The Divide Read online

  Amelie had been working at the Goodtime for almost a year now and she had a kind of seniority, for what it was worth—the newer girls would come to her with questions. But seniority counted for shit. Seniority did not prevent the occurrence of truly rotten days.

  Like today, when the new girl Tracy innocently grabbed off a couple of her regulars and seated them in her own section. Like today, when she was stiffed for a tip on a big meal. Like today, when some low-life picked a busy moment to walk out on his check—which George would sometimes forgive, but, of course, not today; today he docked her for the bill.

  It was maybe not the worst day Amelie had ever experienced. That honor was held by the memorable occasion on which a female customer had come in during the afternoon, ordered the Soup of the Day, meticulously garnished the soup with crushed soda crackers, then retired to the Ladies and opened her wrists. Both wrists, thoroughly and fatally. Amelie had found her there.

  George told her later that this had happened four times during the history of the Goodtime and that restaurant toilets were a popular place for suicides—strange as that seemed. Well, Amelie thought, maybe a suicide doesn’t want a cheerful place to die. Still, she could not imagine taking her final breath in one of those grim salmon-colored stalls.

  So this was a bad day, but not the worst day—she was consoling herself with that thought—when Tracy tapped her shoulder and said there was a call for her on the pay phone.

  Bad news in itself. No one was supposed to take calls on the pay phone. She could think of only one person who would call her here.

  “Thanks,” she said, and delivered an order to Alberto, then checked to see if George was hanging around before she picked up the receiver.

  It was Roch.

  Her intuition had been correct:

  Avery bad day.

  He said, “You’re still working at that pit?”

  “Listen,” Amelie said, “this is not a good time for me.”

  “I haven’t called you for months.”

  “You shouldn’t call me at work.”

  “Then come by my place—when you get off tonight.”

  “We don’t have anything to talk about.”

  Amelie realized that her hand was cramping around the receiver, that both hands were sweaty, that her voice sounded high and throttled in her own ears.

  Roch said, “Don’t be so shitty to your brother,” and she recognized the tone of offhanded belligerence that was always a kind of warning signal, a red flag. She heard herself become placating:

  “It’s just—it’s like I said—a bad time. I can’t talk now. Call me at home, Roch, okay?”

  “You’ll be home tonight?”

  “Well—” She didn’t like the way he pounced on that. “I’m not sure—”

  “What, you have plans?”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m living with someone.”

  “What? You’re doingwhat?” The outrage and the hurt in his voice made her feel a hot rush of guilt. Crazy, of course. Why should she consult him? But she hadn’t. And he was family.

  But she could never have told him about Benjamin. She had been hoping—in a wistful, unconscious way—that the two of them would never have to meet.

  The party at Table Four was signaling for her. This was, Amelie recognized, a truly shitty day.

  She forced herself to say that she was living with a guy and that it might not be all right for Roch to come over, she just couldn’t say, maybe he ought to phone up first. There was a very long silence and then Roch’s voice became very sweet, very ingratiating: “All right, look—I just want you to be happy, okay?”

  “I’m serious,” Amelie insisted.

  “So am I. I’d like to meet this guy.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Hey! I’ll be nice. What is it, you don’t trust me?”

  “I just—well, call me, all right? Call me before you do anything.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  She waited until the line went dead, then stood with her forehead pressed against the cool glass of the enclosure. Took a breath, smoothed a wrinkle out of her uniform, forced herself to turn back toward the tables.

  George was standing there—hands on his hips, a monumental frown. “You know you’re not supposed to use this phone.”

  She managed, “I’m sorry.”

  “By the way, the corner table? The party that was waiting for the bill? They had to leave.” Now George smiled. ” Tracy took your tip.”

  * * *

  She was out of the place by nine.

  Nine o’clock on a Friday in October and Yonge Street was crowded with the usual … well, Amelie thought of them astypes. Street kids with leather jackets and weird haircuts. Blue-haired old ladies in miniskirts. Lots of the kind of lonely people you see scurrying past on nights like this, with no discernible destination but in a wild hurry to get there: heads down, shoulders up, mean and shy at the same time. It made her glad to have a home to head for, even if it was only a shitty apartment in St. Jamestown. Shitty but not, of course, cheap—nothing in this town was cheap.

  She peered into the shop windows, trying to distract herself, but it was a chilly night and she felt intimidated by the warm glow of interiors and the orange light spilling out of bus windows as she trudged past the transit station. Nights like this had always seemed comfortless to her. You could smell winter gathering like an army just over the horizon. Nights like this, her thoughts ran in odd directions.

  She thought about Roch, although she didn’t want to.

  She thought about Benjamin.

  Impossible to imagine the two of them together. They were so different … although (and here was the only similarity) each of them seemed to Amelie endlessly mysterious.

  Roch should not have been a mystery. Roch, after all, was her brother. They shared family … if you could call it family, an absentee father and a mother who was arrested for shoplifting with such startling regularity that she had been banned from Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and Ogilvy’s. Sometimes Amelie felt as if she had been raised by a Social Welfare caseworker. She’d been fostered out twice. But the thing was, you learned to adapt.

  Roch, her little brother, never did. They grew up in a rough part of Montreal and went to the kind of Catholic school where the nuns carried wooden rulers with metal edges embedded in them—in certain hands, a deadly weapon. The nuns were big on geometry and devotions. Amelie, however, had had her own agenda. In an era when the Parti Quebecois was dismantling English from the official culture, Amelie had resolved to teach herself the language. Not just the debased English everybody knew; not just the English you needed to follow a few American TV shows.Real English. She had conceived of a destiny outside Montreal. She saw herself living in English Canada, maybe eventually the States. Doing something glamorous—she wasn’t sure what. Maybe it would involve show business. Maybe she would manage a famous rock band.

  Maybe she would wait tables.

  Roch was different. He never had any ambitions that Amelie could figure out. When he was real little he would follow her around as singlemindedly as a duckling; she would tow him down St. Catherine’s Street on sunny summer days, buy Cokes and hot dogs and spend the afternoon watching the Types from the steps of Christ Church Cathedral.

  Roch had needed the company. He never had friends. He took a long time learning to talk and he wasn’t reading with any facility until he was in fifth grade. Roch, it turned out, was slow. Not stupid—Amelie made this important distinction—just slow. When Roch learned something, he hung on to it fiercely. But he took his time. And in that school, in that place, taking your time was a bad thing. It made you look stupid. Not clever-stupid or sullen-stupid or anything dignified; it made you look dog-dumb, especially if you were also small and ugly and fat. Amelie had been bruised a few times defending Roch in the schoolyard. And that was when she bothered to stand up for him. A thirteen-year-old girl sometimes doesn’t want to know when her idiot brother is
catching flack. She thought of him that way, too—her idiot brother—at least sometimes.

  But Rochwasn’t stupid, Amelie knew, and he learned a lot.

  He learned not to trust anybody. He learned that you could do what you wanted, if you were big enough and strong enough.

  And he learned to get mad. He had a real talent for getting mad. Pointlessly, agonizingly mad; skin-tearing mad; going home and vomiting mad.

  And then, eventually, he learned something else: he learned that if you grow up a little bit, and put on some muscle, then you can inspire fear in other people—and oh, what an intoxicating discovery that must have been.

  Amelie trudged along Wellesley into St. Jamestown, past the hookers on the comer of Parliament, thinking October-night thoughts. She stopped at a convenience store to pick up a couple of TV dinners, the three-hundred-calorie kind. She was skinny—she knew it, in an offhand way—but her reflection in the shop windows always looked fat. Mama had been fat, with a kind of listless alcoholic fatness Amelie dreaded. Amelie was young and skinny and she meant to stay that way.

  She put Roch out of her mind and thought about Benjamin instead, and that lightened her mood. She even managed a smile, standing at the check-out counter. Because Benjamin was the great discovery of her life.

  A recent discovery.

  He had come into the Goodtime just about six months ago, on one of those ugly spring days when the wind is raw and wet and just about anybody is liable to wander in off the street. She took him at first for one of those wanderers: a tall, benign-looking, shy man with a puppydog smile, his collar turned up and a black woolen cap plastered to his head. An oddball, but not a Type, exactly; he looked straight at her in a way Amelie appreciated. She remembered thinking the odds were mixed on somebody like that: he might tip generously or not at all … you could never tell.

  But he did tip, and he came back the next day, and the day after that. Pretty soon he was one of her regulars. He came in late one Wednesday and she told him, “I’m going off-shift—you’re late,” and he said, “Well, I’ll walk you home,” in that straight-ahead way, and Amelie said that would be all right—she didn’t even have to think about it—and pretty soon they were seeing each other. Pretty soon after that he moved out of his basement room on Bathurst and into the St. Jamestown apartment.

  Benjamin was decent, well-meaning, kind.

  Roch enjoyed crushing people like that.

  Amelie’s smile faded.

  And of course there was the other problem, which she tried not to think about, because, even among these other mysteries, it wastoo mysterious, too strange.

  The thing about Benjamin was, he wasn’t always Benjamin.

  * * *

  The apartment was a mess, but it felt warm and cozy when Amelie let herself in. She kicked off her shoes, ran some hot water for the dishes, plugged a Doors tape into the stereo.

  She was not deeply into Sixties rock, but there was something about Morrison: he just never sounded old-fashioned. The tape wasStrangeDays; the song that came up was “People Are Strange.” Loping drumbeat and Ray Manzarek moaning away on keyboard. That real sparse guitar sound. And Morrison’s voice doing his usual psycho-sexy thing.

  Timeless. But she turned it down a little when she peeked into the bedroom and saw Benjamin asleep under the covers. He slept odd hours; that was one of the strange things about him. But she doubted the tape would wake him—he slept like a slab of granite.

  Back to the dishes, Amelie thought.

  Awright, yeah! said Morrison.

  And if Roch came by—

  But maybe he wouldn’t. She consoled herself with that thought, bearing down with the scrub brush on one of the Chinese dragon bowls she’d bought in Chinatown. The basic fact about Roch was his unpredictability. He might say he was going to do something, but that didn’t mean shit. You never could tell.

  She took some marginal comfort in these thoughts, losing herself in the rhythm of the music and the soapy smell of the hot water.

  She was draining the sink when the last song, “The Music’s Over,” faded out. She heard the click of the tape as it switched off, the faint metallic transistor hiss from the speakers … and the knock at the door.

  * * *

  “You should have called.”

  “I tried earlier. You weren’t home.” Roch stood blinking in the hallway. “You’re supposed to invite me in.”

  Amelie stood aside as he came through the door.

  “Place is a mess,” he observed.

  “I just got home, all right?”

  He shrugged and sat down.

  It was six months since Amelie had seen her brother, but it was obvious he hadn’t let up on his gym work. He was six foot one, a head taller than Amelie, and his shoulders bulked out under his bomber jacket. AD the body work, however, had done nothing for his looks. His face was wide and pasty, his lips were broad. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and Amelie could see them moving there, knitting and unraveling, making fists, the fingernails digging into the palms. She told him to sit down.

  He pushed aside a pile of newspapers and sprawled on the sofa.

  Amelie made coffee and talked to him from the kitchen. There had been a letter from Montreal: Mama was adjusting to the new apartment even though it was smaller than the old one. Uncle Baptiste had been in town, looking for work when the Seaway trade picked up again. She kept her voice down, because it was possible even now that Benjamin might sleep through the whole thing … that Roch would say what he had to say and then leave. She pinned her hopes on that.

  She poured a cup of coffee for him and one for herself and carried them into the living room. She sat opposite him in the easy chair, took a sip—bitter black coffee—and listened to the sudden silence of the room, the absence of her own voice.

  Roch said, “I lost my job.”

  She put her cup down. “Oh, shit.”

  He waved his hand. “It was a stupid job.”

  Roch had been working as a parcel clerk at the BPX depot, the last Amelie had heard. This was, frankly, not a great surprise; Roch had never been good at keeping jobs. But it was not good news, either.

  She said, “You found anything else?”

  “I have some leads.”

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged.

  “You have any money?”

  He said, “Is that an offer?”

  “I don’t have a hell of a lot to spare.”

  Roch was silent for a while. His expression was reptilian, Amelie thought, the combination of his pout and the slow, periodic blinking of his eyes. She was tempted to stare. Instead, she looked at her coffee cup.

  Roch said, “You could earn some.”

  “What—George is gonna raise my salary because I have an unemployed brother?”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Her brother paused in his blinking. “Calyx! Amelie, do you think I’m stupid?”

  When Roch got angry he slipped into his father’s vernacular: it wascalyx this and tabernacle that, maudit ciboire de Christ and so on. Venerable back country curses. She shrank down in her chair. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Roch smiled. The steady semaphoring of his eyelids began again. “Waitressing is not the only way to make money.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I have a problem here. I have to pay rent, you know.”

  “Look, what do you want? Some cash? A loan?” She reached for her purse. “I can give you twenty.”

  “Fuck that,” Roch said. “Twenty dollars? Christ!”

  She waited.

  He said, “Remember when we came to this city?”

  Now Amelie was silent for a beat.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You remember what we did then?”

  Deep breath.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe the time has come again.”

  “No,” Amelie said.

  “What?”

  “I said no! All right? Is that cle
ar? I won’t do it.”

  “I don’t like the tone of your voice.”

  “I don’t care.” She couldn’t look at him.

  He said, “You don’t care that I’m broke—that I’ll be out on the street?”

  “No. I meant—”

  “Hey, I’m your little brother! You look after me!”

  “So you want to pimp for me? Is that your idea of a good career move?”

  Christ de calyx! As her father might have said.

  But Roch only smiled. “You can keep your day job.”

  “Well, fuck you!”

  Her reaction was involuntary. She hated him for bringing up the subject. Sure, she had done some things in the past. She was barely seventeen when they left home; Roch was younger. They slept on warehouse roofs some nights, and other nights they rented rooms in the wino hotels on Queen Street. You can’t survive on the street without doing something you don’t like. And so maybe she had done that—what he talked about—when they needed the money, and maybe once or twice just because they wanted the money … but that was the old days. He was crazy, coming here with a proposition like that.

  So she stood up and said fuck you and it was a mistake, because Roch did not take well to that kind of abuse—as he had told her many times—and now he was standing up, inches away from her, so close she could smell the hot-metal reek of his breath. He did not blink at all. He took her wrist in a fierce grip. All that weight-lifting had made him strong.

  He said, “You do it if I tell you to do it.” Then he slapped her.

  The slap was painful and Amelie stumbled away from him. She caught her foot against the table supporting the stereo; she fell down hard on the floor and the tape player came tumbling down after her. Strange Days popped out of the cassette compartment with a streamer of tape reeling after it. Amelie closed her eyes.