Cricket in a Fist (21 page)

*

On the day before the last, Aga came by in the afternoon for tea and sat across from Tamar at the kitchen table. Only a rare woman could get away with tying her hair away from her face, and Aga wasn't one of them; the ponytail emphasized her high forehead. Her arms were thin, and she moved her long fingers with unconscious grace. She would have looked wonderful in a nice blouse and skirt, and Tamar was about to tell her so when Aga said, “You look nice. I like your scarf. Are you enjoying your day off?” Tamar examined the question for sarcasm, but there was none. The girl only smiled politely across the table and sipped her tea.

Before the accident, if Ginny had been around, she'd surely have said, “Oh, really, Mother, there was no need to get all dolled up just for me.” Ginny would have known that Tamar's outfits and jewellery always complemented each other tastefully, even on days when there was no one to see them at all, and would have expressed her disdain in comments that eluded answers. But now that Ginny was different, was silent, there was no one with the inclination or the gall to batter Tamar so; truth be told, no one knew her well enough to find her weak spots, and no one had any reason to discover where they lay. With a fierce pang of loneliness, Tamar reached across the table to squeeze Aga's wrist, then quickly recovered and turned the hand over to examine its dry cuticles and clean, short nails. “Come upstairs before you go,” Tamar said. “I'll get you some skin cream. What do you use?”

Aga didn't pull abruptly away as Ginny might have done, but she didn't answer the question either. Smiling in that mild, somehow secretive way of hers, she leaned back, resting the weight of her arm on Tamar's hand like a princess with her suitor. As though Tamar should lean down and kiss the girl's chapped, lily-white fingers. “Just lotion, I guess,” Aga said. “I still have some of that stuff you gave me before.”

“Which one?” Tamar let the hand go.

“I'm not sure, Tam-Tam. I don't always remember which product you gave me is which, you know?”

Aga was always polite when she came by, polite on the surface at least, her manner subtly tinged with impatience. Only when Steven was around, when Ginny was around, did Aga become rude and sullen, crossing her arms and looking away from conversations, trying to block them out. During sessions with Dr. Manning, Aga had always looked wearily into her lap or out the window, setting her lips, thinking, presumably, about more important matters. If Aga only knew how her own mother, at that age, used to bite her bottom lip, hold her hand to her throat and furrow her forehead, deep in thought about some perceived injustice. Often, this withdrawal had come over Ginny as she stood by Tamar's side after dinner, holding a tea towel to dry the dishes. As Tamar turned to pass a utensil, she would find the girl still holding the last plate, moving the cloth too slowly and gently to have any effect. Startled out of her reverie, Ginny would finish quickly, with an air of placid compliance. It was only with practised effort that Tamar had resisted grabbing her daughter by the shoulders to shake her. It was so stubborn, so cruel how Ginny looked longingly at some distant point, obviously wishing she had someone worthy of her confidence.

“Will you please focus on the task,” Tamar would say, “and put your hair out of your face?”

“And the overbearing mother attempts to correct yet another defect in the slovenly young daughter's comportment,” said Ginny, leaning away from Tamar's hand. It was Robert's legacy, this tendency to make bizarre, incomprehensible remarks. She was clever; Tamar was struck by her daughter's cleverness. But instead of trying to “discuss things,” as Robert used to do, Ginny would look at Tamar inscrutably, lips pressed together, before she fled to the living room to play Gershwin and Bach on the piano, incessantly and somehow angrily. Ginny had never been like Tamar, nor like anyone Tamar had grown up with or met in Canada. Ginny made herself impossible to know. But, Tamar regretfully admitted to herself, she hadn't wanted Ginny to confide her private thoughts; she had merely longed for the girl to stop thinking them. Ginny's most dreaded weapon, in fact, had always come in the form of confession.

“Don't like my top, do you?” she'd said at the dinner table when she was fifteen. “Well, good news. I didn't spend a cent on it. I ripped it off. Stole it. What are you going to do about that?” Or when she was seventeen and announced that her history teacher had fallen in love with her and bought her an obscene pair of panties, which she flung across the sitting room into Tamar's lap. Surely her claims in that case were invented or at least exaggerated. And then, when Ginny allowed herself to be ensnared by Asher — Tamar could picture her daughter so clearly, standing by Esther's knitting basket, hands on hips, wanting an explosive reaction. And Tamar had only wanted Ginny to stop complaining, confessing; to stop looking so burdened, so suspicious, so often as if she had just come to a realization that changed everything.

“Well,” said Aga, startling Tamar as she set her cup down. “I'd better go. I'll see you soon. At the next — well. Whenever.”

“Come up just for a minute,” Tamar said again, as Aga put on her shoes and jacket and leaned in for a kiss. “I want to give you this new cream for your hands. Please — a gift.”

Aga followed Tamar out the front door and up the stairs to the salon. When they reached the reception desk, Tamar linked arms with her lanky granddaughter and held the girl's wrist firmly. Cassandra and Marcy were loitering around the desk, chatting with the new receptionist, the three of them a colourful girlish cluster of red lips and shiny hair.

“Hi, Agatha,” Cassandra said, giving the girl a quick hug.

“It's really slow right now,” Marcy said.

“Did the new hair potion come?” Tamar asked. She looked behind the desk and saw the unopened box, just as the receptionist pointed it out. Sarah, that was her name. “Do you remember what we talked about, that every stylist needs one at her station?”

“Yes.” Sarah stood up.

“You do remember talking about that?”

“Yes, I do.” She was already cutting the box open.

“When it's slow,” said Tamar, “that's the perfect time for you girls to do these things.” The new girl didn't respond, just took a handful
of the small, round containers and hurried toward the styling stations.

“Don't you love these long layers?” Tamar fluffed Cassandra's newly dyed hair, with its blond chunks curling chaotically around darker locks. “It frames her face perfectly. Don't you think Aga could have something like that? You know, just some wisps around the forehead. Something softer? Take out your ponytail,” she told Agatha.

Within minutes, Cassandra was leading the girl away. “Trust me,” Tamar heard Cassandra say. “I know what you'll like. Just trust me.” It was true — Cassandra always knew what her clients would like. Tamar was sometimes baffled by the styles Cassandra created, especially for teenagers. But the young women, with mismatched swatches of colour, absurdly short bangs or random long wisps, were always thrilled. And the styles always did somehow flatter their faces.

Tamar sat at the reception desk and looked at Sarah's doodles in the appointment book — all flowers with smiley faces.

“Who hired you?” she said, as the receptionist approached the desk again. She only realized from the girl's expression how nasty the question had sounded.

“You and Cassandra did.”

“Oh yes. Of course, of course. Well, good.” She stood. “I'm just going to sort out a few things in my office.”

Tamar paused beside the sink where Cassandra was washing Aga's hair. “Give her a little makeup, too,” Tamar suggested. “A little eye makeup and some lipstick. Some colour in her cheeks.”

Aga had removed her glasses and squeezed her eyes shut. It was always telling to see a client leaning back against the sink's neck rest, hair drenched. From this angle, the face looked so different; the view had always reminded Tamar of looking at a familiar house from above, through a crack in the ceiling. Upside down, all the usually hidden nuances appearing out of shadow. And Tamar saw, with new certainty, that Aga would appear old before her time. Her skin wouldn't wrinkle badly, but her face would be world-worn.
Tamar had seen this in Aga even when she was a small child. The night Ginny went into early labour with Minnie, Tamar had sat on Aga's bed and seen it in the pale glow of the night light. She was a pretty little girl, especially without her glasses, elfin and intelligent-looking, but Tamar saw then that this face would come to have the same sickly allure as Asher's: around the eyes, the burden of some terrible wisdom and the suggestion of a monstrously compelling sadness.

Tamar touched Aga's cheek lightly. “Little one,” she said, “I'm going to take care of a few things in my office. Don't forget to say goodbye.”

The desk in Tamar's office was a shambles, and she sat down with a sigh, slouching for a moment before straightening her back and setting to work. Cassandra's claim terrified her: that they couldn't run the business for much longer without a computer. She wouldn't even know what to do with such a machine, and the more Cassandra tried to convince her, to explain the convenience and the necessity of it, the more helpless Tamar felt. She opened her ledger and flipped through its pencil-smudged pages. She wouldn't be able to run the business much longer at all; that's what it came down to. She would have to hire a manager. She would have to retire, to move behind the scenes. She thought how running a business for fifteen years had changed her, had forced her to be practical and stubborn in ways she hadn't known herself capable of. And she was proud — she had created a business she was truly proud of.

Even after Tamar opened Inner Beauty, Ginny had disparaged her as a “makeup artist,” but it had always been more than that, always more than a job, and more than a knack for applying coloured pastes to skin, for teaching others to do the same. “No one spends as much time in front of mirrors as you do. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Oh mirror,” Ginny sighed, imitating Tamar's accent. “Please make me the prettiest makeup artist of them all so I can sell my magical wares to the simple-minded townspeople.” And Tamar did
spend a lot of time looking at mirrors, and not just at mirrors, but at women's faces, a steady stream of them, in all their minutiae. These clients were afraid something was slipping away, and they wanted it back. The changes that alter a face begin so slightly a woman can overlook them for years, but the day comes when she begins to see small signs, and then every new inspection holds the hope that nothing has happened after all, that it was only a trick of the light or a bad night's sleep. It was Tamar's job to smooth these imperfections into oblivion for as long as possible, to ease a face back in its history toward a time before flaws.

Tamar may not have been brilliant and fearless like Robert was, but she had tried to impart to her young daughter the wisdom she possessed, telling her not to distort her forehead so, not to push out her lip, wrinkling her chin. “Elasticity doesn't last forever,” she told Ginny, just as she told her clients. “By the age of thirty, everything's going downhill.” She brought home the best cleansers, toners and moisturizers for herself and her family, but Ginny would often wash with soap or even just water. Tamar knew this because products in Ginny's shower that should have lasted for two months didn't need replacing for a year.

“Stop scrutinizing me, Mother.” Ginny would toss that thick, amazingly lovely hair over her shoulders and roll her eyes. “I'm a human being, not a doll, all right?” It was true that Tamar scrutinized; she couldn't help but notice every stray hair around her daughter's eyebrows, every unsightly reddish blotch on the girl's cheeks and, during the year or two when Ginny ironed her hair, all those frizzy, dry split ends. Very early, Tamar could see Ginny as an old woman, the particular ways that time would ravage her — she could see it in each fine line under the eyes, in the creases that deepened and didn't quite fade after a laugh or a grimace. Just as Tamar had watched the groove between her own mother's eyebrows, which had always appeared at times of intense concentration, such as when she was cooking or pretending to listen to the radio before bed. This line, Tamar foresaw, would engrave itself permanently, visible always, even in sleep, and Esther's worried mouth would shrivel at the edges to fall in on itself.

It never failed, Tamar's uncanny ability to see the future, to predict the face a woman would wear in ten years, the faces she would wear in twenty and fifty years; the way she would come to hold her lips and narrow her eyes; whether she would wear her age with dismay or with dignity. Tamar saw it all, a process lying in wait to unfold, as steady, painful and inevitable as cutting their first teeth. She saw every detail of time's passage, saw each mark and crease, and how each would deepen or lengthen. This was her business. Inner Beauty — Ginny had mocked the name, but Tamar thought it was perfect and not at all ironic. Every woman believes she is meant to be beautiful, and Tamar's gift was the ability to make this beauty actual. That's why Cassandra was her favourite employee — she understood this, too.

Tamar looked around the office at all the photographs and prints she'd mounted, the magazines and books on the shelves. If she hired a manager, she would have to take all her photographs down. This wouldn't be her office anymore. It was a miserable prospect, though she'd tried to convince herself it would just give her more time to help with Ginny. She still half believed this was a reasonable hope, even then, on the second-last day. She picked up the photograph on her desk, which she had removed from the wall days before to study, as though it could tell her something she had never noticed. Once again, she looked at her own sunburnt cheeks — the sunburnt cheeks of a child. And Esther's pale face, framed with a sun-swept bob. Esther, in her early thirties, had looked much younger. People sometimes mistook her in those days for a student, a child. It was something about her skin. It was the combination of Esther's big eyes and her tiny frame, Tamar's father once said, that made women her own age speak to her as if she were a child.