Ellen in Pieces Page 16

  7

  IT’S ALL YOUR MOTHER’S FAULT

  Back in fifth grade at Rayburn Elementary in North Vancouver, Mimi had felt her first cruel stirrings of love. They were for Mr. Clark—lanky of limb, hair tucked girlishly behind his ears, the same navy blazer every day with a chalk line across his butt from leaning against the board ledge. Not during class, but whenever they happened to pass each other in the hall, Mr. Clark would sing out, “Che gelida manina!” Though Mimi had no clue what it meant, it sounded beautiful ringing off the walls, almost as beautiful as “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” by Bryan Adams, though not quite.

  Another thing she remembered. How Mr. Clark brought in a mechanical model of the solar system and set it up on his desk.

  “An orrery,” her counsellor Kevin said seven years later when she was being treated for her interesting life. Kevin was Mr. Clark’s opposite—blocky, his shaved head parenthesized by large ears. She hated him for saying “orrery,” the way she hated him a minute ago for saying, “La Bohème?” As though that could possibly compute for a seventeen-year-old.

  “That’s what it’s called. You turn the crank and the planets move?”

  She made teeny-mouth. Outside the window, the Red Riding Hood woods pressed in around the rehab centre.

  “Sorry,” Kevin said. “I’ll be good.”

  Mimi waited a full three minutes, waited until he stirred in his chair. It was Ellen who had named teeny-mouth and revealed its effectiveness. “I just want to grab you by the face when you do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make that teeny-mouth.”

  Mimi hadn’t even known she was!

  She didn’t actually want the session with Kevin to end; she was her own favourite subject back then. Just before he gave up on her, she relaxed her mouth.

  “How did you even get this job?”

  He laughed. “You were saying?”

  Back at Rayburn Elementary, Mr. Clark asked who wanted to help work the orrery. Though every hand shot up, he naturally picked Mimi to walk the long aisle between the desks and stand by his side at the front of the room. She only reached his blue-blazered chest, though, to Mimi, their height difference was irrelevant.

  The gears started stiffly, but once the two of them got going, Mr. Clark’s moist hand over hers, they really flew. Faster and faster, the nine planets Tilt-A-Whirled around the bright orange ball of the sun. Before the astonished class, Mimi and Mr. Clark made time. That was what it amounted to, this dizzying choreography, the earth pirouetting on its axis, reeling through its orbit: days, months, year after year. She was ten, she was seventeen, she was twenty-seven and still trying so very hard not to have an interesting life.

  EVENTUALLY Mimi escaped—not rehab, but her family. Or more to the point, Ellen. Ellen who blamed Mimi for everything that had gone wrong in her own life.

  Mimi headed for Toronto, where she rented the first place she looked at, an apartment in a house on Davenport Road with an old yellow one-speed stashed on the porch. The landlord said she was welcome to use the bike. The previous tenant was unlikely to return for it, having gone off to join a convent.

  The apartment smelled funny. Mothbally nun’s habit, Mimi thought. Nevertheless, she stayed for the two years that she worked at Future Bakery. When she left that job for BioLife on the Danforth, she moved across town to a brick co-op. It was a sublet, thankfully; she wasn’t expected to be co-operative. All that time she’d been writing long frustrated e-mails to Ellen about not dancing and not being able to work up the nerve to audition, and receiving not-very-helpful e-mails back.

  Then Georgia, Mimi’s childhood dance teacher and Ellen’s good friend, set up an audition. But this only meant that when Mimi was invited into the company—semi-professional, no big deal—it felt like a favour to Georgia. Mimi ended up making teeny-mouth all the time. Sarcastic e-mails flowed out of her. The bloody commute to Scarborough, how the show was stupid, a musical comedy about nuns. Nuns are following me everywhere, she wrote. She was still riding around on the old yellow bike from the first apartment.

  One morning she woke swollen and immobilized. Get out of bed? How? She was on the phone so fast to Ellen, who, of course, didn’t believe a word she said.

  From: emcginty61@shaw.ca

  Sweetheart,

  Please don’t hang up on me. I’m only trying to help. Go to a doctor. Get a referral for physio. Can you skip rehearsals for a few weeks?

  Mom

  From: mimiredshoes@gmail.com

  DON’T YOU GET IT????? I AM IN PAIN!!!!!!

  “DON’T touch it!” she shrieked.

  The doctor cocked a skeptical eyebrow that her flowered hijab seemed to neutralize. “You have to show me. I have to know there’s really something wrong.”

  “Of course there’s really something wrong! I can’t bend my leg! It hurts like hell!”

  “Hop up.” The doctor patted the table, making the paper crackle.

  “I can’t.”

  “Then pull your pant leg over your knee.”

  Mimi did and the doctor said, “Okay. I see what you mean.” She knelt on the floor and gently prodded the tender grapefruit of Mimi’s joint, causing her to wince.

  Rest. Elevation. Ice.

  “Can you give me the name of a physio?”

  “That’s all you want. A physiotherapist?”

  “Yes,” Mimi said.

  The doctor wrote down a name and Mimi took the torn-off sheet and turned to go.

  “And the pain?” the doctor asked.

  The scarf bowed over the pad again. Mimi accepted the prescription, folded it in half, and limped out without saying thanks. Yet she was tingling all over and the pain in her leg had temporarily vanished. Just from a word written on a piece of paper.

  “IT gives me powers,” she’d told bald, sticky-out-eared Kevin, all those years ago in his office in the woods.

  “How so?”

  “It makes the pain go away. That’s what it’s for, right?”

  “If you use it correctly. If you don’t, it causes more pain. Pain for everyone in your life.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Mimi said. “It gives me powers.”

  SHE quit rehearsals. After a week Sebastian, the director, called. “I’m only phoning you, honey, because Georgia e-mailed and asked me to. She says you hurt yourself. Did you hurt yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a nice tone of voice to use on someone who’s phoning out of concern.”

  “You’re concerned about Georgia, not me.”

  “Correct. But she’s concerned about you. And you’re lucky in that. You’re a very lucky girl. Georgia is one of the kind souls of this world.”

  “I’m twenty-seven.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m not a girl.”

  “You act twelve. If you want to help out until your leg gets better, come. But you have to commit and be responsible. You have to fix your broken attitude. Are you coming back?”

  Mimi hung up.

  She couldn’t ride the yellow bike now, had to take the streetcar to work. Boarding, she placed her right foot on the first step and straightened the leg to bring the unbendable left one up beside it. And again. The driver stared, then looked away. Mimi made teeny-mouth as she dropped in the fare.

  On Broadview, they passed an old brick church that previewed its sermons on a sign out front. That day it was about counting the hairs on your head. She would remember the quote later because for much of the ride she puzzled over whether this was even possible when there were something like a hundred thousand strands on the average human head. She’d read that somewhere.

  At BioLife they tried to accommodate her injury. They let her sit on a stool behind the register. The earnest, long-skirted manager recommended glucosamine and fish oil capsules; she reminded Mimi of her employee discount. Mimi tucked the bottles under the counter. The next afternoon they were gone, reshelved, and Mimi knew the jig was up. How could she work there
if she didn’t believe in the healing power of Nature?

  For Mimi, there was really only one thing that worked.

  “DID you ask for it?” Ellen said on the phone, her voice tight with panic. No, probably anger.

  “She offered it to me.”

  To Mimi’s surprise, Ellen started pleading. Back when Mimi was using, Ellen had only pleaded as a last resort. She was the adult, Mimi the child. But now they were even.

  “Don’t take it, sweetheart. Don’t give in.”

  “Why not? I can’t dance. Every time I try to get back onstage, I hurt myself. Oh, and I’m quitting my job. They’re giving me the stink eye because I wouldn’t buy their forty-dollar supplements.”

  In the long, ensuing silence, Mimi thought she could hear her mother writhe.

  Secretarial (Etobicoke, ON)

  Reply to: job-5cjjq-2236343801@craigslist.org

  Filing and organizing for retiree. 416-688-1532 $10/hr

  Way over on the other side of the city in the opposite direction of Scarborough. Wherever Mimi needed to go, it would be far.

  THE first thing she saw coming out of the subway station into the heat was the TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE sign on the litter bins out front, the clear plastic wrap that had swathed the lids already torn away. The bins erupted greasy takeout cartons and swollen diapers.

  After a ten-minute limp up a long, mansioned street, she arrived at Mr. D’Huet’s all sweaty. The house looked vaguely Shakespearean except for the Cadillac in the driveway with a pugged front grill. She rang the bell. Eventually he answered, a shirtless old man with wild, flossy hair.

  “Ah!” he said.

  “I saw your ad. On Craigslist? I got a text back right away.”

  His fingers disappeared inside his white mat of chest hair and his face, open a moment ago in surprise, took on a conflicted aspect. Mimi had hacked out a bob the night before with manicure scissors and troubled herself into something secretarial; she was buttoned to her chin so her tattoo wouldn’t show. Not making teeny-mouth was killing her.

  “Come in then,” he said, gesturing toward a chandeliered dining room stacked with cardboard boxes. Boxes on the floor, on the table, on the brocade seats of all the chairs. In another room a phone was ringing.

  Mimi hobbled through the cardboard obstacle course, glancing back at Mr. D’Huet, not so mobile himself, using the furniture as crutches. He motioned for her to carry on through a door that led to a bright, unclean kitchen. By then whoever was phoning had given up.

  There were boxes everywhere here, too, and a girl with butterscotch hair and heavy bangs sitting at the table evaluating Mimi through mascara-clotted eyes. Some relation, Mimi thought, a granddaughter or a great-niece, yet vaguely familiar.

  “Sit down,” the old man said.

  “Take off your shirt,” the granddaughter deadpanned.

  Mimi did a double take and the girl giggled. Mr. D’Huet missed the quip. He introduced himself, then the girl. Glenna.

  “And you are?”

  “Mimi.”

  Only when she’d pulled her resumé from her bag and slid it across the table to Mr. D’Huet did Mimi realize this sooty-eyed Glenna had actually come for the job too. Because there already was a resumé on the table. Glenna unslouched herself so she could better read the exaggerated facts Mimi had bulleted on hers. She grinned, and the collusion Mimi saw on her rival’s face spooked and offended her. Mimi placed Glenna then, not by the grin with its childish gaps, but the zeros in her eyes. Not Glenna per se. Her type.

  After that, Mimi avoided all contact with those ciphered eyes.

  The old man donned a pair of smeared glasses to consider the two documents. Even before he’d finished reading, the phone on the wall started ringing again. He looked at it in desperation, cuing Glenna, who sprang out of her seat to answer it. Until then Mimi had assumed no contest between her and a girl who was soaring before 10 a.m.

  “If the job’s already taken, I’ll go,” Mimi said.

  Mr. D’Huet blinked through the smears. He covered her hand with his. “But there’s so much to do.”

  “It’s taken.” Glenna hung up. “So how about I turn the ringer off?”

  Mr. D’Huet had never heard of Craigslist. He didn’t even know what Mimi had meant by texting. His son had placed the ad, then left town on business. He wanted the boxes dealt with before he returned at the end of the week.

  Some of them were decades old, filled with brittle articles pressed in yellowed folders. Various passions had absorbed Mr. D’Huet at various times, most recently the life-giving properties of peanut butter that had saved him after the devastating loss of his wife three years before. Also the D’Huet family tree, regimental beer steins, and astronomy. He’d retained every warranty certificate for every appliance he’d ever owned, every airline ticket and boarding pass for every flight he’d taken. One box was for Christmas cards, one for completed crossword puzzles, and many were dedicated to his son, Brent—report cards, artwork, certificates of merit. Forty years of his wife’s sewing patterns.

  Glenna and Mimi were supposed to sort through everything, cull the important from the absurd and discard the latter. Mr. D’Huet gave this order himself, passed on from his son, but in practice he made it difficult to carry out. When Mimi limped into the living room seeking permission to chuck a folder of articles about the reinstatement of Pluto as a planet, Mr. D’Huet’s sympathetic expression, brought on by her awkward gait, converted to alarm. But it was so interesting! And this was the secret to a long and happy life—to be interested. And to eat peanut butter.

  At the end of the day he paid them in cash, though little had been accomplished, certainly nothing in the living room, where Glenna had perched on the couch next to Mr. D’Huet squeezing her wrists between her knees and prodding him to tell her more and more about his beer steins.

  They left Mr. D’Huet’s together. From the corner of Mimi’s eye Glenna looked on the scrawny side of sixteen, though was probably twenty, like the girls Mimi had hung with ten years ago in Vancouver, ageless within a range, able to project innocence or sophistication, depending on their purposes. Mimi had got in deep with them, shared and shared alike, crushed the pills together and took turns licking the spoon.

  Eyes like that little Orphan girl in the cartoon.

  Glenna said, “Easy, hey? I bet he’s a nudist. He just puts on pants for company.” She fished for lip gloss in her bag. “He’s diabetic.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Wow, she can talk.” Glenna bumped against Mimi chummily. “I saw the stuff in his bathroom.”

  All Mimi had seen was a container on the kitchen counter among the bread heels and the peanut butter jars. Seven small lidded compartments, one for each day of the week. Through the semi-transparent plastic, the ghosts of different coloured pills.

  She had yet to fill the prescription the hijab doctor had given her. Instead she’d tucked it in an envelope, sealed it, then closed it in a patterned soap box, an Ellen gift. She’d tied a string around the box, knotted it twice, and buried it in a drawer. Now all she had to do to feel its charge was draw alongside the dresser.

  “There’s some good stuff in one of the upstairs bathrooms,” Glenna told her. “I should have taken it. Oh, well. Tomorrow.”

  What outraged Mimi was that this girl she didn’t even know, this Glenna, imagined she, Mimi, would want to know about the good stuff. Mimi had lived inside her abstention, tested it, and won—she had a prescription!—yet she was still, all these years later, sweating some pheromone the zero-eyed sniffed out. The same thing had happened at Future Bakery, so she’d left.

  “I love these jobs with old people. Their bathroom cupboards are, like, stuffed. They don’t even know what’s in there half the time.”

  “So this is what you do? Steal from old people?”

  “I don’t take anything they’d miss. This is a great gig. Usually I have to wipe their asses. Is your leg real or fake?”

  Mimi didn’
t reply.

  “You live over near the Danforth, right?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I read it on your resumé. Notice how there isn’t any garbage around here? Rich people drive their garbage to Muskoka. In their Beemers. Or they come over to Parkdale and dump it.”

  But there was garbage, right where Mimi stopped, in front of the subway station, the teeming contents of the bins fermenting in the precocious June heat. She pretended she wasn’t going home by subway, because Glenna was. “Are you going back?”

  “To Mr. D’Huet’s?” Glenna said. “Aren’t you?”

  “That depends if you are or not.”

  “For sure I’ll go, then,” Glenna said. “Maybe we’ll have some fun, hey?”

  Sweetheart,

  This is just a little something for that crummy commute when you’re back rehearsing. The extra thing is because Georgia says to build your leg up with walking. Nothing strenuous. Enjoy.

  Love, Mom

  P.S. I hear there’s a garbage strike out there. Ugh!

  Mimi tossed the card aside on the bed where she was icing her knee. She already had an iPod. Typical Ellen with her memory issues. Especially annoying was her self-serving habit of blanking on everything bad—Mr. Clark, for example.

  Back in rehab, during their family sessions, Ellen’s constant tactic had been to deny, deny, deny. Poor Kevin would press his prayer hands to his lips to keep himself from interrupting her. (Or maybe he was praying. Pseudo-godliness suffused the place, from the New Age music piped into the post-and-beam lobby, to the whispered talk about giving yourself over to a higher power.)

  Once Mimi had said, “I can count on one hand the times I felt loved as a child.”

  “How, sweetheart?” Ellen had asked in a tremulous voice.

  “I felt loved when I had lice.”

  Everyone recoiled, Ellen and Kevin, Mimi’s younger sister Yolanda, huddled in the corner weeping behind her glasses.