Girl Unwrapped (6 page)

“Yay, here’s Toni,” yells Peter, clapping her on the shoulder and making her stumble, though he doesn’t mean to. Peter’s like Tubby in the Little Lulu comics, a bowling ball of a kid, heavy and clumsy, charging blindly in their games and taking others down with him. Nick, the Greek, is skinny, quick, and cunning with his feet, one of which he now winds around Toni’s ankle while his hands shove. It takes all her will to keep from flying sideways into the pond. They shuffle and grunt for several moments until Toni takes advantage of her greater height to regain ground and gives Nick her wild dog look—teeth bared, face steaming. He breaks into a just-kidding grin. He knows she’s capable of a sudden burst of fury that can undo his manoeuvres and deliver painful kicks to the shins. Standing back, he lets rip with the first half of the Woody Woodpecker cry: “Hee, hee, hee,” then stops so she can finish it. “Haw, haw,” she shouts. They both convulse in giggles. From his perch on a flat-topped rock, Frankie, “the Squirt,” watches this out of his pinched, serious face and his forever-smeary glasses. Though Frank’s a pipsqueak, there’s never been any question about him belonging to the gang. The gang was formed long ago, before any of them can remember, and once you’re in, you’re in for good. Arnold, their captain, leans against a tree and whittles arrows out of saplings. Whip, whip, goes the blade of his penknife, stripping off grey bark to expose the moist, white wood. Toni approaches to get a better look at the arrows and the beautiful, slicing blade.

“Hey, Arnold. What are we playing? Indians and Settlers?”

Arnold shrugs. “Maybe,” he says.

He likes to keep his men in line. He likes to keep everyone guessing. Arnold is half a year older and half a head taller than the rest of them. He has a narrow, foxy face, dark curly hair tumbled over his brow, and a know-it-all smile. But he does know things: wrestling moves, how to pinch candy from under Goyette the grocer’s nose, how to sneak fags from his dad’s overalls, and what the “F” word really means. Arnold’s father was wounded in the war, so now one leg is shorter than the other, but that doesn’t stop old man Mackay from booting his son to kingdom come when he’s mad. Sometimes Arnold wears purple bruises all over his body. And that makes him even more of a captain.

Whipping out a slightly flattened pack of Players Navy Cut from his back pocket, Arnold doles out cigarettes to each member of the gang. He lights his own by flicking a match against his thumbnail, sucks in smoke, and exhales it through his nostrils. No one else can match this feat, but the other guys push out their lips and attempt to blow smoke rings. Toni takes short, shallow puffs that burn her throat and curdle her stomach, though she’d never let on.

“Know what happens to girls when they grow up?” Arnold says in a thoughtful tone while gazing up at the patch of sky between the trees. “They pee blood.”

There’s stunned silence for a moment, then Nick and Peter explode into hooting laughter while Frankie stares goggle-eyed at Toni through his smeared glasses.

“Bullshit,” Toni says.

“Nope. Got it from a very reliable source.”

“Load of hooey,” Toni says.

“Peeing blood. Yech!”

Nick makes retching sounds.

“Tell you something else,” Arnold says coolly as smoke curls from the sides of his mouth. “Girls get hair between their legs. I know it for a fact ’cause I’ve seen it myself.”

“Who? Who’d you see?” Frankie shrills, leaning so far forward on his perch it looks like he’s about to topple over.

Arnold ignores him. His eyes flick up and down Toni in a funny way as if he’s trying to tell whether she too has sprouted hair in unspeakable places. There’s only one answer to this. She flings her burning cigarette into the pond, springs to her feet and kicks Arnold in the thigh. Maybe she got him in a spot already sore from his father’s beatings because he gasps and clutches himself and has to concentrate on the pain. But in another moment Toni’s on the ground, straddled, arms pinioned above her head. The other boys crowd around chanting, “Bellybutton, bellybutton.”

The bellybutton treatment is Arnold’s special brand of torture, reserved for times when extra discipline is in order. He grows one of his thumbnails especially long for this purpose. Still pinning her arms with one hand, Arnold lifts up Toni’s T-shirt with the other and digs into her navel with his long, sharp nail. She squirms and bucks, but Arnold holds her firmly in the vice of his knees and the grip of his fingers. The thumbnail burrows deeper, igniting an astonishing flash of pain. The surprise and misery come not just from the hurt—which is bad enough—but from
where
it hurts. The sting travels right down to her privates as if the damp little hole in her belly were connected to her peeing place by a taut, invisible string. The sensation creates a fierce need for release. If Arnold decides to keep the pressure up long enough, he could make her piddle her pants. That’s the brilliance of the bellybutton torture—that it can end in a smelly, humiliating mess. And what if this time there was more than just pee? What if she gushed a bright red, stinking stream out of her privates, making them shamefully visible? It’s bad enough she has to crouch in the bushes while the guys can stand tall and aim their little water pistols straight ahead.

The thumbnail drills down. Arnold smirks as he waits for her whimpered plea for mercy. Abruptly, Toni stops struggling. She lets herself go limp and stares right into her tormentor’s eyes. Without moving a muscle, she floats herself away, high into the treetops, and the pain changes from a red-hot fire to a small yellow ball behind her head. It’s a trick that came to her some time ago in the dentist’s chair when the whine of the drill was so unbearable she just had to escape. Suddenly, amazingly, she could, she did. Now she continues to stare at Arnold with deadly calm, letting him know she can wait him out. The gleeful certainty in his face becomes confusion, his eyes drop, his grip loosens. Finally he rolls off her, with an embarrassed shrug. When she’s on her feet again, he claps her back to show there are no hard feelings. She’s one of his men, after all.

“Anyway, even if girls do pee blood when they grow up, that won’t happen to me,” Toni crows. “I’m not like other girls.”

“That’s true, you aren’t,” Arnold admits, but there’s an unsettled question in his voice.

The game of Indians and Settlers begins, a game of stealth and strategy, of hiding, searching, and killing with pointed-finger guns. The boys whoop as they give chase through the underbrush. The woods resound with yells and mouth explosions, the snap of twigs, the splash of rocks in the shallow pond. Everyone except Toni is caught and killed and freed and killed again. None of the boys can hide as well as she does. They give themselves away, almost immediately, with an impatient grunt, the need to taunt their pursuers. They never
want
to stay hidden for very long, whereas Toni does. Stretching out on the ground behind a log, she covers herself with branches and disappears. She becomes a thing, hard, impenetrable, unmoving, just like the dead tree that shelters her. She knows that once, long ago, her father flattened himself into a paper-doll figure and lay, barely breathing, under a tumbled heap of books in the attic of his shop while the Nazis crashed around in the room below. Papa, too, knew how to leave his body.

In the distance, she hears her name.

“Toni! Toni! We’re going home without you.”

The calls become fainter and fainter. She falls into a great, deep, tranquil silence that wraps itself around her like an eiderdown quilt. Dampness from the ground seeps through her trousers, bugs crawl about, but she is happy and busy within herself. All that exists is this little patch of earth beneath her elbow. Look at last-year’s leaves that have been disintegrating into the forest floor. They are stiff, stark skeletons, intricately branched. Look how one leaf vein connects to another and how they spread out to mirror the shape of the full-blown tree.

“Toni! Toni!”

An anguished voice punctures her dream world. Peeking through the brush, she spies a hat, a long lean figure, and a grimacing, ashen face.

“Hi, Papa,” she says sheepishly.

He sucks in his breath with a strangled sound. His eyes hold horror. They are fixed upon her face, but it’s not his Toni he sees. There’s no daughter here, no precious little girl. Instead, he sees a sight so dreadful it eats him up from inside.

“Wha … what?” he gasps. He points a long shaking finger. “What have you done to yourself?”

She touches her face and her hand turns red. She sees what he sees: blood, gore, mutilation.

“It’s okay, Papa. It’s just the lipstick. We put it on our faces for war paint.”

She wipes her face with her arm to demonstrate the truth of her words. They walk out of the woods together in shamed, crushing silence. How could she kill her papa yet again?

chapter 5

The landlord wants to raise the rent by five dollars, and the Nutkevitches next door are on the move—two facts that send Lisa into a rage.
How dare that skinflint ask more for an apartment with gaps, cracks,
rust stains, pipes that groan like old men complaining, and windows
with broken pulleys that could crash down and chop off your head?

How dare the Nutkevitches find their dream house in the suburbs
first?
Lisa learned about their neighbours’ happy prospects after running into Mrs Nutkevitch at the produce section of Steinberg’s. Mr Nutkevitch—a
shoichet
, a butcher, and before that a common rag peddler— has bought a split-level bungalow in an up-and-coming west-end suburb to which Jews are flocking in droves. The other bit of news that Lisa has divined was that another little Nutkevitch is on the way. The twins’ mother looks exactly the same as ever, as far as Toni can tell, but Lisa
knows
, she can smell the baby coming. To top it all off, a sleek, brown Chevy sedan from Harold Cummings’ used car lot stands in front of the building next door waiting to carry the burgeoning family off to their four-bedroom palace with the basement den.

“Good riddance,” Toni chortles into her cup of cocoa. But Lisa bristles with the energy of discontent. She gulps her morning coffee at the kitchen counter while shredding a large head of cabbage. The cuckoo clock warbles and Lisa barks, “
Verdammt!
” and Toni stifles a giggle because her mother’s curses are hilarious when not aimed directly at her.

“Now’s the time to buy,” Lisa declares, knife poised in mid-air. “Now.”

Julius continues to read the paper, folded twice to make a neat parcel he can hold steady in front of his face while his other hand lifts the coffee cup to his lips.

“We could get a nice bungalow in Côte Saint-Luc for about twenty-thousand dollars.”

“Twenty-thousand dollars?” Julius tears his eyes away from the newsprint and stares at her, incredulous. “That’s what you call affordable? Twenty-thousand dollars?” He speaks the number slowly as if trying to get a grasp on that huge tower of money.

“We get a mortgage. We put a little down, the rest monthly. It wouldn’t be so much more than we’re paying now.”

“Yes, of course, a mortgage.” He taps his forefinger to his temple to show what he thinks of such a notion.
Verrucktheit
. Madness. “You want to ruin me with debts.”

“Everyone here has debts. That’s how people live in this country. That’s how people get ahead.”

“
Naturlich!
Buy now, pay later. Pay with my blood.”

If they’d just ask Toni her opinion she’d tell them they can stop fighting right now, because she has no intention of moving. She glances around the kitchen, cosy and crowded with familiar objects—the Arborite-topped table, the vinyl-covered chrome chairs, the sputtering gas stove, the fat-tubbed wringer-washer, and the dear old cuckoo clock on the wall. Where could be better than here? But Mama and Papa are too caught up in each other to pay attention to Toni. So she turns back to the book she’s reading,
Black Beauty,
about the adventures of a lovely young horse who must deal with the injustice of bad masters in a harsh world.

The argument does not go away. Day after day, at breakfast, at supper, through the bedroom walls at night, her parents raise their voices against one another. Lisa cajoles, loses her temper, hurls sarcastic barbs. Julius meets her with crossed-armed silence or mocking remarks of his own. “Indeed, Xanthippe!” he mutters. One morning he reminds her of Uncle Alfred, ruined by debts, besieged by creditors, consumed by shame, and driven to fire a bullet through the back of his mouth with his World War I revolver. Debt is a cancer, Julius’s father used to say. And even he, a well-established bank employee, lost barrelfuls of money.

“That was the Inflation, the Depression. That was Europe in the dark days. Now there is prosperity, opportunity, the New World, in case you haven’t noticed, Mr Head-in-the-Sand. Where would we be if I didn’t push you forward? Still in some stinking back alley in Rome waiting for the right moment to leave. It was
I
,” Lisa strikes her fist against her chest, “
I
who got us the entry papers.
I
who made the arrangements.”

She glares across the breakfast table. A series of incredulous chuckles falls from his lips, a sound like bubbles bursting. He rolls his eyes. Her version of events is too preposterous.

“She forgets how she nearly lost us our chance to come to Canada because of all her scenes at the consulate. We were nearly blackballed.”

He addresses these words to Toni, speaks quietly, reasonably, hand on his cheek, head shaking, as if the two of them were consulting over a mental case. Toni doesn’t allow herself to crack a smile. She locks eyes with her father’s and nods. Then she stares down at her plate and focuses on her bread and butter so she doesn’t have to see her mother’s wounded expression.
My own daughter betrays me
.

The hostility between her parents gets worse. Every day, accusations fly back and forth. The conflicting stories about how they got to Canada get mixed up in the argument about moving. Her mother corners Toni in her bedroom after school as she’s changing out of her tunic.