Bilingual Being (18 page)

«Ça loge din' poche» [it fits in a pocket], my father had announced one day after work, giving us a clue about our shared gift. I heard his statement in French and immediately passed it through my English translation filter. That's how, as the authoritative older sister, I spent the whole week steering my younger brother down the wrong road, as we both tried to think of a gift small enough to fit in a coat or pants pocket, and yet still suitable for us to share. When Sunday arrived,
though, we found that it was a huge, green, canvas tent, army-style, in a long duffle bag about as tall as my brother. This kind of bag, it's true, is another use of the French word, «poche.»

«J'vous ai dit qu'c'ta' din' poche» [I told you it was in a pocket], my father quipped in patois, laughing at the wordplay he'd engaged. It was one of the rare times I ever saw my father relaxing, so I can't begrudge him that my brother and I were left feeling pretty silly about his bilingual “gotcha” game. Get us, it did.

Yet when I think back to that last sibling project of ours, and how it turned our linguistic mash-up – read “flexibility” – into a family joke, I admit that I end up on a mental tangent where I struggle to come to terms with the more negative, dissembled aspects of the so-called bilingual advantage. Sure, on paper, we've both reaped advantages. After all, my whole premise of self, and of this story, is that I've successfully undertaken a psychological reconstruction in the second language I was offered, English. And just because he's stayed home doesn't mean my brother hasn't played the “English card” to his advantage either, albeit in the fluctuating political and linguistic winds of Quebec. He and I have enjoyed innumerable material and social advantages – a wider range of friends, interests, and employment opportunities, for example – because of our ability to move fluidly inside two language communities.

There are absolutely “advantages” to be had in the state of bilingualism, in other words – in this type of dual being-ness – and both of us have appropriated them, though in substantially dissimilar ways. The advantages aren't at issue. What is at issue is the full phrase as it's found in public discourse: “
the
bilingual advantage.” It seems singular, definite and neat, like «l'addition» on the restaurant bill. But it feels like there are a lot of places on that tidy slip of paper where things have, indeed, slipped. Like things have fallen out of our pockets while we were reaching for the money. Vital things. Is the real issue the article, the
the
? As if it were assuredly and necessarily worthwhile to split a family into distinct language pathways? The jury's out. It often feels, in some intangible and unspeakable way, as if one of those elusive objects that fell out of our pockets was the best thing of all.

Don't get me wrong – I don't want to be like those detestable people who win the lottery and then whine about how it changed their lives
too much. I'm thankful, so thankful, that I had a second language and culture to offer options unavailable in my first set. And my brother and I are grateful – if I can dare to speak for him here – that we can watch television on more channels, understand the lyrics of more of the popular music available, or read from more divergent sources. That we can tap into the pulse of the world through different conduits. Drink from variant cultural fountainheads. And so on.

Yet he and I live on either side of a thin wedge – one that was driven in by trauma, it's true, but fabricated from culture nonetheless. I don't know what my brother hates or loves the most, or what makes him happiest or most fearful, or which have been the best and worst days of his life. And I so much wish I did.

Long ago my mother took us on special occasions to buy delicious pastries from Kerhulu's downtown. There were two kinds we always bought: pink ones with a giant R (for rum), and white ones with a giant K (for kirsch). These cakes were my mother's perfect treat for both her children, Richard and Kathleen. Ever the gifted storyteller, my mother wove the most delightful tale on the bus journey back home with our precious white box of six cakes, three of each. She told us in complete earnestness how these tiny cakes, sold to thousands of people every day, were made just for us. I believed her to my deepest core so sincerely that I'd often wonder aloud why the pink ones weren't the K ones. «Ah ça, on'el sait pas» [Ah, that, we don't/can't know], she said, smiling mischievously. But it's been a long time since my brother and I were two cakes in a box.

CHEZ BIRKS

Funny what you learn from shopping when you're small, because the only other explanation I have for our conundrum comes from eyelevel store data gleamed from my pint-sized view of the world. It's from Birks, a stunningly beautiful jewellery outlet on the best streets, and as one of the flagship businesses in the earliest and most splendid malls. I loved those magical words, the verbal string that summoned my call to higher ground: «Oké, on va chez Birks aujourd'hui. Y faut qu'ej trouve un cadeau pour …» [Okay, we're going to Birks today. I have to find a gift for …] It made wearing the crunchy clothes and putting up
with the scratchy seams at the waist worth it, though it drove my poor brother into a classic tantrum. The rest of the utterance was completely irrelevant to me. The primary thing was that we were going, so we would
be
there.

First, Birks was perfect because it was so positively clean. No mold, no dust, impeccable. I don't even think anyone would have had the nerve to smoke in there, would have dared, though it was technically allowed in those years. The clerks looked matronly and proper, stern and efficient. I visualize them taking that cigarette butt right out of some cheap mouth, disdainful. They smiled, but not too much and not in a creepy way. And they spoke from behind a high counter, allowing a proper distance that precluded pinched cheeks and the other perils of childhood. All this made it homey for me from the start, intuitively safe.

Its second asset was its iconic colour: royal blue. What a colour! It was exactly the colour I dreamed of having as my own, but wasn't allowed. Girls wore pink, boys blue. Let's not even talk about yellow or green. And orange and purple? Not true colours, you know. So pink it was. Blue lived only in my dreams – and at Birks. Here were miles and miles of royal blue plush under my feet, deep carpet flawlessly vacuumed, caressing the soles of my crisp, black shopping shoes, like walking on water. And those royal blue boxes! Tiny, perfectly hinged wonders with their soft white satin linings. Miniature beds for jewel princesses! Snug velveteen cradles where a petite golden cross tucked its fragile chain, or a modest birthstone ring held its stone high while it sailed away in a perfectly blue Birks bag.

I forgave my baby brother for finding it hard to sit still on the expensive padded chairs with the rigid wooden arms while I cooled my cheeks on the glass cases along each side of the store – not the mouth or nose, it left a messy print – as I ogled their treasures. It was a place with limited possibilities for touch, or play, or even a bit of understandable silliness, but for me it was a palace – a kingdom in the sky, but on the street. I think they've changed the blue a bit over the years, made it lighter. Then again, perhaps it was always so. Maybe my memory of it is just hopelessly romantic, a reverie of a deep, rich, incomparable blue.

That celebration of beauty and inspired meaning began at the massive double glass doors with the huge blue B on the handles. The letter was properly oriented on the right-hand door, with the vertical
down-stroke to the left, but reversed on the left-hand door. When the doors were closed, they greeted their enchanted customers with these two stunning Bs with their backs to one another. It was an artistic monument to reversals, an inverted alphabetical masterpiece. You opened the shiny door with the right-facing B to get in, leaving the backwards B behind on the door you didn't need. Open the opposite door on your way out, and you were using the B that used to look backwards from the outside but now looked the right way because you were inside. And somewhere in that flip-flop, the view from outside and inside, I extracted significance that helped me handle a few reversals of my own in front of those other shiny objects, mirrors.

I saw you could do almost the same thing with a K and an R: put them back to back and have them look similar. That's when I understood that my brother and I simply had slightly different ways of seeing, doing, and being. It's just that his top circle was closed, and mine was open. In my preschooler's mind, I read it as some endopsychic symbol, another example of myth and meaning coming together in ordinary life. Common sense delivered in common things. When you have trouble figuring out what's going on in your world, I guess you grab your paradigms, and your hope, wherever you can. Philosophers call it primitive, but I call it sensible. For that's how, in a creatively deviant (deviantly creative?) way, I came to an early peace and considerable understanding about what was happening between my brother and me – our proximity versus our distance, our similarity versus our divergence.

It would be a full fifty years from those days before either one of us could interrogate how the various reversals in the characters of key people in our lives – including me – made any sense. But I extracted immeasurable calm and solace in those days from learning that the different linguistic orientations my brother and I were evolving were really nothing more than a mere inversion of signs, flipped Bs on a handle. And from learning that my funny sense of self was exactly like that double door – a plain matter of perspectives. With so much meaning to be had in a single letter, I dared to imagine what the entire alphabet – or even better, an entire language – had to offer.

Wings

My French self puts on my English self

like an oversized pair of wings,

every morning, in some archaic dawn.

No sense to try to think of day and time

when a small child was arrested,

quivered alone in a psychic rainstorm.

No matter how it happened – by what

means a body barely breathing

came upon such a pretty set of feathers.

They were recycled, just hanging there

in the closet of another culture –

faint images of white that became material.

Stretching tiny arms underneath the warmth,

I could move from where I stood

to find air among soft clouds of possibility.

10

ENGLISH ROOTS

SUNDAY DINNERS

For the proof of my success as a constructed anglophone, I have to look no further than Granny St-Onge. In her tidy suits, complete with matching pin – butterfly, pheasant, bird, dragonfly, or roses – her sensible shoes, her proper shirts closed to the neckline, and her hairdos styled after her beloved Queen Mum, this avowed monarchist nominated me her “favourite granddaughter,” a proper lady. It was the ultimate seal of approval that I could «passer pour une anglaise» [pass as an English person].

Sundays at Granny St-Onge's had a uniquely English flavour compared to time spent at my grand-maman Dumont's boarding house. The only commonality was the piano that both homes boasted in their living rooms. My grand-maman Dumont had an ordinary upright, the type that could be found in old movie houses playing along with the picture shows. The sisters, or the priests, or some second- or third-removed aunt would play a traditional air, and everyone would join in to sing along, sometimes quite raunchy songs, as long as grand-maman herself was in the kitchen out of earshot, as she inevitably was. Granny St-Onge, on the other hand, had a baby grand, a Görs & Kallmann brought by special crate from London, a family heirloom that still sits in my mother's home. The piano was an instrument for playing, not for sing-alongs, inviting only expert hands and closed on other occasions.

Dinners consisted of the same menu each week, the one she'd had Sundays back in England: roast beef, Yorkshire puddings (no one could compete with their puffiness), mashed potatoes (no lumps, absolutely no lumps), gravy, carrots, and horseradish. I don't remember desserts other than platefuls of Peek Frean cookies, or shortbread brought from England by a visitor or sent on to Canada as a care package. The table was impeccably set, everyone having their assigned seats, unchanging from week to week – and the most amazing thing of all, silverware that was really silver, lying like royalty on top of lacy napkins. The napkins, I learned early and well, were more for show than use, as any civilized person will tell you.

After dinner there was tea, sometimes in the “garden” – my granny's name for her yard, a tidy enclosure bounded by lilac trees and a wooden fence covered in ivy with huge, shiny leaves. In fact, it really was more like a garden, with peonies and pansies and my granny's favourite plant of all, lavender.

My English granny loved lavender, smelled like lavender, and crocheted hanger covers that smelled like lavender. If there was ever a gift to be bought for her, the choice was always easy: expensive chocolates from a real chocolatier, of which Quebec had many, or, the hands-down favourite, lavender-scented Yardley products. My granny worked to supervise in the kitchen more than to actually cook, and left the cleaning to others, as was proper. And while she drank her tea at the table after her meal (eaten slowly, of course), she asked about school, cared about awards, and inquired at times about specific subjects and ideas.

But what I liked best of all was that when someone came along to distract her from being a bit bookish, as they tended to do, by showing her a funny trick with some cards, or arm wrestling in front of her, Granny kept a stoic expression, and always the same comment would come: “Oh, my. Oh dear.” And she'd return to our conversations, or let me sit as she chatted with an uncle about business or current events. I was a big girl then, a serious girl, and a “good girl.” I dare say she may even have blurted out in a whisper, “not like those others” (meaning some of my cousins), on a few too many occasions.