A Second Chance Read online

  David starts stammering, which happens when he’s nervous. His patience has reached its end. Mine has too, and the only way for me to wrap this up is to get David to promise he will change the French rapper for a Quebec one, and that he will come and see me over the lunch break in order to catch up with the others. He accepts these conditions because he has no intention of keeping his promises.

  After school, I have to stay for the launch of Catherine’s book. She’s a colleague from the French department who has written a novel called Twenty Days. The launch, organized by our social committee, is from five o’clock to seven o’clock in the school basement. Half of the small space is taken up by a tomato garden, and the warmth from the grow lights and the moisture from the soil make the room feel like a greenhouse. The tables have all been covered in blue velvet for the occasion, and there are bowls with chips and glasses of sangria. I prefer to get myself a beer from the cash bar. I haven’t been drinking beer lately, but this one hits the spot. It’s been a long time since I had a glass without having to get one for Adam.

  Oliver, the art teacher, sits down beside me. As usual, he has trouble because of his stiff leg, and his cane is an inconvenience when he wants to sit down. He has bought himself a beer, too, and he raises his glass, saying, “Cheers.” I ask him if the students from my tutorial groups are still giving him trouble, and he smiles, saying this isn’t the time to talk about it.

  I’m so happy Annie-Claude comes over to sit with us. I like her, and I feel lucky this year to be the French tutor for some of her students. This is not the case with Robert’s students, who have the same attitude as their teacher: distant, cold and disdainful. Annie-Claude’s students are warm and affectionate.

  I particularly like Sako, an Armenian from Lebanon, and Lissandra, a Colombian. I’m comfortable enough with them that they’ll often stay to chat after class. They know my husband is unwell, and they always ask about him. Sometimes I sit in class with them during Annie-Claude’s teaching hour to watch their progress and help them if they can’t keep up. Annie-Claude is happy to have me in her classroom and wants to keep me as long as possible.

  I don’t think she can cope with such noisy classes. Today, she asked me to stay with her and give her a hand with the whole group on the introduction to a descriptive text on the 9/11 attacks. Sako showed me his draft, which went like this: “Across the world, there have been many tragic events, but those of 9/11 were unthinkable.” I suggested he use the expression, “beggared description,” and Sako was thrilled. He does not know many expressions in French: he arrived only recently and speaks only a little of this new language.

  Annie-Claude is having a bad day. She did not sleep well last night, I can tell from the black circles under her eyes. I suspect it’s the beginning of a breakdown. She lives alone with her fifteen-year-old son, and she gets depressed when it’s time to fix something around the house. The current problem is a blocked chimney, and she keeps us posted on developments. Oliver teases her about the chimney. Robert, who is in charge of staging the evening, takes pictures of the three of us.

  Catherine’s book is about a young woman disguised as an old grandmother who works in a crêperie. A thick dress and some padding hide her fine skin, her long hair, her breasts and hips. No one could imagine what a beauty she really is, least of all the young man who sells cell phones on the other side of the lane. She’s secretly in love with him, but the shop he works at is closing down in three weeks. This is all the time she has to win his heart.

  It’s late, but I don’t go straight home. I have a terrible headache, and I want to take a walk in spite of the ice on the sidewalk. In the past few days, it snowed, then it rained, and now it’s frozen over. I stop at the small park behind the school and sit on a bench. I get up to go when I start feeling cold.

  It’s dark when I get in. Adam has switched on the lamp in the living room and is waiting for me by the window. He can tell the time, but only sort of, so he draws big round clocks on a sheet of paper to mark the times of my departure and my arrival. I told him this won’t really help him, as I often have to stay after school to finish my planning, meet the principal, or call parents. I always find him at the living room window, waving with his good hand as soon as I turn into the driveway.

  Before I go indoors, I try to shovel away of the day’s snow from the driveway, which has become a skating rink. I have to pay for my recent laziness. I should have swept away the puddles of water that have now frozen. The only good thing is that no one uses our driveway except me, and I know its worst spots well.

  Adam welcomes me with the news that the telephone has rung five times; he has even noted this in his notebook. I pay no attention to his worry or to the blinking light that tells me there are messages. I sometimes wonder if anyone other than telemarketers care about us.

  “Let me get changed, Adam, please. They can wait a while, unless you’re waiting for a few calls.”

  He doesn’t know how to react to this. I wish he would laugh, but he just looks at me in distress, and that fills me with horror. It’s a long time since I’ve felt so down.

  It’s only after supper that I listen to the messages. There’s one from Sara and one from Marta, and I can see Peter’s family name on the display. I’m surprised I still remember it. He called twice, but left no message. I wonder if perhaps it’s his name that made Adam anxious. Did Adam see his name? Did he recognize it?

  I watch how seriously he’s concentrating on his drawing, paying attention to each line of a winter landscape with children playing around a perfectly circular snowman.

  Who gave him this book? My God, he isn’t a child. The professionals at the Geriatric Centre say that adults underestimate the beneficial role played by colouring and drawing. Incredible as it may seem, small children can project themselves into the picture and breathe life into printed images. We should really be jealous of how they live inside their heads.

  Is Adam a child who learns new things? Or is he an adult who has forgotten? To them it may be the same thing, but I think there’s a big difference.

  The telephone rings, startling me. I must have turned the volume up by mistake.

  It’s a Concordia University number.

  Peter. He’s calling me from his office. So he hasn’t gotten home yet. Did he stay at work just to call me?

  First, he asks me if I can talk. I say no, not really, but he continues anyway. I’m sure he understands Adam’s limitations. Either it makes no difference to Peter if Adam’s around, or he doesn’t care how Adam will react.

  Peter wants to set up a time for us to meet downtown and have a coffee. He wants to talk to me.

  I tell him I have to get home after school to take care of Adam. He insists, but I stay firm. He says he can help me if I need any support. He adds that he imagines how difficult it must be for a woman to replace a man in the house.

  “Difficult in what sense?” I ask in a bad temper. I explain as calmly as I can that if I have any problems, I call the plumber, the gardener, the snow cleaner, the electrician. I have a good salary and I can pay for any service I need to run my house. I add that Adam was never handy or fond of manual labour. He hated it when he really had no alternative but to take care of something. He fixed the faucets when the water was dripping because of the broken seals, and he ploughed the snow in the driveway when Canada Post threatened to sue us for putting its employees’ lives in danger.

  Peter is so insistent that I have to cut him off brusquely. “Listen, Peter, it isn’t a man that’s difficult to replace in a house. It’s a husband.”

  That’s the end of the conversation.

  Adam used not to listen when I was on the phone, but he has been paying attention to this call. He heard the alarm in my voice. He set down his crayon and watched me the whole time.

  “That was Peter,” I say, taking a deep breath. “He insists on seeing me.”

  Adam does
not dare ask why.

  “He thinks I need his help.”

  Adam desperately wants to know what to say. I would like to end the conversation, but Adam hasn’t yet picked up his crayon again.

  What is he waiting for? There’s nothing more to add.

  Our weekend routine is the same as usual. I prepare the coffee, do my exercises, and then come back to the bedroom with a big mug. I turn on the lamp on my bedside table and read for an hour or two. The only magazine I still subscribe to is Maclean’s, which I keep for Sundays. Even Adam used to leaf through it from time to time, without exactly loving it. He said he did not fit the profile of a Maclean’s reader, but I’ve gotten used to its style, its articles, and its journalists.

  Adam used to say that I read it because of my obsession with work well done, or perhaps with making the most of what I’ve paid for. He may be right. I can’t bear to throw away a magazine I haven’t read from cover to cover, including the ads.

  One day, I even sent the magazine a letter criticizing a campaign launched by a fast food chain. In order to stimulate the sale of its products, the chain was advertising its support for research to fight stomach cancer, diabetes, and heart attacks. Isn’t that the worst kind of hypocrisy, to sell poison and then pretend to look for the antidote?

  Maclean’s did not publish my letter, but they answered me privately, saying that the ads did not contravene any accepted ethical norms. I answered that if the ads did not contravene ethical norms, they certainly contravened good sense, but there was no reply.

  As usual, I summarize some of the more intriguing news for Adam. Before his stroke, he was unwilling to listen. He was always exhausted after a week of hard work and just wanted to recuperate over the weekend. So I told him about the Maclean’s article that argued an adult should sleep no more than seven hours a night.

  These days, there’s no need for me to lecture him. He’s paid his sleep debts and rarely sleeps more than seven hours.

  We’ve managed to cut out a whole bunch of other habits that used to cause us to fight. The most irritating was his habit of falling asleep in front of the TV. He was sometimes in the living room till midnight, when he would awaken with his kidneys frozen to the cold leather of the sofa. Too tired to brush his teeth and change into his pyjamas, he just came to bed in his T-shirt and shorts. After twenty years of marriage, I was still after him about his physical laziness and poor hygiene. Eventually I pretty much gave up, resigned in the face of all the evidence that a woman can never change her husband. Let him do as he pleased. A couple ends up getting its own particular habits, either through tolerance or through indifference.

  Adam gets out of bed, brushes his teeth, and then lies down again next to me with his own book. He has learned the letters and is working on syllables. The fact that he has to learn two languages all over again complicates matters, the doctors all agree on that. They and I have decided, though, that he has to recreate the life he led before the stroke and try to relearn as much as possible. To keep track, I draw up school reports, three per year, which I complete after mid-term evaluations and final exams. He’ll be on spring break at the same time as my students.

  This morning, I tell him about an article on wearing the veil in Canada. He listens closely. Does he still think the veil should be banned in a secular society? That’s what he used to think, before his stroke.

  Today, I’m too drained to get into this.

  We used to have hot-button issues that invariably ended in an argument. One was his admiration for Fidel Castro, who defied an empire as a young man, toppled an oppressive system, and reversed a colonial past. I pointed to Cuba’s catastrophic history – living off the largesse of the Soviet Union, then abandoned after the fall of Communism – and its bleak future. How could heroism result in such a disaster? The Communist regimes excluded free will. That was the worst thing. People can’t live without choice. Of course they’re disappointed when a system that promised miracles proves to be a failure: that’s been the case since the dawn of time. We’re still living with the side effects, which include the demolition of self-esteem.

  “The first communists, after all, were Athenian women,” I used to say whenever Adam accused me of being an opportunist, by which he meant capitalist-lover.

  I’m alone on the barricades now. Fidel Castro has turned into a senile old man in a blue tracksuit, and he haunts us no more. So I show Adam every article I see on the Cuban crisis and the problems all those old regimes now face. He listens in silence.

  And since he’s given up arguing, I start to give him a reason for doing so. In defending Cuba, he wanted to justify the twenty years we lived under Communism. Even if we deny Castro’s achievements, we can’t purge ourselves of our own Communist youth.

  Adam dozes off, his children’s book on his chest.

  I watch the contortions of the wind-blown branches outside the window. It’s stormy, the temperature just below zero. At the beginning of February the weather suddenly turned warm, and I’ve been able to walk to school, a ten-minute walk. The mountains of snow on the sidewalks are melting; the streets are being washed by rain. There was another shower this morning.

  Heading back to the kitchen, I see our driveway is almost completely free of ice. And I thought I’d be dealing with a skating rink until spring. I don’t use salt, which damages the roots of perennials along the edge of driveway and eats paving stones like a cancer.

  Sara calls to ask if we want to go up north. I tell her I’m busy. Marta is organizing a party at her place just before Valentine’s Day. She calls it a potluck community party, to disguise the fact we’ll also be celebrating the pagan feast. She sent us all an email asking us each to make one dish. She’ll take care of dessert, and wine will be $10 per person. According to her last message, though, it turns out that one of her friends has offered to contribute homemade wine. Everyone has to wear red.

  On Friday morning, when I got Marta’s message, I was in the staff room with a pile of exams. End of term is close, and I have a lot of marking to do, as well as reports to prepare for meetings with the parents. I answered, explaining it was impossible for me to get organized in time. She fired back, saying I didn’t need to prepare anything. There’d be plenty of food.

  I had my own reasons for declining the invitation. Preparing a dish for twenty or more is not such a big deal. What I don’t like is the change to my routine.

  On Saturdays, I usually spend the day cleaning and doing laundry. Sunday I shop and run errands. Adam likes to come along, this being the only time he leaves the house, except for outings he hates, like seeing the doctor, going to his old-and-forgotten-skills lessons, and visiting people he doesn’t remember. He knows, too, that I never get back when I say I will, and he worries when I’m late. Our Sunday errands require nothing of him except to keep me company. No way he would miss out on them.

  Marta’s invitation wrecks my weekend.

  We get out of bed at 8.30 a.m., dress for our outing, and have breakfast. I then warm up the car, in spite of the mild weather. This is what Stavros tells me to do; he’s the mechanic who says I should never drive with a cold engine.

  I follow professional advice religiously and would never disregard what a mechanic tells me. Stavros has had a lot of advice for me since Adam’s stroke. He considers me pretty clueless when it comes to the car, but I can sometimes surprise him. Adam used to be terrific at deciphering car noises, every suspicious knock and clunk, and I learned how to recognize the difference between the sound of worn-out shock absorbers and the sound of snow tires against the chassis, which happens because they’re bigger than regular tires. He also got me a shiny new tool case, which includes electrical chargers. I personally haven’t needed them yet, but they’ve saved a few other people a bundle.

  Stavros imagines that I owe all my mechanical knowledge to him. I do pretend that I understand what he mumbles in a mix of Greek and English. His
garage has been one of the most dependable things in my life, but I fear now for Stavros’s health, for the doctors have found a lump in his neck.

  I take advantage of this early outing to stop at the Arab jewelry shop opposite Adonis on Curé Labelle. The receptionist called to let me know that my items were ready and the cost was $100, reasonable enough for three silver chains, a ring, a bracelet, and two new pairs of earrings – one with jade teardrops, the other with the transparent pink stone the Chinese call shui jin. These last are Sara’s Valentine’s Day presents.

  The receptionist welcomes me warmly, turning away from the radio playing a song in Arabic. She seems to be overwhelmed. She hums along as she rummages through a box full of small, labeled plastic bags. I’m the only customer in the shop, which is full of perfume bottles and gold jewelry. There are swarms of people here during the holidays buying up cheap stuff. I don’t trust her perfumes or her jewelry, either. I make a show of looking around, but this does not spark any interest. I probably don’t look like the kind of person who wears big gold chains.

  We cross the street to Adonis, which is jammed with people. At almost every counter, I hear people talking Romanian. I recognize one of my eighth grade students, Elena, with her mother. I avoid them, being in no mood for small talk.