Girl Unwrapped (37 page)

Scenes float up through the fog of memory: Robin dancing erotically with one of her acting buddies—a girl with long blonde hair, high cheekbones, violet eyes. Supposedly straight. The two pressed up against each other making kissy faces. Was it merely another performance, or did a current of real desire run beneath the show? Couldn’t have been too serious, though, could it, because Little Miss Glamourpuss is not the one who spent the night in Robin’s bed. Toni remembers draining the last drops from a bottle of Johnny Walker. She remembers a taxi, the long difficult ascent up the slippery outdoor stairs to Robin’s apartment, leaning on Robin’s shoulder. Just Robin, or was there someone else? Several people? Did the party continue in the kitchen or was that merely a dream? She slides her hand sideways, reaching for Robin, and finds instead a cool expanse of taut bedsheet where her girlfriend should be. She opens her eyes again. The room is empty.

“Robin!” she croaks. “Hey, Robin.”

Peals of laughter from the kitchen. Creak of the floorboards in the hall. Slam of the front door.

“Robin! Where the fuck are you?”

She’d go see for herself, but her head feels like a bag of mud.

The door of the bedroom swings open and Robin waltzes in, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, perky, smiling. And stark naked. Toni heaves herself into a sitting position.

“What are you doing?”

“I was about to take a bath. Wanna join me?”

“Who were you just with? I heard someone.”

“Oh. That was Monica. We were saying goodbye.”

“Like that? You said goodbye like that?”

Robin’s breasts have never seemed so bouncy and impudent. The nipples stick out, to the left and to the right, like signs pointing in opposite directions:
They went that-a-way.

“No, silly. I was wearing a towel.”

Robin rubs her hand hard over Toni’s head.

“Ow. That hurts.”

“Poor baby. You look like shit. Come, a bath will do you good.”

“Monica spent the night here? She slept here?”

“Not exactly, no. She didn’t sleep and neither did I. We were up all night. Talking.”

Robin’s eyes appear calm, untroubled, unwavering. A wall of glass. Talking? What kind of talking? What kind of churning of jaws and flapping of tongues went on from three in the morning—or whenever this started—all the way to now? Robin’s gaze remains steady and impenetrable and Toni recognizes the look, the hard glaze of false innocence. She has worn that mask herself a thousand times in her mother’s presence. But now is not the moment for confrontation. Her head is too sore, her stomach too wobbly, her nerves too frayed. Later, when she’s got her strength back. Then she’ll get to the bottom of this business with Monica. She lies back on the bed and groans. It is a groan that gives voice to her excruciating pain, a groan that she hopes will pierce Robin’s heart with pity and make her fall on her knees with guilt. Instead, Robin leaps onto the bed and springs up and down on the tips of her toes like an acrobat on a trampoline.

“Let’s take a bath. Let’s take a bath.”

Toni’s aching head flops like a rag doll’s against the pillow.

“Ow, ow. Goddamn it. You’re killing me.”

Toni grabs one of the jumping ankles and Robin stops bouncing, though she doesn’t sit down. Toni can’t bear to look up at that animated face, so out of sync with her own. That’s the problem, isn’t it? They are out of sync these days. Whatever Toni’s mood happens to be, Robin’s is sure to be the exact opposite. Rolling over on her side, Toni fumbles around on the bedside table for her watch. Where is it? A flutter of panic. Then relief, when the trusty Omega tumbles out of the hip pocket of her jeans, which lie in a heap on the floor. Her fingers close around the cool metal. She holds the watch to her face—12:35 p.m. Not so bad. The day isn’t shot. There’s time for aspirins, coffee, a heart-to-heart with Robin, a kiss-and-make-up session, and a long, hard slog at the library afterward. Perhaps this Monica is just a trifling interest that can be nipped in the bud, and Robin hasn’t so much to atone for after all. Hangovers make one paranoid. As Toni starts to strap the watch to her wrist, Robin jumps up and down again. A prancing foot kicks the watch right across the room.

“You bitch,” Toni screeches. “That’s my father’s watch.”

She rolls out of bed, crawls on hands and knees to grope amid the dustballs beneath the desk.

“Did it break?” Robin asks. She doesn’t sound nearly as contrite as she should.

“I don’t know,” Toni says. Holding the watch to her ear, she can hear the quiet tick, tick, tick, intimate and reassuring as a heartbeat. “It’s okay, I guess. But you
might
have broken it. You might have
broken
the most important thing I own.”

She glares through the tears that have welled up in her eyes. Robin still looks quite chirpy and unaware of any transgression.

“Come on, sourpussy. I’ll give you a massage. I’ll wash all your grouches away.”

Toni teeters on the edge of full-blown anger, then takes the hand Robin reaches out to her. She loves Robin’s hands, so small but strong and clever. A massage would be just the ticket. And, yes, a bubble bath and Alka Selzer and a big, steaming mug of coffee brought to the edge of the tub. Plus a clear, unequivocal explanation of what happened last night. Wrapping herself in a sheet, she follows the naked, prancing Robin out the door.

They lean back against the porcelain on their respective sides of the tub, limbs touching, but no warmth coursing from one body to another. The bubbles have hissed and popped into nothingness. What’s left is thin scum on tepid water. Robin places her wet feet on either side of Toni’s face, squeezing Toni’s cheeks so that her lips lift up from her teeth.

“Come on. Let’s have a smile.”

Toni pushes the playful feet away.

“I hate you.”

“You have no reason to hate me. You’ve chosen to see things a certain way.”

Robin rests her head against the edge of the tub and gazes up at the ceiling. Toni wonders what other interpretation there could possibly be.

“We didn’t sleep together,” Robin had said. “But there’s an energy between us. I think it’s something we’d like to explore.”

Explore! Yeah, right! Such a benign clinical expression like a couple
of Girl Scouts on a trail-blazing expedition
.

“You’ve got the hots for Monica. You’re sick of me. Why don’t you just come clean?”

“I’m not sick of you.” Robin sighs. “I told you a long time ago I don’t believe in exclusivity.”

“You can’t be involved with two people at the same time. That’s bullshit.”

“Okay. If that’s how you feel.”

Robin’s tone sounds flat and final, as if something’s been decided. A wave of panic surges in Toni’s chest.

“She’s straight, you know. Anyone can see that. She’s just playing games.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about.”

Robin’s lips twist in a thin smile. The tap drips. John Lennon peers smugly through his wire-rimmed glasses, while Janis Joplin offers her stoned grin. Lazy drops of water trickle down the steamed-up window beyond which the sky blazes an annoyingly cheerful shade of blue. Toni hurls a sponge toward the Lennon poster. It hits the wall with a wet plop.

“You want to try your chances with her, but keep me in your back pocket in case things don’t work out.”

“Don’t make me out to be the bad guy. You’re the one always making excuses. You’ve got to study. You’ve got to run to your classes, run to your mother. But you want me here waiting like a good little wife.”

Robin steps out of the bath and into a towel, rubbing herself thoroughly, paying special attention to the bottoms of her feet, before marching away. Toni pulls out the plug and hugs her knees while the scummy water inches down her body, leaving her feeling heavier and heavier, colder and colder. She remains in the tub until the last trickles gurgle down the drain.

“You never complained before,” she whimpers to the empty room.

chapter 29

The coffee tastes like ashes, like the black wet muck left after a campfire has been doused. The toast is bad too, brittle, dry, foreign matter in her throat. Toni can’t fault her mother. She got up early and made her own breakfast, but the meal went stale before it reached her lips. Her mother sits on the opposite bench in the breakfast nook, sipping from her favourite miniature gold-rimmed cup and munching and skimming the paper as if everything were normal. And so it is. The same Europack Deli-brand mocha they’ve been drinking all their lives, made in the same stove-top percolator. The same bread as always, a sturdy German-style farmer’s rye, toasted and thickly buttered. It’s Toni’s tastebuds that have changed. Gone flat.

Head propped on her hands, Toni gazes down at her open textbook, which shows an electron-microscope photograph of something that looks like blood-red spaghetti: cilia on the nasal epithelium. The text blurs. The photo pulses. Her own nose hairs prickle as the tears rise. Who cares about any of this? She’s tired of science. The only reason the book is here is so she can avoid her mother’s well-meaning questions and prying eyes.

Across the table, the coffee cup clinks in the saucer. Her mother clears her throat.

“It’s all over,” she pronounces. “I know. You don’t have to say. Your heart is broken, and you think you never will be happy again. But you will be, I promise. Listen to your old mother.”

Toni steals a peek through the veil of her fingers and sees her mother nodding, sees the pressed-together lips, the sad, knowing gaze. She ducks her head again and draws in her breath carefully. Before she came into the kitchen, she’d managed to clean up her face and swallow her sobs, but now they threaten to engulf her once more.

“Believe me, this is just a passing storm. He has given you a taste for love, which is a valuable thing. So he has served a purpose. For the rest, goodbye, good riddance.”

Toni’s throat constricts.

“You’ll find another. You have no idea how young you are, my darling. And he doesn’t deserve you. I knew that all along. I never did care for him.”

Toni gasps in astonishment. “What are you talking about, Mama?” She balls her fists in sudden fury. “What do you know?”

“I know that a man who refuses to meet his girlfriend’s mother is worthless.
Nu
? Don’t you agree?”

Lisa arches her pencilled brows and lifts her chin, exposing the creases on her aging neck. Her gold earrings glint in the morning light. She is a well-dressed lady prepared for her predictable, manageable milieu, where spring fashions follow upon fall, customers are malleable, wholesalers can be harangued, and staff can be cowed. A world of Hadassah meetings, gym classes, shopping sprees, ladies’ lunches, good deeds, and smart deals. A world in which sons and daughters come around by and by, and despite detours to ashrams or road trips or hippie happenings, eventually find their way to the wedding canopy––—the only possible happy ending.

“There is no
him
,” Toni spits. “There was never any
him
. Can’t you get it, Mama? Do you have to be so stupid?”

There. Said. Done. An unnatural stillness fills the room like the terrible moment after the bomb has dropped and before the bloodied survivors start to scream. Toni clutches her head, heels of her hands pressed into her eyeballs, and waits for what comes next. But she doesn’t care, she really doesn’t care anymore. Bring on the wailing and railing, the scolding, the threats, the pleas.
Have you no shame?
Your poor father must be twisting in his grave. Promise me you’ll never
do such filthy things again. Promise me you’ll get treatment. It must be
hormones. It must be bad influences. All you need is the right boy. We’ll
find you a boy.
Pointless. Specks of dust in the wind, such rebukes and lamentations. They cannot change the immutable fact of the hand she has been dealt.
I am what I am, and I’m not sorry. I can’t be.
This is the bedrock of her existence now. It is good to feel its hard-edged presence.

The bench on the other side of the nook creaks as her mother shifts her weight. Silence, awful silence, like a dangling sword. Toni is afraid to look up, but she must, though her heart hammers violently now. Her mother’s eyes are wide open and strange, revealing the bewildered pain of a wounded animal. No fight there, or flight, just a sinking resignation instead. It is the look her mother wore during frozen moments in the first few months after Toni’s father died. Toni came upon her once, standing stock-still in the living room, the watering can in her hand angled tipsily above the African violets. She gazed down at the plants as if she had never seen such things before and couldn’t understand how this leafy profusion came into existence on the coffee table. The hand holding the can trembled, and water dribbled from the spout onto the polished wood surface, but she neither poured properly nor put the can down. She just stared. At that moment, Toni rescued the watering can, put her arm around her mother, and broke the spell. Her mother sank against her in relief. No such rescue is possible now. She is no longer a daughter.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she says in her anguish. “That was mean, how I said it. I didn’t intend to be mean.”

“But you were.”

The tone is flat. Not a reproach exactly. More a statement of fact.

“It’s not how I meant to tell you. And I
have
wanted to tell you. I wish I could make you understand it’s not so bad, my life.”

Toni stops. It occurs to her that perhaps she’s assumed too much and there’s still a need to spell things out.

“You do understand what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

A noise comes from her mother’s throat. A sour laugh.

“I’m not quite as stupid as you think.”

It is then Toni realizes her mother always knew. Or knew for a long time, in any case. In some deep-down place she knew, as one knows about death and disaster, that one can fend them off for only so long. Now the thin veil has been ripped away, the fiction that fed hope is gone. This is how things end. A single pronoun spoken out loud becomes a breath that extinguishes a flame. Something vital and precarious is snuffed out forever.
She always knew.
All those assertions about the wedding-to-be were just empty bravado. But this does not make the situation any easier. On the contrary, the unspoken words stand between them:
I always knew you would disappoint me.