Girl Unwrapped (8 page)

“Now is the time for a clean sweep,” her mother says, handing Toni a large paper bag. “Throw broken toys or the ones you don’t want in here.”

Though the remnants of Golly and Teddy have gathered dust in a corner of the closet for ages, Toni hates to toss them out. Even the mutilated tribe of dolls tugs at her heart. She wants to keep everything, the tattered board games, cracked water pistols, ripped rubber balls, even gumball-machine charms that litter the bottom of a drawer. Her mother taps her foot with impatience.

“They’re only things. Don’t get attached to things. I left home at sixteen with hardly more than the clothes on my back. Everything comes and goes.”

One day, Toni finds the cuckoo clock in a box of odds and ends relegated to the garbage. It gives her a strange feeling to see the clock, which once hung grandly on the kitchen wall, lying on its back amid stinky rags and clutter, its pendulum chains spilling out of the bottom. The clock hasn’t worked right for some time; still, the outside is the same as ever, a dark brown wooden house with a steeply sloped roof and a trap door under the eaves. Behind the door, the tiny bird that once seemed so real to her is just a flimsy bit of papier-mâché. She rips the frail body off its perch and crushes it between her fingers. Suddenly enraged, she gallops through the half-empty rooms, hitting the walls with her fists, while part of herself looks on from afar and says scornfully, “You’re really much too old for such nonsense now.”

She’d imagined that on the day of the move all the guys of her gang would gather round on the front walk, long-faced, giving one another comradely slaps on the back to cheer themselves up. Arnold would give a captain-style speech about how the gang would always stick together no matter what, and Toni would say she’d be back to visit soon. But the first of May turns out to be a Monday, a school day. No one is around except a whimpering baby in a stroller and its bored-looking mother.

Toni has to help carry down boxes, which they pile beside the curb until the moving van arrives. Then there’s nothing to do but stand and watch as the two brawny hired men take over, emptying the apartment with surprising speed. When her parents’ mattress appears—naked, sagging slightly in the middle, looking not entirely clean—Toni has to turn her head and is suddenly glad none of her chums are here to witness the sight. Finally, the van doors slam shut and the truck roars off carrying practically everything her family owns within a space not much bigger than their balcony. After the van leaves, Julius, Lisa, and Toni stand at the bus stop with suitcases of newspaper-wrapped fragile or precious items Lisa didn’t trust to the movers. The other passengers on the bus stare as they heave their bags inside, stumble forward, try not to bump any elbows, and wrestle the suitcases into the narrow aisles between the seats. One man smirks a little, as if he knows all about people like them and is not impressed.

Part II

Camp Tikvah

chapter 6

Overnight, Toni’s become a beanstalk, long, gangly, big-footed, everything stretched out and wrong. Clacking across the kitchen floor in high-heeled mules, Lisa turns on the light, then starts back at seeing her newly hatched giant of a daughter, an overgrown dinosaur, cracked out of its grotesquely large egg, lurking in the shadows by the fridge.

At thirteen-and-a-half, Toni is five-foot-eight and still shooting upward, towering over her mother and approaching her father’s height, but there’s no advantage to being tall. Instead, she feels exposed, naked, every inch open to her mother’s scrutiny, to say nothing of the scrutiny of kids at school and strangers on the street. Everyone can look her up and down, there’s so much to see, and it’s hard to say which is worst, her mother’s anxious appraisal, the withering glances of classmates, or the coolly curious gaze of strangers. Her body betrays her in other ways too: feet that trip over themselves, hands like bunches of bananas, hair where no hair should be, curling under her arms, fuzzing her legs, sprouting from her private parts. And then there are the breasts she’s supposed to be proud of but that feel like something soft and vulnerable has leaked out from inside her.

For weeks she’s been dismayed to see that the flat pennies on her chest have risen to become two swollen bumps, which could officially be called boobs.
Boo-boo, booby prize, booby trap.
She tries to hide them under her navy cardigan buttoned to her chin, but her mother crows, “My little girl is developing,” as if it were an achievement, and drags her off to see Nadia, the saleslady at the lingerie department of Zellers. While the two women discuss the virtues of double-stitched reinforced cups, elastic backing, and adjustable straps, Toni huddles in the corner of the dressing room avoiding, as best she can, the sight of the long, pale stalk with the stricken face in the mirror. She is measured, prodded, jerked this way and that and finally trussed in her first bra, size 32A. Itchy and tight around her ribcage, the bra sports two dunce caps in front that end in squishable cones of empty air.

“Room to grow!” her mother chirps.

Dressed once more, slouching along the street behind her mother, Toni feels the presence of those dunce caps beneath her cardigan, pointing, thrusting, announcing themselves to the whole world. And the world stares back in bone-tickled astonishment.

At school she’s among the outcasts, though not openly tormented. She doesn’t merit such attention. Despite her long, galumphing body, the boys barely notice Toni, and for this small mercy she’s grateful. The girls have a more pointed way of dismissing her. They size her up, exchange glances, arch their brows, and look away as if offended by the sight of her, then turn back to their intimate huddle. She pretends not to care, shuffling down the hall with her nose in a book, but can’t help sneaking peeks at her classmates. What are they saying? What are they thinking? Sometimes the need to know is so fierce, she’ll drift toward the edge of their circle and then have to endure the sudden turn of a head, a sarcastic, “Ex-kyoose me?”

Gym is agony, not just because she can’t accomplish a single movement with grace, but because of the humiliation of showers. She emerges from her towel at the last minute, dashes under the stream, trying not to look at who is looking, trying not to let her eyes register the sight of her classmates’ nakedness. But there they all are, soft-skinned, bare-bummed, bare-boobed, shining under streams of water, setting off an uncomfortable commotion in her chest.

Her mother brims with advice and hopeful projects. She comments, criticizes, coaxes, cajoles, clips out magazine articles about makeovers. Here’s a photo of dowdy Sue with the horsey face, lank hair, downcast eyes—the “before” shot. And now, look! The “after” Sue, with hair clipped and puffed, kiss-curls caressing her cheeks, drawing attention away from that long, unfeminine jaw line. The new Sue smiles into the camera, eager and bright as a squeaky-clean plate. She has been groomed.

“Stand up straight, for God’s sake. You look like a question mark. Tall can be lovely. Models are tall. Maybe my daughter will become a model. Hmm? Don’t hide your face. Be proud.”

Her mother delivers this lecture after her own recent makeover, which includes a powder-blue jersey-knit dress—the latest spring fashion from Shmelzer’s—a hairdo of high, stiff, lacquered waves, and nails gleaming with Coral Dust polish. Since moving to their Snowdon duplex three years ago, her mother’s hair has gone several degrees lighter, from muddy brown sprinkled with grey to Mahogany Lustre to Chestnut Glow to Arresting Auburn. But newly awakened to ugliness—her own and the rest of the world’s—Toni sees what Lisa wants to hide; the spidery lines around her eyes, the tiny, fleshy protrusion by the side of her nose, the way her feet bulge out around the straps of her high-heeled shoes, and the raw look of her fingers despite the gleaming nail polish. Toni sees, and she’s not sure what she hates more, her mother’s ugly parts or the way she stalwartly, triumphantly denies their existence through the feminine arts of makeup, dress, and charm.

Reaching up, her mother tries to brush away the thicket of bangs on Toni’s forehead.

“Get away from me!” Toni shrieks. She crashes out of the kitchen, slams her bedroom door. A few minutes later, her mother knocks—a firm, unapologetic rap—and enters the room without waiting for an answer.

“That was not my daughter talking,” Lisa pronounces, bristling with offence. From a Zellers bag, she produces a new, downy soft, egg-yolk-coloured mohair sweater, the kind that is all the rage. Toni can just imagine how big and yellow she’d appear in one of those. Like a giant “caution” sign.

“
Nu?
What do you say?”

Toni squishes her face deeper into the pillow. Even more infuriating than the appeal for gratitude is her mother’s troubled gaze, the anxiety flickering beneath the surface. Peeking out from the folds of her pillow, Toni sees her mother fish something else from the paper bag, a bottle of Arrid Junior Deodorant, which she places in the middle of the bureau. The Arrid bottle stares down accusingly. Lately, Toni has been lathering her underarms with the Mennen Deodorant from her father’s side of the medicine cabinet, always careful to put it back in the exact same spot, but apparently her mother has noticed.

“Leave me alone,” Toni rages.

Her mother’s hand flies to her breast where the arrow of ingratitude has lodged.

“I lost my mother when I was not much older than you. I’m glad I have no such cruel remarks on my conscience.”

Her voice quivers with grand tragedy. She wheels around and marches out of the room.

Later, at lunch, devouring blintzes and sour cream (her appetite is huge these days, she can’t control it), Toni avoids her mother’s gaze.
You see how good I am to you
, those dark eyes telegraph.
How good my
blintzes are?
Toni would like to go on a hunger strike, but her mother lays traps of irresistible food.

These days, when Lisa isn’t hounding Toni about one thing or the other, she’s busy with work at the store, where she’s been promoted from alterations to sales, with Hadassah committees and bazaars, and with her bridge club ladies, who come on Thursday afternoons and leave before Julius arrives home for supper—it’s understood he doesn’t want to run a gamut of ladies. On the surface, Lisa is relentlessly cheerful—the family is finally getting ahead—but Toni suspects fraud. Something is wrong, something is missing, disappointment and bitterness fester beneath Lisa’s polished surface.
You’re not really happy,
you’re just pretending.
Toni wants to hurl the accusation, but this could bring revelations and Toni doesn’t want to know what’s bothering her mother. She really doesn’t want to know. She assumes it’s got something to do with her mother’s nature, her impossible expectations. Always pushing—pushing and then furious to encounter a locked door.

Her parents don’t fight, they side-step one another. Her father absents himself as much as possible, leaving the women to sort out the messy women’s business. He now has an office above a shoe store on Queen Mary Road. After dinner, he disappears into his study with a guilty but determined air, especially on evenings when discontent seeps out of Lisa’s pores and she bangs around with pots in the kitchen. His study is in what was supposed to have been the nursery for a baby. No one has told Toni there was supposed to be another child, but she knows, just as she knows the reason for its absence. Her parents are too old. Younger people have babies, not people as battered-looking as Lisa and Julius. And that’s fine with Toni. She certainly never wanted a baby in the house.

Her father bothers her too these days: the dry click when he swallows, the pouches under his eyes, the parchment colour of his bald head, the aging, used-up look of him. She resents his general pessimism, the sarcastic remarks that reveal his anxiety about money. “Do you own shares in the electric company?” he asks with a grimace when she forgets to switch off a light. Yet, according to her mother, he’s doing well, having recently completed exams that allow him to call himself an accountant, not just a bookkeeper. New clients and bigger fees are just around the corner, but you’d never know it by the way he carries on. Plus, his feeble attempts at humouring her drive Toni crazy. When Toni mentions that she’s bored, he says, “Good.” Why good? Because it means he’s achieved something after all to have settled in a country where his child can be bored. He turns back to his dense columns of newsprint, the reassuring reports of catastrophes elsewhere. She wants to pummel those clean-shaven cheeks above the neat goatee, but what’s the use? She lurches from the table to escape to her room, stumbling on the rucked-up carpet along the way.

And then there are the moments when he departs from his body. She looks up from her breakfast toast to find a mannequin in a suit across the table. Frozen limbs. Eyes of stone. Immediately she busies herself with stabbing her finger into toast crumbs along the rim of her plate until a dry cough and a creak of the breakfast-nook bench tell her it’s safe to lift her head. Her mother sips coffee as if nothing happened. None of them speak about these little absences. Do they really occur, or does she dream him into an impenetrable black-and-white photo, one that reveals less and less the more you stare? She is no longer frightened, as she used to be, just a bit sickened, as when the bus gives an unexpected lurch, making her momentarily nauseous.

Her mother is delivering another of her lectures about eggs, blood, babies, what’s nice, what’s not nice. She sits at the breakfast nook opposite Toni, who hunches over her cocoa and tries to lose herself in the sweet, milky liquid. Lisa’s voice is that of a faraway carping crow. A crow with neat rollers, a hairnet, and pencil-thin eyebrows that leap up and down. Her face is flushed with self-importance. Her forefinger stabs the air.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes,” Toni sighs and looks back at the chocolaty bottom of the cup. Seems she’ll be captive a while longer.

“Look at me when I speak to you.”

Toni looks. She sees creases under the foundation makeup, red lines in the whites of the eyes, shiny brown circles surrounding dark holes. That’s what the pupils are, holes, empty space. Mr Blake, the biology teacher, told them the word “pupil” comes from the Latin, meaning “little doll,” because, if you look carefully, you should be able to see a tiny reflected image of yourself in someone’s eye. Of course, as soon as he said that, everyone in class tried to peer into one another’s faces amid yelps of laughter. It was only when Toni examined herself in the bathroom mirror at home that she saw what Mr Blake was talking about. A miniature, shadow self looked back at her. She doesn’t see anything like that as she stares into her mother’s eyes now, just black spots floating together. This staring is a new trick, a nice one, because her mother is forced to draw back a little.