“It won’t?”
“I’ve got too much crap. I’m a stinking cesspool.”
“You mean to tell me you’ll have a hangover forever? After one little binge? Well, maybe not so little.” Janet chuckles again. “But still … ”
“You know what I mean,” Toni says fiercely as tears well up in her eyes.
Janet smokes in silence.
“You’re not a … a cesspool.” Janet’s laughter sounds awkward now. “You’re just very young, you know. Sensitive and mixed up. Trust me. One day all this will be a funny story to tell your grandchildren.”
A funny story. Does Janet really think so? Or is she just putting on the counsellor act? Toni longs to see Janet’s face, but doesn’t dare turn over. One look, one wrong look, out of those sea-green eyes would blast her to smithereens.
“Hey, come on now.” Janet pats the top of Toni’s head. A whimper escapes Toni’s lips.
“Oh! Sorry. Tender, eh?” Janet pulls her hand away.
“You’re not hurting me,” Toni whispers, but Janet’s hand does not return.
“I’d offer you the hair of the dog that bit you, but plain tap water is a better idea. Anyway,” her voice sinks to a whisper, “I’ve got nothing left. You drank me dry.”
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” Toni wails, banging her forehead against the couch. “I’m sorry for everything. Everything.”
“Hey, don’t put yourself down for showing some spirit. Ruach! Ruach!” Janet imitates a dining hall chant. A crazy hope catapults into Toni’s thoughts. Perhaps Janet regards yesterday’s scene as not so very horrible after all. Maybe they can still be friends. Toni rolls over to look up at Janet’s droll grin. When her mouth relaxes, the cute chocolate freckle on her upper lip reappears, a tiny piece of Janet that Toni has come to regard as her own.
“I’m leaving today. Soon as my parents get here. I couldn’t stay. Not after … after all the things I said, in front of everyone.”
“Oh, that.” Janet waves her hand. “People babble all kinds of stuff when they’re looped. Forget it. I have.”
“Can we get together when you’re back in the city? Could I come over to your place sometime?”
The smile fades from Janet’s lips. She stares blankly at Toni for some moments and blinks.
“I’d hate not to see you ever again. Please.”
“Hey! Of course you’ll see me. I’ll be playing concerts, you know. Might even come to your school some time.”
“Could I help out with your concerts? Could I be a stage hand?”
Janet takes another drag and directs the smoke out of the corner her mouth in a long, nicely controlled stream. Her eyes fix upon the window above Toni’s head.
“Concerts aren’t like that. It’s just me and a few friends with guitars. There’s nothing to stage.”
“I could carry your guitar. Or … help with the lights?”
Toni can hear how desperate she sounds.
“Just come and listen. And bring your own friends.”
Janet’s tone is flat. What Toni fears most is happening right now. The gap between them has started to widen, and though Janet smiles her coaxing, joking smile, there’s no connection. Instead, there’s finality to the way she rises after a last friendly poke in Toni’s ribs and says, “Be seeing you,” and makes a point of singing out a hearty goodbye to Bunny too, as if the secretary is just as important to her as Toni. Then she’s skipping down the outer stairs and all Toni can do is watch her go.
The bags loaded into the trunk of the car, Toni urges her mother to get going, but Lisa wants a private word with the director first. Lisa wears her shimmering green dress with the bolero jacket and a string of fake pearls that look real enough to fool Herr Rothschild himself. An outfit that means business. Toni slides down in the passenger side of the waiting car. Very soon the P.A. will announce the Tuck Shop is open and kids will appear—the twins even! Hurry, hurry, hurry. But Lisa takes her sweet time.
After an eternity, she finally stomps back down the stairs, plunks herself into the driver’s seat, slams the car door, and starts the engine. They rattle along the pot-holed road, and Toni’s temples throb with heat, misery, and the remnants of her hangover. She hopes her mother won’t make good on the promise of a long talk during the drive home. She wants silence, oblivion, the landscape zipping by. Their progress down the dirt road is torturously slow.
“What a stupid little man,” her mother says as she negotiates a turn too quickly and then steps on the brake, making Toni jerk forward. Everyone who annoys Lisa is “little.”
“Covering up for his own incompetence. Puffing himself up like a toad. Immediately I saw through him. I looked straight into his eyes, and he could not look back at me.”
Toni stares out the side window. The bushes along the road are coated with ash-grey powdery dust.
“I know his type. A petty official who tries to put the blame on others, but he could not fool me. I let him have it.”
Now Toni can’t help but relish the scene, as she imagines it: her mother’s face growing darker and darker, her eyes filled with a terrible light, Myron realizing his mistake too late, cringing behind his desk, smiling stupidly with his peanut-goo teeth as a torrent of shrill, indignant words slaps down his feeble arguments, her mother like a magnificent tropical bird in her iridescent green suit, flashing pearls, and brilliant lipstick, showing up the mess in Myron’s office. You tell him, Mama!
“Says we should send you to a psychiatrist. Never have I been so insulted.”
What? Toni whips around, away from the imagined scene in the green blur beyond the window. She faces her mother, a sudden chill in her heart.
“Yes, a … what do you call it? A head shrinker. For my daughter. Says you are troubled. My Toni! Does he think I don’t know my own daughter? I thought this was a proper camp with proper management, I told him. Where was the supervision, I asked him. And where did that liquor come from? That he couldn’t answer me. He’s covering up for someone, himself for all I know. Maybe he keeps a bottle under his desk.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Toni mumbles.
“No? So maybe one of his counsellors does. Maybe that Janet you so adore is the drunkard. Ha! I see I’ve hit on the truth. With one look, I see things. Not like that stupid director. A mother knows.”
“Mama! Shut up, shut up!” Toni presses her hands over her ears.
“Okay, okay. Calm down, Bubbele. We’ll talk properly later.”
Toni slumps against the car door and closes her eyes tight. Lisa says nothing for a while. They pass a beaver swamp, a run-down cabin beside a small lake, a clearing with a weathered farm house, and some motionless cows.
“What an awful road,” Lisa exclaims when a rock pops up against the undercarriage of the car.
“How long to the highway?” Toni asks.
“Soon, Bubbele, soon. I know you want to get home. I’ve made my yeast buns for you.”
“I’m too hungover for yeast buns,” Toni says.
“My poor chick. That girl was a bad influence. I could tell from your letters.”
“You don’t know anything!” Toni shrieks. She twists around, away from her mother, and leans as far as she can out the window.
“Get back in here,” her mother says firmly. She rolls up the window part way when Toni slouches in her seat again. “Dirty air,” she says, shaking her head over the clouds of dust they leave behind. Presently they come to a hardtop road between corn fields. The car glides along smoothly at last.
“I know one thing,” Lisa says. “You think that girl is a goddess, and that’s perfectly normal. Happens all the time with young persons your age. Nothing strange about it, no need to pay some head shrinker to tell us that. I just wish they’d supervised you better and didn’t let you become so attached.”
Rage surges in Toni’s chest as she watches the rapid movement of her mother’s lips, the indignant quivers of her head. Lisa finally pauses for breath, while coming to a halt at an intersection
to the highway.
“I’m a lesbian, Mama.”
Toni’s sweaty fingers grip the under-side of the car seat. She holds on for dear life, like someone on a roller coaster about to take the downward plunge.
Her mother makes no move to turn onto the highway. For a few moments the car idles and there’s nothing but the monotonous cheep of crickets in the fields and her mother staring at the windshield. Toni thinks she’s going to be sick again. That wooziness in her stomach, and the air so still. If only the sullen sky would burst forth with thunder, lightning, rain. It just sits there, dark and bloated.
“Don’t be crazy,” Lisa finally says in a voice of quiet fury. “You are no such thing. Is that what he called you, that ugly little man?”
Lisa’s foot presses on the accelerator so that the car jerks forward as she swings onto the highway.
“He didn’t. But he knows. Everybody knows.”
“Nobody knows you like your mama does. You came out of my body. You are a perfectly normal, good girl. Clean and decent, like you were raised. You don’t even know what that word means, do you?” She glances sharply in Toni’s direction.
Toni’s face boils as she turns toward the window. They are moving swiftly now, bearing down on a lumbering half-ton truck.
“Of course I do.”
Lisa utters a barking laugh. “Mein Gott, there are a million miles between admiring some older girl, as you did, and that other thing. You have not a cruel bone in your body. Such women are sadists. You understand? They are cruel, depraved. She-devils, not women.” Lisa makes a spitting sound. “The Nazis selected them to be guards in the camps because they could be counted on to act like beasts. You have nothing whatever in common with those monsters. You will put such worries out of your head, do you hear?”
Her mother’s eyes narrow, and she clutches the wheel fiercely, speeding up, then slowing down abruptly, as she changes her mind about overtaking the truck. She launches into another tirade about Camp Tikvah and Myron’s chutzpah at refusing to give a refund for the two weeks Toni will miss. Then Lisa tells Toni about Julius’s poor health, his ulcers, his lack of energy. They mustn’t worry him with the details of this incident. He’s been told that Toni has the flu.
Toni sits with downcast eyes, barely hearing a word. She envisions a flushed, hard-faced, leering woman in jackboots and a uniform, brandishing a whip over a row of naked prisoners. She-devil. A word she’s never heard her mother use before. It is ugly, lurid, extreme, compelling in its accuracy, pointing to the depths of depravity and the vehemence of Lisa’s feelings on the subject.
Toni’s veins fill with ice.
chapter 11
All Toni wants is to drown in sleep, to fall into the depths of a black, suffocating void. Spread-eagled on her bed, she sinks into the torpor of a late-August heat wave. Across the city, lawns lie scorched, leaves droop, sparrows hide under hedges, their beaks open, gasping for air. Each day the radio announcer predicts a thunderstorm, but no rain comes. A faint smell of rot hangs everywhere. The whole world is dying. Good.
“Let’s see a film,” Lisa says. “The movie house will be air conditioned.”
She fans herself with a folded section of newspaper as she stands in Toni’s doorway.
“And then we could go to that new place downtown. The A&W. Hmm, Bubbele? What do you think? I heard it’s very popular with the young people.”
Toni hears the newspaper swish back and forth. She hears the coaxing in her mother’s voice and something else not usually present, a hesitation, as if Lisa’s unsure how to approach this deformed creature that used to be her daughter. The nausea, never far from Toni’s throat these days, condenses. With her eyes shut tight, Toni shakes her head. Kids from school probably hang out at the new A&W. What can her mother be thinking?
“Well then, go to the Y. Go for a swim. You can’t just lie there like an empty sack.”
The newspaper slaps at the foot of the bed. A hand tugs Toni’s arm. After more exhortations, Lisa retreats, muttering curses against the foul, inhuman heat. She’ll be back later. Not another word has been said about the topic that engaged them in the car on the drive home from Camp Tikvah. Not a word more will be said. A closed book. And did those things actually happen? Were they not like one of those lurid stories whispered from ear to ear in the bunk after lights out, growing wilder and more grotesque as each teller takes up the tale? Toni’s fists, clenched during her mother’s presence, relax, and she sinks back into lethargy. But her body just pretends. Even in slumber, a fluttering moth of anxiety knocks about inside her gut. When she wakes her jaw feels sore, as if she’s had a rough session beneath a dentist’s drill. She’s been grinding her teeth.
After dark one evening, while her parents watch TV, Toni ventures out into the tepid air. Her feet take her to Decarie Boulevard, to the Snowdon branch of the Jewish Public Library, located in a commercial building upstairs from a deli. The library consists of a single, stuffy, book-crammed room and a wrinkled, doddering librarian, barely awake, her chin propped on the bridge of her folded hands. The librarian rouses herself at the arrival of this rare bird, a summer evening visitor and a young one at that, but Toni declines the offer of help. She slips away into a corner, carrying with her the most innocuous of books: the Oxford English Dictionary. She scans the entries and when she finds the one she’s been searching for, huddles over the desk.
“Resident of the Isle of Lesbos … female homosexual … sexual attraction to a member of one’s own sex … a perversion.” And that’s all. Nothing more beyond a few terse definitions. Still, she derives some satisfaction from seeing the word that has been rolling around in her mind for weeks—the word that sounds so much like a disease—in bold print. She stares until the letters stamp themselves on the backs of her eyelids.
Another day, while her parents are out, she rifles through her father’s study and finds something useful at last: a thin volume of essays by Sigmund Freud. Her father has no particular interest in psychiatry, though, unlike Lisa, he regards it as a serious science. He’s probably never read these essays. Freud was a Viennese Jew and a book hound; it was said the great man stopped to browse in the very shop where, decades later, Julius worked. This long-ago, fleeting, personal connection would be enough to make her father want some books of Freud on his shelves.
Seated cross-legged on the floor between the big oak desk and the filing cabinet, one ear cocked for her parents’ returning footsteps, Toni skims the essays. The language is dense and convoluted, imposing and authoritative. Although she understands little, certain words jump out at her: aberration, deviation, inversion, perversion, masochism, sadism, hermaphrodite. There are terms that fascinate and repel. “Fetish,” for example. What a deliciously hideous word, sounding like the German fett—fat, greasy. Freud rips away romance. He defines kissing as “contact with the mucous membranes of the mouth.” With merciless precision, he details other contacts of organs and mucous membranes, grotesque combinations she could never have imagined. All humans are sick, it appears, but some are sicker than others. “I am an invert,” she doodles on the pale skin of her thigh. She draws an upside-down stick figure with its head in a trash can. Then she furiously rubs at the marks with a spit-moistened hand.
There’s one hopeful note in the sad litany. Freud says inversion can be cured by hypnosis.
On a listless afternoon, Toni sets out for the Jewish General Hospital on Côte-Sainte Catherine Road, about a mile from her house. Her mother thinks she’s finally gone to the Y for a swim. She carries a plastic bag with her bathing suit, towel, hair brush, and a piece of her mother’s strudel as she stands in the busy hospital lobby. A robotic voice calls for this or that doctor to come to this or that section of the hospital. Toni wanders down one hall after another. Finally, she finds the courage to tell a girl behind an information counter that she’s mentally ill. Where is she supposed to go for that? The girl barely looks up from the form she’s filling out to direct her to the emergency department. T
oni’s knees weaken. Emergency! She imagines men in white coats rushing at her to pin her arms in a strait-jacket and almost turns back. But she has come too far. Grimly, she trudges toward a set of double doors and ends up on a bench between a man with his arm in a sling and a weary mother with a feverish toddler.
She waits for two hours while almost everyone else in the crowded waiting room—those who were before her and those who came after— gets seen to first. At last a tousle-headed man carrying a cellophane-wrapped sandwich calls her name. She wonders if he’s going to offer her the sandwich, but instead he ushers her into a little room and closes the door. The man carefully places his sandwich on the gurney and rests one of his haunches upon it, half sitting, half standing, quite close to Toni and looking down at her. He introduces himself as Dr Margoles and stretches out his hand. His handshake is damp. If it weren’t for his unbuttoned white coat with the stethoscope in the pocket, she wouldn’t have guessed he was a doctor.
“I’m an intern,” he says softly, as if reading her thoughts. “Is that all right with you?” He’s pasty-faced with watery, lashless eyes behind glasses, a hoarse voice, deeply sincere, striving to ooze reassurance.
She nods.
“Good.” He draws out the word. He considers her for a long moment before adding: “What can I do for you?”
What indeed? The intensity of his stare, the soft unhurried manner of speaking, throws her off. One of his socks has rolled down, revealing a well-scratched mosquito bite on a bony ankle. She says nothing.
“You told the nurse you wanted to be cured of … of certain inclinations through hypnosis. Is that true?”
She can’t bring herself to say a word. She wants to put her hands over her ears, shut her eyes, and crouch in a corner.
“Are you afraid of me?”
He leans forward. The watery blue eyes lock on hers. It occurs to her that he’s starting the hypnosis treatment on the spot and that she ought to relax and let it work. She ought at least to try.
“No, I’m not,” she answers.
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