Ellen in Pieces Read online

  “I can’t,” Charles groaned. “Your stomach. You’re too big.”

  Ellen sank to all fours, tugged his leg. He whimpered as he knelt. “I want to. But we shouldn’t.”

  Ellen shoved him onto his back and, straddling him, pushed down once, hard, hating Larry.

  “Oh, Ellen,” Charles whispered. “Vroom. Vroom.”

  On the third or fourth push, Ellen realized he had withered and was already out of gas. He scrambled out from under her, sat there glistening and limp in his remorse. Ellen had not experienced a release of any kind, but Charles was crying.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You’re pregnant and everything.”

  “Don’t tell Moira,” she said, though she had every intention of telling Larry.

  WHILE Jack McGinty was still in hospital, Ellen called Brad Wheeler-Dealer. December wasn’t the best month to put a house on the market, what could they do?

  Ellen hadn’t actually met Brad in person, had only seen him smiling boyishly out of bus shelters. (She’d picked him for his name, because he sounded like he would rake in the biggest bucks.)

  He showed up the next day to do the walk-through. “This lino, Ellen? If you replace it with cork or ceramic, you’ll recoup the expense tenfold, I guarantee it. Same for the cabinets.”

  “I should redo my kitchen for a stranger? I don’t know, Brad.”

  He’d already fixed sticky notes to half the furniture, little yellow flags that meant get rid of it.

  She felt angry. Why? If, over the years, she’d learned a thing or two about herself, one of them was just to stop. Stop and try to figure out the real source of the rage. If she did that, it would usually dissipate.

  “I feel like you’re judging me, Brad.”

  “Judging you? Never. It’s just a house.”

  Ellen sighed. Because, of course, if she didn’t do so many stupid, impulsive things, no one would have any reason to judge her.

  “At the very least, Ellen? Paint. And this sort of thing”—he gestured to the fridge papered over with recipes and photographs—”it will cost you thousands. I’m not kidding.”

  She ripped it all down. Baked Alaska. The list of fruits and vegetables most likely to be pesticide-tainted. Here, under several layers, was a three-year-old mammogram reminder. Brad was chuckling.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Who’s this?” He pointed at the picture of Mimi in front of the CN Tower, toothful smile, nose ring. She told him. “Really?” he said. “I thought she was your sister.”

  “Come on.”

  “For sure. We could have a drink sometime after all this is over. To celebrate.”

  Ellen tapped the broad gold band on his finger. “I don’t think so.”

  “No hard feelings,” said Brad Wheeler, who evidently didn’t feel things very solidly. He left a stack of papers—the contract, stat sheets on houses in the area and what they’d sold for.

  So here was Ellen, chucking again. Chucking crap so the house would show well. On all fours in the downstairs crawl space, pushing more boxes out into the light. Mildewy cardboard boxes all over the rec room. Opening the softened flaps of one, she discovered school-work. Such comical spellings! In the drawings, no one had a neck. How could she discard this precious record, proof that no matter how she beat herself up about it now, her girls had been happy?

  At the bottom, a smaller box. She lifted the lid, shrieked, and dropped it. The disgusting contents spilled out onto the floor. Something had chewed its way into the box and expired. A very hairy sort of rodent. She bent to inspect it then, gingerly, picked it up. By the blunt end, not the flowing end.

  Larry’s ponytail.

  Oh, she was evil. Wicked. She put it in a padded envelope addressed to Larry Silver. General Delivery. Cordova Island.

  She knew the address by heart.

  ON the first of December Jack McGinty was released from hospital. He stayed with Ellen for a week, enjoying her cooking now, taking short walks in the neighbourhood with her. Ellen kept him company during the evening news, which she normally didn’t watch because she interacted too much with the television. Jack coached her through several minor repairs, such as replacing a broken switch plate in the hall; he couldn’t do the work himself because his hands still shook, though not half as much.

  Brad Wheeler-Dealer’s stat sheets scandalized Jack. He couldn’t believe the price of real estate.

  “The more expensive, the better. I’ve got plans.”

  What plans? her father wanted to know.

  “I’m tired of publicity. It’s all self-promotion now anyway. Social media. Do you remember I used to make pots?”

  Jack didn’t. He’d probably never seen one of her pots.

  “Back when I was married to Larry. When we were living on Cordova Island. I’d like to take it up again. I’m going to sell the house and live off the proceeds. Sign up for some classes. Maybe rent a studio.”

  “You’ll have more than enough money,” her father said.

  Every night Moira phoned to talk to him and exchange with Ellen a few civil, then gradually warm, words. That day twenty-three years ago, when Charles ran straight to Moira and foolishly confessed because he couldn’t wait until the party was over like everyone else—it seemed to evaporate. The fact that there was no party in the end, only confrontation, screaming, Jack McGinty leaning back in the Muskoka chair gripping the armrests like he was travelling too fast in it. The flurry of confused packing, Ellen fleeing with Larry and Mimi and not even saying goodbye to her father. It had all happened so long ago—did it even matter?

  “How are you holding up with him?” Moira asked. “Is he driving you crazy?”

  “Does he drive you crazy?” Ellen asked.

  “Of course! He never talks. You never know what he’s thinking. Mom did all the talking. Remember?”

  “Yes,” Ellen said, suddenly tearing up. “I do.”

  The night before Jack was supposed to fly back to Calgary, Moira said over the phone, “Ellen? I always thought Larry was a jerk. You did everything for him, but what did he ever do for you? We watched that program of his. It wasn’t even funny. We didn’t get it at all.”

  “Thank you,” Ellen said.

  The next morning, since Ellen and her father were both up anyway and it was unexpectedly clear and sunny, she suggested that they leave for the airport early and take a walk on the jetty. Jack attended fully to the drive, seeing the city for the first time in his seven-week stay, the city herself finally showing all her coloured feathers. The mountains were two-toned with snow, the fields around the runways a shimmery green. When Ellen asked him what he thought of it, he said, “It’s fine.”

  They parked. For five kilometres the jetty stretched out into the ocean, an elevated road to nowhere, banked with boulders. Under it a pipe led from the sewage treatment plant. Jack had sure put that pipe to the test.

  High above them a plane traced a U before landing. Jack watched, then did the same, took Ellen’s arm and turned back toward the beach. At the water’s reedy edge the sand was flecked with broken shells and glass and plastic. He managed an unsteady squat then, placing both hands in the icy water, waved them, like he was Moses trying to coax the sea apart.

  “There,” he said, once she got him standing again. “Now let’s go.”

  His bags were half stuffed with Poppycock. She helped check them in, then he insisted that she leave. He was fine. He would get a cup of coffee. He would have his seashore-besmirched shoes shined.

  “What was the name of the place you just took me to?”

  “The Iona Jetty,” Ellen said.

  She was meeting Brad Wheeler-Dealer back at the house, so she said goodbye. She hugged her father and he actually told her, maybe for the first time in her life, “I love you, Ellen.”

  When she looked back, he was still standing in front of the taxi stand, watching her walk toward the parkade. Like in that poem, not drowning, but waving. She smiled and waved back.

&
nbsp; But during the long drive home, as she strained to remember the name of the poet, the lines came back to her.

  I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning.

  She’d misremembered it. She only realized what it meant later, when she and Brad sat down at her kitchen table.

  Because the first thing she saw was her father moving his hands in the water, testing the temperature, and the typed note on top of all the papers.

  I am sorry.

  “What’s the matter, Ellen?” Brad asked. “What’s this all about?”

  3

  ELLEN-CELINE, CELINE-ELLEN

  So Ellen had found herself alone with a two-year-old in a near-empty, perpetually cloud-scarved house halfway up the North Shore mountains, eight months pregnant with her second child. All those years ago.

  Only twenty-two and already divorcing.

  As desperate as she’d been to leave Cordova Island, population 357 born-again hippies, aging draft dodgers and sundry arty types, now Ellen missed it. Ellen and Larry had been passionate members of that close community (Larry too passionate, it turned out), contributors to its potlucks and Friday-night jams in the tiny island hall, users of its Free Store and babysitting co-op. If you met somebody on the road on Cordova Island, you stopped and talked for half an hour about your garlic crop and your aura. That’s the kind of place it was.

  But now when Ellen took Mimi to the park, she felt she was from a far-off country, a land of long-tressed, naked-faced women and bearded, huggy men, she a resident alien among the feather-haired and Lycraed North Vancouver natives, all of whom chatted in tight circles around the playground equipment, snubbing her. It was 1983. Mimi teetered then fell on all fours in the sandbox. Ellen marvelled at how she simply thrust her diapered bottom in the air and boosted herself up. “How do you do that?” she asked, for she, Ellen, was in mid-collapse and would never, ever right herself.

  Every few nights she called Larry in California and asked him to please, please, just come back for the birth. He kept telling her, “Amy wouldn’t like it.”

  Amy was the slutty L.A. actress who had stolen Larry from her.

  At her core Ellen was resilient and practical—no crisis could override that—so one day she took the bus down to the Health Unit and signed up for pre-natal classes. Tuesday evenings for four weeks, babysitting provided.

  In the second class they practised breathing exercises on mats. Ellen had to pair up with the instructor, which caused the pity level in the room to soar. Afterward a ringlettey woman, who was so petite and muscular her pregnancy barely showed, intercepted Ellen and asked if she wanted to go for coffee sometime. That was Georgia.

  “Oh, thank you!” Ellen gasped.

  When they met up later in the week, Georgia brought along Celine, the glamorous one who all through the class ostentatiously stroked her belly like she was accompanying them on the harp. She was much taller, massively pregnant, but only from the front and side. From the back, you couldn’t tell. (Ellen just looked fat under all her loose hippy garments, so no one offered her a seat on the bus.) By chance Georgia had run into Celine at the Park Royal Mall, recognized her from the class, and invited her along. None of them really knew each other.

  Georgia, who seemed tactful and shy, might never have asked, but Celine did, the second their coffee mugs were set in front of them. There was a boldness to Celine, a right-to-knowness that, combined with her overall perfection—clothes, hair, skin—would have smacked of bourgeois entitlement on Cordova Island.

  “So?” Celine asked Ellen. “Are you doing this on your own?”

  Ellen fiddled with her hair, still long then, more chewed-on rope than braid. Here in the city, her hair added to her pathos, but she hadn’t realized it yet. “Apparently,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  The interrogation obviously pained Georgia. She stared into her mug, then shot Ellen a lifeline kind of look. Ellen ignored it. Bobbing far out beyond her pride, she wanted, needed, Celine’s sympathy more.

  “I was married. Until about a month ago.”

  “That’s brave,” Celine said, taking in Mimi too, squeezed onto what little remained of Ellen’s lap, sucking on the crayons the waitress had brought. “I’m not sure I’d leave Richard in my condition. Not that I have reason to.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Ellen said.

  “He left you?” Celine said, and both women, Georgia too, instinctively and together, reached for Ellen. “What a bastard!”

  Ellen wished Larry could hear how she limped to his defence. “He had his reasons, I guess.” Then, without volunteering the fact of her own slip-up, she started weeping.

  Georgia squeezed her hand; Celine hugged Ellen hard. This was the sisterhood they had celebrated in the Cordova Island Community Hall once a month when the Women’s Empowerment Group met, but which had proved to be a lie. Who would have thought she’d find it here, in a yuppie café on Lonsdale Avenue?

  It was Celine who answered Ellen’s call when her labour started, who took Mimi to Georgia’s and coached Ellen all day, rubbing the small of her back, timing contractions, reading out from her notebook the pertinent passages they had covered in class. Who drove Ellen to the hospital six hours later and remained steadfastly with her in the delivery room while Ellen, squatting, screamed out her agony, “I hate your fucking guts, Larry Silver! I hate you so much!”

  For here was another lie: contrary to what they’d learned in pre-natal class, the crowning of the baby’s head is not necessarily a moment of pure joy. Ellen was, in fact, at her lowest then, the most biblically wretched creature that had ever crawled the clodded surface of the earth. No one could feel more abandoned, more utterly abject, than she, Ellen Silver, in her final push.

  Two thousand kilometres away the father of the child ripping mercilessly through her body was probably screwing his slutty actress girlfriend right that minute. What could be worse than that?

  Something. What happened to Celine was worse.

  “ARE you on crack?” Tony, her hairdresser, asked in 2007, the week before Ellen left on her trip to France with Celine. “That Celine? The quack? The one you complain about every time you come here?”

  “Every time?” Ellen asked, surprised and a little ashamed she could be so consistently disloyal.

  To her relief, Tony moved on to the subject at hand, Ellen’s roots, how the grey was already showing again so how about something dramatique? He danced around the chair, running his tiny hands upward from the nape of her neck to her crown. These days Ellen wore her hair to her shoulders. The ungrey ends slithered between Tony’s fingers. He tocked his head from side to side, a dashboard ornament, formulating improvements.

  Recently, Tony had softened his own look. Because he was small, he seemed ageless. Not a perceivable minute had settled on him since 1983, when Ellen first sat in this chair. Now he’d turned himself into a tousled schoolboy just leaping out of bed, an effect that probably took hours to create.

  “I could do something to you today, Ellen, that I guarantee will draw those horny Frenchmen to you like, like—They will oo-la-la! They will fall on those shit-covered French sidewalks trying to get a glimpse up your skort.” (Ellen had brought her new skort in a bag to show Tony.) “They will curse that skort. Merde, merde, merde, they will say. I thought it was a skirt, but I can’t see anything!”

  “Skirt plus shorts. Skort,” Ellen said again.

  “It will put them into a frenzy, the skort together with what I could do to your hair, if only you’d let me. If only you would laissez-faire your hair the way you have your life.”

  “Don’t fuck up my hair, Tony.”

  “You take chances, Ellen. You’ll probably screw fifty horny Frenchmen over there. Or you could. If you’d let me do this one little thing.”

  “It’s tempting,” Ellen had said.

  NOW here she was! In France! In France, writing a postcard to Tony so he would get it before her next appointment. Until they adju
sted to the time change, she and Celine were renting a six-hundred-year-old house in a tiny village in the Luberon Mountains. Celine, a practising herbalist, was all messed up. She’d locked herself in her room. But Ellen had been liberal with the Zopiclone, even on the plane. (If it went down, she preferred to sleep through it.)

  Ellen, in France, with her café au lait and chocolate croissant that she had ordered herself using actual French words, sitting in a village square waiting for a horny Frenchman she might claim in the postcard to have screwed to come along. Wild iris crowded the base of the fountain, à la Van Gogh. Chocolate bittersweet on her tongue. Then the bells in the eleventh-century church began to ring.

  Oh my God, thought Ellen, clutching her head. Sonnez les matines! Ding dang dong!

  It was almost too much, too beautiful.

  She wrote on the card to Tony, Who needs a man?

  HER relationship with Celine was complicated, more complicated than with Georgia, who, like Tony, had also expressed trepidation when Ellen told her about the hiking trip. Ellen and Celine had a long history together, yet this history, full of tribulations for both, as well as minor triumphs, did absolutely nothing to change Celine’s attitude toward Ellen. Celine was (Ellen thought) frozen in the big-sister role she had taken on when they first met, a role that Ellen frequently resented, especially now that her actual sister, Moira, was back in her life.

  After their father’s inexplicable suicide last winter, Moira had barged in on Ellen’s grief and taken control of practical matters—the funeral, returning the body to Alberta to be buried beside their mother. Ellen, named as executor of his will (again, inexplicably), still had many tedious and terrible tasks to perform (his taxes, for one). But she had put it all aside with Moira’s blessing for this rejuvenating trip with Celine.

  All those years ago Ellen had been lost and desperate and she would never forget Celine’s kindness to her, which was probably why they were still friends. (She wasn’t so disloyal after all!) She just didn’t want to be treated like a woebegone child at the age of forty-six.