by Sasha Troyan
By the time we reach the dirt road, it’s filled with mud. Our shoes keep getting stuck. Juliet’s shoe comes off completely. She tells me to come so she can lean on me while she puts it back on. She gets annoyed when I suggest she ask Luis. She gets very mad when Al and I shout, “Juliet and Luis. Juliet and Luis have had a lovers spat.” We’re so wet our clothes stick to our bodies. I can see Granny and Ethel’s corsets through their dresses.
Then Granny trips.
I don’t see it happen. All of a sudden she lies in the mud. Her face is very pale and her hair looks purple. I crouch on the ground and hold her hand. Juliet feels her ankle. She says she thinks it’s not broken, just twisted. Luis bends over and lifts Granny. We follow him to the car. I insist on getting up front.
Inside the car it’s dark and the sounds are muffled. There’s just the tap tap of the window wipers and a clicking noise Mummy makes with her gold locket, pushing it in and out, reminding me of Daddy who used to put his hand on Mummy’s hand and ask her to stop. It feels as if we’re traveling through the air because it’s so misty. I can’t see the road or the trees. Now and then, when the mist parts I catch a glimpse of the river. It flows softly as if it were dreaming.
Even the house is hidden by the mist.
Granny says she does not need a doctor. Great-aunt Ethel says she thinks the man who owns the house across the way is a doctor. Juliet says it might be best for him to take a look, and Mummy says she’ll walk to his house. She asks me if I would like to go with her. Al wants to come too, but Juliet says she has to stay with her. The doctor’s garden doesn’t have flowers, just a lawn and bushes that are perfectly trimmed. There’s no wild part like our garden.
His house is modern. It’s big and white and there are lots of windows and you can see right in. Once we saw the doctor in his underpants. It’s the only modern house in the neighborhood, apart from the public housing apartment buildings just outside Malsherbes.
Mummy knocks lightly on the door. In the glass pane I can see her reflection. She looks very beautiful. Her hair is pulled back but it’s curling and very full because of the rain. The orange jumper she’s wearing has turned a deeper orange. I knock more loudly on the door. I bang until Mummy tells me to stop.
The door opens and a man with a very narrow face and big white hair appears. “Bonjour,” he says. He talks so softly it’s hard to hear what he says. “Vous êtes medecin?” Mummy asks. He nods. “Ma mère a tordu sa cheville,” Mummy says. “Est’ce que vous pournez venir l’examiner?” He says that he is not a general practitioner. He’s a psychiatrist, but he would be glad to come over and take a look.
He goes back inside his house and comes out with a raincoat which he places over his head. He walks with tiny quick steps.
When we get to the house, Mummy says I should change out of my wet clothes. I don’t want to, but Juliet appears and says I must. I watch the doctor walk with tiny steps to Granny’s room. I do not like his narrow face. He makes me think of a fox.
That night I can’t sleep for a very long time. I talk to my doll, the one Mummy gave me. She’s made of rubber except for her head. Even her ears are made of rubber. She’s only got one ear left and no eyes. I tell her not to worry. Everything is going to be all right. I promise to have her eyes fixed. Once I took her to a party and all my friends were giving their dolls a bath and I put my doll in the water, but when I pulled her out her eyes had popped in. I cried and cried and I thought Mummy would be mad but she said it wasn’t my fault. Granny says that she knows a butcher who can fix my doll’s eyes. I didn’t know that butchers fixed dolls, but she said this one could.
Later in the night, I awaken to the sound of footsteps. The shadow of the cupboard door looks like a man. I don’t move. I hold my breath. The cupboard door bangs shut and the curtain blows out into the room. Carefully, I push back my sheets and climb down from my bunk bed. I’m about to get into Al’s bed when I hear Juliet slam her cup down on her bedside table.
Usually, she’s reading an Agatha Christie with her glasses balanced on the end of her nose, her head leaning against the white wall above her bed. When she sits up, you can see a yellow circle on the wall. She gets very angry when I tell her she has a greasy head. She says everyone’s head would leave a trace. Sometimes, she’s not reading. She’s sipping wine and looking up at the ceiling.
But tonight when I peer through the doorway, she’s playing cards. She’s playing patience. She’s wearing her short, frilly, nylon, pink see-through nightdress. I open the door a little wider and the door creaks, but she does not look up. She’s crying. The tears are dropping onto her cards, but she doesn’t wipe them. I’ve never seen Juliet cry before. I wonder if she is thinking about her fiancé who died in the war. I imagine him thin and pale with long thin fingers. He lies on the grass like the soldier in Rimbaud’s poem.
“Juliet,” I say. She looks up at me but she doesn’t seem to know who I am. She picks up one card then another but she doesn’t move them to another pile; she just replaces them in the pile they were in. Then she says, “Go to bed.”
“But I can’t sleep,” I say.
I walk over and sit down on her bed. “There are lots of creaks,” I say. “Listen.”
I strain to hear footsteps. I hear only the sound of moths beating against the lampshade, the river and the wind and Juliet’s breathing, but then there’s a loud bang and I squeeze Juliet’s arm very hard.
“Ow,” she says. “Now, I’m going to have a bruise.”
“Did you hear?”
“It’s just the wind,” she says.
“Juliet, tell me about the Second World War some more,” I say. Talking about the war always puts Juliet in a good mood.
“Go to bed,” she says.
“Juliet, did you have a father and a mother?”
“Of course,” she says.
“What was your father like?”
“He wore contact lenses,” she said. “He was one of the very first people to wear them.”
“What are they?” I ask.
“They’re pieces of glass you put in your eyes to see better,” she says.
I think it must be painful to wear pieces of glass in your eyes.
“He liked to eat cheese with maggots, right?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says.
“Daddy likes to put vanilla ice cream in his express,” I say.
She picks up the king of hearts and stares at it.
“What was your Mum like?”
“She used to sit darning our socks. Sometimes she wore a clothespin on the tip of her nose to make it thinner. She wanted to have an upturned nose.” I feel like laughing, but I can tell that Juliet doesn’t so I pull at the green cloth covering the walls, and she tells me not to so I wander over to the card table with the felt top where Juliet has laid out her puzzle. She’s worked on it a little more, but you still can’t tell for sure what the picture is going to be. All I can make out is a bit of the background which is dark green and looks like dirty water and something that could be a boat but would have to be pale green.
“Do you want to work on your puzzle?” I ask.
“It’s much too late,” she says.
“Would you like a tissue?” I ask.
“All right,” she says.
I take a tissue from her tissue box on top of her chest of drawers. She blows her nose loudly, wiggling it from side to side. She needs another tissue and another. She tells me to bring her the trash can. Inside, I see her bikini. I don’t ask her why she’s put it there.
She sips her wine, pulls out another cigarette and lights it, then smokes, leaning outside her window. She doesn’t say anything when I lean out with her. It’s stopped raining but water drips from the roof onto our heads.
Six
In the morning, I slip into Granny’s bed. I close my eyes and the sounds of her sleeping and the river mix so that at times I can’t tell one from the other. I feel as if I’m floating. Perhaps it’s because I spent so much time in
the canoe yesterday. Granny said that for weeks after she’s stepped off the QEII, the earth felt unstable, as if she was walking on the heaving deck of a ship.
I hear light footsteps. Mummy stands in the doorway. Her hair’s all funny: it stands up on one side. The rims of her eyes are red and her white nightdress has a stain down the front. She slips into bed next to me. She has to lie on the very edge because we don’t want to wake Granny. “Talk to me,” Mummy says. I have so much to tell her. I could talk all day. First, I tell her how I wish I didn’t have to go back to school in September. She says not to worry about school. We have quite a few weeks until then.
Besides, she says, you did much better at school this trimester. I tell her about how I hope to get the cross of encouragement next trimester. I almost got it last trimester, but they gave it to another girl. There are three kinds of crosses: croix de première is for the best student, croix de seconde is for the second best, croix de troisième is for the third best and then there’s the croix d’encouragement which is for the student who has made the most effort. I have never had any of the crosses. They look just like general’s crosses and you attach them to your sleeve. You only get to wear them for three weeks, then you have to earn them all over again. You can also earn blue, red, and yellow ribbons during exams. I imitate all my teachers and Mummy laughs very hard. Her laugh is the best laugh. It’s high pitched and goes higher and higher. When she laughs in the cinema, everyone laughs with her. She laughs especially hard when I imitate my teacher making the distinction between un accent grave and an accent aigu. It wakes Granny up.
“Hello, darling,” Granny says. “It’s good to hear you laugh. How are you feeling?”
“How are you feeling?” Mummy asks.
“Not too bad,” she says. “A bit sleepy.” She touches the cat on her head. “I thought I felt a weight pressing me down.” Tiger jumps off her head onto the carpet and runs out the door.
Granny closes her eyes and we continue to talk in whispers.
I ask Mummy if Granny is going to have to go to the hospital and she says she doesn’t. The doctor said she’s just twisted her ankle.
“Have you ever been in a hospital, Mummy?” I ask
“To have you and Al,” she says. She tells me how when she was in the hospital she had to press a button and say in a loud voice over a loudspeaker that she had to peepee, but she felt so embarrassed that she held it in for as long as she could. My Mum was only seventeen when she had me. She asked Daddy to change her room twice. First, she wanted to be in her own private room but then she got lonely, so she asked to be with other women but they all made comments about how young she looked so then she asked to be put back in a private room.
The light on the blue-green mohair blanket is very bright. It’s warm and I ask Mummy if she would like to go for a swim and she says that’s a lovely idea.
We tiptoe out of Granny’s room, through the living room which is just as it was our first morning here. The air is cool and drifts through the open windows, rippling the blue curtain hems.
We run out the door across the wet lawn, let our nightdresses drop onto the grass, and dive naked into the pool.
The water is cool and smooth next to my skin and I float on my back. I look up at the sky and wonder what my father is doing.
When I go back to Granny’s room, she’s hobbling around in the nude. Granny loves to walk around naked. Her skin is all loose and floppy. It hangs in folds and is very white.
We tiptoe through Ethel’s room to get to the bathroom, but Aunt Ethel awakens.
“Really, Will,” she says, sitting up. She does not approve of Granny walking in the nude.
“I’m going to help Granny with her bath,” I say.
We fill up the tub very high and put in lots and lots of rose bubbles. Granny holds onto my shoulders as she slowly lowers herself into the water. I pass a big sponge over her back. She has lots of brown freckles and tiny red dots. I ask her what the red dots are and she says they’re burst blood vessels.
“Lovely, lovely,” she says, scooping water and throwing it over her shoulders so that it splashes her back.
“What are we going to do today?” I ask.
“Well,” she says, “I’m not going to be up to much, but you can play in your treehouses. Or you can do some knitting.”
After her bath, Granny sits in the armchair that matches the waterlily couch. She lets me sprinkle her with baby powder. I put on lots and lots of powder until she says, “That’s enough, dear. You’re putting some even in my hair.” I laugh and tell her that was what they did in the old days. Then she asks me to pass her one of her paper panties. I love her paper panties. They’re pink and white and come in a long string of plastic bags connected to one another. She lets me have a pair.
I watch her as she bends over and carefully places one foot, then the other, quite swollen now, through each leg hole of her panties. Her fingers tremble and I want to reach out and help her but I’m not sure she’d want me to. I remember the way she gets annoyed when Luis tries to help her out of the car by swinging her legs over the side. She breathes heavily and straightens up. She’s not going to wear her corset today, just her cream dress.
She’s just pulled it on when there’s a knock on the door and Juliet and Ethel come in. Juliet sits down on the couch and places Granny’s foot on her lap. Her foot is so small you’d think it was a little girl’s if it weren’t for the blue veins and the way her bones stick out. We watch Juliet tie a beige bandage around Granny’s foot. She says you mustn’t do it too tight or too loose. In a few days she’ll let me do it.
Mummy and Al come into Granny’s room and we all stand around Granny and she says she’s very happy to have her family au complet, then she leans back and closes her eyes.
Ethel says we must leave her room. “Have a nice day off,” Granny says to Juliet. I beg Mummy to go with us in the canoe. It’s really fun because the river is very full and the current strong. She says she’ll come as long as we stay within earshot of the house. I wonder if she’s waiting for a telephone call from Daddy.
We spread our towels on the bottom of the canoe and Mummy and I sit at either end with Al in the middle. I ask Mummy to tell me about when she was a little girl. Her father died when she was only seven years old and she and her sister moved from their big house into a tiny apartment with Granny. She says she was very spoiled. She was Granny’s favorite because she was the littlest one.
Her sister would beg her not to get on her bed, not even to touch it with one finger, but Mummy would and her sister would smack her and then Mum would run to Granny and tell on her. But sometimes Mum had a bad time, especially when her cousin Heather would come over. She was four years older than Mum and two years older than my mother’s sister. They would tease Mum by saying, “Where is Claire? Where is Claire? She’s down in the garden picking her nose,” and she would say, “But I’m here. I’m here.” My Mum says she still feels like that sometimes because we’re foreigners in France. She says it’s different for us because we’re little, but I don’t think that’s true. When I’m at school and the teacher asks us a question about America, she always turns to me. She says, “Gabriel is American. She must know.” And then when I don’t know, everyone is disappointed. “But I haven’t been there since I was five,” I say. “My mother is South African.” No one will believe that Mum is South African because they think that all South Africans are black but they’re not.
When Mummy stops talking, she says she really must get some practicing done. We watch her walk through the grass and across the patio and into the house. Soon the sound of her practicing drifts out onto the lawn and the water. Al and I continue to float in the canoe. We see the doctor trimming hedges. We see nests with blue or green or cream speckled colored eggs, but we do not touch them. We know we must not. When I was younger, I took some eggs and put them near the radiator. I thought they would hatch and I could have baby birds, but Granny explained that the mother has to sit on top
of them to keep them warm. We drift all the way to the green bridge. We stare at the water rushing towards the dam. We can feel the pull on the canoe. Al says we should let the canoe go down, but I say no, and we turn around. We can’t row because the current is too strong, so we take the canoe out and then we let out the air and fold it up and I carry it under one arm until we reach our treehouses.
We pretend to be soldiers and use our towels for capes, blackberry juice for blood. We’ve been wounded at war. I wrap my towel around one arm. Al wraps hers around her waist and drags a leg. We pick up two sticks we pretend are sabers. The grownups are the distant enemy. We’re on the look-out for Daddy. I tell Al how Granny and Ethel said he was bound to show up. Like a bad penny, Ethel said.
“What’s a bad penny?” Al asks.
“It’s a penny that’s no good,” I say.
“What’s a penny that’s no good?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess it’s a penny that’s bent or crooked or something.”
In front of the house, we see Luis washing his car. Large soapy bubbles glide across the car and drip down onto the gravel. Al and I like the wet stones, but as soon as they dry they don’t look beautiful anymore. We watch Luis dip a large brown sponge in a red bucket. He shows us the correct way to rub the car: in circles. He says we can climb into the car, as long as we don’t put our shoes on the cream seats. Luis’s skin is the same color as the seats. We take turns looking at the photograph of his two boys which dangles, from the rear view mirror. They look exactly the way I imagine Daddy’s lady’s twin boys. They have dark hair and dark eyebrows and they’re wearing the same outfits.
He hoses the car down while we’re inside. I tell Al we should pretend we’re in a boat that’s sinking. This is what it would look like. We scream but no one can hear us. Luis has fallen outside the boat. He’s drowning. Through the water, we can see only bits of the house. The ivy leaves are seaweed, the house itself an old buried boat. Our little boat is soon going to sink beside it. We try to see who can hold their breath the longest. Al wins. She almost faints.
