The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay

Author:Michel Tremblay [Tremblay, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Montreal, Quebec culture, Families, WWII, Francophone, Michel Tremblay, Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, Women, Motherhood, Divine comedy
ISBN: 978-1-77201-074-9
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 2016-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

EVERYONE ON LA RUE MONT-ROYAL—storekeepers, workers, deliverymen, salesmen, waitresses, even the man who tore tickets at the Passe-Temps—knew Victoire, or at least they’d heard of her, the older ones often saying to the younger ones who’d been recently hired: “We can complain all we want about what a pain in the neck our customers are, not one comes anywhere near Ti’-Moteur! Now, there’s a pain in the neck! She’d come in here and buy nothing more than a peanut, but she’d drive everybody crazy, knocking things over, saying we hid the best things for the rich ladies from boulevard Saint-Joseph, and most of the time, she’d walk out without buying a thing, leaving us to clean up her mess! We were so scared of her sometimes, we’d call the other stores and tell them to pretend they were closed! That’s the truth! We were doing them a favour! Ti’-Moteur would take la rue Mont-Royal all the way from de la Roche to Papineau, both sides of the street, and turn it upside down in one afternoon, then afterwards, she’d go back to la rue Fabre with one pair of stockings in her brown paper bag or a one-cent sucker stuck in her mouth like a trophy!” Françoise, the head waitress at Larivière et Leblanc’s lunch counter, would tell at the drop of a hat about “the time that crazy bitch Ti’-Moteur ate three butterscotch sundaes and after every one, she told me I’d forgot to serve her, and then she left without paying, shouting at the top of her lungs how she’d never set foot again in a place where you wait hours for your sundae and never even get a whiff of it!” That time, in fact, Victoire had realized she’d forgotten her change purse and, too proud to admit it, she decided to gain some time by eating sundaes until some solution occurred to her. After the third sundae, when she was about to retch and a migraine was sawing through her skull, she suddenly straightened up and started giving hell to Françoise, almost without realizing it, as if she were having a nightmare, scarcely knowing what she was saying, but saying it with conviction. Luckily for her, it worked: she left the store unscathed, her reputation still intact, or so she thought—and feeling not a shred of guilt. “Don’t tell me three butterscotch sundaes are going to break Larivière et Leblanc! I’ll never believe that!” And when Ti’-Moteur disappeared from circulation, stories started going around about her, each more harebrained than the next—all over Plateau Mont-Royal. They started by saying that she’d simply moved and so much the better, but this too-easy conclusion didn’t satisfy anyone; they needed something they could get their teeth into, a tragic end or at least some great misfortune, to fill the gap caused by her absence from the life of la rue Mont-Royal. Monsieur Applebaum, the manager of Grover’s on the northeast corner of Fabre and Mont-Royal, claimed that he’d seen

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