Girl Unwrapped (17 page)

“Ew. They’re wiggling!” girlish voices squealed. “They’re germs.”

“No, sperm!” said one of the boys. “See the tails?”

“Chuck contaminated the slide. Stuck his hands in his pants, didn’t you Chucky?”

“Eek! Disgusting!”

Toni Goldblatt, the Grade A student, the one who has re-made herself from the inside out, bent her face to the microscope’s eyepiece and took notes. She allowed herself just the ghost of a smile at her classmates’ shenanigans. There were no tails, of course, and the girls knew that, but pretended otherwise. To them the little organisms were just dots of nothing. They couldn’t appreciate the wonder. Only someone like Mr Price could. Mr Price, the biology teacher, a fellow traveller in the realm of scientific pursuit.

Now, the evening before her mid-term, Toni reviews her biology text and lab notes, elbows on her desk in the bedroom that she has transformed as much as possible into a monk-like cell. Gone are the flouncy white bedspread of her mother’s choosing and the matching curtains with all that superfluous trim. Instead, the naked pane of glass looks out at the March-bare tree in front of the house and hard-packed snow. Only the plain, white roller blind hangs at the top of the window, ready to be pulled down and blot out the world. A brown wool blanket stretches tightly over the bed, tucked neatly into hospital corners. Her books are arranged in alphabetical order. Pens, pencils, rulers stand erect in their black plastic holder, and stray papers are stowed in three-punch binders. Once upon a time, a few months ago, she was loose and lazy, her room cluttered, her mind a swamp. But the old Toni no longer exists. Peeled off like dead skin.

Sucking in a deep breath, Toni opens her loose-leaf binder to a blank page and quickly sketches the paramecium with its components and labels, exactly as in the diagram she’s memorized. Mr Price would be pleased. His eyebrows would lift slightly, and his lips shape the words: “Clever girl.”

Mr Price has a narrow, sharp, aristocratic face, wears horn-rimmed glasses, tweed jackets with leather patches at the elbows, and an expression of cool, scientific detachment. He can settle down the class with just one long, withering glance.

“The world doesn’t care whether you pass or fail,” he says, delivering his warnings in an almost cheerful tone. “No one gives a hoot. That’s what you’ll find out the day you leave school. Sink or swim, it’s entirely up to you.”

He perches on the end of the teacher’s desk, lacing his long fingers around one knee, calm and aloof, yet Toni likes to think he gives a hoot about her. In the remote gaze behind his glasses she’s glimpsed flashes of admiration for his star pupil. She’s convinced they share an unspoken bond, a cool bright passion for knowledge. They are united in disdain for everything else—for the shallow, frenetic world of miniskirts, electric guitars, the swinging British sound, Expo 67 fever, unisex hairstyles, the restless, unruly hordes at Northmount High. Others can get themselves into a lather about the latest Beatles album,
Revolver
. What has that to do with anything real, with study, facts, grades?

But Toni keeps such scorn to herself. To her classmates, she’s quiet, studious, amiable Toni who doesn’t mind if someone looks over her shoulder to copy a homework assignment. She used to get crushes on girls, but that was lifetimes ago. She’s almost a member of a different species now. Almost like
My Favorite Martian,
the funny little guy from outer space in the TV series, who can do amazing tricks such as read a whole encyclopedia in seconds, but is baffled by the oddities of human emotion. Rude jokes, sexual innuendo, classroom flirtations flow right past her. Extraneous chatter. That’s part of being clever.

Now, TV voices murmur through the wall. Her parents watch the late evening news in the living room. Earlier, her father stood in her doorway and asked if the volume was up too high. “Of course not,” she told him, while rattling off definitions in her head. She saw him glance about her orderly room, reassured and pleased with her industry. Lately, a new understanding has grown between them, the understanding of two people who like to delve down into the quiet of their minds. They can sit together and read, producing no sound beyond the rustle of pages, the clink of a coffee cup. Occasionally, they still go for long Sunday walks while Lisa prepares dinner. He listens respectfully as she tells him about biological processes, osmosis, for example. He nods and rubs his goatee thoughtfully with a leather-gloved hand. He stoops a bit more than he used to, so that they are the same height as they walk along, shoulder to shoulder. Thrilled with her report cards, foreseeing scholarships, he doesn’t probe or nag, as does her mother. He doesn’t expect her to aim for more than a lifetime of honourable, dispassionate industry.

Fact by fact, she gathers up kernels of information like a harvest mouse building up a winter’s storage. The paramecium has reproductive choices: divide itself in two or exchange nuclear material with one of its fellows. Very efficient. Very clever. There’s nothing mysterious about becoming top of the class. It’s called hard work. She plans to score a perfect 100 in mid-term biology, high nineties in everything else, and next year when the real test, matriculation exams, comes around, she’ll be ready. By July next year, she’ll have her photo published in the
Montreal Star
among the province’s most outstanding students. There she’ll be, one of the few females amid all those male faces, and printed beside her photo, a breathtaking grade-point average. Her parents will burst with pride. Everyone in the city will see the picture. Perhaps there’ll be a phone call.
Hey, kiddo, remember me? I’ve
never forgotten you. Wow, first in the province. Way to go.

But she’s been dreaming while precious study minutes have escaped. She compares her sketched diagram to the one in the text and finds she forgot to include the contractile vacuole, the sack-like pump that controls osmotic pressure. Without its little pump the paramecium would fill with water and explode like a balloon. Not good. She must redouble her efforts, review everything from beginning to end. In last month’s test she made a stupid mistake that came from missing the obvious and robbed herself of a perfect score. Mustn’t happen again. Focus, focus. In a recurring dream, she has seen herself with a blank exam booklet, her hand paralyzed, while her mind teems with memorized facts, tiny spinning organisms with lashing tails that jerk frantically and collide against the impermeable barrier of her skull. Meanwhile the wall clock booms out the seconds.

Focus, focus. The night has many more usable hours.

When her eyes grow bleary and words swim on the page, she resolves to refresh herself with the 5BX program. She found the Royal Canadian Air Force pamphlet at the bottom of a carton of books her father brought home from a thrift store. She was immediately drawn to the promise of fitness and discipline through five basic exercises to be done in the privacy of one’s room, a mere eleven minutes a day. Toe touching, back swimming, sit-ups, push-ups, running, and jumping on the spot. There are charts and diagrams and tips.
Defeat the first
desire to skip; then defeat all such desires as they occur.
A bull’s eye adorns the top of each page. Toni intends to reach the lofty heights of Chart Six, when she’ll be able to do a Russian-style kick squat and a flying push-up. The pamphlet suggests that after Chart Three, women should refer to the gentler XBX program, but Toni has no intention of doing so. The floor shakes as she crashes through her stride jumps. The door of her bedroom flies open.

“Are you crazy? It’s almost midnight.”

Her mother stands on the threshold and glares out of her mask of cleansing paste: two dark, piercing eyes surrounded by a meringue-like crust.

“I’m almost finished,” Toni gasps as she flings her arms outwards.

“The Cheung family downstairs will call the police.”

The Cheungs will do nothing of the sort. They are meek immigrants from Taiwan who never complain, but Toni tries to jump more quietly, nonetheless, on the tips of her toes, which will give her muscles more of a work-out anyway.

“
Mein Gott
, you go to extremes. It’s not healthy.”

Lisa’s mouth stretches in a grimace. A flake of dried paste falls from the ghostly mask. Toni turns so she’s facing the window, her back to her mother. Her feet thump down, her hands slap above her head, and she counts out the repetitions until she’s done. Annoyed to find her mother still in the room, she falls to her knees to begin an extra round of push-ups.

“Do you want to look like an army sergeant?”

“It’s my body.”

“In my day, girls did gymnastics to become supple and graceful.”

“Your day!” Toni snorts. Her biceps burn, her shoulders ache.
Don’t
force your body until it hurts
, the pamphlet warns on the very first page. But she wants it to hurt.

As she waits at the bus stop on Victoria Avenue, Toni goes over everything again in her head: the categories of protozoa, their methods of ingestion, excretion, movement, reproduction. She can visualize diagrams and text and even the exact page on which the text appears. She’s almost like that Martian guy. Although she hardly slept, she’s alert, mind buzzing, brain like a giant searchlight. As she mentally ticks off facts in her review lists, she observes the bedraggled line of passengers queued up along the soggy snow-banked street. They clutch their collars and hunch their shoulders against the wind. A man with hairy nostrils mutters that the bus is late. A big lady with patently false teeth hopes March will go out like a lamb. Three guys from her school try to shove one another into the soupy slush in the gutter.

When she turns away from this pathetic clutch of humanity to gaze across the street, a warm splash of colour catches her eye. Her body jolts awake. There! Over there, at the bus stop on the other side! A girl in a belted brown coat stands with windblown hair catching the sunlight. That flaming shade of auburn, that languid stance with hands in pockets and hip thrust out. It could be no other. After all this time!

Toni abandons her place at the front of the line and tears across the street, dodging a car that slides sideways as its driver slams on the brakes. The angry blast of a horn follows her as she sprints diagonally, uphill, bypassing the girl, her intent being not to approach head-on but to walk down past her, casually. She’s not sure what she’ll say when the girl turns her head. Perhaps nothing. She just wants to see, to be sure. With each step Toni’s blood pounds harder.

Nyah, nyah! Not Janet Bloom. Not even close.
The face that comes into view is broad and plain, with dull brown eyes instead of green ones. Toni’s chest deflates, the disappointment is devastating, though it’s been months since she chased such phantoms. She has not allowed herself to actively seek out Janet, but every so often she catches a fleeting glimpse, always illusory. The crazy thing is, months ago she could no longer clearly envision Janet’s face. The image had gone blurry, which depressed her more than anything. The mad, weak, sicko part of herself longs to repossess the memory. Her drill-sergeant self does everything in its power to stamp that memory out.

When she gets to school, she finds an empty bathroom, slips into a stall, and retches as quietly as she can into the toilet. All that good food, her mother would lament. All that nourishing bread, cheese, cocoa, fruit, jam. But Toni is glad to see her breakfast go. It’s been churning around in her fluttery stomach for the past half hour.

Although light-headed, sweaty-palmed, and bitter-mouthed, she breezes through the test. There’s not a single surprise in the list of questions. The trick ones almost make her laugh, they’re so obvious. She finishes early so has time to check and re-check her answers. Nevertheless, after handing in her paper, she walks away convinced there was one, small, slippery-tailed detail that eluded her. Maybe worth just a half a percentage point—but still!

chapter 13

Toni’s father sits on the edge of his chair, angled away from the dinner table. He peers down at the evening
Star
clutched in his hands, his brow knit, his lips twitching as if the words he reads were live creatures jumping around in his mouth. Every so often one of them escapes.

“Nasser,” he mutters. “Egypt … Israel … troops.”

The potato soup at his elbow is growing cold.

“
Verdammt noch mal!
” Lisa fumes.

She doesn’t approve of newspapers at dinner. At breakfast, in the kitchen, all right, she’ll make concessions, but at dinner she likes a touch of civility, eating in the dining room, using a nice tablecloth and the shiny “good” cutlery. Tonight, too, in honour of spring, a centrepiece of red tulips adorns the table. They were wild ones that escaped the flower beds at Saint Joseph’s and popped up in the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the wrought-iron fence. The drooping heads now hang over the lip of the vase, loose petals stirring in the breeze from the open window.

“If Papa’s allowed to read at dinner, so am I,” Toni declares. “My end-of-year exams are two weeks away. Two weeks!”

How could this have happened? She’s been preparing for her grade ten finals for months.

“I forbid either of you to read at the table.” Lisa points her spoon toward Julius’s bowl. “I’m not reheating that.”

Julius’s eyes remain fixed on the paper. “‘Nasser’s forces gathered along Israel’s border are combat ready,’” he reads aloud. “‘The Secretary General of the UN calls the situation potentially grave.’ Potentially grave! Potentially! Hah!”

“What nonsense! Nasser’s bluffing.” Lisa raps her spoon against the table. “If you let every foul story in the newspaper spoil your appetite, you’ll never eat.
Nu, schon!
”

Toni noisily scrapes back her chair and stomps to her room to retrieve her Latin text. Latin is her worst subject, the one that could pull down her grade-point average. Her only defence will be to memorize whole swaths of the material that could appear as a sight translation. Back at her place at the table, she whispers bits of the
Aeneid
while her parents continue to argue about the newspaper article.