Rue des Rosiers Read online

  It. The baby.

  Just because Gail doesn’t want kids doesn’t mean Rose shouldn’t.

  And Rose did. She and David were always deciding things, planning, and they’d had this pregnancy all figured out. Rose would have three whole months paid maternity leave, thank you Unemployment Insurance. Pat, their mom, empty-nested and eager to jump back into her role as the perfect mother, was set to babysit three days a week when Rose did go back to work. It was all planned out.

  They really wanted that baby.

  “The GP says she has to go on antidepressants.” Gail’s voice has gone flat. “It’s clinical depression, he says, not just her feeling down.”

  It’s the first Sarah’s heard of the expression.

  Gail puts on her smart-big-sister-to-dumb-little-sister voice. “Clinical depression is the medical term for a depression that isn’t just a mood. There’s an actual chemical imbalance that impairs brain function. She’s sick. Physically. That’s why they want to put her on antidepressants.”

  “Do you think she should go on medication?”

  “I don’t know,” Gail says. “She might be getting better. She didn’t sound as bad as last time, I don’t think. David told Mom that Rose is sleeping a bit better. I don’t know… Maybe she should try a course of medication, just to help get her over this hump. But she’ll get over it. It was just a miscarriage. She can have more kids. The doctor told them it was insignificant in terms of her fertility.”

  Just a miscarriage. Insignificant. Rose loved that baby already. It was almost full term. And then she had to carry it for weeks, weeks, waiting to give birth to a dead baby. How is it possible in the twentieth century that a woman has to carry this dead thing in her for weeks, and modern science can’t just take it away, let her bury it, let her bury what she hoped for, what she already loved? “She loved that baby, Gail.”

  Sarah sees the look on Gail’s face, knows she’s picked the wrong word, knows what’s coming.

  “Just what exactly are you saying?” Gail’s starting to flush. “Are you saying a foetus is a person? You, of all people?”

  Is Gail going to pick a fight? Is she going to start up on a woman’s right to choose now? When they’re talking about Rose? “No. But I’m saying she loved that baby before it was born. It almost was born.”

  “It wasn’t a baby, Sarah! You can’t call it a baby when it’s still in utero!”

  There’s no point trying to talk this out with Gail, whose face has gone a deep dusky rose, her narrow chest rising hard with each breath.

  “For fuck sake, Sarah, where would you be if you hadn’t had a safe abortion when you were a teenager? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  She should know better than to try talking to her impossible sister. Sarah gets up from the table, starts wiping down Gail’s counter, swabbing the rings under the detergent bottle, the crumbs under the toaster. She has to do something. She has to be doing something. She can feel Gail fuming behind her, but she won’t turn around, she won’t look back.

  ~

  The abortion’s become this cautionary tale Sarah tells herself, told her boyfriend Michael when they met a year and a half ago, two sentences: when I was sixteen and having sex for the first time I got pregnant. I had a safe abortion at the Morgentaler Clinic in Montreal. On the Spadina streetcar home from Gail’s, she wonders what would have happened if the story had been different, if she hadn’t gotten the abortion.

  Sarah watches a kid at the back of the streetcar playing air guitar with a buddy. Her highschool boyfriend, Nick, played lead guitar in a band he’d put together. She loved to watch his mouth while he played, he had to hold his mouth just so, really hard and tight, as if he were holding the music back, keeping it inside. Their best song, “Gloria,” the one they practised over and over, only had three chords. The chorus spelled out the letters – gee-el-oh-are-I-ay – so that they were almost words, almost meant something. Gloria made the boy feel good, all right, but what the hell did she feel? Gail no doubt would have a lot to say about that omission, about the repression of female sexuality.

  At sixteen Sarah knew almost nothing about sex, even the basic mechanics were fuzzy. No real sex-ed in schools in those days. And Pat, her mom, for all her being the perfect cookies-in-the-oven, kitchen-floor-gleaming mom, was too embarrassed to ever give Sarah the birds-and-bees talk. She was too shy to ask Rose, and Gail didn’t seem interested in boys. So it was all hit or miss. Sarah tried looking sex up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the basement, but all she managed to find were a lot of colour diagrams of internal organs.

  Nick waged a steady campaign for going all the way. He knew Sarah didn’t mean to be a cockteaser, but she was leading him on. And he told her about blue balls, how if they just kept fooling around but she didn’t let him have sex, this mysterious awful painful thing would happen to him. She’d had no idea boys were so fragile – they were supposed to be the tough ones. Sarah didn’t like the pressure. And she really didn’t want to get pregnant. So part of her thought, no way. Go find yourself a girl who’s easy, Nick.

  But a bigger part wanted to go along.

  And it wasn’t because of Nick’s dumb arguments. It was because before Nick, and his hands, and his mouth, there were times she felt like one of those cheap chocolate Easter eggs, so hollow with loneliness she could break. So finally one day, on the sofa in the rec room, they did it. After, she asked Nick if he shouldn’t use a safe next time, he could get a safe, couldn’t he? At a drugstore? He said wearing a condom was like washing your feet with your socks on: it wouldn’t be any fun for him. So a few days later Sarah went on her own to the Mount Carmel Clinic to get condoms. Mount Carmel. It sounded like a candy bar. The Clinic was great. Everybody knew you could get birth-control information and pregnancy tests and condoms there, and they wouldn’t tell anyone. But she never did work up the nerve to ask Nick to use them. They used the rhythm method, because what were the odds, Nick said.

  Good, as it happened. They must have been having sex for almost a month and the box of condoms still hadn’t been opened. And she was late.

  She kept thinking she couldn’t be pregnant so soon, they’d only had sex five, maybe six times. Then another day and another went by with no period. How was she going to finish school if she was knocked up? What was she supposed to do with a baby? Sarah remembers the crazy little conversations, bargains she started making in her head: she’d never do it with anyone ever again as long as she got away with it just this once. She’d run away from home, live on the streets, hide in someone’s barn. Not tell anyone and give birth in a field, like those women in China, leave the baby on church steps, synagogue steps.

  Nothing in her wanted this.

  She told Nick she was almost ten days late. She could go back to the Clinic, he told her, she could get a test. And the Clinic could give her a referral for an abortion, if she was pregnant and decided she didn’t want it. Abortion was legal in New York. And there was the Morgentaler clinic in Montreal. Sarah knew she was too young, she couldn’t have a baby. She couldn’t tell her parents, she was too scared. But she could tell her big sister Rose. She’d tell Rose because Rose would know what to do, Rose would tell her what to do.

  Which she did. Which was to get an abortion.

  The truth is, for all that the story is boiled down now to two tidy sentences, Sarah has this ghost count in her head, how old her kid would be if she hadn’t had the abortion. Boy or girl, she doesn’t know, could they even tell the sex that early? But she didn’t ask.

  Eight. The kid would be eight. Briefly her mind flits to a gawky kid, good at baseball, track and field, like her. Good at maths, like her.

  She stops herself. The streetcar bumps along the tracks heading north up Spadina. Sarah hauls on the window to open it, she needs the breeze on her face.

  Where would she be if she hadn’t had access to a safe abortion, what would she be? She sure wouldn’t be her sister Gail, who even as a teenager was way too smart to get knocke
d up. Her sister the crackerjack newly minted lawyer, the success. No. And not Rose either, the perfect sister, who waited until everything was in place – the devoted husband, the stable job – before she got pregnant with the kid she decided to have, wanted to have.

  If Sarah hadn’t had the abortion, she’d be what she is now, a loser scraping by on minimum wage. And on top of that, she’d be a single mom in some basement dive in Winnipeg.

  And how would she feel about the son or daughter who’d kept her from graduating high school?

  She can’t imagine not loving a kid.

  ~

  gift

  paris. michael is back from paris, his first time in Paris. City of light. City of romance. In fact, Sarah beat him to Paris. She was there once, for four days. Her boyfriend-of-the-month, Reuben, asked her to come back-packing through Europe on $10 a day with a side trip to Israel. The penny said yes. Four days in Paris. She remembers how dirty it was, how glorious. The mystery of bidets in the bathroom of the grungy little hotel, frîtes on the street in the Latin Quarter. With French mustard. Reuben got some sort of crotch rot from the dirty sheets, a fungus. The whole place made him nervous. But she loved it. Maybe partly because her French was pretty good even then. And it’s better now. She figures she hasn’t had much in the way of a vacation since she was twenty and backpacking. Five years.

  She’s over at Michael’s apartment, the sweet two-storey, two-bedroom on Howland he keeps asking her to move into. He’s back from Paris and here’s his trophy, a gift. The package is wrapped in pale blue tissue paper, a seal of a deeper blue closing the folds. Un p’tit paquet cadeau. His grin wide. The salesclerks always offer to gift-wrap stuff. She starts nibbling at the seal with her fingernails. Her nails are always trimmed close for work or she can’t keep them clean.

  Michael takes the package, opens it for her: a skirt in polished cotton a deep blue, almost indigo, with little slashes of black patterning it. Cotton, but such a fine weave that it feels like silk. The salesclerk thought it would fit: he told the clerk Sarah was très petite. He holds it against Sarah’s waist, testing for size.

  She likes it. Of course she does. But Michael probably paid more for the skirt than she’s spent on clothes in a whole year. In the top drawer of the dresser in her rooming-house room, Sarah keeps a spiral-bound notebook to record expenses: newspaper 50¢; subway tokens $8; laundry $2.75; lunch 95¢. Beside it a column of running totals, which she does in her head. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. She can pay all her bills but it’s tight, she needs to keep track. And she always pays her share. She doesn’t want to owe him anything.

  He pulls her up for a kiss. The skirt was expensive, yes, he tells her. Shockingly, obscenely expensive.

  She likes Michael’s mouth. A taste of peppermint, a taste of salt. The kiss continues and for moments they both forget about the gift, then she draws away, steps back, looks at it again.

  He slides his fingers inside the waistband of her jeans. He wants her to try it on. She unzips the jeans, steps into the skirt. Tugs at the fabric belt, ties a bow at the front. Très petite. He steers her to the narrow full-length mirror hung on the closet door.

  She’s not sure about the woman in the mirror. She looks at her hands – clean, but rough-looking, a bit chewed at the knuckles with nicks and scratches from the job. She looks up again, this slight, graceful woman; the lines of the skirt making her a bit fuller, giving some amplitude to the small self she’s used to, the one that doesn’t take up too much room.

  His hands slip back into the waistband of the skirt. “I missed you.” He takes her to sit on the bed, puts his mouth against her neck. “Stay the night this time. The whole night. I don’t want you to go home.” Now the beautiful skirt is pooled on the hardwood floor. All right. All right. She’ll relent this time, stay through to morning, whatever it costs.

  ~

  The sisters used to play a game: if you were a dog, what kind of dog would you be? Sarah would be a Jack Russell, Gail and Rose agreed instantly. Sarah argued for a border collie because she liked how smart they were, but the other two wouldn’t have it, they knew she was the muscle and spunk of a Jack Russell. And that meant Gail had to be a Jack Russell too. Peas in a pod. People often thought they were twins, despite the twenty months between them. The big debate was about Rose. If she were a redhead, Rose Red, she’d be an Irish setter, but she wasn’t a redhead, all three of them were brunettes. The two younger sisters thought Afghan, they wanted lean and elegant and perfect, and wasn’t that Rose, even before her growth spurt, before she rose above them, 5' 7" at the least? She wasn’t tough in the same way as them, Rose, not interested in softball or track. What she did love was dance, and her long limbs lent themselves easily to it. Back then, Rose was never the centre of a clique but never at the edges either. Not an anxious joiner like Gail, always jockeying for status, and not a loner like Sarah. It was easy for Rose, she was easy in the world, comfortable in her skin. That’s how it seemed to Sarah.

  Sarah never minded not having much in the way of friends, because Rose and Gail were pretty much all she needed. She remembers the three of them squeezed into the double bed Rose reigned over, the oldest sister getting her own room. The three of them head to toe, toe to head, cuddling each other’s feet, which they pretended were wriggling babies. Making sister sandwiches, fighting about who got to be the meat. Squeezed tight against each other, squealing, squished and happy. Rose always supremely in the lead, framing the stories, setting the rules of the games. Winter Sundays, the three of them making grilled cheese sandwiches under the broiler, slices cut from the huge blocks of Bothwell cheddar their father brought home from the factory. Rose in charge, supervising the timing so the cheese was just the perfect melted gold with patches of light brown. The three of them in the long summer evenings of Winnipeg, playing Kick the Can and Hide & Seek in the backyards and alleys, in the rectangles of their neighbourhood. And always being found.

  They were all always found.

  Now Sarah thinks maybe it’s Gail who’s the border collie. She’s certainly smart enough. But is it Gail or is it Sarah who has that need to herd, keep things together, at least where it comes to the sisters? Sarah, the youngest, who can never let the thread go too far or too loose, or she’ll feel herself slip. The thread stretching so far now. Maybe that’s what she is, a bulldog. Dog with a bone. Won’t ever let anything go.

  Not her sister. She is not going to lose Rose. Not if she has to breathe for her; not if she has to make her want to live.

  She is never going to lose Rose because without Rose she doesn’t know who she is.

  ~

  Michael’s been back from Paris three days now, but they’re still hungry for each other. So much so that he’s managed to persuade her to stay the night twice in a row. She knows it drives him nuts when she leaves, as she usually does, in the middle of the night. Though he sleeps like the dead, never stirs when she slips out of bed to walk the 15 minutes from his place to hers, he hates waking up without her. She can’t explain why she doesn’t like to stay, not even to herself. Just knows she’ll wake up at 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 afraid of that old terror, afraid of being afraid. Just like she used to when she had one of her nightmares, the ones that started when she was just a kid. She’ll wake and start to feel herself freezing over, feel it coming over her, and she’ll have to get up, get dressed, do something, to keep herself from the dream. Save herself. She’ll have to prove to herself that she can get up, get dressed, leave the apartment and walk down the street to her own room. She’ll walk under the shadows of trees through the dark streets that belong to her, not afraid, fall into her bed and sleep till morning.

  She can’t talk to Michael about this. Doesn’t talk much at all, but tonight, after two nights where she made herself stay with him, where she didn’t in fact wake up but slept beside him through the night, she finds herself telling him about the sisters and their games, their dog selves. “You’re not a Jack Russell,” he says, running a finger along the
definition of her ribs, her tight little stomach, following the curve of a bicep. “You’re a whippet. Purebred.”

  “Purebred Jewish,” she tells him.

  “Purebred Jewess.”

  “Don’t, Michael...”

  “What?”

  “I hate that word.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it feels full of hate.”

  He sits up in bed. “Oh for god’s sake, Sarah. What now? Why is Jew okay but not Jewess?”

  Jew. The word swells to fill her mouth, the room. Jew isn’t okay. She can’t even say Jew to herself without feeling the hate soak through that single syllable, without feeling the word, the hate, obliterate her. And she hates herself for letting that feeling go into her.

  “Sarah? Fill me in here; cut me some slack.”

  Of course he doesn’t get it. Michael’s a blank slate when it comes to these gradations of hatred, self- and otherwise. He grew up in some WASP hick town in British Columbia and until he got to university, he’d never even met anyone who was Jewish. She’s no good with this kind of stuff. Gail’s the one who could explain how the colonized mind internalizes oppressive negative social stereotypes. But she’s not Gail.

  “Sarah? Please don’t go into your silent routine again.”

  “I… it’s… Look.” She takes a breath. “Michael. I have trouble even with Jew.” He can’t stop himself from wincing. “Yeah, it’s wrong. But I always hear the slur. Hear all this weight behind the word: history, the war. I can’t separate it out. And then that ess: Jewess, Negress. It always seems to mean less. And I feel a smirk there. Like the marker for sex is a marker of sexiness.” She rubs the heel of her hand against her forehead.