Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Page 6

  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.

  It was all over now. The ageless building, with its embedded odour of old salami, decaying peanuts, and wet wool, would be gone from my life for good. Miss Kenny, my homeroom teacher, returned my smile; teachers were always in a forgiving mood on the last day of school. Giddy with relief, I left the classroom and began emptying my locker. Goodbye, Coronation! I tossed my report card into the garbage, along with the empty soda cracker boxes, broken protractors and leaky pens, and ran outside. I waved to the girls who had tolerated me, waved to Neil Charles, the boy who liked me. As usual, he looked away, embarrassed.

  And then I realized I’d forgotten my house key.

  I had no choice but to make my way to the Sparkly and Shine Dry Cleaners, where my mother, keeper of the spare key, worked.

  The sun was a summer sun, finally reliable after indecisive springtime spurts, and the sky was a splendid blue. I decided to walk the entire way, sixteen blocks. I wish I still had the dress I wore that day: thin grey-and-white stripes on soft, crinkly cotton, black pea-shaped buttons all the way down the front. The dress had come with a bright red patent-leather belt and matching purse, lingering remnants of the Doris Day look. I gave the purse to my mother: “Just right for you,” I said ambiguously. But the belt I kept—I liked its coy puerility.

  My new white sandals clicked on the pavement. I fell into a reverie in which it seemed to me that the clicks were linked by an invisible mechanism to the sun, and the wild buttercups scattered on patches of creased grass were bits of liquid sun that had fallen to Earth. With their impossibly deep glow, the buttercup petals were as beautiful, as thrilling, as any work of human art. If only I could do more than pluck one and stare at it.

  The Sparkly and Shine Dry Cleaners was the only successful enterprise in a row of small shops. Bambi Children’s Apparel promised Quality Clothing for Boys and Girls; a sample of their goods was displayed on two child mannequins that must have been rescued from a Twilight Zone episode. A nameless store sold footwear for the entire family: red high-heels for women, black party shoes for girls, brown-and-white men’s loafers, tiny white baby shoes speckled with holes. Dusty and usually empty, these stores were unbearably depressing. If only I were rich, I thought, I’d go in and buy everything.

  I slipped the buttercup into my suede shoulder bag and entered the Sparkly and Shine Dry Cleaners. Mr. Hirshfeld, the owner of the shop and originator of its lopsided name, had apparently not grasped the intricacies of English grammar—or any other grammar, as far as I could tell. Trapped in an inexhaustible, throttling rage, Mr. Hirshfeld was never heard to utter human sounds. Instead, he barked at anyone who came near.

  Nevertheless, business thrived. Mr. Hirshfeld was multilingual; he could bark in several languages. His customers brought him their droopy clothes and Mr. Hirshfeld, who knew how things were done in Europe, silently swept the disgraced items out of sight. And returned them the following day, all shiny and clean, as promised.

  Generally I avoided Mr. Hirshfeld, who was, I felt, particularly ill-disposed towards me, but now I entered his store without a second thought. Even seeing my mother, with her damp forehead and solid mountain of curls, working away at her sewing machine amidst the heat and steam and barking, deflecting compassion by unleashing her catalogue of persecutions—even seeing Fanya didn’t ruin my mood.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked up and flagged me with a fluster of arms—mamaleh mamaleh my only child my heart my life—

  “I need the key!” I finally managed to interject. “Key!”

  —ai ai ai the key I told you I told you—

  She reached for her black alligator purse and snapped open the big bronze buckle. The small red purse I’d given her was for going out in the evening to play cards. Mr. Hirshfeld was already barking at us, he wanted her to ge
t back to work. My mother dismissed him with a truculent guffaw.

  —to work to work he is the whip I am the horse—

  Her perfumed chin wobbled as she laughed at her joke. Canadians, the little lambs, didn’t frighten my mother. Like my teachers, like bus drivers, Mr. Hirshfeld could do us no harm—that’s what it came down to. There was trickery everywhere: carpet cleaners damaged her carpets, the makers of cereal boxes deceived her with air, but they had no clout, and this safety catch gave my mother courage. With her pink nail polish and fishnet stockings held up by fat garter clips, she was armed to the teeth.

  —he is the whip I am the donkey—

  My mother laughed, Mr. Hirshfeld barked, I shouted “Key!”—it could have been an avant-garde performance piece—and in walked Rosie.

  In walked Rosie, lost inside a cloud of white nylon curtains, the kind that smelled of rust and made a small zed sound when you rubbed one fold against the other. The kind you hid behind when you were waiting to be carried off by Harry Belafonte.

  She unloaded the curtains on the counter and Mr. Hirshfeld barked, “Curtain! Two-ninety-nine!” Then, re-evaluating as he tugged at the fabric and found more than he’d anticipated, “Three-ninety-nine! Tuesday!” He took hold of the curtains in his strong arms: Mr. Hirshfeld and his bodiless bride.

  “Hi.” Rosie smiled. “I’m Rosie Michaeli. Are you Mrs. Levitsky’s daughter?”

  Hypnotized, I nodded. Not that I minded owning up, but right now any mention of my mother seemed intrusive. Luckily, she had returned to her machine at the back of the shop, where the suffocating heat enveloped her like a malevolent balloon.

  “Maya, right? Your mother’s talked about you. Do you want to come over?”

  Come over. The words dislodged me, as though an enormous celestial map were spread out before me, a map sprinkled with shooting stars and new planets and dotted lines. Come Over would be the name of the bridge that led there.

  Two black braids, large dark eyes, black eyebrows, heartbreaking mouth. Skin that glowed like the skin of red-cheeked children in coloured frontispiece illustrations, carefully preserved under a sheet of onion paper. Ted and Ellen flew downhill in the sled.

  I saw at once—anyone could see—that Rosie was a hybrid: beauty queen and do-gooder. I had thought that popularity and charity were incompatible; the leading girls in elementary school were shrewd, vigilant, and deliberately coarse, and their good looks had more to do with authority and a sense of privilege than with appearance. They sucked in available rewards like plants curling towards light, and their occasional handouts were self-serving. Rosie, for all her glamour, was on the alert for opportunities to rescue—not conspicuously but incidentally. It made no difference to me, knowing that I was only another hapless delegate of need. I didn’t mind that Rosie was indiscriminate in her invitations. I smiled and nodded.

  And yet I was filled with grief. In the beginning of all love there is grief, because at that moment you’re closest to the ghost of parting. You know how easily it could all slip away, how easily it could evaporate into eternal, never-to-be-consummated longing. “Sure,” I said.

  “Great. I live on Coolbrook—we just have to take the 161 to Decarie, and we can walk from there. It’s such a nice day.”

  “I walked all the way from Victoria,” I said. “It didn’t even take that long.”

  “We can start walking, and then if we see the bus, we’ll run for it … I love your dress. And I love your hair! It must have taken you years to grow it that long.”

  “I’m thinking of cutting it all off.”

  “Oh no, please don’t ever cut it!”

  “All right,” I said, secretly vowing to obey her request. A vow would bind us.

  “We always bring our things here. Your mother’s really good. She fixes stuff for us all the time.”

  “Her mother was a dressmaker too. I guess it runs in the genes.”

  “Does she make you dresses and things?”

  “She tries. I don’t always like what she makes.”

  “You’re lucky for that, at least,” she said, divining it all: Maya and Mrs. Levitsky, a tense and tipsy acrobatic act.

  Though I was a head taller than Rosie, we fell easily into step: I was a slow, lackadaisical walker, and Rosie was light and quick, so it evened out. She was wearing a navy blue skirt, an ironed white blouse, black penny loafers. There was an alluring inevitability about this Spartan outfit, like the ruby flash on the wings of a blackbird, or the immortalized gown of the cloak-bearer in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Later, when I had a chance, I would casually touch the navy skirt, feel the cotton fabric for myself.

  “What school do you go to?” I asked Rosie.

  “Eden. Well, Mei-Eden really. We call it Eden for short. It’s a Hebrew school—my father teaches music there.” She pronounced Eden so it rhymed with heaven.

  “Like Paradise? Adam and Eve?”

  “Don’t get the wrong idea! It’s just a dumb old school. You’re so tall—how old are you?”

  “Thirteen and a half. What about you?” I asked.

  “I’m fourteen, but I just finished grade seven, same as you. I missed a lot of school in grade five, so I had to repeat.”

  “How come you missed school?”

  “Daddy was sick—I had to help out.”

  “I almost had to repeat too. Not because I was away, though. I just got bad marks.”

  “What are you doing this summer?”

  “I wanted to go back to the camp I went to last year, Camp Bakunin. I loved it there—but it doesn’t exist any more. So I’m just staying in the city.”

  “Me too. I can’t leave Mummy and Daddy.”

  “Where will you go to high school?” I asked her, trying to conceal the urgency of the question.

  “Same place, Eden. They have a high school too. Daddy teaches grades one to five. He’s the music teacher.”

  “Could I go to Eden?” I pronounced the word the way she had.

  “But you’d have to know everything they’ve taught us up to now! You know, Hebrew and Tanakh and all that.”

  “What’s Tanakh?” I asked, struggling with the third consonant.

  “Oh, Bible and stuff.”

  “I could catch up this summer.”

  “Well, it would be hard in one summer … I’ll ask Daddy. I’ll bet if you just learn Hebrew it’ll be enough.”

  Because she assumed responsibility for everyone, Rosie didn’t sound like a teenager, or even an ordinary adult. She roped you in with her solicitude, and when she spoke, her intrepid, cheerful tone and careful constructions made me think of a tourist guide in a foreign city. Here is the canal, where Vittorio de Lima nearly drowned in 1782. Please watch your steps, everyone, as we board the gondola.

  We caught the bus at Pratt Park and sat together on a double seat. Rosie’s arm touched mine, white skin against freckled, as the bus bumped along. “That was my school,” I said when we passed Coronation. “I’m glad I don’t ever have to go back.”

  “I heard bad kids go there,” Rosie said, worried for me.

  “I was one of them,” I assured her, and we both laughed. It was an intimate, conspiratorial laugh, the kind that excludes the rest of the world. Oh, bliss!

  “Here’s our stop,” Rosie said, and for a second or two my heart pounded as if I’d been running—the body’s involuntary passion alert. We crossed the Decarie expressway, and even the concrete overload and the blare of cars zooming below us grew softer in the aura of anticipated pleasures.

  Coolbrook. You know how it is, with love—all at once, the mundane, arbitrary details of the beloved’s life arouse every emotion you’ve ever felt or will feel, and a street name you hardly noticed before will never be the same. There were duplexes here too, but instead of yellow or white imitation-brick exteriors glued onto cube frames, the houses on Rosie’s street were old, heavy, built of red bricks or coarse grey limestone set in irregular mosaic patterns, and they had overhanging roofs and charming little e
ntranceways.

  Rosie lived on the ground floor, even though her parents were tenants. Owners usually took the bottom units, renting the upstairs to poorer families like us—I’m not sure why. Maybe the lower flats were favoured because they came with a basement, or (this was before the fitness craze) because there weren’t stairs to climb. Living downstairs meant less income from rent, but in this high-strung community of refugees and war survivors, esteem and comfort were the precious commodities.

  My mother, as usual, brought her own unique perspective to the subject and preferred living upstairs: she was convinced that if robbers or murderers came to the building, they’d be much more likely to maraud the lower units. There would have been continual clashes between my mother and any landlord unlucky enough to be saddled with her. By a stroke of good fortune, however, the owners of our duplex had migrated to Florida. They left the building in the care of their nephew, a law student who strongly resembled a turtle. His duties were to collect the rent and keep an eye on the property. Instead, he had developed ingenious strategies for avoiding my mother.

  “We live on the ground floor because stairs are hard for Daddy,” Rosie explained. “Our landlord’s really strange. He takes cold baths, and he looks through our garbage. And every three days he tries to raise the rent.”

  “What’s he looking for, in the garbage?”

  “He thinks maybe we threw out something useful. The whole basement is full of his junk. Poor guy.”

  Rosie opened the tall arched—arched!—door, and I followed her in.

  This was the house my giant ancestor lived in. Or else I’d crossed the ocean and reached Brobdingnag. “Out of sight,” I said. “Literally. You can’t tell from the outside how big it is—like one of those optical illusions.”

  “I know,” Rosie said. “Daddy can’t bear small spaces, he has a thing. We used to live in a house on St. Hubert, but it was too noisy.”

  Oddly, apart from its size, the apartment was as insipid as ours; the same plywood doors, aluminum windows, flecked linoleum, dismal wall-to-wall carpets. I imagined the draftsman going about business as usual, intending to write 9’ on the blueprint and accidentally adding a digit, or maybe one night someone got fed up and decided to try something new: space, more and more space.