Voice-Over

by Carole Corbeil

  But when Odette noticed the pilot, her blue eyes lit up. “All-o, Yvon,” she said, and kissed him on both cheeks, very French-French gracious. Her cloudy face had opened, and she was suddenly launched into one of her French-French impersonations.

  For the girls, her French from France impersonation, which surfaced intermittently, was the safest of her many impersonations because it was modelled on her friend Louise, who was kind and loving. Louise had pots of money, summered in St-Tropez when it was still a fishing village, picked lovers from Parisian boîtes à chansons, drank red wine with lunch and did yoga first thing in the morning. She was Odette’s only French-French contact, even though she wasn’t French-French at all, but a rich Montréalaise with bohemian tastes.

  Odette’s American impersonations were not so safe. She could go from Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce to Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot in two seconds flat. The mid-range was not so bad. There was Doris Day for avid innocence, and Debbie Reynolds for bouncy. But the worst thing that ever happened in Hollywood as far as their father was concerned had to be Grace Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier. When Odette was in her Grace Kelly phase, Roger was nothing but a frog who should have been a prince.

  Yvon the pilot blossomed in her French-French effusion.

  “Un p’tit drink?” Odette said.

  “Je ne dirais pas non,” Yvon said, and smiled.

  Odette went into the kitchen and came back carrying glasses with life-buoys on them.

  THEY ALL SAT AT the little table on the verandah, drinking gin, the ice tinkling in their glasses, smoke rising from their cigarettes like distress signals.

  Odette told the girls to do some découpage on the floor of the verandah while the grownups “talked.” They cut out pictures of movie stars from Odette’s Photoplays and Screen Gems. Janine and Claudine had to share scissors and Janine grabbed them first and started to cut out a picture of Dr. Kildare. There was an ornate frame of curlicues around Dr. Kildare’s face. Janine took her time, driving the scissors with minuscule precision around every curl. Her tongue was sticking out. Claudine sat, cross-legged on the green-painted verandah, looking at the picture of Ben Casey she wanted to cut out. The frame on Ben Casey was plain.

  She might as well listen to what the adults were talking about. She might find out something that would protect her later on.

  “She was too good to live,” her mother said.

  “C’est vrai,” her father said. “Too good, like an angel.”

  “La beauté,” Yvon said, “c’est tragical. Ça fly du monde.”

  “En tout cas, c’était une belle femme.” Her father took a big sip of gin. “Hein, Yvon, une belle femme, ben sexy, hein, pour un homme it was something, Marilyn Monroe.”

  They were silent after that. And then her mother burst out, “She couldn’t breathe. You understand that, Yvon, don’t you, a woman like that couldn’t breathe. People were on top of her all the time. Wanting something she couldn’t give.”

  Yvon looked embarrassed. His English wasn’t so good and he didn’t want to be left behind. “Ouais,” he said, “she couldn’t breed.”

  “Ben respirer, c’est respirer,” her father said, “arrêtez-donc.”

  “Tu comprends rien,” Odette said with a sigh. “On parle psy-chologie, là, Roger.”

  “Ah, la psychologie,” he said. “She was rich, she was sexy, you’re going to tell me dat’s hard? She was crazy. I know dat kind of crazy.”

  Claudine caught her mother’s eye, the sadness there, and pushed it away.

  “Yvon,” her mother said, “don’t you think Claudine looks just like Elizabeth Taylor dans National Velvet? And Janine, elle, she’s a young Ingrid Bergman, look at those lips. I could kill for those lips.”

  “Elles te ressemblent beaucoup, Odette,” Yvon said.

  Claudine pretended not to hear. She was sick of waiting for the scissors. She told Janine that Dr. Kildare looked like something that came back from the drycleaner’s. Janine dropped the scissors. “Ben Casey, là,” she said, “he’s full of hair. C’est laid ça, du poil sur les mains.”

  “Maman,” Janine said, “c’est qui le plus beau, Docteur Kildare ou Ben Casey?”

  “Bien moi,” their mother said, “je préfère Docteur Kildare.”

  Claudine waited. She felt nothing. And then something exploded in her chest. She raced across the verandah, hit her leg on her mother’s chair, fell, got herself up again and screamed down the stairs. She heard her father say, “Mais, voyons donc,” and Yvon say it was time he was going, and her mother say that this was a dramatic age, and then all she heard was her own heart pounding as she raced into the woods.

  SHE HID IN THE woods for a long time, imagined that she would spend the night there and give them all a big scare. She walked, stirring dead leaves and scaring birds from trees. Her throat felt sore, she was shivering, even though she was sweating from running up the hill.

  After a while, sitting on a stump, scratching a piece of tree fungus with her fingernails, she heard Yvon start up the hydro-plane, and saw it rise in the late afternoon sky.

  She would have liked to go up in the sky like that, to get out of the swamp of what she felt. She knew things were going to go wrong, could sense it in her whole body, the way animals could sense an earthquake.

  Claudine decided to follow the ridge behind the house and then find a way down to the little beach with the big rock covered with green moss. The rowboat was beached there. If she could get to it without being seen, she could row out onto the lake, watch the reflections of the birch trees undulating in the water, feel the strength of her arms on the oars, the water dripping from their tips when she pulled them out, let her self drift out of the picture.

  She got bigger as she walked. She had a plan. It surprised her how quickly she got to the beach.

  Problem was, they were there.

  She hid behind the cedars that sheltered the beach.

  Her mother was leaning on the big boulder that straddled the beach and the water. The moss on the rock looked lime green in the last rays of the afternoon sun. From that rock, Claudine and Janine had fished and caught little perch with pale yellow bellies.

  HER MOTHER’S FACE WAS washed out in the sun, her arms were crossed against her gingham shirt, her jaw set against her father, who had picked up a stick and was making lines in the sand, lines that radiated from his feet. He’d taken his shirt off, and his plaid bermuda shorts were too loose, they hung below his navel where the dark hair grew in a line.

  “Odette,” he said.

  “I paid for the house,” she said, “with my hard-earned money, and I want you out. Tu comprends? Roger. Out.”

  “Ton argent, c’est toujours ta maudite argent. I paid, too. J’en ai payé, Odette des affaires. You’re not the only one paying and paying and paying. And money’s not the only thing I paid. De te voire flirter avec Yvon, comme ça, c’est humiliant, Odette.”

  “Maudit menteur. You can’t stop lying, can you? You just can’t stop. Just answer this. Is it me or is it you who bought the house in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce?”

  “C’est toi. Mais je suis encore père de famille, Odette. C’est encore moi qui porte les pantalons icitte. It’s me that wears the goddamn pants in this house.”

  “Then try and keep them on!” she screamed.

  “Pardon?”

  “How is she, la p’tite cocktail waitress qui travaille au Black Sheep bar chez Ruby Foos? Hein, a va bien, elle? Elle a pas d’enfants, elle, hein. Elle s’en fout, elle, des enfants.”

  “You’re not going to start that again. C’est fini, ça. Baby, I tell you it’s finish.”

  He walked over to her, and was about to take her chin in his hand and lift her head up when she screamed, “Touche-moi pas, touche-moi pas! Don’t come near me.” She was shaking. “The detective,” she said, “he didn’t say it was finished
, c’t’affaire-là.”

  “Maudite chienne. You had me followed? Maudite cochonne.”

  Claudine stopped breathing so she wouldn’t have to hear. She wanted to run away.

  Her father grabbed her mother by the shoulders and started to shake her against the big boulder. “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!” he shouted. Odette was crying, terrible cracked sounds were coming out of her chest.

  “Maman, Maman,” Claudine moaned, but they didn’t hear her. They struggled against each other, until her mother crumpled crying on the sand.

  “C’est fini, Odette,” her father said. “Fini. You killed it, satisfied? It’s over.” He walked right past Claudine.

  “Roger, laisse-moi pas toute seule, Roger.”

  He turned around, for one split second. “J’en peux plus, Odette,” he said. He was crying, but he kept on walking.

  Claudine had done something wrong, she was doubled over with the pain of having watched. After a while her mother stopped crying and stepped down to the water, and washed her face there.

  Claudine ran as fast as she could back to the cottage. She was feverish, she was dying of thirst.

  AFTER GULPING DOWN THE rest of the gin from the bottle, their father said he was going to take them over to their grandfather Béribée’s house to eat. His hands were shaking. Claudine looked at the label on the empty bottle.

  What about Maman, Janine asked. He said she wanted to be alone. “On va prendre le bateau,” he said, “on va avoir du fun.”

  Roger was weaving a little as he walked down the path. Claudine and Janine followed. Claudine said I don’t feel well, to Janine, to the trees. She kept thinking about those nightmares she had where she could hear kittens mewling in the basement and she couldn’t get to them, they were buried in rubble. It was an awful sound. But in the dreams she forgot about the kittens and left them behind, just like she was forgetting about something now, and leaving it behind.

  Roger had trouble starting the engine, he pulled and pulled on the cord and it flew back without a sound. He swore. He pulled the choke out. It still didn’t start. But then he squeezed some black bulbs from the lines going to the orange gas tanks, and when he pulled the cord this time, the engine started.

  And so they went to their grandfather’s house, bobbing in orange life jackets that fit over their heads like stocks, and their father gunned the boat through the dark water, and the wind whipped tears from their eyes.

  Roger manoeuvred the turquoise steering wheel with a crooked baby finger. “Woooah,” he yelled, and slalomed through imaginary buoys.

  Claudine looked behind her to see if her mother was on the verandah. She wasn’t. The motor cut through all of the reflections in the water, ploughed through the wavy zigzag of birch trunks, ripped through their dark foliage and left a white scar behind.

  THERE WAS MUSIC COMING from the large white clapboard cottage, but the car wasn’t in the driveway. Soft big band music broken up by insistent horns and the childlike sound of a xylophone drifted to the lawn of their great-uncle Jean’s cottage.

  The music stopped suddenly, and something else started up, a man’s voice, deep and phony to the girls’ ears.

  “C’est Mel Tormé,” Roger said, bobbing his head to either side and snapping his fingers. “I’m getting sentimental over you.”

  “C’est dégoûtant,” Janine said.

  Claudine was so feverish, she wanted to lie down on the lawn and go to sleep.

  Standing by the screen door now, they could see their grandfather with his arms around a woman who wasn’t their grandmother. They were dancing. It was Francine, but not a Francine they’d ever seen. This Francine had long dark hair falling onto her shoulders instead of her usual French twist, and she wore a light print dress instead of bermuda shorts with a stained sleeveless white blouse.

  When they heard them shuffling at the door, Béribée and Francine parted so abruptly that it was as if time had changed gears, what had been slow and syrupy turned jerky and speedy. Lights were switched on, Mel Tormé was whipped off the old Victrola with a good scratch of the needle, Francine adjusted her hair, Béribée poured drinks, and then settled into his usual posture on the armchair by the table where he kept his war magazines with pictures of Nazi soldiers tearing blouses off the shoulders of women with pained faces.

  They learned that their grandmother had gone to Montreal for a few days.

  Francine took the girls into the kitchen and made them Campbell’s tomato soup and toast. The overhead light in the kitchen was very yellow, and the linoleum floor smelled like grey Spic and Span water. Francine put cream in the soup, and it turned pink. Claudine tried to eat it, but ran into a viscous jellied hump. She spat it out.

  “Je me sens pas bien,” she said.

  Francine put her cool hand on her forehead and said she had a fever.

  In the living room, Béribée and Roger were discussing their mother. Claudine and Janine’s ears were burning with fear. They were going to have to go back in the boat in the dark, and Roger was on his second rye already.

  IN THE HAZE OF her fever, propped with cushions on the living-room couch, Claudine heard them discuss Marilyn Monroe. Her grandfather said that Francine thought she had been murdered by the Mafia, that maybe she knew things and that they gave her pills to make it look like a suicide.

  “Whatever she knew,” Béribée said, laughing with a wet wheezing cough in his armchair, “it was safe in her pretty pea brain.”

  “Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire, pea-brain?” Francine wanted to know.

  “Petite, là, comme un pois,” Roger said.

  “Elle avait la cervelle dans ses seins, hein, Roger?” Béribée said, and broke up laughing.

  “Her brain in her tits, elle est bonne celle là, Béribée.” Her father was laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes.

  “Je trouve pas ça drôle,” Francine said. “Pas drôle du tout.”

  Béribée looked at her hard. “Fait pas ta grande Catholique là, franchement. Je l’aimais Marilyn, you know that.”

  “Moi aussi, Francine,” Roger said, “je l’aimais Marilyn, a beautiful woman like that. Une vraie déesse. On joke, mais on l’aimais au fond.”

  Things got quiet after that, and the silence pried Roger loose.

  “Tu veux ma grosse flashlight?” Béribée said.

  “C’est une pleine lune,” Roger said, and so it was, huge and silver, bouncing light on the lake like bits of quartz in a dark stone. But he took the big flashlight anyway, and Janine got to shine it all the way home.

  THE COTTAGE WAS DARK. Not a light on.

  Claudine thought, Maman’s gone. But the car was still there, parked by the back of the cottage. Claudine grabbed the flashlight from Janine and shone it on her father’s footsteps up the hill.

  Roger opened the kitchen door and turned on the light. There were toast crumbs on the counter and there was a note on the kitchen table. Roger crumpled up the note, and the girls followed him through the dark living room and into their mother’s room.

  Claudine was still holding the flashlight; it felt like a game, like she was a robber flashing a beam of light here and there looking for money and jewels. The beam lit up her mother sprawled naked on the bed, sheet wrapped around her, eyelids soft as moths. She was snoring.

  “Maudite sans-coeur,” Roger said, and grabbed the flashlight and turned on the bedside lamp.

  “Les filles, out,” he said. “Janine, mets la bouilloire, et prépare un café pour ta mère. Deux cuillerées de Nescafé. Ta mère a pris des pillules.”

  Claudine sat on the kitchen floor. Her knees were shaking, her teeth were chattering. She watched Janine make the cup of coffee, in a dream, Janine moving so slowly, the kettle taking hours to boil. From a great distance, she could hear her father shouting, “Réveille-toi, Odette, réveille-toi,” over and over like a needle stuck on
a record. It sounded like he was slapping her.

  And then everything moved very quickly again. Claudine grabbed the cup of hot coffee from Janine’s hand, and she was walking outside, following her father down to the dock. He was carrying her mother on his back, holding her hands around his neck. A heavy, lifeless body. Nobody’s body. Her feet dragged on the ground. She was naked and her skin shone phosphorescent in the moonlight.

  Janine walked behind Claudine, moaning, “Elle va mourir, Maman va mourir, Maman va mourir.” Claudine wanted to tell her to shut up, but her jaw clamped shut. She was stiff from being scared of tripping on a cedar root and splattering hot coffee on her mother’s back. If only Janine would stop moaning. Her moaning could pull death out of the dark. The moonlight looked metallic now.

  She’d left her mother behind. She should never have done that. It was her fault, all of it. Her father cursed her mother all the way down to the dock. “Maudite sans-coeur, tu vas marcher, ma maudite sans-coeur.” Claudine could see his anger stabbing her body, the knives in it that made her mother’s body twitch and lurch on his back. And she started her own chant, “Arrête Papa, arrête Papa, arrête Papa.” She wanted to crush his killing voice and her sister’s dirge. They were calling death down from the trees. They were going to make it happen. But there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  “Tu fais semblant, Odette, avec tes mélodrames,” he said as they walked out of the dark trees onto the moonlit dock. He laid her down on the dock. Her head fell away from her body like a rag doll’s. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. Her white breasts gleamed in the moonlight. Claudine took off her kangaroo sweatshirt and covered her mother with it.