Sweet Affliction

by Anna Leventhal

  The yoga teachers tell her to do strange and impossible things, like lift her heart. “Soften your lungs.” “Soften your eyes.” “Open your chest.” Risa pictures her chest opening like the cabinet where her parents keep the good china, her guts stacked like plates and her softened lungs sitting on top like a matched pair of teacups. The man leans over Risa and murmurs into her ear, “Find your breath,” and suddenly Risa feels a wash of energy move through her legs. The man has a long, gentle face like a horse. Do he and the woman do it together, opening their chests and lifting their hearts? Risa cannot imagine it. The woman seems another animal entirely, a musky and active one, like a ferret. Risa closes her eyes against these thoughts and focuses on the column of her breath turning over and over in her glass-cabinet torso.

  After class Risa walks across the parking lot to her dad’s car. She can still hear the rasp of the woman’s breathing and her voice saying, “soften, soften, soften.” Her eyes feel blunt and smooth as fingertips. She floats to the car on waves of breathing, so light and serene and feelingless, and she senses that the expression has slipped off her face like a plate of leftovers dumped into the garbage. She slides into the passenger seat and straps herself in silently. “What,” her dad says. “What is it now?”

  “Nothing,” she says, feeling that peace and goodwill must be flowing from her in waves.

  “For godsakes,” her dad says, turning the ignition, “what are you upset about this time? Maybe it’s time to think about quitting these classes, all they do is make you miserable.”

  Risa feels her soft heart fold in on itself. Her face changes from radiant to sullen, but nobody can tell the difference.

  Wellspring

  I have a guilty secret. The secret is that no matter what happens, there lives inside me a bright sliver of joy. It’s like a hum from a machine that won’t turn off. However bad things get, however hopeless or sad I feel, there it is: zzzmmmmmmmmm.

  I’ve done many things to try to find the switch to quiet it. For years I volunteered as a counsellor at a drop-in centre for teens downtown. There I would hear stories of kids pricked by stray needles as they foraged for food in dumpsters, girls pregnant from gang rapes and unable to procure abortions, rampant diabetes in a thirteen-year-old boy that left him missing both his feet. And while I listened to them, offered sympathy and support and referrals, gave out addresses of shelters even more squalid and dangerous than the streets where they lived, I heard it.

  Zzzmmmmmmmmm.

  Joy.

  Mom calls to ask if I can bring her something, but she can’t remember what it’s called.

  “Come on, Angela, you know what I mean. It sounds tense and desperate. A clench?”

  “A clutch,” I said.

  Mom sighed. “That’s the one. Bring me my clutch, the red one.”

  My mother’s apartment is in Outremont, a few blocks away from the house where I grew up. On my way down Champagneur I spy three quarters of a smoke by the curb. It looks like a skeleton finger beckoning to me. I bend for it and as my hand goes out, a word floats down from above.

  “Hello.”

  I look up to see a young Hasid, maybe sixteen, with clear quartz skin and reddish curls showing from under his fedora. Those hats look sharp and I don’t care who knows it. “Hi,” I say, closing my hand around the butt and slipping it into my pocket.

  “Are you Jewish?” he says.

  “No,” I lie, thinking he will leave me alone.

  “Do you speak Yiddish?”

  “No.”

  “Do you speak French?”

  “No.”

  “English?”

  “No,” I say, beginning to feel like I’m in an Abbott and Costello routine. I turn to go, but the kid halts me by going “Ah ah” in a sharp voice and raising his hand. I turn back.

  “Listen,” he says. “I need you to tell me about sex.” His eyes are serious, pleading. He has that accent.

  This is not the first time this has happened. I’ve been asked to explain blow jobs and finger-banging to teenage boys in black hats ever since my family moved to this neighbourhood. Once an older man asked me to come home with him, and seemed genuinely surprised when I declined. “Why not?” he said. “I’d pay you!”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to do that,” I tell the kid, looking around. A man halfway down the block is smoking on his balcony. His eyes are shaded by the rim of his hat.

  “I really have to know,” he says. He seems so sad. What must it be like, to have wet dreams and no internet? I decide to be a grown-up about it.

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath. “There’s a penis and a vagina—”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” he says, waving his hand. “But is it fun?”

  “Well, it helps if you like the person.”

  “You only have to like them?”

  “Some people think you should love each other, but lots of people do it just for… fun.”

  He nods. Then he says, “is it big?”

  “Is what big?”

  “The hole.”

  “Uh. It’s big enough, I guess. You know, it’s not just, like, a hole.”

  His eyes widen. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s like… got skin around it, and lips, and—”

  “Lips?” I can see now this was the wrong thing to say.

  “Can I see it?” he says.

  “What?”

  “The hole, can I see it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” I say, and start to walk away.

  “Please,” he says, and reaches for my arm. I start to run.

  “You’re so pretty!” he yells after me.

  I run all the way to my mom’s apartment, three blocks.

  I use the spare key to let myself in. The silkscreened People’s History posters on the wall have been re-arranged according to colour: Judi Bari, Cochabamba, the People’s Occupation of Alcatraz, Emma Goldman, Little Bighorn. It’s just like my friends’ college dorm rooms, except my mom’s posters are dry-mounted, not stuck on with Blu Tak. I notice a new sticker on the fridge: No Love on Stolen Native Land. I locate the clutch, which is really more of a purse, beside the bed, buried under the plain white comforter.

  As I leave the building I do a quick scan for the kid, but he’s either gone or in deep camouflage. Beyond the corner is the kosher bakery, which I can smell a block away. I decide to pay a visit for the first time in years.

  A tiny woman behind the counter hustles rugelach and cheesecake and poppyseed rolls into crisp, thick brown paper bags. The crowd shouts out requests in what seems like total anarchy; there is no line, no numbers taken or called. Crumpled bills and handfuls of change flow back and forth over the glass. The smell is trance-inducing: yeast, sugar, eggs, the chemistry of rising and expansion.

  I hover near the back of the scrum, waiting for an opening, trying for eye contact with the tiny woman. A short, pudgy, well-dressed man elbows past me and cries “I need some rugelach!”

  I am startled by an older woman who touches my arm just above the elbow. Her pale hair peeks out from under a blue terrycloth turban. She is tall, though stooped, and wears a shapeless navy coat. The whites of her eyes are the colour of old snow.

  “You had better just get in there,” she says. “Since the war we don’t stand in lines no more.”

  The heat from the rugelach spreads through my backpack into my lumbar region. On Côte-Sainte-Catherine the leaves are already beginning to turn. This fall everyone is wearing something called a shrug. It is like a special covering for the gesture; it only covers the part of the body that shrugs. The bus is late, or early. I paw the butt out of my pocket, put it in my mouth and light it.

  The year I started smoking cigarettes I found on the curb was the year my dad started sleeping with The Turtle’
s wife. My sister Stacey and I boycotted our mom’s feminist Seder and in retaliation Mom started having her DIY gynecology meetings in the living room. Once I found her looking at our neighbour Ms. Knope’s cervix with a speculum, right on the green leatherette La-Z-Boy. There were a bunch of other women sitting around drinking herbal tea and gin—I could smell the juniper. Angela, come see this, Mom said, it looks just like a mini-doughnut. Dad was out somewhere, probably banging The Turtle’s wife.

  Sometime during that period I walked down Van Horne to the corner of Wiseman, right into a half-smoked cigarette, which I picked up and started huffing without even thinking about it. It was so natural, that first time; I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to get back that feeling of spontaneity. No, not spontaneity—need. I went for it like one chemical bonding with another. I was twelve.

  The Turtle wasn’t called The Turtle because of some sex thing or because he refused to come out of his shell. He was The Turtle because he played one on television. Terrence was his name, Terrence the Turtle. He was the goofy, lumbering nemesis of the rabbit in a long-running series of commercials for O’Hare Couriers. His sidekick was a snail named Susan, and there was a running gag about how he couldn’t keep up with her fast-paced lifestyle.

  He had once been a serious actor, once played Lenny in a Stratford production of The Homecoming. But no one called him Lenny.

  It was hard for me to imagine anyone marrying or even fucking him, and I guess it was hard for The Turtle’s wife too, because from what I heard my dad wasn’t the first or only person she slept with during the course of their marriage.

  The cigarette habit, at least, proved to be a relatively long-term affair. I liked the surprise of it, the feeling of being a tourist. Would it be a lung-busting King Size Export ‘A’ Green, or “one-way-ticket” as Dad called them? A husky blue-collar Pall Mall? A prim and bitchy Menthol 100? More than once I was delighted to taste the medicinal green from a half-spent cig. I carried a lighter in my cargo pants everywhere I went.

  There were also the times I would find a butt still burning, recently ejected from its owner’s lip, sometimes still damp and salty at the end: the unexpected rush, the participation in the moment, the tongue-coating tang of a stranger’s mouth.

  “Hepatitis!” Stacey used to shout at me whenever I’d make a dive for a fast-rolling butt on its way to the gutter, flecks of orange scattering from its head. I learned to make my grabs alone.

  We had grown up watching The Turtle’s commercials, had stayed with him through bad writing, poor costume choices, short-lived sidekicks of unidentifiable species and gender. We would linger on the channel if we landed on one of The Turtle’s ads. Already nostalgic for our childhoods, we felt a tenderness toward him and his message of slow-and-steady-wins-the-race. We would boo the rabbit, a grinning plushy forever knocking Terrence on his shell.

  Stacey walked around in heels and Dad’s tweed jacket, her mouth smeared with Cherry Pop! lipstick. At ten she looked like a tiny drag queen. She called The Turtle’s wife Spare Mom. This was an attitude she had cultivated in recent years, much removed from the girl so sensitive she cried when someone said she was a southpaw.

  Sometimes I wondered why Mom put up with this tacky business, Dad running out at eleven p.m., bizarre phone calls in the middle of the night.

  “Look,” said Mom. “You think you understand everything, but you don’t. You think this sounds like nonsense. Yes, I can tell by the way you’re frowning. You think you understand what love is, a prize you find at the bottom of the cereal box. You have no idea.”

  “You always told us love was a construct of the bourgeoisie,” I said.

  “We don’t eat cereal,” said Stacey, “because it overloads the pancreas.”

  “You’re killing me,” Mom said, “oh you’re killing me. I’m dead.”

  The cooled air of the hospital smells like a pretty girl’s hair. I pass the nurses’ station, on which there is a coffee cup with a picture of a coffee cup on it. Two nurses are deep in conversation.

  My mom is sitting up in bed, glaring at the TV. Her bald head and hooked nose give her the look of a wounded eagle. I’m relieved she isn’t wearing her wig, a brown bobbed thing made for someone half her age. It has short Bettie Page bangs and is made from real hair, probably from some poor Russian woman forced to sell her ponytail to feed her kids. The wig was chosen by my mother’s nurse, a tall, big-boned woman named Linda. Linda herself has a straight brown chop that hangs over her ears like two mud flaps. Her hands are very large and seem to have at least one more joint than normal. She has a deep voice that contrasts with her little girl mannerisms, like twirling the hair by her ear as she talks. Her eyes are green and striking.

  Once she told me she had a new invention for dental floss.

  “Oh yeah?” I said.

  “Yep. Wanna know what it is?” Before I could answer, she said “Cinnamon buns!”

  “As a flavour?” I said. My mother, who was sitting out of Linda’s line of sight, caught my eye and made a loop-de-loop gesture by her temple—the international sign for total fucking nutbar.

  “Nooooooo,” Linda said, drawing her lips up into a smooch. “For cutting them! Because a knife gets too sticky.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow is right!”

  There is something new and bizarre in the corner of the room, a face made out of what looks like bread dough, with blank holes for eyes and a tangle of curly yellow yarn on top like a kid’s drawing of pubic hair. Paper wings protrude from either side of the head like scalloped ears. It’s holding a wooden placard that reads Friends are angels that come from above. Sent down from God for you to love. So if you are sad and don’t know what to do. Just remember that I care for you! I have no idea how it got there. It must have been left by the woman who occupied the room’s other bed, who is no longer there. I try not to think about where she might be now.

  The whole scene is making me feel terrible for my mother, who hates sentimentality like poison. “I know a woman,” she once told me, “who saved a noodle that fell out of the pot and onto the red-hot burner and didn’t burn. She framed it and hung it on the wall so its message could inspire her. I am doing everything I can not to become that woman.”

  Myself, I’m trying not to become the noodle.

  “I brought rugelach,” I say, holding out the bag.

  “Oh God, take that away,” she says. “I can’t so much as look at food right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thank you though.”

  “I brought a book too. There’s a new Chomsky I thought you might like.”

  “How sweet. Put it there.” I start to put it on the night table, but she gestures toward the drawers. “No, no, in there,” she says, “I need that clear, for my dinner tray.”

  “But how will you read it?”

  “Well I’ll get it out when I’m ready for it, dear, obviously.” Which I have to admit is reasonable enough.

  When Stacey and I were kids Mom used to give us a morning glass of apple cider vinegar cut with water. Drinking it was mechanical enough, though sometimes it would have a slimy gob of mother at the bottom. It was like swallowing an oyster. I would grimace as it slid sown my esophagus; it seemed like I could feel it the whole length of its journey to my gut.

  “Why do they call it mother?” I asked once.

  “Because it’s the omnipotent wellspring of reproduction and health,” said Mom.

  “Because it’s supposed to be good for you but makes you want to barf,” said Stacey. Mom smiled and put her hands on our shoulders. “You’ll thank me for this one day,” she said, like a mom on TV.

  Stacey and I started referring to her as Omnipotent Wellspring after that. We didn’t call Dad anything.

  Now my mom says “I’m dying for a fag.”

  “Mom, you can’t say that.”

  “I believe I
just did.”

  I fumble out a smoke from my pack. She puts it behind her ear, a gesture that recalls a younger version of herself with a pencil, hunched over her desk, making sketches for an illustration for Tikkun or Mother Jones.

  “Remember how Leanne’s working on the set of The Man of Ville Emard as a dresser?” I ask her. “The director told her she was so beautiful he’s going to make a part for her in his next film. Isn’t that hilarious? What a sleaze.”

  “Why would she tell you that?”

  “Because it’s funny?”

  “It’s a bit vain, no?”

  “I think she just thought it was an amusing story.”

  “‘You’re so beautiful I’m going to put you in a movie.’”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “To be funny.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that really what you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. Maybe you’re right. Some people need to pump themselves up to feel good, though.”

  “Mom!”

  “I just think that maybe Leanne is a little insecure, and that’s why she tells you these things. She’s nowhere near as pretty as you are.”

  “This isn’t about me! And, excuse me, she’s ridiculously pretty. Everyone thinks so.”

  “If you say so.”

  “What?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Okay. Forget I brought it up.”

  We sit in silence for a while.

  “What in the name of God is that,” I say, pointing to the angel.

  “What?”

  “That hideous angel.”

  “Oh,” Mom says, “someone here gave me that. I thought it was kind of cute.”