Ellen in Pieces (18 page)

Eyes like that little Orphan girl in the cartoon.

Glenna said, “Easy, hey? I bet he’s a nudist. He just puts on pants for company.” She fished for lip gloss in her bag. “He’s diabetic.”

“How do you know that?”

“Wow, she can talk.” Glenna bumped against Mimi chummily. “I saw the stuff in his bathroom.”

All Mimi had seen was a container on the kitchen counter among the bread heels and the peanut butter jars. Seven small
lidded compartments, one for each day of the week. Through the semi-transparent plastic, the ghosts of different coloured pills.

She had yet to fill the prescription the hijab doctor had given her. Instead she’d tucked it in an envelope, sealed it, then closed it in a patterned soap box, an Ellen gift. She’d tied a string around the box, knotted it twice, and buried it in a drawer. Now all she had to do to feel its charge was draw alongside the dresser.

“There’s some good stuff in one of the upstairs bathrooms,” Glenna told her. “I should have taken it. Oh, well. Tomorrow.”

What outraged Mimi was that this girl she didn’t even know, this
Glenna
, imagined she, Mimi, would want to know about the good stuff. Mimi had lived inside her abstention, tested it, and won—she had a prescription!—yet she was still, all these years later, sweating some pheromone the zero-eyed sniffed out. The same thing had happened at Future Bakery, so she’d left.

“I love these jobs with old people. Their bathroom cupboards are, like, stuffed. They don’t even know what’s in there half the time.”

“So this is what you do? Steal from old people?”

“I don’t take anything they’d miss. This is a great gig. Usually I have to wipe their asses. Is your leg real or fake?”

Mimi didn’t reply.

“You live over near the Danforth, right?”

“How do you know that?”

“I read it on your resumé. Notice how there isn’t any garbage around here? Rich people drive their garbage to Muskoka. In their Beemers. Or they come over to Parkdale and dump it.”

But there was garbage, right where Mimi stopped, in front of the subway station, the teeming contents of the bins fermenting in the precocious June heat. She pretended she wasn’t going home by subway, because Glenna was. “Are you going back?”

“To Mr. D’Huet’s?” Glenna said. “Aren’t you?”

“That depends if you are or not.”

“For sure I’ll go, then,” Glenna said. “Maybe we’ll have some fun, hey?”

Mimi tossed the card aside on the bed where she was icing her knee. She already had an iPod. Typical Ellen with her memory issues. Especially annoying was her self-serving habit of blanking on everything bad—Mr. Clark, for example.

Back in rehab, during their family sessions, Ellen’s constant tactic had been to deny, deny, deny. Poor Kevin would press his prayer hands to his lips to keep himself from interrupting her. (Or maybe he
was
praying. Pseudo-godliness suffused the place, from the New Age music piped into the post-and-beam lobby, to the whispered talk about giving yourself over to a higher power.)

Once Mimi had said, “I can count on one hand the times I felt loved as a child.”

“How, sweetheart?” Ellen had asked in a tremulous voice.

“I felt loved when I had lice.”

Everyone recoiled, Ellen and Kevin, Mimi’s younger sister Yolanda, huddled in the corner weeping behind her glasses.

“That was the only time you ever gave me your undivided attention,” Mimi said. “Your fingers in my hair? I needed that.”

Of course Ellen didn’t remember it the same way, but at least she remembered. “You screamed bloody murder all the way through it.”

And they both turned to Kevin so he could choose between their contradictory recollections, Kevin who was praying hard that they could just get through the hour.

“Is attention the same thing as love?” Ellen had asked him. “Because I loved her so much. I do. But I had to earn a living. I didn’t always have time to spend with her.”

“You had boyfriend time,” Mimi had said with a triumphant glance at Kevin.

Anyway, Ellen
had
sent something Mimi didn’t have, a sensor to Velcro onto her running shoe. The tape had been peeled off the hard plastic case the iPod came in; Ellen had already opened it. And charged the iPod, Mimi saw when she lifted it out, shiny and metallic green. And downloaded two dozen songs. Billie Holiday. Ella Fitzgerald. Louis Armstrong. Charles Aznavour. The corny music Ellen loved.

Mimi twiddled to the bottom of the list.

“(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.”

T
HE
next day she showed up at Mr. D’Huet’s early. While she waited for him to get to the door, she checked the pedometer. One thousand and forty-three steps.

“Hello! Thanks for coming!” He waved her in. Foam tracked one side of his wobbly face. He was shirtless today, too, dressed in sport socks and slippers and khaki shorts that grazed his hairy knees.

“Should I continue with those boxes in the kitchen, Mr. D’Huet?”

“Start anywhere you want. There’s so much to do. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” He clutched the banister.

Mimi waited, watching him ascend the white-carpeted stairs, an ancient trudging up Everest, until he safely reached the summit.

The first box was stuffed with opera and theatre programs, another with old phone bills. She dumped it all into a plastic garbage bag.

Mr. D’Huet reappeared. “What am I supposed to do with the bags?” she asked. “There’s a garbage strike.”

“Really?” Mr. D’Huet said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

When the doorbell rang, Mimi volunteered to get it because Mr. D’Huet was just taking a loaf out of the old-fashioned bread-box and searching for a clean knife.

Glenna jittered on the front steps. Cut-offs and toffee pigtails. Her gapped, complicit smile.

“He doesn’t want you anymore,” Mimi said.

Laughing, Glenna stepped forward. Mimi slammed the door and locked it. Glenna rang again.

“You’re fired,” Mimi whispered through the mail slot.

“Fuck you!”

While Glenna pounded, Mimi limped off as fast as she could in case Glenna snuck around and tried to insinuate herself in the back door.

Mr. D’Huet was sitting at the kitchen table with his bread and peanut butter, bobbing a teabag in a mug. “What was that all about?”

“U
NICEF.
”

“Oh,” he said. “Too bad. I’d like to get in touch with them.”

Mimi dragged the garbage bag filled with opera programs
through the French doors, kicked it down the deck stairs with her good leg, then limped to the far railing, where she peered along the side of the house. No Glenna. She waited a few minutes just in case, staring out at the overgrown back garden.

Mr. D’Huet was paying a breeder to develop a rose in honour of his late wife. He told Mimi this when she came back inside and complimented him on his roses, roses being the only flower she could identify in his garden other than dandelions. Later, she found the file of correspondence with the breeder. Also the resumés, hers and Glenna’s, on a pile of grocery delivery forms.

Mimi got through twelve boxes that second day. The most interesting contained old black-and-white erotic postcards. She kept those but chucked the takeout menus. A few times Mr. D’Huet wandered in to talk, out of loneliness or because he wanted to check on what she was throwing out. Personal questions she deflected with questions right back.

“So what are you going to call the rose?”

As she was leaving, Mr. D’Huet counting the bills into her hand, she said, “You keep your doors locked, don’t you? Because you should if you’ve got cash lying around.”

“It’s not lying around. It’s in my desk drawer.”

She couldn’t believe he’d told her that.

Then he asked something weird. “Are you a churchgoer?”

“What? No. Why?”

“You’re always humming. It sounds like a hymn.”

“I don’t know any hymns,” Mimi said.

“It’s quite pretty, whatever it is. Mabel was Anglican. I went along for the ride. Are you coming back tomorrow? Good. Good. I wonder what happened to the other girl.”

He tipped her a ten because she’d worked so hard.

On the steps, Mimi turned on the pedometer. Two blocks away, she checked that it was counting. Fifty-two slow steps.

Somewhere in the trees the telephone bird sang, the one whose call sounded like a ringing phone. She remembered hearing it at Mr. D’Huet’s throughout the morning, but now it dawned on her that it hadn’t been the bird. It was the upstairs phone. Yesterday Glenna had turned off the ringer in the kitchen. If Mimi went back to tell Mr. D’Huet, it would mess up the pedometer. Also her leg hurt. She could feel it stiffening as the fluid built up.

She limped on, humming “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.”

As soon as she heard herself, she made teeny-mouth and picked up her pace.

“Mr. Clark was like the sun to you,” Kevin had said during rehab. “All you kids were the planets moving around him. Did you see him as a father figure? Your own father had just left you. He was absent most of your life. Then he came back, only to leave again.”

“Haven’t you been listening to a single word I’ve said?” Mimi replied. “I loved him. I wanted to get married to him.”

But how had a song by Bryan Adams attached itself to Mr. Clark? Mr. Clark who liked opera? Mimi had attached it. A child’s soundtrack is different from an adult’s; adult motives obscure, their movements uninterpretable. She didn’t know that at ten. For a long
time Mimi actually believed the teachers slept at the school. She couldn’t fathom that they had a life outside of teaching her.

She deleted the song from the iPod, but she couldn’t clear it from her head. When you delete files, they’re still there, the same way the past is always there. In rehab, under Kevin’s patient guidance, Mimi had figured out Mr. Clark was the real reason she started using percs. Kevin helped her get over the pain of what had happened, but he hadn’t deleted Mr. Clark.

Now she was humming the song all the time.

The next day, Wednesday, she was okay. She focused on the sealed envelope in the soap box, how she had resisted it. She kept on resisting until Thursday afternoon when she came to Mr. D’Huet with a question.

The owl folder in her hand, Mimi knocked on the open door. Mr. D’Huet looked up from his desk, vaguely owlish himself in his glasses. He was writing to the United Nations and the Red Cross and any other humanitarian agency he could find the address for. Could Mimi help with that too? Could she drive? Since they’d revoked his licence, getting to the library was so difficult.

“Don’t you have Internet?” Mimi asked.

“I don’t believe I do.”

She asked about the owls.

“The name D’Huet derives from
chouette
, which is French for ‘owlet.’ No, keep this. It’s interesting.” He bent over the old manual typewriter again and continued two-fingering his peanut butter testimony, showing Mimi the feathery hairs on his back. Then, as she turned to go, he asked, “Do you want to look at Mabel’s things? In case there’s anything you fancy?”

Mimi heard the
whoosh whoosh whoosh
of air through feathers. Her resistance growing wings and flapping off.

She dropped the file on the stairs, stepped up with the good leg, straightening it to lift the other, until she reached the top. The bedrooms were on the upper floor, three of them as unlived-in as museum displays. The exception was the small plaid room that must have been Mr. D’Huet’s, the twin bed tousled, stuff piled everywhere. A nozzled machine sat on the bedside table. Yesterday Mr. D’Huet had refused to part with an article on how playing the didgeridoo reduced the symptoms of sleep apnea. Mimi pictured him in the bed gasping for breath in the middle of the night, the mask and nozzle attached to his face, a shrivelled old elephant god.

In the bathroom at the end of the hall syringes and swabs in plastic packaging cluttered the counter. She moved on to the master bedroom, where dark furniture stood around on a soundless white carpet, a carpet like snow with a perfect set of tracks leading to the ensuite bathroom. A wintery stillness filled this room, a palpable sense of expectation coming from furniture kept behind heavy drapes. The furniture was waiting for something to happen and now, finally, something did.

Mimi followed Glenna’s tracks. When she opened the medicine cabinet, bottles and bottles rolled out and tumbled into the sink, their clattery warning drowning out her curses.

“D
ID
you find something you liked?” Mr. D’Huet asked.

She patted where it hung by her hip. An Indian shoulder bag embroidered with little mirrors, the pill bottle in it.

“Oh,” Mr. D’Huet said, peering. “Was that Mabel’s?”

“It was in the closet.”

“I guess it was, then. I’m glad you found something. Let me get your money. Will I see you tomorrow?”

Outside, the bag’s tiny stitched-on mirrors ignited in the sun. Mimi dragged her stiff leg along, making resolute fists. People had started leaving their garbage where there were city bins, creating these impromptu mini dumps. Passing the one in front of the Old Mill station, she held her breath.

Down on the platform, a just-departed car inspired her. Mimi twirled, then collapsed against a pillar like some martyr in a painting. A man jogged down the tiled stairs and leered. Her button had come undone. Mimi covered the tattoo—the outline of a hand with the lines of significance drawn in. She’d found the picture in a book in the spirituality section at BioLife, torn it out, and brought it to be needled onto her chest. Her real hand pressed the tattooed hand and the subway screeched in.