Later, back at Ben’s apartment, smelling of Lifebuoy, bright and chipper with invented stories, she’d crawl into bed with Ben and replay her time with Colin to float above the plague of guilt and self-hatred. Replayed it, and replayed it.
Never once did she think of Ben, of what it did to him. She had simply been angry at him, angry that his existence created complications. Maybe that’s how Colin feels. No. It’s not the same. Not the same at all. It’s a habit with Colin, it’s part of his male prerogative, that’s what she can’t stand.
What is it Colin says, when he’s feeling high and mighty? Oh yeah, not everything is about you.
I don’t think everything is about me, you asshole. It comes out with a snarl. She’s said it aloud. The Portuguese woman in front turns and gives her a look.
You asshole.
Turning into a bag lady.
Claudine walks to the curb. Lifts her arm high. Taxi, she says, to no one in particular. A yellow cab on the other side of College makes a U-turn. “Thank you,” she says. The driver is Jamaican. “No problem,” he says. The car is spotless, the suspension smooth, the sound system exquisite. He’s playing Marley, burning down Babylon one more time. Claudine puts her head back on the brown vinyl seat, and yawns.
MOVING ABOUT THE LOFT she hardly lives in is like walking on a beach at low tide. There are pools everywhere of what came in and settled in their comings and goings, but in her eyes now everything is his, his mess, his papers, his clothes, his overflowing ashtrays, his books, his bits of receipts, his stray pennies and socks, his western ties with buffaloes and Indian heads. It’s as if he’d been shot and trailed his guts all over the place. In the days when she thought the pathology she was involved in was an ordinary relationship with ordinary expectations of shared house-keeping, she used to accuse him of domestic imperialism. Saying can you try and be neater would have no effect. The word imperialism might inspire guilt. He himself used the word with impunity in all his political arguments, but he just laughed when she lobbed it his way. So she created corners for him, a corner for him to write in, with his table, his lamp, his filing cabinet; a corner for him to read in, with his inherited chairs and a stand-up lamp. The place was big enough for this. But he couldn’t keep to that. He spilled over everything. It wasn’t that she was so neat. With Ben she’d been the messy one. It was just that somebody had to draw some line.
At one point, she became fixated with keeping the blond wooden table by the big windows free of debris. Every day she piled all of his papers in neat stacks and put his pennies in jars, and his receipts in an old peach basket she’d painted bright colours in brighter days. She wiped the table, put seasonal flowers in a glass vase, fruit in the blue bowl her mother had given her for her twenty-first birthday, and spread shells and stones around candles in wooden candlesticks. Every night, he dumped his pennies all over the table, pulled out shredded receipts from bars and restaurants, took a beer out of the fridge, put his feet on the table, took his latest manuscript and spread it all over the blond table. He made a deletion or two, left everything on the table, and talked about his work. When she said something, he looked at her with dark eyes. “I either live here or I don’t,” he’d say. Or, “For fuck’s sake, what is this? Why don’t you get some design magazines and make a nice spread on your table. If that’s what matters to you, I’m outta here.”
In that first year, when she’d rented the loft because she was sick of the smell of yeast and dry-cleaning fluid that seeped through the floors of Colin’s place, the table had taken on the aura of an altar. He desecrated it, she cleaned it. Eventually she had given up on the altar, and on everything else. And what a giving up it was. If there was no equality, there would be nothing at all. He would have to live in his own fouled nest. Trouble was, she had to share that nest. If she cooked, it was with the understanding that he would do the dishes. If he didn’t do the dishes, the dishes could sit soaking in the sink for a month. The water turned rusty, bubbles of mildew grew on the surface. Once, in the middle of a fight about housekeeping, he threw an entire set of dinner plates against the wall. She swore he broke the dishes so he wouldn’t have to wash them.
“I’m doing it for you, too,” he said.
“Sure you are. Teaching me non-attachment to worldly things, are you?”
And then, as sometimes happened, in the confusion of drugs and alcohol, truth like a great angel descended into him, and spoke. “No,” he said, eyes serious, “I’m having the tantrum you never had.” That’s what Janine used to imply, when she had her hysterics. “I’m doing it for everybody,” she’d say. Claudine felt herself wavering. “What do you mean, what do you mean?” she said, crying, picking up pieces of cheap white stoneware. But she knew exactly what he meant. He was the piece of herself she’d put away for a rainy day.
CLAUDINE STANDS BY THE table, palms pressed against the blond wood, leaning towards the dark of the windows. There are three dried oranges in the blue bowl. A postcard from Anne, who is in Montreal editing a Film Board documentary about the daughters of mothers who took DES. “Wish you were here” is scrawled on the back. “It’s dark, and airless, and the junk food is delicious.” The postcard is of a mother chimpanzee picking nits out of her offspring’s head. It is one of Jane Goodall’s photographs. There is so much tenderness in the gesture, such intelligence in the mother’s eyes.
It reminds Claudine of Marie-Ange’s stuffed monkey, which she has to hold against her chin to go to sleep. The plush on the monkey’s head is all worn down where she rubs it. Claudine noticed that tonight when she put her to bed. How loving Marie-Ange’s face is, how open and loving. Can’t have that. Not with Colin the way he is. There’s no better form of birth control than not wanting to repeat a history.
Colin’s change sticks to her palms. His journal is on the table.
Claudine’s hands are cold, her neck compressed. She opens the journal, closes it, opens it again and reads. The last entry is a poem, it is addressed to “S.” It starts with a quote from Ginsberg’s “Song.” “Yes, yes, / that’s what I wanted, / I always wanted, / I always wanted, / to return to the body / where I was born.”
Claudine reads on.
She sleeps, small bones
warm between the sheets
while I write to you
In her dreams
the sky falls like a roof
and buries the woman she dreams
I am writing to,
buries you who waits for
my shadow to wake
her from her sleep
Frozen by the table, Claudine doesn’t hear the lock turn, doesn’t hear Colin come in. She rereads the lines, trying to decipher an ancient language, meanings shifting with the blink of an eye.
“Stooping to snooping now,” he says.
“God, you scared me,” she says, whipping around, spinning to the ceiling. “I didn’t hear you.”
Colin walks to the fridge and grabs a beer. He looks taller than usual. He wears black cowboy boots he just picked up at the Sally Ann. He opens the beer with the opener he always leaves on the table and lets the cap fall beside it. It bounces to the floor.
“So how do you like it?” he says.
“What? That you’re flirting with my sister now? How do you think I like it?” Claudine suddenly notices that her shoulder bag is still on her shoulder. Her mouth is dry with fear.
“How do you like the poem?”
“Who’s S?”
“What?”
“S, who’s S?”
“Christ, you’re paranoid. It’s part of the Sisyphus series I’m writing. It’s a poem about waiting, about people who take the same rock uphill, over and over. About people who can’t get over the first pains. I’m thinking about calling it Sisyphus poems for my country.”
His eyes are round, dead, expecting to be challenged, but he’s warming up to his theme. “We�
��re always waiting for deliverance to come from somewhere else.”
“This is such bullshit,” she says, plopping herself down in the chair by the table. “You’re trying to make me crazy.” She lights a cigarette. “Tu vas me rendre folle,” she says.
“What?”
She’s too tired to answer.
He drinks his beer. They listen to the buses go by on Spadina.
“All you ever do is attack, attack, attack,” he says. “Do you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this?”
“Please,” she says, “don’t bother going into your martyrdom schtick. Spare me, okay?”
“Just tell me what you want,” he says.
“I want —” She just has to say it, but she’s terrified, as if it will bring violence to say it. “I want this to be over.”
She sees it for one brief second, the panic of loss on his face. He clutches her arm. “This cold thing in you,” he says. “This cold thing.”
“You made the cold thing.”
“I did a lot,” he says softly, “but I didn’t do that.”
The phone rings, cutting the thick air between them. She gets up on the third ring, grabs it on the fourth.
It’s her father. Nice of him to call just then. She hasn’t heard from him in months. He had gotten through to Janine weeks ago to tell her he was going to have an operation. “C’est tu sérieux?” she’d asked Janine. “C’est toujours sérieux,” she said, “mais c’est jamais sérieux.”
He doesn’t mention the operation. He’s phoning from Quebec City, from “a top of de line ’otel, dans une belle chambre, y a un bar, la télé en couleur, pis une belle vue des plaines d’Abraham.” He says he’s driven there with his wife, Jeanne, so they can watch the Tall Ships coming in from all over the world.
“Viens-t-en,” he says. “Viens nous rejoindre.”
She tells him she’s working.
He says he needs to see her. “On va avoir du fun. C’est un moment historique,” he says, “on reverra jamais ça.”
“Okay,” she says. She’s hypnotized, can’t refuse his voice full of need. “Okay, Papa, je m’en viens.”
“You’re so weird,” Colin says, “when you talk to your father.”
“Yeah?”
“Like young and breathless.”
It goes in like a hook. She stops herself from biting. She can pack her bags. She has somewhere to go.
CHRISTMAS
~
1960s
The Christmas after Odette left Roger, she bought her first artificial tree. The trunk looked like a green broom handle, shiny and full of tiny holes. The girls stood in the living room of their small apartment in Ville Saint-Laurent and took on the job of unpacking the synthetic branches and plugging them into the holes. They put them in every which way, not paying attention to the tagged numbers that insisted on a symmetry of long branches at the bottom and shorter ones on top.
Odette was in the kitchen, where she was taping fake holly to the handle of a glass pitcher full of viscous eggnog from a carton. She came into the living room and poured them each a glass. The girls tried it, made polite noises, and put their glasses down on the mantel of the fireplace that didn’t work.
The living room was a small rectangle with pocked walls and ceiling. The furniture from their old house in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce looked much too big for this room. The cold room was crowded with stuff, reminding the girls of their diminished state. Behind the pale blue curtains, which were too long for this room, a door led to a small battleship-grey balcony with a wrought-iron railing. The way Odette said “the balcony,” you would have thought it wrapped the length of the building like a penthouse balcony in a forties movie.
The girls felt a responsibility not to crush the false cheer of Odette’s fantasies. They had to agree to Odette’s version of things, otherwise Odette would cry, and the sound of it, like lungs going through a wringer washer, was too much to bear. But the balcony scared them both so much that they hardly ever went on it.
Claudine didn’t understand the construction of it. It looked glued to the building, there on the third floor, with the view of other balconies from other apartment buildings. In nightmares, the balcony cracked from the façade of the building and sent her toppling down onto the roof of a car. Over time, she became obsessed with rehearsing the fall, imagined herself hanging on to the railing and jumping the gap from the falling balcony to the doorstop. If she couldn’t manage that, she thought that if she remembered to bend her knees at the last minute she could perhaps bounce off the roof of the car like a trampoline and be saved.
Sometimes she thought she had the capacity to survive anything. She was an emissary from another planet, sent to bring on the evolution of the human race. She had been chosen, and, as a chosen one, was marked for survival. At other times she thought she might be dead already, and what she witnessed as the world was the Bon Dieu’s limbo, a region reserved for half-sinners and pagans, grey, flat, without a sense of her body’s gravity. Just last month, right after Odette had picked them up from school in a taxi and brought them here to this apartment, she’d seen an episode of The Twilight Zone that had shaken her, the story of a man who’d encountered an absolute replica of himself in every respect. The man became obsessed with killing his double. He did manage to kill him, with a knife, but suffered a gash to the wrist while doing so. He looked at it. He was standing in the middle of a highway. He lifted up the gap of flesh on his wrist and saw the electrical circuitry where his veins should have been. He was a robot. The double he’d killed had been his human self. Claudine took to watching her wounds very carefully.
“IL FAUT RECOMMENCER,” JANINE said. She looked pale, and darkcircled. Her navy blue school tunic was shiny from wear. The tree branches stuck out every which way like a TV antenna. She was trying very hard, which gave Claudine the freedom to say “c’est niaiseux.” And it was niaiseux, their first Christmas without Papa, and a broom handle for a tree. Odette said, “Ça va durer longtemps un arbre comme ça.” She told them she couldn’t carry a real tree up three flights of stairs.
Claudine did nothing. She sat on the couch, tongue coated with eggnog, watching Janine and Maman rearrange the branches of the tree. Odette called out the numbers, and Janine found the appropriate holes. Every once in a while both of them would walk away from the tree to admire their handiwork. Maman put her arms around Janine’s shoulders and told her she was going to be an engineer.
Claudine picked at the skin around her thumbs, bit tiny strips and chewed them. It was already dark, and she could smell the cooking from downstairs. Fried onions. Sour cabbage. They themselves had eaten turkey TV dinners. Odette had put orange slices and maraschino cherries on top to make the aluminum trays look more festive.
“J’ai oublié ha musique!” Odette said, and threw her head back and rolled her eyes. There were little bits of dry skin on her orange lipstick, and gold bangles clinked on her wrists. She hurried over to the RCA Victor and put on Chubby Checker.
“Come on, les girls, let’s twist,” she said, and started to sing, “Let’s twist again, like we did last summer, do you remember when? Allons, Claudine, lèvetoi.”
Claudine put on her shoes with the slippery soles. “C’est ça,” Odette said. “On écrase une cigarette avec nos pieds, est on s’essuie avec une serviette.”
Janine was twisting up a storm with a synthetic branch in one hand. “Like we did last summer,” she sang.
Odette couldn’t bend all the way down like they could, and this was very satisfying. They always laughed at her dancing. They were laughing now. Odette tried everything, and she was the one who’d taught them the twist, and brought home a limbo bar with crepe paper the colour of fire, but now the twist was passé and the girls were learning the new dances, and teaching Odette. Privately, Janine and Claudine often talked about how she just didn’t have it, she moved
to the rhythms of another time, she tried to make everything sexy.
“Ouf,” she said now. “Ouf, j’en peux pus,” and sat down, laughing. Claudine stuck it out to the end of the song, to show her how effortless it was for her.
“Viens ici, Claudine,” she said and grabbed her from the couch. “Ma p’tite t’as l’air triste, donne-moi un bec, pitoune.”
“Maman,” Claudine said. And tried to get away. But Odette brought her hand down and stroked Claudine’s hair. “Maman,” she said, and suddenly felt sleepy.
The song ended and Odette got up and put on Christmas with The Chipmunks. High-pitched voices leapt out of the gold-flecked speaker, and Odette went back to her job of reinventing the tree. Her pleading face said this is fun, this is even better than a real tree, isn’t it?
Claudine started to unpack the Christmas balls. Some were ridged with blobs of artificial snow, which they’d used for the first time last year. Their father had gone crazy with the stuff because it came in a spray can. He had been smitten with aerosol cans for months. For a while their house had been alive with the sound of little balls being shaken in cans of spray paint. He was especially fond of Scotchgard, which was supposed to coat furniture so it wouldn’t get stained. In a rare moment of domestic involvement, Roger had Scotchgarded the couch and chairs of the living room in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce house. He sprayed everything, mosquitoes, windows, boots to protect them from salt, garden chairs to protect them from mildew. It was the spray era, and after Roger’s interest in pushing the button and spraying died, everything came to a sad standstill. It had satisfied something in her mother, had brought on a truce of sorts. Odette had stopped hiding bottles from him. They went to see Days of Wine and Roses together and talked about it, and she got the money together to send him to the States to a place called Wildwood, which was said to help people “dry out.” Janine and Claudine had blossomed in the truce, had helped out with things, had walked as softly as they could through the no-man’s-land of their parents’ rapprochement. But then something worse even than drinking had happened and the house heaved with the convulsions of that, night after night. And the bottles came out again.
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