Cricket in a Fist (22 page)

Only once had a face surprised Tamar entirely, had it abandoned its course like a train redirected onto a different track to avoid a wreck. But how, precisely, had her mother changed? Why, a month after the war ended, when Collette van Daam opened the bedroom door, joy and relief visible in her face, had Tamar felt the possibility of her imagined reunion recede forever? Her mother was much
thinner than she had been, her hair shorter and no longer smooth or stylish, and it was white at the temples. But what else? Her skin couldn't, surely, have turned grey. Esther smiled falteringly; her eyes were red and swollen, and she held her hand out to Tamar, pulled her close and leaned into her. There was no longed-for whiff of rosewater. Esther smelled stale, like something old. And though, in the months and years that followed, she put on weight and had her hair styled, even dying the white parts brown, though she took her lipstick from a drawer and smeared it on her lips, Esther did not get her old face back.

And Tamar had spoken of these things to Ginny, surely, if only in bursts, in sentences begun and never finished. Perhaps she had described her parents and the day trips they used to take, the three of them, to the beach north of Amsterdam, and the curve of her mother's cheeks, the smoothness of her mouth, dark with the deep red lipstick that was popular at the time. Tamar had told stories, had told Ginny about finding Esther in front of the mirror with that old lipstick in her hand, and how the colour refused to sit on her lips the way it used to, how significant this seemed, though it was only because the makeup was dried out. Had she told Ginny about Esther's nose, how she'd powdered it to cover the pores, and had she described the girlish curve of her mother's nostrils, seen from below? Ginny might well have understood what Tamar meant: between 1943 and 1945, the future of Esther's face was erased and replaced with another. Had Tamar been the one to tell her daughter that a soul can flee this world and leave a living body behind; had she given Ginny the idea to stubbornly insist she'd been knocked out of herself?

Certainly, Dr. Manning thought Ginny had picked this idea up somewhere, that she had mulled it over and held it close, and then, when her head hit the floor, allowed it to overtake her. Tamar hadn't even realized that psychiatrists were considered real doctors, that they had patients with actual injuries and illnesses in their care. She hadn't known hospitals had psychiatrists on staff until Dr. Jessup, the neurologist, introduced them to Dr. Manning, and explained
that he, a psychiatrist, would be taking over Ginny's care. Tamar had become accustomed to Dr. Jessup and trusted her, with her tidy, simple hairstyle, enviably long legs and intelligent, plain face.

The pains in Ginny's elbow that had her yelping at night loudly enough to wake Aga and Minnie — the doctors suggested quite clearly that she was making them up. Or, perhaps, was somehow imagining them. Tamar had told Dr. Jessup, privately, about Robert, how he'd grabbed for Ginny, ripping her sweater as she fell and that she'd broken her elbow on impact. She had never spoken of Robert's death, had never spoken of Robert at all, in front of Steven or the girls, but now Dr. Manning knew about it and brought it up.

“Do you remember that, Ginny, your father ripping your sweater?” Dr. Manning asked. Ginny didn't answer. She was sitting between Tamar and Steven, across the desk from the doctors, dressed in the bleach-stained blue track suit she'd adopted as her uniform.

“She was eleven,” Tamar said. “And she has never remembered . . . that.”

“This is the second serious accident you can't remember?” asked Dr. Manning.

“Ginny,” said Dr. Jessup, knowing full well that she wouldn't get an answer. “Would you say you have a history of recklessness and of hypochondria?” Tamar looked at Steven for help. She was betraying her daughter somehow, not explaining properly.

“Wait,” Steven said. “There is something wrong with her. We need to get her better. What are you saying? That's she's making the whole thing up? Look at her.”

And they all did. Tamar had finally persuaded Ginny to have her hair trimmed, so it was short and tidy and would have looked fine if it wasn't filthy. Her face was pale and slightly bloated. Though Ginny had lost weight with her newly acquired distaste for most foods other than steamed vegetables and rice, she had barely moved a muscle since the accident; she was so lethargic that Tamar felt sleepy just from being near. Ginny looked from face to face. Then she said loudly, in a satirical, sing-song tone, “Doctor, mother, husband, daughter.” Tamar braced herself for the hysterical laughter that usually followed moments of tension or absurdity, “pathological
laughter,” the doctors called it. But Ginny inhaled sharply and then stopped, her face falling as though some terribly serious insight had interrupted whatever had struck her as funny. Aga laughed out loud, briefly, at the comically concerned expression on Ginny's face, and then she, too, stopped abruptly, horrified.

“Sorry,” said Aga.

“Ginny,” Dr. Manning tried. “Steven tells me you've been writing quite a lot lately. At the kitchen table?”

“Writing quite a lot lately. At the kitchen table? Someone's always looking over my shoulder,” she said vaguely.

“Ginny,” said Dr. Manning. “Let's start meeting three times a week. Twice alone, and once with the rest of your family, all right?”

“I don't understand,” Tamar told Steven as he drove her home that day, down Smythe Road, with Aga and Ginny in the back seat. Minnie must have been with Steven's parents. “Aren't you a neurologist?”

“I'm a neuroscientist.”

“You study the brain.”

“I study the brain, yes. I observe how rats' brains respond when deprived of sunlight, primarily.”

“What a strange topic.” Tamar fell silent, watching the tightness in Steven's forehead. She had never truly taken notice of his personality, its nuances, and it came as a surprise to see he was suffering and not behaving altogether reasonably. She'd always thought Steven was entirely dependable. Even when Ginny had first met him at the university and he started phoning, coming by, Steven had struck Tamar as steady and gentle, intelligent and trust-inspiring. Tamar and Esther, calmly ignoring Ginny's insistence that she and Steven were “just friends,” wishfully discussed the simple, normal process occurring before them. Ginny had gone to school, attracted a nice man and become the subject of an old-fashioned courtship. Tamar and Esther had a vague and encouraging notion that Steven was a scientist, setting out on an orderly, impressive career that promised wealth and security. Even his parents, it turned out, were exactly the kind of people who would have produced a son like Steven seemed to be. Everything about them — their clothes, their furniture, their
belief system — was confidently solid and simple; like Steven, they were almost normal, but too intelligent and scruffy around the edges to bypass eccentricity. Sheila was always slightly overweight, affectionate and motherly, with a baffling inability to keep her greying brown hair from flying around her head like frazzled wire; Fred wore shirts and ties under sweaters, smelled of pipe tobacco and, when he finished a meal, always managed to leave his chair and the floor around it covered in crumbs. Ginny's engagement and marriage had been such a relief, like waking from a bad dream. Steven had won her over after all, despite the rubbish that happened in between. Asher could be put aside as an unfortunate mishap attributable to the folly of youth.

But as Steven drove them home from the hospital that day, Tamar saw that he had changed, that he was sick and tired of the whole thing and could no longer be taken for granted; he was elsewhere, lost in the kind of thoughts that would amount, if he voiced them, to betrayal. Still, she would be shocked, a year later, about his other woman, his engagement. So soon after Ginny left. Tamar would never have thought Steven was complicated enough to have an affair. An affair requires passion, involves heartache and conflict and, surely, the agony of loving, for some period of overlap, two people, and having to choose between them. Tamar hadn't realized Steven was capable of the necessary emotional agitation or the deceit. Robert never had affairs, surely. Whatever he had, they weren't affairs.

When Ginny was long gone, Tamar would learn that Steven had been keeping a mistress all along. Even as they met Dr. Manning, he'd had this woman, this secret. Aga, when she lived with Tamar during the year before she moved to Toronto, would recount the wedding vows, how the new wife described falling in love with Steven in the arboretum in early autumn, and described how she dared to kiss him for the first time. “Early autumn,” Aga stressed. “Early autumn, Tam-Tam. Before Mama's accident. How could I live in the same house as them, knowing that?”

And Tamar would wonder if Robert, too, had ever professed love, if another woman had waited, agonized, for him to end his sexless
marriage, the details of which he had recounted, and marry her instead. Tamar would wonder if Steven had phoned this mistress, this Lara, after that first session with Dr. Manning, if he had confided in her, admitting, “I don't know how long this will continue.” If he said, at the end of the conversation, “I love only you.”

The sessions with Dr. Manning had consisted entirely of talking, and Ginny observed the proceedings in a silence that seemed sometimes placid, sometimes obstinate. Tamar, Steven and the girls would review the mundane events of Ginny's week, Dr. Manning asking Ginny how she enjoyed certain meals or events or even what she thought of particular television shows.

“It was fine,” Ginny might say, if she was feeling particularly talkative. “It kept my attention, I guess.”

“Let's rebuild her life,” Dr. Manning told Tamar and Steven. “Rebuild her memories around her and let her walk back into them when she's ready. I think she does remember, but she's turned off her opinions about all these things. This suggests to me that she's been hurt. We need to make her feel safe and cared for.”

Steven recounted a family trip to Toronto. When four-year-old Aga got lost in the museum and he found her huddled in a dinosaur display. He described a Christmas party at which one of his professors had collapsed, drunk, across Ginny's lap. He talked about the night Minnie was born. As Steven spoke, Tamar thought of all the things she knew about Steven that he didn't know she knew. She pictured him waiting in a rundown bar the night before Asher Acker left for Israel; she imagined Steven standing at a window with Ginny, late at night, a wine glass in his hand, pointing out his nude neighbours across the alley.

For months, these meetings with Dr. Manning went on. And Ginny changed; she did change. She spoke in longer sentences and was less lethargic. She stopped staring out her kitchen window all day, and she lost weight. So much weight. Aga said Ginny did pushups and sit-ups in her bedroom and read piles of library books. Aga
discovered, by snooping when Ginny was out, that most of these were autobiographies written by the likes of seventeenth-century nuns. Then Ginny got a lock for her bedroom door. And as Ginny showed more signs of life, of sanity and purpose, Dr. Manning had Steven, Tamar and Aga frenziedly narrating her life, trying to steer her back instead of away.

“Do you remember that imaginary friend you had, Ginny?” Tamar said during a session in that winter. “My God, it's been a long time since I thought about that. She insisted she had a sister,” Tamar told Dr. Manning. “What was her name — I can't remember.” Ginny seemed at least to be listening, if not with particular interest. She was so very thin by then, her collarbone sharply defined above the neckline of her sweatshirt. The whole outfit was ridiculously baggy, several sizes too big, and her hair was raggedy again, growing out into what Aga called a mullet.

“She was very long and very thin, this sister, and could be folded and kept in a pocket. One time, we were crossing Laurier Street during rush hour, Ginny and I. She must have been four or five.” Dr. Manning raised his eyebrows meaningfully, and Tamar realized she was doing it again — talking about her daughter in the third person. “You must have been four or five, Ginny,” she corrected herself. “The traffic was just terrible, and when we finally got across the road, you started crying and carrying on, insisting that Morgan — that was her name — had fallen from your pocket and was stuck on the other side. You absolutely insisted. This Morgan was a brave soul who'd defeated all manner of enemies, but she was afraid to cross the busy street by herself.”

Aga laughed too loudly, as people do when attempting to seem natural around someone insane or very old. “What did you do, Tam-Tam?”

“I took your mother back across. She was throwing a tantrum. A real tantrum. She insisted I take the imaginary character firmly by the hand.” Tamar demonstrated, holding out her fist.

“What was she like? Where did the name Morgan come from?” Dr. Manning addressed these questions to Ginny, but Tamar answered.

“Oh, Ginny was so little. Could she remember something from when she was so small?”

“You'd be surprised,” Dr. Manning said.

“Morgan was, like I said, very, very thin. She had black hair, right, Ginny? And she was extremely clever. A doctor and a circus performer, Ginny claimed.” Aga laughed again, at a more normal volume this time. “Morgan le Fay was Ginny's favourite character in those King Arthur books,” Tamar explained. “She loved those books. King Arthur and his knights. You know them? Strange books for a little girl, really.” Robert used to read those stories to Ginny, and somehow, Tamar was sure, everyone in the room knew this, was waiting for her to say it. “Oh, and she was an orphan. Morgan was. A wayward waif, Ginny used to say. She must have heard that phrase from — somewhere. She was full of big words. Such a clever girl. Like Aga is.”

Dr. Manning had told her that she should try to talk about Ginny's father. Those King Arthur books would be a good memory, surely. That's what Steven was doing — recounting good times, telling stories only of the sparkling moments when everything had seemed perfectly all right. Aga and Steven both seemed to recall long-ago conversations and events in such detail. Aga, especially, claimed to know precisely what was said, the words Ginny had used, for example when she first saw the new apartment downtown, or when Aga had been sick at preschool. Tamar looked at Dr. Manning's narrow face and looked away, a humiliating, infuriating memory seizing her body with the sickening assault of a bad smell. She didn't know how she'd come to be standing in the hallway between her bedroom and her mother's, a laundry basket at her feet, Robert kneeling with his face against her waist, drooling and crying into her clothes. She only remembered the silent struggle as she tried to get his hands out of her skirt, the taste of panic and disgust in her mouth, perspiration under her arms and prickling the palms of her hands. How old had she been? How old was Ginny, and where was she? Esther, certainly, had been in the kitchen nearby, cooking. The smell of marjoram and savory was in the air.