Backing out of the convent’s too-narrow driveway Clément clipped the nuns’ Rose of Sharon bush as he usually did. At least no blossoms pressed themselves accusingly against his window. It was early December and bare branches scraped the glass. “Heard that,” said Georgette from the back seat.
“Sister Joan’s going to come after you with her spade,” said Odile, laughing, also from the back seat. She’d had a girlish giggle about a million years ago; now his wife’s laugh was a weak growl. “Sexy,” Clément called it.
He almost said so now, stopped himself because Georgette, long-widowed, didn’t like him “talking dirty.” She didn’t like knowing that he and Odile, her older sister, sometimes still got it on, as the kids called it. Things had to be just right for them: no arthritis business for her, no bad gas for him, no worrying calls from the kids, or bad news on TV, or a snowstorm. So much could come between people, but sometimes it was like old, yelping good times.
“Remind me to get Maddy to give me back my coral sweater and that book I lent her. She’ll start thinking they’re hers,” said Odile.
“What book?” Georgette asked.
“Oh, that one. You know.”
Clément heard the new vagueness again. “The one about near-death experiences,” he prompted.
People were still coming out of St. Mary’s: old mémés in dark wool coats and silk scarves cupped around crisp dos. He saw Benoit and Alexandrine, old friends, and gave them a salute. Benoit held up both arms, sent back the victory sign.
“That Benoit,” Clément said. “They don’t make them like that anymore.”
“Near-death experiences? I call those things near-death disasters,” said Georgette. “I swear if I see any of our dead relatives heading my way down some blue tunnel, I’m turning back right then and there.”
“And going where, chérie?” asked Clément, as he accelerated gradually. Odile had begun complaining lately: “You used to be such a smooth driver.”
“Well, not there,” said Georgette.
“This could be the one time where your indomitable will won’t count for much,” said Clément. As he turned onto East Street, he felt the tires of the Camry lose it for a second. First frost and already the roads were something you had to think about.
“I hate winter,” he said.
“Indominable…whatever. You and your big words,” Georgette said. “Why don’t you just call a spade a spade? I’m bossy.”
“No really, what are you going to say? ‘Sorry, can’t die right now, I’ve got a roast in the oven, stuff at the cleaners, and I need to find out what’s happening with Erica on All My Children’?”
“Oh, just shut up, You,” Georgette said.
“Yeah, just drive, You,” Odile said.
He was their driver. Every Sunday, after Father Bruce said mass, after holy communion — and this wasn’t like sex: snowstorm, sore back, September 11th, it was wine and bread, blood and body — the three would get back in the car, go pick up Maddy in Springfield, and head out. Sometimes they went looking for tag sales, though this was more Georgette’s and Clément’s thing, a competitive thing almost. Sometimes they’d just end up at the Friendly’s near Maddy for a late lunch of shrimp in a basket. Sometimes they just drove. Lately, though, there’d been changes. Lately things had turned a bit funny out Maddy’s way.
“Damn, I forgot the pyx again,” said Clément, feeling in his pocket for the small container.
“I wish you would just say darn,” said Odile. “Or shoot. Shoot is good.”
“It’s not like she really cares about communion or anything to do with religion anymore,” Georgette said. “Why can’t you get that? Maddy doesn’t care. She’s into other stuff, as she says, so why should we care? She probably doesn’t even know it’s Advent.”
“She’s my sister-in-law, too. I care about her,” said Clément, and then added less forcibly, “I care about her soul.”
“Well, just stop. It’s wearing you out,” said Georgette.
“What?” said Clément. “Who’s wearing what?”
“Forget it,” said Georgette. In the mirror Clement saw Georgette nudge Odile and tap her ear.
They were now safely on the highway, so he could relax a bit, especially since the highway guys had already spread a layer of sand. He felt more traction, more bite, under them as he sailed to the far left lane. He liked to speed, good safe speeding, when the girls weren’t paying attention.
“Look at that,” Odile said to Georgette. “Another Big Y. They’re building another Big Y out here.” He glanced at them through the mirror as they looked out Odile’s window. People still thought they were twins. Just eleven months apart, the same shade (Miss Clairol Catalina Gold) on their fine, permed curls, the same Deauville jaw (square, a bit bullying). And those same pale blue eyes.
“Teeny weeny bladder time, ” said Odile.
“We just got on the road,” said Georgette, but Clément was already signalling and moving right.
It was a new service station, or an old station under new ownership, they noticed when the women got out. “This used to be a Shell, didn’t it?” said Odile, brushing crumbs from her fur coat. Their maman had always packed saltines in little waxed paper bags in case one of the seven kids got carsick. Now Odile’s and Georgette’s granddaughters packed crackers for their little guys. “No, it was an Exxon,” insisted Georgette. “And an Esso before that.”
“That’s not what I remember,” said Odile.
Clément watched the sisters, arms linked because water had frozen around the pumps. If either slipped on the ice, they’d go down together. Georgette was probably right about its being an Exxon. Odile’s memory was…well, it wasn’t Alzheimer’s or anything, but it wasn’t like it had been. She’d always been so definite, so sure of things, like how to make the best pork and beef tourtière, how to serve communion, how to discipline a child. You didn’t argue with Odile when she was in her domain: home, church and everything in between. But now that she was in her leisure years — a term they all agreed was hilarious — she was growing uncertain.
While the attendant filled the gas tank, Clément paced, popped a Tums. The three of them would have to talk about Maddy sooner or later. But when the sisters got back in the car they were deep into their soaps. If Tad and Aidan and Boyd hadn’t locked Michael in a dumpster, would Michael really have raised a ruckus at Erica and Jack’s wedding? And who really is Greenlee’s father? And that mystery man, Juan-Pablo, isn’t he something, having romanced (Georgette’s word) not only Simone, but Mia and Kendall, too? They went back and forth from French to English, mostly French, their kind of French, a Beauce patois from the fifties, and he hadn’t the heart to interrupt them and bring them back to the other soap opera.
The SUV was the first thing they’d seen when they’d pulled up in front of Maddy’s last Sunday. It sat huge and silver in the driveway.
“Oops,” said Odile.
“You’d think she’d have some decency,” said Georgette, but she was already hurrying out of the car.
Clément had beat them both to the door. “Hi, you,” Maddy said when she opened it. She smelled good. Maddy always smelled good, and the same good, spraying on quantities of Emeraude for fifty years of mornings. Two-cheeked kisses, the old Quebec way, and then the other sisters were behind him and sniffing around like bloodhounds.
“Is he here?” asked Georgette. “You might have had him leave before us, you know.”
“Who?” asked Maddy, and she’d looked genuinely mystified, not like she had the usual something up her sleeve. She’d had her hair cut since the week before and maybe lightened, too, Clément noticed. She was wearing a smart little red pantsuit and low black boots.
Georgette motioned her thumb to the driveway. “Who is he this time, Madeleine?” And Maddy had laughed so long and so happily that the three had ended up grinning in the hallway with her. How bad could it be if she was this happy?
“I actually turned on Passions this week,” Odile was saying from the back seat now. They were back to English, probably not even aware they’d switched. Clément inched up the speedometer again, slipped into cruise control just as the back tires fishtailed a tad.
“Traitor!” said Georgette, then added, “OK, I surf now and then, too. Who’s doing what to whom?”
“I couldn’t figure out right away,” said Odile, looking up to see Clément’s amused eyes on hers and waving him off, “but it seems that when Luis came to search Mrs. Wallace’s house...”
“I remember her,” said Georgette.
“Well, he notices something strange about Beth because she forgot to strap on the bag of sugar she’s been using to pretend she’s pregnant.”
“No!” said Georgette.
“Who’s pretending to be president?” asked Clément.
“For the last time, would you please get your hearing checked?” said Georgette.
Last Sunday Clément had also forgotten to bring the pyx for Maddy. (Strictly speaking, you were only supposed to bring communion to someone infirm. But, Clément reasoned, that sort of fit in Maddy’s case.)
“He’s not just having senior moments, he’s having a senior decade,” Georgette said after Clément had apologized for forgetting the wafer.
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ve been saved,” Maddy had laughed. She’d sat them down in her sunroom, mixed everyone rum and Cokes. “We can take my new wheels to Friendly’s,” she said.
A year before, there had been a guy parked in the driveway, a guy named Larry, but he’d driven a 1988 Plymouth Voyager van, a real beater. Nice enough guy, though at fifty-five a bit young for Maddy who, like all of them, was either coming up on seventy or just nudged past it.
“What’s in it for him, do you think?” Georgette had asked on the way home one Sunday after the five of them had gone out for shrimp in a basket.
“I know what’s in it for her,” Odile had said. “She told me he has a big…basket,” And she’d let out one of her laugh-growls.
“Thanks,” Georgette had said. “I needed to know that.”
The snow was starting to pile up now, giving the road a pillowy, lopsided feel. Clément moved out of the passing lane, and the new furrows he had to cross caused the Camry to shimmy.
“Whoa!” said Odile.
“Let’s not kill ourselves,” Georgette said.
Surprised to find his hands shaking, Clément said, “Shouldn’t we talk about your sister?”
“She’s already gotten way too much attention in this family,” said Georgette.
Two months after he’d appeared, Larry and his Voyager were gone. But Maddy was soon hanging out with a new crowd. These friends greeted Odile, Clément and Georgette like long-lost family. “Clem, Clem, so good to see you! Maddy’s told us so much about you all.” Too-long hugs and too-tight handshakes and too many people standing too close and assuming too much. It was only when Maddy invited them to an official intro night that they’d seen all this earnest interest and down-home warmth for what it was: Amway. Maddy had toiled on the bottom rung of the pyramid for six months, long enough to drag every family member to an intro night and invest in a lifetime supply of biodegradeable cleaning products.
Then it was Hindu meditation with chanting tapes, incense and photos of a porky little Indian fellow in every corner of the house. Then this spring it was another man. This one, Pierre, was into cooking, really into it. Maddy was still in the throes of replacing her white appliances with brushed stainless steel and converting her kitchen from electric to gas, when the guy upped for L.A. to open a Cajun takeout.
This one hurt. When they’d taken her out for Sunday lunches late in the summer, Maddy had barely eaten. She laughed and cried at the wrong places in a conversation. If it hadn’t been for the money that Alain, Maddy’s second husband, had left her, she’d really be up shit creek now, they all agreed.
But it wasn’t the money that worried Clément, not fundamentally. He could only guess what worried Georgette — probably her year-younger sister getting too much sex and liking it a lot, or blowing all her money on a gigolo. Odile? These days Odile almost had to be reminded to worry. She’d turned into a laissez-faire kind of gal, lost her judgmental edge.
Which left him to do all the serious worrying. And what worried Clément the most — he could hardly say it out loud, though he’d tossed it in earlier when the two were ragging on him in the car — OK, here it was…was her soul. Not that Maddy was going to go straight to hell for her untethered tendencies in later life. It was just the idea that when the time came — and, at seventy, one had to finally admit that it was going to be sooner than later — one wished for a soul in a state of greater repose. That’s why the old rituals felt so precious now. Peace be with you. And also with you. A restless spirit at seventy seemed to Clément a sad, sad thing.
The car slipped onto another, bigger drift — where were those highway guys? This stuff was layering thick and fast — and both women yelled to him to watch it and maybe they should stop and call Maddy.
“No,” said Clément, knowing it would be more dangerous to try to turn around out here. He dreaded having to change lanes for any reason now. If they could just make it to the exit after this, he could ease off the ramp and slow-motion it on side streets to Maddy’s. When he thought his voice would come out sounding almost normal, he said, “OK, mesdames, what are we going to do about votre soeur?” Because after last week Clément had to admit that maybe Maddy needed some help.
As promised, she’d driven them in the big silver SUV, a Nissan Pathfinder, to Friendly’s, where she’d surprised them all by ordering two ice cream sundaes — hold the shrimp in a basket — and announcing that she’d just become a car saleswoman at Hal Houston’s Nissan dealership.
“Or car salesperson,” she said. “We’ve got to be PC, right? We are in the early zeroes.” She’d sat in her usual spot in their usual corner booth, beaming under her haircut, and meeting every one of their concerns and considerations with cheerful logic. Why should she sit around and wait for another man? Why shouldn’t she work if she was able? And why the hell not sell cars?
“Because you’ve never sold anything before?” Georgette asked.
“Because you’re sixty-nine?” Odile asked.
“Because you don’t know one thing about cars?” Clément asked as gently as he could.
As was his long habit, he kept a close watch on all three: referee, buffer, interpreter. Georgette did her usual hammering, with Odile throwing up her hands early on, saying, “Well, darling, it’s your life.”
There was a logic to it. The Nissan dealership was trying to get a bigger market share of their particular demographic. And what better person to appeal to senior drivers than a senior herself, especially one cruising around town in a silver Pathfinder, especially one with a nice wardrobe, expensive haircut and winning personality?
“How many older people do you actually see driving SUVs?” asked Georgette.
“See, that’s just it, the market’s wide open. It’s all opportunity out there!” said Maddy, and by then the others were too exhausted to remind her about all the opportunity she’d claimed in the past year and what it had done to her.
How had Maddy ended up so wide open, as she put it? Or so unstable, as Georgette put it? It depended on who you listened to. Odile said Maddy had lost her anchor when Alain died of congestive heart failure three years ago. She was one of those women who needed a man to keep her focused. And with two husbands dead and buried, who could blame her for being a bit scattered now? Georgette, though, said Maddy had always been up and down, a drama queen since age two and a glutton for attention. Not to mention, made of porcelain.
They’d just passed Exit 8, which meant the next one was hers. Clément began to edge the car a fraction to the right. But the snow was now so thick between lanes, the resistance under the tires so great, that he was forced back into the tracks he’d been following so doggedly. Changing lanes was going to take an aggressive turn of the wheel and flooring the accelerator. He checked the rear-view mirror — both women were looking out their windows, quiet for once. Clément sent up a prayer and then sent them, he hoped, into the next lane. For a moment it felt as if the car was in someone else’s hands. The women screamed as the slush from the highway, the snow from the sky, flew at them. But then, in a movement that felt more like a landing than a lane change, they were in the right lane, surprisingly steady, and still going forty miles an hour.
“Hey, You, what are you trying to prove?” said Odile.
“I think he wants to kill us and keep the insurance,” Georgette said. But they both sounded wonderfully relieved.
No one saw exactly what happened next as, signal clicking and flashing, they turned onto the off-ramp. But they all felt it. Clément sensed everything going out from under them…tires, road, earth. Georgette felt herself as light as a fleck of seafoam, heard Odile singing Clément’s name. Odile felt an arm thrust in front of her and thought, “This is what a whirlpool feels like.” In the front, Clément thought suddenly of Sister Joan’s Rose of Sharon bush, how purple the blossoms turned in July. A certain silver SUV popped into Georgette’s mind, and Odile cried, “Maman!” And still they moved through space, Clément’s head bouncing off the steering wheel, Odile pressing like a piece of paper to the right back door, Georgette looking up at the sunroof to see falling snow.
One of the paramedics punched in Maddy’s number on his cell — the number clear as a headline in Clément’s head. “Darling,” Clément said. “We can’t come today. We’ve had an accident. We can’t come. Do you understand?” And then Georgette had insisted on speaking, too. She was lying on the next stretcher after telling everyone, “Mon beau-frère est vraiment un bon chauffeur.” She kept on in French to Maddy, telling her she’d put out her arm to keep Odile from hitting the front seat. “Maman taught us to do that, remember?”
Odile wasn’t saying anything from her stretcher. “A bit of shock,” a young paramedic told Clément, who kept craning over to see how she was doing. His back hurt, his neck, too, but already they’d been told how incredibly lucky they were.
When the second ambulance failed to show up — “This is going to be a helluva day!” one paramedic said to another — they wheeled all three stretchers onto one ambulance. “Your own private tour bus,” one said.
“No more touring for me,” Georgette said. “Hey, You,” she called to Clément. “That’s it. No more Sunday drives out to Maddy’s. From now on, she wants to see us, she comes to us. What do you say to that, Odile?”
“OK,” said Odile. And the sound of that voice, his wife’s voice, made tears run from Clément’s eyes. They were speeding through the blizzard now, the road somehow solid beneath them.
“I mean really, she’s got her big SUV wheels now, right?” Georgette said. “She’s one; we’re three, right? I mean, how come we never saw that before? No more saving her soul, You. From now on, we’re watching our own asses.”
The paramedic closest to Clément looked down at him and smiled. “Happens to some people, the adrenalin. Can’t stop talking. I think she’s happy to be alive.”
His cellphone rang. “Your sister,” the paramedic said, putting the receiver next to Clément’s ear. “She must have done star-69.”
Clément listened for a long minute. “Me too, sweetie. Yes. Of course, I’ll tell them.” He handed the phone up to the paramedic.
“Well?” said Georgette.
“She was crying,” he said. “‘I love you all so much. Tell my sisters. Tell my sisters.’ She just kept saying that.”