Bilingual Being (9 page)

If you do the math carefully, you can see the French side coming out ahead by one holiday. This was offset, however, by the fact that other than sharing in my mother's family's birthdays, births, deaths, and marriages – an additional twenty days a year or so – it was to my English granny's we went every Sunday for dinner, bringing the English side ahead by about twenty days a year. It was an excusable breakdown of
arrangements in a decade where it was understood that «l'homme est l'roi d'la maison» [the man is the king of the house]. By any definition, then, French and English enjoyed an arrangement with our family not unlike that of joint custody. And like any such custodial settlement, each side vied for my preferences.

Of the greatest importance to me was that the English side honoured my scholastic achievements. They patted me on the head and smiled, praising me and speaking about me so that I felt like a prize myself. I'd been designated “intellectually gifted,” which seemed to matter to them. On the French side, academics were virtually ignored: «Y a bin des choses qui sont bin plus importantes dans'vie qu'ça, t'sais.» [There are many things in life that are more important than that, you know.]

That's how my mother explains how she attended as few parent nights at my school as she could get away with, happy to pop her head in to hear “Everything is fine,” and hurry back home. My father never entered the building except for one Christmas performance in my Grade 1 year, where I was the Blessed Virgin holding a doll in wraps and was kissed by Joseph – my Jewish neighbour and best friend for three years – to the
oohs
and
aahs
of an auditorium full of parents. I look back to find so many contradictions and irreconcilable paradigms in that minor holiday performance, as I played the virgin getting her first kiss, my Joseph and I already outsiders. But when your life is a confusion of truths and secrets – a discordant blending of what is open and hidden – you become suited to life in the borderlands, accustomed to, and expecting, incongruity.

JE'L SAIS, JE'L SAIS

Unlike his anglo siblings, who took it upon themselves to support my English cousins' schooling, my father was an inherently pragmatic man who was too busy to care about such matters. He had, after all, done extremely well for himself without schooling past Grade 8. And so it was that I attended, one year, the father-daughter breakfast unaccompanied, at my mother's command: «Ça va êt' correc'. Y va y en avoir d'aut' qui sont là toute seule aussi. C'est pour les p'tites filles ça. Tu vas voir.» [It's going to be okay. There are going to be others who are there alone, too. It's for the young girls, this event. You'll see.] There weren't.

Witnessing every other girl there with her dad, I vowed to do my best never to bring memos home about school events again. Father-and-daughter days were really for the fathers, not the daughters. But in my mother's world there was plainly no reference point. Imagine a father minding the children's schoolwork! Or a group of men invited to spend the afternoon at a convent! Unthinkable! My mother's misuderstanding was in fact completely reasonable. It was up to me to become more vigilant.

And it would have been a good plan except for my mother's best friend, the encyclopedia woman again, a dynamic spirit, unstoppable even today nearing eighty. She was one of the key school volunteers, working on her English and energetically supporting her three daughters. And she'd fill in my mother about the goings-on at school. I'd have to work hard to counteract her efforts. Why hadn't she informed my mother about the logistics of the father-daughter breakfast? Likely she'd been too busy setting the tables, ordering flowers, sending out the invitations. Besides, within a few years, both women figured out exactly where my father stood in relation to school, this one or any other, and I was spared further incidents of this sort.

We moved into a phase where interest in my schoolwork became a cursory practice, a glance at a row of marks while my mother ground up beef by hand, turning the crank, never pausing. Straight As. What else was new? «Je'l sais, je'l sais» [I know, I know], she'd say, and ask me for the salt or the milk. How could she be expected to take an interest? Wasn't this school changing everything between us? How did her daughter being so good at it make any of that better? It only made it worse.

I was learning English too well, too fast, and it was churning our lives over as surely as that meat-grinder handle. She could feel what I could not and feared what I entered into fearlessly: that learning English was making me into the disconnected daughter who'd break her heart, while it turned her into the marginal mother who'd become less influential as the English side battled for my head and began winning.

My report cards from those years, kept in a file by my very organized mother until the end of Grade 8, speak to my quick progression, my lightning advance. In Grade 1, there's a steady row of 80s and 90s, 82 per cent in English and 98 per cent in “application.” Within one year,
I have a 98 per cent in English, a mark I'd hold virtually undiminished even in Grade 4, a peak of my troubles, when my “application” hit a C+. I was a bit distracted, I suppose. I note, though, that other than that “low effort” mark – ironic, to say the least – nothing registers on the social landscape in the way of help or intervention. By Grade 5, a teacher commends my spirit for refusing concessions, though I “missed class discussions” and “missed tests.” And by Grade 8, through more spotty absences, I record A+ straight down every column, through every term.

By age thirteen my report cards were no longer kept. It seems that in my mother's eyes I'd reached the end of the line, achieved a destiny that she wasn't sure she wanted to keep witnessing. But as for me, I wasn't done at all – barely beginning. I'd bury myself in a book every night, every moment I was home. I studied and over-studied. I looked forward to essays and projects the way others might anticipate a new piece of clothing or a toy. Through my English school, I'd found a perfectly convenient outlet not just for my identity but for my powerful anxiety too.

A COMPLETE WRAPPING OF THE SELF

On the other side of my linguistic custodial arrangement, the French half continued to do what it had always done – vie for my senses, for my intuitive self, trying to bring me into its domain with a direct appeal to the visceral core of my being. There was the cooking, obviously, especially the baking: desserts at every meal, cakes and pastries for every occasion, mouth-watering smells filling every recess of our house in testament to my mother's outstanding skill and versatility, and to that of her mother, grandmother, and sisters. Their tables stood like tapestries of colour thrown up against the drabness of “roast beef Sundays” and “turkey holidays” on the English side, identical each time. Tasty, of course, but sameness glorified nonetheless.

In my French universe, everything was colour and smell and whimsy. Cakes in springtime were shaped like butterflies; breads shaped like dollar bills celebrated a new job. Sandwich loaves were coloured like art, and gingerbread men had painted faces and clothing. Unrecognizable things floating in jellied salad didn't need to be explained – people
just laughed at the novelty. And in all of those years, on all of those long buffets improvised on pingpong tables and plywood propped between ironing boards, I don't remember a single straight celery stick or carrot stick (they curl into ribbons, you know) or any round radishes (they were all roses, of course).

Even ordinary dinners took on something of the magic when my father's absence released my mother's spontaneous charm: Kraft slices made into cheese eyes and smiles on mashed potatoes to get us to eat our vegetables – «Y sourit parce qu'y veut qu'tu l'manges.» [He's smiling because he wants you to eat him.] I happily became a potato predator.

The appeal to my senses went beyond the food to a complete wrapping of the self in an image that withstood time and has remained firm in my psyche despite all I've done and lost since then. During «el temps des sucres» [maple sugar season], kids ran through the woods to check the pails, the giant pots boiling on wall-to-wall wood stoves until we could finally roll the taffy in the snow, as adults in «la cabane à suc'» [a log cabin deep in maple country] sang and drank too much wine in the thick maple-scented vapour.

On fishing trips to «el camp d'pêche» [a log cabin or fishing camp], though I hated fishing – too sad for the fish – I made crafts for myself with sticks and bark, and learned to draw insects, dragonflies especially. Best of all was rowing alone, slow waves hitting the bottom of the boat. At night, the parents gathered to play spoons – with much beer and wine, it's true – but there was honest laughter and the smell of the wood smoke climbing to the rafters of the massive fishing lodge. A dozen children pretended to sleep as they whispered ghost stories to the movement of flashlights on the log roof, the sound of bears scraping away the bark on the log walls, and, if we were really lucky, the rain on the thick tin roof overhead.

My favourite nights of all were the sleigh rides around Carnaval, when my mother and her extended family, everyone from «mon'onc' Henri» and his clan from «la campagne» [the country], to «ma tante Yvette» from Montreal, manager of what some would have called “a gentleman's service,” would descend on Quebec. We'd rent a huge horse-driven sleigh for a ride through the woods at dusk, finishing off, of course, with another party. Among my mother's treasures is a photograph of one such event, a black-and-white image about three inches
square on thick Kodak paper. I remember how the older folk pinched our cheeks when they greeted us, and the smell of the bear skin tucked around my face, its comforting prickliness and warmth, as we were bundled for the dark ride through six-foot snowdrifts. It was 30 or 40 degrees below zero, but we were warm to our souls.

Inside, while the adults revelled, we were put down here and there on beds covered with aunties' wolfskin coats, to fall asleep to the sound of fiddles and spoons, an old aunt on the accordion, loud bawdy songs, and feet hard on the wooden floors, through the winter night. It was a celebration of cultural and temporal isolation, sensual and lyrical, just as that icon of Québécois society, Gilles Vigneault, once described it in a song that became an unofficial anthem: «Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver.» [My country is not a country, it's winter.]

I hate the cold now, dread life below zero degrees, but I still adore the look and feel of winter, especially the nights when gigantic, slow snowflakes fall quietly against the black sky. When you stand by a street light and look up, it seems as if they're splitting their trajectory right above your head, parting gently just so they can pile up lightly on either side of you. You're a little boundary for them, standing there against the night. And all around, the world is softened. Every sharp edge and bit of dirt is erased, muted by an aesthetically perfect layer that grows right before your eyes.

DES MUGUETS

If I move even further back in time from those cold nights of old songs and slow snowflakes, I can recede even deeper into my cultural borderlands. My guide for that part of the journey is my baby book, mailed to me during another of my mother's basement cleanups. It indicates that I began life as a sturdy female, nine pounds, and was baptized as a Roman Catholic on the seventh day of my life. My mother records with meticulous care the «cadeaux et visiteurs» [gifts and visitors], numbering them to an impressive seventy-four.

I note the instructions from Hôpital St-François D'Assise that my mother feed me every four hours, not through the night, and for no more than thirty minutes each time. I also read that at eight months I was taken off heated Carnation evaporated milk, thick and syrupy, and
put onto cold, thin, regular milk. Seriously? Carnation milk? In a baby bottle? Like so much else, its application as infant formula becomes another signature of the peculiar times, the commodification of pleasure.

In fact, modernity was branding everything – including children – in the name of happiness, endorsing unrestrained frivolity. Santa smoked his Lucky Strikes or Camels – and drank beer, or most often, Coke. Over there, the “miracle of Marlboro” baby encouraged his parents to light up and relax before punishing him, while other babies promoted everything from coffee to dog food. Toddlers pushed “barbiturate therapies” such as Nembutal, and the “sleep fairy” championed Valmid – each with their convenient calming effects. Children were even used to boost thalidomide sales, with Distaval and its companion products touted as convenient sedatives “without side effects.” Soporifics for children became critical aids in this age of adult exuberance, alcohol and chloroform standard ingredients in children's syrups for coughs or sore throats. And everywhere, the Coppertone Girl flaunted suntan oil, showing her naked bottom as a little dog mischievously pulled down her swimsuit (she had no top, of course). She came into the world in 1959, drawn to look three, blond, blue-eyed, and naive. On mechanical billboards, the dog stripped her again and again, fine entertainment. Putting her fictive birthday in 1956, Coppertone Girl was my senior by barely one year in this market, and widely considered «une p'tite bonne femme adorab'.» Not just an icon, but a model.

It was par for the course, then, when an amateur photographer my mother knew took a shot of me in a ritual that would become familiar – and later, far murkier in my mind. It's a black-and-white Kodak print in which I'm on a blanket, on a table of some kind, up against a wall. I'm wearing a short baby dress, and my feet are bare. I have a toothless smile, and both of my arms are slightly elevated in a delicate startle motion. My expression suggests I was perhaps midway into a round of peek-a-boo. It's paper-clipped to the page titled “La première photographe de bébé.”

My mother has written «Mr X est un photographe amateur et il a pris cette photo de Kathy sans préparation, alors qu'elle était a jouer. Elle a 8 mois. N'est-ce pas un amour de bonne femme?» [Mr X is an amateur photographer. He took this picture of Kathy without
preparation, while she was just playing. She's eight months old. Isn't she a dear, good woman?] A few pages later I'm recorded as being a child who's «bonne et ne veut jamais faire de peine» [good and never wants to hurt anyone], who likes «les jeux calmes et tranquilles» [quiet, calm games].