Here Until August. Josephine Rowe
Maybe so. But in the moments before Madame Ayliffe’s door swings open, before the paramedics shuffle onto the far end of our shared balcony and I know to feel otherwise, the McTell song seems assertive, almost joyous, and I’m happy just to be out here, bare-shouldered, tapping the scissors on my thigh to keep time.
Saturday afternoon, the sun sinking into skin like teeth into kitten-scruff. Everyone placid with it, eyes narrowed to dreamy slits. I’m out here cutting Jody’s hair, Jody docile in a foldout chair with his forearms resting on the balcony railing, head tipped forward so that the snippings fall over the side and are scattered before they reach the courtyard three stories below.
Birds’ll make nests of that, he says.
Not if they have any self-respect.
On the balcony beneath ours, the Yukon Jack girls. Somehow they manage to put that stuff away by the case, just the two of them. Their arguments, along with their heat, rose up through our floorboards all winter. Now they’re a sprawl of legs and magazines. The Husky One and the Unhusky One. We pass them all the time on the stairs. Nodding hello like we never hear them threatening each other, or talking dirty. The ventilation broadcasts everything, indiscriminately, from the weather to sports commentaries to new slang for pussy and whore.
Jody’s listening now while I cut, transfixed by what can be seen of the girls’ bare feet, toes painted fluorescent orange, curled simian around their balcony rails. An outflung arm fanning a copy of Elle Quebec. But they only speak to each other in cool transactions. Just Donne-moi le! and Bouge ta jambe!, and the sound of ice being rummaged around inside a cooler. Nothing juicy or vocabulary boosting.
These first sleeveless days have slunk in late, a full week into May, no less, where we and everyone else have been waiting to pounce on them with dirty laundry and spritzed Aperol. When Jody rode up from Louisiana he was brown and gnarled with odd muscle he’d gained working on his uncle’s bowfishing charter. There were scratches from the baby ice-box alligator still crosshatching his arms. But five months lived in artificial light have left him just as soft and harrowed-looking as the rest of us in Montreal. No one can stand to be inside today, least of all him. Everyone’s out here showing their paled limbs, their unscarved throats, sunning themselves like anemic reptiles. Ash branches are flashing new shoots, gaudy as kids’ jewelry. On someone’s radio they’re warning rain, a real spring soaker, but no one can believe that from here.
Only a fortnight ago the ice rinks were still melting. Already the slackliners have taken over, rigging up their webs all through Parc La Fontaine and wavering from tree to tree with arms outstretched. Already the work crews have been dispatched to patch up roads that fissured open during the deep freeze.
Yesterday I passed a freshly paved square of sidewalk outside the Pharmaprix. A woman had pulled up her stroller and was pressing her baby’s bare feet into the wet cement. Holding him under the arms and sort of dabbing him into the gray paste, while he shrieked in glee, though it was then only 12 degrees in the sun.
Put some shoes on that kid, I almost said but didn’t. I suppose some small, still unbitter part of me recognized that most of us have to take posterity where we can get it.
This apartment is an old one, its radiators mummified under several decades of paint, murmuring like pigeons or clanking like geese, depending on the hour. Marie, my former roommate, took all the curtains with her, and the living room became a big glowing terrarium for anyone who cared to look up from the street. Some of her things still haunt the rooms; enough to sleep on, sit in, cook with, drink from. There’s a recipe for banana crepes in her handwriting, taped inside one of the kitchen cupboard doors, and the bathroom cabinet still smells faintly of her vitamin C. The lease is good until Canada Day, which Montreal reassigns as Moving Day and celebrates by hauling furniture up and down treacherous external stairwells in drenching heat. When July rolls around I can either sell this stuff on to the next tenants, or post it online, or I can chop it all down into matchsticks and toss them into the alleyway: Marie said she really couldn’t give a shit.
It wasn’t anything personal. As the city shook its fiery coat of leaves a dread had crept into Marie’s heart, curled up snug, and refused to budge. Midway through October she dropped out of Life Sciences and then out of Quebec.
Marie believed she was blessed, and who knows, maybe she was. As a parting gift she blessed me a thumbprint-sized piece of scallop shell and told me it would lead me to providence. I carried it around in my coat pocket the rest of fall and into winter, worrying at it until all the ridges had worn down and it was fingernail-smooth. How many years of ocean, of tumbling waves would that have taken? I felt mighty as the sea, having worn it down like that with only my nervous energy. Now what? I would’ve asked Marie, but by then she had moved back to Renfrew. I was alone with the sound of the radiator and other lives coughing through the walls.
Now and then my mother called from not-even-Oshawa, sounding more and more, to my sharpening ear, like a complete hoser. This appraisal treacherously failed to acknowledge her raising me on Anne Carson and Japanese stoneware and black lava salt, tastes that could only just be sustained with a single, part-time income in public health. She had looked into a lot of hideous mouths to see me through McGill, as she was so fond of reminding me. I’d taken a gap year in Mexico, followed by a second gap year nurturing an acquired taste for eighties telenovelas, and finally my mother said that if I didn’t use the tuition money to learn something she was going to take her girlfriend to see the Panama Canal.
But I, too, dropped out of university, out of Life Sciences. In a misjudged effort at gratitude, I held out until mid-November: two weeks past the refund deadline. Making a farewell round of the preserved sea creatures and fetuses lined up in jars, their eyes and nostrils still sealed, I decided not to tell my mother, not yet. (I could pay her back, I promised her, inwardly. She would escape to Panama, after all.) I stayed on in the city, picking up a job folding towels and refreshing rooms at a fancy day spa I could never have afforded to visit. It was the best I could do, and maybe a little better than I could do. I might have fared all right in France, but I barely had enough French to be a waitress here.
The job meant waking at 6:45 every weekday. The apartment next door would already be lit up with French radio. Proof of life over there, behind the complex alarm system that seemed excessive and out of place in our semi-decrepit graystone. Just what are they fortifying? I wondered. Meth lab. Snuff set. Storehouse for rare smuggled reptiles. But as far as I could tell the sole occupant was a flossy old thing who rarely left her apartment. We shared a balcony, though, and once or twice I’d seen her out there, wind lifting her hair to show a high forehead of dark-veined porcelain, the exiled contessa of some vanished nation. The first time we exchanged words, she’d shuffled out wearing only a quilted paisley housecoat to glare towards the mountain. Nearly all of the leaves had fallen from the trees, and now the view was clear to the lurid cross.
T’es encore là? She spoke to the cross, not to me. To me she said, Il te faut un casque, and knocked on her fragile head.
Marie had taken her helmet but left her bicycle, and each morning I carried it downstairs and clattered it over the fissured streets towards the day spa on a route that still took me past Leonard Cohen’s house. If my mother called I’d make a point of telling her this, that every morning I rode past Leonard Cohen’s house, evidence that I was still studying.
I spent the first weeks of winter alone, wandering the apartment’s half-empty rooms. Its windows are the old sash kind that mean trouble in the winter, but in the kitchen there are panels of colored glass that shoot red and amber oblongs across the floor when the sun finds the sweetest angle, so it feels kind of warm even when it isn’t. One morning I stood there, moving my hand through red light to gold, thinking: This is the kind of window where if you just stand for long enough, somebody will come and put their hand on your shoulder. Whoever it is you’ve been waiting for. Then my phone rang, and my heart kicked, but it was only an automated female voice congratulating me on a free trip to the Bahamas. I listened to the spiel of promises, thinking how someone had gone into a studio and recorded these words, understanding how they’d be used.