He was a bit bad, but not too much. We got drunk, and once we threw bottles at a wall in an alley and we wrote graffiti, but that was about it. We went to Old Montreal mostly. Old Montreal is cool. We used to go there with Simone when I was a kid. It has ancient buildings from when the explorers first came and ancient cobblestone streets. When the weather's nice everyone sits out in cafés and you can watch artists on the street drawing people. They have horse rides too, for tourists. I always felt sorry for those horses. They didn't look too happy, trapped inside all those harnesses.
Ricardo told me a lot about his life. He had leukemia for two years when he was around eleven. His dad was a bus driver and his mom was a nutritionist who went to
schools and told kids how to eat better. His grandparents also lived with them.
We made out in my room. He didn't want to go all the way because of a dream he had when he was in the hospital with leukemia. He was getting a lot of transfusions and they gave him nightmares, or maybe it was the drugs, and he had a bad dream about sex. He dreamed he saw someone doing it, and their dick came off and stayed inside the woman, and he woke up feeling sick. I knew what he meant, because I've had dreams where my teeth fall out.
I almost began to think I wasn't totally repulsive, with Ricardo. He used to say, “This is the best part of my week by far, girl.”
He was good at comedy. That's what I really liked about him, how funny he could be. He didn't just copy jokes from TV. He made them up as he went along. Like we might pass some old man and he might start pretending to be that old man and saying in an old man's voice, “Laddy, in my day we didn't even have wheels. We just rolled people up. Never did work too good.” It was more the crazy way he said it.
He got along OK with Michelle and his dad but not with his mom. She was always after him to do better in school. His mother's name was Angela, but he called her Lady Jane. Sometimes she'd say, “Don't you Lady Jane me, young man,” but she didn't really mind.
Then two weeks after school ended, he broke up with
me. Not that I was surprised or anything. It was a fluke all along. He said he met some other girl who worked at Wendy's, and that was it.
That's when I started being mean to Mom. And believe me, Xanoth, Mom never did a thing to deserve it. She never raised her voice in her life. That's because of what she went through when she was a kid, on the farm.
Apart from ignoring her, I began to snort at everything she said as if it was the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life. She'd start telling me about something from the past and I'd give this huge yawn. So she stopped, and then she had no one to talk to. And I lost out too, because she used to brush my hair at night, and now I wouldn't let her near me.
It was the worst summer. I was so desperate to take my mind off things that I got something in the park. I don't know what it was, but it was a total waste of money and it only made me feel a million times worse. First I thought I was being chased by the cars on the street. I knew I wasn't, but I couldn't get rid of the feeling that they were all after me.
Then I thought these zombie-like ghouls were walking next to me. That totally freaked me out.
Then when I got into bed I shut my eyes and these scenes began flashing through my mind. I never even knew I had scenes like that in me. Like horrible car accidents, or this giant guillotine that terrorists were using to kill a thousand people at a time. It was sick.
I had these scenes three nights in a row, but they were shorter and more faded the second and third night. So that was my first and last time with drugs. I don't know if it was a cheapo rip-off drug, or if that's just the way drugs affect some people.
Anyhow, that was my summer. Mom had a house back then on Old Orchard that I pretty much took over, so at least I made some money. I couldn't stand the people who lived in that house, but I didn't have to see them much. The father was in politics and the mother thought she was an artist but her stuff sucked. All she did was glue strips of metal on a canvas. Every single thing in their house was ugly, like metal masks and metal everything. And the two boys were thieves. Their parents had to pick them up from the station for stealing CDs from the Bay.
Yours forever,
Fern
Sunday
December 23
Hi Xanoth,
David signed two new leases â one with a student from Germany, and the other with three girls. The German guy shook hands with me as if I was an important person. I guess people are more polite in Germany. The girls are really giggly and young, around nineteen, and David didn't think they'd be reliable, but he agreed to take them.
That leaves one more apartment. I hope it gets rented soon. It's tiring answering the phone and making appointments and then people don't show up, or they do show up and I have to take them around. They ask such stupid questions sometimes, like “Do you get noise from the street here?” With the cars going right below! No, that's just an illusion you're having. There is no noise here at all because actually we're in a castle on the hills of Scotland. It only looks like an apartment building on Clanranald near Queen Mary.
I got really depressed again today, Xanoth. Beauty doesn't like this place. This morning I let her out in the hallway while I was washing the floor because I know
she'd never run out if someone came in. She's too scared of strangers.
I was right. She stayed next to me the whole time. She kept sniffing the pail of water, but luckily she didn't put her paw in. The smell of the detergent was too strong.
I had to buy more food. There's a Provigo on Monkland and it got really warm suddenly, so it wasn't a problem walking there. It was actually raining.
At the check-out I began talking with the cashier about how expensive the fruits and vegetables were, and she actually told me about this store on Somerled that sells them for a lot less! She'd probably get fired if they knew she's sending customers somewhere else.
I found the store and she was right. The prices were way lower for fruits and vegetables. Which is good, because I was having a craving for fresh food.
Everything together cost me $204.14. It didn't make sense to make a lot of trips if I'm paying for bus tickets, so I asked for delivery and walked home.
I really need to get a job with free food, Xanoth. There's a retired guy on the first floor who gets the
Gazette
every day, and he doesn't come out for it until around noon, so I borrowed it yesterday to check the ads for hotel kitchens and restaurants. I called a few places, but so far nothing. Mostly they want cooks.
The system here with the garbage is a disaster. Tenants are allowed to stick their garbage in pails at the end of the driveway, and then I'm supposed to take them
out front in time for the pick-up on Tuesdays and Fridays.
The problem is that some of the tenants want to save on garbage bags, so they put their garbage in stupid little grocery bags which I have to dig out and put in regular garbage bags. There was a whole stack of super-strong garbage bags under the sink in my apartment. Now I know why.
Another problem is that there isn't enough room in the pails, and the whole area is a huge disgusting mess.
I decided to make signs with new rules. I made six bilingual signs. One of the tenants, Louise, helped me with the French. I taped them all over the building with black tape from the tool box. The sign says:
NEW GARBAGE POLICY. TENANTS ARE ALLOWED TO BRING DOWN THEIR GARBAGE ONLY ON MONDAYS AND THURSDAYS AFTER
6:00
P.M. ALL GARBAGE HAS TO BE IN LARGE GREEN BAGS OR IT WILL BE RETURNED TO THE TENANT. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. THE MANAGEMENT.
I couldn't believe I wrote that sign. It's like you see signs like that all your life, and you think you're ignoring them, but they're going into your brain. Like signing
THE MANAGEMENT
. I didn't even know I knew that word.
Yours forever,
Fern
Monday
December 24
Merry Christmas, Xanoth,
I got a card with forty dollars from Jack, c/o the Coopers. They mailed it to me along with their own card and a pair of really nice suede mitts.
I'll send Jack a card back and give him this address. Simone left behind a set of 50 Christmas cards and there are still about ten left.
Actually, I should write to Simone and tell her about Mom, but I don't really feel like it. Every Christmas she sends us one of those Letters to Everybody, so I know she married a widower with diabetes and three kids, and they had another kid together. I don't know the latest, because I stopped reading her letters a while back.
Here we all are tobogganing in the snow and having fun.
Now I can die.
The way Mom met Simone was she had a ride from Manitoba to Montreal, and she stopped at a store to pick up a few things, and there was Simone's notice on the wall,
APARTMENT TO SHARE
.
Simone was around 30 with blond hair to her shoulders.
She was a massage therapist at the Y. She talked and laughed pretty much non-stop.
Simone knew a million things about how to get stuff. She knew about Value Village and the vestiaires and where you could go for picnics. We used to go to Ãle Ste-Hélène in the summer and we'd spread out a blanket and eat hard-boiled eggs and cookies. Simone always treated me to ice cream. She said two scoops was best, because three were hard to manage and one was boring. She liked doing nails and toes. She shampooed my hair in the bath and made me French braids.
Simone taught Mom how to cook. She found this one recipe in a magazine where you fry chopped onions and tomatoes and green peppers and then when they're almost ready you break four eggs on top and cover the frying pan tight and the eggs get done from the steam. The trick is not to break the yolks when you crack the eggs into the pan. Simone had a food processor, so the chopping only took a few seconds, on off on off on off, to get it even. We made that recipe a lot.
Simone saved us, because Mom didn't know where to get clothes or anything else.
When I was seven, Simone decided to move to Kitchener, where she had some friends. At first I thought she was moving to a new job in a
kitchen
, but eventually I figured out that she was leaving Montreal. She said it was easier to do massages in Ontario.
We couldn't afford the apartment without Simone, so
we had to move. Before she left, Simone helped us find a new place. Come to think of it, she's the one who bargained with the landlord about keeping the old woman's furniture. Unfortunately, she took her food processor when she left. A lot of those recipes weren't the same without it.
That's all I have to tell you about today.
There were two cards for the janitor who lived here before me. I took them out of the envelopes and put them next to my cards. They're both in Spanish.
Yours forever,
Fern
Wednesday
December 26
Hi Xanoth,
There was a noise problem last night. There's an oboe player on the third floor, and his playing bothers this East Indian guy under him who has to work early and is trying to get some sleep.
I'm going to ask David if the oboe player can move to the apartment on the top floor in the corner, which is still empty. It's the same size and rent. The people under that apartment don't look like the type to complain. They're a guy and girl, around 20, very cool and into themselves. They act like they're living in New York and hanging out with rock stars. They'll like having a black oboe player living on top of them. It will help them with their illusions.
Yours forever,
Fern
Monday
Midnight December 31
Hi Xanoth,
Happy New Year.
Yours forever,
Fern
Wednesday
January 2
Hi Xanoth,
We got another 20 cm of snow dumped on us.
David came by to pick up the latest applications. I talked to him about Victor, the oboe guy. David said it's fine with him, but he didn't think Victor would want to get a new phone, because Bell charges an arm and a leg for a move. I didn't think of that.
He said, “What I really need is the original copy of the lease but I can't find those bloody leases or anything else.” He looked like he was ready to kill someone. Then his phone rang and he had to run off.
I went to tell Victor. He said he doesn't have a landline and he doesn't mind moving to another apartment, as long as it's a three and a half. He said, “I need space for my body and soul.”
He told me a bit about himself. He used to play in an orchestra, but then he got divorced and missed rehearsals, so now he plays in a fancy club four nights a week. He has two kids. I was surprised about that. He doesn't look the type. He says he doesn't see them much. He wants to,
but his wife doesn't want him in her life. She has a new guy and they live in Beauharnois, wherever that is.
I got a peek at his apartment. His mattress is on the floor, covered with a cozy red wool blanket, and he has lots of CDs. There was a definite smell of ganja.
I told him I'd help him move in exchange for a meal and he said, “Cool.”
I felt a bit down after I talked to him. Because I liked him, and I knew that someone like him would never in a million years go for someone like me.
At least I have you, Xanoth.
Yours forever,
Fern
Thursday
January 3
Hi Xanoth,
I helped Victor move his stuff today. He didn't have all that much, and nothing was really heavy. He was nice, cracking jokes and worrying about me when we were carrying his bureau up the stairs. He called me Miss Hercules.
He wanted to give me a CD of his playing, but I told him I don't have a CD player. He said I should come over some time to listen to it.
He forgot about the meal, or maybe he thought I was joking when I told him we'd do an exchange. So I reminded him. I said, “Well, you owe me a meal.”