Ellen in Pieces (20 page)

And then the most amazing thing happened. Glenna flicked on the radio and twiddled the dial until she landed on a pop station. “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” was playing.

They had merged onto a smaller highway with only four lanes and less illumination. The moon and a few stray stars hung above the circuit board of subdivisions on either side. As they sped away from her old life to some ambiguous destination, Mimi listened. Mr. D’Huet was right. The song was so generic, so inexplicit, it really could have been a hymn.

Or a mother singing to her child.

And the snippets, which seemed so random, began to adhere and form a whole. The song. Ellen’s fingers moving through Mimi’s hair, strand by strand. Mimi tallying her steps in her notebook that morning and noticing what she herself had written on the first page:
Who’s Counting?

Glenna belted out the song. Now Mimi began in a quieter voice, testing out how it felt—until Brent snapped the radio off.

But the feeling stayed.

“Tell me about that feeling,” Kevin had asked. “Not the powers. What you feel inside when you take the drug.”

“I feel like there’s something in me to love,” Mimi had said.

She unrolled the window. That was neat—a car with a window you had to unroll. Like turning the crank on the orrery. She saw the moon, the faint stars vying for attention against the glare of human habitation. Pluto was up there somewhere, that small cold outcast planet far away. But there were people who still believed in it, people who wished it well.

S
omewhere Mimi was walking, Ellen’s troubled and troubling daughter, placing one foot in front of the other on the tarry side of a six-lane highway. She must be hot. Her feet must hurt. No, let it be some safer road, a rural one, where out of a scrubby ditch a blackbird’s sarcastic trill rises. Not that trucker’s whistle, the one who ogled her at the rest stop half an hour earlier and was now pulling to the side of the highway, waiting for Mimi to catch up.

Yet even as Ellen fretted over this scenario, a mother’s worst nightmare, she sensed that Mimi would be okay. Because if Mimi
was
on the highway with July’s eye glaring down on her, slogging through a miasma of humidity and exhaust fumes, aiming her sore feet straight for Vancouver, thousands of kilometres beyond that eighteen-wheeler just ahead? If she
was
about to meet that trucker?

No one knew as well as Ellen.
He’d better watch out.

M
ATT
asked, “What are you thinking about?”

They were spooning together in her afternoon-hot loft, Matt’s cheek stuck to her shoulder with the glue of their combined sweat. Sunshine mocked Ellen through the skylight—her loose belly exposed, breasts flopping bedward—while Matt’s young arm, tanned and firm as a mannequin’s, circled her waist. She reached with her foot for the tangled sheet and, failing to catch it between her toes, suffered there undraped.

“My daughter’s coming home,” she said. “The one who lives in Toronto? She’s walking back.”

“The piece of work?”

“Is that how I described her?”

Probably. In Ellen’s imagination the scene on the highway was still playing out, the unsuspecting trucker leering as Mimi approached, all shimmery with heat haze. He couldn’t guess at her awfulness, could only see the blackening clouds she trailed.

Mimi had phoned last night, past midnight her time, to inform Ellen of her plan. She was going to walk all the way to Vancouver, or try to, a benign goal for a girl who formerly went in for darker pastimes. Tongue piercing. Shoplifting. Torturing her mother. It would end badly, this cross-country amble, like everything else the girl touched.

Girl? She was twenty-seven. Ellen hoped she hadn’t mentioned that to Matt, who quite possibly was younger.

“She called last night from Barrie, of all places. I’ve no idea what she was doing there. I said, ‘Walk to the airport. Fly home.’”

Mimi had hung up. Anyway, Ellen hadn’t meant it. If she were honest, she’d ignore the guilt boring into her and admit that she didn’t particularly want Mimi back.

About the walking, Matt expressed neither interest nor surprise. He jiggled and squeezed Ellen’s right breast, made it stand up and quack,
But where’s she going to stay?

And Ellen said, “Ouch.”

L
ATER,
they went outside where it was cooler, to the triplex’s communal backyard—a rectangle of lawn hedged by straggly forsythia. A pair of weathered Muskoka chairs faced each other. In the shade of one of Ellen’s half-barrel planters, where she was growing lettuce, Tony flopped down and resumed his nap.

Matt was complaining about his girlfriend again. In the beginning, he never used to mention her, but these last few weeks she kept coming up like acid reflux. Ellen listened, sipping her ice water, touching her breast—the talking one—discreetly through her sundress. It felt a little tender, like it had been overhandled.

“If I leave my clothes on the floor, she puts them in the oven,” Matt said.

“That’s risky.”

The downside of a callow lover: obtuseness. The two Muskoka chairs stood so close together that Matt’s and Ellen’s knees touched, Matt with his forearms on his thighs, looking not at Ellen, but into her lap, as though presenting for her viewing pleasure his shirtless, muscled back. In a small way it compensated her. And the sun, already slapping its hot hands against his shoulders, pinkening them, offered Ellen a small revenge.

This particular issue, the housework issue, so boring to Ellen who lived alone, was at least less painful than Matt’s gripe a few days before. “When I open the fridge, or as I call it, ‘the condiment cupboard,’ and see that big bottle of cranberry cocktail? That’s the sign.”

The poor girl suffered chronic bladder infections. Meaning no sex. Did Ellen need to know that? Why had he told her? Even ‘condiment cupboard’ hurt. Every couple, no matter how miserable, spoke its own private dialect. But for Ellen and Matt there was only body language.

Eventually Matt ran out of domestic grievances to air, as well as other subjects for over-sharing. He went home to Nicole, whose name he only ever uttered by mistake.

Ellen moved inside and ran a lukewarm bath. Just as she lay back, Tony burst in, sprang onto the toilet lid, and stepped daintily across to the tub’s ledge. Like an agitated sentry, he paced back and forth, licking his black lips. He hated water, hated to see her in it. When she bathed him, he shivered uncontrollably.

Her own complaints Ellen addressed to her dog. “I told him about Mimi. He wasn’t interested. He only cared that she wouldn’t get in the way. So you see how it is, Tone? He can moan about his girlfriend, but when I moan, he changes the subject.”

Tony tilted his black head. Pathos bulged in his eyes.

“Why does he keep telling me these things? It’s not as though he’s going to leave her and move in with me.”

Tony tilted the other way.

“What?” Ellen asked, and when the dog whimpered, she lifted her breast out of the water, imitating Matt. “I wish you could talk,” she made it say.

That was when she noticed the bruise and how, compared with the other breast, the right one seemed slightly swollen. She climbed out of the tub, dried her top half with the towel. With her arm raised in the mirror, she leaned in to examine the discoloured patch in a better light. Meanwhile, Tony commenced his relieved devotions, licking the water off her calves.

C
AROL,
her doctor, said, “Do you have a boyfriend, Ellen?”

Ellen sighed. “Long story.”

“But someone’s been squeezing you pretty hard?”

“The brute.”

Carol probed Ellen’s breasts with her long fingers, but couldn’t feel any lump. She flicked through Ellen’s file, commenting acidly on her dismal record of responding to mammogram requests. “They’re not invitations to some party you can blow off.”

“I know that,” Ellen said, shrinking down.

“I’ll send you in, just in case.”

“In case of what?” Ellen asked, but Carol had already swivelled in her chair to face the computer screen.

“How are the girls?” she asked.

“Oh God,” Ellen said. “You will not believe Mimi’s latest.”

Carol inquired no further. She was probably just distracting Ellen, whose suspicions were now fully aroused. Except that Carol had been short with her, sarcastic, and that sarcasm reassured Ellen.

Because really, if Ellen had cancer? Would Carol be so mean?

O
N
Thursday Ellen found herself in the waiting room of the X-ray clinic, gowned in blue, her purse and everything she’d taken off—blouse, amber beads, bra—in the stackable red plastic shopping basket with metal handles that folded down. Most of the chairs were occupied. The woman beside Ellen looked Arab or Persian with rippling hair and a Nefertiti nose. Another was quite old, or entirely grey at any rate. Worry defaced her.

Ellen probably looked worried. Mentally she put the worry in her basket, but this only made the weight in her lap too much
to bear. Yet two of the women, the two who were flipping blasély through magazines, didn’t appear worried at all.

Good idea. Ellen reached for a
Bon Appétit
in the pile on the table. She tried flipping, but couldn’t keep it up even to convince herself. Someone’s name was called. The grey-haired one stood and followed a technician down a hall, toting her basket. Another woman arrived, almost as though to take her place, selected a gown from the pile, and went to change.

Eventually, Ellen fell into thinking. Mimi had phoned again the night before from a motel near Goderich.

“Isn’t that on one of the Great Lakes?” Ellen had asked.

Mimi had said she didn’t know, she’d arrived in darkness, that she guessed she’d find out in the morning.

“Why are you doing this, honey?” Ellen had asked.

“I’m trying to figure that out.”

Though Mimi had sounded more cryptic than anything, Ellen couldn’t help hearing malice in her daughter’s voice, unfairly maybe, because other than hanging up on Ellen that first time, Mimi was being perfectly, uncharacteristically civil. She was probably too exhausted at the end of her day-long walks to rouse her inner mother-tormentor.

Ellen, so familiar with her daughter’s dark side, so long-accepting of her own victimhood, pictured Mimi through her mother-eye again. Mother-eye—the curse cast on every birthing woman, the hex of self-sacrificing empathy.
I will see your pain, but you will never see mine.
Through her mother-eye Ellen imagined the stale motel room halfway across the country, vaguely at first, then distinctly enough to make out Mimi by the window, her dancer’s body lithe and tall, her dark hair cropped. Pursed-lipped, Mimi tugged aside the stiff curtain and looked across the near-empty motel
parking lot, across the lonely, unseen highway, to where the lake would be.

And Ellen’s mother-eye saw what Mimi saw: an appalling blackness, a true void. In her bitterness, Ellen had forgotten to give her daughter stars.

“Ellen McGinty?” someone called.

Ellen rose. A technician led her to a small, dim room with an examining table. “Aren’t I here for a mammogram?” Ellen asked.

The technician glanced in the file. “Your doctor phoned in for an ultrasound. And a biopsy.”

“A biopsy?”

In obedient bewilderment, Ellen set down the basket and removed the gown. She reclined on her side in the gloom, exactly as she had in the too-bright sunshine in her loft with Matt the week before. The technician was Chinese, her hands a man’s. An earlier generation might have called her “strapping.”

Ellen cast down her eyes and saw it, seemingly separate from her body: her breast. The same breast Matt had playfully given voice to, that the technician was swabbing with an alcohol pad, preparing to administer the freezing. Syringe packages lay on the nearby tray.

Ellen closed her eyes. “Ouch,” she said.

She went numb with the shock of it. All of her floating to the ceiling, looking down, the way near-death experiences are narrated. She saw her own forehead furrow:
Don’t think that word. Death.
Then a doctor and an intern entered and Ellen settled back into herself. Smiles and introductions, gel slathered on the insensate breast. The doctor wore pearls, Ellen noticed.

The ultrasound wand was a mere pressure, their subdued discussion jargon-filled. The doctor seemed to be explaining the procedure
to the intern. Ellen could hardly understand a word. In and out of the white-coated huddle, biopsy instruments were passed.

“Okay!” the doctor sang, peeling off her gloves. An overhead light came on and the doctor and intern left. The technician fixed a Band-Aid to Ellen’s breast.

Ellen asked her, “So I’m okay?”

“No—”

A cry tore free from Ellen, startling them both.

Immediately the technician apologized. “My English,” she said, wringing her big hands. What she’d meant was that she couldn’t comment. The sample had to go to the lab, the ultrasound to the radiologist. Ellen’s doctor would pass along the results.

“When?” Ellen asked.

“Seven to ten days.”

E
LLEN
couldn’t shake the first feeling, the blindsiding, at hearing that “No.” Because her own mother had died of breast cancer. And look what happened? Ellen was left completely bereft, without love and guidance. Not quite true, she knew now, but that was how she’d felt back then. When she was growing up, people always said Ellen looked like her mother. The two of them had the same long nose and auburn hair. Well, Ellen had quite a lot of grey now, which her mother hadn’t lived long enough to earn.

Tears flooded Ellen’s eyes.

In the clinic elevator she kept her forearm pressed against her sore right breast. The man riding down with her noticed and was made uncomfortable. That or there was something terrible written on her face. Her mother’s death, the tears hastily wiped away. He stared fixedly at the floor numbers counting down.

The doors opened on a scrum of people who then cleaved their ranks for Ellen. They parted, all of them looking at her, looking hard, like they knew something about her that she didn’t know herself. They seemed burdened with this knowledge because, uncharacteristically for a crowd, instead of charging right into the elevator, they waited for Ellen to step out.

I’m okay?

No.

How had she got to the clinic? She couldn’t remember. Then she did. She’d driven. She pushed through the side door that led to the parking lot, stopping a second time because she didn’t, in fact, own a car anymore. She’d sold it after she moved to the studio.

(How odd the way her thoughts were being released, one at a time, like old-fashioned bingo balls.)

She’d borrowed the car from Tilda. Ellen waited for the release of the information she needed next: make, colour.

Things flowed a little better once she found the car. She set the basket on the hood and dug with shaking hands for the keys. It was the correct car, she already knew because she recognized Tilda’s things in the back seat. A bag of fleece for one of her knitting projects, the steering-wheel club that Ellen had neglected to use.

Driving was automatic.

At the pay station the attendant also avoided looking at her. Ellen stopped on the other side of the gate, flipped down the visor, and checked her reflection in the mirror. Nothing.

“I’m okay,” she said.

Only when she got home and knocked on Tilda’s door to return the car keys did she figure it out. When Tilda reached for her. “Oh, Ellen. What happened?”

“Nothing,” Ellen said, glancing down to see what Tilda saw.
The blue hospital gown and the red plastic basket still hanging on her arm, her clothing in it, her D-cup bra on top of everything.