Cricket in a Fist (20 page)

. . . Steven, the truth is, I didn't throw your letter off any bridge. A satisfying picture, but I only thought of it the next day, when it was too late. In fact, I ripped the pages into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet, where they transformed into an inky wad. I used the plunger to suck it partway back up, but finally I had no choice but to stick my hand down and deliver the papier-mâché cyst from my drain and throw it in the garbage. Maybe you should follow my example. Stop reading right now, rip these pages into a thousand pieces and give them the flush. I recommend doing it one page at a time — that way they'll go down smoothly. Or ask Ginny to fold each page into a paper crane and the two of you can fly them off the bridge of your choice. Bring along a romantic picnic, maybe, make a day of it.

Your letter's true fate exposed, I resolve that the rest of what I write will be one hundred per cent true as true. Sometimes, in analysis, it takes a patient quite a while to come around to the actual facts. I'm in analysis as part of my training here. It's a strange process, I admit. Threatens to transform us all into crackpot narcissists before we're turned loose on the wealthy neurotics of the world. Ginny and the baby, Tamar and Esther, they've all come up in my sessions, as you can imagine. And you, too. And now I'm going to tell you another thing you don't know.

After that first night with Ginny in the park, I went to the cosmetics counter at the mall and looked for Tamar. I knew it was her right away, by her accent and from Ginny's description. Straight-backed, bird-boned, blond. She tried to sell me a little vial of Chanel for my “sweetheart.” Oh Tamar, with her ingenuous
glamour — she was a saleswoman from times long past. Poised to help me win some young virgin's hand with a bottle of smelly chemicals. I could tell I had made an impression, and two days later, I drove to their apartment. When Tamar opened the door, she looked at me strangely, couldn't figure out where she'd seen me before. I asked for Ginny, but I knew she wouldn't be there, that she had a class that night. The third time I dropped by that month, Tamar's curiosity and good manners compelled her to offer me tea. I knew she didn't tell Ginny about all my visits. Especially once she started talking about the war, she needed to keep me secret. And she was my secret, too — I'd go from her apartment to the Chateau Lafayette to drink with you. Sometimes Ginny would be there with you, and neither of you knew a thing about it.

Tamar showed me I was born to be a psychoanalyst. It was almost easy to get her talking about things she'd never said out loud before. I wanted to talk to Esther, too, but she was off limits. If I tried to get into a room with her, Tamar would practically run to block my path. What do you suppose she thought I might do? She was jealous and didn't want to share me. She was afraid I'd initiate the same kind of intimacy with Esther. But Esther wouldn't have been so easy to seduce, even if I'd had the chance. You can tell just by looking at her. She was stuck in her own head in a whole different way.

Tamar told me her husband used to frequent whores. She said she stopped sleeping with him before Ginny was born, so he eventually started sleeping around, a Friday
-
night ritual. Imagine her telling me these things, the two of us in her living room, sitting as far apart as the furniture arrangement would permit. Her hair was smooth and blond, her eyelids as artful as Brigitte Bardot's. More and more frequently, I saw her looking me up and down. She found me repulsive. Longed for me to scrub my face and trim my hair. When I smiled, she glanced away from the stains on my teeth. I could see she was confused because she longed for me to touch her. Classic transference.

Did you know that she stood across the street, watching,
as the
SS
took her family? Maybe it's something you should know, if you're going to be part of that family. Maybe you should be equipped with some sort of explanation for that woman's coldness and her daughter's hysteria. Did you know that Tamar was hidden in a neighbour's house for almost two years? She said Esther came back so changed it was like living with a stranger. As she told me this, her mascara ran, a single vertical line down each cheek, like a mime's makeup. Her story was the perfect lead-in for my thesis, which I decided then and there to write about survivor syndrome and survivor guilt — specifically about children who'd been in hiding while their parents were in the camps. Tamar and Esther's relationship was horrible and fascinating to me. I was excited, feeling the key to everything I'd been looking for right in my hands. Was I being exploitative? Don't think I haven't thought of that. But no, I wanted to help her, to use her story to help others. And Esther was in the kitchen as Tamar and I spoke, stuffing tomatoes with smoked oysters and cilantro. I could see her lying emaciated in a crowded bunk, making inventories in her head. Recipes and spices, the potential uses of oysters, smoked and raw.

I told Tamar she was expressing feelings she'd repressed for nearly thiry years. I told her about survivor guilt and explained that her ambivalent feelings toward her mother were perfectly understandable. Abandoning my customary armchair, I crossed the Persian rug and sat on the sofa beside her. She didn't flinch. Her eyelids were painted grey and purple and her eyelashes were black glued-on brushes. If Ginny hadn't mentioned it, I might have thought the lashes were real; they made her look like a beautiful comic-book alien. I leaned in and kissed her. The taste of her lipstick coated my palate like oil; she must have been used to having that taste in her mouth all the time. I asked her to wash off the makeup so I could see her real face. I wanted the real taste of her lips and the real smell from behind her ears. It occurred to me that Tamar's fixation with glamour, with physical flawlessness, wasn't so different from Esther's preoccupation with cooking and eating haute cuisine. When civilization falls apart, food and
clothing become purely a matter of survival; the seriousness with which Esther and Tamar approached the aesthetics of food and fashion made perfect sense to me. With my hand in her hair (stiff, impenetrable hair — how I longed for her to wash it!), I told Tamar so. And with that she was gone, as far away as she could get, her arms crossed, ashamed and confused. “You are a silly little boy,” she told me. I tried to reason with her, but she kept repeating that I had to leave.

She was so repressed, so irredeemably repressed, and I felt like she'd led me on. All masks on top of masks — I'd peel one off and find another underneath. Just when I thought I'd found some genuine emotion, I found her as opaque as ever. I told her she was frigid to the core. I wasn't a trained analyst, Steven, and I broke down. I was so angry and disappointed with my failure. Maybe if I'd given her more time she would have come round; instead, I went back to her apartment later that night, after the off-limits supper hour. When Tamar came to the door, I asked for Ginny. Told them I was just in the neighbourhood and was wondering if Ginny would like to go for dessert. Dessert, Steven! Ginny was surprised and delighted to see me, if mostly because it annoyed her mother. And what could Tamar do? She let Ginny walk past her, out of the apartment and into my clutches. I went back every evening that week and took Ginny out. And on the seventh day — well, that's when things went too far. A week later, picking up Ginny and all her belongings, I felt like the Pied Piper, luring Tamar's child away as her punishment for cheating me out of my due.

Ginny was obsessed with her childhood, was always talking about the many moments her mother had let her down. She spoke ad nauseam about her grandmother's mental instability, Esther's habit of walking away while someone was speaking to her. Ginny seemed entirely unaware of her own tendency to do just that; the few times we went grocery shopping together, I'd turn in mid-sentence and find she'd wandered off. She remembered, in vivid detail, dinner conversations from when she was seven. What they were eating, what her father was wearing, her mother's hairstyle.
And she seemed to take it as a personal affront that I had no anecdotes, could offer no description of how my mother stood in the kitchen wearing a certain apron.

Abraham Sutzkever was in the Vilna ghetto in 1943 when he wrote “Liberation.” Two lines from this poem were going to be the epigraph for my ill-fated thesis: “And time will drill you quietly / Like a cricket caught in a fist.” Steven: when we bury memories, they live on in hidden places, and though we're stronger than they are, they're persistent and finally must break free. I hate to think of the four of us — you, me, Ginny and Agatha — bound together forever. I'll try to forget about you, and you'll try to Relegate me to the unfortunate and distant past, but these ties will haunt us all.

By the time I left Ottawa, Ginny couldn't reach her toenails anymore, and they'd grown to absurd lengths. I wished she'd reconnect with her mother; cutting toenails would have been up Tamar's alley. But instead I had to do it. The day before I left, I sat on my bed at Ginny's feet. She'd sprained her ankle chasing me down the fire escape when I showed her my plane ticket. Yelling after me that we'd always be connected because of the baby. I sent her to the hospital in a taxi, then phoned Tamar — I had to reunite them somehow before I left. Ginny's whole foot was swollen, black and blue. I cut the nail too short, and it bled. The pain must have been dulled by whatever they gave her for her ankle, because she didn't seem to notice. I wondered if I should tell her what I'd done. I looked up as she raised her cigarette to her lips; her eyes were closed. In weariness? Pain? I didn't know. I didn't say anything, just blotted the blood away and kept clipping.

I was supposed to meet you at the Laff that last night, and I stood you up. I might as well tell you now that I went downtown and stood outside the bar. I couldn't force myself to go inside, so I watched you through the window. You looked so uncomfortable by yourself, staring down at your drink, glancing up at the door every minute or so. You looked as if you were rehearsing a lecture in your head, as if you were preparing to have the last word.
Watching you alone and waiting, I felt like you must feel, Steven, watching a rat behind a pane of glass. Doesn't the vulnerability ever get to you? The credulity in their faces as you drip neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors into their water?

The next morning, you insisted on coming over to drive me to the airport. I couldn't talk you out of it. I remember the cabbie pulling away from the curb just as you drove up, the bewildered look on your face. God forgive me, I have to laugh remembering it. I felt guilty as hell, but a grin kept forcing itself onto my face. It was the perfect end to our little melodrama, you standing on the street beside your car, Ginny up on the balcony, the two of you transfixed by my film-worthy exit. I was only thinking about getting away. I was laughing.

And Steven, I didn't want to know what happened next because it had nothing to do with me. You have everything now; I have nothing left to contribute. Please don't write back to me. Don't tell me the sordid details of your love and its eventual decline. I wish the two of you luck sleeping in that bed you've made for yourselves. But it's not my story anymore — just leave me out of it.

Asher Acker

After I burned all my nostalgic relics, I stayed in a hotel for the night. In the morning, I went to the airport and left for Spain. I stayed in a small town for a month, and in this place where I'd never been before, I began to feel nostalgia again, in occasional, unpredictable attacks. But I seemed to be nostalgic for other people's memories: random strains of music I couldn't possibly have heard before, unidentified smells from a neighbour's kitchen, a door with cracked brown paint. I was filled with longing — fierce, sorrowful and sublime. These experiences were not a backslide in my recovery, not a relapse into memory's propagandistic traps. Rather, they showed me that a sensory experience can be an occasion for pain, but looked at another way, the experience is only a sound, or only food cooking, or only paint peeling on a door. Everywhere is home; everywhere is nowhere in particular.

Baruch Spinoza writes that “one and the same thing can at the same time be good and bad, and also indifferent. For example, music is good for one who is melancholy, bad for one who is in mourning, and neither good nor bad for the deaf.” Memories are just stories, and stories are neither good nor bad for the amnesiac.

             
J. Virginia Morgan
        The Willing Amnesiac: Reappearing into the Present

She tried for over a year before she failed. Even on the last day, Tamar was trying. She was trying even as she left the clutter of files on her desk and opened her office door to a slim, strange woman with a shoebox in her hand. Her daughter, her Ginny, stood in the doorway like a friendly acquaintance who has left her engine running while she drops off a few things before leaving town.

A year and a week and four days earlier, Tamar hadn't known she ought to be grief-stricken and afraid. She would have been frightened if she, Steven and the girls had been led to a serene, private room equipped with sofas. Twice she had sat in such a room: once with Esther, when Robert was killed; and once with Ginny, the morning Tamar couldn't wake her mother. But this time the nurse merely led them through a set of doors, down a hallway and through another door into a waiting room Tamar had never seen before. It had cushioned chairs and a television, and the only other person there was a young man with a large bandage on his leg. It was late when the nurse explained that Ginny was conscious but exhausted, heavily medicated for pain, and that they should let her sleep and come back the next day. Steven drove Tamar home. She went straight to bed and had no trouble sleeping. She had wanted a good night's rest before facing Ginny's wrath with the world for tripping her up again.