YOU COULD ONLY TAKE ONE HOT BATH A DAY IN our apartment because it took twenty-four hours for the tank to fill up again. I was in the bath Saturday morning about a month after the parade. My nylons were hanging from the shower rod by their tippytoes. Adam came in and started taking off his clothes.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to be a great philosopher one day, Little Nouschka Tremblay.”
“There’s a very fine line between being a person who changes the way that his contemporaries think and being an idiot with bad hair and an unpublished manifesto.”
“That’s funny! And you shall be famous too!”
He climbed in with me. We were sitting in the bathtub with our knees pressing against one another.
“Just because you’re in the bathtub with me, don’t get any funny ideas. It doesn’t mean that I’m your girlfriend or anything like that.”
“Did you and Nicolas used to take baths together?”
“We didn’t have a mother, okay?”
“Neither did I, really. I spent most of my time with my nanny.”
“Still, you had one. Mine was just Val-des-Loups trash.”
“That’s terrible. Your mother was Lily Sainte-Marie! I like that song.”
We both started singing it.
I bought her a drink and she threw up on my shoes
I took her out dancing, but she was too young to get into the club
I bought her a book of poetry, but she didn’t like to read
Lily Sainte-Marie!
Her hands were always dirty
Lily Sainte-Marie, the first pretty girl born in Val-des-Loups since 1883.
Adam got out of the bath, tied a towel around his waist and started combing his hair straight up. He considered his blond hair to be one of the natural wonders of the world. When he was done, he looked like someone who would give bad advice to the dauphin at the French court. I drained the bath and was sitting on the toilet lid in my underclothes, painting my toenails.
Nicolas walked into the bathroom. He leaned against the wall next to the medicine cabinet, wanting to hear what we were talking about, I guess. It was amazing that we could all squeeze in there.
“Do you know that my nanny always turned off the radio when Lily Sainte-Marie came on?” Adam said. “She said it was the saddest song in the world. I never got why that song made her cry. I thought it was funny.”
“What was she like?” Nicolas asked suddenly.
“My nanny?”
“Yeah, what was she like?”
“She was really shy. She hated having to order meat at the meat counter. She used to collect the labels off of wine bottles and paste them into a book. She asked if she could have a cat. She always played the lottery. She had bumblebee patches on her jeans.”
“What else?”
“If I had a tiny scratch on my knee, she would cover my entire leg with iodine so it was completely orange. She liked canned spaghetti.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“No.”
It was an awfully strange question to ask. I looked over at Nicolas. He looked oddly focused. He usually got impatient when anyone rattled on about anything, because he was anxious to be the one doing all the talking.
“You couldn’t even really see what she looked like. She wore her bangs down in her face.”
“Well, you were very lucky to have a nanny, weren’t you? Wouldn’t it be possible that without her, you would have walked into the street and been hit by a car? I was hit by a bus when I was five and I broke my arm. I could’ve used a nanny that day. Singing her cheery songs.”
Adam and I were both stunned. I had never heard him turn on Adam that way.
“What are you so angry about?” I asked.
When we were about eleven, Nicolas and I used to sometimes speculate on the whereabouts of our mother. We didn’t talk about it in the house because we didn’t want to upset Loulou. But it would pass the time as we walked to school.
We understood why she had left us. We had seen enough after-school specials to know that it was because she had been too young to take care of us. But we couldn’t figure out why she wouldn’t come back for us now. She was older and we weren’t babies and we were able to do so many things by ourselves. We got dressed on our own and rode the metro everywhere.
Once, we decided that she was in medical school in Poland. We imagined her weeping as she did tests on white mice. And when she was finally a doctor, she would come back for us. We imagined her removing our tonsils and then giving us little bowls of Jell-O for dinner.
Sometimes we would look into the mailbox, just peeping, just hoping that there would be a note from our mother in there, something that would give us a clue about where she might be and that would give us a more concrete idea about what was keeping her away. But then as we got older, we just figured that she didn’t want to come back. She was happy with her life, wherever it was. I tried to accept this, but Nicolas never did.