Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  Janine thought Colin would go home, and at first she wanted him to go home because she didn’t want his eyes on her, she didn’t want those kinds of eyes distracting her from giving Marie-Ange what she needed. But he didn’t go home. He stayed and helped.

  Marie-Ange turned into a baby, she needed to be carried and walked like a colicky baby. All night, Janine and Colin walked her in their arms, back and forth in the upstairs hall, walked her until she fell asleep. She would wake up and cry as soon as they tried to put her down on her bed. So one of them would take her into their arms and start walking again, back and forth along the hall. They had to switch because she was heavy enough now, at three, to weigh down their backs until it became unbearable. They sang to her. Janine sang “Les Anges Dans Nos Campagnes,” Colin sang Bob Dylan songs without putting the angry whine into them.

  She was so sick, she didn’t balk to be out of her mother’s arms. As long as she was moving, she was all right, pressed against a living, breathing chest that moved up and down as she had moved once, carried in the warmth of her mother’s womb. When she fell asleep and they tried to lay her down, she would moan and start crying again, her arms would reach out to her mother’s neck. “Mummy,” she cried, “Mummy.”

  Janine disappeared into her, walking in the upstairs white hall, white camisole soaked with her daughter’s fevered body. Colin helped by just being there, so that she couldn’t spiral down into her feelings of inadequacy, of being a bad mother who didn’t know what she was doing. Having him there stopped the panic. As the night wore on, it was as if they stopped seeing themselves as having any relationship beyond the one of keeping Marie-Ange moving through her fever. When they switched her from arms to arms, they nodded silently. Colin seemed grateful, in an odd way, to have a reason to forget about himself.

  At six o’clock in the morning, Marie-Ange’s fever broke as suddenly as it had come on. She looked up from Janine’s shoulder and said down. Janine looked at Colin, who was slumped against the door of the bathroom. His hair was stringy. Sweat stained his shirt.

  Janine put Marie-Ange on her feet and she ran to Colin and said where’s Deen, her name for Claudine. “She’s away,” Colin said. “She’s in Quebec City.” And then Marie-Ange said she was hungry, and they all went down to the kitchen and Janine gave her a bowl of Rice Krispies. She ate that, and then pieces of apple and a banana. Then Marie-Ange crawled onto her lap and fell asleep there. Her forehead was cool to the touch.

  Janine carried her upstairs, Colin following. She laid Marie-Ange on her bed and covered her. Her dark bangs were still wet from the fever and the washcloths they’d taken turns applying to her forehead. Her white skin was translucent, showing pale veins around her temples.

  They watched her sleep in the early light of morning, listened to the birds singing in the chestnut tree that had been in full bloom just weeks ago.

  IN THE FULL MORNING light, Janine makes a pot of coffee, pours them each a cup, and then decides against drinking it so she can get some sleep and be fresh when Marie-Ange wakes up.

  She feels shy, sitting opposite him at the kitchen table, thinking of herself as she was hours ago, moaning against his body. And him saying this is you.

  In the diffuse light of the pink kitchen, he looks pale, drawn, almost hollow. Yes, that’s what’s in his eyes when he stops talking and gesturing and reaching for something, his eyes are hollow. She looks at him over her steaming cup of coffee and descends right down into those eyes, down to the very bottom of him, and at the bottom is a frightening emptiness. He is, she thinks, what people need at the time. Nothing else.

  “I’ve got to go,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  They walk to the front door. She opens it.

  “Good night,” he says, and tries to kiss her on the cheek, but in the awkwardness of not knowing what she wants, she twists her head and his lips end up on her ear. “I guess I should say good morning,” he says.

  She watches him walk away. The Portuguese woman across the street is shaking her throw rugs as she does every morning. Janine waves. The woman looks at Colin, waves back. Janine feels an odd rush of wanting to explain, it’s not what you think. But the Portuguese woman has gone back to beating her rugs on the wrought-iron railing of her porch, and Janine closes the door and goes up to bed.

  CLAUDINE

  ~

  August

  C laudine wakes up in a sweat. The room is pitch dark except for a grey band of light between the drapes of the hotel room. In her dream, Odette was drowning, and Claudine had to watch, helpless, from the shore. There was nothing she could do but watch. A tidal wave had come and taken Maman away, a wave as big as a high-rise, and Claudine had almost been swept away, too.

  The bed is hard, the room smells of processed air and synthetic rugs, and she is so thirsty her dry lips are sticking together. Didn’t something like that happen? In the darkness of this foreign room in Quebec City everything seems upside down, unknown, shadowed. The breeze from the air conditioner blows against the curtains, shifting a band of light on the ceiling. She could be underwater, she could be anywhere. One time Claudine had asked Janine about it, do you remember, she said, the time Maman drowned? “What are you talking about?” Janine said.

  “The summer before they split up. Didn’t Maman almost drown?”

  “You know what happened that summer,” Janine said. “Nobody drowned.”

  Claudine rolls onto her belly. So soft this bed, a soft siren call for more sleep. But no, she’s wide awake now. She feels around the bed for the phone, because that’s where the phone ended up last night.

  Sitting up naked in the dark, Claudine looks at the glow of the digital clock radio on the bedside table: 7:48. She wants to call again. Why is she stuck here, with an ice pick in her belly, dialling for no answer?

  She lets go of the phone, kicks the mustard-coloured blankets back, puts on the oversized white T-shirt she was wearing last night, and walks to the window. She parts the curtains, and there it is, like an old deserted soccer field, the Plains of Abraham. The plains are shot through with black hoses, from which sprinklers shoot sprays of water at regular intervals, soaking the grass in the pearly light of early morning.

  Soon the calèches will start moving along the road that cuts across the plains. Soon the sun will be hot and high in the sky. Soon, sleek grackles will look for worms under the wet drizzle of the hoses. Somewhere on the outskirts of the city red-winged blackbirds will trill and dart from bush to bush in the blazing light of drying marshes.

  The heat will come through the cobblestones of the old city, will soften the tar of flat rooftops, bounce off the slate tiles of mansard roofs, will heat the water of the St. Lawrence, will cover the horizon in white clouds.

  To walk in this great big world. To find a way of untying the knot while walking in this great big world.

  Claudine opens the curtains wide, turns and sprints to the bathroom.

  In the shower, she gulps the warm water to assuage her hungover thirst, washes her hair, her armpits, her neck, her breasts, her belly, her pubic hair, her thighs, her knees, her calves, her feet. The train travel, the bad meals, the beers, the peanuts, the awful encounter with her father, the obsessive night of phone calls, all of it swirls down the drain with the water pooling at her feet.

  The shower curtain has grey mermaids and pink scallop shells on it. She can’t see herself in the steamy mirror. She brushes her wet hair back on faith.

  JEANNE MUST HAVE HEARD her moving around, because there she is, face sticking out of her door, when Claudine starts walking down the hall.

  “Où tu vas, là?” Jeanne whispers.

  “Prendre une marche.”

  “Es-tu correct?”

  “Oui.”

  Jeanne looks young and open without her make-up, without her stepmother mask. She wears a turquoise negligé, smells of Jean Naté. She sm
iles, and, surprised, Claudine smiles back. For one brief moment, they are simply women chatting in the early hours in a hotel hallway.

  “Claudine?”

  “Oui.”

  “Prends ton temps.”

  IN THE COFFEE CHOP, Claudine eats a rancid croissant with marmalade from a package. She reads La Presse, leaving fingerprints of butter over a report that Lévesque is suffering from bouts of amnesia.

  The waiter takes her money, says merci, à la prochaine, as if they’d spent the night dancing. Bienvenue, she says. He looks just like Jean-Pierre who used to live next door to them in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Dark, dark hair, and eyebrows reaching to join over the bridge of the nose. Or like Jean-Marc, her older cousin, who used to flirt at eleven years of age by giving her electric shocks with Christmas tree icicles at the Beaulieux’ house in Outremont.

  THIS CITY IS NOT a city either, it is all statues and cannons, all embalmment and defence.

  Even Duplessis, whose corpse used to stink of corruption, has been cast, and is now displayed on the green lawn of l’Assemblée Nationale.

  Claudine walks past l’Assemblée and down to the promenade that overlooks the St. Lawrence. The city is Sunday-quiet, the sky blue. The clouds are the puffy white clouds of childhood, mysterious shapes waiting to be named lamb, angel, dragon, shapes and beings nobody over three feet could ever see. Claudine sits on a bench by a statue of Marie Rollet and her children and watches the river that figured in all of her drowning nightmares as a child. It was the only water, the only river. Les courants would take her away, they said, would take you from the shore if you so much as put a foot in, take you down to the depths where you would be dragged across lacerating rocks. You would die, never see your family again. Le fleuve tue, they said, and it did every summer, the river killed the children, just like abandoned Frigidaires did, in basements, in garages, in the pages of Allo Police. And the adults talked about those poor children in hushed tones, like they were little martyrs God had decided to take, and you could feel the fear of death in their voices, and it was left to you, the child, to live with the horror they tucked into their warnings.

  But it is still blue, le beau fleuve St-Laurent, and it flashes silver in the sunlight, seagulls darting here and there over the moving water. There is something awesome about it, a giant artery carved into the earth, pulsing with currents.

  And then Claudine sees a tall ship coming in, with huge masts and sails straining against the wind. Watching the slow progress of the ship in the river, she thinks of what it must have been like to see these ships arrive for the first time. Those who lived here did not see Tall Ships, they saw hairy bears on the leafless trees of moving islands, hairy creatures from another world coming to their shores with crosses and swords. Those creatures brought diseases, a baptizing God and a way of looking at the world that split it in half, into the good, the bad, into les européens, les sauvages, into les blancs, les peauxrouges, the spirit, the flesh. They sanctified the spirit and raped the flesh. Salvation and damnation, that was the stubborn template she had been taught, year after year. The hatred she still feels for Catholicism surprises her. She never thinks about it in Toronto.

  Claudine stands, looks up at the passive, suffering face of Marie Rollet. She remembers her name but not what catapulted her to bronze-hood. She hardly remembers the history she was taught year after year by the nuns. What she remembers is the peculiar smell of lies in the chalky rooms, suffocating lies that smelled of convent wax, the caramel-coloured wax that nuns used on the wooden corridors of schools, nuns on their knees spreading the smell of purpose and hate, of control, of martyrdom and rage. And children soaking it up like thirsty, dry wood, waking up night after night with nightmares of les sauvages surrounding them with tomahawks, scalping them, skinning them alive, eating their hearts.

  CLAUDINE WALKS DOWN THE staircase to the bottom of the cliffs. The shops are opening now. Artisanat. Weaving for profit in colours assigned to the past, brown, beige, brown, beige.

  She walks right to Place Royale as if she knew where she was heading. The church, Notre Dame des Victoires, the ice cream and souvenir shops, the restored seventeenth and eighteenth-century houses all create an airless square tomb there at the bottom of the cliffs. No car sounds. Just a humming, as if the square were air-conditioned.

  She finds a table on the terrace of the café by the church. She orders a coffee and looks at the church. It is small, grey, the kind of plain church sailors always ended up with. It rises up, singular, light blazing on either side of it, unlike the other buildings in the square, which are joined together in restored façades. Above the portico of the church is a statue of the Virgin Mary with cast-down eyes and open hands. She looks like she has just dropped something, frozen in an attitude of regret. The sun beats down on the cobblestones. When the coffee comes, she cradles the white cup in her hand, watches the dark blue shadow of her head on the white metal table.

  Somebody has left something on the table. A pamphlet. From the pamphlet she learns that the remains of Champlain’s habitation were found underneath this spot. They’ve painted white stripes over the pavement to indicate where his house was. The life below was a life of mud, of frozen ruts, a life made bearable by the steaming breath of domestic animals destined for slaughter. And below that, there was something else, too, Stadacona, an Iroquois village, a granary of corn.

  So many lawyers. So many bones. Paved over and painted with white stripes so you can’t feel the bones.

  But humming like a crypt anyway. Just like memory, humming in her cold body.

  AUGUST

  ~

  1962

  The summer Marilyn Monroe died, Odette rented a cottage on Lake Memphremagog where she’d spent some of her child-hood summers at her rich uncle Jean’s place. The girls were happy to get out of the city; it was like going outside for the first time after being sick with a fever, everything looked sharp and clear and clean. It was going to be a summer of ferns and white pines and cedar smells, of long days spent in swimming shivers and sun.

  Their grandfather and grandmother were at Jean’s place that summer, a white clapboard cottage farther down the lake. By the time August hit, Béribée was in the full throes of an affair. The affair was carried out by seventy-five horsepower Evinrude; every afternoon the girls watched as their grandfather’s wooden boat honed in on Francine’s cream and green cottage.

  Francine had a daughter, Lucie, who was Claudine’s best friend. All summer Claudine, who at ten was still young enough to collect crayfish in tin cans, weighed complex loyalties against the shame that had crept into Lucie’s eyes. Francine’s breasts were so dark that her cleavage looked black. Claudine’s grandmother blanched every time someone mentioned her name.

  Before they’d gone to the cottage, Odette had threatened to leave Roger, Roger had said he would kill her if she left, and then he’d threatened to leave himself, and the girls had dropped to their knees and hung on to his legs screaming stay, Papa, stay. It filtered down to the girls that they were going to a cottage with their mother so that their parents could rehearse a more devastating outcome.

  Béribée, Julia, Francine, Odette, all grieved for Marilyn Monroe. Sympathy poured out of them like milk from huge milk cans, their eyes grew soft and teary, their faces opened with love. Even the priest at mass in the village of Austin had made them bow their heads in silence for her. The girls didn’t get it. They looked at her pictures in Life magazine and saw babyflesh squeezed into tight clothes. In movies she toddled, she squeaked, she looked like she had a baby’s bum on her chest, her lips pouted like she wanted a bottle. What was so important about her, what did she have that they didn’t have?

  THE WEEKEND AFTER SHE died, Roger came to visit by hydroplane. That’s what started it. “Le maudit de show-off,” Odette said as they all stood on the verandah, watching the hydroplane hovering over the lake. She inhaled her cigarette with a tragic mouth.
Her face looked cloudy, at odds with her Tammy outfit. It was the summer the movie Tammy and the Bachelor came out to the small dusty cinema in the town of Magog. And Odette had taken the girls to see it three times. They all braided their hair after that, and wore red and white gingham shirts and rolled-up jeans and sneakers, and chewed pieces of grass self-consciously, offering their profiles to the sunset.

  Odette looked like a girl, braids tied with bits of yarn, gingham shirt tucked into what the girls called maman-jeans. But her face was set against the hydroplane. “A big shew,” she said in her Ed Sullivan voice, “a really big shew,” and slammed her mother-of-pearl lighter down on her pack of Craven “A”s, and sat down on the wicker rocker by the railing of the verandah.

  Janine and Claudine ran down to the dock, and all the way down the dirt path they felt pulled back by their mother’s disap-proval. It was like running with an elastic band tied around your waist. By the time they got to the dock, their father was already standing on one of the skis of the plane, hanging on to the wing, laughing. He had a bottle of Gordon’s gin in one hand and his eyes were as glassy as the lake.

  The pilot was a big man, his face flushed with broken capillaries. “Des belles filles,” he said to Roger, while tying the hydroplane to the dock so Roger could unload his suitcase. Roger asked him up for a drink. The pilot said no, but Roger insisted. “Un bon p’tit coup,” he said, “ça va te remettre.” He made a fist when he said that, and punched it up in the air, as if a drink were so magical it could kick-start the universe itself. Then he picked up the girls and kissed them on both cheeks.

  All the way up the hill, Roger looked for Odette. The girls could sense it in his sweaty palms. It was not the meeting they’d spent days imagining. Claudine thought the hydroplane would bring mother around, but it only made her angrier.

  Odette sat on her chair, a forlorn Tammy, self-consciously absorbed in the black-eyed susans the girls had picked for the visit. All day, when they’d been cleaning, the girls had urged their mother’s decorating spirit on as she arranged blue mason jars and antique irons on the mantel of the fireplace. But all of it was coming to nothing. They could see her face now, as they mounted the steps. She looked at the three of them as if they were a package. She stubbed out her lipstick-stained cigarette. When she finally spoke, it was in her cold voice. She said, “Combien ça t’a coûté, ça?”