The White Bicycle Read online

  "The girl in the yellow dress has it!" I say.

  "Taylor, you're not supposed to tell!" cries my mother. "That stops your friend from guessing!"

  We try another round. Another girl goes out of the room and we hide the button under the girl sitting on my right. When the Finder comes back into the room, we chant again, "Button, button, who's got the button?" I can't believe that the Finder does not know where the button is. These girls are all very dumb.

  "Does Marcy have it?" she asks.

  "No!" I yell, and give the girl next to me a little shove. "It's under this one's butt, stupid!"

  "Taylor, you're spoiling the fun!" says my mother. She has a configuration of wrinkles on her forehead that looks just like an h.

  "I don't want to play," I say. "These games are dumb."

  "Taylor, mind your manners," says my father, who has not been playing the games so he does not know that they are dumb games.

  "Anyone who likes these games is dumb," I say. "And I'm not playing anymore."

  "You sit there and be nice!" says my mother. Her voice is loud and it makes me stand up and kick the nearest thing— which happens to be the bottom of the girl next to me and I dislodge her bottom off the button.

  "Bottom off the button," I say. "Bottom off the button." Soon everything goes white and then I am back in my bedroom where I wanted to be. I bounce on my bed. "Bottom off the button," I say, over and over, and the words make a kind of nest for my mind to rest in.

  I have often thought about this birthday and how things were afterward, because that was the night my father left. It's just like a character said in Harold Pinter's play, The Birthday Party: "Sometimes when people go away, they don't come back." Harold Pinter the playwright, not Harold Pinter who is my gerbil and who is at Shauna's, in his cage, probably chewing himself a nest out of a paper towel tube that he will share with Samuel Beckett.

  What Happened After My Eighth Birthday Party

  Eleven years have passed since the day my dad left. I turned nineteen on my last birthday, and I was glad not to have a birthday party. I have not had a birthday party since I was eight, and I am happy about that. I do not like birthday parties, just like Stanley did not like birthday parties in Harold Pinter's play, The Birthday Party. Party games frightened Stanley, while they disgusted me, so we have a slightly different perspective about this. But Stanley said he preferred to go out quietly on his own to celebrate, which is exactly how I feel about it.

  "None of those girls are my friends," I told my father when he came to get me out of my bedroom for the second time the day of my eighth birthday. Dad talked softly to me, bending down so he could see me under the bed. Then he got loud and he started pulling on my legs. Dad finally dragged me downstairs and I was kicking and screaming.

  "Here comes The Freaker," I heard one girl whisper. That was the name they called me at school and I hated it. Hearing the name at home made me feel hot all over.

  Somehow my father got me seated at the table. I did not eat anything and as soon as my father took his chair away from behind my chair, I fled back to my room. Everyone else ate the pancakes and syrup my mother had cooked, and pretended to have a good time without me. Or maybe they really did have a good time. I do not have any way of knowing for sure because of our different perspectives.

  After the party was over, my parents had the last terrible fight and Dad left.

  After my father left, my mother threw his things out their bedroom window. "And don't come back!" she yelled. Standing at the window of my own room, I saw his clothes tumbling down from the house and I felt as if I were going to throw up. Suit jackets. Shirts. Pants. Suspenders. Clothes are meant to be in closets, not sailing through the air and landing on snow.

  At that point, I forgot that my father had already left and I began to think that soon he himself would be flung out the window to follow his clothes. "Stop," I squeaked, fear shrinking my voice. "Stop. The snow isn't deep enough. The snow isn't deep enough!"

  But the falling things continued. I stood helplessly watching the garments settle, one on top of the other, on the crust of snow. It occurred to me that the clothes would get wrinkled, and then driven over when the car came out of the garage, and I wished somebody would pick them up, but I couldn't move. Finally, I shook out my stiff body and crept away from the window.

  My mother even threw a photo album. I don't know why. Later I saw that photo album in the basement, before she burned up all the pictures in it. In the pictures, my mother had on a wedding dress and my father wore a suit. There were no pictures in the album of my dead brother Ashton— and no pictures of me.

  I wonder what would have happened if the kid in the blue sweater had come to my party. When the other kids called me The Freaker, would that kid have said, "Her name is Taylor Jane, and she is my friend"?

  Anyway, probably the blue sweater wouldn't have fit by then and so the kid wouldn't have been wearing it. I had grown out of all my grade one clothes by the time I was in grade two. Good thing I am not growing anymore or I would grow out of my jean dress and then I would not be able to wear it anymore.

  If I had that blue sweater I would put it in a picture frame and hang it on our wall at home. Here in France, there are a lot of interesting things on the walls. There are pictures of naked Egyptians. There is a cloth embroidered with a church on the front. There is a watercolor painting that I really like of the village of Lourmarin. The colors look as if they were put there in layers, which must have taken the artist a great deal of planning.

  Why Seven is My Favorite Number

  For a long time after my eighth birthday, I wished I were still seven. Last winter, when I met with the psychiatrist every week, she said I had a non-intrusive obsession with the number seven and she encouraged me to think about why I might have started to fixate on this number. I am rolling back this memory now, seeing our conversation as if it were happening again.

  "Perhaps by looking for sevens, you are really looking for a way back to that happy time before you were eight and your parents still lived together," the psychiatrist says.

  "Perhaps," I answer. "I never thought about it that way." I take another sip from my water bottle. I have the urge to take six more sips, but I stop myself. That's the thing about my obsession with sevens. I can control it, which means it doesn't control me.

  "In the long run it will help you to know the contexts of your obsessive behaviors," says the psychiatrist. "You can

  use calming strategies to help yourself in those contexts."

  "I do not like to run," I say. "Let alone long distances."

  "I mean, over a longer time period, you will be able to understand your obsessive thoughts better and have more control over them," she explains.

  "I hope I can get control over them before my next job interview," I say. "Because I am getting tired of working only two hours a day at the bookstore."

  "What are your goals for a job, Taylor?" asks the doctor.

  "Well, maybe seven hours. That would be good," I say. "But just on some days, because on other days I will be taking university classes."

  "You want to work in a bookstore?" she asks.

  "Yes."

  "You don't want to work anywhere else?"

  "No," I say. And then I stop to consider. At that time I had only worked in bookstores, and so working somewhere else had never occurred to me. "Upon reconsidering, I have a different answer," I say. "I might like another kind of job, especially if it lasts more than two hours a day. You can't support yourself and be independent if you only work two hours a day."

  This was a good answer, because if I hadn't wanted to work anywhere but a bookstore, I would not have this job in France. Many people would like to go to France and I am proud that Alan Phoenix trusted me enough to ask me to look after his son. He is paying me the Saskatchewan minimum wage for the mornings I am working, which is $7.95 per hour. When you add airfare and living expenses on top of that, I am making $2,322.50 per month more than I was m
aking working part-time at the bookstore in Saskatoon. Since we are here for July and August, I will have made more than I would make at the bookstore in a whole year. And a job as a personal care assistant in France will look very smart on my resumé.

  When Alan Phoenix told me that he had received funding to collaborate on a project with a well-known painter in France, and asked if I would come along to babysit Martin Phoenix, I was happy to accept the job. To my surprise, my mother agreed very quickly. In fact, not only did she agree, she said she would come, too. She said it was about time she got to see the world, and that now, thanks to Grandma dying and leaving her money in the will, she intended to get out and do things.

  My mother and Alan Phoenix are drinking a lot at the wine caves but she does not sit around in her bathrobe, which is a change for her and a relief for me. If my mother had sat around in her bathrobe much longer last spring, I was going to give her my next appointment with the psychiatrist. Being obsessed with your bathrobe is probably the worst obsession a person could have because you can't go to work when you're not wearing the proper clothes. And if you can't go to work, you can't be independent. Luckily they hired a temporary secretary in her place while she is away this summer, or she would be fired for sure.

  I am glad to be here in France putting "personal care assistant" on my resumé. It's surprising that almost five weeks have passed since our arrival on July 5. Just as surprising is that we only have three more weeks to go. I will be back in Saskatoon in time for university to start, which is a good thing.

  An Afternoon that Begins With a Wine Cave and Ends With a Mail Truck

  It is another rainy day and this is unusual for the south of France. Alan Phoenix says that Madame Colombe told him that this is the wettest year in thirty years. Usually, the grass here is dry and there are bald patches. But now the ground is covered with vegetation and even the mountains are green all over.

  Yesterday afternoon I went with my mother to a wine cave where she tasted eight different wines but did not get drunk. I tasted some wines too and they all tasted like fish. Beside the wine cave was a wine museum, started by the great-grandfather of the man who owns the wine cave, and my mother paid ten euros for each of us to go through and see the wine-making artifacts. The temperature in the museum was a pleasant 19 degrees Celsius, according to an old thermometer on the wall, and there were six rooms painted beige. One of the rooms contained old equipment for cutting the vines and I hadn't realized how many different varieties of scythes and sickles there were for slicing the stalks by hand. Another room contained the presses that squeezed the grapes into juice. I found out what makes the different colors of wine: it's the skins of the grapes. The red skins are left in the mix for only a short time to make rosé wine, but left for a longer time to make the red wine.

  The presses had big tubs with lids slightly smaller in diameter than the tubs themselves; these lids hung over the tubs on wooden nuts and bolts. By swinging a lid, you could force it down tighter and tighter onto the grapes. This would feel very comforting if you were a person sitting inside the tub and if the pressure was just right. If it were built correctly as a "human press," I could control the pressure by manipulating the lid to come down on top of me as I sat curled up in a tight ball. For me, that would replace things like rolling up in sheets and squeezing under furniture for the calming effects deep pressure offers. I wonder if anyone has ever made a human press.

  One of the rooms was full of bottles and the oldest ones had no seams because they were blown by hand. You could see that these bottles weren't a regular shape due to human error. The bottoms rose up a long way inside most of the bottles; this makes you think you are getting more wine than you actually are. There were also bottles shaped like animals and people. There was even a bottle made to resemble a Canadian Mountie. This was the only reference to Canada in the museum. It is strange that, since I have been in France, this is the only thing I have seen that represents Canada. It is interesting to me how a place as big and complex as Canada can be reduced to one thing: Mounted Police.

  It was a pleasant afternoon, except that my mother was in it. She kept telling me to look at things I didn't care about and she distracted me from what I was really interested in. I wanted to spend more time looking at those wine presses. I thought about coming back to the wine museum on my own, except I'm not sure how I could get here.

  "Maybe you would like to take a cooking course that teaches how to match wines to the food you eat?" my mother asked. "I could sign you up for one in Lourmarin. That kind of knowledge would be very useful."

  "I am not going to take a cooking course," I told my mother. "I am going to work for the summer as a personal care assistant and then I am going back to university in the fall where I will be taking more biology classes."

  "We'll see," said my mother. "It's important to be practical, Taylor."

  As soon as I think about this conversation, I start feeling as trapped as if I were Stanley in Harold Pinter's play. Maybe I am just like Stanley, even though I wish I wasn't. Maybe when I get back to Saskatoon there will be a list of students for a cooking course—and my name will be on it. I cross my arms, pinch my earlobes, and do the deep knee bends my psychiatrist showed me as a calming strategy. Quite possibly I should use this strategy before talking to my mother, but that would mean doing it all the time and this would be very disruptive.

  I wonder when my mother started making me anxious, instead of making me calm. When I was little and she was in my classroom, sitting on a chair with her flowered handbag on the floor, I felt happy and relieved that she was there. She doesn't make me feel happy and relieved any more. This might be the difference between an island of stability and a prison.

  Martin Phoenix still has his rash. The doctor said that his rash was something called Pityriasis Versicolor. She said it would eventually cover his whole body and then go away, and that it wasn't contagious. Alan Phoenix said that this was ridiculous and that it was just diaper rash, but you cannot buy the creams here without a prescription and the doctor wouldn't issue one. Luke Phoenix said that the consultation was an easy way for the doctor to make twenty-seven euros.

  My mother said to shake some cornstarch onto the rash, because that is what she had successfully used with me when I was little and I had diaper rash. It is embarrassing when my mother talks about this. I would prefer that my friend and potential brother Luke Phoenix not know about my diaper rash as a baby. People's childhood rashes should be private.

  "That is a private thing," I told my mother when she started talking about my diaper rash.

  "Never mind," she said.

  Martin Phoenix used his Tango to say that the doctor was hot and could he go back there tomorrow. Alan Phoenix laughed at him and said the doctor was too old for him, although she is probably rich and might be helpful around the house. Martin Phoenix said that age and money aren't a factor if you're really in love.

  "Just beauty," said Alan Phoenix, and kissed my mother on the cheek. I looked the other way. They'd just better not get married this summer or this personal care assistant job won't count. It has to count or I can't put it on my resumé. And if it's not on my resumé, there will be an empty space representing this summer—and empty spaces do not look good to prospective employers.

  "Over and under," is the phrase that irrationally sings in my brain. "Over and under, over and under." I sing it seven times, and then I stop.

  From my window as I type this journal onto my laptop, I can see the yellow mail truck turning into the lane. I avert my head or I know I will sneeze because of the yellow. I listen carefully to the neighborhood sounds. There are different barking noises depending on the progress of the truck. At the beginning of the lane, there is deep, chesty barking. Next there is short, sharp, high-pitched yipping. After that I hear growling and snapping—this is from the big black dog that they keep on a chain in the yard. When somebody passes, it runs toward the fence where it is brought up short on the end of the chain. Finally
there are many barking sounds at once, because the last house has five dogs. When these five dogs bark, the first ones start up again, but by the time the truck gets to our driveway, which is a long one banked by olive trees, the barking has stopped. I have not seen any cats along this street. I like cats but I do not like dogs. It's not that I'm afraid of dogs. I don't like them because of their smell and their barking.

  I wonder if barking is an obsession, like cleaning was for me before I went on medication for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and worked with the psychiatrist on self-management. Maybe there is medication and therapy for dogs, but I doubt it. I still want to clean sometimes when I'm feeling anxious, but I can usually talk myself out of it. And when I am in my rage circuit, I mostly just swear inside my head, not in the open. I put my anger in the soles of my feet, where it can't hurt anyone, like my psychiatrist taught me to do.

  The mail truck drives right up to our door. I watch as a man in a uniform rings our doorbell. Alan Phoenix is in his studio and might not hear the bell. My mother has taken our rented car to the Hyper U to buy chocolate-filled croissants because we are out of them, and that's all people seem to want for breakfast these days. Luke Phoenix has taken Martin Phoenix on a walk to Vaugines, where they both wanted to see how much fun it was to go down the hilly streets with the wheelchair, even though they both had to wear their raincoats and my mother said Martin Phoenix had to wear his bike helmet and that both of them should watch out for cars.

  I wait for a minute to see whether Alan Phoenix will hear the doorbell after all. He does not, so I go down to the front door.

  I dislike opening doors to strangers because these are people I do not know and anything could happen. I am like Stanley in the play when Stanley confessed to being afraid of a van coming with a wheelbarrow in it. When I was little I was especially afraid of delivery vans. Today I know that when I open the door, the yellow mail truck will be in the street and I will try not to look at it. But when I