The Strangers' Gallery Read Online Free PDF

reason, she would stop eating it, refuse to eat at all till you searched the supermarket and found some other exotic tidbits that were to her liking. I discovered “sardine cutlets in lobster consommé” and “cat caviar.” Probably sculpins’ eggs, I thought, but who cares. She loved it, whatever it was.
    Little did I know, or Miranda, for that matter, that cat-sitting Dorothy was a nurturing, fathering test, or pre-test, that I was taking. Had I passed? With flying colours, if I were to take Miranda’s unbridled enthusiasm for my grades. Dorothy loved me, she had thrice proclaimed after she returned from her trips—almost two weeks at Christmas, a week at Easter, and a whole month in the summer. How she deduced this, I’ll never know—perhaps because Dorothy was even fatter when Miranda came back. Dorothy hadn’t moved except to the food and water bowls and the litter box in the basement, though she did venture outside in the summer. But I myself could feel growing within me, even at this early stage of my parenting career, a kind of King Lear resentment toward this ungrateful feline-child. Not sharper than a serpent’s tooth exactly but…
    When Miranda returned from Montreal on the first of August, after my third babysitting stint with Dorothy, she brought me fresh croissants as a gift, a baker’s dozen from her favourite café in Montreal, the Duc de Lorraine, which was not far from where she had been living in her sister’s apartment off Côte-des-Neiges Road. Perhaps she had remembered the stale croissant and coffee I had served her the day before she left, when she had briefed me on my caregiving duties during her absence. These tasted as if they’d just come out of the oven when we sat out on my verandah having one with our coffee at four-thirty that afternoon. Not so the Maxwell House coffee, which was clearly not a recent roast. Nothing like the bowl of café au lait that she described with such delight, which she’d had for breakfast at seven that morning when she bought the croissants.
    Miranda looked different—I think it was her hair. Not tied up in the usual ponytail with a simple elastic and barrettes on the sides. It was cut short, Frenchified, as I thought of it, though it wasn’t what we used to call a French crop, or bangs—her brow was still bare—but something that I associated with
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. It accentuated her high cheekbones, her dark eyes, her litheness, her angular features. She looked less troubled as well. Losing both parents at the same time, and so tragically, must have been quite a blow, not easy to recover from, but she had never talked about the accident, only mentioned it in passing. Perhaps she’d guessed that the Morrows had told me all about it. Frank had described the collision in morbid detail. Morbidity was fast becoming his normal cast of mind.
    â€œWhat did you do in Montreal?” I asked Miranda.
    â€œI cried a lot,” she said. “Ilse is very emotional, and when she cries I cry, too. I did a lot of sketching. Her apartment building is on the side of a hill, and at the very top is a little park like a wild wood. You can get lost in there. There were flowers I’d never seen before. I made dozens of sketches. I spent some time on the Plateau, in the coffee shops and bars with Ilse and her friends—actors and dancers, all of them—a wacky lot, stoned all the time, but very serious about their work. They laugh at everything except their work. But I spent most of the time by myself—in the park I mentioned, in the Duc de Lorraine, the Mount Royal Cemetery. That was also close by. An amazing place—a lot of tombs. Mom wanted to be buried in a tomb. She was so afraid of being buried in the ground, but she feared cremation even more. Dad dismissed all this with a laugh. They left no instructions in their will, so we had a traditional burial.”
    Her talk