Ellen in Pieces Read online

  “FIRST Matty. Then Matt-a-tat-tat. Which became Machine-Gun Matt. Machine-Gun Mutt. Doggy. Dogbone. Boner. Erection Man, or just E.M. Then, for some reason, Dr. Dog. Dr. Love. Loverboy.”

  “Loverboy?” Nicole said, still staring straight ahead. “Really?”

  He had made her come for this drive. “Clay Franks lived here.” Slowing, he stared at the house. Snow-blown driveway, its banks waist-high. Two-car garage. Vinyl siding. Amber glass on either side of the front door. Same as every other house.

  “A.k.a. Frankster. Frankenfurter. Weiner. Weenie. Teenie-Weenie. Then just Teenie, though the guy was, and probably still is, huge.”

  Nicole finally broke her silence. “It’s so sad about your mom. She’s much worse than last summer. She seems completely blind now.”

  “We got mad at him and put a bag of dog shit in his mailbox.”

  “Charming.”

  “Next door there? That was Tommy Gerken’s place. He tried to make Blake Wineman grab Teenie’s balls. ‘Grab them! Grab them!’ I guess he was gay, but we didn’t think of that. He was unbelievable on defence. Later he got called up from Juniors. Played two games for the Flyers. We all went over to Winey’s to watch.”

  He glanced over. Nicole seemed to be pouting now. She was wearing a tweed newsboy cap that left the tips of her ears exposed and a long muffler wrapped twice around her neck. She lifted her chin so he could see her mouth better.

  “What?” Matt said.

  “I don’t find this particularly interesting.”

  “I went shopping with you.”

  “When? You mean with my parents?”

  “The craft fair.”

  “Oh, the craft fair!” She crossed her arms over her chest and stared out the passenger window, right at Penny Barber’s house. Penny Barber—Barbie, Barbell, Barbarella—was the first girl Matt ever asked out. She said no.

  “What?” Matt said.

  “You’re just so weird around your family.”

  “Weird?”

  “I get the feeling you’re embarrassed by me.”

  “What?” He accelerated at the same time he slapped the wheel, like the car was a horse. “You’re embarrassed by me!”

  “I am not!”

  “‘Matt prefers Tim Hortons,’” he mocked.

  “What was I supposed to say? You stormed out of Starbucks.”

  “There was a huge line. I just went across the street where there wasn’t one. What’s the matter with that?”

  “Can you look at the road when you drive? This car belongs to my parents.”

  “Starbucks is overrated. And I hate”—he took his hands off the wheel to scratch air-quotes—”‘French-press’ coffee. It tastes like sludge. Your parents’ French press?” Hands up again for the quotes. “It’s made in China.”

  They drove in complete silence for several blocks, along the winter-locked streets of his banal childhood, the stomping ground of his appalling ordinariness, the inspiration for everything he would eventually not become. Not even come close to becoming. Nicole wouldn’t look at him, but finally she said, “I know you must be sad about your mom. I know because you gave her such a nice present.”

  THAT was what she was upset about. He didn’t realize it until the end of the day, not even when he found her crouching by the artificial tree peering inside the little wooden box.

  She said, “You bought this at the craft fair.”

  But before that there was Christmas dinner, Patty and Carl spelling each other off, treading a circle around the table with the bawling Hickey Machine. Matt had seen the kid’s face but once the whole day. Other than that, his strange tonsure was always turned toward them.

  Anne wouldn’t address Nicole directly, which Matt was beginning to wonder about. She must be mad, too, like Patty. She stabbed at her plate, hit china. A few times she actually pushed pieces of food onto the tines of her fork with her fingers, hunkering down, trying to be surreptitious. But everyone noticed. Everyone stared, it was so sad and bizarre. Nicole must be grossed out, Matt thought.

  Nicole was telling them about Hazelton, where she had researched her thesis. “Eagles everywhere. I got to interview the elders. I felt so privileged.”

  She wasn’t grossed out. Matt was grossed out.

  “What exactly are you studying again, dear?” Alden asked.

  “Case and agreement in Gitxsan. Gitxsan is the language they speak up there. I’m trying to figure out why there are these two very different sentence types with different agreement patterns.”

  “I have an agreement pattern,” Carl said. “I agree with everything Patty says.”

  “You had to go all that way? Why not pick up the phone?” Alden asked.

  “They can’t tell you. They don’t know. Just like you probably can’t explain why we say ‘thieves’ instead of ‘thiefs,’ for example.”

  “Do we?” Carl asked. “Thiefs. Thieves. Thiefs. Thieves.”

  Matt dreaded someone would use the word Indian. When they’d had this same conversation the night before, everyone said “First Nations.” Nicole’s parents had praised her to the skies for working to preserve a dying language, while Matt sat with the paper crown from the Christmas cracker on his head, a linguistic imperialist with a TESL certificate.

  Also, at Nicole’s they’d had trifle.

  NICOLE filled the hydration system while they were in the bathroom getting ready for bed. She squirted Matt and more water came out than expected and soaked his shirt.

  “What did you do that for?”

  He only had two shirts with him. The rest were back at Nicole’s parents’ place. He peeled off the wet one and, shoving the towels aside to make room, hung it over the rack.

  Nicole said, “It was just a joke. Lighten up. You’re the one who gave me a crappy present.”

  Ah, he thought, welling with tenderness. So that was it? She was jealous. Jealous of his mother, thank God. But how to explain? He couldn’t have given Nicole the pot. He wasn’t a complete cad.

  He folded her against his bare chest. She was taller than Ellen, but much slighter. There didn’t seem to be enough of her, while he could grab pieces of Ellen in his hands. These kisses were so different as well: tentative, regretful.

  “I wish we could sleep together,” Nicole said when they separated.

  “We’ll sleep together tomorrow night at your folks’ place.”

  “But I want to sleep with you tonight. I miss you. We sleep together in Vancouver. They know that. Why can’t we sleep together here?”

  “It’s just the way they are,” Matt said, digging out the toothpaste from her makeup bag.

  “Well, it’s silly.”

  “Sorry they’re so silly.”

  “Me too,” Nicole said, and something in Matt twisted.

  “Sorry my family isn’t hip, like yours,” he said. “Sorry they’re low-class.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You thought it.”

  “I never once thought it!”

  “Sorry you had to buy the plane tickets. Sorry I’m such a lousy boyfriend. Sorry I don’t feel like sleeping with you tonight.”

  She was behind him in the mirror, her eyes filling with tears. Then she wasn’t.

  THE basement bedroom was cold even in the Walmart sweater and Matt couldn’t sleep. He lay there thinking about his conversation after supper with Carl, the two of them on the back deck sharing a cigar, the double cloud of smoke and breath, while Patty and Nicole cleaned up.

  Matt had been fully accoutred: parka, hat, gloves. He stomped his boots as he smoked. He-man Carl wore a hoodie.

  “There’s this glut of ESL teachers in Vancouver. Half the schools shut down after 9/11. I’m on all the sub lists but, so far, nobody’s calling.”

  “So what’re you doing with yourself every day?” Carl asked, manipulating his jaw to expel the smoke in perfect rings of diminishing size.

  Matt, who had consumed a lot of beer by then, was going to tell him. About the followin
g game and how, surprise surprise, it had brought him to Ellen. He and Carl didn’t normally exchange intimacies, but Matt remembered that he’d married Patty in a Catholic church. Carl might understand about guilt and the warped things it made you say and do. But in that long pause, while Matt’s dulled brain sorted the pros and cons of a confession, Carl changed the subject.

  “I’m first in my hockey pool,” he said.

  Nicole was in Matt’s old room upstairs. He should go to her and apologize, slip into bed with her, sneak down in the morning.

  He considered phoning Winey or Teenie, but according to the clock it was two in the morning. “Hey, it’s me, Loverboy. Dr. Dog. E.M. What’s happening, man? Long time no see. Yeah, I’m living in Vancouver now. Yeah. Fuckin’ ay, man.”

  He could have looked them up any of the hundred times he’d been home during university, but he never had.

  When he finally got out of bed, it was because he remembered the Cosmo on the coffee table and the tantalizing information it contained. To know his sexual destiny, or even get a hint about where this business with Ellen was heading, would help him sleep. If not, there were the models, all of them super stacked.

  The Christmas tree had been turned off but the lamp next to the couch was on. He didn’t see her until she spoke.

  “Matthias?”

  But he’d been quiet! Absolutely soundless. So how did she know? How could she not? She’d given birth to him, nursed him. (He’d probably suckled her the way the Hickey Machine suckled Patty, like a workaholic leech.)

  All day Matt had been avoiding his mother. He was afraid of her blindness. Now he stood before her, mortified. She knew he’d come upstairs for the magazine. She knew he intended to jerk off with it. She knew everything: when he was in the room, when he felt ashamed.

  He felt ashamed.

  “Here I am,” he said.

  She patted the place next to her; he came and sat beside her on the couch. His gift to her was in her lap, he saw now, out of the wooden box. She fumbled for the light, snapping it off and plunging Matt into darkness with her, but only for a second. When the light came back on, an intricate pattern sprang out from the ceiling and walls, kaleidoscopic, as she turned the pot.

  “Can you see it?” she asked.

  She was holding the pot over the bulb. Above and all around them, its negative spaces filled with light. Lacy, sensual, vaguely Arabic, or like some arcane script no one knew how to decode, the shapes frolicked and wrote themselves.

  “Can you see it?” Matt asked.

  “That’s all I see. Lights and darks.”

  He tipped back his head to watch. Anne found his hand, found and squeezed it. Matt squeezed back.

  This was what the pot was for.

  IN the Convention Centre, the crowd pressed around them but they might as well have been alone. He and Ellen stared at one another, each surprised the other existed outside the universe of Ellen’s bedroom loft. That was what Matt was thinking anyway. Finally, he picked up one of the pots, only to discover it was mainly made of air. Afraid it would crumble in his hand, he set it down.

  “Take it,” she said.

  “No. I want to buy it. How much is it?”

  She pointed to the small clear sticker on the box. One hundred and fifty dollars. He must have winced because, again, she invited him to take it. Then she looked away. With her face turned, he saw her crease again.

  Ellen asked, “Who’s it for?”

  He hadn’t got that far in his mind. He was only being gallant. But she misunderstood his hesitation and quickly scanned the crowd. It ruined everything, this acknowledgment that other people existed, one in particular who was unknowingly involved and very, very close to being hurt.

  Ellen fished under the table for the Visa machine. She took his credit card, impersonally, made the imprint and handed it to him to sign.

  Matt signed. He watched her pack the pot in the little wooden box, nestle it in the straw, slide closed the lid. She put the box in a string-handled bag and passed it to him.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Ellen said, “Oh, come on.”

  FAR ahead, Nicole perused some knit goods. Over the top of the partition she could see on display in the next booth pictures jigsawed from inlaid wood. When her eye fell on one of an eagle, she was back in Hazelton again, walking by the river with a tiny, wiry elder in a trucker’s cap, trying to ply out words. She got the feeling he was only pretending not to understand her questions, so she stopped asking, and when she did the river’s palaver came to the fore. Stones grated underfoot. And something else, a sound like a very angry person cleaning glass. The elder pointed to a tree.

  An eagle? Really? Its call was so high-pitched and girlish.

  She heard her name and turned. Matt was weaving through the crowd. In the weeks since her return, she’d grown used to the silent language of his resentment. All her beautiful memories, like the one she’d just been enjoying, tainted with his mood. But here he was, coming toward her now, shining all over. The old Matt.

  She smiled and dangled two pairs of booties. “For the baby. Which ones do you like?”

  Then she noticed the bag hanging on his arm and, curious, said, “You bought something. Can I see it?”

  Matt said no, which pleased her more than anything.

  6

  YOUR DOG MAKES ME SMILE

  So in her forty-eighth year Ellen took up with a man-boy in his twenties who wore shorts in any weather. She couldn’t believe her luck.

  At first Matt had hours (all day in fact; he was unemployed) to lie around with Ellen, who, living off her savings, was queen of her own life. Queen Ellen spread out in the loft on the hot twisted sheets, inhaling the tang of their exertions, while Matt scampered naked down the ladder to do her bidding. He brought her a glass of water, a wad of tissues to wipe the milty puddle off her belly, a cheese plate from the fridge.

  One afternoon he fell back, curls fanning across the pillow. “I need to ask you something really personal. I’ve never asked anyone before. I need the honest truth. Please.”

  “What?” Ellen said. “What?”

  “Is my cock too big?”

  This went on for three glorious weeks that autumn while even the weather seemed to announce the return of love. The horse-chestnut trees burst into flame, the Japanese maples dripped red, burgundy, carnelian. It didn’t rain.

  And then it did. Lashings of it, the wind tearing off the last celebratory leaves. The trees stood around, undressed and shivering, clotted with crows’ nests.

  Now Matt brought his cell phone up to the loft and left it turned on. Ellen pretended she didn’t see it tossed onto the clothes he’d so urgently shed, but there it lay, connecting him to someone he’d failed to mention.

  She pulled the sheet up to cover her body. Too much information.

  Let the suffering begin.

  ACROSS the street from the studio was a corner store. This time of year Christmas cacti, poinsettia, and little bonsai pines crowded the board-and-cinderblock shelves out front. Plants, cigarettes, and lottery tickets were the store’s main business. Ellen, worried the place would go under, occasionally scooted across to buy something she didn’t need. Another plant to ignore to death. A can of corn. There was little else. The Frosted Flakes looked archeological.

  She ran across in sweats and an old loose T-shirt scabbed with drying flecks of clay. A dog was shivering in a newspaper-lined box beside the till. She couldn’t tell its breed. The black kind with a goatee and plaintive eyes.

  “Where did it come from?” she asked.

  The owner of the store said, “My brother. Driving from Chilliwack? He saw it on the road. You want it?”

  “I just came in for some corn.” Ellen set the can down, leaving fingerprints in the dust on top. “Maybe you should take it to the SPCA.”

  He waved his arms back and forth like an aircraft marshal directing a 747 with batons. “Too busy!”

  “Oh. Do you want me to take it for y
ou?”

  Ellen tucked the niblets in the box with the small black dog and carried both across the street. Halfway, the dog reached up and licked her face.

  “None of that now,” she said.

  Hardly anyone got Ellen at first, but this dog did. He beat his feathery tail against the side of the box and smiled. When she shifted the cardboard carrier onto one hip to open the door, he leapt right down, dashing circles around the studio, sniffing everything—Ellen’s workbench where she carved her pots, her dentist’s chair. He jumped onto the couch and tossed the cushions aside with his snout. Then he did what Ellen always did when visiting someone for the first time. He flounced over to the shelf and read the spines of all her books.

  MATT didn’t come that day, or call. Normally this meant long unfocused hours tied up in knots of hope, then, when Ellen could no longer deny he was a no-show, her dejected release from these self-wound coils. How pathetic to be waiting all day for a man as young as her daughters. Tear-stained, humiliated, she fashioned little monsters out of clay, then flattened them.

  Today she put aside these pitiful recreations. She had to get a dog to the SPCA. To do that, she needed a collar and leash. One thing led to another and, come evening, the dog was still there sniffing Ellen’s books.

  She too loved the smell of old paperbacks, that particular, melancholy odour. It only followed then that the dog should have a literary name. (She had to call him something before she turned him in.) Tintin? Tintin was the boy, not the dog. What was the dog’s name? She Googled it. Snowy.

  Snowy would not do.

  Chekhov’s stories were right there on the shelf, perfumed by dust and sadness. The moment Ellen settled in the dentist’s chair with the book, the dog sprang onto the footrest, gingerly walked the double plank of her outstretched legs, then curled into a polite ball and fell asleep. A dog in the lap of a lady reading “Lady with a Lapdog.”

  In the story the dog appears in the opening paragraph, trotting along the Yalta promenade. No name, just a breed. A white Pomeranian. (This is ironic, for Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov thinks of the women he seduces as of the lower breed.) How many times had Ellen read this story of a passing affair that swells to a grand passion? Many, many times, and every time reminded her of her first reading at seventeen or eighteen, when she’d sobbed. With each rereading, the sob returned, a ghost in her chest, lodged too deeply now to release, her own heartaches grown around it. She’d been living with that impacted sob ever since. Catharsis interruptus.