Day 35: The Roads of St. Claude (Or: People Pleasing Since 1983)

“We welcome the cyclists into our home,” Robert explained in his thick accent, his hand squeezing the back of his neck. His eyes landed on what I estimated were my knees. I discovered, over our short stay in St. Claude, Manitoba, that this is as close to prolonged eye contact as Robert gets. We were standing in his driveway, about to wheel our bicycles into his open garage. He returned his hand to his hip. “It’s better if you’re European, but, you know, Canadians are fine too.” I stared at him, sifting this comment through various colanders in my brain. It lingered above the pot containing bitter Quebecois separatists, but when I noticed his bumper sticker - ‘Belgians are Beautiful’ - it fell through the sieve shaped for arrogant expats with Canadian-shaped chips on their shoulders.
        “Well, I’m from Vancouver,” I said . Funny. I’ve told everyone else on this trip that I’m from Nova Scotia. I find my childhood in a rural town garners more respect from the locals than my seven years in a city. But I’m quick to adjust my details based on what I think you want or expect from me. St. Claude is a fully-French community, and Robert and his wife Josiane might be horrified if they knew this east-coaster’s bilingualism doesn’t venture far beyond Bonjour and Au revoir. They had followed Toby and I as we rode to St. Claude’s campground, where they pulled up beside us and asked us if we wanted to sleep at their place for the night.
        “You can stay in our ‘ome!” Josiane insisted, hanging out the passenger window. “You can ‘ave shower, laundry, air-condition, nice bed.” Robert had sat silently in the driver’s seat, nodding.

“And I am from Switzerland,” said Toby. Robert, satisfied at least one of us was European, asked Toby some questions about his country. He responded with a bit of French, and everyone seemed pleased. Josiane quickly resumed into English, but I didn’t hold on too tightly to my relief. I'd yet to charm a grin out of Robert, and I suspected he might pounce on me with French at any moment. Josiane, however, was a little ball of light, with a wide, porcelain face and short red hair. She was quick to smile and laugh, and her thick accent reminded me of an amusement park - full of colours, sounds, twists and turns requiring my close attention lest I get lost.
        Their kitchen faced a large backyard full of bird feeders, gardens and skunk traps. Presently, two black birds with orange chests enjoyed some seed at the window. “Ah! Birds,” exclaimed Robert. “Probably a rare sight for you, hmm?” He raised his eyebrows in my direction.
        “Uh,” I faltered, unwilling to put up any outright arguments. I was, after all, a guest. “Not--”
        “You do know what kinds of birds these are, yes?” he challenged. My eyes darted to their kitchen clock which, in lieu of numbers, had pictures of birds with their names underneath. I squinted at the three o’clock orange and black blur, trying to read.
        “Orioles,” he replied. “They are orioles. Male. It’s important to know what you’re looking at.”
        “That’s true,” I mumbled. As Robert watched the birds, I noticed how far his ears stuck out, and how his grey eyes bulged, creating the illusion that someone was pulling back the sides of his head. His hairstyle, with its pompador-esque curl, matched perfectly his hair in his and Josiane’s thirty-year-old wedding photo that sat on a doily beside the floral sofa. Robert’s voice was nasally, stiff and full of rebuke. Someone, at some point in his childhood, had tormented him, and I imagined I reminded Robert of that someone.

Over lemon chicken and chow mein at the local Chinese restaurant, Robert told us about the different nationalities and religions comprising the tiny community of St. Claude.
        “It used to be entirely French. Now, we have Germans, Pilipinos, Polish, Ukrainians, Hutterites--” he stopped and glanced quickly in my direction. “You do know what Hutterites are, yes?” Luckily, months earlier, my neighbour had educated me on these tiny farming colonies. I still remember the look on Rafael’s face when I had professed my original ignorance. I wasn’t about to disappoint, for the same reason, another grey-haired European.
        “Of course!” I cried, a little too loudly.
        “Good,” he continued. “Anyways, before these immigrants arrived, St. Claude was tiny. Only enough children for one country schoolhouse--” he stopped himself again. “You do know what a country schoolhouse is, yes?”
        “Yes,” I replied.
        “Good,” he continued. And so it went. He offered us a lot of information, but always as if he was defending its validity. He asked us a lot of questions, but always as if he hoped we wouldn’t know the answer. Josiane presented the complete opposite: she sat quietly, a small smile fleeting across her face. Every so often, she buffered Robert’s tirades with light-hearted observations, but she always stopped there. She never asked any questions, didn’t open up any conversation path Robert hadn’t already trampled firmly down.
        After dinner, Robert paid for everything and I thanked him, warmly, a couple times, but still failed to melt his tough exterior. He drove us back to their house and headed inside to wait for a plumber who was coming by for an estimate. Josiane switched into the driver seat and we headed to the nursing home where she works. She wanted to give us a tour.
        “Here is the X-ray machine, here is the janitor’s closet, here is the administration office, here is the toilet.” I ran out of responses. I’d reached my annual quota of “Oh, nice!” about four rooms ago, so I continued in silence. Josiane didn’t seem to notice. She walked the halls with purpose and happy authority. At the sound of her voice, the residents stopped watching the television and put down their forks and turned in her direction. She spoke to them in a high-speed, energetic French, and each one was left giggling and beaming. After the tour of the nursing home, she drove up and down every street of Saint-Claude - there are about twelve - and made sure we could locate the post office, the grocery store, the insurance broker, and the French school where Robert taught history. Finally, it was time to return home. Robert was waiting at the kitchen table, and Josiane whipped up some ice cream sundaes.
        “You do know what kind of berries these are, yes?” Robert asked me. I pushed my spoon through the thick blue syrup.
        “Um, blueberries?”
        “No,” he scoffed. “Saskatoon berries. They grow in our backyard.”
        “Nice!” I said. “We have a lot of raspberry--”
        “We have so many we don’t know what to do with them,” Robert continued. “Lots of wild berries here in Saint-Claude. It’s nice to live so close to nature.” He paused and tilted his head, his eyes landing on my ice cream bowl. “So what exactly is a Masters in Creative Writing?” he asked. The dreaded question, followed by the dreaded-er question, ‘What do you expect to do with your degree?’ At the best of times, with the best of people, I still feel I have to defend my educational choice. This is probably because I’ve yet to actually commit to pursuing writing as a career, so I always feel like I'm lying, or acting poorly. In the face of Robert’s multi-faceted disapproval, my mind short-circuited. I stammered.
        “Well, it’s a fine arts program--”
        “But there’s no skill you’re learning,” he insisted. He pushed his chair farther away from the table and crossed his legs.
        “We learn--”
        “I mean, there’s no material you’re studying, no area of expertise, no specific knowledge,” he raised his hand higher and higher, as though spatially measuring the exact amount of student loan money I was wasting. “It’s not applicable, like history, or math.”
        “It’s a workshop-based--”
        “So I suppose there wouldn’t be any thesis, because what would your thesis be on, the history of creative writing?” He laughed.
        “The thesis is your book, or your screenplay, or your stage play, that will hopefully go on to be published, or produced.” I stopped short, unprepared for such long airtime.
        “Hmm,” Robert frowned, his eyes buried deep in his own ice cream. “I just…I just never found anything interesting at all, at all, at all about the language arts.” His eyes met mine, then fell again. “At all.”
        “Really?” I asked.
        “No. Not at all. Nothing.”
        “You don’t read?” I asked, and recognized the sadness in my voice as the first authentic emotion I’d demonstrated all evening.
        Josiane spoke up. “Robert reads history books. And science books.”
        “Facts,” Robert stated. “I like facts. Fiction and make-believe? I have no time for it at all.” His spoon clattered against his empty bowl.
        I heard My Dear Friend’s voice in my ear, the advice she gave me last year throughout my struggles in our Creative Nonfiction class. Everything is fiction, Chelsea. There’s no such thing as nonfiction. It’s all interpretation, it’s all spin, it’s all motive. Everything is a story someone told someone once. I considered going down this road with Robert, but what was the point? I cannot briefly and succinctly summarize what a story is. What it means to tell a story. How our lives are intersections of thousands of stories, criss-crossing and overlapping like the roads of old cities. The next morning, the sun would rise over the driveway where we would stand, silent. I would open my arms to hug Robert goodbye, and he would lift, automatically, his right hand, thinking I meant to shake it. His arm would hang in the air, awkward, like a street sign with a broken hinge, and I would leave my arms stretched wide, waiting. He would hesitate, then sort of jump towards me and wrap his arm around my back and pull me too quickly into his chest, which would be hard and smell of soap. He would say, “Yep. Yep. Yep,” though I would say nothing, and I would think, in that moment: This is a story, Robert. What just happened, right here. Where are the facts? But that night, at the kitchen table, I remained silent. And the bird clock ticked.
        We moved into the living room where an old-fashioned radio played a drama on low volume. Robert reminisced about the latter days of communication, and mentioned Twitter with disgust. I announced, proudly, that I had managed to avoid discovering exactly what a Twitter was. I knew that, for once, he would be pleased to share my ignorance on a subject. Rambling on, I revealed I was cell phone free in Vancouver, and I did not own a television. (I made sure not to mention my blog.) Hearing myself extolling my alleged virtues, I wondered, for the umpteenth time, “When will I stop worrying about what assholes think of me? Why do I feel the need to endear myself to someone so intent on remaining unimpressed?” But I forged on. I knew my purported disdain for technology could never make up for my status as a creative writer, but I wanted to end the night sharing something, bonding in some way. This is where I feel most comfortable. For whatever reason, I find it easiest to fall asleep on common ground.