So long ago

I saw this for the first time in 1984 just before I met her. In the 1980s I remember hearing a man talking about being here in the 1940s during the war and how he'd played bagpipes for a regiment that was going overseas. It's been 40 years for me too now. The motel I stayed in was in a small town, St-Louis-de-France, on the road to her place - now the town has been absorbed by Three Rivers, and the Motel des Pins, an isolated stop on the highway is gone - August, 2024

Ursulines Convent, Three Rivers, 

Quebec. "Time flies like a shadow"

credit: MartianBold, wikimedia Commons

Christmas lights outside her house, sometime around Christmas 1984.

 The bad guys often win. Today was the day I drove up to see my girlfriend F. and found she had moved in with a man 20 years older than her, an alcoholic, who had been stalking her at her school and who she said had raped her. 

I felt good when I'd gone to Three Rivers to learn French. I was exploring a new town, learning new things. Since I was born in Quebec and had lived in a part of Ontario that had a lot of French Canadians the culture wasn't new to me. One of the first persons that I met there was someone from Cornwall I'd gone to school with named Brown who said she'd say 'both' if someone asked her if she was French or English. The town had an acid smell in the air from the pulp and paper mill and the water tasted bad since it came from the St. Maurice river. Most people drank bottled water.

F. was a student there who taught. I first saw her on stage as the staff was being introduced, a pretty, plump girl in a long cotton dress. She drove a four door Ford Escort, brown/beige paint with the image of a falcon on the sides followed by traces of its outline, I guess to suggest speed. She bought it with her own money. It would go on to be wrecked by that guy, who blamed her for the accident since she was late and that somehow caused it.

We'd joked around when the class had gone to the La Mauricie National Park where she had worked the summer before, helping blind children experience the park. She flirted with me and danced singing  "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" in French. She said The Sound  of Music was one of her favourite movies. It's really kitschy. 

She ran into the woods, wanting me to chase her, but the woods were on a peninsula so I just hid and wanted for her to come back. She walked out of the woods with a very solemn expression , unlike the carefree laughing face she had a few minutes earlier.

She used to watch me closely after that. I saw her in the evening at the school, asked her what she was doing, and said she was going for a walk - I asked if I could accompany her. And then she ran off to talk to the head of the student teachers to check if it was OK to go out with a student. I didn't think of it as going out.  I thought we were just going for a walk together, but it did turn into a date, and that was her idea. She told me "Tonight I am not a monitor (name for the student teachers)" 

She said it several times so I'd get the point as we walked into the night,  and then she sat down on some stairs that looked down from a ridge into the lower part of the town. 

We went back to the park with the school another week after we started dating covertly and we swam at the beach there. There were purple irises growing. I'd told her she needed sunscreen and by accident squirted some on her boobs. She laughed. I was so embarrassed! 

She warned me not to love her, even said 'shouldn't we stop this?' before we kissed for the first time but I thought she was just saying she was damaged from other relationships and she'd just need some patience. She said it could be any two people here and the same thing would happen. I suggested I ask the next man who walked by to take my place and she laughed. She kept on saying "I am just a little girl" and "C'est juste un feu d'artifice" (It's just a firework) referring to our love when we saw some fireworks and I said that joys in life were like that, and should be enjoyed. She smelt like wildflowers, not from perfume, just naturally.

She told me she'd won an Academy Award. She'd sometimes tell me things that were untrue, so this time I laughed and asked her if she was Meryl Streep. She'd meant she'd won a scholarship,  bourse académique in Canadian French, for a university in Montreal. I winced a little when she told me that, as I worried she'd attract a man who wanted to freeload off her success, which it ultimately did. 

She had mental health problems- she had a pain in her abdomen that seemed to be psychosomatic and when we were together once it got so bad she had to go to the hospital. First she wanted to go to her friend's house but she was having trouble driving. I couldn't drive a manual transmission so some police who stopped behind us drove her to the house and carried her in, but eventually we ended up going to the hospital and nothing physically was wrong with her. Her friend, another student at the school, seemed jealous of me. In high school she told a teacher she liked she was taking drugs (she wasn't) and spent time in a treatment centre with serious addicts. She also told me once she had terminal cancer, which she didn't.  

She said she had been raped in an earlier relationship and that I believe.

She was funny and was kind to me when we were together. I felt something cold dripping on me as I sat down at a dance she took me to. I thought somehow I was sweating cold and got up to go out. It was her dripping water on me from a glass! I was happy with her and I wished that when we walked the street of her town that I could cut our happiness up like a cake and share it with people.

We went on a field trip to Montreal. She was in charge of a group of adult students but wanted to be with me. I just walked around and just north of the main intersection I felt a sudden push and thought I was being mugged. I turned around to see her grinning. She pulled me behind a wall in a parking lot and hugged me. Then she took her students with me to Complexe Desjardins and I drew her attention to a restaurant on one of the higher levels and she spent some minutes trying to lose them. I waited by the restaurant and looked at her students following her like a line of ducklings following their mother. A security guard eyed me curiously. Finally she evaded them and we went by subway to Angrignon Park at the end of the line. I remember a little girl of about eight with a backpack suddenly shrieking on the platform because her mother had gotten on the train and accidently left the girl behind as the train pulled away. A woman knelt beside the girl to reassure her.

We pressed on.

We ended up hugging and kissing in the grass at the park before going back. She sat beside me on the bus back to the university and asked to be told stories and held my hand under her coat. I told her the story of Gelert the dog who was unfairly killed by its owner, Prince Llewllyn, when the prince had thought that the dog had killed his son, when the dog had really defended the child against a wolf.

It was the 1980s and she wore a crinkly fabric skirt, or a long artisanal cotton dress and those 'jelly' plastic shoes . She wanted green ones and I found a shop with them, but she needed me to find the shop - her sense of direction was poor and she could get lost in her own town. She wore a small charm with concentric circles like a target, and an ankh ring which she knew was a symbol of immortality- I think she might have had a excessive fear of death. I finished the term at the end of the summer and would have stayed there if I knew she wanted me to. The last night there was a pub party at the Utrek. I was walking out of it when she came out the door to talk. I'd asked her if she wanted to keep it going, and she said she didn't know, so I left the party. I didn't know this but she got sick again in the pub and had to go to a psychiatric hospital. She'd told the same jealous girl to give me a message to come see her, but jealous girl didn't do it, so I left town not knowing she wanted me to stay. I rode my bicycle to Guelph and tried to find a place, ended up in a horrible hotel for that semester, She wrote me a letter telling me she loved me, then stopped writing. I was going through something else that was painful. I'd go into an empty classroom and cried. I finally called her and I visited her during the fall break. Everything seemed OK but she told me about the 40 year old. She was seeing him but she said he was not her lover or anything. Then I went back and she stopped writing again. I called her, she wanted to see me over Christmas. So I went and that time I could go to her house and meet her family. We saw 'The Dog that stopped the War" and a spaghetti western at a local cinema. She cried at the end of the first film, where the dog dies, and fell asleep with the western. We skied in the same La Mauricie park up to a small cabin with a stove. I lit it and she told me I was playing hide-and-go-seek - I think she meant I was hiding my true emotions but I wasn't.

Her bedroom was in the basement. Their dog Aglaé was growling at me and I laid down on the floor to show I was no threat. She pulled me along by my arm. She showed me a pail full of pennies she brought up from the basement to the living room and pointed out one that had King George on it, with the IND:IMP mark and I guessed it was from 1947 before turning it over. I was right but it wasn't the ones with a tiny maple leaf after the 7 that were made in 1948 after India became independent and George was no longer emperor.

She wore a big  pendant with a seagull that was also artisanal to the Twelfth Night (January 5) dance we went to on the last night we were together. She liked "Jonathan Livingston Seagull".

She wrapped a green scarf that matched her green eyes around her head like a turban and we talked outside her house as I was about to drive off for the last time. I said I'd be back but she acted sad. She kept thinking I'd leave her because she wasn't any good.

She'd asked me for help to get the guy to leave her alone. He'd follow her around the school and even stole my letters from her mailbox at the school, which was just an open pigeon hole cabinet that everyone could access (I didn't learn about the rape until later). She knew I would be there, confirmed the day and hour on the phone. She left the house after a fight with her mother and moved in with the guy some time before the end of January so she had time to tell me not to come. I didn't know this had happened until I saw them together at a restaurant that I saw her going to when I got there. I can still see the outside of the restaurant in my mind - my life would change after I went up the stairs and went in. The 40 year old hid behind her. Literally. But he realized I wasn't going to fight and so he just sat down. They both smiled at each other when they saw what pain I was in. I shouted and left the restaurant and drove home like a zombie. I'm lucky I didn't crash the car. I was a wreck for a long time after that.

 Later on, and I shouldn't have had anything to do with her after that but I did, she told me she'd had a fight with her mom and left the house and said she couldn't go anywhere else, although she knew I'd stayed in a motel that was only $15 a day, she had friends in town and she could have even slept at her school. He did well out of it, two kids and a good job  that being with her got him, even though he still beat her. 

Three years later, I'd gotten better, graduated and was going to another university, I still tried to get in touch with her. Then she called me. She was ready to leave him. Collect call in the morning. She had one child with him she didn't want and he wanted another. She stood by the baby's crib and told me she didn't love or want this one, and didn't want another. She wanted to leave or for me to father the next one so she'd have less reason to have anything to do with him afterwards. I didn't want to father a child because she would still be living with the violent man who might realize it wasn't his. Then she changed her mind. She finally left him some years later, after she had another kid, but still dated men like him, guys who moved in with her and took over her life  for a while. One did it before he even learned how to spell her last name right.

She was perfectly capable of leaving him by herself, and she could have told the people at the school she was at that he was stalking her.

I saw her one last time after that, by accident. She was a sad woman walking a Bichon Frisé. I didn't want to talk to her.

It's hurt me ever since.

I heard a story on CBC radio from a Cree man about a man who was on his way home when he was shot by a stranger with an arrow. Instead of going home he pursued the man, if only to find out why he shot him. Instead of getting treated for his wound at home, he died of his injury in the forest. I did the same thing. 

When my dad was dying a short time after she started seeing me again, I imagined she was beside me in the hospital room. It was just something I imagined to comfort myself. She would never do that in real life.

I kept thinking she'd call me to say sorry and we would be friends again. It was silly to think that was going to happen. If she felt guilty about it, it wouldn't have happened in the first place.

I just drove around pointlessly along the St. Lawrence for a long time after that, usually through the night, hoping to find my way back.

She did well in her career, important jobs, and retired early but still was hospitalized over mental health issues.

I'd waited so long for her to call me, explain things, ask for help. Her call came just after I saw Jane Siberry the night before. She played Map of the World with Rebecca Jenkins. I saw someone in the audience I went on to become great friends with. She still calls. I really made a bad decison in answering F's call and jumping on the bus back to her town. She stopped seeing me again after a short while and called me a 'Fat Liar and fat bastard' after I told her something I had to and she didn't want to believe.