She was a tall girl, shy, with red/brown hair, who referred to "girls" as "gheerllz". She ate with a fork and knife at the same time, sort of like a German. She dutifully took the monster out for hour long walks on the beach, complete with yellow fuzzy ball. He came back exhausted and curious: why didn't *we* take him out for such consistently excellent walks? She spent a lot of time on her computer. Chatted with friends in the afternoon. Chatted with us at night. In the daytime, she yodelled. She came to us in Ste Agathe, loaded with rose wine, some special chocolates of the small kind. The kind you needed to unwrap four at a time and pop them into your mouth. In the morning Maria would get into her car and do her rounds, while tall girl from the French Alps ate her bread and jam and tea, sort of like a Brit. Maria liked keeping up with the busy antics of business people in Ste Agathe near our deli. The Chinese guy at the corner, the woman with triple-toned hair across the street, the knife sharpener on our block who opened only at weird times. The tough gangster, Chu-chu, who swore in American and then claimed that the English language lacked vocabulary. He has guns buried in one of the hills in town, apparently. He wore shorts from K-Mart circa 1979, complete with tube socks, bad-ass goatee and grayed pony-tail, complete with a girl's 10-speed bike. He'd spend twenty minutes threatening ghost bad guys and then take off in a huff on his bike.
Maria would then come back, pick up her cousin and take her for a scenic ride through the *other* towns, Val-Morin, Val-David, Ste Adolphe d'Howard...places we grew to love. Since moving to Ste Agathe we realized we were stuck in a town where most of the townspeople were basically weird little oompa loompas.
Just wait until summer, we'd regale Frenchie. More barbecues. Jacques is a sensitive guy, a real sweetheart. But he eats barbecue meat with his hands like a barbarian. Wait for Jerome. And Matthieu and Amelie. And the guitar players. And Joe Skaggs. Melanie with her house in a neighborhood of beavers and moose, bears and deers and otters. No other houses. And weekends on one of their lakes. And then the garlic spray for the mosquitos. And the firework competitions in Montreal all of July. Last year Portugal rocked the house! And wait for the Festival du Jazz. And a drive-in movie in Laval. Maybe we go to Ottawa, to Toronto, to the beach house, to the cousins' places, to this and that and then some. But then the phone call came and France was all nutty still. Nothing I could see on the news. But the country has been rocked by strikes by the students. Close to civil war, we were told. Which messed up all of the businesses. And the universities had to change their academic schedules so that our visitor had to leave Canada asap or else she wouldn't be able to take her general exam in her master's program, and then she'd have to re-take the entire year over. She packed. We prepared the monster for her leaving and getting shorter walks in the future. "She's leaving, get used to it," we informed him. His tongue still stuck out. His ass still looked like a loaf of bread. Phone calls, and last-minute trips to see the vital things, and as many people as possible, ensued. We lost our habits. We had our routine. But so did Cousin Sandrine.
