Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Read online

  “Here, why don’t you take these?” Rosie handed me three books, their ripped spines curling at the ends. She gathered another three or four for herself. “You’ll also need a special notebook. I think I have one at home.”

  “How is it special?”

  “It has the alphabet on the back, and thin sort of lines. Thanks, Mr. Lewis. Sorry we bothered you.”

  Mr. Lewis locked the door and returned to his janitorial duties.

  “Let’s bring these to your place,” she suggested. “Mummy will drive us.”

  Carrying our loot, we headed back to Rosie’s. We set the books down on the hood of Mrs. Michaeli’s car, and I watched over them while Rosie went in to fetch her mother and pick up the special notebook.

  Mrs. Michaeli’s car smelled of lilac and Elmer’s glue and menthol cigarettes. I’d only been in a car a few times, when parents drove me home from birthday parties, but I settled into the back seat as if I’d been chauffeured all my life. Rosie described our small excursion for her mother, made it sound funny and quaint. She did it even though she knew it wouldn’t help. Rosie’s fatalistic generosity was not very different, in the end, from my acts of evasion.

  Using the key my mother gave me, I opened the door to our flat, and Bubby crept towards us like the tide.

  “Hello, there,” Rosie said.

  It didn’t matter, after all, what Rosie encountered in my house, not only because her home was as odd as mine, or because she wouldn’t hold anything against me. It turned out that I’d been wrong about friends; I’d always assumed that you started off by inviting someone over, and out of that gesture a friendship evolved. But it wasn’t like that. Once you had a friend, that person was part of your life and everything in it.

  I bent down to receive Bubby’s whiskery homecoming kiss. “This is Rosie,” I said. “I met her today.”

  I led Rosie to my bedroom. Bubby, as always, had tidied up. Her tidying was efficient if unpredictable: today my navy loafers were arranged end to end on the windowsill, with my hairbrush tucked inside one of them.

  We sat on the bed and I spread the books out on the blue-and-purple bedspread. “Your eyes remind me of a painting I like,” I said. “I’ll take the book out of the library and show you.”

  “You know so much. What a cosy room!” Rosie said. “I can see how much your mother loves you.”

  I ran my fingers along the books—my gateway to Eden. The smallest one was a slim blue hardback, almost as thin as the notebook, with thick, shiny pages. I’d never come across such sumptuous paper in a book, paper that made you want to turn the pages just so you could handle it. I stared at the first page: bold, flame-tipped letters seemed to be reaching up to a drawing of lightning and dark clouds.

  “That’s Torah,” Rosie explained, “but for grade one. That’s why the print is so big. Torah’s just the first part. Then come the Prophets and the Writings. It’s called Tanakh, when it’s all together. Here’s the Tanakh we used this year.”

  I opened the heavy book she handed me. Here the flame-tipped letters were surrounded by squiggly marks so minute they resembled the imprints of insects.

  Rosie read my mind. “The small print is Rashi. You don’t need to know that.”

  “I’ll manage,” I said, though I had no idea how. Six years in one summer—it seemed impossible. The script looked impenetrable, more like a cryptogram than a language.

  “You read from right to left. The dots are the vowels. Imagine thousands of years ago, when they believed in golden calves and sacrificing children. Here, I’ll show you how it works.”

  What I really wanted to do was touch her braids.

  Rosie went through the alphabet on the back of the notebook and explained the final forms of some of the letters.

  “I’ll practise later,” I said. Tonight, in bed, I would begin. My stomach went skidding at the thought, and though I’d never experienced that sort of sensation, I recognized it as sexual excitement.

  There was a small crash as my mother, on cue as always, flung open the front door. Her voice, followed by the scent of Ben Hur perfume, filled the house. She’d fought her way through another day, warded off the Cyclops, dropped by Hades.

  —mamaleh mamaleh where are you are you here—

  I slammed my bedroom door shut. Rosie was shocked. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Oh, all right.” I opened the door and let my mother in.

  —who who is this hello hello yes I know you—

  She stopped midway, swayed like a great ship, her face contracted, her bosom expanded. She’d noticed the books.

  “Hello, Mrs. Levitsky. These books are from my school, Eden. Maya says she’d like to go there next year—what do you think?”

  —what’s that Eden what—

  “Sorry, we should have asked you first.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to her, Rosie,” I moaned. “She’s always like this. It doesn’t mean anything. Mom, leave us alone, please. This is Hebrew—Hebrew, see?” I opened one of the books and, impersonating Reveen the Impossibilist, I swung it back and forth in front of her eyes. “See … Hebrew … thousands of years old … right to left…”

  —I know Hebrew I know Hebrew don’t show me avinu malkenu adon olam ha ha ha—

  “You know Hebrew?” I asked. I’d thought that Fanya had by now ransacked every last corner of her remorseless memory. Hebrew, I was fairly certain, had never come up.

  —the one the one with the father and the leg they sawed off—

  “Don’t!” Placing my hands on my mother’s shoulders, I steered her gently out of the room. I shut the door firmly after her and rolled my eyes. “My mother and her crazy stories.”

  “Poor thing. Was she in Auschwitz?”

  “Oh, who knows where she was! It’s all tangled up there in what she calls her brain.”

  “Never mind, don’t feel bad. I have to go help Mummy make supper, and after that I have a date with this guy, Freddy. But come over tomorrow morning, can you? Maybe you can stay all day, if your mother doesn’t mind. There’s a party in the evening.”

  “Party?”

  “Yes, Mummy and Daddy spoil me. We have a party every Saturday night, it’s fun. We dance, we play games…”

  “What sort of games?”

  “You know, charades, stuff like that.”

  “I won’t know anyone.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll introduce you to all my friends. You’ll like Sheila—I mean, Dominique, that’s her new name—she’s smart like you. And Dvora, everyone likes her.”

  “Is Freddy your boyfriend?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer. And yet I wasn’t exactly jealous. What I already had—Rosie in my life—was a bounty for which I could only be grateful. But there was more to it: Rosie’s availability was a part of who she was, and yielding to it was a way of having her.

  “Not really … he wants to be. He wants to be the only person I date. Poor Freddy!”

  “He shouldn’t be so possessive, maybe,” I ventured.

  “I can tell we’re going to be best friends. Even though you’re ten times smarter than me.”

  “I’m not. I’m really not.”

  “Next time I’ll tell you more about myself. Will you tell me?” she asked generously.

  “I don’t have any secrets,” I replied, downcast.

  “You’re a riot.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a joke,” I said. “I really do wish I had some secrets, and you were the only one who knew them … I do have something nice I can show you, though. It’s not exactly a secret, but we keep it in a drawer.”

  Desperation had given me an idea, and with the idea came a sweet surge of anticipation. My mother had a treasured cashmere sweater with pearl buttons which she kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. It was pale blue, though the usual terms—cloud blue, pastel blue—fail to capture the quality of its colour; it was the sort of colour that, in combination with the cashmere, the pearl buttons, and the simple cut, m
ade you wonder how a piece of clothing could convey such pure innocence. It was nearly unbearable, that innocence, that purity. The story that went with the sweater was as unbearable: when my mother returned home after the war, she found her old apartment empty, not a curtain left, not even a broom, and as she sat on the steps and wept, the man who lived next door showed up with a parcel, left for her by her mother. Inside was the sweater. More likely that he stole it and repented, my mother added with a snort. And who knew what else the neighbours had in their cupboards! Candlesticks, silverware, lace tablecloths that had taken months to sew, hundreds of books—expensive, leather-bound volumes—and, worst of all, her father’s entire collection of photographs. The sweater looked bereft even without this Aladdin’s story of lost fortune, and I often paid it a visit in the dresser drawer. I’d take it out for an airing, lay it on my mother’s white chenille bedspread, press my cheek against the cashmere, then carefully refold it.

  Signalling to Rosie not to make a sound, I led the way to my mother’s bedroom and shut the door behind us. Luckily Mère Levitsky was busy in the kitchen and didn’t see us creeping to her room; it would have ruined everything, had she swept down on us with her account of our solitary family heirloom.

  I lifted the sweater from the drawer, held it against my torso, and told Rosie the story of the kind-hearted, or repentant, neighbour.

  “They weren’t taken away together?” Rosie asked. “Your mother and her mother?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. My mother was at a friend’s house or something…”

  “It’s fabulous,” Rosie said.

  “Here, try it on. It’s too small for me, but it would fit you.”

  “Oh, no! I don’t think your mother would want that. Anyhow, I really have to go. I have to help Mummy and Daddy … Pretend I died!” And before I had a chance to ask her what she meant, she fell down to the floor and lay there limp and motionless in the nook formed by the two beds.

  I bent down and whimpered, “Rosie, Rosie, my only friend, how could you leave me like this?”

  She lifted a swan-ballerina’s arm.

  “She’s alive!” I cried. “Call the doctor!”

  “There are no doctors in this place,” she rasped. Then she laughed and stood up. “You understand things,” she said.

  “Not really. But I like you.”

  “I’m sorry I have to go. Will you come over tomorrow?”

  “When’s the earliest I can come?”

  “I usually sleep in until ten or eleven. But don’t worry—even if I’m asleep, Mummy and Daddy are always up early. They’ll be happy to see you.”

  “I’ll walk you to the bus,” I said. “I could ride back with you, to keep you company.”

  “And then I’ll have to come back with you! We could do that all day. Really, I don’t mind. I like buses.”

  “Okay, I’ll just wait with you.”

  We walked to the bus stop and waited together in silence. There was nothing more to say. We both knew that Rosie’s benevolence was an equal match to my desire, and that this would be the basis of our friendship. I would give her my need and in return she would give me as much as she could of herself. And if she was enlisting me for reasons of her own, reasons that had to do with her parents, that was fine with me.

  The bus arrived and took her away from me. I walked home slowly. Alone in my room, tucked in bed, I let the day’s pleasures billow like a sail in warm wind. I had a friend. This was what it was like to have a friend, a friend for life. Rosie’s monastic house, the abandoned school, Rosie on my flowered bedspread: with these things in my life, nothing but their disappearance could ever make me unhappy again.

  Rosie kept her promise. She drew me into her life, introduced me to everyone she knew. “This is Maya, my new friend. She wants to go to Eden next year, so she’s going to learn everything in one summer. She’s really brainy.”

  “I’m not—I practically flunked out,” I said, but no one believed me.

  The designated centre of the world that summer was the local swimming pool. DJ Doug Pringle with his sexy English accent on the radio, lifeguards with sun-bleached hair, wet feet running on wet cement. It was noisy and crowded, but when Rosie emerged from the dark, dank locker rooms, currents of excitement travelled through the pool crowd. She was beautiful even in her striped navy and zinc-yellow bathing suit, beautiful even in the rubber bathing caps we were all forced to wear. But she was unimpressed by the impression she made, and thought we were only humouring her.

  It would have caused my mother no end of anxiety had I removed one of our colour-coordinated bath towels from the house, especially for a venture as dubious as public swimming. With a handful of coins from the money jar in the linen closet, I bought a beach towel at Woolworth’s. My mother was convinced that tuberculosis lay in wait for me at the pool: I’d end up spending half my life at a sanatorium. When I came home, she took the towel—on which Rosie had knelt as she spread suntan lotion on my back, on which I had lain as I delved into the mysteries of Hebrew vocalization—and boiled it for several hours in the tub. The oversized image of a sailboat soon faded into a masterpiece of abstract art.

  My notion of Judaism up to then had been foggy. At our place, as in a futuristic story in which the last Jew clings irrationally to the single surviving remnant of a forgotten past, we had an aquamarine menorah with a gold Star of David etched in front. Bubby had brought it with her when she came to us, and had set it prominently on the television cabinet. It remained there for the next few days, expanding under my mother’s glare. At last, unable to bear its presence any longer, she picked it up by the stem and removed it to a more secluded location, between the toaster and the sugar tin.

  Now, as Jeff and Freddy and Kris strolled over and settled themselves along the perimeters of Rosie’s towel, I read about the beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens (plural) and the earth (feminine) and the earth was (feminine form of the verb) chaos, and darkness was (implied verb) upon the void. In Hebrew, it rhymed, alliterated, pulsed. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. A language of abbreviations, blunt and evasive at the same time. The words were everything and nothing.

  I worked hard, though there were also days when my brain seemed to be waterlogged. If Rosie were a Catholic, I’d be studying The Lives of the Saints—it was all the same to me. But what exactly was Judaism? Clearly it was more than Adam and Eve in the garden, Cain and Abel outside it. I had no one to ask. The Michaelis, like my mother, were removed from the more tangible aspects of Jewish life, and my questions were too vague for my new pool friends. I found a dusty one-volume Jewish encyclopedia at the Atwater Library which I was allowed to check out, and I began to read entries at random. A spiral of festivals and significant food entered my consciousness, and I filled several Hilroy notebooks with complex stories involving miracles and violent death, all of it as foreign as the fat alabaster Buddhas in Mr. Wong’s gift shop. I read until late at night, but no coherent picture emerged, and when I put away the encyclopedia and closed my eyes, I had visions of the disparate pieces falling in slow-motion through the air, a shower of plagues and horseradish.

  Dvora and Sheila/Dominique came to the pool nearly every day. Yes, Sheila—my former bunkmate! Her memories of Camp Bakunin were different from mine: “What a pretentious assortment of neurotics,” she said, referring to the counsellors. If she remembered that I’d washed her underwear, she didn’t let on.

  Along with her new name, Sheila had adopted a particular style of hippie cool—sombre, skeptical, sophisticated. I rarely saw her smile, though her comments were often amusing. She wore a long black skirt and stayed away from the water; she said she was hydrophobic, but the real reason, I discovered, was her conviction that kids were peeing in the pool. “You’d have to put a gun to my head to make me go into that piss-pot,” she confided. She couldn’t bear direct sunlight and never stretched out to tan like the rest of us. “I must be part-vampire,” she liked to say.

  Sheila—I cou
ld never think of her as Dominique—occupied herself in other ways. In a small black notebook she jotted ideas for use in a future film or novel. She also knew how to crochet. “I crochet because I’m high-strung and compulsive,” she said, her arched eyebrows arching even higher. She sold doilies and tablecloths to her parents’ friends, and she’d buy us all pepperoni pizza with the money she made, not because she liked pepperoni, but because she wanted to prove that God didn’t care what anyone ate. “Have a kid in its mother’s milk,” she’d say wryly as she handed us slices. I had read about dietary restrictions in the Jewish encyclopedia, but the article hadn’t mentioned that decisions about which ones to follow depended on whether you were Very Strict Orthodox, Strict Orthodox, Religious But Not That Strict or Not Religious. Do not eat a kid in its mother’s milk: a moving directive, thin and exotic, almost a plea.

  One day, Sheila gave me a seashell shawl she’d been working on. “I’ll keep this forever,” I said, embarrassing her. “Don’t exaggerate,” she chided me in her usual sardonic drawl. But in fact, I still have Sheila’s shawl; I’ve spread it over my DVD player. Study in Metal and Lace, by M.L.

  In spite of her cultivated nonchalance, Sheila’s life was hard. She could never stay at the pool for more than an hour or two because she had three younger siblings to look after. Her parents worked long hours at a store, six days a week, and Sheila helped with the cooking and childcare. I offered to lend a hand—we all did—but she put us off. “I like being captain of the ship,” she said. Possibly she didn’t want us to see the chaos in her home; there were rumours of a cramped, squalid apartment, with diapers soaking in pails.

  Dvora in her ruffled bathing suit was round and bosomy; the ruffles matched her Little Lulu curls, which bounced like Slinkies when she moved. An expert on the Top 40, she brought her transistor radio to the pool and always knew who was singing and for how long they’d been on the chart. A flyer from the local radio station helped her keep track, and she ticked off the songs as they came on: “Mrs. Robinson,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Angel of the Morning.” Between hits she furtively handed us small, individually wrapped toffees she’d snuck past the guards. Sheila broke pool rules as well: we weren’t allowed to bring furniture with us, but Sheila sat on her own portable lawn chair. She told the lifeguards that she’d had polio as a child and that her back was damaged. I doubt they believed her (we’d all been vaccinated against polio), but it was easier to let Sheila be. Her Madonna eyes and pale oval face, partly hidden by stray strands of hair, discouraged confrontation.