Surfacing Read Free Page B

has appeared in the kitchen doorway and Paul speaks with her in the nasal slanted French I can’t interpret because I learned all but a few early words of mine in school. Folk songs and Christmas carols and, from the later grades, memorized passages of Racine and Baudelaire are no help to me here.
    “You must come in,” he says to me, “and take a tea,” and he bends and undoes the hook of the wooden gate. I go forward to the door where Madame is waiting for me, hands outstretched in welcome, smiling and shaking her head mournfully as though through no fault of my own I’m doomed.
    Madame makes the tea on a new electric stove, a blue ceramic Madonna with pink child hanging above it; when I glimpsed the stove on my way through the kitchen I felt betrayed, she should have remained loyal to her wood range. We sit on the screened porch overlooking the lake, balancing our teacups and rocking side by side in three rocking chairs; I’ve been given the store cushion, which has an embroidered view of Niagara Falls. The black and white collie, either the identical one I used to be afraid of or its offshoot, lies on the braided rug by our feet.
    Madame, who is the same thickness all the way down, is in a long-skirted dress and black stockings and a print apron with a bib, Paul in high-waisted trousers with braces, flannel shirt-sleeves rolled. I’m annoyed with them for looking so much like carvings, the habitant kind they sell in tourist handicraft shops; but of course it’s the other way around, it’s the carvings that look like them. I wonder what they think I look like, they may find my jeans and sweatshirt and fringed over-the-shoulder bag strange, perhaps immoral, though such things may be more common in the village since the tourists and the T.V. ; besides, I can be forgiven because my family was, by reputation, peculiar as well as anglais.
    I lift my cup, they are watching me anxiously: it’s imperative that I mention the tea. “Très bon,” I manage to get out in the direction of Madame. “Délicieux.” Doubt seizes me, thé may be feminine.
    What I’m remembering are the visits our mother was obliged to pay Madame while our father was visiting Paul. My father and Paul would be outside, talking about boats or motors or forest fires or one of their expeditions, and my mother and Madame would be inside in the rocking chairs (my mother with the Niagara Falls cushion), trying with great goodwill to make conversation. Neither knew more than five words of the other’s language and after the opening Bonjours both would unconsciously raise their voices as though talking to a deaf person.
    “Il fait beau,” my mother would shout, no matter what the weather was like, and Madame would grin with strain and say “Pardon? Ah, il fait beau , oui, il fait beau, ban oui.” When she had ground to a stop both would think desperately, chairs rocking.
    “ ’Ow are you?” Madame would scream, and my mother, after deciphering this, would say “Fine , I am fine.” Then she would repeat the question: “How are you, Madame?” But Madame would not have the answer and both, still smiling, would glance furtively out through the screen to see if the men were yet coming to rescue them.
    Meanwhile my father would be giving Paul the cabbages or the string beans he had brought from his garden and Paul would be replying with tomatoes or lettuces from his. Since their gardens had the same things in them this exchange of vegetables was purely ritual: after it had taken place we would know the visit would be officially over.
    Madame is stirring her tea now and sighing. She says something to Paul and Paul says, “Your mother, she was a good woman, Madame says it is very sad; so young too.”
    “Yes,” I say. Mother and Madame were about the same age and no-one would call Madame young; but then my mother never got fat like Madame.
    I went to see her in the hospital, where she allowed herself to be taken only when she could no longer