Girl Unwrapped

by Gabriella Goliger

  “Are you afraid of men?”

  The question is puzzling.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  He seems a touch disappointed. Runs his hands through his straggly hair.

  “Have you ever done anything with other girls? You know, experiments with touching, and so on?”

  What can he be thinking? What does he take her for? “No!” she shouts, causing him to jerk backward and almost loose his balance as the gurney shifts. He re-crosses his legs and ponders her again with his spooky blue eyes.

  “So it’s just feelings you’re worried about?”

  Perplexed by the question, she remains silent. Just feelings?

  “Do you notice boys at all? Do you notice them on the street, at school?”

  She thinks of the guys in her class. How bunches of them burst into a room and start up a frenzy of drumming on the desks before the teacher arrives. They are certainly noticeable.

  “Yes.”

  “You look at boys?”

  “Sure.”

  “I see.”

  He clears his throat. Taps his chin.

  “I think you should talk to your guidance counsellor when school starts. That’s what he’s there for. Kids your age have all kinds of feelings. Perfectly normal.”

  His tone has become crisp, matter-of-fact, the keen interest suddenly gone. She understands she is being dismissed.

  “By the way, hypnosis is rarely used as a treatment anymore. Quite outdated,” he asserts as he bends to scribble notes on a clipboard.

  Toni slinks back through the emergency waiting room, past the rows of benches and the knots of people. All the jittery sense of daring that buoyed her up until this moment has left her. She feels stupid, like she’s failed some kind of test, but also that she’s been cheated out of a proper diagnosis. Perhaps she should have demanded to see a real psychiatrist. Never deal with underlings, her mother always says. But there’s no way she could bring herself to ask for a second opinion.

  A line from the Bible jumps into her mind—Male and female He created them—and she sees the perfectly formed, side-by-side couples of every species marching across a verdant new world. They march confidently through time, those proper beings, while the “it” she is watches frozen and alone from within the great void. The “it” belongs nowhere. Emptiness and chaos will follow it all the days of its life.

  On the Labour Day Monday before school resumes, Toni hikes to Côte Saint-Luc Road. “Cote Saint-Puke” is what Janet used to call the suburb she grew up in. “Little boxes, little boxes, and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,” she’d sing in a high, fast falsetto, cracking up the kids and counsellors gathered around her.

  Toni loiters across the street from a classy, white-brick apartment building with an awning. Its name, “The Savoy,” is written in gold on the heavy glass doors. She counts the storeys (fourteen) and the balconies (eighty-four) and keeps a hawk eye on who goes in and out. She’s done this before, but always under cover of darkness, never in broad daylight. Doesn’t matter any more. Doesn’t matter if she’s spotted during her crazy vigil. The game’s up, or will be soon. For this very reason, Toni feels in her bones that this time, finally, she’ll catch sight of Janet. All she wants is a glimpse of Janet’s red hair disappearing through the glass doors and then to see blinds roll up in one of the windows. Oh, to be able to figure out which apartment is hers at last. But as with all the other times, the people who enter and exit the Savoy bear no resemblance to Janet. A light rain falls, steaming the streets, soaking through Toni’s shirt. A few cars swish by. Hardly anyone’s about. Perhaps everyone’s still at their cottages in the Laurentians, drinking up the last drops of summer.

  Tomorrow school starts again. Guys and girls in new fall jackets will throng the halls, eagerly sharing stories about their summer adventures. Whispers too. Whispers about something that happened at a camp. The story will have travelled from the A&W to the Orange Julep Drive-in to the halls of Northmount High School. Were Toni to pass by the huddled groups, a sudden silence would descend. Nothing said out loud, but everything known.

  There’s only one thing left to do. Death ends agony in one magnificent blast. Death cancels out sin, wipes the slate clean. In death you are pure. Powerful too, because death is mightier than the sum total of all your creepy thoughts and acts over a lifetime. Death takes everyone’s breath away. Death says: You see? She gave her all. Her suffering wasn’t ordinary. The dead are loved forever. They are the flame in the glass.

  She trudges back to Snowdon, getting wetter and more bedraggled with every step. At Queen Mary Road and Westbury she pauses and casts her eyes uphill toward Saint Joseph’s Oratory, the Shrine. As a kid, she used to love to sneak in with her buddies, to prowl around the vast, dimly lit chambers with their rows of flickering candles, the yellowing crutches of supplicants cured, and the urn in which Brother André’s heart was preserved in formaldehyde. Her parents used to scoff at these attractions, calling them goyische naches, gentile diversions, but the mystery and the promise of miracles called to her. The black cross on top of the basilica seemed like a man with his arms outstretched in flight. She starts up the hill toward the Shrine and the veterans’ hospital opposite, while the cars and rumbling buses hurtle by. She imagines ambulance sirens, priests, and nuns rushing forward, wounded soldiers watching the commotion below from their hospital windows. She imagines newspaper headlines. She smiles as she walks, calm and easy. Halfway up she teeters on the edge of the curb and waits with her eyes closed. Soon the Number 65 will come and, gathering momentum, will plunge down the long slope of Queen Mary Road. All she has to do is fall forward slightly, let go, let go. Beautiful oblivion at last. She sucks in her breath.

  An engine roars, wind slaps her face, and thick exhaust enters her nostrils as she opens her eyes. The bus rolls down the hill and away. Her feet have remained plastered to the sidewalk. They are obstinate, these size-nine feet. They will not budge. They don’t belong to her at all, none of her body does. She resents this rebellion of the flesh, yet can’t help but feel amazed at the blind will that has revealed itself. At the pivotal moment, an overwhelming force shouted through every cell, drowning out the feeble instructions of her mind. So how do people kill themselves? How do they do it? She now sees that her own attempts will be hopeless. She is here, unremittingly here in this world. No point in waiting for another bus.

  As she trudges toward home, she finds herself walking into Kalman’s Five and Dime. The bell above the door announces her entry with a loud, jarring ring.

  “Yes?” Kalman barks. He has dark bags under his eyes and nervous hands that unwrap a bundle of Yiddish newspapers on the cluttered counter. His mouth falls in sour lines as he sees her standing in a daze of indecision. Should she buy chocolate bars? Should she gorge herself? Her glance falls upon the display of school supplies on the shelves along the wall, and she wanders over. If she’s got to show up at school tomorrow, she may as well have the gear. She spends every cent of two months’ accumulated allowance on a set of Hilroy exercise books in five pastel colours, along with pencils, pens, erasers, and a geometry set. Kalman’s voice purrs with new respect as he totals up these items and mentions each by name. Suddenly, his stubby, newsprint-grimed fingers bouncing over the cash register keys strike her as beautiful. A wave of gratitude washes over her and she wants to weep. She has a flash of insight. It occurs to her she could become a proper egghead. Not just ordinary, get-along-without-effort smart as she’s been all along, but brilliant. So brilliant she becomes untouchable and is catapulted onto another plane.

  chapter 12

  Toni knows the paramecium. She has studied this charming pond creature inside out. There it lies before her in the grainy textbook photo: a single transparent cell, shaped like the sole of a shoe, marvellously intricate and ingenious. A universe unto itself. She covers the page with her hand and whispers the names of the paramecium’s components; oral groove, cilia, food vacuoles, macronucleus, micronucleus.
In the diagram beside the photo, the slipper-like body is outlined in bold purple, with paler shading for the internal parts, everything clearly labelled. In real life, the creature is minuscule and the colour of water. Even under the microscope, only its jerky, spinning movement gives it away. During biology class she took her turn peering down into the clever apparatus of revealing mirrors and saw slipping by, just beyond her magnified quivering lashes, the blobs of life held together by the thinnest skins imaginable, propelled by rafts of minute hairs.

  “Ew. They’re wiggling!” girlish voices squealed. “They’re germs.”

  “No, sperm!” said one of the boys. “See the tails?”

  “Chuck contaminated the slide. Stuck his hands in his pants, didn’t you Chucky?”

  “Eek! Disgusting!”

  Toni Goldblatt, the Grade A student, the one who has re-made herself from the inside out, bent her face to the microscope’s eyepiece and took notes. She allowed herself just the ghost of a smile at her classmates’ shenanigans. There were no tails, of course, and the girls knew that, but pretended otherwise. To them the little organisms were just dots of nothing. They couldn’t appreciate the wonder. Only someone like Mr Price could. Mr Price, the biology teacher, a fellow traveller in the realm of scientific pursuit.

  Now, the evening before her mid-term, Toni reviews her biology text and lab notes, elbows on her desk in the bedroom that she has transformed as much as possible into a monk-like cell. Gone are the flouncy white bedspread of her mother’s choosing and the matching curtains with all that superfluous trim. Instead, the naked pane of glass looks out at the March-bare tree in front of the house and hard-packed snow. Only the plain, white roller blind hangs at the top of the window, ready to be pulled down and blot out the world. A brown wool blanket stretches tightly over the bed, tucked neatly into hospital corners. Her books are arranged in alphabetical order. Pens, pencils, rulers stand erect in their black plastic holder, and stray papers are stowed in three-punch binders. Once upon a time, a few months ago, she was loose and lazy, her room cluttered, her mind a swamp. But the old Toni no longer exists. Peeled off like dead skin.

  Sucking in a deep breath, Toni opens her loose-leaf binder to a blank page and quickly sketches the paramecium with its components and labels, exactly as in the diagram she’s memorized. Mr Price would be pleased. His eyebrows would lift slightly, and his lips shape the words: “Clever girl.”

  Mr Price has a narrow, sharp, aristocratic face, wears horn-rimmed glasses, tweed jackets with leather patches at the elbows, and an expression of cool, scientific detachment. He can settle down the class with just one long, withering glance.

  “The world doesn’t care whether you pass or fail,” he says, delivering his warnings in an almost cheerful tone. “No one gives a hoot. That’s what you’ll find out the day you leave school. Sink or swim, it’s entirely up to you.”

  He perches on the end of the teacher’s desk, lacing his long fingers around one knee, calm and aloof, yet Toni likes to think he gives a hoot about her. In the remote gaze behind his glasses she’s glimpsed flashes of admiration for his star pupil. She’s convinced they share an unspoken bond, a cool bright passion for knowledge. They are united in disdain for everything else—for the shallow, frenetic world of miniskirts, electric guitars, the swinging British sound, Expo 67 fever, unisex hairstyles, the restless, unruly hordes at Northmount High. Others can get themselves into a lather about the latest Beatles album, Revolver. What has that to do with anything real, with study, facts, grades?

  But Toni keeps such scorn to herself. To her classmates, she’s quiet, studious, amiable Toni who doesn’t mind if someone looks over her shoulder to copy a homework assignment. She used to get crushes on girls, but that was lifetimes ago. She’s almost a member of a different species now. Almost like My Favorite Martian, the funny little guy from outer space in the TV series, who can do amazing tricks such as read a whole encyclopedia in seconds, but is baffled by the oddities of human emotion. Rude jokes, sexual innuendo, classroom flirtations flow right past her. Extraneous chatter. That’s part of being clever.

  Now, TV voices murmur through the wall. Her parents watch the late evening news in the living room. Earlier, her father stood in her doorway and asked if the volume was up too high. “Of course not,” she told him, while rattling off definitions in her head. She saw him glance about her orderly room, reassured and pleased with her industry. Lately, a new understanding has grown between them, the understanding of two people who like to delve down into the quiet of their minds. They can sit together and read, producing no sound beyond the rustle of pages, the clink of a coffee cup. Occasionally, they still go for long Sunday walks while Lisa prepares dinner. He listens respectfully as she tells him about biological processes, osmosis, for example. He nods and rubs his goatee thoughtfully with a leather-gloved hand. He stoops a bit more than he used to, so that they are the same height as they walk along, shoulder to shoulder. Thrilled with her report cards, foreseeing scholarships, he doesn’t probe or nag, as does her mother. He doesn’t expect her to aim for more than a lifetime of honourable, dispassionate industry.

  Fact by fact, she gathers up kernels of information like a harvest mouse building up a winter’s storage. The paramecium has reproductive choices: divide itself in two or exchange nuclear material with one of its fellows. Very efficient. Very clever. There’s nothing mysterious about becoming top of the class. It’s called hard work. She plans to score a perfect 100 in mid-term biology, high nineties in everything else, and next year when the real test, matriculation exams, comes around, she’ll be ready. By July next year, she’ll have her photo published in the Montreal Star among the province’s most outstanding students. There she’ll be, one of the few females amid all those male faces, and printed beside her photo, a breathtaking grade-point average. Her parents will burst with pride. Everyone in the city will see the picture. Perhaps there’ll be a phone call. Hey, kiddo, remember me? I’ve never forgotten you. Wow, first in the province. Way to go.

  But she’s been dreaming while precious study minutes have escaped. She compares her sketched diagram to the one in the text and finds she forgot to include the contractile vacuole, the sack-like pump that controls osmotic pressure. Without its little pump the paramecium would fill with water and explode like a balloon. Not good. She must redouble her efforts, review everything from beginning to end. In last month’s test she made a stupid mistake that came from missing the obvious and robbed herself of a perfect score. Mustn’t happen again. Focus, focus. In a recurring dream, she has seen herself with a blank exam booklet, her hand paralyzed, while her mind teems with memorized facts, tiny spinning organisms with lashing tails that jerk frantically and collide against the impermeable barrier of her skull. Meanwhile the wall clock booms out the seconds.

  Focus, focus. The night has many more usable hours.

  When her eyes grow bleary and words swim on the page, she resolves to refresh herself with the 5BX program. She found the Royal Canadian Air Force pamphlet at the bottom of a carton of books her father brought home from a thrift store. She was immediately drawn to the promise of fitness and discipline through five basic exercises to be done in the privacy of one’s room, a mere eleven minutes a day. Toe touching, back swimming, sit-ups, push-ups, running, and jumping on the spot. There are charts and diagrams and tips. Defeat the first desire to skip; then defeat all such desires as they occur. A bull’s eye adorns the top of each page. Toni intends to reach the lofty heights of Chart Six, when she’ll be able to do a Russian-style kick squat and a flying push-up. The pamphlet suggests that after Chart Three, women should refer to the gentler XBX program, but Toni has no intention of doing so. The floor shakes as she crashes through her stride jumps. The door of her bedroom flies open.

  “Are you crazy? It’s almost midnight.”

  Her mother stands on the threshold and glares out of her mask of cleansing paste: two dark, piercing eyes surrounded by a meringue-like crust.

  �
��I’m almost finished,” Toni gasps as she flings her arms outwards.

  “The Cheung family downstairs will call the police.”

  The Cheungs will do nothing of the sort. They are meek immigrants from Taiwan who never complain, but Toni tries to jump more quietly, nonetheless, on the tips of her toes, which will give her muscles more of a work-out anyway.

  “Mein Gott, you go to extremes. It’s not healthy.”

  Lisa’s mouth stretches in a grimace. A flake of dried paste falls from the ghostly mask. Toni turns so she’s facing the window, her back to her mother. Her feet thump down, her hands slap above her head, and she counts out the repetitions until she’s done. Annoyed to find her mother still in the room, she falls to her knees to begin an extra round of push-ups.

  “Do you want to look like an army sergeant?”

  “It’s my body.”

  “In my day, girls did gymnastics to become supple and graceful.”

  “Your day!” Toni snorts. Her biceps burn, her shoulders ache. Don’t force your body until it hurts, the pamphlet warns on the very first page. But she wants it to hurt.

  As she waits at the bus stop on Victoria Avenue, Toni goes over everything again in her head: the categories of protozoa, their methods of ingestion, excretion, movement, reproduction. She can visualize diagrams and text and even the exact page on which the text appears. She’s almost like that Martian guy. Although she hardly slept, she’s alert, mind buzzing, brain like a giant searchlight. As she mentally ticks off facts in her review lists, she observes the bedraggled line of passengers queued up along the soggy snow-banked street. They clutch their collars and hunch their shoulders against the wind. A man with hairy nostrils mutters that the bus is late. A big lady with patently false teeth hopes March will go out like a lamb. Three guys from her school try to shove one another into the soupy slush in the gutter.

  When she turns away from this pathetic clutch of humanity to gaze across the street, a warm splash of colour catches her eye. Her body jolts awake. There! Over there, at the bus stop on the other side! A girl in a belted brown coat stands with windblown hair catching the sunlight. That flaming shade of auburn, that languid stance with hands in pockets and hip thrust out. It could be no other. After all this time!