Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (13 page)

In the lazy haze of “Summertime Blues” and hidden toffees and the sunny chlorinated smell of the pool’s cement floor, we didn’t notice a gang of delinquents heading our way—a fox-faced girl and three or four boys with fuzzy moustaches and bleary eyes. The girl’s name was Belinda, and I remember that her blonde hair was ragged with split ends, and it seemed to me at the time that this defiant neglect coincided with something lank and ragged about her bullying.

Usually they stayed away from us, but Rosie’s popularity must have threatened their sense of supremacy, and with a hunter’s instinct they knew that Rosie, if attacked, would not be able to fight back. And so they came over to where she was sitting and, laughing uproariously, pretended to fall on her. As they tumbled down, one of them spit on her face. Before anyone had a chance to react they’d fled, braying like donkeys on speed.

Rosie fled to the locker room, fumbled with the combination of her lock, and pulled her skirt and shirt over her wet bathing suit, all the while sobbing in that hiccoughy way you can’t control. I’d never seen Rosie cry—I don’t think anyone had. We tried to talk to her, but she’d moved away from us. She ran out of the pool area to the adjoining park and, still sobbing, sat down on the bench of a picnic table. When Jeff tried to put his arm around her, she brushed him off. The only thing she accepted was a tissue, so she could blow her nose.

“Do you want someone to drive you home?” we asked her. She shook her head emphatically. “Don’t ever tell Mummy and Daddy,” she said, and she made us all swear.

Eventually she calmed down, but she didn’t want her parents to see her red eyes. “I need a shower,” she said in a fragile monotone, and Dvora offered her house. Dvora’s parents had two cars, and every evening at seven either her mother or her older brother Raphi showed up at the pool to pick her up.

Rosie accepted Dvora’s invitation. Dvora called her brother from a phone booth, and twenty minutes later Raphi arrived in a station wagon. The three of us climbed into the back and Raphi tore down the street at twice the limit.

Dvora lived in one of the new developments in Côte St. Luc, where new, custom-made houses alternated with barren, as yet unclaimed lots. Dvora’s house proudly reproduced a castle’s crenellated turrets on all four sides. The doorbell chimed like a harp; you could dim lights gradually by turning a knob; the upstairs bathrooms had two sinks, gold-plated faucets, spouts that released water in a soft spray. I’d heard about these luxuries; most of us were poor, or close to it, and easily impressed.
Did you see the ice crusher, man? Did you see the colour TV?

While Rosie showered, Dvora and I leafed through
Mad
magazines and romance comic books. Of the pop artists I’d come across at the Atwater Library, the only one I liked was Roy Lichtenstein, who made me laugh—and here was his template: a girl fell for a long-haired artist who drove a motorcycle; he cheated on her; she saw the light and chose the guy in the suit. I could have read these encouraging moral tales for hours, but before I’d finished the second
Young Love
, Rosie appeared in the doorway. Wrapped in a hooded white bathrobe, its belt trailing on the carpet, she looked like the sorcerer’s apprentice. “I don’t know what got into me,” she said contritely. “I’m just going crazy, I guess.”

“We’re all going crazy in this heat,” Dvora said. She meant outside; her house was air-conditioned. “Want some blueberries with whipped cream?”

“I’ll just get dressed. You go, I’ll be there in a sec.”

Raphi was in the kitchen, sitting at a round acrylic table in a noncommittal pose, the chair pushed sideways and one knee up. He wore baggy blue swim-shorts and though he was at least seventeen he seemed small and brittle. But he was good-looking, or maybe it was his nervous confidence that made him attractive. He glanced up at us and began ranting about an article on China in
Time
magazine. He was breathless with contempt as he read the sentences out loud. “Christ, what bullshit. Self-serving propaganda scaled down to the level of the average eight-year-old.” With his clever fluency, he reminded me a little of Anthony, but
Raphi was on a tangent of his own, while Anthony never said anything that wasn’t calibrated against the person he was taking on. Anthony was interested in your response, waited for it, seemed almost to be sustaining himself with what you said, or the way you said it, or even the way you looked at him. Raphi was a self-contained, free-floating system.

Rosie and I watched as Dvora poured cream into the bowl of an electric cake-mixer. Her brother pushed the table away and went to the fridge to get a bottle of Coke. “There’s cocaine in Coke,” he said. “That’s where it gets its name, and that’s why I’m addicted. I wouldn’t put whipped cream on those blueberries if I were you,” he told Dvora. “You’re turning into a tub of lard as it is.” He plucked the strap of her sleeveless top.

“Fuck
off
,” Dvora wailed as Raphi returned to the table with his Coke.

Dvora’s mother, who’d been sunbathing on the patio, stepped into the kitchen through sliding glass doors. She was wearing a complicated beach outfit and her tanned arms gleamed with suntan oil. Smiling pleasantly as she clinked a glass of cola with ice, she was immediately recognizable as a non-immigrant: she knew her place was in this house, this country, this life.

“Stop tormenting your sister, Raphi,” she said without concern. “I need you outside—the hose isn’t working properly.”

“I don’t know a damn thing about hoses,” Raphi said irritably, but he leapt up and darted outside like a skittish alley cat.

“Hello, Rosie. Who’s your new friend, Dvora?”

“Maya,” Dvora said vaguely.

“How do you do?” Dvora’s mother said just as vaguely, and before I had a chance to answer—not that I had any idea how to respond to “how do you do”—she walked out again, sliding the glass doors behind her.

“I like your family,” Rosie said.

“I’m going to kill Raphi one of these days,” Dvora grunted. “He’s such a jerk.”

I wanted to stay at Dvora’s, listen to her records, watch her brother, watch her parents. But Rosie said she’d stayed away long enough—she had to get back. Raphi drove us home. Rosie asked to be dropped off first, and Raphi requested a goodbye kiss in return. Rosie leaned over and kissed his cheek.

“Cute chick,” he commented, as he drove me to my place.

“Yeah,” I said.

He stole a sideways glance at me, sly and sharp. “You agree, do you?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Maya.”

“You’re different,” he said. “You’re not like Dvora’s usual retard friends.”

“Rosie’s not a retard,” I said.

“I didn’t mean her—she’s obviously in a league of her own.”

A day or two later, the delinquents were caught breaking bottles in the locker room and were banned from the pool for good.

Towards the end of August, I wrote an obsequious letter to the principal of Eden Academy.
Dear Mr. Aigen, the dream of a lifetime would be fulfilled if …
Mrs. Michaeli, who knew where the principal lived, delivered the letter by hand.

A few days later, an envelope with the school stamp arrived at our place, addressed to my mother. Inside was an application form and a letter. I would be accepted on condition that I pass a test. I’d have to answer questions about the holidays, write a composition in Hebrew, and demonstrate familiarity with biblical stories; I was allowed to bring an English-Hebrew dictionary and a Hebrew Bible. I began scribbling crib notes in the margins of my appropriated
Tanakh
. I still have those notes, I still have the heavy book with my pencilled annotations in the margins, thin and pale amidst the flowery print.
Passover:
matzahs, oppressed by Egyptians. Hanukkah: candles, oppressed by Greeks.

I arrived at the empty school on the Thursday before Labour Day weekend. Only the office showed signs of life: two secretaries were shuffling about, preparing for the school year. One of them was a woman with the widest smile I’d ever seen, like Tenniel’s drawing of the Cheshire Cat, but kinder. She wore a pink sweater and matching button earrings, large and glossy, with gold trim. “Take all the time you need, sweetheart,” she said, handing me the exam.

I wrote for hours: I was asked to expound on the Patriarchs, and since the examiners failed to remind me that there were only three, I included in my essay Noah, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Solomon, Saul, Joshua, David, and anyone else who seemed important. Twice the secretary checked in and asked me with a worried squint if I was all right.

My performance on the exam was pitiful, and I knew it. My grasp of holidays was poor, and my Hebrew composition (“Why I Want to Attend Mei-Eden”) was an extended wild guess, largely plagiarized from my Bible:
Let me go, I pray thee, and return unto my brethren which are in the school …
I prepared myself for another round of begging and pleading; I wasn’t ready to give up. But no one contacted us. I asked Mr. Michaeli to inquire, and he reported back, to my relief, that my name was on the roster for the coming school year.

I soon understood why my exam never resurfaced. It made no difference, as it turned out, what I knew and didn’t know. You had to have Hebrew classes in a Hebrew school; beyond that, no one seemed to care much about them. The Hebrew teachers had resigned themselves to lesser status—the lucky ones had to endure forty minutes of being ignored by bored but somewhat subdued students; the unlucky ones were caught up in a storm of bad behaviour. The students walked the halls with an air of invulnerability and fraught nerves: the school was both battlefield and refuge, the teachers mock targets. The rules I’d fought against for seven years
had already disintegrated here, and I surrendered happily to classroom tedium.

I was an outsider, but so was everyone else. Early in the year I asked the principal whether I could wear a navy blue dress to school. The mandatory tunic made me look like a deflated tent, and my white shirt was constantly bunching up under it.

“I don’t want to start a trend,” the principal grumbled.

“It’s a plain dress. My mother made it,” I said. “It’s not my fault I’m so tall,” I added plaintively. It hadn’t taken me long to pick up the prevailing rhetorical style.

He gave in. I was the only girl who wore a dress, just as Rosie was the only one who wore a skirt and blouse. But we were all exceptions in some way. Naomi, whose father had died, never removed her winter coat; Joanie stayed away from school for days and weeks at a time; Karla’s father flew into rages, during which he whipped his children with a belt—they had to wear long sleeves to hide the marks. A boy in ninth grade had food allergies and ate his lunch alone in the chemistry lab. Arlene had a hearing aid; Brian smoked in the boys’ toilet. The school took us all in, as though we’d been washed ashore in a shipwreck. One doesn’t expect conformity, or uniformity, from castaways.

In this new setting, my view of Rosie expanded. Rosie at her desk, Rosie staring at the blackboard, Rosie doodling in her notebook. In class I positioned myself next to her, but one row behind, and closer to the wall, so she’d be in my line of vision when I looked at the teacher.

I soon discovered that when it came to schoolwork Rosie was lethargic and scattered. Directed to prepare us for an inhospitable world, our teachers loaded us with work. Eden students, especially the boys, took it as a given that they had to excel; those who were having difficulties felt ashamed and tried to keep their low grades a secret. Rosie didn’t care either way. “It’s pointless, when you really think about it,” she said. I packed her books for her, I went home with her after school and showed her what needed to be
done—not exactly the scenario of chivalrous rescue I’d conjured up in the privacy of my room but satisfying all the same. She nodded politely as I read
Julius Caesar
to her, but her glazed eyes betrayed her.

Infected by the culture of academic ambition, I also began to work hard. There were two problem areas, however. In History class, I sank into a stupor, impervious to any catastrophe, past or present. Back in fourth grade, when I had come up against the settlers and the Iroquois, Jacques Cartier and the fur trade, endless wars between England and France, and then the fur trade again, always the fur trade, whatever that was, I responded with obstinate apathy. This was not as bad as my mother’s disarrayed chronicles from
there
, but as incomprehensible. The transition, in high school, to empires and revolutions didn’t change anything, and during History class I mostly thought about what I’d be eating for lunch and whether I’d be seeing Rosie after school.

Biology, taught by Mr. Lurie, was problematic for different reasons. Even Eden, it turned out, had its drill sergeant. Over the years I’d perfected a number of return-to-sender tactics to ward off intimidation, but as soon as Mr. Lurie entered the classroom, I felt as forsaken as an old toy at the bottom of a lake. Mr. Lurie had comic-book features—furrowed brows, square chin, Superman hair—and his specialty was identifying the one imperilled place in the heart and squeezing there. My only defence was to fail so extravagantly that the hunt became embarrassing. And it worked: eventually my sad exams, not one question answered correctly, succeeded in silencing Mr. Lurie and he left me alone.

But I did well in my other classes. Chemistry was taught by Miss O’Connor; with her charismatic smile, rebel permissiveness, and exotic advocacy of this new thing, Women’s Liberation, she won our hearts. She lived only a few blocks from Eden, and when I didn’t understand the day’s lesson, I walked to her flat after school for private tutoring. I’d sit at her kitchen table and struggle with
covalent bonds while her shy, androgynous roommate—as we thought of her then—did her best to stay out of sight.

And finally, Math with Mrs. Adler. Recalling her, I want to invoke Prospero’s Ariel, though Mrs. Adler was a frumpy, lumpy woman in unfashionable tweed dresses. Yet something about that elusive dexterity seems apt. There were rumours that she’d lost her children in the war, but I didn’t believe it; she was too hardy, too circumspect and good-natured to have been
there
. She promised to dance a jig if anyone scored ten on the weekly test. It was easy to get nine out of ten if you studied, but the last question was for mathematicians only, and we relied on Ephraim, the class brain, to solve it. He did, every now and then, and in her ill-fitting tweed dress and flat, heavy shoes Mrs. Adler would twirl and stamp her feet as we cheered her on.