Ellen in Pieces (17 page)

Ellen, with much nervous lip-licking, had explained how to teach a dog to read. “Take soap. Rub it on the card with the correct word. Rub the corresponding picture or object. Leave the other pictures unsoaped. What the dog is actually doing is reading the smell. That’s what smelling is for them.”

Eli asked what grade Tony was in.

(Lying with Matt, listening to Tony singing at the bottom of the ladder, she had used
Lady with a Lapdog
to teasingly fan his face. “Aren’t you curious how I taught him?”

“I know how you did it,” Matt had said. “That’s the book with teeth marks all over it.”)

Amber wouldn’t make eye contact, even when Ellen complimented her on the latkes, which were in fact rubbery and grey. Neither would Amber look at Larry. Instead, she shot secretive glances at Yolanda as though the two of them were teenagers.

Afterward, Ellen volunteered to do the dishes. Yolanda offered to dry.

Two rubber duckies, one with a bow tie, the other in a flowered bonnet, perched on the window ledge above the sink amid the driftwood and shells and coloured bits of beach glass. Ellen wondered about the pretty detritus, the shells and glass, things you’d pick up on a beach holiday to take home as mementoes. What possessed Amber—it had to be her—to gather and display things so commonplace to island life? Ellen pictured her moping down at the beach, noticing a shell, and stooping. And in her mind’s eye Ellen saw the thong again, the world’s most uncomfortable undergarment, and was glad, very glad, no longer to be young.

Yolanda whispered, “So Dad told Amber—”

The plate Ellen was washing nearly slipped out of her hand.

“—that he didn’t find her
very interesting.
”

Ellen untensed. “Why is she mad at me, then?”

Yolanda said, “It’s not you. She’s mad at Dad. See how the boy is facing straight ahead?” She pointed to the duckies. “That means Dad wants to make up. But the girl has her back to him. So Amber is still pissed off.”

“Are you serious?” Ellen asked.

Yolanda picked a dripping plate out of the rack and, covering her face with it, giggled.

W
HEN
the dishes were done, Yolanda went out to the greenhouse with Amber, ostensibly so Amber could smoke. Sean was in the bath with Fern. This left Ellen and Larry effectively alone, except for Eli, who was walking on Larry’s back.

“Why do you like to get stepped on?” Eli asked.

“It’s what I’m used to,” Larry said.

Ellen snorted. Soon Eli lost interest and scampered off to look for his Arctic Hare, leaving Larry face down on the rug.

“Those are great kids,” Ellen said. “It’s nice you see so much of them.”

“I’m wanted for my indoor plumbing.”

She laughed and went to the kitchen for more wine, found Eli crouching behind the island counter with the hare that had cost her three hundred and fifty dollars, its face stained with chili now. He’d discovered chopsticks in a drawer and was carefully inserting them between the stitches into the animal’s body.

She returned with a glass for Larry too. By then he’d resurrected himself and was stoking the fire, stabbing the burning logs with the fresh one.

“Did you lose weight?” he asked.

“No,” Ellen lied.

Larry closed the fireplace doors. “You seem happier.”

“You don’t. And your sweater is ugly.”

She felt sorry for him, the way after seven or eight readings she had begun to feel sorry for Gurov, shackled by bitterness. Every new affair inevitably grew
complicated
and problematic; love always became an unbearable
situation.
When Yolanda moved here to be with Sean after Eli was born, Larry visited them. His visits to his own children had been infrequent, but now that he was a grandfather, he came. At some point he decided to move back, possibly
when he met Amber. Ellen had never asked why, but now she did.

There turned out to be a story. The way Larry offered it up made Ellen think he had been waiting a long time for someone sympathetic to lend an ear, and that no one had until now. Until Ellen. It concerned a play Larry had gone to see in L.A. five years before.

“A play everyone was raving about. By a young playwright.”

“A woman.”

Larry nodded. “It was pretty good. I liked it. The playwright was there so afterward I went over and introduced myself. She didn’t know who I was.”

Ellen sensed what was coming. She disguised her cringe with another sip of wine.

“I told her about
Talking Stick
and the awards it won and my TV projects.”

“
Talking Stick
was a great play,” Ellen said. “Your best.”

“I only wrote two plays,” Larry said.

“That was my favourite.”

He looked at her. Larry had a look like a Taser—it disabled you with feelings of stupidity and self-doubt. But Ellen had been looked at by Larry so many times over the years she was as desensitized as a lab rat. “And?”

“That’s it,” Larry said. “I told her who I was. She didn’t have a clue. She’d never heard of
A Principled Man.
It ran two seasons. I was head writer.
Curve Ball
?”

“The baseball show,” Ellen said, being kind. She’d never seen it. She’d never watched a baseball game in her life.

“
Curve Ball
drew a blank too.” He scratched his stubble, then admitted that he had asked the young playwright to go for a drink sometime, not necessarily that night. “‘To talk about your play.’ I
said I had a few suggestions. Well. She took
gross
offence. It was unbelievable how she overreacted. Like I’d just said her play was shit, when I’d said the opposite.”

“Unbelievable,” Ellen said, thinking of Tony in full snorkel mode at the base of a tree. Now that she’d read all those dog books, she knew what he was so desperately seeking there. Some other dog’s three-week-old piss to dilute with his own.

Amber appeared out of nowhere with Yolanda behind her. “I’m going to bed,” she announced.

“See you,” Ellen sang. “Thanks for dinner.”

Larry looked at Amber and it had its intended effect. She swung around and stomped off like a giant little girl, her beads clacking.

Yolanda said, “I’m just taking a quick bath, Mom. Do you want to walk now with Sean and Fern or come later with me and Eli in the truck?”

“We’re talking,” Larry told her.

“Well, don’t talk too much,” she said to Ellen.

“Gotcha,” Ellen said as Yolanda left.

“The last time I wrote something decent was when we lived here,” Larry said, as though those discomfiting walk-throughs hadn’t happened. “That’s your answer. That’s why I came.”

“So how’s the play?” Ellen asked.

“There’s no play,” Larry said, and he turned and opened the doors of the fireplace and slammed another wood chunk in.

“Did you tell Amber about last year?”

Larry said nothing.

“Larry? You shouldn’t have. She’ll tell Yolanda if she hasn’t already. And now she hates me. Is that why she invited me? To show me that she hates me?”

“It’s a test,” Larry said.

Ellen threw up her hands. “It was nothing.”

“Was it?”

The way Larry looked at her then was entirely unfamiliar. There was a softening in his eyes that seemed more than the creases of middle age. She saw his pain too. His back, and now his play. Larry had always had a tortured process.

“My therapist?” Larry said. “The one in L.A.? He used to say I was addicted to Act One.”

“What does that mean?”

“I like beginnings. When I lived with you? Here? That was the only time I ever finished a play.”

Ellen stared at him. The sweater made him seem shrunken. He pressed both hands to the small of his back. Also, now that his legs were stretched out in front of him, she saw two different coloured socks, brown and black.

Larry stood. Last year she’d followed him to his office, to his battered leather couch calicoed with the stains of former conquests. Not then, not during any of the other times that they had coupled up for old times’ sake, or relief, had he ever indicated that she might be his muse.

Now he limped out, leaving Ellen by the fire in the lonely cathedral of the room, wondering where everyone had got to and how they’d ended up this way, so miserable. Well, the children were all right, and Sean too. Yolanda was just tired.

“Nonny!” Eli called.

Ellen had forgotten he was behind the kitchen island. She hurried over. Eli held up the hare, impaled with chopsticks now—a voodoo doll—and Ellen sighed.

She lifted him off the floor, set him on the counter next to the sink.

“Look at these two,” she said, showing him the duckies on the windowsill. She made the girl ducky fight the boy ducky, and Eli threw back his head and laughed.

It
was
laughable.
Pathetic.

Then she turned the girl ducky so it faced the boy ducky, so it seemed to be nuzzling the boy ducky’s neck.

S
OMETHING
happened just as they were leaving that changed the entire holiday for Ellen. Larry, when summoned by his daughter, shambled out to be hugged by her, then Ellen. After helping a squirming Eli into his coat, Ellen pulled her gloves from her pocket. And something fluttered to the floor, something orange that Larry bent, wincing, to pick up. To her amazement, and Yolanda’s apparently, he straightened with a smile, his first that evening—for all Ellen knew, that year.

A poop bag.

“I know what’s different about you, Ellen,” he said. “You got a dog.”

I
N
the truck, as they drove away, Ellen told Yolanda, “I love him.”

“Who? Dad?”

“My dog.”

She came to her decision then. She would forget Matt. Forget Larry. What had they, or any man, ever done for her? She was always giving, giving herself away. No more, she decided. No more. She would get Tony neutered and live with him instead. Long slow walks in the morning, reading together every night. In between, a little bit of squeaky banana and some fetch. The second half of
her life unspooled before her like a newsreel, its headline blazing: CO
NTENTMENT
! CO
NTENTMENT
!

After that, Ellen just
had to
talk to Tony. She used Yolanda’s phone to call Tilda.

Tilda said, “Yesterday there was so much corn in his poo. Today he’s better.”

“Have you been practising with the Henry James?”

“Um,” Tilda said.

“Where is he?”

“Right here. He’s sleeping.”

“Put him on. Tony? Hi, Tony! Whatcha doing? Do you miss me, Tony? I sure miss you. What’s he doing, Tilda? Does he know it’s me?”

“He’s wagging all over the place.”

So who was Ellen’s grand passion? She wondered this after she hung up. Of course it was Larry. It had always been Larry, her Gurov. (But this was only her point of view. Larry, of course, would have a different opinion. He always did.)

Then this past October she’d found herself standing in line behind a young man whose shirt tag poked out the back of his collar. She’d tucked it in. He’d turned and said, “Your hands are cold.”

Your hands are cold. Your hands are cold. Let me. Warm them. Let’s go up.

She hadn’t told Larry about Matt, though she’d planned to. She’d planned to say, “See? I, too, can
snatch from life
all that it can give.”

Then, what with the Winter Solstice party, and Christmas, and visiting old friends who still lived on Cordova Island, Ellen did forget Matt. She barely thought of him after that night at Larry’s. Things were getting complicated between them anyway, especially now. Now that she had Tony.

W
HEN
she got home to Vancouver, he was waiting for her. Tilda opened the door and he leapt against her legs and dervished all around her. The whole dog wagged. He wagged for Ellen.

She threw her bags inside and out they went. Tony sniffed and peed, sniffed and peed. Reaching the end of the block she turned; he was far behind. But all she had to do was call his name and he ran right to her, tongue out.

A child’s pink purse lay in the gutter in front of the corner store across the street. Ellen wiped it on the grass and showed it to Tony, who took the handle in his mouth.

In the next block, an elderly woman came along. “What in the world is he carrying?”

“We’re just coming back from Saks,” Ellen said. “Gucci’s on sale.”

“Well, he is cute.”

“Smart too. This dog can read.”

The woman’s face crinkled all over when she smiled, in a way Ellen found very beautiful.

Back home, the mail was in a drift behind the door. She unpacked her suitcase first—she had bones for Tony—then checked her phone messages.

“Ellen? Are you back? It’s Matt. I’ve been calling and calling. I really have to see you. I
have to.
”

She pressed the phone against her ribs, pressed it hard, but it wasn’t any use. It had been building all this time. And out it came. Out and out and out.

Tony laid back his ears and cocked his head to one side,
but both of them knew
because both of them had read the story.
The end was still a long, long way away and the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.

B
ack in fifth grade at Rayburn Elementary in North Vancouver, Mimi had felt her first cruel stirrings of love. They were for Mr. Clark—lanky of limb, hair tucked girlishly behind his ears, the same navy blazer every day with a chalk line across his butt from leaning against the board ledge. Not during class, but whenever they happened to pass each other in the hall, Mr. Clark would sing out,
“Che gelida manina!”
Though Mimi had no clue what it meant, it sounded beautiful ringing off the walls, almost as beautiful as “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” by Bryan Adams, though not quite.

Another thing she remembered. How Mr. Clark brought in a mechanical model of the solar system and set it up on his desk.

“An orrery,” her counsellor Kevin said seven years later when she was being treated for her interesting life. Kevin was Mr. Clark’s opposite—blocky, his shaved head parenthesized by large ears. She hated him for saying “orrery,” the way she hated him a minute ago for saying, “
La Bohème
?” As though that could possibly compute for a seventeen-year-old.

“That’s what it’s called. You turn the crank and the planets move?”

She made teeny-mouth. Outside the window, the Red Riding Hood woods pressed in around the rehab centre.

“Sorry,” Kevin said. “I’ll be good.”

Mimi waited a full three minutes, waited until he stirred in his chair. It was Ellen who had named teeny-mouth and revealed its effectiveness. “I just want to grab you by the face when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make that teeny-mouth.”

Mimi hadn’t even known she was!

She didn’t actually want the session with Kevin to end; she was her own favourite subject back then. Just before he gave up on her, she relaxed her mouth.

“How did you even get this job?”

He laughed. “You were saying?”

Back at Rayburn Elementary, Mr. Clark asked who wanted to help work the orrery. Though every hand shot up, he naturally picked Mimi to walk the long aisle between the desks and stand by his side at the front of the room. She only reached his blue-blazered chest, though, to Mimi, their height difference was irrelevant.

The gears started stiffly, but once the two of them got going, Mr. Clark’s moist hand over hers, they really flew. Faster and faster, the nine planets Tilt-A-Whirled around the bright orange ball of the sun. Before the astonished class, Mimi and Mr. Clark made time. That was what it amounted to, this dizzying choreography, the earth pirouetting on its axis, reeling through its orbit: days, months, year after year. She was ten, she was seventeen, she was twenty-seven and still trying so very hard not to have an interesting life.

E
VENTUALLY
Mimi escaped—not rehab, but her family. Or more to the point, Ellen. Ellen who blamed Mimi for everything that had gone wrong in her own life.

Mimi headed for Toronto, where she rented the first place she looked at, an apartment in a house on Davenport Road with an old yellow one-speed stashed on the porch. The landlord said she was welcome to use the bike. The previous tenant was unlikely to return for it, having gone off to join a convent.

The apartment smelled funny. Mothbally nun’s habit, Mimi thought. Nevertheless, she stayed for the two years that she worked at Future Bakery. When she left that job for BioLife on the Danforth, she moved across town to a brick co-op. It was a sublet, thankfully; she wasn’t expected to be co-operative. All that time she’d been writing long frustrated e-mails to Ellen about not dancing and not being able to work up the nerve to audition, and receiving not-very-helpful e-mails back.

Then Georgia, Mimi’s childhood dance teacher and Ellen’s good friend, set up an audition. But this only meant that when Mimi was invited into the company—semi-professional, no big deal—it felt like a favour to Georgia. Mimi ended up making teeny-mouth all the time. Sarcastic e-mails flowed out of her. The bloody commute to Scarborough, how the show was stupid, a musical comedy about nuns.
Nuns are following me everywhere
, she wrote. She was still riding around on the old yellow bike from the first apartment.

One morning she woke swollen and immobilized. Get out of bed? How? She was on the phone so fast to Ellen, who, of course, didn’t believe a word she said.

“D
ON’T
touch it!” she shrieked.

The doctor cocked a skeptical eyebrow that her flowered hijab seemed to neutralize. “You have to show me. I have to know there’s really something wrong.”

“Of course there’s
really
something wrong! I can’t bend my leg! It hurts like hell!”

“Hop up.” The doctor patted the table, making the paper crackle.

“I can’t.”

“Then pull your pant leg over your knee.”

Mimi did and the doctor said, “Okay. I see what you mean.” She knelt on the floor and gently prodded the tender grapefruit of Mimi’s joint, causing her to wince.

Rest. Elevation. Ice.

“Can you give me the name of a physio?”

“That’s all you want. A physiotherapist?”

“Yes,” Mimi said.

The doctor wrote down a name and Mimi took the torn-off sheet and turned to go.

“And the pain?” the doctor asked.

The scarf bowed over the pad again. Mimi accepted the prescription, folded it in half, and limped out without saying thanks. Yet she was tingling all over and the pain in her leg had temporarily vanished. Just from a word written on a piece of paper.

“I
T
gives me powers,” she’d told bald, sticky-out-eared Kevin, all those years ago in his office in the woods.

“How so?”

“It makes the pain go away. That’s what it’s for, right?”

“If you use it correctly. If you don’t, it causes more pain. Pain for everyone in your life.”

“That’s what I mean,” Mimi said. “It gives me powers.”

S
HE
quit rehearsals. After a week Sebastian, the director, called. “I’m only phoning you, honey, because Georgia e-mailed and asked me to. She says you hurt yourself. Did you hurt yourself?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a nice tone of voice to use on someone who’s phoning out of concern.”

“You’re concerned about Georgia, not me.”

“Correct. But she’s concerned about you. And you’re lucky in that. You’re a very lucky girl. Georgia is one of the kind souls of this world.”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m not a girl.”

“You act twelve. If you want to help out until your leg gets better, come. But you have to commit and be responsible. You have to fix your broken attitude. Are you coming back?”

Mimi hung up.

She couldn’t ride the yellow bike now, had to take the streetcar to work. Boarding, she placed her right foot on the first step and straightened the leg to bring the unbendable left one up beside it. And again. The driver stared, then looked away. Mimi made teeny-mouth as she dropped in the fare.

On Broadview, they passed an old brick church that previewed its sermons on a sign out front. That day it was about counting the hairs on your head. She would remember the quote later because for much of the ride she puzzled over whether this was even possible when there were something like a hundred thousand strands on the average human head. She’d read that somewhere.

At BioLife they tried to accommodate her injury. They let her sit on a stool behind the register. The earnest, long-skirted manager recommended glucosamine and fish oil capsules; she reminded Mimi of her employee discount. Mimi tucked the bottles under the counter. The next afternoon they were gone, reshelved, and Mimi knew the jig was up. How could she work there if she didn’t believe in the healing power of Nature?

For Mimi, there was really only one thing that worked.

“D
ID
you ask for it?” Ellen said on the phone, her voice tight with panic. No, probably anger.

“She offered it to me.”

To Mimi’s surprise, Ellen started pleading. Back when Mimi was using, Ellen had only pleaded as a last resort. She was the adult, Mimi the child. But now they were even.

“Don’t take it, sweetheart. Don’t give in.”

“Why not? I can’t dance. Every time I try to get back onstage, I hurt myself. Oh, and I’m quitting my job. They’re giving me the stink eye because I wouldn’t buy their forty-dollar supplements.”

In the long, ensuing silence, Mimi thought she could hear her mother writhe.

Way over on the other side of the city in the opposite direction of Scarborough. Wherever Mimi needed to go, it would be far.

T
HE
first thing she saw coming out of the subway station into the heat was the T
EMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE
sign on the litter bins out front, the clear plastic wrap that had swathed the lids already torn away. The bins erupted greasy takeout cartons and swollen diapers.

After a ten-minute limp up a long, mansioned street, she arrived at Mr. D’Huet’s all sweaty. The house looked vaguely Shakespearean except for the Cadillac in the driveway with a pugged front grill. She rang the bell. Eventually he answered, a shirtless old man with wild, flossy hair.

“Ah!” he said.

“I saw your ad. On Craigslist? I got a text back right away.”

His fingers disappeared inside his white mat of chest hair and his face, open a moment ago in surprise, took on a conflicted aspect. Mimi had hacked out a bob the night before with manicure scissors and troubled herself into something secretarial; she was buttoned to her chin so her tattoo wouldn’t show. Not making teeny-mouth was killing her.

“Come in then,” he said, gesturing toward a chandeliered dining room stacked with cardboard boxes. Boxes on the floor, on the table, on the brocade seats of all the chairs. In another room a phone was ringing.

Mimi hobbled through the cardboard obstacle course, glancing back at Mr. D’Huet, not so mobile himself, using the furniture as crutches. He motioned for her to carry on through a door that led to a bright, unclean kitchen. By then whoever was phoning had given up.

There were boxes everywhere here, too, and a girl with butterscotch hair and heavy bangs sitting at the table evaluating Mimi through mascara-clotted eyes. Some relation, Mimi thought, a granddaughter or a great-niece, yet vaguely familiar.

“Sit down,” the old man said.

“Take off your shirt,” the granddaughter deadpanned.

Mimi did a double take and the girl giggled. Mr. D’Huet missed the quip. He introduced himself, then the girl. Glenna.

“And you are?”

“Mimi.”

Only when she’d pulled her resumé from her bag and slid it across the table to Mr. D’Huet did Mimi realize this sooty-eyed Glenna had actually come for the job too. Because there already was a resumé on the table. Glenna unslouched herself so she could better read the exaggerated facts Mimi had bulleted on hers. She grinned,
and the collusion Mimi saw on her rival’s face spooked and offended her. Mimi placed Glenna then, not by the grin with its childish gaps, but the zeros in her eyes. Not Glenna per se. Her
type.

After that, Mimi avoided all contact with those ciphered eyes.

The old man donned a pair of smeared glasses to consider the two documents. Even before he’d finished reading, the phone on the wall started ringing again. He looked at it in desperation, cuing Glenna, who sprang out of her seat to answer it. Until then Mimi had assumed no contest between her and a girl who was soaring before 10 a.m.

“If the job’s already taken, I’ll go,” Mimi said.

Mr. D’Huet blinked through the smears. He covered her hand with his. “But there’s so much to do.”

“It’s taken.” Glenna hung up. “So how about I turn the ringer off?”

Mr. D’Huet had never heard of Craigslist. He didn’t even know what Mimi had meant by texting. His son had placed the ad, then left town on business. He wanted the boxes dealt with before he returned at the end of the week.

Some of them were decades old, filled with brittle articles pressed in yellowed folders. Various passions had absorbed Mr. D’Huet at various times, most recently the life-giving properties of peanut butter that had saved him after the devastating loss of his wife three years before. Also the D’Huet family tree, regimental beer steins, and astronomy. He’d retained every warranty certificate for every appliance he’d ever owned, every airline ticket and boarding pass for every flight he’d taken. One box was for Christmas cards, one for completed crossword puzzles, and many were dedicated to his son, Brent—report cards, artwork, certificates of merit. Forty years of his wife’s sewing patterns.

Glenna and Mimi were supposed to sort through everything, cull the important from the absurd and discard the latter. Mr. D’Huet gave this order himself, passed on from his son, but in practice he made it difficult to carry out. When Mimi limped into the living room seeking permission to chuck a folder of articles about the reinstatement of Pluto as a planet, Mr. D’Huet’s sympathetic expression, brought on by her awkward gait, converted to alarm. But it was so interesting! And this was the secret to a long and happy life—to be
interested.
And to eat peanut butter.

At the end of the day he paid them in cash, though little had been accomplished, certainly nothing in the living room, where Glenna had perched on the couch next to Mr. D’Huet squeezing her wrists between her knees and prodding him to tell her more and more about his beer steins.

They left Mr. D’Huet’s together. From the corner of Mimi’s eye Glenna looked on the scrawny side of sixteen, though was probably twenty, like the girls Mimi had hung with ten years ago in Vancouver, ageless within a range, able to project innocence or sophistication, depending on their purposes. Mimi had got in deep with them, shared and shared alike, crushed the pills together and took turns licking the spoon.