Madeleine lays down QUEER for a triple word score.
Her mother doesn’t bat an eye, merely says, “That’s more like,” and counts, tapping each tile with a long buffed nail. “Forty-two points.”
“Maman, you’re not smoking.” That’s what’s different about tonight.
“I quit.”
“When?”
“Today.” They play.
“XI?”
“It’s an ancient Chinese coin.”
They switch to speaking French at some point. At least, Mimi does; Madeleine limps along half and half. But she understands every word. A rough translation: “For years after we lost your brother I used to pray that I might receive a letter one day from a Vietnamese girl. I imagined that she would say, ‘I have his child. Your grandchild. May I come see you?’ And she would move here with her child — a little boy — and we would all live together. She would be my daughter-in-law. Very pretty. Long dark hair, sweet-natured. She would speak French of course, and we would become the best of friends. Her child would grow up with her and your father and me, and … we’d all live happily ever after. And then — I don’t know, maybe only last year — after your papa had his heart attack”—here Mimi pauses to wipe her eyes and Madeleine hands her a box of tissues—“I realized that this young woman I was making up … this sweet girl with the long dark hair, she was my daughter. And that”—Mimi sucks in a breath through her mouth, unlipsticked at this hour—“I already have … a beautiful daughter.”
Mimi holds the tissue to her eyes. Madeleine reaches across the Scrabble board and takes her mother’s hand.
When she was set to return to Toronto the following week, Madeleine put her bag into the trunk in the front of her VW, closed the lid and called Winnie, who was leaning against Mimi’s legs in the doorway of the condo.
Mimi reached down and stroked the helmet-head. “Madeleine, do you mind if I hang onto her for a little while?”
“… You want to keep her?”
Mimi began to rev up: “I’m a woman alone, a dog is good protection—”
“Maman, it’s fine. But you have to give her back when Olivia comes home.”
“Olivia? Oh yes, your Spanish friend.”
“Not really, she’s just in Latin America at the moment.”
“Oh”—baby-talking to the dog—“then she won’t mind, will she? Will she, hein? Will she, will she. Ça ne dérange personne, non? Non, non, non, non—”
“Maman?”
Mimi looked up again.
“I’ll call you when I get home.”
Madeleine pulled away, a cooler in the back seat filled with enough food to feed an Acadian family for a week.
HIGH FLIGHT
WHEN JACK DIED, a large white bird rose and departed through the ceiling of the fully serviced condo in the suburbs of Ottawa. Camouflaged by cottony clouds, it caught a warm updraft and soared higher and higher. Wingspan of an eagle, ocean ease of a gull, white bird of great good fortune, it ascended….
… slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
“Look at that,” said Jack, pointing up. It was before he and Mimi moved into the condo. It was after they found out Mike was missing. It was before hope began to wane. Madeleine was surging with the dark joy of imminent blast-off into the world far from this suburb.
“It’s a glider,” said Jack.
A white airplane. Silent. Slow. Wings long and tapered, clean and unencumbered by engines. It banked and looped unhurriedly.
“Now, that’s flying.”
He licked his ice cream — rum ’n’ raisin. Madeleine, hers. Neopolitan — best of all worlds.
“Want a lick?”
“Thanks Dad, that’s really good.”
They watched as the craft arced upward, decelerating, offering its smooth breast to the sky before swooning back into the arms of gravity, as trusting, as brave as an animal or a child.
“You know, old buddy, you can be anything you want to be.”
And when Dad said it, she knew it was true.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
PRÊTE-MOI TA PLUME, POUR ÉCRIRE UN MOT
But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
EVERYONE KNEW THAT Ricky had changed his name, but Madeleine would have remained comfortably ignorant of his new one had Auriel not said they. In that instant it arrived unbidden in Madeleine’s mind. Colleen and Ricky’s original name. How many Pellegrims could there be in Canada?
The name lay there like a smooth stone collected on holiday. She put it in a drawer of her desk and got back to work, back to her life. She turned on her computer. She put paper in the printer. She sat down and started writing.
What business are you in?
The funny business.
She phoned Shelly every ten minutes, reading her funny stuff. Then stuff that was not so funny, to which Shelly said, “No, keep it for now. It’ll get there, you just don’t know how yet.” They got together every couple of days so Madeleine could try stuff out. Stuff that didn’t require “stuff.”
What are you selling?
Stories.
From time to time she came across the smooth stone. Upon opening her desk drawer in search of a pencil, a paperclip. Sometimes it cropped up in the cutlery drawer among the knives, in the medicine cabinet, under the couch — she had bought a couch. And a bed. Her friends had held a breakup shower for her. Even Christine had given her a gift, a Braun hand mixer. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.
A week after she got home, Madeleine sat cross-legged on her old Persian carpet, eschewing her new club chair, and called longdistance information.
“For what city?”
“Winnipeg.”
“For what name?”
“Marjorie Nolan.”
“Thank you, here’s your number—”
She grabbed a pen and wrote the number on her hand.
She waited until six-thirty central time.
A woman answered, “Hello?”—querulous voice, not Marjorie’s.
“May I speak with Marjorie please?”
A rustling as the woman lowered the receiver, her voice a muffled complaint, “It’s for you-ou …,” followed by a clunk of receiver against table or floor.