The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (25 page)

“Raise your arms.”

“There’s a woman upstairs from me who is deliberately running the shower at the same time that I’m taking one, so I can’t take warm showers.”

Like any old person who lived alone, he just wanted to tell the doctor about everything that had happened to him lately. It felt so good to be able to talk to someone that he just didn’t know when to stop. He was like a hungry person eating.

“I’m worried that there’s a Q-tip stuck in my ear and that’s why I can’t hear anything.”

“I examined your ear canal and there’s nothing in there.”

“There are junkies in the neighbourhood. They break into my apartment and steal my heart medication.”

“You can go to the pharmacy for a renewal.”

“I bought a microwave from the neighbour’s son. It doesn’t even work. I put a bag of popcorn in it and I sat in front of it for seven hours, waiting for it to pop.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I’ve been waking up, lying on the kitchen table.”

“You sleepwalk?”

“I have no idea how I got there.”

I would instinctively try to stop Loulou from talking about something that couldn’t possibly be of any interest to the person
he was talking to. It always hurt his feelings, so this time I just decided to let him go on.

The doctor wasn’t responding to anything that Loulou said, no matter how wild it was. The doctor looked as if he was above all the elderly oddballs that came in. They all lived in tiny apartments with mismatched plates. It was his job to keep these people alive, but there didn’t seem to really be a point to their being alive. Loulou had been giving away part of his paycheque for years in order to sit in this cramped room and be looked down on by the doctor. This was our lauded free health-care system that we bragged about to the world.

“She used to be on television, you know.”

This always got people’s attention. The doctor glanced around at us, vaguely interested, but then he lost focus again. He seemed absolutely exhausted and overworked. Anyways, how could he possibly recognize me in a wet fur hat and combat boots with scuffed toes. He was English. He watched American television. They had no idea whatsoever what happened in French Québec.

“Nouschka spoils me. I raised her myself. She had a red raincoat that was so cute. I never knew anything about little girls. I don’t know what on earth you’re supposed to tell a girl to stay out of trouble. She ran around wild. Little boys’ mothers would come and complain that she had been playing doctor with their kids. I thought for sure that she had a career in medicine ahead of her, because she played doctor so much.”

He laughed really loud so that he didn’t have to notice that no one else was laughing at his terrible joke.

There was a knock on the door and the doctor stepped out for a moment to talk to the nurse, making us wait again.

“What was I like when I was seven?” I asked. “You were about to tell me.”

“You were always fretting about Nicolas. When your brother broke his arm, you cried for three days. You were always worried that we were all going to die. You were worried about the neighbours’ cats. Just worry about yourself. You don’t have to worry about the whole world. It doesn’t do it any good.”

That suddenly made me sad. He was right. All that worrying hadn’t done anything for anybody. It certainly wasn’t helping Raphaël. The doctor walked back in, interrupting my melancholy.

“Do my feet look blue to you?” Loulou asked.

The doctor glanced at Loulou’s feet for a split second and then went back to writing on his pad.

“Are you voting Oui
ou
Non?”

That got his attention. The doctor looked up at the old babbling lunatic, whose Oui vote could put an end to the life he was enjoying. English speakers had an absolute horror of separation, and scores of them had left after the first referendum. Loulou smiled innocently at the doctor.

O
ONCE IT WAS COLD, IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO
imagine that it had ever not been cold. Arguments lasted longer. They hid behind couches and under the table. They stayed in the corner like a sulking child waiting for you to ask what was wrong, so that he could start complaining all over again.

On New Year’s Eve I wanted to go to the Ukrainian Ballroom. I went there every year.

Raphaël put on a black sheepskin hat, a thick woollen peacoat and a long scarf with red and blue stripes, which he wrapped around and around his neck.

I had on a coonskin hat. You bought them at the back of the tiny tourist shops, along with wallets made out of sealskin, toy polar bears, maple syrup and miniature Indian braves. I put on my black coat.

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a little matryoshka doll. Misha had given it to me. There were always things that were left in the pockets of your winter coats from last year. My last winter was so far away that it was like a childhood
memory that I had completely forgotten. I was going to time-travel that night.

Sometimes I would be pulling on a pair of tights and I would remember a past adventure. I would remember a time when I was at the cheap repertory movie theatre. And the boy next to me walked his two fingers up my legs and under my skirt. And put his fingers inside me.

I always ran into boys I had slept with. They would do things that clearly acknowledged that we had slept together. They would wink in a stupid way. They would smile a giant smile. Or do some sort of bad moonwalking on the opposite side of the metro.

At the entrance of the club, there were mounds and mounds of coats hanging from the coat racks. The rose-patterned radiators were spray-painted gold. The water inside them was boiling hot. If you touched them, your hand would be scorched. If you left your hat on them too long, it would catch fire.

People were getting on stage to sing popular songs, while the policemen’s band played along. They were cheaper than a regular band. They all wore navy blue uniforms. I think that they gave a portion of their pay to burned children.

The old people were wearing paper crowns. They were dancing by taking two steps forward and two steps back. They were wearing their fancy suits that they hadn’t worn since the holidays last year.

There were passed-out children everywhere. They were lying under tables. They were lying in amongst the piles of coats. Like moths with folded wings.

The waitresses started passing out toy hats. Everyone was putting on plastic top hats, or yellow paper crowns, or red cones with ribbons cascading from the top in ringlets. They
were blowing little plastic gold bazookas that were shaped like tiny trumpets. I put on a gold crown. People were giving one another New Year’s kisses. A girl with a red dress came up and kissed me. A man dressed in a light blue suit came up and kissed me.

We were obsessed with kissing in Montréal on ordinary days, but on New Year’s, we took it to a whole other level.

Raphaël was drinking at the bar. He knocked back another Scotch. Each Scotch weakened his immune system and lit him up like a light bulb. Girls kept planting their kisses on him like he had just rescued their village from a giant. I looked over at him and laughed. He looked sort of annoyed. I mean, some truly filthy and beautiful things came out of his mouth in bed, but out of it he sometimes was oddly puritanical.

It was so pretty. Before I was married, all those many months ago, I would have probably ended up going home with someone there. I missed the feeling of being able to go home with just anybody. I missed the feeling of not knowing who you would end up with by the end of the evening. I missed having fried eggs on a cracked plate with a pattern of a peacock on it with a stranger that I’d had sex with the night before. It was impossible to be married so young at the end of the century.

“I can’t stand it here. Let’s go.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Raphaël. It’s New Year’s Eve. Live a little bit, will ya?”

Everyone at the bar was talking about the referendum. It was becoming more and more likely that it was going to be called. We had been looking forward to this since we were children. A lot of us had been raised by separatists. Other countries had declarations of independence written by men with white wigs and tailcoats and buckled shoes. Ours was written by men
with bell-bottoms and sideburns and tinted sunglasses and enormous butterfly collars.

The Canadian government was telling us that we couldn’t use their money anymore if we separated. Why did they think we cared? We would have dollar bills with roses on them. We could have René Lévesque, his comb-over slicked on top of his bulging forehead, with a cigarette in his mouth, on the five-dollar bill. And Gilles Vigneault with his navy blue sailor hat, white sideburns and big nose on the twenty.

It was a bit of a shock, especially given the context of the conversation, to see Adam standing there. I didn’t understand why my English ex-boyfriend would be in my part of the city. He knew that I spent every New Year’s Eve at the Ukrainian Ballroom. There wasn’t much point to being there if you weren’t in love with me. Here he was, dressed in a tuxedo, the bow tie undone. He was looking at me intently, waiting for me to notice him.

I touched Raphaël gently to indicate that I was leaving him for a second. I made eye contact with Adam as I walked to the bathroom. I passed a bulletin board that had crudely coloured butterflies held down by push-pins. I went to the upstairs bathrooms. I knew that no one would come up here, because most people didn’t know about the bathrooms. They were the children’s bathrooms for the daycare in the building. There was no secret corridor in this neighbourhood that Nicolas and I did not know about.

The echo of someone singing a Patricia Kaas song was coming down the hall after me. It was like she had fallen down to the bottom of a well and was continuing to sing nonetheless. She was becoming smaller and smaller. I was hoping that Adam was following me.

I looked at the tiny sinks and the little toilets and the doorknobs that were close to the ground. The change in perspective seemed to really throw me. It gave me the feeling of being in a funhouse. I had been coming here for years. When I was very small, I had never noticed that there was anything different about this bathroom. I had fit perfectly. Adam walked in behind me.

There was something absurd about his outfit. It was almost as over the top as the paper crown I had on my head.

“I didn’t want to just come up to you because I heard that your boyfriend might be a little bit mad and somewhat irrational.”

“Did Nicolas tell you that?”

“Might have been.”

He smiled. We were wary of each other. Every time I had been with Adam, it had the breezy lightness of a one-night stand. It had never felt as if there could possibly be a heaviness between us. And here it was. I had been feeling so brash and confident and wild and glamorous out in the hall. And now I felt like a schoolgirl who had been caught cheating on her homework. I was shaking the same way that I had when we visited Lily. He was filled with stories and knowledge about my mother that had the possibility to floor me.

“It’s strange what happened, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah, I thought that it would stop feeling odd, but it didn’t. I feel sort of like we’re brother and sister, but then I don’t. I mean, that isn’t quite it. Then I realize that I don’t have any siblings myself, so I would actually have no idea what that felt like.”

I went and sat on the wooden board over the radiator. I hoped that it would warm me up. Adam followed and sat next to me.

“But I sort of felt that by staying away I was keeping something from you. That I had something that you wanted. Nicolas used to ask me all these questions about Noëlle, but how did I know that she was your mother? I just answered off the top of my head. The thing is that I was at a family dinner back home and I started thinking about you. There was stuff that I should have told you about her when we were breaking up.”

We were talking in the bathroom because we were aware that what we were doing was somehow illegal. We were somehow intuitively ashamed. What would Raphaël think if someone whispered to him that Adam and I were alone in the bathroom together? He would surely imagine that we were fooling around or fucking or flirting or having some sort of conversation that was the equivalent of sex. But it wasn’t true. We were doing something that made us feel even dirtier. We were talking about my mother.

“What do you want to tell me about?”

“Like about how she would lie in bed with me and tell me stories.”

“What kinds of stories?”

“Stories about twins.”

“She told you stories about twins?”

Without even thinking about it, I put my hands up and pointed to my chest, as if to ask, “Stories about me?”

“Yes, there was a boy and a girl.”

“What did they look like?”

“What do you think? They had wild black hair and they were so lovely that people would slam on their brakes to get a better look at them.”

“Did you add that, or did she?”

“Noëlle did.”

“Were they personable? Were they charming?”

“Sure, sure, sure. They were very funny and very adorable.”

We had begged Loulou to tell us stories. He would lie on the bed and try to read us a picture book. But Loulou had only gone to Grade Three and the effort would put him into a deep, deep sleep. He would take up all the space in the bed, so that we were scrunched up against the wall. Then we would spend ten minutes trying to push him off the bed. He would inhale so deeply that he would suck all the oxygen out of the room and then let out these brief sorts of snores. We had always had to tell each other stories. Which we would find unsatisfactory. Then we would get into squabbles.

Those were our stories Adam heard. We were meant to be the ones who heard those stories.

“Tell me one of her stories.”

“My favourite one was the story where the twins get lost at sea.”

I perched anxiously on the edge of the radiator, waiting to hear it.

“They were on a big ocean liner. They were on their way to the World’s Fair in Paris. But on the way, there was a ferocious storm.”