Girl Unwrapped (2 page)

“What does internment mean?”

There, she’s done it. A sudden silence fills the room, along with what she thinks of as the Brown Smell. Those words she understands, but not quite—“interned,” “imprisoned,” “underground,” “house arrest,” “displaced”—change the quality of the air. Instantly the atmosphere becomes like that cold, damp, and queasy-making place beneath the outside cement stairs where cats pee and the Brown Smell lurks. You aren’t supposed to notice. Noticing makes the changes in the room more terrible, yet strangely thrilling too, so she can’t help but ask again, her voice high, insistent: “Tell me, tell me!”

Lisa rears up in her chair, her chin trembles, her mouth opens. She is ready to spit out words like gunshot, the whole wretched story, but Julius flaps his hand and makes rough gurgling sounds—
harrumph,
harrumph
—as if something is caught in his throat. His face grows pale. He is choking, drowning.

“Never mind,” Lisa hisses, rising from the table. “Help me clear the dinner plates. Hurry up.”

When the dirty dishes have been stacked beside the sink and the glass bowls set out for the sugar dumplings, Lisa says: “I have something for you,
Bubbele
. Come with me.”

Her tone coaxes. Her expression has changed from thunderous to sly.

“What about dessert?” Toni cries, sensing the new danger.

“Come with me first. Then dessert.”

Toni’s heart sinks as she follows her mother through the door of her parents’ bedroom, where, in the centre of the big bed, the cardboard box from Shmelzer’s awaits. Lisa opens the box with a flourish and fishes out a girl’s dress that she holds up in the air between pinched fingertips.

“
Nu?
What do you say? Lovely, isn’t?”

The dress is blue-and-white-checked cotton with a wide flared skirt and petticoat underneath, bands of rickrack along the hem and sleeves, a Peter Pan collar, a cinched waist, and a cloth belt that ties in a bow at the back. Toni knows her mother went to a lot of trouble to make the dress with her own hands during moments stolen from her long day’s work at Shmelzer’s where she sews alterations in a curtained-off alcove. Toni’s closet is full of similar creations. Last month, Lisa brought home a tartan jumper with a pleated skirt. Before that came the despicable dirndl dress with the polka-dot skirt, laced bodice, and white blouse with puffy sleeves. Toni’s mother can’t understand why her daughter would prefer to wear trousers and T-shirts, filthy with grass and mud. Why scuffed up sneakers and hair like a rat’s nest? Such attire is
schlampig
.

“People judge you on your appearance,” she always says. “The world respects you if you look your best. You can never have enough respect.”

Lisa herself is always well turned out in good quality suits and dresses—bought at a discount at Shmelzer’s—brooches and necklaces (costume jewellery, but no one would know), powder, rouge, and a bold slash of lipstick for a smile to conquer the world. Julius is an elegant dresser too, in neat, dark suits, the pants crisply pressed, white shirts, sober tie, highly polished shoes, and a matching felt fedora with a tiny flared feather tucked into the band. He never appears on the balcony on hot summer evenings in an undershirt as do the other men of the neighbourhood. His shirts, long- or short-sleeved, are always done up to all but the very top button, even when the stifling heat of August blankets the city. So how did Julius and Lisa Goldblatt, refined and cultivated people in the old European style, get such a gypsy of a daughter? This is the question her mother sometimes throws at Toni and offers her own answer. It’s this shabby neighbourhood the family’s stuck in for the moment. It’s that gang of boys Toni runs around with. The janitor’s son and the other fellow with the flat feet and the odd boy with the shifty eyes—juvenile delinquents in the making, the lot of them, and none of them Jewish either.
Stay away from those little
hooligans
.

Her mother holds the new dress aloft in one hand, clamps Toni’s shoulder with the other. “Don’t make such an ugly face. Go ahead. Try it on.”

“Do I have to?”

“I would have jumped for joy to receive such a lovely gift when I was your age. I would have fallen to my knees and kissed my mother’s hand. Put it on!”

After many sighs, Toni stands before her mother with bowed head. The stiff new material itches, the waist pinches, the collar chokes, the skirt and petticoat billow and rustle, and everything is wrong. Toni feels like a badly built kite, certain to plunge nose-first into the dirt after the first attempt at lift-off.

“Hmm. You grew behind my back. I’ll have to let out the hem and sleeves.” Lisa peers at Toni, puzzled, as if she were expecting a somewhat different child to be standing before her. “Still, it’s very nice. Look in the mirror.”

She pushes Toni toward her vanity table with its army of makeup bottles and perfumes and its large, oval mirror that tilts up and down so you can see yourself from different angles. There she is, trussed in checked cotton, wrists dangling, scabbed and knobby knees exposed. Every dress she’s ever worn makes Toni feel both confined and naked, aware of the great, empty spaces between her legs and the folds of material waiting to tangle her up when she walks. She thinks of Mabel, the chimpanzee who appears on the
Ed Sullivan Show
clad in frilly dresses and matching bonnets, strings tied in a bow under her chin. Mabel looks very black and hairy against the pale, flimsy material of her outfits. Her trainer, who is dressed in a tuxedo, invites Mabel to dance, and they shuffle around to waltz music, he taking graceful steps, she shambling awkwardly, the dress flapping around her bowed legs. At the end of the performance, Mabel curtseys, blows hideous smacking kisses at the roaring audience, and lurches about as if yanked by an invisible chain. All the while she stares directly at Toni through the TV screen, her dark eyes knowing and sad.

Toni fumbles for the buttons behind her back.

“Can I take it off now?”

But Lisa isn’t ready to release her from the frilly prison.

“Leave it on. You keep that dress on if you want your dessert.”

“But that’s not fair!”

The outrage! The unbearable trickery! Her mother’s cool, unyielding eyes. The same adamant expression is reflected in the face of Grandma Antonia as she stares out from her pewter-framed picture atop the bureau. Those two are always ganging up on her. Dashing down the corridor, Toni throws herself at her father’s feet.

“Please, please, please, please, Papa,” she wails. Hot tears splash down her cheeks. He gazes down miserably, biting his lips. His hand clutches his temple,
Ai, ai
, it hurts right there above his eyebrow where her unhappiness has lodged itself, burrowing deep and growing bigger than any suffering she can possibly imagine.

“Stop that. Look how you aggravate your poor Papa.”

Lisa shouts. Toni screeches. A shudder runs up Julius’s long limbs. He can’t bear a scene.
Go away, go away
. His hands flap as if shooing off a swarm of flies, but it is he who leaves, hurrying down the hall to shut himself in his study, a tiny nook between the bathroom and the fire escape, which is crammed with books, two towering shelves of them, that form a solid barrier against the noises from the rest of the house.

Sent to bed early, Toni clutches her teddy bear in one arm, her golliwog in the other, and sucks her thumb—she knows she’s too old for this, almost eight, but sometimes you need extra comfort. It’s not her fault that Papa got a migraine. It’s not fair that Mama is so mean. Soon she won’t be allowed to be a tomboy anymore. She will have to wear dresses every day instead of the clothes that she considers like a second skin, the shirts, dungarees, and scuffed-up sneakers that smell of basement corners, bubble gum, street gutters, coal dust from the furnace room, and the big, wild woods.

From their place of banishment behind the dresser, the unloved tribe of dolls snickers. Some are girlie dolls with long-lashed eyelids that fly open when you tip them, exposing their foolish blue eyes. Some are bald-headed babies with outstretched arms and puckered lips that form a perpetual “Oh” of want for the bottle that never comes. They are birthday-present disappointments, one and all, the results of Mama and Papa’s and the faraway uncles’ good intentions. She had to smile and say “thank you” for each doll, while her heart sank at the stupid, oh-so-pretty faces. Only Teddy and Golly are real chums.

The neglected dolls jeer and mock:
You can hide us, but you can’t get
rid of us.
Same with the dresses that crowd the closet. What to do? Her one-eyed Teddy, old and wise, doesn’t mince words.
Run away
.
Build
a shelter of pine boughs in the woods. Live like Radisson, the explorer.
Leave right now. I dare you.
But it is cold beyond the edges of her covers. The bare linoleum would send shivers up her legs. The woods on the Mountain are still soggy with snow. Above her head, a long finger of yellow light slants across the ceiling, making the darkness in the room lonelier than ever. But worse is the sound behind the wall. The headless man has begun to moan. His strangled cries reach out through the plaster, and all she can do is burrow down beneath the covers, pressing Golly and Teddy to each ear, while chanting “Mama-PapaMamaPapa” to drown him out.

chapter 2

Melt water gurgles in the roof gutters. The dregs of winter drip away. Toni opens her eyes on a bright April sky and wisps of clouds like horses’ tails. She leaps out of bed to press her nose against the window. From her vantage point at the back of their third-floor apartment, she has a good view of sooty buildings like their own, of wash lines, fire escapes, congresses of pigeons, muddy lanes to gallop through and puddles to stomp in and chainlink fences to climb.

As far as Lisa is concerned, the apartment on Maplewood Avenue is a stopgap measure, a step up—but only just—from the downtown slum in which they used to live. Their first home, when her parents got off the ship in Montreal harbour, was a room in a cold-water flat with rickety staircases and thick lips of ice along the bottoms of the windows in winter. Toni was too small to remember, but Lisa tells stories. The streets overflowed with immigrants, “greeners” like themselves from every blasted corner of Europe.
Fellow Jews, yes, but dingy synagogues,
men in black coats, the babble of Yiddish. We didn’t go through
what we did to end up in Borscht Alley. You want to be with your own,
but you want a bit of lawn in between.
Their current neighbourhood facing the back of Mount Royal is neither one thing nor another, Lisa says. Not a slum, but not an up-and-coming suburb either. The apartment buildings look worn out and listless, like people just trudging along to the end of their days.

As far as Toni’s concerned, there can be no other home, no other street, no other neighbourhood in the whole world. All imperfections are perfect. All belong to her: the cracks that zigzag up the walls, the gaps in the kitchen linoleum, even the creaking floors that scare her at night. These things are as much her possessions as her trove of cat’s-eye marbles and her Dinky Toy cars. In the dimly lit basement of the building, pipes snake along dark ceilings, a coal-fired furnace roars, and a big pile of coal fills the air with a peppery smell. But best is the Mountain. Their street hugs the wild side of Mount Royal: miles and miles of trees, bogs, ponds—Radisson and Davy Crockett land. If you follow a path through the tangle of woods, you emerge on a wide, stony plateau beneath a semi-circle of cliffs that rise high as skyscrapers. Toni and her gang often scramble up the sheer rock face for the lick-in-the-belly danger sensation and the view from the top, the north end of the city spread out before them all the way to the faint glimmer of the river in the distance. It seems to Toni that her parents’ wanderings from place to place had a single purpose: to bring her to this place beside the Mountain.

She squints through the window to see whether her gang is down in the lane yet. Soon they will assemble—Peter, Nicky, Frank, and their captain, Arnold, good old Arnold. With whoops, whistles, and Tarzan yells, they’ll dodge the street traffic and charge into the wild frontier. Saturday morning. Spring at last. Time to be Daniel Boone.

Still in pyjamas, she begins to wolf down her breakfast of cooked oatmeal from the bag with the Quaker man on it, his fat red cheeks setting a good example. Her father, dressed for work, studies the
Gazette
, neatly folded into quarters and held close to his face, while the radio mutters in the background. In the evenings, Julius reads the
Montreal Star
. Though most of it is bad, there can never be enough news for some reason. Lisa patters around the kitchen in her rose-coloured wrapper and high-heeled mules, her head bristling with rollers beneath a hairnet.

Toni contemplates her bottomless bowl of porridge as Saturday excitement boils in her chest.
The guys, the woods, the Mountain.
While her mother’s back is turned, Toni slips spoonfuls of breakfast into the plant on the kitchen table and covers the gluey mess with damp black earth. Were her parents to see, they would both have a fit, in their own individual ways: Lisa roaring with outrage, Julius convulsing in private grief. A sacrilege, to waste food. However it tastes, however much excess exists, food must be treasured. Regiments of carefully labelled leftovers cram the Goldblatt fridge. Hardened bits of bread crust and rinds of cheese wrapped in wax paper lie hidden in the pockets of her father’s well-pressed suit jackets.
One never knows
. Her mother now swoops forward to inspect Toni’s bowl.

“Finished eating? Good. You’re going to play with the Nutkevitch girls.”

“What?”

“It’s all arranged. They’re waiting.”

Howls of protest are to no avail. Her mother’s flinty eyes and iron grip mean business.

“You will play with the Nutkevitch girls. You will wear your nice new dress.”

Double outrage.

“I hate the twins!”

“Nonsense. What’s to hate?”

As far as Lisa is concerned, the Nutkevitch twins, who live in the apartment building next door, are cute, chatty, charming, good at everything girls are supposed to be good at. They take ballet lessons, they play piano. They go to a special Jewish school where there are no
goyische
hooligans. The Nutkevitch family are
Ostjuden
, eastern European Jews, but it doesn’t matter, you can’t have everything. Such nice girls.