Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  You had to act, she knew now. Not wait on what anyone else thought you should and shouldn’t do. Decide for yourself what needed to be done and do it.

  The doorbell rang. Maddy dropped her brush into the plastic tub of paint, and wiping her hands on an old T-shirt, traipsed down the stairs. “Coming!” she hollered. She wore a pair of pink shorts so ancient the corduroy had rubbed bald, and had tied a head scarf around her curls.

  Fara stood below the steps on the sidewalk. “Hi. Am I disturbing you?”

  Maddy held up green-spattered fingers. “Painting one of the rooms upstairs.”

  “I can come another time.” Fara backed up. “I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Come on, then, if you don’t mind me facing a wall.” Maddy had already turned away, assuming Fara would follow.

  “Your banister is gorgeous. The real estate agent told us about it.”

  “What real estate agent?”

  “The one who sold us our house. She said hippies used to live here and they stripped all the wood. She said she’d love to sell your house.”

  “Real estate agents.” Maddy blew a raspberry. “They keep pushing cards through the mail slot. I know they can sell my house. But tell me, if I sold it, where would I live that wouldn’t cost me just as much to buy as I’d make on the house? I’d be no further ahead.” She stooped for her brush and stood back to survey the corner where she’d left off.

  “But this is such a big house and you’re all alone. You could buy a smaller place.”

  Maddy smoothed the brush in slow up-and-down strokes. She found painting relaxing. “What if tomorrow I meet the love of my life and get pregnant with triplets?”

  “I didn’t mean —”

  “It’s okay. I’m joking.” Actually, only half-joking. She wished people with partners would think before assuming that people who were single were fated to stay that way.

  Fara said nothing for a moment. “I like this pale green. It makes the room look fresh. Maybe I’ll use it for one of our upstairs rooms. We’re shuffling everything around again. We had our bedroom in the front, but the street’s too noisy.” She peered down the hallway. “You sleep in the front?”

  “Always have. I’m one of the original hippies — that’s how long I’ve been here. Why don’t you grab a chair? There’s one next door.” Maddy pulled the ladder toward the corner and climbed a couple of rungs.

  Fara returned with the chair from the sewing room. “This would make a nice bedroom.”

  Maddy sucked in her lips. For nothing in the world would she sleep here. It was the woman with the braid’s room. At the beginning, after the other kids had left and Stilt had moved to Vermont or B.C. — wherever it was hippies retired — she’d kept the door closed. She’d never even looked inside. The pigeons and squirrels could have been having a party. For her, the house didn’t exist in that corner of the hallway. She’d rented out the other upstairs room, and after a year that tenant asked if her cousin, who was moving to Montreal to study at Concordia, could have the empty room next to hers. They would fix it up themselves. When they left, Maddy rented out both rooms again. It was still the woman with the braid’s room, but Maddy could bear it now. Look, even paint it.

  She heard the chair squeak and remembered Fara, who’d said nothing since her comment. “You still there?” Maddy asked.

  “Yeah … I wanted to ask you about the people who used to live in our house.”

  Maddy lifted an eyebrow at the wall. “You mean the suicide.”

  “Not the suicide,” Fara said so sharply that Maddy glanced at her. Fara sat twisting a thread that trailed from the hem of her shirt round and round her finger. “I was wondering about his brother. Was he living there when it happened?”

  “He moved out a couple of years ago. He didn’t get along with his dad. It was like his dad thought Ben wasn’t his kid. I heard him a couple of times yelling at Ben, saying his mom should have taken him when she left.”

  “She wasn’t living there either?”

  Maddy dipped her brush and began painting again. “She took off years ago. I don’t know if they ever heard from her again. Ben was maybe eight or so. Xavier was younger. He hadn’t started school yet, so one of the neighbours up the street used to mind him along with her own kids. When Ben finished school, he would get Xavier. You’d see him coming down the street, hardly tall enough to push the stroller in a straight line, but he wouldn’t let anyone help. I saw them out on the back steps once — there used to be steps where you’ve got a deck now — eating ravioli from a can. They both had a spoon and took turns, handing the can back and forth.” She had to stop talking to concentrate on not touching the brush to the ceiling.

  Fara said, “Sounds like they were really close.”

  “That was when they were little. Xavier turned into a bit of a wild boy. He did all kinds of crazy things. Once — the story was in the paper — he climbed up under the Victoria Bridge. You know, across the St. Lawrence? And he was always getting into trouble at school. I don’t think it was easy for Ben, being his brother.”

  “I wonder what it’s like for him now that he’s dead.”

  Maddy climbed down the ladder. “What do you mean? Obviously he knows his brother is dead. What should it be like for him?”

  “I think losing a sibling is a very specific kind of loss. It’s not like a parent who was in charge and took care of you. Your sibling is the other kid who was there while you were growing up. Even if you didn’t have a good relationship, your sibling is part of you in a way no one else is — and probably even more so if your parents weren’t around or not really there for you.”

  Maddy had crouched to begin painting the bottom of the next corner. She thought about her brother, Stan. They only saw each other twice a year, though they lived in the same city. “I guess,” she said. “I never thought about it. When we were growing up, my brother and I were more antagonistic than friendly. Our mother was always running interference, making sure I did all the chores and he got the biggest piece of babka.”

  “Do you and your brother get along now?”

  Maddy had painted as far up as she could reach and turned now to get the ladder.

  “Let me.” Fara said. She manoeuvred the ladder to the corner and rattled the legs in place.

  “We’re not friends but we’re not not-friends, if you get what I mean. If he needed help, I’d do what I could. And him for me, too, I think. Mind you, we haven’t actually tested that theory.” She looked at Fara. “What about you?”

  Fara shrugged but said nothing.

  Meaning what? Maddy wondered. Didn’t her theories about siblings apply to herself ? Or was she an only child?

  “Suicide,” Fara muttered. “It’s such a definitive way to die. I know, all death is final, but suicide isn’t just dying. It’s choosing death. His brother must blame himself that he never noticed something was wrong. Do you know if there was a note? If he explained why?”

  “No idea.” Maddy waited a beat. She didn’t want to keep talking about suicide. “How’s Frédéric? Have the two of you been getting to know the Pointe?”

  “Mostly we’re still working on the house. But you were born here, right?”

  “This is where my parents headed when they got off the boat. Their only contact in Canada was the Polish priest at Holy Trinity on Centre Street.”

  “So you know a lot about the Pointe.”

  “When you’re a kid, I think you take most things for granted. You don’t have any perspective. Most of what I learned about the Pointe came later, when I took courses at Concordia. I had this sociology professor who was big on oral history. He came to the Pointe to interview people and collect photos. He told me a lot.”

  Brian had interviewed her, too. She’d told him about the neighbourhood boys walking to Verdun for a street fight, and how the dépanneur three streets over had a horse
for deliveries up until the nineties. She’d never told him about her baby — at first because she was too shy to admit how stupid she’d been to have a baby and then lose it; and then, when he became her boyfriend, she worried that he wouldn’t approve if he found out. So naive he was, too, tracing the stretch marks on her stomach and believing her when she said they were from a vitamin deficiency when she was growing up. Even though at other times, she’d told him her parents had kept a garden with carrots, onions, tomatoes, and green beans. Later, after she and Brian split, she was glad she’d never told him about the baby. He would have included it in an article or a book, and blamed it on poverty and poor living conditions in the Pointe.

  Fara shifted on her chair. “The signs along the canal call it the Cradle of Industry. Le Berceau de l’Industrie.”

  “My professor said that, too. The history of Pointe St-Charles is the history of Montreal is the history of Canada. The Lachine Canal, the railroad, the factories, and the workers from the Pointe were the link between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic — the rest of the world.”

  “You don’t sound like you believe it.”

  “Sure I do. But history isn’t just the part that sounds glorious. It’s everything.” Maddy poked her brush into the top corner. “Why aren’t there any signs saying that the Pointe was Canada’s first industrial slum?”

  “Not a slum,” Fara objected.

  “People living twelve in a room with no running water and open sewers in the street? I’d say that was a slum. In the early 1900s the Pointe had the highest rate of infant mortality in all of Canada.” Another of Brian’s statistics. She used to accuse him of making his career from slumming, and listen to how she echoed him.

  “But it’s not like that now,” Fara said.

  “Not like that, no.” Though if Fara opened her eyes, she could see a few things for herself. The women in tight skirts standing at the corner of Wellington, leering at the traffic, weren’t waiting for the bus. And those teenage boys who hung out at the house on the corner. Maddy had been cycling down the alley and saw the mom in the open back door, giving one of the boys a blow job. And though the family who used to send their toddler onto the sidewalk to exchange drugs for money had been evicted, Maddy had seen them since living only a few streets over. Wait until that kid got to kindergarten.

  She climbed down the ladder. Her neck and arms ached from stretching. “I want a beer. How about you? We can sit outside.”

  Maddy peered at every building as if the numbers might suddenly skip or somersault backward. 4437, 4439, 4441. They were fixed to the top of door frames or screwed into the brick. Some walls had a glazed ceramic tile with a faded saint’s head next to the door. This used to be a Portuguese neighbourhood. Urban fact #11: Ethnic communities formed inner-city ghettos around churches, temples, or mosques, and grocery stores stocked with vegetables and meats they liked to cook. As soon as they could afford to, they moved to houses with lawns and indoor garages in the suburbs. Another kind of a ghetto.

  For her parents, leaving Warsaw had exhausted their daring. They stayed in the Pointe, scrimped and saved, until they could buy a narrow brick row house. Another Polish family lived upstairs and paid them rent. Maddy’s family had four rooms on the ground floor, as well as the dirt cellar lined with shelves filled with jars of vegetables, jam, sauerkraut, and pickles her mother preserved. Maddy’s mother did the laundry by boiling their sheets and clothes in a large kettle on the stove. Maddy remembered the excitement when her father salvaged an ancient wringer washer. The rollers squeezed the wet clothes into flattened pancakes her mother shook open and hung outside, even in the winter when they didn’t dry but froze. Maddy had many household chores but was forbidden to touch the washing machine. Only her mother lifted the dripping clothes from the tub and fed them into the rollers. Maddy used to watch with growing dread mixed with guilty longing. Those were the same hands that slapped her on the head and boxed her ears. What if they got snatched by the rollers and crushed, spewed out flat as the squished pillowcases? She knew these were wicked thoughts, and that thoughts were as evil as deeds, but she still never told the priest when she kneeled in the confessional. If it ever happened, she would tell him. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Maddy checked the napkin where Yushi had printed her address. There, on the second floor at the top of a curved metal stairway. Each step echoed with a tremor.

  She pressed the buzzer and turned to survey the neighbourhood. As in the Pointe, she saw mostly brick, but the brick wasn’t as old, and the buildings were wider, the cornices more ornate. The horizon felt closer, too: spreading roofs and skylights, with high-rises just beyond and the mountain nearby. Here, you were in the city, not on the edge of it, by the river.

  Behind her she heard the door open.

  “Sorry.” Yushi was drying her hands on a dishtowel. “I was cutting mango for pickle.”

  “I thought you were going to wait till I got here so I could watch.” Maddy followed Yushi down a scuffed oak hallway into the welcoming smell of warm curry. Yushi wore a chef’s apron, folded at the waist, with the strings wrapped twice around her small waist. The front and sides were blotted with smears of yellow, green, and brown. It was a working apron, unlike the pristine bibs they donned to serve pastries.

  Yushi dropped the dishtowel over the back of a chair. “If you wanted to watch from the start, you’d have had to sleep here. I soaked the channa last night.”

  “Channa?”

  “Chickpeas. You canna do buss-up-shut w’out channa,” she half-sang. And in her usual voice, “Let’s do one lesson at a time. Today you’ll see how I make roti.”

  At one lesson at a time, Maddy could look forward to several visits. She sucked in her lips to keep from smiling too broadly.

  On the counter was a bowl of chopped mango, a larger bowl covered with a cloth, a chopping board, a plate upended over another plate, a scattered handful of green chilies. On the stove two large pots bubbled softly. Though orderly, the space was cramped for cooking. Maddy’s kitchen was so much larger. She could have suggested Yushi cook at her place, but she’d wanted to see where Yushi lived.

  “Here’s the channa.” Yushi lifted one of the lids on the stove and stirred the thick, turmeric-yellow stew. She prodded a few chunks and squished them against the sides of the pot with the back of the wooden spoon. “Potato,” she explained. “It t’ickens the sauce. We call it aloo.”

  “Aloo is the sauce?”

  “Aloo is potato.”

  The stew in the next pot was darker. “Baigan,” Yushi said as she stirred it. “Eggplant.” She rapped the spoon against the pot and set the lid at an angle. “Just before we eat, I’ll add shrimp. That’s not Trini, that’s how I make curry shrimp — with baigan.”

  Channa, aloo, baigan. The vocabulary of getting to know Yushi. “What do you call shrimp?” Maddy asked.

  Yushi threw her a look. “Shrimp.”

  Maddy was embarrassed — as if she’d been caught on the lookout for exoticism. But she, too, came from a culture with its own food. “I never ate shrimp growing up. It would have been too expensive. Also, I don’t think my parents even knew what shrimp were. We lived on cabbage rolls. Golabki.” She patted her hips as if that explained why they were so wide.

  “Cabbage rolls filled with …?”

  “Rice, sometimes hamburger.”

  “There’s more interesting stuffing you could make. Let me think about it.” Yushi lifted a heavy, flat metal round from a cupboard. “Seen one of these before?”

  It looked like the bottom of a cast-iron pan. “No sides?” Maddy asked.

  “You need to press around the edges of the roti while they’re cooking so they puff. It’s hard to do that with sides. It’s called a tawah.”

  “Can you buy them here?”

  “In Montreal? Probably. I got mine in Toronto.”

  Yushi began clear
ing as much space as she could on the counter, setting the bowl with the chopped mango on the toaster oven, sliding the chopping board behind a canister.

  “What’s this for?” Maddy pointed at the two plates, one upended over the other.

  “Nothing. I’m finished with that.” She lifted the plates apart. The bottom one had a green smear along the edge, a tiny mash of minced garlic, bits and flecks of leaves. “My mum always chopped her garlic and herbs before she started cooking, and put them on a plate —” Yushi dabbed pursed fingers in spots around the plate. “When she was cooking, she had everything ready. But you had to cover the plate to keep de nasty flies off. Keeps the herbs fresh, too. She always covered plates and bowls with plates or a damp cloth. I don’t think she ever bought a roll of plastic wrap. She wouldn’t have seen the use.”

  Yushi rinsed the plates and left them in the sink. “I already made the roti dough because it has to rest. Any kind of bread dough, you want the gluten in the flour to …” She rubbed her finger and thumb together. “Get elastic.”

  She plucked the cloth off the steel bowl to reveal a ball of white dough.

  “What’s in it?” Maddy asked.

  “Flour, baking powder, water, bit of yeast. Pinch of salt if you want. What’s important is the texture. Wash your hands and feel.”

  Maddy dried her hands on the towel on the chair and poked a finger into the dough.

  “No, feel it.” Yushi scooped up the ball and smacked it into Maddy’s open hands. “Pull it apart and make me eight loyas.”

  “Loyas?”

  “Balls.”

  Maddy felt the resistance and stretch of the dough as she pulled it in half, twisted those halves apart, then again.

  Yushi rolled each of Maddy’s chunks into smooth balls, lined them up on the counter, and draped the towel over them. “So they don’t dry up,” she explained. “The Indian name for these breads is paratha. Buss-up-shut is Trini for burst-up shirt. You’ll see why. When I flip one off the tawah, you’ll slap it up.” Yushi demonstrated by clapping her palms. “The layers get all torn and lovely — perfect for sopping up sauce.” She pulled a small steel bowl toward her. “This is ghee. Clarified butter. You know what that is, right?”