Girl Unwrapped (39 page)

“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.

“You don’t have to do this, Mama. I’ll look for my own place.”

“There is not much time. You’ll want to get settled before summer begins. Here’s what I suggest.”

Toni is about to give her an argument, but sinks onto the breakfast nook bench instead.

“Find something for the first of June, after your exams. Start looking right away. There will be lots of vacancies, especially where students live.”

The voice that delivers this advice is calm, practical, resigned.

“Rent an apartment, and if you need to share, you be the one to choose the roommate. Advertise for the kind of person you want— someone quiet and clean and so on. Well, I leave that up to you. That’s your job. Just don’t take in any louts or freeloaders or drug addicts or pushy types. And you must have a written agreement. I’ll speak to my lawyer about that. What I want to emphasize is that you should select, not be selected. This gives you better choices.”

The strategy makes sense. Toni remains quiet, still not sure whether to believe in the forgiveness implicit in her mother’s words.

“Heaven forbid I should chase you out. But if your mind is made up to go, then you must start your search immediately. You have no time to waste.”

“Will you be all right on your own, Mama?”

“Me? All right? Why should I not be all right?”

The motherly head rises, the jaw stiffens, the eyes blaze.

“
I
am not some delicate egg that needs to be coddled.
I
have taken care of myself all my life.
I
have survived Hitler. Have I not? Have I not?”

Lisa’s fist crashes down on the table. Toni ducks her head and stifles the wild laugh that such tirades inspire.

“But you! You have a lot to learn, Miss Know-It-All, Miss-Let-Other-People-Walk-All-Over-You. Yes, that’s you. Don’t give me an argument. In one way or another, that’s what happened with that girl. I could smell it. Well, you better learn to stand up for yourself. You better learn right now. My daughter must not be a dish rag.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Why do you smile? There is nothing funny.”

“Yes, Mama.”

When they have finished their discussion on apartment hunting and rise to leave the table, Toni bends low to envelop her quivering, indignant, five-foot-two, stand-up-for-herself mother in a hug. The first proper one in ages.

chapter 31

In the end, she settles on a bachelor apartment in a modest, low-rise building on Hutchison Avenue, a little east of the Ghetto. The bachelor is slightly more expensive than shared accommodation would be, but there are fewer hassles. She really doesn’t want to deal with roommates. After she and her mother scrub the place from top to bottom and apply a fresh coat of paint, it looks cheery enough. The amenities include a galley kitchen and a balcony of sorts in the form of a fire-escape landing on which she places a potted geranium, the biggest and most thickly blossomed plant from her mother’s collection. The pink blooms shake in the early June breeze, soaking up the warm sunshine, and look plucky and bright against the austere black of the metal rails.

Her furniture consists of the desk from her room at home, the foldout couch her father used to nap on in his study, some bookshelves Mr Abbott gave her, and a small table-and-chair set her mother found at the scratch-and-dent sale at Eaton’s. Toni tried to argue she could eat perched on a stool in front of the counter between the kitchen and main room, but her mother insisted a home was not a home without a proper table. Robin has given her scented candles, a couple of plush, tasselled cushions, and a poster of Virginia Woolf.

“I’m not supposed to let in any louts or freeloaders or drug addicts or pushy types,” Toni had said when Robin came by.

She’d been rehearsing the line all morning and thought she did manage to say the words with a reasonable lightness of tone. Robin smiled, ignored Toni’s attempts at stoic reserve, and reached up to plant a kiss on her mouth. Toni knew Robin too well by then to read a great deal into the kiss. All it meant was:
Now that the messy stuff is
over, I officially grant you permission to join my tribe of ex-lovers so we
can simply be friends.
After Robin left, Toni thought her heart would break all over again, that the emptiness of the apartment would crush her to bits. She took a long walk through the downtown streets, bought herself a jumbo steamed hotdog on Saint Laurent Boulevard, and felt a little better. She went to a poster store and, after searching through the Picassos and Mirós, the James Deans and Marilyn Monroes, she bought herself a map of the night sky. She liked the foreign-sounding names of the stars and the idea of learning patterns that had guided explorers through the centuries.

The star map looks down from the wall beside her bed, giving her something to contemplate when she’s tired of reading but not ready to turn off the light. Opposite is a photo from her Jerusalem days of a cat on a garbage bin. She has contact sheets full of famous Israeli landmarks, but the cat has always been her favourite. For some reason the scrawny figure with the shoulder blades sticking up through loose skin, the lowered head, the tense stance, the wide, watchful eyes encapsulates Jerusalem for her. Everything is distilled in that defiant, unblinking stare: mazes of lanes and walls, vistas of dry hills, the searing sun, the thorny cactus, the choking dust, the cries of vendors, the pungent smells of sage, Turkish coffee, and dung. Curses and arguments, life on the boil. “You can never forget me,” the photo says. “May your tongue cleave to the roof of your mouth if you try.”

Toni has never read a word of Virginia Woolf. According to Robin, the British author was a lesbian at heart, if not fully in the flesh, and a brilliant, stunningly beautiful almost-lesbian at that. Toni was instantly captivated. The black-and-white portrait shows a young woman in profile, pale, delicate featured, sad-eyed. Her hair is done up in a loose, old-fashioned bun behind her head, exposing an elegant neck and a pretty ear. Virginia graces the wall above the dining table. Toni considers the poster a kind of tribute to what she had with Robin, but it is nice for its own sake too. Something lovely and female to look at while breakfasting alone.

When her mother saw the Virginia Woolf portrait in pride of place above Toni’s table, she screwed up her lips and seemed unimpressed even after Toni explained who the great lady was. Her mother said nothing, only glanced up at the portrait with a certain resentment Toni only understood on Lisa’s next visit. Her mother arrived with bagsful of additional house-warming gifts; cutlery and pots and pans, but also a collection of family photographs in five-by-seven standalone frames. There was a copy of the photo of Grandma Antonia that had dominated the bureau in her parents’ bedroom. There was a snapshot of Toni’s father, younger than she’d ever remembered him, looking handsome and energetic in an open-necked short-sleeved shirt, his suit jacket flung over his shoulder. He stood on a path against a background of lush woods—a pause during a ramble on the Mountain, no doubt. Another photo showed Toni’s parents standing close together at some fancy dance party, both dressed to the nines. A fourth was of Lisa holding Toni as a toddler on her lap.

“Why must you have pictures of strangers in your apartment?” her mother asked, placing the photos around the room. “Isn’t your family good enough?”

Toni accepted the offering, while making it clear Virginia would remain where she was. When her mother left, Toni repositioned the family photos all together in a line on the ledge of the window overlooking the fire escape and the back lane.

Toni has come to agree with her mother that it’s good to have these familiar faces in the room. They provide a kind of company and reassurance. In certain moods, Toni sticks out her tongue at her stern-faced grandmother whose disapproval she always took for granted, though they never met. But she also rather admires the strong features, the set jaw, the unflinching eyes. Sometimes, when she glowers defiantly into the mirror, she finds a certain, pleasing resemblance.