Girl Unwrapped

by Gabriella Goliger

  “You bow down to this goddess. For what? For heartache.”

  “I didn’t choose heartache.”

  “You choose to throw away your life.”

  “It’s not a choice … it’s …”

  “It’s unnatural!”

  “Natural to me. I can’t pretend anymore, Mama.”

  “I can’t pretend, either. I can’t pretend I don’t want something better for my only child.”

  Stalemate.

  Nevertheless, it is an opening, this outburst. Familiar territory, the resentment and anger and the fierce, unwavering maternal claim. Their old lives are shattered, yet something endures.

  Neither of them talk about it. The subject, quietly acknowledged but avoided, becomes like an awkward piece of furniture they negotiate during their daily rounds. A bleak Passover comes and goes without even a toast drunk to Elijah the prophet. By silent mutual agreement, Toni and her mother shun the holiday that more than any other links Jews to their past. As a child, Toni loved the festive meal and ceremonies. Her father would read from the Haggadah. They ate matzah and bitter herbs to remember the afflictions of their ancestors under Pharaoh and grew merry on the four cups of wine. During the song that enumerates the blessings of the Exodus, Toni would yell out the chorus—Dai-daiyenu, it is enough; each blessing on its own suffices. Now, Lisa’s grim face seems to say, there are only curses to which to apply the phrase, daiyenu.

  They nurse their separate griefs in their bedrooms at either end of the apartment. When they speak at all, it is of neutral subjects, Toni’s classes, Lisa’s day at work. Toni spends long hours at the library. Where else is there to go without a lover? As far as Lisa knows, her daughter could be anywhere. Toni makes no announcements. Her mother asks no questions. But the first Saturday night that Toni feels ready to go back to the club, she becomes aware of her mother’s hovering presence. Lisa stands in the doorway as Toni irons a pale blue cotton shirt to military crispness. She watches with folded arms as Toni fluffs up her bangs and smoothes the sides of her dark, pixy-cut hair. Out of habit, Toni had almost locked the bathroom door for privacy, but then deliberately left it open. All those years of sneaking around. I can’t pretend any longer. Lisa makes no comment as Toni pulls straight the kiss-curls that the girl at the beauty parlour took it upon herself to shape. She can feel her mother appraising her outfit with new eyes.

  “I’m going to the club,” Toni declares gruffly. She waits for the question: What kind of club? She has not decided how to answer.

  “I just ask for one thing. That you be discreet.” Her mother pulls her arms tighter across her chest. “You don’t have to advertise. Understand? It is no one’s business.”

  “You want me going out with a bag over my head?”

  “I don’t want you to draw unwelcome attention. I don’t want you to go anywhere police could be watching. You may think this country is so free and just, but there are limits to what people will tolerate, and you will give them excuses to make you a victim. I won’t have it. It’s not fair to me either.”

  Toni regards her mother with surprise.

  “It’s 1970, Mama. We’re not in the thirties or in redneck country. People live and let live in this city. Okay, okay, don’t get excited. Of course I’m careful. The place I go is perfectly safe. Don’t worry.”

  She looks back into the mirror unable to bear her mother’s stony expression, which masks a rising hysteria.

  “I’ve been doing this for quite a while, you know. No big deal.”

  She laughs awkwardly, leans forward, as if she’s found something on her face that needs closer inspection. “There have never been police at the club,” she lies.

  She remembers Juanita’s stories about raids and, while she’s witnessed none herself, she has not forgotten the instructions. Drop your partner. Head for the back door. The possibility of a police invasion at any moment adds to the excitement of a night out at Loulou’s. She remembers other battle tales she’s heard over beers and cigarettes and the bravado of loud laughter, tales of betrayal at workplaces, jobs lost, homes wrecked, assaults by thugs. Still, what her mother envisions is a distortion. Her mother sees spies in every corner, entrapment agents, morality squads, witch-hunts, jackbooted thugs. The cruel knock on the door in the middle of the night, the round-up, the cattle car. These are the visions permanently stamped on her mother’s mind. Nothing can erase them, not even Trudeau’s grand statement a few years ago about the state having no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Toni promises to be discreet because it never occurred to her to act otherwise. But she knows the promise will do little to allay her mother’s fears. Suddenly she pities her parents because of all the things they felt obliged to hide, their primitive suspicions and knee-jerk paranoia. They truly come from another world, a starker one, the shadows of which no amount of modern light could ever dispel. But it is their world, not hers. Between then and now lie not merely more than twenty-some years, but a whole new universe of hope, promise, brilliance: Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” and Trudeau’s “Just Society” and “Ban the Bomb” demonstrations and draft dodgers and psychedelic art on the sidewalks of Montreal. She looks at her mother. For a moment, she has again that strangely fearful but exhilarating sensation she felt at the airport almost two years ago when she was on her way to Israel and waving goodbye.

  chapter 30

  Her favourite spot in the library is the row of desks by the fifth-floor windows overlooking the main campus grounds. From here she can look down at students criss-crossing the soggy grass on their way to classes, heads ducked against a slanting April rain. Through the smoked glass that gives everything a grey, other-worldly appearance, she can watch the budding branches toss, the flag atop the arts building flap and clouds scud across the sky. And see none of this, really, because her mind is busy sucking up information from the pages spread out on the desk. Today she has a 751-page book to review. She’s allotted half-an-hour per chapter, with ten-minute breaks, and has devised a method of self-quizzing that includes closing her eyes and recreating diagrams from memory.

  She reads the heading called “Mistakes in Meiosis,” turns to the window, and tells herself about the errors that can occur during the formation of reproductive cells. In the separation of minute chromosome strands, the wrong number—too many or too few—can result. Or the structure can be wrong—an inversion, a translocation—leading to defects, diseases, seeds that cannot grow, but also, every so often, a brilliant new form of adaptation. Millennia of incremental steps created biologic diversity. Mistakes are part of the scheme. A defect in pigmentation, for example, led to the camouflaging white fur of Arctic animals. A flush of euphoria warms her cheeks as she not only finishes her chapter five minutes early but envisions the universe as a single, pulsing, unfathomably complex organism. Ah, that’s science fiction. But it’s fun.

  She puts aside the plastic ruler which she uses to guide her eyes down the columns of text, laces her fingers together, and has a good stretch. The desks in front and behind her are occupied by the bowed figures of other plodders. Papers rustle, pens scritch. The pretty girl in the black beret two desks over won’t look up; she’ll never give Toni a smile. All strangers. All the lonely people, the song goes. The library is a heap of self-focused ants who wrestle with their personal grains of sand. She hardly knows anyone in her classes. Her fellow science students are a conservative, unengaged, buttoned-down lot, mostly male, with a sprinkling of straight-arrow girls. They have their house parties, beer nights, and football games.

  She desperately misses Robin. She misses the heady moment of entering Robin’s apartment, the lavender-painted bedroom, the scent of pot, perfumed candles, Robin’s skin, and Robin’s loopy grin. And the excruciating thrill of never knowing whether Robin was completely hers. She misses that too. Oh, and the chaos of tangled bed sheets, the gurgles of the radiator, the wail of Joplin through the walls, the fall-down-on-the-floor giggle fits, the sexy dancing together at Loulou’s, and the ac
knowledgement in the faces of the women who greeted them there, the eyes that said, “They’re a couple.” (Even though Robin had decreed they weren’t.)

  She has the impulse to run down to the lobby of the library, find a pay phone, make a call.

  Oh, Goofy. Is it really you? Imagine, I was just thinking of you too. Guess I can’t get you out of my mind.

  Yeah, sure. Dream on, idiot.

  The Omega, which she has unstrapped and laid flat on the table, reads 5:45 p.m. Fifteen minutes, not the allotted five, flew away. She let herself sink into the quicksand of fantasy, that swamp that lurks beneath the surface of her will. She sees herself flubbing the exam, blowing the scholarship. Then what? No love, no degree, no career, her whole life a total flop before it started. Her eyes fix on the second hand, its steady, heartless march in a circle that repeats and repeats itself. Oh, Papa.

  Yearning stabs suddenly as she envisions him hunched over his ledgers. She sees his long bent back, one side of his bald head shiny from the light of the goose-necked lamp, the other side in shadow. He would have loved the fine, modern library she’s sitting in now, the bland white fluorescent light, the sound-absorbing beige carpets, the long orderly rows of book-filled shelves, the soft rustle of pages being turned, the silent music of a million books and hundreds of busy brains. She sees him writing his numbers into ledger columns, subjecting himself without question to the steady grind of work. There is submission in the stooped shoulders, but dignity too. He looks up and offers her one of his pale, sweet smiles, a touch of irony in the corner of his mouth as if to say, “Well, I wasn’t a rocket scientist, but I endured as best I could, and you have to admit, you’re glad I did.”

  She remembers how, when she was a child, he showed her a newspaper clipping about scientific research in Antarctica, the most inhospitable place on earth and yet a kind of paradise, he tried to explain, because the only human presence was an international brotherhood of scientists working together for the common goal of knowledge. He told her that if a person were able to live more than one life, his second existence would be as a researcher alone in his hut on the ice with his measuring devices and the great, grand sweep of a frozen continent before his eyes.

  “Take me with you, Papa,” she’d said, and he’d replied, quite gravely, “All right then, we will both go together in our second lives.”

  How many thousands of times must he have glanced at the face of his Swiss watch, anxiously, perhaps, because the hour was late and there was so much work to be done? But he would have been soothed, too, by his ingenious little device of interlocking wheels that converted the vast, chaotic stretch of time into an orderly series of moments. She looks again at her textbook and is ready to study. Soon she is deep into the chapter on viruses and bacteria.

  By next stretch break, daylight has faded. The smoked glass gives back her faint reflection. A revelation dawns, a decision. There is something she must do, something she wants keenly. The conviction has been growing for weeks in the deep earth of her subconscious, but only now, because of some inner readiness, has it burst into the light. Her mother may not entirely approve, but it can’t be helped. She’ll get over it. She’s shown herself to be far more accommodating than Toni ever thought possible.

  “I need to move out, Mama. I need a place of my own.”

  The statement comes out in a tone of cold finality. Her mother draws back as if slapped in the face. They both stare at each other, stunned.

  “Do I interfere with your life?”

  Her mother bangs her cup down into its saucer. Her eyes are dark pools of hurt.

  “You come and go as you please, all night long sometimes, and do I say a word? You have the use of the car. You talk to me when you want, ignore me when you want. I ask no questions. I don’t pry.”

  “Mama, it’s got nothing to do with you. I just need to be on my own. To be independent. Because … I can’t explain. I need–—”

  “You need to run away from your mother.”

  “Not run away. Just be in a different place. I’ll visit. Every Friday night if you want.”

  Toni squeezes bits of rye bread into pellets between nervous fingers, but her voice is even. She’s surprised at how certain she feels, and justified in her certainty, though lacking clear words of explanation.

  She now feels self-conscious in her mother’s presence, aware of all that her mother thinks and feels and keeps to herself. They were closer when they were lying to one another. The truth has made them strangers.

  “I know you’ll never understand,” she says miserably.

  Her mother gives her a sharp look.

  “You don’t want to go back with that, that person, do you?”

  “No, no. It’s got nothing to do with her either. Believe me, that’s completely over.”

  Toni sighs. Everything’s over but the heartache.

  “Because you’ll regret it if you do. You’ll be going backward, not forward. Always in life you must go forward.”

  “But that’s it, you see? I left home once when I went to Israel and now I’m back here. I’ve gone backward.”

  “Don’t twist my words.”

  Her mother jumps up and starts scrubbing the counter top beside the stove. She shakes clouds of Dutch cleanser out of the can and attacks the surface with frenzied zeal. The sponge in her fist hisses and spots of white powder land on her good wool dress. Toni stands up too, wondering whether she should try to say more or let her be.

  “Mama, look … ”

  “How are you going to pay for this whim, Miss Independent? Nu? Are you going to use up your college fund so you can live on your own? The money your father worked for so hard? What about your ambitions? Everything you throw away. My dreams you destroy. Your father’s dreams too.”

  Lisa rips the burners out of the stove. The burner guards clatter into the sink. She up-ends the toaster, yanks open the crumb tray, and crumbs scatter over the just-wiped-clean counter and linoleum floor. It is refreshing to see such energy. Toni chuckles at the sight of her mother’s head lowered and her shoulders hunched up. The maddenedhen look, her father used to say.

  “Mama, calm down. I won’t use up my college money, okay? I’ve still got savings from my job last year, and I’ll work this summer. I’m sure I’ve done well in my exams, so I might get a scholarship. There are lots of cheap apartments in the student ghetto. I’ll share a place. All I want is a room, see?”

  “You have rooms here. Rooms and rooms and more empty rooms.”

  The burner guards rattle as her mother scours them with steel wool, the abrasive grey paste covering her fingers, doing God-knows-what damage to her carefully manicured nails. She grits her teeth and screws up her face in a fury of concentration. Water spurts from the faucet. Toni approaches, lays a tentative hand on her mother’s shoulder. The hand is shaken off. Lisa leans into the sink and away from her daughter. The stiffness of her body and the contortions of her face say there’s no point in pursuing the discussion any further.

  All right. Be like that. You prove my point.

  Toni hardens her heart and gathers her resolve.

  The cold war continues when Toni returns from classes that evening. Her mother moves about the house as if Toni weren’t there, as if she’d already departed. Sloughing her off. She has prepared supper for herself, a meal for one: leftover chicken drumstick, tiny portions of rice and peas, eaten without sauce or butter. A prisoner’s rations according to the standards of the Goldblatt household, a meal of affliction. She eats in stony silence while Toni cooks herself an omelette and toast and then, just to underline her own position, pulls out everything of interest from the fridge: pickles, salad, cold cuts, apple strudel.

  Her mother, who has finished eating before Toni gets to the table, retreats into the living room to work on a piece of embroidery. Passing by on the way to her room, Toni sees the frown of concentration as Lisa threads her needle. The white piece of linen in her hands is a runner. Over the years she has made several of these
with themes of flower baskets and birds to match the Sabbath tablecloth that still gets hauled out for the occasional festive meal. She works in utter silence, but Toni can hear her thoughts: Here is the trousseau that is not to be. My life’s labour wasted.

  The next day is the same. And the next. Toni could stay out late to avoid the chill at home, but she decides that to do so would be to capitulate. She decides instead to stay home and ignore the psychological warfare. She plunks herself on the couch to watch an episode of Ironside with Raymond Burr playing the role of the wheelchair-bound detective with the steely resolve. It’s her mother’s favourite show, but Lisa doesn’t join her daughter in front of the TV. She storms in with the vacuum cleaner, pushing the sucking mouth around chair legs and corners, filling the room with the machine’s clatter and whine. The message is clear: You want to leave? Get out then. Go. I don’t need you. I don’t want you, ungrateful child. Why are you still occupying my furniture?

  Toni presses her hands over her ears to block out the noise and fixes her eyes on the screen. She will not be cowed. She will leave in her own sweet time when she’s ready. It is her right. Deep down, though, she wonders how long she can swallow the poison. Her mother is the stronger one, armed with the conviction of the insane.

  Toward the end of the week, Toni comes home to find her mother engaged in some kind of project on the kitchen table. The newspaper lies open to the classified section. She wears her reading glasses and holds a yellow marker. Beside Lisa’s elbow is a notepad with a list of phone numbers.

  “I won’t have you living in a hovel,” she coolly announces before Toni can ask any questions. “You must get yourself a decent place. I can see a few possibilities.”

  Tap, tap goes her pink lacquered nail over the page of the newspaper, pointing to various ads she has circled. Apartments for rent. Her voice sounds firm and rational, free of hurt and accusation, as if the cold war had never happened and she’s just picking up where they’d left off when Toni first declared her intention to move. What is she up to? What now? Toni feels herself once more out-manoeuvred, the ground shifting around her. She distrusts the nonchalance in her mother’s face. Too many times it has masked depths of bitterness that reveal themselves a moment later in an annihilating barb.