It was there at the zoo that I first saw Pierre-Loup, squatting beside the wolf cage. There was something about the way he was whispering so tenderly between the bars, the way the wolves were all gathered around him, that attracted me right away. I was never the love-at-first-sight type, and yet what I experienced that day was unlike anything I’d ever felt for a man I’d only just met.
“They’d better be treating you guys well,” he said, “or they’ll be hearing from me.”
It was an incredibly odd thing to be saying to wolves, but I lived in a Bohemian neighbourhood and so I figured he must be a poet.
When he turned and saw me staring at him he smiled, and I recognized that smile from countless newspaper articles and TV appearances. He bared all his teeth and tilted his face downwards while looking at me. He kept this expression frozen on his face as he made his way over.
“Yes, I am the infamous Pierre-Loup,” he said. “And you are an absolute vision in that little red coat of yours. The moment I saw you I said, ‘Why, that girl’s so cute, I could eat her up.’”
He threw his head back and laughed.
That first night we spent together, there was a full moon out. He said he couldn’t stay in on a night when the moon was full. We went to the social club down the street from my apartment and danced all night. It seemed that no one had ever taken poor Pierre dancing. He rolled around on the dance floor in delight, overturning chairs and tables until finally we were thrown out.
At the end of the night, he carried me up the stairs of my apartment building and onto the roof. He tried to get me to howl at the moon with him, but when I tried I only ended up giggling, and once my giggles had faded to silence, very slowly, he leaned in and we kissed. It was Pierre-Loup’s first kiss ever and it was so sweet — so small and yet filled with so much promise. It was the kind of kiss that little boys make when they kiss their mirrors alone late at night and dream of being men one day.
THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS
The whole lot of us are at the rental board: my mom and my dad and my three brothers. We are all dressed up. I have on a black sweater dress that is too hot. There is a big hole in the butt of my underwear, but no one can tell. We all sit in the blue plastic chairs while the landlord’s lawyer explains why we deserve to be evicted. We have been going to the rental board for as long as I can remember. The landlord is always trying to get us OUT. We are always so nervous, but the judges always give us another chance no matter what we do, because nobody likes to put a family out on the street. If we are evicted, then other landlords don’t have to rent to us, and they for sure never will. And then if we are homeless, child protection will put my brothers and me in foster homes. And we will all be separated. We will be doomed!
The landlord’s lawyer keeps listing all the things we have done this time. In the tiny courtroom, the landlord makes a lot of accusations against us. He says that my brothers and dad pee out of the window. This is true, because it is hard in the morning for everyone to wait their turn to get into the bathroom.
The landlord says that we destroy mail from the mailroom. This is true too. Once we took all the circulars and made them into paper crowns. That had been such a fun afternoon. All the other kids came around, and they all wanted to be able to make themselves paper crowns as well. We had all been kings.
He says my dad set some fireworks off behind the building. There were only actually five fireworks. He had made a big deal about buying them too. There was a Native who was selling them out of the trunk of his car. The rockets made soft popping noises, just like a bird being shot in the heart with an arrow. And then all this silver fell. It was so pretty. I put my hands out in case the silver would come all the way down to the yard. I would have pools of silver in my hands, like Jesus, kind of.
The landlord complains about my brother’s snow woman. He made her with really big breasts and then used buttons as nipples. Plus he used a pinecone as pubic hair. And he put an old wig that he found in the basement on its head. It caused a car accident when someone slowed down to look at it. It was a work of art.
The landlord says that we played racket ball against the building wall, making everyone who lived in the apartments annoyed. We don’t remember this ever happening. Another tenant comes to testify that we poured pink food colouring on their white cat. Which, actually, we had done, but I regret it to this day.
From the other side of his big white desk, the judge tells us that he has had enough.
He says that he has been looking through our files and that he has decided that we have been warned plenty of times. That it just isn’t fair to the landlord and the other tenants around us. And that the next time we are brought in for disturbing the general peace of the building, he will evict us.
As we ride the subway home, we vow to ourselves that we will change the way we act.
“Turtledove,” my dad says to me. “It’s your job to keep an eye on all of us.”
We get on our knees on the seats to look out the window. We almost never go anywhere, so the ride is like a vacation and we are carefree. My dad puts his arm around my mom.
My mom has a scrapbook filled with some newspaper articles about when my three brothers and I were all born at the same time. On that major day, my dad told a doctor that he was out of work and he didn’t know how he was going to afford all these kids that had shown up on his doorstep, so to speak. The doctor had been really nice about it and suggested that we call a local newspaper. The newspaper set up a hotline so that people could send money and stuff to help us out.
My dad had always wanted to live in one of the project buildings. But he couldn’t until we were born. When we came into his life all at once, he moved right to the top of the list. He climbed up that list exactly like when you land on a ladder in that board game.
We still have too many stuffed animals left over from when we were first born and people sent us gifts after reading the paper. They are always piled up on all our beds and I have to tunnel under them to go to sleep. They are so dorky. There is an alligator that wears a tuxedo, for instance. I don’t know why we didn’t throw them away, but we never really throw anything away. There is even a broken television on top of our fridge.
We love our small apartment because it is on the ground floor and we don’t have to climb stairs, and we’re lazy in that department. There is always this sound of rumbling from inside the walls. We are not sure what it is. My dad says that he thinks it is actually the sound of the boiler in the basement that we are hearing. We can’t complain about it because the landlord will tell us, well then, go on and move. The landlord hates us because we are on welfare and are doing nothing about it. Also, once my dad was drunk and told him that he was a blood-sucking slumlord and threw a beer can at his head, which for some reason he took to heart.
My dad said that he stays on welfare because he gets more money with four kids than he would if he still worked for the sales company that he used to work for before my mom got pregnant. He said that looking after us is a full-time job. He also said that he has Type 2 diabetes. He doesn’t want to have a diabetes attack, so he can’t do anything too strenuous, like putting on shoes at seven in the morning.
We always say that I am the baby, even though we have no idea who the baby is. When you are a girl, you are always going to be littler than boys. Sometimes it is annoying to have so many brothers. Like, let me tell you this: I like to wear lollipop rings. They always grab my hand to suck on the ring, which is gross and nasty and against my rights.
It’s Friday after school, and my mom pushes us all in a grocery cart at the same time. But we get into a fight because nobody wants to carry the piece of ham on their lap. Then the manager comes to complain to my mother about it and to say we can’t all be in the damn basket at once. Maybe it’s a fire hazard, because almost everything good in life is a fire hazard. Anyway, we climb out, one by one.