Girl Unwrapped Page 2

  “Hmm. You grew behind my back. I’ll have to let out the hem and sleeves.” Lisa peers at Toni, puzzled, as if she were expecting a somewhat different child to be standing before her. “Still, it’s very nice. Look in the mirror.”

  She pushes Toni toward her vanity table with its army of makeup bottles and perfumes and its large, oval mirror that tilts up and down so you can see yourself from different angles. There she is, trussed in checked cotton, wrists dangling, scabbed and knobby knees exposed. Every dress she’s ever worn makes Toni feel both confined and naked, aware of the great, empty spaces between her legs and the folds of material waiting to tangle her up when she walks. She thinks of Mabel, the chimpanzee who appears on the Ed Sullivan Show clad in frilly dresses and matching bonnets, strings tied in a bow under her chin. Mabel looks very black and hairy against the pale, flimsy material of her outfits. Her trainer, who is dressed in a tuxedo, invites Mabel to dance, and they shuffle around to waltz music, he taking graceful steps, she shambling awkwardly, the dress flapping around her bowed legs. At the end of the performance, Mabel curtseys, blows hideous smacking kisses at the roaring audience, and lurches about as if yanked by an invisible chain. All the while she stares directly at Toni through the TV screen, her dark eyes knowing and sad.

  Toni fumbles for the buttons behind her back.

  “Can I take it off now?”

  But Lisa isn’t ready to release her from the frilly prison.

  “Leave it on. You keep that dress on if you want your dessert.”

  “But that’s not fair!”

  The outrage! The unbearable trickery! Her mother’s cool, unyielding eyes. The same adamant expression is reflected in the face of Grandma Antonia as she stares out from her pewter-framed picture atop the bureau. Those two are always ganging up on her. Dashing down the corridor, Toni throws herself at her father’s feet.

  “Please, please, please, please, Papa,” she wails. Hot tears splash down her cheeks. He gazes down miserably, biting his lips. His hand clutches his temple, Ai, ai, it hurts right there above his eyebrow where her unhappiness has lodged itself, burrowing deep and growing bigger than any suffering she can possibly imagine.

  “Stop that. Look how you aggravate your poor Papa.”

  Lisa shouts. Toni screeches. A shudder runs up Julius’s long limbs. He can’t bear a scene. Go away, go away. His hands flap as if shooing off a swarm of flies, but it is he who leaves, hurrying down the hall to shut himself in his study, a tiny nook between the bathroom and the fire escape, which is crammed with books, two towering shelves of them, that form a solid barrier against the noises from the rest of the house.

  Sent to bed early, Toni clutches her teddy bear in one arm, her golliwog in the other, and sucks her thumb—she knows she’s too old for this, almost eight, but sometimes you need extra comfort. It’s not her fault that Papa got a migraine. It’s not fair that Mama is so mean. Soon she won’t be allowed to be a tomboy anymore. She will have to wear dresses every day instead of the clothes that she considers like a second skin, the shirts, dungarees, and scuffed-up sneakers that smell of basement corners, bubble gum, street gutters, coal dust from the furnace room, and the big, wild woods.

  From their place of banishment behind the dresser, the unloved tribe of dolls snickers. Some are girlie dolls with long-lashed eyelids that fly open when you tip them, exposing their foolish blue eyes. Some are bald-headed babies with outstretched arms and puckered lips that form a perpetual “Oh” of want for the bottle that never comes. They are birthday-present disappointments, one and all, the results of Mama and Papa’s and the faraway uncles’ good intentions. She had to smile and say “thank you” for each doll, while her heart sank at the stupid, oh-so-pretty faces. Only Teddy and Golly are real chums.

  The neglected dolls jeer and mock: You can hide us, but you can’t get rid of us. Same with the dresses that crowd the closet. What to do? Her one-eyed Teddy, old and wise, doesn’t mince words. Run away. Build a shelter of pine boughs in the woods. Live like Radisson, the explorer. Leave right now. I dare you. But it is cold beyond the edges of her covers. The bare linoleum would send shivers up her legs. The woods on the Mountain are still soggy with snow. Above her head, a long finger of yellow light slants across the ceiling, making the darkness in the room lonelier than ever. But worse is the sound behind the wall. The headless man has begun to moan. His strangled cries reach out through the plaster, and all she can do is burrow down beneath the covers, pressing Golly and Teddy to each ear, while chanting “Mama-PapaMamaPapa” to drown him out.

  chapter 2

  Melt water gurgles in the roof gutters. The dregs of winter drip away. Toni opens her eyes on a bright April sky and wisps of clouds like horses’ tails. She leaps out of bed to press her nose against the window. From her vantage point at the back of their third-floor apartment, she has a good view of sooty buildings like their own, of wash lines, fire escapes, congresses of pigeons, muddy lanes to gallop through and puddles to stomp in and chainlink fences to climb.

  As far as Lisa is concerned, the apartment on Maplewood Avenue is a stopgap measure, a step up—but only just—from the downtown slum in which they used to live. Their first home, when her parents got off the ship in Montreal harbour, was a room in a cold-water flat with rickety staircases and thick lips of ice along the bottoms of the windows in winter. Toni was too small to remember, but Lisa tells stories. The streets overflowed with immigrants, “greeners” like themselves from every blasted corner of Europe. Fellow Jews, yes, but dingy synagogues, men in black coats, the babble of Yiddish. We didn’t go through what we did to end up in Borscht Alley. You want to be with your own, but you want a bit of lawn in between. Their current neighbourhood facing the back of Mount Royal is neither one thing nor another, Lisa says. Not a slum, but not an up-and-coming suburb either. The apartment buildings look worn out and listless, like people just trudging along to the end of their days.

  As far as Toni’s concerned, there can be no other home, no other street, no other neighbourhood in the whole world. All imperfections are perfect. All belong to her: the cracks that zigzag up the walls, the gaps in the kitchen linoleum, even the creaking floors that scare her at night. These things are as much her possessions as her trove of cat’s-eye marbles and her Dinky Toy cars. In the dimly lit basement of the building, pipes snake along dark ceilings, a coal-fired furnace roars, and a big pile of coal fills the air with a peppery smell. But best is the Mountain. Their street hugs the wild side of Mount Royal: miles and miles of trees, bogs, ponds—Radisson and Davy Crockett land. If you follow a path through the tangle of woods, you emerge on a wide, stony plateau beneath a semi-circle of cliffs that rise high as skyscrapers. Toni and her gang often scramble up the sheer rock face for the lick-in-the-belly danger sensation and the view from the top, the north end of the city spread out before them all the way to the faint glimmer of the river in the distance. It seems to Toni that her parents’ wanderings from place to place had a single purpose: to bring her to this place beside the Mountain.

  She squints through the window to see whether her gang is down in the lane yet. Soon they will assemble—Peter, Nicky, Frank, and their captain, Arnold, good old Arnold. With whoops, whistles, and Tarzan yells, they’ll dodge the street traffic and charge into the wild frontier. Saturday morning. Spring at last. Time to be Daniel Boone.

  Still in pyjamas, she begins to wolf down her breakfast of cooked oatmeal from the bag with the Quaker man on it, his fat red cheeks setting a good example. Her father, dressed for work, studies the Gazette, neatly folded into quarters and held close to his face, while the radio mutters in the background. In the evenings, Julius reads the Montreal Star. Though most of it is bad, there can never be enough news for some reason. Lisa patters around the kitchen in her rose-coloured wrapper and high-heeled mules, her head bristling with rollers beneath a hairnet.

  Toni contemplates her bottomless bowl of porridge as Saturday excitement boils in her chest. The guys, the woods, the Mountain. Whi
le her mother’s back is turned, Toni slips spoonfuls of breakfast into the plant on the kitchen table and covers the gluey mess with damp black earth. Were her parents to see, they would both have a fit, in their own individual ways: Lisa roaring with outrage, Julius convulsing in private grief. A sacrilege, to waste food. However it tastes, however much excess exists, food must be treasured. Regiments of carefully labelled leftovers cram the Goldblatt fridge. Hardened bits of bread crust and rinds of cheese wrapped in wax paper lie hidden in the pockets of her father’s well-pressed suit jackets. One never knows. Her mother now swoops forward to inspect Toni’s bowl.

  “Finished eating? Good. You’re going to play with the Nutkevitch girls.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all arranged. They’re waiting.”

  Howls of protest are to no avail. Her mother’s flinty eyes and iron grip mean business.

  “You will play with the Nutkevitch girls. You will wear your nice new dress.”

  Double outrage.

  “I hate the twins!”

  “Nonsense. What’s to hate?”

  As far as Lisa is concerned, the Nutkevitch twins, who live in the apartment building next door, are cute, chatty, charming, good at everything girls are supposed to be good at. They take ballet lessons, they play piano. They go to a special Jewish school where there are no goyische hooligans. The Nutkevitch family are Ostjuden, eastern European Jews, but it doesn’t matter, you can’t have everything. Such nice girls.

  Lisa pushes, tugs, brushes, fastens—brisk, efficient, merciless. Captive in the billowy-skirted dress, her hair tightly pinned with two butterfly-shaped barrettes above her ears, Toni shuffles toward the twins’ house next door, while her mother glares like a tiger from the front walk.

  Their names are Ashie and Shevie, but Toni calls them Assie and Shittie. With their snooty, better-than-you attitude, they try to make Toni feel she’s the one who’s all wrong. Her buddies hate them too, because not only are the twins girly-girls, they are weirdly foreign, using Jewish expressions and speaking in sing-song voices. On the Jewish high holidays they go on foot to attend a synagogue many blocks away. Dressed up and marching briskly, their noses in the air, the twins push their baby brother, Yankele, in his carriage and act as if they think everyone else is being lazy. The guys understand Toni isn’t Jewish in any way that matters, just as she’s not quite a girl. She’s a tomboy. Her family never goes to synagogue. They keep holidays quietly, behind closed doors. The boys pump her back, saying “Good old Toni, good old sport.”

  Now, Toni stands on the doorstep of the Nutkevitch apartment, summoning up the nerve to ring the bell. She can never tell the twins apart, which adds to her disadvantage. They wear identical clothes and high, bouncy pigtails, their hair parted perfectly to create a straight, narrow road of pale skin up the backs of their heads. Behind the door she can hear their baby brother bawling. Assie and Shittie, Toni chants in her mind as she stabs the doorbell with her finger.

  Mrs Nutkevitch answers. She is big-chested, flushed and sweaty, wearing a flour-speckled apron and smiling distractedly. She jiggles Yankele on her shoulder with one hand and holds a cloth diaper in the other. The watery-eyed baby gapes, hides his face in his mother’s neck, and sticks out a bare red bum. Greeting Toni with little cries of welcome, the twins hook their arms into hers and escort her down the hall to their room. White and gold furniture, frilly curtains, two sets of identical hairbrushes, combs, and hand mirrors on the dresser. On each of the identical beds, a row of dolls arranged according to size, confronts Toni with glassy stares.

  “How nice of you to visit,” says one twin in a phony grownup voice.

  “Have a candy,” says the other, offering Toni a LifeSaver from a multi-coloured roll.

  “Oy, I love your dress. It’s gorgeous!”

  They bob their heads in agreement and finger the rickrack on Toni’s sleeves. Clearly they are under orders to be nice.

  “Let’s play house. We’ll be mummy and daddy and Toni can be baby.”

  “I don’t play house,” Toni growls.

  “Oh,” says the twin who made the suggestion. She sucks her cheeks around her LifeSaver while raising her eyebrows and exchanging a look of astonishment with her sister. What kind of girl refuses to play house? “So what do you want to do?”

  Toni shrugs. To say, “I want to go home” would be to sound like the baby she doesn’t want to pretend to be.

  “We could have a game,” says the other twin in an encouraging tone. “We could play rummy.”

  Toni nods, grateful. Card games are neutral, neither boys’ nor girls’ territory. Cards can be played without shame even while wearing a flare-skirted dress with a white petticoat underneath. The three of them sit cross-legged on one of the beds and play round upon round of five-card rummy, then hearts, fish, war. Toni wins as often as either of the twins, so they’re not cheating or ganging up on her. Toni notices that though the twins have no toys she would consider playing with, they do have some of the same Walt Disney books she has on her own shelves. In the kitchen Mrs Nutkevitch is baking something for a midmorning snack, something the twins call rugelach.

  “You’ve never had rugelach?!”

  The twins stare incredulously, as if Toni were an ignorant country mouse. They explain about the yummy rolled pastries filled with raisins, nuts, and chocolate powder.

  “You haven’t lived until you’ve had rugelach,” says Ashie—or is it Shevie?—with a cute toss of her head that makes her seem almost a teenager instead of eight years old and in grade three just like Toni. From the heavenly aroma seeping beneath the door, Toni thinks they may be telling the truth, and that it’s worth hanging around until the snack is served.

  When they’ve tired of cards, the twins again propose a game of make-believe, and once more Toni shakes her head. She would like to explain about being a tomboy, but that’s easier to do while wearing dungarees and surrounded by the gang. So she pulls the hem of her dress over her bare knees and decides to stop talking altogether. While Toni remains sullen and cross-legged on the bed, the twins spin their stories, chattering merrily, and hop around the room, pigtails dancing. Here comes Papa, home from a long day’s work at his butcher shop. Mama greets him at the door with joyful cries. Now they will dress up for a party. But before they can go out, they must attend to baby. “Schluf, schluf, kindele,” the twins croon in high, squeaky, lullaby voices. Toni squeezes shut her eyes and claps her hands over her ears until she feels a hand lift her dress. Her eyes snap open.

  Two identical, gleeful faces grin down at her. One twin holds a diaper, a real cloth diaper like the ones Yankele wears, the other has talcum powder and petroleum jelly. Toni flings herself backward and hits the wall, which pushes the bed sideways and makes the entire row of dolls tumble to the floor. Still on her back, she bucks, kicks, roars. The girls shriek. The bedroom door flies open.

  “Kindele! What’s going on?”

  Mrs Nutkevitch stands in the entrance, a flour-dusted oven mitt pressed against her cheek, an expression of alarm on her face as if she cannot believe such havoc can be happening within her four walls. From the kitchen comes Yankele’s rising wail. Before the twins can spew out a malicious tale, Toni bolts. Down the hall she runs, out the door of the Nutkevitch apartment, down the stairs, heart racing. On the front walk she pauses for breath, then turns toward home at a more leisurely pace, exulting in her freedom, until she hears them chant in unison behind her: “Toni the freak! Toni the freak!”

  There they stand on the steps with their hands on their hips and their grinning faces thrust forward. Without stopping to think what she’s doing, Toni bends over, pulls down her underpants, and moons them with her bare behind. There’s a moment of stunned silence, then the eruption of a new chant, voiced with frantic hilarity: “Garbage bum! Garbage bum!”

  Their vengeful delight makes Toni wonder if mooning the twins was such a brain wave after all or the sort of dumb move that haunts you the rest of your life. Suddenly she
feels squishy inside, foolish and naked and wrong. Suddenly she’s Mabel the chimp, all bowed legs and shambling feet and hairy humiliation in front of an audience collapsing in hysterics. Pretending a dignity she doesn’t feel, she walks stiffly away while her hair, loosened from the barrettes, flops in her face and the wide ship of her dress wobbles in the air.

  But later she gets even. Dressed again in her proper tomboy clothes, Toni swoops upon the twins as they play skipping games on the three squares of walkway in front of their house. She plasters two identical wads of Dubble Bubble onto the backs of their two unsuspecting heads. From their hiding places in the hydrangea bushes, the whole gang bursts into cheers as Assie and Shittie wail for their mama. Before the posse can arrive, four boys and Toni race across the streetcar tracks to the waiting embrace of the spring-green woods.

  chapter 3

  Grandma Antonia is a flame in a glass, a dancing tongue of fire above thick white wax. When Toni bumps against the kitchen counter, the flame body twists, writhes, as if angry at being disturbed.

  “Hold still,” Lisa hisses, pinching Toni’s arm. “Stand and listen while I say the Kaddish. And when I’m done, you say ‘Amen.’”

  This evening is the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and a day of remembrance for all those without a final resting place. In the Goldblatt family household, it is a day to spit on Hitler and to mourn Grandma’s death.

  The memorial candle sits in a small glass jar with the blue Star of David and Hebrew letters printed across one side. The flame will burn all through supper, through their television shows—Gunsmoke, Country Hoedown, the CBC evening news—and throughout the night, filling the kitchen with a spooky glow. All day tomorrow, the flame will sway behind its sooty glass walls, finally becoming nothing but a tiny blue eye in a puddle of wax, clear as tears. And still it will endure, on and on, refusing to disappear until well after dark. Once a year the candle is lit, allowing Grandma, whose spirit lurks in mysterious corners of the house, to come out into the open. She fills the kitchen with her eerie light, her brazen presence, tingling the skin at the back of Toni’s neck.