Cricket in a Fist (17 page)

The next morning, Tam-Tam came over early to witness Dad wheel Mama down the hall to sit at the kitchen table by the window.
He put a bowl of cereal in front of her, and we watched in silence as she ate all of it, a promising feat. “Your favourite,” said Dad, naming the brand. The corners of her lips tightened upwards, eyebrows slightly furrowed — that smile I was coming to know and hate. Tam-Tam offered to help her bathe and Mama looked at her strangely. “No thank you,” she said finally, quietly.

For the next three months, Dad regularly took her to the hospital for tests and therapy, prompted her to come to the dining room for dinner and told her when it was time for bed. By the time the cast came off her ankle, she was using her arm again, too, but complaining from time to time of stabbing pains in her bicep, which mystified Dr. Jessup. Tam-Tam came over almost every day for dinner, but we visited her rarely — Mama seemed painfully uncomfortable in Tam-Tam's house, sitting rigidly with her hands clasped as if she was afraid she might break something. “You have a lovely home,” she told Tam-Tam politely the first time we took her there. Whenever we came back home, she returned by default to the kitchen, where, chin in hand, she kept watch over the spread of snowy downtown streets visible from eleven floors up. The worst was when I'd find her sitting in there by herself, laughing hysterically and twisting her hands together, short hair standing up in greasy tufts.

I gaped at the green-tiled wall, realizing I was still on the toilet, holding my hand against my jaw but no longer grinning. I had no idea how long I'd spent in the bathroom, Sundar and Erin abandoned in the living room. After flushing the toilet and laboriously washing my hands, I made my way back through the long apartment. The memorial service was still playing on the television, but there was no sound except rain on cameras; soldiers and civilians stood with their heads bowed in reverent silence. Erin was straddling Sundar on the armchair, and I saw them licking each other's tongues, faces an inch apart. As Sundar massaged Erin's ass, I could see one of her nipples threatening to puncture the ancient yellow cotton intended to cover it. Staring at them stupidly, I assured myself they were unlikely to get hair bleach on the furniture if they stayed in that position, then turned and went back past the rooms on either
side of the hallway, nudging each door a few inches further open as I passed.

The closet door in my mother's room was mirrored, and I balked at my plastic-bag-headed, red-eyed reflection. My glasses looked like thick, black lines, arranged dorkily outside the grocery bag so they wouldn't be bleached, and the rest of my face receded into an insubstantial blur. I turned on the light in the large closet, stepped in and shut the door behind me. It was roomy now that so many of the boxes were gone. My mother had new clothes hung neatly, clothes hangers all facing in the same direction. She had begun to wear silk blouses and tight, above-the-knee skirts. Some of the clothes in the closet were clearly too small for her. She must have been working towards this new size with her no-fat diet and regular visits to the gym.

I knew I was disappointed about Sundar, but only, I told myself, because it had been a year since I'd had sex with a boy, the only one, and I'd decided that he didn't count. I'd just been hoping for a fuck, for Sundar to become my first-time story, so I could forget about the other one. It had never occurred to me to want a boyfriend or to consider falling in love. I didn't even care very much about the sex itself. I'd only been hoping to acquire a sexual experience, light and lusty, to replace the memory I'd intermittently revisited over the last year in moments of weakness and masochism.

The first person I'd spoken to after my mother's accident who was neither a relative nor a medical professional had not been Helena, who was still supposed to be my best friend. It wasn't any of those girls with magnetized mirrors in their lockers and big, round handwriting that I couldn't for the life of me emulate. It was the Saturday after Mama's accident when I looked up Bachmann in a phone book at the hospital. There was only one listing. A man with an accent just like Ingo Bachmann's, only heavier, answered. “Can I speak to Ingo, please?” I said. The sound of my voice surprised me. It sounded normal. I had never spoken with Ingo Bachmann on the phone before. “It's Agatha,” I told him when he said hello. When he didn't respond immediately, I barely resisted adding, Agatha Winter.

“Oh,” he said. He sounded like a kid. I didn't think of him as a
kid. I had never referred to him out loud before, either, and I had never separated his first name from his last. I asked if I could come over, and he told me which bus to take. He lived north, past the mall, in the dingiest part of downtown. It was a part of the city inhabited by what Tam-Tam called “welfare people.” He told me to climb up the fire escape at the back of the house and go in through his bedroom window.

“Don't knock too loud,” he told me.

It was early evening but already dark when I found his house, and I was cold in my army jacket and jeans. The rusty stairs wobbled when I put my weight on them, and the paint on the house's outside wall was cracking. It felt wrong to see Ingo Bachmann's home, but I'd made up my mind. I'd been on the bus for forty-five minutes and turning back was not an option. He opened the window and watched, bewildered and bleary-eyed, as I struggled my way through. As my eyes adjusted to the light, he wandered across the room to sit down on a chest by the door and stare at his bare feet. He was wearing jeans and a pyjama top, as though he'd already been ready for bed in the afternoon or was still wearing pyjamas from the night before. I looked around for a place to sit other than on his bed. My only option was an upside-down milk crate by the window. A pile of comic books lay at my feet, along with a few books including his copy of
The Metamorphosis
, which he'd been reading the first time we spoke in the cafeteria. We faced each other from opposite ends of the minimally decorated room. It smelled like a boy's room, the room of a boy without a mother. A small lamp at the foot of his bed was the only source of light, and I could barely see him.

“So,” Ingo Bachmann said. “You haven't been at school.” I imagined my father's response to this kind of comment:
you have a remarkable grasp of the obvious.

“I've been at the hospital. My mother was in an accident. She almost died.”

He looked up at me. “Your mother almost died?”

“But she's not going to. She's going to be all right, probably.” We sat in silence. “My biological father abandoned me before I was born,” I said. If my mother didn't get better, I would be like an
orphan, alone in the world and dependent on the kindness of strangers. Ingo Bachmann, surely, would be the type to appreciate the tragedy of the situation.

“Agatha,” he interrupted me. “I think I should tell you a few things about me. I mean, I'm not sure about, you know, everything we've been doing. I'm not sure I've been acting like I should.” Going to his house had been a mistake; I felt stupid for not having realized it. I'd only wanted the comfort of his body, only wanted the heady lust that filled my nose and mouth and pushed everything else away when we groped under the gym-building stairs instead of going to history class. Not knowing how to explain that he'd misunderstood, I hugged myself tightly and leaned forward. I hadn't eaten a proper meal in days — only hospital food and the oven fries Dad had prepared the night before. I had an overwhelming urge to lie down on the bed and go to sleep.

“I'm not sure about anything,” Ingo Bachmann said. “My father and I don't get along well. I'm not good at school . . . I don't know. Everything is confusing. There's this girl, her locker is across from mine and I think maybe . . . ” His voice was a low murmur, a grumble.

“Could you come and sit over here?” I said, indicating the bed beside my milk crate. We got under the sheets and lay close together. Ingo Bachmann touched my pale pink hair, staring intently at my face. I tried to feel like I did during our make-out sessions on the grass by the canal, despite the dim light and the smell of teenaged boy — unchanged sheets, cigarettes and dusty comic books. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling intensely, his bony shoulder against my cheek. He told me his mother had died after a long illness when he was thirteen. His father had brought him to Canada because they had a few relatives here. He had no idea what to say to his son, not even what to say when they ate dinner together. They kept the television on; that was how Ingo Bachmann learned the English colloquialisms he'd never learned at school. “My mother didn't want to die,” he said. “She was remorseful for leaving my father and me alone. You're lucky that your mother will live.”

Then he sat up and took off his clothes without looking at me.
He undressed me the way you would a sleeping child, and we lay face to face on our sides. I'd never been naked in front of a boy before. Our bodies were remarkably alike, bony and long limbed. I hoped he didn't mind that my breasts were so small. My face buried against his neck, I squeezed my eyes shut, arms tight around his scrawny, warm, hairless body. I felt close to sleep, sinking into a drowsy well of soft, cigarette-smelling skin and saliva, until he secured me around the waist, grinding his hips into mine. Then, abruptly, he turned me onto my back and lay on top of me. Staring at my face with intense determination, he shoved my legs wide apart and started pushing against me hard, his rib cage weighing painfully on my chest. He never seemed to notice that I had breasts at all. I wriggled under him, trying to get more comfortable without hurting his feelings, and flexed my back so he could push himself inside me.

There
, I thought, with a gasp, my eyes watering,
I did it
. I knew it was a moment I was obliged to remember for the rest of my life and took careful note of the details. The way he held his breath, the model planes hanging from the ceiling, and the way he groaned before he rolled off me. We lay with our foreheads pressed together, breathing each other's breath, and I reached down to see if I was bleeding. “I really want you to be my friend, Agatha,” Ingo Bachmann murmured. “I really want you to be my friend. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, touching his greasy pale hair with my other hand. “Of course we're friends. Of course.” I knew when I said it that it was a lie. I lay awake for hours watching him sleep, and we kissed awkwardly on the lips after I climbed back out onto the fire escape. I walked home as the sun rose.

Ingo Bachmann faded into the background, too, along with Helena and her volleyball friends. One time, shortly before he dropped out of school, he tried to talk to me in the hallway. He reached out toward my arm and I dodged around him quickly, not looking at his face. After he stopped coming to class I found a note in my locker:
You may think you can take back everything you said, but you can't change the fact that I was inside your body
. I showed it to Reiko, and she said Ingo Bachmann was a misogynist. “Stalker
behaviour,” she said. But I put him out of my mind easily, focusing on my newly acquired friends, who congregated in the food court of the mall.

My family was not as easy to ignore, especially my sister. Minnie started avoiding our mother after the accident, nervous when they were in the same room and balking at any physical contact, which only ever occurred accidentally, since Mama wasn't eager to touch anyone either. Minnie backed away into corners of our apartment, reminding me of a dog in a werewolf movie who senses before anyone else that she's in the presence of a body without a soul. With Dad and me, Minnie became clingier, always sitting beside Dad on the sofa with a fistful of his sweater sleeve balled in her hand. She was still in morning kindergarten, and Dad often took her to his office at the university for the afternoon. The campus was close to my high school, so I walked there after my classes were over, across the frozen canal, and took my sister home. One afternoon I found her sitting at Dad's desk examining formaldehyde-preserved cross-sections of brain.

“And right down here in the cerebellum, and then up here in the frontal lobe,” Dad was saying, tapping the jars with a pencil, “that's where your mother probably incurred her injuries.” Minnie insisted on sleeping in my bed almost every night for the first few months. Welcoming the warmth of her little body curled up against me at night, I didn't want to be alone any more than she did.

Minnie's fifth birthday came. Dad bought her a gift and signed the card,
Love Dad and Mama.
That Chanukah, we went to Granny and Grandpa Winter's house for dinner one night, and, on Christmas, Tam-Tam came to our apartment to eat Chinese takeout and exchange small gifts. Dad bought Mama a gift certificate for a day spa and signed the card from all of us; he bought me and Jasmine sweaters and avoided attaching cards at all. By spring, when he took us to Granny and Grandpa's Passover Seder, his face looked tired of smiling. I suggested leaving Mama at home, but he refused. She paid rapt attention to the reading of the Haggadah, and when everyone else joked and laughed she only looked more intent and serious. Dad was still trying to keep the Mama-shaped hole wide open so she
could slip back in whenever she was ready, and Mama tolerated all the commotion in her strange, silent way, excluding herself from most conversations by staring at some point on the wall. Sometimes she would blink out of her reverie to stare at whoever was speaking, eyebrows quivering. She shook her head gently as though she'd heard a familiar strain of music and was trying to place it. As though she was trying to solve a riddle.

Late in the spring, Mama left her post at the kitchen table. She cashed in her spa day, came home polished and scrubbed, and then began to bathe regularly again. She washed her hair every day, which she'd never done before, and slicked it down with gel. She easily passed her driving test, and Dad started walking to work so she could take the car to her therapy appointments at the hospital. She joined a gym and started going to exercise classes three times a week. It was a warm day in June when I turned onto our street after school to see a woman in a streamlined track suit walking ahead of me, quick-stepped, straight-backed and decisive. I only realized with a start and after a full minute that it was Mama. I could see that she was breathing hard and guessed she had just been jogging. I waited outside the building for five minutes to avoid taking the elevator with her. She was not becoming more like her old self.