“There’s a yellow submarine?” she asks. Her nose wrinkles; this is her incredulous look—it’s my sister’s too. This slightly upturned retroussez nose that’s so expressive. Sam smiles grimly—his pitch is obviously right, he can’t fake that, but his tone is a protest against the song’s—nasal, thin, worse than Ringo’s. I groan. Claire gets the gist immediately. Now she and Sam are a team.
“We all live in a yellow submarine!” they sing wildly.
I take my part: in a frail irate tone, I ask, “What is that infernal racket?” She guffaws at me for making fun of my own seriousness; to prove that I can take a joke, that I am a joke with my adult prudishness. Why am I trying so hard? But it’s too late to sing with them.
Serious, suddenly, Claire asks, “What was the yellow submarine?”
“Oh,” Sam says. “It was imaginary. An imaginary submarine.”
Sam asks if my sister might come down for Christmas, à propos of nothing, or maybe it’s that I told him she feels like she hates her husband now that he’s become interested in municipal politics and talks about it all the time. I couldn’t resist betraying her sadness and anger, the way a child will never fail to point at another child their own age, eternally surprised to find others moving through the world experiencing it the same way as them. Anyway, I’ve told him a million times, no. No one wants to come to Minneapolis—not from Montreal. And we were just there two months ago for Maman’s funeral, so holiday travel won’t be in the budget. I shrug. We’ll just have a token tourtière again this year and he’ll ask me again to tell Claire how my family stays up all night on Christmas Eve. That we wait til after midnight mass to eat, and that we eat until dawn. When we were dating he asked me what we ate for Christmas, and I told him we ate venison pies, head cheese, blood pudding—and we did, but mostly the old folks ate that. The rest of the food was what midwesterner’s would have: casseroles, sweet gherkins, pickled onions, and ham. Did I feel more lonesome for my family because I’d married an anglo, or because I’d described them to him as exotically as possible? Compared to his family, mine are more colourful, but now I fear I’ve made them seem cartoonish, and worse, more unreal to me in the bargain. Last Christmas when I couldn’t sleep I took some cognac to my smoking spot, the second step of the back porch. I let the snow purple my fingers, and sang the folk song about the girl who wanted to get married, but all the men were at war. C’est la belle Françoise, qui veut se marrier, maluron, lurette…. And I cried because my voice was not Maman’s—had none of her warmth, and you have to let yourself be maudlin. You have to give into it sometimes.
At half past six, Sam stands and says, the way he says every night he has a rehearsal, or a concert: “Ladies, I take my leave.” He bows. Claire bows. They bow at each other as if she’s Chaplin and he’s her straight man, again and again. I love their complicity. I wish I wasn’t her mother, so I could be in on it too. Stupid, childish thoughts.
Everything is quiet after he’s left. Claire puts her dishes in the sink and asks, “S’il-te-plait Maman, je veux dessiner dehors?”
“Je voudrais,” I say.
“Je voudrais dessiner dehors,” she says blankly, but using the conditional as I asked. I watch her, crouched on the sidewalk like a small, malleable frog, while I do the dishes. She is totally absorbed, her arm mirrors the tree limb she’s drawing like one of those movement lines in cartoons. I put the radio on again and the music isn’t quite satisfying. From my collection of audiobooks, mementoes from when I was learning English, I choose The Old Man and the Sea and find that dark night of waiting again. Outside the only point of interest in view is Claire’s rigid body. The houses are there, but all I see is myself in this street; myself and my daughter. As the sun goes down the sky gets darker and the trees get brighter, but I don’t really see it. I feel a direness. It’s plain this fish is killing the old man. He’s long since sliced his hand. Now his good arm has gone numb. He has no sway. He only has a line. Claire’s crouching on the perimeter of her drawing now, not wanting to scuff it. The Macnamaras pull into their driveway but stay in the car. I don’t imagine why. I stay with myself. I swear I see a flying fish on the Macnamara’s lawn, its wings, protruding from its dorsal fin, a bioluminescence of impossible green. I wring out my scouring sponge with my fist. Imagine all the bacteria caught in the drops that strike the stainless steel of the sink. If we could see germs, the very spirit of dirt made flesh, they might be that green.
At bedtime, Claire has her head in the crook of my elbow while I read to her. When I feel her attention ebbing, I let the book close.
“Do you love me more than Daddy?” she asks.
“On t’aime également, sans cesse, sans mesure,” seeing her brow furrow I hold my hands out like Lady Justice and her scales.
“No.”
“Mais si!”
“But you love me more?”
“Quand t’es follement amoureuse—”
“What?”
“When you fall in love, you want to make a baby. When you have a baby, you’ll see, it’s different.”
“Why?”
“It feels different.”
The heat of Claire in my arms fills me with anticipation. I imagine the rush of her thoughts and wait for her to ask why. When she doesn’t, I get my arm out from under her by making a pained expression and jiggling it elaborately. She laughs. I pull the blankets up around her shoulders, and she says, “More.” I pull them up around her chin, and she says, “More.” I pull them up and let them fall, covering her face, and she casts it off to show me her laughing face. Her eyes are grey like mine, naturally. I bring my face to hers, and say, “Bisous,” like I say every night. And she puts her tiny mouth on my mouth and thrusts her tongue past my teeth.
I stand. Her head is alert, but her limbs are still cast lazily away from her. I feel my molars inching towards my front teeth. Taste the soap Maman slid over my tongue when I was bad. Imagine forcing that horrible bitterness on Claire, the desperate pleading of her eyes as my hand clamps the soap inside.
“I want to know what it feels like,” she says. She is like a woman, saying I want like that. My rage is a knot in my chest, and I close the door. I’ve never shut her up in her room before. There’s no lock on it. The mute knob offers no closure. I open the door and slam it. I imagine carrying the Shaker chair from my desk up the stairs, and wedging it between the door and the doorknob. Instead, I sit in the hall. Exhale slowly to stop my heart from racing. Is this my fault? Did I make her this way? I did, when she was a baby.
I remember that I’d been dreaming, and the man with the classic torso was kissing me, more and more—and I woke up with my tongue in my daughter’s ear. There was the rawness of morning in the room and the unfirm look of her skull. I shut my eyes against the fat of her cheek, the delicate cartilage of her ear. I couldn’t look. Claire, Claire, Claire, I said, to break my own heart. I molested my baby at eight weeks, I said to myself, to an interlocutor, the one you explain yourself to, to yourself.
I couldn’t look at her. I knew that when I opened my eyes, I would see only how much more I was—more than she was. She was just a baby, and I could hurt her. What if I opened my eyes, and I saw the tight bliss of sleep in her baby eyelids and her baby fists, and I stuck out my tongue and licked her face like a dog—like a man acting like a dog. Because I could.