Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  “Allo, um, hello. Video co-op.”

  “Claudine?” It’s Janine, with punishment in her voice.

  “Hi,” Claudine says, feeling unbalanced but cool with coke.

  “You-were-supposed-to-be-here,” Janine says.

  “What?”

  “Dinner, Thursday night, remember?”

  “Oh. Oh, I forgot, oh, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe this, I forgot.” Guilt like worms in the belly. “Can you hang on for a second. Jan, hang on.” Claudine puts the phone on hold, tightens the five-dollar-bill roll, and does the other line. She rubs her nostrils, inhales deeply, feels the frozen buzz, the tightening of her jaw, the metallic taste. She is floating now.

  “I didn’t say it was all right, putting me on hold,” Janine says.

  “I’m sorry. There was someone on the other line.”

  “I phoned everywhere. I got hold of Colin. He said you never even told him about it.”

  “I did. Really I did. I just, I needed to do some editing, and I came here, and I forgot. I’m really sorry. Please don’t be mad at me. Please.”

  “You sound awful. You sound like … Mum. All thick-tongued.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m fine, really.” The spiral is coming to take Claudine away, down down into the little sister who can’t take care of herself, such a sham, she’s the one who’s always done the taking care of. Always. Of Odette. Of Janine. Even of Roger.

  Claudine taps the rolled-up bill on the edge of the desk. “Did you get a job yet, Jan?”

  “Taking care of Marie-Ange is a job,” Janine spits out.

  “Don’t be mad,” Claudine says, “I’m just asking. Hey, did you know I was nominated for an award at this small festival out west?”

  “That’s great.”

  “I’m really sorry about tonight. I’m so sorry. Can we make it tomorrow night?”

  “I made this big meal. Jim drank all the wine.” Silence again. They listen to each other breathing.

  Claudine feels so powerful, she imagines saying bring all the world’s problems right here, line them up, I will solve them one by one, rub my hands in between the tasks.

  “I miss you,” Janine says. “Marie-Ange misses you.”

  “I miss you, too, I miss her.” Claudine remembers the warm feel of Marie-Ange on her lap, the way her eyes look into hers; it’s as if they have always known each other, as if they were variations on a theme. “How is she, the sweetie?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be better when I finish this thing.”

  “You always say that.”

  They’ve come to the moment when they have to cut off. And both of them are juggling with who’s going to hang up first. “I’ll bring Chinese food. We’ll come tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Okay. Jim hates Chinese food.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  “Manges tes carottes,” Janine says.

  “Toi aussi.”

  They laugh. It’s their code from when they were little girls. The idea was that they’d send this “manges tes carottes” message to each other if they were ever kidnapped. It would mean I’m all right but call the police.

  CLAUDINE HANGS UP AND rubs her hands together. They are always cold, even in this heat. The coke racing through her blood-stream makes cleaning up a breeze. She puts away the tape, shelves her guilt towards Janine, too.

  She’ll go home now.

  She’s going to drive through the dark night, her body like a moist print on the car seat, inhaling the rot of summer in the city, feeling the sand in the concrete of monolithic buildings shifting a little in the heat. It is not the kind of city where you can climb in a lighted fountain and feel the wash of water soak your summer dress through, not the kind of city where abandon is welcome. Someone is always watching, judging, bracketing. It is easier, here, to snort abandon in small rooms, face down into a mirror, guessing at the old face hiding in the slack of the young one. Easier to implode, and leave the explosions to the ones who come from elsewhere, shifting and twisting in the vacuum of well-guarded indifference they find here.

  Claudine turns off the lights.

  Three years ago, she thought Colin had a key to another Toronto, the hidden one, the one where people laughed and showed each other themselves in bright circles. She had wanted some of that, a sense of belonging. Colin had many friends, artists, writers, musicians, actors, whom he dominated with equal doses of flattery and sharp truth-telling, the kind that digs in like splinters; you have to keep going back to the source in the hope that it will be removed. He was always available, that was his main attraction, available for drinking and anyone’s breakdown. When his friends were low, they went to him because you couldn’t get lower than Colin, somehow, and that was deeply reassuring.

  When she saw him read his work, she could see who he attracted, young men in leather jackets, hoping for a beat revival, for anything that would sweep the feminist fact under the carpet and restore them to their rightful place; and young women who wanted to be bad; and slightly older women who wanted something wrong to be right.

  Closing the door of the co-op now, Claudine thinks, I’m different. What I want, more than anything, is to prove he’s wrong about everything.

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE said that.” Janine is holding the receiver in her hands.

  “What? What did she say?” Jim is lying on the bed, naked with a book of listings draped over his thigh. He wants to branch out now, from renovating to actually buying, then renovating and reselling. If he can scare up one down payment. Somebody told him he could use his house as collateral. There’s people out there turning houses over and making a hundred grand pure profit. “Well,” he says, eyes sizing up a semi with brick front, “what did she say?”

  “She said I should get a job, that it wasn’t fair to you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is a job, this is a fucking job. What does she know about it?”

  Jim stares at the semi, admires the ceiling fan he installed in their cathedral-ceiling bedroom, the way it cuts the air, spins shadows on the mauve walls.

  “Marie-Ange looks pale,” he says. “You should make her eat more.”

  “She doesn’t like anything but macaroni and cheese.”

  “You’ve got to trick her,” Jim says, getting excited now. “Make the food into trucks going into a garage door. Or something. I can always get her to eat. When you’re not here, she eats everything.”

  “Yeah, everybody’s better than me. You’re so superior to me, I don’t know how you can stand being around me.”

  “I didn’t say that, Jan. Come on, we’re just talking.”

  “All of you. So much better than me, hey. Well, you do it, then. I’ll get a job and you stay home and do it if you’re so goddamn good at it. See how you do. I don’t give a shit anymore.”

  Janine stomps out of the bedroom, tying the sash of her bathrobe. Her whole body is shaking. She wants to scream. She slams the bathroom door behind her, picks up her Danielle Steel book from the top of the toilet tank, opens it. The letters are ringed in red, her hands are shaking so hard she can’t keep the book still.

  Breathe now. She tries to do labour breathing, panting in short hot breaths as if she were pushing. She needs to float away now, to reach for the high notes of the day, but all she can see is Jim’s drawn face, the way he was in the labour room, holding up a card of the yin and yang sign and saying focus, breathe, focus. And how she wanted to scream fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, in front of the nurses, Marie-Ange’s dark head crowning between her legs.

  “Oh my baby,” she says aloud now, holding the book against her forehead.

  She really needs to float away, to reach for the high notes of the day, to reach for what Colin said on the phone, what he said when she called
to find out where they were, dinner steaming on the table, the burning of waiting for them in her chest. He said gorgeous, you sound gorgeous. So sorry about this, you know your sister. She forgets, and how are you, he said, in this voice that knows her. That last time they were all together, he had said it then, too, had said she was gorgeous, when they found themselves alone in the kitchen.

  He had even touched her. “Gorgeous,” he said, and touched her hand. He can look quite gorgeous himself with his scruffy long hair and his black leather jacket. Janine flies away now, repeating the scene in the kitchen while Claudine was talking to Jim in the dining room, her secret, her warm secret, and it melts her rigid body to float up and up into that dreamy, blissful place where his eyes met hers, lighting her up as if she were a singular, unique, beautiful being on an empty stage, warmed in the light of a thousand eyes, rocked by the breath of a thousand mouths.

  It was like growing wings, this, this small dreaming on the cold porcelain edge of the tub, willing the scene back to life.

  Wings. Janine needs wings. Has always needed wings.

  “JAN, OPEN THE DOOR. Open the door, would you just open the door?”

  “What?” Janine says, in a small voice, staring at the black and white tiles of the bathroom floor.

  “Angie’s calling for you.”

  “I can’t move.”

  But she does move, seeing her pale face rise in the mirror as she gets up from the edge of the tub, looks at her new blond streaks, at the full mouth her mother always said was like Ingrid Bergman’s. She wipes her wet face with the back of her hand, blows her nose in a piece of yellow toilet paper.

  “What?” Jim says from the other side of the door. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” she says, opening the door. She walks right past him and into Marie-Ange’s bedroom.

  “Oh baby,” she says, scooping Marie-Ange into her arms, burying her face in her daughter’s sleepy warmth.

  “Mummy,” Marie-Ange says, “I had a bad dream. I dream you die.”

  “I’m not going to die, Sweetie. Don’t worry about that.” MarieAnge wraps her sleepy-warm arms around Janine’s neck and settles half-asleep on her lap. “I love you,” Janine says, “I love you so much.”

  “All right, that’s enough,” Jim says and takes Marie-Ange from her mother’s arms, and carries her back to her bedroom, and lies down with her until she goes back to sleep.

  When he comes back into their bedroom, his eyes are puffy, half-asleep. Janine is feeling guilty. Her shouting must have been the thing that woke up Marie-Ange. Jim takes off his bathrobe and hangs it on the hook behind the door. His body is long and lean, his arms strong and brown.

  Janine takes some moisturizer and spreads it on her legs. The cool cream feels good, smells of tea roses.

  “That smells good,” Jim says, and crawls in beside her.

  Janine feels her throat tightening. She wants to really talk to him, to feel that he’s listening, but she’s afraid.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know what got into me.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Do you get scared sometimes?” she says.

  “What are you scared of?” His face is serious, purposeful.

  “I have terrible pictures.”

  “Pictures?”

  “When we’re in the park? And Marie-Ange climbs to the top of the big slide? I see her falling, sometimes, see her hit the back of her head. It’s —”

  “Stop it.”

  “Why do I have these pictures?”

  “Everybody has pictures. They don’t mean anything. Go to sleep.”

  “Please,” she says. “Talk to me.”

  “I am talking to you.”

  “Please don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “No I’m not. You get yourself all wound up over nothing and then you turn it back on me. And then you say I’m mad.” He’s turned away now. “Please,” he says, “go to sleep. I’ve got to get up early. I’ve got to plan my day.”

  A good carpenter is a prepared carpenter, that’s what he used to say when they first met. She had been awed by this step-by-step approach to life. She was so used to the chaos of winging it. Her father. Her father couldn’t even mow the lawn. In the last house they’d lived in, the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, he’d had two tons of sand poured into the back yard so he wouldn’t have to mow the lawn. “On est à la plage,” he said. “C’est comme Old Orchard.” And Odette rolled her eyes.

  Janine stares at the white ceiling fan whirring above them. Her hair lifts in the breeze. She bunches a pillow against her chest, lies down facing Jim’s back. The slope of his ribcage rises and falls with his deep breath. She is so close to him she can smell the sun and salt on his skin.

  She closes her eyes and sees Colin, his long hair falling in his face. Gorgeous, he says. She touches her hair, feels the gold streaks radiating from her head on the pillowcase she bought in Chinatown. It has embroidered flowers, she can feel the silky bumps of roses rising under her fingertips.

  “I love you,” she says.

  “I love you, too,” Jim says in a groggy voice.

  CLAUDINE

  ~

  July

  C laudine couldn’t drive. She had climbed into the car, felt her head snapping and crackling with coke as she put the key in her ignition, and thought no, I don’t want to do this. She was afraid of the shakes and the great white spaces in her mind, of where she could vault to behind the wheel of a car.

  So she followed in the wake of other people walking on Queen Street, catching the life of other lives while thinking of Walter, whom their mother insisted they call Daddy when she married him almost twenty years ago. What would Walter make of all this? He always called throngs of people “the great unwashed.” He always said, looking down from the height of his wealth at men and women walking the streets of Montreal, “Look at that. That has the vote.”

  The air is close, the clouds low. It’s going to storm. Walking past The Parrot restaurant with its neon parrot sticking out in yellows and reds, Claudine can’t shake the picture of huge Walter walking on Sainte-Catherine Street, his nose crinkling with disdain. Walter had entered their lives with the swiftness of a character in a fairy tale. Maman and Walter were going to get married. She had been to Belmont Park with him, and he had won a huge stuffed monkey. That was the offering. The monkey had a plush suit that covered up the pale plastic flesh of what could have been a thickset doll. Its face was stuck in a permanent grin, and it had tiny low pink ears. Claudine remembers holding the monkey on her bed, and feeling the snap behind its neck, and being repulsed by the plastic smell. She was thirteen, Janine was fourteen. They had outgrown stuffed animals years ago, were now smearing Beatles posters with peppermint lipstick lips. But this monkey was so big that it had a kind of glamour, the glamour of the oversized.

  “We’re going to knit two families together,” Walter said. And Janine said to Walter, “What will we call you?” in her brave, broken English. And Odette said, “You can call him Daddy.”

  Daddy. A different word than Papa. But a betrayal nevertheless. And Odette beamed like a schoolgirl who’d won the first prize. Her lipstick was smudged, she smelled of Fleurs de Rocailles.

  They had sat there, on their twin beds that were pushed together, the bedroom in the new apartment being much smaller than their room in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, and felt the promise of something richer than they had been fed on. They watched their mother’s newest performance and thought this one might take them where they’d never been taken before.

  And it did. In time, they moved from the small apartment to Walter’s house in Westmount. All of their furniture, dishes, linens, all that had covered them, held them, all of the objects they had poured their fears into, were packed away and moved into the high-beamed attic
of Walter’s house. Odette covered their old lives with sheets, and set about redecorating the new.

  Janine and Claudine ended up calling it Cinderella time. That’s what Walter’s boys, who’d lost their mother to a stroke just a while back, called them. “Cinderella,” they’d shout out from large rooms with overstuffed chairs, laughing at having their very own stepsisters to endure and torture. The boys, John and George, called the girls frogs, and Pepsi-maywests. The frogs never did turn into princesses; they just lost their tongues there in the castle, lost their tongues, and their culture and their sense of belonging anywhere at all. Imperceptibly, and slowly, they grew to hate what they had been, to feel shame in the shadow that wealth and Anglo-certainty threw on their frittered history. In that world, they met the most perfect disdain money could buy. It hit them just at the point when their bodies were blazing with hormonal needs to belong.

  “Isn’t it time,” one of the stepbrothers would say, “the girls got their teeth pulled out, Dad? Isn’t that what happens with French-Canadians, they get them all pulled out, and get false teeth about this time?”

  “That’s enough,” Walter would say, and send them to their room. He would wink at Odette, and Odette would smile. “We would never let that happen,” he said.

  Walter was as good as his word. He sent them to dentists and optometrists and remedial reading, took hold of their maintenance and paid for what had gone wrong in years of neglect. He sent them to private English schools, the shock of it, moving from the pace of nuns and cynical girls who wore white lipstick and read Jacques Prévert, to the healthy bustle of women teachers who fancied themselves bluestockings, and to the freckled faces of girls with braces who played muscular basketball in green pleated shorts.

  They were the only French-Canadians to ever have gone to this school, and they played the only card they had, their exoticism, Janine making friends easily by offering effusive “Latin” affection, Claudine cultivating bohemian traits to stand apart. An old Parisian woman taught French, and she took every opportunity to humiliate them by correcting their pronunciation. “Je ne comprends pas, Mademoiselle Beaulieu. Répétez, s’il vous plaît.” Claudine refused and collected new things called demerits, which, much to her surprise, enhanced her standing among the English girls who had a literary and artistic bent. And it was there that she found her niche, reading Leonard Cohen, Hugh MacLennan, astounded that writers actually existed who wrote about Montreal. The literature the nuns taught had all been from France, impossibly remote stuff redolent with virtue and arcane words that the girls all pronounced as if they were holding lace handkerchiefs away from limp wrists. There were so many different kinds of French then, the French most people spoke, the tense, learned French on Radio-Canada, and the French-French spoken by Parisians, who were called poufs or tapettes by the men.