Cricket in a Fist

by Naomi K. Lewis

  “You took out your nose ring,” she said. “You’re shorter than me. Why are you dressed like that?”

  “It’s a Halloween costume.” I opened my jacket and showed her the dress. “The scarlet letter. You know? I’m a character from a book.”

  “Oh.” She must have applied a fresh coat of lipstick while waiting, because her lips were dark, shiny purple. Her breath smelled like gum. It didn’t occur to her that I must be dressed up for a party, that I had cancelled my plans for her. Of course it didn’t; she was thirteen.

  I led Minnie down the escalator and looked up to see our reflection; behind me, she leaned on one foot as if she was trying to disappear into the escalator railing. She’d inherited Mama’s full features and Dad’s bulky height. Her nose and lips were fleshy, breasts full, lips full, limbs long. Away from the light of my apartment, I was pleased to see how good I looked in my costume. My hair was a vampish approximation of Victorian, my lips bright, shiny red. My skin looked pink and healthy and I was satisfyingly slight. My sister followed my gaze up to the mirrored ceiling and scowled. No one would have guessed that we were related.

  “I’m starving,” Minnie said, as we walked through the food court under Bay Street. After considering her options, she ordered Chinese food served from large metal tubs and waited for me to pay and choose a table. She used the disposable chopsticks easily and thoughtlessly, and I watched her eat half the food and drink a whole cup of pop. There was an amoebic blob of purplish red polish in the centre of each of her fingernails, and she still sucked her lips between bites — she would have been humiliated to know how childlike it made her look. Finally I asked, “So, what the hell happened?”

  “Are you going to rat me out?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t even know what you’re doing here.”

  “Didn’t you think I’d come? Did you get my e-mail?” She’d been writing me daily, sending articles about J. Virginia Morgan and interviews with her. I had stopped reading her messages carefully, since they mostly consisted of rants about Lara’s mother, Bev, who’d moved in with them. “I guess you weren’t paying too much attention,” she said. “I wasn’t going to call you, by the way. But the person who was supposed to meet me at the bus station didn’t show up.”

  “What? Minnie? Who do you know in Toronto?”

  “You know no one calls me that anymore. Jasmine.” Our mother had been six months pregnant when she had her ultrasound and decided on the name Emily Jasmine. As soon as she was born, my sister became Minnie. Mini she was: three pounds when she came into the world, and though for the first four years of her life she grew softly round and tall for her age, she was still miniature to us, and her full name was reserved for reprimands. When she started kindergarten, she was Jasmine at school, still Minnie at home. The first time a little girl phoned and asked sweetly for Jasmine Winter, I saw my sister’s personality splitting: she was a child who turned into a different person when her parents were out of mind. She looked at me evenly, elbow on the table, chopsticks between her fingers.

  J. Virginia Morgan writes in all her books that your past, and your family’s past, are just stories. They are no more important and have no more claim on you than any other story. You feel shackled, she claims, but you’re really just afraid to let go. And I was wondering already, as Minnie pushed chow mein around her plate, why she’d really run away. It was Halloween, the day the worst had happened, the day everything always came back to haunt us. Surely she had come looking for an explanation, the details that would make everything clear. I was the only other person who’d seen it happen; I was the one who was supposed to have protected her, and my sister had come with some matters to settle.

  I was ten when Minnie was born. Mama and Dad had prepared me, and I had pictured the scene many times. It would two weeks before Christmas, and I would stay at Granny and Grandpa Winter’s house. We lived in Aylmer, Quebec, and I went to the anglophone school in Hull. But when my sister came, I wouldn’t take the bus home with my best friend, Helena, like I usually did; Grandpa Winter would be waiting for me in his car, clad in sweater vest and tweed tie, pipe between his friendly yellow teeth, to take me to Ottawa’s west end. When I returned home at the end of a week of grandparently indulgence, I would have a sister. But Minnie arrived over a month early, before the world was ready for her, purple and gold wallpaper for her nursery still rolled up in the closet, cradle bought but unassembled, Granny and Grandpa Winter at an auction out of town, buying aged objects for their antique store.

  Mama had been immobile for two months, swelling and reclining, reading and watching TV. She told all her piano students she was taking a break from teaching. “I’m not putting my feet up,” she told Dad. “I’m just putting them aside until after the baby’s born.” When Mama put her feet aside, she fell limp onto the brown corduroy sofa and stayed there all day with a book in her hand and the television on. When I came home from school, she’d be watching Three’s Company, looking resignedly sardonic, running her fingertips over cushions, over the coffee table, over her thighs in silent scales and sonatas.

  “Hey, little Agamemnon,” she’d say, as I settled on the floor with my homework. She was always inventing new nicknames for me; she had only recently stopped calling me Agmire. “My inescapable Agmire,” she used to cry as I walked in the door.

  During her pregnancy, Mama’s hair had lost all its lustre and hung, scraggly and perpetually greasy, down to her shoulders. Then she had it all cut off, and I hated the way it looked, bristly and red like a hedgehog. The three freckles on her sweat-shiny nose stood out like stains, and the shape of her face had changed, once-high cheekbones rounded. Her hands were bumpy and rough with warts and eczema. My fingers were spotted with little round bandages where Mama had dabbed my own warts with drugstore medication, but she wasn’t allowed to use it herself because of the pregnancy.

  One morning in late autumn instead of mid-winter, Mama insisted something was wrong, and by late afternoon she was lying on the sofa, a towel under her hips. I waited with her in the living room, watching her grimace, while Dad did the unthinkable: he phoned Tam-Tam and Oma Esther and asked them to come over and watch me. I expected Mama to put up a fight, but she only looked dismayed, then sighed and didn’t even argue. Dad took me into the kitchen and motioned for me to jump up and sit on the counter so our eyes were level. He said quietly, as if he was telling me a secret, “Agatha, the baby’s coming early. I need you to be a big girl and take good care of your guests, all right?” I knew it was the other way round and Dad was trying to trick me into being good, but I nodded.

  My grandmother and great-grandmother hadn’t come out to Aylmer for at least a year. Neither of them drove, so Tam-Tam and Oma Esther had to take a taxi all the way from downtown Ottawa. When it pulled up in front of the house, Dad left Mama lying on her back, rushed outside and grabbed the overnight bags from the trunk. I followed him to the door and watched from among our boots while Mama complained from the couch that I was letting all our heat out the open door. Dad helped Oma Esther from the far side of the taxi. White head, red coat, black pants, she looked like a ladybug and stood barely higher than Dad’s elbow, and the breeze blew his dark hair around into his face so it was indistinguishable from his beard. My great-grandmother safely transported to the sidewalk, Dad looked around as though he’d lost something. Quickly recovering, he opened the car door on the side closest to him and released TamTam. Hand in the crook of his sweatered arm, she stood straight-backed, gracefully blond and vaguely offended, smoothing her pants as if she were brushing off dirt.

  Two minutes later, Dad and Mama were in the car and gone. I stood in the foyer while Oma Esther settled onto the brown corduroy couch. There she would remain for most of the evening, slowly moving her jaw from side to side in an eternal struggle with her dentures. Tam-Tam walked around the living room, into the kitchen and back again. She paused by the piano and pressed down one of the yellowed ivory keys, so slowly it didn’t make a
sound. Mama usually taught piano lessons a few times a week, and I, reluctantly, was one of her students. She even had me booked into her schedule: my lessons were after school on Tuesdays. The piano used to be in Tam-Tam’s house — it had been her husband’s, and he was Mama’s first teacher. My grandfather died long before I was born, hit by a bus while riding his bike, back when my mother was just a little girl. I knew a few things about him — that he was Irish, that he used to eat Marmite, a knife-scrape of pungent tar on toast. His parents had died before he met Tam-Tam, which was why he left Tam-Tam all the money she eventually used to start her salon. I knew that he used to play the piano and sing loud enough to wake the dead, otherwise known as Oma Esther. Mama said that her father never realized what he was letting himself in for, taking Tam-Tam and Oma Esther into his home, that he could never understand or abide by their rules and rituals. She said that when the bus hit her father’s bicycle, the force of impact threw Mama-as-a-little-girl off the handlebars and out of harm’s way. She only broke her elbow. I wondered if she’d seen his body.

  Once I heard Dad ask Mama why Tam-Tam had never dated or remarried since her husband’s death. Mama laughed in surprise. “Oh, she’s had a few chances,” she said. Dad’s question disappointed me with its cluelessness. Even at the age of ten, I knew Tam-Tam’s attention to grooming had nothing to do with attracting men. She lived with Oma Esther and loved me and my mother. She liked the girls who worked in her salon, liked to dress them up and tweeze unsightly hairs from their faces. Men were far too brutish for her. I only wondered how and why she had ever married one in the first place.

  “Shall I follow you to the guest room?” Tam-Tam turned to me, hands on hips. Her accent was exaggerated inside our house, which seemed too small for her voice and the way she moved. Tam-Tam had trouble pronouncing “the”; it often came out dah. Because, as Mama explained, her first language was Dutch. She avoided the th in my name by always calling me Aga. Oma Esther’s accent was different because she’d grown up speaking Yiddish as well. The bright blond of Tam-Tam’s hair, the soft red of her lipstick and the smells of her perfume and powder all seemed too vivid for such a humble house, with its standard suburban design. I looked over at Oma Esther, who was fumbling intently with the buttons on her cardigan. I longed to sit on the floor by her legs and let her braid my hair while I thought the whole situation through, but Tam-Tam said, “Come along,” pausing by the overnight bags she’d left near me, at the bottom of the stairs. “Will you show me where to put these?” She handed me Oma Esther’s big purse that opened on top like a mouth and snapped shut with two twists of shiny metal.

  “You don’t remember where the guest room is?” I said, not wanting to lose the autumn smell near the door, the warmth of Mama and Dad’s coats against my back. I’d said the wrong thing; I slipped past Tam-Tam’s horror-stricken face and started up the stairs with the purse, neck burning with disappointment that I had somehow hurt her feelings already, confirming her well-known suspicion that Mama wasn’t raising me right. We didn’t speak while she unpacked, and I watched in disgrace from one of the guest room’s twin beds.

  Tam-Tam’s golden hair curled at the ends where it touched her slim shoulders; it was a completely different blond from my own, which was darker on top and almost white at the tips, sun-bleached from a summer of reading in the backyard hammock. Tam-Tam was not, I had come to realize, a normal grandmother. When I was ten, she was elegant and striking; when she was younger, she had been movie-star beautiful. Her clothes placed neatly in one drawer and Oma Esther’s in another, Tam-Tam set her cotton makeup bag on top of the dresser. Sitting in the rocking chair, she removed her warm black socks and pulled a pair of shiny gold slippers over the sheer stockings underneath. “Your shoulder’s ripped,” said TamTam, eyeing the seam of my favourite blue sweater. “You change your top, then come along downstairs and show me what Steven left us to eat.” I wondered what she would say if she saw the thick wool work socks that Mama wore around the house all winter.

  Mama was in a hospital bed and Minnie on her way by the time Tam-Tam reheated Dad’s vegetable stew from the night before. I set the dining room table with the special-occasion dishes, each wide bowl dark blue with a big green flower in the middle. Mama, Dad and I often ate in the living room, plates on our laps, watching Jeopardy. This habit was as comforting and snug as Mama’s wool socks with the white toes and red stripes around the tops. Tam-Tam and Oma Esther would think we ate this way every night, and I was proud of myself for protecting my parents’ precious and unrespectable habits, their unbreakable thick glass plates.

  Oma Esther examined her stew, pushing the carrots and potatoes aside. She turned to me. “Where is my handbag, Vlinderkind?” That was her special nickname for me; Mama said it meant butterfly-child, which was the most flattering thing anyone had ever called me.

  “Butt, for short,” Mama had pointed out.

  “Please get her handbag from upstairs,” Tam-Tam told me; I was already standing.

  When I returned, Oma Esther patted my cheek before clicking her huge purse open. She snapped her fingers against the twists of metal at the top, and, like an adventurer with a bottomless bag of provisions, retrieved three fist-sized packages wrapped individually in napkins. She handed one to Tam-Tam, who accepted it without reaction, and held another out to me, nodding for me to take it. She unwrapped the third. “Sticky buns with sweet ground beef,” said Oma Esther. We didn’t eat meat in our house, though Mama and I ate anything we could get our hands on when we were at restaurants or other people’s houses. Dad would have been upset if he’d known meat had touched his dishes, so I placed my bun on the napkin and ate it from there.

  “These are so good,” I said, wondering what other treats were hidden away in the pockets of Oma Esther’s overnight bag. She and Tam-Tam ate over their bowls, little bits of the delicious, spicy beef tumbling and tainting Dad’s stew below. Two more secrets. Dad mustn’t know that his dishes had touched beef; I told myself I’d put some extra soap in the dishwasher. I also knew that Oma Esther’s habit of keeping food in her purse was one of Mama’s most hated things.

  After dinner, I sat on the floor in the living room making paper snowflakes for the Christmas play we were rehearsing at school. Tam-Tam flipped through a fashion magazine, and Oma Esther studied a book she’d found in the kitchen, running her finger slowly along the pages as though concentrating her attention on each word before moving on to the next. A bright, glossy garlic bulb filled the front cover. The book had been on the kitchen’s bookshelf, unopened, for as long as I could remember. Someone, likely Oma Esther herself, must have given it to Mama as a gift. My grandmother and great-grandmother were out of place and odd, and I was beginning to feel sorry for them almost as much as I felt sorry for myself. Tam-Tam looked silly sitting on the brown corduroy couch in her stylish outfit, shiny white-tipped nails against glossy, perfumed magazine pages. Tam-Tam kept herself and Oma Esther immaculately put together. Oma Esther had stopped dying her hair brown now that she was in her early eighties, and it was pure white but permed into shape. She wore only a tiny amount of makeup, and her skin was a mass of wrinkles. The cookbook in her lap was a small but reassuring reminder that this silent, denture-adjusting Oma Esther was the same person I knew from Saturday mornings at Inner Beauty.

  Mama and I had lived with Tam-Tam and Oma Esther until I was three, when Mama married Dad, but I remembered almost nothing of those years. Seemingly all my life, my mother and I had seen Tam-Tam and Oma Esther every Saturday morning when we crossed the Ottawa River to Ontario to shop in the Byward Market and visit Inner Beauty, my grandmother’s hair salon and beauty spa. For as long as I could remember, Tam-Tam had seen me and my mother only in our visiting clothes. Mama wore skirts and stockings, her eyelashes dark and lumpy with mascara, and I was forced to wear a dress with patent leather shoes that squashed my feet. The way we usually looked — my well-loved sneakers with the hole in the toe and Mama’s plaid shirts with socks under sandals — w
as a well-kept secret.

  Inner Beauty occupied the top floor of the house, and Tam-Tam and Oma Esther lived underneath. They belonged in the apartment and salon — Tam-Tam directing hair snipping and lipstick selling, leg sugaring and eyebrow waxing. Oma Esther sat in one of the royal blue chairs, her head a mass of pink curlers, then went downstairs to the kitchen, to her pots and pans and blenders and cookbooks. Her racks and racks of spices. The apartment and Inner Beauty had separate entrances from the street; a brown door opened to TamTam and Oma Esther’s front hallway, and a narrower rust-coloured door led upstairs. The salon’s front stairwell matched our kitchen because Tam-Tam had given Mama and Dad her leftover paisley wallpaper. There hadn’t been quite enough paper left for us, so there were two exposed squares of yellow-painted drywall beside our kitchen cupboards. It was always strange to see our wallpaper as we ascended to the salon, the familiar pattern under fluorescent light. The narrow door and wooden handrail were painted the same deep orangey-rust as the tiny leaves on the wall.

  Each Saturday, Oma Esther had her hair set by one of the stylists and then went back downstairs until it was time to set her tightened curls free. She never said anything to me on her way out of the salon, just walked out past the cash, down towards the rust door. I would wait a few minutes and then go quietly down the hallway past the cosmetics counter. Tam-Tam’s office was accessible through a pink door beside the washroom; it had a grey-blue carpet and was spotlessly clean, decorated with framed photographs on the walls, the desk and the top of the binder-filled bookcase. One of them showed Tam-Tam as a little girl, reaching up to hold hands with her parents. She had blond braids and was smiling. The girl in the photo was pretty and held herself as if she was used to posing. Oma Esther had short, straight, light brown hair with bangs and looked happy and tired, and her husband was almost a foot taller than she was. He had a smouldering cigarette between the fingers of his other hand and a mischievous look in his eyes. Mama told me that he went missing after the war, and that she was named after him: his name was Jozef. No one had ever called Mama by her first name, Josephine. I liked the idea that my mother had a hidden first name and wished I had one myself — it made her seem like a spy with a secret identity. There was also a picture of Tam-Tam with Margaret Trudeau, whose makeup she’d done a few times.