Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Read online

  I leaned forward, pulled out the plug for a few seconds, then replaced it and added more hot water. My baths were typically drawn-out affairs, especially in winter. Not that the apartment was cold—heating was included in the rent, and my mother and Bubby preferred a tropical climate. But we were mostly house-bound from December to March, and baths provided a diversion. My mind wandered as I sank under mounds of bubble bath. I loved the foam—the snow-white dips and towers, the weightless solidity, the soft, soapy sound of tiny bubbles popping in unison.

  Bubby continued clanging in the kitchen. She would have been baking her intricate European pastries: little rolls and squares and triangles filled with cinnamon, jam, chocolate cream. The door to the bathroom was unlocked, in case my mother came home while I was still in the bath. Closed doors made her frantic; she’d fling them open like a blast of wind in Kansas. My mother’s free access to the bathroom, regardless of circumstances, resulted in a rather lax—one could even say bohemian—attitude to nudity in the all-female Levitsky household.

  The Levitsky household: Bubby Miriam, Fanya, Maya. Three mad women. Mad, mad, mad.

  Take my mother’s bedroom. Had I lived in a sane house with sane people in it, my mother’s bed would have stood at one end of the room, Bubby’s at the other. But along with many other phobias—some of which were probably unique to her—Mère Levitsky was averse to alterations in the placement of furniture. The result was a Mondrianesque composition, with Bubby’s narrow bed extending at a right angle from halfway along the footboard of my mother’s double bed. The reason for this peculiar set-up was my mother’s refusal, when Bubby joined us, to move her bed from the centre of the room to the wall; the only other option was the L-shaped arrangement, though why the new bed was pushed right up against my mother’s footboard, I couldn’t say. Bubby didn’t mind, as far as I could tell.

  But Bubby was also strange. Here’s how my bubby washed herself: she carried an empty pail to the bathtub and filled it with hot, soapy water, then removed her clothes, climbed into the bath, and scrubbed herself with a sponge. Her body was thin and misshapen, because of there. That is, misshapen because her back was broken there, and thin because that was the way she was. When she’d finished washing, she rubbed herself dry with a facecloth and called to my mother to help her out.

  Then there was the fully mobilized laundry campaign. Bubby was in charge of laundry, and no one was allowed to interfere. She took care of the entire journey, from hamper to washing machine to clothesline or rack, back to laundry basket, and finally to the ironing board. She didn’t mind about other things, she was compliant and oblivious in every other way, but if my mother or I tried to reclaim a single item of clothing while it was en route, Bubby would wrest it from our hands.

  As for my mother—I wouldn’t know where to start. There was no beginning with Fanya Levitsky, and no end. No middle either, come to think of it. Her brain was jumbled and jammed, and everything was bouncing around in there, like the bobbing needle of her sewing machine. Hard to believe, in view of her general state of emotional strain, but my mother was a dressmaker, with a particular fondness for lace collars, tinted glass buttons, velvet ribbons, flounces and filigree. Her feet swelled out of high-heeled shoes, her elbows were dimpled, her neck was powdered, her hair had been sprayed into layers of stiff waves, as if in imitation of a wig.

  But despite the trouble she went to, despite the perfume and mascara and white nylon slips, at the drop of a hat she would fall apart, all wails and weeping, railing and ranting—not at me, that would be unthinkable, but at department stores and pickle manufacturers, can openers and leaky faucets. As for the relentless unveiling of shreds and scraps from there, I’d stopped listening when I was six years old. Body parts, kapos, electric fences, attack dogs—what could it all mean? I preferred to focus on B Is for Betsy; I was trying to read all the Betsy books, if I could find them. There were five libraries that carried children’s books in English, and my mother and I travelled across the city in search of Betsy’s Busy Summer, Betsy’s Winterhouse, Betsy’s Little Star.

  So much for Bubby and my mother. That left me. Actually, I wasn’t sure whether I was mad or not. I was merely play-acting, which meant I was deflecting, not absorbing, the lunacy—or did it? At mealtimes, for example: though I piled food on my plate, I never managed to sample all the dishes spread out before me. One day I forgot the green beans, glistening under clumps of margarine; another day I neglected the kasha and bowties, flavoured with tiny black tendrils of fried onion. My omissions did not go unnoticed by my mother, who wrung her hands and tried to guess the food’s fatal flaw. Exasperated, I’d plunge my face into the spurned bowl and, imitating a predatory animal, gobbling and snorting and growling, I’d scoop up the beans or kasha with my teeth.

  My mother, half-laughing, half-whimpering, brought both hands to her cheeks and rolled her head—ai ai ai mamaleh even a crumb of bread we would look for in the mud—

  Not that she sat with us—she was too busy running back and forth between table and stove, checking pots, adjusting the heat, fretting over culinary setbacks. As for eating, she squeezed it in before and after the meal, tasting bits of food straight from the pot or nibbling leftovers.

  Bubby was also hard to pin down: you had only to glance away for a few seconds and every last morsel on her plate would be gone. She ate each of my mother’s offerings separately: first the rice, then the tiny pieces of chicken my mother had chopped up for her, then the Canadian Living quiche. (Every Sunday my mother meticulously copied out what she called Canadian recipes from her magazines, unless they involved alien ingredients such as asparagus or zucchini.) When Bubby was done, she quickly removed her plate, hobbling to the sink and depositing it there. Then she returned to the table and watched me with fixed absorption, as if witnessing a complex operation—someone assembling a clock or repairing a radio.

  I wanted to help out with the meal, if only to diffuse my mother’s attentions, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Bad enough I didn’t have a father, cousins, uncles, aunts, more grandparents; bad enough that we were poor—at least I would have an easy life. An easy life meant, apparently, being waited on. It seemed to me back then, and still seems to me now, that my mother often imagined that her own sufferings had transferred themselves to my life, and that she had to find a way to compensate me for our shared misfortunes. And then there was her needy surplus of love, love that had nowhere else to go. I was the love sponge. It was good and not good.

  In short, I definitely didn’t belong to one of the families featured in our English reader: the children raking autumn leaves before dressing up as pumpkins for Halloween, the mothers in tidy brown hats and skirts, the fathers a little remote but always jovial and reliable as they sat at the wheel of their black cars.

  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 design
er—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.