Her smooth white stockings made her look like candy canes whose red stripes had been licked off.
She rode this ten-speed bicycle that was too big for her. Sometimes she fell over when she was trying to get off it. It had belonged to Joe when he was much younger. He said that it was a top-of-the-line bicycle that Olympic cyclists in France used.
She was trying to blow bubbles out of a bubble wand with some dish soap. The bubbles kept popping automatically. She had wanted to bring things of wonder into this world.
When she was thirteen, she put on a pink velvet dress to go to a bar mitzvah. She had a card with a Star of David and fourteen dollars in it.
There was a long table with little boys in suit jackets eating hot dogs. One boy had a burgundy and yellow striped turtleneck under his band jacket. He had a single mom.
There were paper napkins with Hebrew letters written on them. There was a band dressed in black tuxedos that glittered. She hoped that they would play “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. That song always made her want to cry, even though she had no idea what it was about.
She sat on the pee-stained couch at the Salvation Army and read Harlequin novels. Sometimes there were horror novels. She would put a bookmark in the book and put it back on the shelf and hope that no one would buy it.
She liked paper dolls when they were in nothing but their underwear. She didn’t know why you were supposed to put those awkward dresses on them.
She said that she wished she could meet a man who was as sexy as Felix the Cat.
She liked when boys wore their grandfathers’ hats. It was as if an old man had wished to be young and got his wish.
The nurse had to show Little O how to help Joe with the oxygen mask. The nurse told Little O that it was a tragedy that she had to live this way. But she didn’t do anything about it.
Little O stood under the forty-watt bulb in the lobby. The landlord was too cheap to pay for a one hundred — watt one. It made the lobby look dim and golden. The nurse reflected that the girl looked like an angel in an oil painting that she had seen in a museum. The nurse couldn’t stop herself from kissing Little O on the forehead and said that she was an angel.
When she started Grade Ten, there was a new boy in her class. They made each other laugh in chemistry lab. They liked all of the same television shows. They both thought it might be kind of interesting to be movie stars when they grew up. They both liked crossword puzzles. They agreed to disagree about music.
She went out with his family to the chicken restaurant. It had a blue neon rooster that blinked on and off in the window. There was wood panelling on the walls and fairy lights along the edges of the ceiling.
They had paper napkins with red flowers on them. They had alcohol wipes that smelled of lemon for you to clean your hands off with when you were done.
There was a jukebox, and the mother gave them a quarter to put in it to choose their song. After dinner there was a scoop of vanilla ice cream floating in the big glass of Coca-Cola, like it was waiting for the Titanic to hit it.
Little O didn’t feel as if there was anything wrong with her. She wasn’t tiny. She wasn’t poor. She didn’t live in a dirty apartment with a grandfather who made her sad.
The boy and his family had mistaken her for a regular girl. And if she could fool these people, then she could fool the entire world. And then it occurred to her that maybe they weren’t mistaken at all. Maybe she just happened to be a very ordinary little girl.
THE SADDEST CHORUS GIRL IN THE WORLD
Before Forester came into their lives, it had been just the two of them. Violet and her mother lived in the east end in the comfortable squalor of their apartment. There were mauve flowers on the wallpaper, and the arms of the couch had been destroyed by a cat named Charles. The east end was known as a squalid, poverty-stricken area of town, but Violet adored the place. She found odd things beautiful instead of ugly. On her way home from school every day, she passed a liquor store that had a handsome gargoyle of a curly-haired baby above the door. She was in love with him.
It was 1922 and Violet’s mother had a job teaching French to some rich English children in Westmount, the very fancy area of town. She was supposed to take the children to the park and point out all sorts of things and tell them what they were in French. This was the lovely idea. But she mostly ran after the children saying, “Non, non, non.”
Violet’s mother dyed her hair a terrible shade of red. She had a navy blue coat and her shoes were scuffed. The poorer they were, the fatter Violet’s mother became. She would eat a huge piece of cake at the café and then she would feel weak. The doctor told her that she should eat healthier, but she said that really it was her only pleasure.
Her mother was so soft and fat that you always wanted to lean against her as if she was a pillow. She made everybody in the room lazy and sleepy. That’s what people liked about her. And she laughed at every joke. She would start laughing sometimes and people had no idea that they had said something clever. Her blue eyes sparkled when she smiled widely and her face seemed so beautiful and full of life for a brief moment that you felt it was a shame she had married so poorly.
Her mother had always drunk a lot. But Violet didn’t mind it. Especially when they had lived alone in the little apartment in the east end. Then her mother would lie on the bed with her eyes closed, saying sweet things under her breath. Her words almost sounded like she was talking in her sleep. She would say half a sentence and then she would only mouth the rest of the words.
“My darling pretty little cupcake. Little Valentine sweet wee little anemone of the deep blue ocean,” she would say.
No one could come up with compliments like that. They were the prettiest things about Violet’s childhood. Before Forester she had always slept in the same bed as her mother.
Violet’s mother would have her come and meet her at work whenever she was in trouble with her boss or when she wanted a raise. She knew that Violet could beg without ever saying a word. She knew that Violet was capable of making people feel ashamed. People were afraid of her big brown eyes. She knew that Violet was her winning lottery ticket. She really was an extraordinary child.
They rode the trolley all the way down Sherbrooke Street one afternoon to her mother’s work. Violet loved that ride. She stuck her head out the window and she felt so free. That’s what everybody in the world wants, isn’t it? To feel free? That’s what Forester stole from them: their freedom.
Usually after Violet met her mother’s employer, they would have a healthy bonus in their pockets. They often went to the museum. There was a painting that the mother liked to look at because she swore that it looked exactly like her when she was young. Violet didn’t really believe it. Today, she took her mother’s hand. They went to a pretty café by the museum to drink chocolat chaud to celebrate. Everything in the restaurant was painted gold. Even the chairs, even the tables, even the hanging lights. There was a vase on the table with a white tulip in it. The bulb of the flower looked like a naked girl sitting on a bed with her arms wrapped around her knees.
Violet was wearing a white shirt with a black tie and a pleated skirt that went down below her knees. While they were seated in the café, Violet took out a book of poetry from her pocket and began to read aloud. Her mother couldn’t listen to a single page without starting to nod off. The milk in her mother’s coffee looked like a swimmer doing a lazy breaststroke.