Ellen in Pieces (13 page)

I
T’S
a mystery how art happens. Patience, hard work, coincidence—in some combination. Quantities need not be exact, but it’s more work than anything. The other really crucial thing is to reach zero. To be abject.

That morning Ellen McGinty sat at her wheel, sat for ages until, erupting in frustration and rage, she attacked the anuses.
Clawed and squished until they extruded, shitlike, between her fingers. She howled and, howling still, staggered out of the garage behind the triplex and into her studio, where she threw herself onto the foldout couch, careful not to smear it with clay.

Sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Ellen emptied out.

Afterward, she washed her hands in a trance and put on the kettle. On the windowsill, a dead plant and, beside it, her lumpy
Bleigiessen
from New Year’s Eve. While she waited for the water to boil, she pushed a finger into the powdery soil of the plant. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. The leaves had sun-bleached to a linen-textured translucency, held together by fibrous veins.

Which was when Ellen thought to check her date book and saw she had a dental appointment.

She dressed in a rush, thinking that the life that was behind her showed like a dirty slip. All she had wanted was a fresh start.

Now she’s in the dentist’s chair, feeling flattered and affirmed, grateful for, and touched by, the words of the bright-toothed woman leaning over her with her tool. The sight of the tool and the hygienist’s kindness coincide (the coincidence) with Ellen’s months of frustration (the hard work, the patience). Ellen remembers the dead plant and how the light shone through a part of it that should have been opaque. The negative space. How it opened to the light. At that moment, stretched out long in the chair, relinquishing herself to its embrace, Ellen breaks through.

Afterward, in the liquor store, the clerk scanning her bottle says, “You’re happy.”

She’s seen him before. He’s a liquor-store lifer, slightly grizzled, eyes pouched. He probably gets a discount.

“I’m
very
happy,” Ellen tells him. “I just had an epiphany at the dentist.”

“No kidding.”

Not only that, she finally remembered that elusive thingy. Driving her eye along the shelves, looking for a label that she liked, it came to her in a flash, unheralded, and not so important after all.

Her eye parked on a bottle of Fat Bastard and Ellen remembered. January 21. Today’s date. Larry’s birthday!

When she gets home, she’ll give him a call.

“An epiphany,” the clerk says. “And what is that again?”

“Halfway between an orgasm and an epileptic seizure.”

N
INE
months later it’s fall again. The purple whatchamacallits are in bloom, also the yellow whatsits. Ellen slips out midday to buy coffee, which she discovered she was out of when she woke, but hasn’t done anything about until now because she’s working on a new pot.

These days her work absorbs and enthralls her, so much so that when passersby drop into the studio (which they do more often), when one of them actually wants to buy a pot, Ellen feels protective of it. She looks the prospective buyer up and down while probing for the sort of information that is usually asked of people adopting pets. (How many hours of the day will the pot be left alone? Are small children likely to be handling it?) This way she has inadvertently bartered up her price. She can get as much as two hundred and fifty dollars, but she will also give one away if she thinks it will be particularly loved.

Her studio window has changed too. In the beginning there were those stolid, cabbagey pots she used to make. Then, for the months that she was teaching herself new techniques with porcelain, it was strewn with broken shards of the old pots with a couple
of cabbages tossed in. Plenty of people stopped to comment on that. And now there is just one small white pot on a wooden pedestal in the window heaped with carded fleece that she got from Tilda. The pot is rising out of a cloud.

Another thing that’s different: her vintage dentist’s chair bought in an antique store on Main Street.

The sign on her door shows a clock. She moves the hands to say she’ll be back in ten, then heads off in the direction of Fourth Avenue.

On this day, Ellen McGinty, forty-eight, has reached the point where she would give herself away if she thought she would be particularly loved. From the outside, it seems as though she’s been doing this her whole life. There have been a lot of men since Larry, short-term boyfriends, one-night stands, but they always shared her with Larry, a person they may not have known existed. Why this should have been the case, and why it suddenly isn’t any longer, Ellen can’t say. She’s just enjoying the fact of it.

She buys a pound of coffee, returns home to grind it and make herself an espresso. The dead plant still sits on the ledge above the sink and beside it, her
Bleigiessen
, which has been changing shape all summer, softening and spreading.

In the main studio window a white curtain hangs. Ellen leaves it open during the day. She throws her pots out back, but does the carving here at a workbench in the corner. She felt isolated out there. Here she sees it all—who admires her wares, who walks right by. Right now a man with a takeout coffee in his hand is looking in, first at the pot in the window, then right into the studio. Because it’s so bright outside, and because Ellen is standing at the rear of the studio, in the kitchen doorway, he probably can’t see her. But she can see him, backlit, autumn sunshine all around his edges.
He’s just a shape now, but somehow familiar. Who? She leaves her cup of coffee on her workbench and starts toward him. It’s Whatshisname—no, Whosit. The closer she gets, the less sure she is because the years keep dropping off him. A few steps across the studio’s battered fir floor to the dentist’s chair and he’s already a younger man than she first thought. By the time she reaches the door, still unnoticed by him, he’s a young one.

In a moment she’ll open the door and he’ll fall back in surprise, as if she has caught him red-handed in some subterfuge. This will be quickly overridden by a powerful mutual recognition. The widening of his sleepy eyes, the way he pushes the heavy waves of hair off his forehead, revealing the whole of his face, which has a sweetness to it—baby cheeks, fleshy nose. She knows this face, yet can’t quite place him.

“Come in,” she’ll say.

Shyly, he’ll step inside and look around. Ellen will point to the small case in the corner where three more pots are displayed, then settle back at her workbench. She’ll unwind the damp cloth from the new pot, take up her tool again. This is the moment when visitors to the studio either thank her and slip out, or ask her a question to signify their interest in actually making a purchase. Either way is fine with Ellen, who will have commenced the delicate scraping of the semi-hardened clay. She’ll forget all about this vaguely familiar visitor.

When she pauses for a sip of lukewarm coffee, he’ll be there still, watching her. And Ellen will ask, “Do I know you?”

“In the café. Ten minutes ago. I was in front of you in line.” He’ll lift his paper cup in the air, as though toasting her. “Matt.”

Now Ellen will remember. The tag of his shirt showed, the side with the washing instructions. The nape of the neck is such
a vulnerable place. (When her daughters were babies, she loved to nuzzle them there.) Impulsively, she tucked it in, which caused him to turn around, a young man in shorts who might have been offended to be touched by an older stranger, who instead said in a startlingly deep voice that did not match his baby face, “Your hands are cold.”

“Cold hands, warm heart,” Ellen chirped.

“I can see that.”

At her age flirting warms her cockles. She left the café pleased.

She’ll reswaddle the pot and rise from her stool with her coffee cup in hand. “Do you want another, Matt? Mine’s cold. I’m making more anyway.”

“Sure.”

“I’m Ellen.”

He’ll follow her to the small kitchen in the rear with its geriatric appliances and knobless cupboards. He’ll say, “What’s going on next door?”

“What do you mean?”

“Those trees with dicks.”

Laughing, Ellen will bend to knock the puck of old coffee out of the portafilter basket into the compost.

When she straightens, he’ll wave the empty paper cup, say, “Can I toss this?” and lean in to drop it in the garbage can. He’ll be close enough then to kiss her, and will.

When he pulls away, he’ll say, “Sorry. I wanted to do that in the café. I was kicking myself that I didn’t.”

I
N
a moment all this will happen. But not yet.

Ellen is still watching him, a stranger, through the glass door
as he gazes at the pot, which is actually less a pot now than the filigreed outline of one, the clay scraped away with the pin tool or the fettling knife and sometimes actual pins or nails. In the beginning she copied patterns she found on the Internet, jewellery and lace, even a surprisingly beautiful pattern in a tumour, discovered by Googling the word
filigree.
(Needless to say, she did not tell this to the person who bought it.)

Lately, though, she just lets the pattern flow out the end of her tool, following it, instead of leading. So far she’s been pleased. She works her way around the pot, liberating its negative space, creating the pattern that she somehow senses was always there in the clay, waiting for her. Sometimes it meets up perfectly where she started.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

I
n the fall Matt’s girlfriend, Nicole, spent six weeks up north doing fieldwork for her thesis. When she returned, she asked Matt to go to a craft fair. She said it was famous, this huge craft fair at the Convention Centre, as famous as the Christmas train through Stanley Park, the carol ships in the harbour, the bridges and construction cranes outlined in coloured lights. Matt, heading into his first sodden coastal winter, concluded that Vancouver had a snow complex. When you have the white stuff, you don’t need convention-sized craft fairs in early November to get you in the mood. But he went. Nicole wanted him to. Not for one second did he imagine Ellen would be there because he’d forgotten all about this other thing she did, this thing that had nothing to do with him.

He’d seen the sails of the Convention Centre before, while biking around the seawall. Ten white tentlike peaks. The day of the craft fair he looked up at the ceiling and realized where he was. Not across the water from this canvasy structure, but inside it. When he levelled his gaze again, he was looking right at Ellen. Just the day
before he’d frolicked nakedly in her loft, yet it took a full second for the seismic shudder of recognition to move through him. He nearly fainted and popped an erection at the same time. Nearly collapsed on the red industrial carpet, a tent rising in his pants.

Nicole touched his sleeve and pointed into the crowded maze of booths. His eyes felt weird in their sockets, like they were floating in brine; he wondered if they looked weird to her.

“I’ll catch up,” he said, and she glided away, right past Ellen, without giving her or her wares so much as a glance.

Three of Ellen’s filigreed pots were displayed on their own small wooden boxes. She hadn’t noticed him yet. Her face was turned away, as though to avoid the stream of shoppers, while on the other side of the black fabric partition a grinning woman in a Santa hat offered candy canes to anyone who stopped to smell her soap. Ellen’s booth was undecorated, just her and the pots, a black velvet cloth, and the pedestal boxes. A crease ran from the side of her nose to the corner of her mouth, previously unnoticed by Matt. It made her look angry. Or older. Or as old as she really was.

Matt came over and stood in front of her and she raised her eyes to him. The blankness in them was so wounding! Remember
yesterday
? It was just
yesterday
that I pounded my love into you. Then something happened on her face. The context he didn’t belong in—the vaulted ceiling, the whole teeming fair beneath it, the ear-worming carols, and the thousand things beaded, turned, spun, and stitched—it all began to fall away, crumbling to bits around him, inconsequential, irrelevant.

E
VER
since Matt and Nicole got together four years ago, they’d spent Christmas with her parents. When they were at the U of A,
no one mentioned this arrangement; holidays didn’t matter so much when you could see your family whenever. But now that Matt and Nicole lived a plane ride away in Vancouver, there were tensions. On the phone his sister Patty had said, “Why do
they
always get Christmas? Why can’t
they
take Boxing Day for a change?”

“Nicole’s an only child,” Matt said. “Mom and Dad have you and Carl. And now the baby too. And I was just out there. Remember?” He’d come home for a week in September to see his newborn nephew, his sort-of namesake, Cody Matthias.

And so on the twenty-sixth, after French-press coffee and homemade scones at Nicole’s parents’ place, they headed out to the Grove. It was an ugly Kal Tire–Tim Hortons kind of drive with only blowing snow to soften the fact of it. Already, after just five months on the coast, Matt was questioning a whole life spent in a place like Spruce Grove, in a house like the one he pulled up at, its double garage doors the focal point, implying the most important thing in Spruce Grove was that you owned two cars.

“Well,” Matt said. “I guess it’s Christmas cake again.”

Last year Nicole had choked on the fossilized Christmas cake. She’d excused herself from the table to go dig the package out of the garbage. Later, vindicated, she’d shown the best-before date to Matt.

“It might be the same cake as last year,” he said now, and Nicole laughed. Easy to joke about his family out in the car, but the second he walked through that door the sluggish pledge he carried in his veins would start to flow.

The sheers parted in the window and a bloated face looked out. Patty. She made an obscure gesture with her hand, not welcoming at all, more like a push-off. Typical Patty: love ya, get lost. Then
Carl, Matt’s brother-in-law, reared up hugely in the window with a more definite sign. He was telling them to go around the back.

“What’s going on?” Nicole asked.

They left everything in the car and went around the side of the house, the minus-30-something outside air a psychic shock. Carl met them at the back door, clasped Matt’s hand bro-style. Matt clasped back. He liked being related to this body type. Normally if a hulk like Carl came toward Matt? He crossed the street.

“Don’t make a sound,” Carl told them. “Don’t say a word.”

They slipped off their boots and crept to the living room still wearing their coats. Patty was stationed on the couch nursing the baby, which had tripled in size since September, just as Patty had tripled with her pregnancy. All you could see was the infant’s veloured back and bald spot as he reclined on the C-shaped pillow around Patty’s stomach. She wiggled her fingers at Matt. His dad, Alden, was there too, having given up his recliner for Nicole, squeezing Matt’s shoulder as he limped past, coming back a minute later with a can of beer to shove in his hand.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning. All the presents under the tree were unopened.

“Alden?” Matt’s mother, Anne, called from upstairs. “Where are you?”

Patty buckled over, trying not to laugh. The baby was nearly squashed.

“Down here!” his dad called. “We’re waiting for Matty.”

“Is he here?”

“Not yet.”

First her socked feet appeared, one finding its place on the stair before the other moved down to join it. In silence they watched her slow, banister-clutching descent. It seemed cruel to Matt and he
had to look away. When she finally reached the bottom and started into the room, she walked almost normally except for her arms, which she bent at the elbows as if carrying an invisible tray.

She stopped. “Matthias?”

“See!” Patty shrieked at the same time Carl and Alden let out a roar. “See! She always knows!”

“Should I change my deodorant?” Matt asked, going over to his mother, who turned to him for a hug. In September she could still see him. Couldn’t she? He waved the unopened beer in her face, but she didn’t react.

“Matty’s here,” she whispered in his ear, as though he were someone else.

He pulled away. “Mom. I should get the bags.”

Coatless, he sprinted out the door to the car, the cold pummel-ling him all the way.

When he burst back inside, Carl called, “I hope those are the presents. I want my presents.”

“You should have gone ahead without us,” Nicole said.

“We didn’t want to,” Patty said in a long-suffering tone. She lifted the baby to her shoulder, drummed his back. He sounded hollow.

“Can I see him?” Nicole asked, just as Alden appeared carrying a mug with a spoon sticking out. “Here’s your tea, dear.”

Anne was right behind him. “Did you ask her what she takes in it?”

“What do you take in it, dear?”

“Milk,” Nicole said.

“No sugar?” Anne asked Alden.

“Just milk,” Nicole said.

“Alden, take it back and put some milk in.”

“I’m on it, Mother. I’m on it.”

Carl, on his hands and knees under the tree, began passing presents around. “Patty. Patty. The Hickey Machine.”

“Oh, he’s so cute,” said Nicole, taking a seat next to Patty on the couch. “Hi, Cody. Hi. Let me know when I can hold him.”

“He feeds, like, all the time.”

There was a PhD thesis to be written on what came out of his sister’s mouth, Matt thought as he settled beside Nicole. Differentiating the layers of grievance—Boxing Day, the countless tactless things Nicole had unwittingly blurted over the years—then sorting the grievances from the sharp way Patty expressed her love.

Carl read a tag and tossed a present. “Matty. Feels like a mouse pad.”

“Okay, here she comes,” Alden announced, limping in with the tea.

“Did you take out the bag?” asked Anne, who still hovered between the living room and the dining room, turned slightly away from everyone, looking old and odd.

Alden turned and limped back out.

As soon as Nicole got her tea the way she liked it, they started on the presents, everyone turning first to Matt, who opened the mouse pad. It was custom printed with a picture of his nephew.

“I’ll keep it in my wallet. There’s plenty of room. Not like there’s any money in it.” He took the wallet from his back pocket and feigned jamming the mouse pad in.

“He has a finger pad on his computer,” Nicole explained.

“Oh, sorry,” Patty said.

Because of Matt’s lack of funds, Alden, Patty, Carl, and the baby all received a can of Kokanee. “B.C. beer!” Alden said. “That’ll make for a change.”

Carl and Patty seemed touched that the baby had got his first beer at three months. “Hey, Hickey Machine!” Patty said, jiggling the can over his head while he nursed. “Look what your uncle gave you!” She said the outrageously overpriced booties that Nicole had bought at the craft fair were “Nice.”

“I hope you didn’t get beer, dear,” Alden told Nicole, who laughed and shook her head.

“Where’s the other two beer then?” Carl said. “Anne, did you get
two
beer from Matty? No fair.”

“It’s smaller than beer,” Anne said, lifting the box into her lap.

As well as the mouse pad, Matt got a Walmart sweater and Oilers memorabilia, Nicole a Walmart sweater and bath beads. She pulled the pink atrocity over her head, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it had been purchased for her by his sister out of sheer hostility, not bad taste. Or not only bad taste. Her static-charged hair rose like feelers in the dry air.

“Acrylic is so warm,” she said.

“What does it look like?” his mother asked.

“It looks okay,” Patty said. “What did Matt get you, Nicole?”

Nicole said, “A water bottle.”

“What!” Carl roared. “
We
all got beer!”

“It’s a hydration system,” Matt said. “I’ll show you.” He went to the door where their bags still were and brought it back, a red nylon pouch with a long clear tube dangling down.

“What does it look like?” Matt’s mother asked.

“A douche bag,” Patty said.

“I was going to say whoopee cushion,” Alden said.

“Pass it here,” said Carl. “I’ll sit on it.”

“Don’t,” Patty told him. “You’ll pop it. Then she won’t be able to drink her water.”

“Okay, okay,” said Matt, seeing Nicole’s face pinkening to match the sweater. He took it and shoved it down into Nicole’s overnight bag again. “It’s for hiking. We’re hiking a lot out there.”

Alden said, “You’re up, Mother. Go ahead.”

Anne turned the present in her lap, feeling for the folds in the paper. Matt had used too much tape.

“I’ll do it, Mom.”

He leapt up but Patty waved him back. What was worse, fumbling with something in front of everyone or being denied the chance to? Anne finally tore the paper off. Now she was feeling the box, but would never get inside it.

“Here, Mom,” he said, taking her hands in his. He righted the box, positioned her thumb in the notch on the lid. “It slides open.”

“I see,” said his mother, even though she didn’t.

She lifted the tiny pot out of the straw it was packed in and held it an inch from her eyes. For some reason this made her seem stupid. “What’s it for?” she asked.

Not—what is it?
What’s it for?

This was the kind of people they were. His father, who suffered chronic back pain, kept on running his carpet-cleaning business anyway. Until just a few years ago, when her eyesight got too bad, Anne used to go on rounds with him; now she booked their dwindling appointments. (Laminate had cut their business in half.) Carl was a manager at Canadian Tire. Patty had cashiered at Safeway since she was sixteen. In Matt’s family, you worked and the things you bought with your hard-earned money had a purpose, like beer. No one was the least offended to receive beer for Christmas, but everyone stared at the pot Anne was turning in her hands and their unease was palpable.

A pot too small to put anything in. A pot full of holes. She
couldn’t even see it! Everything they feared for him had come true. He’d given up a job offer to go live in a city so soft it didn’t even snow, where he had no other job lined up and still hadn’t found one despite his unpaid-for university degree. He’d followed Nicole without marrying her, Nicole who hogged him every Christmas and was getting a PhD in a subject they couldn’t remember or understand. All of it, embodied in this inexplicable gift.

And that was only the half of it. They didn’t even know that Matt was sleeping with the woman who’d made the pot.

B
ACK
in mid-October, after Nicole left town, Matt met Ellen at the coffee place on the corner. A woman in loose clothes, older than him; women his age dressed in yoga bondage.

The way she stood in the line—claiming her full allotment of space, confident she deserved it—attracted Matt, who every second second-guessed himself. He should have been earning 2.3 million Korean
won
a month plus the completion bonus at the end of two years, living in free housing supplied by the
hakwon.
He should have been eating kimchi. Nicole had agreed he should go and clear up his debt. And if she wasn’t accepted in any of the PhD programs she’d applied to, she would come to Korea too. You didn’t need the TESL certificate, just earned more if you had one.

But she
was
accepted, and it turned out that she couldn’t bear to part from him, and he her, in truth. Normally, they didn’t do the dirty enough to satisfy Matt, not by a long shot. Anticipating their parting, they did it all the time, and Matt thought, okay, this is worth 2.3 million
won
. He cancelled his contract.