Aga laughed too loudly, as people do when attempting to seem natural around someone insane or very old. “What did you do, Tam-Tam?”
“I took your mother back across. She was throwing a tantrum. A real tantrum. She insisted I take the imaginary character firmly by the hand.” Tamar demonstrated, holding out her fist.
“What was she like? Where did the name Morgan come from?” Dr. Manning addressed these questions to Ginny, but Tamar answered.
“Oh, Ginny was so little. Could she remember something from when she was so small?”
“You’d be surprised,” Dr. Manning said.
“Morgan was, like I said, very, very thin. She had black hair, right, Ginny? And she was extremely clever. A doctor and a circus performer, Ginny claimed.” Aga laughed again, at a more normal volume this time. “Morgan le Fay was Ginny’s favourite character in those King Arthur books,” Tamar explained. “She loved those books. King Arthur and his knights. You know them? Strange books for a little girl, really.” Robert used to read those stories to Ginny, and somehow, Tamar was sure, everyone in the room knew this, was waiting for her to say it. “Oh, and she was an orphan. Morgan was. A wayward waif, Ginny used to say. She must have heard that phrase from — somewhere. She was full of big words. Such a clever girl. Like Aga is.”
Dr. Manning had told her that she should try to talk about Ginny’s father. Those King Arthur books would be a good memory, surely. That’s what Steven was doing — recounting good times, telling stories only of the sparkling moments when everything had seemed perfectly all right. Aga and Steven both seemed to recall long-ago conversations and events in such detail. Aga, especially, claimed to know precisely what was said, the words Ginny had used, for example when she first saw the new apartment downtown, or when Aga had been sick at preschool. Tamar looked at Dr. Manning’s narrow face and looked away, a humiliating, infuriating memory seizing her body with the sickening assault of a bad smell. She didn’t know how she’d come to be standing in the hallway between her bedroom and her mother’s, a laundry basket at her feet, Robert kneeling with his face against her waist, drooling and crying into her clothes. She only remembered the silent struggle as she tried to get his hands out of her skirt, the taste of panic and disgust in her mouth, perspiration under her arms and prickling the palms of her hands. How old had she been? How old was Ginny, and where was she? Esther, certainly, had been in the kitchen nearby, cooking. The smell of marjoram and savory was in the air.
Was it the same day she found Robert reading to Ginny on the sofa in the basement, a football game playing in the background? Esther had made Ginny a monkey out of old socks, and the child always clutched it in her fist as Robert portrayed each of King Arthur’s knights with a slightly different accent. Earlier the same day, had Tamar told herself, as she did so often in those days, that soon, perhaps, she would move back to the basement bedroom with her husband? Perhaps, she was forever telling herself, she would soon feel the way a wife should. And truly, it hadn’t seemed so unlikely that she might return to work at the department store and that it might make everything better. They didn’t need the money, she used to tell herself, but it couldn’t hurt. Her mother and Ginny would be fine together for two days or so every week. Just two or three days, for Tamar to go out in the world and talk to people she didn’t know, who didn’t know her. And then she would be able to love him. They wouldn’t necessarily have another baby; they could be careful. He was, after all, a doctor.
As Dr. Manning struggled to engage Ginny in a stilted discussion of nuns and their memoirs, Tamar realized that she did remember. She remembered how she had glanced over to see Robert engrossed in the football game, and how she’d turned from his room to enter Ginny’s instead. As she stripped the tiny bed, Tamar heard the television click off, the white noise of the football game happily cut short. She shook the pillow out of its case with unnecessary aggression as Robert stopped in the doorway to watch her but regained control seconds later to drop the white fabric, decorated with tiny strawberries, on top of the pile. She could see, without looking at him directly, that her husband was formulating some infuriating, ironic comment, but he only said, “Ginny’s sleeping.” He followed Tamar to the laundry room and leaned against the door to watch her separate out the whites. Her husband. How breathtakingly disappointing that the word’s meaning had diluted and warped so. Mijn echtgenoot — she had expected someone strong, irresistible and slightly mad, who caught you in his arms and kissed your face, whose presence felt comforting and thrilling, domestic with an undercurrent of the erotic.
“And what delight,” said Robert, as the washing machine came to life, “does the enigmatic kitchen mistress have in store for the good doctor and his wife tonight?” He waited for Tamar to speak and then added, “I could swear I smell the makings of a pot pie.”
“I don’t know. Something with carrots and potatoes.”
“After me own heart,” said Robert in the exaggerated Irish accent he reserved for pithy, self-mocking remarks, but without the joviality he usually reserved for such moments.
Tamar headed upstairs without comment. Robert stepped lightly up behind her and through the kitchen, where Esther was, indeed, rolling pastry while vegetables simmered in a thick white sauce; she was clad in a new blue apron that Tamar had brought home for her. “You’re a genius,” Robert remarked as he passed, as though to a moody child who could be tickled into cheeriness; as always, his manner with Esther made Tamar cringe. Esther, however, offered a wry smile. The side of a tooth near the front of her mouth was discoloured — it always had been and had seemed alluring when Tamar was a child. Now it struck her as an irreversible mark of decay and ill health, and she hated to see it.
In the hallway between her bedroom and Esther’s, Tamar put the laundry basket down and turned to walk past Robert, who was hovering right behind her. “Where are you going?” he said, in his normal Canadian voice, the one he used when he wasn’t joking, which was rarely; he joked even when angry or despondent.
“To the den. To sit.” She stopped as he took hold of her upper arm. Not hard, but he was touching her, and she waited for him to stop.
“You’ve more than got your figure back,” he told her. “You look better than ever. Do you know that?”
“Thank you.” She stood perfectly still.
“Why are you so afraid of me?” He moved to embrace her, and she stiffened as he pulled her against him and smoothed her hair, kissing it. “I know it’s difficult.”
“You don’t know me,” said Tamar, surprising herself. She glanced toward the kitchen, assuring herself that Esther couldn’t hear their voices.
“I know you.” He kissed her gently, and she parted her lips slightly as he pulled away, the taste of him making her head light. “I know you,” said Robert. “I want to know you, Tamar. Just trust me. Show me everything.”
Tamar pulled back and shook her head. “Wait.” He must have been repeating something he’d heard in a Hollywood movie — and he thought people actually said things like that to each other. To trust him seemed as absurd a request as if he had asked her to open her rib cage and give him her heart.
“No more waiting.” His face was in her hair, his hands fumbling with the buttons on her blouse as he tried to manoeuvre her toward her bedroom door.
“What are you doing?” Tamar’s question came out irritated, disgusted; she was grateful that the panicked pounding in her chest was inaudible from the outside as Robert secured her around the waist with one arm and bent to grab her skirt with the other. She wedged her elbows between herself and his shoulders and tried to pry his hot, wiry frame off her, but he just sank lower, the side of his face below her breasts, now trying to reach up her skirt with both hands. “What are you doing?” Tamar said again, aware of the words’ absurdity but unable to formulate any others.
“You’re my wife.” She could feel the heat of his breath through her blouse. “You are my wife, Tammy, my wife.” It had been almost two years since he’d
called her Tammy — back before Ginny was born. He had found the incongruity hilarious and romantic. Back then, he’d said it with such affection and optimism. Her skin felt damp; he was drooling. She thought he might be crying. “I miss you,” he said, his voice rushed and muffled against her chest. “I want to kiss you again, I want you to feel me again. Remember how you used to love it? I want to kiss your legs, I want your cunt. Please. I want to give you pleasure, I want you to love it.”
“My mother. Be quiet, please, Robert, please.”
“Oh, God.”
Tamar forced her knee into his abdomen and pushed hard with her leg and both arms. Robert staggered dramatically against the far wall, clutching himself, and Tamar started towards him, horrified, to see if he was hurt.
“I didn’t think you had it in you,” he gasped, his eyes wide, watery and bloodshot. He was shaking; she couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying, and it occurred to her that he was a remarkably good-looking man, a remarkably good man, and didn’t deserve any of this. “I surrender,” he said. “I give up.” As Tamar left him where he stood, he called after her, “You win.” She sat in the den with a magazine, staring fixedly at an enormous photograph of a woman with straight, centre-parted hair and a man’s tie around her neck, waiting for her hands to stop shaking.
Was this the kind of story Dr. Manning wanted to hear? Such a story is better forced back out of the mind before it infects everything, makes every memory appalling. It was only a few days after Robert’s attempted seduction that Tamar found, on her bed, a paperback copy of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, and opened it to see the inscription, in Robert’s handwriting: Tamar, trust me — my ears and my heart are yours. R. She turned it over to read the blurb on the back and was seized with anger, dismay and disgust. Robert’s gesture was as menacing and as ingenuous as a cat leaving a mangled mouse on its master’s pillow, a trail of muddy, bloody paw prints in its well-intentioned path. Tamar was tempted to destroy the book by ripping or burning, but instead she carried it out of her bedroom, out of the house, and disposed of it in a garbage bin across the street. She pictured Robert telling other doctors and nurses at the hospital, “My wife is a real-life Anne Frank.” She imagined them all looking at her with pity and fascination at the next dinner party.
When Robert came home from work that night, Tamar could barely look at him. She dreaded the expectant, kind longing with which he was surely gazing across the table and was sure she would scream if he told her one more time that his own father had wanted him to enlist, caring “more about politics and honour than human life”; that his best friend was killed by “the krauts” in Dieppe; that his Irish ancestors had been quarantined in typhus-infested shacks in Montreal. She was aware of hating him, of wanting never to see him again. It was not malice but stupidity — bland, wide-eyed stupidity — that caused most of the suffering in the world. The kind of stupidity that had overcome her and caused this absurd, unrectifiable situation: an alien living in her home and understanding nothing.
Ginny was talking in a bored voice about a saint she found “kind of interesting” who had desired, more than anything, even as a child, to be martyred by Moors, and, half listening, Tamar wondered if Ginny had known how strange it was that her parents slept in separate rooms; did she know how Robert had irritated and repulsed her, how he had hounded her, invading her privacy in every possible way? Dr. Manning claimed that children perceive and understand all those sorts of things. Then Tamar remembered something more important: how Ginny, a year or two after she and Steven were married, had started phoning often, in a panic about the tiniest of discomforts, the nuances of interactions. Ginny was upset because she’d gone out to do errands and had asked Steven to finish the laundry. “He hadn’t even remembered to do a single load of laundry. Not a single load. I just stood there watching him resolve to help me with the housework, and all I could think about was leaving. Going somewhere alone, like to a Mediterranean city, where I could walk around in markets all day wearing dresses, and sit on the beach, and just leave all the fucking dirty laundry and malls and playgroups behind. Isn’t that awful? All I could think was that I could leave; I could. I could just lift myself out of this pile of . . . of crap.”
And Tamar was speechless, because it had never occurred to her, at such moments with Robert, to imagine herself alone. To imagine herself without Esther, without Robert or Ginny, let alone desire it. “Hello, Mother? Don’t you have anything to say? Any opinion at all?”
“Please don’t yell at me,” said Tamar. “I don’t know what you want me to say. All this complaining you do.”
Perhaps if Aga and Minnie weren’t in the room, Tamar could have broached these things with Dr. Manning. Aga was slouching in a chair by the window, staring out at the parking lot through her absurd black-rimmed glasses, distressed, disgusted or bored, and Minnie was bent over a colouring book at her sister’s feet. It was such an odd thing to do — to bring a fifteen-year-old and a five-year-old to these meetings. Steven claimed that the girls needed to feel involved, that Aga needed more than anything to understand the situation properly. The more she was kept in the dark, he was certain, the more anxious she would become.
“Can I ask a question?” Aga cut in, addressing Dr. Manning.
“Yes, Aga? A question for your mother?”
“A question for you,” said Aga, and the doctor nodded. “Do you think my mother’s a hysteric?”
“Where did you learn that term?” Steven asked.
“I read it in a book.” Aga shrugged. She was always reading books. “A book about psychoanalytic theory.”
“Isn’t she clever,” Tamar said.
“Yes,” said Steven. “She is.”
“Isn’t she! Throwing words around that I can’t even say.” Tamar laughed lightly and looked at Dr. Manning for sympathy, only to realize he was noticing and assessing everything she said, studying her as though he had just figured something out — probably that she had single-handedly driven her daughter to insanity.
“Aga,” Dr. Manning said, turning to the girl with a sympathetic, indulgent air. “We don’t talk about hysteria anymore, but you’re right that conversions like your mother’s are very Freudian. She’s converted psychological problems into physical pain.”
“Hysteria,” said Aga, eyeing Ginny. “Mama. You used to talk about hysteria, remember? You explained it to me — you said Oma Esther was a classic case. Dad, you used to accuse Mom of faking all the time. You always said she was suggestible. All her digestive problems? You said they were because of Oma Esther in the Holocaust, remember?”
Steven looked at the girl, surprised and hurt. You’re not her father, Tamar thought.
“Your mother was a Holocaust survivor?” Dr. Manning asked Tamar.
“Hold on,” said Steven. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Why are you so afraid of talking about your wife’s past?” Dr. Manning asked him. “You should consider that question seriously. This is the reality of the situation.”
“The fucking reality of the situation,” said Steven. The word sounded forced coming out of his mouth; Tamar had never heard him swear before. Aga looked at him with undisguised contempt. “The reality of the situation,” he said again, as if he had never heard anything so sad or so stupid.
Aga looked back out at the parking lot, and Tamar almost envied her the adolescent entitlement to disdain, not to mention her apparent ability to understand what the doctor was talking about. Tamar thought of Asher — he had aspired to be a psychiatrist, hadn’t he? Or something like it? He had aspired to sit in rooms like this one, leading patients to recall their least dignified moments. That’s what he’d been trying to do all those years ago; he’d been practising on Tamar. She wondered what Asher would make of Ginny’s condition; how odd that he was out there somewhere, doing things, with no idea what had transpired.
The last time they went to Dr. Manning’s office as a family was on an uncommonly cold day in early spri
ng. The doctor said Ginny had to re-establish her life in her own way, perhaps in a way that none of them had anticipated, and that she needed some breathing room. From then on Ginny went alone, or perhaps she stopped going at all. Soon Tamar would no longer know her daughter’s schedule, and when Tamar went to visit, there was no telling if Ginny would even be home. Ginny had already changed so much. She was sleek and thin and strong, and so guarded.
It had already been growing dark when they left the hospital for the last time, and Tamar sat beside Steven in the front seat. The others squeezed into the back, Minnie in the middle. The sky was grey, streaked with clouds, and the hospital and the parking lot were grey, too, white showing through only where the last remnants of snow lay in filthy piles. Steven’s hair, at the temples — Tamar had never noticed it before — was turning grey. Steven started the ignition and turned on the heat, which blew cold air from outside into the already uncomfortable car, and then he let his arm fall to his side.
“Just going to let the engine warm up a bit,” he mumbled, then cleared his throat and said, “We’re here for you, Ginny. Do you understand that? We are all sitting here, we all come to this hospital again and again, me, your mother and the girls, for no other reason than you. Do you understand that?” He turned to look, and Tamar couldn’t help but do the same. Ginny was impassive in her ski jacket and track suit. She had removed her mitts and folded her bony fingers in her lap. The hapless air she’d adopted after the accident had given way entirely to straight-backed, patient tolerance. Minnie was leaning as far as she could into Aga, practically sitting on her lap to avoid contact with her mother. Aga turned from the window to watch Ginny as well; they were all staring at her, waiting, except for Minnie, who rested her face against Aga’s collarbone and closed her eyes.
Cricket in a Fist Page 18