Rouge(46)

It’s called imagination, Mother told Ms. Said when Ms. Said brought her into the school to talk about the pictures. She’d laid them all out on the desk, to my great shame. All my angry red suns and my beautiful maidens and my shining mirrors.

Is that what it’s called? Ms. Said asked, and Mother didn’t answer, just stared at my pictures. Her sunglasses were on, so I couldn’t see her eyes. Ms. Said is the one who told me my last name, Nour, means “divine light,” did I know that? I thought Nour meant something dark like the French word for black. Noir, Nour, a lot of French people get it confused, including Grand-Maman. Nour, Ms. Said said. Looks like “night” but means “light,” remember that. Mother’s name means “of the gardens.” No one looks at Mother’s name with narrowed eyes or says it like a question. Noelle Des Jardins, they say, and I know they see a beautiful snowy garden like I do. Her face offers a picture. The red of her lips and blue of her eyes like flowers poking out of the white.

“Belle,” Mother says now, “please just stay here and be good for Grand-Maman, okay?”

“But I don’t want to be good for Grand-Maman!” Now I’m shouting. Grand-Maman’s evil, I want to tell Mother. I want to tell her about Grand-Maman’s eyes. How they can go from light brown to shining black in an instant. How the blackness seems to fill her whole eye, even the white. This happens whenever she tells me about the end of the world, how it’s coming soon. She’ll start the minute Mother leaves. Belle, she’ll hiss from her white island of couch. Viens ici. But there is never time to tell Mother because she’s always going somewhere.

“Mom, please let me come with—”

“No, Belle.” And the words are like a slap. My face stings with it. For a minute, Mother looks cruel. It feels like her beauty was only a disguise. This thin, hard mouth, these flashing eyes, this jaw of stone—this is the truth of her face.

“Stay. Here. Stay here and be good and don’t go in my room.”

“I don’t!” I shriek. I’m a terrible liar. I feel my face go red. I look at the floor, where I see my foot’s jittering. I can feel her staring at me, not like she’s mad, but like she’s sorry for me. She reaches into her purse. Lights one of her long cigarettes. Look what I’ve done. I’ve made her smoke. She’s been trying to give it up, she really has, but she never will with me around. Whining. She exhales a plume of smoke into my face.

“Play with your dolls or something, all right? I guess you’re a little old for those now. Read one of your fairy-tale books, how about that?” She makes it sound like such a fun time. Like I haven’t read these books a thousand times before.

“All right,” I say.

“Chin up, Sunshine. No more long face. Or else what? What do we say?”

“It’ll freeze that way,” I finish.

“That’s right. And we don’t want that, trust me.” And she does an impression of me pouting. Makes her eyes storm cloudy and sticks her lower lip out really far. I don’t want to laugh, but I do. And Mother smiles. Pats my head. “Much better.” Kisses the air near my face three times. I catch a whiff of her violets and smoke, the waxy animal smell of her lipstick.

“Bring me back something?” I call after her. Pathetic. I don’t know the meaning of the word yet, but the minute I heard Mother use it about someone, I knew that’s the word I was. She’s already going out the door, but she hears me.

“Like what?” she calls over her shoulder.

You, I think, after she’s gone.

From the living room window, I watch her go. A man is waiting outside our apartment in a fancy red convertible. Chip. The one who Mother says looks a little like Montgomery Clift. Monty, Mother calls him and sort of sighs, like she’s actually met Montgomery Clift, like he’s not at all a dead stranger. When Mother calls Chip Monty, he gets angry. I’m not a queer, Chip says, and then he winks at me. I don’t wink back. I hate Chip. He looks nothing like the beautiful man I see on Mother’s black-and-white screen at night, who Mother calls by his first name only, like they’re friends. I think there’s something very wrong with Mother’s eyes if she sees Monty in Chip. Apparently, Chip is Connected to the Industry, Mother says—whatever that means, Grand-Maman always adds—and if he could get Mother a role in his next film project, wouldn’t that be so wonderful for Mother? Then Mother wouldn’t have to slave her days away in Ladies Apparel at the Bay, dealing with those god-awful ladies. So difficult the ladies are, Belle, Mother says, closing her eyes as if she can still see them in her mind. But difficult’s one thing, she whispers. Mother can handle difficult. Mother can handle anything, she’s a survivor, after all. What’s trying for Mother about the ladies who shop in Ladies Apparel is that they have No Style. All they want are the saddest slacks. Sweaters to fucking drown in, even when Mother is very happy to show them other options. They always choose Death by Polyester. Mother sometimes wants to ask them why not just go down to Hardware and buy a garbage bag and wade into the Saint Lawrence River and have done with it? It’s the lack of style, the lack of dreaming, that gives Mother a migraine every night when she comes home. So that she has to sit in the dark for a very long time watching old movies to do what she calls cleanse. And if I’m quieter than quiet, if I let Mother sit and smoke on the couch, watching the TV screen like it’s a window to the most magical world, mouthing the words she knows by heart, I can sit with her. And Mother might even pat my hand, point at the screen with her cigarette, at Elizabeth Taylor or Gene Tierney or Catherine Deneuve, and say, See? Now that’s style. I see, I say, but I’m still looking at Mother’s face fixed on the screen, dreaming herself into this other world. Her face looks like it never does. Soft. Open. Like she could cry any second, but she won’t. The Bay and its ladies have left her mind. Or it’s Mother who left, the screen took her away. Opened a door and Mother walked through it. Movies do that to Mother, open something usually closed. I guess they do that to me, too, sometimes. Certain ones, anyway. If Chip or the Troll or whoever got Mother a good role, just one, Mother could leave the Bay and its ladies forever. She’d torch it on her way out the door. Set all the slacks and sweaters on fire, she wouldn’t be sorry. They’d burn up quick, she says, made as they mostly are from cheap materials.