Cricket in a Fist Read Free Page B

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 outthe 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.
    Once I heard Dad ask Mama why Tam-Tam had never dated orremarried since her husband’s death. Mama laughed in surprise. “Oh, she’s had a few chances,” she said. Dad’s question disappointed me with its cluelessness. Even at the age of ten, I knew Tam-Tam’s attention to grooming had nothing to do with attracting men. She lived with Oma Esther and loved me and my mother. She liked the girls who worked in her salon, liked to dress them up and tweeze unsightly hairs from their faces. Men were far too brutish for her. I only wondered how and why she had ever married one in the first place.
    â€œShall I follow