[ WP ] You 're back home for the first time in years . This is where you grew up . It seems like the more things change , the more they stay the same .

There are enough people in Montréal that she could be anyone. She might have a name like Isabelle, might have brown hair with shades of red, might argue with herself about the existence of God to pass the time while walking to the dep for smokes. Say she is confused about what to do with her life. Say she wonders about it at least once a day while she tries to pay rent on this third-floor room in the old house whose landlord is probably involved in the mob or why else would it be the only house in this neighbourhood without brilliant cement and bricks with edges like knives? The house is filled with several roommates who flirt with unbelievability, like Garret, who is a quiet bassist that never seems to come out from behind the Tool sticker on his bedroom door; or like Ansel who—every night, it seems—brings skinny young men home from the bars and into his mattress-on-the-floor bed so often that she has come to expect their stumbling footsteps in the hall at three in the morning and the half-hour of soft laughter and moans that soak through the plaster. It is comforting, she once explained to Ariane on a wet and foggy January morning as they smoked on the front porch and watched children walking by to the public school. The way Isabelle sees it, sexuality is supposed to be a communal experience. She points to the example of old cultures, with communities huddled in long houses or sharing caves for warmth. By firelight or in darkness, two bodies would begin to move and breathe heavily and everyone would hear it as a comfort. Sex reminds us that there is hope for human love, she says, reaching out to the margarine container with a rock in it that has been the ash tray for years. She flicks her thumb against the filter and it feels good, which draws a sideways connection in her mind. She tells Ariane that, actually, maybe all of us were meant to be like Ansel and his different boys. 
 
 
 During the evenings, we look for her in the usual places that we find young people without careers. She is lucky enough to have grown up in the city, at least until her dad got the oil job in Alberta, *ainsi elle parle français. * For her there are more jobs, especially in serving. Odds are, if we pay attention while we walk, we'll find her on a popular street in an *arrondissement* that students can still afford to live in. It's easy to imagine her walking down the long sidewalks of Outremont, past the old brick and iron bannisters of the walk-ups, to a narrow place that you'd hear about through friends-of-friends that serves mediocre food for cheap, and gets loud enough to keep yuppies away. If we stop in front of the glass on a Friday evening in February, we can see the people packed tight inside—young and glowing with alcohol and not properly dressed for the cold. Isabelle edges her way between the roaring tables in tight black pants and a black shirt and a platter of fried appetizers balanced over the heads of customers who stare when they do n't know that before starting work she went downstairs to the graffiti-covered washroom to spread a long smile across her face. She adjusted it, pushed in the sides where it looked insincere, and went back up the cracking tile steps to earn her tips. At eleven-fifty, a thin young man with a long face and hair matted to his head vomits nachos on the sleeves of his polyester jacket and in the uproar of the tables nearby she does n't see two other men with large tabs flit out the doors with any hopes she had for a good take. In the heavy silence after the last couple has tripped out the door and into the hard, frozen streetlight, she cleans the floors before cashing out and peeling the smile off her face. 
 
 
 She has no work on a Wednesday and the landlord comes by in his flashy sedan to pop off curses at the always-leaking washer in the basement. His face, when he emerges, is flushed and patterned, reminding her of the insides of her eyelids. He comes into the little kitchen while she is frying eggs and washes his hands in the sink with her dish soap. She tries to make conversation, though she is afraid of this man and the people he might know. Her landlord goes to the window and in French says that sometimes he wants just to burn his properties to the ground. She realizes that he is looking at her when he does n't say anything for a few seconds. She turns around to see what he is doing but he is much closer to her than she expected. He tells her that his mother used to make him eggs just like that every morning, then turns and thumps down the hall and out the door to his car. That night, and most nights, she goes to see a friend and then finds herself in a bar like the one she works at, staffed by women that could be mistaken for her, and she spends too much money and dances to pounding music before staggering out by herself and down the street in a wind that slips under her sweaty clothes with its cold hands. She falls onto the sheets of her bed and dozes for a moment before she realizes that she ca n't hear anything from Ansel's room. The bedroom is silent, and spinning slightly. 
 
 
 She is n't sure if it is a dream she remembers in the morning or her imagination distorting the yelling of a couple drunks outside as she stared at the ceiling unable to sleep, and this is the strength and weakness of endings like this that provide their catharsis through the reductive clarity of pain. She recalls at one point her parents were on the sidewalk below her window, in the yellow light, screaming at each other, waking her roommates who heard Isabelle's name in the shouting and came knocking hesitantly at her door, asking through the wood and paint if they should call the police while the two people outside used the intimacy of twenty-four years of marriage to hack as deeply as they could into each other's hearts.
