"Mona Says Fire Fire Fire", Cont'd
Since moving from megacity to Refugee Cove, Mona wakes up most mornings not surprised by where she is but by how easily she's been able to fill the corners of this new life, as if someone pressed a button, clicked a mouse, and here she was. Clicked a moose, as they say. So teaching French at the district school fits into her plan, like weight loss. Her friends, those city mice, married and childrened, divorced or approaching, have a heaviness about them Mona doesn't want to gain. The combined mass of debt, relationships, family and careers, with the added carbon and diesel in the air, is suffocating.
To better her French, she enrolled in a six-week French immersion program in St. Fanforon, Québec the summer before she moved to Nova Scotia. She and dozens of randy teens stumbled off the train at three in the morning ready to party, not study. Mona bonded quickly and necessarily with anyone close to her age and by the end of the first weekend, she and MBA candidate Dennis Baker were the first to acquire nicknames.
"Bonjour Monsieur D'Argent."
"Bonjour Grand-mère. Comment ça va?"
After a week, the fervor was as contagious as strep throat in a co-ed dorm. They found themselves dizzily dancing to French hip hop, drunk on bottled Expor', bumping hips on the sweaty Friday night dance floor beside fellow students literally half their ages. And then, unable to go back to the rooms in their billeted houses, they found the lee side of a wood pile in a dewy-grassed backyard. They broke the French-only rule when neither knew the word for condom.
"I was stacking my firewood today and thought of you," Mona now says into the phone. She laughs slightly, then stops. "I'm finding myself thinking about you. I talk to you in my head. I've done long distance before. A few hours away, weekend visits. But a time zone? I want to be a grown up. Love letters and sad phone calls seem very first-year university. Very French immersion."
"Break-ups and honeymoons."
"Midnight sun then weeks of darkness."
"Have you ever seen the Northern Lights?"
"From the plane last time I saw you."
"They don't just look beautiful, Mona. They crackle."
"Do you have a minute Madsozwelle Berlo?"
Colin's dad. No time for parent-teacher time. Mona hesitates slightly before saying, "Of course."
"Well, Colin? He's a bit upset about French. He-his mom wanted-" He pauses, his mouth shifting on his words like a horse chewing a sugarcube, "-if there'd been some last year...." He shakes his head. "Keeps getting harder," he says.
"Yes," Mona nods, though she doesn't know if he means school, or parenting, or life. Mona pretends he means teaching, and this helps her nod. Nodding calms her-the bobbing, a raft in the sun. Avoiding his eyes, she stares at his Fundy Bay Tractors cap, which, she guesses, is hiding a receding hair line.
In Québec, when Mona was first having a terrible time struggling with the language and culture, crying like a lost child, Dennis made her feel better. He said that the only way to learn a language is to dive into the water and hold your breath for as long as you can, until you emerge with gills. But the second trick, the secret trick, is to get past the point of panic, get to the peace that comes before drowning. She wants to relate this now to Colin's dad, but Mona has noticed a habit in the community of male ease, of keeping boys boys for as long as they can, before they have to give in to their lives of labour. The girls do better, or care more about school. They'll need it in the future. Most of these boys won't. Once on the water, their survival suits will save them. If they wear them.
"Don't worry, Mr. Gillin. He'll be parlez-vooing in no time." Vive la révolution!
"Call me Rubin."
Rubin. Yummy.
"Then call me Mona."
"Moona," he pronounces.
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