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Authors: Stephane Michaka

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BOOK: Scissors
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That was a goose, right? I thought I heard a goose.

Geese have a way of squawking that imposes a brief period of silence. Then everything starts chirping and buzzing again, just like before.

Those brusque interruptions remind me of the first years of my marriage. I was young, I needed air, so did Marianne, but I didn’t let her have any.

We were kids, with two children we’d had too soon. What
do you do when the road behind you closes and you can’t back up anymore? I wrote a story about that: “Who Needs Air?”

I’d like to take it up again, revise it, improve it. This morning Paula asked me, “What do you love most in life? What is it you want to preserve at all costs?”

I didn’t say, “My wife.” I didn’t say, “Marianne and the children.”

I said, “My stories.”

Good God, I said my stories.

Who Needs Air?

Ambulance sirens, that’s what I bring home with me from my nights on duty.

From midnight to eight in the morning, the sirens follow one another, or sometimes blend together, on the two-lane road that circles the hospital. I can hear them from my night-watchman’s box, first far, then close, and finally not at all, when the lights are still on but the sound is off and the ambulances park in the back, unburdened of an injured person or a corpse.

At the moment, my thoughts go no farther than that. To me, emergencies are distant sounds I hear from inside a glass cage.

But when the night’s over and I sit down to write, the sirens return and haunt me. They get mixed up with other sirens, with specific catastrophes engraved in my memory.

Like the time in the sawmill where my father worked, the Big Gully sawmill. I went there after school one day to learn something about the work, and I saw a man, Frank Dubont, whose arms no longer ended in hands. The foreman said Frank was drunk and had leaned over the saw so it would carry him away. But the saw had taken only his hands. I turned to my father. I figured he was going to tell me not to stay. His eyelids were red and his lips were trembling. I averted my eyes. The teeth of the saw were intact and gleaming with blood. As I was leaving on my bicycle, I passed the ambulance coming in.

Another siren comes back to me from one Christmas
when the snow never stopped coming down. The scene was our neighbors’ house. They were Carole and Ben Weber, and they’d been separated for a month. Now Ben was living in a mobile home owned by his mistress, Betty Pradinas. Carole’s best friend up until a month ago. I don’t know what Ben could have been thinking, but he showed up at the house to wish Carole a merry Christmas. Maybe she lured him with some tasty little dishes (Betty knows how to do lots of things, but cooking isn’t one of them). In any case, Ben got served. Three bullets from a .22. Who would have thought Carole Weber kept a rifle in her vegetable garden? A rifle and some Ajax for killing slugs. Ben didn’t die, he was just perforated. By love, of course, it was love that perforated him. Betty’s mobile home wasn’t seen again.

A siren never far from my mind: the one in the ambulance taking Marion to the hospital. It’s her second pregnancy, and there are complications. I’m at her side. While I hold her hand—her fingers are too weak to squeeze mine—I start thinking,
So what if …?
If she lost the baby, that might not be a tragedy. A doctor’s leaning over her. With a quick look, he checks on how I’m holding up. Why on earth am I making this face? Playing the anxious guy? The truth is I’m saying to myself,
It might not be a tragedy
. The doctor concentrates on my wife. I keep on thinking,
So what if …?
I’m twenty years old. Marion’s eighteen. She got pregnant again three months after our first baby. By the time she realized what was up, it was too late.

With the siren drilling my ears, I have the impression that Marion and I are driving right into a wall.

My son is born the next day. Theo.

Marion’s better. She turns her face to me, her drawn features, her pale smile. I love her so much I could go nuts from it. And I don’t hear the siren anymore.

I should be at my typewriter, working. But as so often, I’m a truant. I don’t go home when my night duty’s over. Not right away. I take the exit ramp, park my car, and wait. While my limbs grow numb and grayish condensation fogs the windshield, I wait for the grocery store to open. So I can get, in exchange for a five-dollar bill and a grunt that means good morning, the bottle of whiskey I crave.

The truth is I really like to drink. I like the taste of liquor. Everything would be a lot simpler if I didn’t like it so much.

It warms me up very quickly. It’s an old acquaintance, a friend waiting patiently on the doorstep. Why leave him outside? He joins me and makes me warm. There in the car, when the bottle rolls at my feet and strikes the other bottles, I can no longer feel my legs, the cold, or remorse.

On the way home, in the comfort zone where the sirens fade away, nothing has any consequences. It’s the hour when my actions are just a rough draft. I could delete a whole day’s worth. I forget that I’ll flop down on the sofa as soon as I get inside and fall into a sleep that will delete nothing but rather insert, insert deeper in me remorse for getting drunk.

I forget that I want to be a writer.

——

It’s a Monday in November. Monday is laundry day. I’m the one who takes care of the laundry. Dead leaves are piling up on the windowsills. The leaves block the rain gutters. I have to take care of that too.

In the evenings, when Marion comes home, the kids are already in bed. As for whether or not they’re asleep, I don’t know. That’s another story.

“You ought to go and check on them,” Marion says, taking out the silverware.

“It’s ten o’clock. My shift’s over, right?”

She flings the knives down on the kitchen table.

“Your shift? You worked a shift? Then why isn’t the laundry done? Why has nothing been ironed?”

“I didn’t have time.”

She moves a knife and looks daggers at me, as if I’m the one throwing the cutlery around.

“I was at the Laundromat. I spent the whole afternoon there.”

“Hard to tell,” Marion says.

“I was at the Laundromat, and something happened.”

“Please, Robin, no stories. I’m not in the mood to—”

“Just listen. Listen to what happened in the Laundromat.”

She sits down, opens a beer, and pours it into a glass. I can’t get over it. I thought I drank them all. Does she have a secret compartment in the fridge?

I suppress a trembling fit and the urge to dismantle the fridge.

“You can tell me your story while I drink,” Marion says.

I can see she’s dying to hear it. My wife loves listening to my stories. She likes inventing them too, but she doesn’t make it her job. Marion pays the rent and the household expenses. That’s the way the roles have been assigned. She’s challenging me to tell the story. I don’t want to disappoint her.

“So I’m in the Laundromat. The place is packed. Mothers with children who should be in school. Why aren’t they in school? I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but not all the children in our neighborhood go to school. They’re playing hooky, I suppose. Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening to you, Robin.”

“And those are the kids Sophie and Theo play hide-and-seek with.”

“What could you possibly know about that?”

She puts down her glass so hard it shakes the table.

“Well, hide-and-seek or some other game.”

“You have no proof they’re playing hooky.”

“In any case, lots of kids. There’s a tremendous racket in the Laundromat. The machines spin and spin without stopping, or rather when one
does
stop, a sturdy matron doing her entire family’s winter underwear is right there to fill it up. And then she restarts the machine, the racket gets louder again, and I’m obliged to wait, to endure, trapped on a bench with three bags of dirty clothes: one Sophie’s and Theo’s, one yours, and one mine, like it’s been ever since we started separating the laundry. Incidentally, why do we separate it?”

“You have more white, that’s all. You have more white than I do.”

“Anyway, I’m there with my bags, wondering how long
I’m going to have to hang around. I look at my watch. The children get out of school in an hour. I’m not talking about the children who are running around in the Laundromat. I’m talking about our children, who go to school.” She lights a cigarette.

“I got that already,” she says. “You should cut that. Those last sentences.”

She pulls the ashtray closer.

“Those sentences have some importance,” I reply. “They’re important, and you’ll see why later.”

I’m on the point of resuming the story when I have the sudden feeling that I’m suffocating. It’s a repeat of the feeling that overcame me in the Laundromat.

I’m afraid I’ll start shaking. I turn to open a window. I lift it a few inches.

“Who needs air?” Marion says.

I look at her. I realize I’ve lost the thread.

“ ‘Those sentences are important,’ ” she repeats, helping me out. “But wait. I thought I heard Theo.”

“It must have come from outside.”

We listen. Muffled voices and the TV set in the opposite apartment, where our neighbors turn the thing on and never watch it. A damp smell enters the kitchen. Marion shakes her head. “That’s not Theo,” she says.

“You want me to go and see?”

“Shouldn’t you be getting ready to leave?”

I look at the clock and see myself in the Laundromat again, staring at the hands of the clock on the wall.

“So school’s out soon. I’m thinking there’s no way—I mean
no way
at all, even if I perform some fabulous feat—to
finish with the wash before I have to go and pick up the kids from school. At that moment, the matron opens two machines. Two opportunities present themselves. I charge over to them, so impulsively I forget the laundry bags. You know that in a Laundromat, in the lawless primitive jungle of a Laundromat, no discussion is possible. There’s no language, no way to assert yourself, other than dumping a massive load of laundry into the machine as it’s being cleared. And I forget the bags. I forget and pull up flabbergasted in front of the matron. ‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘I don’t need any help.’ She refills the machines, closes the doors, and punches in the programs. I stand there like an idiot, with my three bags at the other end of the Laundromat. I head back to the bench. Someone’s taken my place.”

“Close the window, Robin.”

“It’s stifling in here.”

“Close the window, the kids are going to catch colds.”

She stubs out her cigarette. While she’s lighting up another one—the ashtray is overflowing, how can she have any left?—I pivot and lift the window higher.

“I’m stifling, me!”

When I turn around, there’s no anger on her face. She comes close to me. Cigarette in hand, she puts her arms around me and lays her forehead against my chest.

I hear the TV, the muffled voices, and a crying child.

“Theo,” I murmur.

She raises her head. We freeze and listen. I think about the cartons of cigarettes she keeps with her stockings and the secret compartment in the fridge.

Marion leaves the kitchen. I start to shake. I feel an irresistible desire to search the fridge.

She comes back and says, “It wasn’t Theo.”

Marion sits down again. I resume my story. The window’s down, but it’s still cold.

I put some water on to boil and tell her the whole story.

I tell her what I felt in the Laundromat. Running from one chore to another, from one child to the other, from Theo to Sophie and from Sophie to Theo. How can I write? I don’t mean a novel, I’ve given up any hope of that, but at least some short stories, stories that don’t take long to put together. I haven’t had even enough time to write stories for the last five years. We used to talk about doing things, we said we had to keep moving. We had some ambitions and all sorts of dreams. Now we have three loans to repay, we don’t have enough money for the heating bill, and the washing machine’s been repossessed. No magazine wants to publish my stories. Nothing’s moving, I’m not writing anymore, I’m bound hand and foot. And you know what? Those kids in the Laundromat, they’re there because their parents don’t have the time to pick them up after school. And I can’t do the wash because I have to go get my kids … Lots of people are better organized than we are. “So you see,” I tell her, “those sentences had some importance.”

The kettle starts whistling. Marion looks at me incredulously.

“How dare you say that? How do you dare tell me all that? You want me to describe my day to you? Is this a contest? The parent with the biggest ball and chain and the
worst day wins the prize? Because I’m not so sure it would be you. I don’t think it would even be a tie.”

She’s talking over the whistling kettle. She moves it without burning herself. How does she do that without burning herself? Sometimes I think my wife’s fireproof.

“You have two jobs. The hospital and the library. You’re a night watchman at the hospital and three afternoons a week you’re a librarian.” (She counts on her fingers. I look at her hand and see it stroking my face.) “I, on the other hand, am a waitress. I wait tables at the university, at the Athletic Club. Every time I put my apron on, I tell myself I’m the athlete, I’m the one who’s athletic. An athlete in the morning and an athlete in the afternoon. In the afternoon, I stop at the parent institute and pick up my kits. I pick up my kits and begin to go door-to-door. Just describing the kit to the customer and explaining how it works takes a good twenty minutes. ‘No, it’s not a first-aid kit, it’s a kit for educating your children.’ I smile from ear to ear and keep some jokes in reserve—jokes are part of the job. Try selling a kit without a smile, just try it and see. You sell the kit and the smile sells you. That’s what I tell myself. And when I explain that to the boss, he talks about giving me a promotion. You could be the regional supervisor, he tells me. Would you like to be the regional supervisor? I started the job three weeks ago and he’s talking about promoting me. Pretty athletic, huh? After I make my rounds, I stop off at Winnie’s. She lets me use the restroom without ordering anything at the bar. It’s a deodorant-stick stop, the one I make at Winnie’s, because I can’t go on to my next job, flogging programs at the movie
theater, if my armpits stink. And while I’m shaking the stick, I look in the mirror and say to myself, ‘How am I going to supervise the region if I have to be home by eight o’clock to put the children to bed? How? I’m asking you.’ And I don’t know why I say that, because I’m not working three jobs just so we can pay the rent and buy clothes for Theo and Sophie and get a new lawn mower—”

BOOK: Scissors
7.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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