A Cage Without Bars

by Anne Dublin

  And one tear slides slowly down her cheek. That’s when my tears come, at the thought of losing Maman. How will she live without her maman? As the nuns try to steer us back out into the cold darkness, I grope for something to say, but the words won’t come. Just as I’m about to step through the doorway, I shove my hand into my pocket and pull out the peppermint candy. I grab Jeanine’s hand and push the candy into it, just as Sister pushes me out the door. For an instant, I catch sight of Jeanine’s face as she’s closing the door. It almost looks as if she might be smiling, just a little. Then she presses her hand flat against the window pane in what almost looks like a wave.

  I run all the way home alone through the dark as tears soak my face and turn to frost. As soon as I burst through the door, I go right over in my snowy boots and wrap my arms around Maman, who stands by the stove.

  “You were a very brave girl today, Aline,” she whispers over my head.

  I sob into her chest, and her gentle hand strokes my hair. Slowly, slowly, I begin to feel like myself again. Safe and warm in my kitchen, just in time for supper.

  0

  The funeral is on Saturday, but Maman says I don’t have to go, that I’ve been brave enough this week. She goes to the church, along with another mother on the street. I stand in the window and watch her walking off through the applesauce slush in the direction of Saint-François d’Assise in her gray tweed coat, black felt church hat, and sturdy rubber boots, her black purse hooked over her arm. Then a while later the hearse carrying Jeanine’s mother glides slowly along our street toward the church, followed by a procession of somber men dressed in black, the neighborhood men who are paying their respects to the Bonenfant family. Papa and Arthur join the procession as it passes, and I stay home with Bernard and Yvette.

  Yvette is still not well, but I don’t want to tell her what will happen next week when she has to get her tonsils taken out. I give her a cup of warm chicken broth that Maman had prepared and try to help her catch up on some of her homework while sitting on the edge of the bed beside her. But I can tell she’s not in the mood, and her face is flushed, and she sounds like she’s growling when she talks. Maman says that her tonsils are like a couple of big red strawberries at the back of her throat. I ask her to open her mouth so I can take a look inside, and it’s true. I can barely see her throat hole because of the big red lumps plugging up where she swallows. They look as fiery as her face.

  Yvette tells me in a hoarse voice that she doesn’t want to do her schoolwork right now and would rather play a game. So I fetch the wooden game board from the kitchen cupboard, and we play a game of Parcheesi on the bed. I let Yvette win three times, but soon I can see that my sister is tired. She settles back on her pillow and her eyes slowly close.

  Bernard is playing hockey out on the street with some friends, but I have to stay inside with Yvette. Musical notes drift from the radio upstairs. I recognize the voice of Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.” Georgette has played it for me on her phonograph a few times. I stand in the hallway to listen for a moment. It’s the most popular Christmas song on the radio right now. And then I hear Madame Coleman’s voice joining in. It sounds like Bing is upstairs singing with her! I don’t know all of the English words, but I recognize some of them, like children and sleigh bells and snow. I like the word glisten, so I say it over and over again. It sounds like a shiny word to me. Like our French word scintiller. I wish we had a phonograph like Georgette’s family so we could buy Bing’s record and listen to it over and over again too.

  I’m about to head for Papa’s rocking chair to curl up and read from my Delly book that I borrowed from the French section of the Carnegie Library last week when I hear a door open upstairs. Then the click of heels on the steps. In the hallway where I’m standing, I look up. And see her looking down at me. Carolyn Coleman.

  “What are you doing down there, little girl?” she asks me.

  “I am not a little girl,” I tell her in my broken English, and she grins.

  “You talk funny,” she says with a giggle.

  “Toi aussi,” I tell her.

  Carolyn frowns. “What did you just say?” she asks me, and I grin back at her.

  “You too,” I tell her in English, and she giggles again.

  “Toi aussi,” she tries to say in French but gets it wrong. That makes me giggle.

  I realize she’s holding something in her hand. It’s an orange, the biggest one I’ve ever seen. And it’s already peeled. How can she have an orange already when it isn’t even Christmas yet? We only have them at Christmas, on the table in the bone china fruit bowl that Maman brings down from the shelf every December. Carolyn sees me staring at the orange.

  “You want some? We have plenty of them.”

  I’m speechless. All I can do is nod. She breaks the orange in half and hands it to me through the banister rails, and I can’t believe my eyes. There’s juice dripping from her fingers, and as soon as the orange is in my hand, juice drips from mine too. This is the juiciest orange I’ve ever seen in my whole life.

  “Merci,” I murmur breathlessly, and she tips her head.

  “What?” Carolyn asks.

  “Oh, tank you,” I tell her in my broken English, after realizing I spoke in French.

  Carolyn laughs again, then runs clickety-clack back up the stairs. I head straight for the rocking chair with my prize. There I sit and rock slowly, crush each slice of orange in my back teeth, and let the juice run down my throat. I should save this slice for poor sick Yvette because maybe it would help her feel better. But I swallow it, instead. I keep telling myself, after each slice, that I will save the rest for my family. But then I eat just one more until there is only one left, and that’s not nearly enough to share with six people, so I swallow that one too.

  “You are a greedy girl today,” my guardian angel whispers into my ear. And in my other ear, I’m sure I can hear the devil laughing at both of us.

  11

  Too Many Pieces to Fix

  Once, when I was in Grade 5, our teacher gave us a description to write. We had to go home and describe our house, the outside and the inside, room by room. After supper, when I sat at the kitchen table and began my homework, Papa asked what I was working at. When I explained, his face grew solemn and he took the pencil out of my hand.

  “It’s nobody’s business what the inside of our house looks like,” Papa told me. “You can tell your teacher I said that if you want to.”

  I couldn’t tell my teacher that. Instead, I told her I forgot to do my homework, and she gave me an E. And a long lecture about being irresponsible, which I didn’t listen to.

  On Monday morning, it happens again. Sister gives us a scrapbook project. We are to cut out pictures of different sorts of vegetables and fruits from magazines and from tin-can labels. It’s about the sort of foods that people eat every day, what they have in their cupboards and iceboxes. We can work on it over the Christmas holidays. As she stands at the front of the class explaining, I look around in desperation, knowing that I can’t do this project, either.

  We don’t have any cans with labels in our house. We have glass jars in the cellar with wild crabapples in sweet syrup that Maman stewed in the fall. We have jars of strawberry and raspberry jam made from fruit my sister and I spent hours picking in the hot sun at Tunney’s Pasture. The cans in our cupboard are all dented and they have no labels. Maman doesn’t know what’s inside of them, either. She gets them from the market for pennies and takes a chance on what’s inside. Sometimes it’s a nice surprise, like the cherries she used in a pie once. Other times it’s not so nice, like the yucky clams we had to eat in the soup she made from them.

  We don’t have any magazines in our house, either. We only have Le Droit, the newspaper that comes every day, and there are no pictures of food in it. And after Maman, Papa, and Arthur read it, Maman puts it in the bathroom so we can wipe ourselves b
ecause toilet paper is too expensive. And we have the Eaton’s catalog that comes in the mail, with beautiful new clothes and all sorts of other things Yvette and I love to look at, but not the kind of food pictures I need for this project. But maybe there’s somebody who can help me with today’s problem.

  I glance toward Georgette’s desk. The Blondins have tin cans in their cupboard, I know it for certain. And they have magazines too. Georgette even has them in her bedroom. Maybe she can get some pictures for me so I can do the scrapbook project. But Georgette hasn’t come to school today. That seems very strange because Georgette never misses school and always does her homework and gets good marks like me. Where could she be? I decide that I’ll stop at her house after school to ask if I can have some of her can labels and pictures from her magazines.

  Jeanine is at school today, though. The funeral for her maman was on Saturday, and last Friday when I went to her house she was crying. Not today, though. She came to school late as usual, slammed the door, and shuffled to her desk in her wet boots. Today, Sister didn’t say a word, but her face turned red and she broke a piece of chalk when she was writing on the blackboard. And Jeanine sat at her desk smirking. When I turned around to look at her, to see if she might wave at me again, her eyes were narrow and she looked the other way. I don’t think I’ll ever be a friend of hers, and I don’t even think that I want to be one.

  At recess, I play with Lucille and Thérèse, since Georgette is away. I wonder if she’s sick, like so many other girls are right now, with sore throats and colds, like Yvette. As the three of us roll a big ball for the head of the snowman that we’re building, I glance toward the corner of the schoolyard where Jeanine and Gilberte and the other big dumb girls usually play in the snow. Today, though, Jeanine isn’t with them.

  “Big dumb Jeanine is quieter today,” Thérèse says, snickering. “You should have seen inside her house, Lucille. It was such a dirty mess. And it smelled so bad in there! Pew!” She makes a face and pinches her nose.

  “Be quiet,” I tell her. “That’s not nice, Thérèse. Especially since her mother just died!”

  Thérèse just sticks out her tongue at me.

  I see Jeanine walking by herself at the edge of the schoolyard with a stick in her hand that she’s clattering along the fence. Just walking slowly and staring straight ahead. I can’t help but wonder if maybe she’s thinking about her maman. I know I would be if I were her, if my maman had just died. Then, for the rest of the morning, she stays very quiet at her desk.

  I prayed to my favorite saint, Sainte Thérèse, for Jeanine and her family when I was in church on Sunday. I hope she and Our Lord were listening. Before communion, I also asked forgiveness for eating the orange.

  When I get home for lunch, Maman serves me vegetable soup with macaroni in it. Today, she made cheese sandwiches for the boys, she explains, because they wanted to eat their lunch at school. Then she sits down across from me at the table, looking serious.

  “Yvette’s fever is gone now, and she’s feeling better. But she still needs to have her tonsils taken out, the doctor said, so she won’t keep getting sick all the time. Tomorrow is the day. Don’t tell her that, okay?” Maman says, patting my hand. “I don’t want her to worry too much about it.”

  “Poor Yvette! I won’t tell her Maman. Will it hurt very much?” I can’t even imagine!

  “Yes, but the doctor will give her some special medicine, so she will be asleep when he does it.” Then Maman pauses and her face seems to flicker like a candle for a moment. “Was Georgette Blondin at school today?”

  “No, she wasn’t. But how did you know?”

  Maman closes her eyes and shakes her head.

  “When Monsieur Nadeau stopped by, he told me that their house is vacant. He tried to deliver their bread today, but nobody was there. He found out from a neighbor that Monsieur Blondin lost his delivery job and has just disappeared. Nobody knows where he went. And that Madame Blondin took Georgette and Jean to Montreal to live with her maman.” She shakes her head once again and sighs. “So very sad for your poor friend, Aline.”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “But what about all of their beautiful things? What about their phonograph and Georgette’s beautiful dolls and all the good food in their cupboards and their nice furniture?”

  “I don’t know, ma belle. Maybe they took some of it, or maybe they left it behind or sold it.” She clucks her tongue. “I’m so glad we have our own house,” she murmurs.

  “You mean that wasn’t their own house?” I ask my mother.

  “No, they were renting it, like so many of the other families around here,” Maman explains. “Sometimes when people rent their houses, they have more money for lots of other things. We don’t because we want to pay for our house, so we can own it someday. We save every penny that we can to give back to the bank because the bank let us borrow some money to build our house. So we can’t have a lot of special things like some other people can.”

  I almost choke on a spoonful of soup just thinking of the ten cents that I took from my mother’s purse. No wonder she never has any money to spare for Sister’s charity box. But I took it from her purse and when the box was gone, I didn’t give the money back. I went to the store and bought candy and shared it with Lucille. And we ate like little pigs, then she threw up all over her boots. And some of that candy is still hidden in the space under the doll dresser drawer. I’m afraid it won’t even taste sweet in my mouth anymore because it’s almost like stolen candy. I wish I could just throw it all away, but I don’t know where and that would be wasting.

  Maman looks very sad. “And this Christmas, well, there won’t be much for you and Yvette and your brothers. I’m afraid that le père Noël might not be able to stop here. It’s been a very hard year for everyone.” She sits and watches me. “Do you understand?”

  “Are we very, very poor, Maman?” I ask because I want to hear her say it herself. I want to understand how poor we are.

  Maman sits and stares at me for a moment, then looks down at her rough hands. We all have chapped hands in winter but no cream. Maman tells us to pee on them to help them heal. It stings, but it works.

  “Do you ever feel hungry, Aline?” Maman asks me. “Do you always get enough meat and potatoes at suppertime? Is there always a pot of soup on the stove for your lunch and hot porridge for your breakfast? And fresh eggs? And chickens?”

  I nod. There’s always food, even if it’s pork fat from the frying pan spread on bread. Which is a treat we all fight over, but when I told Georgette about it, she made a yucky face and said that her mother throws that stuff away. Maman doesn’t waste a crumb. And sometimes, like on wash day, we have cornflakes for breakfast because it’s faster for Maman than making porridge. And we always have good dessert, like tapioca and rice pudding and bread pudding and thumbprint jam cookies and raisin buns. And pies, always pies. Everything made by Maman, never bought from Monsieur Nadeau. Maman says that he delivers bread and desserts to our tenants upstairs.

  “Bon,” Maman says. “Are you warm enough in your bed at night and when you go outside every day? Do you have clean clothes to wear without any holes in them?”

  I nod again. Sometimes my face gets cold, and sometimes my fingertips, but I don’t really notice when I’m walking to school or playing outside. And there are plenty of warm wool blankets and quilts for our beds. And even though our clothes aren’t always new ones ordered from Monsieur Eaton, they’re always clean and tidy. Maman washes them every Monday. Sometimes I stir in the rag with the bluing tied inside of it that helps make the sheets whiter. Maman would never stand for gray sheets like the ones she sees on some of the other women’s clotheslines on our street.

  “Are you happy?” Maman asks. “Living here, in this house, with Papa and me, with your brothers and sister?”

  I nod again. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt unhappy. I’ve felt angry at my brot
hers for teasing me sometimes, and at Jeanine Bonenfant for chasing me and punching me and throwing snow in my face. I know I’ve been jealous of some of the things that my friends have, and lately I’ve been a bit greedy. But most of the time, I know I’m happy. I remember Jeanine’s face today. I don’t think she’s very happy. Maybe she never has been.

  “Now, do you think we’re very, very poor, Aline?” Maman asks, gently patting my arm. “Or do you think that maybe we’re a little bit rich?”

  I’m not sure. I do know that we’re different. We’re not like the rich ones with the nice clothes and the store-bought cookies and the pretty dolls and the money to give to charity. Neither are we like the Dionnes, who seem to have everything they could ever want—except for their parents. They have nurses and a doctor instead and live in a different house than their family. There are the princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, who live in a palace in England with their parents, the king and queen. They have beautiful clothes and houses and lives. I wonder if they’re happy, or if they know that they’re rich.

  We’re not like the poor ones, either, who come to school smelling bad, with dirty and holey clothes, and have bugs crawling in their hair all the time instead of just a few times like us. The ones who swear and never do their schoolwork and have fathers who are drunks, though some of the rich ones have fathers like that too.

  I’m still not sure what to say to Maman, so instead I just nod. Then I ask her a question.

  “Maman, where’s the pretty china fruit bowl? For the Christmas oranges. It’s already December, and you haven’t taken it down from the cupboard to put on the table yet.”

  Maman starts blinking quickly. She looks toward the cupboard, then back at the table and the empty spot in the center where she traditionally places the fruit bowl.

  “I didn’t want to tell you this.” Maman touches her throat. “But now it’s time. The other day, I climbed up on a chair to take down the fruit bowl. And Aline, I dropped it. It broke into too many pieces to fix, so I had to throw it away. I’m so sorry. Please don’t tell the others until they notice, okay? And then when they ask me, I’ll tell them too. It’s not that important anyway, is it?”