Cricket in a Fist Read online

  Did you know that she stood across the street, watching, as the SS took her family? Maybe it’s something you should know, if you’re going to be part of that family. Maybe you should be equipped with some sort of explanation for that woman’s coldness and her daughter’s hysteria. Did you know that Tamar was hidden in a neighbour’s house for almost two years? She said Esther came back so changed it was like living with a stranger. As she told me this, her mascara ran, a single vertical line down each cheek, like a mime’s makeup. Her story was the perfect lead-in for my thesis, which I decided then and there to write about survivor syndrome and survivor guilt — specifically about children who’d been in hiding while their parents were in the camps. Tamar and Esther’s relationship was horrible and fascinating to me. I was excited, feeling the key to everything I’d been looking for right in my hands. Was I being exploitative? Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. But no, I wanted to help her, to use her story to help others. And Esther was in the kitchen as Tamar and I spoke, stuffing tomatoes with smoked oysters and cilantro. I could see her lying emaciated in a crowded bunk, making inventories in her head. Recipes and spices, the potential uses of oysters, smoked and raw.

  I told Tamar she was expressing feelings she’d repressed for nearly thiry years. I told her about survivor guilt and explained that her ambivalent feelings toward her mother were perfectly understandable. Abandoning my customary armchair, I crossed the Persian rug and sat on the sofa beside her. She didn’t flinch. Her eyelids were painted grey and purple and her eyelashes were black glued-on brushes. If Ginny hadn’t mentioned it, I might have thought the lashes were real; they made her look like a beautiful comic-book alien. I leaned in and kissed her. The taste of her lipstick coated my palate like oil; she must have been used to having that taste in her mouth all the time. I asked her to wash off the makeup so I could see her real face. I wanted the real taste of her lips and the real smell from behind her ears. It occurred to me that Tamar’s fixation with glamour, with physical flawlessness, wasn’t so different from Esther’s preoccupation with cooking and eating haute cuisine. When civilization falls apart, food and clothing become purely a matter of survival; the seriousness with which Esther and Tamar approached the aesthetics of food and fashion made perfect sense to me. With my hand in her hair (stiff, impenetrable hair — how I longed for her to wash it!), I told Tamar so. And with that she was gone, as far away as she could get, her arms crossed, ashamed and confused. “You are a silly little boy,” she told me. I tried to reason with her, but she kept repeating that I had to leave.

  She was so repressed, so irredeemably repressed, and I felt like she’d led me on. All masks on top of masks — I’d peel one off and find another underneath. Just when I thought I’d found some genuine emotion, I found her as opaque as ever. I told her she was frigid to the core. I wasn’t a trained analyst, Steven, and I broke down. I was so angry and disappointed with my failure. Maybe if I’d given her more time she would have come round; instead, I went back to her apartment later that night, after the off-limits supper hour. When Tamar came to the door, I asked for Ginny. Told them I was just in the neighbourhood and was wondering if Ginny would like to go for dessert. Dessert, Steven! Ginny was surprised and delighted to see me, if mostly because it annoyed her mother. And what could Tamar do? She let Ginny walk past her, out of the apartment and into my clutches. I went back every evening that week and took Ginny out. And on the seventh day — well, that’s when things went too far. A week later, picking up Ginny and all her belongings, I felt like the Pied Piper, luring Tamar’s child away as her punishment for cheating me out of my due.

  Ginny was obsessed with her childhood, was always talking about the many moments her mother had let her down. She spoke ad nauseam about her grandmother’s mental instability, Esther’s habit of walking away while someone was speaking to her. Ginny seemed entirely unaware of her own tendency to do just that; the few times we went grocery shopping together, I’d turn in mid-sentence and find she’d wandered off. She remembered, in vivid detail, dinner conversations from when she was seven. What they were eating, what her father was wearing, her mother’s hairstyle. And she seemed to take it as a personal affront that I had no anecdotes, could offer no description of how my mother stood in the kitchen wearing a certain apron.

  Abraham Sutzkever was in the Vilna ghetto in 1943 when he wrote “Liberation.” Two lines from this poem were going to be the epigraph for my ill-fated thesis: “And time will drill you quietly / Like a cricket caught in a fist.” Steven: when we bury memories, they live on in hidden places, and though we’re stronger than they are, they’re persistent and finally must break free. I hate to think of the four of us — you, me, Ginny and Agatha — bound together forever. I’ll try to forget about you, and you’ll try to Relegate me to the unfortunate and distant past, but these ties will haunt us all.

  By the time I left Ottawa, Ginny couldn’t reach her toenails anymore, and they’d grown to absurd lengths. I wished she’d reconnect with her mother; cutting toenails would have been up Tamar’s alley. But instead I had to do it. The day before I left, I sat on my bed at Ginny’s feet. She’d sprained her ankle chasing me down the fire escape when I showed her my plane ticket. Yelling after me that we’d always be connected because of the baby. I sent her to the hospital in a taxi, then phoned Tamar — I had to reunite them somehow before I left. Ginny’s whole foot was swollen, black and blue. I cut the nail too short, and it bled. The pain must have been dulled by whatever they gave her for her ankle, because she didn’t seem to notice. I wondered if I should tell her what I’d done. I looked up as she raised her cigarette to her lips; her eyes were closed. In weariness? Pain? I didn’t know. I didn’t say anything, just blotted the blood away and kept clipping.

  I was supposed to meet you at the Laff that last night, and I stood you up. I might as well tell you now that I went downtown and stood outside the bar. I couldn’t force myself to go inside, so I watched you through the window. You looked so uncomfortable by yourself, staring down at your drink, glancing up at the door every minute or so. You looked as if you were rehearsing a lecture in your head, as if you were preparing to have the last word. Watching you alone and waiting, I felt like you must feel, Steven, watching a rat behind a pane of glass. Doesn’t the vulnerability ever get to you? The credulity in their faces as you drip neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors into their water?

  The next morning, you insisted on coming over to drive me to the airport. I couldn’t talk you out of it. I remember the cabbie pulling away from the curb just as you drove up, the bewildered look on your face. God forgive me, I have to laugh remembering it. I felt guilty as hell, but a grin kept forcing itself onto my face. It was the perfect end to our little melodrama, you standing on the street beside your car, Ginny up on the balcony, the two of you transfixed by my film-worthy exit. I was only thinking about getting away. I was laughing.

  And Steven, I didn’t want to know what happened next because it had nothing to do with me. You have everything now; I have nothing left to contribute. Please don’t write back to me. Don’t tell me the sordid details of your love and its eventual decline. I wish the two of you luck sleeping in that bed you’ve made for yourselves. But it’s not my story anymore — just leave me out of it.

  Asher Acker

  After I burned all my nostalgic relics, I stayed in a hotel for the night. In the morning, I went to the airport and left for Spain. I stayed in a small town for a month, and in this place where I’d never been before, I began to feel nostalgia again, in occasional, unpredictable attacks. But I seemed to be nostalgic for other people’s memories: random strains of music I couldn’t possibly have heard before, unidentified smells from a neighbour’s kitchen, a door with cracked brown paint. I was filled with longing — fierce, sorrowful and sublime. These experiences were not a backslide in my recovery, not a relapse into memory’s propagandistic traps. Rather, they showed me that a sensory experience can be an occasion for pain, but looked at an
other way, the experience is only a sound, or only food cooking, or only paint peeling on a door. Everywhere is home; everywhere is nowhere in particular.

  Baruch Spinoza writes that “one and the same thing can at the same time be good and bad, and also indifferent. For example, music is good for one who is melancholy, bad for one who is in mourning, and neither good nor bad for the deaf.” Memories are just stories, and stories are neither good nor bad for the amnesiac.

  J. Virginia Morgan

  The Willing Amnesiac: Reappearing into the Present

  Five

  She tried for over a year before she failed. Even on the last day, Tamar was trying. She was trying even as she left the clutter of files on her desk and opened her office door to a slim, strange woman with a shoebox in her hand. Her daughter, her Ginny, stood in the doorway like a friendly acquaintance who has left her engine running while she drops off a few things before leaving town.

  A year and a week and four days earlier, Tamar hadn’t known she ought to be grief-stricken and afraid. She would have been frightened if she, Steven and the girls had been led to a serene, private room equipped with sofas. Twice she had sat in such a room: once with Esther, when Robert was killed; and once with Ginny, the morning Tamar couldn’t wake her mother. But this time the nurse merely led them through a set of doors, down a hallway and through another door into a waiting room Tamar had never seen before. It had cushioned chairs and a television, and the only other person there was a young man with a large bandage on his leg. It was late when the nurse explained that Ginny was conscious but exhausted, heavily medicated for pain, and that they should let her sleep and come back the next day. Steven drove Tamar home. She went straight to bed and had no trouble sleeping. She had wanted a good night’s rest before facing Ginny’s wrath with the world for tripping her up again.

  *

  On the day before the last, Aga came by in the afternoon for tea and sat across from Tamar at the kitchen table. Only a rare woman could get away with tying her hair away from her face, and Aga wasn’t one of them; the ponytail emphasized her high forehead. Her arms were thin, and she moved her long fingers with unconscious grace. She would have looked wonderful in a nice blouse and skirt, and Tamar was about to tell her so when Aga said, “You look nice. I like your scarf. Are you enjoying your day off?” Tamar examined the question for sarcasm, but there was none. The girl only smiled politely across the table and sipped her tea.

  Before the accident, if Ginny had been around, she’d surely have said, “Oh, really, Mother, there was no need to get all dolled up just for me.” Ginny would have known that Tamar’s outfits and jewellery always complemented each other tastefully, even on days when there was no one to see them at all, and would have expressed her disdain in comments that eluded answers. But now that Ginny was different, was silent, there was no one with the inclination or the gall to batter Tamar so; truth be told, no one knew her well enough to find her weak spots, and no one had any reason to discover where they lay. With a fierce pang of loneliness, Tamar reached across the table to squeeze Aga’s wrist, then quickly recovered and turned the hand over to examine its dry cuticles and clean, short nails. “Come upstairs before you go,” Tamar said. “I’ll get you some skin cream. What do you use?”

  Aga didn’t pull abruptly away as Ginny might have done, but she didn’t answer the question either. Smiling in that mild, somehow secretive way of hers, she leaned back, resting the weight of her arm on Tamar’s hand like a princess with her suitor. As though Tamar should lean down and kiss the girl’s chapped, lily-white fingers. “Just lotion, I guess,” Aga said. “I still have some of that stuff you gave me before.”

  “Which one?” Tamar let the hand go.

  “I’m not sure, Tam-Tam. I don’t always remember which product you gave me is which, you know?”

  Aga was always polite when she came by, polite on the surface at least, her manner subtly tinged with impatience. Only when Steven was around, when Ginny was around, did Aga become rude and sullen, crossing her arms and looking away from conversations, trying to block them out. During sessions with Dr. Manning, Aga had always looked wearily into her lap or out the window, setting her lips, thinking, presumably, about more important matters. If Aga only knew how her own mother, at that age, used to bite her bottom lip, hold her hand to her throat and furrow her forehead, deep in thought about some perceived injustice. Often, this withdrawal had come over Ginny as she stood by Tamar’s side after dinner, holding a tea towel to dry the dishes. As Tamar turned to pass a utensil, she would find the girl still holding the last plate, moving the cloth too slowly and gently to have any effect. Startled out of her reverie, Ginny would finish quickly, with an air of placid compliance. It was only with practised effort that Tamar had resisted grabbing her daughter by the shoulders to shake her. It was so stubborn, so cruel how Ginny looked longingly at some distant point, obviously wishing she had someone worthy of her confidence.

  “Will you please focus on the task,” Tamar would say, “and put your hair out of your face?”

  “And the overbearing mother attempts to correct yet another defect in the slovenly young daughter’s comportment,” said Ginny, leaning away from Tamar’s hand. It was Robert’s legacy, this tendency to make bizarre, incomprehensible remarks. She was clever; Tamar was struck by her daughter’s cleverness. But instead of trying to “discuss things,” as Robert used to do, Ginny would look at Tamar inscrutably, lips pressed together, before she fled to the living room to play Gershwin and Bach on the piano, incessantly and somehow angrily. Ginny had never been like Tamar, nor like anyone Tamar had grown up with or met in Canada. Ginny made herself impossible to know. But, Tamar regretfully admitted to herself, she hadn’t wanted Ginny to confide her private thoughts; she had merely longed for the girl to stop thinking them. Ginny’s most dreaded weapon, in fact, had always come in the form of confession.

  “Don’t like my top, do you?” she’d said at the dinner table when she was fifteen. “Well, good news. I didn’t spend a cent on it. I ripped it off. Stole it. What are you going to do about that?” Or when she was seventeen and announced that her history teacher had fallen in love with her and bought her an obscene pair of panties, which she flung across the sitting room into Tamar’s lap. Surely her claims in that case were invented or at least exaggerated. And then, when Ginny allowed herself to be ensnared by Asher — Tamar could picture her daughter so clearly, standing by Esther’s knitting basket, hands on hips, wanting an explosive reaction. And Tamar had only wanted Ginny to stop complaining, confessing; to stop looking so burdened, so suspicious, so often as if she had just come to a realization that changed everything.

  “Well,” said Aga, startling Tamar as she set her cup down. “I’d better go. I’ll see you soon. At the next — well. Whenever.”

  “Come up just for a minute,” Tamar said again, as Aga put on her shoes and jacket and leaned in for a kiss. “I want to give you this new cream for your hands. Please — a gift.”

  Aga followed Tamar out the front door and up the stairs to the salon. When they reached the reception desk, Tamar linked arms with her lanky granddaughter and held the girl’s wrist firmly. Cassandra and Marcy were loitering around the desk, chatting with the new receptionist, the three of them a colourful girlish cluster of red lips and shiny hair.

  “Hi, Agatha,” Cassandra said, giving the girl a quick hug.

  “It’s really slow right now,” Marcy said.

  “Did the new hair potion come?” Tamar asked. She looked behind the desk and saw the unopened box, just as the receptionist pointed it out. Sarah, that was her name. “Do you remember what we talked about, that every stylist needs one at her station?”

  “Yes.” Sarah stood up.

  “You do remember talking about that?”

  “Yes, I do.” She was already cutting the box open.

  “When it’s slow,” said Tamar, “that’s the perfect time for you girls to do these things.” The new girl didn’t respond, just
took a handful of the small, round containers and hurried toward the styling stations.

  “Don’t you love these long layers?” Tamar fluffed Cassandra’s newly dyed hair, with its blond chunks curling chaotically around darker locks. “It frames her face perfectly. Don’t you think Aga could have something like that? You know, just some wisps around the forehead. Something softer? Take out your ponytail,” she told Agatha.

  Within minutes, Cassandra was leading the girl away. “Trust me,” Tamar heard Cassandra say. “I know what you’ll like. Just trust me.” It was true — Cassandra always knew what her clients would like. Tamar was sometimes baffled by the styles Cassandra created, especially for teenagers. But the young women, with mismatched swatches of colour, absurdly short bangs or random long wisps, were always thrilled. And the styles always did somehow flatter their faces.

  Tamar sat at the reception desk and looked at Sarah’s doodles in the appointment book — all flowers with smiley faces.

  “Who hired you?” she said, as the receptionist approached the desk again. She only realized from the girl’s expression how nasty the question had sounded.

  “You and Cassandra did.”

  “Oh yes. Of course, of course. Well, good.” She stood. “I’m just going to sort out a few things in my office.”

  Tamar paused beside the sink where Cassandra was washing Aga’s hair. “Give her a little makeup, too,” Tamar suggested. “A little eye makeup and some lipstick. Some colour in her cheeks.”