Following the Summer by Lise Bissonnette Read Free Book Online Page A

that bares his hairy legs, she brings him cigarettes and he takes them as if she were clinging to him. He’ll be discharged tomorrow. No one has asked what’s wrong with him, only stammered prescriptions for rest to the plain-spoken woman he waits for and receives. In this country suicides hide in the woods, or succeed with a rifle. There is no contrition for refugees, for Italians who long for the sun, who cannot get used to shadows and beer. To warmth that is stored for the winter.
    Corrine doesn’t know what she wants from him. She says again that he’s handsome, taller than his countrymen but more worn down, he is thin now, and dry like the tobacco he taught her to roll. Marie has never been inside the hospital but she can see the white before a boy’s eyes, of the morning porridge, midday fish, evening stew, and the night that falls without music.
    But Corrine is the one she understands, you don’t make a child with a man whose plexus is elsewhere. You take them and you taste them. Marie has never known another hand between her legs than Ervant’s, but she knows that strangers have a different way of touching, that they violate with reverence. Ervant tells her he once rubbed the clitoris of a woman who had stood off by herself, weeping, at a village fair, and that she came against his leg and offered him nothing in return. She knows that it is possible and that this woman’s Pietro will lose her if he tries to unite their lives further. But it’s not up to her to say so. The summer isn’t over, she will come back to hear this story while protecting her own.
    She wonders why Corrine never wears a dress, her black slacks are wrinkled at the knee and crotch, she looks like a waitress again.

Eight
    I N AUGUST THE WOLVES DON THEIR SUNDAY best. Because she has no grandmother nearby and her mother knows none either, Marie doesn’t know where she picked up this saying. But it comes to her at the approach to meetings that are never arranged, that are always kept, that bring her to the park near five o’clock. The grass is decaying from the sun, the dog is falling apart from arthritis and the heat, she holds on to her white knitting. The night shift now begins when the sun is still high, when Corrine goes back to the Union Hotel in time for the men’s liquid suppers.
    She has been taught beige, white, loose, she has learned parsimony in her choice of clothes for summers that are too brief. Corrine always looks different, squeezed into close-fitting blouses, skintight camisoles, slacks that fit tightly at ankle and hips, in blue, green, orange, in black streaked with red. She clashes with the grey rocks that they lie on. Marie avoids both the shade of the park and other people’s looks at the two women, one of whom has neither purse nor dog nor necklace. On the flaking stone the sun is not so harsh now, the bicycles have disappeared, transgressing other boundaries outside the properties owned by the mine. The vast wrinkles in the solid dunes form hollow beds. They talk, Corrine always louder and longer.
    Nothing about herself, or very little. Stories about people who live.
    The big-breasted little prostitute who can’t leave town because the morality officer reserves her for himself. She is in love with a college boy. She sets him ablaze in the early morning, he helps her make the bed and change the towels before her daily rounds. She is still pink and, already, absolutely alone.
    The big bully who has refused to leave his room since his beloved returned to Montreal to go back to his wife and children. He weeps over a bag full of love letters and a fishing photograph that shows them with their arms around each other’s shoulders.
    A locksmith dressed in black from head to toe behaves like a curate in the face of bashed-in doors, yesterday’s vomit, broken glass in the corridor. But he can be seen lingering outside those rooms where the new girls are always slow to