Ellen in Pieces Read online

  Of course she would, and Larry assumed she agreed without asking any questions because she so disliked Ellen. It was a prick-ish thing to do, the sort of thing Larry specialized in when he was young and horny all the time. But now he was fifty. Or past fifty.

  He asked Esther, who of all people should know. “How old am I?”

  She lifted her white, brooding head. “Did you even tell her I was coming?”

  Larry reddened. “The thing is, Ma? You weren’t so nice to Ellen back then.”

  Esther patted her lips with her napkin and folded it in half. “She raised those girls on her own. They turned out okay. Not brilliantly, but better than I expected, especially Mimi with her drugs. Her mother pulled her through that. And never once did they—Mimi and Yolanda, I’m talking about—never did a bad word about you cross their lips.”

  “Really?” he said. “I’m surprised.”

  “And Larry?” she added. “How was I supposed to know Ellen would be the best of a bad lot?”

  HE’D planned a long pretense, a calm, sightseeing type of drive to Esther’s hotel, which was about ten minutes away by the direct route. By then exhaustion would defuse her. In Florida, Esther retired at nine after an hour bathing in milk, or whatever she did.

  In the parking lot behind the Chinese restaurant she placed her whole crabbed hand over his. Her several rings cut his knuckles.

  “She doesn’t feel good, Ma,” he said.

  “Neither do I.”

  He drew back and studied her. His indomitable mother, his abominable mother.

  “Okay. But if she says no? That’s the end of it. Right? Right?”

  He stepped out of the car, punched Ellen’s number into the phone. Esther reached over to turn on the ignition so she could lower the window and listen.

  “Hey, babe. It’s me. How’re you feeling? Ah. Really? Ah.” He nodded several times. He had not pressed send to complete the call. “That reminds me of. Okay, a rabbi, a guru, and an air-traffic controller walk into a gym. The trainer goes up to the air-traffic controller and says—” He had no idea. He tucked his free hand into the opposite armpit, leaned against the car. The smell of burnt garlic wafted over from the restaurant’s rear door.

  “‘Can I help you?’ And the air-traffic controller says—” What? What? “‘I brought two friends. They want to learn to fly.’”

  The words came all on their own, naturally, the way they never did anymore despite his head-bobbing and hand-wringing before the Wailing Wall of the computer screen. Or when he wandered around making voice memos on his iPod. Afterward, when he listened to those memos? Moses wept.

  “So the trainer gets the guru lying on a mat. Instantly the guy starts levitating. Then the rabbi climbs up on the StairMaster—What? No, babe. There’s no point. I’m just trying to make you feel better. And guess who’s here? Esther’s here. She’s asking to see you. What? No, no. Of course she’ll understand.”

  He stood a minute to let this sink in for Esther before pocketing the phone and brushing the crushed pretzels off the seat. Back behind the wheel, he said, “Ma, listen. I’m sorry you made the trip for nothing. But I did tell you. Didn’t I say?”

  Esther leaned back and shut her eyes.

  Across the Burrard Street Bridge. Right turn to loop back to Beach Avenue. The moseying summer traffic suited his purpose. It took a quarter hour just to get to Stanley Park.

  Inside the park the seawall swarmed with fitness freaks, with tourists, with gays. Larry chose a runner, not entirely at random—he liked the way her ponytail and other parts swung—and matched her pace. Then the road veered from the shoreline and they were driving through forest. He didn’t need to look over at Esther. The whole car had filled with her discontent. He sniffed a few times, wondering if you could actually smell discontent. And if discontent was available in one of those cardboard air fresheners that dangle from the rear-view mirror, what shape would it be? Nice, but he couldn’t voice-memo it with Esther beside him. He was mostly collecting these thoughts for Ellen now, to distract her from the general shittiness of chemo. What was that other thing? What?

  The rabbi. The rabbi on the StairMaster. Larry could see him now, climbing, climbing in his suit and yarmulke. His sad, sweat-beaded face.

  After he ran out of park, he inched the length of Denman Street to the Coast Plaza. By then, he’d killed an entire hour.

  A bellhop materialized and stuck his smiling face right in the car window. “Checking in?”

  Esther clutched the belt where it bisected her bosom.

  “I’ll come up with you, Ma. Get you settled. We can have a drink in the bar. Let’s have a little visit. You came all this way.”

  He was amazed how dignified she looked with her eyes squeezed shut. Her hands were turning white.

  “Ma?” he said, gently.

  She spoke to the bellhop. “Tell him I’m here to see Ellen. Tell him I get out of this car for Ellen and only Ellen.”

  “JUST what do you want to see her for?”

  They were driving back over the bridge, away from downtown, Larry unable to conceal his anger now.

  “Buttinsky,” she said.

  Yet there was a time when Esther aired her grievances freely. About Ellen she had opened all the doors and windows. Ellen had deliberately ensnared Larry with her pregnancy. Then Larry left Ellen to marry Amy, who was not a shiksa, but that had not gone well either.

  “Two months from now would have been better,” he said. “This is not a good time. Three months, better still. When she’s well again.”

  Esther nodded the slow nod that actually meant no.

  He parked in front of the corner store, its brick-and-board shelves frilled with plants. Across the street, three small, lacy pots stood on pine boxes in Ellen’s window, a white curtain behind them. Ellen was probably in her dentist’s chair, where she often spent the night because she felt better when she wasn’t lying flat. Larry slept on the foldout couch, or the floor, and all the next day his back reminded him that these arrangements were less than ideal. There was a bed in the loft, but he didn’t want to climb down the ladder in the dark if Ellen called for him in the night. He had other complaints, as well. Too many visitors. The graveyard odour of Ellen’s clay, the dust.

  Esther said, “Where is she?”

  Larry gestured across the street. “The middle one. Let me go in first and talk to her.”

  “No!”

  “You can’t just ring the doorbell.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ma, she’s having treatments! She feels like hell! Can’t you understand that? We got about four hours sleep last night!”

  Esther exhaled. She made her impatient lip movements. “Phone her again.”

  After several rings Ellen answered.

  “Sorry, babe. Were you asleep?”

  “When did you go out?” she asked.

  “Listen. I have a surprise for you. I’m just outside. With someone.”

  Esther made a break for it. She must have mastered the seat belt on the way because it in no way impeded her now. And the car door, so heavy, flew open, as though she’d karate-kicked it. Both the surprise of her escape, and his fear of her falling and breaking a hip, leaving him with two invalids, rooted him in his seat. He remembered her purposefulness in the airport, how she’d stumped along, not slow at all, until she saw him. How could he have doubted her strength, gathered now for this final sprint? His eighty-two-year-old mother was actually running across the street, and by the time he found his voice again, it was too late. She was pounding on Ellen’s door.

  “It’s Esther!” Larry yelled in the phone.

  He didn’t get out of the car. Because Ellen did bear a grudge. Larry knew for a fact that she did. From where he sat, he couldn’t see Ellen when she opened up, only the back of his mother packaged in her pale blue pantsuit, her hair like icing. It seemed they were talking. Then the door opened all the way and Esther stepped inside and the door closed again.

  Larry snapped
the phone shut. He gave them five minutes, max.

  He reclined the seat while he waited and, though he tried to rest his eyes, he kept glancing over to see if Esther had been expelled yet. Gerhard’s video installation played in a continuous loop on one side. (Larry pictured the oft-visiting German, shuddered.) In the window to the right of Ellen’s, a life-sized knitted raccoon crouched. It was both demonic and kitsch, though Larry was beholden to the woman producing this bizarre menagerie for taking Ellen’s dog at this difficult time.

  And in the middle were Ellen’s pots, which he’d looked at many times without really seeing. Even when Larry and Ellen were married, Larry had paid no attention to Ellen’s pots. He remembered eating out of them—at that time they were much chunkier vessels—but he couldn’t recall any specific one because they were unremarkable. If one fell to the floor and broke to pieces, not even Ellen cared. She gathered up the shards and flung them off the back stoop, which overlooked a sheltered cove. Those were their hippy years, living on Cordova Island, when Larry was writing plays. The broken pottery landed on the rocks and became even smaller pieces that were then washed away—like Ellen and Larry’s two-and-a-half-year marriage.

  At some point between then and now, when, Larry couldn’t say—he hadn’t even known Ellen was turning pots again; she’d mostly worked as a publicist all these years—Ellen had had a breakthrough. Something to do with the airiness of the pots, their uselessness. Too small to be practical, not to mention full of holes, this was what gave them value. Yet he’d always considered himself the artist, even after he’d gone in the other direction, leaving theatre for television because at least his scripts got produced. Ellen’s pots sold for as much as two hundred now, though the ones in the window she wouldn’t part with.

  He rubbed his eyes, blurring the three white pots. Ellen’s pots that were, practically speaking, priceless.

  Eleven minutes. Ellen and Esther made Gerhard, the gay German skinhead, and Larry, the Jew with a backache, look like a love match. Yet they’d been in the same room for eleven—twelve minutes now. Soon there would be shouting. Larry would have to rush in. And who would he placate? Back then, there was no question he would run to Mother—but now?

  Esther was probably unpacking. “Here,” she was saying, “remember this? Remember when you phoned? When Larry was supposed to be staying with me?”

  “When he was really in L.A. with Amy? And I was pregnant?”

  “Yes. Here. Take it,” Esther was saying and she put the thing in Ellen’s hands.

  Ellen held it up at eye level. It was dense, like a fossil. Larry couldn’t quite visualize it, but he could see Ellen with the scarf tied around her head, her face gaunt and beautiful. She’d lost so much weight she was as thin as when they’d met back in university.

  ESTHER: All I ever wanted? What any mother wants.

  Larry scrambled through the glove compartment for something to write on. He wouldn’t remember. He’d already forgotten the idea he’d had driving through the park. Something about the shape of a feeling. Under the insurance papers was an old mileage log. He found a pen just as the thing in Ellen’s hands transubstantiated to nothing. To air.

  But Esther’s baggage does not lighten because it contains something that can’t be easily lifted out.

  ESTHER: I know we don’t have the same God.

  They argue about this while Larry takes it down. Ellen doesn’t believe in God, of course. She tells Esther she has proof.

  ESTHER: What proof? What?

  ELLEN: Esther. It’s in your purse.

  Esther digs down until she finds it. She finds it and blinks back tears. And all she can do now is concede the truth of Ellen’s position. Because no just God would ever allow it, that his people would hunger and all that would be offered to them were little packets of pretzels impossible to open.

  HE wrote down other things. For example, that Ellen said he, Larry, was incapable of happiness. Untrue! He’d felt happy the last few weeks. Ever since Ellen had phoned him on Cordova Island and explained her diagnosis—inflammatory breast cancer—and the grim treatment options. They discussed whether or not to tell Yolanda and Mimi. At first Ellen didn’t want them to know. Yolanda was busy with her kids—and Mimi? Who knew how Mimi would react. A week later Ellen did tell them, but during that first phone call, Larry had stopped listening. Because he’d already decided he would go.

  Anyway, how happy could he be when Ellen was wretched? So not happy, no. Rather, he felt the way he used to in the middle of a play, as though life were dropping into his lap everything he needed to write it, and if he could just keep up his intensity of focus these gifts would continue flowing. Despite the fatigue, or because of it, he’d lived these last weeks in that same state, loving Ellen again, loving her all the way to remission.

  Then he really had to get out of the car because reclining the seat hadn’t worked. Sit too long and you shall spasm: these were words he lived by. And if it happened that he spasmed, relief came only in the form of a small child walking on his back, preferably his grandson.

  He stood beside the car to stretch and fiddle with the iPod. The store’s closing ritual had begun. The owner was moving the plants inside. The woman, Vietnamese probably, recognized him because Ellen insisted he buy something there every few days, as though she were personally responsible for keeping the seedy little place solvent. Larry voice-memoed this while the woman was inside. When she came out again, she smiled.

  Esther spoke again and Larry repeated it into the iPod, adding his exegesis.

  “‘Such promise he showed.’ Her point being that the only time I wrote anything worthwhile—the plays, I mean—was when I was with Ellen. As if she had thought of that. I told her as much myself.” He crossed the street hoping to get a look in the studio, but the white curtain prevented him. Now he was close to the pots, face to face with them. She carved out the patterns freehand. With a tool, she’d told him, or a pin.

  What you take away is more important than what you leave in.

  He’d go around the block.

  A lane ran alongside the row of studios. Larry had got that far when he heard a door opening behind him. It was the neighbour, the knitter with the forgettable name from next door, leaving with Ellen’s dog, a shin-high, black thing that reeked whenever it was brought to visit and barked in the night, always when Larry was just on the point of falling back to sleep.

  “She didn’t even like Talking Stick,” he told his iPod. “Every time I mention it, she does that thing with her mouth.”

  He tried to describe Esther’s mouth movements that had irritated him his whole life. According to Ellen, Mimi had inherited a version of it. Ellen had a term for it. What?

  Later, when he replayed this monologue, there would be stammering and the sound of traffic on Fourth Avenue, where he was walking now among the flip-flopped mob streaming up from the beach to fill the restaurants and pubs. They looked so young, and were, he knew from their piercings and tattoos. Amber had a bruise-like mandala on her left shoulder, and in her right nostril, a stud. Once Larry had come across her in the bathroom with the stud out, picking snot off it. What have I done? he’d thought.

  It was vaguely insulting, their youth and robust good health. “Speaking on behalf of pain sufferers everywhere,” he said into the iPod.

  When he reached the end of the too-long block, he turned and left them to their pinkening sunset, their rosy futures.

  Now a residential street lined with apartments. A woman three floors up was watering her plants. A man stood shirtless, in shorts, with a long fork in his hand, before a barbecue fixed to the balcony rail. Surely, surely, Esther and Ellen would be finished talking about whatever they were talking about, which Larry was beginning to suspect wasn’t him, after all. And as he walked he heard the laugh tracks of all the TVs surreally overlapping. Who was laughing? This was something he ought to know. Were there professional laughers? How much were they paid? And what was their suicide rate?

  Ahe
ad of him the weird, frizzy-haired knitting woman was returning with the dog. Larry deliberately slowed to prevent meeting up with her. Last time, he’d incited tears.

  “What will I do?” she’d asked.

  “When?” Larry asked.

  “I love Ellen so much.”

  “She’s going to get better,” Larry said.

  “From Stage Four?”

  And Larry lost it. “Have you ever been to a restaurant?”

  “A restaurant?” she said. “Yes.”

  “Have you ever ordered steak in a restaurant?”

  “Not recently.”

  “But you have.”

  “Probably.” She brought her chapped hand up to her throat. “I’m confused.”

  “Medium rare? Well done? Well done, I bet.”

  “Maybe I haven’t ever ordered a steak.”

  “Well, I have. I’ve ordered a steak many, many times. Rare. A hundred times. A thousand times. Yet how many times have I received on my plate, in a restaurant, the rare steak that I ordered in good faith?”

  “I don’t know where this conversation is going, Larry.”

  “Never! Never! They say rare, but they don’t know what they’re talking about! Do you get it now?”

  Behind the googly glasses, tears. “No.”

  “Well done. Stage Four. It’s just a thing they say!”

  She ran off sobbing. That was two or three days ago. Now the dog arabesqued against a light post. They moved on and Larry, still halfway down the block, walked normally the rest of the way back to Ellen’s.

  Maybe he should go in and rescue her. The thing was, he really needed to lie down before his back seized up. If he went in and lay on the floor of Ellen’s studio it would seem attention-seeking. He’d find some grass and lie there until Esther came out. The grass in front of the studios was a mere strip. If he lay there, people would think he was drunk and call the cops.

  Across the street, behind the corner store, a monster of a laurel hedge towered. He crossed and went over to it, checking underneath it first for dog shit. Got down on his knees, crawled under the branches, positioning himself so he was at least partially covered. From the fiasco of his marriage to Amber he’d salvaged at least something. Some useful yoga exercises. His back settled into the hard ground.