for almost twelve years, Dad, Mama and I, and finally Jasmine, too, and during that time, our personalities burrowed into all the small places no vacuum cleaner can reach. We trampled our birthday parties into the carpets and painted over our arguments, fusing them to the walls. And maybe it was when we moved downtown that we began to snip whatever ties held us together. Time shifts the contents of a house like the earth; what was topsoil when we moved in transformed slowly into the mulchy bottom layer of long unopened desk drawers, the far-back of closet shelves too high for even Dad to reach without standing on a chair. We turned up our comfortable mess all the way to its murky underside. We cleaned out the whole place — emptied every cranny, excavated forgotten scraps of paper, gathering shoeboxes from their shadowy hiding places and exposing their contents to the light of day. Mama, Dad and I filled the hallways of our house with garbage bags. Even Minnie organized her drawings, put her crayons and coloured pencils away, sharpening each one before placing it carefully in its box. I examined and discarded outmoded clothes, old birthday cards, the sweater I’d planned to make in the sixth-grade “knitterbockers” club that had never progressed past a cuff hanging from a needle. I filled garbage bags with gifts from clueless relatives.

  For all the garbage bags I filled haphazardly, I also packed two boxes with neatly stacked relics. Mama, I discovered much later, packed boxes of journals, photographs and old clothes, a collection of my childhood drawings, a string of red origami cranes. She put these boxes in the guest room closet at our new apartment, closed the door and didn’t open it until after her accident. J. Virginia Morgan warns against clutter of any kind. Never shove something out of sight. Instead, get rid of it. If you want something out of mind, she writes, its continued and hidden existence can only do you harm. She writes that, in her house, she never places an object on top of another in such a way that one is hidden. All her cupboards are made of glass. If you have anything to hide, dig it up. Not to polish it and admire it and show it off, but to get rid of it once and for all.

  Dad didn’t have a big office in the new downtown apartment, so he took a carload of boxes to his office at the university. A year later, they were still unpacked in a corner, and one early October weekend when I was fifteen, he offered me a hundred dollars to organize his office. I had nothing to do, because Helena was away with the volleyball team, so I agreed. All day, while he was in the lab, I shelved books, organizing by subject before alphabetizing. Dad’s office had floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall. I wondered how it could be that I was more like Dad than Mama and resolved for the thousandth time that I would never get married or have children; I would never sit around chopping vegetables and doing laundry when I could be sitting in an office, surrounded by books, writing and publishing great insights.

  Other than his books and neatly Duo-Tanged articles, Dad had packed one large shoebox, secured with a flimsy piece of tape. I came across it in the late morning, on top of a journal about narcolepsy. I could see from the logo that the box had once contained winter boots. I pulled up the lid and peered inside. And there it was, right on top. A thick, dilapidated envelope with Dad’s name in the middle and another man’s initials in the top left-hand corner: A.A. A.A’s handwriting was heavy, in black ink on off-white paper. I closed the box and held it shut, then opened it again. Took out the envelope and held it in both hands. Pressing it to my face, I smelled only old paper that had been kept for years in a small space. I opened the envelope and looked inside, unfolded the old, plain beige stationery. I read and reread the signature.

  A letter from my biological father to Dad. If only I’d had the self-help wisdom at my disposal, the foresight to do what Dad should have done twelve years earlier — to light a match and put an end to it. But I had to know. I wanted to see his handwriting, feel the way he formed sentences, to find something familiar that had made its way into my own blood. I put the letter in my bag and tucked the resealed box behind a row of books on one of Dad’s shelves, where such boxes always go. I read the letter twice while eating eggplant curry in a café down the street. I was strangely calm when Dad drove me home that night, still calm at school on Monday. I reread the letter in the library at lunchtime, on the bus ride home, just as, long ago, Asher Acker read and reread Mama’s covert postcard. And though I was calm, a virus had entered my bloodstream. I could feel it circulating, spreading, the symptoms beginning almost imperceptibly, like an itch in the back of my throat. I watched Mama standing in the apartment’s stark white kitchen, yellow apron around her wide waist. All the appliances were shiny and science-fiction inspired, no wood anywhere; Mama was lumpy and larva-like, out of her element. Ballooning inside me, I felt a heady recklessness, a growing, giddy disregard for any consequences. I thought of the little girl who could set fire to things with her eyes, and I stared at my mama, waiting for the flames.

  I had left my family for six years, and everything had changed while I was gone. Even Tam-Tam had stopped managing Inner Beauty, and now she was moving. Selling the salon, Jasmine said.

  “Jasmine says Tam-Tam has a boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” Dad said. “Victor? He’s not her boyfriend, exactly.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  “I phone Tamar once a month at least, to see how she’s doing.” He glanced over at me. “I always thought highly of her; I still do.”

  “Of Tam-Tam? I thought you never even liked her.” I’d been sure he and Tam-Tam never spoke again after the day Mama left.

  Steven kept his eyes on the road. “I always liked her. You know, my parents were always so normal; when I met Tamar, it was like seeing a whole different way of doing things. I liked it. I still do. She’s an incredibly strong woman.” I tried to recall a single instance during my childhood when Steven and Tam-Tam had seemed to connect. “She’d love to hear from you, Aga. I’m sure she’d be thrilled to tell you about the salon and Victor and everything else.”

  “Who is Victor?” We were passing Bathurst already, and my hands were starting to shake. It occurred to me that I could jump out of the car and run. I could change my identity and move to a different city; no one would ever find me. I didn’t really have any friends who’d notice I was gone.

  “Victor,” Dad said. “It’s a remarkable story, actually. He owns a restaurant in the Byward Market and his late wife used to have her hair done at the salon.” Jasmine had already told me that much. “It turns out that he’s from Amsterdam, the same neighbourhood as Tam-Tam. He came to Ottawa about ten years after her and Oma Esther. His family was friends with the people who hid Tamar during the war.” I stared at him, and Steven nodded. “The parents have both died, but Tamar spoke with the daughter. Femke something — a different surname from the one Tamar remembered; she’d been married twice. They were living in Montreal all this time.”

  “No way,” I said. “That’s incredible. I mean, I remember TamTam talking about her. That’s just incredible. Did she tell you anything about it? What was it like talking to her?”

  “It is incredible, you’re right. She said they had a long talk. And she and Victor have become quite close friends. They spend a lot of time together. Dinner, plays. Your grandmother spent a lot of time alone, for a long time.”

  “But all her friends from the salon?”

  “Those were
clients and employees. They tend to come and go.”

  Suddenly, beside Dad in the car, I was desperate to see TamTam, to see the salon again, at least once, before it was gone. Inner Beauty had always been a part of my life. In my earliest memories, I spun in the royal blue vinyl and chrome chairs, examined my head from every angle in the mirrors and leafed through the sample binders, colours and colours of dyes, polishes and shadows.

  The Saturday two weeks after I found Asher Acker’s letter, I wore my bright yellow rain slicker, prepared for the forecasted rain. It was Halloween. Since we’d moved downtown, it was only a ten-minute drive to Inner Beauty, and there was no longer any excuse to get out of occasional visits. As far as I was concerned, I’d grown up far past cute, but Tam-Tam’s ladies still pressed their red lips onto my cheeks, then rubbed at the marks they’d left, long red nails leaving half-moon indentations in my skin. The morning was staticky and grey, thunder rumbling a long way off. I watched the dark clouds through the living room window of our eleventh-floor apartment and laced my newly bought army boots. I’d wanted them for months, but until a few days earlier, Helena had me convinced they would look stupid. They were polished black and steel-toed, indestructible enough to carry me fearlessly into my new, Helena-less life. Minnie had new boots, too, red rubber, with a matching rain hat. Four years old, she was chubby and wide-eyed, and everything made her laugh. The TV, the tone of jokes she couldn’t possibly have understood. She laughed loudly with her mouth wide open, fell off chairs to roll around on the floor. Her round cheeks got the worst of it at TamTam’s, her effortless charm mercifully diverting attention away from me.

  We took the elevator down to the lobby of our building, and Minnie was a fireman in her gumboots. For her Halloween costume, she’d have a plastic hose as well. “Firefighter,” Mama tried to correct her. “You don’t need a penis to fight a fire.” But when she went to the rescue, Minnie was a man. Her name, she insisted, was Fireman Jeff. My mother was wearing a trench coat over her tucked-in grey blouse and a wrinkled black skirt that was too tight at the shin-length hem. She completed the ensemble with a blazer that wasn’t the same fabric or quite the same shade of black as the skirt. Mama only put on makeup for Tam-Tam or if she was going to a university function with Dad. The lipstick and eyeliner didn’t settle properly onto her face but sat like a slightly skewed superimposition. She went down to the parking lot to get the car, and I waited in the lobby with my sister. Red plastic fire engine in hand, Minnie saved me. We ran out of the building together, me leaning on her shoulder. “There!” she breathed. “You’re okay now, lady. Try not to be scared. I’m going back in for the cat.” She shaded her eyes against imaginary flames and puffed up with courage, but Mama pulled up and called out to us through the car window.