Claudine wondered if her father would have an artificial tree, too. She was hot, hands sweating on the silver ball that reflected her face like a kettle. She took her school tunic off and threw it on the couch. Her mother gave her a look that said a couch is meant to be looked at without a navy blue tunic on it. So Claudine retrieved the tunic, folded it and took it to her room to the chipmunk sound of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
Her bed was squeezed in with Janine’s. She fell into it the way she fell into water off the dock of the cottage their mother had bought last summer, their last summer as a family.
SO SLEEPY, SO TIRED in the radiator heat. Claudine brought her knees up, close to her chest, and closed her eyes. In that darkness, she saw her father’s face in his apartment on Côte-des-Neiges. Was he listening to the Chipmunks, too, was he decorating his tree by himself? What did he do without them? Was his apartment full of what he called “his chums?” The chums argued together. Roger would get all heated up about not being able to be answered in French at Eaton’s, and a chum would say, “C’est vrai, Roger, on est pas maîtres chez nous.” And they would swear together, calvaire, d’hostie de sacrament, and then the chum would apologize for doing it in front of his “belles filles.” Claudine hated the awful men in his apartment building, all of them drinking, away from their wives, their children. A drinking building, that’s what he’d found.
He’d nailed the wooden cabinet in his bathroom shut. Claudine and Janine both knew that there were women things in there. They could sense that a woman lived there, too, her traces removed for their Sunday visits. Was it the woman who had made her mother call him “un maudit cochon,” whom Papa said Odette invented because she was crazy and green with jealousy? At night when you heard these things you saw pink pigs and green faces dancing before your eyes. All Roger said when they asked questions was, “Dis pas ça à ta mère.” Don’t tell your mother. And when they went home on Sundays, exhausted from worrying about Roger’s drinking and driving, Odette grilled them for the bits they couldn’t give without betraying him.
Last Sunday he’d taken them to see The Sound of Music. He left them there in the middle of the movie. He said he was going to the bathroom, and she and Janine held hands after that, afraid suddenly, while Julie Andrews raced to the top of the Austrian Alps. He didn’t come back until the movie was over. They were putting their coats on. He herded them to the car and took them to the Black Sheep bar at Ruby Foos, where they sat on stools while he talked to the woman behind the bar. “J’ai des belles filles, hein,” he said to the woman. And the young blond woman smiled and said, “Oui, Monsieur Beaulieu, vous avez des belles filles.” And he said, “J’aime ça quand tu m’appelle Monsieur Beaulieu,” and stuck out his tongue like he’d known her a long time.
The Black Sheep bar had a stuffed black sheep with curly horns guarding its entrance. He’d taken them to this bar for years, but Roger never failed to point it out to them, to deem it sufficient amusement while he drank. They’d exhausted its entertaining possibilities years ago. They were almost teenagers, almost eleven and twelve, and they wore pearly pink lipstick and nylon stockings with elasticized garters under sleeveless synthetic shifts, they teased the back of their hair a little so it stuck up in what they called their bubble cuts. They rolled their eyes at the Shirley Temple cocktails and were starting to look down on younger kids, boys in short pants and girls in frou-frou dresses. But he didn’t see any of that, he didn’t see they were growing up.
After eating Chinese food, he took them back to their apartment and parked the car. He started to cry, then, saying, “C’est-tu beau The Sound of Music.” And they both begged, “Pleures pas, Papa, pleures pas.” He told them their mother had stolen them from him. His special girls. Claudine, who was going to be une artiste, and Janine, who was going to be une bonne mère de famille.
“Je vous aime,” he said, “si vous saviez comment je vous aime. Ça fait mal, aimer comme ça.”
ODETTE
~
July
Ihe game went badly. She sliced the ball, and hooked it, and two of her drives ended up being dribble balls. She was carrying a dead weight around, as if there had been a shift in gravity, as if the fairways were trying to trip her and flatten her body against the green grass. She hardly said a word to Walter, who drove the cart with boyish gusto. She declined to play the last nine holes, pleading tiredness, and watched him play in his pink pants and green golf shift. She could never get used to the sight of palm trees on a golf course. It was like playing on a handtinted postcard.
Walter is napping on the large white bed with the wooden ceiling fan circling above him, the blades throwing shadows on the white sheet that covers his body. The last thing he’d said before falling asleep was red snapper disagrees with me. Mrs. Bryce, the housekeeper, had made it for lunch, smothered in onions and curry with rice and peas. Almost hallucinating with Valium and booze, Odette had seen his face arguing with a red snapper.
After the golf game she wanted to write letters to her daughters, and she did, sitting on the balcony, watching snowy egrets swooping down into the dun-coloured grass by the watchtowers. But what she wrote is a blur. Then she took a shower.
Naked now, she walks to her white-louvred dressing room, unhooks her royal blue bathing suit and puts it on. She takes a bathing cap she’s never worn, it is covered with flowers and yellow shapes like fish scales, and puts it in her see-through beach bag. She slips on her straw sandals, folds the letters she wrote to Janine and Claudine and puts them on top of her chest of drawers, by her wedding ring. She sets out for the beach.
JENNY STANDS BEHIND THE bamboo poles of the bar, straightened hair pulled back tight into a ponytail wrapped with a flowered scarf. Beyond her, the sea sparkles in the four o’clock sun, the blue sky stretches to infinity. She is wiping the counter of the bar. Usually, Jenny works at the desk inside, managing the time of cleaners and gardeners. But there is so little beach traffic in the off-season that the men who usually tend bar have the afternoons off, and Jenny spends part of her afternoon waiting there for the occasional Villa La Mar denizen to drop by.
“You alone today, ma’am?”
“Yes,” Odette says. Odette likes Jenny, who is Mrs. Bryce’s daughter. She reminds Odette of herself, young. Jenny is always immaculately dressed, and solicitous and cheerful. She is saving up her money to study hotel management in Kingston.
Sometimes Odette can hear the phrases ticking away in Jenny’s head, phrases from her era when she switched to public relations from modelling, when she promoted soft drinks and cigarettes in order to make a living. She had battalions of cigarette girls working for her in promotional campaigns. They swarmed into the prestigious balls of the Anglo winter season, the St. Andrew’s ball, the Heligonian ball, where debutantes with broad shoulders and too much face powder found their husbands. Those were heady days for Odette, mastering the lessons of Dale Carnegie, teaching the young women whom she hired how to listen, how to think positively, how to marry a product to human flattery. It was so easy for her to fool the world, but afterwards she couldn’t help but have contempt for the men who paid her to delude them. Such fools, all of them.
Jenny’s got it, she’s got the moves and the put-on lacquered face. Put on a happy face, the customers are always right, make them feel special, be a good listener, nod and smile. But there’s something soft underneath, something soft in her body. The air around her gives. Odette always thought she would break if she stopped trying to please.
“A rum and orange juice, ma’am?”
“No, not today. Jenny, I want to go snorkelling.”
“Alone, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“Not recommended alone, ma’am.”
“I’m not going far. I’m just going to the reef.”
“I dunno, ma’am.”
“Well, maybe I won’t go that far, maybe I’ll just stay by the sh
ore. Practise my breast stroke.” Odette demonstrates a feeble breast stroke, even though she is a strong swimmer, always has been. Jenny is looking at her funny.
“I need the snorkelling stuff, Jenny. Can you please get it for me.”
Jenny walks to the big wooden padlocked box behind the bar, takes her huge key ring out of her belt, selects a small key and opens the lock. She looks back at Odette. She takes out black flippers, a blue mask with snorkel. Odette looks at Jenny’s feet in yellow espadrilles.
The sun on the sand is blinding. Did she say thank you, can’t remember now, hurrying, feet burning, rushing to get to the wet part of the sand. The sun works at erasing her head, swiping her head off with the glare it picks up from the white metal tables dotted here and there on the sand.
Odette wants water to surround her limbs. That’s all she knows. She longs for the tingle of salt around her mouth, the way she has of letting in a little salt water and spitting it out, like a clam, breathing. She looks back to see if Jenny is watching her. Jenny is on the bar phone, oblivious to Odette’s struggle to adjust the black straps of the flippers.
They are huge and ridiculous on her feet. Bending now, spitting into her mask and then rinsing it, Odette feels the sun beating on her back. She adjusts the mask over her flowered bathing cap. Time to bite into the mouthpiece. Now, walk, she says to herself, walk into the water. She walks in up to her knees, bends, and embraces the water in the shallowest of dives.
The shock of the cool water on her face wakes her up a little. It gives her a burst of energy. She swims fast, with strong strokes to get beyond the surf. She can hear her breath as she sucks the air down into her mouthpiece. She can hear it in her ears, her breath is inside her skull. Her flippers have stirred the fine sand, at first she can’t see anything, then she sees the clear sandy bottom all around her.
Her legs are awkward with the extra pressure the flippers exert against the water. For the longest time, her breath sounds like someone else’s breath in her ear. For the longest time, she sees herself as one-dimensional, flattened between sky and water.
She has swum beyond the surf so she can relax now, arms extended, clutching the blue Caribbean in a slow crawl. She lets herself drift, feels her body relax, give in to the water. The water is as warm as bathwater. She closes her eyes, bobs in the small waves, just like the small waves you can make in a bathtub. She sees her grandmother’s face, vague now, some silvery halo, long teeth, her face when she was very little, yes, she was in a bathtub and her grandmother was standing above her. She was little and her grandmother was saying your mother’s gone back to Halifax.
The heaviness there, the sleepy heaviness while she bobs up and down. She could go to sleep, right here, right now.
Swimming towards the reef, using the breast stroke, Odette bites down hard on her mouthpiece. She thinks of all the ships that must have foundered there, split hulls spilling chained human beings into the waves. She saw an engraving of a scene like that in a museum in Kingston last year. It was not something that belonged in a picture, not something that could be cross-hatched and framed.
The sandy bottom is gold from the sun that streams down through layers of water. But suddenly a curtain has dropped, the golden light vanishes. The sandy bottom turns grey, almost muddy. Confused, Odette looks up. The water streams from her mask, the shore bobs into view, white sand and green vegetation shot through with dots of dull colour, palm trees with rusty-coloured coconuts, roofs, umbrellas, satellite dishes. The tinny sound of reggae carries over the waves, as does the smell of vegetation burning. It is dark without the sun. The darkness brings the chill out of the water and breeds fear. She imagines a huge hand grabbing her legs and pulling her down into the darkness.
Should she go forward or backward? She thinks of drowning as a seizure, as something sudden, uncontrollable, a seizure of doubt about belonging, as if a bird suddenly lost faith in its wings and plummeted, that’s what it must be like, to doubt buoyancy for one second and then panic and thrash and swallow the ocean for air. I will bring it on, thinking this way, breathing too fast. The hand in the water. A huge hand. She is gasping, can’t seem to get enough air. The mouthpiece feels like a hand across her mouth.
The sun reappears, floods the water with benign golden light, bounces off the whitecaps forming at the reef to the east of Odette, illuminates the brightest ribbon of turquoise around the shore.
She floats, her breathing returns to normal. Too many bad pictures. Craning her neck, Odette checks the distance to the reef, puts her head back in the water. The bottom has dropped. She is floating over a huge bowl of darkness, sleepy again, letting go of her stiff fear.
She snorkelled here once, the first winter they stayed at Villa La Mar. She came out to the reef with Walter in a glass-bottomed boat. She had been so afraid then, of sharks, currents, lampreys, of brushing against the sharp spines of unknown molluscs. Walter had stayed in the boat and all the time she swam above the reefs she had been conscious of him watching her, waiting to laugh at her awkwardness. He had not laughed, as far as she knew. When she got back in the boat, telling the young skipper that she had thoroughly enjoyed herself, she had seen herself in Walter’s mirrored sunglasses. A squashed version of herself, with a huge belly, against white clouds.
She had not wanted to snorkel then. She had wanted something else, to float in a boat by herself, small, protected, lying down soaking up the sun in a shell, yes, that was it, she had had this childish fantasy of being a Thumbelina set adrift in a walnut shell.
Now she watches the bubbles forming around her fingers, the water like jelly in her hands, hears her own breath sucking air out of the blue sky into her mouth, her lungs, filling her chest with buoying strength. Sometimes she can hear her feet crashing against the surface in the webbed slap of flippers, sometimes the passage is smooth, all is warm jelly.
The bowl of darkness ends in a wall of black coral. She is afraid of scraping her belly open, but the wall is farther down than it appears. Here is another bowl, defined by perimeters of coral, all kinds of coral, coral that grows in twisted branches, in coils like brains.
She lets herself float above it, bobbing with the waves that have picked up from crashing against the reef. Then she takes a deep breath and dives through layers of cool water. It is as if the pressure of her body in this bowl flushes out every bright fluttering creature that has found its way here. Schools of parrotfish dart before her eyes, swim with great speed away from her looming body, then, suddenly used to her, circle back. The water is teeming with translucent fish, their tiny skeletons visible beneath their scales. Electric-blue fish separate and dart away as she swims towards the bottom, amazed at the plants growing with all the ease and decorative spacing of a botanical garden. Holding her breath, ears popping a little, Odette thinks, all this hidden away, no one can see these riches without going down.
Then she sees it. Tries to blink it away, but it’s still there. Something brown and orange, like a bloated hunchback caught on a coral alcove.
She pushes herself off the coral and swims as fast as she can to the surface, legs thrashing, gasping for air.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.
Not that.
No.
The water in her mouth, full of death.
But before she realizes what she’s doing, she’s gone back down straight for it. It becomes more angular the closer she gets, less like the bloated body of a man. She is almost out of air by the time she gets to it. But she touches it with both her hands, grasps it, and pulls it from the coral. It’s nothing but a rusty old anchor covered in orange tarp. She has broken the coral behind it. She picks up the piece of coral and ascends, holding it with one hand, swimming with the other.
Panting, she breaks the surface. In the sun, the piece of coral is pale and pink and layered with spirals. Skeletons. She had thought she was going to see a dead body, and she’d brought back this, the sk
eletons of tiny creatures, sharp and beautiful in her hands.
CLAUDINE
~
August
H er father has a scar on his throat now, since the operation. He wears it like jewellery. It is pale and crooked and begs for a question. But otherwise it’s the same. The two of them, father and daughter, tongue-tied, with Jeanne fussing in between.
ON THE TRAIN FROM Toronto to Quebec City, Claudine read A Passage to India to escape the dread she always felt going back to Quebec. She wanted to like the book because it was supposed to be good, and she tried very hard not to succumb to the hypnotic telephone wires looping up and down along the track, to that hypnotic marking of time above sad, dusty chicory and limp goldenrod. She tried hard to stay in the prejudiced intrigues of colonial India, but the passage where Miss Quested went into the caves kept confusing her. What had happened in the caves? What was the terrible echo she heard? Why wouldn’t Forster say?
Claudine still expected to find out how to live from books, but she no longer read in French. Had not for years. In French the words exploded, leaving her sad and defeated, the same feeling she had when she went back to Montreal. It wasn’t really Montreal she was afraid of, not the real Montreal floating in the St. Lawrence with its network of bridges, its mountain peaked by an electrified cross, not the real Montreal of Sherbrooke Street and Sainte-Catherine Street or even of the Main, all spiffied up with boutiques and restaurants now, but still smelling of slaughter and sawdust and gravestones. Montreal wasn’t a real place anymore for Claudine. It was more like a plain with a crater at the centre. A collar around the neck that tightened as soon as she saw the tins roofs shining in the sun, the steeples, the sorrowful backs of Saint-Henri houses leading into the heart of the city.
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