The Lonely Hearts Hotel(9)

“Does it bother you?” Pierrot asked her.

“No. We won’t be here forever. When we go, we can do as we please.”

What an idea! There was the possibility for escape? Pierrot had never considered that. He had been a child for his whole life, so it seemed reasonable to expect that he would continue to be one for the rest of it. But there was the possibility of being free.

Rose pointed across the field in front of the orphanage. You could see the city being built every day. There was a different cityscape every time you looked. There would be new turrets and garrets and roofs and windows and crosses. They were approaching the orphanage, a fleet of warships getting closer and closer to the shore.

Three nuns came out with sticks above their heads to separate the boy and girl. Rose dropped Pierrot’s hand and ran across the yard.

? ? ?

LATER THAT NIGHT Pierrot whispered the words “I’m quite wicked too” under his breath. He liked that. He liked to have her words in his mouth. He wanted to open his mouth and hear her laugh. He had a strange longing that he couldn’t put into words or logically understand: he wanted to be one with her.

? ? ?

ROSE WAS LET OUT of the cupboard and went back to her dormitory later that night. She was glad it was nighttime because the bright lights would give her a headache. She supposed she was lucky. She had been inside for only five hours this time, not days.

She had spent the whole time in the cupboard wiggling her back molar. It had come loose when she was struck on the side of the face for talking to Pierrot. She had it now, in her pocket.

Sister Elo?se had told her that she was a slut and that she had been trying to tempt him. Maybe the sister was right. She did have an urge to be near Pierrot. It always got her in trouble. She risked everything for him.

The other girls had already gone to sleep. There was a full moon outside and it lit up the dormitory with an eerie light. She sat on the edge of her mattress, unlaced her shoes and tucked them under her bed. She reached beneath her dress and peeled off her stockings. She stretched out her naked legs in front of her and admired them. The nail on her right big toe was completely black and about to fall off, because it had been stomped on by a cane. Her left knee was dark blue from landing on it when she was knocked over.

She pulled her white dress over her head. She hadn’t unbuttoned enough buttons and she got tangled up in it, looking like a butterfly trying to get out of a cocoon. She wrestled it off, folded it and put it in her trunk. There was a violet ring around one arm where she had been yanked.

She took off her onesie underwear. It was thin, like a bit of smoke escaping from a cigar. There were marks across her back where she had been beaten with the cane. And her side was still light brown from where a rib had been cracked in a previous beating. There were three drops of blood at the bottom of her onesie because she had gotten her period. They looked like rose petals.

A young girl’s body is the most dangerous place in the world, as it is the spot where violence is most likely to be enacted.

Rose pulled her nightgown over her body and leaped into the bed. She wiggled under the blankets. She thought about Pierrot. She didn’t know what it meant to always want to be close to someone. She wanted to have the same experiences as him. She wanted to hit him and have a bruise appear on her body.

“I’m a terrible person,” Rose whispered at the ceiling.

“I’m quite wicked too,” Pierrot whispered back.





7


    IN WHICH THE SNOW IS CUED FROM BELOW



Christmastime was magical in Montreal. The snowflakes were enormous that time of year. They were so white that sometimes it hurt the children’s eyes just to look at them. There was such whiteness everywhere. There was such a cleanness to it.

At Christmastime there was much work to be done at the orphanage. They were always putting on plays at the town hall for the public. In 1926, for instance, they put on a play about Daniel and the lions. The children all had manes made of skullcaps and yellow yarn fitted on their heads. They had to be very careful not to let the yarn fall into their soup before the show. Rose was in that performance, and the audience had laughed loudly at her distinctive roar and the way she shook her head.

The following year, the one in which Pierrot and Rose both turned thirteen years old, the orphanage’s creative committee, consisting of nuns around a dinner table, decided to put on a production about winter. The night before the performance, all the children dressed up like snow angels. They had wings made out of white feathers that had straps to wear on their shoulders and little wire halos that were attached to the back of their outfits in order to float over their heads. They held their white gowns up over their knees so that the hems didn’t get completely covered in mud and dirty snow as they hurried into the horse-drawn cart. The clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves sounded like a roomful of children with hiccups.

The children walked out onto the stage. They put their hands together in prayer. They looked downward at the floor, with their lips tucked in. They were afraid to look at the crowd because it might cause them to laugh. They all tried to hurry out in a straight line. One of the children turned her head and looked at the audience. She froze for a couple of seconds and all the children coming up behind crashed into her.

There was a song about the winter. The children all sang whoooo whoooo whoooo to mimic the sound of the wind. They put their arms up in the air with their fingers spread and waved them back and forth as though they were tree branches. Some very small children came out on the stage and began to beat the surfaces of metal drums to create the sound of a storm. And then the racket stopped and all the children looked up. Then, to the audience’s delight, paper snowflakes began to fall from the sky above the children’s heads.