“Success without college,” says Madeleine.
Olivia reaches down her hand.
The housemates are out. There is half a bottle of bad white wine in the fridge, along with blocks of tofu, mysterious Asian greens and murky tubs of things.
“How many people live here?” asks Madeleine.
“That depends,” says Olivia.
How can she bear communal living? The bathroom alone. Madeleine sips and is ambushed by a complete happiness. What are these unreasonable happinesses? Like the lilies of the field who neither toil nor weep. The way the light leans in from the balcony down the hall to lounge against the walls painted pale pink, the softness of a gust of air, one’s sudden weightlessness. Ecstasy. State of grace in a friend’s apartment on a Sunday evening in May. Everything is going to be all right.
Olivia walks past her with a watering can. After a moment, Madeleine hears music. Strings—attenuated, patient. Baroque strands like hair drawn through a comb, untangling the market sounds outside. She follows the music to the front room. Olivia is on the rickety balcony watering the plants.
Madeleine joins her. Olivia turns to her.
“No,” says Madeleine, “it would be like kissing my sister.”
“You don’t have a sister.”
Olivia’s secret identity is revealed in the kiss. The amazing transformation works in both directions: she turns back into Madeleine’s friend when they are talking. Colleague, critical, argumentative. They go inside. They kiss against the wall outside Olivia’s bedroom. They stay standing for quite a while, in deference to Madeleine’s desire to avoid a “rebound” relationship.
“We don’t have to have a relationship,” says Olivia, “we can just have sex.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No, but I think it’s better if we think of you as a swinging bachelor for the time being. You should date for a while.”
Madeleine sees herself in a Matt Helm apartment—remote-control bed and bar, shag rug. “I don’t think so,” she says.
Olivia leans, one shoulder against the wall, shirt open, devastatingly sensible underwear. The Maidenform Woman—you never know where she’ll turn up.
“‘Date,’” says Madeleine. “I don’t even like the word.”
“Okay, then we can just have sex. And be friends.”
“That’s called a relationship.”
Olivia kisses her again. “You’re not ready for a relationship.”
They lie down on the dreadful futon, field of lumps and crabgrass, and Olivia resumes her secret identity, pink-tinted titan.
“I’m actually in crisis,” says Madeleine, looking up into the most familiar, most radiant face—most amused too. “In pain. I’m on the brink of a nervous breakdown. How come I’m having such a good time?”
“Because you’re a happy person,” says Olivia. “That’s your guilty secret.”
Madeleine smiles. Closes her eyes, tastes sweet water. “You’re so sweet,” she says. You run so sweet and clear. She opens her eyes, keeps them open. “C’est pour toi.” Don’t talk. Take what you want.
In between, there is the guided tour of small scars. Have you ever noticed that many people have a tiny one over an eye? At the outer edge of brow, the bony orbit doing its job, taking the brunt of whatever was hurtling toward the eye—a branch, a ball, hockey stick, a paw—
“I got this playing badminton when I was nine,” says Olivia. “My mother put a butterfly Band-Aid on it and I felt really important.”
“Wounded in action,” says Madeleine.
“Where’d you get this?” She holds Madeleine’s left hand, palm up, tracing the lifeline and its pale shadow with her finger.
“Ci pa gran chouz,” says Madeleine. Olivia smiles but doesn’t ask what kind of French that is. “A knife did it.”
Olivia raises an eyebrow. “Presumably someone was holding it at the time.”
On guard! “Colleen.”
“Who was Colleen?”
“My best friend,” says Madeleine. Says her heart. “We became … seurs de san.”
Olivia hesitates, then, “Blood sisters?”
Madeleine nods. “When I was nine. Colleen Froelich.” Pellegrim. The name arrives from the back of her mind, dusty but intact.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have a sister out there somewhere.”
Olivia smells like sand and salt, a tang of sweat and Chanel. Old-fashioned feminine. Skilfully juxtaposed with the pink hair and multiple earrings.
The aroma of smoked sardines floats in. Olivia joins Madeleine at the window, chin on the sill. On the next balcony over, small silvery bodies hang pegged like socks to the clothesline. Olivia calls, “Avelino! Hey, Avelino!”
A stocky, charred-looking man in car-greasy overalls steps onto the sardine balcony and squints in their direction.
“Toss me one, pal,” calls Olivia.
Pal.
Avelino plucks two fish from the line, turns to her, rehearses a toss, then releases them. Madeleine ducks. Olivia catches one fish, the other lands on the floor. “Obrigado!”
They eat off a ratty bamboo placemat on the futon, with bread and olives and the rest of the bad wine.
Being lovers with Olivia is like wrapping the present and tying on the bow after you have been enjoying it for years. Backwards, perfect. Everyone should fall in love with a friend.
“Why did your parents call you ‘Olivia’?”
A loaf of bread, a smoked sardine and thou.
“My father loved Shakespeare and my mother loved olives.”
Here is love’s guilty secret: it doesn’t hurt. It has been right in front of her.
ASSEYE DE TI RAPPELI
“‘If I don’t take this child away with me,’ thought Alice, ‘they’re sure to kill it in a day or two; wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?’”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
IN MY DREAM, I am travelling through woods at night. The vegetation is very green despite the darkness. Leaves and branches swish past with the intimate indoor clarity of movie sound. Rex is walking beside me, I can hear the crackle of his paws through the undergrowth, smell his breath, meaty and warm, feel his fur. I know the trees are watching. There is a level of dread but I realize it’s part of the ordinary condition of dogs and trees. I think to myself, dogs and trees are very brave. We come to a clearing. A canopy of mist—no, light—over a child lying on the grass. A girl in a blue dress. Rex looks up at me. His face so kind and concerned. Expectant too. I recognize the child. It’s me. The grass around her begins to bend and flatten. I wake up, terrified.
“What is it?” asks Nina.
“The blue dress,” says Madeleine, and weeps.
Blue dress is one of those details that come alive only when they are released into speech. Like the princess in the glass coffin. Open the lid, remove the apple from her mouth, release the word into air. Watch it reunite with its companions, form clusters of meaning.
Blue dress might have remained preserved under glass, like the exhibits in a museum case—hollow eggs, pinned moths. Mute about meadows and nests and the warm hides of deer who bend to drink from a stream in springtime. Showing, but not telling.
The blue dress was Claire’s, of course—Madeleine knows that, never forgot it—but it’s surprising how information can lie quietly dispersed for a lifetime. She has never forgotten what happened in the classroom after three, but she has remained immune to its meaning. It has lain dormant in its cocoon of silence.
“What about the blue dress, Madeleine?”
“It was hers.”
“Whose?”
This immunity to meaning is not amnesia, it is craftier and harder to “snap out of.” Because you are awake and sane. There was no tornado, no looking glass or rabbit hole. There is just a room at the top of your mind with a lot of stuff that never got put away. Like toys that lie inert, waiting for midnight.
“Claire.??
? The word is a small cry, a bird escaping her throat.
“What about Claire, Madeleine?”
She hears a moan, it has come from her but reminds her of someone else…. “She was murdered?” In her voice she hears the interrogative inflection of a child, cadence of bewilderment and fear, whose fault is it? Mine?
“I know,” says Nina. “I’m so sorry.”
“She was strangled?” She begins to rock.
“Madeleine?” says Nina gently.
Madeleine looks up and takes the box of tissues from Nina’s outstretched hand. “I’m sorry.”
… Reminds her of Grace, voice veering, eyes unmoored and swerving. Like a trapped dog.
“Why are you sorry?”
“I don’t know,” she sobs.
Grace Novotny. Why does Madeleine remember the names of kids from grade four when she can’t remember the names of people she bonded with six weeks ago on a film set? Marjorie Nolan, Grace Novotny, Joyce Nutt, Diane Vogel. The following little girls….“I testified at the trial.”
She tells about Ricky’s alibi, the air force man who waved but never came forward. She tells about her lie, and how she reversed it on the stand. About how her father revealed to her the secret of how to recognize the right thing. It was simple: the right thing would always be the hardest.
“Poor little thing,” says Nina.
Madeleine stops rocking and allows her eyes to rest on the painting of the bleached skull, relieved to have told the story, and is rewarded with a realization: “I think I still feel a lot of guilt about Ricky.” Once the words are out, she recognizes them as stunningly self-evident. “I guess I’m an open book to you, eh?”
“Perhaps, but I can only read one page at a time.”
“Oh wow, was that, like, profound or something?”
Nina waits. Madeleine fiddles with the rake in the miniature sandbox, feeling very small. “Nina … what if I get better and … I’m not funny any more? What if I can’t work? What if I have to go back to school and become a lawyer or a pharmacist or something?”
Nina holds the pink stone in the palm of her hand, gently weighing it, and says, “When did you first want to be a comedian?”
“Oh, when I was about, like … I was five or something. I stood on a kitchen chair and told jokes.”
“When did your friend die?”
“We were—she was nine.”
Nina says, “So you were funny before that happened.”
Madeleine bites her lip, nods.
“Comedy is your gift,” says Nina. “The other things … the pain. Your father’s illness, your brother. And Claire and … all the things I don’t know about—those are all, at best, grist. At worst, they make you want to go off the road. And that’s not really funny.”
Madeleine longs to thank Nina for this, but she can’t speak. Like a dog, she will take this treat away to eat later, in private. “See you next week.”
In a second-hand clothing store in the market, while shopping for a new old Hawaiian shirt, Madeleine sees Claire. In the next instant she corrects herself; that child couldn’t possibly be Claire, Claire is my age, she wouldn’t look anything like that now. In the next instant she corrects herself—Claire is dead. Let’s not think about what she looks like now.
She is out doing normal Saturday afternoon stuff, unaware that a layer has advanced from the back of her mind to the front, like a slide in a kid’s View-Master. The newly promoted layer is taking a turn filtering everything she sees, and distributing the information to the various lobes and neural nets that deal with face recognition, emotion, smell, memory. The layer is dated, however. It doesn’t get out much. It hasn’t been used since 1963. Like software, it needs to be upgraded.
She glimpses a dog out the corner of her eye—Rex. She looks again, it’s a beagle. Besides, Rex must be long dead by now. Good boy. Such a good Rex. It happens all day, breaking in this rookie layer of mind. Thus Madeleine sees a kid squinting through the smoke of a cigarette, leaning delinquent against the convenience store at College and Augusta, and says, Colleen.
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” asks Nina.
“I’m sorry I—I feel so sorry for my parents.” She puts her face in her hands.
“Why?”
Plucking several tissues: “Well. That was their little girl. They didn’t know what was happening to her. They loved her.” She blows her nose.
“What about you, Madeleine?”
“I can see him, you know? I’m standing there, and he’s got his hand up, you know? Up my dress. It’s like their little girl came home to them all smudged and broken and they never knew it. They still treated her … as though she was precious.” Sobbing, throat aching, she is beyond sarcasm. “My mother picked out those pretty dresses, and he touched them.”
“You sound as though you feel … it was your parents who were violated.”
Madeleine nods. This makes sense after all.
“What about you, Madeleine?”
She looks up. “What do you mean?”
Nina looks so kind, Madeleine feels a little worried.
“If you could go back to that classroom now,” asks Nina, “what would you do?”
“I can’t change what happened.”
“That’s true.”
“I would”—sorrow comes like sighs, gusts of rain, no longer falling but blowing across fields, dirt roads—“I would say, ‘It’s okay, I’m here,’ and … I would watch.”
“Watch?”
Madeleine nods, tears rolling down. Mum, Dad. Watch me. “’Cause I can’t change it. But at least, if I watched it, she wouldn’t have to be alone.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Madeleine. Me.”
Nina passes her a glass of water.
“Did you ever tell anyone what happened?”
Madeleine sips, shakes her head. “I kinda danced around it, you know? I didn’t know….”
“What didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t know it hurt….” Madeleine cries into her hands. “I didn’t know it hurt so much.” She is raining, raining. She feels the box of tissues arrive in her lap.
After a minute, Nina says, “You’ve been alone with this.”
Madeleine nods.
We think of “witness” as a passive role, but it’s not, it can be terribly difficult. That’s why we say “to bear witness.” Because it can be so painful. Watch me.
“What would happen if you told your parents now?”
Madeleine stops weeping. “Oh I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“My dad’s not well, I might—it could … kill him.” She blows her nose.
“What about your mother?”
“I don’t know…. What if she—?” Madeleine groans because here comes the sorrow again. “I don’t want her to comfort me.”
“Why not?”
“Because she hates what I am.”
Nina waits.
“That’s not fair, she loves me. I just don’t know what she’d do with the information.”
Nina waits.
“She’d—she’ll say, ‘So that’s why you’re the way you are.’” Something so precious and individual, put down to a crime, an obscenity…. No.
Nina says, “If surviving sexual abuse were a recipe for homosexuality, the world would be a much gayer place.”
Madeleine smiles. “I’m all better now,” she says.
“Glad to hear it.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Not for a second.”
She dreams again of too much light. Too green grass. Legs so heavy she can barely walk, thighs like wet cement, pressed down to earth by yellow light.
ABRACADABRA
“You know,” he added very gravely, “it’s one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle, to get one’s head cut off.”
Tweedledee, Through the Looking-Glass
MADELEINE BUYS TWO AVOCADOS fo
r Olivia and, on her way past the butcher shop in Kensington Market, catches a glimpse of the clock between stripped rabbits hanging in the window; a handprinted sign beneath them announces, “Fresh Hairs.” She has a date with Christine for “some closure” in forty minutes—enough time to do a little writing.
While she’s sitting outside at a guano-festooned table, making notes on a napkin, the ass of a big grey suit passes inches from her face. “Pardon,” says the puddingy voice, like the cartoon hippo making his way down the row in the movie theatre. Restaurants and theatres: the only public contexts in which it is perfectly acceptable to have the ass of a stranger grazing your nose. Madeleine leans back to give the man room. It’s Mr. March. Her stomach plummets. He has kids, a son and daughter. Foiled again, doc—Mr. March would be sixty-something by now, he would be … her hands go cold on the wrought-iron table, she gets the point. He would be sixty—maybe seventy-something. He has continued through time, just like Colleen and Madeleine and the clock in the butcher shop and the rabbits on their way to the pot. He is not a ghost in a classroom, playing out the same eternal scene. He has been teaching for the past twenty-three years. He may still be teaching. He is still out there.
She gets up and leaves. Goes to Olivia’s apartment, finds the key under the brick, enters and calls the police.
She is referred to various departments within the OPP, and finally reaches someone who takes down her story of sexual abuse—“It wasn’t just me, he had a group of us—” and promises to get back to her.
What else is right in front of her that she can’t see?
Various roommates begin to arrive. Someone starts playing the banjo. Of course they don’t mind if she hangs out. She curls up at the end of the heavenly collapsing couch, under a blanket that smells like years of laundry, and waits for Olivia.
Rape.
It’s embarrassing to find out that you are like other people. Even if half of them are celebrities. Especially if half of them are celebrities. It can happen to anyone. I am not special.