Following the Summer by Lise Bissonnette Page A

weeks after the first kiss. What would Corrine have done to capture him?
    She went out into a night filled with wind that lashed her under the layers of wool. She was five minutes from Corrine, from the grocery store that would be closed by the time she got there. She knew it well, it was the grocery store of her childhood, of errands done with bad grace. A place that smelled of canned goods, of stale apples, of cold meat at the back. A sleepy place where you only went when you had to, for a loaf of bread or a quart of milk. Marie remembered the grey cat, always in motion, that drove the mice towards the warehouse next door. She’d never been back.
    But now she had no choice. She went along the main street that led directly there, the one she’d taken thousands of times between school and home. She could no longer travel it with her eyes shut. Everywhere service stations had replaced the old apartment blocks, taverns, restaurants, beauty parlours with apartments upstairs. The town had always been ugly, now it was becoming hideous. A harsh light fell onto snow mixed with oil, the few trees had given way to garage billboards, there was not a living soul except for vulgar men around their cars, and two stray dogs that sniffed at one another.
    She moved quickly, into the trap. Never had the shadows felt so close. There was nothing here now to erase her anger and her isolation. She had expected to be able to borrow from others their notions of elsewhere, to steep herself in their images and to break up her own, to triumph day by day over those who had narrowed these hard places, places of evil spells, of rocks and burns. But they had won, those who put up new churches and gave streets the names of monsignors. Their wind rose from the earth, it meandered through their boundaries, whistled across her skin and made it blotchy, it took her apart, and delivered her finally to their small businesses, her culmination.
    She had taken whatever she could from Ervant, who had been able to live with ruptures, who had stubbornly consumed them all. But she was wrong, he had evolved instead from desertions to renunciations, driven here by his fear of the past and ready now to settle down in turn, to eat away a little more from this earth of rust and metal, to plant some grass and a child that resembles him, to keep his wife clean and to grab a piece of any passing ass.
    She had never had girlfriends, so inane were the girls in the convents and the wives of others you meet when you’re twenty. But she’d had Corrine, so late it was already in pieces, scraps of history, scraps of bodies, scraps of summer. She knew very well what she had wanted: to slip into the nights of a woman who does not dream. Who laughs at the fearful and at the thousand subtle shades invented by feelings to hold you back, to turn girls into whimperers and later into women who lie in wait.
    She was cutting, Corrine, and now the boy from the tavern who claimed to know everything had told the truth. She was cutting when she didn’t belong to someone else, who kept her warm.
    Marie would go there directly, to see that and to understand it. It would be two minutes to six, she would push open the door whose latch set off the two-note bell, she would meet a little girl carrying a paper bag, who would turn left near the middle of the hill. She might even be Diane, who was of no interest to her now.
    She was going to see Corrine between the cans of soup and the cookie stand. She would pretend to have come here by chance, feign surprise at seeing her. They would exchange a few words about Pietro’s illness, which was curable, and about her own more peaceful life. She’d buy her milk or her bread as she’d done in the past. In any event, that’s what brings you here at six o’clock.
    But it was from the cold room at the back that Corrine emerged. The metal door creaked on its hinges, she wore a white smock over black slacks. She looked the same