Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (43 page)

“Non, maman. Ça va
. It’s okay.”

She would pull a wool cap down from the coat rack, and reaching up to him—for she had always been a small woman and he, although short, was already several inches taller than her—try to secure it over his head. He would rip it off with a vengeance, fling it at her, and run out the door.

“Maxime, you will freeze,” she would call after him, and on some occasions would even run outside, still wearing her dressing gown, in an attempt to make him, at very least, carry the hat in his pocket. Two days later, when he was fighting a head cold but refusing to stay home in bed, she could not remain silent, and would nag and pester on the subject.

“If you would dress properly for the cold, this would never have happened.”

Well, this was the way with many mothers, indeed every shivering teenager in a scant jacket and blue jeans has been told on his way out the door to dress more warmly, and if he hasn’t, the world should pity him that no one cares enough to tell him how to live his life. Yet Sarah’s anxieties, her nagging, her mothering, went far beyond the usual. Her fears were legion, ranging wildly and unpredictably from the
insignificant to the cataclysmic: what if Daniel was killed flying home from a conference?; what if Maxime failed his exams?; what if the gas leaked?; what if the pipes froze?; what if the neighbour’s dog, who could be seen digging up bones in his own backyard, burrowed under the fence and disturbed Sarah’s newly planted tulip bulbs?; what if that car speeding towards them had failed to see the red light, did not brake in time, and struck Maxime, leaving him crippled for life?; what if Daniel cut his finger with that newly sharpened knife?; what if that tea towel brushed against the stove and caught fire?; what if that cheque had got lost in the mail?; what if Daniel put on the freshly ironed shirt before its newly smoothed surface had been given proper time to set?; what if dinner burnt?; what if they all died?

The worst of it was, Sarah could not keep silent. She knew that her fears were often ungrounded, and that their articulation was no great form of social intercourse, that she annoyed her husband and embarrassed her son, putting them from her as much as she tried to bind them to her, the very existence of the only two people she truly loved paining her day after day. Yet still she spoke, as if to speak was to arm against.

Patient, calm, and reassuring, Daniel was accepting of this aspect of his wife’s character—accepting, or perhaps quietly resigned after twenty-seven years of marriage. He had done what he could to make her happy, provided a good home and removed any possible source of anxiety that he could imagine. He had believed first that the resolution of her business affairs in France would somehow close her grief and then later assumed that the birth of a child would bring her placidity, but he slowly gave up those expectations, daily letting another little fragment of hope slip away as he
watched her mothering become as fearful and all-consuming as her domestic cares had proved before Maxime’s birth. If this continually heightened state was not a particularly happy way of being, it no longer seemed to him that it was a particularly unhappy one either. This was how they lived, that was all.

He was not a man who often discussed his emotions, nor those of others, but he was not stupid nor unobservant. He sensed that Sarah continually rehearsed the potential hurts and disasters of the future, as though she might guard against them, because she could do nothing to rectify the catastrophe of the past. But he could not understand how exactly history gnawed at Sarah, for Sarah herself would have been hard put to describe it. It was not, as a woman of 35, of 40, or now of 52, that her grief sat fresh upon her. Her parents were faint memories now, with little place in the forefront of her consciousness, compared to the shopping list that she was working her way through as pushed her cart along the aisles of the grocery store, the tempting pictures in the travel brochure featuring the location of Daniel’s next medical conference, the difficult fact of Sam’s failing health, or the necessity of attending Maxime’s school play the following week. It was just that, even as she fulfilled her role as wife, mother, and adopted daughter, she maintained a certain distance from them, as though displaced from the very reality of her own life. It was only through frantic worry that these things became real for her. Indeed she secretly wondered to herself at times if her anxiety was only an act, a facade she adopted to convince those around her that she felt, belonged, and cared.

She struggled continually to inhabit the present, the place where Maxime, still a child, dwelt effortlessly. He knew
that his very existence as anything more than a carefully cossetted baby could pain his mother beyond bearing, but was too young to understand why. Forty years seems to a teenager an unimaginable eternity, more than twice his own lifespan, and the notion that the truncated lives of his unseen grandparents shaped his mother’s current existence did not occur to Maxime. To him, his mother appeared only alarmist and ineffectual, and where his father had learned to live quietly with Sarah, the son raged and chafed, uncomprehending and unsympathetic. In the house in North Toronto, Daniel would attempt to fix and rationalize while Maxime would sulk and hide.

One year and one summer after the spring night on which his mother had served quenelles and crème caramel, he managed to escape. On a baking hot Tuesday in early September 1984, he waved goodbye to his parents and watched them climb into their car and drive away. He mentally brushed aside a clinging tendril of emotion, climbed back up the steps on which he was standing, and returned to the small room in which he and Daniel had, just the day before, deposited two overstuffed suitcases, a few cardboard boxes of books, and one full of the coffee mugs, cutlery, and tea towels that Sarah had carefully packed for him. It was time to unpack and settle into the first home of his own, these sparsely furnished quarters in a students’ residence with space only for a bed, a desk, a bookcase, and an armchair.

Aside from his immediate, mundane needs to buy a few posters for his walls, rent a bar fridge for the room, and register for classes, the way ahead looked hazy but exciting. If, for Sarah, the future was a place that could be imagined with alarming acuity and required strict planning if it were to prove any better than the past and the present, then for the
teenage Maxime, unburdened by the past and alternately overjoyed and deeply frustrated by the present, the future had always seemed a vague but deeply desirable place. He still sensed that it posed as-yet-undefinable problems that would require solutions, but since he could not yet foresee what they were, he remained largely unworried and saw instead bright visions of independence and belonging, achievement, and respite. Here he was then, catapulted into his own adulthood by means of the family sedan. He let the air out of his lungs with an audible whoosh, turned to the first box, and ripped open the lid.

His plan had been a clever one, almost devious, and suggested that, if he did not sympathize with his mother, he certainly understood her well enough to see his way around her. In his Grade 13 year, he had applied not only to the University of Toronto but also here, to McGill, in Montreal, five hundred kilometres east of his parents’ home. When he was accepted, there was no arguing with it. McGill’s undergraduate programs were as respected as Toronto’s; its medical school was particularly venerable, historic home to doctors Osler, Penfield, and Bethune. And if the university itself were anglophone, the city was bilingual: in Montreal, Maxime would speak French. It was to his mother’s linguistic pride that he ultimately made his appeal for freedom.

Sarah was torn. At first, she was frantic about the idea of his departure, secretly afraid that geographic distance would make permanent the widening gap between them, openly expressing one objection after another, citing the expense, the risk of loneliness, the dangers of bad companionship, the
shortage of clean laundry, and most of all, the certainty of bad cooking.

But in the end, he went with her blessing. She recognized that if her son was to find an enduring place for her language in his head and in his heart, he must discover for himself a francophone world beyond their home. He had grown reluctant to speak French, shrugging off the language with a few mumbled words before he switched to English, and when she did force more lengthy conversation upon him, she noticed that his grammar was slipping. He no longer used the subjunctive in which she had so carefully coached him, enlarging on his high school French lessons with the help of a thin red-covered book of verb conjugations that provided her with concrete evidence of the spellings and usages that she knew by instinct alone but with complete accuracy, despite the long distance that separated her from those who had taught her a mother tongue. On occasion, Maxime could also be heard to attribute a masculine article to a feminine noun or vice versa, a mistake that surprised and appalled her, for she had believed that whatever agonies it might cause an anglophone, the correct gender of a word would always remain second nature to the native speaker. His mistakes convinced her that he might abandon her language altogether if it proved so difficult to maintain. In Montreal, he would find adult uses for the words of childhood, and she hoped that once he had completed his studies and returned home, the joy they might share in talking together could repair their weakened bond.

So, she was willing to view Montreal as a useful place for her son, although in her heart she disliked the city. It had failed her. On her first visit, pushing the eighteen-month-old Maxime around Expo 67 in a sturdy red stroller provided at
the entrance gate, she felt herself an outsider not only in the cheery hubbub and colourful optimism of the world fair held on an island specially constructed in the St. Lawrence for the occasion, but also on the original island, the real city beyond the carnival. With its ebullient French speakers growing more confident by the day, its broad modern avenues and picturesque old churches, its three-storey limestone apartment buildings and their curving exterior staircases of brightly painted wrought iron, Montreal was the city they called the Paris of North America. Friends in Toronto were surprised that Sarah had yet to visit and were convinced she would love the place.

Perhaps if she had delayed suggesting such a trip to Daniel until the summer in which the entire world descended on Montreal and it seemed impossible not to go, it was because she secretly wanted something from the city, yet simultaneously knew she could not have it. With a longing so suppressed it was almost unconscious, she hoped Montreal would satisfy her by containing within its streets both her losses and her present, that it would be precisely that for her, a Paris of North America. Yet such comfort also seemed improbable, so she postponed the moment when reality must surely disappoint her.

As she and Daniel bundled themselves and the baby into a cab at the end of a long day’s sightseeing; as they parked Maxime with the hotel daycare; as they picked over the fish and vegetable dishes on the menu of a French restaurant that came highly recommended, she spoke eagerly to the driver, the babysitter, and the waiter in her own language. But she found their colourful vocabulary difficult to parse and their thick accents impenetrable in places. And in the cab driver’s eyes reflected back at her in his rear-view mirror, in the
babysitter’s little laugh, or the waiter’s raised brow, she thought she detected a note of disdain, as though she somehow insulted them with her speech. In the end, they all just seemed happier to speak to Daniel in English. Perhaps they had sensed that she willed them to be something they were not and would have none of it. Here, she saw the streets, the architecture, and the language itself as one sees one’s own face reflected in the bulbous surface of the bathtub taps, experiencing the city as a horrible distortion of the familiar. Looking back with a twisted smile, Montreal refused her longings.

Well, it was only right. Why should Montreal be other than itself? This game of comparisons was one they played in Toronto. This restaurant was better than New York, that play as good as any you might see in London. The Windy City seemed just like home; Montreal recalled the City of Lights. If you ever visited Hong Kong, why, you’d think you were in Vancouver. Normally, Sarah knew better than to enter into these parallelisms. Like the alcoholic who will never appear to be drunk, she knew that for her to make comparisons was to betray dissatisfaction, even to feed it. No, Montreal was not Paris, and she found it best, on the whole, not to visit there, but to await Maxime’s return to Toronto.

That was what she was doing one Sunday afternoon in early May at the end of his first year in medical school when she realized that she had run out of milk. She turned from the fridge, opened the door that led to the basement, and called down the stairs.

“I’m just going out for a minute. There’s no milk left.”

Daniel raised his head from an as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to repair the coffee grinder, which had emitted a
painful squeaking sound when asked to perform its job that morning and then halted altogether.

“Take the car. Max will be home any minute.”

“Oh, no. I can’t be bothered. It’s nice out.”

So, she walked, happily covering the few blocks between the house and Yonge Street, where she turned northwards. There, she passed the new Thai restaurant that had opened last fall—God only knew how they had made it through the winter—and the shoe repair shop where the faded advertisements for Cat’s Paw soles had remained unchanged in all the years she and Daniel had lived in the neighbourhood. The next building housed a small florist’s shop, and the sidewalk outside was covered with red buckets full of pink tulips and blue hyacinths, forced in greenhouses so they would appear a few weeks before their natural time, seducing the impatient with a ready-made spring. There were small bunches of miniature irises too, each dainty dipping blue petal licked with a tongue of brilliant yellow from its centre to its edge. Here, Sarah slowed her step, mentally hesitating. She might actually buy a bouquet, compensating for an anticipated lack: the ones in her garden had not flowered last June. The rhizomes were old, probably exhausted, but she was giving them this one last season before she gave up and replaced them. So far, there was no sign of flowers on the fine spiky green leaves in her back flower bed, and it was the bucket with a black-on-white label marked “Dwarf Irises $2.99 a bunch” that tempted her most of all.