Here Until August. Josephine Rowe

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       Real Life

      It’s Blind Willie McTell playing when they carry her out. “I Got to Cross the River Jordan,” one of the later, elliptical versions, where he lets the guitar finish half his lines. Nobody can … but Lord I got to … in that cold clay. Later I’ll get snagged on the morbid coincidence of this and Jody will shrug it off as nothing, point out that pretty much any blues number from his late father’s collection would have seemed fitting. Maybe so. But in the moments before Madame Ayliffe’s door swings open, before the paramedics shuffle onto the far end of our shared balcony and I know to feel otherwise, the McTell song seems assertive, almost joyous, and I’m happy just to be out here, bare-shouldered, tapping the scissors on my thigh to keep time.

      Saturday afternoon, the sun sinking into skin like teeth into kitten-scruff. Everyone placid with it, eyes narrowed to dreamy slits. I’m out here cutting Jody’s hair, Jody docile in a foldout chair with his forearms resting on the balcony railing, head tipped forward so that the snippings fall over the side and are scattered before they reach the courtyard three stories below.

      Birds’ll make nests of that, he says.

      Not if they have any self-respect.

      On the balcony beneath ours, the Yukon Jack girls. Somehow they manage to put that stuff away by the case, just the two of them. Their arguments, along with their heat, rose up through our floorboards all winter. Now they’re a sprawl of legs and magazines. The Husky One and the Unhusky One. We pass them all the time on the stairs. Nodding hello like we never hear them threatening each other, or talking dirty. The ventilation broadcasts everything, indiscriminately, from the weather to sports commentaries to new slang for pussy and whore.

      Jody’s listening now while I cut, transfixed by what can be seen of the girls’ bare feet, toes painted fluorescent orange, curled simian around their balcony rails. An outflung arm fanning a copy of Elle Quebec. But they only speak to each other in cool transactions. Just Donne-moi le! and Bouge ta jambe!, and the sound of ice being rummaged around inside a cooler. Nothing juicy or vocabulary boosting.

      These first sleeveless days have slunk in late, a full week into May, no less, where we and everyone else have been waiting to pounce on them with dirty laundry and spritzed Aperol. When Jody rode up from Louisiana he was brown and gnarled with odd muscle he’d gained working on his uncle’s bowfishing charter. There were scratches from the baby ice-box alligator still crosshatching his arms. But five months lived in artificial light have left him just as soft and harrowed-looking as the rest of us in Montreal. No one can stand to be inside today, least of all him. Everyone’s out here showing their paled limbs, their unscarved throats, sunning themselves like anemic reptiles. Ash branches are flashing new shoots, gaudy as kids’ jewelry. On someone’s radio they’re warning rain, a real spring soaker, but no one can believe that from here.

      Only a fortnight ago the ice rinks were still melting. Already the slackliners have taken over, rigging up their webs all through Parc La Fontaine and wavering from tree to tree with arms outstretched. Already the work crews have been dispatched to patch up roads that fissured open during the deep freeze.

      Yesterday I passed a freshly paved square of sidewalk outside the Pharmaprix. A woman had pulled up her stroller and was pressing her baby’s bare feet into the wet cement. Holding him under the arms and sort of dabbing him into the gray paste, while he shrieked in glee, though it was then only 12 degrees in the sun.

      Put some shoes on that kid, I almost said but didn’t. I suppose some small, still unbitter part of me recognized that most of us have to take posterity where we can get it.