It was true. All the caddies at Kahnawake were Indians. Mohawks from Caughnawaga reserve.
But the golf pro was American. Dropped out of the PGA circuit because he couldn’t take the pressure, Walter told her, “but he’s got the sweetest swing you ever did see.” Odette took lessons from sweet-swing; he was a handsome man, about her age, with a face reddened by eczema, who wrapped his arms around her arms, standing behind her, legs apart, his hands wrapped around her hands, showing her the proper grip.
The proper grip. The sweat of that. Sweating through becoming the proper wife with the proper grip. They all laughed at her for trying so hard.
The drink so cool and delicious, and with the first sip she already knows that she will want another one.
The first times at that golf club. Must have been the middle of June, the peonies were in full bloom. The women’s locker room at Kahnawake was full of their heavy, layered heads falling down over the rims of blue glass vases. The scent of them in that pale blue room, icy with good taste, had made Odette dizzy. Her hands were already sweating in her new deerskin golf gloves, and she wondered how often you were supposed to change gloves anyway. Odette doesn’t know when to change her gloves, she heard one of her voices say. They smell. Have you noticed how Odette’s gloves smell?
She gripped and she gripped and she gripped and at night she showed her calluses to Walter. Sweet-swing kept saying relax, relax, let go, let your wrists go, loosen up your hands, loosen up your mind. It’s just a game, let go of control, the ball wants to go. Oh sweet-swing could talk a blue streak in her ear, while he pressed himself against her. That was another thing. The way he thought, like most of the men there, that she should be available to him. Because she was blond. Because she was pretty. Because she had a French name. She couldn’t say anything to Walter about it. And the women hated her for it. It’s always been like that. The way the world is.
And sweet-swing couldn’t do anything about the sight of V-Jay’s name on all the plaques. V-Jay, Walter’s first wife, had won a lot of tournaments; the women’s championship and the doubles, the husband and wife championship, the costumed foursomes, whatever it was, V-Jay’s name was always up there on a plaque. Hard not to grip hard, living with the ghost of V-Jay, her life imprinted in every corner of Odette’s life, at the club, in every chintz cushion of the Westmount house, in every resentful fold of Walter’s boys’ minds.
Odette polishes off the rum. Always did everything to please those boys. Never got so much as a thank you. She’d had to be the heart in that house, had to be the furnace that warmed things up.
“Odette!” It’s like a command from the hot sky.
She turns, sees Walter waving from their balcony. His hands encircle his mouth. “Teeing off in twenty minutes.”
So, she wants to scream. So?
“Better come in and shower.”
Odette waves, closes her eyes. When she figures that Walter’s gone back in, she smiles at the waiter and gets herself a refill.
Downs it in two seconds flat. Closes her eyes, feels the first swimming dizziness of the day, her limbs floating in the chair she lies in.
Getting hotter now. So hot the air shimmers. There is a film of salt over her eyes, the sweat between her breasts drips down, making a dark stain on her royal blue bathing suit. Her fingernails dig into her palms. So often now when she looks at her hands she is surprised to find tightly clenched fists. She has to tell them to unclench, as if they belonged to someone else.
So many voices. She tries to still them with rum and Valium, but they come out muffled and dark, dragging her down to the bottom. The voices want to pin her down, blame her. They emanate from Walter sometimes. Those voices tell her I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Odette can hardly breathe sometimes. When he moves, the air sours with ancient commands. “Don’t make so much noise. So unseemly, so demanding, so annoying. So goddamn emotional. I don’t want to hear about it. Be quiet. Stop breathing.” Most of the time Walter is silent, but this is what she hears in his silences. And she has to stop herself from saying but I didn’t do anything, I am innocent.
There’s something in his silence, in his will to silence her, that drives her to fight him. She wants to penetrate that wall, bash into it with her fists, with her tongue.
“Are you angry with me?” she said this morning at breakfast.
“No, what makes you say that?”
The weight of it. Trying this and that.
“I love you,” she said, getting up with a plate full of crusts.
It is her only form of punctuation.
“Odette.”
“Yes?”
“You should watch the sauce.”
Maybe she has time for another one now. And then she’ll have a swim to wash it all out. She is lifting her glass in the sun, a tall pocked glass. The waiter nods.
So bad. She’s so bad for doing this. Can’t help it.
I can’t help it. Wanting to scream that, when the girls said you’re embarrassing when you drink. You drool, Mummy.
Janine and Claudine know nothing. They don’t know what it took, what it takes to make these kinds of bargains. What it is to age, as a woman. They think women have power now, but they don’t know how that beam of power gets weaker and weaker for a woman the older she gets, how sudden the discarding is. No matter what you’ve given, what you have not given. How you can turn around and be on the street. They don’t know what it is to hold your tongue.
She wanted them to go to university. To be spared poverty. To have that power. To get an education in English. To be spared the pale bleached dresses of hand-me-downs by calling Walter Daddy. To climb the ladder, to be good, brave, climb that ladder, hold their tongues for the time, just for the time being, until they managed independence, she wanted this for them.
What was so wrong with that? What had she done that was so wrong? Odette sees it in their faces now, when she visits, once, maybe every two years, sees the refusal. As if nothing she had ever done had meant anything. Hard-hearted refusal. For everything she has done, in her wisdom, in her knowing.
Odette never went to university. Her father said that was for boys. Her father never laid a hand on Eddie, or on Doris and Kathleen; he took everything out on her. He hit her and shoved her against walls, against the newel post of the staircase, she remembers that time, looking up at the picture of the smiling cupid in an oval wood frame by the staircase, and feeling something wet falling in her eyes. She doesn’t remember that much from the other times. Nobody knows this. There are things you just don’t say. And her mother, rest her soul, made her apologize.
Say you’re sorry to calm him down. Say you love Daddy.
And she did, she said I’m sorry, I’m sorry, weeping, I’m sorry. Crying, I’m sorry. And that made him hit her again, on her face, the face he said looked like a goddamn saint waiting at heaven’s door.
Claudine and Janine know nothing.
They don’t know about that, and they don’t know about what Roger did. Everything she bought was repossessed. Houses, cars, even a second-hand boat she’d bought with her hard-earned money the summer she got the cottage on Lake Memphremagog.
I don’t have any nerves left.
Roger always said tu te montes des histoires. And he hit her, too, and said he’d kill her and the children if she ever left. Nobody believed her, not the parish priests she went to for advice, not her mother, not her sisters. Nobody believed it. She believed it. She thought, he’s going to kill me and my babies. If I leave, he’s going to come after us and kill us.
And the children see him and talk to him and call him Papa. They don’t refuse him. They resent her, and don’t refuse him.
They never understood what she’d gone through after the separation with Roger, who didn’t pay a cent of child support, who took his visiting rights on Sundays and brought the girls back tired, sad, unsure.
She had taken any job then. Anything that came along. She was thirty-three, too old for modelling, except for the most menial things, which she did, like being a demonstrator for hospital beds. That was where she met Walter, who was on the board of the Montreal General Hospital. It was luck, really, he’d just happened to be there that day, part of the group watching her as she stood in white and pearls pushing the buttons of a bed that rose up and cranked down and scrunched into a snake shape right before their eyes.
He had watched her, listened to her patter, and smiled kindly. He was a tall man with grey eyes, a gentleman she thought, looking at his tall frame, his greying hair, at the peculiar smile he had, as if it were a surprising thing for him to smile, and that surprise worked its way into his smile.
The General bought the beds. Walter asked her out. He listened to her story, a woman, alone, having to support her two daughters, living in a small apartment, having to travel across the country sometimes to organize demos and other public relations duties. Worrying about money all the time. What that did to her. He took her to Café Martin on Mountain Street, he took her to dinner at his golf club, he drove up to Summit Lookout in his Cadillac and pointed out the rooftop of his house just below the Boulevard.
His age made her feel young, and new. When he held her against him, she wanted to say take care of me, rock me, she wanted to be swept up out of the struggle. He found her endearing, she could tell that, he liked the quick way she had of laughing, of marvelling at the world of wealth he offered. He said he’d never met anybody like her, no woman had ever brought out what she brought out in him. He laughed at himself, turning up at her door with powdered candies with little messages on them, I love you, Be mine, bought her candies, perfume, made her wait in the restaurant while he went out to get the car and opened the car door for her. He did all these things as if they were simply normal. He had no idea that the regularity of his affection and his attention to detail were foreign to her. All that time, the time of their courting, she’d waited for signs of danger, for signs that civility could turn into rational savagery, romance into empty promises.
But it didn’t. He talked to her in the way she imagined a good father would talk, telling her about things she’d never heard of, explaining things she’d never had time to think about. He pointed out the stars to her, showed her how to crack open a lobster, explained the stock market, revealed the secret of capital and interest, the river-flow of money that passed through his hands as the CEO of a large American subsidiary that made chemical fertilizers, how the company had branched out after the war, how the chemicals that had been developed for the war had been turned into first-rate agricultural enhancers. How the third world could be transformed by the wonder of high-yield farming.
It was the idea that he could love her small, disorganized self that she found most enticing, and that he could, because of his love, scoop her into another life, a life where money was never a worry, where she didn’t have to leave the girls to go on trips, didn’t have to think about what they ate, who they saw, about doctors’ bills and dentists’ bills, and all of the emergencies, real or imagined, that Janine and Claudine were prey to.
She had thought then, I will be free.
When they had moved into his house she had felt squeezed in a way she had never, for one moment, imagined. His old life had laid down tracks as intractable as steel, and she, who had dreamed of sleeping in, of shopping and reading, of having a second childhood, found herself hooked up to his engine, only allowed to watch his landscape on either side of the tracks.
And the girls. And his boys. Well, they’d done the rest. What they’d had, Walter and her, was a courtship and a three-week honeymoon, and that was all. When they’d come back from their honeymoon, they’d walked into a hormonal war zone with four teenagers riding around them like a posse, circling their intimacy and crushing it dead.
Odette walks to the water like a somnambulist. She is hot and slightly drunk, she wants to fall into the cool water and let herself go, let herself sink to the bottom. She dives, surfaces, kneels in the shallow water so as not to expose her skin to air. From the water, kneeling in the brilliant sunlight, stifling huge sobs, she sees Walter walking on the beach. Why should she be crying now, after all these years? She’d made her peace. A long time ago. Must be the drinks making her cry.
Walter is wearing a lime green alligator shirt and pink pants. His mouth is turned down at the corners. She can feel the weight of him as he walks with his cheats on the beach.
She waves. He turns his back on her. “Wait for me!” she yells. “I’m coming!”
JANINE
~
July
O h no. he’s started. Colin’s drunk and he’s started, the big talk, the arguing, the flinging of hooks to catch a pound of flesh. Janine didn’t think it would happen so soon, but Claudine and Colin came into her house looking just like a cartoon of a couple with black clouds over their heads, and now Colin is spreading the black cloud around. At first, Claudine apologized profusely for forgetting about dinner last night. As if apologizing and apologizing could make it better. If she’d noticed her new streaked hair, yeah, if Claudine had said something like your hair looks nice, maybe that would have made things better. But she was too much in herself, as usual, to notice anything.
Later, in the yard, while Janine was feeling good and strong cutting curly parsley with a pair of scissors, Claudine picked at her nails and said I think I’m falling apart. But Marie-Ange was still up, and right there with them in the yard, so Janine couldn’t really pursue that line. It would lead to tears. It would upset Marie-Ange before her bedtime. All Janine could think of saying was, “Well, Colin sounded very lonely last night when I called.” Claudine gave her a hard look and said what do you mean? And Janine said that when she called to find out where they were last night, Colin seemed lonely and unhappy. Maybe she should do her editing in the daytime. Men need a little coddling sometimes at night.
“You don’t know anything,” Claudine said.
“Pardon me for living,” Janine said, “I just fell off a hearse.” It had been their grandmother’s favourite expression.
“I think he’s having an affair,” Claudine said, voice choked, pinching basil leaves between her fingers.
Janine took Claudine’s cold hand in hers. “I don’t think he’s like that,” she said. “It’s not his style.”
“I don’t even know why I care,” Claudine said.
“Because you’re in love with him, that’s why.”
Colin and Jim watched them walk hand in hand over the yellowed lawn. Marie-Ange tugged at the hem of Janine’s pink dress. Claudine, in a black jean skirt and a man’s white shirt, walked with her head down, watching her running shoes. “A sight for sore eyes,” Colin said when they came in.
And now the four of them are all sitting in the yellow dining room with the columns retrieved from torn-down houses, columns that used to hold up the roofs of porches but now hold vases of dried flowers. Marie-Ange is in bed, although not asleep, and demanding to be “checked” every ten minutes. And Janine is trying to keep a grip on things. She can’t follow what’s going on. She can never understand what Colin is on about. He’s already drunk most of the wine, and now he’s opening another bottle. He has to be the most articulate drunk she’s ever seen. He never gets messy. He gets sharper.
There are fish bones and lemon slices on the big white serving plate that was piled high with salmon and ginger just twenty minutes ago. Janine knew that Claudine would forget about the Chinese food, and even if she didn’t, Jim wouldn’t eat it because of the MSG, so she picked up some frozen salmon steaks at Loblaws and made a pinker version of last night’s meal. The orange poppies she picked from the garden are drooping from weakened hairy stems, the petals bright and delicate as tissue paper. It is hot as Hades again. Last night’s storm did nothing to break the hot spell, just added humidity.
J
im, who’s never been able to stand Colin, although he likes to smoke his joints, is pushing a piece of broccoli over to the side of his plate. Claudine’s mouth is half-open, ready to deflate Colin’s big talk. The appetite Claudine has for a fight can be frightening. Even when cowed, even when unhappy, Claudine can whip out a phrase that will cut through bone, so Janine’s body has gone on red alert, the red alert of her childhood. Her body is stiff, wanting to control whatever is threatening to erupt.
“This country,” Colin is saying, “can never decide if it wants to be a country. That would be too much trouble, getting out of diapers, going for a shit without the United States wiping our asses.”
Janine waits, listening and absorbing the dark that comes out of Colin’s mouth. Colin’s hands fly in all directions, his head jerks from side to side, he goes blurry. He makes Janine dizzy. The polished cherrywood table is round, but Janine feels she’s sitting at the head of it, the hostess responsible for everything that comes out of everybody’s mouth. “It’s international,” Jim says.
Colin lights a Player’s Light. He puts the burned match in the white serving plate, and Janine retrieves it as discreetly as possible. “What was that?” he says to Jim.
“The money market, it’s all related,” Jim says.
“That’s exactly what I mean, man, I start talking about this country and all of a sudden we’re talking about money. Not your money, not my money, but their money.” Colin smiles at Janine. It is magnificent, this smile, so vital, so open, so conspiratorial. Janine smiles back. She can’t help herself. Colin’s smile makes you feel as if you’re the special pupil in the class, the only one who really understands the complexities at hand. She doesn’t understand his big talk, but she does understand his frailty, his neediness. He was the eldest in his family. They talked about it once, how the eldest gets broken up, breaking the parents in. He said when my brother was born, I remember being in the bath and thinking the little fucker had better not cut my grass. She’d been shocked a little. It’s not what she’d felt. She wanted Claudine. She was so lonely before Claudine came.
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