Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (2 page)

Everything is here, inside these pages: our shifting and shuffling, our small victories and elaborate blunders.

In I go.

1968

I
lived back then with my courageous mother and, luckily, my grandmother, in an upper duplex on Bedford Street, in the Côte des Neiges district.

A pretty name, Côte des Neiges, evoking images of snow angels and silver skates, but to Montrealers the words suggest an immigrant population, neighbourhoods running to various stages of seediness, small shops. Forty years ago, there were fewer seedy stretches, and Jews newly arrived from Europe or seeking escape from the noisy Plateau chose to settle on the more respectable streets: Kent, Linton, Bourret. We liked the worn-out witticism: God gave Moses Canada because he stuttered; he’d meant to say Canaan. All that has changed; these days, other immigrants live on Linton and Kent.

The rooms of our Home Sweet Home were arranged in a claustrophobic ring around a central foyer. The living room faced the street, my bedroom came next, then the kitchen—with a door leading to the back balcony. A bathroom and my mother’s bedroom, which she shared with my grandmother, completed the asymmetrical circle. The hapless architect had left the foyer for last, and it was oddly shaped, a by-product of the five unevenly spaced rooms.

But the floor plan was the least of it—the entire building was doomed by its white-tile facade, low ceilings, plywood doors. These paltry efforts aroused my sympathy: I felt sorry for the aluminum windows, the stippled taupe-and-white linoleum in the kitchen, the unloved and unlovable wall-to-wall carpets. They were doing their best.

Here, then, on a rainy Saturday in April—April 15, 1968, to be exact—I, Maya Levitsky, daughter of Fanya and the late Josef Levitsky, could be found soaking in a scrubbed and sterilized lavender-blue bathtub, after a windy, drizzly journey to the
Atwater Library and back. I was in love with the Atwater Library, in love with the majestic reading room, polished pine tables, vaulted ceilings, enormous arched windows, and the skylight of diamond panes surrounded by garlands in low relief—yes, garlands! Someone had gone to all that trouble, just for a ceiling. And of course the books, shelves and shelves of art books, shelves and shelves of novels. That’s what I did on weekends: I read at the library, and when I grew tired of reading I leafed through folio-sized reproductions of famous paintings. The art prints held as much intrigue and drama as the novels: Venus and Cupid in erotic embrace, angels and weeping mothers, village squares, sunsets and nightmares, a lone woman in a red hat waiting for a train …

I sat up in the bath and submerged my legs, then slid back down as my knees went up. Maya, the human accordion. I never did mind my overly long, overly freckled body, and I felt protected by my Pre-Raphaelite red hair. Right now, though, with my head immersed up to my ears, I felt like Millais’s floating Ophelia. That very morning I’d read the story behind the Ophelia painting: Millais’s docile model, Elizabeth Siddal, had posed in a tub in the dead of winter and, not wanting to interrupt the artist at work, said nothing when the lamps heating the tub went out. As a result she contracted pneumonia, and her father sued. All in all, I preferred Waterhouse’s Ophelias, eager and sensual in white-and-gold and blue-and-gold. Waterhouse, like us, craved an alteration of the sad plot, wanted to keep Ophelia alive and well.

Here I am, then, in the water, in the house, neither posing nor drowning, twelve years old and already nearly six feet tall. How did I come by my height? Both my mother and Bubby Miriam, who was my father’s mother, barely reached my shoulder, and according to them, my father was also on the short side. Someone in the lost and distant past must have been tall—an aunt, a second cousin. I imagined my giant ancestor, swinging in a rocking chair somewhere in Eastern Europe, knitting herself a shawl for the winter. On and on it trailed, past her knees and along the floor.

At school they called me Beanstalk. We owned a hand-me-down copy of
Jack and the Beanstalk
, donated by one of my mother’s card-playing friends. I’d read the story to Bubby a hundred times; she never tired of it, and neither did I.
Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman
, I said in a deep, hollow voice, and we both laughed like goofs. It was never entirely clear whether my bubby understood English, but there were illustrations to help us out.

The beanstalk in the story grew and grew, exactly like me—
like a Cossack—
my mother liked to say. She touched me as if I were an amulet, kissed my arm because she couldn’t reach my face unless I hunched down. I didn’t hunch down—not for her. I bent down for Bubby but not for Fanya. Yield to my poor mother’s unfeasible demands, her gluey woes, and you could end up like Elizabeth Siddal—or Ophelia.

So there I was, with or without Cossack blood, steeping in a bubble bath. When the water began to cool, I used my toes to rotate the faucet with the faded red dot. Through the thin walls I could hear Bubby clattering in the kitchen. That was the only sort of noise my grandmother ever made: she wore cloth slippers over her bumpy bunions, and she usually crept soundlessly through the carpeted rooms, but when she baked, a tin-pan racket filled the apartment.

It was quiet, apart from that. My mother was out; she worked on Saturdays and sometimes on the way home she stopped at Steinberg’s to buy groceries. In the Fanya-free stillness—even the furniture seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when my mother was away—I contemplated my body. I approved of it, on the whole. Like the apartment, it was doing its best, though in addition to being excessively long, it was angular, disproportionate, my shoulders too broad, the rest of me bony. I’d found a replica of my naked body at the library, in a painting by the fifteenth-century illuminator Belbello da Pavia. Belbello—what a divine name!—left us an Adam and Eve who look as if they’ve run into each other accidentally at the pizzeria (the cute red-and-green building on the
left) and are trying to decide between the all-dressed and the double cheese. Adam’s body resembled mine; maybe Belbello couldn’t find a male model. Or maybe I had a man’s body. All in all, I was lucky that my nickname at school was Beanstalk and not Frankenstein.

I leaned forward, pulled out the plug for a few seconds, then replaced it and added more hot water. My baths were typically drawn-out affairs, especially in winter. Not that the apartment was cold—heating was included in the rent, and my mother and Bubby preferred a tropical climate. But we were mostly house-bound from December to March, and baths provided a diversion. My mind wandered as I sank under mounds of bubble bath. I loved the foam—the snow-white dips and towers, the weightless solidity, the soft, soapy sound of tiny bubbles popping in unison.

Bubby continued clanging in the kitchen. She would have been baking her intricate European pastries: little rolls and squares and triangles filled with cinnamon, jam, chocolate cream. The door to the bathroom was unlocked, in case my mother came home while I was still in the bath. Closed doors made her frantic; she’d fling them open like a blast of wind in Kansas. My mother’s free access to the bathroom, regardless of circumstances, resulted in a rather lax—one could even say bohemian—attitude to nudity in the all-female Levitsky household.

The Levitsky household: Bubby Miriam, Fanya, Maya. Three mad women. Mad, mad, mad.

Take my mother’s bedroom. Had I lived in a sane house with sane people in it, my mother’s bed would have stood at one end of the room, Bubby’s at the other. But along with many other phobias—some of which were probably unique to her—Mère Levitsky was averse to alterations in the placement of furniture. The result was a Mondrianesque composition, with Bubby’s narrow bed extending at a right angle from halfway along the footboard of my mother’s double bed. The reason for this peculiar set-up was my mother’s refusal, when Bubby joined us, to move her bed from the
centre of the room to the wall; the only other option was the L-shaped arrangement, though why the new bed was pushed right up against my mother’s footboard, I couldn’t say. Bubby didn’t mind, as far as I could tell.

But Bubby was also strange. Here’s how my bubby washed herself: she carried an empty pail to the bathtub and filled it with hot, soapy water, then removed her clothes, climbed into the bath, and scrubbed herself with a sponge. Her body was thin and misshapen, because of
there
. That is, misshapen because her back was broken
there
, and thin because that was the way she was. When she’d finished washing, she rubbed herself dry with a facecloth and called to my mother to help her out.

Then there was the fully mobilized laundry campaign. Bubby was in charge of laundry, and no one was allowed to interfere. She took care of the entire journey, from hamper to washing machine to clothesline or rack, back to laundry basket, and finally to the ironing board. She didn’t mind about other things, she was compliant and oblivious in every other way, but if my mother or I tried to reclaim a single item of clothing while it was en route, Bubby would wrest it from our hands.

As for my mother—I wouldn’t know where to start. There was no beginning with Fanya Levitsky, and no end. No middle either, come to think of it. Her brain was jumbled and jammed, and everything was bouncing around in there, like the bobbing needle of her sewing machine. Hard to believe, in view of her general state of emotional strain, but my mother was a dressmaker, with a particular fondness for lace collars, tinted glass buttons, velvet ribbons, flounces and filigree. Her feet swelled out of high-heeled shoes, her elbows were dimpled, her neck was powdered, her hair had been sprayed into layers of stiff waves, as if in imitation of a wig.

But despite the trouble she went to, despite the perfume and mascara and white nylon slips, at the drop of a hat she would fall apart, all wails and weeping, railing and ranting—not at me, that would be unthinkable, but at department stores and pickle
manufacturers, can openers and leaky faucets. As for the relentless unveiling of shreds and scraps from
there
, I’d stopped listening when I was six years old. Body parts, kapos, electric fences, attack dogs—what could it all mean? I preferred to focus on
B Is for Betsy
; I was trying to read all the Betsy books, if I could find them. There were five libraries that carried children’s books in English, and my mother and I travelled across the city in search of
Betsy’s Busy Summer, Betsy’s Winterhouse, Betsy’s Little Star
.

So much for Bubby and my mother. That left me. Actually, I wasn’t sure whether I was mad or not. I was merely play-acting, which meant I was deflecting, not absorbing, the lunacy—or did it? At mealtimes, for example: though I piled food on my plate, I never managed to sample all the dishes spread out before me. One day I forgot the green beans, glistening under clumps of margarine; another day I neglected the kasha and bowties, flavoured with tiny black tendrils of fried onion. My omissions did not go unnoticed by my mother, who wrung her hands and tried to guess the food’s fatal flaw. Exasperated, I’d plunge my face into the spurned bowl and, imitating a predatory animal, gobbling and snorting and growling, I’d scoop up the beans or kasha with my teeth.

My mother, half-laughing, half-whimpering, brought both hands to her cheeks and rolled her head—
ai ai ai mamaleh even a crumb of bread we would look for in the mud—

Not that she sat with us—she was too busy running back and forth between table and stove, checking pots, adjusting the heat, fretting over culinary setbacks. As for eating, she squeezed it in before and after the meal, tasting bits of food straight from the pot or nibbling leftovers.

Bubby was also hard to pin down: you had only to glance away for a few seconds and every last morsel on her plate would be gone. She ate each of my mother’s offerings separately: first the rice, then the tiny pieces of chicken my mother had chopped up for her, then the
Canadian Living
quiche. (Every Sunday my mother meticulously copied out what she called Canadian recipes from her magazines,
unless they involved alien ingredients such as asparagus or zucchini.) When Bubby was done, she quickly removed her plate, hobbling to the sink and depositing it there. Then she returned to the table and watched me with fixed absorption, as if witnessing a complex operation—someone assembling a clock or repairing a radio.

I wanted to help out with the meal, if only to diffuse my mother’s attentions, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Bad enough I didn’t have a father, cousins, uncles, aunts, more grandparents; bad enough that we were poor—at least I would have an easy life. An easy life meant, apparently, being waited on. It seemed to me back then, and still seems to me now, that my mother often imagined that her own sufferings had transferred themselves to my life, and that she had to find a way to compensate me for our shared misfortunes. And then there was her needy surplus of love, love that had nowhere else to go. I was the love sponge. It was good and not good.

In short, I definitely didn’t belong to one of the families featured in our English reader: the children raking autumn leaves before dressing up as pumpkins for Halloween, the mothers in tidy brown hats and skirts, the fathers a little remote but always jovial and reliable as they sat at the wheel of their black cars.