Girl Unwrapped

by Gabriella Goliger

  “Yes! The leftovers.” Sharon shrieks at the memory.

  “Yech!” the others chime in.

  “She got weirder and weirder.”

  “Her parents finally took her out of school, thank God.”

  “What happened to her then?” Faye asks in a serious tone.

  “I dunno,” Angela shrugs. “Probably the mental asylum. She’s probably still groping her petunia.”

  Everyone howls with horrified laughter, even Faye. The twins never glance upward in Toni’s direction as they speak. They don’t have to. She can feel Liz, the ape-girl, the mental case, raging and hideous, inside herself. Her heart flutters like a trapped moth. She wishes she could summon righteous anger—You, you are the ugly ones, you alone—but the best she can do is feign indifference, gripping her paperback between sweaty fingers. For the past couple of days, during lulls between activities, she’s been devouring Exodus, swept along in the thrilling saga, fighting alongside its heroes through every chapter, burning with their loves. But now Liz the Lezzie takes over. The printed words swim on the page.

  In the days that follow come more Liz stories. There are dirty jokes, whispered secrets, sudden bursts of laughter that erupt at the mere raising of an eyebrow, the mouthing of code words, the flick of a lizardly tongue.

  chapter 10

  Fish like black needles flit near Toni’s feet. Lacy shadows ripple along the sandy bottom of the little bay, and beyond, the silvery lake shimmers beneath a hot blue sky. Toni rubs her mosquito-bitten legs against sun-warmed granite. Nice spot she’s found. Private. The yelp of kids at Camp Tikvah sounds like the mew of far-off gulls. She takes another swig from the bottle.

  It is pleasing to put her lips to the glass mouth, to tip her head back. It is rude, wild, naked, and angry. Wine pours in a silky gush into her belly. The first gulps had made her sputter. They burned her throat and made sweat pour from her forehead into her eyes. Then a pleasant numbness spread through her limbs, her tongue grew large, likewise her hands. Invincible. She drinks with understanding. She has a plan: to get very, very drunk.

  To find this secluded bay, she’d hurried along a muddy track behind the boathouse through a half-dried-up marsh and then fought her way through tangled bush. She pushed at the branches with her free hand while clutching the wine bottle hidden beneath her shirt with the other. Just when she thought she could go no further, she glimpsed the beckoning rock, a bare, pink-veined boulder overlooking the bay.

  The bottle she’d snatched so quickly and carried away beneath her shirt turned out to have a screw top. Lucky! She didn’t expect to feel so good. Just wanted to feel not so bad. She’s surprised now at the laughter at the tip of her big, floppy tongue, and how the village across the lake seems to float in the air. She glugs down some more of the wine. A brown duck lands, feet first, in her little bay and begins to paddle toward a clump of arrow weeds.

  “Cheers,” Toni calls out. The startled creature takes off again with a nervous flutter of wings. Toni clutches her sides. Too funny.

  Perhaps she will go into the water. That would be nice, to float on her back and gaze at the clouds, to lie there until the sky turns indigo and the winking stars appear.

  “To life,” she howls.

  “Ai, ai,” the lake softly echoes.

  Back at the Culture Hall, they’re rehearsing Fiddler on the Roof. Golde asks Tevye if he loves her, his daughters beg the matchmaker for husbands, the entire village, in shawls, rubber boots, and cotton-batten beards bawl out the chorus: “To life, to life, l’chayim.” Janet coaxes music out of their throats. But where is the papier mâché goat? Where is the production assistant who was supposed to bring the goat from the arts and crafts room? Missing. Oh no, our Toni is missing. Send out a search party. The entire cast, Janet out in front, runs toward the woods. Maybe an angel will lead Janet to this spot. Oh, I was so worried.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe no one has noticed. Maybe no one misses the goat, either. It wasn’t finished anyway, was still a stiff wad of drying newspaper in the arts and crafts room. So Toni took a detour. She approached the staff house, tapped at a certain door, entered Janet’s room. Janet’s guitar lay on the bed, its neck resting on the pillow, as if it were taking a nap. The sight of the lovely blond-wood instrument brought a new ache into Toni’s heart. She lay down and curled around it, drawing her knees up beneath its curved bottom. The strings uttered a soft murmur as she settled in. She pressed her cheek against the tuning keys and lay for a long time as the cool wood absorbed the warmth of her thighs and fused with her sweaty skin. Now and then she plucked a string. The vibrations soothed her aching chest. When at last she shifted her body, she heard a clunk and a rolling sound beneath the cot. She put her eye to the gap between the bed and the wall and saw a wine bottle rolling back and forth among the dust bunnies.

  “Ha!” she yells now, throwing her head back and looking straight up at the sun.

  “Ah, ah,” the lake responds.

  She flings the empty bottle onto the pebbled shore where it shatters with a satisfying crash. Heaving a great sigh, she staggers on Frankenstein legs into the bush, both arms flailing. She plunges from woods into marsh.

  Tall reeds surround her, blocking her way. Knife-sharp edges slice into her skin. Blood mingles with sweat on her arms and legs. Ooze sucks at her feet. Something furious buzzes in her ear, takes a juicy bite out of the side of her neck. Where in this stinking swamp is the high ground with the solid track? Vanished. Shit, shit, shit. She is drowning in reeds. Within the fog of confused thought, a hard, alert kernel of fear awakes. She’s in trouble. Help!

  And then she’s on hands and knees, panting and laughing, howling with laughter, because the marsh has given way to a grassy bank, beyond which she sees the familiar green boards and white window frames of the boathouse.

  “Pick myself up. Start all over again,” she chortles, shouldering a paddle plucked from a hook on the boathouse wall. She stomps along the dock where the canoes are moored. She has a date with a canoe. She will cross the lake, find the stream that snakes into the wilderness, follow the current like the voyageurs of old. “Radisson, oh Radisson,” she sings as she struggles with the knot on the mooring line. But who’s this calling her name? Why, it’s Faye! Little elfin Faye has come up behind her on the dock and wrings her hands in the most comical manner.

  “Hi there, Faye. Wanna come for a ride?”

  She barely gets the words out. That floppy, furry tongue!

  “Oh, Toni! You’re all wet and muddy and bleeding. What happened? I was looking all over. Lorna sent me to find you.”

  “Where’s Janet?” Toni sighs, sinking onto her backside.

  “Janet? I guess she’s in the dining hall with everyone else.”

  The dock sways crazily when Toni springs to her feet. Canoes clunk together as she lunges past Faye. Up the slope she marches, on ground that heaves like a sea. Onto the dining hall veranda, her soggy sneakers slapping the boards. She flings open the door. From the hush in the room she can tell they are about to recite a Sabbath eve blessing. There is the white-garbed Sabbath Queen, having just lit the flickering candles. And there’s Janet. Lovely, flaming-haired, freckle-cheeked Janet. Blessed are you, Lord of the universe …

  A roar rises in Toni’s throat. Heads turn, faces freeze. Nothing matters now but to tell the true story. There may never be another chance. She needs to explain that, despite all the weak-willed, shameful, under-the-blanket episodes (which she has renounced finally, for good and all, she swears it), her love is pure, decent, undying, worthy. Far worthier than anything any dumb guy like Hank or Alain has to offer. She’s not the Lizzie type, nothing like that. Furthermore, the twins are cockroaches. A torrent of words pours from her mouth.

  Janet looks like the woman in the horror movie who has just seen Godzilla loom into view and whose fascination is about to turn into terror. No, no, Janet! Please understand! Toni lunges. Arms restrain her. Someone pinions her to his side, shuffles her out the doo
r. Someone’s saying “Whoa! Whoa!” as if talking to a runaway horse. She’s half-dragged, half-carried along the veranda, down the steps, her head bouncing like a rubber ball. “Stop,” she manages to gasp. They come to a halt, and her bearers allow her to sink to her knees.

  The world goes black.

  Myron’s office is stifling, cramped and crowded with shelves, a filing cabinet, and an oversized desk, behind which Myron sits in his swivel chair, regarding Toni gravely. Perched on the edge of a metal chair, she looks down at her scratched, welted legs. She wishes Myron wouldn’t stare so intently, as if he wants to bore a hole in her skull and examine the contents. The oscillating fan on the window ledge stirs the papers on the desk and the tufts of hair on the sides of Myron’s otherwise bald head, but the breeze doesn’t reach Toni. Sweat trickles down behind her ears.

  A dish of shelled peanuts sits amid the papers by Myron’s elbow. He runs his tongue along his teeth and lifts the dish toward her, inviting her to partake. Her throat constricts at the odour of masticated nuts on his breath. She began her day with her head bowed over the infirmary toilet.

  “Sorry. Forgot.” Myron utters a sympathetic groan. “I know just what that’s like. The self-inflicted wound.”

  She looks up quickly and sees how his brow knits and his mouth scrunches up, as if he can feel the pain at her temples. Then he smiles broadly. There’s peanut goo in his teeth.

  “I tied on a few when I was a freshman at McGill. In the morning, I’d wish I hadn’t been born.”

  He chuckles softly at the memory of those raucous nights and wretched awakenings. It’s hard to imagine Myron as anything but what he is now, plump and balding and slow-moving, like a walrus.

  “Of course, I was much older than you. I was legal, at least.” He cocks his head, still smiling but narrowing his eyes, as if taking aim. “Where in heaven’s name did you get that stuff, whatever it was you drank, to get so drunk?”

  Toni’s shoulders stiffen, she ducks her chin and mutters.

  “What?” He cups his hand around his ear. “Can’t hear you.”

  She repeats, more audibly this time, “I don’t remember.”

  Her eyes fix on her jiggling knees. She hears his doubting grunt and his fingers scrabbling in the dish, the crunch of peanuts. She remembers more than she cares to. It is true that whole swaths of yesterday have vanished, but certain moments leap out of the dark. A chaos of scenes. The marsh, the whipping reeds, a flapping duck, Janet’s frozen horrified stare. Toni can smell rotted vegetation, wine, and vomit beneath the odour of peanuts.

  “Did someone give you liquor?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What did you actually drink? Beer? Spirits? Wine?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Who else was with you?

  “No one!” she says, glancing up in surprise. “I was by myself.”

  “And that you do remember?”

  She ducks her head. She twists her hands together in her lap.

  “Look at me, please, Toni. That’s better. You’re protecting someone. I wish you wouldn’t. I’m not seeking to lay blame, I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

  As he studies her, Myron pinches his fleshy lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, tugs it outwards and lets it snap back like a piece of rubber. The silence in the room stretches out for what seems an eternity.

  “Would you feel more comfortable talking to Shirley?” Myron asks in a gentler tone.

  Toni shakes her head hard. Not Shirley, the infirmary nurse (and Myron’s wife). Toni doesn’t want to meet those frank appraising eyes, that annoyed expression, the one Shirley wears when a child comes in with mosquito bites scratched raw. What have you done to yourself now?

  If only they’d just let her crawl back to her bed in the infirmary. She wants to bury herself again in the cool, clean, pressed linen.

  “If Faye hadn’t stopped you, you might have gone off in that canoe and drowned. Have you thought of that? Have you thought of how that would be for your parents?”

  His tone is sharp now, has lost its chummy warmth. But nothing happened, she wants to say, though she almost wishes something had. Drowning seems preferable to twisting around on the hard metal chair waiting for the more awful questions that are sure to come: What’s this about being in love with Janet? What were you trying to do last night? Kiss her? That’s what it looked like to everyone watching.

  “You were on the dock.” Myron continues, relentless. “You were drunk as a skunk.”

  “I’m sorry,” she wails, clutching her head. “It was stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  “Yes,” he agrees and snorts. “I’m glad you realize that. We’re getting somewhere if you do.”

  She stares at him again, at the nasty ironic smile on his lips, anger welling up. How could he not know how desperately idiotic and ashamed she feels?

  “You say you were alone. You drank yourself into a stupor. Why?”

  “Just for the hell of it.”

  “Well, well,” Myron falls silent, fiddling with his moustache. “You are obviously a very troubled young person, Toni Goldblatt. Those first few weeks of camp you were having some difficulty adjusting, but that’s not unusual, and then you seemed to settle in.”

  He flips open a file folder at the top of the stack in front of him, scans the page inside. “You got your Junior’s swimming badge. You learned to paddle stern. You volunteered for the musical. You were liking camp better, weren’t you?”

  She nods.

  “You developed a strong attachment to Janet Bloom. That’s perfectly normal too. I believe she’s been a good influence, all in all.”

  He says this with no particular emphasis. If he notices, he does not care to acknowledge the heat that flames Toni’s face to the tips of her ears.

  “I have to conclude these troubles of yours came with you to camp. There are some things we’re not equipped to deal with at Camp Tikvah. Your parents will have to get to the bottom of … the situation. I spoke to your mother this morning. She is coming to get you. Perhaps that’s best. What do you think?”

  Toni nods dully. Yes, it would be best. Facing her parents would not be half as bad as spending another minute at Camp Tikvah. Suddenly she longs for the sight of her father’s car.

  Myron leans his elbows on the desk, his cheek against his fist, and studies her with a strange expression as if unsure what to make of her. But the puzzled frown and the half-closed eyes also make him look sleepy, and she has the funny thought that he might nod off in this position. Then abruptly he jumps up and glides around to the front of the desk with surprising ease, considering he’s so chubby and the space so narrow. She gets up too, less gracefully, rattling the metal chair. He puts his hand on her shoulder and pats it lightly.

  “You’re a decent girl, Toni, I’m sure of it. You need help, professional help, but you’ll be fine.” His voice swells with false heartiness. “Maybe one day you’ll be back with us at Camp Tikvah. In the meantime I hope that all the good things you’ve learned and experienced here will serve you well.”

  The hand on her shoulder steers her toward the door. As she’s about to exit, the hand grips and holds her back.

  “I think I know where the booze came from. That guy in the kitchen. Alain Dubois. It’s him, isn’t it? Okay, you don’t have to say a word. I can see it in your face. I never like when the kitchen staff fraternize with the campers.”

  One final squeeze to her shoulder and he pushes her out the door. From beyond the screened windows of the Camp Tikvah office come the sounds of an ordinary day: yells from the baseball field, distant singing, an announcement on the P.A. about tonight’s bonfire. Already none of this has anything to do with Toni. She slumps on the beaten-up vinyl couch and hopes her mother will arrive before any Tikvah-maniac can discover her here. Hey, it’s the sicko, the barfing drunkard, the … No, she won’t let herself think of the other names being whispered from ear to ear.

  Farther inside the roo
m, Bunny, Myron’s niece, who is also camp secretary, pecks out a letter on a typewriter. Her ponytail quivers with the effort of concentration. Staccato bursts of tapping are interrupted by Bunny’s curses as she stops to apply gobs of Wite-Out over her mistakes. She’d barely looked up when Toni entered the room with her duffel bag over her shoulder. Parked at the bottom of the steps outside is the suitcase into which Toni hurriedly stuffed all her belongings. What’s taking her mother so long? Toni gets up to look out the window at the dirt road. She tries to will the family car, a black Ford Falcon, into view, but the dusty stretch of road remains empty. Then out of the corner of her eye she notices someone on the path. Her heart flips. It’s Janet. Toni drops face-down on the couch, nose squashed against the vinyl, arms wrapped around her head like someone taking cover from an air raid. She knows it’s an absurd position, but she remains so, barely breathing, as the door opens.

  The typing stops. A long silence follows. Neither Janet nor Bunny says a word, but Toni imagines them exchanging looks and shrugs. Blood pounds in her ears as she waits and silently pleads—for Janet to leave, for Janet to stay. She feels the pressure of a thigh against her side as Janet lowers herself onto the couch. She hears the striking of a match, a long sighing exhalation. The smell of smoke in the room brings a wave of nausea to Toni’s throat, but she wills it away. This small act of martyrdom pleases her.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Janet says softly. “Hear you’re feeling pretty wrecked.”

  Toni doesn’t answer. She presses her sweating forehead harder against the taut vinyl. The irregular tapping of the typewriter resumes.

  “I know all about that. Been there.” Janet chuckles. “Don’t worry. It passes. You’ll be yourself again soon. Drink lots of water and the crap will get out of your system.” She sounds light-hearted and distant, like someone speaking to an invalid and obliged to be cheerful.

  “No!” Toni hears herself groan into the cave between her elbows.

  “No?”

  “It won’t pass.”