Ellen in Pieces Read online

  The technician glanced in the file. “Your doctor phoned in for an ultrasound. And a biopsy.”

  “A biopsy?”

  In obedient bewilderment, Ellen set down the basket and removed the gown. She reclined on her side in the gloom, exactly as she had in the too-bright sunshine in her loft with Matt the week before. The technician was Chinese, her hands a man’s. An earlier generation might have called her “strapping.”

  Ellen cast down her eyes and saw it, seemingly separate from her body: her breast. The same breast Matt had playfully given voice to, that the technician was swabbing with an alcohol pad, preparing to administer the freezing. Syringe packages lay on the nearby tray.

  Ellen closed her eyes. “Ouch,” she said.

  She went numb with the shock of it. All of her floating to the ceiling, looking down, the way near-death experiences are narrated. She saw her own forehead furrow: Don’t think that word. Death. Then a doctor and an intern entered and Ellen settled back into herself. Smiles and introductions, gel slathered on the insensate breast. The doctor wore pearls, Ellen noticed.

  The ultrasound wand was a mere pressure, their subdued discussion jargon-filled. The doctor seemed to be explaining the procedure to the intern. Ellen could hardly understand a word. In and out of the white-coated huddle, biopsy instruments were passed.

  “Okay!” the doctor sang, peeling off her gloves. An overhead light came on and the doctor and intern left. The technician fixed a Band-Aid to Ellen’s breast.

  Ellen asked her, “So I’m okay?”

  “No—”

  A cry tore free from Ellen, startling them both.

  Immediately the technician apologized. “My English,” she said, wringing her big hands. What she’d meant was that she couldn’t comment. The sample had to go to the lab, the ultrasound to the radiologist. Ellen’s doctor would pass along the results.

  “When?” Ellen asked.

  “Seven to ten days.”

  ELLEN couldn’t shake the first feeling, the blindsiding, at hearing that “No.” Because her own mother had died of breast cancer. And look what happened? Ellen was left completely bereft, without love and guidance. Not quite true, she knew now, but that was how she’d felt back then. When she was growing up, people always said Ellen looked like her mother. The two of them had the same long nose and auburn hair. Well, Ellen had quite a lot of grey now, which her mother hadn’t lived long enough to earn.

  Tears flooded Ellen’s eyes.

  In the clinic elevator she kept her forearm pressed against her sore right breast. The man riding down with her noticed and was made uncomfortable. That or there was something terrible written on her face. Her mother’s death, the tears hastily wiped away. He stared fixedly at the floor numbers counting down.

  The doors opened on a scrum of people who then cleaved their ranks for Ellen. They parted, all of them looking at her, looking hard, like they knew something about her that she didn’t know herself. They seemed burdened with this knowledge because, uncharacteristically for a crowd, instead of charging right into the elevator, they waited for Ellen to step out.

  I’m okay?

  No.

  How had she got to the clinic? She couldn’t remember. Then she did. She’d driven. She pushed through the side door that led to the parking lot, stopping a second time because she didn’t, in fact, own a car anymore. She’d sold it after she moved to the studio.

  (How odd the way her thoughts were being released, one at a time, like old-fashioned bingo balls.)

  She’d borrowed the car from Tilda. Ellen waited for the release of the information she needed next: make, colour.

  Things flowed a little better once she found the car. She set the basket on the hood and dug with shaking hands for the keys. It was the correct car, she already knew because she recognized Tilda’s things in the back seat. A bag of fleece for one of her knitting projects, the steering-wheel club that Ellen had neglected to use.

  Driving was automatic.

  At the pay station the attendant also avoided looking at her. Ellen stopped on the other side of the gate, flipped down the visor, and checked her reflection in the mirror. Nothing.

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  Only when she got home and knocked on Tilda’s door to return the car keys did she figure it out. When Tilda reached for her. “Oh, Ellen. What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Ellen said, glancing down to see what Tilda saw. The blue hospital gown and the red plastic basket still hanging on her arm, her clothing in it, her D-cup bra on top of everything.

  THAT same day, Day One, Ellen phoned Carol, hopping mad.

  “I did say biopsy, didn’t I?” Carol said. “Maybe I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m so worried now.”

  “Don’t be. Not until those tests come back.”

  “My mother had breast cancer.”

  “I’m aware that, Ellen. So excuse me for saying this, but mightn’t that have prompted you to have the occasional mammogram?”

  Mean! Even as Ellen shouted down the line, “That’s what I thought I was going in for!” she felt buoyed up by relief.

  DAY Two, Matt came over. Ellen’s sign said SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED, but she opened for him when he knocked.

  “Just so you know, I don’t feel like it today.”

  For the first time in the ten months of their affair, she’d told him no.

  I’m okay?

  No.

  She assumed he would leave and come back another time, but he settled on the couch beside Tony, who woke long enough to wag. Ellen returned to her dentist’s chair and the Bon Appétit she’d accidentally brought home in the shopping basket. She didn’t mind Matt being there. His carefree, shaggy presence was not unlike Tony’s.

  “How’s your daughter?” he asked.

  “What?” Ellen said. “Oh, fine.”

  A week ago his indifference to Mimi had been Ellen’s main irritation. Already the waiting had altered everything.

  “You seem sort of upset. Are you mad at me?”

  Ellen looked at him, her sweet, rutting lad with his hair in his eyes. (Not hers, actually.) His chin was turned away, eyes squinted, as though in preparation for a blow. “Mad at you? No.”

  “What’s wrong, then?”

  Until the results came back and she knew she was okay, she couldn’t speak about the biopsy. Instead she brought up Mimi’s crazy scheme, which had been temporarily eclipsed.

  “It’s so like her to do this. When she was little her father and I used to joke that we got what we’d deserved.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Giving her such a self-referential name.” Ellen demonstrated those long-ago tantrums, thumping her chest. “Me! Me!”

  Matt laughed.

  “A woman walking alone on the highway? After dark?”

  “Someone could pick her up,” Matt said.

  “Exactly. Some trucker.”

  “Or run her down.”

  Ellen didn’t confide her dread of Mimi actually arriving. At her current pace she would be bearing down on Ellen by late fall, the oppressive, grown-up incarnation of that long-ago child Ellen could sometimes only subdue by holding her small, thrashing body tight against her own.

  “She’ll be okay,” Matt said, and Ellen sighed.

  He pointed to the Bon Appétit. “What’re you cooking?”

  Ellen got out of the chair, tossed him the magazine. “You choose.”

  The night before, she’d fallen asleep easily, but had woken several hours later to struggle and sweat till dawn. Her mother had been sitting at the foot of her bed, watching her. Ellen was sure of it. Not her father, who died so much more recently. Only her mother. Why?

  Now the terrible night was all but written on the face Ellen saw in the bathroom mirror. She washed and dried it. She touched the breast again, noticeably more swollen today, inflamed around the biopsy incision.

  Matt chose Korean. Beef barbecue, shrimp and green onion pancakes, field greens.
“We’ll have to go to the store,” Ellen said.

  The red plastic basket was already waiting by the door. They walked down to Fourth Avenue, past the blue-awninged café on the corner. It used to be just one of many cafés on Fourth Avenue before taking on the importance of a landmark—the four walls where Ellen and Matt had met—the smell of coffee wafting out, so erotic. Just a café again now; she barely noted it on the edges of her preoccupation.

  They crossed the street, walked a block of irrelevant boutiques.

  “I was supposed to go to Korea,” Matt said.

  “What?”

  “Last year. I had a job lined up teaching English. Then she was accepted in the PhD program.”

  “Nicole?” Ellen asked.

  Matt looked around, as though Ellen’s shameless uttering of Nicole’s name might cause her to appear. Theoretically, she could. She lived in the neighbourhood with Matt. Because of her, Ellen and Matt had never ventured farther than Ellen’s overgrown, semi-private backyard. This, too, was different.

  “So I came here instead. To the city of a thousand language schools. Except half of them have closed.”

  “A PhD,” Ellen said, shaking herself. She had to reimagine the girlfriend, her rival, hysterical stuffer of clothes in the oven. A girl sitting primly on the toilet, wincing as she tried to pee. A PhD candidate.

  “She was mad when I couldn’t get a job. Now she’s mad that I’m working in yard maintenance.”

  “Are you sure that’s why she’s mad?” Ellen asked.

  They walked into Whole Foods, Matt carrying the basket, Ellen the magazine folded open to the recipes. Everything glowed mockingly with good health. The other shoppers, too, their baskets abrim with supplements and kale. Ellen would start eating better. She’d sign up for yoga just as soon as she knew she was okay. Go and see Celine for herbs.

  At the Meats section, Matt lifted into the basket the steaks she pointed to. He glanced nervously around again. He and Nicole probably shopped here. Maybe Nicole and Ellen had waited in the same line with neither of them realizing their point of commonality.

  “Do you want to separate?” Ellen asked.

  “I’m thinking about it,” Matt said.

  “I’ll meet you at the checkout then.”

  Ellen moved along to Seafood, sniffing at some pretty nubs of shrimp. Matt followed. “I thought you meant from Nicole! Separate from Nicole!”

  Both of them stricken with confusion in Whole Foods, staring at each other. His complaining monologues over these last few weeks began replaying in Ellen’s head.

  “You’re not asking me to help you decide, are you? Because that would be—” She struggled for something other than cruel. Couldn’t he see how hurtful this was? Because if he left Nicole to her gallons of cranberry cocktail and her PhD? He’d go and get himself some other girl his age while he kept on visiting Ellen.

  “Inappropriate. Life advice, I can do. Love advice, no. Excuse me?”

  She nabbed someone in a Whole Foods shirt, too aggressively by the way he recoiled. “Do you have Asian pears?”

  He gestured to the bins of fruit, pinching his lips the way Mimi always did.

  “Go,” she told Matt, with a curt, dispatching wave. “And green onions and ginger.”

  “I’m not asking you to help me decide,” he told her, walking away backward.

  She searched out the rest of the ingredients—sesame seeds, rice vinegar—before meeting up with Matt at the checkout, still angry.

  “I’ll take the life advice,” he said.

  His words and the rueful way he clutched the basket to his chest softened Ellen. “This one time? I’ll do love advice. Do you have any money?”

  He transferred the basket to one arm so he could pat his shorts pockets.

  “I mean in the bank.”

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “She pays for everything. She’s sick of it.”

  “How long have you been with her?”

  “Five years.”

  “Five years?” Ellen said. “Longer than I was married.”

  BACK home, Matt straddled a chair in the doorway of Ellen’s tiny kitchen. Tony was more in the way, underfoot from counter to fridge, sitting pretty as a meerkat when she sliced the steak, gulping down the raw shreds she indulged him with.

  Matt asked about Larry.

  “He’s a playwright.”

  She glanced at him to see if he wanted more. Why shouldn’t she talk about Larry, after all Matt had told her about Nicole? She puréed the pear, the garlic, the liquids in the food processor, dumped the concoction over the mound of steak strips waiting in the bowl.

  “He started as a playwright, then gave it up for TV. Now he’s bitter. Be true to your heart. There’s the life advice I promised. Anyway, we get along now.”

  “You’re friends?”

  Ellen shrugged. “We have children and grandchildren. And a history. That’s what I meant in the store. If a person stays in your life long enough, the kind of complaints you’ve been talking about? Or worse complaints? I won’t bore you with Larry’s atrocities. Suffice it to say there were many. Anyway, over time, these things don’t matter so much.”

  Matt looked doubtful.

  “It’s like money in the bank. Your attachment is the interest. It compounds. Do you understand?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I’m so bad with money.”

  She started on the salad dressing, grating ginger into the bowl. “One thing I’ll say about Larry. When he was around? Which he hardly ever was. But when he was actually with us? He was a wonderful father. During Mimi’s Troubles especially.”

  “What troubles?” Matt asked.

  Ellen always thought of that time in capitals, like a kind of civil war, which it was. “She tore her meniscus in dance class. After the surgery, she was in a lot of pain. I should’ve listened to my instincts, but they weren’t as loud as Mimi’s screams.”

  So she had allowed Mimi that prescription. And then the real pain began.

  “Mimi would phone doctors all over town impersonating me, giving her permission for the drug.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Sixteen. She stole. My friend Celine was over and Mimi plucked the credit card right out of her purse. She started running with this group of girls, meeting up downtown. They were feral. Once they swarmed a bus driver for the outrage of asking them to pay the fare.”

  “Whoa. You said a piece of work. I thought you meant, like, my sister.”

  “Then she stopped coming home at all. I caught up with her in someone’s basement, dragged her out by the hair. Dragged her all the way to rehab. But you never really get over something like that. Not after spending most of a year wondering where your daughter is and if she’s moved on to heroin and is paying for it giving blow jobs in some alley.”

  Matt cringed. “I’m sorry.”

  Ellen washed her hands. She looked over, saw he was sincerely appalled. It touched her.

  “Of course, Larry didn’t pay his share of rehab, claimed he couldn’t. But he did fly up to visit Mimi. And afterward, he took her to Paris. Just the two of them, for a week. He paid for that.”

  “Do you still love him?” Matt asked.

  “Larry? I wouldn’t use the word still.” Ellen took up the whisk. “It makes it sound like I’m besotted, which I’m not.” But she had been, for years and years. Besotted. “I guess I do.”

  Matt slumped. “Does he love you?”

  “I think so. In his substandard way.” She dipped her finger in the bowl and licked it, smiled.

  He said, “This is fucked, don’t you think? You love your ex-husband and he loves you, but you’re sleeping with me.”

  “I could say the same thing about you and Nicole.”

  He blushed, and it struck Ellen again how simple the world is for people under thirty, for whom love has barely been compromised by life. Love unopened, still in its shiny package.

  “Are you happy?” he asked. “I mean, despite all this
stuff with your daughter, are you happy with how things are?”

  “What a question! Ask me in a week.” She turned her back.

  “Why?”

  “Ask me that in a week too. Can you light the barbecue?”

  That morning she’d almost vomited. It had seemed that she wouldn’t be able to bear the wait. But when they finally sat down to eat, Ellen was surprised by the time. Several hours had passed and she was starving.

  “It’s good,” she said, lifting a wedge of the crispy shrimp pancake with the chopsticks, dipping it into the sauce. Sweet and sour, the edges lacy. The lettuce, too, had an intense, almost synesthetic flavour. It tasted green, this lettuce that she’d coaxed to life herself.

  “It’s fantastic,” Matt said.

  “Just think. If you’d gone to Korea? You would’ve eaten like this every night.”

  Matt said, “This is better.”

  SHE woke on Day Three blinking. There was the actual 6 a.m. light and there was the flash of clarity about how her days would go now until Carol called. Increasingly, dread. She would be made sicker and sicker with it. Stopping herself from Googling prognoses, which she had so far resisted—impossible. By the time Carol called, Ellen would be so convinced she had cancer, a fiercely metastasizing type that had already colonized her whole body, that Carol’s reprieve wouldn’t at first register. I’m okay? Ellen would repeat in the phone, dazed.

  And then it would be as if the terrible week and a half had never happened, except that she would be left with this wonderful post-scare gift, the kind of appreciation for life reserved for those whose mortality has been severely tested. Survivors of nautical disasters, people who miss planes that crash. A week from now everything would seem very, very beautiful and precious, like Ellen was living in a poem. The light splashing her face at 6 a.m. would not just feel like, it would be, molten gold. Fact and metaphor both. She would have it all.

  She could hardly wait.

  In the meantime, though, Tony had to be walked. She went out with him several times a day, somehow always ending up on the abandoned train tracks that ran from the Fraser River all the way to False Creek, cutting through Ellen’s neighbourhood in Kits. Community gardens had sprung up where the brambles weren’t too thick. Tony ambled along their edges, pissing on the basil.