“I wish we had a cat. Why can’t we, Papa? Why?”
His mouth closes tightly, his encircling arm drops. Toni isn’t sure whether he’s annoyed by her question or troubled by the absence of a cat in their lives.
“The cat was actually supposed to be for my sister. To keep her company. She was often ill.”
“What was wrong with her?”
He doesn’t answer. He stares out the window at the dark brick wall. Then, after a long uncomfortable silence he says, “The cat was afraid of her.”
“Why?” Toni shrills. Suddenly, she, too, is afraid, because of the hollow sound of his voice and the sudden stiffness in his limbs. He turns from the window and fixes her with the strangest expression, as if he sees not Toni, but some terrible ghost, and this look takes her voice away, so that while she wants to call out to him, she can’t. The cry lies frozen in her throat. Now he turns away again, his eyes blank and empty, his body like unfeeling wood, all of him unreachable. PapaPa-paPapa. The words knock against each other but can’t find their way to her lips. She slides from his knee.
“There’s a good girl,” the hollow voice says.
“Show me another book?” she manages to whisper.
But nothing moves in his face except for the blink of eyelids over cold grey jelly. She slips away out of the room, closing the door noiselessly behind her to shut out the unbearable sight of her absent Papa. The spell could last a minute or a long, long time. Somehow it’s her fault. She made him disappear. Her wrong question, or maybe it was just her careless jostling against his shoulder, broke some invisible string. One moment he was her Papa, the next moment a puppet severed from the things that hold him up and make him work.
In her parents’ bedroom, in the closet behind her mother’s dresses and her father’s suits, lies a metal chest about the size of a breadbox. Toni knows how to creep unseen into the closet, half closing the door behind her, unlock the chest with the key from the hook in the corner and settle herself noiselessly on the dusty floor. Inside the box, among bundles of uninteresting papers, is an envelope with a few cracked photos. Toni slips them out one by one and holds them up to the shaft of light. The lost relatives.
They wear old-fashioned outfits like in a Major Hoople cartoon: the men have waistcoats, fedoras, round spectacles; the women wear long, dark, tight-fitting suits and hats like bowls pulled down over their ears; and the children have round, shocked eyes and serious mouths. Among the children in the photos she recognizes her father, though there’s no beard, of course, no furrows across the brow. What connects that face with her papa now are the pale, moody eyes and the long reedy body. In one photo, he wears a sailor suit and holds the hand of a blonde little girl in a white dress, white stockings, white shoes, and an absurd white bow like a huge butterfly perched on her head. Is this the girl who scared the cat? She looks no stranger than any of the others. We should put them into an album, her mother sometimes says of these photos, but her father looks away. One time he did consent to tell Toni who was who. Sister, mother, father, uncle this, auntie that, cousin so-and-so. He jabbed his forefinger at the people, spoke in a flat, weary voice, as if they were strangers to him, too. Now she can’t remember any of what he said. A washed-out, grainy blur of faces gazes back at her.
chapter 4
June has come. The breezes that blow through open windows smell of earth, dust, lilacs, cut grass, the meaty turds left curbside by the horse that pulls the Borden’s Milk truck through the streets. At Goyette’s corner store, they’ve started selling ice cream cones again—vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, Neapolitan—a nickel apiece. At Saint Joseph’s Oratory, pilgrims recite a prayer on each step while ascending a long outdoor stairway on their knees. The Mountain is in bloom, and that great blue sea of time—summer holidays—beckons.
Nine-year-old Toni gets ready for her school day with the resignation of a soldier preparing for the trenches. Slipping on the uniform— white blouse, pleated navy blue tunic, and spit-polished Oxfords—she becomes that other self: quiet and studious, good sport, blackboard monitor, nobody’s special friend, but nobody’s enemy either. In the bathroom, she scrubs her hands to raw pinkness. Her mother, rushing by in her housecoat, pauses by the open bathroom door to comment.
“Amazing. Such a schlump on our street, such a neatnik at school.”
Lisa smiles a knowing smile that says: You’re not such a lost cause as you pretend to be. You really are my little girl at heart. There’s no way to explain to her mother about the two separate realms that require Toni to be two different people. And even if she could explain, it wouldn’t change a thing. She checks her nails for stubborn bits of grime. Their teacher—the frosty, aloof, and terrible Miss Muir—once stopped at Toni’s desk while patrolling the aisles.
“My, my, what filthy nails!” Miss Muir exclaimed.
Her tone made Toni feel the hold-your-nose horror of the unclean, and everyone snickered. There were boys with grubbier paws in the class. Miss Muir was so offended because this particular set of nails belonged to a girl, which made the dirt beneath them inexplicable and especially dark. Toni made an inner vow to never again give cause for such scorn.
Surveying herself now in the bathroom mirror, Toni decides a tunic is not as bad as a dress. A dress is nothing but a flimsy curtain, insubstantial as the little pig’s straw house, whereas a tunic is made of solid, dark, pleated, no-nonsense material that falls to her knees. And the crisper the pleats, the tidier the belt, the shinier her shoes, the better the outfit can be imagined into the uniform of the Lone Ranger. It’s a stretch. It requires eyes-squeezed-shut concentration until the dream takes hold. Hi ho Silver, away!
Before leaving the house, Toni pauses in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom to watch her mother at work on herself with creams, powders, lipstick, pencils, pincers, tweezers, and inky black stuff from a tube with a tiny spiral brush. Putting on a face, it’s called. As if Lisa’s morning-pale cheeks and unpainted lips were not the real thing, the face, but instead, a filmy, ghostly mask that could vanish in the bright light of day. Seated at the dressing table in her peach-coloured slip, Lisa brings a pinching apparatus up to her left eye and squeezes down on the scissors-like handle. She holds the pincer in place while her eyelids quiver.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
Lisa’s free eye slides sideways to observe her daughter watching.
“We must suffer to be beautiful.”
She smiles. Her mouth, not yet coated with lipstick, looks soft, naked, and vulnerable, like a flower petal about to fall off its stem. With deft strokes of the little spiral brush, Lisa lengthens and blackens her eyelashes, then flutters them at Toni, who turns away.
“Yech!”
“One day soon you will be begging me to let you put on makeup. Oh yes, you will. A mother knows.”
Toni says nothing. When Lisa moves to the closet to choose her outfit for the day, Toni snatches one of the golden tubes of lipstick from the dressing table and slips it into her book bag. The gleaming finger of red, so much finer and brighter than a crayon, will come in handy. Later.
In the alley behind their apartment building, Toni meets tubby Peter and squinty-eyed Nick, two boys from her gang who go with her to Jubilee School. Her other buddies, Arnold and Frank, attend a Catholic school beside a tall-spired church run by black-robed nuns. Ashie and Shevie—the Nuts, as the gang has come to call the Nutkevitch twins— head off early with their father on a bus every morning to a remote, mysterious part of town to attend a school for Jewish kids only.
During the entire long, carefree walk toward Jubilee, through the tree-lined streets and vacant-lot short cuts, Toni, Peter, and Nick amble and tumble together. They bump shoulders, take turns kicking stones, and share licorice strings like the best of pals. But the moment they reach the outer edges of the school yard, the brotherly trio comes apart. Peter and Nick dash off without a word to join a ball hockey game in the area that by common understanding belongs to boys alone. This territory takes up
a broad semi-circular swath, stretching to the fences, fields, and streets—the outer borders of school premises—while the girls’ sphere consists of that inner space near the doors and walls. There’s no question of Toni following the guys. Nothing personal. Just how it is. At school, the divisions are plain and firm.
Instead, Toni heads for the Double-Dutch skipping game in progress near the steps beneath the doorway engraved with the words “Girls’ Entrance.” Though she never skips—those silly, mincing hops are beneath her dignity—Toni doesn’t mind turning rope. She whirls them in fast-moving arcs, standing with legs slightly apart like a cowboy who rustles steers. As feet scuffle and voices chant, Toni dreams herself back into the world of the Lone Ranger until Karen Weissbloom appears. When she sees Karen, Toni’s heart goes “plop,” like a puppy falling into a bath of cold water, and then beats hard. Her palms tingle as if something’s about to slip from her hands. She has to concentrate to make sure the two whirling ropes don’t collide. What is it about Karen Weissbloom? She’s the girliest of girls, yet in a totally different category from the squealing, giggling Nutkevitch twins. Karen is the angel on the Christmas tree, the Sugarplum Fairy, Tinker Bell, and Snow White, all rolled up in one. She has silky tresses of honey-blonde hair, dimpled cheeks, tender eyes, and a mouth like a cherry lollipop. Karen isn’t just pretty, she’s sweet, with a warm, trusting smile for everyone, as if she couldn’t imagine a mean thought in anyone’s heart. Toni never speaks to Karen. Just watches her, aware of Karen’s halo glow.
Miss Muir is teaching geography. Who knows the names of the Great Lakes? Would someone please do her the favour of raising a hand? With arched brows, she eyes the bowed heads, the squirming bodies trapped behind desks. She makes an “O” of disappointment with her lips. But it’s not real disappointment. There’s haughty triumph in the way her graceful head swivels on its long neck when she scans the class for someone reckless enough to think they know the answer.
Miss Muir hails from Scotland, the pink place at the very top of the pink expanses known as Britain and Her Dominions on the map of the world. She is tall, slender, and beautiful in an evil-queen sort of way, with pencilled eyebrows, ice-blue eyes, porcelain skin, and chestnut hair done up in a tight French roll. In the lapel of her tweed suit jacket a silver brooch shaped like a thistle sends out dark gleams. She’s a stickler for spelling.
“Gels and boys,” she often says. “Nothing so marks you as an ignorrrramus as the incorrect spelling of homonyms.”
She utters the “g” of “gels” deep in her throat, like a growl.
Now, as Miss Muir prowls the class, she wonders aloud why no one knows the answer to her simple question. Has no one done his homework? Toni has. She could rattle off, “Ontario, Erie, Huron, Superior, Michigan,” because those big, fine names have sunk into her mind along with the names of the explorers and coureurs du bois. But she doesn’t raise her hand because the words disintegrate on her tongue under Miss Muir’s cool, amused, unnerving gaze. And anyway, Toni would rather vanish into dreams. A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hi ho Silver, away! The Lone Ranger! It’s easy to disappear. She’s been playing that trick ever since she can remember, slipping out of her body, leaving a ghost of herself in the chair. She appears to be completely present, hands folded on her desk, back straight, while her mind splits: one part keeping track of Miss Muir, the rest taking a holiday wherever it pleases. The seat she’s chosen helps: front row, off to the side near the window. She’s just a blur in the periphery of the teacher’s vision.
Flinty eyes sweep the room in search of a victim. Miss Muir’s voice rings out above the shuffling and uneasy whispers.
“Karen Weissbloom,” the teacher commands. “Stand up, gel. Tell me the names of the Great Lakes.”
The chair legs scratch across the floor as Karen rises. Toni’s dream flies away, and she focuses on the girl whose pretty face pales, then blushes red, a flood of hot colour rising up from the tender V of chest framed by her regulation white blouse.
Silence. Heavy, monumental silence.
“Well?” Miss Muir’s eyes bore into their victim. “Surely you know at least one of the names.”
Karen’s lips move, but no sound comes out. Her inability to speak prolongs the torture. She’s too delicate a lamb, too much the gentle princess, sweet and unsuspecting and used to adoration, to deal with the likes of Miss Muir. Cupping a hand to her cheek, Toni frantically mouths the answers, but Karen doesn’t see. The golden head hangs, hiding the angel face behind a curtain of hair. Toni wants to put her hand up—Choose me, choose me instead—and save her darling from further disgrace. But what if that’s the wrong thing to do? What if everyone thinks she’s just showing off? Worst of all, what if Miss Muir, with her uncanny knack for peering deep into the dark corners of the heart, roots out some blemish of the soul, some bit of filth that escaped Toni’s notice until now, and blows it into daylight on a wind of cruel, disdainful remarks, and it is Toni twisting, cringing, blushing, and suffering in front of the class instead of Karen? What if?
Tap, tap, tap, goes Miss Muir’s wooden pointer, a relentless beat against the linoleum floor. Karen’s classmates squirm in sympathy, but not a word emerges from anyone’s mouth. Finally, the teacher lifts a weary hand to her brow.
“Oh, sit down. Really, this class is tiresome today.”
A sigh whispers through the room, the expelled breath of thirty-one pupils who have been sitting on the edge of their chairs. When the recess bell finally rings, even Miss Muir’s dagger eyes can’t keep them all from exploding from their seats and stampeding out the door toward the brilliant June sunshine. In the yard, a cluster of friends circle Karen, touch her hands and hair, murmur words of consolation in her ear. Toni watches from a few feet away, hands in her jacket pockets, one of which holds the treat she has been saving, a Lowney’s Cherry Blossom. She likes to savour it slowly, to eat with understanding as Lisa puts it, by nibbling a hole in the chocolate shell, sucking out the cream, and squeezing the maraschino cherry between her teeth. But the thought now comes that she could offer the Cherry Blossom to Karen. “Here!” she’d say, and the soft blue eyes would melt with gratitude. As she starts to walk over, the friends press closer so that Karen disappears behind a wall of bodies. The huddle becomes a single creature with many giggling heads. Giggling at Toni? Telling secrets? A chant rises up from the huddle:
“All in together, girls,
It’s fine weather, girls,
When is your birthday?
Please jump in!
January, February, March … ”
Indeed they are girls, the whole stupid bunch of them, Karen included, singing one of those cutesy skipping songs that sets Toni’s teeth on edge. They don’t know that’s how she feels. They don’t know a thing about her, and that’s just fine. She doesn’t care. School is in-between time anyway.
Off with the tunic, on with the real clothes, the rumpled trousers and T-shirt that lie on the floor of her closet. They are soft with use, smell of grass, dirt, gum, and have absorbed the neighbourhood into their fibres. Heart singing, muscles on fire, Toni races across the street and into the thick, green woods. Whooping and wild like a TV Indian she runs, crashing through the underbrush, stumbling and muddying the heels of her hands on the path. Coming, guys. Coming, coming. Golden light pours down out of the late afternoon sky, making the leaves overhead glow like jewels. Gasping for breath, she arrives at the meeting place, the pond circled by mud-caked rocks, swarming with tadpoles and water-bugs.
“Yay, here’s Toni,” yells Peter, clapping her on the shoulder and making her stumble, though he doesn’t mean to. Peter’s like Tubby in the Little Lulu comics, a bowling ball of a kid, heavy and clumsy, charging blindly in their games and taking others down with him. Nick, the Greek, is skinny, quick, and cunning with his feet, one of which he now winds around Toni’s ankle while his hands shove. It takes all her will to keep from flying sideways into the pond. They shuffle and grunt for se
veral moments until Toni takes advantage of her greater height to regain ground and gives Nick her wild dog look—teeth bared, face steaming. He breaks into a just-kidding grin. He knows she’s capable of a sudden burst of fury that can undo his manoeuvres and deliver painful kicks to the shins. Standing back, he lets rip with the first half of the Woody Woodpecker cry: “Hee, hee, hee,” then stops so she can finish it. “Haw, haw,” she shouts. They both convulse in giggles. From his perch on a flat-topped rock, Frankie, “the Squirt,” watches this out of his pinched, serious face and his forever-smeary glasses. Though Frank’s a pipsqueak, there’s never been any question about him belonging to the gang. The gang was formed long ago, before any of them can remember, and once you’re in, you’re in for good. Arnold, their captain, leans against a tree and whittles arrows out of saplings. Whip, whip, goes the blade of his penknife, stripping off grey bark to expose the moist, white wood. Toni approaches to get a better look at the arrows and the beautiful, slicing blade.
“Hey, Arnold. What are we playing? Indians and Settlers?”
Arnold shrugs. “Maybe,” he says.
He likes to keep his men in line. He likes to keep everyone guessing. Arnold is half a year older and half a head taller than the rest of them. He has a narrow, foxy face, dark curly hair tumbled over his brow, and a know-it-all smile. But he does know things: wrestling moves, how to pinch candy from under Goyette the grocer’s nose, how to sneak fags from his dad’s overalls, and what the “F” word really means. Arnold’s father was wounded in the war, so now one leg is shorter than the other, but that doesn’t stop old man Mackay from booting his son to kingdom come when he’s mad. Sometimes Arnold wears purple bruises all over his body. And that makes him even more of a captain.
Girl Unwrapped Page 4
