Ellen in Pieces Read online

  “Why didn’t you call me before?” Ellen asked in the car.

  “What?”

  “What took you so long?”

  He put a shaking hand over his face. “I thought you would call me.”

  “I did! I did call you! You hung up!”

  “Did I? Your sister must have been there. You should have called again.”

  All these years she’d thought he hated her for what she’d done to Moira, he’d merely been cowed. He loved her, and Ellen felt all that love now, retroactively, felt dunked in it, slathered with it, emolliated with the parental caring she had longed for all this time. Though not when she looked over at him in the passenger seat, head bowed, fingers rolling imaginary pills. Then she felt sorrowful and sick.

  “Where’s the ocean?” He asked this out of the blue not five minutes after they had crossed the Lions Gate Bridge, where, if he’d looked up, he would have seen the waters of Burrard Inlet diligently lapping at the edges of the city. Since his arrival three days ago, there had been nothing but view-obfuscating drizzle. Driving around in the car, he’d mainly focused on his lap.

  “You may as well see it if you’re here. How about we go down to Lonsdale Quay tomorrow? We could even take the SeaBus across to downtown. For fun. If you’re feeling up to it.”

  He lifted his head now, interested in something for the first time. Another good sign. “SeaBus? You mean a ferry?”

  “Sort of.”

  He wanted to go right now.

  “You’re too tired, Dad. I can tell. And you must be starving.”

  He insisted, so Ellen took the Lonsdale exit. They could have lunch at the Quay.

  But no sooner had she parked and got him out of the car than he took a cursory glance around and changed his mind.

  “Take me home,” he said.

  WHILE the disintegration of Ellen and Larry’s marriage took place in one day on the July long weekend at Moira’s in Calgary, the marriage itself lasted two and a half years, most of them spent on Cordova Island because land off the grid was cheap and they could live cheaply on it while Larry wrote his plays.

  Cordova Island was also where Ellen discovered pottery. She’d been pregnant with Mimi when they first arrived and needed an outlet herself. The island so teemed with creative types that you didn’t really fit in unless you batiked, or made driftwood furniture, or wove lampshades out of kelp. Ellen took lessons with an island potter, Mary Bourne, who encouraged her. Apparently Ellen had an instinctive feel for the possibilities of clay, not to mention strong hands. It made her ludicrously happy to take what was essentially a lump of dirt and transform it into something useful.

  But along came Mimi, demanding Ellen’s full attention. When Ellen wasn’t tending to the baby, or the garden, or the chickens, or milking Stinky, the goat, she was scrubbing diapers against the painful corrugations of a washboard. Water warmed continuously in a vat on the wood stove for this purpose. Larry saw to that at least—chopping the wood and exorcising his dramaturgical frustrations at the same time. This division of labour worked well for him. Ellen, though, made little progress in her craft after giving birth. She carted the same box of pots and knick-knacks down to the Cordova Island Saturday market, stationing herself behind her foldable card table spread with her amateur wares, Mimi in a sling across her chest, nursing on demand. The tourists would come, though not that many. Most made the difficult trip for a different kind of pot.

  With her second pregnancy, it became too much. A wave of morning sickness hit and she would stagger outside and retch in the grass because the outhouse was too far. “Please, Larry,” she would say, supplicating with chapped hands. “I just can’t do it this way anymore.”

  Larry liked island life. They would probably have stayed, except that something happened that entirely changed their lives.

  They’d been subsisting on an allowance from Esther, Larry’s mother, and the modest royalties of one of his plays, Talking Stick, the one that had won a Jessie and a Chalmers award and had even enjoyed a short run in an L.A. little theatre. A producer saw the L.A. show and contacted Larry through his agent, offering to fly him down to talk about some projects he needed writers like Larry Silver for.

  Larry used the diaper water to shave off his beard. “Oh my God,” Ellen told him afterward. “You looked like a rabbi. I never noticed.”

  He kept the ponytail, but when he got back a week later, the first thing he did was get Ellen to cut it off.

  “So we’re moving?” she said.

  They put the Cordova Island cabin on the market, bought the house on the North Shore, Larry’s future earnings easily qualifying them for a mortgage. He already had script meetings, so it was up to Ellen to pack and petition friends to take the animals. After L.A., Larry would fly to Florida to visit his mother for a few days. He’d join Ellen and Mimi in Calgary for Jack McGinty’s fiftieth birthday party on the July long weekend.

  By then Ellen had entered the most frustrating phase of pregnancy, when desire supplanted nausea. This desire, she knew from carrying Mimi, would only increase in direct proportion to her swelling.

  “Some men find pregnant women incredibly sexy,” she told Larry. “They place ads in the paper. That’s what they want.”

  “And some men think they look like a certain farm animal.”

  Larry gave her permission to answer an ad. He had a TV pilot to write.

  “It’s your throbbing cock I want inside me,” she whispered.

  Larry said, “Nice try.”

  The dreams were shocking. Larry may not have desired congress with an animal, but Ellen had it with a grotesque cliché of a bull, a great heaving beast with a bracelet through its nose. Weirdly, she was off the ground, clinging to its underside, somehow hanging on. Even Tom Green, the captain of the Cordova Island ferry, made an appearance. About sixty with stumpy legs, he was a physically unappealing man. Ellen couldn’t meet his eye when she and Mimi boarded to cross to the mainland and catch their flight. Troll-like Tom lifted Mimi off the dock so gently. Ellen, remembering his way with her the night before, blushed.

  Even after they touched down at the Calgary airport, Southern Alberta seemed one vast cloud-piled sky. Ellen could see things in those clouds like she used to as a child. Now though, instead of elephants and ducks, there were clefted buttocks, pillowy vulvas.

  Cocks.

  The two sisters, who had only been grudgingly in touch since Ellen left home, were now grown women with something in common—husbands and children. Moira, three years older than Ellen, already seemed middle-aged with her mannish, no-nonsense haircut and her golf clothes. In Alberta, they added fluoride to the water system, a practice scientifically linked to Conservative values. Or so Ellen joked. But now Moira was being exceptionally solicitous to her frazzled, hippy sister. She seemed to want to make up for their soured adolescence.

  “You look tired, Ellen,” she said the afternoon they arrived.

  “I’m hot. I’m preggers.”

  “Go lie down. Jenny and Sandy will watch Mimi.”

  So thoughtful! Now Ellen could masturbate.

  They’d come a few days before the big birthday party specifically for the cousins to acquaint. Moira’s younger two doted on Mimi, petting her wispy hair and kissing her fairy hands. With all the attention lavished on her, Mimi’s rages simply ceased.

  The eldest boy was uninterested. He read a lot and wore braces rigged out with coloured rubber bands. Something in the way the elastics stretched and retracted unnerved Ellen. It was exactly the sort of detail her subconscious might erotically repurpose.

  Desperate, she phoned Larry in Florida and got his mother.

  “Out where, Esther?” she asked.

  “At the grocery store. Is there a message?”

  “Just tell him I called. He’ll know what it’s about.”

  She didn’t hear back until the next day, when Larry delivered the frustrating news that his mother had twisted her ankle. On purpose, Ellen assumed. He was staying an
extra day to drive her to her appointments.

  “How about I take the extension in the bedroom?”

  “Oh, please,” Larry said.

  Calvin. That was the eldest boy’s name. Thankfully he stayed away at night. It was his father who ventured into the lurid playroom of Ellen’s dreams. Soft-spoken, uxorious, not-her-type-at-all Charles. Charles who was about as sexy as Tom Green.

  But look how Tom Green had pleased her!

  AND now Jack McGinty had been staying with Ellen in North Vancouver for five days. Friday, the morning after the banking marathon, Ellen found mail for him in her box, several pieces, each with a yellow sticker indicating it had been officially redirected. How odd, she thought. When he first phoned, he’d asked for her address even though she’d offered to pick him up. Did he want to stay?

  Maybe she wouldn’t sell the house. Maybe she’d keep it and live here with her father. If he had Parkinson’s disease, she would have to. It wasn’t as though he was any trouble. He only came upstairs to eat and apologize for being so much trouble.

  She took his mail downstairs. The bedroom door was closed. She’d already seen his breakfast dishes in the sink, heard the whir of the shaver and the higher-pitched whir of the electric toothbrush. Now all was quiet so, leaving his mail on the seat of the stationary bicycle, she went to augment his toilet paper from her Costco hoard.

  Ack! Splashed all over the bathroom mirror, brown flecks. On closer inspection it turned out to be All-Bran flung off the toothbrush. She cleaned the mirror. All the while it niggled at her that the bedroom door had never been closed before.

  “Dad?”

  She opened the door and looked in, saw the empty bed tidily made with shaking hands. On the dresser lay his note.

  I am sorry. Love, Dad

  It took a few minutes to figure out where he might have gone. She remembered the day before, his head rearing up at the word SeaBus, and then she was flooring it down Lonsdale Avenue in the rain, swearing and honking, fingering everybody, arriving just in time to see her father at the ticket counter fumbling with his wallet. He acted like he didn’t even know her, this coatless Fury, his own daughter.

  “What did you mean by that note?”

  The jaw wagged.

  “I’ll go with you.” She turned to the girl behind the counter. “Two tickets.”

  Jack McGinty walked away. “Where are you going?” Ellen shouted. “Come back here right now!”

  “What’s your problem, lady?” the girl asked.

  Ellen swept after him, took his arm less than gently. Outside the terminal, she pulled him in the direction of the car. He almost stumbled, which set Ellen shrieking.

  “What were you going to do that you would leave me that note? Run away? In this condition? Where?”

  Strangers had stopped to watch. Some of them circled Ellen and Jack McGinty, umbrellas open, trying to decide whether or not to intervene.

  The SeaBus. The ocean. The ocean. Then she knew.

  “No, Dad. You weren’t going to do that. There isn’t any deck or anything.”

  She began to wail. “If I take you to the hospital, will you tell them what you planned to do? Will you? Because then they’ll have to help you.”

  And that was what happened, five long days after he arrived, a bloodied, tremoring mess.

  It felt like five months to Ellen, who, after another entire day spent in Emergency, staggered into her dark house alone and turned on all the lights.

  She was wresting the cork from the wine bottle, about to make an earnest start on it, when the doorbell rang. Too exhausted to think, she answered it.

  Two people with blacked-out eye sockets stood on her porch. For mouths, crazy crimson gashes.

  Halloween. She’d completely forgotten.

  “Do you think he really would have done it?” Georgia asked the next day on the phone.

  It was in his eyes already, something dead in the cracked bottom of the china cup.

  Ellen said, “I told the admitting clerk he was suicidal. That he planned to throw himself off the SeaBus. She said to let him speak for himself.”

  “And?”

  “He nodded.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Georgia said and, for once, Gary, who was probably right there listening, butted out.

  “Then this inexplicable behaviour once he gets admitted. He turns all jolly, chatting up the nurses, telling his life story. Things I’d never heard. After the nurse leaves, I explode, of course. ‘What do you mean you’re fine? Are you fine? Did you come here because you’re fine? If you’re fine, they’ll send us home and, frankly, Dad, I don’t know what to do with you.’”

  Georgia produced the sympathetic clucks she could always be counted on to produce.

  He had done exactly the same thing with the beautiful red-sweatered psychiatrist with the Polish name. This time Ellen had interrupted the cheerful chit-chat. “Am I going to get a chance to talk?”

  They left Jack and headed down the stretcher-jammed corridor.

  “Old people groaning,” she told Georgia. “People covered in blood.” She thought of the pair at her front door. “Blind, teeth kicked in.”

  “No!” Georgia cried.

  “I was already telling the whole story to Dr. Polska, begging for her help. Meanwhile, all those eyes were saying, ‘Help us too!’ Why is there so much suffering, Georgia?”

  “Oh, Ellen. I don’t know.”

  They found the room—bare of wall, ugly of chair—whose purpose, Ellen surmised, was to assemble loved ones for the delivery of devastating prognoses.

  The doctor was committing Jack McGinty.

  “What do you mean committing?” Ellen asked. “I thought he had Parkinson’s.”

  YET Ellen McGinty herself was no stranger to mental distress. She’d had her own brushes with despair. Her mother’s death, for example, when Ellen was at an impressionable, confused age. And when Larry left her, Larry with whom she’d been ruinously in love, for whom she’d changed her name because from the moment she met him she’d wished only to expunge her McGintyness and let Larry plate her very essence, which was restless and hungry to live.

  And Mimi! Miss Teen Druggy, Lady Permastone. She might as well have jammed a stick of dynamite between Ellen’s ribs, blown her heart right out of her chest, then tap-danced across the bloody, strewn bits.

  “At least you have a mother to hate!” Ellen used to yell at her.

  Yes, Ellen had been wretched and sometimes she hadn’t wanted to get out of bed, sometimes hadn’t, but made the thousand phone calls that put the food on the table from her bed, weeping in between them. But now when she thought of her father’s tremors, the castanet of his jaws, she understood that something black had seized his every fibre and was shaking him from the inside.

  Imagine, she thought. Imagine always coming home to darkness.

  The day after he was committed, the city descended bleakly into November. All Souls’ Day, Day of the Dead. Ellen stood at the window, depressed—well, not really, she knew now—sad, hungover, staring at the forbearing cedars dripping in the yard. Her father had only just returned and already he was lost to her again.

  Later in the afternoon she visited his tiny cupboard of a room in the psychiatric assessment ward. While he quivered silently in his bed, Ellen perched on the chair with a fruit basket in her lap. Now that she knew what was the matter with him, it seemed so obvious.

  “I still miss Mom,” she told him. “Every single day. There are so many things I wish I could have talked to her about. Sometimes I do talk to her. Sometimes she even answers. Once I was complaining about Mimi. You know what she said? She said, ‘She’s just like you were.’ I heard her, clear as anything.”

  Ellen looked over at her father. His eyes had rolled back in his head, like she’d shot him.

  Earlier, walking into the hospital, Ellen had tripped. Some of the fruit had spilled out of the basket. She got up now and went over to the little basin in the corner, filled it with soapy water. Every p
iece of fruit she washed then dried with paper towels.

  The human heart is about the size of your fist. Where had she learned that? About the size of a Macintosh apple, all dented and bruised to mush.

  “HE’S there, isn’t he?”

  This was Wednesday, the day Jack McGinty was supposed to see the geriatric specialist. Ellen had just left a message cancelling the appointment she’d finagled. Assuming it was the clinic calling back, she’d answered without looking at the call display.

  Moira said, “I thought you were going to stay out of our lives. I thought you were going to leave us alone. What do you mean by this? You are not to interfere! Do you hear me? You are not to get involved! Put him on the line! Put him on right now!”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Liar! We all still hate you!”

  Her sister breathed hard, catching her breath for the next round.

  “How do you really feel, Moira?” Ellen asked.

  Moira hung up.

  But now Ellen had the number, not unlisted at all, right there on the call display.

  JACK McGinty’s fiftieth birthday party, August 2, 1983. Larry had insisted on cabbing from the airport.

  “How much is that going to cost?” Ellen had asked him on the phone, before remembering that Larry was making real money now.

  She wanted to pick him up. She wanted to get out of her sister’s house and away from Charles.

  In her dream the night before, she’d encountered Charles somewhere innocuous, the backyard or the garage. He was doing something with his hands—what, she couldn’t tell. In waking life Charles’s hobby was making and flying model airplanes. That was the boyish kind of man he was, the kind Larry scorned. In fact, she dreaded that Charles would invite Larry to fly one of his planes and that Larry would pretend enthusiasm and later mock his brother-in-law in a play, or worse now, in a television sitcom that Moira and Charles would be more likely to see. Would Larry ever write another play? She hoped so. The best of him came out in his work, the part she loved best, the humour and the tenderness. The best went to the play, and what remained was Ellen’s.