Girl Unwrapped (28 page)

“It’s nice of you to have come,” Toni says after another awkward silence.

“Of course we came,” Sharon says, with genuine warmth. “We’ve known you and your parents since, since forever, even though it was just for little bits at a time. I remember your dad from when we lived on Maplewood. That nice hat with the little feather he used to wear. Remember that, Angie?”

Which hat are they talking about? The grey fedora with the blue and black feather, or the straw boater with the tiny tan-coloured plume? Or some other hat that long ago bit the dust? It seems important to know, but she can’t bring herself to ask.

“It seems like ages ago we were all in camp together,” Angela suddenly says. “You never went back to Tikvah, did you?”

Toni searches Angela’s face and finds no apparent memory of their old animosity and the disgrace that exiled Toni from camp. Have they truly forgotten? Did those incidents loom much larger in her mind than in theirs? Or have those ugly events simply become irrelevant, a time of childish things they can all put behind them because they are grown up and different people now?

“We skipped one summer of camp,” Angela continues in a chatty tone. “Then we went as junior counsellors. I wish we’d gone to Israel instead, like you did. That sounds so exciting. Was it fantastic?”

“You could go to Israel next summer,” Toni suggests, avoiding the question.

The twins look at one another. Sharon giggles, while Angela rolls her eyes.

“Shari’s got herself engaged. Can you believe? She’s way too young. She’s my baby sister, you know. Came out of mummy’s tummy after me. The wedding’s supposed to be next June. But I might go to Israel on my own afterward. I’d like to try a kibbutz. Hey, don’t look so surprised. We can live separate lives. We’re not the Bobbsey Twins, no matter how it looks.”

The twins chatter about Sharon’s fiancé and about how they’ll both be starting at McGill in a few weeks and how Angela wants to get into drama. Last year, she played Abigail in their high school’s production of
The Crucible
and became hooked. They are the same animated, confident, gorgeous twins as ever, yet different. Harmless, and kind of sweet. They ask questions about Toni’s life in Jerusalem, seem genuinely impressed that she learned enough Hebrew to get by on the streets within a couple of months.

Their admiration makes Toni all the more aware of how utterly she failed in Israel. She so wanted to fit in. She’d been drawn to the solidity of the place and the straightforward message of the Jewish homeland. But there were layers and layers of complexity beneath the simplicity, she realizes now. She was undone by subtleties she could barely fathom.

“Hey, did you ever run into Janet Bloom when you were in Israel?” Angela asks. The question seems to have been asked in all innocence.

“No,” Toni says quickly, her face burning.

“Too bad. But you must have heard of her while you were there. She’s a star, or almost a star, anyway. Our cousin who’s at the Technion in Haifa told us about hearing her on the radio. I always knew she’d make it big. She really has talent.”

Angela sounds just a bit wistful, as if Janet’s talents cast doubt on her own and as if there’s only so much stardom to go around.

“Will you go back to Israel once your life gets back to normal? Oh, God, how can I say something so stupid? Life back to normal! It’s not so simple, is it? I’m an idiot.”

Angela touches Toni’s hand again tentatively. The twins look at one another. There’s a brief moment of hesitation, during which the old telegraph system between them seems at work. They come to a decision of some sort and Sharon speaks.

“Listen, call us anytime. We can go out for burgers. Or a movie. You’ve got to meet Joe.”

Angela writes down their phone number for Toni on a paper napkin. Toni thanks them again for coming and mumbles something about getting in touch. When they take their leave after paying respects to Lisa, Toni crumples the napkin in her fist and leans back on the chair. She’s bathed in sweat, exhausted by the encounter. Her mother leans over.

“Wasn’t it nice of them to come? I always liked the Nutkevitch girls. You should stay in touch.”

“They are nice,” Toni agrees, while knowing she’ll never call. They’re still of a different world than her own, though what her own world is she couldn’t possibly say.

And now, filled with a strange agitation, overwhelmed by the heat and closeness of the room, she has to escape. She bolts from the apartment into the gravel driveway behind the building. Mr Cheung and his boys are there. They’ve changed into shorts, T-shirts, and running shoes, and are washing the Cheung’s white Pontiac. The boys seem to have had a soap fight because bits of foam cling to their clothes and shoes. Mr Cheung holds a spurting hose. As soon as he sees Toni hesitating in the doorway, he fires some command to his sons in rapid Chinese, rushes to turn off the outdoor tap and hops over to her.

“How are you, Miss Goldblatt?” he says, as if they haven’t seen each other for days.

“I’m okay, I guess.”

She sucks in a gulp of sticky air. Although the showers of the morning have come and gone, the day remains hot, humid and still, with a dense bank of clouds overhead. She’d forgotten a summer sky could be anything but fiery blue. Was it really only twenty-four hours ago that she stood on the tarmac at Lod Airport saying goodbye to the fluttering Israeli flags? The air was hot and humid there too, yet entirely different, shot through with the wetness of the sea and a hundred indecipherable Israeli smells. Now this place called home is the one that seems foreign.

“Say, do you have a cigarette?” she asks Mr Cheung.

“I don’t smoke, Miss Goldblatt. I am so very sorry.”

His almost hairless eyebrows bunch up in concern. Something about the earnestness of his apology and the funniness of his round, kind, very Chinese face beneath his fresh-from-the-barbershop crew-cut catches her off guard. The weeping comes in painful snorts and gasps. He puts an arm around her. The top of his head barely reaches above her shoulder, yet she collapses against him, allowing him to support her weight as the crying spell engulfs her. Through her tears she becomes aware of the two young sons watching from behind the hood of the dripping car, their staring eyes filled with a deep, dark wonder.

chapter 21

Her father is alive. The whole story of his death was a big mistake, a tragic mix-up caused by broken words received through a faulty telephone line. Nevertheless, all is not well. He’s been cut in half. The top part of him, his torso, balances on the edge of a white-sheeted gurney, while he stares down to where his legs should be. He mumbles, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as if apologizing to his missing legs. Toni wants to rush over and say, “It’s my fault, Papa. All mine!” But she can’t move or speak and he refuses to lift his eyes. Which is just as well because she’s leaking blood. A dark stream oozes from her bellybutton, down her limbs and out from under the cuffs of her pants to form a viscous pool on the floor. Her childhood buddy, Arnold, arrives to play bellybutton games. He’s up to his old tricks, fumbles under her shirt, wants to press his thumb into the tender cavity. He’ll make the leak worse.
Get
off! Go away! Papa will see
.

She wakes and remembers everything: her father’s death, the new fear ballooning inside her. Fear is a growth in her belly, a dark lump that expands relentlessly. It is real. It cannot be wished away. The last day of the
shiva
, awareness struck that her period might be late and she thought of what was planted that strange, drunken night at Hotel Vienna. The boy from the Old City sneers from afar. She barely remembers his face, yet his presence engulfs her. The encounter she perceived through brandy-befuddled senses takes its revenge.
You thought you
could pick me up and then throw me away like a market-stall trinket,
well that’s not how it works,
habibti.
I’m in charge, see? The boy’s in
charge. I had fun, but that’s not good enough. I had to leave my mark.

Every day she has checked between her legs and been overwhelmed by the sordid implications of a clean wad of toilet paper. The pink, damp folds of her private parts seem deceptively normal, unsullied. But clean on the outside means trouble within.

What will she do? She can’t think. Panic grips her gut as she huddles beneath the blankets in her still darkened room. Panic hurts. It is a crescendo of pain beneath her navel, a wave of nausea in her throat.
S
he groans aloud and opens her eyes, this time for real. She has cramps. She has soiled her pyjamas and sheets. A familiar sharp, gory smell assaults her nostrils. Despite the impulse to retch, she swoons in relief. Ordinary discomfort and mundane mess—this she can deal with. Later, as she lies abed with Midol and a hot water bottle, a nugget from the
The Facts of Life and Love for Teen-agers
floats up from the depths of memory.
Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. You’d be a lot
sorrier if you never did menstruate …

She is grateful for “the curse” this time, all right. She lolls in gratitude while reviling the boy who caused her so much anxiety just when Papa, only Papa, should have been on her mind. The little creep. His filthy lust interfered with her life. It’s his fault she hasn’t been able to mourn. He stole tears that belonged to Papa. She stews in her loathing. But after a while her rush of anger exhausts itself, and then Samir’s words come back to her:
My friend, even not in your language or in
mine are you making any sense.

A memory from her last day in Israel floats into her mind. During the bumpy bus journey from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, some Arab villagers came on board, including a very pregnant young woman dressed in the traditional head-to-toe garb. Since all the seats were taken, the villagers—mostly men—crowded the aisles, and a few of them squatted down onto their bundles and suitcases, but the young woman remained on her feet. As the bus lurched forward again, she clung with one hand to the support rail and held her swollen belly with the other. Toni began to rise to offer her seat, but an Israeli man pulled a reproving face.

“What are you doing?” he said. “She is used to standing. You will only embarrass them.”

He wore a satisfied, disdainful smile, as if to say, “What can you expect of Arabs?” Toni struggled for a moment with doubt, but all that had recently happened threw her into confusion and so, not wanting to create a spectacle, she kept her seat. And yet, during the whole rest of the trip she was uncomfortably aware of the large-bellied, precariously balanced woman behind her in the aisle. Now she wishes she hadn’t listened to that man, but what did she know? And what does she know still of fairness and rightness and wrongness in that crazy little country?

The start of autumn is etched into the yellowed, spotted leaves of the maple outside. The street below is still. Kids are in school, mothers shopping, dads at work. Toni wanders into the living room, which is neat and spotless, thanks to her burst of zeal yesterday when she flew about with dust cloths while her mother, still in her housecoat, sat blank-faced in the breakfast nook. Now, from the kitchen, comes her mother’s voice speaking sternly into the phone.

“I have the letter from the doctor, Mr Epstein. It was not a preexisting condition. Nothing that was diagnosed. When will you send the insurance cheque?”

Her mother appears in good form this morning, busy with the business of death that continues well after the funeral. They spell each other off, it seems. One day Lisa copes, another day Toni does, though at times they both walk around like zombies. Why the cleaning fit yesterday? Lint bothered Toni. Shrivelled leaves on the carpet were an outrage, as were the messy piles of unread copies of the
Montreal Star.
Her mother said to throw them out, but Toni couldn’t. Someone would want to read them.
Someone
. The living room smells of furniture polish, Windex, emptiness. She wouldn’t have thought absence could be such a presence, a silent, invisible intruder, creeping up behind you to say “boo.”

Before returning to Italy, Uncle Franz said to Toni, “You must come to visit us. Merano is a jewel in the autumn. I will take you to the Dolomites. You must bring your mama. Why do we live so far apart? A shame!”

He shook his large head and smiled with his mild, sweet eyes. Toni was struck anew by the difference between him—big, gentle, easy-going— and her petite, firecracker mother. Over the years her father had suggested that Franz was something of a dimwit, but Toni now thinks otherwise. When it was time to say goodbye, Uncle Franz embraced Toni in a bear hug, the kind of hug that made her feel instantly bereft when he let go. In the past, she had never questioned why her mother took trips to Italy on her own, why they’d never gone as a family. When Toni asked, Lisa stiffened and her mouth turned down.

“He put it off,” she said, her voice bitter. “Too busy, too expensive, he wanted to save for your education. Always something. But finally, finally, we were going, all of us. Next summer. We planned for you to fly from Israel and meet us in Rome. He promised.”

She wailed these last words and anger rose in her eyes.

“The problem wasn’t the money, of course. It was going back. He never wanted to set foot in Europe again. Yet he bought books from Nazis. I’m sure some of them were Nazis, though he laughed at me when I said so. He paid German agents to buy him books. He spent a fortune on long-distance calls.
Ach
!”

She shook her head and waved away these thoughts with three swift motions of her hands.

But Toni has no interest in a trip to Italy. She hasn’t the energy. The memory of Uncle Franz has faded. She slumps onto the couch, flinging aside the cushions she so carefully arranged yesterday, lights a cigarette, and flicks ashes into a pot of African violets on the coffee table. Her mother, dressed in a good blue suit with a coral necklace at her throat, marches in.

“Why must you smoke?”

“Why not?”

“It’s an ugly habit. Unhealthy. Makes a woman look coarse. Your father wouldn’t like it.”

Toni glowers at her mother. The new weapon: the wishes her father can no longer express.