Ellen in Pieces Read online

  Somewhere, Mimi was doing the same thing. Walking. Whenever Ellen thought of it, she picked up her pace to stay ahead. Then her mother came to mind and Ellen wondered, am I also a daughter walking toward her mother?

  During one of these walks Ellen remembered her previous night’s dream. Mimi had been a toddler again, so blond she was almost white-haired. Which she had been in real life, deceivingly angelic at two. The dream child screamed in Ellen’s arms. She flailed so that Ellen had to turn her face away to avoid a blow from a miniature fist, which actually hurt quite a bit.

  Eventually, Mimi worked out her demon and fell limp. Ellen carried her to the nursery. Not the real one—Mimi never had one—but an idealized nursery from a magazine with a frieze of white bunnies on parade. As soon as Ellen noticed the bunnies, actual rabbits appeared, hopping around underfoot. Somehow she made it to the crib without tripping, which was a feat because more and more bunnies infiltrated the room, a colony of them.

  Black bunnies.

  Ellen laid Mimi down, careful not to wake her. When she straightened, she saw that Mimi’s hair had changed to her grown-up colour and that she had melanized to the colour of pitch. Also, the front of Ellen’s shirt was dripping with something oily. Something dark and sticky soaking right through her clothes. Ellen felt it on her skin.

  ON Day Five Ellen followed the tracks to the end. Until then she’d only gone far enough to know that when the waiting was done, she would pause among the gardens and marvel at how people in the middle of a city still responded to the urge to till the earth. They responded with plots and raised beds along this old allowance, with pretty driftwood trellises where the scarlet runners tangled themselves. They responded with old rubber tires, out of which zucchini fecundly tumbled.

  At the end of next week—not that long, really—she would open a gate, the one with hand-carved pickets. The one with the angel ornament.

  And boldly enter.

  She would pick some stranger’s peas and taste it, the bright greenness of life.

  But not yet.

  Today she and Tony continued walking, staying true to the tracks, passing a veterinary clinic and two car lots. Behind the brewery, she came to a narrow gravel road. This she followed too, eventually arriving at an empty expanse under the Burrard Street Bridge.

  Above her, a cathedral span of concrete echoed with the metallic clatter of cars. Down here, she stood in a weedy no-man’s land—a wall-less ruin was what it felt like—bordered by condos, scrubby woods, and a boat yard behind a chain-link fence. Tony pulled hard toward the woods so she let him have his way. He wanted to sniff. Sniff and pee. It was what he lived for.

  She noticed her indifference to harm. They entered the woods strewn with litter, some of it drug related. A blue rubber glove caught up in the salal. A shopping cart half submerged in a mucky creek. A yawning duffel with clothes twistedly spilling out. People lived or partied here. Where was her daughter now?

  Yet in this obscure, seedy, non-place she was protected by the wait. Or at least it felt that way. She stood unafraid while Tony splashed his dwindling urine against tree after tree.

  The only thing that could hurt her was still days away.

  “IT’S all right,” Matt said the next time he came, Day Six, when she refused him sex again. “I’ve come to cook you dinner.”

  “Really? I didn’t know you could cook.”

  “I can clean too. There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  “I know there is,” Ellen said, tagging along to her little kitchen.

  He upended his pack, sending two fist-sized, yellow potatoes spinning on the counter. Bacon followed, the package landing with a slap. “You’re going to love it. It’s an old family recipe. You won’t ever have had it.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No.”

  “I actually want to.”

  He allowed her to wash the potatoes and put them in the oven.

  “Now what?” Ellen asked.

  “We wait.”

  She sat back in her dentist’s chair while Matt went through a stretching routine on the floor. He’d mowed lawns all day. Grass mingled with his hair. Ellen would have offered her shower, but how would he explain that when he got home?

  Then he was leaning close to her, smelling of sweat and lawn, gently shaking her awake. He left her to gather her wits, returning with the potatoes in oven-mitted hands. He needed two bags, paper or plastic, it didn’t matter.

  “This is yours,” he said, handing her the potato in the Whole Foods bag. “Do what I say or you’ll fuck it up.”

  He pulled out a chair, pointed to the bag, then the seat.

  “You want me to sit on the bag?” Ellen asked.

  “Yes.”

  She laughed.

  “Go. You have to do it while it’s hot.”

  He muscled her toward the chair. She dropped the bag, plopped down on it. Sprang up. “Ouch!”

  “Pathetic. Watch.”

  Matt thrust out his butt, waved it over his bag like a hen positioning herself over the straw. He flipped his knees to his chest. When he landed, the paper bag crackled and his eyes grew wild. For five or ten seconds his feet pedalled the air, then he leapt up and ran around the room pretending to put out a fire in his shorts. Tony chased him, barking in alarm.

  The phone rang. Ellen was waiting for Mimi to confirm she’d received the money Ellen had transferred into her account.

  It was Tilda next door, wondering what was going on.

  Zerquetschte Kartoffeln they called it, this very special dish reserved for reunions on his father’s side, or all-male events. Squished Potatoes. Matt fried the bacon, then fried the flattened tubers in the leftover grease.

  “And?” he asked as they shared the first crunchy, salty pancake with its surprising softness in the middle.

  “I like it.”

  “Good. That’s the first part of the test.”

  A test? What was he up to? Ellen wondered. What did this odd behaviour mean?

  “Part One is do you like my Zerquetschte Kartoffeln? Part Two is can you say Zerquetschte Kartoffeln?”

  “No,” Ellen said.

  “Try. Sa.”

  “Sa.”

  “Sa-kwetch-ta.”

  “I’ll bet that’s the squished part. It’s—what’s that word?” A poetic term. She remembered. “Onomatopoeic!”

  Do you have dimpled, bruised, and/or puckered skin on your breast?

  Yes > Skin changes to the breast could be the sign of a serious problem. > See your doctor.

  No> For more information please talk to your doctor.

  Day Seven, 3 a.m.

  The phone rang. Ellen, who was already awake and sitting at the computer, turned and stared at where the phone lived on the corner of her desk. She actually gagged. It stopped, only to start up again ten seconds later.

  “Mom?”

  “Mimi?” Ellen said. “Where are you, honey? What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Me? What do you mean?”

  Ellen heard a ragged exhalation, but couldn’t quite believe the veracity of Mimi’s tears. Tears she could manufacture on command.

  “I had a dream,” Mimi said.

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

  “It’s six here. This is the time I start.”

  “Well, you scared me. You’re scaring me.”

  “Mom, I love you.”

  Ellen sat blinking for a moment. When she finally spoke, it was in the level, calm voice Mimi would recognize even three thousand kilometres away, a voice from the past.

  “And I love you, too, honey. More than you’ll ever know. But I have to ask you something. Try not to get mad.” She took a fortifying breath. “You’re not using again, are you?”

  There were rustling sounds. A tissue?

  “No,” Mimi said.

  So matter-of-fact was this no, so unfreighted with overreaction, that Ellen only grew more suspicious.

/>   “Sure?”

  It was the middle of the night, the only light in the large studio room coming from the laptop on her workbench, Ellen washed in the pink glow of the breast cancer website. All at once the computer went to sleep.

  And night threw its hood over Ellen.

  She sank inside herself. Over the years things had been said on both their parts—insults, accusations, threats—that Ellen wished could be unsaid, so many things. Now, to this long list, she had added, Sure?

  A dream, Mimi had said. Ellen’s own returned in a flash, the one where holding Mimi had stained her shirt front black. There was another interpretation, of course—that Ellen’s breasts had been filled with the toxic stuff, that she’d been nursing her daughter with it all along.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’ll let you get back to sleep.”

  “Wait, sweetheart.” Ellen stood up, steadying herself against the bench. She touched a key to bring back the light. The screen bloomed again with its ominous statistics. “Did I talk much to you about my mother?”

  “Your mother? A little, I guess. How she died. You told me that.”

  “I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately. Thinking that if she’d been around—” Ellen pressed her eyes, one and then the other, with the heel of her free hand. “Why even think this way? She wasn’t. Have a good walk, sweetheart. And be careful, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “All day I’m worrying,” Ellen said. “I’ll be glad when you’re finally home.”

  MATT came by the same day to tell her he’d decided. “Could I stay here?”

  “Here?” Ellen said.

  “For a while. Until I find a place. Or forever. Whatever. When your daughter comes, I’ll get lost.”

  He said he loved her, and Ellen was truly alarmed then. “So why does everybody love me all of a sudden?”

  What had life done to Ellen that she couldn’t see this love coming? Life had tested her. It had made her a woman who could be hard on the outside. Ellen counted on her fingers. Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten. She pictured herself four days in the future, standing in a place she didn’t know. She would be okay. She and Mimi would be okay.

  This was the final test, these four days, and when she’d survived them, she would accept into her soft centre this young man who had made the last ten months of her middle age fly, who was at this moment kissing each of the fingers she had counted on, separately, like people do in poems.

  But Carol called earlier than expected

  and asked her to come in.

  Ellen went

  and was comforted.

  And from that undoctorly embrace Ellen said,

  Excuse me,

  I have a call to make.

  Larry said he would come

  tomorrow

  on the morning ferry.

  Act Two

  9

  STAGES

  In the airport Larry’s mother seemed shrunken, her skin a desiccated brown against the glare of her hair, like something left out in the merciless Florida sun, but with purpose to her walk. When she got near enough to recognize Larry, she stopped. Stopped and released the handle of her wheeled carry-on, her baggage, and waited for Larry to come and pick it up. He did, kissing her paperbag cheek and leading her by the arm out of the terminal into the summery, contrailed air.

  In the car she kept sifting through her purse.

  “What are you looking for, Ma?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  Eventually she found it, found two, but kept the second—packets they offer on planes in lieu of meals. She pushed it at him. “Open it.”

  He fiddled with it as he steered, gave up, and tore it open with his teeth. Mini pretzels strafed the dash. “Sorry,” he said.

  Esther leaned back and closed her eyes, finally at ease. After a minute she raised a finger, righteous and crooked at the top knuckle. “And the orange juice was warm.”

  “We’re going straight to a restaurant.”

  “I’m not hungry. I’m trying to make a point.”

  “Which is?”

  “Never mind. My disappointments are my own. What about Ellen? Is she coming with us?”

  THE last time Larry saw his mother was a total disaster in all senses of the word. In the practical sense, the sense easiest to cope with, there was Tropical Storm Fay tearing up the panhandle, triggering an Enhanced Fujita Level 2 tornado outbreak and biblical flooding. But the millions of dollars’ damage, the loss of life, the beach holidays washed away, were nothing compared to Esther’s non-reaction to Amber, Larry’s latest wife. Outside Esther’s condo the long-haired palms whipped back and forth like heavy-metal guitarists riffing. Stop signs behaved like weather vanes. Inside, Esther wouldn’t speak to either of them. A stillness had descended, as appalling as Fay’s empty eye.

  Larry had assumed long, condemning silences. He was well acquainted with the skillful, sometimes devastating, way Esther deployed them. The neutron bomb of her silences. But after two days Amber cracked. As soon as it was safe to, she fled the vacuum of the condo, sobbing. For several hours Larry didn’t know where she’d gone or if she knew her way back. He blamed himself for bringing her, though not enough to go looking for her beyond the condo’s secure gate. He tried, stepped out the door and gingerly around the fronded wreckage—an uprooted palm had narrowly missed their rental car. He saw the sunken, toothless maw of the collapsed swimming pool and retreated back inside.

  She had real physical presence, that size-twelve wife of Larry. Whenever there was something heavy to be lifted, Amber did it. Larry’s back was shot. That day, just as he was about to call 9-1-1 and report her missing, she bounded back, trembling and radiant.

  “Larry! Half the streets are under water!”

  The bottom of her skirt dripped with the proof of it and pooled around her sandals, the rubber-soled kind, designed for deluge.

  “And guess what I saw? An alligator! An alligator swimming down the middle of the road. I couldn’t believe it. Oh, Larry. I tried to grab a stick and touch it. I wish I had.”

  As Amber was telling him this, miming the paddling legs, Esther hobbled out of her room. Terror replaced the thrill and amazement in Amber’s eyes.

  Esther didn’t ask about Amber now, left behind in a hurry on Cordova Island. How she was, where she was. No. Two years ago in Florida she had foreseen Amber’s irrelevance. Esther asked about Ellen, to whom her son hadn’t been married for a quarter century.

  WHAT a force a mother is! A case in point: the Chinese restaurant. Here in his adopted city—adopted then abandoned, for Larry had mostly lived elsewhere and only returned to Vancouver to be with Ellen during her treatments—Chinese food was ubiquitous. Sometimes three restaurants in a row. In one particular suburb a diner would be hard-pressed to find anything but. The entire Sino-spectrum spread out for the intrepid omnivore, from Szechwan to Cantonese, Hot Pot to Dim Sum, even Hakka, Chinese-Indian. Tripe, bitter melon, live squirming shrimp. But in the company of Esther, Larry, who on his own would choose scalding long green beans stir-fried in shirt-staining curry, made sure to take her to a bad one. Bad as in the Chinese she was used to, the Palm Bay, Florida, Dinner-for-One variety.

  She said she wasn’t hungry, but how couldn’t she be? At home she ate at 5:30 on the nose. Even during a tropical storm she ate at 5:30. It was already 7:00 for Esther, 4:00 for the unhungry Larry, when the waiter set the teapot down between them and listlessly unstacked the little cups.

  Esther said, “We’ll see Ellen after this.”

  Larry opened the clichéd menu, read the stock choices. This to win him some time before Esther unpacked her metaphorical baggage. The real suitcase was in the trunk of the car.

  “I came all this way,” she said.

  “It’s very generous of you, Ma.” He’d told her not to, but at six that morning she’d phoned with her flight times. “How about Lemon Chicken?”

  “It’s the least I could do for the
poor woman.”

  The waiter shuffled back with a sleepy face and an order pad. The pinkie nail on the hand that held the pad was long and smoothly filed, reminding Larry of the coke habit he’d had once upon a time when he lived in TV Land. The waiter’s nail, no doubt, was for spooning out the MSG.

  “And the least she could do,” Esther went on, “is see me. Or does she still bear a grudge?”

  Larry closed the menu. “Do you see anything you want?”

  She adjusted her lips and looked away, so Larry went ahead and ordered from the somnambulist, unable to suppress his own yawn.

  “I’ve got you in a good hotel.”

  She turned back and with the blank-eyed expression of a Roman bust stared straight over his shoulder, out the restaurant window behind him.

  “Remember when I took Amber down to meet you? Amber, my wife? During that storm? She saw an alligator swimming down the street. I just remembered that.”

  He pictured the creature’s yellow eyes, its peculiar writhing progress, the warty back, as though he’d actually been there with Amber knee-deep in the receding waters. Then the Fried Rice came, glistening with oil, and the dun turds of Lemon Chicken. Larry served. Esther poked at the frozen peas with her fork and sighed.

  He couldn’t ask outright what she wanted from Ellen. That never worked. As far as Larry knew, they hadn’t been in touch for years. When Mimi and Yolanda were kids, of course Esther and Ellen had communicated. Ellen would put them on a plane to Florida. There were pickup arrangements to discuss. But once the girls were older, they dealt directly with their grandmother. No doubt news shuttled back and forth, complaints about Esther to Ellen, and vice versa. But that was the extent of it as far as he knew.

  But before that? Before Ellen and Larry’s divorce? Not many silences between mother and daughter-in-law then. The grudge Esther referred to was over some subterfuge that Larry had once involved her in. He’d asked for her co-operation. “If Ellen calls, make like I’m there,” he had told her long distance, L.A. to Palm Bay. “Would you do that for me?”