Luc pulled Isabelle’s shirt off over her head. As it was coming off, she felt as if she was going through a dark tunnel. There she was with a tiny white training bra with a blue bow in the middle, sitting on a bed at a party. He was able to see all the birthmarks and moles on her belly. No one but her family had ever seen those before.
She had nothing to say to him. This boy didn’t know a thing about her. She was going to make love to somebody who didn’t even know her. He might get her pregnant and then not return the baby’s calls for the rest of his life. She would end up getting the cheque like her mother and trying to make the best of it. She didn’t like the way his hands felt on her. She turned her face away when he tried to kiss her. Her body went stiff when he tried to put his hands around her hips.
“Aww come on, Isabelle,” Luc whispered. “Don’t be a frigid bitch, okay?”
All she could think about was home. Her mother was probably singing along with the radio while turning the pages of a magazine with her ridiculously long fingernails. She made her face all crazy with longing when she sang Céline Dion. The scratch of his zipper sounded like the arm of a record player suddenly being jerked off.
Isabelle opened her mouth and yelled a rather preposterous and loud, “No!”
She had learned to project her voice like that from her family. It was like her whole family and all the different generations of loud people were helping her assert what she needed to say. The only thing that they were blessed with was lip, but they didn’t know how and when to use their gift.
“Get the hell off of me, would ya!” she shouted. “You think I’m going to put out for a bum like you. Let me out of this shithole, pleeeze!”
And so Isabelle Ferdinand changed her mind. Isabelle still wanted to be a kid and to be loved the way that a kid who has a future is loved. She put her shirt back on quickly, causing butterfly barrettes to fly every which way, and stood up and left the room. She went down the hallway and pushed through the crowd of wild teenagers to get to the front door. She hurried down from the moon and got back to earth.
Sneaking down the hallway of her apartment, she passed her mother in the kitchen, humming along to the radio. She walked really quietly because she didn’t want to attract anyone’s attention. She flopped onto her own bed. The quilt was covered in flowers and smelled like her childhood. She wanted to bury herself in the ground, like a mustard seed, until she was ready to grow up wild and enormous.
The next day she was at the library in her bell-bottom corduroys and a sweater with a rose on it, reading paperback novels. And wherever she is now, she is probably still doing her own thing.
THE STORY OF A ROSE BUSH
My parents sent my brother and me to spend the weekend with our grandparents on the south side of Montreal, which they did once in a while so that they didn’t have to go themselves. My mother especially couldn’t be around Grandmother. We always told her that she should make an exception for Grandmother. She had lived through the war and had lost her entire family when she was little. Look at all the things the poor lady had been through. Cut her some slack, for crying out loud. But all Mother knew was that she couldn’t stand the old woman.
Grandmother was sitting in the kitchen in her wheelchair when we arrived. She raised her small hand and gestured for us to eat whatever we wanted of her leftover scrambled eggs. “Allez, allez,” she said. “Don’t be shy. The guilty are never shy. The innocent are shy and it gets them nowhere.”
We pulled our chairs up close to hear her. Grandmother had a soft voice, as if she had been eating powdered doughnuts all day long. And like a cassette that had been repeatedly played, her voice got harder and harder to hear as she got older. I was complimented for my Parisian accent all the time, which I’d picked up from her. Grandmother said she couldn’t understand the French in her neighbourhood. I think she just used it as an excuse not to make small talk.
There was a can of pea soup balanced on her lap. Grandfather yelled out from the bathroom for us to make her lift it. About six months before, Grandmother had had to have bypass surgery because she was having trouble breathing when she walked. She didn’t want to go and we all had to beg her. We told her how much nicer her walks to the Salvation Army around the corner would be. However, due to complications during her operation, she became paralyzed from the waist down, and she couldn’t walk anymore at all. She kept shaking her head at us when we came to visit her at the hospital, bewildered that she had ever listened to such idiots.
After she came home from the hospital, a physiotherapist told her that she should lift a can of pea soup above her head to get her strength back. As was our custom, my brother and I stood next to her wheelchair and yelled and screamed at her to raise the can way up, but she couldn’t be bothered. Instead she decided to eat marshmallows without her dentures in, looking as though she was trying to squash her face into a permanent frown. She told us we were welcome to lift the can up and down ourselves if we wanted.
She lit up a cigarette. She was always setting the blanket on her lap on fire. She even somehow managed to get cigarette burns on my underwear. She had been smoking for so many years that she could suck half the cigarette in one inhalation. Right then, she exhaled a white cat that stretched its limbs and descended from her mouth and curled up under the table lamp.
She asked us to pass her two cold spoons that were in the fridge, to hold under her eyes to help prevent dark circles.
Grandfather came into the kitchen after being in the bathroom the whole time. We asked him if he needed anything at the store. He said yes, and that we should bring Grandmother and the dog along for the walk. As was their habit, Grandfather helped her put on makeup before she went out. He put on loads of blue-green eyeshadow over her eyes and she looked like a clown, but she liked it that way. He stuck some random bobby pins in her hair too. Her hair was so fine that you could see the scalp through it, which gave the hair the effect of looking pink. She put on this enormous pair of sunglasses that might make a person question her sanity. She had seen a documentary about Jim Jones and decided to get herself a pair, that being the only thing she took away from that horrific tale.
She wore a Star of David around her neck even though she claimed that she wasn’t Jewish. She said she only did it because she would get bargains at the butcher.
My brother and I put a ski jacket on over her housedress, pulling her arms through the sleeves as if she was a little kid. She never wore shoes, only a pair of black slippers with embroidered roses. They both fell off while we were running across the street at a yellow light and pushing her like mad. The German shepherd picked one up and carried it to the other side of the street.
Not yet accustomed to the wheelchair, my brother and I were always getting into situations with it. Like that day we tied the German shepherd to her wheelchair and it had pulled her halfway down the block by the time we got out of the store. She accused us of treating her no differently than a dog. We piled the groceries on her lap, which she wasn’t too crazy about either. She lit up a cigarette and smoked indignantly.
Grandfather still thought she was so beautiful. He was afraid that she was going to fall in love with a war veteran who was also in a wheelchair. He wore a fez and a burgundy suit and sat next to a fishbowl outside the Salvation Army. When we saw him, we followed Grandfather’s instructions, which were to just keep pushing if he was outside the store, even when he waved hello.
And Grandfather had a point, because even though she was a slob and had to live among us bozos, Grandmother was entirely elegant. Occasionally she would let out some pithy little remark in order to remind everyone that they would never have her pedigree. When we passed the playground, she said, “When I was a child, children recited poetry and suffered existential angst. What on earth are those ninnies preoccupied with?”