Cricket in a Fist

by Naomi K. Lewis

  Languid in the front seat beside my mother, I turned to join my sister in a car song: “When you slide into first and you feel something burst . . . ” My voice, I was sure, was lower than usual; there was something slower and softer about me. A constant, sleepy ache through my whole body. I had willed my life into the realm of the extraordinary, into the wiry arms of the pariah of grade ten history class. For the last month, when it was too cold to lie in the grass by the canal, we’d been meeting inside the school. Mr. Meyers always sighed and nodded, waving me away, when I asked to go to the washroom. My grades had been getting progressively worse this year, a drastic change from last year. More than a few minutes away from class would arouse suspicion, but each meeting under the gym-building stairs progressed from the last. Just the day before, Ingo Bachmann had pushed my back against the wall, his thigh between my legs. It was enough to last all weekend, all through Monday, until my next history class on Tuesday. I replayed every touch. The memory of his gangly long fingers pushed Helena’s betrayal out of my head, overwhelmed even thoughts of two fathers. Ingo Bachmann and I kissed with mouths grotesquely open, gluttony and lust in one.

  We crossed Mackenzie King Bridge along with all the buses. Mama glanced nervously at the hordes of Saturday shoppers entering and leaving the Bay, Minnie crooning, “When you slide into home and your pants are full of foam . . .”

  “Please,” Mama said, just as I joined my sister in the song’s final uproarious cry, “Diarrhea!” Mama hated it when Minnie acted this way, twitching with an energy bigger than her body. Mama and Dad had explained to me that I mustn’t get my sister too worked up; that we needed to keep her calm by maintaining an “atmosphere of serenity.” I knew how Mama felt, but I didn’t care. Minnie squirmed in her seatbelt, rubbing the back of her carefully combed head against vinyl. She’d have the makings of a large dreadlock by the time the car stopped. I grinned at her between the seats, and she pushed her fire truck back and forth on her lap, opened her mouth to start her siren noise, then glanced in Mama’s direction and pressed her lips together with a superhuman effort to stay quiet.

  “You’re fifteen years old,” Mama said. “Why do you encourage her?” I faced forward and crossed my arms.

  We were all silent until we reached York Street, but just as Mama spotted a parking space, Minnie broke down. “WOOOooo-OOOOooo,” she howled.

  “Jasmine!” Mama jumped, her hands lifting right off the wheel. “You girls will be the death of me. Now I’m going to lose the space.” But she didn’t and pulled into it.

  I started crossing the street, Minnie clinging to my hand, while Mama put money in the meter. She waited for a car to pass and speed-walked to catch us. “Wait up,” she called, but I ignored her and didn’t slow down until I reached Inner Beauty’s orange door. Free hand on the doorknob, I watched my mother strut toward us in her pointy-toed high heels and unbuttoned trench coat. She was in one of her heavier phases, and her clothes were all too tight. She tucked in her shirts, then pulled them out in a puff at the top of her pants or skirt, presumably to hide the bulge of her stomach. According to Dad, her depression medication caused weight gain.

  “Adults don’t say wait up,” I told her. “That’s a kid thing to say.”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty, Agatha.”

  I opened the door and waited for her to go through, then nudged Minnie ahead so I could go up last. The stairwell’s paisley wallpaper reminded me of the kitchen in our old house, Mama standing at the counter chopping at vegetables in that slapdash way of hers. That kitchen had matched her, seemed made for her, even complemented her skin tone. In autumn, the sun set around the time Mama cooked dinner, and we squinted across the long shadows of the fridge and table, walls aching with rust and brown. Minnie sat in the highchair with her back to the window, pumpkin-coloured baby mohawk a fiery slash across her skull, and I sat in a pool of sunlight on the counter, and Mama’s wooden spoon stirred garlicky, spicy smells through the room to settle in our clothes and on our skin. Her hair and eyes had looked almost red in the dinner-cooking light, a fierce scarlet shining through from behind the brown.

  That day at the salon, Mama was a blight on my existence, something hateable and grotesque that I wanted to squash under my shoe. And just as Ingo Bachmann had been easily seduced, so my mother was proving easily squashed. The world was soft and pliable as rotten wood, yielding with alarmingly little resistance to my quiet, drawn-out tantrum. I watched from behind as Mama climbed the stairs, and I made a gun with my hand, aimed it at the back of her head. Pow.

  Long before that day, Dad had stopped coming to Inner Beauty with us. He started again briefly when Minnie was first born, but everyone could see he didn’t belong. With his beard and sweaters and his bulky height, he was incongruously male. It seemed right that my mother, my sister and I would venture manless into the land of bright blue swivel chairs, omnipresent mirrors, heavy odours of femininity in the making. Where beauty was applied with brushes and trimmed into shape with tiny, sharpened blades. Dustpans and garbage cans filled up over the course of the day with discarded bits, the fluffy no-good ends of smooth, bright coiffures. Old ladies sat in a row, chatting and reading magazines, their white hair in pink rollers; and Tam-Tam held court over the stylists, hair washers, eyebrow pluckers, leg waxers, manicurists, pedicurists and cosmeticians. She invited them to treat me like a doll, a guinea pig. When business lagged, my cheeks were painted pink, my eyelids shadowed blue, my head covered in braids or curls.

  I followed Mama and Minnie into the salon. Tam-Tam was at the reception desk, talking to a girl with short red hair while Cassandra arranged a display behind them. Mama and Tam-Tam kissed each other’s faces carefully, to leave makeup intact.

  “Isn’t she gorgeous,” Tam-Tam said, trying to rearrange Minnie’s hair while kissing her forehead. In her early sixties, my grandmother looked like a young fifty. She reached out to grab my hand in a bone-crushing squeeze. “You’re so tall,” she exclaimed, standing close. She said the same thing the week before, and the week before that.

  “You’re taller.”

  “Only because of my heels,” she stage-whispered.

  Minnie ran her fire truck up Tam-Tam’s black skirt. My grandmother glanced down at my sister, who was gazing up hopefully. “I’m a fireman,” Minnie told her, a little uncertainly. Tam-Tam smiled and touched Minnie’s tangled hair again.

  Cassandra crouched so she was face to face with my sister and asked how many fires she’d put out. “About fifty million,” Minnie told her, and everyone laughed except Mama, who stared past us into the bustling salon and sighed.

  Cassandra had been working for Tam-Tam for about two years, and according to Mama, my grandmother liked her air of pretty helplessness, her willingness to accept any overbearing advice sent her way. Tam-Tam watched her playing with Minnie and said, “Cassandra, you need to get your eyebrows waxed. Never mind about refilling the bottles. Go to Marcy and get that taken care of.”

  Happy to escape Mama and Tam-Tam, I followed Cassandra into Marcy’s small room, with Minnie in tow. We sat on stools while Cassandra arranged herself in what looked like a dentist’s chair. Marcy was a voluptuous woman in a fake lab coat. Dad looked like a real scientist in his lab coat, but Marcy was a Bond girl. Her lipstick extended beyond her actual lips, encircled by dark, almost purple liner like a bruise. Her breasts pushed against the white coat, and her cleavage showed when she leaned forward. I tried not to look down at my own almost flat chest. I thought of Helena and her newly grown Bond-girl chest. Dad had readily invited Helena on our family car trips and called her “kiddo,” but my mother always seemed suspicious, responding guardedly to Helena’s posing-for-a-photograph smile. Maybe Mama sensed the mistake I’d made — that I was surprised to have caught and kept Helena’s attention, not sure how I’d tricked her into noticing me and wanting my company. Mama had always been annoyed by Helena’s faux-exotic prettiness, which got her the part of Snow White in our fourth-grade play, the chief’s daughter
in our fifth-grade Thanksgiving skit and finally Tiger Lily in the school production of Peter Pan. “She’s a Disneyfied Indian princess,” Mama complained, picking me up from rehearsal. “Why is she wearing war paint while rowing sedately down a stream?” I thought Helena looked beautiful with the feather sticking up at the back of her head. I’d wanted the part of Wendy but was in the chorus of lost boys instead.

  Marcy stuck a tongue depressor in the wax and spread some on her own hand. I wondered if she, like Helena, had always had a Bond girl inside her, just waiting to bloom.

  “Ready,” she said. Fenced in by the chair’s high arms, Cassandra looked vulnerable and small, trying to appear nonchalant before her eyebrows’ impending fate. Marcy smoothed a piece of waxy fabric under Cassandra’s eyebrow and ripped it off.

  “So, Agatha,” said Cassandra, pressing her finger above one watering eye. “Tamar says I’m supposed to cut your hair today.” My hair was finally as long as I wanted it, halfway down my back. “Just those split ends.”

  I thought the slightly frayed ends were feral and sexy. I told her I needed my hair the way it was for my Halloween costume. I was going to wear a long red velvet dress that I found at the Salvation Army, with red wings I made out of pantyhose and coat hangers. “I even have red shoes,” I said.

  “What are you?” she asked. “A red angel? A devil?”

  “A red bird,” I told her.

  “A cardinal?” Marcy said. She’d finished with Cassandra’s eyebrows and was tidying her workspace.

  “I guess,” I agreed, not wanting to explain further.

  “You should dye your hair red,” Marcy said, before Minnie and I followed Cassandra out of the room, “and put black makeup around your eyes. It would be perfect.” As soon as she said it, I knew I had to do it. Bright red hair would transform me; when Mama saw my Halloween costume, she’d realize I was inescapably smarter than she was, that she could never outwit me. Everything she’d done, all her conniving and cowardice. She’d see that nothing was hidden from me, even what happened before I was born.

  It wasn’t long before I found the perfect colour on Cassandra’s chart, little bunches of different coloured hair attached to a laminated poster. “Scarlet,” I said, pointing.

  “That’s not a hair colour,” my mother argued. She slouched in the chair closest to Cassandra’s station. “This is red hair.” She pointed to her own head and Minnie’s thoroughly tangled locks. “It would be kind of neat if your hair was the same colour as ours.”

  “No way. It’s for my costume. Scarlet.”

  “You’ll look like a freak. God, with those glasses, too.” I pushed my heavy black-framed glasses up my nose with one finger and Mama shook her head. She’d begged me to wear an old, more feminine pair today, along with a different pair of shoes. The army boots, too, were part of my costume. An origami bird going into battle.

  “Scarlet O’Hara.” Mama shrugged. “O’Haira,” I almost yelled. “Get it?”

  “Yes,” my mother said. “Fine. Please lower your voice, Agatha. Your grandmother’s customers need their serenity.” A woman with foil in her hair and a leathery tan turned to glare.

  “O’Hara,” Minnie repeated. “O’Hara, O’Hara, O’Hara.” She laughed and rolled onto her back at Mama’s feet. “Ha!” she bellowed, an imitation of Grandpa Winter’s staccato laugh. When no one joined her mirth, she went limp and silent, closed her eyes and pretended to be dead, tongue sticking out at the corner of her mouth.

  Cassandra told my mother it was just semi-permanent dye, so the red would wash out within a couple of weeks. “Semipermanent,” my mother repeated. She stopped swivelling to help Minnie climb up into her lap. “Have you wondered why they don’t just call it temporary?”

  Cassandra smiled and shrugged, lifting a lock of my hair to examine it. I flicked a gooey blob of gel off the arm of my chair and it hit Mama’s wrinkled skirt. She gaped at me.

  “Sorry.” I shrugged and looked away from her with a wave of aversion. Surely neither Asher Acker nor Dad had ever kissed her with the intensity of desire that Ingo Bachmann had for me.

  I leaned forward to let Cassandra comb out the knots at the back of my head, shut my eyes and thought, Ingo Bachmann. Mama sat listless in her chair, hands clutched together around Minnie’s belly. I caught her eye and thought, Ingo Bachmann. I watched my face in the long mirror as Cassandra paint-brushed dye onto my hair, scalp to tip, and held him in my head, a smug secret. Ingo Bachmann leaning towards me over the cafeteria table. Holding my hand behind the school. Crunching my glasses painfully against my nose with his face. Kissing me. Slobbery kisses that left my whole chin wet.

  “Indigo Blackman is a freak,” Helena said. The school cafeteria was pink with lime-green tables. We usually went somewhere else to eat, but Helena hadn’t had time to leave the school because of volleyball practice. She was wearing her team T-shirt, which was straining over her breasts. Her hair was in a perky, high volleyball ponytail. “He’s a pervert,” she said. “He doesn’t bathe.”

  “How do you know? What do you mean?”

  “I know, Agatha,” she said. “Everyone knows.”

  “He looks kind of interesting.” I liked that he was tall, but not as tall as he seemed from a distance, and how he watched the ground when he walked, hair flopping into his eyes. His clothes were old and didn’t fit him quite right, and his arms and legs were too long for his body. He’d already failed history twice and looked more than two years older than the rest of the class, with his awkward height and stretched-out limbs. He sat with his fingers spread on the desk, leaning forward and looking down. Sometimes a spit ball bounced off his back, and someone would snicker.

  “Interesting?” said Helena. “Really? Why don’t you go and talk to him?”

  “Yeah,” said Helena’s friend, a blond, pig-tailed volleyball player who had pictures of shirtless body-builders in her locker. “Why don’t you suck his interesting balls?”

  Helena gave the girl a look of disdain. “Seriously, Agatha,” she said. “Go talk to him and tell me what he says. It’ll be so funny.” He was eating a sandwich by himself, drinking chocolate milk from the carton and holding a book open. I stood up. The blond girl squealed as I walked away through a bunch of ninth graders to sit down across from Ingo Bachmann.

  “What are you reading?” I asked after a few seconds, to get his attention. He held up the book. It was Kafka, in German. “Oh. My parents have that book. In English, though.”

  “Have you read it?” He still hadn’t looked at me.

  I shook my head. “My mother wanted to read it to me when I was a kid, but my father made her stop after the first page. He thought it might traumatize me.”

  His German accent drew out his words so his voice was like chanting. “I think you would like it.” Ingo Bachmann stared at me with his too-moist blue eyes, squeezed them shut and then popped them open again, frog-like, as if he might start to cry. I imagined that his tongue might pop out, stick to me and suck me in, all so fast that no one would see, and no one would ever know what happened to me.

  “Don’t you usually read comic books?” I said, thinking of the volume I’d often seen tucked inside his history textbook. He didn’t answer, and I felt my face turn red. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “I don’t know.” He didn’t respond, just smiled and tilted his head to one side. His hair wasn’t greasy that day; he must have washed it the night before. It was fluffy, and one hair in the middle of his head stuck straight up. I tried desperately to think of something alluringly eccentric and intelligent to say. Something profound and dark to show that I appreciated the pain of being misunderstood and foreign. That I understood the metaphorical significance of waking up insectile, the edge of consciousness frayed by unsettling dreams. The sleeves of Ingo Bachmann’s grey sweater were too short, the cuffs worn thin, and his fully visible wrists were obscenely lean and smooth.

  “Do you like me?” I said.

  He
blinked hard, smiled and tilted his head even further to the side. “I think so,” he said after some consideration. His lips were chapped and cherry red, and his lone vertical hair swayed gently. It didn’t occur to him that I might be making fun of him. His skin was perfectly clear, his patchy stubble a white-blond glow. I followed him out of the cafeteria and out of the school.

  “I was hiding in the library,” I told Helena later. “Where did you think I was? Making out with Indigo Blackman somewhere?”

  “Don’t even say that. I didn’t know what to think when you left with him.”

  “Yeah. Well, gotcha.”

  Ingo Bachmann was beautiful. He was so beautiful I wanted to kill him. I wanted to hold him down and take bites out of him. That’s the kind of thing he would say, blinking hard. “That tree over there is so beautiful, I want to kill it. I want to chop it into pieces.” Ingo Bachmann was all seventeen-year-old melodrama. Lying in the grass by the canal, he was tormented by the colourful leaves overhead, wrenching his floppy yellow bangs with a closed fist. The things he said would have made me blush if anyone else heard them. The thought of Helena hearing my conversations with him was unbearable. That first time, we left the cafeteria and crossed the street behind the school to stand under the trees. I pushed my forehead against the dent under his shoulder, closed my eyes to the smell of wool and deodorant and cigarettes. He rested his hand gently on top of my head. I looked up at his face, and Ingo Bachmann leaned down to meet my lips. We kissed open mouthed, breathing hard. His breath and saliva in my mouth and my nose, I wanted him to touch me everywhere, wanted to press myself against him, but he held me away, a tight handful of my shirt in his fist.