Judith's Sister

By Lise Tremblay

In the seemingly endless small-town summer of 1968, a twelve-year-old girl contemplates with dread the social prospects of her fast-approaching enrollment in a class for gifted students at the local high school, arranged by her mother who “blows up” at the drop of a hat—she doesn’t intend to let her daughter marry “the first man to come along,” and she is prepared to do anything to make sure her children don’t grow up “ignorant,” like Judith’s sister, Claire. To escape her mother’s unpredictable and interminable rants, the young girl locks herself in her room with her books, escaping into a life of imagination and dreams, mostly of older guys like Marius, as beautiful as a god when he dons his softball uniform every Wednesday to play in the community park, and to whom she writes anonymous love letters.

Fortunately, there’s the prettiest girl in town to look up to. Recruited by the pop music band Bruce and the Sultans as their go-go dancer, if her audition in the big city of Montreal goes well, Claire is to accompany the band on their upcoming provincial tour. Idolized by the story’s unnamed narrator, Claire is the “big sister” she never had, but whom she shares by proxy with her best friend, Judith.

In this, her fifth book, Lise Tremblay paints a picture of rural Quebec in the years following the Quiet Revolution in her signature style so refreshingly free of artifice and literary hyperbole. Society is changing fast, new values are making inroads, but old traditions remain deeply rooted. Judith’s Sister is a coming-of-age novel that focuses on the timeless themes that preoccupy all adolescent girls: solitude, alienation, obesity, lies, sexuality, shame, madness and fear of strangers; and our inevitable first encounters with the grown-up betrayals of friends, family and community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780889227323

Lise Tremblay

Born in 1957 in Saguenay, the award-winning writer Lise Tremblay is one of Quebec’s most prominent novelists. Her first novel, L’hiver de pluie, was published by XYZ Éditeur in 1990 and won the Prix Découverte du Salon du livre du Saguenay-Lac Saint-Jean and the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize. Following this promising debut, Tremblay continued to wow critics with her skillful craft, winning the Governor General’s Award for Fiction with her third novel, Mile End. The jury for the prestigious prize praised Mile End as a “forceful, highly intense novel accentuated by a temperance in the writing which shatters received ideas.” The essence of Tremblay’s literary universe is exemplified by the clear-eyed observation of its characters and the world in which they evolve; the language is precise and unsentimental, holding up a mirror to our own existence and hurling us, in spite of ourselves, towards the pits of reality. Tremblay currently teaches literature at the Cégep du Vieux-Montréal.

Book preview

The paperboy threw the half-wet Sunday paper onto the rug in the front hall. The minute I heard him close the door, I jumped out of bed. I wanted to be the first to see Claire’s photo. I grabbed the newspaper and started looking for it. The photo was on page twenty-two and it showed Claire framed by her parents. Mr. Lavallée was wearing a suit. The article told Claire’s story, how she’d gone from the quarterfinals to the semifinals and now on to the finals of the dance competition. If she won, she would spend the year as a go-go dancer on the farewell tour that Bruce and The Sultans were going to take around the province. I couldn’t believe it. If she won, my best friend’s sister was going to meet Bruce in person, and maybe he’d even come to the Lavallées’ house. That was all Judith and I could talk about, and we were spending a lot of time together, helping her father. They had a big lot of land and Mr. Lavallée had decided to build his own mini-golf before the ­beginning of summer. Judith and I were helping him lay the green carpet over the concrete forms, making sure that the surface was really smooth. The hardest part had been the Camel. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get rid of the crease between the two humps, and there was no fixing it. Her father finally gave up. He said that the ­people at the mini-golf in Jonquière had a special machine that could fix it, but it was really expensive and he couldn’t afford one. The Camel would have to remain creased, and that was that.

The mini-golf was practically finished. Except for the wooden signs announcing the names of the holes. Judith’s father was painting them in the shed that we called the shop. The Lavallée family was proud of their mini-golf. They had the prettiest backyard. There were patio chairs, tables, a fireplace, a statue of the Virgin, a swing. We spent most of our time there. Sometimes, and we never knew why, ­Judith’s father came out on the back porch and sent us all home, threatening to give us a kick in the ass, but that didn’t ­happen often and he only carried out his threat once. Martial Turcotte was the one who got it. It’s true that he had stolen the baseball mitt away from Régis, Judith’s handicapped brother, claiming that Régis didn’t know how to play and he’d never learn. Régis never went anywhere without his cardboard box filled with different-coloured wires and his baseball mitt. He also had an old leather briefcase stuffed with baseball and hockey cards and he gave the players crazy names that sounded vaguely like English ones. Judith said that Régis was the way he was because when he was a baby, he’d had a bad case of meningitis. At the hospital, they’d given him drugs that were too strong and they had burned some of his brain cells. He was normal before that.

Régis paces up and down the streets of the neighbourhood all day, and at night, at suppertime, if we see him, we’re supposed to send him home. He is horribly ugly, but we’re so used to seeing him, we don’t notice anymore. Once he showed up at Mrs. Bolduc’s kitchen window. It was dark out and she was doing the dishes with her sister. Régis had a habit of gluing his face to the window to see inside the neighbours’ houses. Her sister had screamed and fainted. Mrs. Bolduc was the one who told my mother about it, but I never mentioned it to Judith, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

Judith and I often took care of Régis. We kept him in the shop when Claire had company. Judith said they need time to explain Régis’s sickness before Claire’s friends could meet him. Afterwards, Claire would treat us to a steamie at Ménard’s Snack Bar and we’d sit in the same booth with her and she’d talk to us for hours about her dates and the people she saw Friday nights at the discotheque, The Pill. Judith and I felt like we knew them. Sometimes we’d lock ourselves inside the shop with an old cosmetics kit and spend the ­afternoon putting on makeup and inventing stories about our night out at The Pill. It was one of our favourite games, but it was a ­secret game. We never left the shop without washing our faces with the pink dish soap her father used to wash his hands that were always stained with oil and engine grease.

I thumbed through the newspaper, thinking I could tear out the page with Claire’s picture before my mother saw it, but I was afraid she’d make a scene, so I left it in. My mother blows up at the drop of a hat. She can blow up when you least expect it. I thought maybe she wouldn’t notice Claire’s picture, but on Sundays she spends part of the day studying every line of the paper. I ate three slices of toast in a row, just imagining what she’d say. Once, I don’t know what came over me, I told her that Claire was going out with Dr. Blackburn’s son and that they were going to get married when he came home from university. The upcoming marriage was all Claire’s ­family could talk about. In the meantime, she went on working at the cosmetics counter at Mr. Duquesne’s drugstore. Mr. Duquesne was also teaching her lots of things about prescription drugs, and sometimes, when he went out for lunch, she filled the prescriptions. But she was just keeping that job until her fiancé came back. I made the mistake of saying that once Claire was married, she wouldn’t be talking to people from our street, because all of her friends would be other doctors’ wives. That’s when my mother blew up. She started shouting that Claire should have enrolled in the business course, the way she told her to, because she was really crazy if she thought that a doctor’s son from the Murdoch neighbourhood was going to marry the daughter of a lawnmower repairman. And she launched into her rant about how education is the most important thing for a woman because you never know about men and you have to be able to earn your own living. And furthermore, I better get one thing straight, she didn’t want to hear any talk about boys or I’d have her to deal with. When she gets carried away like that, I always end up going to my room to read or to think about Bruce. My mother scares me. Every time it happens, I think I should have kept my mouth shut, that this wouldn’t have happened if I’d been careful, but somehow, don’t ask me how, it happens all the time.

My mother just didn’t understand that Claire was the prettiest girl in town and all the guys at The Pill wanted to go out with her. Claire was going to leave for Montreal and maybe become a star or a fashion model. We would see her on television and in the show-business magazine my mother buys sometimes when she has one of her fits and tells us she’s leaving forever and we’ll never see her again. On those days, she puts her coat on over her old dress and heads for the Snack Bar where she orders a Coke and talks to the owner, Mrs. Ménard. She sits at the counter and spends a couple of hours reading Échos Vedettes and then she comes home with a big bottle of Saguenay Dry and cooks us our favourite meal, hot chicken sandwiches with canned gravy and French fries. Her copy of Échos Vedettes is always at the bottom of the bag, so I grab it and go read it in my room. My mother gives it to Mrs. Bolduc afterwards, ­because she collects newspapers for her husband’s fishing camp.

Needless to say, my mother saw Claire’s picture, but for once she didn’t blow up. All she said was: Poor Claire. Then she stood up and did what she does almost every Sunday. She tried to make caramel fudge. She and my father stirred the mixture for hours, and as usual, it didn’t work. So she made a white cake and sprinkled the grainy sugar on it. We have the same dessert every Sunday. You don’t want to waste the sugar and butter. Caramel fudge is the only recipe my mother can’t make. And every week, just before it’s time to beat the mixture, she thinks it’s working, the sugar seems to have the right texture. She’s always sure, until, after stirring it with her wooden spoon for ages, exhausted, she finally lets the sugar harden at the bottom of the pan.

I spent that Sunday reading in my room. Mrs. Bolduc had lent me a pile of romance novels by Delly and I had almost finished them. I didn’t go out, it was raining too hard. People kept coming and going over at the Lavallées’ house all afternoon. All Judith’s ­sisters came to visit with their husbands. I could imagine Claire in the gold lamé jumpsuit she’d bought for the contest finals. Claire was lucky. Judith was right to be proud of her sister, even if Claire hurt her feelings sometimes, calling her pimple-face. I never really dared say anything. I’d just listen to Claire talk and I’d disappear as soon as she looked bored. I knew that she made fun of me, too, calling me Fat Gumby, after the flat-faced man. But I wouldn’t have missed one of her stories for anything in the world.

The nun who’s the principal of our school is purple in the face. She is so mad, we can’t even understand what she’s saying. She is walking down the aisles, pushing the girls who are wearing knee socks out of the lines. I am one of them. It’s hard not to laugh. She ­finishes her rounds, then she has everyone recite a dozen rosaries to ward off the Devil and she finally lets us all go back to our classrooms, singing: "O Mary we crown thee with blossoms today! Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May. I get a slap on the back of my head. I was singing my lungs out. The principal informs me that a girl possessed by the Devil has no right to call upon the Virgin Mary. Later, me and the other foolish ones" are sent home for the rest of the week. The school would be calling our parents.

It was nice out. Almost all the girls who wear knee socks are in my class. We decide to wait for recess at St. Charles School so we can tell the boys what happened. While we’re waiting, we push up our skirts and the sleeves of our blouses to get a tan in the field across from the school. The principal kept coming out on the balcony to keep an eye on us. Finally, Roxanne Rondeau stands up and gives her the peace and love sign. In no time at all, we’re all doing it. The principal went back inside and