Why did Dad want to pretend her mother had never existed? Yes, she had only been four, but she knew her mother's accident had happened on Halloween. And Jasmine had been excited the day Mama was coming home from the hospital; she ran to the door and stopped in her tracks, stunned into silence for the first time in her life. When she was little, she'd felt uneasy whenever either of her parents got a haircut. For at least a day, she would be panicky, sure that her mother or father had been replaced by an imposter. It was like that, seeing Dad wheel Mama in the door, her head shaved. For the next year, Jasmine was afraid of this interloper in her house. This strange woman who sat in silence for days, who laughed hysterically like a child, who woke up in the guest room, screaming, in the middle of the night. The woman had not felt like Jasmine's mama, hadn't smelled like her, hadn't talked like her. The longer she stayed, the harder it was for Jasmine to remember what her real mother had been like, and she was relieved the day her father told her the woman had packed her bags and left. Dad held her on his lap and said, “I'm sorry, Minnie, but Mama had to leave,” and expected Jasmine to be sad. But that woman was not Mama.
Jasmine entered the bus terminal for the second time without hesitating and found to her relief that there was a bus leaving for
Toronto in fifteen minutes. She tried to look older and sure of herself. “I'm going to visit my mother,” she told the man at the ticket counter. “She gave me a note. You can call her if you want, but she's probably at work.”
“That's fine,” said the man. It was that easy. She bought a ticket and stood with the crowd by the Toronto sign. Over in the arrivals area, she watched a girl her own age put a big backpack on the floor between her feet, breasts stretching the fabric of her faded blue sweatshirt as she bent down to extract a water bottle from the bag. Coatless, the girl pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head. She had a particularly blank look on her face, big eyes and slightly parted lips. A real space cadet, Lara would have said â a phrase Jasmine considered insulting to astronauts.
There was one window seat left, near the back, so Jasmine sat and shoved her bag under the seat. She tapped her fingers on her thigh, anxious for the bus to leave before her school called Bev again, and Bev called her father, and the search began. The first thing people do when someone is missing is to phone the airport, the bus terminal and the train station â Jasmine knew that much from books and movies. Through the window, she could see into the terminal; she could see a tall, wiry man speaking to the girl in the sweatshirt; he was wearing a black leather coat and jeans faded to grey, but Jasmine couldn't see his face. The girl looked up, nodding at whatever he was telling her.
Toronto. Jasmine was anxious for the bus to leave before she changed her mind. It said in
The Willing Amnesiac
that it was normal to feel a moment of regret, of doubt. Jasmine had the other two books,
The Maternal Return
and
Accidents
on hold at the library. It had taken her forever to read the first one, with the help of the dictionary, and she had a foreboding that the second, with its weird title, would be even harder to understand. The website said Virginia lived in Toronto. It also listed all her upcoming workshops. They were mainly in American cities, and never in Ottawa, but there would be one at a hotel in Toronto in two days.
Jasmine caught her reflection in the window and experimented with looking vacant. The engine started, the bus eased forward, and
it occurred to Jasmine that if Dad called the bus terminal and found out she'd been there, found out where she was headed, there might be rescuers waiting for her in the Toronto terminal. Agents of family togetherness, anti-pimps, with muscles and uniforms, to trap her and send her home. It was too late to turn back. As the bus pulled out, the hooded girl and her tall companion were heading for the exit. It was like watching someone walk toward a disaster, as if Jasmine knew what was about to happen but was paralyzed, unable to stop it. She put her hand against the window as the man led the girl through the terminal and away.
San Francisco, CA
November 10, 1977
Steven, you piece of shit.
One week ago, I opened my mailbox to your handwriting. I read your letter once, then drove to the middle of the bridge and tossed it in the bay. Three years and five bullshit letters â and then this. You clearly weren't looking for my blessing, since you did it first and told me later.
You must wonder why I decided to respond after all. Was it the suspicion, sneaking into my mind over the course of the week, that I should take some kind of responsibility for skeletons I left in the closet you've chosen to occupy? Or maybe the memory of all those nights we spent drinking at the Laff, debating brain vs. mind? No, Steven, at the risk of causing a rift in your newfound domestic bliss, I'll tell you something you don't know. Two days after your self-congratulatory confession drowned in the Pacific Ocean, I received a postcard with the same news again. It was from Quebec City, a lovely picture of the Chateau Frontenac. Have you ever noticed that Ginny's handwriting looks compulsively neat at first glance but turns out to be practically illegible when you go to read it? I won't bother you with the obvious psychoanalytic implications. But I'll transcribe the postcard for you verbatim.
Dear Asher, I've married Steven Winter. Can't say I'm surprised the Israeli military wasn't your cup of tea. Best, Ginny. PS I'm in
Quebec City right now with Steven and Agatha. Remember how we planned to come here? But then your car broke down so we screwed in the park instead. Afterwards, we ran into Steven at the bookstore. Funny how things turn out. G. PPS Water/Self Service/Please/Self Service.
And scrawled sideways up the edge, spanning the whole message:
Steven doesn't know I'm writing to you.
My initial tantrum had worn off by then, and I didn't have the impetus to get back in the car, drive back to the bridge and send Ginny's epistolary masterpiece to the same watery grave. Instead, I left it on my desk and put it in my pocket the next day. I read it twenty times: on the cable car, in class, while I ate my lunch. I brought it home again and used it as a coaster for my coffee mug. I read it in the bath until the cheap ink ran and then I dropped it in the water to watch it disintegrate. When Ginny and I lived together, she used to stay in the bath for hours every day, reading, soaking the bottom edges of her books and mine. Smoking and dropping ashes on the pages. She told me she hadn't taken a bath since early childhood. Her grandmother insisted that showers were the greatest evil of modern technology, so Ginny had always showered.
The memory of Ginny in my bathtub has a strange and sickly allure. Her stomach sticking up out of the water, cigarette ashes floating around among the bubbles. She marinated herself in tobacco, came out of the bath smelling worse than when she got in. You're so proud of the fact that Ginny quit smoking. Well, I wouldn't be so sure. Being with you has probably pushed parts of her personality into secret places, cigarettes into hidden compartments of her purse. I imagined the baby would be born with a fag in its mouth and a depressed look on its face. To be honest, I always assumed it would be a boy. I don't know why. With all that Nietzsche she read, she was probably hoping to give birth to the Ãbermensch. Nietzsche and Agatha Christie were her favourite writers at the time, and she didn't seem to think one was any more or less important to the development of human civilization than the other.
And those birds â the paper birds she was always folding.
At first she was hoping for a miscarriage, then just to survive the birth, and she folded a growing a line of defence against the homicidal fetus. I don't know if she ever hit the thousand mark, but she must have come close. When she decided university was a waste of time, Ginny cut all her class notes into perfect squares. Folded them into cranes. Little white birds covered in blue lines and that infuriating handwriting. I'd come home from the university, and there she'd be, folding, bathing, reading, smoking. Swelling up. Sometimes you'd be there, too, sitting with her at the kitchen table, and a hush hung over the room, as if the conversation had ended in mid-sentence when you heard me at the door. Ostensibly, you were waiting for me so we could chat on the balcony. You'd read over drafts of my thesis and give me advice. And I knew you had a thing for her the whole time. I'm an expert on the human psyche. I should at least be able to tell when my friend is infatuated with my girl, hanging on her every neurotic word. Remember, I used to want a crazy girl who had her shit together. You agreed with me. We both thought Ginny was it. And you, despite your claim that it's “completely different now,” have yet to come to your senses.
One time, Ginny picked up my plate from the dinner table and threw it across the room like a Frisbee. Greasy tomato sauce sprayed the wall in a morbid trail, and the plate flew right out the window. We heard it break on the sidewalk. It wasn't a satisfying smash like you might expect but more of a distant crunch, like stepping on a baby bird. She said she did it to get a reaction, just so something would happen. We were driving each other nuts with boredom. And you envied me Ginny's body, too. There was that famous time in my car, the culmination of forbidden passion, conception of the looming bastard child â she kept saying “ouch,” complaining about the seatbelt buckle digging into her side. When we lived together, sometimes, in bed with her, I'd be looking up at the clock, trying to finish in time to listen to the news. I'm not heartless. I could see she had a spark. But a spark that never catches isn't enough. It's nothing but potential, and you can't love someone indefinitely for potential.
Do you know that, Steven? Do you?
Are you even aware of the emotional complexity of normal human beings? Who see other humans as people, not just brains wrapped in bodies? I'll tell you again, you see people as specimens, experiments, neurons. Yes, I'm accusing you in a letter so you can't defend yourself. I know you think I see people as specimens, too. To you, Ginny may be a collection of neurons, but to me, she was a collection of neuroses and complexes and family secrets. What's the difference, right, Steven? And I retort like I always did: there's more to life than all that. Sometimes a girl's just a piece of ass. You'd better get that through your head. You'd better start seeing your wife as the piece of ass she is, or else she'll leave you. She'll vanish like a brain cell zapped by your chemicals.
Obviously, this isn't the ideal letter from a friend, congratulating you on your recent marriage. But what did you expect? You've married the mother of my child. Well, you're welcome to her.
Can you really be as naïve as you seem? I can't stop picturing how it happened and where it will go. Was that what you were hoping for when you wrote? That I'd be plagued by thoughts of you and Ginny's tender, righteous love, so much better than anything I ever had with her? The first time you kissed her â the most chaste of passionate kisses â you probably told her you loved her truly and deeply for who she really is. You were, no doubt, ecstatic with decency and goodness, thinking you were the first to understand and value her for all that intelligence and potential. And she was touched by your sincerity, tempted by your offer of salvation. She pushed to the back of her mind a sneaking suspicion that you didn't really understand her at all, that your naïveté would never let you see her whole; and I predict that this small suspicion will grow over the years until it pulls her away from you. You won't understand what happened. You'll think, I was so kind to her, so gentle, and I bent myself every which way trying to suit her. How I wish I wasn't so sure I was right. God grant me even a sliver of doubt. You'll hate me for saying
this, but someday you'll look back and see that I was right, and you won't be able to say I didn't warn you.
I remember that party at your house, when I met Ginny for the first time. I thought you were ridiculous. She was practically a teenager. Every time I looked in her direction, she smiled and shifted around in her seat. When I left your place, I stopped to have some soup at that Oriental place on Somerset, with the fish tanks in the back. The party had depressed me â I hated the way you acted around those academic types. And all the usual inane chatter about scholarships, theses and drug-induced sexual excess. I was beginning to work on my thesis back then, planning to write about shell shock and Vietnam vets. I had mixed feelings about the whole thing, couldn't shake my nagging envy of those who'd gone to war. I realize now that joining an army wasn't the answer. I left the restaurant just as Ginny came around the corner, balanced precariously on those huge shoes she used to wear. We went back inside, and I watched her eat a bowl of soup. She was still stoned and sucked the stuff in like her life depended on it. She had just spent an hour alone with you, Steven, and she was agitated. Why, I wondered. Wielding the chopsticks expertly, she told me how her grandmother was an obsessive cook, that her family always used chopsticks when they ate this kind of food. I pictured the most genteel family you can imagine. Genteel and gentile, long white candles on the dining room table. There was a sign on the wall:
Water
Self-service
Please
Self-service
and Ginny loved it. Kept reading it aloud: haiku, Shakespeare, beat-poet style. She paid for her meal, and we went to the park across the street and talked for the rest of the night. She was wearing a bulky white scarf thing around her shoulders and faded denim bell-bottoms, and they both looked like she'd never washed them. We sat across from each other at one of those tables with the chessboard tops.
When I told you about my all-nighter with Ginny, you pouted into your beer like a little boy who didn't get his birthday wish. But what I didn't tell you was that she talked about you the whole time, circling around you, trying to dismiss you. I made fun of your lab coat, your formaldehyde specimens. The way you pressed your hands together like a fifty-year-old man when you were explaining something. And she was grateful, relieved to laugh. She told me that for a long time, as a child, she'd wanted to be a nun, covered head to toe in a thick, stiff black habit, a crucifix around her neck. Only eating potatoes, lentils and barley. She'd imagined herself praying in Latin and helping those less fortunate. Her beloved dead father was a lapsed Catholic. Beware girls with beloved dead fathers! She mentioned, casual as can be, that her mother and grandmother moved from Holland to Canada after the war, that of all her family, only those two had survived. I looked for signs of Hebrew blood. That fleshy nose, maybe, but her Irish half had otherwise taken over. “And my mother's blond,” she said. “Like you.” My parents had lost some distant European cousins in the camps, but in Canada, my family had been safe and sound. My masochistic envy swelled large, the proximity of suffering buzzing like a taut string. I could practically smell the crematoriums of Auschwitz in Ginny's Irish-red hair . . .