Cricket in a Fist Page 13

  “What’s with the costume?” he said.

  “I’m a Freudian slip,” I admitted. Dad had given me the idea for the costume, and I should have known better. No one knew what I was supposed to be.

  “A Freudian slip,” repeated Sundar. “When you say one thing but you mean your mother.” I laughed. “My parents have a mug with that on it,” he said.

  Then my tongue was numb and my costume was no longer a costume at all, but Sundar’s phone number was inside my bus pass. At the school dance, Reiko, pupils gaping, spun around me in circles, and I thought of Sundar’s sparkly star, its tips grazing my breasts like a promise.

  During the next ten days, I spoke to Sundar on the phone five times. He told me he’d dropped out of high school, worked as a canvasser for Greenpeace and lived in a boarding house. His parents were rich, he said, but he cared about things more important than money. I didn’t tell him anything about my own parents. Instead, I thought of Sundar’s body. I couldn’t wait for him to see me naked. My lips had not made contact with another human being since I’d started ignoring Ingo Bachmann the year before.

  Sitting upright in the passenger seat, I glanced at Sundar’s profile. I’d never known a boy with thick, dark stubble before. “Want to dye my hair blue?” I said.

  “Let’s all dye our hair,” said Erin.

  “Okay,” said Sundar. “I guess.”

  “We can go to my place.” My mother was at therapy, my sister at school and then a friend’s house, and my father at the university. None of them would be home for hours.

  Sundar parked in the market, uncomfortably close to my grandmother’s salon. It felt like a betrayal to take my hair into my own hands instead of acquiescing to Tam-Tam and her hair-styling minions. I glanced down the street in the direction of Inner Beauty as we walked away, afraid Tam-Tam might appear in the doorway and catch me. At the drugstore, Erin selected three boxes of ultrablond hair bleach. She said there was no point using anything else until we were as blond as we could be. Although I was blond already, she said I wasn’t ultra-blond. We chose our future hair colours at a store on Rideau Street: Turquoise for me, Pillar-Box Red for Sundar and Bubblegum Pink for Erin.

  Sundar and Erin followed me through the lobby of my apartment building to the elevator. They were quiet all the way up to the eleventh floor and watched with a kind of subservience as I unlocked the door. They dumped their tuques and jackets on the bench beside the closet. Without her hat, Erin’s face was something different entirely; she had straight, mousy brown hair, and her eyes and nose looked small in contrast with her lips.

  After they’d admired the view of downtown from the living room window and we’d all crowded into the bathroom, Erin took charge. We filled Sundar’s hair with bleach first. Erin said it was too dark to turn white, but that it didn’t matter because we’d just put the red on top after. He rolled a joint in the living room while Erin and I did each other’s hair and secured plastic shopping bags around our heads. My mother’s library books were piled on the coffee table, a collection of new-age advice books with “PhD” after the authors’ names. My father winced whenever he saw her reading these books, her new passion. I moved them into a tidy pile on the floor before we lit up.

  Erin turned on the television and stopped at the first channel. They were replaying the service at the war memorial, which had ended while we were deliberating over hair dye. I watched the pipers playing in the rain and I held smoke in my lungs, trying not to cough. Sundar and Erin smoked pot like experts, letting it settle into their lungs and ooze lazily from their mouths and nostrils. Mama and Dad, I knew, used to smoke pot, too, in the seventies. Mama at parties, quiet and smiling flirtatiously at boys across the room. I looked for people I knew on the TV screen, but the cameras stayed on the veterans. I watched the old men with their incomprehensible expressions until I turned, startled by the piano. Sundar, behind us, was playing out-of-tune Beethoven on Mama’s piano: some version of the Fifth Symphony, a sure sign of childhood lessons. Despite the poor condition of the neglected instrument, his proficiency was apparent. I laughed in surprise, and Erin laughed as well. Sundar played it up, the plastic bag on his head bobbing. No one had touched the piano since Mama’s accident. Music, once her chief comfort and long-time source of income, was forgotten. She also seemed to have forgotten that the piano had once belonged to her idealized, martyred father, who, she’d always said, gave up his life while saving hers. I had no way of knowing if Mama remembered the hours spent beside me at the piano bench in the futile hope that I’d secretly inherited her talent. Watching my hands mutiny across the keys, she’d lamented, “Concentrate, Agatha.”

  Sundar stopped playing with a crashing finale and rolled onto the floor in front of the sofa by our feet. The sofa was grey-blue and too hard to sink into. “Nice apartment,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I told him, grinning so hard it hurt my cheeks. “We’ve only lived here for about a year. We used to live in Aylmer. Vive le Québec libre, you know?” I stared at them, my eyes watering. “Vive le Québec. You know?”

  “Fucking right,” said Sundar.

  Erin grabbed my hand and yanked. “We should hang out again sometime.” She took a pen out of her pocket and wrote her phone number on the inside of my arm. “There. Now you can’t lose it.”

  Through the blue-carpeted hallway, I passed every room, tapping my fingertips against doors so they swung slightly open. Kitchen, Dad’s room, Minnie’s room, my room, Mama’s room. Finally, the bathroom. I sat on the toilet for a long time, trying to discern some pattern in the differently shaded green tiles on the wall. Lara. I tried saying the name out loud. “Lara.” I knew I’d have to say that name again. Many times. But maybe it wouldn’t last. And, I told myself again, who could blame Dad, a man whose wife screwed his best friend before marrying him. Surprised by my spastic giggle, I held my palm against my involuntarily grinning mouth. Then my burning, watery eyes. It was one year ago, just over a year ago that Mama had come home. She’d been in the hospital for the first week of November, and Dad brought her home the Saturday afternoon after her accident. He pushed her into the apartment in a wheelchair; her face was wan, and she sat in the entranceway, quiet and curious as a first-time visitor. The break had been bad, and they’d had to screw the bones together with steel. She couldn’t use crutches because her left arm had gone completely numb, and she couldn’t move it. Dad had explained this — that she had hit the back of her brain, which controls motor functions. She had only been unconscious for a short time, though, and it shouldn’t be serious. Even her arm would recover. She lay on the sofa while I helped Dad make spaghetti for dinner, Minnie colouring intently at the kitchen table. Throughout the meal, Mama listened in silence to our forced conversation. Whenever we addressed her, she shook her head apologetically, as though she had been thinking about something else.

  According to Dr. Jessup, Mama had retrograde amnesia, a condition that usually resolves itself in hours or days. “Her memory will come back,” she assured us. “Surround her with familiar things. Remind her of anything that makes her comfortable and happy. Try to reinstate her old routines.” Dr. Jessup said we should remind Mama of happy times, but she would likely never remember the accident itself, and even the hours or days leading up to it could be gone for good.

  “But she might remember?” I asked. “The hours leading up to it?”

  “It’s possible. But it’s also likely that she won’t.”

  “How likely?”

  Dr. Jessup gave me a funny look. “It’s very likely that she’ll never recover her memory of the accident and the hours leading up to it.”

  Dad set out to bring Mama back to normal as quickly as possible. On the first night, he cooked her favourite spaghetti sauce, and Mama blinked down at her plate, blinked at Dad. Gave that apologetic little smile, with more than a hint of distress playing around her eyes. Minnie was uncharacteristically silent as well, looking down at her food in shy discomfort, as though there were a strange
r in the house. Dad had explained to her about Mama not remembering anything, that we had to act as normal as possible. Later, he would say that he should have left Minnie at his parents’ house, at least for the first few days.

  The next morning, Tam-Tam came over early to witness Dad wheel Mama down the hall to sit at the kitchen table by the window. He put a bowl of cereal in front of her, and we watched in silence as she ate all of it, a promising feat. “Your favourite,” said Dad, naming the brand. The corners of her lips tightened upwards, eyebrows slightly furrowed — that smile I was coming to know and hate. Tam-Tam offered to help her bathe and Mama looked at her strangely. “No thank you,” she said finally, quietly.

  For the next three months, Dad regularly took her to the hospital for tests and therapy, prompted her to come to the dining room for dinner and told her when it was time for bed. By the time the cast came off her ankle, she was using her arm again, too, but complaining from time to time of stabbing pains in her bicep, which mystified Dr. Jessup. Tam-Tam came over almost every day for dinner, but we visited her rarely — Mama seemed painfully uncomfortable in Tam-Tam’s house, sitting rigidly with her hands clasped as if she was afraid she might break something. “You have a lovely home,” she told Tam-Tam politely the first time we took her there. Whenever we came back home, she returned by default to the kitchen, where, chin in hand, she kept watch over the spread of snowy downtown streets visible from eleven floors up. The worst was when I’d find her sitting in there by herself, laughing hysterically and twisting her hands together, short hair standing up in greasy tufts.

  I gaped at the green-tiled wall, realizing I was still on the toilet, holding my hand against my jaw but no longer grinning. I had no idea how long I’d spent in the bathroom, Sundar and Erin abandoned in the living room. After flushing the toilet and laboriously washing my hands, I made my way back through the long apartment. The memorial service was still playing on the television, but there was no sound except rain on cameras; soldiers and civilians stood with their heads bowed in reverent silence. Erin was straddling Sundar on the armchair, and I saw them licking each other’s tongues, faces an inch apart. As Sundar massaged Erin’s ass, I could see one of her nipples threatening to puncture the ancient yellow cotton intended to cover it. Staring at them stupidly, I assured myself they were unlikely to get hair bleach on the furniture if they stayed in that position, then turned and went back past the rooms on either side of the hallway, nudging each door a few inches further open as I passed.

  The closet door in my mother’s room was mirrored, and I balked at my plastic-bag-headed, red-eyed reflection. My glasses looked like thick, black lines, arranged dorkily outside the grocery bag so they wouldn’t be bleached, and the rest of my face receded into an insubstantial blur. I turned on the light in the large closet, stepped in and shut the door behind me. It was roomy now that so many of the boxes were gone. My mother had new clothes hung neatly, clothes hangers all facing in the same direction. She had begun to wear silk blouses and tight, above-the-knee skirts. Some of the clothes in the closet were clearly too small for her. She must have been working towards this new size with her no-fat diet and regular visits to the gym.

  I knew I was disappointed about Sundar, but only, I told myself, because it had been a year since I’d had sex with a boy, the only one, and I’d decided that he didn’t count. I’d just been hoping for a fuck, for Sundar to become my first-time story, so I could forget about the other one. It had never occurred to me to want a boyfriend or to consider falling in love. I didn’t even care very much about the sex itself. I’d only been hoping to acquire a sexual experience, light and lusty, to replace the memory I’d intermittently revisited over the last year in moments of weakness and masochism.

  The first person I’d spoken to after my mother’s accident who was neither a relative nor a medical professional had not been Helena, who was still supposed to be my best friend. It wasn’t any of those girls with magnetized mirrors in their lockers and big, round handwriting that I couldn’t for the life of me emulate. It was the Saturday after Mama’s accident when I looked up Bachmann in a phone book at the hospital. There was only one listing. A man with an accent just like Ingo Bachmann’s, only heavier, answered. “Can I speak to Ingo, please?” I said. The sound of my voice surprised me. It sounded normal. I had never spoken with Ingo Bachmann on the phone before. “It’s Agatha,” I told him when he said hello. When he didn’t respond immediately, I barely resisted adding, Agatha Winter.

  “Oh,” he said. He sounded like a kid. I didn’t think of him as a kid. I had never referred to him out loud before, either, and I had never separated his first name from his last. I asked if I could come over, and he told me which bus to take. He lived north, past the mall, in the dingiest part of downtown. It was a part of the city inhabited by what Tam-Tam called “welfare people.” He told me to climb up the fire escape at the back of the house and go in through his bedroom window.

  “Don’t knock too loud,” he told me.

  It was early evening but already dark when I found his house, and I was cold in my army jacket and jeans. The rusty stairs wobbled when I put my weight on them, and the paint on the house’s outside wall was cracking. It felt wrong to see Ingo Bachmann’s home, but I’d made up my mind. I’d been on the bus for forty-five minutes and turning back was not an option. He opened the window and watched, bewildered and bleary-eyed, as I struggled my way through. As my eyes adjusted to the light, he wandered across the room to sit down on a chest by the door and stare at his bare feet. He was wearing jeans and a pyjama top, as though he’d already been ready for bed in the afternoon or was still wearing pyjamas from the night before. I looked around for a place to sit other than on his bed. My only option was an upside-down milk crate by the window. A pile of comic books lay at my feet, along with a few books including his copy of The Metamorphosis, which he’d been reading the first time we spoke in the cafeteria. We faced each other from opposite ends of the minimally decorated room. It smelled like a boy’s room, the room of a boy without a mother. A small lamp at the foot of his bed was the only source of light, and I could barely see him.

  “So,” Ingo Bachmann said. “You haven’t been at school.” I imagined my father’s response to this kind of comment: you have a remarkable grasp of the obvious.

  “I’ve been at the hospital. My mother was in an accident. She almost died.”

  He looked up at me. “Your mother almost died?”

  “But she’s not going to. She’s going to be all right, probably.” We sat in silence. “My biological father abandoned me before I was born,” I said. If my mother didn’t get better, I would be like an orphan, alone in the world and dependent on the kindness of strangers. Ingo Bachmann, surely, would be the type to appreciate the tragedy of the situation.

  “Agatha,” he interrupted me. “I think I should tell you a few things about me. I mean, I’m not sure about, you know, everything we’ve been doing. I’m not sure I’ve been acting like I should.” Going to his house had been a mistake; I felt stupid for not having realized it. I’d only wanted the comfort of his body, only wanted the heady lust that filled my nose and mouth and pushed everything else away when we groped under the gym-building stairs instead of going to history class. Not knowing how to explain that he’d misunderstood, I hugged myself tightly and leaned forward. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in days — only hospital food and the oven fries Dad had prepared the night before. I had an overwhelming urge to lie down on the bed and go to sleep.

  “I’m not sure about anything,” Ingo Bachmann said. “My father and I don’t get along well. I’m not good at school . . . I don’t know. Everything is confusing. There’s this girl, her locker is across from mine and I think maybe . . . ” His voice was a low murmur, a grumble.

  “Could you come and sit over here?” I said, indicating the bed beside my milk crate. We got under the sheets and lay close together. Ingo Bachmann touched my pale pink hair, staring intently at my face. I tried
to feel like I did during our make-out sessions on the grass by the canal, despite the dim light and the smell of teenaged boy — unchanged sheets, cigarettes and dusty comic books. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling intensely, his bony shoulder against my cheek. He told me his mother had died after a long illness when he was thirteen. His father had brought him to Canada because they had a few relatives here. He had no idea what to say to his son, not even what to say when they ate dinner together. They kept the television on; that was how Ingo Bachmann learned the English colloquialisms he’d never learned at school. “My mother didn’t want to die,” he said. “She was remorseful for leaving my father and me alone. You’re lucky that your mother will live.”

  Then he sat up and took off his clothes without looking at me. He undressed me the way you would a sleeping child, and we lay face to face on our sides. I’d never been naked in front of a boy before. Our bodies were remarkably alike, bony and long limbed. I hoped he didn’t mind that my breasts were so small. My face buried against his neck, I squeezed my eyes shut, arms tight around his scrawny, warm, hairless body. I felt close to sleep, sinking into a drowsy well of soft, cigarette-smelling skin and saliva, until he secured me around the waist, grinding his hips into mine. Then, abruptly, he turned me onto my back and lay on top of me. Staring at my face with intense determination, he shoved my legs wide apart and started pushing against me hard, his rib cage weighing painfully on my chest. He never seemed to notice that I had breasts at all. I wriggled under him, trying to get more comfortable without hurting his feelings, and flexed my back so he could push himself inside me.

  There, I thought, with a gasp, my eyes watering, I did it. I knew it was a moment I was obliged to remember for the rest of my life and took careful note of the details. The way he held his breath, the model planes hanging from the ceiling, and the way he groaned before he rolled off me. We lay with our foreheads pressed together, breathing each other’s breath, and I reached down to see if I was bleeding. “I really want you to be my friend, Agatha,” Ingo Bachmann murmured. “I really want you to be my friend. Okay?”