Girl Unwrapped (15 page)

Farther inside the room, Bunny, Myron’s niece, who is also camp secretary, pecks out a letter on a typewriter. Her ponytail quivers with the effort of concentration. Staccato bursts of tapping are interrupted by Bunny’s curses as she stops to apply gobs of Wite-Out over her mistakes. She’d barely looked up when Toni entered the room with her duffel bag over her shoulder. Parked at the bottom of the steps outside is the suitcase into which Toni hurriedly stuffed all her belongings. What’s taking her mother so long? Toni gets up to look out the window at the dirt road. She tries to will the family car, a black Ford Falcon, into view, but the dusty stretch of road remains empty. Then out of the corner of her eye she notices someone on the path. Her heart flips. It’s Janet. Toni drops face-down on the couch, nose squashed against the vinyl, arms wrapped around her head like someone taking cover from an air raid. She knows it’s an absurd position, but she remains so, barely breathing, as the door opens.

The typing stops. A long silence follows. Neither Janet nor Bunny says a word, but Toni imagines them exchanging looks and shrugs. Blood pounds in her ears as she waits and silently pleads—for Janet to leave, for Janet to stay. She feels the pressure of a thigh against her side as Janet lowers herself onto the couch. She hears the striking of a match, a long sighing exhalation. The smell of smoke in the room brings a wave of nausea to Toni’s throat, but she wills it away. This small act of martyrdom pleases her.

“Hey, kiddo,” Janet says softly. “Hear you’re feeling pretty wrecked.”

Toni doesn’t answer. She presses her sweating forehead harder against the taut vinyl. The irregular tapping of the typewriter resumes.

“I know all about that. Been there.” Janet chuckles. “Don’t worry. It passes. You’ll be yourself again soon. Drink lots of water and the crap will get out of your system.” She sounds light-hearted and distant, like someone speaking to an invalid and obliged to be cheerful.

“No!” Toni hears herself groan into the cave between her elbows.

“No?”

“It won’t pass.”

“It won’t?”

“I’ve got too much crap. I’m a stinking cesspool.”

“You mean to tell me you’ll have a hangover forever? After one little binge? Well, maybe not so little.” Janet chuckles again. “But still … ”

“You know what I mean,” Toni says fiercely as tears well up in her eyes.

Janet smokes in silence.

“You’re not a … a cesspool.” Janet’s laughter sounds awkward now. “You’re just very young, you know. Sensitive and mixed up. Trust me. One day all this will be a funny story to tell your grandchildren.”

A funny story.
Does Janet really think so? Or is she just putting on the counsellor act? Toni longs to see Janet’s face, but doesn’t dare turn over. One look, one
wrong
look, out of those sea-green eyes would blast her to smithereens.

“Hey, come on now.” Janet pats the top of Toni’s head. A whimper escapes Toni’s lips.

“Oh! Sorry. Tender, eh?” Janet pulls her hand away.

“You’re not hurting me,” Toni whispers, but Janet’s hand does not return.

“I’d offer you the hair of the dog that bit you, but plain tap water is a better idea. Anyway,” her voice sinks to a whisper, “I’ve got nothing left. You drank me dry.”

“I’m sorry, so sorry,” Toni wails, banging her forehead against the couch. “I’m sorry for everything.
Everything
.”

“Hey, don’t put yourself down for showing some spirit.
Ruach!
Ruach!
” Janet imitates a dining hall chant. A crazy hope catapults into Toni’s thoughts. Perhaps Janet regards yesterday’s scene as not so very horrible after all. Maybe they can still be friends. Toni rolls over to look up at Janet’s droll grin. When her mouth relaxes, the cute chocolate freckle on her upper lip reappears, a tiny piece of Janet that Toni has come to regard as her own.

“I’m leaving today. Soon as my parents get here. I couldn’t stay. Not after … after all the things I said, in front of everyone.”

“Oh, that.” Janet waves her hand. “People babble all kinds of stuff when they’re looped. Forget it. I have.”

“Can we get together when you’re back in the city? Could I come over to your place sometime?”

The smile fades from Janet’s lips. She stares blankly at Toni for some moments and blinks.

“I’d hate not to see you ever again. Please.”

“Hey! Of course you’ll see me. I’ll be playing concerts, you know. Might even come to your school some time.”

“Could I help out with your concerts? Could I be a stage hand?”

Janet takes another drag and directs the smoke out of the corner her mouth in a long, nicely controlled stream. Her eyes fix upon the window above Toni’s head.

“Concerts aren’t like that. It’s just me and a few friends with guitars. There’s nothing to stage.”

“I could carry your guitar. Or … help with the lights?”

Toni can hear how desperate she sounds.

“Just come and listen. And bring your own friends.”

Janet’s tone is flat. What Toni fears most is happening right now. The gap between them has started to widen, and though Janet smiles her coaxing, joking smile, there’s no connection. Instead, there’s finality to the way she rises after a last friendly poke in Toni’s ribs and says, “Be seeing you,” and makes a point of singing out a hearty goodbye to Bunny too, as if the secretary is just as important to her as Toni. Then she’s skipping down the outer stairs and all Toni can do is watch her go.

The bags loaded into the trunk of the car, Toni urges her mother to get going, but Lisa wants a private word with the director first. Lisa wears her shimmering green dress with the bolero jacket and a string of fake pearls that look real enough to fool Herr Rothschild himself. An outfit that means business. Toni slides down in the passenger side of the waiting car. Very soon the P.A. will announce the Tuck Shop is open and kids will appear—the twins even!
Hurry, hurry, hurry
. But Lisa takes her sweet time.

After an eternity, she finally stomps back down the stairs, plunks herself into the driver’s seat, slams the car door, and starts the engine. They rattle along the pot-holed road, and Toni’s temples throb with heat, misery, and the remnants of her hangover. She hopes her mother won’t make good on the promise of a long talk during the drive home. She wants silence, oblivion, the landscape zipping by. Their progress down the dirt road is torturously slow.

“What a stupid little man,” her mother says as she negotiates a turn too quickly and then steps on the brake, making Toni jerk forward. Everyone who annoys Lisa is “little.”

“Covering up for his own incompetence. Puffing himself up like a toad. Immediately I saw through him. I looked straight into his eyes, and he could not look back at me.”

Toni stares out the side window. The bushes along the road are coated with ash-grey powdery dust.

“I know his type. A petty official who tries to put the blame on others, but he could not fool me. I let him have it.”

Now Toni can’t help but relish the scene, as she imagines it: her mother’s face growing darker and darker, her eyes filled with a terrible light, Myron realizing his mistake too late, cringing behind his desk, smiling stupidly with his peanut-goo teeth as a torrent of shrill, indignant words slaps down his feeble arguments, her mother like a magnificent tropical bird in her iridescent green suit, flashing pearls, and brilliant lipstick, showing up the mess in Myron’s office.
You tell
him, Mama!

“Says we should send you to a psychiatrist. Never have I been so insulted.”

What?
Toni whips around, away from the imagined scene in the green blur beyond the window. She faces her mother, a sudden chill in her heart.

“Yes, a … what do you call it? A head shrinker. For my daughter. Says you are troubled. My Toni! Does he think I don’t know my own daughter? I thought this was a proper camp with proper management, I told him. Where was the supervision, I asked him. And where did that liquor come from? That he couldn’t answer me. He’s covering up for someone, himself for all I know. Maybe he keeps a bottle under his desk.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Toni mumbles.

“No? So maybe one of his counsellors does. Maybe that Janet you so adore is the drunkard. Ha! I see I’ve hit on the truth. With one look, I see things. Not like that stupid director. A mother knows.”

“Mama! Shut up, shut up!” Toni presses her hands over her ears.

“Okay, okay. Calm down,
Bubbele
. We’ll talk properly later.”

Toni slumps against the car door and closes her eyes tight. Lisa says nothing for a while. They pass a beaver swamp, a run-down cabin beside a small lake, a clearing with a weathered farm house, and some motionless cows.

“What an awful road,” Lisa exclaims when a rock pops up against the undercarriage of the car.

“How long to the highway?” Toni asks.

“Soon,
Bubbele
, soon. I know you want to get home. I’ve made my yeast buns for you.”

“I’m too hungover for yeast buns,” Toni says.

“My poor chick. That girl was a bad influence. I could tell from your letters.”

“You don’t know anything!” Toni shrieks. She twists around, away from her mother, and leans as far as she can out the window.

“Get back in here,” her mother says firmly. She rolls up the window part way when Toni slouches in her seat again. “Dirty air,” she says, shaking her head over the clouds of dust they leave behind. Presently they come to a hardtop road between corn fields. The car glides along smoothly at last.

“I know one thing,” Lisa says. “You think that girl is a goddess, and that’s perfectly normal. Happens all the time with young persons your age. Nothing strange about it, no need to pay some head shrinker to tell us that. I just wish they’d supervised you better and didn’t let you become so attached.”

Rage surges in Toni’s chest as she watches the rapid movement of her mother’s lips, the indignant quivers of her head. Lisa finally pauses for breath, while coming to a halt at an intersection to the highway.

“I’m a lesbian, Mama.”

Toni’s sweaty fingers grip the under-side of the car seat. She holds on for dear life, like someone on a roller coaster about to take the downward plunge.

Her mother makes no move to turn onto the highway. For a few moments the car idles and there’s nothing but the monotonous cheep of crickets in the fields and her mother staring at the windshield. Toni thinks she’s going to be sick again. That wooziness in her stomach, and the air so still. If only the sullen sky would burst forth with thunder, lightning, rain. It just sits there, dark and bloated.

“Don’t be crazy,” Lisa finally says in a voice of quiet fury. “You are no such thing. Is that what he called you, that ugly little man?”

Lisa’s foot presses on the accelerator so that the car jerks forward as she swings onto the highway.

“He didn’t. But he knows. Everybody knows.”

“Nobody knows you like your mama does. You came out of my body. You are a perfectly normal, good girl. Clean and decent, like you were raised. You don’t even know what that word means, do you?” She glances sharply in Toni’s direction.

Toni’s face boils as she turns toward the window. They are moving swiftly now, bearing down on a lumbering half-ton truck.

“Of course I do.”

Lisa utters a barking laugh. “
Mein Gott
, there are a million miles between admiring some older girl, as you did, and that other thing. You have not a cruel bone in your body. Such women are sadists. You understand? They are cruel, depraved. She-devils, not women.” Lisa makes a spitting sound. “The Nazis selected them to be guards in the camps because they could be counted on to act like beasts. You have nothing whatever in common with those monsters. You will put such worries out of your head, do you hear?”

Her mother’s eyes narrow, and she clutches the wheel fiercely, speeding up, then slowing down abruptly, as she changes her mind about overtaking the truck. She launches into another tirade about Camp Tikvah and Myron’s chutzpah at refusing to give a refund for the two weeks Toni will miss. Then Lisa tells Toni about Julius’s poor health, his ulcers, his lack of energy. They mustn’t worry him with the details of this incident. He’s been told that Toni has the flu.

Toni sits with downcast eyes, barely hearing a word. She envisions a flushed, hard-faced, leering woman in jackboots and a uniform, brandishing a whip over a row of naked prisoners. She-devil. A word she’s never heard her mother use before. It is ugly, lurid, extreme, compelling in its accuracy, pointing to the depths of depravity and the vehemence of Lisa’s feelings on the subject.

Toni’s veins fill with ice.

chapter 11

All Toni wants is to drown in sleep, to fall into the depths of a black, suffocating void. Spread-eagled on her bed, she sinks into the torpor of a late-August heat wave. Across the city, lawns lie scorched, leaves droop, sparrows hide under hedges, their beaks open, gasping for air. Each day the radio announcer predicts a thunderstorm, but no rain comes. A faint smell of rot hangs everywhere. The whole world is dying.
Good
.

“Let’s see a film,” Lisa says. “The movie house will be air conditioned.”

She fans herself with a folded section of newspaper as she stands in Toni’s doorway.

“And then we could go to that new place downtown. The A&W. Hmm,
Bubbele
? What do you think? I heard it’s very popular with the young people.”

Toni hears the newspaper swish back and forth. She hears the coaxing in her mother’s voice and something else not usually present, a hesitation, as if Lisa’s unsure how to approach this deformed creature that used to be her daughter. The nausea, never far from Toni’s throat these days, condenses. With her eyes shut tight, Toni shakes her head. Kids from school probably hang out at the new A&W. What can her mother be thinking?

“Well then, go to the Y. Go for a swim. You can’t just lie there like an empty sack.”

The newspaper slaps at the foot of the bed. A hand tugs Toni’s arm. After more exhortations, Lisa retreats, muttering curses against the foul, inhuman heat. She’ll be back later. Not another word has been said about the topic that engaged them in the car on the drive home from Camp Tikvah. Not a word more will be said. A closed book. And did those things actually happen? Were they not like one of those lurid stories whispered from ear to ear in the bunk after lights out, growing wilder and more grotesque as each teller takes up the tale? Toni’s fists, clenched during her mother’s presence, relax, and she sinks back into lethargy. But her body just pretends. Even in slumber, a fluttering moth of anxiety knocks about inside her gut. When she wakes her jaw feels sore, as if she’s had a rough session beneath a dentist’s drill. She’s been grinding her teeth.