The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (3 page)

A cat crawled in the window. There was a catnip tree in a yard in the alley behind the building. Every time I looked out my window, there were cats in the tree. They often jumped onto the balcony and into my room. It was hard to have a memory without at least one cat in it.

Later that night Loulou got drunk and went into the living room to watch television. There were stains on the gold cushions of the couch. I spent about five minutes trying to get a channel. Loulou had made an antenna out of five coat hangers that sometimes picked up a channel from New York.

“Sit down already. That’s as good as you’re going to get it.”

I threw myself down next to him on the couch. He put his arms out in front of him, as if we were in a small boat that might capsize. I guess I figured it was my duty as a granddaughter to sit next to Loulou and listen to his nonsense. In Québec, people took care of their parents and not the other way round.

The news was on and they were talking about how there was going to be another referendum within the year. Québec would again vote on whether or not to separate from Canada.

“Oh my goodness,” said Loulou. “All this again. Your father was nuts about separating. Oh my goodness. He was at all the marches. Do you remember that?”

“How could I forget, he dragged Nicolas and me to all the rallies.”

“That’s right. You guys used to wave those flags around. Nicolas would really get into it. Man, what a little guy. He was yelling for a free Québec, wasn’t he?”

“You voted Oui too.”

“What do I know? When Jean Lesage came into power he took all the electricity companies away from the Anglos and the Americans. Then my heat bill came down. I’ll always remember that the Anglos made me freeze to death. Oh, and everyone in this building was voting Oui. I just wanted to make everyone happy. Who did you vote for?”

“I was seven years old.”

“Of course. Did you sign up to finish school?”

“I signed up without Nicolas.”

“You were better in school than he was. He was always antagonizing the teachers. It’s good to do something by yourself. I used to beat you to stop you from sleeping together in the same bed, but you still did. You ate out of the same plates. You wore the same clothes. You said the same things at the same time. You took baths together. It was disgusting.”

I slammed my glass on the table.

“Laisse-moi tranquille avec ça.”

Loulou was right about Nicolas never fitting in at school, though. He was diagnosed by the teachers as having every learning disability they could think of. They assigned a different one to him each year. He broke his leg playing musical chairs in Grade Three. He acted like it was the only chance he was ever going to get to win anything.

Nicolas used to say that he dropped out because the teacher had made him use the word
incandescent
in a sentence. He said that it was emotional abuse. But we just stopped going when he was sixteen because he hated it so much and was failing every class.

I was able to sit still in class and did okay on my report cards, but I left with him anyways. After that, we were educated by second-hand paperback books and madmen on Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Anyways, even though we were high school dropouts, people still treated us like precocious geniuses just because we’d been on television.

We had so much fun together during those years. We stayed out all night. We were always drinking. Even when we were teenagers, we would sit in our bedroom and drink until we cried. We would hug our stuffed animals like lovers and pass out in our clothes, with one leg out of our pants and the other leg in.

I
WALKED TO THE BEDROOM THAT
I
HAD SHARED
with Nicolas since I was a baby. On top of the bureau, there was a pile of VHS tapes on how to teach yourself karate. Nicolas had been watching them for years. He was actually really good at a lot of the moves. He looked like he was good at them anyways.

We never threw anything away. We had Valentine’s Day cards from elementary school. There were storybooks on the shelf next to some of Nicolas’s dirty magazines. There was a
Peter and the Wolf
record. There were action figures on the windowsill.

There were postcards that Étienne sent us from when he was in prison. We stuck them religiously to the wall, and now the Scotch tape was all yellow and peeling. There was a postcard of a man on a unicycle. There was a postcard of a strongman pulling a bus. There was a postcard of a naked woman completely covered in tattoos. That was particularly horrifying for us as children. We would spend hours looking at it.

The room had been our dad’s long before we were born. The closet was still filled with his clothes. Grandmother and
Loulou never bought us new toys because they figured we could just play with Étienne’s. Our stuffed animals were wretched. They had wanted to retire after Étienne. They had wanted to just chill out at the bottom of a toy box. They could barely hold their heads up and were missing eyes.

Still, we wheeled them down the street in an old doll carriage. We tied bibs around their necks and stuck empty spoons up to their mouths, begging them to eat. We changed their clothes and straightened their hair. We told them we loved them. They just said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Nicolas and I slept in the same double bed. There was a single mattress by the window, but we just used that as a couch. We slept in our boots some nights under the giant old quilt that was covered in green roses.

I closed the window and the blind and lay on the bed. I started reading where I’d left off in
Les Misérables
. With the exception of Lucky Luke comic books, Nicolas did not share my fondness for reading. It was hard to concentrate on anything once Nicolas came home with his latest plight and crazy antics.

I was excited that I had signed up for school. I didn’t know why. I felt as if I had had an unusually productive day. He would be very sorry indeed when he found out what kind of day I had had. Wouldn’t he be amazed to find out that I had been nominated queen of the entire city? I couldn’t wait to make him regret having stood me up.

But it got later and later and Nicolas still didn’t show up.

I figured that he was probably at the Polish Social Club. There was a big dance floor there and he really liked to show off with his terrible moves. For some reason girls couldn’t resist him when he was dancing. The visions of what he was doing kept building and building in my head, until I was imagining
a whole bar filled with people raising their glasses in the air, toasting him.

I decided that I might as well go out and look for Nicolas.

I put on a pretty dress. It was navy blue and had white buttons in the shape of flowers going down the front and little puffed sleeves. I rummaged through the drawer, pushing Nicolas’s boxers and gym socks out of the way until I found a pair of grey corded tights. I pulled them on. There was only a hole in the left foot where my big toe stuck out and another one behind my right knee. They were practically brand new as far as my tights went.

A cat slipped in the window, lay on the bed and rolled onto her back happily. She had just been impregnated. She lay there on her back with her paws on her chest, reliving the evening nervously in her mind.

I stuck a barrette with a silver star into my black hair. If I was going to be popping my head in and out of bars like a wife who was looking for her husband who had just got paid and was squandering all the money, at least I was going to look unbelievably fantastic while I was doing it. And if I didn’t find Nicolas, I might find someone else to distract me.

O
H, WE HAD A LOT OF SEX BACK THEN IN
Montréal; it wasn’t just me. Blame it on the cold. The roses in everyone’s cheeks made them seem way more appealing than they actually were. We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection. Every night seemed like the last night on earth because we would all freeze to death shortly. Every night was a sad farewell party, a retirement party, the last few hours of a wedding. We were always bidding one another adieu. The line between having sex and not having sex was a lot finer than at any other time or place in history.

I had to admit that I had a strong tendency to date jokers. I couldn’t say no to them. I would sit across from someone I was dating and try and imagine who in the entire world would date this nimrod other than me. But I always had to have a boyfriend. They distracted me from being sad. They baffled me with their stupidity. I refused to believe that finding love was difficult.

When we were very little, I don’t even think that Nicolas and I were aware that we were different people. It was only
when we started dating that we were able to spend any time away from each other. In these heightened experiences we were distracted from missing each other.

And a one-night stand made you feel as if you had just been invented. You were with someone who couldn’t quite believe in your existence. They marvelled over you the way that people marvelled over a brand new baby, where they couldn’t get over you having ten toes and fingers.

It was exciting and scary like the first day of elementary school. There was something so innocent about it. In longer relationships you end up having to think up all sorts of fantastic fantasies to be excited by the person. But now, this first night you are enough. Who really wanted to know themselves? Instead I could exist happily in this world of first impressions.

It was raining outside and the whole street smelled of pee. I started peeking into a couple of bars but Nicolas was nowhere to be seen. I decided to give up and go to the social centre where I could go dancing myself. There were coloured light bulbs all around the door. They sold beer for a dollar at happy hour. If you’d had enough to drink, coming out, the different-coloured lights looked like the aurora borealis.

Inside there was still the backdrop to a play that the children from the elementary school next door had put on. There were clouds cut out of cardboard hanging from strings. There was a little brick house that the big bad wolf couldn’t blow down. The edges of the curtain were tattered, like pants that had been dragging on the ground.

A man was playing this huge, out-of-tune piano. The melodies from it filled up the hall. Some of them floated out the door and through the neighbourhood. This piano had been
brought over on a ship from the old country. Nobody was used to tunes that were that sorrowful. The pigeons would fall right out of the sky.

There were streamers on the ceiling. And all the balloons were lying on the floor. They moved from our shoes to make room for us.

I walked up to the bar. Everyone yelled out and clapped, happy to see me. I had a black purse with tiny mother-of-pearl beads that were always falling off that I flopped onto the bar. I decided to try gin. I was always looking for a drink that wouldn’t make me feel completely plastered after one glass, but I never succeeded. Patrick, the bartender, poured me a shot. The stools on either side of me were immediately filled up.

They laughed at everything that I said. Nicolas and I were always trying to make every single person we met fall in love with us. What a job. It was a bad habit that we had picked up as child stars. But maybe it’s the same for everybody.

I drank my gin as I listened to the ridiculous guys trying to charm me.

A man named Gaston had a box of Turkish delight. He opened the box and offered me one. Another guy whose date had stood him up pinned a corsage on my dress. A boy named Luc gave me a lucky rabbit’s foot that was dyed bright green. I didn’t know that people still believed in lucky rabbit’s feet.

I noticed a man my age, who was wearing a black toque over a mop of blond hair, staring at me. He was missing a front tooth. He still managed to be the sexiest guy in the bar. He was so young and handsome that the missing tooth seemed like a charming novelty. He came over and sat on my lap. He pulled a gold necklace with a rose pendant hanging from it out of his pocket. He’d probably stolen it from his mother.

“Would you like to have dinner with me? I know a little place where they set the cheese on fire.”

I pushed him off my lap while laughing. I was considering his offer. I was so bored and I wanted to be with someone.

I looked up at the ballroom ceiling and it seemed as if the whole lot of us had been swallowed by a whale. As if we were all in here as a punishment for running from our calling.

Misha came in at that moment, carrying a paper bag filled with groceries. He was wearing a long navy blue trench coat over his suit. His hair was long and grey and went to his shoulders. His face was wet from the rain. His lips were jutting out in concentration as he looked around the hall.

Misha was so fat, he made a lot of noise just breathing. He had something wrong with his tear ducts, so they wept all the time. He always had handkerchiefs in his pockets. He took one out that was made of polyester and had tiny cowboys and horses on it. I had worn a very similar one on my head when I was a baby.

The tears made his eyes seem sparkly. His eyelashes were dark and glistening—like the kind that kids draw on their dolls with ballpoint pen.

I could tell Misha had just come from work. He worked as a salesman selling toilet paper. He mostly sat behind a desk doing inventory all the time. He never really even got close to the toilet paper. According to Marxism, this was very damaging for his psyche. He should have been allowed to drive the toilet paper in the trunk of his car up to people’s houses and sell it to them and watch them wipe their asses with it.

The guy in the stool next to me spotted a pretty redhead and bounced off. Misha sat down. He swirled around a glass of brandy that had a fever in it. I’d slept with him before. He was
the oldest person I’d ever dated, but I liked that about him. It made him seem unique.

“My father was a ventriloquist,” Misha began. He didn’t want to waste any time. He knew that he was in competition with all the other guys at the bar and he knew that I could never resist his stories. “His puppet was so mean. One night the puppet killed him during a performance. The police didn’t know whether to call it a suicide or a homicide.”