Cricket in a Fist Page 17

  Aga had removed her glasses and squeezed her eyes shut. It was always telling to see a client leaning back against the sink’s neck rest, hair drenched. From this angle, the face looked so different; the view had always reminded Tamar of looking at a familiar house from above, through a crack in the ceiling. Upside down, all the usually hidden nuances appearing out of shadow. And Tamar saw, with new certainty, that Aga would appear old before her time. Her skin wouldn’t wrinkle badly, but her face would be world-worn. Tamar had seen this in Aga even when she was a small child. The night Ginny went into early labour with Minnie, Tamar had sat on Aga’s bed and seen it in the pale glow of the night light. She was a pretty little girl, especially without her glasses, elfin and intelligent-looking, but Tamar saw then that this face would come to have the same sickly allure as Asher’s: around the eyes, the burden of some terrible wisdom and the suggestion of a monstrously compelling sadness.

  Tamar touched Aga’s cheek lightly. “Little one,” she said, “I’m going to take care of a few things in my office. Don’t forget to say goodbye.”

  The desk in Tamar’s office was a shambles, and she sat down with a sigh, slouching for a moment before straightening her back and setting to work. Cassandra’s claim terrified her: that they couldn’t run the business for much longer without a computer. She wouldn’t even know what to do with such a machine, and the more Cassandra tried to convince her, to explain the convenience and the necessity of it, the more helpless Tamar felt. She opened her ledger and flipped through its pencil-smudged pages. She wouldn’t be able to run the business much longer at all; that’s what it came down to. She would have to hire a manager. She would have to retire, to move behind the scenes. She thought how running a business for fifteen years had changed her, had forced her to be practical and stubborn in ways she hadn’t known herself capable of. And she was proud — she had created a business she was truly proud of.

  Even after Tamar opened Inner Beauty, Ginny had disparaged her as a “makeup artist,” but it had always been more than that, always more than a job, and more than a knack for applying coloured pastes to skin, for teaching others to do the same. “No one spends as much time in front of mirrors as you do. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Oh mirror,” Ginny sighed, imitating Tamar’s accent. “Please make me the prettiest makeup artist of them all so I can sell my magical wares to the simple-minded townspeople.” And Tamar did spend a lot of time looking at mirrors, and not just at mirrors, but at women’s faces, a steady stream of them, in all their minutiae. These clients were afraid something was slipping away, and they wanted it back. The changes that alter a face begin so slightly a woman can overlook them for years, but the day comes when she begins to see small signs, and then every new inspection holds the hope that nothing has happened after all, that it was only a trick of the light or a bad night’s sleep. It was Tamar’s job to smooth these imperfections into oblivion for as long as possible, to ease a face back in its history toward a time before flaws.

  Tamar may not have been brilliant and fearless like Robert was, but she had tried to impart to her young daughter the wisdom she possessed, telling her not to distort her forehead so, not to push out her lip, wrinkling her chin. “Elasticity doesn’t last forever,” she told Ginny, just as she told her clients. “By the age of thirty, everything’s going downhill.” She brought home the best cleansers, toners and moisturizers for herself and her family, but Ginny would often wash with soap or even just water. Tamar knew this because products in Ginny’s shower that should have lasted for two months didn’t need replacing for a year.

  “Stop scrutinizing me, Mother.” Ginny would toss that thick, amazingly lovely hair over her shoulders and roll her eyes. “I’m a human being, not a doll, all right?” It was true that Tamar scrutinized; she couldn’t help but notice every stray hair around her daughter’s eyebrows, every unsightly reddish blotch on the girl’s cheeks and, during the year or two when Ginny ironed her hair, all those frizzy, dry split ends. Very early, Tamar could see Ginny as an old woman, the particular ways that time would ravage her — she could see it in each fine line under the eyes, in the creases that deepened and didn’t quite fade after a laugh or a grimace. Just as Tamar had watched the groove between her own mother’s eyebrows, which had always appeared at times of intense concentration, such as when she was cooking or pretending to listen to the radio before bed. This line, Tamar foresaw, would engrave itself permanently, visible always, even in sleep, and Esther’s worried mouth would shrivel at the edges to fall in on itself.

  It never failed, Tamar’s uncanny ability to see the future, to predict the face a woman would wear in ten years, the faces she would wear in twenty and fifty years; the way she would come to hold her lips and narrow her eyes; whether she would wear her age with dismay or with dignity. Tamar saw it all, a process lying in wait to unfold, as steady, painful and inevitable as cutting their first teeth. She saw every detail of time’s passage, saw each mark and crease, and how each would deepen or lengthen. This was her business. Inner Beauty — Ginny had mocked the name, but Tamar thought it was perfect and not at all ironic. Every woman believes she is meant to be beautiful, and Tamar’s gift was the ability to make this beauty actual. That’s why Cassandra was her favourite employee — she understood this, too.

  Tamar looked around the office at all the photographs and prints she’d mounted, the magazines and books on the shelves. If she hired a manager, she would have to take all her photographs down. This wouldn’t be her office anymore. It was a miserable prospect, though she’d tried to convince herself it would just give her more time to help with Ginny. She still half believed this was a reasonable hope, even then, on the second-last day. She picked up the photograph on her desk, which she had removed from the wall days before to study, as though it could tell her something she had never noticed. Once again, she looked at her own sunburnt cheeks — the sunburnt cheeks of a child. And Esther’s pale face, framed with a sun-swept bob. Esther, in her early thirties, had looked much younger. People sometimes mistook her in those days for a student, a child. It was something about her skin. It was the combination of Esther’s big eyes and her tiny frame, Tamar’s father once said, that made women her own age speak to her as if she were a child.

  Only once had a face surprised Tamar entirely, had it abandoned its course like a train redirected onto a different track to avoid a wreck. But how, precisely, had her mother changed? Why, a month after the war ended, when Collette van Daam opened the bedroom door, joy and relief visible in her face, had Tamar felt the possibility of her imagined reunion recede forever? Her mother was much thinner than she had been, her hair shorter and no longer smooth or stylish, and it was white at the temples. But what else? Her skin couldn’t, surely, have turned grey. Esther smiled falteringly; her eyes were red and swollen, and she held her hand out to Tamar, pulled her close and leaned into her. There was no longed-for whiff of rosewater. Esther smelled stale, like something old. And though, in the months and years that followed, she put on weight and had her hair styled, even dying the white parts brown, though she took her lipstick from a drawer and smeared it on her lips, Esther did not get her old face back.

  And Tamar had spoken of these things to Ginny, surely, if only in bursts, in sentences begun and never finished. Perhaps she had described her parents and the day trips they used to take, the three of them, to the beach north of Amsterdam, and the curve of her mother’s cheeks, the smoothness of her mouth, dark with the deep red lipstick that was popular at the time. Tamar had told stories, had told Ginny about finding Esther in front of the mirror with that old lipstick in her hand, and how the colour refused to sit on her lips the way it used to, how significant this seemed, though it was only because the makeup was dried out. Had she told Ginny about Esther’s nose, how she’d powdered it to cover the pores, and had she described the girlish curve of her mother’s nostrils, seen from below? Ginny might well have understood what Tamar meant: between 1943 and 1945, the future of Esther’s face was e
rased and replaced with another. Had Tamar been the one to tell her daughter that a soul can flee this world and leave a living body behind; had she given Ginny the idea to stubbornly insist she’d been knocked out of herself?

  Certainly, Dr. Manning thought Ginny had picked this idea up somewhere, that she had mulled it over and held it close, and then, when her head hit the floor, allowed it to overtake her. Tamar hadn’t even realized that psychiatrists were considered real doctors, that they had patients with actual injuries and illnesses in their care. She hadn’t known hospitals had psychiatrists on staff until Dr. Jessup, the neurologist, introduced them to Dr. Manning, and explained that he, a psychiatrist, would be taking over Ginny’s care. Tamar had become accustomed to Dr. Jessup and trusted her, with her tidy, simple hairstyle, enviably long legs and intelligent, plain face.

  The pains in Ginny’s elbow that had her yelping at night loudly enough to wake Aga and Minnie — the doctors suggested quite clearly that she was making them up. Or, perhaps, was somehow imagining them. Tamar had told Dr. Jessup, privately, about Robert, how he’d grabbed for Ginny, ripping her sweater as she fell and that she’d broken her elbow on impact. She had never spoken of Robert’s death, had never spoken of Robert at all, in front of Steven or the girls, but now Dr. Manning knew about it and brought it up.

  “Do you remember that, Ginny, your father ripping your sweater?” Dr. Manning asked. Ginny didn’t answer. She was sitting between Tamar and Steven, across the desk from the doctors, dressed in the bleach-stained blue track suit she’d adopted as her uniform.

  “She was eleven,” Tamar said. “And she has never remembered . . . that.”

  “This is the second serious accident you can’t remember?” asked Dr. Manning.

  “Ginny,” said Dr. Jessup, knowing full well that she wouldn’t get an answer. “Would you say you have a history of recklessness and of hypochondria?” Tamar looked at Steven for help. She was betraying her daughter somehow, not explaining properly.

  “Wait,” Steven said. “There is something wrong with her. We need to get her better. What are you saying? That’s she’s making the whole thing up? Look at her.”

  And they all did. Tamar had finally persuaded Ginny to have her hair trimmed, so it was short and tidy and would have looked fine if it wasn’t filthy. Her face was pale and slightly bloated. Though Ginny had lost weight with her newly acquired distaste for most foods other than steamed vegetables and rice, she had barely moved a muscle since the accident; she was so lethargic that Tamar felt sleepy just from being near. Ginny looked from face to face. Then she said loudly, in a satirical, sing-song tone, “Doctor, mother, husband, daughter.” Tamar braced herself for the hysterical laughter that usually followed moments of tension or absurdity, “pathological laughter,” the doctors called it. But Ginny inhaled sharply and then stopped, her face falling as though some terribly serious insight had interrupted whatever had struck her as funny. Aga laughed out loud, briefly, at the comically concerned expression on Ginny’s face, and then she, too, stopped abruptly, horrified.

  “Sorry,” said Aga.

  “Ginny,” Dr. Manning tried. “Steven tells me you’ve been writing quite a lot lately. At the kitchen table?”

  “Writing quite a lot lately. At the kitchen table? Someone’s always looking over my shoulder,” she said vaguely.

  “Ginny,” said Dr. Manning. “Let’s start meeting three times a week. Twice alone, and once with the rest of your family, all right?”

  “I don’t understand,” Tamar told Steven as he drove her home that day, down Smythe Road, with Aga and Ginny in the back seat. Minnie must have been with Steven’s parents. “Aren’t you a neurologist?”

  “I’m a neuroscientist.”

  “You study the brain.”

  “I study the brain, yes. I observe how rats’ brains respond when deprived of sunlight, primarily.”

  “What a strange topic.” Tamar fell silent, watching the tightness in Steven’s forehead. She had never truly taken notice of his personality, its nuances, and it came as a surprise to see he was suffering and not behaving altogether reasonably. She’d always thought Steven was entirely dependable. Even when Ginny had first met him at the university and he started phoning, coming by, Steven had struck Tamar as steady and gentle, intelligent and trust-inspiring. Tamar and Esther, calmly ignoring Ginny’s insistence that she and Steven were “just friends,” wishfully discussed the simple, normal process occurring before them. Ginny had gone to school, attracted a nice man and become the subject of an old-fashioned courtship. Tamar and Esther had a vague and encouraging notion that Steven was a scientist, setting out on an orderly, impressive career that promised wealth and security. Even his parents, it turned out, were exactly the kind of people who would have produced a son like Steven seemed to be. Everything about them — their clothes, their furniture, their belief system — was confidently solid and simple; like Steven, they were almost normal, but too intelligent and scruffy around the edges to bypass eccentricity. Sheila was always slightly overweight, affectionate and motherly, with a baffling inability to keep her greying brown hair from flying around her head like frazzled wire; Fred wore shirts and ties under sweaters, smelled of pipe tobacco and, when he finished a meal, always managed to leave his chair and the floor around it covered in crumbs. Ginny’s engagement and marriage had been such a relief, like waking from a bad dream. Steven had won her over after all, despite the rubbish that happened in between. Asher could be put aside as an unfortunate mishap attributable to the folly of youth.

  But as Steven drove them home from the hospital that day, Tamar saw that he had changed, that he was sick and tired of the whole thing and could no longer be taken for granted; he was elsewhere, lost in the kind of thoughts that would amount, if he voiced them, to betrayal. Still, she would be shocked, a year later, about his other woman, his engagement. So soon after Ginny left. Tamar would never have thought Steven was complicated enough to have an affair. An affair requires passion, involves heartache and conflict and, surely, the agony of loving, for some period of overlap, two people, and having to choose between them. Tamar hadn’t realized Steven was capable of the necessary emotional agitation or the deceit. Robert never had affairs, surely. Whatever he had, they weren’t affairs.

  When Ginny was long gone, Tamar would learn that Steven had been keeping a mistress all along. Even as they met Dr. Manning, he’d had this woman, this secret. Aga, when she lived with Tamar during the year before she moved to Toronto, would recount the wedding vows, how the new wife described falling in love with Steven in the arboretum in early autumn, and described how she dared to kiss him for the first time. “Early autumn,” Aga stressed. “Early autumn, Tam-Tam. Before Mama’s accident. How could I live in the same house as them, knowing that?”

  And Tamar would wonder if Robert, too, had ever professed love, if another woman had waited, agonized, for him to end his sexless marriage, the details of which he had recounted, and marry her instead. Tamar would wonder if Steven had phoned this mistress, this Lara, after that first session with Dr. Manning, if he had confided in her, admitting, “I don’t know how long this will continue.” If he said, at the end of the conversation, “I love only you.”

  The sessions with Dr. Manning had consisted entirely of talking, and Ginny observed the proceedings in a silence that seemed sometimes placid, sometimes obstinate. Tamar, Steven and the girls would review the mundane events of Ginny’s week, Dr. Manning asking Ginny how she enjoyed certain meals or events or even what she thought of particular television shows.

  “It was fine,” Ginny might say, if she was feeling particularly talkative. “It kept my attention, I guess.”

  “Let’s rebuild her life,” Dr. Manning told Tamar and Steven. “Rebuild her memories around her and let her walk back into them when she’s ready. I think she does remember, but she’s turned off her opinions about all these things. This suggests to me that she’s been hurt. We need to make her feel safe and cared for.”
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  Steven recounted a family trip to Toronto. When four-year-old Aga got lost in the museum and he found her huddled in a dinosaur display. He described a Christmas party at which one of his professors had collapsed, drunk, across Ginny’s lap. He talked about the night Minnie was born. As Steven spoke, Tamar thought of all the things she knew about Steven that he didn’t know she knew. She pictured him waiting in a rundown bar the night before Asher Acker left for Israel; she imagined Steven standing at a window with Ginny, late at night, a wine glass in his hand, pointing out his nude neighbours across the alley.

  For months, these meetings with Dr. Manning went on. And Ginny changed; she did change. She spoke in longer sentences and was less lethargic. She stopped staring out her kitchen window all day, and she lost weight. So much weight. Aga said Ginny did pushups and sit-ups in her bedroom and read piles of library books. Aga discovered, by snooping when Ginny was out, that most of these were autobiographies written by the likes of seventeenth-century nuns. Then Ginny got a lock for her bedroom door. And as Ginny showed more signs of life, of sanity and purpose, Dr. Manning had Steven, Tamar and Aga frenziedly narrating her life, trying to steer her back instead of away.

  “Do you remember that imaginary friend you had, Ginny?” Tamar said during a session in that winter. “My God, it’s been a long time since I thought about that. She insisted she had a sister,” Tamar told Dr. Manning. “What was her name — I can’t remember.” Ginny seemed at least to be listening, if not with particular interest. She was so very thin by then, her collarbone sharply defined above the neckline of her sweatshirt. The whole outfit was ridiculously baggy, several sizes too big, and her hair was raggedy again, growing out into what Aga called a mullet.

  “She was very long and very thin, this sister, and could be folded and kept in a pocket. One time, we were crossing Laurier Street during rush hour, Ginny and I. She must have been four or five.” Dr. Manning raised his eyebrows meaningfully, and Tamar realized she was doing it again — talking about her daughter in the third person. “You must have been four or five, Ginny,” she corrected herself. “The traffic was just terrible, and when we finally got across the road, you started crying and carrying on, insisting that Morgan — that was her name — had fallen from your pocket and was stuck on the other side. You absolutely insisted. This Morgan was a brave soul who’d defeated all manner of enemies, but she was afraid to cross the busy street by herself.”