“How big do you think they want it?” she asked.
Morley, still in her twenties, had never done any gardening in her life. She considered the lawn for a while and then marked out a rectangular bed that ran along the front of the house. She wasn’t surprised that they wanted the grass out. It was so incongruous: The cottage had a woodsy feel to it; the lawn was as manicured as a putting green, flat, spongy and soft. Morley used an axe to hack out large chunks of grass. Then she pried the sod loose and stacked it at the end of the driveway.
Morley was finished in a couple of hours. She put the axe down and went inside and made lunch.
They ate on the dock again. When they had cleaned up, Morley stared at her garden and decided it wasn’t big enough. She got the axe and ripped up another section of lawn. By supper, she had pulled up about a third of the grass.
“What do you think?” she said.
Dave thought she had made the garden way too big. He didn’t say that, however.
“Good,” he said. “It’s good. It looks great.”
Things were not looking great inside.
Halfway through the afternoon, Dave had uncovered a brick chimney. He had found a sledgehammer in the shed, and he had been going at the chimney for over two hours. It looked as if someone had lobbed a small explosive into the kitchen.
“This wasn’t the way it was described to me,” muttered Dave at eight on Friday morning.
They had been up since seven. For the second day running, Morley had set an alarm. They were leaving the next day. It was only eight and Dave was already sweating and covered in the brick dust which hung in the air of the cottage like smoke. But he was getting close. With any luck the chimney would be down by noon.
This was the day they met Jean-François and Marie-Josée.
As Dave and Morley hammered away at the kitchen, Jean-François and Marie-Josée were driving back from their two weeks in Maine.
As usual they were coming directly to their cottage to spend the last two weeks of their vacation at the lake. As they rolled up the autoroute, and the blue Laurentian Mountains rose up in front of them, Jean-François was having the same conversation they have every year. Mostly with himself.
“Well, that was nice,” he said.
Marie-Josée nodded, unconvincingly.
“But,” he added, “it’s good to be home.”
As they crested the big hill and began their descent into Notre-Dame des Plaines, Marie-Josée was staring out the car window, feeling a little desperate. They were going to spend the rest of the month at the lake, the exact same month she had lived through every year. She knew exactly how it was going to go.
On Monday mornings Jean-François would mow the lawn.
“The dandelions are terrible this year,” he would say.
On Tuesdays, they would drive into Saint-Sauveur for groceries. Wednesdays was laundry. Thursdays they would barbecue. On Fridays, take a bike ride along the old Loken Trail.
At 2:30 each afternoon, they would swim. At nine o’clock Jean-François would pour their final glass of wine. At eleven o’clock, lights out. It was like summer camp, except there wouldn’t be one solitary surprise. Not one unexpected moment.
I should get him a whistle, she thought.
“Pardon?” said Jean-François.
When he turned the station wagon into their driveway, Marie-Josée blinked. She stared at the house and then at her husband.
Jean-François had gone completely slack-jawed.
There was an orange and white Volkswagen van parked in their normal spot. There was a pile of rubble beside the van.
And as they sat there, a guy stood up from Marie-Josée’s chaise longue and walked toward them. The guy was grinning from ear to ear.
Jean-François opened his car door, got out and stood there in an uncomprehending haze. And that was when he noticed their entire front lawn had been dug up. Well, okay, a third of it.
He staggered backwards, reaching out for the door of his car for support. He felt as if he were in a dream. He reached absentmindedly for his face and fingered his cheek. His scar was starting to throb. He managed to choke out a few words.
He said, “Ça ça fait là là?”
He was pointing at the disaster in front of him.
The guy who had been sitting in the chaise longue smiled, and bobbed his head encouragingly, and spoke the words he had been practising all week.
“Bonjour,” he said. “Je m’appelle Dave.”
Jean-François didn’t actually faint. He did however sink to his knees, staring, in disbelief, at the pile of rubble and the ruined lawn—the lawn he had been weeding and spraying and mowing since he was tall enough to grasp the handle of the lawn mower. His pride and his joy.
Dave was still beaming at him as he went down. Dave thought he was joking. His kind of guy. So Dave went to his knees too. And they kneeled in front of each other for one long, silent uncomprehending moment.
Then Dave, who was thinking how happy the guy must be, reached out and grabbed Jean-François’ hand and shook it. Then he put his arm around the older man’s shoulders and led him into the kitchen, pointing proudly to where the kitchen wall used to be. The kitchen wall that Jean-François had stared at all his boyhood years.
Jean-François gasped in horror.
It suddenly occurred to him the guy might be a wing nut, maybe even dangerous. He tried to wrestle himself free. Where was Marie-Josée?
Marie-Josée was outside.
She had got out of the car and surveyed the piles of ripped sod, the scar of dirt across her lawn, and Marie-Josée had smiled.
“Well,” she said, to no one in particular, “what I think we need is wildflowers.”
Then she saw Morley standing uncertainly by the dock, and she pointed at the black earth and said, “I love what you’ve done with the place. Who are you, anyway?”
Morley said, “We’re the renters.”
And Marie-Josée said, “What renters?”
Which is when Jean-François burst out the front door, and Morley burst into tears.
It was Marie-Josée who settled everyone down. Once she managed that, it didn’t take them long to work out what had happened.
Left, left, right … right?
There had been one too many rights. Dave and Morley were supposed to be at the little cottage down the road, the one with the sagging, moss-covered roof.
They tried to clear out. It was Marie-Josée who insisted that they stay for dinner. While Marie-Josée prepared supper, Jean-François kept walking into the kitchen and staring dumbly at the place where the wall used to be.
From the kitchen he would walk to the lake, where he stood on the dock as the wind died and the sun settled. Something about all this felt familiar. Whatever it was, it was trying to bubble to the surface, but it just wouldn’t come.
He went back to the house for the third time.
Marie-Josée was making a salad. Talking a mile a minute to this young English couple. They didn’t seem so bad.
“Ouvre le radio, mon oiseau; j’ai besoin de musique.”
He wandered over to his father’s old radio and absentmindedly flicked it on. Then he stared at it. The radio. His father’s old wooden radio.
“What?” said Marie-Josée.
“Rien,” said Jean-François. “Nothing.”
But it was clear by the way he was staring at the radio it wasn’t nothing at all. It was something, that’s for sure.
Jean-François was remembering his first year as a vet. He had bought his father a new radio for his birthday—a portable Grundig transistor that he could take down to the dock. Jean-François was excited to give it to him. It was the first expensive thing he had ever bought his father.
His father didn’t even pretend to be impressed. “It doesn’t have tubes,” he said. “It looks like a toy.”
He didn’t seem to care that no tubes was the point of it. Or that it was the best portable radio money could buy. That it was supposed
to be small. He thought it looked flimsy.
“It is made of plastic,” he said.
His father’s old radio had a wood case. At first Jean-François was angry and hurt. How could his father be so dismissive of such a thoughtful gift? Why did his father reject everything that was different? Why couldn’t his father move forward with the rest of the world?
Then one night, he watched his father pick up the little transistor radio. The old man squinted at the dials and fiddled with the antennae. Then he put it down and moved over to his big tube radio with its impressive mahogany floor stand. His father ran his hand lovingly over the wooden cabinet, and as he did, he looked suddenly old, and sad, and even a little afraid. And Jean-François understood.
It’s unnerving to think you’ve figured out the world only to see it move on ahead of you, to find that the things that bring you comfort are obsolete, vanishing. To know that all of the signposts and symbols, all the information and skills you had spent your life mastering might be of no help to you in the future. Jean-François understood why his father might prefer the old and familiar to the new and sleek. The next time Jean-François visited, he packed the transistor radio into his suitcase and took it back to his apartment. It was still there in his basement workroom. The following Christmas he gave his father a set of fishing lures. But it saddened him that his father had chosen to be left behind. It frustrated him that his father couldn’t see that the future was fresh and exciting, bursting with possibilities for anyone who embraced them.
The very first thing that he and Marie-Josée bought when they first married was a tiny colour-television set. Jean-François had been so proud of it, and of himself for getting it. That seemed long ago now, and while Jean-François liked to embrace all the new technology that came his way, standing on the porch staring at the lake, it occurred to him that he had become more like his father than his twenty-year-old self would have thought possible.
He was on the porch, still staring at the lake, when a young man and woman glided by in a canoe.
“Eh ben,” he said suddenly. “Ça fait rien.”
What he was trying to say was, I like it.
They ate outside in the screened-in part of the porch. They opened a bottle of wine. By the end of the second bottle, they were laughing, and they moved right past it, and beyond it, and every time they circled back to it, it seemed even funnier.
As they worked on dessert, Marie-Josée showed them her newest piece of blown glass, a piece that she had picked up in Maine.
It was a mobile—a clatter of little glass birds.
“Les petits oiseaux de Marie-Josée,” said Jean-François, rolling his eyes. “Ha-ha-ha.”
It turned out she called him Monsier Oiseau. The birdman.
For his fiftieth birthday, she had given him an antique birdcage with a stuffed parrot. It was hanging by their bed in the city.
“Where I have to look at it,” said Jean-François, desperately.
It was clear that his feelings for the stuffed bird were complicated by love. He hated the bird. But he loved her; you could see that. And he loved that she had given it to him.
They stayed up too late. They drank too much wine.
Dave and Morley ended up staying overnight. And visiting each year for a couple of summers. This August was the first time they had seen Jean-François and Marie-Josée for over a decade.
When they saw each other, Dave and Jean-François both dropped to their knees, just like they did that afternoon a quarter of a century ago. It’s a thing they do.
Then they got up (Dave had to help Jean-François, who uses a cane these days), and they walked down to the dock together, past the wildflowers that Marie-Josée put in.
There is no lawn left anymore—it is all wild and grassy now. So Dave and Jean-François walked along the path that goes through the tall, wavy grass. Dave trailed his hands through the lacy seedpods and said it looked very nice.
“I like it better,” he said, “than it used to be. Than the lawn.”
Then he tried in French.
He said, “C’est plus sauvage.”
“Oui,” said Jean-François. “Plus wild.” Then he put his arm around Dave. “Comme les montagnes,” he said.
“Oui,” said Dave. “Wild comme les montagnes.”
Dear Stuart,
I have listened to your show for years, and you strike me as one of those people who has an opinion on just about everything. What do you have to say about this?
When I drive around a right-hand corner over thirty kilometres an hour, I hear a strange knocking coming from my trunk. I got my friend Bruce to ride in the trunk the other day to try to check exactly where it is coming from, but he couldn’t tell. And then I pulled in to a Tim’s parking lot and turned the engine off and had a smoke and thought I could still hear it, but that turned out just to be Bruce.
What do you think that might be? Do you think it is serious?
Yours sincerely,
Evan
Dear Evan,
Strange noises coming from a trunk are not something that should be ignored. Putting your friend back there was a good idea. But if he was unable to help, you might try some different approaches. Do you have a dog? You would be amazed what a good hunting dog will turn up in a trunk. You seem like a sensible fellow and I don’t think I have to mention this, but under no circumstance should you venture in there yourself. I have attached a cautionary tale.
RAT-A-TAT-TAT
Dave was at Kenny Wong’s café. He was sitting at the counter, eating a bowl of rice pudding and reading the latest issue of his favourite music magazine, when Kenny banged through the swinging kitchen doors. Kenny was carrying two big paper bags, presumably to the fellow waiting at the cash—a takeout order—but he stopped dead when he was abreast of Dave’s stool. Without turning to look at Dave, standing right behind him, but staring straight ahead at the cash, Kenny said, “That’s your second bowl of pudding.”
Dave said, “No it isn’t.”
Kenny said, “It is so. You got up when I was in the kitchen and got yourself a second bowl.”
Kenny, who was still looking straight ahead, not at Dave, sounded mildly threatening. Just as Kenny hadn’t turned to look at Dave, Dave hadn’t turned to look at Kenny.
It was hard to tell if this was a game or something serious. If this were the Wild West, however, you wouldn’t take a chance, you’d be looking around for something to duck under in case shooting was about to start. Dave, who had put his spoon down and was staring at his hands, said, “It’s not my second bowl.”
And Kenny said, “Liar.”
Everyone in the place stopped talking. Everyone was listening now. There was a beat of silence, some of the customers no doubt thinking Here come the guns, when Carl Lowbeer, who was sitting in a booth by the wall, piped up.
Carl said, “It’s not his second.”
Dave spun around on his stool to face Kenny, grinning like a school kid. “See,” said Dave.
But Carl wasn’t finished. Carl said, “It’s his third.”
Kenny looked at Carl and then at Dave. “J’accuse,” he said.
Dave looked over at Carl and muttered, “Traitor.”
The tension then proved too much for the guy waiting for his takeout. He grabbed the bags from Kenny’s hands and hurried out of the café.
An hour later, the place was mostly empty. Even Carl was long gone. But Dave was still sitting there, still reading his magazine, with a fourth bowl of rice pudding in front of him.
Kenny was there too, with his feet up on his desk, right in the middle of the café. Kenny hung up the phone and said, “Okay. I have been thinking about this … I have decided next Thursday is my fake birthday.”
“Ah, come on,” said Dave. “We just got through Christmas.”
Kenny looked at him sideways. “That’s not a protest is it? Is that a protest?”
Dave thought for a second and said, “No, no. I was just saying.”
Ken
ny said, “’Cause if you want to lodge a protest, that’s okay with me.”
“I was just saying,” said Dave. “I wanted you to be sure.”
Kenny and Dave have this thing about birthdays. I am not sure how long it has been going. A long time. Once a year, whenever they feel like it, they are allowed to declare that it’s their birthday and the other guy has to take fake birthday guy to lunch. And give him a present. According to the rules, they can declare any day of the year their fake birthday, except, of course, if it’s their real birthday, which they are not allowed to mention. They just observe the fake birthday.
And that’s how Dave ended up at the mall, looking to find Kenny a fake birthday present. It is something he has been surprisingly good at over the years.
Dave’s presents have always been unexpected … in the best possible way. They have been, when they have been good, something Kenny would never have bought himself, but really wanted nevertheless. And when they have been great, well, when they have been great, they have been things Kenny didn’t have a clue he wanted, but once he got them wondered how he had lived without them all his life.
Truth is, Kenny looks forward to Dave’s fake birthday present every year. Dave knows this, but the great difficulty with great success, of course, is the great difficulty of repeating it. This is why Dave was feeling so much pressure at the mall as he wandered around, looking for inspiration.
He stopped to get a coffee. He was standing at the coffee counter, pouring a creamer into a takeout cup, when he spotted the pet store. And that was when Dave remembered the greatest present he had ever bought. Not for Kenny. For his son, Sam.
He had arrived at the mall feeling pleased with himself that year. It was Christmas Eve, and the stores were filled with men, loaded down with parcels, all moving briskly and with purpose.
His first stop was the toy section of a large department store.
“Twelve-year-old girl,” he said to the clerk.
The middle-aged woman handed him a brightly packaged craft kit, as if she had been doing this sort of thing all night. Dave paid for the kit and left, not asking for suggestions for Sam. He knew that he could figure out the perfect present for a five-year-old boy himself.
Extreme Vinyl Café Page 10
