Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (3 page)

But Bubby Miriam had sailed into our lives like a lifeboat. She found us, with the help of the Jewish Agency, when I was six. The war had dispersed families; no one knew who was alive. The lists of missing people were too long to be ordered, and locating lost relatives was frequently a matter of chance—a familiar candlestick, for example, glimpsed in a shop window.

We spent several weeks preparing for the miraculous incarnation of my father’s mother. When she first heard the news, my mother seemed to fall into a semi-trance, and for once she sat with me at the kitchen table as I ate, hands folded in front of her, staring at the ceramic frogs that clung with outstretched legs to the sides of the napkin holder. At regular intervals she chanted
living living living
, and I joined in, for in spite of the dramatics I understood that this development was auspicious. I was acquiring a grandmother.

Practical matters soon roused my mother from her daze. My bubby was in Chicago; she had to cross the border; there were documents to be signed. Anything could go wrong along the way, my mother warned me. But she went ahead and bought a bed and a feather pillow from a friend whose husband had made a fortune on the stock market and who was redecorating her entire house, actually hiring an interior designer—
such things they have here—

When the big day arrived, my mother, who had been cooking and baking for days, set all the cakes and buns on the table and plumped the pillow of the new bed half a dozen times. At the prescribed hour, she took my hand as if we were the ones setting out on a journey, and as we stood waiting in the cubist foyer of our flat, she drew me close to her and made tiny, mewling sounds, like someone encountering calamity and trying, not entirely successfully, to remain silent.

The doorbell rang and my mother swung her free arm in imitation of an airplane about to land. The runway was her chest.

—come in come in—

She opened the door and there they were: the man from the agency and, standing beside him, my grandmother. “Well, Mrs. Levitsky.” The man smiled weakly. “Here she is—your mother-in-law, Miriam Levitsky.” He turned to me: “Your bubby.” Shyly, he lowered his eyes and dug his hands into his pockets. He must have expected a tearful embrace. Instead, my mother stared at my grandmother for a few seconds, then began to wail—
Yossi my Yossi—
but my grandmother was apparently hard of hearing. She lifted her suitcase, shuffled past my mother, and shut herself inside the bedroom.

My mother offered the agency man a glass of tea, and without waiting for an answer she scuttled off to plug in the electric kettle. The man sat down uneasily on the living-room sofa. He wore a dark suit and a striped tie. The tie looked borrowed, somehow, and seemed to be on the verge of strangling him, and his trousers had inexplicable vertical creases running down the front. I wondered
whether I’d want him for a father and decided I wouldn’t. You could tell he was unlucky. His own relatives, I assumed, were still missing.

My grandmother emerged from the bedroom wearing a flowered dress with brass buttons. Her white hair was held neatly in back with a shiny metal clasp. She beckoned to me with her arm and handed me a piece of chocolate wrapped in foil.

“Is she staying?” I asked hopefully.

“Yes,” the agency man replied quickly, glancing at the door. Twenty minutes with my mother and he’s pining for freedom.

As soon as he’d left, my grandmother walked slowly to the kitchen, opened the back door, and gazed out at the yard below. She nodded in approval, and my mother and I dragged three kitchen chairs to the balcony. We called it a balcony, but it was really a landing from which a flight of stairs spiralled down to the lawn. The stairs were made of wood, and when my mother and I went down to the yard to pick daisies the boards sagged under our weight with disquieting creaks, and we gripped the railings with both hands.

There was exactly room for the three of us on the landing. I sat in the middle, between my mother and my new grandmother, sucking on the chocolate so it would last a long time. In the yard, a neighbour’s beagle was digging and running and wagging his tail, and we all laughed. My mother began reminiscing—
the sun the sun was shining on the dead bodies—

My grandmother took my hand, squeezed it, and winked at me. I looked up at her and, with what seemed like an almost supernatural feat of translation, I gathered that it was possible to ignore my mother. I smiled at my bubby, and she smiled back. We continued to hold hands, complicit in our dismissal of my mother’s extraterrestrial commentary.

Ai, ai
, as my mother would say, was it any wonder I had no friends? Not real friends—not friends you met outside of school. Fanya would never let me visit just anyone; she’d insist on coming with me, inspecting the premises, meeting the parents. And what
would they make of her garbled snippets of horror-history, her prophetic alarms?

Surprisingly, I wasn’t one of the outcasts either. I was invited to birthday parties, I sat with the popular girls at lunchtime. One boy, Neil Charles, slipped me a folded note when the teacher’s back was turned:
I like you
. A quiet boy with a poetic face and dramatic ears. I smiled at him, but he flushed and looked away quickly. Too complicated for me.

The bubbles in my bath had gone flat. I ran my fingers through the white islands and watched them separate like amoebas in science films.
Alas, my love, you do me wrong
, I sang,
to cast me off discourteously
. I was imitating Jane Hathaway, the yodelling secretary on
The Beverly Hillbillies
. I hated that sitcom, really hated it. In its various manifestations, life in Canada proved daily that my mother’s overwrought, splintered world was not real. But here was a TV show that echoed her distortions. I was baffled. Who were these people? What exactly was funny about them? The laughter was canned, I knew, but everyone at school seemed to agree with the studio’s cues. My classmates recapped each scene at recess with shrieks of delight.

Only Jane struck me as comical, and I half-watched the show in hope of seeing her. I was exactly like her: tall, hopelessly wayward, blissfully hopeful, and possibly the only competent person in my immediate surroundings.

I began feeling hungry, and I was wondering whether the pleasure of stuffing myself would be worth the trouble of getting out of the bath when the front door flew open. Huffing and puffing, eulogizing and exclaiming, my mother entered the house, safely delivered from her pilgrimage to Steinberg’s.

—Maya Maya my mamaleh—

Her coat was wet and she rushed to the bathroom to hang it over the tub. And there I was, soaking in the bath, ruining her plans. She didn’t mind—she didn’t mind anything I did. I was the daughter who could do no wrong, the daughter who would show
the way. That was one of my several roles in the family circle: New World liaison. Pointing at a word in one of her magazines, my mother would ask me what it meant. I deciphered advertisement slogans, television dialogue, comments overheard on the street. If necessary, we consulted our bible,
Webster’s New English Dictionary
, paperback edition. Sometimes I had to explain the explanation.

Bubby came to my mother’s rescue with a hanger, took the coat and toddled off. I drew the shower curtain, leaving only my head exposed to my mother’s scrutiny. I noticed that she was waving a long skirt of pink reward stamps in one hand and her even longer grocery receipt in the other. The groceries themselves would arrive later; my job would then be to tick off each item on the receipt as my mother darted from brown-paper shopping bag to cupboard, breathless with suspense. Never once, in all the years, had anything gone astray, but my mother enjoyed the ritual and so did I. Stocking up. The cupboards refilled with the things we liked.

—mamaleh look look what I found—

Crammed between sink and wall, tucked into a satin yellow dress she’d made for herself, trailing clouds of Ben Hur perfume, she brandished the supermarket receipt. She often copied down notices from the bulletin board at Steinberg’s: a bride needed a seamstress to alter a wedding dress; a McGill student was offering violin lessons; someone was selling a ten-piece camera set. My mother would painstakingly transcribe the entire text onto the back of her receipt so she could consult me when she came home. I reached out to see what she’d dug up this time, but she jumped away, clutching the precious scroll to her satiny bosom—
no no if it gets wet and smudges—

Instead, she knelt by the tub and held it up for me to see:

This summer, send your children to Camp Bakunin, where the campers make the rules, improve their minds, and learn humanitarian values. Ages 10–14. Reduced rates for the proletariat.

My mother’s neat handwriting always impressed me. I would have expected a congested scrawl, but even her shopping lists were written in elegant script.
Butter
was a tiny drawing;
pineapple in a can
looked like a garden. She’d been taught penmanship, she explained, when she was a schoolgirl. She wasn’t “from some shtetl”—her parents were educated, they went to the theatre, they read Homer on Sunday afternoons. Though I blocked out most of my mother’s torrential reminiscences, I was familiar with a few manageable strands: her father had been a respected photographer and amateur astronomer; famous people had come to the house to have their portraits taken by her father and their clothes sewn by her mother; professors and artists had joined them for dinner. Over prolonged meals of borscht and baked fish they discussed every topic under the sun. Palestine, yes or no? Séances, real or sham? Pavlov, good or bad?

—see what it says here you you make the rules if only Yossi—

Yossi, my father, had died before I was born—before he even knew I was an upcoming human. My mother invoked his name at random, as far as I could tell.

As for making the rules, we both knew what that was about. I was terrified of sports, terrified of flying objects, high jumping, and above all the evil vaulting horse! Every Wednesday my mother wrote a note for the gym teacher—a grumpy, tyrannical man who with his impregnable torso and belligerent beard resembled Popeye’s nemesis, Bluto—and asked that I be excused from gym class. I was “in a certain time of month,” “suffering from a terrible cold,” “dizzy,” “faint,” or (my favourite) “low with iron.” The gym teacher had stopped reading these notes; he’d toss the envelopes I handed him on the windowsill and, giving me a dirty look, motion me to sit on the bench. From the sanctuary of the corner bench I watched the girls in my class running and jumping in their blue shorts. I enjoyed myself, though I never stopped wondering: how was it humanly possible to enjoy volleyball?

My aversion to sports was an insurmountable obstacle when it came to any summer camp project. What if they wanted me to swim? This was before the days of science camps, art camps, music camps; the barbaric assumption back then seemed to be that all children were athletic. I felt fortunate that at least my mother never forced me to do anything. In some instances—for example, if on a rainy day I refused to bundle up like Nanook of the North—she begged and wept, but she never coerced. Every trait or resource a person might need in order to rule by decree, Fanya lacked.

“I need a towel, mother dear,” I said. “I’m getting prune fingers.”

With a flurry of signals my mother indicated to Bubby that I needed two clean towels—one for my long hair and one for the rest of me. Bath towels were used only once in our home; Bubby snared them before they had a chance to dry and sent them off on the laundry tour.

At least my hair was no longer tangled when I came out of the bath. Earlier that year, my mother had come across an ad for conditioner in one of her magazines:
Nobody knows like a hairdresser what a ground-breaking new product like this can do. Watch your husband’s eyes when he greets you that night!
My mother rushed out to buy the ground-breaking product, and our post-toilette scenes were instantly transformed. I no longer had to sit on a chair for an hour, reading Gogol while my mother grappled tearfully with knots and bird nests. Now the brush slid effortlessly through my wet hair—
see see how this works it’s mindboggling—

“Mindboggling?” I was amused. But looking back, I’m impressed; impressed that my mother, for whom language was a fraught enterprise, was determined to take on English. She’d more or less discarded her other languages, now that we were Canadian, and she spoke English even to Bubby.

Swaddled in towels, I took the grocery receipt from my mother and shut myself in my room. The only mother-proof door in the house was the one leading to my bedroom. When I was much younger, my mother would run to my bed every second or third
night. Crying and quaking and muttering what sounded like voodoo incantations, she’d take me in her arms, her bouncy body heaving under her nightgown. I can’t say why I wasn’t frightened, or how I knew her distress had nothing to do with me—a child’s unerring intuition, I suppose; or maybe I didn’t find these nighttime episodes all that different from the usual wringing of hands that went on during the day. But I didn’t like being jolted from sleep, and one night, shortly after my eighth birthday, I came up with the idea of pushing my desk against the door.

My mother, as usual, took a catastrophic view—what if there was a fire and she couldn’t wake me? She shared her apprehensions with her card-playing friends, who were more than happy to be of service: “Make an appointment with Dr. Fine. He gives out sleeping pills like nobody’s business.” My mother was not one to spurn a helping hand—
yes yes I will do
—

Sedation, in the form of Seconal, put an end to Fanya’s nocturnal peregrinations, but I liked the new system, and whenever I wanted privacy I pushed my desk against my bedroom door. My mother soon developed a worshipper’s awe of the barrier, and the desk became superfluous. All I had to do now was shut the door and my mother walked quietly away. Oh,
ma mère, ma mère
.

Like a midwife of home decor, my mother had plunged me, by way of matching bedspread and curtain, into a rayon explosion of purple and blue chrysanthemums. She’d become enamoured of the set while browsing through an Eaton’s catalogue and had saved up for it. I was happy because she was happy; that’s the way it is with children. If the chrysanthemums made her heart swell with pride, I had to admire them for their uplifting properties.