Ellen in Pieces Read online

  A decade ago, when Larry and Ellen had already been apart—separated, then divorced—for seven years, Larry phoned.

  Normally, Ellen called him. She called so that his daughters could have contact with their father. She would pass the receiver over to them, or suggest he invite them down to L.A. Even though Ellen felt humiliated when Mrs. Silver II answered, she called. Estranged from her own family and suffering because of it, she swallowed hard and dialled. She dialled for the sake of her girls.

  Now Larry phoned out of the blue and asked to come back. His marriage to Amy was over. Some new woman he’d been besotted with had dumped him at the same time the television series he wrote for was cancelled. Raw with these failures, Larry wanted to be with his children.

  And Ellen allowed it. Watching him get out of the cab a few days later, seeing his overgrown black curls, his wrinkled chinos and sad pouched eyes, the way he set down his suitcases and checked every pocket of his pants and jacket to come up with the fare, drawing out a wadded bill here, a bit of change there, she immediately forgave him. Forgave and swelled with a physical ache to have him inside her body and life again.

  And Larry forgave Ellen, though he had much less to forgive.

  Ellen thought they were happy, like during those two crazy, hippy years on Cordova Island living off the grid. Larry had seemed happy the nine months he lived with them in North Vancouver. They had great sex. He and the girls formed an instant mutual adoration society. He even made their lunches—better lunches than Ellen’s, cheese melts with raisin faces, Rice Krispies squares that weren’t square but stamped out with cookie cutters.

  Before Larry’s return, the girls used to walk themselves to school. Ellen was working, the only mother who didn’t escort her kids, and for her negligence she received a wide range of disapproving looks, from askance all the way to deploring. But now Mimi and Yo had a father to walk them and pick them up. In between, Larry fixed up the house and wrote his play and pulled the phone out of Ellen’s working hand and fucked her in the afternoon. He stood at the stove stirring Rice Krispies into the marshmallow goop, muttering snatches of dialogue. He’d written plays before getting sucked into television. Ellen told him he didn’t need the money anymore. Ellen Silver Promotions was thriving by then so he could be true to his art again.

  “You make me puke,” she told him when he announced he was going back. “To Amy?”

  “To L.A.” He rose from the bed and left her in it, closing the door softly with a hand behind his back.

  Within twenty-four hours, he was packed and out of their lives.

  At the time, Ellen had been hired to promote an American novelist on the Vancouver leg of his West Coast book tour. She got the girls up, dumped their cereal in and around their bowls.

  “When’s Daddy coming back?” they asked. Again, again, again!

  They couldn’t understand his inconstancy. Mimi was too young the first time to remember he’d abandoned her before. Yolanda had been unborn.

  Ellen lost it. “Daddy isn’t coming back! Daddy’s never coming back! Daddy used up all his chances!”

  That went over well. It was one of the few mornings she walked them to school. Well, she dragged them, sobbing, Ellen in tears herself, saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I have to be downtown in twenty minutes. Believe me, I would like nothing better than to stay home with you and cry.”

  She met the American novelist in the restaurant of the Hyatt to review his schedule. Interviews, bookstore signings, then the grand finale, the Reading. He asked straight out, “Did you love my book?”

  “I did,” Ellen said. She’d only read the beginning and the end and some of the middle bits. “It’s brilliant.” It was middling, actually, but you don’t feed two children on honesty. “Before I forget.” She slid her business card across the table to him. “Anytime you need to, call.”

  He looked at it. “‘ESP.’ Cute.”

  Ellen sighed. “Silver isn’t even my name anymore. I’m back to McGinty. I’m divorced.”

  How it seared, that admission. Why had she told him? She looked down at the coffee spoon on her saucer and contemplated gouging out her eyes with it. I’m not crying, she would tell the surprised novelist, I’m not. It’s just that, when you blind yourself? Your eyes water.

  And so the American novelist’s reply didn’t register at first. Ellen was on autopilot, not only contemplating self-harm but miserable for having shouted at the girls that morning. All through the meeting she’d kept picturing herself hauling them, wailing and unbrushed, into the school.

  What he’d said was “Good.”

  Now she looked up and really saw him, the antithesis of Larry. Tall, even when seated. Also full of himself, though that was more a point of commonality. He would have been gorgeous but for the blond hair ebbing off the promontory of his forehead. But who was Ellen to be critical? Parts of her were too prominent. Fortunately, she was sitting on two of them.

  “Do you have ESP?” the novelist asked.

  The business was done, his breakfast consumed, their coffee cups thrice refilled. Ellen relaxed. “Let me see.” She closed her eyes and touched her temples. Under the table, the novelist placed a foot over hers, implying not pressure but closeness. A shudder ran through her, half-thrill, half-warning. She felt very slightly ill. “The bill will come,” she intoned, “and you will offer to pay it. But I will insist and you will succumb.”

  “Succumb?”

  The waiter appeared. Just before she closed her eyes, Ellen had noticed him in her peripheral vision making his way across the room. The novelist threw back his head and let go a weird, high-pitched laugh, almost a seal’s bark.

  “I’ll get it,” he said before the waiter even opened his mouth.

  “I insist,” Ellen said, reaching for her purse.

  The novelist laid the back of his hand across his Gibraltar forehead, behind which all his novels were plotted—his conquests, too, no doubt. “Oh, I succumb!”

  Had his publicist in San Francisco succumbed? In Seattle? At eleven-thirty in the morning? She shouldn’t do it. Why did she always do it? To spite Larry? He wouldn’t care. To prove to herself that she could collect lovers too? That she was still desirable even though Larry didn’t want her? Or just to keep opening her wound? She felt so wretched afterward. She always felt so lousy.

  “We could go upstairs. But I warn you, I’ll want to hear more about my book.”

  “I could read it out loud,” Ellen said.

  “While I do delicious things to you.”

  The waiter, who had vanished with her credit card, returned with it on a tray just in time to hear the novelist in mid-seduction. He quickly stepped away. Ellen, blushing, leaned over the bill, dizzy with embarrassment and desire. Desire could be so wonderfully distracting. Her desolation was lifting, even as she calculated the tip. Fifteen percent, plus five for discretion.

  Click.

  Something dropped onto the bill, right onto the blank line she was staring at. A crumb, or a speck of dirt.

  She hoped.

  Not alive. Not a living thing.

  Yes. It definitely moved, was probably on its back, kicking its imperceptible legs in the invisible air. You needed the magnifying glass that came in the nit kit to actually see their legs.

  In an instant her whole scalp was crawling. She glanced at the novelist to see if he’d noticed—no. He was signing her copy of his book. Ellen swept the tray onto the restaurant floor, oopsed and picked it up.

  “Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

  She barely reached the bathroom in time. Vomited, rinsed her mouth in the sink, scratched her whole head hard enough to draw blood. With the comb, she made herself presentable again.

  Back at the table, she told him. “Sorry. Suddenly, I’m not feeling so hot.”

  ON her way home, she stopped at the drugstore for delousing shampoo and a pregnancy test. Now she lay in the tub in the middle of the day, suds dripping down her shoulders, over her breasts. It to
ok ten minutes to kill the lice. Then you had to comb out the corpses and the eggs.

  Deep inside her, a factory was churning out cells. Of course she would have to have it, the assembled product. A sister or a brother to her girls. A living thing.

  Except Larry would accuse her of doing it on purpose. To lure him back. She didn’t have to tell him. She could claim it wasn’t his. Thank God she hadn’t slept with the American novelist or she’d have him to contend with too.

  But how could she have another baby on her own? She wouldn’t be able to work for months. Larry had no money. She didn’t qualify for Employment Insurance. She’d have to sell the house. And, as if the judgmental looks she received at the girls’ school weren’t bad enough, imagine her waddling in, pregnant, with no obvious father around? She didn’t care for her own sake, but it wasn’t fair that Mimi and Yolanda should be stigmatized.

  That had to be ten minutes. Eyes watering, stomach twisting from the smell, she slid down, just her face and knees out of the water, legs bent like she was already in the stirrups.

  It was her only option. Then she’d start volunteering on Hot Dog Day.

  AFTER Yolanda’s collapse in the car on the way home from seeing Dr. Carol, Ellen sat her down in the living room for a proper talk. She brought her a piece of bread, a glass of water. Yo, cross-legged on the couch, swollen from crying, tore off the crusts, rolled some of the soft part into a pill, and washed it down.

  “Come on,” Ellen said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Yolanda lifted her face, which was so pretty, yet always naked and defenceless. Only the glasses protected her. “I thought I should know what it was like.”

  “What?” Ellen asked. “Being pregnant?”

  “No. Having sex.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t use a condom. After how I brought you up?”

  “It broke.”

  Then the inevitable complications. She liked him. Especially after the sex. “I read about it,” Yolanda said. “Your body releases a hormone during sex to make you bond.”

  “Maybe he likes you too,” Ellen said.

  “Men don’t have that hormone.”

  “Ah,” said Ellen. “That explains a lot.”

  Yolanda rolled herself another bread pill. “Also, I hardly know him.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “I’ve never had any kind of operation. It would be another experience. Except, I have … I have these feelings.” Her glasses misted over again.

  “That’s hormones too,” Ellen said.

  “I already love it,” Yolanda announced.

  Ellen remembered her glass of wine on the kitchen counter. When she came back, Yolanda’s UBC T-shirt was hiked up, her hand on her belly, which looked more sunken than anything. Ellen set the glass down and light moved through the wine and shone on a magazine, the opposite of a shadow, a burning spot so fierce it seemed the magazine would ignite. Why can’t we feel that purely? she wondered. Why was there always mishmash and contradiction? She wasn’t a sentimental person. She really believed that Yolanda should have the abortion and get on with her life. Yet when Ellen was in the same predicament, she hadn’t been able to do it either. The hospital had called with the date of her procedure and she’d cancelled it in a gush of tears.

  “What should I do, Mom?” Yolanda pleaded. “What would you do?”

  Ellen took a sip of wine. “No comment.”

  “I know it will be hard. Raising a kid on my own.”

  “Try raising two,” Ellen said.

  “I know. I know how hard it was for you, Mom.”

  Ellen stiffened defensively. “Do you?”

  “You seemed so angry.”

  “I was angry!” Ellen said, causing Yolanda to shrink back. “You would’ve been angry too. You don’t know the half of it. And your sister. Your sister! Have your baby! If it turns out like your sister, then you’ll see!”

  “I wasn’t accusing you of anything,” Yolanda whimpered. “I was trying to be …” She started to rise off the couch. “Sympathetic.”

  Abruptly she bolted, a hand clapped over her mouth. Ellen set down her glass and went after her.

  Yolanda made it as far as the bathtub, where she disgorged the thirteen bananas and half a slice of bread that she’d eaten that day. Ellen sat on the edge of the tub and stared down at the beige sludge. It looked remarkably like baby food.

  She wet the cloth, wrung it out, wiped her daughter’s face. “I’m sorry. I was yelling.”

  “You were always yelling,” Yolanda said without meeting Ellen’s eye.

  “Always?”

  “At Mimi. Not me. That didn’t make it any better.”

  “Look at me,” Ellen said, and she lifted Yolanda’s atrocious glasses off her face. “I shouldn’t have said what I said. What I should have said was this. I wouldn’t have changed anything about you. Not for the world. You were, are, perfect. And if you have that baby? It’ll be perfect too.”

  A buttinsky. Where did that come from? Probably Esther, Larry’s mother, Ellen’s former mother-in-law, an odious person, yet charmingly stuffed with Yiddish bons mots. “I’m curious,” Ellen said in the car, in her own defence, to no one. What mother wouldn’t want to get a gog at the boy who had deflowered her daughter? Who had impregnated her?

  She found parking just off campus, then asked directions to the liquor store. Right next door was a café. “You call it Tall,” Ellen told the girl behind the counter, “but it’s actually Short. It’s Small, yet you call it Tall.”

  The girl sighed.

  “I’m just saying,” Ellen muttered. “Some people have it figured out.”

  She took her coffee outside and, at one of the metal tables, pretended to read Pride and Prejudice, holding it upside down for fun. He wasn’t there. Yolanda had said he always was. After a few minutes she turned the book the right way up and that was it. Completely absorbed by the Bennet family’s delightful problems, she forgot the stakeout.

  In the middle of Chapter Three, a sound like a train clacking over the rails returned her to her proper task. Him for sure, pirouetting to a stop. The skateboard took flight, its coloured underside flashing. He caught it in one hand. Tan dreadlocks, dirty jeans barely clinging to his hips, a bad cough. His name, Yolanda had said, was Sean.

  From behind Pride and Prejudice, Ellen watched. He rooted through his backpack. Out came crocheted juggling balls, a cigar box. To warm up, he flipped two balls in each hand and coughed. A university liquor store was not the most lucrative place to ply his trade. While his coloured balls orbited, frat boys went in and out for beer, ignoring him. “Hi!” he kept saying. “Hi!” The cough sounded like a chair being pushed out, scraping the floor.

  Occasionally he’d cajole someone into tossing him a set of keys, or an apple, for a few turns with the balls. Or he’d look at his watch without altering his rhythm. “These balls have been in the air for thirteen minutes. Only your generous donation can keep them going.”

  Yolanda must have donated. Ellen pictured her scooting past, hurling change in the Romeo y Julieta box. The bus stop where she always waited was just across the street. When you see a person every day, you start to feel connected. You start to worry when they’re not there, or when their cough won’t go away.

  Ellen gave him a twenty, which was stupid, because he watched it flutter down on the mosaic of pennies and dimes in the bottom of the box, then looked at her, amazed. And smiled. Very boyishly. All the while the balls kept circling. Blushing, her cover blown, Ellen slunk off.

  “Hey, awesome! Thanks! Good karma to you, lady! That lady just gave me twenty. I didn’t put it in myself—”

  He broke off hacking.

  LATER that night, delivering rotten bananas to Yolanda at her desk, Ellen noticed she was highlighting every word in What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

  So, she thought. So.

  She made no comment.

  But then the feelings jackbooted in and they were not at all
what Ellen had expected. Almost faint with them, she took to her bed with a cold cloth over her forehead and a box of tissues balanced on her stomach. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even relieved that Yolanda had finally made up her mind.

  Back then—ten years ago, when Ellen had been pregnant for the third time by Larry—she’d been all business. She’d had no time to feel anything but nausea. She’d taken on extra contracts, written grant proposals for arts organizations too, just to earn enough money to get them through the year after the baby was born.

  Ironically, it made her an even worse mother. Where once she’d rationed the TV—thirty minutes a day, no more—now it babysat Mimi and Yo. Or she farmed them out shamelessly to Georgia and picked them up late. No time to patiently comb every strand. Off to her hairdresser they went, the girls bawling in side-by-side chairs while Tony, making a face, lopped off their infested ponytails and tossed them on the floor.

  “Remember?” he told Ellen. “I did that to you when you came over here from that”—he flapped his little hands—”that island where you never bathed.”

  Even lopped, Mimi’s and Yo’s hair still grazed their indignant shoulders. Not good enough. “Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby,” Ellen told him. “As short as that.”

  Afterward Mimi had said, “Mama? I’ll hate you forever and ever now.”

  Little did Ellen know she would hear those words so often they would eventually have no effect, but that was the first time and they felt like a wrecking ball to the chest. Back then, in the sunshiny world of childhood, where forgiveness was dispensed like lollipops, she made everything right just by taking them to get their ears pierced.

  At twelve weeks, Carol sent Ellen for an ultrasound. Ellen shuddered, remembering how the technician had buried the transducer so deep into Ellen’s fat that it hurt. She suggested a transvaginal scan instead. For this Ellen had to clamber off the table, dress, and go empty her bladder, which she’d painstakingly filled on Carol’s orders.

  “Well, that was a relief,” she told the technician after she had dumped all those cups of tea. “This? Not so much.” She meant being penetrated with a cold, K-Y Jelly–slathered rod. What could you do at a time like this but crack a joke or fake an orgasm? Except the technician seemed humourless.