The Girl Who Was Saturday Night Read Free Page A

sickly bunch. They would hang around garbage cans in the alleys behind Chinese restaurants. They would smoke cigars so that they could have smoke coming out of their mouths.”
    “I know, you told me.”
    “I’m glad they went extinct. Fucking ruined the Middle Ages for everybody. Oh, they didn’t like it when the shoe was on the other foot.”
    “I’m starving.”
    Loulou started making dinner. He never let anyone else cook. He had a dishrag tossed over his shoulder with roses on it. He had an oven mitt that was shaped like Babar the elephant. The spaghetti fell onto the floor like a burst of applause when a famous person makes a surprise cameo on a television show.
    “Oh my fucking God. What the fuck just happened here? Am I losing my mind or is there spaghetti over the floor? I’ve gone senile. I can’t fucking stand it.”
    As I brought a broom, Loulou put on a new record that he had found in the garbage. He played it at full volume and it was hard to make conversation. I had to scream bloody murder for him to pass me the salt. Loulou was drinking milk out of a plastic measuring cup. He always thought that Nicolas and I and everyone else our age had AIDS. He wouldn’t let us use the same cups as him.
    “Did you know that you can get into the zoo for free if you’re on welfare? Why aren’t I on welfare? Sign me up.”
    “You are on welfare.”
    For a long time, Loulou had collected scrap metal for a living. He still stopped to lift up a refrigerator with his bare hands every now and then to show people that he could. He carried around a briefcase filled with spark plugs and telephone wires and a wrench that weighed five or ten pounds.
    But he was getting old and was always having tiny heart attacks while lifting things into the back of his truck. He would get faint after pushing a stove up onto the flatbed of his truck and fall over. People would call 911 because they would find him lying in their garbage heap staring up in the air. He had the look of a bewildered little kid on his face when he came to. His rescuers were always moved by the expression of absolute innocence that he had on his face at those moments. When he would tell Nicolas and me about these episodes, we would laugh so hard, we couldn’t speak. We would even burst out laughing in bed in the dark when we thought about it. A few days ago, he’d found a fridge in the garbage. He put it on a little red wagon and pulled it down the street. He had to stop in order to have a heart attack. Nicolas lay on the kitchen floor screaming with laughter when I told him. Mortality didn’t mean anything to us because we were so young. We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine.
    A cat crawled in the window. There was a catnip tree in a yard in the alley behind the building. Every time I looked out my window, there were cats in the tree. They often jumped onto the balcony and into my room. It was hard to have a memory without at least one cat in it.
    Later that night Loulou got drunk and went into the living room to watch television. There were stains on the gold cushions of the couch. I spent about five minutes trying to get a channel. Loulou had made an antenna out of five coat hangers that sometimes picked up a channel from New York.
    “Sit down already. That’s as good as you’re going to get it.”
    I threw myself down next to him on the couch. He put his arms out in front of him, as if we were in a small boat that might capsize. I guess I figured it was my duty as a granddaughter to sit next to Loulou and listen to his nonsense. In Québec, people took care of their parents and not the other way round.
    The news was on and they were talking about how there was going to be another referendum within the year. Québec would again vote on whether or not to separate from Canada.
    “Oh my goodness,” said Loulou. “All this again. Your father was nuts about separating. Oh my goodness. He was at all the marches. Do you remember