The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (10 page)

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m going to be a great philosopher one day, Little Nouschka Tremblay.”

“There’s a very fine line between being a person who changes the way that his contemporaries think and being an idiot with bad hair and an unpublished manifesto.”

“That’s funny! And you shall be famous too!”

He climbed in with me. We were sitting in the bathtub with our knees pressing against one another.

“Just because you’re in the bathtub with me, don’t get any
funny ideas. It doesn’t mean that I’m your girlfriend or anything like that.”

“Did you and Nicolas used to take baths together?”

“We didn’t have a mother, okay?”

“Neither did I, really. I spent most of my time with my nanny.”

“Still, you had one. Mine was just Val-des-Loups trash.”

“That’s terrible. Your mother was Lily Sainte-Marie! I like that song.”

We both started singing it.

Adam got out of the bath, tied a towel around his waist and started combing his hair straight up. He considered his blond hair to be one of the natural wonders of the world. When he was done, he looked like someone who would give bad advice to the dauphin at the French court. I drained the bath and was sitting on the toilet lid in my underclothes, painting my toenails.

Nicolas walked into the bathroom. He leaned against the wall next to the medicine cabinet, wanting to hear what we were talking about, I guess. It was amazing that we could all squeeze in there.

“Do you know that my nanny always turned off the radio
when Lily Sainte-Marie came on?” Adam said. “She said it was the saddest song in the world. I never got why that song made her cry. I thought it was funny.”

“What was she like?” Nicolas asked suddenly.

“My nanny?”

“Yeah, what was she like?”

“She was really shy. She hated having to order meat at the meat counter. She used to collect the labels off of wine bottles and paste them into a book. She asked if she could have a cat. She always played the lottery. She had bumblebee patches on her jeans.”

“What else?”

“If I had a tiny scratch on my knee, she would cover my entire leg with iodine so it was completely orange. She liked canned spaghetti.”

“Was she beautiful?”

“No.”

It was an awfully strange question to ask. I looked over at Nicolas. He looked oddly focused. He usually got impatient when anyone rattled on about anything, because he was anxious to be the one doing all the talking.

“You couldn’t even really see what she looked like. She wore her bangs down in her face.”

“Well, you were very lucky to have a nanny, weren’t you? Wouldn’t it be possible that without her, you would have walked into the street and been hit by a car? I was hit by a bus when I was five and I broke my arm. I could’ve used a nanny that day. Singing her cheery songs.”

Adam and I were both stunned. I had never heard him turn on Adam that way.

“What are you so angry about?” I asked.

When we were about eleven, Nicolas and I used to sometimes speculate on the whereabouts of our mother. We didn’t talk about it in the house because we didn’t want to upset Loulou. But it would pass the time as we walked to school.

We understood why she had left us. We had seen enough after-school specials to know that it was because she had been too young to take care of us. But we couldn’t figure out why she wouldn’t come back for us now. She was older and we weren’t babies and we were able to do so many things by ourselves. We got dressed on our own and rode the metro everywhere.

Once, we decided that she was in medical school in Poland. We imagined her weeping as she did tests on white mice. And when she was finally a doctor, she would come back for us. We imagined her removing our tonsils and then giving us little bowls of Jell-O for dinner.

Sometimes we would look into the mailbox, just peeping, just hoping that there would be a note from our mother in there, something that would give us a clue about where she might be and that would give us a more concrete idea about what was keeping her away. But then as we got older, we just figured that she didn’t want to come back. She was happy with her life, wherever it was. I tried to accept this, but Nicolas never did.

I
WAS ON MY WAY TO SCHOOL
. P
IGEONS SHIFTED
back and forth from one foot to the other, like old ladies with bags of heavy groceries in either hand. I was dressed up for class. I had a vinyl jacket with a horse on it and a pink dress shirt with a butterfly collar. I had a grey skirt and Wallabees. I thought I looked like the most no-nonsense girl on the planet.

I walked by a store that sold religious statues mostly to put in your front lawn. They were all crowded in the window. Some were on boxes and chairs in the back row. They were like people watching a parade. I felt peaceful looking at them. It was like they had all gathered to look at me and that the world just had to be full of grace.

I turned when I heard a car honk its horn. Nicolas leaned way out the window in order to talk to me as he was driving. He had on a polyester shirt with a print of buildings on it with the
suit jacket he’d bought at the Salvation Army. His jacket was completely covered in cat hair.

“Hey, can you come check out this house with me?”

“No, you can see perfectly well that I’m busy.”

“I want to see something. What, are you a snob now? You think that you’re too good to spend the afternoon with me? I’m sorry, does Miss Boulevard Saint-Laurent have some sort of contractual obligation to fulfill? Will they take your plastic tiara away? Your free coupon for a meal at le Palais de Bombay? Have you used up your discount coupons for the amusement park? You know they sell those tiaras five for a dollar at the pharmacy.”

Nicolas suddenly drove the car up onto the sidewalk, trying to run me over. I jumped backwards, sticking my hands out in front of me as if to stop the car. I was startled.

“Get in the car, Nouschka,” he said.

I took off running down the street. He jumped out of the car, which was half on the sidewalk, and ran after me. I was screaming at people who I passed on the street for them to call the police. Naturally nobody did anything. They knew to keep out of it. He grabbed me from behind.

I screamed and he held me against the wall. He was wearing a pair of pyjama bottoms with sharks on them. He was dragging me back to the car. One of my shoes came off. I was going to miss my class now.

My purse flipped upside down and my cue cards for my oral report spilled out and fell all over the ground. He wouldn’t let me pick them up. I picked one out of a puddle with the tips of my fingers. When I bent down, he grabbed me from behind. This really enraged me.

“Why don’t you help me?” I asked people passing by.

A man slowed down as he was passing us. He had a concerned look on his face, and he seemed to be thinking about stepping in.

“Don’t try and interfere with me, sir, or you and she and everyone will end up dead. She’s my sister. You don’t want to get involved in this. It’s been going on since we were born.”

The man walked away, looking over his shoulder every few seconds. He was out of our hair, but then a police officer pulled over in front of our car. Nicolas was playing with fire because he was on probation for demanding that a librarian hand over the money she had collected in fines that day. We both sort of stopped moving as the officer came up to us. He was middle-aged, with greying hair, barrel-chested and intimidating. He didn’t faze Nicolas in the least.

“Officer, she’s mentally ill. You see, we were born as Siamese twins and I got the brain. I have to make all the decisions for both of us, on account of her faculties being so deficient.”

“I’m a writer,” I said in my defence. Even though I hadn’t written a word.

“I don’t care what either of you are,” said the officer. “You’re going to knock it right off.”

The officer grabbed Nicolas by the shoulder, firmly. Nicolas let go of me and swung around to face the officer.

“She won a beauty pageant and it went to her head. She couldn’t handle success. She expected us to bring her breakfast in bed after that.”

“I’m sick of you bringing up that contest. Are you jealous?”

“Jealous! Officer, after she won there was a criminal investigation. It just didn’t make sense.”

“You two look familiar to me,” he said.

“You saw him at the zoo,” I said. “He reminds you of someone from the monkey exhibition.”

“Are you two Étienne Tremblay’s kids?”

We both stopped horsing around.

“I used to love you guys on television,” he said.

He went and picked up my Wallabee and handed it to me. We smiled uneasily. We both walked over to Nicolas’s car and got in it. We pulled away from the curb, Nicolas waving to the police officer to show that we were respectable and upstanding citizens.

As the gears shifted, so too did our spirits. It was amazing how fast our moods changed at that age. Two minutes before, I had wanted to kill Nicolas, and now we were two thieves on the lam who had outsmarted the law once again! But I was still slightly depressed and couldn’t really feel good about being in the car.

We headed over the highway to the west side of town. The car picked up speed. I was worried; it felt like the bottom might fall right out. It was probably better easing down narrow rickety east-end streets, where you had to stop every couple minutes for a passing alley cat.

We turned off the highway and drove into a residential neighbourhood, down a street that was covered in huge trees that came together over the road and blocked out the sun.

There were identical houses on either side of the street. All the lawns were clean and all the cars were new. We parked in front of a red and orange brick house with light blue shutters. He was quiet finally. We just sat and looked at it. I was afraid to ask. I figured he was casing the place for some sort of robbery. In which case, sitting in front of it in broad daylight in the crappiest car in the city didn’t seem like the most brilliant idea. Nicolas’s knees were bouncing up and down and he was fluttering his fingers up and down on the steering wheel.

“What the hell are we doing here?” I asked.

“Forget it,” he said. “I can’t say it because it’s something you ought to know about gradually. The shock of it might turn your hair grey.”

“What? Say it or I’ll kill you.”

“I found our mother.”

“Lily Sainte-Marie!”

“Noëlle Renaud.”

I was suddenly afraid. I did not want our world turned upside down. I did not want to have any actual information about our mother.

“Oh, Nicolas. Leave her alone.”

“I think we should meet her.”

“You just go and stare at her every day?”

“Hey, you’ve got to stalk somebody.”

“No, actually. You don’t. I don’t want to see her. I feel lousy. I don’t even feel like myself. I feel shitty all of a sudden. It’s like I have stomach cancer. I just want to go home. I feel like I’m disappearing. Oh, my stomach. Nicolas! Drive me back home. I don’t feel well at all.”

He put his hand over my mouth while looking straight ahead. It was five-thirty and she was coming home from work. She was dressed in a beige suit and comfortable white pumps. Her hair was dyed light brown and she wore her bangs in her face. She had nothing in common with Étienne.

We got out of the car. She saw us. We could tell from the look on her face that she knew exactly who we were. She looked uncomfortable. She looked nervous. Actually, she looked terrified. We were both quiet. We didn’t even want to speak for fear that she would disappear. We got quiet the way you get quiet when you see an animal emerge from out of the woods. You know that the minute it notices your presence, it’s going to bolt.

“Hello,” she said. “Wow. What are you doing here?”

“We wanted to just say hello,” Nicolas said softly.

“Hello,” she said. “Do you live around here?”

“No.”

“You two look so much like Étienne.”

We just nodded. Lily looked around her. She looked up, as if to see if there was a helicopter up above that was going to lower a ladder down to her. We had probably popped up again and again in her dreams. But now, lo and behold, here we were on her lawn. I guess it was natural that she was befuddled.

“It was a long time ago. I was younger than the two of you are now,” she said, almost as if to herself.

We nodded again. We all just stood there. She wasn’t making any effort with us. She probably had rehearsed a million things to say to us. She must have. She probably had a soliloquy prepared. But she couldn’t think of it right now for the life of her. I knew that Nicolas had said her name was Noëlle, but I couldn’t help but think of her as Lily. That’s what I had called her in my head for my whole life. Not Mother.

“Do you want to come in?” Lily asked.

Her house was very orderly. There were flowers on the curtains and on the tablecloth. Everything was new and had been bought at stores. Nothing had ever been dragged out of the garbage. We sat down around the kitchen table. All the chairs matched. She made some coffee. Nicolas and I felt painfully out of place. We were like kids who were showing up on the first day at a new school. She poured us all cups of coffee and set them down in front of us.

“How did you go about finding me?”

We didn’t say anything. Lily looked at us and straightened up, gathering courage. She decided to launch into her defence.

“You have to understand what life was like for me when I got pregnant. Everybody in my town looked down on me. They treated me like I was so, so ugly. I just sat in my room, crying all the time. I was afraid of my father. The looks he would give me were so awful. I didn’t even like going down to the kitchen because my dad would give me such a look. Sometimes he would slap me hard across my face.”