My father stormed out of the room with his coffee. My mother looked at me, eyes dancing. ‘Your father can only spout so much bullshit,’ she said, ‘because for some reason he thinks he’s never done anything bad.’
Bad. And God is backwards.
Yeah, I knew exactly why Barbra had called herself an exile. I knew because I’d read it on chabad.com. Exile in the time of Sabbatai Zevi was a spiritual mission for those who lived in countries where they were being persecuted and oppressed. Because if you lived in persecution on the terrestrial plane, said Chabad, there was a reason. Your suffering was not in vain. You were here to look for and find holy sparks in darkness. Jews in exile, said chabad.com, had a duty to liberate holy sparks from evil.
I deduced that exile for Barbra – unwillingly taken from her home in Ethiopia and brought to a punishing, doglike Israel – experiencing further exile in our Rotary-fuelled Canadian basement – meant that she was here among us all to snuff out the evil.
I believed that she could liberate this Jew-boy from all fucked-up, racist things.
And I could help her, backwards, upside down: I could reverse the saviour fantasy.
§
I remember the first time I went to Joel’s house, his Grade 10 sister was lying on the couch in a dark room with a wastebasket in front of her face.
‘She has mono,’ Joel said. ‘From sucking face.’
Joel lived in one of the biggest houses in our neighbourhood. It was a fifteen-minute walk from school. He had a nanny because both of his parents worked full-time. Joel’s nanny’s name was Miriam and she was from Grenada. Miriam always called me ‘sir’ or ‘young man’ when me and Joel came in for lunch. Every single time, she made us Kraft Dinner. Joel ate his with ketchup. He didn’t clean up his plate. I always brought mine to the sink and felt bad that Miriam was expected to clean.
‘Joel,’ Miriam always said. ‘Look how this young man behaves.’
But I knew that I behaved poorly, too. I did not clean up every meal with my own mom.
Joel was the person who taught me the word cunt. He said it described a vagina succinctly.
‘Cunt is succinct,’ I parroted, not really knowing that word either but understanding instinctively. ‘Cunt is succinct. No ifs, ands, or buts.’
Joel started laughing. I laughed along. That day we rhymed cunt with shunt, bunt, and runt. The next day, I remember, I said cunt to Abigail. She was pretty young – me and Joel were in Grade 6 at the time and I don’t even remember the context – but I know I didn’t mean cunt as bad. Cunt was succinct! But Abigail instinctively felt like cunt was wrong. I guess we were both instinctive ‘understanders.’ Her face turned bright red at cunt. Then she shut her eyes and squeezed all the muscles in her body like she did sometimes at the table when she didn’t want to eat.
‘What’s wrong with you, Abigail?’ I remember I said. I watched my sister squeeze her face so hard until she seriously had to breathe.
Then, a few days later while we were in the car, Abigail said to my mother from the back seat: ‘Mom, my cunt hurts.’
‘What?’ my mother exploded, all of a sudden speeding. I saw her neck skin go bright red, just like Abigail’s had.
I knew that cunt to my mother meant something really bad.
‘Your vagina hurts? You mean your vulva? Abigail, where did you hear that word?’
My mother was practically shrieking. She pulled us over abruptly. A car beeped behind us.
‘It itches. Just a little,’ Abigail said.
My mother spun around, purple-faced and still attached to her seat belt. Abigail stared at me.
Cunt was my shame. I couldn’t look at my mother. ‘I told her that. Sorry.’
‘I don’t want to ever hear you use that word. Ever again!’
My mother glared at me. She could not catch her breath. I said sorry again, in fact I said it a few more times and to Abigail, too, but my mother stayed mad at me for the whole day. I realized how brazen Joel was whenever he said the word cunt. Joel’s father was a lawyer and his mother was a doctor who travelled to places like Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro. I wanted to ask Joel why cunt was the worst word in the world for vagina.
‘Miriam says it when she’s on the phone, laughing. It’s not evil,’ Joel reported. ‘Cunt. Scunt. Rashole. All those words.’
When Miriam worked at Joel’s house when we were in Grade 6, she always wore the same sack-shaped dress with pink roses. She wore yellow rubber gloves up to her elbows. In these gloves, I’d seen Miriam pinch Joel on his arm or his cheeks. It always seemed to me she meant, I’m in charge of you.
But after the lunch when I’d told Joel my cunt story and we were laughing, I saw Miriam pinch Joel really hard.
‘I’m going to smack you so bad even your mother’s not going to know how to fix it,’ she said.