Girl Unwrapped Read Online Free Page A

delight makes Toni wonder if mooning the twins was such a brain wave after all or the sort of dumb move that haunts you the rest of your life. Suddenly she feels squishy inside, foolish and naked and wrong. Suddenly she’s Mabel the chimp, all bowed legs and shambling feet and hairy humiliation in front of an audience collapsing in hysterics. Pretending a dignity she doesn’t feel, she walks stiffly away while her hair, loosened from the barrettes, flops in her face and the wide ship of her dress wobbles in the air.
    But later she gets even. Dressed again in her proper tomboy clothes, Toni swoops upon the twins as they play skipping games on the three squares of walkway in front of their house. She plasters two identical wads of Dubble Bubble onto the backs of their two unsuspecting heads. From their hiding places in the hydrangea bushes, the whole gang bursts into cheers as Assie and Shittie wail for their mama. Before the posse can arrive, four boys and Toni race across the streetcar tracks to the waiting embrace of the spring-green woods.

chapter 3
    Grandma Antonia is a flame in a glass, a dancing tongue of fire above thick white wax. When Toni bumps against the kitchen counter, the flame body twists, writhes, as if angry at being disturbed.
    “Hold still,” Lisa hisses, pinching Toni’s arm. “Stand and listen while I say the Kaddish. And when I’m done, you say ‘Amen.’”
    This evening is the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and a day of remembrance for all those without a final resting place. In the Goldblatt family household, it is a day to spit on Hitler and to mourn Grandma’s death.
    The memorial candle sits in a small glass jar with the blue Star of David and Hebrew letters printed across one side. The flame will burn all through supper, through their television shows— Gunsmoke , Country Hoedown , the CBC evening news—and throughout the night, filling the kitchen with a spooky glow. All day tomorrow, the flame will sway behind its sooty glass walls, finally becoming nothing but a tiny blue eye in a puddle of wax, clear as tears. And still it will endure, on and on, refusing to disappear until well after dark. Once a year the candle is lit, allowing Grandma, whose spirit lurks in mysterious corners of the house, to come out into the open. She fills the kitchen with her eerie light, her brazen presence, tingling the skin at the back of Toni’s neck.
    On Yom Kippur, Lisa fasts, “for my own reasons,” she says, but cooks meals for Toni and her father, just as on any other day, and joins them at the table to make sure every morsel goes down as it’s supposed to. They all stay home for the day, don’t troop off to synagogue like the Nutkevitch family does. Papa works, just not where people can see. On Yom Kippur, he works at home, in the silence of his study. To do otherwise would be disrespectful, he says, though Toni isn’t sure why. Disrespectfulness extends to shopping in stores and playing in the streets. It is a strange day of being holed up together. Of waiting. Of hiding.
    “ Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba… ”
    Mumbo jumbo falls from her mother’s lips. The Kaddish prayer. Lisa closes her eyes. Her voice rises, defiant against the twilight gloom of the kitchen and the everyday noises, the patter of October rain in the gravel lane outside, the gurgling fridge inside, and now the clang, whirr, “cuckoo” from the brown clock, shaped like a fairy-tale cottage, on the wall above the kitchen table. Toni wants to jump onto a chair and push Cuckoo behind his door before Mama loses her temper and rips him out of his hidey-hole once and for all. Toni strains forward, but her mother’s hand yanks her back.
    “… Yit’barakh v’yish’tabach v’yit’pa’ar v’yit’romam v’yit’nasei .”
    Grandma’s flame rears straight up, sending a long wisp of smoke toward the ceiling.
    What happened to Grandma?
    A bad question. Whenever Toni dares to ask, her mother spits