Ellen in Pieces (16 page)

“Read,” she commanded, holding the card in front of Tony.

He pranced over to
Lady with a Lapdog
and brought it back to
Ellen. For this, she rewarded him with a palm full of corn. Then she turned to Matt so he might—she hoped—claim his reward too.

B
US
to Horseshoe Bay, ferry to Nanaimo, bus upisland to German Creek. Ellen pulled her suitcase—stop-start, stop-start—stones jamming the wheels, through the gravel parking lot to the government wharf where the ramp was angled at eighty degrees. And she remembered how, all those years ago, whenever they left Cordova Island or returned, it had seemed so difficult. Inevitably it would be low tide like this and Ellen would have to negotiate the ramp with all their groceries and bags, and Mimi, just a baby. Ellen had needed a sherpa. And where was Larry? Why couldn’t he sherp?

She let the suitcase go first, clutching its strap and the railing, inching her way down, thinking of Tony pulling on the leash. She’d left him with Tilda.

It was the same ferry, a metal tub with a covered freight area, rows of wooden benches inside. Ellen loaded her suitcase on. Eventually other passengers began arriving with backpacks and Rubbermaid bins filled with provisions or the Christmas presents they’d come to the mainland to buy, stacked on foldable dollies. A group of strangers. It used to be that whenever she took the ferry, she knew everyone and they knew her and half of them, it would turn out, had slept with Larry.

Last year Ellen had slept with Larry at the Winter Solstice party at Larry and Amber’s house. Amber had gone to bed early. “Cramps,” she’d announced to the room. The island was full of secretless women, their menstrual cycles public knowledge. Ellen used to be one herself, though last year she had taken this information to mean that Amber’s body, if not Amber, accepted that these
intermittent reunions between Larry and Ellen were Ellen’s only opportunity for sex.

That was Ellen’s point of view anyway, that she threatened no one.

And this year? This year Ellen was besotted with Matt, who kept coming around. If he had a reason apart from sex, it was his secret.

The ferry backed out of its berth. A seal watched, head and shoulders out of the water, then ducked. Gulls screamed in a wheel above the dockside fish store. Ellen had forgotten the Solstice Party until now. At the end of Ellen and Larry’s marriage, when she’d learned that friends of hers had slept with him, she’d sought them out, shrieking, “How could you?” Very easily, it turned out. As easily as Ellen slept with Matt, rationalizing all the way. Ellen didn’t know the girlfriend. She was young. She would pity Ellen if she knew.

But Ellen knew Amber. She was practically related to her.

Tossed in the bag with the Christmas presents,
Lady with a Lapdog.
During the crossing, Ellen took out the book and sniffed it, ran her fingers over the dog-Braille inside the front cover. She’d intended to reread the whole thing, but instead found herself back with poor Anna Sergeyevna, stuck in love with Gurov, a man who classifies the women he sleeps with according to three types:
carefree, good-natured women, whom love had made gay and who were grateful to him for the happiness he gave them;
those
who made love without sincerity, with unnecessary talk, affectedly, hysterically;
and
two or three very beautiful women whose faces suddenly lit up with a predatory expression, an obstinate desire to take, to snatch from life, more than it could give
.

This last type were
no longer in their first youth
.

And Ellen? Which type was she? Grateful and utterly sincere, yes. But it was true, too, that she was chatty in bed and freely voiced her pleasure. And that in two years she’d be fifty.

Then she felt it, the sob that could never be released, pressing hard behind her ribs. She put both hands over the place at the same time she glanced out the window, glanced at that precise December moment out on the open ocean with the solstice approaching when the colour of the sky and the colour of the water merged and there was no light anywhere to orient her. The great grey middle of her life.

The sob absorbed back inside her body. Next time she looked, it was night.

H
ER
son-in-law, Sean, picked her up in the truck. They drove the main road companionably, Ellen shocked by the winter darkness. Off the grid, the island shut down on these long, overcast December evenings. They passed the Post Office, the Community Hall, the Free Store; Ellen couldn’t see these structures, only the forest in the headlights. She marvelled that Sean knew onto which rutted lane to turn. They bounced along, cedar boughs brushing against her window, spookily, like the memories of her former life here clawing to get in.

Eli ran out of the cabin when he heard the truck. “Nonny!” He was almost seven, with wild clown-hair he’d got from his dad. Sean, though, had sheared off his Medusa dreadlocks and reinvented himself—toque-wearing father, entrepreneur.

Taking her hand, Eli dragged Ellen inside. Sean followed with her suitcase. Eli looked from it to Ellen.

“Did you bring me a present, Nonny?”

Yolanda came over from the stove with baby Fern in a sling on her back, tsking at Eli, her glasses half fogged from cooking, exhausted and angelic in her half-hearted ponytail. She’d thickened from having babies, the way Ellen had. That’s what motherhood did, puffed you up, then beat you down.

“Give me that baby right now,” Ellen said in the middle of their hug.

Yolanda loosened the knot on her chest. Ellen waltzed Fern over to the couch lumped with sleeping cats. “Eli, come here,” she called. “I have some news. I have a dog staying at my house. His name is Tony. And you will not believe this, but it’s true. He can read.”

Yolanda, back at the stove, said, “I thought we were cat people.”

“Where are our presents?” Eli asked.

“Don’t give in to him. He has to wait.”

“Why should you?” Ellen whispered. “Bring me that bag next to my suitcase.”

In it was
Lepus arcticus.
Arctic Hare.

At dinner, Ellen told them about her neighbour Tilda. “She knits Canadian wildlife. She spins the yarn herself.” The white hare slouched on the table dangerously close to Eli’s bowl of chili. “That’s why he’s so soft,” Ellen told him. “He’s got real bunny fur mixed in with the wool.” She didn’t want to say what the hare and the tiny Townsend’s vole she’d bought for Fern had cost. “They’re not really toys. They’re works of art.”

Yolanda said, “The Solstice Party’s at Mason and Spirit’s place this year. And Amber invited us over tomorrow night. Do you want to go?”

Likely Ellen blushed. She fanned her face, pretending the chili was too hot. If she said no to Amber’s invitation they would wonder why.

Sean was trying to get Fern to eat a bean, washing the sauce off in his mouth, spitting out the bean, and feeding it to the baby by hand. At the same time, he glanced at Ellen and smirked.

“What?” Ellen said.

“Amber alert!” he cawed, flapping his hands on either side of his toque. “Amber alert!”

Yolanda slapped him on the shoulder.

“What does he mean?” Ellen asked, but Yolanda wouldn’t say.

Before bed Ellen read to the children and tucked them in. Then she stumbled in the starless dark to the outhouse and back. Calling good night to Yo and Sean, she retired to the tiny, frigid room, the one too far from the wood stove, less a bedroom than a pantry lined with dried beans and canned preserves. The cats joined her, bed-warmers, slipping out later to kill.

Last year she’d lain in this same rack of a cot listening to the ocean’s restless exhalations, wondering what would happen between her and Larry. This year, the ocean was still exhaling, but the hands Ellen imagined moving over her were young.

“W
HEN
I say
walkies
he grabs something that smells like me. A sock. Once he headed out with my panties.”

Yolanda asked, “Are you keeping him or not?”

“I didn’t plan on it. Now I’m in something of a situation. Because I care about him. I can’t stop thinking about him. Like now. Talking about the dog counteracts the pointlessness I feel going for a walk without a dog.”

They were following a rocky trail through the woods down to the beach, Fern in the sling wearing a bright Peruvian cap with ties, twisting her head back to look at Ellen, Eli marching ahead
pretending to shoot things, while Yolanda intermittently called out, “Cease-fire!”

“I should give him up. I’m not getting any work done. I feel like I’m being dragged around by the hair.”

“Sounds like you’re in love,” Yolanda said.

Ellen halted in the middle of the path with her mouth open, her hand clutching her heart. Was she? The other hand reached for the support of a tree. She leaned in, pressing her forehead to the rough bark.

“Mom?” Yolanda hurried back and slipped an arm around Ellen. “What’s wrong?”

Fern’s small hand patted her head. It felt like the touch of a crow’s wing, over and over.

“Are you depressed?”

“No.”

“Last night I thought you looked so beautiful when you came into the cabin. You seemed so happy.”

Ellen glanced up. “Did I?”

“Yes. Sean even said so. He said you looked hot.”

“I love that man,” Ellen said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I’m—”

No, she was too embarrassed to confess.

“I know,” Yo said. “It’s the holidays. They get me down too. Maybe we shouldn’t go tonight.” Her lips brushed Ellen’s cheek.

“Go where?” Ellen asked.

Y
OLANDA
went ahead with the kids in the truck while Ellen and Sean walked over with flashlights, Ellen hugging the ditch. Any old draft dodger with one headlight and a medicinal marijuana permit
could round the bend, but Sean strode fearlessly up the middle, the way he would, on a dry day, streak down it in a death-defying crouch. He custom-made longboards and sold them online, or bartered with them. Somehow the boards, their Child Tax Benefit payment, and Ellen’s occasional cheques sustained them, the way Larry’s plays and Ellen’s pots and her mother-in-law’s handouts had sustained Ellen and Larry all those years ago.

The glowing glass lantern of Larry and Amber’s house appeared through the trees, the opposite of Yolanda and Sean’s cabin. The opposite, too, of the shack where Larry had once lived with Ellen. This house, architect-designed, cathedral-ceilinged, powered by the sun, was built on sitcoms. You walked right into the heart of it, where Larry’s big, sturdy child-bride Amber stood at the stove talking to Yolanda, but falling silent when she saw Ellen come in the door.

Amber had changed her hair, sheared the sides and beaded the long part on top.

“Nice,” Ellen said, smiling and opening her arms.

On Cordova Island the standard greeting was a hug. You hugged the postmistress when she handed over your mail. You hugged the man who filled your propane tank. But Amber turned away from Ellen.

Bewildered, stung, Ellen tried again. “What are you making?”

“Latkes.” Amber transferred one out of the pan onto a paper-towel-lined plate.

“I have the best latke recipe,” Ellen said. “Grind the potatoes in the food processor. Then they’re fluffy instead of rubbery and don’t look so grey. Do you have a food processor?”

“No,” Amber said.

“Are we doing Hanukkah?”

“No,” Amber said.

“Can I help?” Ellen asked, sincerely.

“No,” again, just as a latke slapped the floor. When Amber bent to pick it up, the not-too-small of her back showed, along with her thong.

“I see London, I see France,” Ellen said, and Amber straightened with such a look of undiluted hatred, Ellen backed away.

All the way to where Yolanda had escaped to nurse Fern in the big armchair by the fire. She sank down on the hearth. Amber was never really warm with Ellen, understandably. Her best friend’s mother was also her husband’s ex-wife, but they’d always muddled through. Now Ellen, who had only expected, along with the usual awkwardness, the guilt anyone would feel returning to the scene of a crime, was confronted with a hostility whose source she quailed to guess at. Amber was the one who’d invited Ellen. Yolanda had said so. Why would Amber do this if she knew what had happened between Ellen and Larry last year?

“Where’s your father?” Ellen asked Yolanda.

“I don’t know. Sean’s checking on Eli in the bath.”

They came over once a week for this purpose, Ellen remembered, trying not to panic. Because Sean and Yolanda would take a bath, too, probably together, while Larry hid in his study—like now, leaving Ellen alone and defenceless against Amber.

“Sure you’re okay, Mom?” Yolanda asked, touching Ellen’s hair.

Larry didn’t show himself until dinner. Unshaven, in slippers and a stretched-out cable-knit sweater, the kind on offer in the Free Store, covered with pills, he finally appeared. At the sight of Ellen, he drew his head back sharply, which confused her. Also, she didn’t know if she should hug him with Amber right there carrying in the plate of latkes, and, instead of setting it down on the table, letting it drop the last two inches so it clattered.

Ellen decided to behave normally and hug Larry before he sat down. It was awkward and his sweater was pungent with old wood-smoke. Strange how different his once-loved body felt when for all these years it had been everyone else’s body that felt strange. All those lovers who weren’t Larry.

Last year, and the year before, over the last quarter century, in fact, when she knew she would soon see Larry, she would always be in some kind of state. Excitement sometimes, often rage. At any rate, some form of passion would carry her away. But this year? This year all she felt looking across the table at the delicately made, silvering man who had ruled her heart for decades was a mild irritation that he couldn’t be bothered to put on something presentable.

She raised her wineglass high in the air. “Cheers, everybody.”

“I
T’S
not you,” Yolanda told Ellen after they had got through the incredibly strained meal, made bearable to Ellen only by her own inane chatter. No one else would step up to the plate and talk. Except the children. Fern had blatted her few words, then guffawed as though she’d cracked a joke.