The Way She Closed the Door

It was 2011, and I’d been alone in Paris for four or five days, walking around, going to museums, sitting in parks, watching people, just waiting, really, for my boyfriend to meet me there. I was staying at a cheap one-star hotel called the Tiquetonne, which was on Rue Tiquetonne, by the Étienne Marcel Métro station. One afternoon, I decided to see a movie at one of those old cinemas near the Boulevard Saint-Michel. I can’t remember what the movie was; I think it was American, maybe a Wes Anderson film. There were only two of us in the theatre: a young guy, who sat at the back, and me. The lights went down and the movie started, but after a minute or two the projector stopped working and the screen went black. The lights came back on, and we, the two of us, waited. The projector started working again and the lights went back down. Then, a few minutes later, it stopped again and the lights came up. It went on like that—lights down, lights up, lights down, lights up—as though Earth were spinning too fast on its axis. Eventually, the projectionist told us that it was impossible, he couldn’t get the machine to work, and we could ask for our money back. So there we were, the young guy and me, standing out on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. I was about to head back to my hotel when the young guy asked me in English if I’d like to have a coffee with him. After all, it was obvious that we both had the time and the money, from our ticket refunds, so why not?

We went to a café nearby and sat upstairs at a long counter that looked out over the street. The young guy—whom I’ll call Luc—asked me what I was doing in Paris. I told him that I was waiting for my boyfriend to show up. I guess “boyfriend” is a strange word because he and I were both in our forties at the time. He prefers me to call him my husband, but that’s a whole other story. Luc told me that he was nineteen years old and lived with his parents. He said that he sometimes worked as a tour guide and was really good at making up believable answers to the tourists’ questions. If he didn’t have an answer, he’d say that there were rumors and there was speculation but that the true story behind whatever it was he was talking about—a building or a person or a monument or a battle—would forever remain a mystery. And they buy that? I asked. He shrugged. He said that the work was O.K. but boring, and he really wanted to travel and study and have adventures. And why don’t you? I asked him. He didn’t know.

We stared out the window and drank our coffee. We talked about movies, about the ones we loved or hated, and how we both enjoyed seeing movies alone in the middle of the day. He asked me where I was from—Seattle? I said, No, Canada, a city called Winnipeg. What’s that like? he asked. I started to describe the city, superficially, how it’s very cold in the winter and hot in the summer. I told him that in the winter it gets so cold that all the smoke coming from the chimneys of the houses stands straight up, in columns; it can’t move or float around like normal smoke. It’s as if it were frozen in midair. And, when it’s that cold, there are these things called sun dogs, two small suns that show up on either side of the big sun. And when you go outside you absolutely cannot stop moving or you’ll die. Winnipeg is one of the coldest cities in the world, which is frustrating for Winnipeggers. We’d like it to be in first place. It would make our suffering easier to handle if we were at least the champions of it. There are two wide, swift-moving rivers that snake through the city, and bridges everywhere, crumbling bridges that resemble dark sutures if you’re looking down from an airplane. You’re probably wondering what city is the coldest in the world, I said. I don’t know its name, but I think it’s in Siberia. I thought that maybe the young guy was bored, maybe I reminded him of his boring life, with my boring description of a midsize Canadian city, so I started telling him other things. I remember feeling that I was tired of entertaining this kid, that I really would have preferred to be alone, wandering around Paris, waiting, thinking.

Now, though, looking back at that day, the broken projector, the café, the kid, I imagine talking to him again. We met only once, briefly, more than a decade ago and I’ve barely thought about that afternoon in all this time. But lately, strangely, the scene plays out in my head many times a day—the way we were perched on high stools by the long counter on the second floor of that café on the Left Bank, the afternoon light fading over the Seine, over the city—and for reasons I don’t understand, or maybe I should say am struggling to understand, the young French guy in the café has become my imaginary interlocutor. In my mind, I’m telling him this story.

A few months ago, my mother and I travelled back to our home town of Winnipeg. (We live in Toronto now.) Actually, Winnipeg isn’t exactly our home town. We come from a Mennonite community, about seventy kilometres south of Winnipeg, very close to the American border. Our neighborhood there is called Hunga Veade, which is a made-up spelling because my parents’ language—Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German—is a spoken language, not a written one, but in English it means “Hunger Beware.” My mother and I had travelled to Winnipeg to see my new granddaughter, her great-granddaughter. We rented an apartment near the center of the city, across the river from the legislative building and a half-hour walk from my son’s place, in the West End. There’s a seventeen-foot sculpture of a naked man on top of the legislative building, which came from France, many years ago. Everybody calls it the Golden Boy. Twenty years ago, it was removed, for cleaning, and the City of Winnipeg displayed it at a food market downtown so that Winnipeggers could get a closeup look at this giant, gleaming, muscular boy, before he returned to the top of the legislative building.

We were in Winnipeg for two months, my mother and I, to help out with my son’s daughters, a three-year-old and the new baby. My mother was old, eighty-five, with a bad heart, and all she could really do to help was hold the baby and sing lullabies in her ancient language—which, if you think about it, is a lot. It’s almost everything. My mother rocked the baby, which meant that I was the one who ran around all day with the three-year-old. She has silvery-greenish eyes, the three-year-old, and was always brushing imaginary hair out of them, something she started doing when her hair was long, before her mom cut it into a cute bob. We ran and ran. When she got frustrated, she screamed. Long, piercing screams. Her face turned red and her body shook. When the tantrum was over, it was really over. She was happy again, throwing herself at me and pulling me up from the couch to dance with her like Josephine Baker. She had all these books about famous people, including Josephine Baker. Ask her who wrote “Frankenstein” and she’d tell you Mary Shelley, or who was seven years old when she got her first guitar and she’d tell you Dolly Parton. It was a party trick her parents could play when they had company. She’s smart and intense, like her dad. They’re both Scorpios, if that means anything to you. Mostly we ran, she and I. It was exhausting but I love her, and, you know, would die for her. That’s what grandmothers do, eventually. We make space in the cave for the little ones. We just bow out. Sometimes I’d turn on Netflix Kids and put her in front of the TV with a bowl of mac and cheese—it had to be the seashell-shaped noodles—and I’d go to the hallway and lie down on the floor to rest and feel the cold air that got in through the cracks around the front door.

I stop talking because my daughter has just texted me. It’s a photo of her unborn son’s scrotum. It’s a boy! I say. Her second boy! I imagine handing my phone over to the young French guy in the café and showing him the picture. I have a lot of grandchildren, I tell him. You’ll really have to bow out soon, he says. Or get a bigger cave. I laugh politely at his joke and sip my coffee and keep talking.

Most of my time in Winnipeg was spent taking care of my granddaughters and also my mother, who needed help with just about everything, even showering, which was a pretty funny adventure for us both. She had a lot of friends over to the apartment and they’d play Scrabble and drink wine, laughing uproariously, then sighing about things like the brevity of life, then laughing again. I was trying to write a book at the time, but it wasn’t going very well and I didn’t really know what I was trying to write about. A line from a book I was reading kept coming back to me: “The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead.” I thought, Yeah, that’s right. That’s a good way of putting it. A lyric from a song that a friend of mine had written kept knocking around in my head, too: “Forty years of failing to describe a feeling.”

When I wasn’t taking care of the grandkids or my mother, I’d go walking along the frozen river behind our apartment and I’d think of those two lines, of the air crackling and of failure. I’d walk for miles along the river—we called it the Ass River, short for Assiniboine—trying to nail down a plan for the book I was writing. I had to be careful I didn’t walk too far. It was easy to forget about things on the river, to forget that parts of my body were beginning to freeze or that I’d lost feeling in my hands or feet, or that my watery, windblown eyes were almost completely iced shut, and that I needed to get back to my mother. When I got to the apartment, my mother was always still up, sitting at the dining-room table, working. She’d been given a small translating job by a movie producer who wanted to adapt one of my books. She was translating English words and lines into her medieval language, which she describes as prust. One evening, as soon as I walked through the front door, she said, Oh, great, hey, listen, I’m having a problem with one of these sentences. The sentence was “I dare you to say no.” There was no word for “dare” in her language. I asked her if she could use a word like “defy” or “challenge,” and she said, No, no, c’mon, we don’t have words like that! She couldn’t stop laughing. Really—she almost choked to death. Even as I lay in bed that night, trying to get to sleep, I could hear her start up again with the laughing.

Another evening, I walked for miles on the river, feeling embarrassed about everything, specifically about writing, about being a person who moved words around, trying to make something. I mean, it was all so embarrassing, and it had to do with being a grandmother, a mother, a useless daughter who got exasperated trying to take care of her old mother, and was afflicted with this need to write things down. It started when I was a young kid, riding in the back seat of our Ford Custom 500, in the dark, on our way home from the city or from church. There was only one radio station—which I called “the hog-and-crop report”—so as my father drove, hunched over the steering wheel, peering into the darkness, and my mother sat beside him, and I stretched out in the back seat, the radio listed the day’s prices on hogs and crops. The list went like this: “alfalfa up” and then some number, “wheat down” and then some number, “canola down, mustard up, corn up, spring sows down”—it went on and on and, for some reason, my parents seemed intent on hearing the whole thing, everything on the list, and they weren’t even farmers.

At about that time, I had taught myself how to touch-type, and while I was lying stretched out in the back seat with the hog-and-crop report droning on in the darkness, I noticed my fingers involuntarily begin to move, but not really, not my real fingers, fingers in my mind, and they were typing every word that was being said. Eventually, the fingers in my mind began to type everything that was being said around me, not just the hog-and-crop report in the car. It would start, first thing in the morning, with my cheerful mother saying, Good morning, sunshine! The fingers in my mind would begin typing and somehow they kept up with everything that was said, even if I was the one doing the talking. All day my fingers would be typing—at school, while I was playing kick the can with my friends, every shout, every taunt, every bit of conversation, every question, every answer, until I fell asleep, finally, at night, exhausted but happy, or if not happy then relieved, because I had done it. I had typed away the day with the fingers in my mind, as though that were the only way of proving to myself that I was alive, that what I was experiencing was real.