The lie

On Wednesday mornings, Margo and I would go to the 'Bibliotheque Pour Tous', the two-room Catholic library were she volunteered as a cashier.

By the time I entered the sixth grade, I had read the entire children section of the library and requested access to the adult room. Margo discussed the matter with my mother and it was agreed that I would only borrow from the literature section. Romance would give me the wrong ideas about marriage and Margo believed that people who read mystery novels were doomed to meet an untimely death.

My first adult book was a biography of Edith Piaf that my mother read first, pinning together the pages of any inappropriate sections with her sewing pins. I un-pinned and re-pinned those sections in the privacy of our family bathroom, learning about Piaf's early childhood in a brothel, the untimely death of her baby brother and her affairs with married men.

As it turned out, there was a lot I learned from the shelves of the Catholic library. My mother had better things to do than pin book pages. Margo put her faith in the good judgement of the acquisition librarians. I was free to roam.

In the winter of eighth grade I stumbled upon sex. I was nestled in one of Margo's armchairs, reading from a coming of age novel, when the main character let a much older man take her clothes off and touch her 'down there'. Uh-oh. And with Margo banging dinner pots ten feet from me. I raced through the next pages and stuck the book in my schoolbag to re-read it later.

When Margo asked me about the book, I lied.

"It's boring, you wouldn't like it."

"The back-cover sounded good."

"It's not your kind of story."

It was the first time I remembered lying to her.

The order of the belt

Over the span of forty-some odd years, Margo's thin belt took a long slow drift upward from waist, to lower-rib cage to stomach to just an inch below the breasts where it finally came to anchor.

There is no telling what the belt was supposed to hold. Margo's polyester dresses were sober of pleats and flounces. The belt was no match for any kind of serious flesh. Whatever needed to be held was more ephemeral than cloth or belly fat, more slippery also. It had to be watched and polished with habit and discipline.

The belt was part of a uniform that also included flat laced-up shoes, thick brown hoses held by a garter and mysterious knit undergraments that were put out to dry in the privacy of the cellar where they could be shielded from the curiosity of neighbors and little children (me included).

As a piece of outerwear, the belt held a special place as the finishing touch to Margo's outfits: the cherry on top, the accessory that declared her fit to be seen in company, acceptable to the world. Beltless, she was either an household item wandering about the house in her nightshirt, or an uneasy vacationer in one piece black swimsuit, dipping a timid toe in seawater. Either way, she was uncomfortable, anxious to get into her real clothes, tighten herself back into place.

But not too tight. Whenever a belt would threating the delicate balance between comfort and propriety, Margo would sit at the dining room table to restore order in the world. She would punch a new belt hole with her scissor tips, round the hole with a fork tooth and work the buckle through the hole to smooth the edges as best she could. It took several weeks for the new hole to fit. She never seemed to mind.

She was patient. She preferred order and the safety of the loop around her body.

The kitchen clock

There were thousands of objects in Margo's house, each containing its own story and sometimes the story of something else attached to it. For a while I knew every broom, pail, crucifix, cotton sheet, shelf, cushion, radio set, picture frame in that house. I knew where some of the dishes came from, three generations back, and which button had been ripped from what shirt and which won at a card game. I could find the worn aluminum spoon whose missing particles had attached themselves to the roofs of our palate over time. I knew where to store the soup pot and where to find the extra stick of butter.

I knew I had paid 70 francs for the kicthecn clock I purchased for Margo's birthday (the equivalent of about $10.00, an enormous sum it seemed to me in 1974). The clock bore the picture of an older woman making dinner. Even though the woman didn't look like her (she never wore her hair in a bun), Margo knew that the clock meant I lover her more than anything in the world. It was still easy to love her that way at thirteen.

She hung the clock on the wall above the kitchen cabinet. I would face it whenever I sat at the dining room table. Margo would sit in that same spot in the afternoons, sipping coffee and knitting, so that the clock would be held in our mutual gaze.

The sugar bowl

I have been using Margo's sugar bowl to store my necklaces. She would be appalled. For Margo, objects had precise functions that could not be changed.

She kept the sugar bowl in the cupboard above the stove, took it out for breakfast, lunch and afternoon coffee.

The afternoon coffee was for visitors: her sister, Gilberte every other Monday, and her sister-in-law, Jeanette, every other Tuesday. They would sit at the dining room table to sew or knit and share the family gossips. Margo would make coffee with milk and put out a dish of cookies on the table. She would pour two small glasses of liquor - cognac, grand-marnier, whatever was available - and they would sip the liquor and drink coffee for a few hours.

I would watch my grandmother's legs from my spot under the dining room table where she would send me to play. The table was like a small play house. I could set my red plastic tea set on the floor and play with my dolls there as long as I was careful not to step on toes.

At the appointed time, Margo would call me from under the table.
- "Do you want a 'canard'?" she'd ask.

She would dunk a sugar cube in her glass of liquor.
- "Eat it fast!"

The sugar felt warmer than usual. The liquor stung my throat. It wasn't the 'canard' I liked as much as the sight of the liquor rising in the sugar. How could liquid go up like that? If I held the sugar cube too long, it could crumble in the glass and Margo would get upset.

- "Look what you did," she'd say. "Now I have to drink it all."

And she would make a face at so much sugar in her mouth.