The Saver by Edeet Ravel Page B

the end of the driveway, and then I’m supposed to take themout front in time for the pick-up on Tuesdays and Fridays.
    The problem is that some of the tenants want to save on garbage bags, so they put their garbage in stupid little grocery bags which I have to dig out and put in regular garbage bags. There was a whole stack of super-strong garbage bags under the sink in my apartment. Now I know why.
    Another problem is that there isn’t enough room in the pails, and the whole area is a huge disgusting mess.
    I decided to make signs with new rules. I made six bilingual signs. One of the tenants, Louise, helped me with the French. I taped them all over the building with black tape from the tool box. The sign says:
    NEW GARBAGE POLICY. TENANTS ARE ALLOWED TO BRING DOWN THEIR GARBAGE ONLY ON MONDAYS AND THURSDAYS AFTER 6:00 P.M. ALL GARBAGE HAS TO BE IN LARGE GREEN BAGS OR IT WILL BE RETURNED TO THE TENANT. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. THE MANAGEMENT.
    I couldn’t believe I wrote that sign. It’s like you see signs like that all your life, and you think you’re ignoring them, but they’re going into your brain. Like signing THE MANAGEMENT . I didn’t even know I knew that word.
    Yours forever,
    Fern

Monday
    December 24
    Merry Christmas, Xanoth,
    I got a card with forty dollars from Jack, c/o the Coopers. They mailed it to me along with their own card and a pair of really nice suede mitts.
    I’ll send Jack a card back and give him this address. Simone left behind a set of 50 Christmas cards and there are still about ten left.
    Actually, I should write to Simone and tell her about Mom, but I don’t really feel like it. Every Christmas she sends us one of those Letters to Everybody, so I know she married a widower with diabetes and three kids, and they had another kid together. I don’t know the latest, because I stopped reading her letters a while back.
Here we all are tobogganing in the snow and having fun.
Now I can die.
    The way Mom met Simone was she had a ride from Manitoba to Montreal, and she stopped at a store to pick up a few things, and there was Simone’s notice on the wall, APARTMENT TO SHARE .
    Simone was around 30 with blond hair to her shoulders.She was a massage therapist at the Y. She talked and laughed pretty much non-stop.
    Simone knew a million things about how to get stuff. She knew about Value Village and the vestiaires and where you could go for picnics. We used to go to Île Ste-Hélène in the summer and we’d spread out a blanket and eat hard-boiled eggs and cookies. Simone always treated me to ice cream. She said two scoops was best, because three were hard to manage and one was boring. She liked doing nails and toes. She shampooed my hair in the bath and made me French braids.
    Simone taught Mom how to cook. She found this one recipe in a magazine where you fry chopped onions and tomatoes and green peppers and then when they’re almost ready you break four eggs on top and cover the frying pan tight and the eggs get done from the steam. The trick is not to break the yolks when you crack the eggs into the pan. Simone had a food processor, so the chopping only took a few seconds, on off on off on off, to get it even. We made that recipe a lot.
    Simone saved us, because Mom didn’t know where to get clothes or anything else.
    When I was seven, Simone decided to move to Kitchener, where she had some friends. At first I thought she was moving to a new job in a
kitchen
, but eventually I figured out that she was leaving Montreal. She said it was easier to do massages in Ontario.
    We couldn’t afford the apartment without Simone, sowe had to move. Before she left, Simone helped us find a new place. Come to think of it, she’s the one who bargained with the landlord about keeping the old woman’s furniture. Unfortunately, she took her food processor when she left. A lot of those recipes weren’t the same without it.
    That’s all