by Alice Zorn
Yushi had stretched her lips and bared her teeth in a vicious grin. Ganache, she said with perfect enunciation and emphasis. Then added, Anyone with a bowl and a whisk can make ganache.
Petitpois flushed. She’d hired Yushi to slide baguettes into paper bags and set pastries in boxes, not to show off expertise Petitpois didn’t have.
When customers asked about the pastries, Yushi could explain in detail. The genoise was moist because it had been drizzled with syrup. Crème pâtissière wasn’t made with cream but milk and eggs. One day, when they weren’t busy, Yushi had sliced a lump of pink marzipan into discs she flattened and curled like petals, one around the other, fashioning a rose. With skills like that, why was she employed as counter help, letting an officious snob like Petitpois bully her?
Maddy looked at her watch. Another minute and she should get back to work. Her eyes had been following the crazy trajectory of the girls in the paddleboat. Both had blond hair to their shoulders, but she saw now that one was older. Were they mother and daughter, having fun together? She watched, wondering what that felt like.
She sighed and glanced at her watch again. Okay. Now. Move. Go.
She sauntered back to the market.
“Enjoy the peaches?” Pierre-Paul called from behind his tables heaped high with berries and fruit.
She smiled her thanks but kept walking. He had a weathered tan as if he’d been in the fields, rototilling soil and watering crops. Undo a couple of buttons on his shirt, and she bet the skin beneath was pale and soft.
Stop that. She mentally slapped her hand. No more married men.
There was a shorter route home, but Maddy liked cycling along the canal. The water glimmered a rippled reflection of sky. The cluster of picnic tables where the embankment widened had a new batch of origami in bright red. In the spring, when the miniature centrepieces had first appeared, she’d ridden across the grass to see what they were. Someone had poked intricately folded paper between the slats. Grasshoppers, flowers, butterflies with antennae, stiff paper crowns. Maddy wondered if the artist was a man or a woman, young or old. Decorating picnic tables was such a sweet task. Good in itself.
She turned off the canal path, down a low hill to the Pointe, cycled past the side-by-side English and French Catholic churches, angled right at the hockey arena where people voted on election and referendum days. At Wellington she cruised to a stop at the lights. A hooker, her skinny buttocks moulded in a tight skirt, harassed the man on his kitchen chair outside the dépanneur. “A cigarette, tabernac! Give me a cigarette!” He perched at a tilt, as if his body had been rattled and the bones reset all wrong. She screeched at him and jerked her arm in the air. Maddy would be stoned, too, if she had to stick her face in strange crotches.
Across Wellington she turned into the alley and up ahead saw a man at her fence. Boy, oh boy! If that was one of the guys from the rooming house taking a piss, was she going to yell! How often had she told them the alley wasn’t their personal, private latrine?
At the crunch of stones under her tires, the man began to walk away, his bandy legs stepping fast. Maddy slowed, recognizing the older of the boys who used to live in the house next door. What was his name? Ben. She’d been at the outdoor tap, rinsing a bucket, when he’d staggered onto the back deck carrying his brother, whose arms hung like deadweights, head lolling. She’d shouted, What happened? What’s wrong? He hadn’t answered and then she couldn’t see what he was doing, because he’d stooped to the deck with the fence between them. Ben! she’d called, Ben! Sirens were howling down the street, careening to a stop before their houses.
She stood at her gate now, not sure if she should cycle after Ben to ask how he was. She hadn’t seen him since the funeral a year ago. She wondered how he felt about his father selling the house. After the suicide, his father had moved away, leaving the house empty. People had assumed he would eventually return — or give the house to Ben.
That day, when she’d seen the couple on the sidewalk, she’d had no idea they were visiting the house. There was never a For Sale sign. Everyone along the street was surprised when they saw a stranger hauling bags and furniture onto the sidewalk, dumping out the house. Even if Ben’s father had needed the money and Ben couldn’t afford to buy the house upfront, families usually came to an arrangement.
Poor Ben, she thought. Exiled to the alley. How he must resent the new neighbours for living in the house that should have been his. How he must hate them.
She watched him walk to the end of the alley, unlocked her gate, and wheeled her bike into the yard.
Maddy woke, blinking at the slit of light between the curtains she hadn’t fully closed last night. A bird was twittering in the tree outside her window and a car drove past, but the house sounded empty. No running water, no footsteps. Even though it was still early on a Saturday, Bronislav and Andrei must already have left. She didn’t know if they’d gone to work or if they’d only stepped out. She belted her robe over the T-shirt she wore to sleep. If they came home, she would dress. In the meantime, this was her day off.
Coffee in hand, she ambled out to the deck. Many seasons of sun and rain had made the wicker chair swell and shrink, and the rattan creaked as she sat. The chair was still comfortable, still her favourite chair, but the armrest was wobbly, so she kept her fingers on the mug.
Jim was in the grass, a long-haired orange tom doing his sphinx act. Shoulders and spine regal, he kept his gaze on the distant horizon — which was, however, blocked by the wood fence.
“Jim,” she said. A stone sphinx, he ignored her.
Saturday off … what a treat. The air was warm, the sky a rich blue with fluffy, storybook clouds. A light breeze made the towering trees along the alley rustle. From inside the new neighbours’ house, she heard, “Frédéric, come here!”
Maddy imagined him stopping what he was doing to see what she wanted. Six feet tall and obedient.
Again she heard, “Fred!”
Ah … not so obedient. It would be a change, having a couple living in the house everyone along the street had gotten used to thinking was abandoned. Abandoned felt fitting after a suicide. Who would even want to live in a house where there had been a suicide? She hoped the real estate agent had told the new people.
In the grass Jim had grown yet more still. His ears were alert. A squirrel had scrabbled under the gate with a curve of bagel it now sat upright to nibble. The fur on Jim’s back rippled the instant before he charged. The squirrel pounced up the fence, scampered a few bounds, and pivoted to scold the nasty cat for making it drop its piece of bagel.
“Jim,” Maddy said.
He blinked at the dahlias, miffed that she’d witnessed his hunting interruptus.
“I don’t want you catching squirrels.” Bad enough when he brought her the mauled bodies of sparrows and mice. “No squirrels, okay?”
Maddy leaned forward in the lawn chair to snip the blowsy heads of the geraniums. Red petals fluttered to the deck. She’d changed into denim shorts and a peasant blouse she’d bought on sale and should have guessed wouldn’t suit her. White puff atop big bum. It was fine, though, for sitting in the backyard.
She angled the shears into the leaves. Her father used to trim plants with her mother’s sewing scissors. Heavy steel with black enamel handles. Her mother had brought them from Poland. As a child, Maddy had marvelled that the same scissors that bit through felted wool could take such delicate snips. Her father’s blunt-boned knuckles and fingers so gentle among the flowers.
He wasn’t a man of words — certainly not one for metaphors — but once, when she stood nearby as he snipped the fading flowers, he showed her inside the petals where the pistil was swollen with seeds. He said that when plants started to make seeds, they stopped blooming. So he was cutting the old flowers before they turned into seeds. Tricking the plants to keep them blooming. He called it a trick — a sztuczka. The explanation, indirect as it wa
s, was the closest to sex education she’d had at home.
Her mother avoided all mention of the body and its functions. Maddy had found out about periods by listening to the older girls in the washroom at school. They said it only happened to girls — like growing breasts. Maddy’s nipples had already started to swell. One of the girls told her periods would be next. Maddy wasn’t sure what that was or how you could tell when it happened, but it excused you from gym. Some girls said it proudly. Others grumbled that it made them sick.
She didn’t know what was happening when she started to feel nauseated from cramps low in her belly. When she saw the dark mess in her underpants, she thought she was dying — bleeding from the inside out. Crying, unable to keep it a secret, she told her teacher, who took her into an office and explained. At home, furtive and angry, Maddy showed her mother the extra Kotex pad the teacher had given her. She said she needed more. A bra, too. The teacher said she should be wearing a bra. Her mother, who lamented every expense and hoarded even pennies — each penny worth several zloty back home — went to the store for a box of Kotex and the Sally Ann for a bra. The pointed cups of the bra puckered over Maddy’s small breasts but she wore it. Only years later did she realize how lucky she was that her mother had bought Kotex instead of making her wear the cloth rags she washed and reused herself. In this one respect, her mother allowed her to be Canadian. When Maddy finished the box of Kotex, which was kept behind the bucket of dirty laundry in the cupboard, her mother bought another.
But even after Maddy got her period, her mother still didn’t explain about sex. She might not have known the words — or known you could speak about it. She hid behind her worries, her prayers, her scrubbing, her bread dough and jars of pickles, her great vats of cabbage in brine.
Maddy deduced what she could from the girls’ talk at school about boys wanting to touch their breasts and begging them to rub their dicks. That part was disgusting — everyone said so — but then you had a boyfriend. If anyone said more than that, Maddy didn’t understand. When Neil wanted to push inside her, even though it hurt, she let him. She didn’t know what it meant when her periods stopped coming. She was hungry all the time and thought she was getting fat. She wore a large sweater, and over that a man’s suit jacket she got at a church sale. She’d grown her curls into a shaggy mop she let hang across her face.
It was Mrs. Granville, the English teacher, who called Maddy to her desk and walked her from the classroom to the principal’s office. The principal talked. Mrs. Granville, too. Maddy was fifteen. Their words blurred in the air. Why did they keep saying baby? She didn’t want a baby. She blinked behind the hair that hid her face from view. The principal said she would have to call her parents. Her parents didn’t have a telephone. Maddy was told to wait outside the office. When Mrs. Granville came out, she said she would walk Maddy home. She followed her up the steps and into the house, slipping off her shoes in the hallway as Maddy had. The floors shone, waxed and polished. Maddy knew her parents would be in the kitchen eating. They always ate before Maddy and her brother, Stan, came home from school, because her father had an evening job he went to after his work at the factory. Maddy’s parents stared, appalled by the presence of a stranger in their kitchen. Mrs. Granville stood in her nylons on the linoleum tile, talking into a void. Maddy’s mother spoke only Polish, her father only the most necessary words of French or English. Pregnant wasn’t a necessary word. When Mrs. Granville finally realized that neither parent understood, she lay a hand on the high mound of Maddy’s belly that was only partly masked by the loose sweater.
Maddy scowled, remembering, and dragged her chair across the deck to the next pot of geraniums. There was nothing to be done about the stupidity of the past. The mistakes and the ignorance. She angled her shears and snipped, dropped the spent leaves and petals by her feet. A sztuczka. Huh.
Behind her, through the kitchen window, she heard the clank of cans being set on the counter. Bronislav and Andrei must be home. They moved in tandem. They hadn’t known each other before arriving in Montreal, but now they worked at the same factory, cooked and ate together, rented two of her upstairs rooms.
“I’m out here,” she called, so they would know she was home.
Bronislav slid aside the door and stepped onto the deck. He was the more sociable of the two. “Hello,” he said. For him, that was a complete sentence.
Her turn now. “The weather’s nice. Are you off today?”
He nodded. He seemed to have nothing more to volunteer.
She heard the cans being slid across a shelf. She allotted tenants one cupboard each, the middle shelf and a drawer in the refrigerator.
“Feel free to eat out here.” She waved her shears across the deck. “I’m just about done, then I’m off for a bike ride.”
“We are going to a wedding.”
“You know someone who’s getting married.”
“No.”
Was it worth asking? She would only make him uncomfortable and he still might not tell her. “Enjoy yourself. Have a good time.”
“Yes.” He backed up, reaching for the handle behind him.
She scraped the heaps of dead flowers and leaves into a nest she carried to the composter. Pushing aside the lid, she squinted and held her breath against the insects that flew up. Her composter was a thriving stew of organic breakdown. In the fall she would shovel the rich black earth out the bottom and spread it around her bushes and plants.
In the kitchen she washed her hands, poured herself a glass of milk, and munched a few dates and tamari almonds. Through the ceiling she heard Bronislav and Andrei walking from their rooms to the bathroom, back and forth.
For hours after they left, the upstairs would stink of dollar-store cologne. Except for her own quiet movements, the house would be silent until dawn, when she might wake to their clumsy tiptoeing up the stairs, the lingering whiff of cheap cologne replaced by booze.
On sunny weekends the bike path along the canal turned into a pinball boulevard. There were speed-nuts in their Tour de France spandex; friends cycling in clots of six-way conversations; Daddy Bear, Mommy Bear, Kiddie Bear families; rollerbladers with their wide stride, pendulum arms, and overweight thighs hoping to lose weight overnight; and even pedestrians, some with strollers, some with dogs — not always on leashes. Urban fact #43: dog owners blamed cyclists when their brainless canines galloped into oncoming wheels.
Maddy waited until late afternoon, when the Pavlovian gong of suppertime called most of the crowd home. She turned onto the canal path behind a woman cycling with a milk crate strapped onto the back of her bike. Inside it sat a Boston terrier with dejected eyes — reconciled to the ride but still unhappy. As Maddy passed, she made kissy noises. The dog’s gloom didn’t change.
Ahead, on the other side of the canal, rose the art deco clock tower of the market. She wondered if Yushi had worked with Cécile, who was good, or Elsie, who was new and needed help, or Régis, who was a shit. The dessert and bread shelves would be almost empty, though customers would still be waiting for the last baguettes, the last cakes.
She debated stopping and saying hello. Slowed as she approached the bridge to cross to the market but didn’t turn. She was already in the trance of cycling.
Past the market extended a row of renovated factory-condos with sandblasted walls and large plate-glass windows. An ex-boyfriend, Brian, used to rage about this so-called revitalization of old neighbourhoods. Revitalization, he spat. The real words are appropriation of cheap real estate. He was right. Someone was making a fat profit, and not necessarily — in fact, rarely — the people who currently lived in the neighbourhoods and would have to move elsewhere as the prices kept going up.
She crossed the next bridge to ride along the other side of the canal, where a hedge of rose bushes basked in the late afternoon sunshine. As a girl, she’d walked here with her best friend, Ginette. There were no rose bushes then, only Q
ueen Anne’s lace they’d picked to make lacy bouquets and pretend they were brides. Later, when Ginette had to go live with her grandmother in Rosemont, Maddy picked two bouquets so that Ginette would still get married one day.
Maddy’s knees pumped. Wind cooled the sweat on her arms and her neck. She was approaching her favourite stretch, where the path twisted through the thick trunks of the cottonwoods. Shafts of sunlight dusted the grass, and the water in the canal gleamed green, reflecting the shade of the trees.
Fara
Fara took a deep breath. All she could smell was the varnish, which had hardened to a clear, if not quite smooth, gloss. The floorboards were uneven and Frédéric had had problems with the sander. The wood still showed scars of paint here and there — a stretched eye of brown, an abraded smudge of bright green.
Fara half-closed her eyes, still taking deep breaths as she walked to the kitchen. She’d become convinced she smelled something foul. It was too faint to identify or locate exactly, but she thought it came from here, in the kitchen.
Frédéric smelled nothing, but his nose was numb from working in the cellar. For the past year that the house had been abandoned, every cat in the neighbourhood had slunk in to piss in the cellar. Someone told Frédéric to spray vinegar on the walls and into the corners to neutralize the reek. Someone else had said bleach. First, he had to haul away the piles of rotten wood and corroded machinery. Movement was clumsy, because the ceiling was low — and made lower yet by the thicket of wires strung across it. He had to walk stooped, kept forgetting, and banged his head.
His build-a-house cousin, Eric, had arrived unannounced one evening. When he stepped into the cellar, he hissed, Tabernac! It stinks down here! He poked around, then chuckled. Haven’t seen an electrical box this ancient since I don’t know when. A microwave will blow it in three seconds flat. In the kitchen he chopped a hand at the counters. Better replace those! As if Fara and Frédéric couldn’t see that for themselves. He knocked on the walls of the second floor and tilted his head, listening. Winter’ll be cold here. Don’t think you’ve got more than newspaper for insulation. Fara followed the two men through the house, touching Frédéric’s arm now and again, so he knew he wasn’t alone facing the volley of Eric’s opinions.