Cricket in a Fist Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œHey, 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,