Banquet
Fiction by Sarah Gilbert
After “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield, published in 1920
An artist Bri recognized, her hair streaked with silver, took the mic, and intoned names: “Louise Malenfant; Dan Bernard; Mike Wood; Laurent Dutaud; Guillaume Robert; Zoey Laframboise; Anna Mark ...” The artist continued, standing in front of a vacant storefront’s dirty window while a guitar player punctuated each name with a minor chord.
“The evicted,” a man near her told the woman next to him. “Amazing there’s anyone left.” Bri felt a flutter in her chest. The recitation continued. Strum-strum-strum-strum went the guitar. She half-expected to hear her own name. Months ago, the new owner of the rowhouse where she rented the basement apartment informed her that he’d be turning the basement into bedrooms for his kids. Bri would have to leave. She’d told no one. Saying it aloud would make it real. She put it in a far cupboard in the back of her mind so she could be free to enjoy every drop of summer in the neighbourhood — her neighbourhood — and its slow drift into fall.
She watched two young women in polka-dot dresses meet two sweet-faced guys with Dutch bicycles and wander off together. Mothers pushed double-decker strollers loaded with tiers of babies. An Hassidic man hurried by.
Although the day was golden Brigitte was glad she had decided to wear her leather jacket. The maple on her street, always the first one to turn, had glowed rosy at the top and as she walked through its shade, there was a slight chill that rose from the pavement. Now Bri put up a hand and touched her collar. She had taken the jacket out of the closet that afternoon, rubbed the dry black leather with vinegar and linseed oil to bring it back to life. “What the hell took you so long?” it seemed to ask. The lining was ripped. “Never mind, tough guy, I’ll sew you up later,” she’d murmured. It was like an old friend. She touched a zippered pocket, rolled her shoulders back under the weight of the leather. She felt a tingling in her hands and arms. When she breathed, something light and sad — no, not sad, exactly — something fluttery seemed to move in her chest.
Rue Bernard was closed to cars and the loose crowd of people milled around in the street and stood on the words that had been painted on the ground in giant yellow letters: NOSTALGIE; ANGER; ESPOIR; SOLUTIONS? ADAPTATION?” The neighbourhood citizens’ committee was hosting the com-munity potluck as a response to the flurry of commercial and residential evictions. They called it le banquet des résistants. Yes, Bri had thought when she saw the poster. Not just a block party, but a banquet. Someone was singing with the guitar now, in front of the empty storefront. One developer had been buying up properties, forcing out the small businesses by tripling the rent, then leaving the space empty until someone with deep pockets came along, usually a chain. The committee had strung up a banner that rippled in the breeze: MILE END IS DEAD. THANKS FOR YOUR BUSINESS.
The song wound down to applause. Bri stood on her tiptoes to glimpse the head of the neighbourhood committee who spoke for a few minutes, then shouted, “We need strict new regulation from the city! No more evictions! Fight speculation!” He raised a fist and stepped aside. She should talk to him. Get advice, she thought as she took a seat at her usual spot. The city councillor spoke next. His hair was thinner and whiter than on the campaign posters, his body bulkier. He said the city wanted to support the residents in their efforts to pre- serve the unique aspects of the quartier.
Bri shared her bench with a couple who stared ahead without speaking. Too bad. Bri always looked forward to the conversation. She had become expert at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting in other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked around her.
Perhaps they would leave soon. This morning had been disappointing, too. Outside the café, a couple in their early thirties, he in fastidiously white sneakers and black sweat- pants and she in Lululemon, had sat down with their lattes. The man had gone on about which washing machine they should buy. The woman had nodded in agreement to everything — stackable, Energy Star, online reviews. But assent wasn’t enough, because the man said to the woman’s shrugs,
“Why do I even bother? You don’t care.” Bri, bored by the couple and jealous of their appliance budget, had wanted to tell them, ‘Be happy. You can afford it.’ It seemed everyone except her had their own washer- dryer these days. The grungy laundromat was often empty.
People stopped to talk, greet, twist open a beer, and set the case of bottles down on the ground. Little children swooped around, laughing; she spotted her neighbour’s seven-year-old, Henri, in a satin dress and a Batman mask and cape. Some kids she didn’t recognize at first because they’d changed size and shape over the summer. The adults Bri had been seeing around for years, too, were changing. The moms were faded, beakier, the dads, thicker. The skinny professor with salt and pepper hair walked by with her greyhound, chatting to the artist who made bicycle bells and metal sculpture.
“Good crowd,” the sculptor observed.
“I thought there’d be more,” Professor Greyhound replied.
These two were out of style, no longer young, rumpled, and looked as though they’d excavated their long-sleeved fall clothes from far back in the closet and got dressed in the dark.
Slender branches shimmered yellow above the sidewalk and the blue sky paled as late afternoon turned to evening. People sat at picnic tables in the street, eating and sharing plates of tomato and basil, asparagus quiche, flung-open boxes of pizza. A teen-aged girl proffered a platter of home-made cookies. A man held out a dish of kielbasa chunks speared with toothpicks. Toddlers clutched plastic bowls of crackers. There were babies in pouches, slings, and buggies. Men with bushy beards, long shorts and tattooed calves leaned on propped up long- boards. Some people drank wine they’d brought from home in stemmed glasses. Bri loved the banquet. She loved the spring soil and plant give away; the Italian marching band and spaghetti dinner of San Marziale on the first weekend of July; the late September Art Parade. At the Halloween and winter solstice lantern processions she carried her mason jar lit with a glowing candle inside. She attended the basement bazaars at St-Michael’s — the cabbage-smelling variety put on by the Polish congregation, and the arty ones run by hipsters. She was part of it all. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t come this evening.
“Where’s Bri, anyway?” one café regular might ask another. She used to go to the café in the morning and Taverna at night, before it moved to the other side of the tracks and the original location turned younger, trendier. She’d been in this village of urban streets since she first got her BA and found her basement apartment on a quiet street. The rent had been cheap back then and had only gone up a small amount every year. Her coordination job at the dubbing company came with free passes to movies and film festivals and a steady pay cheque, which had seemed more than ample after years of part-time student jobs.
At her corner café, when she’d first seen local actors and film production people, she felt triumphant. She had landed far from the small Ontario town where she’d grown up. She had a degree. A cultural job. An apartment in Montreal. She fell in love and made a commitment to the neighbourhood. It was only now, at forty-five, after two decades had passed and caused strange shifts around her, that she wondered if she’d miscalculated. The poet next door she’d once dated had stopped to say hi a couple summers ago, when he, his girlfriend, and their child were pedaling by en route to their place in Rosemont. The neighbourhood photographer she’d been involved with had moved to the other side of town with a woman and her teenage sons. And this evening, she glimpsed her musician boyfriend at the edge of the crowd, a toddler on his shoulders. A former fixture at the café with her, he now held hands with his much younger wife, who appeared to be on the verge of giving birth again at any moment. “Wow!” Bri mouthed. She waved to show how happy she was. Happy to see him, happy to see them, happy with her choices in general — and specifically right this minute.
She’d packed up a container of black beluga lentils, a fork, a single beer, and put on her jacket. The lentils had turned a disappointing muddy brown when cooked, and she could see now that her food was all wrong for this banquet anyway. She should have brought something to share, like empanadas, or pizza, or crinkly triangles of spanakopita.
A dancer and yoga teacher who used to live next door to her had once compared life in the neighbourhood to a sitcom where they all had their parts to play. That’s why Bri always made sure to leave home at the same time when she went out for her morning coffee. She didn’t want to come in late and disappoint the others. It was a performance, of course. She put on lipstick, fixed her hair, her jacket. Not everyone would understand. Maybe that’s why she felt shy about telling people at work when they inquired, “Good weekend?”
“Oh, yes,” she always said. “I just hung out in my neighbourhood.”
What if she’d said, “Actually, I’m doing this improvisational-reality-based-sitcom- project.”
“Really?” they would ask. “You are?”
And Bri would pat her desk and lookdown and say shyly, “It’s something I’ve been working on for a long time.”
Now she felt a clench of panic in her gut. What if she lost her part?
She had asked around discreetly and checked the online listings. She’d stopped to read all the posters on poles for lost cats, bands, stolen bikes, and yard sales, in the hope of spotting an apartment share or sublet or transfer of lease. A small affordable place? Not around here. Not anymore.
The musicians had been taking a break. They started again and played something warm, sunny, yet there was just a faint chill — a something, what was it? — not sadness — no, not sadness — a something that made you want to sing. Bri saw a writer — a one-time regular at the café—she hadn’t glimpsed in years. He’d grown old. Over the years, many familiar faces had just evaporated. There’d been people she used to see at the café all the time, even on Christmas morning. They were the people who had no family close by and nowhere more special to be. Antonio, the café-owner, gave them all a Christmas shot of brandy in their coffee. They were the ones who’d been here since the beginning, or at least the ’90s. That’s what today’s event was about. How to hold on: how to stop the change that had already happened. The new people, the young families with down-payment money from parents, careers in law, medicine, videogame design, or who-knew-what. The people who bought a duplex and dug out the basement and opened up the back with windows and added a mezzanine on top to create a single-family monster home — in her village. But there were still a few of Bri’s people left and some, like the wrinkled old writer with the tattered shoulder-bag, had come back for this. A reunion!
The music lifted, the setting sun shone; and it seemed to Bri that in another moment all of them, the whole street, would burst into song. The young people, laughing and moving together, they would begin. And then she too, and the others on the benches — they would come in with a kind of accompaniment — something low, that scarcely rose or fell, something so beautiful — moving. They were all in this together. Bri’s eyes filled with tears and she looked smilingly at the people she’d been seeing for years on the street and lined up at the pharmacy and in the aisles of the grocery store and in the slow lane of the pool at the Park Avenue Y in swimsuits and bathing caps. Yes, we understand, we understand, she thought — though what they understood she didn’t know.
Just at that moment a young couple came and sat down next to her. They were beautiful. The girl held out her phone to get a selfie of their heads together, faces glowing, long limbs entwined. And still soundlessly singing, still with a trembling smile, Bri prepared to listen.
“Don’t,” said the girl. “Come on.”
“Why not? Her?” asked the guy. Bri touched her neck casually, looking around to see who he meant. “Who cares? Who gives a shit what she thinks?”
“Her jacket,” giggled the girl. “So retro. So ’80s. Not in a good way. She’s wearing, like, a whole dead cow. Pathetic. And she thinks it’s legit.”
“Whatever,” said the boy in a bored whisper. “Come here —”
“Not now. Not here. I’m starving,” said the girl, standing up. “I wonder if they have anything vegan.”
On Bri’s way home on a Saturday night she usually got a chocolate bar, a good dark one, at the grocery or the pharmacy. It was her weekend treat. Sometimes she tried a new kind: pink peppercorn; cardamon; chili pepper; grapefruit. If she’d never tasted it before, it was like carrying home a tiny present — a surprise. She hurried on those nights and filled the kettle for tisane with an added flourish.
But this evening she passed the stores, the untouched bottle of beer clunking against the glass container — still full of lentils — in her bag as her footsteps struck the sidewalk. She went down the stairs into her dark little closet of an apartment — a closet that wasn’t even hers anymore — and sat down on her red duvet. She sat there for a long time. She unzipped the jacket and without looking, threw it in the corner. But when she turned her back, she thought she heard someone crying. »