Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (31 page)

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Come to the pub. We’ll be there.”

“I’m not sure. I have to check with my friend Marianne. I promised her we’d get together this weekend.”

“Bring her too. She’ll love it. It’s a blast. You have to come. It’ll be so much fun.”

Max moves forward and playfully takes Susan’s hand, swinging it to and fro. “Come on, say you’ll come. Please.”

His powerfully focused attention, so flattering at first, is taking on a hint of desperation. Perhaps Susan was about to relent; now she is sure it wouldn’t do to acquiesce.

She pulls her hand away, saying, “I’ll see. It depends on Marianne,” and as she drops Max’s hand, it knocks the notebook that was sitting on her lap. The notebook slaps the ground, making a hard sound that echoes slightly in this concrete chamber.

Max dives for it, grabs it up, and extends it towards Susan’s reaching hand.

“Thanks,” she says, and takes the notebook.

But as her fingers touch it, Max grabs it back, laughing. She smiles. He proffers it again, she touches it, but he again pulls back. He repeats the trick a third time.

“Max, don’t be an asshole!”

Susan stands, ready to get serious about retrieving her property. She walks up to Max and reaches firmly towards the middle of his body where he holds the book. He whips it out and up, away from her hands, and holds it above his head, his face now flushed with excitement and his breath coming quicker. He is not tall, but neither is she, and he can hold it an inch or two out of her reach. She stands on tiptoes, stretching up fruitlessly, threatening to topple against him.

“Max, please…”

Both of them appear silly now, lacking grace. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised at Susan. I didn’t think she’d play this adolescent game. She doesn’t need to.

I watch Max. His eyes sparkle with anticipation; his lips part with breathlessness. I squirm in my skin.

Susan laughs now with a high-pitched sound that, as it begins, resembles the giggle of a small child, but as it prolongs itself, changes into some inhuman cry, the gulping of a tortured fish or the squeal of a trapped mouse. She chokes it off.

What does he want with her?

He leans back, still keeping her at bay. My flesh itches and I must move. I rise up.

“Max, arrête donc!”
I yell at him in French and, surprising him with my swiftness, succeed in grabbing the notebook from his hand. I give it back to Susan, who says thanks but doesn’t look especially pleased. Max is baffled by my action.

“Marie…”

“I have to go the library.” I stalk off towards the glass doors.

In the
salle des manuscrits
, the sound of a dropped notebook echoes rudely. Heads bob up, someone angrily hushes, as though the sound were voluntary and might be repeated. I look up shamefaced and scrape back my chair, but the assistant assistant librarian is passing by and before I can reach down to retrieve my property, he picks it up. He smiles at me, a slow smile that perhaps he supposes to be flirtatious but looks to me merely mocking.

“
Toujours la Proustienne?”

He doesn’t return the notebook, but instead turns it over to find the cover. This is torture, and he knows it. He looks back at me again to check that I am watching and then he slowly opens the flyleaf as though he might read what I had written.

S
ARAH JUST NEEDED
a handful of pebbles, a few nice round ones, but was puzzled as to how she might find any in the midst of the snow-covered garden. She looked vaguely around her at the spreading blanket and soft lumps that in summertime would form the firmer figures of flower beds, lawn, and shrubs, and saw no obvious solution. An hour ago, this project had seemed like a grand idea, but now she felt the first little twinge of defeat as a bitter taste at the back of her mouth and a slight tightening in her stomach.

Behind her, Maxime beat his stubby legs against the porch steps and waved his little arms in the air: bundled into his powder-blue snowsuit, he had also lost all his hard edges, and his puffy figure with its rhythmic movements looked like some funnyman on the Saturday cartoons, a friendly astronaut floating in space, or a goggle-eyed diver exploring the deep. As he flapped about, he kept up a chant: “
Un oeil, deux yeux, un oeil, deux yeux …
”

A minute ago, these words had amused and delighted Sarah. Her son was proving very slow to speak, and said little more than Mama, Papa, and no. That winter, she had been encouraging him by teaching him vocabulary, pointing to her eyes, then to his, to her nose, then to his small pink
button, to her lips, then to his tiny rosebud mouth, and saying the words as she went:
“Un oeil, deux yeux, le nez, la bouche.”
Now, he was finally repeating the words back, and had, miraculously it seemed to her, not only recognized the nature of their current project but also grasped the irregularity of the plural all in same moment.
Un oeil, deux yeux
. But as he kept it up, his first delicious giggle at having mastered this trick had disappeared and he started to chant listlessly. With each repetition, Sarah felt increasingly desperate.
Un oeil, deux yeux …
The snowman she had built for her two-year-old son lacked eyes, and she was not sure where she would get some.

She had hatched this plan that morning, when a heavy, wet snow had started to fall on the city. She had never built a snowman, but she remembered them from her childhood, or at least from the Canadian years of her childhood, and since then, from time to time, she had seen one decorating a front garden or a schoolyard on a day of fresh snow. But not just any kind of snow. She knew that too. Snow came in all sorts of different weights and consistencies, and it would take the wet stuff of late winter to build a good snowman. That was what had started falling that March morning, and as she looked out at it, gauging its properties from the way it plopped out of the sky and sat lumpishly on the street, she said to herself words she had heard Daniel utter before. “Good snow for a snowman,” he would say without any intention of building one, just commenting on the weather. Why shouldn’t she try building one, she wondered that morning. Could it be so difficult? It was thirty degrees or so, not really very cold, and after lunch, if the snow had stopped, she could put Maxime in his snowsuit and take him out into the garden. They would give it a try.

At first, things had gone very well. Dressed in a thick pair of wool trousers and an old car coat, with her hands secured inside Daniel’s work gloves, Sarah had started by making a big snowball on the ground, encouraging Maxime, who was crawling at her side, to push more towards her. Realizing this was a limited technique, she instinctively began rolling the ball in front of her so it would pick up snow as it went. Maxime ran alongside her laughing brightly as she pushed the growing ball down the length of the garden and finally brought it to a halt near the back fence.

“This is a good spot, Maxime. We’ll make him stand here. See, that’s his bottom. Now, we need a second one, for his middle.”

And so they began again, rolling their way back towards the porch, before realizing they now had a large snowball at the wrong end of the garden. Valiantly, Sarah lifted the ball. It was an awkward thing to carry, and heavy too, weighing her backwards like her pregnancy had done, and it was with a waddling gait that she made her way again to the base of the snowman.

Maxime was greatly pleased by his mother’s unusual behaviour and toddled after her, trying to help her with her burden by flinging himself underneath the ball as she walked, which only made her progress more unsteady. Halfway down the garden, as he launched himself at her body with particular vigour, the ball slipped from her hands and fell to the ground, splitting into four pieces.

“Oh oh.” Maxime bit his lip and looked up at his mother to measure her reaction. Was this a catastrophe or a big joke? Was this like the game of throwing the soft toy on the floor over and over while his laughing mother picked it up each time, or was this like the tragedy of the plastic milk cup
brushed off the counter and spilling its contents all over the kitchen floor as she cried out in exasperation?

“It’s all right, Maxime.” Today, his mother was all smiles. “We’ll fix it.” She sandwiched the pieces back together and rolled the whole through the snow a few more times for good measure, winding up beside the first ball. Awkwardly again, she lifted it up and secured it on the base by blurring the seam between the two with more sticky snow.

It was when she placed the third ball on top that Maxime began to glimpse what it was they were about, and when she broke two errant twigs off the trunk of the nearby maple and stuck one on each side of the middle ball, he shrieked with delight and, in some transport of ecstatic recognition, ran backwards until he reached the porch. He plopped himself down on the steps and cried out for the next requirements. Eyes, eyes, the snowman would need eyes.

What did one do for the eyes and mouth? Sarah wondered. In Maxime’s picture books, a snowman would always have two little black diamonds for eyes and a crescent-shaped row of the same for a mouth. They must be pieces of coal, she realized, now that she actually thought about it, but nobody used coal any more. She and Daniel had always had an oil furnace in this house, and if there had been a coal burner in the house where she had once lived with Sam and Rachel, she supposed they must have got rid of it years ago. The coal had a very particular odour when it burned, she remembered, but she had not smelled it in years.

“
Un oeil, deux yeux.”

“Maxime, come with Maman,” she said, and with no plan other than to distract the child, she led him by the hand out the garden gate and into the alleyway that ran between their house and the neighbour’s. Perhaps they
would find something in the street, some gravel or a stray pebble. But as they were walking down the alley, their progress slow and clumsy, for it too was covered by the fresh fall, she saw exactly what they needed. The neighbour had covered an odd patch of soil which jutted out into the alley with a pretty collection of flat, round stones, almost a little rock garden in its own right. The stones sat close enough to the house that they were protected by its generous eaves and remained largely free of snow. Sarah looked about her. It was wrong perhaps, but she would only borrow a few, the neighbour would never notice they were gone, and she could certainly return them in a few weeks, when spring arrived and the snowman inevitably melted. Letting go of Maxime’s hand, she bent down and quickly gathered a few of the smaller specimens, two for the eyes, and just three more, that would have to do for the mouth. She stuffed them in the patch pockets of the car coat and, taking Maxime’s hand again, led him slowly back into the garden.

“
Un oeil!”
Exultantly, she stuck the first stone on the left side of the snowman’s face, then dipped into her pocket for the second
“deux yeux.”
Then, she carefully positioned the other three in a rough crescent.
“La bouche.”
She turned grinning to Maxime and, before he could say anything, demanded his attention and his patience with a raised finger. She knew exactly what came next. “Le
nez …
wait there for just two seconds. Maman will only be minute. Just wait right there, Maxime.”

She bolted up the porch steps, flung open the door, kicked off her boots in the back mud room, and ran in her stocking feet through the kitchen to the refrigerator. Rummaging through the vegetable bin, she pulled out an
old carrot the tip of which had twisted rather artistically in growing. It was just the thing. She pulled her boots back on and, spotting an old toque of Daniel’s in the mud room, seized on it too with sudden inspiration, returning to Maxime with both the carrot and the hat. He had gone back to his leg-drumming seat on the porch steps and was now simply chanting for her return.

“Mama Mama Mama.”

“Come, Maxime.” They went back down to the bottom of the garden and Sarah laid the toque carefully in the snow before handing the carrot to Maxime. “Hold that, carefully. No, like this, with the other end facing out.” Then she bent to him and lifted him towards the snowman. “Put his nose on. That’s right, right in the middle.”

With a jabbing thrust, Maxime managed to get the blunt end of the carrot firmly stuck in between eyes and mouth, and his mother lowered him to the ground. “Bravo!” She picked the hat up herself and stretched it over the snowman’s bald head, and mother and son now stood back to admire their work.

“Regarde le bonhomme …
See the man we’ve made. Your papa will be so proud of you when he gets home. Just wait until he sees what we made.”

The days were growing longer now, and it would still be light when Daniel got home that afternoon. She would catch him at the door before he slipped the rubber galoshes off his shoes and tell him to go out to the garden. She had triumphed.

She ushered Maxime back into the house now, thinking she would give him a bath to warm him up before it was time to start making dinner. In the mud room, she encouraged
him to sit down on a low stepstool by giving his shoulders a little push, and then knelt at his feet to take off his boots, noting that one sock had got quite wet during their play. As she pushed his boots to one side and lifted him off the stool, preparing to lie him flat on the ground because that was always the easiest way to coax him in and out of the snowsuit, its peaked hood fell away and exposed his head.

Her first thought was automatic. It was the thing she had thought for several weeks now, every time she saw his hair. Daniel was right, they really must try to take the child to a barber. In his two years of life, he had never had a proper haircut and his hair, black and gently curly, was now hanging in ringlets that fell to his shoulders. She loved it and was reluctant to go after it with the scissors, while Daniel’s few attempts at pruning, on a weekend while Maxime was in the bath, had been met with such howls of fear and protest, his father had abandoned the effort.

“Okay, let’s hand him over to the professionals,” Daniel had laughed. “He’s starting to look like a girl.”