Girl Unwrapped (16 page)

After dark one evening, while her parents watch TV, Toni ventures out into the tepid air. Her feet take her to Decarie Boulevard, to the Snowdon branch of the Jewish Public Library, located in a commercial building upstairs from a deli. The library consists of a single, stuffy, book-crammed room and a wrinkled, doddering librarian, barely awake, her chin propped on the bridge of her folded hands. The librarian rouses herself at the arrival of this rare bird, a summer evening visitor and a young one at that, but Toni declines the offer of help. She slips away into a corner, carrying with her the most innocuous of books: the
Oxford English Dictionary
. She scans the entries and when she finds the one she’s been searching for, huddles over the desk.

“Resident of the Isle of Lesbos … female homosexual … sexual attraction to a member of one’s own sex … a perversion.” And that’s all. Nothing more beyond a few terse definitions. Still, she derives some satisfaction from seeing the word that has been rolling around in her mind for weeks—the word that sounds so much like a disease—in bold print. She stares until the letters stamp themselves on the backs of her eyelids.

Another day, while her parents are out, she rifles through her father’s study and finds something useful at last: a thin volume of essays by Sigmund Freud. Her father has no particular interest in psychiatry, though, unlike Lisa, he regards it as a serious science. He’s probably never read these essays. Freud was a Viennese Jew and a book hound; it was said the great man stopped to browse in the very shop where, decades later, Julius worked. This long-ago, fleeting, personal connection would be enough to make her father want some books of Freud on his shelves.

Seated cross-legged on the floor between the big oak desk and the filing cabinet, one ear cocked for her parents’ returning footsteps, Toni skims the essays. The language is dense and convoluted, imposing and authoritative. Although she understands little, certain words jump out at her:
aberration, deviation, inversion, perversion, masochism, sadism,
hermaphrodite
. There are terms that fascinate and repel. “Fetish,” for example. What a deliciously hideous word, sounding like the German
fett
—fat, greasy. Freud rips away romance. He defines kissing as “contact with the mucous membranes of the mouth.” With merciless precision, he details other contacts of organs and mucous membranes, grotesque combinations she could never have imagined. All humans are sick, it appears, but some are sicker than others. “I am an invert,” she doodles on the pale skin of her thigh. She draws an upside-down stick figure with its head in a trash can. Then she furiously rubs at the marks with a spit-moistened hand.

There’s one hopeful note in the sad litany. Freud says inversion can be cured by hypnosis.

On a listless afternoon, Toni sets out for the Jewish General Hospital on Côte-Sainte Catherine Road, about a mile from her house. Her mother thinks she’s finally gone to the Y for a swim. She carries a plastic bag with her bathing suit, towel, hair brush, and a piece of her mother’s strudel as she stands in the busy hospital lobby. A robotic voice calls for this or that doctor to come to this or that section of the hospital. Toni wanders down one hall after another. Finally, she finds the courage to tell a girl behind an information counter that she’s mentally ill. Where is she supposed to go for that? The girl barely looks up from the form she’s filling out to direct her to the emergency department. Toni’s knees weaken. Emergency! She imagines men in white coats rushing at her to pin her arms in a strait-jacket and almost turns back. But she has come too far. Grimly, she trudges toward a set of double doors and ends up on a bench between a man with his arm in a sling and a weary mother with a feverish toddler.

She waits for two hours while almost everyone else in the crowded waiting room—those who were before her and those who came after— gets seen to first. At last a tousle-headed man carrying a cellophane-wrapped sandwich calls her name. She wonders if he’s going to offer her the sandwich, but instead he ushers her into a little room and closes the door. The man carefully places his sandwich on the gurney and rests one of his haunches upon it, half sitting, half standing, quite close to Toni and looking down at her. He introduces himself as Dr Margoles and stretches out his hand. His handshake is damp. If it weren’t for his unbuttoned white coat with the stethoscope in the pocket, she wouldn’t have guessed he was a doctor.

“I’m an intern,” he says softly, as if reading her thoughts. “Is that all right with you?” He’s pasty-faced with watery, lashless eyes behind glasses, a hoarse voice, deeply sincere, striving to ooze reassurance.

She nods.

“Good.” He draws out the word. He considers her for a long moment before adding: “What can I do for you?”

What indeed? The intensity of his stare, the soft unhurried manner of speaking, throws her off. One of his socks has rolled down, revealing a well-scratched mosquito bite on a bony ankle. She says nothing.

“You told the nurse you wanted to be cured of … of certain inclinations through hypnosis. Is that true?”

She can’t bring herself to say a word. She wants to put her hands over her ears, shut her eyes, and crouch in a corner.

“Are you afraid of me?”

He leans forward. The watery blue eyes lock on hers. It occurs to her that he’s starting the hypnosis treatment on the spot and that she ought to relax and let it work. She ought at least to try.

“No, I’m not,” she answers.

“Are you afraid of men?”

The question is puzzling.

“No.”

“Oh.”

He seems a touch disappointed. Runs his hands through his straggly hair.

“Have you ever done anything with other girls? You know, experiments with touching, and so on?”

What can he be thinking? What does he take her for? “No!” she shouts, causing him to jerk backward and almost loose his balance as the gurney shifts. He re-crosses his legs and ponders her again with his spooky blue eyes.

“So it’s just feelings you’re worried about?”

Perplexed by the question, she remains silent.
Just
feelings?

“Do you notice boys at all? Do you notice them on the street, at school?”

She thinks of the guys in her class. How bunches of them burst into a room and start up a frenzy of drumming on the desks before the teacher arrives. They are certainly noticeable.

“Yes.”

“You look at boys?”

“Sure.”

“I see.”

He clears his throat. Taps his chin.

“I think you should talk to your guidance counsellor when school starts. That’s what he’s there for. Kids your age have all kinds of feelings. Perfectly normal.”

His tone has become crisp, matter-of-fact, the keen interest suddenly gone. She understands she is being dismissed.

“By the way, hypnosis is rarely used as a treatment anymore. Quite outdated,” he asserts as he bends to scribble notes on a clipboard.

Toni slinks back through the emergency waiting room, past the rows of benches and the knots of people. All the jittery sense of daring that buoyed her up until this moment has left her. She feels stupid, like she’s failed some kind of test, but also that she’s been cheated out of a proper diagnosis. Perhaps she should have demanded to see a real psychiatrist.
Never deal with underlings,
her mother always says. But there’s no way she could bring herself to ask for a second opinion.

A line from the Bible jumps into her mind—
Male and female He created
them
—and she sees the perfectly formed, side-by-side couples of every species marching across a verdant new world. They march confidently through time, those proper beings, while the “it” she is watches frozen and alone from within the great void. The “it” belongs nowhere. Emptiness and chaos will follow it all the days of its life.

On the Labour Day Monday before school resumes, Toni hikes to Côte Saint-Luc Road. “Cote Saint-Puke” is what Janet used to call the suburb she grew up in. “Little boxes, little boxes, and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,” she’d sing in a high, fast falsetto, cracking up the kids and counsellors gathered around her.

Toni loiters across the street from a classy, white-brick apartment building with an awning. Its name, “The Savoy,” is written in gold on the heavy glass doors. She counts the storeys (fourteen) and the balconies (eighty-four) and keeps a hawk eye on who goes in and out. She’s done this before, but always under cover of darkness, never in broad daylight. Doesn’t matter any more. Doesn’t matter if she’s spotted during her crazy vigil. The game’s up, or will be soon. For this very reason, Toni feels in her bones that this time, finally, she’ll catch sight of Janet. All she wants is a glimpse of Janet’s red hair disappearing through the glass doors and then to see blinds roll up in one of the windows. Oh, to be able to figure out which apartment is hers at last. But as with all the other times, the people who enter and exit the Savoy bear no resemblance to Janet. A light rain falls, steaming the streets, soaking through Toni’s shirt. A few cars swish by. Hardly anyone’s about. Perhaps everyone’s still at their cottages in the Laurentians, drinking up the last drops of summer.

Tomorrow school starts again. Guys and girls in new fall jackets will throng the halls, eagerly sharing stories about their summer adventures. Whispers too. Whispers about something that happened at a camp. The story will have travelled from the A&W to the Orange Julep Drive-in to the halls of Northmount High School. Were Toni to pass by the huddled groups, a sudden silence would descend. Nothing said out loud, but everything known.

There’s only one thing left to do. Death ends agony in one magnificent blast. Death cancels out sin, wipes the slate clean. In death you are pure. Powerful too, because death is mightier than the sum total of all your creepy thoughts and acts over a lifetime. Death takes everyone’s breath away. Death says:
You see? She gave her all. Her suffering wasn’t
ordinary.
The dead are loved forever. They are the flame in the glass.

She trudges back to Snowdon, getting wetter and more bedraggled with every step. At Queen Mary Road and Westbury she pauses and casts her eyes uphill toward Saint Joseph’s Oratory, the Shrine. As a kid, she used to love to sneak in with her buddies, to prowl around the vast, dimly lit chambers with their rows of flickering candles, the yellowing crutches of supplicants cured, and the urn in which Brother André’s heart was preserved in formaldehyde. Her parents used to scoff at these attractions, calling them
goyische naches
, gentile diversions, but the mystery and the promise of miracles called to her. The black cross on top of the basilica seemed like a man with his arms outstretched in flight. She starts up the hill toward the Shrine and the veterans’ hospital opposite, while the cars and rumbling buses hurtle by. She imagines ambulance sirens, priests, and nuns rushing forward, wounded soldiers watching the commotion below from their hospital windows. She imagines newspaper headlines. She smiles as she walks, calm and easy. Halfway up she teeters on the edge of the curb and waits with her eyes closed. Soon the Number 65 will come and, gathering momentum, will plunge down the long slope of Queen Mary Road. All she has to do is fall forward slightly, let go, let go. Beautiful oblivion at last. She sucks in her breath.

An engine roars, wind slaps her face, and thick exhaust enters her nostrils as she opens her eyes. The bus rolls down the hill and away. Her feet have remained plastered to the sidewalk. They are obstinate, these size-nine feet. They will not budge. They don’t belong to her at all, none of her body does. She resents this rebellion of the flesh, yet can’t help but feel amazed at the blind will that has revealed itself. At the pivotal moment, an overwhelming force shouted through every cell, drowning out the feeble instructions of her mind. So how do people kill themselves? How do they do it? She now sees that her own attempts will be hopeless. She is here, unremittingly here in this world. No point in waiting for another bus.

As she trudges toward home, she finds herself walking into Kalman’s Five and Dime. The bell above the door announces her entry with a loud, jarring ring.

“Yes?” Kalman barks. He has dark bags under his eyes and nervous hands that unwrap a bundle of Yiddish newspapers on the cluttered counter. His mouth falls in sour lines as he sees her standing in a daze of indecision. Should she buy chocolate bars? Should she gorge herself? Her glance falls upon the display of school supplies on the shelves along the wall, and she wanders over. If she’s got to show up at school tomorrow, she may as well have the gear. She spends every cent of two months’ accumulated allowance on a set of Hilroy exercise books in five pastel colours, along with pencils, pens, erasers, and a geometry set. Kalman’s voice purrs with new respect as he totals up these items and mentions each by name. Suddenly, his stubby, newsprint-grimed fingers bouncing over the cash register keys strike her as beautiful. A wave of gratitude washes over her and she wants to weep. She has a flash of insight. It occurs to her she could become a proper egghead. Not just ordinary, get-along-without-effort smart as she’s been all along, but brilliant. So brilliant she becomes untouchable and is catapulted onto another plane.

chapter 12

Toni knows the paramecium. She has studied this charming pond creature inside out. There it lies before her in the grainy textbook photo: a single transparent cell, shaped like the sole of a shoe, marvellously intricate and ingenious. A universe unto itself. She covers the page with her hand and whispers the names of the paramecium’s components; oral groove, cilia, food vacuoles, macronucleus, micronucleus. In the diagram beside the photo, the slipper-like body is outlined in bold purple, with paler shading for the internal parts, everything clearly labelled. In real life, the creature is minuscule and the colour of water. Even under the microscope, only its jerky, spinning movement gives it away. During biology class she took her turn peering down into the clever apparatus of revealing mirrors and saw slipping by, just beyond her magnified quivering lashes, the blobs of life held together by the thinnest skins imaginable, propelled by rafts of minute hairs.