Hunting Houses Read online

  “Get a move on, Tessa. Quit stopping to look at everything along the way.”

  Farther on, she’d slow down then stop. My hand clutched the branch, string, rock, candy wrapper I’d just picked up from the sidewalk a bit tighter, and I waited to see what was coming. “We’re going to be late, we’re already late, if I’m late to work, do you know what’ll happen? I could lose my job and then who’d pay for groceries, the rent, the boots on your feet?”

  I wanted to say, Daddy’s got money. But her already sombre gaze would have darkened further. I thought, She hates my father.

  I hadn’t yet understood that no, what stretched her to the breaking point was the sustained effort she put into not disappointing me, not revealing my father’s financial inconstancy; what set her lip to trembling was love. I’m only thirty-two not old at all how did I turn into a harpy who yells and tells her daughter to quit stopping to look at everything she sees when that’s exactly what she should be doing at the age of four at any age, how is that?

  So, more often than not, I held my tongue, dropped the branch the string the rock the wrapper, watched them fall and asked myself whether it hurt when they hit the ground.

  Only fleeting memories remained of Abitibi, damp images that vanished quickly. My father’s car, its leather seat burning my thighs after swimming at the lake; I had to sit on my wet towel not to get burnt, and I’d always forget. The smell of coconut lotion to soothe my raw skin felt uniquely comforting afterwards. The burn was a reminder of all the hours spent splashing in the crystalline waters of La Ferme Lake, shaking sand off our bathing suits, wolfing down hot dogs, searching for wild raspberries in the underbrush where hidden couples made out. Once I caught a glimpse of a woman’s breast, then a man’s sex. The wet friction of their flesh, the confusion of skin, the hairs, the thrusting, and the man’s final groan would come to me at night, lying in bed, my body awake to the pulsing call of a Morse code I would only recognize much later as desire.

  During trips to visit our great-grandmother who smelled like eucalyptus and who my mother adored, we always stopped in at the Sullivan creamery where my orange ice cream cone would end up smeared in my hair and make me feel sick. Paule stood outside leaning against the car door, a slender silhouette with a cigarette in her hand, as we licked away the drops running down our thumbs, our palms, our wrists. Some always fell onto our thighs, mine plump and pale (Two bleached ham hocks! my paternal grandmother would cry whenever she saw them, and even though I didn’t understand, it was clear that her words were no compliment), quickly mopped up with the hem of my T-shirt, no harm done. My mother was disheartened by the way I always tended to end up covered in sugar in all its forms. Good God, what did I ever do to deserve such a slob for a daughter!

  Paule didn’t believe in a god, even less so in his goodness. If I could just remember to wipe my mouth after dipping my slice of bread in maple syrup when no one was looking, erase any trace of melted chocolate from my fingers, throw away the Cellophane from the Kraft caramels I pilfered from my brother’s Hallowe’en basket. If she didn’t see me eating and no longer saw her daughter as a dirty little pig, then Tessa-the-slob wouldn’t exist anymore, right?

  One night, she took us to her friends’ place. She must have stopped seeing them soon afterwards, since, of their huge house chock full of books, Turkish carpets, and posters for exhibits held in faraway museums, all I remember is that one summer party when they brought all their tables out into the lush backyard (was it in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce somewhere? Or maybe Ahuntsic?) to make one long table covered in newspaper since we’d all soon be elbow deep in lobster claws and melted butter. Two hot plates had been set up on the grey veranda, its paint peeling off in spots, with huge aluminum pots to welcome the wriggling lobsters amid the joyous cries of older boys who intimidated me as much as they fascinated me. My brother wore a polite smile, his mouth a thin line to conceal his distress at the killing of those poor creatures. Later, he would eat with as much gusto as everyone else, but I knew the passage from the world of the living to the world of the dead bothered him, whether it be of an insect, a barbecue chicken, or a Christmas tree. Weren’t they all sad to lose their lives?

  After supper, the adults lingered around the table, full of wine and stories told a hundred times before.

  “She had no panties on! She showed up for her thesis supervisor in a mini-skirt and pantyless!”

  “Big deal, no one but me knew! I wanted to feel the power of my feminine mystique!”

  “Hon, you’ve got Betty Friedan all wrong!”

  “I definitely get her better than you, dude…”

  “Hey, Marc, did you know Suzanne defended her thesis commando?”

  And off they went again. Paule laughed like everyone else. Pretty well every time I walked by on my search for dandelions with the hosts’ daughter (what was her name again, she had such a pretty wildflower wallpapered room and a white wicker desk, straight out of my dreams), my mother grabbed my arm and pulled me to her to shower me with kisses, one of her rare displays of affection that I took stiffly then missed as soon as they were over. Inside, the boys had spread comic strip albums out on the floor and were lost in stories of pirates and of Gauls.

  The white-wicker girl led me to her parents’ bedroom, which had the biggest bed I’d ever seen. “It’s a king,” she pronounced like someone in the know. I nodded without a word, Be careful not to show how ignorant you are. Then she pulled a pile of books from under the bed and laid them out on the quilt with a feverish look. She began turning the pages of a comic book that must have been for adults only, you could tell right away by the images of big-busted women and men swigging beer straight from the bottle. The girl placed a plump finger (What a pretty ring with its sapphire stone! What if I took it from her while she slept?) on one of the pictures. A giant, naked woman lay stretched out on the prairie. She was asleep, her mouth partially open. She took up the space of several houses and the church steeple only reached her ear. Her legs were spread and her sex was hairy. It was then that I noticed a little man climbing inside her with the help of another elf pushing him in headfirst. Elves clung from her breasts; others tried to clamber up her thigh. Looking at her face again, I saw she wasn’t asleep. Instead she was smiling, eyebrows raised, with the same focus I’d glimpsed on the lovers in the underbrush at the lake. “They’re doing sex,” I said, and the girl added, “Uh-huh, they’re doing sex and, at the end, the elf pees in her mouth.” We didn’t speak. There was still so much we had to learn about the mystery behind why this image was both exciting and repulsive. Even the girl with the princess room knew that.

  I wondered why my mother’s friends had such pretty houses while we lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Saint-Viateur above a store that sold handbags. Weren’t they all alike, these grown-ups who drank Black Label beer at five, then wine with their guinea fowl à la Meaux mustard? Didn’t they all have the same Léo Ferré LP and the same “oui” badges hidden under the socks in their underwear drawers to forget the tears they’d shed over the May 1980 referendum? Didn’t they all speak out against politicians’ shocking bills? My mother’s friends were university professors, social workers, civil servants — there were a few eccentrics thrown into the mix: the guy who grew garlic whose black beard was so thick his nose was barely visible, the woman who sold second-hand Indonesian furniture in a tiny boutique on Saint-Denis, but the others seemed to lead tranquil lives in their houses still sporting “original stained glass” and their fridges always crammed full of individual yogurt containers. At home, we bought puffed rice cereal in bulk and stored it in glass jars that we kept in plain sight atop the kitchen water heater next to the gas furnace.

  Paule left every morning to work as a secretary for a sweaty, red-faced man with tight curly hair who ran an import–export business. She hated her job. When I’d lie at her feet on the living room floor, drawing pictures (mermaids first, and singers later), I’d sometimes overhear he
r on the phone: “I can’t quit, we’re in the middle of a recession. Things are only supposed to get worse. There’ll never be any benefits or security. At least I’ve got a paycheque.” Her friends spoke of collective bargaining, angry unions, hard-fought-for benefits not to be lost at any cost. My mother kept quiet, poured herself a drink and nodded, gazing out the window, cut off from the world, staring at the powerlines in the distance or at a fall maple tree turning red. At those times, she couldn’t have been more different than her friends and she couldn’t have been more alone.

  Yet there were other delicious days when she was fully present and accounted for. It was immediately apparent. She’d have a skip to her step when she came home from work. She’d bring bags full of fruit and puff pastry and would sometimes have had enough time to stop in at the bookstore and buy the new American novel she’d heard about on the radio. On those days, Paule loved to talk. She talked about her day at the office, memories from her childhood spent counting her grandmother’s buttons and bobbins, her birth stories, spectacular and funny. We loved to listen. With supper done, we’d ask her to walk with us over to the park or down Laurier to window-shop after the stores were closed, and she’d agree. On the way there, she’d never tell us to hurry up and would stop with me in front of the flowery skorts at Deslongchamps that I coveted with near-troubling ferocity. “We’ll make our own, clothes to fit our own taste, it won’t cost as much,” she’d say, trying to convince me. She promised that on our next trip to our grandmother’s, we’d borrow her sewing machine. Then we loitered on the steps to the church for a good while, long enough for me to walk their entire length, imagining myself on a tightrope above a river full of crocodiles. When she announced, “Time to go home,” her voice had nothing of its usual bored, fatigued tone. This time around, going home held the promise of bubble baths, stories read from cover to cover, and hot milk before bedtime.

  The next morning, her eyelids would be heavy once more, and when she growled at Étienne to get out of the bathroom, I knew that the break in the clouds had closed. Still, I looked forward to the next interlude the way you look forward to a letter, or to spring.

  At naptime, we had to lie down on royal blue gym mats held together with worn Velcro. The daycare, both a refuge and a lion’s den, was steeped in cooking smells: Chinese-style macaroni, vegetable soup, cabbage rolls. Hot, salty food, mouthfuls of onions and soya sauce. At home, we didn’t eat the same kind of meals; Paule was determined to have us eat like adults — or was it simply that she didn’t want to stoop to the level of “family fare”? When she brought a rack of lamb to the table, maybe it didn’t remind her that she was a single mom as much as a meatloaf would have. In any case, food at the daycare was attuned to the times and I had no complaints. When naptime rolled around, all that was left of lunch were the lingering smells and reassuring clink of thick pink plastic dishes being washed in the kitchen. They put on soft music for us that I recognized and replayed non-stop in my head, unable to sleep. Lying on the plasticized mattress cover, a tiny blanket (never heavy enough, never warm enough for me to fall asleep) over my shoulders, I spent the allotted hour fastening and unfastening the Velcro on the mat. Keeping jerky time to the lullabies. I’d be warned, then stop. And start up again. What else was there to do? How else could I spend eternity until I gained access to the grown-up world? I examined the posters on the wall — hand hygiene, required winter clothing, how to settle disputes between friends. Blond birdlike girls and freckle-cheeked boys. I always looked more like the boys than the girls in the posters because of my snarled hair and sticky fingers. I stared at the exercise ladders, counted the number of rungs to the top then back down again, reciting the alphabet. At the bottom of the ladder, I’d only made it to “P” and so had to go up again to end with “Z.” Letters, numbers, the harp in the lullabies, the Velcro, the blue, the sleeping faces. (How did they do it? How were they lucky enough to gain access to oblivion?) Their limp bodies were an irresistible draw, and sometimes I’d run my fingers over one child’s knee or another’s wrist, just to measure how asleep they were. I didn’t want to wake them. Maybe by touching them, I’d have access to their world. Sometimes I would place my pinkie on a playmate and leave it there for minutes at a time, until my fingers started to tingle. I soon found the fixed position as unbearable as when my mother, ignoring the fuss I’d make and the fact I was forever losing them, forced me to wear those small fitted leather gloves. Only then would I pull my hand away and roll over on my island of a mat to stare at the large round clock above the window, its big hand on six, another half-hour to go, but I had run out of numbers and letters and tired my finger out on Claudia’s knee or Bobby’s wrist. The lullabies had died down; the only sound remaining was that of the regular breathing in and out. Patience, Tessa. Patience.

  The Bathing Suit

  First-time buyers can be spotted from miles away. Their bodies are taut with excitement. They’re literally poised on the threshold of everything to come. For them, the process takes on a symbolic hue: the handing over of keys, the pen they use to sign the purchase offer, the weather on the day they visited the house. Tanya and Marc are no exception to the rule. A few days ago, I showed them a condo by the Lachine Canal, and it was love at first sight.

  I’m the listing agent for Steve, a banker now determined to make his fortune in Toronto. He was rarely home. On top of working twelve-hour days, Steve would spend the rest of his waking hours at the gym or in restaurants frequented by Canadiens players, and saw no reason to decorate the condo’s interior. “That’s girlie stuff,” he told me with a wink. I took it as a generous gesture: he was under no obligation to wink at his real estate agent, especially given that I’m at least twelve years older than he is and that, in his eyes, I must have about as much sex appeal as a Christmas tree. Tanya and Marc found neither the sad ecru walls or the laminated pictures that Steve clearly inherited from the show condo when he moved in depressing. Tanya labelled the look interesting, adding, “The pictures bring out the mahogany in the kitchen cupboards.” I said, “You should consider a career in real estate.” Her face shut down. “Maybe after the treatment’s done.” Marc shot me a look of dismay, a look that proclaimed, Change the subject, let’s not go there, my life is nothing but one extended discussion of Tanya’s goddamn fertility treatments. But before I could lead them over to the walk-in closet, Tanya had aired the whole story: six years of trying, including two with the help of drugs, only to realize that in vitro fertilization was their only hope, the side effects of the hormones were tough, Marc was so patient, and she still had hope. When I said three boys in answer to the usual question (“Do you have any children?”), her face registered a multitude of expressions: surprise, admiration, sorrow, envy. “Three boys! How wonderful! That’s really wonderful! Did you hear that, Marc? Three little boys.”

  Right then and there, I decided that I liked Tanya and that I would to the bitter end, even if she had a thing for mahogany cupboards and contemplated putting a waterbed in their bedroom.

  Today, Tanya shows up for our meeting in an overpriced café on Viger carrying a jar of jam. “For our guardian angel,” she says, handing it to me. “It’s my raspberry jam. I pick the raspberries myself with my mother every summer on my parents’ farm in Saint-Hyacinthe. Children usually like raspberry jam, don’t they? Do yours?”

  I thank her — “Yes, they love it” — and am surprised as I slip the jar into my purse to feel a tightness in my throat and my eyes blinded by tears. This young woman bursting with simple, profound needs moves me and reflects my own darkness back at me. Marc chimes in, tells me how it was Tanya’s jam that seduced him, says, “Feed a man, and he’s yours for life.” Usually, I’d delight in the cliché’s pathetic lack of originality, but Marc places his hand on Tanya’s and Tanya’s fingers squeeze his. The two are alone, together in their suffering, and everything in them is magnified, so I put a sock in it. They are love, and the only thing left for me to do is to just shut the hell
up.

  “Do you think five thousand below the asking price is a reasonable offer?”

  Marc has gone all earnest on me. His hair, normally hidden under a New York Yankees ballcap, is slicked back today like a real gentleman’s; of the typical suburban dweller, the kind you see in spades at sports bars, almost nothing remains. Broad shouldered as he is, Marc looks like yet another fine, upstanding citizen. But he’s worried. Tanya hasn’t liked a single condo other than this one. For the past few months, he’s had to give her a daily shot in the thigh; they’ve made the same trip, sometimes three times a week, to the fertility clinic on Décarie to check the number of follicles she produces, most often returning home no further along, We’ll see in two days’ time. They’ve waited for calls that never came. Tanya stumbled on a diet that a group of women on the Internet swore by. Marc added the address for a Vietnamese herbalist who worked miracles for a colleague’s wife to his smartphone. Tanya has preceded and followed every medical procedure with an acupuncture session; it worked for Céline Dion, “Just look, she has three boys now too.” Marc has masturbated in the clinic’s pistachio-green windowless room trying not to think of his child since that would be wrong, but how could he not, because what else was he doing there if not making a child?

  Nothing was spoken, but in the nervous hand with which he stroked his nascent beard over and over, in his fear of losing a condo for want of five thousand dollars, Marc came across loud and clear: Tanya and I need some good news.

  “I think it’s a very reasonable offer. Honestly, you could even bring the price down a bit more.”

  Tanya shakes her head. “No, I don’t want to lose it.”