The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (20 page)

Go to it, he had said. While I was in the bathroom reading the instructions I could hear him typing.

We had been vacationing in France. I was in the shower and I'd felt a sharp pinch and knew. It was like anything else without rhythm or beat. No way to be sure of it; I was sure. My
forehead tingled, I broke a light sweat. All the objects in the world brightened in a single synchronic pulse. If Lyle wanted to leave, he could leave. If there was a fight, I would hardly be able to pay attention. Nobody feels conception taking place; I felt it.

The wheels on Lyle's office chair squeaked over my head. The test sat on the windowsill. The bathroom linoleum was cold underfoot and there was a flattened squiggle of blue toothpaste in the sink with some of Alex's hair stuck in it, wavering under a thread of water from the leaking tap. On the floor above, Lyle was rolling toward the bookshelf. Dragging himself with the heels of his shoes. Then he kicked himself back to the computer and began typing again. Our luggage was still in the living room, though we'd been back a week. I wanted it put away. Beside the pregnancy test, an enamel soap dish, a brilliant white bar of soap smeared with two bleating red petals from the geranium. The faded pink cross on the plastic wand turned redder.

I called up the stairs, It's positive.

Lyle rings the doorbell and we wait. Prissy Ivany swings the door wide open and grins at us. She's wearing a long, clingy black dress with a greenish sheen and her hair is big and orange.

Your hair is beautiful, Prissy, I say. Charles Ivany comes up behind his wife.

She once hid some forks in there, Charles says.

That's true, says Prissy, a whole place setting.

Where's Alex, asks Charles.

A sleepover, I say.

Charles is smoking with an emerald cigarette holder and he's wearing a tuxedo jacket with satin lapels and a red bow tie. He has a miniature set of antlers on his bald head.

So glad you could make it, he says. Let me take your coats.

Let's get that baby settled away, says Prissy. Charles claps his hands once.

What will you have to drink? I've got a very good sherry.

I'll try the sherry, Lyle says. He's beaming happiness.

Good man, says Charles.

Prissy brings me to a bedroom upstairs and helps me with the folding playpen. She switches on a baby monitor and holds it to her ear. Then she gives it a shake.

Guess that thing works, she says. When we come back downstairs Charles is telling a story about Thomas Aquinas.

Just stopped writing. Charles pauses to grin at everyone.

He'd had a vision. Everything he'd written before was straw. Charles throws back his head and laughs.

Can you imagine,
straw
, it was all straw.

Blue diodes are the next thing, Joanne Barker announces. That's all you'll hear from now on, blue diodes.

What about pocket calculators, Lyle says, didn't some calculator guy get the Nobel?

Don't start with me, says Joanne. She raises her chin at Lyle, saucy and flirting.

I want to do what Diane McCarthy always does, says Prissy. Each man moves two chairs down before dessert. Men, desert your wives.

Listen, says Lyle. Everyone hushes at once. Pete has started to cry.

I walk out to the car, Pete in one arm, the folded playpen banging against my shin. I throw it into the trunk, strap Pete into the car seat. There's a J. J. Cale tape in the stereo and it bursts honeyed and sweltering into the frosty air.
Magnolia, you sweet thing, you're driving me mad
. Fat snowflakes drift onto the windshield. The steering wheel is too cold to hold. Somewhere in the world there are magnolias. There are men who love women, a particular woman, to the point of devotion. In that part of the world babies sleep under filmy mosquito nets while their parents drink iced tea or have sex in the hammock. The babies sleep because they are overcome with muggy, perfumed heat, or maybe there are no babies. I wonder if I am too drunk to drive. I wonder it even as I sail through a red light on Elizabeth Avenue. The man in a grey fedora whose car I nearly cream has a face of pinched putty. His mouth hangs open. Pete is wide awake, he's watching the snow. When we were driving through an industrial park last week Alex had said, What if we're all dead and we only think we're alive?

This is what happened in France. This is how I got pregnant after eleven years of wanting nothing so much as to feel a child moving in my belly again. A medieval village with lace curtains in the windows and swirling cobbled streets, a castle built in a mountain pass. Isobel lost the car keys at the beach and took everything out of her knapsack, crusty socks, Don DeLillo, shaking away the sand. A goat with a chawed blue rope tied to
its neck leaped onto my chest, left cloven mud prints on my blouse. An elderly woman invited us into her home, gave us port. There were four weasels glued to tree stumps on her high shelves. They killed my rabbits, she said. We saw the Papal Palace. Far below the palace grounds there is a prison, the courtyard formed by the walls draped with a fine green netting. Once a prisoner escaped in a helicopter. A girl stood on the wall and screamed to her boyfriend in a dark prison window. Did you get my message? A tattoo of a skull peeked over the drawstring waist of her pants. A field that flashed emerald, lime, yellow, and blue as the clouds drifted. A double rainbow. A sky like cashmere shredded on the blades of the mountains. A pig farm with the wind blowing toward us. Run by only one man and several computers, Lucien said. Lucien on a zigzagging unicycle, the whites of his eyes showing under the iris as he watched the silver bowling pins he juggled. Sugar cubes wrapped in a paper that says Daddy. In Marseilles a haughty waiter rolled his eyes. Alex bought sunglasses with lenses like houseflies from a black man with cornrows who jiggled his leg madly and stared in the other direction while she tried every pair. We slept on a sailboat docked in the harbour, forest of white masts pricking the indigo sky. A woman in a far-off window looked over a square, a child sleeping against her shoulder. Lamb kabobs roared on a grill, hissing and spitting fat. We picked almonds off the ground. I had my thirty-seventh birthday. Lyle slapped the cake down and the plate spun in tight, tiny circles and I shouted, Why do you always get what you want?

Bernard grew up in Paris sitting around the gypsy campfires,
he tells us while he slices tomato. He is a friend of Lucien and Isobel, with whom we are staying.

I'm trying to find my parents, he says, on the computer. They have a program. He lays the tomato slices on a platter, layering them like limp dominoes.

Somewhere in Algeria, he says. I have a name.

His gut hangs over his belt and his teeth are yellow, some are missing. Sacks under his eyes. He's short compared to Lyle, his skin is swarthy. He sticks a red pepper with the point of the knife and brings it to the stove. He lights the propane and lays the pepper on the blue flame. He takes a round of fresh mozzarella out of his knapsack and slices it. He turns the pepper and the skin is blackened and blistered. He argues about Picasso. Everything in French and I can't follow, but he turns to me, pointing the tip of the knife.

Picasso's not for the common people, he says. The vehemence is thrilling. I like that he doesn't know who his parents are. I make my decision.

What's he saying about Picasso, I ask Isobel.

Bernard is a bullshit artist, she whispers.

Bernard stays the night because of the rainstorm. He's afraid of lightning. He tells me that if I am on a mountain road it's possible the lightning will pour down the hill like water and pool at my feet. If this happens I should crouch on the nearest boulder. Be careful not to dip my toe, no matter how beautiful it looks. The electricity goes out and we all gather at the window to watch the lightning over the mountains. The thunder rolls and cracks. We can hear the cows lowing, we can hear
their bells. Someone is whacking them with a switch. I think: Part of the world lives with stinky, delicious cheese and weasels with glass eyes. Part of the world hates Picasso. Part of the world dances around a bonfire.

We are eating ice cream from the carton. Alex is asleep with a white sheet wrapped tight around her in the next room. The lightning zaps the snaggled interlocking branches of the olive grove. Lightning flushes through the grove like blue blood pulsing in organic tissue.

It's getting closer, I say to Bernard, whose breath I can feel on the back of my neck. I regret saying it because in the next minute I understand from the particular heat or smell coming from him, or the quality of his breathing, his stillness, that Bernard is terrified. We are all huddled in the window. He's a chef during the winter season. I didn't decide. At no point did I make a decision.

Lyle and his sister Isobel and her boyfriend Lucien run into the garden to gather the laundry. It's already so heavy with rain the sheets are dragging in the mud. We watch them dash back and forth in the battering lightning. It is monstrous and ancient, insubstantial, lethal, full of bliss. Something that might pick them up in its long pointy fingernails and fling them across the field. Bernard is rubbing circles on the cheeks of my ass with the flat of his hands while I lean against the windowsill watching them below. The lightning is stomping toward us on rickety legs; one gnarled, X-rayed bone pierces the mud, then the other. It keeps coming. Lyle and Isobel and Lucien are running under the wet sheets, they are like trapped moths beating
their wings inside an overturned glass. Bernard presses a knee between my legs and spreads them apart. He crunches up my cotton skirt in his hands. He slides my underwear down to my knees. I am leaning on the window, the stone sill digging into my elbows. When he comes I think, unbidden, of something that I've heard about tuna. That if they die while panicking you can taste the fear in their flesh.

This thing with Bernard only took a minute. I swear that when the lights came back on and everybody burst back in soaked and loaded down with wet, muddy sheets Bernard and I did not exchange one complicit glance. It wasn't sweet, nor was it scurrilous. Pete looks like Lyle. Or his expressions, his smile, look like Lyle's.

It's past four in the morning and Lyle hasn't come back from the Ivanys'. I want him to come home. My arms ache from walking Pete. I sit in the cold living room, Pete wrapped in a quilt, and watch David Letterman. He shows a video clip of himself chasing a man in a chicken suit. He grabs a fire extinguisher and sprays the man, who lifts his knees high and grabs at his tail feathers as if this is hurting. A taxi pulls up outside and I turn off the TV and stand in the dark behind the lace curtain to watch for Lyle. But a giant blob of silver helium balloons bobs out of the cab, and a woman's boot tests the slush. It's my nextdoor neighbour. Her boyfriend comes around to her door and holds her by the elbow. He stands beside her while she struggles with her keys. He is looking into the sky, his breath frosty. He turns her from the door and takes the collar of her jacket in his
hands and draws her to him and kisses her for a long time. Then she tries the keys again and the door opens and they go inside and pull the balloons in behind them.

Pete starts to cry. His body straightens, goes stiff, he almost squirms out of my arms. His cheeks are flushed. He tangles some of my hair in his fist and pulls it out. I lift it away from his hand. I get out his snowsuit and lay it on the carpet and push his arms and legs into it. I go out to the car and put Pete in the car seat and start it and wait for it to warm up. I want to drive past the Ivanys'. See Lyle's silhouette against the living-room curtains.

But I decide instead to go to the Fountain Spray. I try to think if we are out of anything, and we are. We're out of milk. But I am stopping because it's open. Because of the fluorescent orange signs that say Sale. The longer I stay away from home the more likely Lyle will be there when I get back. I'll know as soon as I look at the front of the house if he's inside, though it may not be altered in any physical way. Or it will be altered in a way I don't register consciously. Footprints in the snow. I stop for the name, too, the Fountain Spray. I will say later, So at four in the morning there I was at the Fountain Spray buying milk. Some comic telling of the life without sleep. Though it hasn't had that name for years. Needs, it's called now. Needs. There's a young man leaning over the counter with the paper. His arms crossed, he's rocking as he reads. The radio slightly off the station. Celine Dion, the song from
Titanic
. There's a stand with a giant pyramid of lemons. Even in the garish light of the all-night convenience store the lemons are blaring with colour.
I think of the woman with the yellow roses in the graveyard and wonder if I dreamed her. It's been so long since I've slept. The waking world creeps into the dreaming one. The young man, a boy really, looks up and closes the paper. The man who crashes the door against its frame shattering the glass and who then draws a hunting knife out of his filthy khaki jacket isn't as incongruous as the lemons. I've seen him in the streets lots of times muttering vengefully. I have crossed the street to avoid him. I've seen him waiting in the early morning hours for Theatre Pharmacy to open so he can get a prescription. In a few seconds he has wrenched most of the boy's body out over the counter, cut a slice through the boy's pale blue shirt. The shirt sleeve is muddied fast and sticks to the boy's arm, it darkens quickly, down to the cuff. The rack with bars and gum stands in my way. Pete starts to cry. The man turns to look at us. I can see his fist on the boy's shirt, twisting it. Perhaps the boy can't breathe. A big jar of pickled eggs falls off the counter and the fat, limbless eggs trundle across the floor as if they have places to see. A stand of chips falls over with hardly a sound. A truism: There are always innocent bystanders. I understand myself to be a bystander.

Pete and I, like extras in a movie. It's the over-brightness, the late hour, I check myself over the way a continuity girl would size up an extra, to see if my presence is necessary, believable. My suede coat with a fur collar, the belt hanging loose from the belt loops, the Velcro flap on my boot sticking out. They are tired boots with wavy lines of salt. My feet are wet. The Velcro gives when I walk and I have to bend over,
with Pete in my arms, in the mall or near the parking meter outside the supermarket, to secure the flap, and it gives again. The boots are baffed out. An expression my mother-in-law uses. The essence of Lyle's mother flits through my head. She is part of the gushing collide of loves and hates and non-moments of my life that is just now thrown into sharp relief. Pete's forest green snowsuit. My fawn gloves, misshapen, a hole in the thumb. I am flabbergasted to find that the evening is bottomless. The continuity girl tallies the accumulating texture, the nuance of each detail I bring to the scene. I appear to be exactly what I am. A woman with a toddler in a convenience store during a hold-up. I am an obdurate subplot, stubbornly present. How did I get here?