“What's have their periods, Mama?”
She concentrated on her driving.
“What's have their periods?”
“It's when a woman wears bandages in her underwear.”
I considered this. “Is Ariella's husband mean?” I pictured seeking him out and tying him to a chair, escaping with Ariella out the window. She could move in with us and share my room.
“Ariella is too young to be married. And anyway,” Mama added vaguely, “I guess she's not actually Orthodox, exactly. But still.”
Whether or not Ariella's future husband would touch her when she had bandages in her underwear, all my fairy pictures and block buildings were created for her approval, just to see her metallic smile and sometimes even get a hug. My clearest memory of Ariella was the day I got sick. When Mama arrived, Mrs. Klein asked, “Was she eating strawberries today?” This must have been a rhetorical question or a reprimand because the evidence was undeniable. I had vomited pink froth dotted with strawberry seeds all over the floor, all over Ariella's flowery cotton skirt. Sitting on her lap, explaining how old I was (six-and-three-quarters), and then, without any warning, bent over and heaving. Mrs. Klein was in charge of the playgroup and I didn't like her. A heavy-set woman who made us ask
for a pass when we needed to use the toilet, she had short, greasy-looking brown hair.
“Why didn't you say you were feeling sick, Agatha?” Mrs. Klein couldn't resist asking this question one more time. She asked it while I rinsed my mouth from a plastic cup, again while she wiped my face with damp wads of brown-smelling paper towel, and now once more in front of my mother. Just to emphasize the fact that, with some forethought, I could have deposited my vomit neatly in the toilet instead of out in plain sight. Mama didn't admit to anything, just said, “Oh dear.”
Outside, it was much hotter than when my mother had dropped me off. A haze hovered over the tar black parking lot outside the Jewish Community Centre. By the time she had me strapped into the back seat, I was crying quietly and steadily. My mother was rigid, tense and heading back across the river, driving fast, worried about the groceries thawing in the sweltering trunk. She said that once chicken thawed you couldn't freeze it again; “I didn't want to have chicken tonight.” She said that if my father had let me go to the francophone Catholic playgroup in our own neighbourhood, instead of the one half a million miles away, “in another
province
,” then she wouldn't have to spend half her life driving around. The air conditioning chilled my damp face, and soon the skin under my eyes ached from the cold of it. Mama was still wearing the same jeans and brown plaid shirt that she'd worn earlier, but the sleeves weren't rolled up anymore. She had put her hair in a ponytail that flicked and twitched like a real pony's tail when she turned her head to look past me at the road. I forgot about crying and closed my eyes. Loose strands of my hair blew in the air conditioning and tickled the cold dampness of my face.
That morning, before playgroup, Mama and I had eaten strawberries from a glass bowl. We'd sat at the small table by the kitchen window, the berries between us. The strawberries hadn't come from one of those little cartons at the supermarket. They filled the bowl, a mound of bright red with fine white sugar sprinkled on top. My mother had picked them herself the afternoon before at a farm outside town, and they were so ripe another day would have ruined
them. A big pot of strawberry jam bubbled on the stove, but there was still this whole bowlful of leftovers in the middle of the table, and we ate the whole thing. Mama's cooking style was the opposite of Oma Esther's; instead of consulting recipes and using measuring cups, she just chopped and poured haphazardly. Instead of tidy racks, she kept her spices in little plastic bags, all stuffed into an old yogurt container.
Mama told me how much sugar goes in jam, a guilty and gleeful fact of excess: she just dumped sugar right into the pot full of berries, shaking the bag to make it come out faster. That's how much sugar goes in jam. “Because otherwise it won't jell,” she explained. We sat at the table and let juice drip down our wrists while we ate. Mama looked pretty when she was still and calm, her face relaxed. She wasn't even thirty then; her hair was long and wavy, reddish brown, and she was wearing it loose instead of in her usual bun or ponytail. She had a bump in the middle of her nose, and her pouty bottom lip was redder than usual from the strawberries. Her cheeks rose when she smiled, as if she had walnuts tucked up there. Mama licked her arm, elbow to wrist, to catch a drip, and I copied her. I knew she should tell me I'd had enough, but she didn't. We kept eating and eating until there were none left.
Inside the garage, I sat with my legs dangling out of the car and Mama crouched in front of me to wipe my face with a wrinkled tissue from her back pocket. She held it around my nose and told me to blow, then folded it and placed it in her shirt pocket. She pushed the hairs that had escaped my barrettes behind my ears and sighed, “We shouldn't have eaten so much fruit.” Her hands smelled like dish soap, and I knew she must have washed the glass bowl of all its sugary remnants. I pressed my nose into her palm seeking some hint of sweetness, and she pulled away, a trail of snot hanging between us as she disgustedly brought out the tissue again with her other hand.
“Why are you crying? Do you feel sick again?”
“I'm sorry, Mama,” I howled. I didn't want her to regret the morning, eating until there was nothing left in the bowl but juice and seeds and those bitter little green leaves. When everything was
strawberries, the big pot on the stove bubbling sweetly towards jam. The way the sun warmed our sticky fingers and cheeks.
Sitting in her closet, I thought of my mother at that same kitchen table, her eyes giving me goose bumps as I scrubbed a burnt pot. It was eerie the way her fingers fell against the wood, two staccato notes before the other three fingers fell together, heavy and dissonant, the rest of the octave left hanging as though she couldn't remember what she'd begun. “Agatha?” The way she said my name, polite and unfamiliar, as if she hadn't chosen it herself, as if she hadn't called across rooms a million times,
Hey Ags
. She asked, “What happened to my skin?”
I turned; she was staring at her hands, palm-down on the brown tablecloth. “Chicken pox,” I told her. Frowning, pale eyebrows quivering, she knew I was lying. She was trying to remember chicken pox and knew it was the wrong memory. Dr. Manning said we should talk about significant moments in her life. “Don't you remember? You had chicken pox on Thanksgiving and you noticed the spots on your hands while you were making the cranberry sauce. You thought you were allergic to cranberries.” The woman at the table stared at me. “Don't you remember?” She blinked. Her inch-long hair was so dirty it stood out at a ninety-degree angle from her head. I blinked back, imitating her perplexed gaze, and her lips trembled. “Sorry,” I started, “it was warts â” and her breath came quicker. She grinned, opened her mouth wide and guffawed, hugged herself around the middle as the shrieking laugh racked her stomach muscles, threatened to break her apart. I slammed the pot down on the counter and left the room.
I heard someone yelling my name, the sound muffled by my mother's clothes and the closet door. For a horrible moment, I thought it was my father, before I stuck my head out and recognized Sundar's voice.
“Agatha.” He saw me from the hallway as I stood in the middle
of the room. “We have to get this stuff out of our hair, we've left it on way too long.”
Erin piped up from behind him, excited and horrified: “It was supposed to stay on for twenty minutes and it's been over an hour.”
We took the plastic bags off our heads in the bathroom, and the smell of ammonia scorched my sinuses. Taking turns at the side of the tub with the hand shower, we helped each other rub the frothing, stinking bleach out of our hair. When Erin's hands touched my head, I realized my scalp was tender.
We looked at each other, looked at the mirror, touched our wrecked hair. Mine was white, Erin's light blond, and Sundar's a horribly frizzy brass yellow. The ends of my hair were like straw and broke off when I pulled on them. Sundar ran his hand over his head; clumps of yellow fuzz drifted to the floor. He was helpless, all his charm dissolved.
I found my father's hair clippers in the bathroom drawer. Erin went first: she knelt at the side of the tub and I shaved her head in long, even strips. While she acquainted herself with her remarkably large, round head in the mirror, Sundar knelt in front of me. His back trembled as his ruined locks fell on top of Erin's. Then I handed over the clippers and knelt in front of him.
“I'll do it,” said Erin. I understood why Sundar was shaking; my own legs vibrated, knees and elbows unsteady on unrelenting ceramic. My poor Chrissie Hynde bangs, only two days old, fell frizzled and fried into the multicoloured wreckage below.
Erin went down the hall to find her tuque and came back with her shaved head covered. It erased the exaggerated roundness of her head; she looked exactly as she did the first moment I saw her.
“Oh my God,” said Sundar, looking me up and down, “you look like
Sophie's Choice
â like a concentration camp person. With the shaved head and that number on your arm” â I looked down at the phone number neatly printed on the inside of my forearm.
“Holy fuck,” said Erin.
“You should see yourself in the mirror,” said Sundar. He and Erin were staring at me. I grabbed a face cloth from the towel rack
and turned on the taps, started rubbing the white hand soap against the numbers on my arm.
“It's permanent marker!” Erin said from the hallway.
They continued to watch me from behind. I wanted them out of my house. “She's freaking,” observed Sundar.
“I'm not freaking,” I said. “My parents are coming home soon and I'm not even supposed to be here.”
As their army boots and sneakers clumped down the hall and out of my life forever, Erin called back to me, “Give me a call sometime.” I could still hear them laughing outside the apartment as they headed for the elevator.
Mama came home first and I recognized her footsteps through the kitchen. She even had a new way of walking, nothing like the footsteps I knew before her accident. I didn't stop scrubbing my arm until I heard her stop in the doorway of the bathroom.
“Ha,” she said. When I turned and she saw the way my glasses contrasted with my bare head, she laughed out loud. Arms crossed around her chest, in its snug pale blue sweater, she said, “Look at you!”
“Look at you,” I answered. Her own hair had been cut and styled, and she was wearing more makeup than I'd ever seen on her face. Even her eyebrows had been plucked into thin, neat arches. “Did Cassandra do that?” Her hands were different, too, nails shiny and smooth, hangnails gone, no rings. I looked closely to see if the manicure had disguised her snowstorm of tiny white scars. She was wearing a slim, knee-length skirt and high black boots.
“No.” Her colourful lips grinned at me. “I went somewhere else.”
Her nails were too long for a pianist; she was not a pianist. I thought of my last piano lesson, when I was eleven, Minnie jolly-jumping in the doorway. When I turned to look at my sister, Mama put her hand on top of my head, turned my face towards the sheet music. “Concentrate!” she told me.
I answered, “You should work at a concentration camp.” I was too stunned by the force of her hand across my cheek to cry. Mama never slapped. She gave up on my piano lessons after that day, and
I could see her hurt, a permanent stain. I'd always thought I'd be overjoyed to be freed from failing to learn music, but her refusal to teach me felt like an almost unbearable punishment. Without understanding what I was being punished for, I tried to make amends by showing how hard I was concentrating. On my homework, my chores, cutting my fish into even squares and chewing each piece ten times.
I stood with my back to the mirror, bald, one arm soapy. My mother looked in my direction without meeting my eyes, her perfect mascara a barrier between us.
“I'm going to Spain.”
“Why?”
“Just somewhere to go. With a friend I met in group. I can't figure out who I am with all these reminders of who I'm not.” She waved her tidied hand toward the green tiles of the bathroom wall, the hardwood hallway, the kitchen with its old table and its gleaming new appliances; her hand waved away the hospital and Ottawa and my grandmother's hair salon, Dad's secrets and her own. My blotchy, exposed scalp was nothing to her; the pile of bleach-wrecked hair in the tub was not her concern.
“Well â where did you get the money to go?”
“I sold the piano. Someone will be here to pick it up tomorrow. And I sold my jewellery, too. And I'm changing my name. I don't want to be called Ginny anymore. I'm Virginia. And I'm changing my last name to Morgan.” She was glittery-eyed with composed euphoria. “Josephine Virginia Morgan.”
“Who
are
you?” I said. “What did you do with Ginny? Where the fuck is my mama?”
“You shouldn't speak that way.” She looked superior, amused.
“You used to speak that way all the time. You swore like a motherfucking sailor.” I thought I saw a hint of infuriating pity in Virginia's eyes. “You
taught
me to speak that way.” My shaved head was starting to make me feel tough.
“I can't really assume responsibility for that right now,” she said, surely quoting one of those books she'd been reading; she must have learned her sympathetic but end-of-story voice from Dr. Manning.
She was J. Virginia Morgan, soon-to-be inspirational anti-memoirist, creator of aphorisms, modern-day philosopher. Virginia Morgan had no reason to be angry with me. So many times in the last few years, I'd wished I had a different mother. So many times I'd silently willed Mama to brush her hair, lose ten pounds, buy some new clothes. But now I missed the woman who told me to put my hands over hers at the piano so I could feel how pieces were meant to be played. The woman who let leftovers rot for months at the back of the fridge, shrugging helplessly when Dad called them her science experiments. I wanted to scrub Virginia Morgan's perfectly made-up face until my mother re-emerged. I wanted the woman who'd fed me strawberries, smiling across the table conspiratorially. I didn't know which memories she'd regained and which were gone forever, but I felt sure she knew nothing about pushing that glass bowl into my hands. Mama had said, “Bombs away, pumpkin,” and tipped the bowl so I could drink the sugary pink juice left at the bottom, gorging myself on more sweetness than my body could hold.