Girl Unwrapped by Gabriella Goliger

Younger people have babies, not people as battered-looking as Lisa and Julius. And that’s fine with Toni. She certainly never wanted a baby in the house.
    Her father bothers her too these days: the dry click when he swallows, the pouches under his eyes, the parchment colour of his bald head, the aging, used-up look of him. She resents his general pessimism, the sarcastic remarks that reveal his anxiety about money. “Do you own shares in the electric company?” he asks with a grimace when she forgets to switch off a light. Yet, according to her mother, he’s doing well, having recently completed exams that allow him to call himself an accountant, not just a bookkeeper. New clients and bigger fees are just around the corner, but you’d never know it by the way he carries on. Plus, his feeble attempts at humouring her drive Toni crazy. When Toni mentions that she’s bored, he says, “Good.” Why good? Because it means he’s achieved something after all to have settled in a country where his child can be bored. He turns back to his dense columns of newsprint, the reassuring reports of catastrophes elsewhere. She wants to pummel those clean-shaven cheeks above the neat goatee, but what’s the use? She lurches from the table to escape to her room, stumbling on the rucked-up carpet along the way.
    And then there are the moments when he departs from his body. She looks up from her breakfast toast to find a mannequin in a suit across the table. Frozen limbs. Eyes of stone. Immediately she busies herself with stabbing her finger into toast crumbs along the rim of her plate until a dry cough and a creak of the breakfast-nook bench tell her it’s safe to lift her head. Her mother sips coffee as if nothing happened. None of them speak about these little absences. Do they really occur, or does she dream him into an impenetrable black-and-white photo, one that reveals less and less the more you stare? She is no longer frightened, as she used to be, just a bit sickened, as when the bus gives an unexpected lurch, making her momentarily nauseous.
    Her mother is delivering another of her lectures about eggs, blood, babies, what’s nice, what’s not nice. She sits at the breakfast nook opposite Toni, who hunches over her cocoa and tries to lose herself in the sweet, milky liquid. Lisa’s voice is that of a faraway carping crow. A crow with neat rollers, a hairnet, and pencil-thin eyebrows that leap up and down. Her face is flushed with self-importance. Her forefinger stabs the air.
    “Are you listening?”
    “Yes,” Toni sighs and looks back at the chocolaty bottom of the cup. Seems she’ll be captive a while longer.
    “Look at me when I speak to you.”
    Toni looks. She sees creases under the foundation makeup, red lines in the whites of the eyes, shiny brown circles surrounding dark holes. That’s what the pupils are, holes, empty space. Mr Blake, the biology teacher, told them the word “pupil” comes from the Latin, meaning “little doll,” because, if you look carefully, you should be able to see a tiny reflected image of yourself in someone’s eye. Of course, as soon as he said that, everyone in class tried to peer into one another’s faces amid yelps of laughter. It was only when Toni examined herself in the bathroom mirror at home that she saw what Mr Blake was talking about. A miniature, shadow self looked back at her. She doesn’t see anything like that as she stares into her mother’s eyes now, just black spots floating together. This staring is a new trick, a nice one, because her mother is forced to draw back a little.
    “Do you understand?”
    Toni nods.
    “Do you have any questions?”
    Toni shakes her head.
    It is Lisa’s turn to sigh.
    Five weeks later, a baffled Toni finds the toilet paper in her hand stained red. Another unpleasant surprise from her body. Growth spurts, pimples, unwanted hair, and now this, a hidden wound. She wipes herself as thoroughly as she can and hopes whatever has been