Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth

by Edeet Ravel

  “No, no,” Patrick said, pulling himself up. “I’ll drive you.”

  “Are you hallucinating?” I asked.

  He gave a stoned laugh. “It takes more than this.”

  The next day I returned to St. Mary’s with a contrite heart. My unwinding was now in its last stages and like a spinning top rocking unsteadily to a halt, I felt slightly off-balance as I slowed down.

  “I’m starving,” Rosie said, as soon as she saw me.

  “So am I. And I finished all my soda crackers on the bus. Sorry!”

  “Wait here—I’ll see what I can find at the cafeteria.”

  There were several other visitors in the waiting room, all of them silent and glum and in a state of contained tension, as if their clothes were scratchy and the air was too dry. I began to feel suffocated by their presence, so I strolled down the hallway, checked in on Mr. Michaeli.

  He had a private room—I suppose the bed situation in hospitals was not as dire forty years ago. He appeared to be sleeping, but the heavy door creaked as I pulled it back, and he opened his eyes. His lips curved into his familiar disconcerting smile, tenuous and dismissive. “Ah, Maya! How are you, our good friend, Maya? Every time I see you, I forget how tall you are and how long is your hair. I knew once a girl with such red hair as yours. We called her Lita. She’s dead, unfortunately.”

  “What exactly is wrong with you?” I asked him.

  “What’s wrong, what’s wrong, who knows! The doctors like to invent problems. Everywhere they look, they see a problem. Kidney, problem. Heart, problem. Stomach, problem.”

  “My father’s lungs were damaged in the war.”

  “So far, they have not found a lung problem. Maybe if we give them another week.”

  “You’re the opposite of a hypochondriac.”

  “That means?”

  “Someone who thinks something’s always wrong with them. Like in that play by Molière.”

  “Ah, Molière. When I was a boy, my father took me to Molière. And now here I am speaking to you in a hospital in Canada about Molière. And my father is dead. In German we saw it, or maybe in Yiddish. Yiddish theatre was big business. Let me tell you, Jews love plays. Too bad we ended up attending the worst play in history.”

  “Who cares,” I said, and instantly—for the first time—I regretted the heartless dismissal, but the words were out and they hung in the air like glass birds.

  “I agree. Some things are too far from the mind to understand.”

  I walked to the window and looked down. Tiny toy people, tiny toy cars.

  “Maya, come here. This is not your problem. And your mother, I saw her on a date. She is—how did my little Rosie say—courted? By a very nice man. They were in a restaurant holding hands.”

  “My mother!”

  “And for who you think she wears that perfume? For you?”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “We all saw, and my Rosie said, wouldn’t Maya be surprised. And I say, better not tell, it could be a secret. But now out of the bag I spill the beans.”

  I tried to picture it—my mother and a suitor, at a restaurant, holding hands. What most startled me was that my mother could keep something to herself. I had not thought her capable of even the smallest subterfuge, this woman who recounted to anyone who would listen her close calls with reckless drivers and rancid butter. Not to mention the ongoing forays into a disjointed alternate universe.

  And of course, beyond that, what man would choose to spend time with a woman most people crossed the street to avoid?

  “What’s he like?” I asked.

  “They were speaking Yiddish. Maybe in Yiddish your mother is more herself. He was dressed well, in a suit and tie. His shoes were shiny. I would say he is a quiet man.”

  A quiet man! Well, he’d have to be, wouldn’t he?

  A nurse peeped in, nodded cryptically, disappeared.

  All at once, in a surge of irritation and disgust, Mr. Michaeli said, “My wife and daughter don’t want to let me go. Already in the Red Cross I was ready to die, but my wife insists for her sake I live. Why this fear? Death, you know, is nothing. But Gitte believes in getting back. Showing them you won. So here I am, waiting for my gold medal.”

  “They love you,” I said.

  But his outburst had exhausted him. “Yes, yes,” he said, his voice retreating. “Love we definitely have.” He shut his eyes; he wanted me to leave.

  It seems we have countless ways of knowing—we surmise; we half-know; we know and don’t know—and everything between. With dismaying clarity, Mr. Michaeli had spelled it out for me: Rosie’s project was to offer compensation for her father’s suffering by means of her talent for happiness, while Mr. Michaeli’s project was to satisfy Rosie and Mrs. Michaeli by staying alive.

  “I’ll wait outside,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure whether he could still hear me.

  I returned to the waiting room and considered the news of my mother’s secret courtship. In fact, it made sense: for the past few months she’d been taking off several times a week, right after dinner. If before Mr. Michaeli’s revelation I thought about these excursions with anything other than relief, I must have supposed that my mother’s circle of card-players was expanding.

  She had also made herself some new outfits recently: a sequined black dress, a white jacket with a purple collar. Her soft cherubic knees were now in view; her lipstick was palest pink. Wandering into her room one evening I had come across a paperback entitled, remarkably, How to Massage Your Man. All the same, it hadn’t crossed my mind that in the real world there might be a man for her to massage. I was accustomed to thinking of my mother as sole inhabitant of a microcosm that no one could alter, and that, therefore, no one could enter.

  I felt betrayed, until it occurred to me that an entire area of discourse was in fact consistently absent from my mother’s fractured soliloquies. The taboo subject wasn’t sex; on the contrary, when free love was celebrated as a revolutionary concept I thought both its proponents and its critics were strangely obsessive.

  Rather, it was the future that, apart from generalized presentiments of disaster, was missing from our lives. I’d never heard my mother mention prospects or plans; we avoided discussing even the week ahead, never mind the broader outlines of hope and desire. I once showed my poor mother a photograph of mirrors reflecting each other to infinity. I was fascinated by the photo: we humans were truly amateurs, incapable even of grasping a concept as basic as endlessness. But Fanya covered her eyes and backed away—don’t don’t show me already I am dizzy—

  It was not, therefore, a polite Russian man my mother was hiding; it was what he might be planning for the two of them.

  I leaned my head against the wall and stared at the fluorescent lights. Titorelli … Titorelli … I was a frequent patron of the Verdi, a repertory cinema on St. Laurent Street that ignored the censorship board’s eighteen-and-over age restrictions. I enjoyed it all: the good, the bad, and the sexist. David Hemmings’s libidinous camera and gestalt investigations in Blowup; Rita Tushingham wide-eyed and overwhelmed in The Knack; circus burlesque and hat fetishes in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits. Other movies educated me: the focus on cunnilingus in some obscure Swedish film was particularly illuminating. And if I had trouble falling asleep at night, I had only to think of Romy Schneider displaying her webbed fingers to Josef K and asking, Has she any physical defect? or recall the mad, lascivious laughter of the wild girls who reached out through bamboo bars and cried out, Titorelli, Titorelli … and I’d drift off.

  I drifted off now in the waiting room chair, and in Proustian pre-sleep I reconstructed the words tinker tailor soldier sailor according to shape and size and colour. I had a confused notion that when I graduated I’d find a job diving underwater in search of people who had lost their vision by drowning. I’d bring them to shore and teach them Braille.

  By the time Rosie returned from the cafeteria I was wide awake. She handed me a container of rice pudding and a plas
tic spoon.

  “Ooh, yummy,” I said. “Thanks, Rosie.”

  “How did it go at Patrick’s?” she asked.

  “It was crazy. Patrick played chess with his mother and they talked about Hegel!”

  And the word, for teenaged-girl reasons, made us collapse into helpless giggles.

  1973

  I’ve come to the last diary, the one that seems to glow like kryptonite, the one that marks off a before and an after. This is where they make their appearance, the demons who rise from the underworld to clutch at our ankles.

  It’s silver, in fact, this notebook, not kryptonite green; I remember how pleased I was with the colour when I bought it, just before we graduated—how fitting it seemed, for soon I’d be starting a new life, and who knew what splendour it would bring?

  You think you can change things when you’re young, that you control the plot, and if something goes wrong, that you can step over it and move on. If your raft capsizes, you can swim to shore, even make a sport of it.

  I did swim into this afterlife, this aftermath, but it strikes me, now and then, that I may have headed in the wrong direction.

  We wrote our last matriculation exam on a Friday morning in late June. I could hardly believe as I put down my pencil that I was free, absolutely free, for the rest of my life, to do as I pleased.

  I had picked up a velvety blue-green corduroy shirt, and I wore it everywhere. My mother had sewn two embroidered bands onto the ends of my bell-bottom jeans, and I’d found a perfect pair of leather sandals with braided straps for only three dollars. I had a hat too—a funny, floppy felt hat, and Janis Joplin sunglasses. Janis herself had died, along with other music celebrities, and we were at the tail end of the hippie era, but the defiant, pacifist spirit and flower-strewn iconography were still a part of the landscape.

  What I wanted now was a celebration. “I’ll die if I don’t go somewhere,” I said for the third time that afternoon. Rosie and I were sitting at my kitchen table, nibbling on Bubby’s fruit salad. Rosie didn’t like the grapefruit, I didn’t like the sliced banana, so we traded. “Where can we go?” I whined. “There must be somewhere.”

  Rosie was also at sea: that morning, her parents had left for Paris with a small group of post-war immigrants from Europe. Mr. Michaeli had resisted at first, but his wife was suddenly animated—even the colour of her eyes seemed to change from dull grey to soft blue. As far as I could tell, Mr. Michaeli felt it would be inexcusable to hold her back; he had commented more than once that she hadn’t known what she was going into when she married him. As for his health, a new drug had worked wonders, and his doctor said he could travel if he didn’t overstrain himself.

  The wonderful coincidence—Rosie available just as I was hankering to get away—proved that it was meant to be.

  “We need someone rich,” I said. “Someone who can drive us and pay all our expenses.”

  “Patrick!” we exclaimed in unison. Rosie wasn’t entirely serious, but I immediately began looking for his number.

  Though Patrick and I had not stayed in touch, and I hadn’t heard from Anthony, I often thought of the Moores in their various hideaways around the globe: monastery, attic, mansion, LA.

  I dialled Patrick’s number. “This isn’t Giovanni’s Gardening Supplies,” he said glumly.

  “Patrick? Is that you? It’s Maya.”

  “Oh, hi.” He seemed pleased to hear from me. “I keep getting calls for this gardening supplies store. They printed my number on some flyer or something.”

  “How are you?” I asked. “Rosie’s here, she says hi.”

  “I’m the same,” he said with his signature sigh.

  “Listen, can we come over? We want to ask you something.”

  “Yeah, sure. You want a lift?”

  He remembered my address and said he’d be there soon. Rosie and I sat by the front window, on the lookout for a white Mercedes. “Where should we ask him to take us?” I wondered, drumming my fingers impatiently on the sill.

  “Ottawa?”

  “Ottawa! I was thinking of something a little more exciting, Rosie—like the Rockies, maybe. A road trip, right across Canada—that would be cool. Like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, except we wouldn’t be as obnoxious as those guys. Or stoned out of our skulls.”

  “Let’s get stoned!” Rosie cheered, and we belted out an unrestrained, partly improvised rendition of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” We moved on to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and were in the midst of making loud, silly sniffing noises along with reluctantly aging Lather when Patrick’s car screeched to a stop in front of the house. We sprinted downstairs and toppled onto the leather seats. Patrick was half-baffled, half-relieved by our giddiness. He’d grown a beard since we last saw him, a friendly, curly beard with surprising threads of gold.

  “Cute beard,” I said. “Makes you look like Che Guevara.”

  “I just got bored shaving. What did you want to ask?”

  We told him what we had in mind.

  “The Rockies ...” he said doubtfully. “That seems like a long way off. I mean, what if we get on each other’s nerves? We’ll be stuck. But … well, I’m not sure it’s still around, but we used to have a country house up north. You could go there, if it hasn’t been vandalized. Or sold. I’ll have to ask my mother.”

  Rosie, who was sitting in front, touched Patrick’s shoulder in gratitude. He drew away with an unmistakable flinch. Rosie wasn’t offended. She turned around and said, “It is kind of far. What if I have to come home suddenly? What if Daddy has to come back? I wouldn’t want to be way out in Alberta!”

  Patrick’s body relaxed, though whether because Rosie had withdrawn her hand or the plan, I wasn’t sure.

  We asked him what he was doing with himself these days. He told us he’d missed the application deadline for Cégep, and for the past year he’d been working, rather pointlessly, at a sleazy magazine store downtown.

  “Better than studying for matrics,” I said. “Thank God that nightmare’s over.”

  The matriculation exams, in those days, were the only ones that counted for graduation, and I knew I’d have to pass them all. I’d discovered that I didn’t need Biology to graduate; I only needed one science credit and, with the help of Miss O’Connor’s after-school tutoring, I’d been initiated into the esoterica of chemical inclinations.

  That left History, which I’d managed to ignore for four years. I had no choice but to cram, and I spent several nights making lists of calamities, for history in the end was nothing but a series of disasters strung together by treaties and agreements. War and more war; there was always someone with an army, ready to fight. My extracurricular reading helped a little. I knew from Lenny Bruce that Hoover was president of the United States during the Depression, and from Hemingway that the Spanish Civil War had Franco on one side and the Republicans, who hid in caves, on the other. Exams were easy back then, and I managed to pull through. The first city in history to be atom-bombed was a) Hiroshima b) Tokyo c) Munich d) Nanking. Now I wanted to rid myself of the superfluous information I’d been forced to house, exhaustingly, in my brain.

  We found Dr. Moore executing an effortless backstroke in a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Rosie and I hadn’t noticed the pool before; it was concealed by a high wall of cedar hedges and wasn’t visible from Patrick’s side of the house. The expression on Dr. Moore’s face as she glided through the water—all worldly woes forgot—was one I hadn’t seen before. As soon as she noticed us, she swam towards the edge of the pool. She looked like a pink sea plant with her long-sleeved, water-darkened pink leotard and matching cap of jiggling flowers and protruding dots.

  “Hello,” she said with casual courtesy. She lifted herself out of the pool and wrapped a towel around her waist. “Are you both well?”

  Before we could answer, Patrick interjected, “Do we still have that country house?” He never addressed his mother by name. He never addressed anyone by name.

  “The cottage in the La
urentians?”

  “Yeah. Is it in one piece or has it gone to wrack and ruin?”

  “The house is intact as far as I know. Were you thinking of going up there?”

  “It’s us—we’re the ones who asked,” I explained. “Me and Rosie.”

  “Ah. So you would like to go into retreat.” I saw that she wanted to be invited; or rather that she wished it were all different, that she was part of a large, happy family. I almost asked her to come along, but Patrick would have killed me. And I don’t think she would have accepted the invitation; she knew we wanted to be on our own—that was the whole point. “I can understand that,” she said evenly, and her controlled, forlorn voice made me think of one of those shipwrecked sailors you read about, who hang on to sanity by repeating the Latin names of trees.

  We discussed the practicalities of opening the house, and it became evident that Patrick would have to come along. He didn’t mind being roped in—he was bored with his job and feeling restless. For the first time in our lives there was nothing to hold us back, and we decided to leave the following day. Patrick said he wouldn’t be missed at the magazine store; the owner, Sam, was insane and wouldn’t even notice.

  Rain fell intermittently on the morning of our departure, but I wanted to wait for Patrick downstairs. My mother and Bubby came with me; they huddled under two umbrellas and tried to persuade me to join them. Instead, I lifted my face to the fine drizzle. Soon I’d be playing house with Rosie; the two of us would recline on a rug in front of the fire, go for long walks in the forest. In this sylvan setting, Rosie would realize that what she really wanted was me, and on a leafy bed I’d finally do with her all the things I’d been dreaming about for four years …

  I was expanding on these Girl’s Own adventures when Patrick’s Mercedes appeared like a ship against the horizon, ready to take me on board. My mother sniffed and wiped her eyes as I bounced into the car with my knapsack. But she relied on Patrick, who clearly had resources, and I promised to phone from the corner store every day.