Read Online Girl Unwrapped by Gabriella Goliger - Free Book Online Page B

air freshener but otherwise seems satisfied. She comments approvingly on the spaciousness of the rooms, the cute breakfast nook in the kitchen, the gleaming electric range: You don’t have to strike a match to light a gas burner . The woman smiles back at Lisa in a pitying way to hear of something so backward as gas. When they reach the bedroom belonging to the household’s teenaged daughter, Toni hangs back because, though the girl is out at the moment, she could suddenly return and stare with frosty astonishment at this strange kid peering in at her things: the white plastic portable record player and stack of 45s, the pictures of the idols—Elvis Presley, Richard Chamberlain, Bobby Vinton—on the walls. Toni can’t get out of there fast enough. Back on the street a couple of boys around her age have started a game of pitch and catch. One of them glances over briefly, and the blankness in his eyes tells Toni what he sees—a nonentity. He doesn’t know Toni is a tomboy and wouldn’t care if he did. A tomboy doesn’t fit in Snowdon.
    Next stop is the Jewish Y. It takes up a whole block on Westbury Avenue, bustles with activity and resonates with voices in the big, marble-tiled lobby. A large glass case displays an assortment of trophies, and all the important men who donated money to the Y gaze down from a gallery of portraits on the wall. There are also faded black-and-white photos of athletes. One shot shows a group of women wearing long skirts down to their ankles, cardigans, funny hats with ear flaps, and lipsticked smiles. The caption reads, “Ladies Hockey Team, 1925.”
    “Baloney. How can they be hockey players?” Toni says loudly to her father, but he’s busy studying a display titled “Our Community Is 80 Years Young.” Lisa meanwhile has disappeared into an office to ask about programs. She returns clutching a bouquet of coloured, mimeographed sheets. So much going on: an Israeli coffee house, a Purim party, folk dancing lessons for boys and girls.
    “I’m not taking folk dancing.”
    Her mother and father look at each other over her head in a meaningful way. She bolts out of the building. She doesn’t know those two people who call after her. They don’t belong to her, nor she to them. She belongs nowhere and with no one anymore.
    When the phone rings at supper time, Lisa leaps from her chair to answer it. She prances back into the kitchen, eyes aglow.
    “They’ve agreed to our terms. We’ve got it.”
    Without bothering to tell Toni what’s been agreed to, she pirouettes around the room, then hauls a startled Julius to his feet and makes him polka with her up and down the hall. The transformation of her parents into prancing ponies is almost as unsettling as the announcement that finally bursts from Lisa’s breathless lips:
    “We move the first of May.”
    Toni attacks the lukewarm potato dumpling on her plate. Have they forgotten the importance of eating food when it’s hot? Is everything to be upside down from now on? Someone has to maintain proper order. Toni tries. Over the next weeks, while her parents are busy, busy, working overtime to earn some extra dollars, Toni comes home promptly after school to bring the empty apartment back to life. She waters the plants, straightens cushions, puts casseroles in the oven, gives the stopped cuckoo clock a tap so that the pendulum resumes its back-and-forth journey and the kitchen is filled with the familiar tick-tock. Despite all her efforts, home becomes transformed into a place of chaos. Cardboard boxes from Steinberg’s crowd the hall and are gradually filled with newspaper-wrapped knick-knacks, dishes, towels, clothes. Cupboards stand open, exposing naked hooks and yellowed shelving paper. Blank rectangles of emptiness stare from walls denuded of pictures. A vast machinery of change is in motion. All protests are useless, ridiculous, like Wile E. Coyote churning his legs in mid-air above the vast canyon that he pretends not to see,