Angels in the Morning

by Sasha Troyan

  Mummy keeps playing with her gold locket, squeezing it open and shut, making a clicking noise. “I’m so lucky to have you two girls,” she says.

  Al and I are sitting on the same red banquette. We’re holding hands beneath the white tablecloth. We’re twins again. I’m wearing one of her hearing aids. When Juliet told Al to put the other ear mold into her ear, Al said she couldn’t because she has a huge pimple so Juliet couldn’t say anything.

  I like wearing a hearing aid. At first it felt funny in my ear, but now it feels nice. Al calls her hearing aid her ears. I have three ears now. Aunt Ethel said I was going to stretch it like a shoe.

  The waiter asks if we have decided what we want and Mummy asks for one more minute.

  “Would you like to order your food in reverse?” She asks us. She means starting with dessert and then having our entree and then the appetizer. She and her sister used to do that when they were little.

  “No thank you,” I say.

  “Very well,” she says. “Maybe we had better not, anyway. This place is so fancy.”

  Al and I order the exact same thing: salad to start with little nuts, then steak au poivre with French fries and Bearnaise sauce.

  As soon as the waiter turns away from our table, Mummy lets go of her gold locket and says very fast, “Girls, what do you think of Xavier?”

  I stare at the white cloth.

  “He’s okay,” I say.

  Al kicks the table leg and the water in the glasses almost spills. For a second, I thought it was me.

  “What about Daddy?” Al asks.

  “Is Daddy still in Brussels with his lady?” I say.

  Mummy looks down at her plate and twists it round a bit. “Actually, he lives in Paris with Françoise.”

  “You mean he never lived in Brussels?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Where in Paris?” I ask

  “On Rue du Dragon,” Mummy says.

  I imagine a narrow street with a big red dragon sticking out of one building.

  “Xavier and I are going to go away for a few days,” Mummy says.

  “When?” I ask.

  “Tomorrow, just for the week-end.”

  We eat our steak frites in silence. Everyone else is talking and laughing very loudly. The smoke is so thick I can hardly see the people at the table opposite us. I guess I stared too much at them because the man suddenly waved at me.

  We have coffee with vanilla ice cream. Mummy didn’t want to let us have coffee, but then she did.

  The waiter brings the check on a silver plate in a black book with the same red sign on its jacket as the ashtrays. Mummy looks inside her navy blue handbag with the gold H; then she empties it onto the white tablecloth. There’s an old metro ticket, a dirty Kleenex, a blue necklace, a toothpick, and a compact case. She searches through every pocket.

  “Oh dear,” she says. “What are we going to do? I don’t have any money. Not even a carte de credit or check. I suppose I could call Xavier but that would be—”

  “What about Granny?” I ask.

  “She’s probably in bed by now,” Mummy says. “She doesn’t have a car.”

  “Luis—”

  “That would be even worse. Can you imagine—”

  “Maybe if you talk to the manager. Remember the time when we were in Italy and you forgot your handbag at the hotel—” I say.

  “Do you want me to ask him?” Al asks.

  “No, no, darling, that’s very sweet,” Mummy answers. “I suppose I could try.” She looks over at the owner who stands on the other side of the room. He’s got very broad shoulders and his hair is greased. He sees Mummy staring at him and marches over. “Madame, is there a problem with the addition?”

  “Oh no, no,” Mummy says, staring into her handbag. “You see, I seem to have forgotten my wallet. I don’t have any money or carte de credit or even personal checks.”

  For a moment, he doesn’t say anything, but then he whispers, one eyebrow rising. “I suppose we’ll have to put you to work cleaning the dishes.” He laughs, then our mother laughs and I make a pretend laugh. “You two will have to wash the dishes.” He laughs again.

  He places his hand on Mummy’s arm.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I have complete confidence. Your husband is a regular. We haven’t seen him lately. Send him my best regards.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Mummy says, getting up hurriedly from the table. She rushes out of the restaurant with her handbag wide open. The man follows us. “Bonsoir,” he says, holding the door.

  “That was awful. Just awful,” Mummy says.

  It reminds me of the time the police stopped her in Paris and asked for her driving license. All she could find in the glove compartment was a tape that had come unwound. She kept pulling the tape, the gray ribbon growing longer and longer until it was completely unwound. The policeman didn’t give her a ticket in the end.

  “I suppose your father must have gone to that restaurant with Françoise,” she says.

  Al and I don’t say anything. All I can hear is the wind rushing through the windows. The fields are lit by the moon. Now and then I reach out and write something across Al’s palm. We’ve decided to call each other by the same name. We use the name that Mum and Dad used to call each other when they were teasing. Prue and Prue.

  The house is dark except for a light in the living room. Granny is asleep in the blue and white striped chair. She’s snoring very loudly. Al says she can hear it. Mummy can’t decide whether or not to wake her. I say we should because otherwise she’ll get a crick in her neck. “Granny,” I say, placing my hand on her arm as I always do. She opens her arms and Al and I rush into them. She smells of her cream and of apricots. She says the two of us can sleep in her bed. “After all,” she says, “tonight is special.”

  She lets us stay up very late. She makes us laugh by telling us stories about how when she was a young girl she turned down a boy who asked her to marry him because his ears were too big, then she tells us about the time she was on the QEII and this lady said, “Excuse me Ma’am,” pointing to her chest and she looked down and realized that her boob had slipped out of her dress. The funniest story is the one about the bee that landed on this waiter’s head. Granny waved her hand in the air to brush it off and she ended up brushing off his toupee. Al and I didn’t know what a toupee was.

  Fifteen

  Even when Mummy stands in the doorway, half in the sun and half in the shade, I think she’ll change her mind and decide not to go with the doctor after all. She’s wearing her pale peach outfit with the pearl buttons down the front. She reaches up with one hand and touches the two dark red roses pinned to the brim of her hat.

  “I hope I haven’t forgotten anything,” Mummy says, staring over her shoulder into the cool shadowy house. “I’m always forgetting something. Goodbye, Juliet.” She stretches out her right hand but then changes her mind and kisses Juliet lightly on both cheeks.

  “Don’t worry,” Juliet says, as she straightens her collar. She has done her dress up wrong so that there is no buttonhole for the top button.

  “You’re only going for a few days,” Granny says. She places her hand on my shoulder.

  “Even if you have forgotten something, it won’t be the end of the world,” Ethel says.

  Mummy bends over and kisses me. Her cheek is soft like a plum. “You be good and remember that your Mummy loves you.” I hold onto her tight but then I let go. She gets into the car and rolls down the window. “I’ll call every day,” she shouts over the sound of the car. We run alongside and then behind the car. We stop only at the top of the hill. We watch the car cut through gold fields, its back window glinting. It disappears into a dip and reappears a little later before disappearing once more. Al and I walk slowly down the hill, kicking a stone. First I kick the stone, then Al kicks it. We kick it all the way to the gravel courtyard.

  We wander through the garden along the bank of silver willows, past our treehouse. We run through the
field and find a Shetland Pony. He’s wild and won’t let us ride him. He tries to kick us if we come close. Then he disappears.

  Al says we should play in our treehouses, but I tell her that treehouses are for babies. Dolls too. “What about pretend?” she asks.

  “Pretend too,” I say.

  I persuade her that we must get rid of our toys: the big and the small dolls, her toy monkey with the head that falls off and no longer squeaks, and my yellow rabbit that has sponge coming out of his nose. Daddy bought the rabbit for Mummy when I was still in Mum’s stomach. He bought it yellow because he didn’t know if I was going to be a boy or a girl. I tell Al that we can give them a proper burial. We wrap them in Al’s white blanket with the blue flowers and then we place them in a cardboard box and we tie string around it. We dig a hole under a tree in the remains of the burnt house. Then we place the box in the hole. We make a cross out of two sticks. We don’t know any prayers because we haven’t been to church for years. We kneel in the earth and then we cross ourselves the way Catholics do. I say, “au nom du père, du saint esprit” and then I can’t remember the rest.

  “Girls,” Granny calls from across the bank. “Why don’t you come for a swim?” We walk across the lawn with our legs tied together by a string.

  We watch Ethel get into the pool. First, she tests the water with the toes of one foot. Then she bends over and wets her hand which she runs over her chest and arms. She slowly eases herself into the water, and says “Ooh” as she lets herself drop. She swims with her neck straining upwards because she doesn’t want to get her hair wet even though she’s wearing a bright pink cap with plastic leaves. Granny is already swimming. She doesn’t wear a cap. Max follows her up and down the pool, and Juliet lies in the sun in her new bikini.

  Al and I jump in without untying the string from our legs. We don’t even take off our T-shirt and shorts. “Girls,” Juliet says. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “We wanted to see what it would be like to swim with our clothes on,” I say.

  It’s hard swimming with one of your legs attached to someone else’s leg. We splutter and pretend to drown. Then we stay in the shallow part.

  “Juliet, why don’t you come for a swim?” Granny asks.

  “Yes,” Ethel says. “It’s such a hot day.”

  “Juliet doesn’t know how to swim,” I say.

  “Of course I do,” she mutters.

  “If you don’t know how, we could teach you,” Granny says.

  “It’s not that hard, Juliet,” Al says. “You just kick your arms and legs.”

  “I have no use for swimming,” she says.

  “But what if you were on a boat and it got shipwrecked?” I ask.

  “At least come for a dip in the shallow end,” Granny says.

  Juliet’s face is bright red. I thought she was crying but she said it was sweat dripping into her eyes.

  She gets up slowly and walks on tiptoes across the lawn. She dips her foot in the pool. She wets her hand and arms just like Ethel, but then she just stands there.

  “Come on, Juliet,” I say.

  “Come on,” Al says.

  She stares at her shadow in the water, then walks round the side to the ladder. She goes down one step, then another. We all gather around her. I have to keep pushing Max out of the way.

  “That dog,” Juliet says.

  “Yes,” Ethel says. “They never should have allowed him in the pool in the first place.”

  “Let me see,” Granny says. “How should we start?”

  “Juliet must hold onto the side and kick,” I say.

  “Excellent idea,” Granny says.

  Juliet kicks, but so slowly she would drown if she weren’t holding onto the edge.

  “Harder,” I say.

  “Harder,” Al says.

  She kicks a bit faster, but then she says she’s tired. She just wants to relax.

  “The most relaxing is to float on your back,” I say.

  “We’ll hold you,” Al says.

  At first Juliet says she doesn’t want to. I wonder if it reminds her of her brothers forcing her to fall on her back. Then Granny and Ethel say they will help us.

  They hold her shoulders and her head, while we hold her legs.

  “Are you ready?” we ask.

  “Not just yet,” she answers. She doesn’t want to put her head back completely into the water.

  “One. Two. Three.” We let go and she floats. She floats and floats. She looks like a man with her hair all wet and her beaked nose sticking up in the air.

  Al and I untie our string and I tell Granny to play a game of floating. Who can stay the longest floating? Ethel’s the only one who won’t do it because of her hair. We try to turn Max onto his back but he barks and scratches us with his long nails. He climbs out of the pool using the ladder, then lies in the sun licking himself.

  We lie on our backs and float, looking up at the sky. The clouds look like my mother and father. I recognize in one cloud the shape of my father’s nose and his hat, in the edge of another, my mother’s profile. I float for a long time, but when I stand up Juliet is still floating.

  Al and I found all these seeds in the garage for growing flowers. They come in small white packets with the pictures of flowers. We’re going to plant them in the remains of the burnt house, right where we buried our dolls, my yellow rabbit and Al’s monkey and her white blanket. We’re going to put them there even though Granny told us they need to be in the sun. They’re just going to have to grow in the shade. Cemeteries always have flowers. We have a shovel but mostly we use our hands. I like the earth that’s below the surface because it’s cool. I don’t like worms. Al’s in charge of pulling them out and dropping them into a bucket, then emptying the bucket into the river. We spend a long time planting the seeds. We don’t notice Juliet and Luis standing beneath the willow tree until we get up to go back to the house. All we can see are their ankles and their feet. Luis is wearing his black shoes. His feet are on either side of Juliet’s bare feet. We watch Juliet rub the back of her calf with one foot. I think they’re kissing.

  “Come.” Granny says, when I go into her room after her nap. She’s already dressed and sitting in her pink armchair. She shoves her knitting into her green bag and pulls on her straw hat. She grabs my hand and we rush out the door. She stops. The swimming pool is pink, and the sun about to disappear. You can see just a sliver of red. We climb the hill slowly and Granny leans quite heavily on my shoulder, but I don’t mind. We wander through the arcade of trees, up the stone steps covered with moss, past mushrooms which have grown at the foot of trees. I think I hear the sound of wings fluttering, but when I turn there’s only the movement of a branch swinging back into place.

  In the vegetable garden the earth looks orange and the grass blue. A patch of wild strawberries has grown. The tomatoes look as if they’re about to burst. Some have dropped and cracked open. Others are ready to fall. I glance over my shoulder to catch the sun before it dips, but it’s already disappeared. In the distance, through branches, the river flickers gold.

  Usually, Granny kicks off her shoes, but tonight she’s having trouble reaching her toes. I take off first one purple shoe then the other. The purple dye has bled onto her stockinged feet. I help her slide up her skirt and unhook her stockings. As I sit down beside her, she says, “Everything is such an effort when you get old.” She slips one hand down the front of her dress and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She slides one out carefully and reaches into her pocket to take out her silver lighter. She lights her cigarette and inhales deeply.

  She takes my hand and holds it in her other hand. Granny says she knew when she first saw me that we would get along. She says she can tell with people right away. Someone can walk into the same room as her and she can tell whether she will like them or not, before they’ve even spoken. Granny lets me try on her rings. One is green, one is yellow, and one is pale blue.

  “I like the blue one best,” I say.


  “Do you? I think I do too. It’s the one I’ve had the longest time.”

  “Did you buy it or did grandfather?”

  “It happened so long ago,” Granny says. She reaches out and eats a small tomato whole. “Once upon a time there was a very young and foolish girl who fell madly in love with a young man. She disregarded her sisters’ warnings and ran away.”

  “You ran away?”

  “Yes,” she says. “But then I changed my mind.”

  “Why did you change your mind?”

  “I realized I was too young to assume such a responsibility,” she says.

  I think I understand what Granny means and I nod because I love it when she talks to me like a grownup. She talks to me as if I were exactly her own age.

  I try to picture what her first boyfriend looked like, but a photograph of my grandfather comes to mind. He was much older than Granny. He was bald and plump.

  “Would you like me to pick you some strawberries?” I ask Granny.

  “Oh, yes,” Granny says. “That would be lovely.”

  Wild strawberries are Granny’s favorite fruit apart from figs. I walk over to the other side of the garden. I can still see Granny from where I am. She’s moved so that now she’s in the shade of a tree.

  With one hand I hold the hem of my dress, with the other I pick and drop strawberries into my skirt. It’s going to take a long time to pick enough strawberries for the two of us. I think of the trip Granny promised me. I see the QEII, a giant white ship cutting through blue waves, and Granny and me sitting on deck wrapped in blankets and sipping consomme. We’ll go around the world. Sometimes I glance over my shoulder and Granny waves to me and her rings catch the sun. Sometimes she does not see me look at her and I watch her pop another tomato into her mouth. I sing an Afrikaans song that Granny taught me. “Liefste Tannie ons bring rosies. Rosies blink met more dou.”