Black Bird by Michel Basilieres Page B

specific than to say she felt “under the weather.” He made her undress and weighed and measured her; he took her blood pressure and her temperature. He had her pee into a cup; he examined her urine as closely as he could. He examined her breasts for lumps. He wasn’t sure, so it took a long time. He made her put her feet into the stirrups and bent into her with cold, dry implements. He was thorough. He put on rubber gloves, which he lubricated, and was more thorough. Finally, as she lay with her legs still spread into the air, he simply stood and stared at her for such a long time that she slowly turned completely red; and then, just as slowly, she resumed her natural colour; and then she began to worry. At last he announced he could find nothing wrong with her.
    Why then did she feel so out of sorts? Gently, the doctor tried to suggest she was just having trouble accepting her grief, and therefore was, well, mentally unbalanced. Perhaps she simply needed some rest.In any case, he would do for her what he did for everyone when he had no idea what was wrong with them: prescribe tranquillizers.
    The small square of paper he handed her at least made Mother feel she hadn’t endured the whole ordeal for nothing. But
unbalanced?
She was puzzled and tried to decide how that could be. It was a fact that since she was a small girl, she had developed the habit of sleeping on a different side each night. Because Angus had tried to raise her with a sense of regularity, she took to sleeping on her right side on even-numbered nights, and her left on odd-numbered nights. But suddenly she realized that the calendar is mostly made up of odd-numbered days. Whenever the thirty-first came along, she would sleep on her left side. But the next day, the first, was also an odd day. So in fact she had been sleeping more often on one side than the other. She realized that all these years of asymmetrical sleeping must have made her brain slide around in her head, until now it wasn’t sitting straight in her skull. The doctor was right: she was mentally unbalanced.
    What to do about it? Well, he’d said rest, and given her tranquillizers. Obviously she needed to correct the imbalance. She would go straight home and start sleeping on her right side, regardless of whether it was an odd or an even day. And she would sleep until she had regained her mental equilibrium.
    It took quite some time.

    Uncle was introduced to his first dog when he was only a child. Fittingly it was just a puppy itself, and he hated it instantly because it refused to be paper trained. But taking it for a walk was something of a pleasure, if only to get away from a house which even then abutted on the funeral parlour on one side, and a crazy woman’s on the other.
    Grandfather’s preferred method of instructing his children was to beat them when they acted contrary to his wishes. So there had been a loud row with Grandmother as Uncle cowered upstairs, listening without his supper. For once, Grandmother had won: instead of being punished for killing the neighbour child’s hamster, Uncle was to be shown the value of life and the responsibility of owning a pet. (In truth, Grandfather was not upset at the slaying itself, but that a child of his took no care to hide the crime. An attitude like that was the privilege only of those beyond the law by reason of birth or wealth or sheer force of personality—a Bronfman, a Van Horne, a Duplessis—but certainly not a Desouche. Regardless, this quibble had no bearing on the argument over an appropriate punishment.)
    Next day, Grandmother took him on the streetcar to the SPCA and kept him there until he had chosen a puppy. Understanding that the lesson he was being taught was not one he could acknowledge and then forsake immediately, he whined and protested. The thought of a lifetime of daily caring for and nurturing his sin was as repellent to the child as it would be to any adult. Grandmother, who considered thismethod of educating