Girl Unwrapped (3 page)

Lisa pushes, tugs, brushes, fastens—brisk, efficient, merciless. Captive in the billowy-skirted dress, her hair tightly pinned with two butterfly-shaped barrettes above her ears, Toni shuffles toward the twins’ house next door, while her mother glares like a tiger from the front walk.

Their names are Ashie and Shevie, but Toni calls them Assie and Shittie. With their snooty, better-than-you attitude, they try to make Toni feel she’s the one who’s all wrong. Her buddies hate them too, because not only are the twins girly-girls, they are weirdly foreign, using Jewish expressions and speaking in sing-song voices. On the Jewish high holidays they go on foot to attend a synagogue many blocks away. Dressed up and marching briskly, their noses in the air, the twins push their baby brother, Yankele, in his carriage and act as if they think everyone else is being lazy. The guys understand Toni isn’t Jewish in any way that matters, just as she’s not quite a girl. She’s a tomboy. Her family never goes to synagogue. They keep holidays quietly, behind closed doors. The boys pump her back, saying “Good old Toni, good old sport.”

Now, Toni stands on the doorstep of the Nutkevitch apartment, summoning up the nerve to ring the bell. She can never tell the twins apart, which adds to her disadvantage. They wear identical clothes and high, bouncy pigtails, their hair parted perfectly to create a straight, narrow road of pale skin up the backs of their heads. Behind the door she can hear their baby brother bawling.
Assie and Shittie
, Toni chants in her mind as she stabs the doorbell with her finger.

Mrs Nutkevitch answers. She is big-chested, flushed and sweaty, wearing a flour-speckled apron and smiling distractedly. She jiggles Yankele on her shoulder with one hand and holds a cloth diaper in the other. The watery-eyed baby gapes, hides his face in his mother’s neck, and sticks out a bare red bum. Greeting Toni with little cries of welcome, the twins hook their arms into hers and escort her down the hall to their room. White and gold furniture, frilly curtains, two sets of identical hairbrushes, combs, and hand mirrors on the dresser. On each of the identical beds, a row of dolls arranged according to size, confronts Toni with glassy stares.

“How nice of you to visit,” says one twin in a phony grownup voice.

“Have a candy,” says the other, offering Toni a LifeSaver from a multi-coloured roll.

“
Oy
, I love your dress. It’s gorgeous!”

They bob their heads in agreement and finger the rickrack on Toni’s sleeves. Clearly they are under orders to be nice.

“Let’s play house. We’ll be mummy and daddy and Toni can be baby.”

“I don’t play house,” Toni growls.

“Oh,” says the twin who made the suggestion. She sucks her cheeks around her LifeSaver while raising her eyebrows and exchanging a look of astonishment with her sister. What kind of girl refuses to play house? “So what do you want to do?”

Toni shrugs. To say, “I want to go home” would be to sound like the baby she doesn’t want to pretend to be.

“We could have a game,” says the other twin in an encouraging tone. “We could play rummy.”

Toni nods, grateful. Card games are neutral, neither boys’ nor girls’ territory. Cards can be played without shame even while wearing a flare-skirted dress with a white petticoat underneath. The three of them sit cross-legged on one of the beds and play round upon round of five-card rummy, then hearts, fish, war. Toni wins as often as either of the twins, so they’re not cheating or ganging up on her. Toni notices that though the twins have no toys she would consider playing with, they do have some of the same Walt Disney books she has on her own shelves. In the kitchen Mrs Nutkevitch is baking something for a midmorning snack, something the twins call
rugelach
.

“You’ve never had
rugelach?!
”

The twins stare incredulously, as if Toni were an ignorant country mouse. They explain about the yummy rolled pastries filled with raisins, nuts, and chocolate powder.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve had
rugelach
,” says Ashie—or is it Shevie?—with a cute toss of her head that makes her seem almost a teenager instead of eight years old and in grade three just like Toni. From the heavenly aroma seeping beneath the door, Toni thinks they may be telling the truth, and that it’s worth hanging around until the snack is served.

When they’ve tired of cards, the twins again propose a game of make-believe, and once more Toni shakes her head. She would like to explain about being a tomboy, but that’s easier to do while wearing dungarees and surrounded by the gang. So she pulls the hem of her dress over her bare knees and decides to stop talking altogether. While Toni remains sullen and cross-legged on the bed, the twins spin their stories, chattering merrily, and hop around the room, pigtails dancing. Here comes Papa, home from a long day’s work at his butcher shop. Mama greets him at the door with joyful cries. Now they will dress up for a party. But before they can go out, they must attend to baby. “
Schluf, schluf, kindele
,” the twins croon in high, squeaky, lullaby voices. Toni squeezes shut her eyes and claps her hands over her ears until she feels a hand lift her dress. Her eyes snap open.

Two identical, gleeful faces grin down at her. One twin holds a diaper, a real cloth diaper like the ones Yankele wears, the other has talcum powder and petroleum jelly. Toni flings herself backward and hits the wall, which pushes the bed sideways and makes the entire row of dolls tumble to the floor. Still on her back, she bucks, kicks, roars. The girls shriek. The bedroom door flies open.

“
Kindele!
What’s going on?”

Mrs Nutkevitch stands in the entrance, a flour-dusted oven mitt pressed against her cheek, an expression of alarm on her face as if she cannot believe such havoc can be happening within her four walls. From the kitchen comes Yankele’s rising wail. Before the twins can spew out a malicious tale, Toni bolts. Down the hall she runs, out the door of the Nutkevitch apartment, down the stairs, heart racing. On the front walk she pauses for breath, then turns toward home at a more leisurely pace, exulting in her freedom, until she hears them chant in unison behind her: “Toni the freak! Toni the freak!”

There they stand on the steps with their hands on their hips and their grinning faces thrust forward. Without stopping to think what she’s doing, Toni bends over, pulls down her underpants, and moons them with her bare behind. There’s a moment of stunned silence, then the eruption of a new chant, voiced with frantic hilarity: “Garbage bum! Garbage bum!”

Their vengeful delight makes Toni wonder if mooning the twins was such a brain wave after all or the sort of dumb move that haunts you the rest of your life. Suddenly she feels squishy inside, foolish and naked and wrong. Suddenly she’s Mabel the chimp, all bowed legs and shambling feet and hairy humiliation in front of an audience collapsing in hysterics. Pretending a dignity she doesn’t feel, she walks stiffly away while her hair, loosened from the barrettes, flops in her face and the wide ship of her dress wobbles in the air.

But later she gets even. Dressed again in her proper tomboy clothes, Toni swoops upon the twins as they play skipping games on the three squares of walkway in front of their house. She plasters two identical wads of Dubble Bubble onto the backs of their two unsuspecting heads. From their hiding places in the hydrangea bushes, the whole gang bursts into cheers as Assie and Shittie wail for their mama. Before the posse can arrive, four boys and Toni race across the streetcar tracks to the waiting embrace of the spring-green woods.

chapter 3

Grandma Antonia is a flame in a glass, a dancing tongue of fire above thick white wax. When Toni bumps against the kitchen counter, the flame body twists, writhes, as if angry at being disturbed.

“Hold still,” Lisa hisses, pinching Toni’s arm. “Stand and listen while I say the Kaddish. And when I’m done, you say ‘Amen.’”

This evening is the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and a day of remembrance for all those without a final resting place. In the Goldblatt family household, it is a day to spit on Hitler and to mourn Grandma’s death.

The memorial candle sits in a small glass jar with the blue Star of David and Hebrew letters printed across one side. The flame will burn all through supper, through their television shows—
Gunsmoke
,
Country
Hoedown
, the CBC evening news—and throughout the night, filling the kitchen with a spooky glow. All day tomorrow, the flame will sway behind its sooty glass walls, finally becoming nothing but a tiny blue eye in a puddle of wax, clear as tears. And still it will endure, on and on, refusing to disappear until well after dark. Once a year the candle is lit, allowing Grandma, whose spirit lurks in mysterious corners of the house, to come out into the open. She fills the kitchen with her eerie light, her brazen presence, tingling the skin at the back of Toni’s neck.

On Yom Kippur, Lisa fasts, “for my own reasons,” she says, but cooks meals for Toni and her father, just as on any other day, and joins them at the table to make sure every morsel goes down as it’s supposed to. They all stay home for the day, don’t troop off to synagogue like the Nutkevitch family does. Papa works, just not where people can see. On Yom Kippur, he works at home, in the silence of his study. To do otherwise would be disrespectful, he says, though Toni isn’t sure why. Disrespectfulness extends to shopping in stores and playing in the streets. It is a strange day of being holed up together. Of waiting. Of hiding.

“
Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba…
”

Mumbo jumbo falls from her mother’s lips. The Kaddish prayer. Lisa closes her eyes. Her voice rises, defiant against the twilight gloom of the kitchen and the everyday noises, the patter of October rain in the gravel lane outside, the gurgling fridge inside, and now the clang, whirr, “cuckoo” from the brown clock, shaped like a fairy-tale cottage, on the wall above the kitchen table. Toni wants to jump onto a chair and push Cuckoo behind his door before Mama loses her temper and rips him out of his hidey-hole once and for all. Toni strains forward, but her mother’s hand yanks her back.

“…
Yit’barakh v’yish’tabach v’yit’pa’ar v’yit’romam v’yit’nasei
.”

Grandma’s flame rears straight up, sending a long wisp of smoke toward the ceiling.

What happened to Grandma?

A bad question. Whenever Toni dares to ask, her mother spits out the answers: “She was taken,” or, “She perished,” or, “She was swept away.” Then Lisa’s body quivers as it does when she’s about to give Toni a smack for being saucy, but instead her hands ball into fists and her lips form silent words meant for Grandma alone. They speak to each other all the time, a conversation that goes on just beyond the range of Toni’s ears.

Where did they take her?

That too must not be asked. Toni knows Grandma was killed, but it was not an ordinary sort of killing as on cowboy shows when the outlaw in the saloon gets a bullet in the chest. Her dying must have been more like when the bad guys tie up and gag the schoolteacher, so that all she can do is roll her eyes and make strangled sounds. “Gag” is what happens when you’ve got to throw up but can’t, and you feel like you’re drowning from the inside out.

The Kaddish drones on. The flame winks, flows, changes shape, transforms itself every instant. Toni remembers a scene from a Walt Disney film where a single flame with an innocent, smiling face swayed on the end of a match. The flame split, became two laughing faces, then they divided and divided again and soon hundreds of wild, cackling flames, their eyes slanted upward with evil, danced all over the forest.

After she died, Grandma’s soul floated straight to heaven
. Whenever Lisa says this, her jaw clenches and she glares down, as if Toni were giving her an argument. Grandma whispers warnings, advice, hovers at the ends of Lisa’s fingers when she lays out rows of cards on the kitchen table and turns them over one by one to tell fortunes. Julius has nothing to say about heaven and he pooh-poohs the fortune-telling cards. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, visions, conversations with the dead. What moans through the cracks in the walls and between the floorboards is mere wind, he’ll say. All that exists are the solid things you can hold or touch—the floor, walls, the antique books he collects—or what science can explain—that fire, for example, is a mix of fuel, heat, and air, nothing more. One candle flame is pretty much like any other.

“…
aleinu v’al kol Yisra’el, v’imru amen
.”

Lisa’s fingers prod Toni’s shoulder, prompting a loud “Amen.” Toni turns her head and blinks away the tears that blurred her eyes after so much hard staring, but Lisa continues to gaze intently for some moments, lips moving, muttering in German, while the flame answers her in a series of winks and nods.

A terrible wonder holds Toni to the spot as she waits for something to happen: an outburst of anger, a torrent of strange words, upraised hands that command the heavens to do their bidding. In the Disney movie the wizard stood on the mountaintop while lightning flashed, bats whirled, trees bent double in the wind. Lisa sucks in her breath. Is it possible that instead of grand anger will come tears? But her mother never cries.
If I cried, I wouldn’t stop.

“Bring Grandma’s photo,” she now says, lowering herself onto a kitchen chair.

Toni dashes to her parents’ bedroom to fetch the pewter-framed photo of Grandma Antonia that stands on the bureau. She wasn’t a grandmother then, Toni remembers, just a thick-waisted lady in a dark, sack-like dress that came to her ankles, pearls around her neck, her hair done up in a tight bun. Lisa distends her lips like a fish and blows mist on the glass and wipes it clean with a cloth. She admires the photo as if for the first time.

“
Mutti
was our rock. She took care of everyone, never complaining. She was wise, clever with her hands, industrious. You bear her name.”

Now the stories flow. On Yom Kippur, Grandma kept several of her famous homemade bread sticks in her handbag. At the end of the long fast day, coming down from the woman’s gallery to the outside steps of the synagogue where Grandpa Markus stood waiting, she slipped him a few for sustenance. Otherwise Grandpa might have fainted from hunger before she could get him home. Grandma herself had no trouble fasting as her constitution was strong as a goat’s, just as Lisa’s is now. Grandma could add up columns of sums in her head. She helped Grandpa Markus in the store that sold fancy linens, tablecloths, runners, lace doilies, finely finished bed sheets, and embroidered blouses. If a crooked dealer came with shoddy goods, Grandma could tell before he unpacked his wares. She could sniff out a shoplifter too. Grandpa Markus would say, “Never mind. If the poor girl pinches a scrap of cloth it’s because she needs to.”