The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (11 page)

She paused. We just stared at her, startled. She couldn’t really do anything but continue.

“I couldn’t go to school because all the boys made fun of me. They didn’t believe that it was Étienne Tremblay who got me pregnant. They used to say that the school janitor was the father. Can you imagine that? Children are so cruel.”

She raised her cup to her lips and it was shaking.

“My mother and I took the bus to Montréal to meet your grandparents. I left you two with them. They were very, very nice. My mother took me to go and get an ice cream cone by Avenue Atwater. It was so beautiful and exciting to me. All those people going by and all the windows. We stopped by a toy store and we saw all these dollhouses and train sets that moved around and little plastic trees. Oh, I had never seen anything like that in Val-des-Loups.”

There was something horrific about the idea of her having an ice cream cone after having given us up. I just wanted it to end. I didn’t want to hear her story. It had never occurred to us that she would see herself as the sad one in this story. Sure, sure, sure. She was the loneliest, most pathetic fourteen-year-old on the whole planet. But we had been listening to Étienne’s excuses our whole life. The last thing that we expected somehow was another excuse. Although an excuse, of course, was exactly what we were going to get.

“You had much better outfits than I ever had as a kid. I remember this little black coat you had on once on TV, Nouschka. You had a daisy in the lapel. It was so beautiful. You looked like your father. Lucky for you two. He was a handsome man when he was younger. You were smart like him, too. The things that would come out of your mouths!”

Nicolas and I immediately shot a knowing, wary glance at one another. She had loved us on television. The same way that everybody had loved us, which was the same thing as not loving us at all. We had had enough of that type of affection. What we needed was a love that was able to shine a light on who exactly we were, so that we could be people offstage. Then we would be able to be real. Then we would be able to grow up. Then we wouldn’t be joined at the hip. This woman only knew what everybody knew about us. Of course she loved our persona. It was designed to be loved.

I wanted her to be proud of things that nobody but a mother could be proud of. I had wanted her to be proud of a story that I had written about a swan. I had wanted her to be thrilled when I dove off the high diving board. She should have been there to cheer when I learned my multiplication table. And I had wanted to be commended for giving the flea-ridden cat a bath all by myself. Those were the things that actually built character. They taught you that ordinary life was meaningful and made sense.

You could tell that she was a bit star-struck. We looked down on people that were star-struck. We couldn’t help it. How could we not look down on people when they were looking up at us?

“I never, never would have been able to get to Montréal if it weren’t for the two of you. After I went back to Val-des-Loups,
all I could think about was getting back to the city. I was only seventeen when I came here to live. I looked after children for a while. But you know, that always made me sad. Now I work as a secretary. We sell accessories for used car lots. The little flags that go around them and those big blow-up snowmen flopping around in the parking lot.”

She turned abruptly and reached into her bag that was on her chair and pulled out a binder, as if it would somehow save her from the topic of this conversation. It was filled with before and after photographs of parking lots where there could have been pictures of us as children. She closed it, knowing that she had to get on with her story.

“This is how I met my husband, actually. He owns one of these car lots. He’s very successful. He does very well for himself. He’s very conventional. He’s very good.” She paused. “I never told my husband about you. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it. But I can’t tell him now. He thinks that he was the first person that I had ever been with. That was very important to him. I really never thought that any man would ever love me. But he does. You can’t tell someone a secret after you have kept it a secret for this long. He would think that I was a liar. He thinks that I’m a good person. It would change everything. He’s a really good man. I’ve been happy with him. It was hard after Étienne Tremblay.”

I noticed that she said our father’s first and last name when talking about him. Even though she had had two children with him, they were not on familiar terms.

In an odd way, although we had dropped in on her, she was more prepared then we were. She had never come looking for us, but she knew that we would come anyways. She had been waiting.

I looked around. There were photos of children all over the fridge. Lily blushed when she saw me noticing them. This had never even occurred to me as a possibility. She had other children. Of course, her husband and children were real people with feelings. Not like us. She reached out for a second but then brought her hand back. Her hand was shaking. You could tell that she was restraining herself and that her instinct was to reach out and touch people who were suffering.

She was holding back because she wanted to protect her husband and kids. That wasn’t fair, was it? She was choosing sides. At least we knew with absolute certainty that Étienne was incapable of loving anybody. He treated everybody else with as little regard as he treated us.

I looked at Nicolas. He usually slouched and crossed and uncrossed his legs when he was in a chair, but now he was sitting perfectly straight. He had beads of sweat on his brow, and his eyes looked almost black because his pupils were dilated. I don’t think that I had ever seen him look that ill at ease.

Lily had been a nanny. She had given cookies to kids who weren’t even hers. She ran around playgrounds putting Band-Aids on all the knees of all the children in the world. She was essentially sweet to every kid except us. This was going too far. I felt like picking up the kitchen table and throwing it across the room. Just so that she would know that I was a real person. Just to make it clear to her that Nicolas and I experienced unhappiness too.

Everyone thought that we had it better. Even when we were being dragged up to the guillotine, they would be envying our velvet jackets that we had picked up at the Salvation Army. They wouldn’t think very much about the part about us getting our heads cut off. Imagine if she saw our living room? What would she think of it?

Lily, or whatever her name was, was starting to cry. But people cry for all sorts of reasons. They cry when they are startled. They cry when they are afraid. They cry to get out of things. People cried crummy alligator tears over their drinks. We were very, very suspicious of tears, having grown up on Boulevard Saint-Laurent.

She would never be our mother. We wanted to go back in time and tell her about nightmares, and about socks that were itchy, and about how spelling tests were unjust, and about how canned soup was creepy, and about how we felt scared first thing in the morning. We would never get that.

“Can you remember anything about us?” Nicolas asked.

His voice was very low and choked up and didn’t sound like his at all. He was asking for a story about us before we could remember. We wanted something more than Loulou’s absurd mythology. Most of his stories of us involved times when we were constipated and he had to give us castor oil. I don’t know what Nicolas was thinking, though, as she had spent next to no time at all with us.

“Do you want to know which one of you was born first?” she asked.

“No!” we both said at the same time.

We didn’t want that. We didn’t want there to be any sort of difference between us. We didn’t want one to be older or to have any advantage over the other. It was absolutely necessary that we be in exactly the same boat.

I realized that it was time to go. There was no need to drag out this painful meeting any longer. As soon as Nicolas saw me starting to stand up, he followed. He practically knocked the chair over, he was so eager to leave with me.

Noëlle walked us to the door. We stepped outside it and
stood there, looking at her. We weren’t sure what we were supposed to do. It was customary to kiss twice upon parting in Montréal. Sometimes when I left a bar, I would go around kissing people I hadn’t even spoken to or been introduced to during the night. What was a kiss other than a promise that the two of you would meet again and again?

She stayed inside the house. We waited, but she did not make a gesture; she didn’t move at all. Her not kissing us meant that she definitely did not want us to come back. We nodded and turned and went on our way.

We sat in the car outside her house. A family got out of their car across the street. They unloaded their grocery bags and carried them into the house. The whole family was pitching in.

“How do people live like that?” Nicolas said. He lit a cigarette.

It took me a few minutes to be able to say something. I knew that I was going to get crazy. I wanted to enjoy the blank numbness as long as I could. But then it came bursting out.

“You brought me out here without any warning just to set me off. You wanted to get me hysterical. You wanted me to get as hysterical as you do.”

“Well, you never get worked up about it because you know that I’m going to be doing all the working up for the two of us. I mean, that isn’t exactly fair either, is it?”

“You’re being selfish. You just force me to go along with your stupid, stupid plans. What was the point of coming out here?”

“We had to get it over with, I guess. But I don’t know, Nouschka. It was like I thought that maybe, possibly, something
magical would happen. Sometimes I’ve thought about how I would tell her about all the lousy things that happened to us and about how lonely and unhappy she made me. And then she would just crumple up and die. Instead she just sort of made me feel shitty. Did she make you feel shitty?”

I didn’t say anything. We were quiet on the ride back. This was almost impossible for the two of us to do. Talking to each other was like breathing. By talking we were able to keep track of every one of the other’s thoughts. For once I didn’t know what to say. I felt ashamed. The silence was terrible. We looked ahead.

“How did you know how to find her?” I asked.

“Adam gave me this address.”

“Adam? Are you serious? How would Adam know?”

Nicolas pulled the car over. He turned toward me, preparing me.

“It’s funny but I’d been thinking for a long time about hiring a detective to find her. But I didn’t know whether detectives actually existed or whether they were just fictional, like in TV shows. But then a year or so ago I was talking to Laurence and he said that his cousin was a private detective.”

“How much did he charge you?”

“I don’t know. I never got around to paying him. He smelled like an old ashtray. He’s friends with a lawyer who was able to pull our adoption papers. Or something. He gave me this old address where Noëlle used to work. I went and knocked on the door. Adam answered. That’s how I met Adam. She’d looked after him. Anyways, Adam didn’t know. I just told him later that I had been knocking on his door with the intention of robbing his house, which of course impressed him. You know how Adam is.”

“She’s the nanny he was telling us about? They watched us on TV together!”

I suddenly hated the two of them. Neither had loved me. They had sat next to each other on the sofa, cherishing my little black beret.

“She raised Adam! Adam of all people! I find that infuriating. I find that so impossibly weird. I can’t even imagine it. I feel lousy about myself even picturing it. I can’t believe that she put muffins and juice boxes into paper bags and wrote his name on them and gave them to him to take to school for lunch. And she took him to the zoo. And she put bandages on his knees. And she read him storybooks and kissed him before he went to sleep. Disgusting,” I said. “I’m finished with Adam.”

“Why take it out on Adam?”

“I’m breaking up with him as soon as we get home.”

“I had nothing to do with it. Look, I gave up a very long time ago trying to get you to not fuck my friends. What was I supposed to say—don’t fuck him?”

“No, you were supposed to tell me who he was.”

“You got weird whenever I would bring up our mother. You would say,
‘Laisse faire, laisse faire, laisse faire
. Don’t bother me with that.’ You never would have let me do this. I couldn’t tell you. Because you wouldn’t let me do it. I had to.”

“You’re a pimp.”

“Are you crazy? Did you hear what you just called me?”

“You’re a low-life. A degenerate.”

“Ah, stop taking this all out on me.”

“It’s because I want you to realize why what you did is so creepy.”

“I know. I know. But I couldn’t get enough of him. When he told us stories about our mother, it made my heart beat so
crazily and it made the blood rush through my heart. And it made me feel like shit. Like I was being poisoned. It’s not my fault he fell in love with you.”

I stopped yelling at him. I realized he couldn’t help it. Our mother had been driving him mad our whole lives. He had had to find some way to get close to her. He could never let anything go once he got it into his head.

Now I understood the feeling that there was something that wasn’t quite right about me and Adam. I was revolted that my sex life was somehow involved in one of Nicolas’s schemes. There had never been any boundaries between Nicolas and me. Now he had created one by virtue of stepping over it.

T
HEY SAY IN
Q
UéBEC THAT IF YOU ARE CONCEIVED
on a night when your parents are drinking, then you are going to be melancholic your whole life. If your parents conceived you the first time they ever had sex, then you will be lucky your whole life, and everyone you meet will fall madly in love with you. Nicolas and I found ourselves in this universe on an otherwise unmemorable night in Val-des-Loups.

Étienne left Montréal for the first time in 1973, to tour rural Québec. He despised it and was bored to death.