Girl Unwrapped (40 page)

The photos of her mother inspire arguments.

“Look here, I know what you’re thinking,” Toni says to the doting, young-mother face, half submerged in a pale mop of toddler curls. “You wish I could have been normal. You’re resigned but not happy. Too bad. I like girls. Okay? That’s how I am. Can’t be changed, and I wouldn’t want to change anyway because then I wouldn’t be me. See? I’d be some other person. It would be like I’d never been born. And I can’t wish that on myself, not anymore. You think my feelings are unnatural. Well, guess what? Nature is a lot weirder and more complicated than you think. There’s homosexual activity among monkeys and dolphins. The female spotted hyena has a fake penis. There are birds that kill their young. Nature isn’t good or bad, it just is. You can’t use biology to make moral arguments. And anyway, plenty of people do things that are a lot stranger than what I’m doing. Just look at the classified ads for orgies and wife swapping and swingers’ clubs, if you don’t believe me. As for grandchildren, they’re just not in the cards.”

By this point in the lecture, Toni is jabbing her finger and shouting. The photo mother continues to look back with the same benign, unruffled, slightly besotted expression as before, and Toni slowly simmers down. This framed mother is manageable, after all. But so is the real-life parent back in Snowdon, comfortably removed, yet just a phone call or bus ride away.

Strangely, she cannot bring herself to talk out loud to the picture of her father. Often she catches his eyes looking through his glasses across the room at her, eloquently tender, yet veiled in his impenetrable mist of reserve. It still enrages her that he could take himself away without a word. He will forever remain unreachable. Although her reasonable brain tells her otherwise, his elusiveness seems a retribution for—what sin exactly? The sin of her own vulnerability. He would have been far less judgemental than her mother, and yet, and yet. If only she could assure him she will be okay.

Among the books that line her bookshelves are several of the novels by out-of-fashion German-Jewish authors her father liked to collect and that Mr Abbott persuaded her to save. “You might develop an interest some day,” Abbott had said. She doubts it. She is sure the dense German prose of a bygone era will always be a colossal bore. But these books seem as good a memento of her father as his Omega watch. Seeing the grey spines with the German titles makes her see her father as he caresses the cover of a cherished volume, cradles it in his hands. The smell of the aged pages, in particular, brings him back. An odour of mustiness, sorrow, regret, and yearning. Now and then she sticks her nose into one of those tomes and sniffs. She feels sweetly close to him then.

Along with the photos her mother gave her, Toni has put out a few of her own. On her cork bulletin board above her desk, she’s tacked the row of four playful mug shots that she and Robin and Monica recently took together for a lark in the photo booth at Woolworth’s. There’s also a colour shot of the girls’ softball team Toni recently joined and one she rather likes of herself alone. It shows her in her gear, baseball cap pulled low over her eyes, fielder’s mitt held up, ready for action. She’s grinning boldly and, she has to admit, she doesn’t look half bad.

Now, on this sunny Sunday morning in June, seized by a fit of perfectionism, she attacks her apartment with an arsenal of cleansers until every speck of dirt has been pounced upon and every surface gleams. Despite this frenzy of work, excess energy still hops beneath her skin, so she dashes into the streets. There is solace in the hum of traffic, the variety of people strolling by, the smell of cars, dust, French fries, lilac blossoms, and new-mown grass. She loves this neighbourhood—a mix of residential buildings and shops, old and new—in the heart of the city. The campus is close by, her summer job at Browser’s Paradise within walking distance, the wooded paths of Mount Royal a short hike uphill. Just minutes away there’s Loulou’s—newly named Loulou’s Disco and bursting at the seams on Saturday nights with enticing women from every part of the city. She loves the bustle of the main streets and the seedy look of some side streets, where down-and-outers smoke butt-ends on rickety staircases and hippies jam with bongos and guitars. Each time she goes exploring, she discovers some new delight: a nifty tobacco store, a café that features live music, an all-night pool hall, a delicatessen with the best smoked meat in town.

Her growling belly leads her to Schwartz’s, into the steam and clatter, the mess of jostling bodies and boisterous voices that shout out their orders and argue in Yiddish. Elbows on the counter, she sinks her teeth into a sandwich piled high with thinly sliced, juicy smoked meat slathered in mustard and topped with a fat dill pickle.

“Nice and tasty, eh?” says an old codger by her side. He lifts his rat’s nest eyebrows and winks to his friend. “Vot en eppetite.”

“See how the
schmaltz
runs down her chin? You want for me to lick it off,
Maedele
?”

The two men chuckle as if they’ve reached the pinnacle of wit. They know she’s Jewish—knew the moment she walked in the door, could read the shared ancestry in her face—and they treat her accordingly, with the friendly-rude-lewd manner reserved for one of their own. They are part of the décor, these wheezing letches. Toni shrugs and continues to chew.
One of these days I’ll walk in here with a sweetie on
my arm, and won’t your ogle-eyes pop?
She savours the thought along with the taste of smoked meat on her tongue.

After Schwartz’s, Toni wanders over to Sainte Catherine Street to join the parade of Sunday strollers, young folk in beads and feathers and leather fringes who crowd the sidewalks to see and be seen. What a city! Montreal in the summer of 1970. There are hookahs and puzzle rings in window displays. There are saffron-robed Hare Krishna guys in Phillips Square. There are jugglers and drummers and psychedelic murals. Music is everywhere, in jazz clubs, Latin clubs, blues joints,
boites à chansons
. “
Mon pays
,” cries Gilles Vigneault from a car radio. “Let it be,” croon the Beatles. “I’ll be there,” chant the Jackson 5. Everyone, but
everyone
is included in those songs.

She finds herself searching for members of that other tribe she belongs to.
You perhaps? Are you?
A game of fantasy and hope. The passing faces give back nothing. Never mind. Already, after a short month in her new digs, she has become one of the downtown people, hip and cool and ready for adventure. She continues to saunter and to scan faces, in tune with the mood of the throng. The air pulses with messages, the exchange of countless secret and not-so-secret glances, the hunger in every heart for connection.

And then, incredibly, it happens to her too. A head turns, recognition flashes, a pair of eyes lock onto her own. The girl in the crowd slows down. A moment ago she wore a dull, closed, almost surly expression, but suddenly she blazes with interest and a delicious smile lifts the corners of her mouth. Is this someone Toni knows from the club? Or just a stranger whose soul reaches out across the void?
You.
Yes, you. I know.
Spinning around on her heels, Toni tries to give chase, but the current of bodies moves too swiftly, the girl has vanished. It doesn’t matter; the animated look on the girl’s face was real and staked a claim, if only for an instant. For blocks and blocks, Toni carries the energy of the fleeting encounter in her squared shoulders and striding feet, and she knows the unknown girl must do the same.

For the moment,
daiyenu
, it is enough.

GABRIELLA GOLIGER’s first book,
Song of Ascent
, won the 2001 Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award. She was co-winner of the 1997 Journey Prize for short fiction, a finalist for this prize in 1995, and won the
PRISM international
Award in 1993. Her work has been published in a number of journals and anthologies, including
Best New American Voices 2000
and
Contemporary Jewish
Writing in Canada
. Born in Italy, Goliger grew up in Montreal. She has also lived in Israel and the Eastern Arctic, and currently divides her time between Ottawa and Victoria, along with her long-time partner, Barbara Freeman.