Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  He gives her a look that says I tried, and reaches for The Atlantic, which has ended up on the floor.

  Staring at his fingernails full of bunched-up gold from the Ex label, she starts to yawn. She wants to say let’s start over, wants to find the button that erases what they do to each other. She watches him read, the heavy lids, the soft mouth, the long straight hair falling in his face.

  “What matters, then?” she says.

  He looks up from his magazine, pushes the hair back from his face with long, thin fingers. “You don’t want to know.”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t want another round.”

  “Please, I want to know.”

  “What matters,” he says, impatient and professorial now, “is what we create in the moment. You. Me. The work. That’s all that matters.”

  “The work?”

  “It’s what ends up on the page that matters.”

  He’s serious. She wants to laugh. “This is not an interview, Colin, honestly.”

  “I’m telling you what I think.”

  “Did you get the car?”

  “No. I’ll do it tomorrow.” He gives her a dark look. “You ask me what matters, is that what matters?”

  “Well, yeah, you’re the one who got the car towed. You should get it.”

  “That’s bullshit. That’s not what you’re really on about.”

  “It’s been a month,” she says. “A month, Colin.” He keeps on reading. “It’s no use,” she says, and sighs.

  The simplest things, she wants to say. You wrap so much around the simplest things. If she pushes any more he’ll get violently angry and go on an intense monologue that’s bound to begin with Blake’s sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires and end up with Burroughs’s accidental shooting of his wife. Testing the envelope, he calls it, and never mind about the space debris.

  “Please, Claudine,” he says. “I don’t want this. This is the truth. One, I love you like crazy. Two, I’ll get the car, I promise. And three, I’m not having an affair. Look at me. I am telling you the truth.”

  “All right. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”

  He looks so crestfallen now. She is too much to bear. She may even be crazy. He is so big in her mind sometimes, but when she holds him she feels how small he is, how scared he is. Fear comes off his skin, soaks the sheets at night. “What are you so afraid of?” she asked once. “That I’ll be discovered,” he said. “That they’ll find out I’m a fake.”

  “You’re not a fake,” she said, with absolute uncertainty. It was like looking into a mirror.

  IT TAKES A GREAT deal of effort, but she gets up from the table. “I’m going to talk to my plants,” she says. At the sink she fills the red watering can. From where she stands she can look through the opening in the kitchen partition and see him reading in the yellow pool of light above the round table. She can tell by his serious face that he’s conscious of her watching him.

  She tries not to spill the water as she walks out the door and up the metal stairs to the black rooftop where she’s asked her brother-in-law, Jim, to help her put up a small deck and a trellis.

  From this height, you can see the lights along the Gardiner Expressway and sense the expanse of the lake beyond it. The black-tarred roof has retained the heat of the day, and the wind carries the warmth to her body, shaking the soft cotton of her T-shirt against her breasts. When she spills some of the water on the deck, it brings out the smell of white pine.

  She waters her potted tomato plants, grazes them with her hands so she can smell the sharp mustiness of their leaves on her fingers. They’re doing fine. Some of them have already gone from yellow flowers to tiny hard green tomatoes. The morning glories she’s planted to cover the trellis and provide good cover when it gets too windy aren’t doing so well. They’re still seedlings.

  She kneels down and pinches the heads of basil so they’ll bush out. Such a green, pungent smell, with a hint of licorice. It never gets pitch dark in this part of the city; there’s always light bouncing into the sky, light and noise. The hum of the city rises into the night sky as if piercing through the weave of a giant speaker.

  Just as she’s about to stand up, she hears the roof door opening and closing. Colin never comes up here. And there’s nobody else in the building at this time of night. Most of the tenants are in the garment business, and there are a couple of furriers. They got the place from this guy who worked with glass and half-lived here.

  She’s almost too scared to turn around, but she does.

  “It’s me,” Colin says. “Hey, it’s nice up here. Your mother’s on the phone.”

  “Now? Is she here?”

  “No, she’s in Jamaica. Hurry.” His voice is flat. The Atlantic dangles from his arm.

  “I hope there’s nothing wrong,” she says and gets up.

  “She sounded fine.”

  She runs down the two flights of metal stairs in her bare feet. Her heart is pounding by the time she grabs the phone.

  “Maman?” she says. “Mum, are you there? Maman?” She hears something faint and realizes it’s her own voice, delayed and thrown back over the line. Then the phone goes dead. “Operator,” she says. “Operator.”

  Colin is looking at her from the front door. He shoves his hands in his pockets. “So,” he says.

  “We’ve been disconnected. Did you tell her I was on the roof?”

  “Yeah. She said she wanted to wait.”

  “Oh well, she’ll call back. Or maybe she’ll call Janine. She always calls her when she can’t get me.”

  She rinses her hands at the kitchen sink. “By the way, we’re supposed to go there tomorrow night for dinner. Remind me, okay?”

  “To your sister’s?”

  “Yeah. Please remind me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I wonder what she wants.”

  “Your sister?”

  “My mother. She hasn’t called in so long. Anything interesting in there?”

  He hands her the magazine.

  “Colin?”

  “Yeah?”

  She takes a step closer.

  He turns away from her, unzips his jeans, takes them off with his underwear, steps out of both, leaves them on the floor and walks behind the bedroom partition.

  HARNESSES

  ~

  1950s

  The harnesses were made of leather, caramel-coloured with beige stitching, and the leather was lined with grey felt cut with pinking shears. In the bright afternoon sun, in the backyard of the duplex they’d been living in for three years, Odette was fastening the harnesses to ropes dangling from the clothesline.

  Baby Claudine, who was now three, was harnessed to one rope, Janine, who was four and a half, was pulling on the other. Above the clothesline, the sky was a sheet of blue light with thin clouds stretching and breaking apart in the wind. After securing the children, Odette walked towards Monsieur Perrault’s yard, and sat down in the chaise longue she’d positioned away from the clothesline. Red-winged blackbirds hopped and trilled in the bushes of the field behind the suburban yard. To the girls, Odette’s shadow as she walked away was like a stain spreading in the grass.

  The girls watched their mother, eyeless behind sunglasses, sprawl on the chaise longue in a red and white bathing suit that felt spongy to the touch. The bathing suit looked the same whether it was on Maman’s body or not. Sometimes the girls couldn’t resist poking their fingers in the stiff cups to see them bounce back into their cone-like shape.

  The cups were one of the mysteries of Maman’s presence in the world, as mysterious as the way she squeezed her bum into a flesh-coloured rubber tube before she went out, or her legs into nylons that turned her legs dark brown. The feet of the nylons smelled like popcorn.

  Now Odette was tr
ying to turn her legs brown with the help of the sun. The girls were getting used to the picture of Maman lying in the sun. Today she said she needed un peu de couleur pour un party ce soir chez les Dupré. They watched as she rubbed oil on her legs and arms and chest, oil that she made herself from baby oil and iodine and something she called le Coppertone. Le Coppertone smelled sweet, like the coconut on the little Vachon cakes that the bread man brought to the door sometimes. After oiling herself, Maman unwrapped a silver sun reflector and stuck it under her chin. One moment her face was there, the next moment it disappeared in a flash of white aluminum light.

  The ground was alive with the humming of crickets, with jumping grasshoppers as the sun’s heat beat on the girls’ moist white temples. The harnesses gripped their backs as they moved back and forth, testing the ropes that fastened them to the clothesline. They waited for Maman’s face to reappear from the shield of white light. After a while their eyes hurt from looking into the sun. After a while they gave up. In the giving up, the world lost some of its colour.

  Claudine was glad to be outside; the smell of cut grass was so strong that it felt as if it were staining her face green. It was so much better than being inside the duplex with the canary carpeting and the silver-flecked green couch and the black panther lamps with zebra-striped shades. From the front window of the living room you could see other duplexes with tiny trees in front of them, tiny trees held together with wires and bandages.

  The backyard was better. It had a forest behind it. Bending down now, and kneeling, Claudine ripped the milky stem of a dandelion, and then licked the milk from her fingers. The bitter taste sent waves of aching to the back of her mouth. She was spitting and licking her forearm to get the taste out, but it was like a wave this ache, up and down her palate. Spying the drooping heads of pale pink peonies in the flowerbed, she imagined that these petals would soothe the bitter ache in her mouth. Stretching the clothes-line behind her, Claudine headed towards the flowerbed. The line screeched in the hot sun, just like the aching in her mouth.

  Janine, who was sitting in the grass and rocking on her bum, watched her walk towards the flowerbed. Janine’s stomach was growling. She sniffed her arm while holding a strand of her hair between her fingers. She stroked her hair and flipped it up while sniffing her arm. She could do this for hours, sniff and flip; it was soothing to smell her own skin and stroke the cool of her hair between her fingers. She wanted to block out the screeching sound of the clothesline from Claudine’s pull. It hurt her ears. Claudine was always pulling and pushing and taking things from her hands. They liked her better. They made excuses for her all the time.

  Now the sky was cloudless, the wind had taken the clouds away. In the infinite blue, Janine sniffed her arm, Claudine sniffed the peonies, Maman burned in her chair.

  THE PEONIES WERE LIKE balls of shredded fluff, pale pink petals having fallen all around the glossy leaves. Claudine wanted to eat the petals if there were no ants in them; sometimes there were ants in the blossoms, black spots crawling in the pale pink. She walked as far as the rope would let her, but the rope was not long enough, the harness gripped her body and bounced her back.

  Janine started to cry because she wanted to walk to Maman’s chair, but Claudine had stretched the clothesline in the opposite direction. As Janine strained towards her mother and Claudine strained towards the peonies, the clothesline stretched and screeched in the hot sun.

  Janine stopped sniffing her arm. She walked over to Claudine’s line and gave it a sharp yank, like she’d seen people do with dogs to make them sit and go still. The jerk of the line tripped Claudine, and she fell, face crashing down into the grass with a shock of white bright pain in her nose. She howled. Janine howled to drown out Claudine’s crying.

  Odette opened her eyes, folded her sun reflector, got up like an oily giant in the sun. Her teeth were clenched. Her hand was out. “J’ai jamais de paix!” she yelled. And now it was as if the shadow that followed her on the ground was around her body, a black cloud billowing. She took down Janine’s plastic pants and spanked her. Janine screamed. “J’ai rien fait, j’ai rien fait!” she screamed. “C’est pas moi, Maman!” Then Odette walked over to Claudine, picked her up, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and spanked her on her shorts. The spank brought the white hot pain on the nose down to Claudine’s bottom.

  Odette screamed “arrêtez de pleurer.” The girls had trouble breathing now. They were shaking and hiccupping. Their chests heaved up and down together. Heaving and crying, tears like hot water washing their faces, heaving and crying, harnessed to the clothesline.

  ALTHOUGH THE GIRLS WERE a year and a half apart, Odette dressed them exactly the same. In those early years, when she was beginning to model on the runways of department stores and for advertisements in the colour weekend magazines, she preferred le style anglais for children. She noticed what Princess Anne and Prince Charles were wearing and bought plaid skirts and leather leggings at Ogilvy’s. Because Ogilvy’s was so expensive, Roger wanted to know why Dupuis Frères in the east end of Montreal wasn’t good enough. Odette couldn’t explain it. “Ça l’air Dupuis Frères,” she’d say with disdain about another woman’s dress, Dupuis Frères meaning cheap and gaudy to hide bad seams and sloppy cutting, Dupuis Frères meaning habitant. Roger understood that, gave up the fight and let his children go about looking like English royalty.

  Roger liked everything moderne. In the hall of the duplex where the girls hung on to their parents’ legs when they left the house, there was a light fixture that Roger called the sputnik. It gleamed, a gold ball with spokes sticking out of it. Roger was proud of it. He always said on est moderne, on est pas comme les autres. And he liked to pick up the girls and fling them high to the ceiling, their feet almost touching the sputnik. The girls imagined walking on the ceiling, stepping over light fixtures, while couches and tables floated below them.

  When Odette started to work in earnest because Roger was bungling things at the flower shop and drinking away much of the money he did make, she hired a seventeen-year-old girl to look after the children. Louise Gallipeau was an orpheline who’d run away from her adoptive home. Louise spent a lot of time looking for her real parents in the phone book, phoning every Gallipeau on the island of Montreal. The girls watched her make the phone calls, and listened to her crying. Sensing the seriousness of her quest, they would lie on the carpet by her feet and play with her toes while she dialled and dialled. “Allo, je m’appelle Louise Gallipeau,” she’d say and quickly hang up.

  The best time for the girls to catch Maman’s attention after Louise came was when Odette was making herself up in front of her mirrored vanity. The girls watched as Odette tried different faces in the mirror. She tried to smile without showing teeth, tried to make her blue eyes twinkle without smiling. She was so beautiful, the skin on her cheeks soft and cool, her eyes full of bright light. Sometimes when they stood by the vanity the girls tried to catch her eyes in the big flash of the mirror. Odette looked at herself and then at their eyes looking at her in the mirror. Sometimes she smiled with a large, generous mouth, a smile of such grand conspiracy that it took their breath away.

  They pawed at her cool arms, tried to get so close to her they could sneak onto her lap, but this she refused, by saying mon make-up, mon make-up.

  The moderne bedroom with the black drapes, black bedspread and blond furniture smelled of cigarettes and lipstick left too long in purses. Above the bed hung a huge colour studio photograph of Odette in a black décolleté with pearls. In the photograph, Odette’s face was so smooth and brown it was like she had a nylon stocking over her head.

  Odette confided in them while applying what she called pancake make-up to her face. “Vous aimez mes cheveux comme ça, mes darlings?” she’d say. And they’d say, “Oui, Maman, c’est beau.” And then she’d put a scarf over her face so the make-up wouldn’t go on her dress when she pulled it through the hole of the neck.

>   When it was over, she couldn’t be touched. When she left, their insides felt pulled down, like water draining from the bathtub.

  Louise always ended up putting them in opposite corners of their bedroom because they fought and bit and hit their way through their sadness. “Dans le coin” was the punishment. They had to watch two walls meeting, and not move. Afterwards, they napped together on one of their single beds, spooning and holding hands and calling each other mon p’tit bébé.

  The days were always better than the nights. In the day, they could make up games, call each other by different names, make up songs with all the bad words in them, pipi, caca, crisse, tabarnack, duplessis, diefenbaker, fesses, tetons, they could play what they called allo, je m’appelle Louise Gallipeau, a game where they pretended to be orphans looking for their real parents. The parents would have the beige faces of the coloured ads in Maman’s magazines, the mother would wear an apron, the father would smoke a pipe, and they would all sit down to roast chicken with gay paper rosettes stuck onto the drumsticks.

  But at night they got scared sometimes when the whole duplex heaved with their parents’ voices. It was like toy guns going off, a bitter smell, the red of the pétard turning black and smoky.

  Janine said she thought she had cauliflower ears because she always woke up first, and her ears felt like they were growing to understand what was going on in their parents’ bedroom. The first signs of danger could be anything, it could be the sound of wooden hangers being pushed aside with a jerk in the closet that adjoined their bedroom, or it could be in the tone of their voices, like tires squealing.

  “Je t’ai vu, Roger, toute la soirée tu lui regarde les seins.”

  “Ben voyons donc, Odette.”

  “T’es chaud comme d’habitude. Tu sais même pas ce que tu fais.”