Free Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth by Edeet Ravel Page B

loved it there—but it doesn’t exist any more. So I’m just staying in the city.”
    “Me too. I can’t leave Mummy and Daddy.”
    “Where will you go to high school?” I asked her, trying to conceal the urgency of the question.
    “Same place, Eden. They have a high school too. Daddy teaches grades one to five. He’s the music teacher.”
    “Could I go to Eden?” I pronounced the word the way she had.
    “But you’d have to know everything they’ve taught us up to now! You know, Hebrew and Tanakh and all that.”
    “What’s Tanakh ?” I asked, struggling with the third consonant.
    “Oh, Bible and stuff.”
    “I could catch up this summer.”
    “Well, it would be hard in one summer … I’ll ask Daddy. I’ll bet if you just learn Hebrew it’ll be enough.”
    Because she assumed responsibility for everyone, Rosie didn’t sound like a teenager, or even an ordinary adult. She roped you in with her solicitude, and when she spoke, her intrepid, cheerful tone and careful constructions made me think of a tourist guide in a foreign city. Here is the canal, where Vittorio de Lima nearly drowned in 1782. Please watch your steps, everyone, as we board the gondola.
    We caught the bus at Pratt Park and sat together on a double seat. Rosie’s arm touched mine, white skin against freckled, as the bus bumped along. “That was my school,” I said when we passed Coronation. “I’m glad I don’t ever have to go back.”
    “I heard bad kids go there,” Rosie said, worried for me.
    “I was one of them,” I assured her, and we both laughed. It was an intimate, conspiratorial laugh, the kind that excludes the rest of the world. Oh, bliss!
    “Here’s our stop,” Rosie said, and for a second or two my heart pounded as if I’d been running—the body’s involuntary passion alert. We crossed the Decarie expressway, and even the concrete overload and the blare of cars zooming below us grew softer in the aura of anticipated pleasures.
    Coolbrook . You know how it is, with love—all at once, the mundane, arbitrary details of the beloved’s life arouse every emotion you’ve ever felt or will feel, and a street name you hardly noticed before will never be the same. There were duplexes here too, but instead of yellow or white imitation-brick exteriors glued onto cube frames, the houses on Rosie’s street were old, heavy, built of red bricks or coarse grey limestone set in irregular mosaic patterns, and they had overhanging roofs and charming little entranceways.
    Rosie lived on the ground floor, even though her parents were tenants. Owners usually took the bottom units, renting the upstairs to poorer families like us—I’m not sure why. Maybe thelower flats were favoured because they came with a basement, or (this was before the fitness craze) because there weren’t stairs to climb. Living downstairs meant less income from rent, but in this high-strung community of refugees and war survivors, esteem and comfort were the precious commodities.
    My mother, as usual, brought her own unique perspective to the subject and preferred living upstairs: she was convinced that if robbers or murderers came to the building, they’d be much more likely to maraud the lower units. There would have been continual clashes between my mother and any landlord unlucky enough to be saddled with her. By a stroke of good fortune, however, the owners of our duplex had migrated to Florida. They left the building in the care of their nephew, a law student who strongly resembled a turtle. His duties were to collect the rent and keep an eye on the property. Instead, he had developed ingenious strategies for avoiding my mother.
    “We live on the ground floor because stairs are hard for Daddy,” Rosie explained. “Our landlord’s really strange. He takes cold baths, and he looks through our garbage. And every three days he tries to raise the rent.”
    “What’s he looking for, in the garbage?”
    “He thinks maybe we threw out something