The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  “Anyway,” Jenny said. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said, and met her eyes, just for a second, but this was a mistake. They bludgeoned me with a look of such infinite kindness that I flinched and turned away.

  “Samara,” she said. “Do you want to talk?”

  “I have to pee.”

  “What?”

  “Just a sec,” I said, and locked myself in the bathroom.

  Once I was in there, I figured I might as well go. No luck. But I sat anyway, savoring my moment of freedom from Jenny’s pity—a pity that was all the more painful because it was so well-meaning. When I couldn’t put it off any longer, I flushed, turned on the water, and pretended to wash my hands. The face in the mirror had bleary eyes and chapped lips. “You look like shit,” I whispered to my reflection, and started putting on eyeliner.

  When I came out ten minutes later, Jenny was folding tiny paper cranes.

  “Hey,” she said, “do you feel like spaghetti for dinner or— Are you wearing makeup?”

  “Yeah. Have you seen my black halter top?”

  “On the lamp,” she said, pointing with the crane’s crisp beak. “Where are you going?”

  “There’s a dance thing tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “Downtown.”

  “I didn’t realize you were the clubbing type.”

  “I’m not. But, well, Hannah invited me, so.”

  She nodded at this lie, then dragged her fingernail across the crane’s back to form the tail. I pulled off my ratty T-shirt and put on the halter. I could tell she was trying not to press me for details, not to push too hard. To give me some space.

  “What time will you be home?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, dropping a kiss on her lips before grabbing my jacket and jamming my feet in my boots. “I’ll call you,” I said, even though we both knew I wouldn’t.

  I rushed out into a tangled nightwood of rank bars and dirty dance clubs, not stopping at any one place but flitting from room to room, bottle to bottle. I folded my frame into foreign bodies, and this was where I felt relief, free from how are you and I love you.

  I was never the type of girl who goes to clubs, the type of girl who parties. I was not that sort of character, that was not my story—and wasn’t that reason enough to go? I wanted to empty my mind, to free myself from the familiar. To be anyone but this unbearable person I could feel myself becoming: a heart full of anger, a head full of abstractions. So I worked my way into the center of the dance floor, letting the music crash on my ears, the bodies beat on my body. I swayed under the strobe lights and thought: This is me, on the dance floor, emptying myself. This is me stepping into an alternate storyline.

  When I got home, Jenny was asleep. I wanted to shower but knew the noise would wake her, so I stripped down to my underwear and slipped into bed beside her curled form. The clock radio read 3:48 A.M. She was drenched in moonlight.

  Jenny, my sepia girl. As a child she’d gone unnoticed by both parents: Judy, a bossy and busy lawyer, and Ira, a kind but weak and no less busy dean. Their unseeing eyes had rubbed the color right off her, so that by the time she was old enough to go to school, there was nothing left for her teachers and classmates to see. Her name sat quietly in the middle of roll call, plain and forgettable. She had a tendency to blend into backgrounds, with pale hair and skin the color of dishwasher detergent. In class photographs, her face invariably showed up as a smudge.

  Maybe that was why, when I saw her sitting across from me on my bedroom floor at age thirteen, her translucent face focused on the watercolor she was painting, I lifted my paintbrush and, on impulse, spread a faint blue streak across her cheekbone. Her eyes widened with surprise—and then she laughed. She raised her own paintbrush and staged her counterattack, the bristles reaching for my nose and forehead and eyelids, but I was too fast for her. I grabbed her skinny wrists and wrestled her to the ground. She lay under me, squirming and giggling. I stared at her mouth and suddenly it was not colorless, in fact it was bursting with color, I had never seen anything so red. I leaned down and kissed her. For a second her eyes were wide and still. Then her face twisted as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, pushed me away and ran out of the room—a room she wouldn’t enter again for almost ten years.

  For a long time afterward, Jenny steered clear of all painting. But then one day, at the age of sixteen, she told her mother she wanted to redecorate her room and her mother bought taupe paint and Jenny revolted. She began to fill canvases with bouquets of wild color, to fill white with explosions of light and profusions of impossible brightness. She showed up at the dinner table with hands splattered in oils and acrylics, flicking their exotic names off her tongue one by one: amaranth, cadmium, chartreuse, burnt sienna, vermilion, xanadu, cerulean, heliotrope, atomic tangerine. She might as well have said Fuck you.

  When high school ended, she chose Concordia over McGill, fine arts over liberal. She left the wealth of Westmount and deliberately moved into the dirtiest, shittiest apartment to be found in the student ghetto. She had money but wanted to live as if she had none. She had parents but wanted to live as if she had none. She painted in her dank apartment and waited for something she could neither name nor remember. She told herself she was learning the opposite of gray, but for all her efforts over the coming months she remained invisible.

  Until the day I showed up at her student art show, not knowing it was hers, and she let me walk her home afterward to her tiny one-and-a-half. I touched her face and, one by one, her features sprang away from the cracked wall behind her. I held her by the hip and the gray drained away. I pushed her against the wall and she laughed a vermilion laugh, feral and throaty, her mouth stained red. I kissed her there and the color spread—she was amaranth, cadmium, cerulean, heliotrope, atomic tangerine—and I pulled her into bed and inside the walls were raining, paint was pouring down, and outside the sky was darkening to a deep pitch black. In the morning, when I held the mirror up to her face, she wept the impossible tears of one who has never known what it is to see her own body.

  I never would have thought that one day those colors would sting my eyes, forcing me to look away.

  By the second week of the semester, the voices of my professors and classmates were needles entering through my ears and piercing my brain. When I looked down at my Norton anthology, the words on the page quietly picked up and rearranged themselves. How long are you going to sit here listening to this crap? the letters read. Don’t you have more important things to do? I skipped one class, then two, then three. It didn’t faze me. The letters were right; Barthes and his cronies would get along just fine without me.

  As to the “more important” things—well. My dad’s manuscript lay crumpled at the bottom of my backpack, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.

  So instead I spent every other night at the clubs, drinking and dancing until dawn. I slept in until two in the afternoon, and when I woke up, Jenny followed me around with big, worried eyes. “Don’t you have school today?” she asked. “Do you want to talk?” she asked. I pretended not to hear the panic in her voice.

  Then Saturday rolled around and Jenny started her job as a nude model. By the time I woke up, she was gone. She left me a note on one of the paper cranes: Went to sit for Kyle & co. It’s 486 Milton, in case you get lonely. Might not be back for dinner. Leftovers in fridge.

  This note filled me with an immense sense of relief—and excitement. She would be out all day, I had the place to myself, I could do anything I wanted! This excitement lasted approximately three seconds, which is how long it took me to realize that there was nothing at all I wanted to do. I picked up a novel but couldn’t focus. Poetry wasn’t any better. I tried to fold a paper crane but couldn’t remember what to do after the first few steps.

  I got dressed and went to a downtown café. When I ordered a bowl of soup, the cashier asked for my name and I told her it was Miranda, which was this thing I did sometimes. I liked to have
strangers call me by other names, names that were not my own. It made me feel like I was getting away with something, hoodwinking the universe in some small cosmic way. Five minutes later, the cashier called out “Miranda!” and a bubble of happiness floated up inside me.

  When I was done eating, I walked outside and tried to think of something else to do. What would Miranda be doing right now? She would be shopping for new shoes. They would come in unusual colors like turquoise and purple. They would be stylish but not painful. If she didn’t feel like shoe shopping, then she would almost certainly be acting in an independent film. Miranda was quirky and eccentric like that.

  Because I didn’t know how to act and couldn’t bring myself to wear turquoise, I did neither of these things. What I ended up doing was thinking, but this was a mistake. I thought about Jenny, naked, surrounded by a ring of beautiful girls with boyish haircuts and oversize glasses and androgynous names. Kyle, I was sure, would have red hair and freckles, but not in an Anne of Green Gables kind of way. In a sexy, look how cute I am as I eat an apple/hold a paintbrush/hand you your clothes kind of way. Would she trail her fingertips along Jenny’s neck, the back of her knee, the curve of her spine to guide her out of one pose and into another? I felt sure that she would.

  When I finally got home, I could hear Jenny through the front door. She was speaking in a flat gray voice, so I knew she was talking to her mother. I stood still with my key in the lock, listening to her side of the phone conversation.

  “Yeah, I just ate. She’s out, I think. How should I know? Out. No, I’m fine, I’m just tired. She’s fine. It’s okay, I got a job, I don’t need more— No, really, what you sent last week is enough. Besides, I’ve got money saved up, I never even cashed my graduation checks. What do you mean? That’s totally what savings are for. Yes, it is. Yes, it— Samara? She’s got her scholarship, that’ll tide her over for a while. What? Yes, a long while. Mom, it’s one of the biggest scholarships in the university! It’s—”

  I jiggled my key in the lock. Jenny’s voice stopped abruptly. Then: “Listen, I’ve got to go. Yeah, she just walked in. I’ll talk to you soon. No, we’re fine, I swear! Okay. Say hi to Dad. Bye.” She looked up from her phone. “Sam?”

  “Hey. How was work?”

  “Boring.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I had to hold my arm in the air for like three hours.”

  “Did it go numb?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you going to do it again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “Can you pass me that magazine?”

  For a second, Jenny looked dumbfounded. Then she handed me the magazine, and I sank into the couch and pretended to read. She sat at the kitchen table.

  “Your brother called,” she said after a while.

  “He called you?”

  “No, you. You forgot your phone at home, so. I saw his name come up on the screen.”

  I turned the page.

  “I mean, I didn’t answer or anything. But I think he left you a voice mail?”

  I got my phone from the far edge of the couch and checked my messages. Lev’s voice filled my head: Hi, um, it’s me. I started looking through Dad’s stuff, his clothes and shoes and stuff, to figure out what we should give away and what we should keep. Is there anything you want? Let me know soon because my yeshiva’s organizing a charity drive and I—

  I deleted the message.

  “Is everything okay?” Jenny said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Just saying hi.”

  “Are you going to call him back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I could go out if you want some privacy?”

  “It’s okay, I’ll call him later.”

  She didn’t say anything. Instead, she started folding another paper crane. This one was even tinier than its predecessor. I stared at my knees. She picked up a paintbrush and painted an eye onto the bird. I could feel it peeking out from under her palm, watching me.

  “Or, hey,” Jenny said, “maybe you want to write him a letter?”

  “Lev’s not really the letter-writing type.”

  “Still. Everyone loves getting mail, right?”

  I considered this, but I knew I couldn’t do it. He would want me to move back home. He wouldn’t say that, of course—he was way too good to say it—but it would be obvious. And he would be right: I should be there to help him through this, of course I should. But. I couldn’t.

  And yet, to do away with the look of kindness in Jenny’s eyes, I nodded. She handed me a piece of paper and a pen. Because she was still watching me, I scribbled Dear at the top of the page; satisfied, she turned back to her flock of tiny birds. I continued to move my hand in case she looked up again, but really I was just doodling absent-mindedly.

  Then I saw what my hand had drawn and I jumped.

  I’d sketched the Tree of Life.

  The pen fell from my palm.

  Jenny turned around and smiled at me. Even without looking directly at it, I could tell it was her brightest, most encouraging smile. It was coming. I could feel it. Three, two, one—

  “So,” she said. “How are you?”

  We went to bed early that night. Jenny gave that nudge of her hip bone that she always gives me when she wants to have sex, but I pretended not to notice and finally she gave up and fell asleep. It was cold of me, and selfish and inconsiderate and mean, but I just couldn’t help it. And I couldn’t fall asleep, either. So I stared up at the ceiling and felt guilty and thought about the Tree I’d drawn and then about my mother and how, when I was little, she used to tell me stories before bed. It was one of the few things I remembered about her. They were complicated Jewish folktales, and most kids probably conked out before the story was half-over. But I always refused to close my eyes until she got to the end and answered the question my schoolteachers had drilled into me: What is the moral of this story?

  So, for example, when my mother told me the legend of the four rabbis who entered the Garden of Eden and found the Tree of Life, counting off their fates on her fingers—“One died, one went crazy, one ‘cut down the plantings’ (not sure what that means exactly, but it’s not good!) and only one came out okay”—I asked her what the story was supposed to teach me about how to handle that kind of situation. She laughed and laughed, and I asked her what, what, until finally she told me that I had nothing to worry about, girls didn’t go wandering into holy gardens, girls didn’t climb the Tree of Life! What did girls do then, I wanted to know. Well, they grew up to be good women who married good learned men, she said, stroking my hair. And once they got married they covered their hair and raised their God-fearing children and that was that! Wasn’t I looking forward to that? Didn’t that sound like fun?

  Beside me, tangled in the moonlit sheets, Jenny shifted in her sleep.

  The next Friday, Jenny and I took the bus to Mile End and Lev greeted us at the door. His face was a pale blur above the whiteness of his button-down shirt, contrasting sharply with his black dress pants. He motioned us inside with a smile. But it was a smile hitched up by elastic bands. His eyes, big and blue and blinking fast, were untouched by it.

  As we stepped over the threshold, Jenny squeezed my hand. She knew that her presence at these Friday-night dinners was the only thing getting me through them, that if she didn’t keep pushing me to come, reminding me I was all Lev had left in this world (as if I could forget!), I would probably beg off. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him. It was just becoming too hard.

  Lev recited the blessings over the wine and the bread, and we sat down to eat. Jenny launched into a series of cheerful questions about Lev’s school life. Was he liking his yeshiva classes this year? Were the rabbis really super strict? Why did they all wear the same black coats, black hats, black shoes, and black beards? Lev fielded her questions calmly, politely, but with a strange new d
istance in his eyes.

  Then Jenny asked, “So, did Samara tell you I got a new job?”

  I shifted uneasily in my chair. I had let Jenny assume that I was speaking, or at least writing, to Lev on a regular basis. His eyes flickered toward mine, then away.

  “No, she didn’t,” he murmured. “What’s the job?”

  “Oh, it’s with these art students. They’re learning to draw the human form, and they need a model to sit for them.” Jenny paused. “Sam didn’t mention it?”

  Lev was blushing now. I could tell Jenny thought my pious brother was embarrassed at the thought of a woman’s naked form, because she swiftly changed the topic by asking if we were ready to move on to dessert. Relief eased the tension in Lev’s face; he nodded. But instead of offering to clear up, I excused myself and went down the hall.

  I had to be quick. I only had five minutes until Jenny, increasingly concerned about my mental state, came looking for me. And I didn’t want her to find me in my dad’s study again. I snuck into my old bedroom and dug my flashlight out from the space between the mattress and the wall. Then I ducked into the study and closed the door behind me, turning on the flashlight and pointing it at the desk. A beam of light illuminated the volumes scattered across the blotter.

  I grabbed the first book to hand and flipped through its pages, searching for something—an underlined passage or a dog-eared page—to help me understand my father’s fascination with the Tree of Life. Nothing. I grabbed the second book. Nothing. Growing frustrated, I went from shelf to shelf, plucking a book out at random, testing its weight in my hands, jamming it into place only to run back a moment later and pluck it out again—but still nothing.

  I slumped down at the desk in despair. Through the window, I saw Mr. Glassman’s silhouette. He was standing at his window, watching me. He raised his hand as if to wave—but, before he could complete the gesture, I killed the flashlight and ducked under the desk.