Once I heard Dad ask Mama why Tam-Tam had never dated or
remarried since her husband's death. Mama laughed in surprise. “Oh, she's had a few chances,” she said. Dad's question disappointed me with its cluelessness. Even at the age of ten, I knew Tam-Tam's attention to grooming had nothing to do with attracting men. She lived with Oma Esther and loved me and my mother. She liked the girls who worked in her salon, liked to dress them up and tweeze unsightly hairs from their faces. Men were far too brutish for her. I only wondered how and why she had ever married one in the first place.
“Shall I follow you to the guest room?” Tam-Tam turned to me, hands on hips. Her accent was exaggerated inside our house, which seemed too small for her voice and the way she moved. Tam-Tam had trouble pronouncing “the”; it often came out
dah
. Because, as Mama explained, her first language was Dutch. She avoided the
th
in my name by always calling me
Aga
. Oma Esther's accent was different because she'd grown up speaking Yiddish as well. The bright blond of Tam-Tam's hair, the soft red of her lipstick and the smells of her perfume and powder all seemed too vivid for such a humble house, with its standard suburban design. I looked over at Oma Esther, who was fumbling intently with the buttons on her cardigan. I longed to sit on the floor by her legs and let her braid my hair while I thought the whole situation through, but Tam-Tam said, “Come along,” pausing by the overnight bags she'd left near me, at the bottom of the stairs. “Will you show me where to put these?” She handed me Oma Esther's big purse that opened on top like a mouth and snapped shut with two twists of shiny metal.
“You don't remember where the guest room is?” I said, not wanting to lose the autumn smell near the door, the warmth of Mama and Dad's coats against my back. I'd said the wrong thing; I slipped past Tam-Tam's horror-stricken face and started up the stairs with the purse, neck burning with disappointment that I had somehow hurt her feelings already, confirming her well-known suspicion that Mama wasn't raising me right. We didn't speak while she unpacked, and I watched in disgrace from one of the guest room's twin beds.
Tam-Tam's golden hair curled at the ends where it touched her
slim shoulders; it was a completely different blond from my own, which was darker on top and almost white at the tips, sun-bleached from a summer of reading in the backyard hammock. Tam-Tam was not, I had come to realize, a normal grandmother. When I was ten, she was elegant and striking; when she was younger, she had been movie-star beautiful. Her clothes placed neatly in one drawer and Oma Esther's in another, Tam-Tam set her cotton makeup bag on top of the dresser. Sitting in the rocking chair, she removed her warm black socks and pulled a pair of shiny gold slippers over the sheer stockings underneath. “Your shoulder's ripped,” said TamTam, eyeing the seam of my favourite blue sweater. “You change your top, then come along downstairs and show me what Steven left us to eat.” I wondered what she would say if she saw the thick wool work socks that Mama wore around the house all winter.
Mama was in a hospital bed and Minnie on her way by the time Tam-Tam reheated Dad's vegetable stew from the night before. I set the dining room table with the special-occasion dishes, each wide bowl dark blue with a big green flower in the middle. Mama, Dad and I often ate in the living room, plates on our laps, watching
Jeopardy
. This habit was as comforting and snug as Mama's wool socks with the white toes and red stripes around the tops. Tam-Tam and Oma Esther would think we ate this way every night, and I was proud of myself for protecting my parents' precious and unrespectable habits, their unbreakable thick glass plates.
Oma Esther examined her stew, pushing the carrots and potatoes aside. She turned to me. “Where is my handbag,
Vlinderkind
?” That was her special nickname for me; Mama said it meant butterfly-child, which was the most flattering thing anyone had ever called me.
“Butt, for short,” Mama had pointed out.
“Please get her handbag from upstairs,” Tam-Tam told me; I was already standing.
When I returned, Oma Esther patted my cheek before clicking her huge purse open. She snapped her fingers against the twists of metal at the top, and, like an adventurer with a bottomless bag of provisions, retrieved three fist-sized packages wrapped individually
in napkins. She handed one to Tam-Tam, who accepted it without reaction, and held another out to me, nodding for me to take it. She unwrapped the third. “Sticky buns with sweet ground beef,” said Oma Esther. We didn't eat meat in our house, though Mama and I ate anything we could get our hands on when we were at restaurants or other people's houses. Dad would have been upset if he'd known meat had touched his dishes, so I placed my bun on the napkin and ate it from there.
“These are so good,” I said, wondering what other treats were hidden away in the pockets of Oma Esther's overnight bag. She and Tam-Tam ate over their bowls, little bits of the delicious, spicy beef tumbling and tainting Dad's stew below. Two more secrets. Dad mustn't know that his dishes had touched beef; I told myself I'd put some extra soap in the dishwasher. I also knew that Oma Esther's habit of keeping food in her purse was one of Mama's most hated things.
After dinner, I sat on the floor in the living room making paper snowflakes for the Christmas play we were rehearsing at school. Tam-Tam flipped through a fashion magazine, and Oma Esther studied a book she'd found in the kitchen, running her finger slowly along the pages as though concentrating her attention on each word before moving on to the next. A bright, glossy garlic bulb filled the front cover. The book had been on the kitchen's bookshelf, unopened, for as long as I could remember. Someone, likely Oma Esther herself, must have given it to Mama as a gift. My grandmother and great-grandmother were out of place and odd, and I was beginning to feel sorry for them almost as much as I felt sorry for myself. Tam-Tam looked silly sitting on the brown corduroy couch in her stylish outfit, shiny white-tipped nails against glossy, perfumed magazine pages. Tam-Tam kept herself and Oma Esther immaculately put together. Oma Esther had stopped dying her hair brown now that she was in her early eighties, and it was pure white but permed into shape. She wore only a tiny amount of makeup, and her skin was a mass of wrinkles. The cookbook in her lap was a small but reassuring reminder that this silent, denture-adjusting Oma Esther was the same person I knew from Saturday mornings at Inner Beauty.
Mama and I had lived with Tam-Tam and Oma Esther until I was three, when Mama married Dad, but I remembered almost nothing of those years. Seemingly all my life, my mother and I had seen Tam-Tam and Oma Esther every Saturday morning when we crossed the Ottawa River to Ontario to shop in the Byward Market and visit Inner Beauty, my grandmother's hair salon and beauty spa. For as long as I could remember, Tam-Tam had seen me and my mother only in our visiting clothes. Mama wore skirts and stockings, her eyelashes dark and lumpy with mascara, and I was forced to wear a dress with patent leather shoes that squashed my feet. The way we usually looked â my well-loved sneakers with the hole in the toe and Mama's plaid shirts with socks under sandals â was a well-kept secret.
Inner Beauty occupied the top floor of the house, and Tam-Tam and Oma Esther lived underneath. They belonged in the apartment and salon â Tam-Tam directing hair snipping and lipstick selling, leg sugaring and eyebrow waxing. Oma Esther sat in one of the royal blue chairs, her head a mass of pink curlers, then went downstairs to the kitchen, to her pots and pans and blenders and cookbooks. Her racks and racks of spices. The apartment and Inner Beauty had separate entrances from the street; a brown door opened to TamTam and Oma Esther's front hallway, and a narrower rust-coloured door led upstairs. The salon's front stairwell matched our kitchen because Tam-Tam had given Mama and Dad her leftover paisley wallpaper. There hadn't been quite enough paper left for us, so there were two exposed squares of yellow-painted drywall beside our kitchen cupboards. It was always strange to see our wallpaper as we ascended to the salon, the familiar pattern under fluorescent light. The narrow door and wooden handrail were painted the same deep orangey-rust as the tiny leaves on the wall.
Each Saturday, Oma Esther had her hair set by one of the stylists and then went back downstairs until it was time to set her tightened curls free. She never said anything to me on her way out of the salon, just walked out past the cash, down towards the rust door. I would wait a few minutes and then go quietly down the hallway past the cosmetics counter. Tam-Tam's office was accessible through a pink
door beside the washroom; it had a grey-blue carpet and was spotlessly clean, decorated with framed photographs on the walls, the desk and the top of the binder-filled bookcase. One of them showed Tam-Tam as a little girl, reaching up to hold hands with her parents. She had blond braids and was smiling. The girl in the photo was pretty and held herself as if she was used to posing. Oma Esther had short, straight, light brown hair with bangs and looked happy and tired, and her husband was almost a foot taller than she was. He had a smouldering cigarette between the fingers of his other hand and a mischievous look in his eyes. Mama told me that he went missing after the war, and that she was named after him: his name was Jozef. No one had ever called Mama by her first name, Josephine. I liked the idea that my mother had a hidden first name and wished I had one myself â it made her seem like a spy with a secret identity. There was also a picture of Tam-Tam with Margaret Trudeau, whose makeup she'd done a few times.
My interest in Tam-Tam's office lay in the door across from her desk. It looked as though it would open to a closet, but it led to a steep, dark, wood-smelling staircase so narrow I could reach out and press my arms against the walls on either side. For years, our weekly visits had been redeemed for me by this secret passageway that descended from Tam-Tam's private office into the kitchen of the apartment below. The stairs were old and unfinished but somehow clean and never dusty. The Saturday before Jasmine was born, I'd crept down, brave and adventurous, holding a make-believe candle in my fist. There was no light, so I had to leave the door upstairs slightly ajar and keep my hand on the rough handrail. I'd learned not to lean on it too hard after Mama had to gouge a series of splinters from my palm with a needle. I walked slowly, trying not to make the stairs creak; the stair treads were narrow, and there was a perilously steep drop from each to the next.
When my fingers bumped against the cigarette pack lodged between handrail and wall, I stopped to check. Each time I looked there were a different number of cigarettes. I thought with a thrill about the ghost of Tam-Tam's father visiting regularly and sitting on the stairs with a smoke, listening to Oma Esther and Tam-Tam's
dinner conversations. I'd considered surreptitiously leaving a note rolled up like a cigarette, imagined starting up a correspondence. Jozef would leave me messages for the family, and though I couldn't quite imagine what these messages might be, my fantasies always involved Mama, Tam-Tam and Oma Esther standing in the meticulous downstairs living room, crying and hugging each other. In the secret staircase, my great-grandfather would be listening, unburdened because the strain on his loved ones was finally lifted. Then his soul would be free. I would see him through the window and he would wave goodbye to me, smiling with love and gratitude before dispersing into a cluster of snowflakes and floating away. The others would be too distracted to notice him.
I'd written many drafts of letters to Jozef. It didn't worry me that he never knew English, since death must surely free a person from all limits imposed by the human brain. But I could never maintain the exalted tone required to initiate contact with my haunted, haunting great-grandfather.
Dear Jozef
, I'd write.
My name is Agatha and I am your great-granddaughter. I'm the girl with straight blond hair and glasses who goes up and down these stairs every Saturday. You're probably wondering how I know about you. I don't know why, but I have a special way of knowing about magical things.
My letters invariably devolved into a plea for help instead of an offering.
Mama's a fat cow. I don't know why Steven ever married her. Helena says I take her forgrantid. I wish she wouldn't always do whatever I say, she's so gullable. I wish she was smarter instead of so nice and pretty. Did you ever feel like this when you were alive?
What kind of person, I reprimanded myself, dumps her problems on a disembodied soul stuck haunting his wife and daughter instead of going to heaven â as if Jozef didn't have enough to worry about already. I satisfied myself by checking the cigarette pack each week. I'd lean over to smell the eternally fresh tobacco, eyes closed, and conjure my great-grandfather's clever black-and-white face.
I knocked on the door at the bottom of the stairs before pushing it open. It didn't have a doorknob but swung out like the door you'd find on a pantry, and anyone looking at it from the outside would have thought that's what it was. Mama had told me that, when her
father died, most of his money went to Tam-Tam, but he'd left some to Oma Esther, too. Oma Esther invested her inheritance and never spent a penny of it until they moved into this home; then she spent all her savings to create the kitchen she'd always dreamed of. “My father always loved her cooking,” Mama said. “He probably left her that money hoping she'd use it to become a world-famous chef.”
Two large bookcases stood at right angles in the corner, separated from the stove, sink and cupboards by a wide, polished wooden counter. The counter was low, built to accommodate Oma Esther's barely five-foot frame, and the bookcases were neatly filled with her hundreds of cookbooks, organized in alphabetical order. Shiny pots and pans hung from racks over the cooking area, perilously low for the average adult. On the wall beside the counter were three spice racks, each jar labelled bilingually in Oma Esther's surprisingly girlish handwriting. According to Mama, Oma Esther's culinary expertise and her meticulously organized kitchen were manifestations of a creepy and unhealthy obsession. Mama always looked tense and unsettled when we ate with Tam-Tam and Oma Esther, helping herself to tiny portions of the perfect meals and pushing them around her plate like a child with a plateful of boiled vegetables. The kitchen table was at the other side of the room, in a corner near the door to the living room. Tam-Tam had assumed ownership of that portion of the room and decorated the walls with white porcelain plates, a glossy peach or strawberry in the centre of each one. A white china bowl full of pears and apples sat in the middle of the yellow tablecloth. I had learned the hard way that the flawless fruit was made of plaster.