Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (7 page)

“You’ve been to Egypt?”

“Only for one day. My father took us all in a plane from Vietnam to Montreal when I was ten, and we stopped in Egypt. The earth there is exactly red.”

“Is he a pilot?”

“No, he’s a doctor. My mother’s brother was the pilot. My mother died when I was three—she stepped on a landmine, left over from the war.” She yawned. “I’m having jet lag. I flew in from Vancouver this morning.”

“Why don’t you want to go back to UBC?” I asked, trying to slice the pie without making too much of a mess.

“I was caught stealing,” she said, pouting. “It was mortifying.”

“What did you steal?”

“I filled in that I worked five more hours than I really worked … Your arms are so long. And your legs. Next to you I’m a shrimp.”

“You know, probably no one cares about those hours, apart from you.”

We spent the next three weeks talking about the fabricated worksheet, Tyen’s future, the respective lengths of our bodies. In the end she decided to complete her studies, but only if I promised to email her every day. I kept my promise, though I haven’t been able to reach her recently, because she’s been doing fieldwork in some Peruvian bog, miles from anywhere.

But yesterday a letter arrived, filled with long descriptions of vein necrosis in leaves, period cramps, cravings for ice cream. In a PS she added,
I can’t wait until I see you again. Stock your freezer with B&J organic chocolate-fudge ice cream. Next time I come I’m not leaving so be warned. Love me. Your Tyen
.

That’s all I have to report. I’ve been occupied, I’ve been busy, with nothing to show for it. Yet all the minute tasks that take me
through my days seem important—crucial even—at the moment I perform them. Another kind of fabrication.

Things are amiss with me. I know that. Things are not as they should be. Reliving that morning by the lake at Camp Bakunin, I feel exiled, almost, by the collapsed bridge between those hopeful stirrings and this land of nowhere, this coalition of no one, to which I’ve been relegated—have relegated myself. But at my back I always hear—something. Not time’s wingèd chariot, something else, just as rumbly and threatening. Not the future. The past.

1969

I
left my heart at Camp Bakunin. School, now drearier than ever, held me prisoner, and I counted the days to my release. But in mid-April Jean-Marc phoned to say that the Bakunin group had disbanded. Mimi was leaving for a kibbutz in Israel, Anthony had moved to New York, Olga was running an artists’ colony, Sheldon would be touring with a rock band, and Bruno had joined a Jesus cult. In any case, the campsite was no longer available—the insurance company had discovered that there was no running water on the premises, and without coverage Jean-Marc couldn’t get a permit.

I wept with frustration and disappointment. As if he knew how I’d take the news, Anthony called an hour later. I was sulking in my room, but I dutifully trudged to the telephone when I heard the ring. My mother and Bubby were superstitious about the phone, which they associated with dire news—though only if they picked up the receiver; I was exempt from the Curse of the Phone. I was therefore the only one who could take calls, and when I wasn’t at home, the rings went unanswered. If I was the one calling from somewhere, I had to use the secret code: ring once, hang up, call back.

“Hello?” I said bleakly.

“Yes, hello and hello again. Am I speaking to Miss Malone?”

“Anthony!” I cried out. Maybe he’d fix everything, find a way to revive the camp. Maybe he was calling with the good news.

“How are you, Joan?”

“I just heard about Bakunin. Jean-Marc says we can’t go back. Isn’t there some way?”

“Alas, I fear not. A good time was had by all, but—life moves on.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I. I was hoping to see you again, Joan. Are you all right, otherwise?”

“I guess…” I said reluctantly. “Jean-Marc said you were in New York.”

“I’m tripping the light fantastic as we speak. Ready to snap my fingers at poetry readings. Seems I’m too late, flower power has taken over.”

“I know that song! ‘Me and Mamie O’Rourke, Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.’ That’s where the title of that book comes from. You know,
Boys and Girls Together
.”

“Ah, yes. The illustrious William Goldman. I came across him only the other week, at a party. At least that’s who he said he was. He may have been an impostor.”

“Really? You met him?”

“New York is small, if you exclude the down and out.”

“How come you’re there?”

“Ah, who knows, Joan Malone. Who knows why we do the things we do?”

“I was really counting on going back to Bakunin this summer,” I whined—with Anthony, as with my mother, I could whine as much as I liked. “Now I’ll be moping around in the city, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.”

“Actually, I need you,” he said. “I need an assistant and you might be just the person, avid reader that you are.”

“You mean, like a job?” For some reason the first thing that came to my mind was Miss Pride, in
Boston Adventure
, hiring Sonia Marburg to be her amanuensis—a word I’d had to look up.

“Yes. Are you interested?”

“I’m not sure I can do anything.”

“You can do this. I’ve written a novel, I need you to read it and comment.”

“Okay, though I don’t really know anything.”

“I detect a theme here.”

“I just mean…”

“I know exactly what you mean—don’t I?” The question began as banter but wavered midway into uncertainty.

“This call is costing you a fortune,” I said.

“Is it? Well, money is no object when it comes to friendship. But you’re right, it’s time to say au revoir. I’ll be in touch. Take good care of your mother.”

“Thanks for calling,” I said awkwardly, or at least that’s how I felt—awkward, inadequate. There was something Anthony wanted from me—cleverness, for example—and I wasn’t up to it.

Two weeks later, a package from New York arrived in the mail, but it didn’t contain Anthony’s manuscript. Instead, he’d sent me a copy of
Middlemarch
, bookmarked with a postcard of a sweetly solemn group of Jewish black congregants, circa 1929, photographed in their Saturday best in front of the Moorish Zionist Temple. On the back Anthony had written, in minute print:
Alas, the novel has gone up in flames. Following the example of that sad creature Mme Mozart one cold night I tossed whatever paper was at hand into the fire, for a few moments of warmth. I send you instead this cautionary tale, though not as a caution to you, Joan. You would never fail to recognize pretension. Take it easy. Who knows what the summer holds for us all, and especially for you?

Who knew indeed? Anthony’s hopeful speculation proved to be prescient, for that was the summer I met Rosie.

My mother was convinced that my continued existence depended on her being in the house when I came home from school, and she’d arranged to work on Saturdays so she could leave the dry cleaners early on weekdays.

But this morning I had only to pick up my report card and empty my locker and I’d be free to go. I’d finally graduated from Coronation Elementary School. This break in routine was creating havoc in the Levitsky domicile—or rather a focus for havoc. My mother wouldn’t be at home when I returned from school, and Bubby had strict instructions not to answer the front door.

—mamaleh don’t forget a key my sunshine where are you—

I emerged from my bedroom and Bubby handed me a clean towel, in case I was seized by a sudden urge to shower. I bowed, flung it open, and spread it around my shoulders like a cloak. “Meet me at dawn, and I shall have satisfaction,” I declaimed. My mother laughed, and panting with the exertion of being manic she raced past us, first one way, then another. She had to set aside Bubby’s lunch, a stew, and fill three glasses with juice and soda water—the soda bottles were too heavy for Bubby to lift.

My mother placed an empty pot on the stove and repeated instructions my grandmother had heard, or not heard, every day for the past seven years. How to turn on the stove, how to turn it off, what to do if there was a fire, who to phone if she felt faint. The glasses of juice and soda water, protected from the elements by Saran Wrap, were lined up carefully on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Saran Wrap! What would we do without it? Our lives were held together by Saran Wrap.

Bubby nodded patiently. She often spent the day baking, and had evidently mastered the finer points of turning the stove on and off without burning down the house. But in all the commotion of juice and stew and projected fire, in the commotion of trying to help my mother unfold the Saran Wrap as it stuck to itself, I did forget the key.

In class, I waited for my name to be called. Laurie Leahy, Maya Levitsky. I’d miss Laurie’s euphonious name, our alphabetical proximity. I walked up to the desk and with a silly grin I accepted the report card that seemed to fill everyone but me with holy, or unholy, dread, as if it were somehow more than a piece of blue cardboard folded in half.

With a blind animal sense, children grasp the basic principles from the start. I knew, for example, that my mother wanted me to be a parent as well as a child. This was partly because she believed that anyone born in Canada automatically had access to privileged information denied to immigrants, and partly because of
there
. My poor mother had lost her confidence
there
. This might
have unsettled me, had Bubby Miriam not arrived just in time. With my bubby to hold the fort, I didn’t have to worry about poor Fanya’s deference to me.

I expected the same latitude in school, and so did my mother, on my behalf. When the time came to enrol me in first grade, my mother found herself in a quandary. She’d heard that teachers were allowed to hit children in Canadian schools—
sooner I would die than allow such a crime—
Tears flowed down her cheeks, smudged her mascara. The solution was to send me to a Hebrew school; I’d be safe enough there from teacher brutality. There were four or five Jewish schools in the city, and the children of my mother’s card-playing friends all attended one or the other.

But my mother had had enough of being Jewish. What if
they
came again?
They
would go to those schools first. She agonized for weeks, until one of the many casual acquaintances and passersby whom she accosted with her dilemma informed her that the Protestant School Board had recently banned corporal punishment. My mother rushed home with the good news. She tried to hug me, but, as always, I squirmed away from her embrace; even when my mother was happy, I was afraid of vanishing inside the vortex of her helplessness. All the same, I was relieved. No one could lay a finger on me, no matter what.

So much for discipline. In school, as at home, I felt free to sift through the rules, select the ones that suited me. I didn’t pay attention in class, I didn’t do my homework, I lost textbooks. I asked to be excused and was found loitering in the yard. Sometimes I was rude. And when my teacher’s back was turned, I slipped my hand into my schoolbag and surreptitiously ate soda crackers.

Attempts to induce me to change my ways failed. I didn’t mind being kept in after school: I read the violet/olive/lilac fairy books in the peace of the detention room. Nor did I mind writing out lines: my mother had bought me a calligraphy set, and I worked on perfecting flamboyant scripts as I copied out promises to improve. I was particularly fond of swashes.

After four years of impasse, they decided to hold me back. My report card was a sad sight:
unsatisfactory
in every subject except English, which came easily to me, and Geography. Geography was my favourite subject because of Miss d’Arcy, a shy woman with teary eyes and tortoiseshell glasses attached to a neck cord. She wore a cross, and there were rumours that she’d once been a nun. At first everyone jeered, pretended to pray:
Ave Maria, Ave Maria
.

I strode up to the front, taller than my classmates, brazen as usual, and roared, “QUIET!” There were rough and tough students at Coronation, but they saw me as a fellow reprobate, and if I was on Miss d’Arcy’s side, they decided that they would be as well. I returned to my desk and Miss d’Arcy returned to exports and imports. “Fisheries,” she said. I was in love with that word, with the lilting way Miss d’Arcy said it: “fisheries.”

But in spite of an
excellent
in English and
excellent
+ in Geography, it was felt that I ought to repeat fourth grade and the principal wrote to my mother to inform her of the board’s decision. They didn’t know what they were up against. My mother marched into the school office, fanning the air with the offending letter.

—who who here is in charge Chekhov she’s already reading—

Followed by a lengthy excursus on dead relatives, lice, husbands lost at sea, and various other topics.

The secretary, then the vice-principal, and finally the principal tried, unsuccessfully, to calm her down. And possibly out of concern for my personal welfare, the principal reversed his decision on the spot. I would be allowed to advance to fifth grade.