Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  It was her tongue, tied. The way it had been on the phone with her father. She could say the words, she could think the thoughts, but her tongue was numb, big, twisted in the wrong directions from speaking English all these years.

  They had gone over the border now, you could tell by the churches and the flashing tin roofs. Claudine put her book away in her black bag. She closed her eyes. She let the train take her away, let herself feel the pleasure of moving without willing anything. In the babble of French and English around her she thought she heard her father’s voice saying c’est un moment historique, un moment historique, to the steel rhythm of the train. That was the last thing he’d said on the phone to entice her to come and see ships from all over the world sail into the harbour of Quebec City. “C’est un moment historique, on reverra jamais ça.”

  For her father, history had always been something that other people organized. Something borrowed. Something that dragged you out of the house. When the Queen first came to Montreal he had dragged the girls to an Outremont street and made them wave Union Jacks and fleurs-de-lis at a crowned dot in a convertible.

  Years later, after Odette married Walter and they lived in his Westmount house and the bombs started going off in neighbouring mailboxes, Roger went into a separatist phase. Made bombs of his own rage. Told the girls that Walter should watch himself “dans son gros Cadillac.” It was always like that, he took things from the world and wrapped his needs around them. Everything became urgently his, a manifestation of himself in the alchemy of the world.

  Claudine slept right past Quebec City and woke up at Sainte-Foy with the word histoire in her mouth.

  Her father stood on the platform with Jeanne. He was wearing a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, a white turtleneck that stretched over his belly, and white polyester pants. Jeanne, blond and grassette still, wore a red cotton dress with little anchors on it. The wind made the dress cling to her thighs.

  “Allo, Claudine,” he said, and kissed her on the lips with tight, held-together lips that made her go dead. And then he looked at her face and said, “Why did you cut your hair, mon pitou?” And then he looked at her legs and her feet in sandals and asked why didn’t she wear des bas de nylons. And then he looked at her from top to bottom and said, “T’es bien mal emmanchée.”

  And they got into his car with the spring bouquet deodorizer, and the VacLite handy for ashes and crumbs and the magnetized token holder for the booths on the autoroutes.

  Claudine sat in the back. They drove in silence, cushioned by the soft velvety interior. Her father was breathing hard from putting her suitcase in the trunk, and it reminded Claudine of how he used to sound when he took them to church on Sundays, so hungover, breathing hard, rolling on the balls of his feet. Odette always slept Sundays. He fixed roast beef and Shirriff instant potatoes, shaking shiny flakes like detergent into a bowl. He made them chef hats out of tea towels. “On a du fun avec Papa, hein, les p’tites,” he said, again and again, and they fake-laughed, greedy for attention.

  Jeanne turned the radio on, fiddled and found an easy-listening station, lots of string, a brass section that had been poured through a muffler. “C’est un big band sound, ça,” Roger said to Jeanne, and snapped his fingers and laughed. He turned to Claudine. She fake-laughed. He looked at her. His soft sore eyes drank her in, draining her, like a glass.

  IT IS HOT ON the terrace with the pink tablecloths flapping like sheets in the wind, the wind annoying Jeanne, who had wanted to sit inside.

  “C’est moche, ça,” Jeanne said when they walked down the three steps to the terrace of this Grande-Allée restaurant. “Laisse faire, Jeanne,” Roger said, “ma fille est icitte. On est en famille.” At that declaration, Jeanne sat down very quickly at the first table, removed a pink serviette from a wine glass and set about polishing the cutlery.

  Her eyelids droop, her mouth is set in a moue. She is not that much older than Claudine. Roger is twenty-odd years older than Jeanne, but her grande bourgeoise pretensions weigh her face down as surely as her slate-coloured eyeshadow and dark lipstick.

  Claudine reads the menu. The wind rattles the sheet of paper listing today’s specials. Potage cressonière, entrecôte au poivre, saumon grillé au beurre d’anchois.

  Holding the menu with one hand, and the corner of the table-cloth with the other, Claudine feels precariously perched. Above their small pink table on the green carpet of this terrace, thin clouds race in the evening sky, their swift forms stretching to breaking point in fields of pale green and pink.

  The wind has made them invisible to one another by dizzying their inner ears. Or so Claudine thinks, perched on her chair, holding down the pink tablecloth. Unaccountably bereft is how she feels. She wants something, the way a child wants something, with swamping intensity, dizzy with the anticipated disappointment. It comes to her that it is her mother she longs for, here in this windy restaurant. She wants her mother and father to sit together and look at her and see her.

  The wind dies down, suddenly, as if to give them an opportunity to order. Roger says he can’t eat salad with his new teeth. He sounds angry. The waiter, whose skinny wrists stick out of enormous white cuffs, smiles with perfect understanding. Jeanne says, “Tu pourrais prendre un bonne soup.” Roger sighs.

  After grilling the waiter about freshness and quality, Jeanne decides that the potage aux asperges is suitable for Roger. Roger agrees that yes, he has been known to like asparagus soup in the past even though today he is not particularly drawn to it, but is willing to have it because there is nothing else suitable for his new teeth. He orders his consolation, a virgin mary, “dans un grand verre, avec beaucoup de Tabasco, pas de céleri, du sel, du poivre, et ben de la glace.”

  He stopped drinking years ago. He always said it was Jeanne who got him through. He joined AA and drank up others’ lives, jackknifed out of bed when buddies found themselves trembling on the edge of a drink and called him on the phone. And then Jeanne had put a stop to that because it wasn’t just men who called.

  It was too late for Janine and Claudine. All of that.

  Jeanne closes the menu with a flash of red nails and sparkling rings. She orders the saumon grillé, without the anchovy butter. The way she says beurre, you would think it caused leprosy. Claudine tries to make up for Jeanne’s snotty tone by ordering a simple salad Niçoise in an overly familiar way. And then it is as if this ordering of food has completely exhausted them. They stare at the people walking along the Grande-Allée, at women in white blazers with gold buttons, at men in captain’s hats. Evidently, the naval trend is building to coincide with the arrival of the Tall Ships into the Port of Quebec.

  Suddenly, Jeanne looks like she’s about to spit. “Moi, là,” she says, “j’aime pas ça être servie par un pied-noir.” Claudine has never heard this expression before, pied-noir, black foot.

  “Pardon?” Claudine says.

  “Ils sont partout maintenant,” her father says. They both look distraught. That Roger imitates Jeanne imitating what she thinks the upper classes do and say horrifies Claudine.

  Claudine drops the word racist on the table.

  It is like turning on the light in a cockroach-infested kitchen. Roger and Jeanne scurry with tales of incompetence and haziness and how they are ruining everything now that Quebec is finally aux Québécois. Both talk at the same time, red-faced, veins throbbing, defending, attacking, competing. Claudine has set a jackhammer in motion and it is out of her control now. The litany is fierce. Québécois, pure lame vieilles souches families are being pushed aside, and financially drained to make room for these newcomers who have loyalty to nothing and nobody. Montreal is unrecognizable. It is not like les Juifs, ou les Grecs, Jeanne says with finality. “Les Juifs, les Grecs, eux-autres, au moins ils sont propres.”

  Roger takes a sip of water. “Listen, Miss Big-shot from To-ron-to,” he says. “You don’t live here no more. You live here, you c
an talk.”

  Exhausted by their outburst, Jeanne and Roger fall silent. The air between them has formed a wall. Claudine swallows. She doesn’t want to argue. She wants to go home now.

  The silence is oppressive. Occasionally, they each lend a hand to stop the wind from flipping the pink tablecloth. Jeanne is now cleaning grains of salt out of the cut-glass grooves of the salt shaker with her long red nails.

  “Ta mère,” Roger says, finally, “comment va-t-elle?”

  “Ah, tu sais Maman.” She doesn’t have the heart to say the booze, the Valium. She tells him they are in Jamaica until the end of the month.

  “Elle va pas bien, hein,” he says.

  Jeanne looks up from her cut-glass task.

  “She’s always been un peu crazee, ta mère,” Roger says.

  “Elle est folle quand ça fait son affaire,” Jeanne says.

  They want Claudine to jump in, the way she always has, by listing all of Odette’s sins. She’s never realized this before, how it is their form of communication, Jeanne and Roger, to exploit her wounds, to cheer her on while they get to shake their heads on the sidelines.

  Roger waits. Claudine looks away. Church bells are ringing, full of promise, and in the restaurant there is the frothy sound of milk being steamed for cappuccinos. The wind has died down, and the patrons of the restaurant are adjusting their voices to this sudden stillness.

  “Bon,” Roger says, “on va laisser faire les bygones.” He grabs his virgin mary and jerks it to his lips, drinks, puts it down on the table, and takes it up again for another gulp. “She took everything,” he says.

  “Roger.”

  “Papa.”

  “Ben oui. Try and stop me. You can’t stop me. She kiss me goodbye, Odette, in the morning, she kiss me goodbye, just like une bonne femme kiss her man off to work, and when I come back at night, the house is empty. Rien. Nuttin. Pas un lightbulb, not even a curtain rod. You know what dat was called, hein. La technique choc pour alcoholiques. Shock technic. I was shock, all right, I was shock. A même pris mon stéréo.”

  Roger is shaking. “She took everything,” he says, “she took mes filles,” and here he grabs the salt shaker and moves it to his right, “she took ma Corvair,” he grabs the pepper mill and moves it to the left, “and she took mon stéréo.” The stereo is the sugar bowl. Roger looks at the neat row he’s created. “C’est de la folie, ça. De la folie.”

  The waiter comes with the asparagus soup, the saumon and the salade Niçoise. Roger puts everything back in the middle of the table.

  “Bon, on va manger,” Jeanne says, and squeezes lemon on her salmon. Juice squirts across the table.

  “I don’t remember,” Claudine says, wiping her face with the pink serviette.

  She is chewing an egg yolk. Her father is slurping the soup so fast the bowl looks like a sink draining. Jeanne is happy with deboning her saumon, brandishing delicate bones up to the light with her beautiful nails.

  “You were too young. Now you can understand,” he says.

  “I was not too young. J’avais dix ans. Somebody picked us up at school by taxi and we went to an apartment, and we never saw our house again.”

  Odette made things vanish. She made herself vanish with her rage. Claudine has never seen it before, the rage she must have felt to punish him like that, to not even care about her children enough to temper the joy of inflicting pain on Roger. Claudine is beginning to understand this. Living with Colin has taught her that at least.

  Roger is almost finished his soup.

  “Pis that grandmère,” he says, “she was furious at what your mother did the summer before.”

  He is speaking English because he thinks it has more force, more factual weight.

  “Quoi?”

  “Les pillules, là. Comme Marilyn Monroe.”

  Claudine’s body turns to ice. The heat of August is a movie screen sham; it is really February, and she is on a terrace, hands frozen to silverware, feet paralysed on a foot of snow.

  “Tu dois te rappeler de ça,” he says, slurping the last of his soup. “It was the summer Marilyn Monroe died.”

  Claudine says nothing.

  Jeanne says, “Elle était une belle femme, Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Oui,” Roger says, “c’était une ben belle femme. Une belle blonde.”

  Jeanne is a blonde, just like Odette.

  Claudine feels sick. “Excusez-moi,” she says and spits egg yolk into her napkin and bolts to the bathroom.

  ROGER RENTED TWO ROOMS in the Concorde hotel, a tall tower behind the Grande-Allée.

  They spent most of the afternoon at the port looking for a parking spot. Claudine had wanted to walk, but her father had insisted on driving, and there was much traffic, and few spaces. From the parking lot, they saw the masts of a Tall Ship flying the Dutch flag.

  Her father started to curse the City of Quebec and the government of Quebec for not providing enough parking spaces for such an international event.

  “Arrête de t’énerver,” Jeanne said. Roger finally stopped a policeman and said he was here with his daughter all the way from Toronto, and he couldn’t find a parking space, it was a national disgrace. The policeman advised him to go back to la Haute Ville and take a taxi.

  Roger said he was too tired to do that. He needed un p’tit café pour se remonter. So they drove to a café near the port and sat on black metal chairs in a greystone courtyard. When Jeanne went to the bathroom and they were alone for the first time since Claudine arrived, he turned to her and said, “Ma pauvre p’tite, t’as pas l’air heureuse.”

  She couldn’t say anything. He said a father could sense things like that, that’s why he’d called. She could always talk to him. He’d always been a chum, not like a father. He would rather be a friend, he said, at their age they could be friends.

  He took her hand and squeezed it.

  Her throat felt tight, paralysed.

  “Dis-moi,” he said, “qu’est-ce qui se passe?”

  “Papa,” she said.

  “Moi,” he said, “je t’ai toujours compris. T’es sensible comme moi, tu a l’âme d’un artiste.”

  Jeanne came back just then, lipsticked and powdered. “Les artistes,” she said, “ils faut qu’ils mangent comme tout le monde.”

  Roger said that was the reason he had not become a musician. His father had said ça se mange pas de la musique. He had wanted to play the drums when he was young, he said it was the only time he had ever been totally happy, when he had sat behind les gros drums and bashed out what was inside of him.

  “C’est pour ça, la jeunesse. Mais il faut grandir, n’est-ce pas, Claudine?”

  He said to Jeanne that when Claudine was young she made the most beautiful paintings, she had so much talent. He said he didn’t understand why she made those films, ces trucs, là, with so much ugliness in them.

  “Les gens veulent pas voir des trucs comme ça,” Jeanne said.

  “Mais non,” Roger said. “On veut pas se faire garrocher ça en pleine face.”

  “Mais c’est mon travail,” Claudine said. “Mon travail.”

  She wanted to rush out of there and call Colin and say you wouldn’t believe, you wouldn’t believe what they said. And call Janine and hear her laugh it away, saying what did you expect? On the phone, she’d said, “I don’t know how you can go there. It’s beyond me.”

  Her father could tell she was angry. He took her arm to walk back to the car. She watched her sandals on the cobblestones. He said, “Abandonne-moi pas, Claudine.” She looked up. He had tears in his eyes.

  She starts calling Colin at ten-thirty that night from the piano bar downstairs in the hotel. Jeanne and Roger went up to their room after dinner. She went up, too, but came back down, and now sits at a table in the dark maroon bar and orders a beer. The place is almost deserted. A woman with kohl-r
immed eyes is singing Claude Léveillée songs while playing the shiny black piano at the far end of the room. There are small mercies, Claudine thinks. At least I don’t have to listen to “Send in the Clowns.”

  The singer ends her set with “Georgia,” which sounds wonderful with a French accent, Georgeea on my mind, and the light is beautiful on her pale face. Claudine orders another beer and takes it to a phone booth at the entrance of the bar, and makes a collect call. There is no answer, the operator says, over and over again, no answer, please try again.

  She has another beer, and then goes up to her room because a guy sitting at the bar is sending her those aren’t-you-lonely looks. Tries calling again. No answer. She sprawls on the big bed with its orange and yellow-flowered bedspread. Her room has an autumnal theme. Everything in it is rust or mustard. She turns on the TV and stares at a man with a huge forehead and a tiny goatee. He is explaining how Tall Ships are constructed. He has diagrams. He is an expert. Of course, he says, the original Tall Ships had none of these amenities. The interviewer concludes the segment by saying that the history of this continent began with “le vent qui avait gonflé les voiles de ces grands navires.” And on the soundtrack a voice sings, “Il était un petit navire, qui n’avait ja-ja-ja-mais navigué, ohé, ohé.”

  Her father used to sing that on car trips. He was the only one who could ever head them out of the first verse.

  There are bits of peanuts between her teeth. She’d eaten them in the piano bar, while drinking her beer. She undresses, looks at the time, one o’clock, the bars are just closing, he should be home soon. She walks to the bathroom, brushes her teeth, looks at herself in the mirror. She is pale, like she was as a child. She lights a cigarette. She’s smoking too much. She’s got to stop, her lungs feel like charcoal.