Mister Roger and Me Page 2

  He was sitting on a small fake-leather, flower-patterned chair in the driveway of the house next to ours, a badly rolled cigarette dangling from a huge, white beard turned the colour of caramel by tobacco smoke. He looked like he’d been there forever. He was the very archetype of the ghetto-dweller, the perfect incarnation of our idea of poverty. Clothes from a bygone era, checkered shirt, brown pants, white socks, and shoes the size of rowboats. All he had to do was drop his arm and his fingers would grab a large bottle of O’Keefe from a case that sat at his feet like an extension of his body. Nonchalantly, with the precision of an electrician, he’d lift the bottle, pour the beer into his hairy face, and give a loud burp. The echo bounced off the neighbouring buildings and ricocheted out into the deserted street, which was completely empty of traffic at that hour, so it rattled around without causing general panic. Empty except for me, at least, standing on the corner for a moment, having suddenly been jerked out of Versailles to take in this Santa figure who seemed to have made himself at home.

  Probably because he was at home. He lived in the Simards’ basement, in the house next to ours, which suddenly seemed very close. I was going to run into him every time I came home.

  I shook out my hair.

  A new neighbour. Again. Someone else who would skip out after the Rental Board’s three-month grace period expired, which thereby inadvertently forced landlords to have to put up with the nonpayment of rent for that length of time. When the three months were up, he’d pack up his boxes and drive off like everyone else, in the middle of the night in a rented truck, which he also wouldn’t pay for. Or else he’d make a dozen small trips in an old junker stuffed to the roof. Like a coward. Like all the rest of them.

  “Hey, Sweetie! That there’s a pretty big sack for little kid to be draggin’ around, ain’t it?”

  Right! Clichés and simple-minded jokes, the prerogative of old farts who haven’t got the wit to be anything else. And here was another one. In films, at least, the elderly always have something sensible to say, something wise even, profound truths it’s taken them a lifetime to discover and comprehend. But in my neighbourhood, where dotards accumulated by the hundreds, the elderly were more often used, disabused, and discarded perverts, when they weren’t out-and-out senile, rambling on in their asinine ways from dawn to dusk. Which meant one of two things: either the films lied or they were written by young writers still full of illusions about the human race. In any case, I already knew how to deal with them. I avoided any reference to my newspaper bag, a dangerous topic at the best of times. The incessant murmur of conversations that came through the walls and bounced down from the balconies whenever I passed by had long since taught me that.

  “That there’s a pretty big bottle of beer for you to be drinking at this time of day, ain’t it?”

  “Bloody hell, what am I supposed to drink? I hate coffee. It gives me heartburn.”

  “You never heard of Pepto-Bismol?”

  “Ha! What’s your name, you little shit?”

  “I don’t have one, you fat drunk.”

  “Well, well, a little comedian! I think I’m gonna like it here.”

  “You’re really going to stay?”

  “Any reason I shouldn’t?”

  “My mother can’t stand people who swear like that. She’ll make you clean up your act, you’ll see.”

  “She’s your mother, goddammit, not mine.”

  “Maybe, but my mother can run the world whether it’s her business or not. You’ll meet your match with her, count on it.”

  “Good, glad to hear it. It’s been a long time since I met my match.”

  There were a lot of things I didn’t understand at that age, but it didn’t take a genius to know that he didn’t give a flying fig about my mother or my big mouth. And there was no point in bringing my father into it, because my father wasn’t very strong, didn’t do much of anything better than any other Tom, Dick, or Harry, and never showed even the slightest desire to take matters into his own hands. In his capacity as the new neighbour, this old relic wouldn’t even take the time to notice my father.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mister Roger.”

  “You just get out of the mental hospital too?”

  “Damn right! Thirty years I spent in that bloody loony bin, Christ on a crutch.”

  “So you’ve been cured?”

  “No, I ain’t been cured. I was normal when I went in, and got crazy while I was there!”

  Always the same old jokes.

  “Then why did they put you in there?”

  “The crazies in there, somebody’s got to wipe their asses for ’em or they’d sit around all day in their own shit. So they bring in normal people like me to do their dirty work!”

  “Oh. Well, anyway, you won’t find living in that house much better than where you were before.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because of the fat lady.”

  “You mean that tub of lard who lives above me?”

  “They call her Badaboom, like the mascot. But you shouldn’t call her that to her face, it isn’t polite.”

  She was enormous. She had weighed over two hundred pounds by the time she was sixteen and was the only one of our neighbours who had had her hair permed into tight, hard curls and whose outlook was determined by her belief that she was the victim of legions of incompetent doctors who dared to suggest that she was, for the most part, responsible for her own plight. Her father, Gargantua Simard, was a perpetual cardiac patient, always dressed in a yellowed nightshirt, his nipples visible. His movements and the texture of his skin were like cake batter. He paraded his imposing bulk up and down the balcony, cursing everything and everybody. Badaboom’s poor saint of a mother did all the cleaning as well as all the maintenance around the house. Because she moved more or less normally, when her daily tasks allowed her to move at all, the other two poured the bulk of their venom on her. The more they abused her, the more sweetly she smiled. It was as though she converted their abuse into well-being, almost like photosynthesis, making the air around her easier to breathe. As for the twin tubs of lard — piggish, thunder-thighed, double-chinned, and thick-headed, with faces like wet plaster stuck on the bodies of obese gargoyles — the idea that they should show her a modicum of sympathy never entered their heads.

  And all this delightfulness lived right upstairs from him. We wouldn’t be seeing him around here for very long.

  “Why do you have a gun?”

  At first I had thought it was his cane, but it was a shotgun, ready by his side, its barrel pointing down toward the asphalt.

  “I can’t tell you or I’d have to kill you.”

  Really, always the same tired old jokes. I was only eight and I was already sick of them. So I left him sitting there. It was the right thing to do. As soon as he thought I was gone he got up quietly. I was spying on him through the front door, which we propped open with a pie-shaped piece of chipboard. He stood a few inches from the wall, seemed to be doing something with his hands, wriggled his legs a bit, and began peeing. Then he started whistling, like he was waiting for a bus or something. It must have made him laugh to think of his neighbours rubbing the steam off the corner of their window to get a look at him. A cloud of no doubt pestilential vapour rose from the thin stream and darkened the wall before merging with the morning dew, blending in with the cat piss, gobs of spit, old cigarette butts, and all the other delicacies that make up the good earth.

  “Go get the dishwashing liquid, please.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Did I hear you say no? Did I?”

  “No, but —”

  “I could have sworn I heard a no.”

  “No, no, but please, it’s just —”

  “The soap! No sob story tonight. And then go get your sisters.”

  There was only one option: kneel down besi
de the bathtub and offer up my neck and scalp without resistance to the jet of water, always too cold, like the steel blade of a guillotine, and to hands completely unacquainted with gentleness. Getting my hair washed was pure torture, and with dishwashing detergent, no less. I didn’t dare complain for fear she would bring out the Scissors of Damocles. In those days my long hair was the only physical trait I had in common with my heroine. And so I gave in: no sob story.

  “I don’t want to hear how cold the water is, or that I’m pulling too hard, or that your back is getting wet. I already know that, and that’s that. Okay?”

  “Okay,” we said in unison, resigned to our fate.

  Dead silence. It wasn’t that I was afraid of my mother, it was just that I knew I would never make so much as a dent in her impenetrable personality. No point complaining, or whining, or arguing, or pleading. To do any of those things was to condemn myself to humiliating defeat. I knew that from having occasionally rubbed her the wrong way. Trying to win against her was as foolhardily stupid as sticking your tongue on a piece of frozen iron railing just to see what would happen. It took me a while to learn that lesson. Both lessons, actually.

  For example, one day when I was lying in bed, home sick from school, brought down by my seventy-second sprained ankle of the year — playing Zorro on the shed roof was not a good idea — she let me wail the entire day, completely uncaring, about as interested in my plight as she would be if Newshour with Marius Brisson were being projected onto the side of the Stock Exchange building. She was totally impervious to my torrent of lamentations. For all she cared I could paddle about forever in my own snot brought on by the violent, bone-crunching spasms in my foot. She remained indifferent to the drama that was threatening to carry me off. I would have to give it up before my sisters came home from school anyway; they would not understand why I was still going on about being severely wounded. I had convinced myself that there was no conceivable remedy: neither hospital, nor cast, nor crutches, nor pity from my extended family and neighbours, nor buckets of chicken nuggets brought home by my father, nor the envy of my friends. No tickertape parade. Nothing would avail. And so I got up, gingerly, limping a little ostentatiously, trying to squeeze at least a drop of pity from my mother’s heart of stone, and went out to play with my friends in the park, forced against my will to admit that she knew the difference between a serious injury and a romantic crisis.

  At about the same time, after one of those evenings of interminable hanging out with friends on the corner, I came home late for supper and played someone who was dying of malnutrition. She gazed at me with about as much concern as she would bestow on a desiccated dew worm on the sidewalk after a downpour: one finds it a bit repulsive, one tries not to step on it, but one is not surprised to find it there, dying its little death.

  “When you come in late, you come in under the table, and that’s that.”

  “And that’s that,” my mother’s mantra. And that lovely medieval phrase “come in under the table,” so useful for mothers without microwave ovens, which hadn’t become popular yet, and who didn’t want to have to explain the logic behind imposing hunger on latecomers. And so I kept coming home late, often enough, anyway, because it provided me with opportunities for public suffering. Of course, I resigned myself to these hours of starvation mostly because they added a tragic touch to my character — What? Nothing for supper but a glass of water, and this the end of the twentieth century in North America! How tragically anachronistic was that? It would have been futile to try to change the rule: “And that’s that.” Adults generally fall back on useful phrases like “It’s a matter of principle” when they don’t know how else to explain something. It makes them sound serious, as if they might be making an argument. But when push comes to shove, it’s the same old thing: we are not going to discuss it, even if there is enough time.

  Enough was enough. One day I would die for real and my mother wouldn’t so much as lift a finger to stop me. And so I used the only means at my disposal — I disappeared. With the classic get-up, a tramp’s poke (a housecoat tied to an old broom handle) full of essential items slung over my shoulder, I walked out the door looking straight ahead with the steady tread of someone on a tight schedule, as though to say, “Don’t get up, stay in your chairs, don’t let me disturb you, nothing you could say would make me change my mind anyway.” What a farce! No one moved a muscle to stop me. No touching goodbyes, no desperate last-minute appeals as I got ready to set off on my own, fear clutching at my chest — oh yes, the fear was there, all right, because I had no more than a vague idea of where I was going except to find myself another family, and that idea vanished before I even got through the door. But I had my pride. I needed to be strong. With a few stray locks of hair blowing into my eyes, I took a deep breath for courage and swept out onto the balcony and down to the street.

  Sitting on the number 4 bus, which would, I had no doubt, take me very far from home, I pondered the perfect uselessness of my existence. Sometime during the bus’s second complete circuit I had a sudden vision: my mother had teleported herself onto the bus, she was right there on one of the side seats near the front, she had come for me — who else if not for me? She had secretly followed me because she was afraid of what might happen to me, she was worried about me, she didn’t really want me to run away. I hadn’t seen her get on, I’d been too busy brooding, but there she was, my mother, sitting quite naturally in the crowd of people staring out at nothing with dead-fish eyes, trying to pretend they were somewhere else. She was keeping her distance so she could keep an eye on me. She was an excellent actress with a wonderful sense of dramatic flair. I could see she was an old hand at taking the bus: only her head nodded when the bus hit a pothole, she moved with a grace that hadn’t quite faded, a physical memory that let her body float comfortably along on the rocking swell of the bus’s metal carcass.

  I watched her for a while, then got off at the next stop. And there she was, two blocks ahead of me, not casting a single glance in my direction. She went into Papillon’s and came out as naturally as though she was just some ordinary mother out buying a litre of milk. There was no outward sign that this was a declaration of her love for me. I gave her enough time to get home before following her, allowing her to resume her place in the tableau vivant that was my little life, which, all things considered, was not so ugly as all that. But also so I wouldn’t spoil that magic moment by saying anything that would make what I had just witnessed vanish into thin air.

  When I got home, there was a Kit Kat chocolate bar waiting for me on the corner of my dresser, in the little bedroom beside the kitchen I shared with Jeanne, my older sister. The bright red wrapper hadn’t escaped her attention, or the attention of my two other sisters. They hung around the sink, even though it had every appearance of being empty of dishes, while I sat on my bed unwrapping the sweet golden nugget designed to be divided up, and when I very carefully snapped the tablet into four ladyfingers, they slipped furtively through the membrane into my half of the bubble, which I didn’t mind for some reason. Sitting on my bed, as if we were sisters who never squabbled about anything, we nibbled at the ends of our sections with the tips of our teeth to make them last longer, having first chewed off the chocolate edge. Silently. Rarity is the mother of method. All except Catherine, the youngest, who looked up at me with her little cat’s eyes, not convinced that everything was all right.

  “Not go away, Hélène?”

  “No, ninnyhead. Not this time.”

  “Not a ninnyhead!”

  “Okay, pimplehead.”

  “Not a pimplehead!”

  “What are you, then?”

  “I’m stinky.”

  “Okay, Catherine, stinkyhead.”

  “Not Catherine!”

  “Who are you then?”

  “Cass-rine!”

  “That’s what I said: Catherine.”

  “Nooooo! Not Catherine! Cass
-rine.”

  “Okay. Cassrine-head.”

  “Yeth.”

  I was so preoccupied by these comforting moments, I wasn’t aware of the hair-washing going on without me. It was like delivering papers on those dark early-winter mornings when I could see or hear nothing but those huge yellow splotches of light that spread out under the streetlamps and the crunching of the snow underfoot. In my head I would calculate how long it would take me to get back to the warmth of the apartment, just as I calculated when the hair-washing would be over.

  “Okay! We’ll dry your hair in the living room. And since there wasn’t so much whining this time, everyone can have a can of pop.”

  “Yay!”

  And so. A measly can of grape, orange, or strawberry soda pop and we were reconciled with life. Between mouthfuls of carbonated food colouring, the scrunch-scrunch of fingers in our recently but deeply degreased hair announced the cessation of hostilities.

  It was during one of these unforgettable moments in history, when we were immersed in the fumes of lemon-scented Palmolive dish detergent, that Margot, who had been inadvertently forgotten in a dark corner of the bathroom, decided to drink a bottle of Javex. It didn’t take her more than a few huge gulps to realize that the picture on the bottle’s label wasn’t of milk, it was a fat French cleaning woman’s white apron. And now, with the corrosive liquid carving a new route through her esophagus, she let out a scream that would waken the dead, the little idiot. But nothing perturbed my mother, not even the certain imminent death of her daughter — there was also a skull-and-crossbones on the label.

  “Go next door and get Mister Roger.”

  “Mister Roger?”

  “Just go, stop giving me a hard time, you know who I mean.”

  “Yes, but why?”