A Boring Wife Settles the Score Read online

  Also by Marie-Renée Lavoie (in translation)

  Autopsy of a Boring Wife

  Mister Roger and Me

  Titre original: Diane demande un recomptage par Marie-Renée Lavoie

  * * *

  Copyright © 2020, Les Éditions XYZ Inc.

  English translation copyright © 2021 by Arielle Aaronson

  First published in French as Diane demande un recomptage in 2020 by Les Éditions XYZ

  First published in English in Canada in 2021 and the USA in 2021

  by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  * * *

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students and readers with print disabilities.

  25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: A boring wife settles the score / Marie-Renée Lavoie ; translated by Arielle Aaronson.

  Other titles: Diane demande un recomptage. English

  Names: Lavoie, Marie-Renée, 1974– author. | Aaronson, Arielle, translator.

  Description: Translation of: Diane demande un recomptage.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200371428 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200371495 | ISBN 9781487009373 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487009380 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487009397 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8623.A8518 D5313 2021 | DDC C843/.6—dc23

  Text design: Sara Loos

  Typesetting: Lucia Kim

  * * *

  House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

  * * *

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Action Plan for Official Languages — 2018–2023: Investing in Our Future, for our translation activities.

  1

  In which I do a little math

  Life is much too complex for a person’s age to accu­rately reflect the number of years they’ve lived. Merely adding up the days seems to me outrageously simplistic. A ten-year-old stuck in a war-torn country is ancient. An old person who has spent a lifetime navel-gazing is basically a teenager in a wrinkly body. For decades, plenty of adults have lingered over the saccharine joys of adolescence with nobody keeping an eye on the stopwatch. Humans evolve in dimensions that exist beyond the laws of time, math be damned. Poor Einstein.

  I know a few people in their fifties (insert name here) who have yet to mature beyond age twenty or so. Occasionally, the people we think are flush with wisdom and therefore immune to the whims of youth take prodigious — and completely unexpected — leaps backward, landing on a snake and tumbling down the board. These regressions are as common as a cold, and though shrinks have formulated a great number of theories with complicated names to explain the phenomenon, I believe this theorizing attributes an overblown sense of importance to it. The regressions are nothing more than brain farts settling in toxic miasmas over everyone around.

  Yet for these men and women, as for everyone else, time marches on, undistracted. Which makes sense: for society to run smoothly, people, like cars, can exist only as a function of their age. We need to be able to rank them, collect statistics, and set insurance premiums. But I’ve done the math and I’ve decided that the shadow cast by the big five-oh, hovering over me since my last birthday, is cruelly lacking in nuance.

  2

  In which I treat my feet

  and eat cassoulet

  My family doctor died. Doctors die like everyone else, the poorly shod shoemakers. You can’t evade the Grim Reaper like the taxman, can’t worm your way out of dying. Everyone has to pay their dues. Pity, though. He was a good soul and should have earned a deferral. I say that very selfishly.

  While I waited to be assigned to someone new, I put my faith in the good graces of a walk-in clinic taking NFD (“no family doctor”) patients of all stripes adding to the burden of a system already struggling with our extended lifespans. But I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to do something about my desiccated feet, their heels cracked and bleeding. The ointments and creams I’d bought on everyone’s recommendation hadn’t done a thing. The dry patch dried some more and grew, threatening to spread to the rest of my body, already lying fallow since Jacques had left me.

  As I sat in a waiting room full of people who seemed sicker than me, I started questioning the urgency of my visit. I remember feeling the same way any time one of the kids was hurt. Between arriving at the clinic in a panic — a worried mother making loud and forceful demands — convinced that my child required immediate care, and hearing our name called over the PA, my conviction would transform itself into the belief that I was unnecessarily bogging down the system and stealing an appointment from someone who was truly sick. Everyone knows kids always feel better once they’re in the waiting room. On this day, when I realized that it would take several hours for A-74 to be called, I was initially furious — half my taxes go to health care, for crying out loud! — until I remembered, just before turning into a cranky old woman, that I hadn’t paid taxes since being laid off a few months earlier. So I dutifully sat and waited. It’s not like I had anywhere else to go.

  The man sitting opposite me was sound asleep, arms crossed, lower lip hanging. It was only a matter of time before he started drooling. I’ve always been amazed by just how easily men sleep in public. They’re able to doze off in a crowd, whether at a meeting, in the middle of a baptism or a play, or at a Senate assembly. At the last Chamber of Commerce gala I’d been to, one of the deputy ministers fell asleep onstage. But instead of being offended, people look at them tenderly (“Just let him be, the poor man’s tired.”). Women, however, rarely if ever sleep in public. They’re too busy keeping up appearances, an obsession they’ve been saddled with since childhood and that compels them to poison themselves for the rest of their lives. We rush to wake women when they doze off inadvertently (“We can’t let her look crazy!”) and anticipate their excuses (“I was just resting my eyes.”). It’s always the same old story: women who drink, smoke, and snooze on the job are vulgar and weak, but men who indulge in the same things are real men. The day we truly address gender equality is the day we think it’s cute when a woman nods off at a family party. My daughter, Charlotte, doesn’t think we’ll make any progress so long as women keep saying “my housework isn’t done” instead of “the housework isn’t done.”

  By the time my number was called, my phone had been dead for an hour and a half and I’d paged through all the tattered gossip magazines lying around. I hadn’t learned anything of substance, other than that celebrities marry and unmarry more frequently than regular people do and that the Kardashians make a lot of babies — oh, and that Demi Moore has saggy knees. I bet her plastic surgeon has since resolved the aesthetic issue that threatened to label her a dog.

  I was directed toward a small examination room, where a young nurse came to check my blood pressure, pulse, and weight.

  “Is my weight really necessary?”

  “Have you stepped on a scale recently?
”

  “Uh . . . no.”

  Obviously, like all women who wished they didn’t give a damn, I knew how much I weighed to the ounce. I just didn’t want to say it out loud, to hear it echo against the beige walls of the broom closet where — I probably should have said as much — I’d only come for a miracle foot cream. But I’m a good sport, so I stripped down and closed my eyes as I stepped onto the obnoxious scale. Denial is just another form of defense. I couldn’t have been more than twenty-five pounds from happiness, so what point was there in ruining my day?

  “Are you running a fever?”

  “No.”

  “What are you here for?”

  “My heels.”

  “Your heels?”

  “Yes.”

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “They’re so dry they’ve started to crack and bleed all over. They aren’t too painful, but I look like a leper when I go out like this. I’ve tried every cream imaginable.”

  She was taking notes with codes and abbreviations, as if the bloody heel branch of medicine had its own jargon. I should have told myself I was in good hands, but instead I just felt foolish. A tattoo of small interwoven flowers encircled her wrist and disappeared beneath the sleeve of her uniform. Maybe her back was covered with a tangle of indiscreet stems thrusting their flowers into her body’s most intimate folds.

  “Any other issues?”

  “Oh, lots, but nothing medical.”

  She smiled politely, like when someone asks a waitress what she ate “to get so pretty.” Funny, old woman, real funny.

  The doctor entered a few minutes later looking altogether unimpressed, as if he was already aware I’d come in for something silly. He was greying around the temples, his eyes were marked by crow’s feet, and he had the deep facial furrows of someone who could stand to gain a few pounds. He was easily pushing sixty. I imagined him slouched in a wing chair, its carved legs sitting on a bearskin rug, a glass of bourbon in one hand.

  “Ms. . . . Delaunais?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So this is about your . . . heels?”

  “Yes, the ones on my feet.”

  “Well, that’s good, I don’t know of any other kind.”

  “Hah.”

  “Have a seat, little lady.”

  “I’m sure it’s no big deal, I just want a prescription-strength cream. My heels are so dry they keep cracking and bleeding all the time, and the over-the-counter stuff isn’t working.”

  I climbed the stepstool and lowered my little-lady bum onto the white paper I hoped was clean. Just the thought of sitting on discharge left by other patients made my stomach turn. I was wearing the skinny jeans I’d bought with Charlotte the year before, which made it difficult to lift my leg and show him the back of my right foot, the worse of the two.

  “Let’s take a look.”

  “Of course it’s not bleeding now, I haven’t done much today . . .”

  “That’s enough, you can put your shoes back on.”

  “Oh! Already? You had enough time to —”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He was already writing something in my file. Some gibberish in an illegible cursive. If I’d known it would be this easy, I would have simply sent a photo.

  “It seems like you’re familiar with this . . . Does it have a name?”

  “Housewife syndrome.”

  He said it like you’d spit out a hair stuck to your tongue, shrugging his shoulders ever so slightly as if to say, Let’s call a spade a spade.

  “Women who don’t work never wear socks. They walk around all day in slippers or sandals. Their skin doesn’t have a chance to rehydrate, so it dries out and cracks over time.”

  His words, buoyed by an undercurrent of scorn, conjured up a list of offensive “synonyms” for the gender term in question — small fry, unpaid nanny, second-class citizen, woman who looks like something the cat dragged in — that fortunately drowned out the life-saving image of the sledgehammer I kept in the front hall closet for emergencies such as this. Knowing it was in close reach had a calming, reassuring, Gandhifying effect.

  “Here’s a prescription for a cream. Apply it morning and evening, and wear socks two or three days a week. It won’t take long for you to see results.”

  I allowed myself one tiny act of vengeance, a childish one that did me a world of good. He needed an Ethics 101 class to understand that it took a shamefully narrow mind to equate “housewife” with “woman who doesn’t work,” but nevertheless I settled for a compliment as I was leaving.

  “It’s very noble of you to continue practising medicine, even past retirement age. We’re in such need of frontline doctors.”

  The smile he offered in response was strangely similar to the kind my friend Claudine reserves for her daughter Adèle at her most infuriating. In teen-speak, rife with scatological references some kids never grow out of, it’s called a “need-to-shit smile.” I said goodbye, waving the white flag with my prescription. Whatever you do, seek peace. That’s what I taught the kids.

  Out in the waiting room, the man was still sleeping, his D-49 ticket clasped between his thumb and index finger. D-53 was blinking on the screen. A sleeping man is so adorable.

  I met Claudine at La Casserole, a cute little French bistro a stone’s throw away from the duplex we’d bought together a few months after my separation. She lived on the ground floor with her daughter Adèle — Laurie, her older daughter, had since moved in with her boyfriend. I was on the second floor with Cat-in-the-box, a.k.a. Steve, my three-legged pet, who was unafraid of the stairs. The bistro’s cassoulet had healing properties that could mend most of life’s misfortunes, and in just a few months we’d used it to repair our broken hearts and souls so often that our waistlines had expanded — we’d burn the weight off in spin class or boot camp at some point or another.

  “There must be an actual name for it! You should have sent him packing.”

  “I did one better . . .”

  “Hey! Before I forget — happy-hour Thursday night at Igloo.”

  “Eh . . .”

  “Oh come on, J.P. will be there.”

  “So what? He’s married!”

  “He’s still fun to look at.”

  “That just annoys me more than anything.”

  “Oh come! The new guy should be there, too.”

  “Fabio?”

  Claudine couldn’t imagine making out with a Fabien, so we’d changed his name slightly to give it a sexier feel. The server arrived carrying our steaming stoneware bowls on a thick wooden board.

  “Watch out, ladies!”

  The exposed parts of the ham shoulder, salt pork, sausages, and duck confit had gently browned to perfection inside the wood-fired oven. A thin, greasy film covered the bean stew, and I was ready to plunge my fork between the pieces of carrot and utterly sacrilegious leeks — I once saw a French tourist crossing himself at the sight — the better to savour the aroma’s meaty swirls through my nose. Claudine’s daughters, unwaveringly vegetarian, refused to set foot in the place as the smells alone would lead them to betray their convictions. My salivary glands were working in overdrive, helping to break down the molecules of such an unholy (but Lord, how exquisite!) quantity of calories. The downside: I’d never make it to the Paris-Brest dessert.

  “Should I bring you another glass of Cahors?”

  “No choice, I’m afraid.”

  Paradoxically, with a glass of “fat-cutter” (as our host liked to call it) to highlight the wine’s utility, the meal seemed less decadent — reasonable, almost; the liquor was more than an accompaniment to the dish, it also served as a remedy. And we were good patients.

  “So, how about you?”

  “Shitty day.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just got back from Adèle’s school.” br />
  “Oh boy . . .”

  “The fruit of my womb is suspended for three days.”

  “ALREADY? The school year just started!”

  “She wears frayed jeans that aren’t permitted, crop tops that aren’t permitted, shoes with wheels that aren’t permitted, and she talks to her teachers just like she talks to me. To give you some idea . . .”

  “Shoes with wheels?”

  “Her dad brought them back from the States. Perfect if you feel like falling on your ass or splitting your head open. So after nine warnings, two detentions, and a few poorly-chosen-but-heartfelt fuck offs, they decided to suspend her.”

  “They’re patient.”

  “Very.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  “Take her phone away?”

  “Her father confiscated it Saturday.”

  “What for?”

  “Her bad attitude, is what he told me.”

  “Man, what’s going on with her?”

  “I thought about the wheel of torture, but I don’t have a wheel big enough. Being drawn and quartered is apparently pretty excruciating, but I’d need horses and I don’t feel like moving to the countryside just for that.”

  “What about burning her at the stake?”

  “Where’d we do it?”

  “Out in the alley.”

  “The fire station is down the street. The guys will come running even before I get the flames going. They’re obsessed with their response times, the bunch of maniacs.”

  “Chinese water torture?”

  “Don’t know how.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I thought about ice baths, like they used to have at the insane asylums —”

  “That sounds horrible.”

  “— but she’s too heavy, I’d never get her in. She’d put up a fight, land a few kicks. It wouldn’t end well.”

  “Time to call in the artillery.”