Cricket in a Fist (7 page)

Tamar sat on the toilet seat, legs crossed, and didn't stare as Ginny pulled her shift over her head and stepped out of her panties. One hand on either side of the claw-foot tub, Ginny manoeuvred herself into the hot water without wetting her damaged ankle. She let that leg hang over the side. Swollen all over, no wonder she was exhausted. Her breasts looked painfully full, already stretching downward almost to rest on the swell of her belly. Tamar remembered her own pregnancy, how her body barely changed, limbs and face
unaffected by the bulge that confined itself to her middle. Ginny was overwhelmed so quickly, impending motherhood touching every part of her. From swollen feet to lacklustre hair, she was strained at the seams.

“Do you think it's funny that I don't have a shower?” said Ginny.

“This isn't right.” Tamar clasped her hands. “You can't live here. We'll have room in the new place. We can all move in within the month. In time for the baby.”

“He's planning to come back. What am I supposed to do? Throw out his things? Leave him homeless?” Ginny leaned her head against the tub's rolled end. “What about my plants? And anyway, I might go there eventually. After the baby's born and my ankle's healed and all that.” She said this as though mustering conviction, but she sounded far from convinced and further from convincing.

“Please, Ginny. This makes no sense. Oma Esther can't understand it at all. It makes her so upset that you're not around to play the piano anymore. It just sits there now, waiting to be dusted.”

“Oma Esther thinks I'm a whore and Asher's a lunatic,” said Ginny. “And she hates the piano. She thinks it's all just” — Ginny wrapped her arms around her chest and shook her head — “mishigas.” Tamar almost had to smile. Ginny had an uncanny gift for imitating mannerisms. Asher had claimed to recognize Tamar, the first time they met, from Ginny's description, but surely he had known her by the girl's performances — impersonations unkind only for their unrelenting accuracy.

“She's not used to all this,” Tamar said. “Can you blame her? Frankly, it's a little difficult for everyone.”

“You don't say.” Ginny filled a green plastic bucket and supported herself with one arm, awkwardly pouring water over her head with the other.

“We're bringing the piano with us when we move,” said Tamar, pressing her palms against her thighs. “Despite the expense. Do you have any idea what's involved? It's quite incredible.” Ginny didn't respond. “My God,” she said. “The expense.” Watching Ginny fill the bucket a second time, Tamar took off her bracelet and moved to the edge of the tub. Ginny didn't object to her mother's help, just let
her arms fall to her sides. Taking the bucket, Tamar continued to drench her daughter's long hair. Greasy along its centre part, it hung straight, past her shoulder blades. Ginny shut her eyes against the water and scrunched her face, lips reddened by the heat. “Israel is subtropical,” she said, as Tamar refilled the bucket. “But it can't be any hotter than here. It'll be dry, won't it, the kind of heat that gives you a nosebleed?” She blinked water out of her eyes and looked up at her mother, waiting for an answer, an explanation. Her long lashes caught beads of water like a spiderweb; at twenty-three, she suddenly looked like herself at six.

Bathing was the only time Ginny had ever chosen Tamar's help over Robert's, the only time she seemed to trust her mother's competence. As a child, she'd let her body sag like a rag doll so Tamar was obliged to do everything for her, even lifting her arms to wash underneath. Ginny's knees and elbows were perpetually scabby and scraped, and every bath day, Tamar found new bruises. Though dressed crisp and neat each morning, hair pulled into two tight braids by Esther, Ginny invariably came home with her outfits skewed, loose hair from her braids standing out in a halo. She stood tall and gangly, one sock crumpled around her ankle. Tamar cringed, watching her daughter walk into chairs and trip over cracks in the sidewalk. Even mosquitoes seemed more attracted to Ginny than to the average person, and from her father she had inherited the pale, faintly freckled skin that often accompanies red hair. Skin that scorches scarlet and raw in the sun, then peels in long strips, fly-wing thin.

At eleven years old, Ginny suffered her first injury serious enough to require doctor-applied bandages and prescribed painkillers. She flew off the front of her father's bicycle, Robert instinctively reaching out to grab her arm. Her sleeve tore in his hand as momentum carried her out of his reach, past the bus's trajectory and into the fatherless rest of her life. Her palms collided with pavement, one elbow fracturing under the force of her own weight. As the doctor prophesied, she would never again be able to straighten that arm completely.

At the hospital, they were led to a private room set aside for
grieving families. Esther winced as though from a deep and painful blow when she heard her son-in-law was dead, but Tamar laughed. “No,” she said. “How ridiculous. Of course he wasn't killed.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Reilly.” The doctor's manner cut her laugh short, cut her breathing short. Something terrible had happened. She had done something terrible. She was a widow, bereaved; she had a dead man's clothes in her house. She would always remember how this doctor's eyebrows met in the middle, that his eyes were slightly bloodshot. The doctor said, “Robert has passed away. I'm very sorry.”

Tamar and Esther sat with Robert's death, waiting for the doctors to set Ginny's broken bones. “There is nothing new for us under the sun,” said Esther. Tamar reached and took her mother's hand, and neither of them spoke again until the red-eyed doctor reappeared, some time later, to ask Tamar to identify her husband's body.

Tamar didn't move. She had never felt so incapable of performing a task demanded of her, so simply unable to comply with what was needed.

“I'll do this,” said Esther. Tamar looked at her mother, forcing herself to shake her head. “I can do this?” Esther asked the doctor. She touched Tamar's hand and said firmly, “I'll see him.” She stood and nodded, followed the doctor from the room.

At her father's funeral, Ginny wore a bandage high on her cheek and a sling to support her cast. Half her lip was swollen and bruised, a lopsided pout. It was a closed-casket funeral, but Tamar knew that Ginny must have seen Robert lifeless on the street beside her. A father with a concrete, bodily death, neat and conclusive. It seemed to confirm that Robert was alien, not one of them. Men in Tamar's family didn't have funerals, didn't leave corpses; they just vanished and faded from memory. The letter from a stranger, confirming her father's death, hadn't extinguished the feeling that he was still out there somewhere, leading some unlikely life. Tamar sat between Esther and Ginny at the funeral, holding their hands tightly. They and a few of Robert's colleagues from the clinic were the only people who attended the funeral.

“This is some family,” Esther said. “We touch men, they crumble like dust.”

Tamar was the sole beneficiary of Robert's will, except for the piano, which would be Ginny's when she married or turned twenty-one, whichever came first, and a surprisingly large sum that he left to Esther.

Six months after Robert died, Ginny contracted pneumonia and spent a week in the hospital. Then she pirouetted into the end table and fell on the vase, splintered glass wedging into her side. She broke a rib skating on the canal, burnt her foot with the iron and sprained her back dragging a bed away from the wall to check for demons. Tamar hoped Ginny's long, shelf-knocking limbs would give way to a model's figure, but puberty brought Ginny's upward growth to a halt and she swelled outward instead, into a sensual voluptuousness. Esther said, “Trouble.” Ginny's lips were full and red, and she stood habitually with one hand pressed against the small of her back, breasts straining her buttons. Esther was always stealing disapproving looks, seeing the girl had become all inefficiency and seduction.

“Don't worry,” said Tamar.

Yet the pregnancy seemed like another mishap, another accident that could have been prevented if only Tamar had been vigilant. Once again she had let Ginny out of sight with a man. A man with no sense. Asher opened the door of his rusty red Ford and Ginny climbed inside. A little girl with two new, smooth braids, sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle, skinny legs dangling.

Tamar had shoved a few items into Ginny's bags when the girl moved out, including a bottle of salon-quality shampoo, and now, looking for something to use on her daughter's grease-heavy hair, she found this bottle amid the clutter in a metal basket at the foot of the tub. An ashtray was balanced on top of the basket, encrusted with the sludge of dampened and dried ashes. Putting it on the floor so she could wash it later, Tamar ignored her fleeting desire for a cigarette. Ginny and Esther had never seen her smoke; it usually took her a week to get through a pack, and she only indulged at work, in the department store's employee changing room. It occurred
to her for the first time, and with a strangely desperate sense of loss, that when she left her job in a month to start her new business, her smoking days would be over.

Asher had left his shaving cream behind, and dried-up drips of foam glued several blond hairs to the top of the container. Tamar wondered if Asher planned not to shave in Israel, if he planned to grow facial hair and ear locks. She imagined the fair scruff the boy would likely find on his cheeks in lieu of a beard and closed her eyes against the image, immediately aware that she was squeezing her lids together, a habit that had already caused wrinkles to start beside her eyes. She dropped the shaving cream into the trash can — Ginny clearly wasn't using it to shave her legs or armpits — and poured a generous amount of shampoo into her palm. Ginny kept her eyes shut. It was a long time since Tamar had washed hair, even her own. She and Esther had their hair washed and set twice a week. After they moved and Tamar opened her salon over the apartment, Esther would only have to walk upstairs to have her roots touched up. Tamar planned to start with two stylists, a manicurist and a pedicurist. She would sell cosmetics and work the cash herself. She had worked in enough stores that she was confident she could manage the books, at least until she could afford to hire an accountant.

She rubbed the shampoo between her hands and said to Ginny, “Doesn't this smell wonderful?” It did: fruity and musky, the smell of griminess cleared away and beauty released. In Tamar's view, beauty products didn't add to or change a woman's appearance but smoothed out hard edges, revealing her best self. At the vanity table each morning, Tamar watched her real face emerge, features sharpened. According to Asher, she felt the same way about grooming that Esther did about cooking. Asher said that she and Esther were both warding off the spectre that lurks beneath civilization. When she recalled this conversation, Tamar felt ill. It had been not only an act of betrayal, it had also been monstrously silly, an indignity that recalled her second date with Robert, all those years ago, after which she'd lain awake for hours remembering how she squeezed his hand between her legs, gasping, mouth against his. She was tortured by the absurdity of it — how ridiculous that she'd let herself go. And,
despite everything, the knowledge that, if given a chance, she would do it again.

Oh, and she did it again. She'd waited for Robert, planned clandestine meetings, and lied so they could be alone. For a little sliver of time, she ached with a desire that demanded all her attention, and she lived to satisfy it. When he had the night shift and she had days off, she took the bus to his house. One time she even met him in his office, and she didn't wait, didn't speak, took the time only to lock the door behind her before tearing into him. When they couldn't meet for several days in a row, she'd find herself motionless at the cosmetics counter, staring at her own reflection in the magnifying mirrors, thinking about his smell, the sound of his voice saying her name; she thought about him while she was working, while she was eating dinner with her mother, as she cleaned the dishes and did the laundry and dyed Esther's hair at the kitchen sink. She was a quiet lover, always aware of the sound of her own breathing and his, and held fistfuls of his thick red hair in her hands.

Robert had shown her something new — he had made her forget about the endless struggle to earn a living and keep her mother's unease at bay; he warded off her panic over the unlikeliness of staying afloat. She believed his claim that this was some sort of love, though it surely in no way resembled the love her parents had shared, which was the kind that led reasonably to marriage. But the kind of love Tamar indulged in three or four times a week led to marriage as well, it turned out, by way of a small, rushed wedding before anything became obvious.

The way Asher coaxed her to speak, conjured confessions — it had all reminded her, in some strange way, of Robert. It was the undivided attention, the look of desire, of wanting something she had and wanting it badly. And she wanted to give it to him. As though he could take her words and leave her free of them. She'd told Asher about her father, that he had been tall and bony, with sharp ribs, cheekbones and shoulders, and had black hair that curled straight up. How he'd swung Tamar into the air with a happiness that was matched in intensity only by his frustration, when his fists slammed against tables and plates smashed against walls. He never
directed these brief, fierce rages at Esther, Tamar or any other person but always at inanimate objects, which, however expensively, could be swept up and replaced. And Tamar told Asher that Esther had been small and dainty, with elegant, thin fingers and a girlish, pretty face. Jozef used to pick her up and swing her around, too, singing her name. He touched her face and called her “my sweet love.” Tamar's parents had loved each other with a rare and dangerous fierceness; Tamar had not realized this until she watched the van Daams, the brusque and often irritated manner in which they took care of each other and the way they tolerated each other's presence and needs. They used to have dinner parties, Tamar's parents, and she remembered how her father put his arm around Esther's shoulders as he conversed and pulled her close for a moment, protectively, to reinforce that she was dear to him.