Mister Roger and Me Read online

  Copyright © 2010, Les Éditions XYZ inc.

  English translation copyright © 2012 by Wayne Grady

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  First published as La petite et le vieux in 2010 by Les Éditions XYZ.

  First published in English in 2012 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  This edition published in 2012 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Lavoie, Marie-Renée, 1974–

  [Petite et le vieux. English]

  Mister Roger and me / Marie-Renée Lavoie, author ; Wayne Grady, translator.

  Translation of: La petite et le vieux.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-203-3

  I. Grady, Wayne II. Title.

  PS8623.A8518P4713 2012 C843'.6 C2012-903340-5

  Art direction: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover illustration: Genevieve Simms

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, for our translation activities.

  Nothing is worth the trouble of being conceived

  unless it is first and foremost a work

  of the imagination; otherwise the sea

  would be nothing but salt water . . .

  Romain Gary, The Kites

  I managed to convince myself that I was a boy, and I made everyone call me Joe. I would have preferred to be called Oscar, like my favourite cartoon character on TV, but at the time Oscar was what we called the skeleton in our biology class, and was also a type of broom with a revolutionary new design. I was okay with being called Joe, even though you had to purse your lips like a chicken’s arse and make a totally boring O sound to say the name. But as long as it didn’t make them think of the Daltons, people would take me seriously.

  Like me, my TV Oscar was a girl who dressed as a boy. She was captain of Marie-Antoinette’s palace guard, and she, much more easily than I, could conceal her real identity, under a huge coat that dripped with military medals and royal insignia. Not to mention her fantastic sword with its golden scabbard, her boots and spurs, her magnificent white horse, her piercing, self-confident eyes that were always brimming with tears and glowing with light, and the wind, oh my God, especially the wind, which caused mini-revolutions in her unbelievably long, thick, fly-away hair that whipped around in time with the show’s theme song: “Lady, Lady Oscar, she wears a man’s attire. Lady, Lady Oscar, her fame will ne’er expire.” You can’t have a hero in a Japanese anime without furious gusts of wind, just like you can’t have a plot that doesn’t include a few ransacked villages. Nothing says courage, strength of character, and resistance to the forces of evil like a head of hair blown by the wind but unbowed. Without wind you miss all that, as the Japanese totally get.

  But the maze of little concrete streets and alleys in our neighbourhood killed any gust of wind that might have strayed into them. There weren’t many trees, either, apart from a few dead cottonwoods that were easy to mistake for telephone poles, so there was no whipping of leafy branches over the tragic paths of our destinies. And my hair, like my whole body, in fact, was already imbued with the spirit of contradiction. My hair obeyed the rules of gravity to a fault, no matter how insane that drove me, no matter how imperiously I commanded it to be unmanageable. Well, I’d just have to learn to live with it. Oscar became my whole life. I would immerse myself in the show and her terrible fate — every day after school, from 4:00 to 4:24 on the Family Channel — all the while quietly forging my own destiny.

  I hadn’t noticed yet that social roles had evolved somewhat since the days of the French Revolution, and so I thought life would be better as a boy, that a pair of male arms would be useful things to have in our family, since we were not very rich. We weren’t poor, exactly, all things considered, but in my romantic mind, eager as I was to see strife and misfortune everywhere, I thought that having a few hardships to endure would make our situation more interesting than if we were a relatively comfortable, middle-class family.

  Childhood is short-lived. Fortunately.

  I would have preferred growing up in a different epoch, as the early 1980s, all cotton and pastel, didn’t lend themselves very well to heroism. Even the Colonial period would have been better, although what I really wanted was to live in the Middle Ages, which took place so long ago we hardly know anything about them anymore. I associated them mainly with castles and knights in armour, with broadcloth dresses brushing against stone walls and people swooning with platonic love (even though I had no idea what “platonic” meant). In medieval times I would have worked in the fields alongside a man with thick fingers and no teeth, who would have sent me flying with a mighty clap on the back against every stubborn stump stuck in the ground; I would have milked cows first thing every morning, cleared land, planted crops, built outhouses, and scraped callouses off my hands at night while sitting by the fire smoking my pipe. I dreamed of the suffering and what I would have to put up with just to survive. I imagined crossing the ocean in a stinking boat that would move only by the strength of our backs, wandering off course into the frozen Far North, suicidal treks across Siberia, being scarred for life — although not in the face, I still intended to be a beautiful heroine — the terrible thirst that rips at the throat. In all my imaginings I stood faithful and upright, facing into the wind, my legs planted solidly on the ground, my gaze fixed firmly into the red, agonizing sun, my eyes framed by an intricate latticework of telltale creases from all the miseries I had seen. Seeing me fighting the elements, the wind literally tearing off my clothes, anyone would easily gauge the full extent of my courage and strength.

  How happy I was. Everything was so simple.

  In actual space-time, however, I was only eight years old, a bit florid in colour, with bluish veins on a body that weighed twenty-three kilos, holding back a mind that was always trying to run off to faraway, pitiless realms.

  Life in the city wore away at my powers. The greatest test of my strength was taking out the garbage every two days. Instead of the hero of the heart-rending story of a rural martyr killing himself by getting up at the crack of dawn to work his arid patch of land, I was a little girl getting up in the morning to carry a stinking green garbage bag down to the sidewalk. Every day I was tortured by the insignificance of my life, which never even gave me a chance to amount to anything.

  Isabelle-8’s brother — in those days, so many girls were called Isabelle or Julie that they all came with call signs — finally gave in and said he would teach me the trade after I pestered him mercilessly for a job. I say the trade because when you’re eight years old you don’t have a lot of career options. You had to be ten to be in the choir, which
in any case didn’t make much of a demand on the legs and arms. You also had to be ten to deliver papers, even though I knew the neighbourhood like the back of my hand. I’d been cruising those streets for seven years by then, not counting the sixteen months I spent perfecting the art of standing still. I’d walked them, run through them, rollerskated and rode my bike on them. I’d got myself lost in them, scraped my knees on them a hundred times, left vast quantities of skin, bits of fingernail, hair, blood, and spit on their asphalt; I’d accidentally wandered into parts that were off limits, and had twisted and sometimes even broken various limbs; I’d been caught up in games that absolutely could not be interrupted; I had deposited, with due concern for equal distribution, incalculable quantities of excrement, solid and liquid, in innumerable gardens and behind sundry sheds attached to numerous buildings and houses. In fact, I was overqualified for the job. But I had to lie about my age in order to prove it.

  “But I warn you,” said Isabelle-8’s courageous brother, “if anyone finds out, I don’t know you from Adam.”

  “No problem. I’ve passed for ten any number of times. Older, even.”

  And thus began my interminable early-morning Stations of the Cross, me bent double under the weight of a huge orange cloth bag full of newspapers. It was a horrible job, if you want to know the truth, made tolerable only by the amount of suffering it caused me (the slow but steady deterioration of my shoulders and back) and by the astounding number of natural enemies it placed in my path: snow, cold, rain, hail, blinding blizzards on starless mornings, bloodthirsty dogs, people who never paid, every bandit, crook, mugger, kidnapper, rapist, and terrorist who could hide behind a Dumpster containing, I had no doubt, the mutilated bodies of former paperboys. My hands, blackened by ink, my face as well, since I had to wipe sweat and rain and ice pellets out of my eyes and off my cheeks and nose, all bore witness to my struggle and my courage. It was fantastic! At the end of each day I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, like they did in the countryside, and said, Ah! Smell that pure, fresh air. How that needle-like frigid wind caresses my nose and throat. On those early mornings, the city, glistening under its thin coat of pinkish ice, looked almost beautiful.

  The tranquility of the neighbourhood, which was normally bustling, was disturbed by only a few odd characters that early in the morning. There was old Methuselah, whose age I was never able to determine. I figured he was somewhere between eighty and a hundred and twenty, but then I had only my mother’s venerable thirty-four years to compare him to (my father was born old, I had no idea what his age was). Methuselah strode down the street, muttering to himself; he was always dressed in a charming black suit that looked ridiculous in a neighbourhood where no one went to work strangled by a tie. And there was Croesus, whose hands were always shoved deep down into pockets filled, so everyone said, with wads of bills, and whose wild eyes swept the pavement in front of him continuously as he walked; and poor Marie-Madeleine, who cried her eyes out walking to Papillon’s corner store for the first of the twenty-some cups of coffee that marked her daily routine, wailing, never letting up for a second except to wrap her lips around the rim of the Styrofoam cup. And there was the Astronaut, a kind of lanky human rubber band, who marched up and down the concrete sidewalks beating the air with his ape-like arms.

  “Hi, kid!”

  And then there was Fred, who delivered papers on the streets that ran perpendicular to those of my route. He was a kind of grandfather figure with verdigris eyes. He was the only one in the unlikely assemblage that was my life in those days who seemed to understand my masculine condition. Maybe it was because we were colleagues, or maybe there was some other reason. I humoured him by listening to his stories about all the grandchildren he probably didn’t have. His mythomania, which both terrified and exasperated me, somehow brought us together.

  “Hi, Fred.”

  “Not too heavy today, is it?”

  “It is, but it’ll be even heavier tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir. Auto supplement . . .”

  “Garden supplement . . .”

  “Wedding supplement . . .”

  “Summer camp supplement . . .”

  “Oh, that reminds me, I’ve got to arrange one of those for my son. His kids’ll love that, eh, going to camp this year. What do you think?”

  “Well, do they have bicycles?”

  “Yes, yes, I bought them bikes last year.”

  I liked giving him a chance to tell his little fictions.

  “Well, then, they’re okay. You don’t need to send them to camp too.”

  “They could take their bikes to camp.”

  “Don’t think so. People camp at camp, they don’t go cycling.”

  “They just camp?”

  “I think so, yes. I think they charge more if you want to do both.”

  “You mean camp and cycle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve been to camp, have you?”

  “Of course.”

  And to tell some of my own.

  “And you’re not going back?”

  “No, I can’t. I’ve got a bicycle now. I bought it with money from my route.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Really. It’s a blue Road Runner. I was on it the other day when I saw you over by our house.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember. You’re right. Now that, sir, is a bicycle!”

  “Right on! I got one with a banana seat so I could give people rides.”

  “Hey, maybe you can give me a lift?”

  “I don’t know, Fred, you look pretty big.”

  “I could put my legs up in the air, like this.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let me know before you come to get me, I might have a visitor.”

  “Hmm-hmm.”

  “. . .”

  “So, are you going to keep it?”

  “Keep what?”

  “That camping supplement. You going to take someone’s?”

  “I’ll take the Witch’s, it’ll drive her crazy.”

  “Right on!”

  “She might even come after me with that broom she keeps up her ass.”

  I loved the way he squeaked like an old clothesline when he laughed. I knew he’d been in the mental hospital, like the others, but he wasn’t crazy, just a bit off, as though his brain hadn’t quite got its sea legs. The other tub-thumpers in the neighbourhood didn’t have what my father called “fellow feeling.” They muddled through their parallel universes, just out of reach, completely isolated by their insanity. Before they got out of the Robert Giffard Health Centre (better known as the Saint-Michel-Archange Asylum), which was a few streets from our house, they’d been turned into walking zombies. All they did was walk and walk and walk. No one seemed to have told them that sometimes they should stop walking once in a while so they could sleep, or wash, or eat, or just sit down. So they went on walking, leaving the smell of abandonment in their wake. No one could do anything with them. A few charitable souls tried to make them listen to reason, but apparently their program had no reset button. Anyway, what was the point of stopping them? A few of them died of exhaustion on the street, between steps, like birds dropping out of the air in mid-flight, their hearts burst from an excess of emptiness, in a moment of lucidity. Years of walking and getting nowhere, exiled from themselves, fleeing nightmares that were only slightly diminished by medication. They were Michel Strogoffs with no mission, no horses, crossing a Siberia with no end.

  There were those at the time who went around using the word “deinstitutionalization” because it was the longest word in the dictionary and therefore worthy of particular interest. It was also a word that brought joy to the hearts of crossword-puzzle addicts who did the Super Crossword on Saturdays and discovered a lot of neat words in it.

  And there were those who, never having heard the word, were caught up in it no
netheless, without really knowing what it meant.

  When I got home after delivering my papers, tired, soaked to the skin, aching all over, looking like a dwarf miner with my face covered in newspaper ink, I would tiptoe through the apartment to the bathroom, in the indifferent quiet of the sleeping household, and play out a scene from Germinal — which I had read as a Classic Comic during my holidays — in front of the mirror before beginning my morning ablutions.

  “Who’s that, who’s there?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Me who?”

  “Joe.”

  “Are you playing with yourself in front of the mirror again?”

  It was my sister Jeanne. Her feet were planted firmly in reality, which has no room for beauty and flattens anything that tries to soar. She had a mind that was far too rational for girls her age, most of whom were still arguing about who should hold the skipping rope.

  “Get lost!”

  “Hey, are you taking your whole thirteen minutes now?”

  “No, these don’t count, I’m coming out.”

  Curtain time. I jumped into bed for a quick nap, thirteen minutes times five — Dad, Mom, my three sisters; I’d go last — before going to school. The hullabaloo that filled our apartment lulled me into a fitful sleep, which I sank into while awaiting my turn.

  I was Oscar again, patrolling the gardens of Versailles accompanied by my faithful André, one of my men, my best, and also my friend, the son of one of our servants. We’d been raised together; he was like a brother to me, and the only one who knew I was not a man. Marie-Antoinette flitted across the stage in my daydream, she was always dressed sumptuously. I didn’t know that the poverty of the people increased in direct proportion to the splendour of the queen’s dresses. Had I known that, I wouldn’t have found them so beautiful.

  I had my sword, my white stallion, and my absurdly long hair. Life was good.

  It was around this time that Roger came on the scene. He was a broken-down piece of flotsam. I came across him when I was returning from my paper route one day, half sleepwalking as usual, not altogether sure if I’d delivered my papers or not. But that morning, as I got close to the house, the presence of this perfect stranger quickly brought me back to the land of the living.