Cricket in a Fist

by Naomi K. Lewis

  Cricket in a Fist

  Cricket in a Fist

  NAOMI K. LEWIS

  Copyright © Naomi K. Lewis, 2008.

  The epigraph is an excerpt from “Liberation” by Abraham Sutzkever, translated by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav and published in A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1990).

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Laurel Boone.

  Cover photograph copyright © Andy Dean, Dreamstime.com.

  Cover and interior design by Julie Scriver.

  Printed in Canada on 100% PCW paper.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lewis, Naomi K., 1976-

  Cricket in a fist / Naomi K. Lewis

  ISBN 978-0-86492-495-7

  Title.

  PS8623.E967C75 2008 C813’.6 C2007-906409-4

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.

  Goose Lane Editions

  Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

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  For my family

  You will look for a key to fit

  Your jammed locks.

  Like bread you will bite the streets

  And think: better the past.

  And time will drill you quietly

  Like a cricket caught in a fist.

  — Abraham Sutzkever, “Liberation”

  Cricket in a Fist

  I woke into a white room full of cut flowers, and my whole life slipped away like some epic, complex dream that leaves a formless uneasiness in the wake of its details. People gathered round me — people I recognized but couldn’t place. A woman spoke to me, said a name that was clearly mine. I grasped at my few remaining threads of memory, but they receded, leaving me empty-minded. All I could recall was a rush of red, a multi-hued fluttering. When I tried to remember more, this redness barricaded the past, leaving me with nothing but the present moment. The younger of the two girls, who I realized later were my daughters, began to cry. Days and weeks passed in a blur. There were always people around my bed, and I was certain they wanted to stop looking at me, but, smiling bravely, they took me home instead.

  For the first few months I was very quiet. I had broken my ankle at the same time as injuring my head, and it was in a cast, so I sat at the kitchen table, where I could see out the window, and waited. When people spoke to me, I couldn’t think of a response. I began to read my old journals and books, and soon I realized that I remembered things. I knew about my childhood, how I’d grown up with my mother and grandmother. I remembered my father’s death and my grandmother’s, remembered marrying and having children. I kept waiting for the accompanying feelings to return, but they never did. I remembered loving my husband, remembered the torment at the times when I didn’t love him. But I felt — nothing. Not even loss; not even guilt.

  As my therapist recommended, I began to write daily, whatever came into my head. My handwriting kept changing. In my house, in the hospital, limping down the street on my crutches, I was disoriented and lost, like a recent arrival on an alien planet. What’s more, I felt pursued. I often perceived a presence just behind me, and when I turned, no one was there. I’d wake in the night panicking, sure that someone was standing beside my bed; but when I opened my eyes the room was empty. My husband, a neurobiologist, was very much involved in my treatment. He and the doctors told me that sensed presences are common after certain kinds of head trauma, but I still believe I was haunted at that time. My lurking pursuer was not a physiological phenomenon or a metaphor — she was the ghost of my former self, armed with all the miserable memories and cynical beliefs that made her the way she was, trying to scare me out of moving forward.

  In The Willing Amnesiac I will tell stories about the figures that haunted the shadowy dream-life I led before waking up and taking control. All names have been changed for the protection and privacy of those still living. I do not wish to slander or misrepresent anyone, and I acknowledge that, ultimately, this story is only about me. It is worth mentioning that I have changed my own name as well, and though I was called by many names throughout my former life, the one I have now is unique because I chose it myself.

  J. Virginia Morgan

  The Willing Amnesiac: Reappearing into the Present

  One

  I spent the day sitting on my dirty white sofa, sewing a scarlet A across the chest of a thrift-store cocktail dress. I’d cut the letter from a large piece of felt, and I leaned close, smoothing the fabric, making each even stitch tiny and tight. Each time I pushed the needle through, I remembered that it was Halloween; it had been nine years.

  And when I sat back, my task complete, I noticed that my neck ached, my fingers were cramped, and the sun had risen high and then set. I hadn’t eaten all day. I prepared spaghetti and tomato sauce and ate at my desk, then showered and dressed and put in my contacts. With my hair up, eyes dark and lipstick lurid, I turned in front of the mirror, running a finger along my letter’s edge, the perfect seam. I pulled on my shoes and jacket, turned back to answer the phone, and thought of that one misstep. The first cancerous cell in my family’s now unrecognizable body.

  I brought the phone to the mirror. “I’m just going out to a party,” I said, rubbing concealer under my eyes. I lived in a huge, square room with a small, separate kitchen and a bathroom too tiny for a tub. The building had once housed offices, and my apartment still had grey industrial carpet from wall to white wall, even in the kitchen. Lamps in every corner meant I never had to use the acoustic-tiled ceiling’s flat, fluorescent lights.

  “I did it,” Minnie said. “I’m not bullshitting you. I’m in the terminal. The Toronto bus terminal. I told you, I told you I was going to do it.”

  I suspected she was calling from Ottawa, sitting comfortably on her bed, hoping to shake me up. It had been nine years today, and she knew it. But I could hear that she was in a large, open space, with strangers walking past her. My little sister was in the wrong city. My city. “But,” I said, “how did you get there?”

  “On the bus. What do you think? Didn’t you get my e-mail? So can you come and get me, or what?”

  I looked at the two long, backless bookcases that served as a wall between my bedroom and living room; Minnie would look outside and see my view of the adult video store, a billboard featuring a cowgirl drinking beer and a streetlight that shone on my pillow all night, impossible to block out completely. I loved my apartment; no one I was related to had ever seen it.

  “Agatha!” she said. “Hurry, okay? I’m about to get kidnapped or something. Don’t tell Dad,” she added, and hung up.

  Thinking of Dad and Lara’s hardwood-floored house with its stainless steel appliances, diagonally folded napkins and avocado-coloured dining room walls, the kind of house Min was used to, I hurried to straighten my dusty lampshades. I rearranged my great-grandmother’s old green and brown shawl to hide the frayed upholstery on my yard-sale armchair. I stopped halfway to the bed and hesitated, looking back toward the door. I didn’t have time — I settled for shaking out my duvet and letting it fall over the crumple
d sheet, still crooked, then shoved a pile of clothes from the floor into the laundry hamper. And my bookcases — I wondered if she’d notice the shelves of women’s autobiographies organized chronologically, beginning with The Life of Teresa of Jesus. I took a cardigan from the back of a chair and tucked it over the slew of celebrity memoirs and self-help books that concluded the collection.

  I couldn’t leave Minnie alone or bring her to the party; I’d made the costume for nothing. In the bathroom, I unzipped my jacket and looked at the dress, short, tight and lettered, and stared at my reflection, willing it to change. I looked sallow. I knew it was just the light, but my red lipstick seemed garish, my skin jaundiced, and my hair so yellow it was greenish, the shadows under my eyes like bruises. I’d barely thought about my sister’s latest e-mail, now several days old. She’d written something about not being able to take it anymore. Any tips? she’d written. I’ll e-mail again when I can. Don’t tell Dad. She rode the bus away from Ottawa, toward Toronto and toward me, alone, down the 401, and I had forgotten about her. I was stitching around the edge of my scarlet letter, dressing by the bathroom’s gruesome light, and pulling on my fishnets. I was examining it again — the scene I had replayed in my head until it incorporated itself into my breathing and my heartbeat to become as constant and essential as any bodily rhythm.

  She was walking downstairs fast, pointy-heeled black pumps clicking on the salon’s grey-tiled stairs, and I was standing hand in hand with my four-year-old sister. Minnie was disguised as Fireman Jeff, a character of her own devising, and my hair was bright red. From the top step, I watched my mother’s descent. Below me and Minnie, the back of Mama’s trench coat swished, her stiff-sprayed hair bounced; we watched her hurry down the stairs, one hand skimming the orange handrail. I saw where Mama’s left foot was headed, saw the roof of Minnie’s beloved plastic fire truck. I don’t know what I heard first — my sister’s shriek, the audible crack of ankle bone or the fire truck clattering down the stairs. Mama’s ankle buckled and her body twisted as she struggled for balance. She spun around, arms thrown up as if in surrender, and she was facing us when she fell. Ankles bent unnaturally, arms raised inelegantly, she looked right at me like a diver who’d already leapt. She seemed to hover there before her fists clutched air, knees gave way, head bent back. The smells in the stairwell were faint and chemical: perm solution, hair dye, nail polish remover. The wallpaper was brown and beige paisley with little orange leaves that matched the handrail and the door.

  Our grandmother, Tam-Tam, heard the crash from behind the front desk of the salon; she pushed past us down the stairs, held Mama’s hand and sent us outside to wait in the rain. We heard the siren a minute before we saw the ambulance hurtling toward us down the block, traffic parting for our mother’s rescuers. Two paramedics carried a stretcher through the rust-coloured door. Beside the curb, a fire truck’s lights were flashing. Minnie sucked her bottom lip hopefully.

  In the hospital waiting room, Tam-Tam, in her cashmere sweater, sipped tea, leaving lipstick prints on the white Styrofoam. My sister rested on Dad’s lap, staring at a baseball-capped man with a huge piece of gauze taped to his bony shin; later, when it was dark outside and she’d irrevocably missed trick-or-treating, Minnie curled up on a chair under Dad’s jacket. The first thing he said to me, running his finger gently down my forehead: “What did those imbeciles do to your hair?”

  I pulled away from his hand. “It’s just semi-permanent. It was supposed to be for my Halloween costume.”

  “Take a look in the mirror.”

  The hair dye had dripped in the rain, and long streaks had run down my forehead and around my eyebrows to pool and dry under the frames of my glasses. My Halloween makeup was ruined, sparkly dark eyeliner smudged under my eyes, and there was a wine-like stain around the neck of my T-shirt. After putting my hair in a ponytail, I folded my glasses onto the sink top and peeled off the red false lashes, painfully removing a few of my real lashes in the process. I scrubbed my face with hand soap, dried my skin with paper towels.

  The nurse moved us to another waiting room, through a set of doors and less crowded, and kept calling Dad aside, talking in a way that made him stoop to hear, nod as if he understood. He told us that Mama had hit her head hard, that we couldn’t leave until we knew how badly she was hurt. I wasn’t eager to go home and change into my red dress and the matching wings I’d made from a coat hanger and pantyhose. If anything, I was glad I’d be missing the Halloween dance. The television in the waiting room played sitcoms, the evening news, eventually Saturday Night Live. I was fifteen. I was touching my sore lips with the tips of my fingers, thinking about the blond, cigarette-smelling boy I’d kissed under the stairs at school the day before.

  One evening, just months earlier, Mama had left our house by taxi, tea towel wrapped tight around the hand she’d cut along with the carrots for our dinner. At regular intervals, Dad drove her away in the night, Mama wheezing or limping or retching. She was accident-and-illness-prone, but she always recovered, and she’d been hospitalized so many times we’d come to believe she was invincible. Dad and Tam-Tam would say later that my sister sensed before anyone else that this time was different. “She cried through the whole taxi ride to the hospital,” Tam-Tam said. She described Minnie’s snuffling, restrained and sorrowful — “not like one of her tantrums.” I didn’t correct them, didn’t argue that she was only crying out of disappointment over not getting to ride in the fire truck, the first real one she’d ever seen up close.

  “The bus?” said Dad, when I called him from the streetcar. “They let a thirteen-year-old on the bus, alone?” I heard him move the phone away from his mouth to tell Lara what my sister had done, and then Lara’s muffled, panicked reply. Lara was practically Minnie’s mother; I barely knew her.

  “Agatha,” Dad said. “Go to the terminal and find her, then get back on the next bus with her and bring her home. I’ll pay for both tickets.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “I have to go to work tomorrow. I have shifts every day this week.”

  “Can’t you tell them it’s a family emergency?”

  “No!” I said. “I can’t. They’re depending on me. Not to mention it’s my job. It’s my income. I have a life here.”

  “You know that I’m happy to help you out financially until you find something better. Did you apply for the job in Gerry’s office?”

  “Steven,” I said. “I’m not moving back to Ottawa to be your cousin’s receptionist. I can’t believe you’re bringing this up right now. I have to go. I’m going into the subway station.”

  The terminal was two trains away, and I knew that if Minnie changed her mind she could leave, walk down Bay Street and dissolve into the city, and I might never find her. I’d lived with Dad and Lara for only three months when I ran away, but Dad found me two days later in the food court of the mall, drinking rum and Coke out of a cardboard cup with my twenty-one-year-old drug-dealer boyfriend. Running away to Toronto is different; my sister had really left home. Two people could live in Toronto for years and never cross paths. That’s why I always checked. In restaurants, streetcars and stores. I walked the length of subway cars, scanning each face. I saw other people staring down at newspapers or gazing intently at dark windows that offered only reflections. Any two people could be long lost to each other, could sit one orange vinyl seat away and never realize how close they’d come.

  I had never found J. Virginia Morgan, and we’d lived in the same city for over four years. It said on her latest book jacket that she divided her time between Toronto and Spain and also toured a lot, giving seminars mostly in American cities. It was unlikely that someone her age, with such a lucrative career, would take the subway, but more and more frequently I thought I caught a glimpse of her across the subway tracks, waiting for a train heading in the other direction. Behind me, I’d catch a flash of business suit, a waft of perfume, but when I turned, it was never her. Didn’t even look like her. My hands would shake with adrenali
n for minutes, and I would tell myself I should move to a different city. I reminded myself why I moved to Toronto, that it was my best option, the best university. It wasn’t because of what her book jacket said About the Author, wasn’t so that, in every crowd, movie, grocery store, I’d feel the possibility of her breath on my neck.

  Since arriving in Toronto, I’d found a thrill in the underground connection between subway station, mall and bus terminal. It was no coincidence that I’d met two boyfriends on the bus; I found people with giant packs strapped to their backs, entering the city from afar or heading for another destination, irresistibly alluring. Usually I entered the terminal because I was leaving town, and it felt strange to walk in with no bag, no intention to take a bus out of the city and onto the highway. Minnie was exactly where I’d told her to stay, sitting on a grey chair with a big red backpack on her lap. She stood when she saw me, and it was plain that she was almost fourteen, poor Minnie, possessed by adolescence at its worst. Since I’d last seen her in Ottawa, six months earlier, her reddish hair had grown longer and she’d put on weight. She’d grown breasts — she had a woman’s body — and was wearing so much dark eye makeup it was visible from across the room. I saw her struggle not to smile as she stood and squared her shoulders. She came towards me past the rows of chairs and the pay phones, chin up, swinging her hips and pouting, catwalking in her yellow platform sneakers. I’d never seen her walk that way before. I recognized the blue and grey Adidas jacket that Dad used to wear.

  “Min.” I grabbed her and held on tight. She was bigger than me, more solid, and the shoes made her even taller. “What were you thinking?” She shifted uncomfortably in my arms, but relief made it difficult to let go. I released the back of her jacket from my fists and stepped away.