“‘Three-bedroom upper, bath, kitchen, sun porch. Parking available,’” she reads aloud. “A sun porch would be nice for my plants.”
“What’s going on?”
Toni looks from her mother to her father, sipping his coffee contentedly. Avoiding Toni’s eyes for a moment, her father clears his throat and tugs his goatee, while an embarrassed grin plays at the corners of his mouth.
“We have come to a compromise,” he says. “We’ll look for a duplex in Snowdon. The prices in Snowdon are still quite reasonable. Especially for a duplex.”
“What!”
“No harm in looking.” Her father lifts his palms in the air, the gesture half hopeful, half surrender.
Toni turns from her father to her mother.
“Snowdon is a good neighbourhood,” Lisa declares. “Not so good as Côte Saint-Luc or Saint Laurent, but still … Nice stores, synagogues, schools, a Jewish Y.”
“What about my friends?”
“High time you made new ones. Enough with those hooligans.”
“What about the Mountain?”
“The Mountain? The Mountain is not going anywhere. You’re never far from the Mountain in this city.”
“Papa,” she chokes. He waves his hands in front of his face. Don’t start, don’t spoil things. He seems not the least bit perturbed that they are about to fall off the edge of the world by leaving the only home she has ever known.
On a blustery Sunday morning in mid-March, the three of them go duplex hunting in Snowdon, strolling long blocks lined with squat one- and two-storey buildings and mature trees. Julius and Lisa stop to admire large balconies, picture windows overlooking neat front yards with waist-high clipped hedges and fir trees standing like sentinels on either side of walkways. Although the lawns still lie brown and battered after the long winter, her parents seem not to notice. They absorb all with keen, possessive eyes.
“A bit of the Bauhaus there,” says Julius, pointing to a curved overhang above an entrance.
“No clutter on the balconies. Not like in the old neighbourhood,” says Lisa.
The old neighbourhood. Already the ground has shifted under Toni’s feet. To her, this Snowdon is all cold, dreary sameness and strangeness; neat, boxy-looking houses, secretive blinds, sober, too-quiet streets without alleys, courtyards, vacant lots, or woods. Even the trees—big, bare-limbed maples plastered against an overcast sky—are tidy and tame. She lags behind while her parents surge ahead, eager to behold what wonders await them in the next house.
They come to a rectangular building divided into two mirror-image duplexes, with wide stone steps and blue-painted front doors, each door set with three rectangular panels of glass. Lisa checks her newspaper clipping. Yes, this is the one. They enter a tiny lobby, climb the stairs to the upper apartment. The owners haven’t moved yet. The housewife—a breathless, exuberant woman wearing black stretch pants, a white turtleneck, and hair that looks like it came out of a spray can—welcomes them with a toothy smile. She ignores Lisa’s attempt at a formal introduction and Julius’s graceful removal of his hat.
“Hey, come on in, make yourselves at home,” she sings, as if they are all old pals.
They stumble out of their boots and tramp in sock feet over a plastic runner and onto the powder blue wall-to-wall carpet of the living room. There’s a plush, white, plastic-covered couch and matching armchairs, a shiny-wood hi-fi set, and the biggest TV Toni has ever seen. The room is bright and airless and Lisa harrumphs as if to say, These Canadians, they never open their windows. Toni is suddenly aware of how stiff and foreign her parents seem, how grating their accents compared to the woman’s easy drawl. She is aware of her father’s long unshod feet stepping carefully over the carpets and polished floors. At home he always wears closed-back slippers.
Lisa pokes her head into closets, sniffs, checking for unacceptable smells. In the bathroom, she wrinkles her nose at a whiff of sweetish air freshener but otherwise seems satisfied. She comments approvingly on the spaciousness of the rooms, the cute breakfast nook in the kitchen, the gleaming electric range: You don’t have to strike a match to light a gas burner. The woman smiles back at Lisa in a pitying way to hear of something so backward as gas. When they reach the bedroom belonging to the household’s teenaged daughter, Toni hangs back because, though the girl is out at the moment, she could suddenly return and stare with frosty astonishment at this strange kid peering in at her things: the white plastic portable record player and stack of 45s, the pictures of the idols—Elvis Presley, Richard Chamberlain, Bobby Vinton—on the walls. Toni can’t get out of there fast enough. Back on the street a couple of boys around her age have started a game of pitch and catch. One of them glances over briefly, and the blankness in his eyes tells Toni what he sees—a nonentity. He doesn’t know Toni is a tomboy and wouldn’t care if he did. A tomboy doesn’t fit in Snowdon.
Next stop is the Jewish Y. It takes up a whole block on Westbury Avenue, bustles with activity and resonates with voices in the big, marble-tiled lobby. A large glass case displays an assortment of trophies, and all the important men who donated money to the Y gaze down from a gallery of portraits on the wall. There are also faded black-and-white photos of athletes. One shot shows a group of women wearing long skirts down to their ankles, cardigans, funny hats with ear flaps, and lipsticked smiles. The caption reads, “Ladies Hockey Team, 1925.”
“Baloney. How can they be hockey players?” Toni says loudly to her father, but he’s busy studying a display titled “Our Community Is 80 Years Young.” Lisa meanwhile has disappeared into an office to ask about programs. She returns clutching a bouquet of coloured, mimeographed sheets. So much going on: an Israeli coffee house, a Purim party, folk dancing lessons for boys and girls.
“I’m not taking folk dancing.”
Her mother and father look at each other over her head in a meaningful way. She bolts out of the building. She doesn’t know those two people who call after her. They don’t belong to her, nor she to them. She belongs nowhere and with no one anymore.
When the phone rings at supper time, Lisa leaps from her chair to answer it. She prances back into the kitchen, eyes aglow.
“They’ve agreed to our terms. We’ve got it.”
Without bothering to tell Toni what’s been agreed to, she pirouettes around the room, then hauls a startled Julius to his feet and makes him polka with her up and down the hall. The transformation of her parents into prancing ponies is almost as unsettling as the announcement that finally bursts from Lisa’s breathless lips:
“We move the first of May.”
Toni attacks the lukewarm potato dumpling on her plate. Have they forgotten the importance of eating food when it’s hot? Is everything to be upside down from now on? Someone has to maintain proper order. Toni tries. Over the next weeks, while her parents are busy, busy, working overtime to earn some extra dollars, Toni comes home promptly after school to bring the empty apartment back to life. She waters the plants, straightens cushions, puts casseroles in the oven, gives the stopped cuckoo clock a tap so that the pendulum resumes its back-and-forth journey and the kitchen is filled with the familiar tick-tock. Despite all her efforts, home becomes transformed into a place of chaos. Cardboard boxes from Steinberg’s crowd the hall and are gradually filled with newspaper-wrapped knick-knacks, dishes, towels, clothes. Cupboards stand open, exposing naked hooks and yellowed shelving paper. Blank rectangles of emptiness stare from walls denuded of pictures. A vast machinery of change is in motion. All protests are useless, ridiculous, like Wile E. Coyote churning his legs in mid-air above the vast canyon that he pretends not to see, because as soon as he does, he will drop like a stone.
“Now is the time for a clean sweep,” her mother says, handing Toni a large paper bag. “Throw broken toys or the ones you don’t want in here.”
Though the remnants of Golly and Teddy have gathered dust in a corner of the closet for ages, Toni hates to toss them out. Even the mutilated tribe of dolls tugs at her heart
. She wants to keep everything, the tattered board games, cracked water pistols, ripped rubber balls, even gumball-machine charms that litter the bottom of a drawer. Her mother taps her foot with impatience.
“They’re only things. Don’t get attached to things. I left home at sixteen with hardly more than the clothes on my back. Everything comes and goes.”
One day, Toni finds the cuckoo clock in a box of odds and ends relegated to the garbage. It gives her a strange feeling to see the clock, which once hung grandly on the kitchen wall, lying on its back amid stinky rags and clutter, its pendulum chains spilling out of the bottom. The clock hasn’t worked right for some time; still, the outside is the same as ever, a dark brown wooden house with a steeply sloped roof and a trap door under the eaves. Behind the door, the tiny bird that once seemed so real to her is just a flimsy bit of papier-mâché. She rips the frail body off its perch and crushes it between her fingers. Suddenly enraged, she gallops through the half-empty rooms, hitting the walls with her fists, while part of herself looks on from afar and says scornfully, “You’re really much too old for such nonsense now.”
She’d imagined that on the day of the move all the guys of her gang would gather round on the front walk, long-faced, giving one another comradely slaps on the back to cheer themselves up. Arnold would give a captain-style speech about how the gang would always stick together no matter what, and Toni would say she’d be back to visit soon. But the first of May turns out to be a Monday, a school day. No one is around except a whimpering baby in a stroller and its bored-looking mother.
Toni has to help carry down boxes, which they pile beside the curb until the moving van arrives. Then there’s nothing to do but stand and watch as the two brawny hired men take over, emptying the apartment with surprising speed. When her parents’ mattress appears—naked, sagging slightly in the middle, looking not entirely clean—Toni has to turn her head and is suddenly glad none of her chums are here to witness the sight. Finally, the van doors slam shut and the truck roars off carrying practically everything her family owns within a space not much bigger than their balcony. After the van leaves, Julius, Lisa, and Toni stand at the bus stop with suitcases of newspaper-wrapped fragile or precious items Lisa didn’t trust to the movers. The other passengers on the bus stare as they heave their bags inside, stumble forward, try not to bump any elbows, and wrestle the suitcases into the narrow aisles between the seats. One man smirks a little, as if he knows all about people like them and is not impressed.
Part II
Camp Tikvah
chapter 6
Overnight, Toni’s become a beanstalk, long, gangly, big-footed, everything stretched out and wrong. Clacking across the kitchen floor in high-heeled mules, Lisa turns on the light, then starts back at seeing her newly hatched giant of a daughter, an overgrown dinosaur, cracked out of its grotesquely large egg, lurking in the shadows by the fridge.
At thirteen-and-a-half, Toni is five-foot-eight and still shooting upward, towering over her mother and approaching her father’s height, but there’s no advantage to being tall. Instead, she feels exposed, naked, every inch open to her mother’s scrutiny, to say nothing of the scrutiny of kids at school and strangers on the street. Everyone can look her up and down, there’s so much to see, and it’s hard to say which is worst, her mother’s anxious appraisal, the withering glances of classmates, or the coolly curious gaze of strangers. Her body betrays her in other ways too: feet that trip over themselves, hands like bunches of bananas, hair where no hair should be, curling under her arms, fuzzing her legs, sprouting from her private parts. And then there are the breasts she’s supposed to be proud of but that feel like something soft and vulnerable has leaked out from inside her.
For weeks she’s been dismayed to see that the flat pennies on her chest have risen to become two swollen bumps, which could officially be called boobs. Boo-boo, booby prize, booby trap. She tries to hide them under her navy cardigan buttoned to her chin, but her mother crows, “My little girl is developing,” as if it were an achievement, and drags her off to see Nadia, the saleslady at the lingerie department of Zellers. While the two women discuss the virtues of double-stitched reinforced cups, elastic backing, and adjustable straps, Toni huddles in the corner of the dressing room avoiding, as best she can, the sight of the long, pale stalk with the stricken face in the mirror. She is measured, prodded, jerked this way and that and finally trussed in her first bra, size 32A. Itchy and tight around her ribcage, the bra sports two dunce caps in front that end in squishable cones of empty air.
“Room to grow!” her mother chirps.
Dressed once more, slouching along the street behind her mother, Toni feels the presence of those dunce caps beneath her cardigan, pointing, thrusting, announcing themselves to the whole world. And the world stares back in bone-tickled astonishment.
At school she’s among the outcasts, though not openly tormented. She doesn’t merit such attention. Despite her long, galumphing body, the boys barely notice Toni, and for this small mercy she’s grateful. The girls have a more pointed way of dismissing her. They size her up, exchange glances, arch their brows, and look away as if offended by the sight of her, then turn back to their intimate huddle. She pretends not to care, shuffling down the hall with her nose in a book, but can’t help sneaking peeks at her classmates. What are they saying? What are they thinking? Sometimes the need to know is so fierce, she’ll drift toward the edge of their circle and then have to endure the sudden turn of a head, a sarcastic, “Ex-kyoose me?”
Gym is agony, not just because she can’t accomplish a single movement with grace, but because of the humiliation of showers. She emerges from her towel at the last minute, dashes under the stream, trying not to look at who is looking, trying not to let her eyes register the sight of her classmates’ nakedness. But there they all are, soft-skinned, bare-bummed, bare-boobed, shining under streams of water, setting off an uncomfortable commotion in her chest.
Her mother brims with advice and hopeful projects. She comments, criticizes, coaxes, cajoles, clips out magazine articles about makeovers. Here’s a photo of dowdy Sue with the horsey face, lank hair, downcast eyes—the “before” shot. And now, look! The “after” Sue, with hair clipped and puffed, kiss-curls caressing her cheeks, drawing attention away from that long, unfeminine jaw line. The new Sue smiles into the camera, eager and bright as a squeaky-clean plate. She has been groomed.
“Stand up straight, for God’s sake. You look like a question mark. Tall can be lovely. Models are tall. Maybe my daughter will become a model. Hmm? Don’t hide your face. Be proud.”
Her mother delivers this lecture after her own recent makeover, which includes a powder-blue jersey-knit dress—the latest spring fashion from Shmelzer’s—a hairdo of high, stiff, lacquered waves, and nails gleaming with Coral Dust polish. Since moving to their Snowdon duplex three years ago, her mother’s hair has gone several degrees lighter, from muddy brown sprinkled with grey to Mahogany Lustre to Chestnut Glow to Arresting Auburn. But newly awakened to ugliness—her own and the rest of the world’s—Toni sees what Lisa wants to hide; the spidery lines around her eyes, the tiny, fleshy protrusion by the side of her nose, the way her feet bulge out around the straps of her high-heeled shoes, and the raw look of her fingers despite the gleaming nail polish. Toni sees, and she’s not sure what she hates more, her mother’s ugly parts or the way she stalwartly, triumphantly denies their existence through the feminine arts of makeup, dress, and charm.
Reaching up, her mother tries to brush away the thicket of bangs on Toni’s forehead.
“Get away from me!” Toni shrieks. She crashes out of the kitchen, slams her bedroom door. A few minutes later, her mother knocks—a firm, unapologetic rap—and enters the room without waiting for an answer.
“That was not my daughter talking,” Lisa pronounces, bristling with offence. From a Zellers bag, she produces a new, downy soft, egg-yolk-coloured mohair sweater, the kind that is all the rage. Toni can just imagine how big
and yellow she’d appear in one of those. Like a giant “caution” sign.
“Nu? What do you say?”
Toni squishes her face deeper into the pillow. Even more infuriating than the appeal for gratitude is her mother’s troubled gaze, the anxiety flickering beneath the surface. Peeking out from the folds of her pillow, Toni sees her mother fish something else from the paper bag, a bottle of Arrid Junior Deodorant, which she places in the middle of the bureau. The Arrid bottle stares down accusingly. Lately, Toni has been lathering her underarms with the Mennen Deodorant from her father’s side of the medicine cabinet, always careful to put it back in the exact same spot, but apparently her mother has noticed.
“Leave me alone,” Toni rages.
Her mother’s hand flies to her breast where the arrow of ingratitude has lodged.
“I lost my mother when I was not much older than you. I’m glad I have no such cruel remarks on my conscience.”
Her voice quivers with grand tragedy. She wheels around and marches out of the room.
Later, at lunch, devouring blintzes and sour cream (her appetite is huge these days, she can’t control it), Toni avoids her mother’s gaze. You see how good I am to you, those dark eyes telegraph. How good my blintzes are? Toni would like to go on a hunger strike, but her mother lays traps of irresistible food.
Girl Unwrapped Page 6