Cricket in a Fist Read online

  Ginny lay in silence, staring at the wool between her hands. Taken aback by this uncommon stillness, Tamar tried to think of the right words — a more thorough and digestible explanation. Too soon, Ginny said, “How is it more complicated, Mother?”

  “She’s not been herself. She’s been a different person since — everyone she ever knew is dead.”

  The yellow wool was wrapped so tightly around Ginny’s pointer fingers that, Tamar saw, they were turning white. Ginny said, “But she knows us.”

  “Your Oma Esther had a sister,” Tamar explained. “My Tante Anke. They were very close. Oma Esther was with Anke when she died of typhus. She had it, too, I think. You mustn’t ever say anything about this to her. All right, liefje?”

  Half an hour later, Ginny stood up and announced, “I think I should be a ballet dancer. Ballet is my destiny.” Freckles burning across her nose, eyes fever-bright, she told Tamar, “Watch this.”

  Standing with Ginny’s hands in hers, Asher’s engine running to take her away, Tamar clearly recalled her urge to grab the front of her small daughter’s nightgown; she could have reached it easily but instead willed herself to remain stock still and watch. The pirouette was out of control as it began, and Ginny hit the end table spinning. The vase fell and Ginny fell, twisted, on top of it. It took the doctors four hours to pick all the glass slivers out of her side.

  Tamar squeezed Ginny’s hands tighter. “For godsake. You’ve made your point. This is going too far.” Ginny eased her hands away.

  For the next month, Ginny called once a week and didn’t answer her phone when Tamar tried to phone more often. She let the telephone ring and ring. Then Asher started calling Tamar. He had a plan. He started showing up by himself again, inviting himself in for tea. It wasn’t like before; now he sat on the red sofa instead of in Robert’s old mustard and brown chair. He spoke quickly, tapping his long fingers on the upholstered arm. “You and Esther can come, too. What are you doing in Canada? There’s a whole country of people like us, Tamar. Where we wouldn’t be in exile.” People like us. Asher had unkempt dirty-yellow hair that he kept pushing out of his eyes, and he smelled of tobacco and wet wool. He said, “You have to think of me like a son. We’re a family now.” He was aglow with the drama of what he’d done, just as he trembled with anxiety to be on his way elsewhere.

  Leave, she willed.

  He had appeared for the first time at Tamar’s workplace, beside the makeup counter, picking up crystal perfume bottles and turning them over for inspection the way one might approach a cut of meat. His hair flopped over his forehead, and he looked intently tired, with soft shadows under his wide-set bright grey eyes. It was the kind of face that wore youth unconvincingly, that was made to be old and weather-worn. Tamar reached for the crystal bottle that he was surely about to drop, and he let her take it. He said, “Are you Ginny Reilly’s mother?”

  And only months later Asher was sitting on the red sofa with its little burgundy flowers, Tamar’s pregnant daughter spirited away into some hole of an apartment Tamar had never seen. He said, “Whatever feelings you have about me, you just need to put them aside. I have to concentrate on Ginny. Your daughter is a very intelligent person, but her intelligence is unfocused. She was a precocious child with no structure in her life.” He had a habit of opening his hand abruptly to emphasize his words, like a starburst. A frog’s foot. He looked at Tamar sadly, wisely. “And now she’s a childish, an insecure person.”

  Tamar willed, Disappear.

  *

  And now Asher was gone, must have landed in Tel Aviv only hours ago. Tamar stood at his sink, scrubbing the last of the dirty dishes he left behind. Mid-August, the humidity at its peak, the apartment sweltering. Asher’s dishes, Asher’s bedroom, Asher’s bathroom. This was Tamar’s first visit here, and while she tried to think of it as her daughter’s apartment, it only seemed absurd that Ginny would stay here when he had left. Incongruous and invasive. Ginny claimed that if she and Asher were married, Tamar would feel differently. And how grateful Tamar was that there was no marriage to contend with along with everything else. That she was not compelled, as Ginny put it, to take the relationship seriously.

  Two foil-covered glass dishes sat on the wooden counter. A dozen chicken croquettes and dish of pad thai — Ginny’s favourites. Esther had spent the previous evening preparing the spicy noodles, and just that morning, she’d chopped the leftover chicken she’d been saving and mixed it with a thick, white sauce. Tamar knew there were eggs involved, then bread crumbs and the deep fryer. Esther always cooked and Tamar cleaned up afterwards, and although she frequently resolved to learn some of her mother’s recipes, Tamar couldn’t retain any memory of the separate steps. She remembered coming home from work, when Robert was alive and Ginny was a little girl, to a fish soup with dumplings. She’d held one of the soft, spongy-white dumplings in her spoon and asked Esther, in English, “How do you make these?”

  Esther answered in Dutch, then repeated what she’d said in English for Robert and Ginny’s benefit. “You just make. Read in the book. Make so it looks like the picture.” But to look in her mother’s cookbooks would have been like reading someone’s diary. Esther’s spidery handwriting filled the margins, sometimes scrawled right on the recipes themselves. Mostly she wrote in Dutch or Yiddish, sometimes in English. Once, sitting down to breakfast, Tamar thought she saw some Hebrew letters pencilled between the lines of a recipe for lemon chicken. Tamar couldn’t read Hebrew and hadn’t known that Esther could either; she flipped the book shut.

  The two dishes, foil tucked perfectly over their contents, could not be put away until Tamar scrubbed Asher’s fridge with baking soda. Sitting in front of the open fridge promised relief from the stifling heat, and Tamar was saving the task for last. Long drips of juice had dried onto every surface, and a greenish liquid festered under the vegetable crispers. The room, which served as both kitchen and living room, had seen weeks and months pass since anyone had bothered to clean. Asher and Ginny had the most unfortunate characteristics in common, and this was one of them. Ginny must have learned it from her father, this helplessness in the face of gathering dust and creeping mould.

  When Robert hadn’t been attending to the frostbitten toes and collapsed arches of his patients, he had been forever in front of the television or at the piano, helping Ginny with her finger exercises, going through sheet music with a pencil. He’d tell his daughter to spread her hands on top of his so she could feel how his fingers moved over the keys. Their backs to the rest of the house, the two of them were united in oblivion to Tamar and Esther’s constant war with disorder — with soiled clothing and food-caked dishes. Sometimes Robert clamped a thin cigar between his lips and played Gershwin by ear; one time Tamar saw, with her own eyes, a long cylinder of ash crumble, during a crescendo, from the end of her husband’s cigar directly onto Ginny’s freshly washed and braided hair.

  Tamar had started running a bath. She had already emptied half a dozen bowls of forgotten leftovers from Asher’s fridge, each at some stage of decay. At least two were identifiable as pasta. One appeared to have been boiled potatoes, and one was unrecognizable, a pungent mass of multicoloured fuzz. Waiting for the kettle to boil, she wiped her hands on a relatively clean tea towel and glanced around the cluttered room. The bookshelf and coffee table were both overflowing with colourful paper, folded into three-dimensional shapes. There were insects, elephants, frogs. But mostly, Tamar could see, there were birds. Innumerable paper birds, all the same, long necked and sharp beaked. Stepping past the small, curtainless window, she glanced out at Ginny and Esther on the balcony and picked up a purple bird from the bookshelf. Turning it over and spreading the wings, Tamar could see it was a mess of scars inside, white showing through where the dark ink had cracked. Leaning in, she examined another bird. This one was made of white paper and was scrawled with black ink — Ginny’s handwriting. The kettle shrieked, and Tamar carefully balanced the purple bird back on top of the psychology textbook wh
ere she’d found it. She poured a cup of tea and turned sideways to step outside through the narrow doorway. She was in her stockings because the heels of her shoes would have slipped between the slats of Asher’s balcony. Ginny’s balcony.

  Ginny rocked herself in a rickety chair. Her sprained right ankle was supported on a plant pot, shadowed by green tomatoes. She must have stubbed her big toe when she fell, because the top half of the nail was missing, replaced by an unsanitary-looking scab. Esther played solitaire beside her. Ginny’s eyes were closed against the faint sound of running bathwater and the smack and shuffle of cards. Her face was swollen and shiny, her hair limp with sweat. The wroughtiron platform they sat on, what Ginny called a balcony, was actually more like a fire escape. Tamar’s pedicured toes were visible through her sheer stocking, their elegance emphasized by unruly surroundings. The potted vegetables and herbs, even the vines, seemed a paltry disguise for a cheap apartment on a rundown centre-town street.

  “Your bath should be ready,” Tamar told Ginny. She turned to her mother. “Do you want to stay out here? I’ve made you a cup of tea.” Esther looked up from her cards as though surprised to find herself in such an unlikely setting. She waved her hand, seven of spades fluttering. “Three generations and not a man to be seen. All gone. Like this.” A butterfly had left Ginny’s basil to flutter past the railing. Addressing Ginny’s bulge, she concluded, “Such a family you’ll be born into.” Ginny put her hand protectively over her middle.

  Tamar noticed, standing, that Esther’s grey roots were clearly visible at the top of her light brown hair, which had been cut and set into a chin-level bob; she would make an appointment for a touchup the next day. Tamar offered both hands to help Ginny stand, then offered her arm for the limp to the bathroom. Ginny’s shift hung down to her ankles at the back, but her belly shortened it to mid-shin at the front. Tamar didn’t comment as they shuffled through the cluttered bedroom, past the dresser, desk and floor, all strewn with books, paper and clothes that Asher hadn’t bothered to pack or put away. A length of mustard yellow yarn stretched across the room from window to door frame, a flock of crimson, scarlet, rose and russet paper birds dangling from it in loops. Ginny followed Tamar’s gaze and said, “I wanted them to look like they were in flight, but instead they look strangled. Isn’t it as if their migration was cut short by some kind of trap?”

  “Did you fold all of these birds?”

  Yes, Ginny had been spending her time folding squares of paper, the same folds every time. “If you make a thousand cranes,” she said, “it’s supposed to be good luck. Actually,” she admitted with a small laugh, “It’s supposed to ward off death.”

  “Well,” said Tamar, “it doesn’t look that way to me.”

  “Doesn’t look what way?”

  “Like the birds are strangled.”

  “Oh, Mother.” They stepped over the red-strapped platform clogs that lay in the doorway to the bathroom, and Tamar resisted the urge to move them. Someone as clumsy as Ginny should never wear shoes like that, especially when eight months pregnant. She had been wearing those shoes, running down the stairs and screaming after Asher, when she sprained her ankle the week before. When Tamar met her at the hospital, Ginny was lying back on an examination table, her ankle already bound in a tensor bandage, infamous red shoes on a table at the side of the tiny room.

  Tamar sat on the toilet seat, legs crossed, and didn’t stare as Ginny pulled her shift over her head and stepped out of her panties. One hand on either side of the claw-foot tub, Ginny manoeuvred herself into the hot water without wetting her damaged ankle. She let that leg hang over the side. Swollen all over, no wonder she was exhausted. Her breasts looked painfully full, already stretching downward almost to rest on the swell of her belly. Tamar remembered her own pregnancy, how her body barely changed, limbs and face unaffected by the bulge that confined itself to her middle. Ginny was overwhelmed so quickly, impending motherhood touching every part of her. From swollen feet to lacklustre hair, she was strained at the seams.

  “Do you think it’s funny that I don’t have a shower?” said Ginny.

  “This isn’t right.” Tamar clasped her hands. “You can’t live here. We’ll have room in the new place. We can all move in within the month. In time for the baby.”

  “He’s planning to come back. What am I supposed to do? Throw out his things? Leave him homeless?” Ginny leaned her head against the tub’s rolled end. “What about my plants? And anyway, I might go there eventually. After the baby’s born and my ankle’s healed and all that.” She said this as though mustering conviction, but she sounded far from convinced and further from convincing.

  “Please, Ginny. This makes no sense. Oma Esther can’t understand it at all. It makes her so upset that you’re not around to play the piano anymore. It just sits there now, waiting to be dusted.”

  “Oma Esther thinks I’m a whore and Asher’s a lunatic,” said Ginny. “And she hates the piano. She thinks it’s all just” — Ginny wrapped her arms around her chest and shook her head — “mishigas.” Tamar almost had to smile. Ginny had an uncanny gift for imitating mannerisms. Asher had claimed to recognize Tamar, the first time they met, from Ginny’s description, but surely he had known her by the girl’s performances — impersonations unkind only for their unrelenting accuracy.

  “She’s not used to all this,” Tamar said. “Can you blame her? Frankly, it’s a little difficult for everyone.”

  “You don’t say.” Ginny filled a green plastic bucket and supported herself with one arm, awkwardly pouring water over her head with the other.

  “We’re bringing the piano with us when we move,” said Tamar, pressing her palms against her thighs. “Despite the expense. Do you have any idea what’s involved? It’s quite incredible.” Ginny didn’t respond. “My God,” she said. “The expense.” Watching Ginny fill the bucket a second time, Tamar took off her bracelet and moved to the edge of the tub. Ginny didn’t object to her mother’s help, just let her arms fall to her sides. Taking the bucket, Tamar continued to drench her daughter’s long hair. Greasy along its centre part, it hung straight, past her shoulder blades. Ginny shut her eyes against the water and scrunched her face, lips reddened by the heat. “Israel is subtropical,” she said, as Tamar refilled the bucket. “But it can’t be any hotter than here. It’ll be dry, won’t it, the kind of heat that gives you a nosebleed?” She blinked water out of her eyes and looked up at her mother, waiting for an answer, an explanation. Her long lashes caught beads of water like a spiderweb; at twenty-three, she suddenly looked like herself at six.

  Bathing was the only time Ginny had ever chosen Tamar’s help over Robert’s, the only time she seemed to trust her mother’s competence. As a child, she’d let her body sag like a rag doll so Tamar was obliged to do everything for her, even lifting her arms to wash underneath. Ginny’s knees and elbows were perpetually scabby and scraped, and every bath day, Tamar found new bruises. Though dressed crisp and neat each morning, hair pulled into two tight braids by Esther, Ginny invariably came home with her outfits skewed, loose hair from her braids standing out in a halo. She stood tall and gangly, one sock crumpled around her ankle. Tamar cringed, watching her daughter walk into chairs and trip over cracks in the sidewalk. Even mosquitoes seemed more attracted to Ginny than to the average person, and from her father she had inherited the pale, faintly freckled skin that often accompanies red hair. Skin that scorches scarlet and raw in the sun, then peels in long strips, fly-wing thin.

  At eleven years old, Ginny suffered her first injury serious enough to require doctor-applied bandages and prescribed painkillers. She flew off the front of her father’s bicycle, Robert instinctively reaching out to grab her arm. Her sleeve tore in his hand as momentum carried her out of his reach, past the bus’s trajectory and into the fatherless rest of her life. Her palms collided with pavement, one elbow fracturing under the force of her own weight. As the doctor prophesied, she would never again be able to straighten that arm completely.<
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  At the hospital, they were led to a private room set aside for grieving families. Esther winced as though from a deep and painful blow when she heard her son-in-law was dead, but Tamar laughed. “No,” she said. “How ridiculous. Of course he wasn’t killed.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Reilly.” The doctor’s manner cut her laugh short, cut her breathing short. Something terrible had happened. She had done something terrible. She was a widow, bereaved; she had a dead man’s clothes in her house. She would always remember how this doctor’s eyebrows met in the middle, that his eyes were slightly bloodshot. The doctor said, “Robert has passed away. I’m very sorry.”

  Tamar and Esther sat with Robert’s death, waiting for the doctors to set Ginny’s broken bones. “There is nothing new for us under the sun,” said Esther. Tamar reached and took her mother’s hand, and neither of them spoke again until the red-eyed doctor reappeared, some time later, to ask Tamar to identify her husband’s body.

  Tamar didn’t move. She had never felt so incapable of performing a task demanded of her, so simply unable to comply with what was needed.

  “I’ll do this,” said Esther. Tamar looked at her mother, forcing herself to shake her head. “I can do this?” Esther asked the doctor. She touched Tamar’s hand and said firmly, “I’ll see him.” She stood and nodded, followed the doctor from the room.

  At her father’s funeral, Ginny wore a bandage high on her cheek and a sling to support her cast. Half her lip was swollen and bruised, a lopsided pout. It was a closed-casket funeral, but Tamar knew that Ginny must have seen Robert lifeless on the street beside her. A father with a concrete, bodily death, neat and conclusive. It seemed to confirm that Robert was alien, not one of them. Men in Tamar’s family didn’t have funerals, didn’t leave corpses; they just vanished and faded from memory. The letter from a stranger, confirming her father’s death, hadn’t extinguished the feeling that he was still out there somewhere, leading some unlikely life. Tamar sat between Esther and Ginny at the funeral, holding their hands tightly. They and a few of Robert’s colleagues from the clinic were the only people who attended the funeral.