The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (2 page)

I saw Adam playing the piano. There was a sign-up sheet for the piano and often kids took their lessons on it. Adam would play for two hours at a time. He was wearing the same suit he always wore and a red scarf. He was cute enough. He had blond hair and blue eyes and a small mouth that always looked as if it was puckered up for a kiss. He composed his own tunes, some of the worst I’d ever heard. I happened to sort of like the one he was playing at the moment. It was all high notes, like someone stirring the tea in a teacup with a silver spoon. I went and leaned against the piano. He grinned like crazy when he saw me because he was madly in love with me.

“What do you call that?” I asked.

“Le minou est un minou et pourquoi pas.”

He was English and he deliberately spoke in nonsensical French sometimes. He winked at me. We’d dated a little bit here and there, but I never really wanted to have anything more to do with him. Perhaps because it was my brother who had introduced us.

I picked up a paper flower that was lying on the ground. I stuck it behind my ear and began dancing around the piano seductively. Adam was just about to get up and come and grab me when someone else took hold of my arm. I turned to see
that it was the priest. I thought he was going to scold me for behaving like a
salope
around an agent of the Lord.

Instead, he asked me if I wanted to try out for the pageant. I wasn’t even dressed up. I was wearing a black sweater with stars on it and red shorts and some cowboy boots that I’d stolen from Nicolas. I had a barrette with a plastic daisy in my hair.

I told the priest I had no intention whatsoever of participating in their beauty pageant, which was insulting to women. I was a feminist and was here to sign up for night school. I was about to walk away, but this old man in a suit put his arms out to block me from going any farther. He was one of those men who are absurdly short. They were children during the Depression and had to eat boiled stone soup. They didn’t like to talk either; they were just always gesturing for you to do things. Now, he put his arms around me and then started pushing me up onto the stage.

“Mais, t’es complètement malade!”
I cried.

The priest seemed to be perfectly okay with all of this. The absurdity of the situation struck me and I just started to laugh and laugh. I yelled for Adam to come and save me. But he called out that it served me right. That’s what I got for trying to be such a big shot.

Here I was up on stage again. It came back to me how your feet made an echo on the stage as if you were a giant. There were six other girls standing there. One seemed to have a head cold and kept sneezing violently.

The priest and three other men sat in a row of chairs in front of the stage and looked at us. The priest liked to be involved in anything that was happening. If there was a pickup game of basketball in the park, he would want to be part of it. He liked to procrastinate from saving souls, I guess. One of the men had a mop leaning against his chair, so he was probably
the janitor. They asked us to strike different poses. We had to close our eyes and pretend that we were flowers. We waved our arms up in the air as if they were petals. One of the men, in a yellow sweater that was five sizes too big, asked us if we could blow a kiss at him. A girl who thought that this was beneath her climbed down off the stage. The janitor said that we should hold our hair up over our heads.

The priest asked us whether or not we had any particular talents. One girl could say the alphabet backwards. I thought this was lovely. The janitor shrugged his shoulders and said that it wasn’t a very sexy talent. Another girl made her lips look like those of a fish. She apologized for having a zit on her forehead, then started giggling.

There was a girl with blond hair. She was so pale, it gave the impression that she’d been scrubbed clean. I thought she was prettier than me. She was able to do the splits. The men looked impressed.

I didn’t have any talents. But when it was my turn, for some idiotic reason, I recited the lyrics from one of my dad’s songs as if they were a poem.

“Marie-Jo! Marie-Jo! Marie-Jo!” they all started singing together.

“Aren’t you Étienne Tremblay’s kid? Little Nouschka Tremblay!”

“Little Nouschka!” Everyone started chiming in.

The men put their heads together, then looked at us and announced that I had won. They did a quick photo shoot of me holding a sceptre and standing in front of a large piece of black paper covered in stars. They said it was to go in the hallway. Plainly, I just got the title because of who I once had been. I was trying my best to straighten out my life, but I always ended up in the middle of some festive waste of time.

I
SUPPOSE I SHOULD TELL YOU RIGHT NOW WHO
our father is. Everybody else knows. Étienne Tremblay had been a pretty famous Québécois folk singer in the early seventies. A
chansonnier
. He recorded two albums that were everywhere. Back in the day, he could come home from a show with a paper bag filled with women’s underwear. Outside of Québec nobody had even heard of him, naturally. Québec needed stars badly. The more they had, the better argument they had for having their own culture and separating from Canada.

There was a signed black-and-white photograph of him over the counter at the hot dog place. Mostly he wore a black suit and a top hat. The top hat was his trademark. He bought it at a costume shop in Vieux-Montréal and fell in love with it. He had blue eyes, a giant nose and was ridiculously tall. He had been really handsome, as handsome as an American. A lot of people had said that he could have been a huge star if he had learned to sing in English. But he hated the English. Hating them was the true passion of his life.

Étienne Tremblay had a terrible singing voice. I had heard him trying to sing a Pepsi tune while washing out a coffee cup and it sounded awful. He couldn’t even carry “Frère Jacques.” Once a newspaper article had called him the Tone Deaf Troubadour. People would ask Nicolas and me if we had inherited his musical abilities. It was safe to say that we had, seeing as we didn’t have any at all.

His real talent, what people went crazy for, was his knack for writing song lyrics. There was a song about a mechanic who builds a snowmobile that can go faster than the speed of light. There was one about a grandpapa who has gas. There was a song about a tiger that escapes from le Zoo de Granby to go eat poutine. He had a song about a man who finds a magical cigarette that doesn’t end, and he never has to come back from his cigarette break. He made the ridiculous squalor that was everyday life sublime. There was no subject that was beneath Étienne Tremblay.

And he was a bon vivant. Everyone loved him for it. He inhaled helium and sang a Gilles Vigneault song on a variety show. There was an interview with him where he claimed to have slept with three hundred women by the time he was twenty-one. He was arrested at a raid at a dirty movie theatre, but this only made people like him more because he had a song about Édouard who finishes work and goes to the dirty movie theatre and always has to make up crazy excuses to his wife about where he has been.

He got caught with prescription pills that weren’t his and was arrested again. He did well in jail. All the other prisoners liked him. He talked to the other prisoners about what some old washed-up
vedettes
from the seventies were like in bed. He claimed to have gone down on Petula Clark. He came out of
prison each time like a war hero. Until he finally ended up being sentenced for eight whole months.

To say that Étienne’s fame had gone to his head would be an understatement. He really believed that he had a higher calling. I think he ranked himself up there with Jesus, and I’m not even exaggerating.

Oh and, how could I forget, in the middle of all this he had two kids who became famous too because Étienne always brought them on stage and on talk shows with him. He would make us come out and wave wildly at the audience and blow kisses and say adorable things that he’d written for us to the hosts. We were known by everyone as Petite Nouschka and Petit Nicolas.

I
HURRIED HOME
. I
WANTED TO SEE
N
ICOLAS SO
that I could tell him about the janitors singing Étienne’s song. I was feeling lousy about it, but he would laugh it off.

It was only about a twenty-minute walk back to our building, across the street from an old theatre that now sold electronics. The building was falling apart but the wooden doors were still painted gold every year. Sticking out above the door was a neon sign that wasn’t ever lit up and said
CHOW MEIN
. There used to be a Chinese restaurant in one of the apartments. Pigeons sat on the sign, crammed together like a group of teenagers making trouble on a bench. The noise they made sounded like a marble rolling across the floor all day, every day.

A girl with messy blond hair was standing in the lobby. She had on a white raincoat and sneakers. She gave me a sad look. I knew she was hoping to run into my twin brother. She reminded me of the Little Mermaid, right before she was going to have to throw herself back in the water because the prince had rejected her. Lonely, crazy girls always thought that Nicolas
was going to save their lives. He gave off that impression. Lord knows why. He had probably already slept with this girl, but I knew he wouldn’t have any interest in her now. I smiled and ran past her up the one step and down the hall.

Our apartment was on the ground floor and it was small. There was yellow wallpaper with canaries in the hallways. There were old-fashioned lamps on every surface. There were second-hand paintings all over the walls. There were a lot of sailboats. There was a painting of Jesus rolling his eyes up at the sky in every room.

Nicolas and I had been raised by our grandparents since we were babies. Our mother had left us on their doorstep, so to speak. Our grandmother had died when we were five, so actually we’d more or less been raised by our grandfather. His mother regretted naming him Léonard only five minutes after she did so, and no one had ever called him by his real name. Everyone just called him Loulou.

Loulou was in the kitchen wearing an old suit jacket over an undershirt. He had fixed a hole in the sleeve of the jacket with a staple gun. He wasn’t wearing any pants. His undershirt was tucked into his boxer shorts, which were covered with little golden paisleys. They looked like goldfish that were all dressed up for church. He was always crapping his pants, so he stopped wearing them at home. It just made life easier. He crapped his pants every time he smoked a cigarette.

Loulou’s nose was big, a family trait, but then what old man didn’t have a huge nose. His ears were enormous too. He had blue eyes and his eyebrows were wild. It was impossible to know anymore what he had looked like when he was young.

He had a pair of dentures, but they were too big for him and made him have to grin ludicrously when he was wearing
them. Loulou once told me that it was perfectly acceptable to slap a man in the face for being forward when he was young. That’s why men of his generation lost all their teeth, because the roots were weak from having been slapped all the time.

“Bonjour, Loulou!” I said.

“Where have you been?”

“Out slaying dragons.”

“There were still dragons when I was little. They were a sickly bunch. They would hang around garbage cans in the alleys behind Chinese restaurants. They would smoke cigars so that they could have smoke coming out of their mouths.”

“I know, you told me.”

“I’m glad they went extinct. Fucking ruined the Middle Ages for everybody. Oh, they didn’t like it when the shoe was on the other foot.”

“I’m starving.”

Loulou started making dinner. He never let anyone else cook. He had a dishrag tossed over his shoulder with roses on it. He had an oven mitt that was shaped like Babar the elephant. The spaghetti fell onto the floor like a burst of applause when a famous person makes a surprise cameo on a television show.

“Oh my fucking God. What the fuck just happened here? Am I losing my mind or is there spaghetti over the floor? I’ve gone senile. I can’t fucking stand it.”

As I brought a broom, Loulou put on a new record that he had found in the garbage. He played it at full volume and it was hard to make conversation. I had to scream bloody murder for him to pass me the salt. Loulou was drinking milk out of a plastic measuring cup. He always thought that Nicolas and I and everyone else our age had AIDS. He wouldn’t let us use the same cups as him.

“Did you know that you can get into the zoo for free if you’re on welfare? Why aren’t I on welfare? Sign me up.”

“You are on welfare.”

For a long time, Loulou had collected scrap metal for a living. He still stopped to lift up a refrigerator with his bare hands every now and then to show people that he could. He carried around a briefcase filled with spark plugs and telephone wires and a wrench that weighed five or ten pounds.

But he was getting old and was always having tiny heart attacks while lifting things into the back of his truck. He would get faint after pushing a stove up onto the flatbed of his truck and fall over. People would call 911 because they would find him lying in their garbage heap staring up in the air. He had the look of a bewildered little kid on his face when he came to. His rescuers were always moved by the expression of absolute innocence that he had on his face at those moments. When he would tell Nicolas and me about these episodes, we would laugh so hard, we couldn’t speak. We would even burst out laughing in bed in the dark when we thought about it. A few days ago, he’d found a fridge in the garbage. He put it on a little red wagon and pulled it down the street. He had to stop in order to have a heart attack. Nicolas lay on the kitchen floor screaming with laughter when I told him. Mortality didn’t mean anything to us because we were so young. We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine.