Coming Up for Air Read online

  ‘I used to hunt for lucky stones on the shore,’ she said, one Sunday in August. We were sitting on a bench close to the Pont Royal, the river air boggy and humid. Working boats passed on the water, powered by oar or steam or sail, carrying coal, linen, flour, timber. Birds made a racket of cheeps and squawks and there was the clop and ricket of carriages above us on the quay. ‘A lucky stone is white and smooth; without any blemishes. It has a hole through its centre.’

  ‘Did you find any?’ I asked.

  ‘One.’

  ‘And did it bring good luck?’

  ‘The perfect stone is meant to bring a husband. Children.’

  It had rained all the night before, and this morning the sun was strong. Water dripped from the acacias and steamed from the veins between the cobbles. My scalp prickled under the weight of my hat.

  Madame Debord pulled at the ruffles of her collar and stared out at the water for a long time, then began to speak again. She told me she had been pregnant seven times. Out of those seven, four babies died in the womb. Out of the three who were born, two died within hours. One, the only one whom she named, lived for twelve days. All of this before Madame Debord reached the age of twenty-six. During this time, Madame Debord told me, she tried everything to keep her babies alive. She travelled to Plombières-les-Bains to bathe in a pool fed from an underground spring. The water, naturally heated and iron-rich and rust-coloured, like diluted blood, was said to be a cure for barrenness or other faults in the reproductive system. She changed the whole of her lifestyle, stayed away from loud noises or ruckuses of any kind. She stayed away from crowds.

  ‘Any excitement is bad for an unborn child,’ she said. ‘A woman is more prone to falling when she’s pregnant. She’s more sensitive to pandemonium and ill feelings of any kind. A baby in the womb is like uncooked bread, and any negative thoughts will affect him the same way the baker’s hand can misshape his dough.’

  One doctor told her the babies were dying because her womb was too hot, so she ate only blandly cooked food – chicken boiled down to broth, or stews of lettuce and sorrel and spinach. She bathed in ice water. But later, another doctor declared the womb was too cold so she switched to salted venison and hot, steamy baths.

  She was fortunate to have survived any of this, fortunate that her husband could afford doctors at all. She told me about Ambrose, the baby who lived for twelve days.

  ‘Mon chou,’ she said, my sweetie.

  All this talk reminded me of what I knew about the bloody howling of my own birth, and I stopped listening to Madame. On the river, a weave of rubbish – blackened vegetables and dirty foam, sticks and weeds – passed by, undulating over small waves. When I turned my attention back to Madame Debord, she had her hands at her chest, palpating the area above her breasts in the way a kitten might press its mother’s abdomen to encourage the flow of milk.

  ‘You cannot imagine the pain,’ she said, her dark, nocturnal eyes looking somewhere I couldn’t fathom. ‘A day or two after Ambrose was gone, my breasts became inflamed with milk and something else much worse. I wanted so badly for this to kill me.’

  I gently pulled her hands down to her lap.

  ‘I was kept alive to furnish two more miscarriages and to watch my husband die.’ She stopped talking, pulled at her pearl earring. After a few moments, she raised her chin, clasped her hands together in her lap. ‘I suppose we should carry on,’ she said, and lifted her hand to me so I could help her from the bench.

  Not long after we started walking down the river path, a woman several paces away called out to Madame. She was coming quickly towards us, the hem of her lilac skirt damp with rainwater. Frantically, she waved a rolled newspaper in the air, trying to get our attention. She was very tall, several years younger than Madame, and moved as if there were a wooden board fastened along her back and neck. She approached us, smelling strongly of rosewater perfume. Madame Debord stiffened against my side as this woman placed both hands on Madame’s shoulders and kissed the air beside each of her cheeks. The woman glanced at me, waiting to be introduced. When no introduction came, she spoke, breathless. ‘So this is your new girl, then?’

  Madame Debord nodded. Her expression was vacant, half formed, like a drawing that had been scribbled in charcoal by a toddler.

  I was about to make an excuse, to get us away from this woman, whoever she was.

  And then.

  A girl, my age, appeared at the woman’s shoulder. A little bit taller than me, a face broad and open, cheeks flushed. She wore a lime-green, checked blouse and a tie at her neck, and a simple, pearl-grey skirt, appropriate for walking. Her clothes were understated and respectful, but everything about her physical self was plush, exaggerated. Her eyes bigger than eyes should be and they were silty, liquid brown. Full lips, thick, dark hair pulled back into a chignon, but curly, difficult to keep under rule. She had the countenance of someone used to getting her way.

  This. This was her. This was the moment we met.

  The woman pivoted to the side and nudged the girl forward, towards Madame. ‘May I introduce you to my niece, Axelle Paquet. Axelle has come from Provence to live with us. She’s working in the perfumery department in La Samaritaine. Isn’t that exciting? You enjoy it so much, don’t you, Axelle?’ The woman turned to me. ‘Have you seen their window displays? La Samaritaine? They’re extraordinary.’

  I had. Impossible to miss. A lot of shine and glitter. Vacant busts displaying hairpieces – fountains of hair. Headless, hourglass torsos tied up to the point of suffocation in expensive corsets. Rows of brass-buckled boots, feathered hats, embroidered linens and sprays of silverware. I’d seen the displays of all the grands magasins and learned that their effect was to leave me feeling empty, regarding articles I would never possess, articles I hadn’t even known I’d wanted to begin with. I looked at Axelle Paquet but her gaze was downwards, bored.

  ‘It’s so lovely to see you outside, Madame Debord, enjoying the fresh air,’ the woman said. ‘Cooped up indoors is bad for the circulation. I get out for at least an hour every day, even in poor weather.’ She continued to prattle, her voice rising. She spoke further about the benefits of fresh air and demonstrated her point with a story about the ill health of a neighbour, a newspaperman, who was now dying of tuberculosis. ‘Too much time in an office,’ she said. Words cascaded from her mouth and I looked again at Axelle. This time, she looked back, widened her eyes in ridicule towards her aunt. I bit my bottom lip against a smile.

  ‘Such a thing as excessive fresh air, though,’ reported Madame Debord. Where her fingers rested on the inside of my arm I felt a gentle pinch. ‘We really must be on our way.’

  ‘Ah,’ the woman said, ‘of course.’ She turned to me and smiled. ‘Take care.’

  We said our goodbyes and Madame pulled me away, and, after we’d walked for a minute, I looked back, if I could just see Axelle Paquet again. But they were gone.

  * * *

  That evening, as Madame sipped her brandy in bed, she told me the woman by the river was a cousin of her late husband, and she hadn’t introduced me because she was, officially, no longer speaking to anyone in his family.

  ‘They tried to send me to an asylum,’ she said, her voice heavy. ‘Once, after Ambrose, then again, after the others. They were all party to it.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ I said.

  She looked at me, eyes drowsy from the liquor, slightly defeated. ‘That niece of hers,’ she said, ‘Axelle What-Have-You. Coquette.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ I said. Deep inside, somersaults.

  * * *

  The following Friday, though I was already late getting home, I stopped in front of La Samaritaine. My basket was heavy with bread, eggs, a bottle of cream and a head of lettuce, and I pushed with some awkwardness through a crowd that stood gaping at the front windows, gaping as if the mannequins behind the glass were not made of wood and
plaster but were instead live actors on a stage. After some tussle, I passed through a heavy set of doors into the magasin. An atrium like a cathedral. Glass and iron railings and level upon level of commerce. An alarming array of pomp and shine. There were pairs of women floating along the aisles, dining together or sitting alone, reading. Chatting. None of it impressed me. I was approached by a young girl in a blue striped smock who offered assistance to my shopping experience, and I asked her the whereabouts of the perfumery. She insisted on walking me there, towards the back of the ground floor.

  When I saw Axelle, I wasn’t at first sure if it was her, but then she turned and there was her profile, the slope of her round cheek. She spoke to someone I couldn’t see, then cocked her ear to listen and nodded, then bent low to some task. Shoppers brushed past me as I stood there, a fool, unable to breathe. She stood again and I was about to leave but she saw me, narrowed her eyes, then, recognition. A smile and a wave. I had no choice but to approach the counter. The air was spicy with lavender, rose and the almondy whiff of heliotrope.

  ‘You’ve come to see me,’ she said. Behind her, shelves extended the height of the wall, stacked neatly with small glass vials of scent, each labelled with a rectangle of white paper.

  ‘I was looking for stockings,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense!’ She pinched my elbow. ‘You’ve come to see me. You want to make friends and I wouldn’t blame you. Life with your Madame must be deadly boring.’

  ‘On the contrary.’

  ‘Hm.’ She studied me for a moment, tapping one finger against her lips. She turned and walked up and down the aisle of perfumes, selected a bottle, then another, and then hovered over yet another but changed her mind and came back. She carefully pulled the wooden stoppers out of the two bottles and placed them on the counter between us. ‘Hand?’

  I gave her my hand. She undid the cuff buttons of my blouse and rolled it back to expose the white belly of my arm, then tipped one of the bottles just at the spot on my wrist where a thick, bluish vein branched off into smaller tributaries, and held the bottle there until a drop of amber oil fell from the spout. She rubbed the oil into my skin with the knuckle of her middle finger.

  ‘Other hand,’ she said.

  On my other wrist, same procedure, different scent.

  ‘It takes a moment for the oil to settle into the skin. On you, one scent will have a very different odour than it would on another woman. Stay here a little longer and we’ll know which is best.’

  So. I stayed a little longer.

  12

  Anouk

  A Mennonite Farm, 1987

  The last week of that summer, the summer of the wasp trap, Anouk and Nora and Red did the long drive to Toronto for Anouk’s appointment at the specialist clinic. Red drove and Anouk watched the familiar pass by the window: craggy walls of Canadian Shield rock that had been blasted open with dynamite when the road was built, in some places painted with decades-old graffiti; mixed forest of birch and pine, fir and maple. Swamps and bog land where dead pines, which looked as if they’d been scorched then cooled to ash, protruded out of water that was clogged with algae, lilies and milfoil. They passed a hundred lakes and they passed gas stations where you could buy gun ammunition and marshmallows and beer; they passed hand-painted signs for fresh strawberries, blueberries and corn.

  Somewhere in the farmland north of Peterborough, where the fields rolled with wheat and corn and where aluminum-sided barns glinted in the sun, Red stopped at the mouth of a long driveway, which led to a Mennonite farm, because there was a sign he hadn’t seen before. Duck Eggs For Sale Here, the sign said.

  ‘These folks usually stay away from the rest of us,’ Red said, excited. ‘We can’t not go in.’

  ‘They only want to sell eggs,’ Nora said.

  ‘It’s an invitation,’ said Red, reversing the car so he could make the tight turn into the driveway. ‘And anyway, you’ve never had a duck egg. They’re delicious.’ Still reversing, his hand on the back of Nora’s seat, he turned his face to Anouk. ‘They’re blue,’ he said to her, as if this fact proved his point.

  Later, Anouk wrote about the Mennonite farm in her notebook. She wrote about the closed gate at the top of the road, and how she had to get out of the car and use the entire weight of her body to open it. She wrote about the barn with a green roof, and the horse buggy in front of the barn with no horse. She wrote about the garden, the beefsteak tomatoes hanging heavy on the vine, and the purple, blooming cabbages.

  She wrote: Me and Dad stood at the bottom of the porch steps and there was not a single sound on that farm. No chickens or horses or wind. The world just stopped. I said Dad there’s no one here but Dad walked up the steps anyway and knocked on the front door.

  She wrote about what she knew of Mennonites, what she’d seen. Horse buggies on the road. Men in neat black suits and hats and ties. Women in bonnets, no make-up, blue collars all the way up to their chins. About this, she wrote: When we’re stuck behind them in our cars we’re like horseflies near their heads. They’ll ignore us unless we get too close.

  She wrote about how she walked up on to the porch with her dad and stuck her nose against the screen door and smelled wood oil, and baking, and the wax of a candle recently blown out. This was the moment she decided that she would write about the Mennonite farm. It was those smells coming on a breeze from somewhere deep inside the house and the subsequent thoughts of sepia faces in old photographs. Women’s tiny hands peeping out of puffy sleeves. Buckles and lace and men with sculpted facial hair. With her nose pressed against the screen door, Anouk touched time.

  Red gave up. And when they turned around to go back to the car, there was a ghost. Anouk wrote about this too, a ghost standing at the bottom of the porch steps. She wore a cap over her hair, and the back of her cap was tied with ribbon. She wore a cotton dress down to her ankles, black leather boots and a blue apron with pockets.

  The girl, not a ghost, led Anouk and Red around the side of the house to a pantry at the back, and Anouk wrote about the jars of peaches and pickles and jams, and she wrote about how the girl’s leather boots scuffed on the soft, wooden floorboards. She wrote about the goosebumps that rose on her arms when she heard the sound of leather boots scuffing on soft, wooden floorboards.

  The eggs cost two dollars for a dozen. Red didn’t have any money and Anouk also wrote about this, about having to go back to the car and get money from her mom, who was sitting with the car door open, her leg stretched out and her bare heel in the dirt, and Bruce Springsteen playing on the car radio. She wrote about how, when the girl came around from the back of the house, Bruce Springsteen noise was being pitched about like the silver ball in a pinball machine. It pinged against the side of the barn, and against the front of the house. It pinged against the horse buggy with its horse bits resting in the dirt. It pinged against the tomatoes and the cabbages. And then Nora couldn’t find any money in her pockets, so Red dove into the car and fumbled across her lap to look in the glove compartment, and Nora said oh for fuck’s sake when Red yelled eureka and backed out of the car waving a two-dollar bill all over the place.

  Anouk wrote about how, when all this was going on, she looked at the girl and the girl had turned her face towards the cornfield beyond the barn, looking as if she were prepared to stand there for all of time if she had to.

  * * *

  Twenty kilometres beyond the farm, they stopped at a roadside chip truck for poutine before turning on to the eight-lane highway that would drag them like a riptide into Toronto. Anouk took a handful of enzyme pills, and she and Nora and Red sat at a picnic table to eat, the glossy brown paint of it peeling off in tiny filings that stuck to the backs of their bare legs.

  The sun was hot, the sky hazy and yellow. There was no wind, only the odd shush of a passing car and the creak of insects rubbing their legs together in the dry roadside grass.

  Nora looked at her wa
tch. ‘We’ll be late doing your physio.’

  Anouk shrugged.

  Nora stared at her. Swiped a gravy-soft fry, sloppy with cheese, from Anouk’s paper cone of poutine. ‘You feel Okay?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Red said.

  ‘You won’t always have us around to check the time, you know.’

  On the ground in front of the table, Anouk spotted the corpse of a dead mouse, pounded foetal into the cement like chewing gum. She slid off the picnic table and crouched down to inspect the mouse and all its parts, perfectly preserved as if under a glass plate. Precise claws, curved tail, the divots in the cheeks that sprouted white whiskers, and the whiskers themselves. Only things missing were the eyes. Dried out or pecked out. She pointed one finger out to touch it.

  ‘Don’t,’ Nora snapped. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  Back in the car, Anouk opened the carton of duck eggs. They could have been described as blue, she wrote later, but only because blue was the closest you could get. It was the same as describing the veins on the insides of your wrists as blue. There had to be a better name for that colour. She just didn’t know yet what it was.

  13

  Anouk