Authors: Caroline Adderson
Ellen in Pieces
Ellen
in
Pieces
A Novel
Caroline Adderson
Patrick Crean Editions
The author would like to acknowledge the support of the BC Arts Council
Parts of this book were previously published in slightly different forms.
“I Feel Lousy” appeared in
Eighteen Bridges
, Issue 5, Winter 2012.
“Poppycock” appeared in
The New Quarterly
, Number 121, Winter 2012. It was reprinted in
Best Canadian Stories 12
, Oberon Press, 2012.
“Ellen-Celine, Celine-Ellen” appeared in
Canadian Notes and Queries
, Number 86, Winter 2012. It was reprinted in
Best Canadian Stories
13, Oberon Press, 2013.
“Your Dog Makes Me Smile” appeared in
Numéro Cinq
, Volume III, Number 26, October 2012. It was reprinted in
Best Canadian Stories 14
, Oberon Press, 2014.
Care has been taken to trace ownership of copyright material contained in this book. The publisher will gladly receive any information that will enable them to rectify any reference or credit line in subsequent editions.
Chéri
by Colette, translated by Roger Senhouse, Penguin, 1954.
“Not Waving But Drowning” by Stevie Smith, Andre Deutsch, 1957.
“Lady with Lapdog” from
Lady with Lapdog
by Anton Chekhov, translated by David Magershak, Penguin Classics, 1964.
In memory of my father
In this way she would be spared, for many years, the degrading listlessness of women past their prime, who abandon first their stays, then their hair-dye, and who finally no longer bother about the quality of their underclothes.
—C
OLETTE
, C
HÉRI
I FEEL LOUSY
T
hat was as much as Ellen could get out of Yolanda as she hovered above her in the bathroom, holding back her golden hair while she retched.
“Maybe you should stay home,” Ellen said.
Yolanda lifted her face out of the toilet. Pink with misery, she let Ellen apply a cool damp cloth. “I can’t skip Inorganic Chemistry, Mom. It’s unbelievably hard.”
“Fine then. Just don’t spread it all over campus.”
Later, Ellen wondered how she could have been so dense.
E
LLEN
had finished. She’d seen her daughters into adulthood, Mimi far too early, slinking off to child-unfriendly places, fearless in the dark. Yolanda she’d had to drag, but anyway, she’d done it, raised her two girls all on her own, except for that nine-month blip when Yo was seven and Mimi ten and Larry came back. Before that, he’d been out sowing his wild oats, which he kept in a little bag between his legs.
It had always been so. They’d met at a house party during university. Larry was just slipping out of one of the bedrooms, closing the door behind him, when Ellen appeared in the hall on her way from the bathroom. Larry followed her to the living room where everyone was bouncing in a circle to The Clash. Later, a rumpled girl appeared and, in dismay, looked around the room for him. Ellen pegged her instantly; she’d been behind the door that Larry had discreetly closed. In the bed. The girl saw Larry tight on the couch with Ellen, his silvery charms back on display, and ran out heaving sobs.
Did Ellen sympathize? Did she foresee in this girl’s public misery the personal shaming in store for her?
No. She’d married Larry.
They heard about this place, Cordova Island, an hour’s ferry ride from Vancouver Island. It was the 1980s, but might as well have been the 1960s on Cordova. Ellen and Larry absconded there in search of freedom, both of them growing out their hair (Ellen wore hers, auburn and thick, in a braid down her back; Larry, a dark ponytail and beard to match). To be free in a place where deer and feral sheep roamed the forest trails, the locals, too, because it was quicker than the road. Free like the Free Store, which was really just a glorified recycling depot. Anytime you looked up, anytime you consulted the sky, there would be a bald eagle or a turkey vulture high above in a tree, watching your every move, like God.
B
UT
that was twenty years ago. These days Ellen’s elder daughter Mimi lived across the bridge in East Vancouver with two roommates she loathed. She worked at Kinko’s and hated that too. Mimi had a talent for dissatisfaction. Yolanda was in pre-med, still at
home with Ellen in the house she’d grown up in North Vancouver, a cedar split-level high up the side of Grouse Mountain. Ellen and Larry had bought it just before their marriage self-destructed, bought it with the outrageous fortune he’d suddenly started making in L.A. On rare clear days there was a gasp-inducing view—oh, the silver-plated ocean!—as far as the Olympic Peninsula.
A few days ago Yolanda had begun experiencing flu-like symptoms. Now they had settled into a regular pattern. Violent vomiting first thing in the morning. Violent vomiting if she didn’t eat. Violent vomiting if she ate anything but bread, potatoes, or mushy, Dalmatianed bananas. She walked around the house with these offensive bananas tucked under her arm. While studying, she kept a bunch within reach.
“So what do you plan to do?” Ellen asked from Yo’s bedroom door.
Yolanda glanced over her shoulder at Ellen and immediately shrunk down, like she was still a little girl fearful of her mother’s rages—despite the fact that they were never directed at her. Or rarely. Unlike Mimi, Yolanda had been a model child.
“I’m going to have an abortion,” she said.
Just like that.
Ellen bowed her head in case there was any sign on her face of what she was feeling. What
was
she feeling? A lot of contradictory things. Relief, for one, but also a painful, almost menstrual spasm.
“Okay. Have you made an appointment?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you have to get on it, don’t you think?”
“I’ve been studying.”
Ellen threw up her hands, and even this small gesture set Yolanda wailing.
“Tell me what I should do!”
“Isn’t there a clinic on campus? Make an appointment. Get a referral. For God’s sake, you’re in pre-med!” Ellen stormed off, sure now of what she felt.
Two hours later she came back un-angry. Something about the matter-of-fact way Yolanda had communicated her decision troubled Ellen. It sounded like she’d been chanting it to convince herself. Or maybe
he
was making her do it. The culprit, whoever he was. Either way, Ellen wasn’t going to get involved. But she thought Yo could use a hug, and she was right. Yolanda was still bent over one of the massive tomes that threatened to pop the pegs of her IKEA desk, feverishly highlighting whole paragraphs, flayed banana peels strewn everywhere. She turned in her chair and flung her arms around Ellen’s waist. Her glasses were smeary. She was too preoccupied to clean them, or she’d been crying.
“You’ll come with me when I do it, won’t you?” she whimpered.
And a great cloud of fruit flies lifted off the half-rotten bananas and swarmed them both.
E
LLEN
phoned her old friend Georgia with the news. In the background Gary, Georgia’s husband, the last Marxist left standing and an inveterate eavesdropper, asked, “What now? Mimi’s up the pole?”
Georgia shushed him. “For once it’s not Mimi.”
Ellen heard the processor grinding. Georgia and Gary were in the kitchen. They cooked together, which Ellen envied. Ellen cooked alone. She pictured them, petite, delicate Georgia with the phone lost in her sproingy hair, circumnavigating Gary—a fat man—at the counter. Their afterthought child, the boy genius Maximilian, four years old, would be reading out the recipe. Their
older son Jacob was away at McGill. Jacob was mild and average. But Maximilian? At two, he would stand on the coffee table during parties and recite “Religion is the opium of the people” to guests who were either shocked or delighted, depending on whether Georgia or Gary had invited them.
To Ellen, Georgia asked the obvious question, the one Ellen had refused to ask Yolanda because of her non-involvement stance. “Who’s the guilty party?”
“I have no idea,” Ellen said. “She’s never even had a real boyfriend. Not that I know of. Last year she took the smartest, gayest boy in the whole school to Grad.”
“Can Mimi find out?”
“I don’t want to involve Mimi. Also, do I need to know who did it?”
“But you think she might have been coerced? Or is being coerced?”
“I hope not. But it’s not like I want her to have it either. Because I’m the one who’ll get stuck with it. I know I will. What do I want a baby for?”
“They smell so good,” Georgia said. “I’d have another if I could. But I can’t.”
“I had my tubes tied,” Ellen said. “Ten years ago.”
“What I mean is, I need to know that the kid I currently have is going to be all right before I commit to another.”
“He’ll be fine!” Gary called from across the room.
“I don’t multi-task with my maternal responsibilities. How did you, Ellen?”
“I made a lot of mistakes,” Ellen told Georgia, “as you well know.”
E
LLEN
remembered something as soon as she hung up. How when Mimi and Yolanda were in elementary school they kept coming home with lice. The school was good, Rayburn Elementary, and right in the neighbourhood, two blocks away. A good school but lousy at the same time. Every year, four or five notices would come home requesting a scalp check.
“
Fuck!
” Ellen would roar, which cued the girls to duck and cover before she hurled the comb. Every infestation a toxic ordeal, a nitpicking torture. Both had silky Rapunzel tresses that took hours to properly delouse. Mimi screeched and writhed, but Yolanda would sit quietly, her back to Ellen, paging through a picture book.
During one of these sessions Ellen noticed that Yolanda had been crying the whole time. Her chest was bibbed with tears. “Oh, honey,” Ellen said. “Am I hurting you?”
“I feel so sorry for them.”
“For who?”
“The baby lices.”
S
PRING,
the window partially open, letting in a bright green scent. Yolanda tossed and sighed in the dark.
“You seem uncertain.”
“Do I?”
“Well, yes.”
They were in Ellen’s bed, where Yolanda sometimes liked to come and cuddle in the middle of the night. She had only started doing this last year, after Mimi left. Mimi, who had once slept between two loving parents, while Yolanda, fatherless at birth, had been banished to a crib.
After a long silence, Ellen asked how she was feeling.
“Awful,” Yolanda answered, and Ellen gathered her up.
It felt strange to be holding a smaller adult in her arms. How many men had she invited into this bed? Too many. Very few who counted and none recently.
“Yo? You don’t have to. You can do whatever you want.”
“Can I?”
“Of course. But I’m not raising it. That’s the last thing I’ll say about it.”
“What about school?”
“What about it?” Ellen said, meaning a baby was an inconvenience, not an obstacle. All over the world women squatted in fields and pushed them out, then strapped them to their chests and hoed the afterbirth into the ground. Look at Ellen, a single mother. Larry kept up payments on the house for those years, but that was it. He contributed shelter; Ellen food, clothing, allowance, dance lessons, drug rehab. She’d started Ellen Silver Promotions when Yolanda was a baby and Mimi three. Before cell phones! Nowadays any woman could run a successful business from a playground—but back then? No.
But telling Yolanda this would be getting involved, so Ellen held her tongue. Also, it would sound like she wanted Yolanda to have the baby, which she certainly did not. If Yolanda had that baby the door to Ellen’s life, which had only just swung open letting in this delicious, irresponsible breeze, would slam shut for eighteen more years.
Periodically, Ellen would evaluate herself in the bedroom mirror. Shoulder-length hair, still mostly auburn. A nice nose, long with a slight bump below the bridge to make it interesting. Blue eyes. The thin lips were treatable with lipstick. A B+ face. With a good night’s sleep, even an A– face. Below the neck, though, where
gravity had rendered her one-time best asset a defect, her average (and her assets!) declined precipitously. Ellen was juggy. Her hips were wide, her ass too—could it be otherwise? But on the positive side again, she was only forty-one and only twenty pounds overweight. She was going to tackle the excess poundage, really—and then, who knew? Who knew what delights awaited her? Unless she had Yolanda’s baby to look after.
“How could I keep going to school?” Yolanda asked.
“No comment.”
“Have you ever?” Yolanda asked.
“What?”
“Had an abortion.”
Ellen winced and changed the subject. “You weren’t forced or anything? Tell me you weren’t.”
“No.”
“No you won’t tell me, or no you weren’t raped?”
“I wasn’t raped!”
“Okay. Then I don’t need to know anything else unless you want to tell me about the man.”
“What man?” Yolanda said, and Ellen let go a sigh of her own.
Actually, in the case of Yo, it could have been Immaculate Conception. She seemed so innocent. Also stupid, the way really smart people sometimes are. Socially hopeless and befuddled and shy. Not that she didn’t understand sex, far from it. Ellen had made sure of that, always tucking condoms in with the sanitary supplies.
Finally, Yolanda clued in. “Oh, him! You mean
him
? He was just a boy.”
Y
OLANDA
slept with Ellen the next night too, and the next, so Ellen reasoned that, since sharing a bed
was
de facto involvement, she might as well make an appointment for Yolanda to see the doctor. Apparently Yolanda was too busy studying to do the responsible thing herself.
The day of the appointment, Ellen went in first to explain the situation, leaving Yolanda in the waiting room. “She says she wants an abortion. Obviously we have to act quickly because—Well, you know. And see what you can find out. How this happened. I’m appalled.”
“Ellen,” said Carol, the doctor whom Ellen had been seeing for so many years they were practically friends.
“What?”
“She’s eighteen.”
“She sure doesn’t seem it. I mean, if it wasn’t for her scholarship, I’d think she was retarded.”
Carol fixed a look on Ellen. She was a long, sinewy woman with a stare like a mink. Her cropped brown hair even resembled a pelt. “Go,” she told Ellen. “Tell her to come in. And by the way, you are way overdue for a mammogram.”
While Yolanda was in with Carol, trying to determine the date of conception, Ellen opened the biology textbook Yolanda had brought along. The highlighter pen was stuck in the chapter on ferns. Ferns, she read, reproduce with spores instead of seeds. The diagram showed the released spores developing into pretty little heart-shaped gametophytes. Gametophytes had both male and female sex organs. Convenient! There were photographs, too, that filled Ellen with verdant memories of those hidden paths that criss-crossed Cordova Island and sometimes opened into spectacular waist-high ferneries.
“I’m ready.”
Ellen looked up with a start. Yolanda stood there, smeary, twisting her hands.
“Hold on. I want to talk to Carol again.”
Ellen found her in the hall reading her next patient’s file. “What did she tell you?”
“No,” Carol said, waving Ellen away with the file folder. “You are incorrigible.”
This forced Ellen, who really did not want to get any more involved, to ask Yolanda outright when they were in the car driving home. “So? So?”
“She did an examination,” Yo said. “She made me pee on the stick just in case.”
“It’s not the flu then?”
“Ha ha.” Yolanda opened her textbook and resumed reading.
Ellen asked how far along she was. She asked when the office would call about the referral. Between her monosyllabic replies, Yolanda uncapped the highlighter with her teeth.