Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  Chaud was hot, but it also meant Papa was drunk.

  Sometimes the fighting stopped as mysteriously as it had begun. Sometimes the furniture moved, scraping floors, falling over. When it reached the point where they threatened to kill each other, the girls got out of bed and watched their mother cry, and their father scream, until one of them would accuse the other of disturbing the children’s sleep. The girls knew what they had to do. Janine wailed and sobbed until Odette snapped out of her sobbing to comfort her. And Claudine played the clown, tried to make them laugh, until Roger turned to her and picked her up, and fixed her a bowl of Trix in the kitchen with the dark, sweaty windowpanes.

  JANINE

  ~

  July

  J anine will, well she doesn’t exactly know what she’ll do, but she’ll do something awful if Claudine and Colin don’t show up tonight. Sometimes they say they’re coming, but they don’t and call from a phone booth, giggling, pissed to the gills.

  The thought of it makes Janine furious. And the weather’s too hot for fury.

  It is the driest summer on record. The sky refuses to rain, lawns are yellowed, the cement backyard of her Portuguese neighbours is so hot that Janine sees waves of heat rising in the air. Orange poppies droop in the cracked flowerbed where her daughter sits with a yellow plastic watering can. Although she is three, Marie-Ange wears a baby bonnet, a pale pink thing that makes her look like a miniature Mennonite.

  Janine stands in her kitchen with a piece of frozen arctic char in her hands, watching Marie-Ange through the open French doors. There are no steps down into the yard, just two cement blocks propped against the foundation. Jim hasn’t gotten around to building the back deck that’s supposed to spread out from the French doors.

  Janine puts the fish down on the counter and gathers her long hair on top of her head. She sees a pencil on the floor, picks it up and sticks it through the twisted bun she’s made of her hair. The sweat on her neck cools, sending a shiver of pleasure down her spine. She picks up the plastic-wrapped char and puts it on her forehead.

  Last night it was so hot that she asked Jim to take them down to the beach in their pickup truck. She had to get away from the city, she thought she was going to die of heatstroke. So they sat, the three of them, gasping for air by the wooden lifeguard chairs of unswimmable Lake Ontario. Dead alewives with silver bellies ringed the shore. From far away they looked like bits of aluminum foil. The air was no different at the beach. The only relief to be had was in watching the expanse of water stretch to a blank horizon, the pink-tinged clouds floating above the yellow haze of the city.

  Today, the house, which she cleans sporadically, feels as if it is melting into one large sticky stain of orange juice and peanut butter and city dust. Janine wants time to stop, to stop feeling time as something that drowns her in bottomless tasks. She does nothing all day long but push objects here and there, picking up stuff and putting it down, each small task interrupted a million times by providing bearings for Marie-Ange’s mysterious encounters with the new world.

  Nothing ever feels done. She would like to accomplish one thing that would get her out of the gravity of being a thirty-three-year-old mommy. Ever since Marie-Ange was born she has felt herself unravelling like a wool sweater in somebody’s hands. Without her consent, the hands pulling on the yarn are making another garment out of what she once was.

  Jim’s fault, all of it. As if it were possible to do this without making a mess of some kind. No, that’s not fair. He tries. It’s just that his trying is so deliberate, so perfectly calculated, so good, that’s what it is, he’s so good and patient all the time. That’s what she’d wanted, to coast on his safe seriousness, to be with a man who measured things and cut things, who kept his tools in order, who had tools for heaven’s sake. So why is it a flaw all of a sudden? It isn’t, she thinks. It just makes her feel flawed.

  Janine spots a bag of cheesies by the fridge. She puts down the char and snatches the bag. She grabs one cheesie, and then two, and then three, eats them all, automatically, one after another, watching Marie-Ange play in the yard.

  “Mummy,” Marie-Ange yells. “Mummy, I want hose. I want hose. I want hose now.”

  Eyes glazed, fingers orange, Janine walks towards the French doors and steps down the concrete step into the yard. In a trance she thinks, I have a child. I am making dinner for my sister Claudine and her boyfriend Colin, my husband Jim is tiling a roof somewhere in this heat. And this is what I’m doing. Turning on a hose. Other women don’t do this. Don’t care the way I do. Selfish women. This is the most important job in the world. I never had this. I never, never, never had this.

  Jim doesn’t understand what she means. When he comes home and she complains about her day, he says it doesn’t seem so bad to me. He sits there, looking at his calloused hands, saying well, do you think I want to do this? It doesn’t seem so bad, his world. At least he’s with adults. Two-by-fours rising clean in cathedral-ceilinged additions, AM radio blasting, reno boys bonding, holsters full of hammers.

  She can tell he’s angry about the way she keeps the house, but he doesn’t say it. It’s in his body, his face, it’s in the way he breathes and moves his legs and arms in Tai Chi positions when she talks to him, as if the joints of his body were infinitely more interesting than anything she could ever say.

  Janine stoops to the garden tap and turns on the hose. She sees the patch of bright green grass growing under the leaky faucet. The soft grass fills her eyes with light. That’s all it takes, she thinks, a constant drip of water, for the greenest of greens to shoot out of the earth. She runs her fingers through the soft grass as if it were a head of hair.

  The water spurts from the hose, throwing Marie-Ange back on her heels. Marie-Ange squeezes the nozzle, and a rainbow arc of droplets appears in the sun.

  Janine walks over to Marie-Ange, who is laughing and spraying the heads of tiger lilies. Overcome, Janine bends down and kisses Marie-Ange’s face. “Oh baby, baby, baby,” she says, burying her face in the soft flesh. “Mummy, you’re hurting,” Marie-Ange says. But Janine can’t stop kissing her daughter’s cheeks. Marie-Ange pushes her away. Janine opens her eyes, as if awaking from a dream. There are orange cheesie streaks on Marie-Ange’s cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I love you so much.”

  JANINE HAD MADE IT through all the hard times in her life by getting sick. Every job she’d ever had always came to a point where she stayed in bed for a week, called in sick for the first few days, then invented tests and hospitalizations and, finally, stopped calling. Stayed in bed, whispering leave me alone, leave me alone, for days and days. Drinking ginger ale. Eating chocolate-covered marshmallows. Having amazing dreams about bears, mad dogs, about houses with walls that cried, about losing babies like sets of keys, about drowning, dreams so vivid they turned the daytime into watery tea.

  They usually fired her. All the fuck-faces with the sour lips of control, walking behind her, straightening up the displays she’d already straightened, the fuck-faces fired her. She abandoned them and they fired her.

  And she had to start over again, yelling Emergency at all the people she knew. Emergency. Emergency. And money would come. Two hundred dollars from here or there. And eventually she would start over, get another job. Forget where she had been. Move to a new apartment, get a new job. Be happy falling in love with men who didn’t matter to her. For the exercise.

  She worked as a receptionist for Domtar, as a researcher for an encyclopedia company, as a substitute teacher, as a telephone researcher of the shopping habits of males over thirty, as a photographer’s assistant, as a salesperson in a fancy kitchenware store on St. Clair, as a salesperson in a fancy custom leather clothes-shop in Yorkville. Life was always about to happen, around the corner. There were movie deals for unwritten books, acceptance speeches for imaginary performances, humanitarian awards for work in Africa. It was all possible, tomorrow, after she got
enough money from the shitty job.

  Until a persistent ache in a leg, a possible embolism, or an incipient brain tumour would send her to Emergency in the middle of the night, three 222s in her belly, eyes so round they felt ringed. She had cards for every hospital in Montreal, and then for every hospital in Toronto, where she moved in the mid-seventies, sick of the sick feeling of her hometown. She got dye tests for her kidneys, cardiograms, barium in the intestines, brain scans. The pain never settled anywhere for long. It was like a star, a shooting star moving over the expanse of her body. She’d starve it or feed it, depending on what she felt was her hold on the world. Sometimes she needed anchoring, and so she ate anything and everything and grounded herself through weight. The puffing of her body kept other bodies at bay. The pain was insulated. And sometimes she needed to purify herself, so she starved herself, and the pain became like a hard pea she imagined sleeping on.

  “Tell me,” she’d say to walleyed interns, “I’m not going to die, am I?” And she asked Claudine the same thing before Jim took over the job of Emergency companion. “J’vas pas mourir, Claudine, hein, dis-moi que j’vas pas mourir.” And Claudine would look at her with serious eyes and say, “Non, Janine, tu vas pas mourir.” Janine could feel the impatience in her voice. Afterwards, when Janine was wrapped up like a little girl in her own bed, beaming with the medical knowledge of her essential wellbeing, Claudine would say, “T’es ben que trop dramatique.”

  That’s what they always said. Maman Odette. Papa Roger. Claudine. And then later, stepmother Jeanne. “T’es ben que trop dramatique.” Later still, stepfather Walter added hysteria to the drama. “You’re making yourself hysterical,” he said, and fed her Gravol throughout her adolescence. It calmed her down.

  After she met and married Jim on the edge of thirty, slipped into him, cooked fish with ginger like he did, put anise in her tea like he did, covered herself in the third world fabrics he liked, after all that, she stopped asking for anything. She became the stable one. Presto. A kind of magic. The wife and mother. It was Claudine’s turn to be on the loop. Claudine didn’t ask j’vas tu mourir? Everything Claudine did these days was je veux mourir. She was drinking, and snorting coke, and smoking dope. She had horrible fights with Colin. One time she showed up with a black eye. She’d stayed over, but spent half the night with Colin on the phone.

  When Claudine was fifteen, after Odette remarried and they were all expected to turn English, as easy as being flipped in a pan, Claudine said I’m not going to be a lady, I’m not going to cross my legs and hope to die. So. So, she’d uncrossed her legs and hoped to die. Big difference.

  Claudine has always had this look in her eyes. As long as Janine can remember, Claudine’s had this look of I’m going to win in her eyes. At fourteen, feeling the ache of new breasts, wanting to brush their tenderness against boys smelling of Jade East, of Canoe, Janine watched the boys turning away from her when Claudine walked into the room, Claudine whose eyes said I am just as hungry as you are, and don’t you forget it. It was so embarrassing the way she pushed so hard.

  She’s still embarrassing; now she makes shocking documentaries of people in trouble, she calls everything that doesn’t hurt, or threaten, or spit, lies. Lately, she makes Janine feel small, weak. Now that she is a mother, she feels consigned to the heap of the disorganized, the dishevelled, the used-up.

  It wasn’t always like that. “Loosen up,” Claudine says. “You’re getting so uptight.” As if it was a choice. Being a mother is like being a filter, a filter so bad things don’t get into Marie-Ange. The filter gets disorganized and used up and uptight so the child won’t. But Claudine doesn’t buy it. “You’re making her uptight by being so uptight. Just relax,” she says, and takes a long drag on her cigarette.

  The drugs keep her loose, she says. She gets all that stuff from Colin who’s about the most uptight guy Janine has ever met. His face wobbles when he talks, his hands fly around, his elbows resting on a table make the whole table shake.

  “I don’t know about Colin,” Janine said to Claudine when they met. “I think he’s bad news.” Claudine looked at her and said, “Don’t say that, this is the best, ever.”

  “I just care about you, okay?” Janine said. “You’re my little sister.” Janine’s heart felt huge when she said that, but Claudine looked stunned.

  “SORRY, HONEY.” JANINE WIPES the orange streaks from Marie-Ange’s face and walks away. Marie-Ange goes back to playing with the hose. Janine’s knees are weak from something, her belly hurts. Marie-Ange turns the hose on her, and the cold spray shoots through her body like an electric shock. “Don’t,” Janine yells, running to the cement block and climbing inside the house. The water follows her, spraying windows and doors. The sound of it is like hard rain on a tin roof.

  But now the cold water feels lovely on her body. And Janine can’t help laughing while fanning out her skirt to see how wet it is. There are dark splashes on what she calls her aquamarine skirt. Marie-Ange sprays in her direction one more time and then brings the hose to her mouth and drinks. Water drips from her pink bonnet and gleams on her face, like a coating of light. From the threshold of the French doors, Janine watches the grace of her daughter as she gambols about in the yard. “Have fun, sweetie,” she says.

  At the butcher block counter she takes out a knife and starts chopping ginger and scallions. The light is very pink in the kitchen, from the sun hitting the walls Jim painted salmon. Cutting and cutting, she keeps hearing Jim’s voice, the ginger’s got to be finely cut, tiny tiny pieces, Jan.

  It makes her furious when they don’t come, Colin and Claudine, but it makes her so nervous when they do come. They drink too much and that reminds her of too many things. At least Janine remembers. Claudine remembers nothing. Just pictures of objects, the yellow tiles of a bathroom, the rust colour of a coat of their mother’s, their father making a snowman in the bath that time because he’d promised and come home too late to do it outside. Claudine remembers stupid, weird details without the warp of terror.

  One time she said do you remember the boarder we had in the basement? He had a black cape, a black moustache and he played the violin?

  What was she talking about? There was no such thing. Janine said you must have dreamed that, and was surprised by the look on Claudine’s face then. Claudine looked stunned, as if she’d been slapped with a wet towel.

  “J’ai inventé ça?”

  “Ben oui,” Janine said. “T’as inventé ça.”

  Janine puts the clay pot full of char and ginger into the refrigerator to marinate. She sits at the kitchen table, lights a king-size du Maurier. Her upper lip is wet with sweat, her skirt is full of water splotches, like dark clouds on the thin blue material. She picks up her Danielle Steel book, opens it, finds her place, and takes a deep drag.

  Outside, Marie-Ange watches a ladybug walk on a tulip bulb she’s just dug up with a tarnished serving spoon that once rested in a satin-lined Birks box. Odette had picked the pattern, a cluster of flowers, because of its name, Eternally Yours.

  CLAUDINE

  ~

  July

  D riving over to the editing room, Claudine turns the corner onto Spadina, and there, looming above the Front Street bridge that spans the railway yards, is the biggest moon she’s ever seen. It is as big, as flat, as white as a satellite dish.

  Claudine drives towards the moon, and her heart surprises her by opening for a moment. She thinks of how deliberately she goes against the grain of herself. What she has forgotten is awe. What she has forgotten is the bigger picture.

  He’d collected the car, as promised. He went to a pound on the outskirts of the city and came back sweating and panting with the ecstasy of having wrestled with what he called the real world. You would have thought he’d stumbled into the middle pages of a Norse epic. There had been dogs at the gate, fat men withholding keys until he paid and signed, sleek crows alighting on rusted
fenders.

  He handed her the keys with a flourish, and then hung his head and said it cost him half his B-Grant. Come on, she said. He wanted so much gratitude. She said thanks, as simply as she could. And then he shrugged his shoulders and closed down because this was confirmation that she could never be satisfied.

  Making a left on Front Street, Claudine leaves the moon behind, tucks it away somewhere, and thinks, he’s trying. It’s hard for him to do the simplest things, but he’s trying. She should have been nicer, been more positive. It’s not his fault that his love makes her uncomfortable. Besides, she knows that if it were comfortable, she would leave him. That’s what she’s always done before. She’s never been able to bear the boredom of comfort.

  THE MOON IS A retinal memory. Claudine parks in the lot behind the white wedding-cake building on Queen Street and steps out into the muggy July air. Her jean skirt feels heavy on her hips. Her black T-shirt is soaked through. She is stunned to think that she doesn’t remember driving here, doesn’t remember one minute of the drive after seeing the moon and turning onto Front Street.

  She swings through the brass revolving doors at top speed and steps into the ancient elevator with the accordion door.

  The editing suite is on the third floor. The equipment was purchased by a loose cooperative of video artists and independent art filmmakers with the help of government funds. Because of her background in TV news, and because she steadfastly refuses to investigate the ideological biases of the documentary form, Claudine is considered mainstream by the cooperative; most of the artists tolerate her by exercising their considerable powers of condescension.

  Claudine doesn’t really mind. For a while she berated herself for wanting to be accessible, but then she forgot about it and went back to her old ways. She learns a lot from them, has learned about using video as a stylistic thing, bits of which she transfers to film. It adds a texture that people recognize as more real than film, somehow. And it’s easier to use in tight interview situations. She used to miss so much because of the long set-up time.