Cricket in a Fist (2 page)

The nurse moved us to another waiting room, through a set of doors and less crowded, and kept calling Dad aside, talking in a way that made him stoop to hear, nod as if he understood. He told us that Mama had hit her head hard, that we couldn't leave until we knew how badly she was hurt. I wasn't eager to go home and change into my red dress and the matching wings I'd made from a coat hanger and pantyhose. If anything, I was glad I'd be missing the Halloween dance. The television in the waiting room played sitcoms, the evening news, eventually
Saturday Night Live
. I was fifteen. I was touching my sore lips with the tips of my fingers, thinking about the
blond, cigarette-smelling boy I'd kissed under the stairs at school the day before.

One evening, just months earlier, Mama had left our house by taxi, tea towel wrapped tight around the hand she'd cut along with the carrots for our dinner. At regular intervals, Dad drove her away in the night, Mama wheezing or limping or retching. She was accident-and-illness-prone, but she always recovered, and she'd been hospitalized so many times we'd come to believe she was invincible. Dad and Tam-Tam would say later that my sister sensed before anyone else that this time was different. “She cried through the whole taxi ride to the hospital,” Tam-Tam said. She described Minnie's snuffling, restrained and sorrowful — “not like one of her tantrums.” I didn't correct them, didn't argue that she was only crying out of disappointment over not getting to ride in the fire truck, the first real one she'd ever seen up close.

“The bus?” said Dad, when I called him from the streetcar. “They let a thirteen-year-old on the bus, alone?” I heard him move the phone away from his mouth to tell Lara what my sister had done, and then Lara's muffled, panicked reply. Lara was practically Minnie's mother; I barely knew her.

“Agatha,” Dad said. “Go to the terminal and find her, then get back on the next bus with her and bring her home. I'll pay for both tickets.”

“I can't do that,” I said. “I have to go to work tomorrow. I have shifts every day this week.”

“Can't you tell them it's a family emergency?”

“No!” I said. “I can't. They're depending on me. Not to mention it's my
job
. It's my income. I have a life here.”

“You know that I'm happy to help you out financially until you find something better. Did you apply for the job in Gerry's office?”

“Steven,” I said. “I'm not moving back to Ottawa to be your cousin's receptionist. I can't believe you're bringing this up right now. I have to go. I'm going into the subway station.”

The terminal was two trains away, and I knew that if Minnie changed her mind she could leave, walk down Bay Street and dissolve into the city, and I might never find her. I'd lived with Dad and Lara for only three months when I ran away, but Dad found me two days later in the food court of the mall, drinking rum and Coke out of a cardboard cup with my twenty-one-year-old drug-dealer boyfriend. Running away to Toronto is different; my sister had really left home. Two people could live in Toronto for years and never cross paths. That's why I always checked. In restaurants, streetcars and stores. I walked the length of subway cars, scanning each face. I saw other people staring down at newspapers or gazing intently at dark windows that offered only reflections. Any two people could be long lost to each other, could sit one orange vinyl seat away and never realize how close they'd come.

I had never found J. Virginia Morgan, and we'd lived in the same city for over four years. It said on her latest book jacket that she divided her time between Toronto and Spain and also toured a lot, giving seminars mostly in American cities. It was unlikely that someone her age, with such a lucrative career, would take the subway, but more and more frequently I thought I caught a glimpse of her across the subway tracks, waiting for a train heading in the other direction. Behind me, I'd catch a flash of business suit, a waft of perfume, but when I turned, it was never her. Didn't even look like her. My hands would shake with adrenalin for minutes, and I would tell myself I should move to a different city. I reminded myself why I moved to Toronto, that it was my best option, the best university. It wasn't because of what her book jacket said
About the Author
, wasn't so that, in every crowd, movie, grocery store, I'd feel the possibility of her breath on my neck.

Since arriving in Toronto, I'd found a thrill in the underground connection between subway station, mall and bus terminal. It was no coincidence that I'd met two boyfriends on the bus; I found people with giant packs strapped to their backs, entering the city from afar or heading for another destination, irresistibly alluring. Usually I entered the terminal because I was leaving town, and it felt strange to walk in with no bag, no intention to take a bus out of the
city and onto the highway. Minnie was exactly where I'd told her to stay, sitting on a grey chair with a big red backpack on her lap. She stood when she saw me, and it was plain that she was almost fourteen, poor Minnie, possessed by adolescence at its worst. Since I'd last seen her in Ottawa, six months earlier, her reddish hair had grown longer and she'd put on weight. She'd grown breasts — she had a woman's body — and was wearing so much dark eye makeup it was visible from across the room. I saw her struggle not to smile as she stood and squared her shoulders. She came towards me past the rows of chairs and the pay phones, chin up, swinging her hips and pouting, catwalking in her yellow platform sneakers. I'd never seen her walk that way before. I recognized the blue and grey Adidas jacket that Dad used to wear.

“Min.” I grabbed her and held on tight. She was bigger than me, more solid, and the shoes made her even taller. “What were you thinking?” She shifted uncomfortably in my arms, but relief made it difficult to let go. I released the back of her jacket from my fists and stepped away.

“You took out your nose ring,” she said. “You're shorter than me. Why are you dressed like that?”

“It's a Halloween costume.” I opened my jacket and showed her the dress. “The scarlet letter. You know? I'm a character from a book.”

“Oh.” She must have applied a fresh coat of lipstick while waiting, because her lips were dark, shiny purple. Her breath smelled like gum. It didn't occur to her that I must be dressed up for a party, that I had cancelled my plans for her. Of course it didn't; she was thirteen.

I led Minnie down the escalator and looked up to see our reflection; behind me, she leaned on one foot as if she was trying to disappear into the escalator railing. She'd inherited Mama's full features and Dad's bulky height. Her nose and lips were fleshy, breasts full, lips full, limbs long. Away from the light of my apartment, I was pleased to see how good I looked in my costume. My hair was a vampish approximation of Victorian, my lips bright, shiny red. My skin looked pink and healthy and I was satisfyingly slight.
My sister followed my gaze up to the mirrored ceiling and scowled. No one would have guessed that we were related.

“I'm starving,” Minnie said, as we walked through the food court under Bay Street. After considering her options, she ordered Chinese food served from large metal tubs and waited for me to pay and choose a table. She used the disposable chopsticks easily and thoughtlessly, and I watched her eat half the food and drink a whole cup of pop. There was an amoebic blob of purplish red polish in the centre of each of her fingernails, and she still sucked her lips between bites — she would have been humiliated to know how childlike it made her look. Finally I asked, “So, what the hell happened?”

“Are you going to rat me out?”

“I don't know,” I told her. “I don't even know what you're doing here.”

“Didn't you think I'd come? Did you get my e-mail?” She'd been writing me daily, sending articles about J. Virginia Morgan and interviews with her. I had stopped reading her messages carefully, since they mostly consisted of rants about Lara's mother, Bev, who'd moved in with them. “I guess you weren't paying too much attention,” she said. “I wasn't going to call you, by the way. But the person who was supposed to meet me at the bus station didn't show up.”

“What? Minnie? Who do you know in Toronto?”

“You know no one calls me that anymore. Jasmine.” Our mother had been six months pregnant when she had her ultrasound and decided on the name Emily Jasmine. As soon as she was born, my sister became Minnie. Mini she was: three pounds when she came into the world, and though for the first four years of her life she grew softly round and tall for her age, she was still miniature to us, and her full name was reserved for reprimands. When she started kindergarten, she was Jasmine at school, still Minnie at home. The first time a little girl phoned and asked sweetly for Jasmine Winter, I saw my sister's personality splitting: she was a child who turned into a different person when her parents were out of mind. She looked at me evenly, elbow on the table, chopsticks between her fingers.

J. Virginia Morgan writes in all her books that your past, and your family's past, are just stories. They are no more important and have no more claim on you than any other story. You feel shackled, she claims, but you're really just afraid to let go. And I was wondering already, as Minnie pushed chow mein around her plate, why she'd really run away. It was Halloween, the day the worst had happened, the day everything always came back to haunt us. Surely she had come looking for an explanation, the details that would make everything clear. I was the only other person who'd seen it happen; I was the one who was supposed to have protected her, and my sister had come with some matters to settle.

I was ten when Minnie was born. Mama and Dad had prepared me, and I had pictured the scene many times. It would two weeks before Christmas, and I would stay at Granny and Grandpa Winter's house. We lived in Aylmer, Quebec, and I went to the anglophone school in Hull. But when my sister came, I wouldn't take the bus home with my best friend, Helena, like I usually did; Grandpa Winter would be waiting for me in his car, clad in sweater vest and tweed tie, pipe between his friendly yellow teeth, to take me to Ottawa's west end. When I returned home at the end of a week of grandparently indulgence, I would have a sister. But Minnie arrived over a month early, before the world was ready for her, purple and gold wallpaper for her nursery still rolled up in the closet, cradle bought but unassembled, Granny and Grandpa Winter at an auction out of town, buying aged objects for their antique store.

Mama had been immobile for two months, swelling and reclining, reading and watching TV. She told all her piano students she was taking a break from teaching. “I'm not putting my feet up,” she told Dad. “I'm just putting them aside until after the baby's born.” When Mama put her feet aside, she fell limp onto the brown corduroy sofa and stayed there all day with a book in her hand and the television on. When I came home from school, she'd be watching
Three's Company
, looking resignedly sardonic, running her fingertips over cushions, over the coffee table, over her thighs in silent scales and sonatas.

“Hey, little Agamemnon,” she'd say, as I settled on the floor with my homework. She was always inventing new nicknames for me; she had only recently stopped calling me
Agmire
. “My inescapable Agmire,” she used to cry as I walked in the door.

During her pregnancy, Mama's hair had lost all its lustre and hung, scraggly and perpetually greasy, down to her shoulders. Then she had it all cut off, and I hated the way it looked, bristly and red like a hedgehog. The three freckles on her sweat-shiny nose stood out like stains, and the shape of her face had changed, once-high cheekbones rounded. Her hands were bumpy and rough with warts and eczema. My fingers were spotted with little round bandages where Mama had dabbed my own warts with drugstore medication, but she wasn't allowed to use it herself because of the pregnancy.

One morning in late autumn instead of mid-winter, Mama insisted something was wrong, and by late afternoon she was lying on the sofa, a towel under her hips. I waited with her in the living room, watching her grimace, while Dad did the unthinkable: he phoned Tam-Tam and Oma Esther and asked them to come over and watch me. I expected Mama to put up a fight, but she only looked dismayed, then sighed and didn't even argue. Dad took me into the kitchen and motioned for me to jump up and sit on the counter so our eyes were level. He said quietly, as if he was telling me a secret, “Agatha, the baby's coming early. I need you to be a big girl and take good care of your guests, all right?” I knew it was the other way round and Dad was trying to trick me into being good, but I nodded.

My grandmother and great-grandmother hadn't come out to Aylmer for at least a year. Neither of them drove, so Tam-Tam and Oma Esther had to take a taxi all the way from downtown Ottawa. When it pulled up in front of the house, Dad left Mama lying on her back, rushed outside and grabbed the overnight bags from the trunk. I followed him to the door and watched from among our boots while Mama complained from the couch that I was letting all our heat out
the open door. Dad helped Oma Esther from the far side of the taxi. White head, red coat, black pants, she looked like a ladybug and stood barely higher than Dad's elbow, and the breeze blew his dark hair around into his face so it was indistinguishable from his beard. My great-grandmother safely transported to the sidewalk, Dad looked around as though he'd lost something. Quickly recovering, he opened the car door on the side closest to him and released TamTam. Hand in the crook of his sweatered arm, she stood straight-backed, gracefully blond and vaguely offended, smoothing her pants as if she were brushing off dirt.

Two minutes later, Dad and Mama were in the car and gone. I stood in the foyer while Oma Esther settled onto the brown corduroy couch. There she would remain for most of the evening, slowly moving her jaw from side to side in an eternal struggle with her dentures. Tam-Tam walked around the living room, into the kitchen and back again. She paused by the piano and pressed down one of the yellowed ivory keys, so slowly it didn't make a sound. Mama usually taught piano lessons a few times a week, and I, reluctantly, was one of her students. She even had me booked into her schedule: my lessons were after school on Tuesdays. The piano used to be in Tam-Tam's house — it had been her husband's, and he was Mama's first teacher. My grandfather died long before I was born, hit by a bus while riding his bike, back when my mother was just a little girl. I knew a few things about him — that he was Irish, that he used to eat Marmite, a knife-scrape of pungent tar on toast. His parents had died before he met Tam-Tam, which was why he left Tam-Tam all the money she eventually used to start her salon. I knew that he used to play the piano and sing loud enough to wake the dead, otherwise known as Oma Esther. Mama said that her father never realized what he was letting himself in for, taking Tam-Tam and Oma Esther into his home, that he could never understand or abide by their rules and rituals. She said that when the bus hit her father's bicycle, the force of impact threw Mama-as-a-little-girl off the handlebars and out of harm's way. She only broke her elbow. I wondered if she'd seen his body.