Cricket in a Fist Page 20

  “Are you all right, Tam-Tam?”

  “My God. How you remind me sometimes of —” Tamar shook her head. She had only spoken to one other person of these things at such length.

  “My mother.”

  “Yes,” Tamar breathed. Asher. Sitting in Robert’s old mustard-coloured chair, limbs stretched out casually, in the old apartment’s living room. That room had seemed so dark always, with its walnut-stained mouldings and heavy burgundy rug. And she told Asher about the end of the war. How the city hadn’t looked different in any obvious, impressive ways, but that when she tried to live with her mother in their old house, every familiar word crumbled. Everything, even their language, was contaminated at the core, rotten. A child of German sympathizers had been sleeping on her soft mattress all those nights while she had huddled at the edge of Femke’s bed or in the crawl space above the ceiling, trying not to breathe.

  Tamar had told Asher how Esther came back alone. That there was no joyful reunion, no frantic conversation, Tamar’s parents holding each of her hands as they related what had happened, how they’d eluded harm. The Germans were gone, but then so were the van Daams — the only people Tamar had seen or talked to for two years. Her father was missing and her shy young aunt Anke was dead. Tamar had described to Asher how Esther had been shaken long and hard until she collapsed, and then, in the quiet afterward, was permanently greyed by settled dust.

  “I was telling you about the day your grandfather died,” Tamar said. Aga reached for her glasses and put them back on, crossed her arms as though she were cold. “I told him that he must stop obsessing. That my mother and I came to Canada to start a new life and forget about those bad years. To leave those terrible times behind. Robert and I fought, and we both said terrible things. He said that if it weren’t for Ginny, he would regret ever laying eyes on me. He claimed that my mother was kind but I was cold hearted. He said he had come to know my mother more than I did. That I wouldn’t listen to her. He said such cruel things. And I told him I could barely tolerate his presence. I said I found him repulsive . . .

  “And then I watched through the window as he rode away on his bicycle. Your mother was sitting on the handlebars. They were almost at her school when it happened. The ambulance picked them up with schoolchildren watching from the other side of the fence, on the playground.”

  “And you felt like it was your fault.”

  “I wondered if I’d worn him down, treated him unjustly and driven him to recklessness, though I knew he could never have knowingly put your mother in danger. How he adored that child. I was sure I had tried, that I had tried so much to understand him. I wasn’t, I suppose, clever or strong enough. What could I have done?” Tamar was suddenly very tired of speaking. Already the regret that follows any lengthy confession was creeping over her skin. “Oh,” she said, making it worse, “but that was all so long ago.” After a long silence, she stood, to indicate that she had finished speaking, but Aga didn’t move. “I don’t know how I’m to get this office in order,” Tamar said.

  “Thanks, Tam-Tam,” said Aga. She stepped away from the desk. “Dad’s probably made dinner.” She was looking away, embarrassed, like a lover who wants to leave but doesn’t know how.

  “Let me get you that skin cream before you leave,” Tamar said, and led the girl down the hall to the stock room. Tamar kissed Aga goodbye at the top of the stairs. Cassandra was leaving for the day as well, and Tamar asked her, though she didn’t expect an answer, why Cassandra hadn’t done Aga’s makeup. “Just a bit of lipstick,” she said.

  “Maybe we’ll convince her next time,” Cassandra said, already on the stairs.

  Everyone else had already left. Tamar was alone. She knew she ought to go home as well; there was leftover takeout in the fridge. She checked the aesthetics rooms; the girls had turned off all the lights and also the main light in the salon. It was always so strange to be alone in this room, with the empty chairs and so many mirrors. She stood in the centre and turned slowly, as she’d done fifteen years earlier, amazed that all this was hers, seeing her reflection from every angle. Unmistakably, she was an aging woman. Elegant, yes, but unmistakably middle-aged. At such an age, one ought to be past foolishness.

  Tamar went back to the office, sat at her desk and stared at the picture of her own young face. Tamar and her parents standing on a cobblestone road, tramlines under her father’s feet. They must have met someone who agreed to take the picture, but she’d always recalled only her parents’ company, the three of them walking to catch their tram, alone in the quiet, windy late afternoon, without seeing another soul. Jozef had the folded beach umbrella over one shoulder and the picnic bag over the other. As always, he walked too quickly for Tamar and her mother to keep up. Every minute or so, he’d notice where he was and stop to wait for them. He’d put his free hand on Esther’s shoulder or touch Tamar’s hair until his mind wandered, and then he’d forget himself again and stride off ahead with the giant, gangling steps that came to him naturally. Tamar loved how he walked with a cigarette between his lips, and how, when he laughed or called out for them to hurry, a cloud of smoke formed in front of his face, making him squint as if surprised by sunlight through a window.

  Tamar recalled viscerally the smell of the air at Noord Wijk, the beach outside Amsterdam, and the moment she had turned her head, shading her eyes with a hand, to realize she had unwittingly followed the sea so far that the day’s picnickers were mere dots in the distance, separated from her by an expanse of dark, wet sand scattered with rocks and shells. Her parents were among the dots, but she didn’t know which they were. She had wandered away to squeeze damp sand between her toes; the water hadn’t been warm enough for swimming, and the day was breezy. As the tide receded, she had followed, edging further and further, step by step, daring the icy water, creeping back up, to lick her toes. Once she took a step forward, she wasn’t allowed to step back again; that was the rule. “One, two, three, four, five.” She practised her English. “Please pass the pepper. May I please be excused?” English, that year, had become her favourite subject in school; she must have been nine or ten, perhaps a little younger. “May,” said Tamar, curling her toes into the sand as the water crept to a hair’s breadth from her skin. “I please” — she edged another millimetre down the beach — “be excused.”

  When she looked back and saw how far the tide had led her, she wanted to run madly, to yell for her parents — the urge possessed her, pushing her bodily forward. She didn’t move. Her body wanted to flee itself; she pictured herself flailing, moving so quickly her feet would sink into the sand, trip over each other and send her sprawling. She let it hold her body full in its grasp — the need to escape this wasteland of beached sea life and return to humanity, to find her parents. But still she didn’t move. Instead, she let out a small, strange scream. She absorbed the terror of being alone, a tiny girl standing on ground that had so recently been under the sea and soon would be again, and then began a measured walk toward the skyline. Her head was foggy, heavy with salt, sun and the breeze, which seemed to keep changing direction.

  When Tamar finally did find her parents, they were unconcerned, her father asleep and her mother reading a novel. She sat down between them without a word, as though she had never doubted they would be there, at that exact spot, waiting for her. Her mother, in a long, white dress made of some diaphanous fabric decorated with a pattern of tiny flowers, turned from her book to touch Tamar’s hair with a soft, white hand. She had set up a beach umbrella to protect her skin; she hated it when her complexion darkened and usually wore a hat. Tamar lamented that she was clearly not fated to be as doll-like as her mother, who was surely the most feminine creature imaginable. Esther had fashionably bobbed hair, chunky from the salt air, with a fringe that framed her face. Tamar’s father snored quietly, looking as relaxed as a long, angular man in bathing trunks stretched out on a towel could manage, and she touched one of his bony hips. Her parents were peaceful and relaxed, as though nothing had p
unctured the pleasantness of the day; Tamar was proud of herself.

  The photograph had surely been taken that very day, the memory of which had always been painful, had always haunted her moments of fierce longing and regret. It was terrible to think how she hadn’t detected anything ominous, that there was no foreboding of doom. Despite an amassing of potent, private tragedies, such as the ease with which her parents became unidentifiable dots below the horizon, life would always resume as usual; the three of them, it seemed certain, would continue indefinitely as they were.

  Yet it had started that day on the beach — so many times since then, Tamar had held herself in check. She had stood still as a statue and watched from across the street as her parents were led from their house, and when she did move, she ran in the wrong direction: away. Yes, her choice had saved her life. Still as a statue she’d stood, still and silent as a plank she’d squeezed herself above the van Daams’ ceiling during raids. Perhaps it was true that she couldn’t have saved her parents, but all her life she had remained immobile; she had steadied herself, listening to her own heartbeat, while the world crushed Ginny’s soul thin as tissue paper, crumpled her up and threw her away. Why hadn’t Tamar tried harder? And now it was too late; it was the second-last day. In less than twenty-four hours, she would return from the Remembrance Day service at the war memorial and towel her hair dry before sitting at this very desk to sort through files, trying to convince herself she could still run the business by herself, and would answer a knock on her office door, expecting to see Cassandra or Marcy.

  Ginny. In a new, tight hyacinth blue sweater and a black skirt, holding a shoebox to her chest with a freshly manicured hand. Between her fingers, an unlit cigarette. Her hair was cut and styled. A smart, contemporary look. Only a professional facial can give skin such a glow. She had gone to another salon. And her clothes — every slim curve of her body showed. “I hope you’re not busy,” Ginny said, stepping into the room. “May I?”

  “My God,” said Tamar. “Look at you.”

  “Yes. Listen. I thought I should tell you in person that I’m leaving tonight. I got rid of most of my old things, but I brought you these.” She offered the shoebox, but Tamar didn’t take it, so Ginny walked across the room and placed it on the desk, beside the ledger. “Oh,” said Ginny, looking down at her own hand, following Tamar’s gaze to the unlit cigarette. “Would you like one? You smoke, don’t you?”

  “No,” Tamar said, truthfully. She hadn’t touched a cigarette in over a year. “What is this, Ginny? You can’t travel alone. You’re not well.”

  Ginny laughed, not the hysterical, choking spasms of her illness, but briefly, cheerfully. “I’m well,” she said. “I’m not going to be called Ginny anymore. I’m Virginia from now on. I’ll be leaving tonight, so” — she clasped her hands and smiled apologetically — “so, goodbye, Tamar.”

  “Who will you travel with?” said Tamar. “Where will you be? How will I reach you?”

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said. “I don’t know what my plans will be.”

  It was Minnie’s shriek in the stairwell, that piercing scream, a year and a week and four days earlier, that had straightened Tamar’s spine along with her resolve, leaving no room for panic. She told Cassandra, at the reception desk, “Phone for an ambulance,” and within seconds she was down the stairs and past her daughter’s limp frame to sit by her head. She told the girls to wait outside.

  Ginny’s body had been slanted toward the Inner Beauty exit, and Tamar knew not to touch or move her, despite how awkward and uncomfortable she looked, lying head first that way. She carefully extracted the bundle of folded papers from Ginny’s grasp and put them in the pocket of her trousers, then took the hand in hers. How horrible it was to see a loved and memorized face unconscious — and how entirely different from watching a sleeping face, which always looks childlike and vulnerable, open and terribly naïve. The face of someone unconscious is a thing with no personality, and Tamar realized what it meant that Ginny had witnessed her father’s death, had seen his unnaturally bent body beside her on the sidewalk all those years ago; the girl had surely carried that image ever since.

  But what startled Tamar the most, what haunted her and would have her lying awake staring at the ceiling all through the night while Ginny flew to Spain, and through many nights in the years that followed, was the sensation of Ginny’s hand in her own. As Tamar sat on those stairs willing life back into her daughter’s body, Ginny had squeezed back, then opened her eyes and stared. Tamar met her daughter’s eyes — not a stranger’s eyes and not the eyes of someone who has forgotten her own name. It was Ginny, faculties intact, with the same look she’d had before leaving with Asher fifteen years before, only calmer, more determined and without the edge of hysteria. It was as though Ginny had grown into herself, become mature, and made a decision that she knew, although she was sorry, was the right one.

  Tamar was sure that during those precious, terrible moments in Inner Beauty’s exit-way she had seen a glimpse of her daughter at her best, what she could have been if Tamar hadn’t allowed her own parents to disappear, hadn’t permitted the past to follow her across the ocean to paralyze her and leave her mute at all the most important moments. And when Ginny closed her eyes again, she looked more asleep than deathlike. Tamar felt a sharp stab of recognition. Fear. She was sure something had changed, that Ginny would awake to make accusations at last — to demand explanations. Tamar imagined herself explaining. Sometimes, my love, a person is so sorry, it seems insulting to apologize. As though an apology, as though words, could begin to make up for the harm one has done. As though one has the right to ask for forgiveness. With fear but also with relief, she anticipated admitting how many times she had rehearsed this conversation in her head — more times than Ginny would probably care to know.

  “There are some things I’ve been waiting to tell you,” Tamar told her daughter on the last day. “Sit down.” She motioned toward the desk chair, but Ginny didn’t move. “It’s about your father. Aga was here yesterday, and I was telling her . . . about your father. The day he died . . . ”

  “Tamar. I’m sorry.” Ginny glanced toward the door.

  “I’ve been waiting to talk with you, though. It’s about time we talked about it, don’t you think so? There was an old letter. A very old letter. I found it in your hand.”

  Ginny touched Tamar’s arm, her pained, pitying expression unable to disguise the joyful conviction that she was already on a plane, already gone. “Goodbye,” she said.

  “Virginia,” Tamar said. “This is absurd. This is unbelievable.”

  “Please. You don’t understand. It’s good. Everything is fine.” Ginny had her hand on the doorknob.

  Tamar stood beside her desk, stood stock still. If she were more like Robert or Asher, she would long ago have thrown herself at the girl’s feet to hold the fabric of Ginny’s skirt in both fists and beg her for another chance. Sometimes the only reasonable course of action, Tamar saw, too late, is to howl and cling, to cry love and promise to change. When she heard the sirens outside, Tamar had held her daughter’s limp hand tightly and told her that everything would be all right. Oh, but she had feared the wrong thing.

  J. Virginia Morgan Workshops

  [jvm@willingamnesia.com]

  To: jazwinter@furymail.ca;

  vlinderkind@eternalpresent.org

  Thank you for registering for my Willing Amnesia™ workshop! Don’t forget to stop at the door and pick up your registration package, which includes your copy of my latest book, Accidents.

  “Willing amnesia” is the revolutionary life- practice I developed nine years ago after a head injury that left me with an enlightening episode of temporary memory loss. During the three hours we spend together, I will show you how willing amnesia changed my life and can change yours, too. Since I developed these techniques to take control of my life, my career has soared with three best-selling books; I have improved my self-image; and I never waste a moment. I want
to share my discoveries so you, too, can harness your freedom and shape your future! Together, we will practise exercises to help you centre yourself in the present. Unlike psychotherapy, my methods are straightforward and don’t involve years of talking about painful memories. And unlike a lot of the many self-help approaches available today, mine takes a holistic approach: whatever the problem areas in your life happen to be, my methods can — and will — help.

  You will need to bring one object with you, so please carefully choose an item in advance. Go through your desk drawers and the back of that shelf at the top of your closet to excavate a “buried burden.” Go through your drawers and find an object that’s been in there for at least a year. Hold the object for one minute and then write down three words describing how it makes you feel. If those words are negative, if you want to shove the object quickly back down under your sweaters, then what you hold is a buried burden. If you cannot bring yourself to dispose of this item, but would never put it out on your coffee table for all to see, then you’ve found what we’re looking for.

  Together we will forget our troubles and forge ahead into a future where anything is possible — as long as you’re willing!

  J. Virginia Morgan