Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (19 page)

Trained
is not the right word. I simply told him what to do. Sailor understands everything I tell him. I need only say, with explanatory gestures, “Sailor, you can lie on the wool blanket, but not on the linen,” and he’ll never go near linen again. I can even say, “This blanket is fine, but not that one.” He was mistreated by his first owners, and I think he developed this penchant for instant obedience in order to survive, poor thing. At least he’s happy now. I admit that I spoil him, and for every blanket I ask him not to lie on, he has several requests of his own. “Your wish is my command,” I rumble at him, and he wags his tail.

Blizzard or no blizzard, Sororité won’t be deserted tonight. I was dragged to Sororité one time in the middle of a snowstorm, and I discovered that we’re a hardy species, we bar addicts. The person dragging me was Carmen, a woman from Texas who was staying in the empty flat for a few weeks. She was a chef, and good company—lively, droll, her voice strong and fearless as she commented, amused and amusing, on everything around her. She had a rice pudding recipe that was immeasurably better than the one I’d been content with until then, and I went into a rice pudding craze when she was here. I still use her recipe, though it’s not quite the same as when she made it. It was Carmen who persuaded me to brave bad weather one stormy Friday night, and when against all odds and surmounting challenges worthy of Shackleton we made it to Sororité, we found the place packed.

Occasionally I toy with the idea of severing the Sororité umbilical cord. Occasionally I ask myself why I go. For the past eight months—since Tyen left—I haven’t met anyone I particularly wanted to invite home. Though, let’s face it, it’s been years since I
met anyone I particularly wanted to invite home. I invited them anyhow; I invited them, then hoped they’d leave. That semicolon after “anyhow” is probably the most conveniently nebulous bit of punctuation I’ve ever used—a semicolon that serves to sweep over the colossal wreck of my own monument to boundlessness.

I blame my house. It has a life of its own and refuses to accommodate guests. Tyen was a rare exception.

1971

T
he army rolled into our city during the October Crisis of 1970; the media managed to frighten outsiders, but we were amused by the sight of goofy-looking soldiers in tanks as we made our way to school. Joshua and Peter, who were in the grade above us at Eden, were arrested at a French bookstore when an altercation broke out between police and two angry customers, and they spent the night in jail. They were released the next day, and an account of their adventure provided a full day’s entertainment. Reassured by her card-playing friends that she had nothing to fear—“What can you do, there are always a few troublemakers”—even Fanya refrained from issuing doomsday forecasts.

Kidnapping was one thing, but when the troublemakers strangled their hostage, they lost whatever public sympathy they’d had. Three months later the sad, brief drama had been replaced by the drama of political debate and brutal weather. We were in the clutches of a deep freeze.

Temperatures fell and remained locked in the penal zone, day after miserable day. Cars turned to metal ice in the middle of the road and had to be abandoned where they stood because there weren’t enough tow tucks to rescue them all. Hell really was freezing over, the dreaded Mr. Lurie joked dryly. Extreme weather seemed to cheer him up.

In January, in the midst of this meteorological assault, I turned fifteen. I blew out a lone candle on a cinnamon cake, and Bubby handed me the colour-blended wool scarf she’d been knitting all week. To spare my mother a polar expedition, I bought myself the gift I would have asked for:
A Treasury of Art Masterpieces
.

Each morning I defiantly prepared for battle by layering my clothes: undershirt, T-shirt, vest, jeans, school dress, sweater, scarf, winter headband, hat, hooded coat, gloves under mitts. I felt like a mummy in a horror movie as I lumbered to school—three blocks
to the bus stop, the long wait for the bus, then another two blocks to the steaming foyer of Eden. The school reeked of something—no one could figure out what it was. Old bananas, milk gone bad, some small, trapped animal decomposing? The vents were being checked out, but so far the vent-men hadn’t found anything. I opened my locker, peeled off my clothes, and waited for my extremities to thaw out.

It was on one of these arctic mornings, as I was warming up, that the high school secretary asked me to deliver a file to the elementary side. My height, and possibly the fact that I was an outsider who had made a valiant effort to get into Eden, made me a prime candidate for small errands.

The corridors of the elementary school always resurrected, for an electrifying second or two, my first time there—Mr. Lewis, Rosie’s locker, the towers of books in the supply closet. Welcome to the Promised Land.

At first I was drawn merely by curiosity to the noise coming from one of the classrooms. I peeked in through the little square window at the top of the door and saw Mr. Michaeli. He was standing behind the desk, grinning helplessly and shielding his face with his arm.

But the grin was not a grin; it was a grimace, a mask. And the helplessness was not helplessness but a cadaverous frieze. It was as though he had lost all human traits, even the human trait of surrender, and what remained was someone else’s indistinct memory of who he had been.

He was under attack by the children. They threw spitballs and pieces of chalk and paper airplanes at him, they shouted, they pretended to cry. He’d been teaching a song in a minor key, and as they sang they sobbed, wiped their eyes, lay their heads on each other’s shoulders and wailed.
By the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept …

I opened the door. Instant silence—amazing how these children can stop and go, like mechanical toys. Mr. Michaeli came towards
me with a smile. He had reinhabited his body, more or less, but I found myself unable to detach his approaching figure from the cowering apparition I’d seen through the window. “Maya, hello, hello.”

“I was on my way to the office,” I said, stumbling on the words.

“Yes, yes, down the hall, on the left.”

The children stared at me with wide-eyed innocence from their desks. It was impossible to leave, impossible to stay.

In the washroom, in one of the stalls, the familiar onslaught, a headache of Martian proportions. Once again I was in the worm museum, running down the halls with my mother, seeking an exit, the small worms wriggling under glass globes. I wasn’t hallucinating; I knew where I was. The images, however, seemed all too real—like a film you’re forced to watch, like something out of
A Clockwork Orange
. The nausea and pain were definitely real, and I moaned.

“Maya?”

I must have been there for a while, because Rosie had come searching for me. She crawled under the door, joined me in the stall.

“I’m sick,” I said.

“Daddy told me you looked pale.”

“Where is he?”

“In the teachers’ room.”

“The kids were throwing things at him—” I began, though I’d told myself I wouldn’t say anything. But the words tumbled out, toads instead of diamonds.

“Oh, that! Don’t worry about that, Maya. He knows what kids are like!”

How did she do it? How did she come by her faultless choreography? Practice, I had to suppose. All those hours, doing the Bachanova … I was the opposite, tripping and slipping. And I couldn’t find a way to get untangled.

“I feel really sick,” I said.

“I can get you an aspirin from the office.”

“It won’t help. I need to go home.”

“You don’t have to worry about Daddy,” Rosie said. “He wouldn’t want that.”

“I don’t care, I don’t care,” I said. “Just get me my coat and stuff, please. I need to go home.”

Rosie brought me my things and saw me to the door. It was as if the shadow of an enormous liquorice wing, low and ferocious, had crept over me. Why were buses so sadistically slow in coming, in a city as cold as ours? Decades of incompetent administration, as everyone knew but did nothing about, and we were the ones who suffered. Rush hour was over, which meant nearly an hour at the stop. By the time the bus came, my fingers and toes had undergone the miserable transition from aching to numb, and the heat inside the bus failed to penetrate. I ran the last three blocks to our house, fumbled with the key, and burst inside, limping and crying. Bubby phoned my mother at work, and in her usual tempestuous way my mother rushed home in a taxi. I was already in bed by then.

That very week Mr. Halpern had taught us about ’
ir miklat
, the city of refuge, where murderers were held for their own safety until they were forgiven or tried. If they killed someone by accident, they had to stay in the ’
ir miklat
forever—or at least until a High Priest died. That’s what I would do: I would stay in my bed forever, safe from the avenging mob. My bed was narrow and not long enough, but Bubby ironed our heavy cotton sheets and remade the beds every five days, and the smooth, sturdy linen that swaddled my naked body was, like all sensuous pleasures, reassuring, consoling.

My mother assumed at first that I was having one of my worm museum episodes. But this was different. The museum had dissolved in the frigid air as I’d waited for the bus, and my headache and nausea had vanished with it. What remained was an absence that seemed narcotic, and all I could imagine wanting, ever, was to sleep.

“Tell everyone I’m not going back to school,” I instructed her.

Rosie phoned, Dvora phoned, the principal of the school phoned. My mother was forced to overcome her fear of the ominous rings and take the calls herself. “Say I’m sleeping,” I murmured. My thoughts collided like ocean debris swept to shore by the waves—the remains of a shipwreck or a plane crash. The debris would be useful if you were stranded on a desert island. But I had everything I needed, apart from, possibly, a compass.

Who was I before I met Rosie? Who was I now? Though such pseudo-ontological queries were standard currency at the time—a fashion fed by Hermann Hesse’s esoteric quests and Castaneda’s far-out encounters with the all-knowing Mexican shaman, Don Juan—my view of myself had never been problematic. I was Maya: tall, pale, and freckled, feet as long as a man’s, arms that forgot to stop growing, breasts that forgot to start growing.

Now the variables had shifted. Something new and threatening hovered at the edges, always at the edges. I was tired.

I wanted my father—I longed for him. I was used to thinking of my father in terms of my mother’s requiem, recited not as a plea to the gods but as a reminder of their malevolence. Now, for the first time, I put in a claim. It was possible, after all, to uproot my father from Fanya’s personal narrative; I’d lost him too. And though I didn’t know what he looked like, I had an image in my mind so particular that I wondered whether it had travelled in some paranormal way from my mother’s brain to mine.

The story of my parents’ courtship was the only one of my mother’s stock pieces that had a beginning, middle, and end, and the only one I enjoyed hearing. My parents had run into each other on the ship that was carrying them to Canada, or, more accurately, my mother had run into Josef, my ailing father. His lungs had been damaged in the war by the deadly fumes of a chemical plant—
some they kept alive to do work—
my mother veered for a few minutes into
there
before returning to the ecstatic reunion. She recognized my father at once; he was sitting on a
folding chair with a blanket over his shoulders, and she flung herself on him.

They’d grown up in the same neighbourhood, had gone to the same school, and eventually performed together in a cabaret. Though Josef was three years older than my mother, she knew him well, was in fact in love with him, as were, she boasted, all the girls. It wasn’t only him—his entire family was revered. Josef’s house was famous for music, theatrics, prophecies. His mother, Miriam, was said to have second sight; his father could play musical pieces backward on his violin and extract coins from ears. They were jolly and generous. Just as some families were cursed, theirs was blessed; everything they touched turned to gold, my mother said, and every one of them was gifted: Josef, his four sisters, even the mysterious Aunt Hilda, who lived with them and was rumoured to be a novelist writing under a pen name.

It was Josef, though, who made my mother’s heart stop, and she mooned over him day and night, trying to come up with schemes to make him notice her. And then her prayers were answered: she was chosen to perform in a skit with my father, and rehearsals were to take place at his house. She had found a way into that favoured circle. It was a coveted place, and she was coddled by them all—they brought out the best in you, my mother explained, made you feel deserving. In the skit my father played a dictator and my mother was a peasant; the story had something to do with water from a well and included a kiss. My mother dreamed about that kiss for weeks.

The show, according to my mother, was a great success, and had war not broken out, she and Josef might have married far sooner, for my father, she was certain, had looked forward to that kiss with as much secret longing as she had. And on the night of the cabaret, Miriam had taught her a magic incantation—time and again, during the war, that incantation had saved her life. My mother wanted to teach me the magic chant, but at this point her story buckled under the weight of unmanageable events, and
signifier collided with signified in a spectacular disintegration of meaning.