Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Read online

  “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.

  But the notice in my hand was pulling, like the Pied Piper, in another direction. I stared at the invitation—or invocation, as it seemed to be. My mother had not caught on, I thought with a rush of excitement; she had definitely not caught on. Camp Bakunin must be a hippie camp.

  The currents that were travelling from south of the border were made to order for me: this was who I was. At school, I had a reputation for irreverence, though my objection was not to our teachers but to the rules and the way authority figures clung to them. I’d been the first in my school to pin a Make Love Not War button onto my lapel. I was told (more rules) to remove the button; instead, I kept it hidden like a secret banner under my sweater. Not that I followed the news, or knew exactly what was going on in Vietnam, but political awareness had strayed into the sphere of popular culture and permeated everything.

  Outside of school, my education was being furthered by Esther, the young, dreamy librarian at the Atwater Library. She smiled even when no one was looking, and her two bulky, straw-coloured braids hinted at counterculture allegiances. Under her guidance, I’d read The Grapes of Wrath and Cry, the Beloved Country. Injustice in those books was abstract, inspirational. A more tangible rebellion was moving our way, even though we weren’t the ones sending soldiers to kill and be killed in Vietnam; we were the ones helping them defect. On the radio, Peter, Paul, and Mary sang about a draft dodger fasting in jail, dying.

  I lay down on my bed and stretched my toes. I was too long for my bed—like Dr. Seuss’s Ned, who had to poke his feet out of two holes in his footboard or else push his head through a hole in the headboard. If I went to Camp Bakunin, I’d sleep in a bunk bed, a bunk bed in a cabin filled with girls. I’d been out of the city only once in my life, on a field trip: in fifth grade we were taken to see the Plains of Abraham. The park was pretty, but I remained detached; it was all too nebulous, too structured. A few hours away from the classroom, then back to Coronation Elementary School on rickety yellow buses. And why were our teachers so cheerful about hundreds of luckless men stabbed, shot, and clubbed to death? It would have been more appro-priate, I felt, to gather solemnly and sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

  This would be different: this would be the real thing. When I was small, I would hide behind the sheer, floor-length curtains in our living room and pretend that Harry Belafonte was coming to take me to Kingston Town. Our life there would be one endless street party; skinny women in crimson dresses would ask me to hold their matching crimson purses as they danced. Or else it was Tintin who would arrive at my door with his little fox terrier in his arms. He’d tell me I was urgently needed in Turkey; I’d have only minutes to pack while a uniformed chauffeur waited by the limousine. My hair was nearly the same colour as Tintin’s optimistic little tuft and would look as picturesque against the blue sea, the deep blue sky.

  As if to dispel any lingering doubts, “Strawberry Fields” came on the radio. Oh, lovely Beatles! John also wanted to take us with him on his languorous, psychedelic voyage. I rose from my bed, opened the door to my room, and announced, “Okay, Mrs. L, I’ll go.”

  My decision set in motion nine weeks of shopping and packing, warning and lament. I didn’t mind; my mother’s focus on the great event coincided with my own impatience. I daydreamed more than usual at school; I drew log cabins and pine forests in the margins of my notebooks. The school year dragged on, until one fine morning our teacher, a tough little mouse of a woman, marched into the classroom with a stack of report cards, handed them out, and sent us home.

  The next day my mother packed the last three items on her list: toothbrush, hairbrush, a tin of Bubby’s pastries. The Camp Bakunin pickup spot was a side street in the St. Henri district, just south of downtown; from there a bus would take us to the campgrounds. I kissed Bubby goodbye and extracted from my mother a promise to translate my letters home into Yiddish. Bubby was happy for me, and she waved from the window as we set off.

  Lugging our new four-piece green nylon luggage set, my mother and I boarded a city bus. My mother grabbed the sideways seats up front, retrieved the address from her purse, and harassed the driver with continual reminders to let us off at the right stop. He finally turned around and asked her to be quiet. Fanya wasn’t offended—such little lambs these Canadians—but she mistrusted people in charge, even if they were little lambs. When we reached our stop, the driver suggested we leave by the back door, and as we struggled with our suitcases my mother called out for all the world to hear—wait wait mister don’t close don’t close—

  Sweaty and out of breath, we made our way towards the meeting place. There were large sections of Montreal I’d never seen, and I was enchanted by the little clapboard houses, with their skewed stairs and toy shutters, all happily sinking into decline. This was exactly what I wanted for myself, I thought. I wanted to live here, or at least know someone who did. The shutters and doors were cobalt blue, cherry red, sun yellow, or had
been left to weather, and the layers of peeling paint had faded into a montage of floating colours.

  The counsellors were late, and we all stood in awkward silence with our awkward parents. We were an odd lot. A heavily built boy whose eyes were nearly invisible behind the thick lenses of his glasses was singing “Yesterday” to an imaginary audience. He spread his arms in that old-fashioned Paul Anka way, a showy display of humble magnanimity. His friend, who seemed to be his mirror opposite—skinny, with a sharp, clever face—urged him on with a peculiar mixture of mockery and affection. A wisp of a girl dressed in black sat on the sidewalk reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Her twin sister straddled their navy aluminum trunk with a bemused expression on her face; for some reason, she was wearing a tiara and a superhero cape. Across the street from us, a frail boy held his mother’s hand and muttered advertisement slogans to himself: Try it, and see for yourself. A few extra pennies, a lot more value.

  My mother was no less conspicuous. When the bus arrived, she changed her mind and clung to my shirt, begging me not to go. It was too late. I hopped onto the bus and blew kisses through the open window as she wiped her eyes.

  Our counsellors stood at the front of the bus and introduced themselves. Just as I’d thought, they were hippies. You could tell by their long hair and extravagant hats, their bead necklaces and leather wristbands. Olga had drawn sunflowers under her round, earnest eyes; Bruno was nervous but kind; Sheldon had Arlo Guthrie hair and a Bob Dylan smile. Jean-Marc, bearded and headbanded, was the oldest (forty-two) and in charge—if anyone could be said to be in charge. Until recently he’d been Jonathan Markowitz, but he’d taken up the Québécois cause and had changed his name in an act of solidarity. Two more counsellors, Anthony and Mimi, had stayed behind to prepare snacks and keep an eye on things.

  I fell in love instantly; I think we all did. As soon as the introductions were over, Sheldon led us in song: Oh when the saints! Go marching in! Oh when the saints go marching in! Oh Lord, I want to be in that number. Yes, when the saints go marching in.

  By the time the bus pulled up in front of the camp, I was sure the saints had already marched in and transported me to heaven on earth. No one on the planet could possibly want to be anywhere but here. We climbed down and hauled our luggage towards the grounds.

  Camp Bakunin had taken over an abandoned campsite; a carved wooden arc supported by two posts welcomed us to Cedar Hills. The name rang a bell—girls from my school must have spent their summers here. But Cedar Hills had either folded or moved to another location. In its current state, the place had a museum look: pilgrim efforts in the wilderness. Since the plumbing was no longer functional, the cook would be bringing canisters of drinking water in from town. As for the call of nature—this, our counsellors assured us, was a precious opportunity for breaking down bourgeois barriers as we all tramped together into the forest, comrades in our common pursuit of bodily relief.

  Though Camp Bakunin had permission to use the grounds, we felt like conquerors revelling in the spoils of victory. The size of the camp contributed to the fantasy—Cedar Hills had been built to accommodate at least two hundred campers; we were a group of forty-seven, with twenty cabins and log houses at our disposal. During the first few days we came across assorted odds and ends: a Mickey Mouse watch in the art room, a lone sandal buried in the sand, a baby-blue disc on which tiny white contraceptive pills were arranged in a circle. These paleological remnants made me think of a world swept away by glaciers or drought; maybe we weren’t conquerors after all, but time travellers.

  We were free to move into any bunk house we liked. The Thus Spoke Zarathustra girl wandered off to the edges of camp and appropriated an isolated cabin for herself, the boys split up into two groups, and the remaining girls, including me, chose to congregate in the bunk house closest to the kitchen. We dumped our belongings on the saggy mattresses and made our way to a snack stand set up on the lawn. Leaning against the back of a chair was a large poster on which our counsellors had written: Welcome Campers! When we can no longer dream, we die.—Emma Goldman. Next to the poster, like ministering angels at the gates of paradise, Anthony and Mimi presided over the milk and cookies.

  Time for a break. I feel almost limp with fatigue, as if I’ve been climbing mountains. A long soak in the bath should help. A long soak with sweet-smelling, skin-soothing elixirs, followed by a steeping of my senses in forgetfulness, i.e., sleep.

  I’ll be back. The past, it turns out, exerts a supernal force of its own, compels me to continue.

  . . .

  The late November sun is bravely casting its pallid light. I’ve made myself a pot of spaghetti and answered two emails from students—hi miss, i can’t finish the paper by tuesday on account of a microeconomics exam / Hi miss, I really truly don’t feel very well … I gave them both a five-day extension.

  I was about to carry on with my story when the doorbell rang. I knew it was Mr. Jamal, my tenant, from his ringing style: a brief, timid buzz followed almost immediately by a longer one, in case the first didn’t go through. Mr. Jamal and his family live on the ground floor. I keep the middle flat of the triplex empty, for in my circles there are always transient women, drifting between affairs or countries, looking for a place to stay. My motive is not entirely altruistic—I don’t want anyone directly below me, running the washing machine when I want to sleep, sleeping when I want to listen to Franck’s Sonata for violin and piano.

  But I rent out the ground-floor apartment; for the past fourteen years, an Afghani family of indeterminate size has been living there. I never know, at any given time, how many people are actually staying in the flat. Relatives turn up, leave, come back; or maybe new branches keep arriving. Maybe the Jamals are a kind of depot, and newcomers stay until they find their own way or get into a fight and disperse—sometimes I hear angry shouts at the doorway.

  The core family consists, I think, of Mr. and Mrs. Jamal, a grandmother, and three or four boys. Mr. Jamal pays the rent punctiliously, in cash, on the first of every month. He hands me the envelope furtively, as if executing a dangerous or illegal transaction, and runs away with a guilty air. Maybe he’s afraid I’ll engage him in conversation; maybe he’s ashamed that his English is still so poor after fourteen years in Canada. His wife, Gharsani, is faring better. She’s a brisk, attractive woman in perpetual good spirits, even though she was a doctor in Afghanistan and now works behind a counter, pouring coffee into plastic cups.

  Financially, the rental is something of a disaster. I pay for heating and hot water, and since there are frequently large numbers of people bathing and washing clothes in the Jamal flat, the rent barely covers my bills. I never could muster the nerve, however, to raise it, even when I noticed the Jamals’ new van parked outside or the expensive electronic equipment making its way into their place—no doubt on the instalment plan. But my spinelessness doesn’t end there: too many comings and goings have taken their toll on the building, and every few months I have to call a plumber to extract a diaper that’s been accidentally flushed down the toilet or repair a faucet that was shut too assiduously, and if a window breaks, I’m the one who replaces it. On the other hand, Mr. Jamal’s jumpy efficiency comes in handy when the stairs and landing need to be cleared, especially after an overnight snowfall. I can sleep in without worrying about dereliction of duty; I know Mr. Jamal will be up early in the morning, shovelling away.

  I assumed when I trotted down the stairwell to my front door—the entrances to the middle and top flats are both on the first-floor landing—that the toilet had flooded again or a pipe was leaking, but Mr. Jamal had come to tell me that he and his family are moving back to Afghanistan. I think the creditors have finally caught up with him.

  I didn’t have a chance to ask when they’re leaving. I’ll need to fix the place up before I advertise for new tenants.

  This Plateau triplex is almost a stand-in for a partner, as shrines tend to be. I worked at creating this shelter from the storm by scavenging regularly through j
unk shops, church bazaars, even the occasional garage sale, in search of treasures: old French-Canadian furniture, hand-embroidered fabrics, sundry objets d’art and antique oddities—such as my nineteenth-century apple peeler, a G.M. Hopkins wonder of cogwheel, spring, clamp, and crank. My prized collection of Victorian illustrations, disinterred from discarded books, hang on the walls. The captions say it all: “Things are bad, but not hopeless,” remarked Dr Keith. / I was only a slip of a girl, badly dressed, and with no presence whatever. / She rose from her seat, and began to pace up and down the room.

  I’m also on the lookout, always, for slide projectors. I’m the only teacher in our Cégep who still uses slides, mostly because I enjoy handling the shiny, miniature squares of film, their shadowy colours hinting at the revelation that light and magnification will produce onscreen, but also because our PowerPoint equipment inevitably breaks down somewhere between The Turtle Dove (Sophie Anderson, 1857) and The Wounded Dove (Rebecca Solomon, 1866). One day the university’s antiquated slide projector will break as well, but I’m not worried—I have five backups stored in the empty flat. Projectors crop up fairly regularly at my haunts, next to the ancient round-keyed typewriters.

  But it isn’t only what I’ve brought into this flat that makes me feel safe here, it’s the house itself. These ornate red-brick triplexes, which lie at the foot of the great green mountain at the heart of our city, were built for the aspiring middle class of the early twentieth century; the owners would live on the ground floor and rent the upper flats. Remarkably, rents were low enough to attract impoverished Jews and other destitute immigrants. Rich and poor ended up sharing the same neighbourhood—not to mention the same hardwood floors, detailed oak panelling, stained glass, and high ceilings from which plaster angels look down with chubby benevolence.