NICOLAS HADN’T SEEN PIERROT IN MONTHS AND he had stopped bringing him up. Nicolas’s spirits seemed to have risen, though. Or in any case, Nicolas started to act as if his spirits had risen. Whenever something was really bothering Nicolas, he got this weird version of happy, which was more like hyperactivity.
I put on my coat and hat and boots and stomped off through the snow to find Nicolas on a windy winter day. I couldn’t hear myself think because the wind was so loud. It took forever just to get to the corner store because my boots kept getting stuck in the piles of snow that I was trudging through.
By the time I found Nicolas at the Portuguese bakery, my eyelashes were frozen and I couldn’t feel the tips of my fingers, even though I had gloves on. My tights were covered in slush right up to my knees. I pushed open the glass door and hurried inside. The tiles on the wall were all blue. They served pastries that were as hard as rocks, and teeny tiny cups of espresso that could make you completely insane.
Nicolas was sitting at a table. His big overcoat was slung over the back of his chair. There were some young guys sitting with him at his table, listening to him avidly. One waved his hands around madly whenever Nicolas made an interesting point. The other boy had a fine moustache and a cast on his wrist, which he had drawn little ships all over. I guess that if his childhood had been better, he might have become a sailor. There was a big puddle underneath them from the snow that had melted off their boots.
Nicolas’s head was lowered as he talked to them. He had a piece of paper with a diagram drawn on it. As I approached the table, he quickly folded up his paper and stuck it into his pocket. He smiled at me as if he wasn’t doing anything at all.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Nicolas said. “Here she is, ladies and gentlemen: my marvellous sister. We once had a fabulous show together. Unparalleled.”
Nicolas stood up and started walking in an exaggerated manner, and then he got slower and slower, until he bent over and hung forward like a windup doll that had petered out. I stared at him for a while. Then I stood up, walked over and stood behind him. I turned an imaginary key around and around on his back. He stood up and started moving again. Everyone in the café applauded. He was doing it for my benefit, of course.
It was a routine that we’d performed on the talk show Midi plus. We had these routines stuck in us like refrains from songs that we couldn’t stop singing, or nervous tics. Anyways, this time it was fun to do one of our old shticks together.
Nicolas brought me over to a table in the corner where we could talk alone.
“You’re miserable. That’s why you came looking for me, isn’t it? You can move back home if you want.”
“No. Raphaël and I are doing fine.”
“I saw your husband reading the newspaper in his pyjamas at the Polish breakfast place. He was making one of the waitresses nervous as hell. And you’re going to tell me that your marriage is okay?”
“Things are really good between us; just the other day I said that it was like we were still on a honeymoon.”
“God, how tacky.”
I didn’t want to let Nicolas think that it had been a mistake to leave home. I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I wanted to keep moving forward, even though it might be awful and strange and difficult.
“Why are you lying to me?” Nicolas asked. “You think that I’m going to judge you? You think that I’m going to give you a hard time about your relationship not working out? There hasn’t been a relationship that worked out on this street since 1973.”
“Do you want to do something together?” I asked. “We could go see a movie or a show?”
“No, no, no. I’m through with that Everyman shit.”
“So what does that mean? You want to go read philosophy or jump out of airplanes?”
“No. What I think we should do is pay our mother another visit.”
“Oh no, that’s not a good idea.”
“Come on, Nouschka. We can’t just leave it the way we left it.”
“No way, Nicolas.”
“You’re afraid of your own mother?”
“First of all, she’s not really our mother; Loulou is. And I’m not afraid of her. She expressed that it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to go and see her, and I’m not.”
“Fuck that. Why does she get to have the final say? This time I’m going to show up at dinnertime and I’m going to scream my motherfucking head off until she comes out and falls on her hands and knees and weeps. What do you think about that?”
“I think you should calm down, Nicolas.”
“I am going to show up on the lawn and I am going to masturbate right in front of all the children. After I have gone back to the city, an army of ugly, dirty boys that nobody will want will sprout out of the ground.”
He tapped his index finger against my chest.
“We have to go back there, Nouschka.”
A woman passing by looked at him. He pointed his finger at the woman and she immediately jerked her head away.
I thought about telling him the story about the floating cello. My idea of who Noëlle was had changed now that I knew she was a storyteller. I had always thought that Étienne’s attraction to her was one hundred percent based on her being young. But maybe she whispered something into his ear that had made her seem completely unique and different from all the other girls crammed into that house in the country. Maybe she told him that he looked like a pirate who had lost his treasure map.
Somehow I liked that idea. I think that all kids—no matter how acrimonious their parents’ relationship is—want to believe that at the point of their conception, their parents had been in love.
But this sort of wistful thinking wouldn’t cut it for Nicolas. What he was looking for was something real. He wanted change. He wanted confrontation. He seemed to be offering me a choice, or a dare, rather. I could either go with him to see our mother, or he was going to stay at the lovely Pâtisserie Gourmande and continue orchestrating his mad Children’s War.
“Everyone is always telling me about what a shitty parent I am. But why do my parents get away with bloody murder? Why do I have to come up with three thousand dollars? Why do I have to prove myself? She’s a terrible parent. She completely abandoned us, so why don’t they take her kids away? Will you explain that to me? Why does she get to have Little Fishstick and Dumont or whatever the fuck their names are?”
“Did you just call her kids Fishstick and Dumont?” I started laughing.
“I don’t know what their names are. I’m just guessing.”
We started laughing hysterically at these two strangers out in the world, who we could think of in a hundred ways but never as siblings.
“But that’s what they looked like in the photographs, no? Didn’t they look like a Fishstick and a Dumont?”
We laughed so hard that we cried.
“That doesn’t even make any sense,” I said. “You’ve completely lost your noodle.”
“My bananas have fallen completely out of my banana tree.”
Nicolas was wearing a Oui button on his pea jacket. I pointed to it. He took it off and put it on my jacket. We were still fighting on the same side of that war. But I wasn’t ready for Lily. Maybe once I had lost everything like Nicolas had, then I would be able to face her again.