The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (31 page)

The woman says, Shoot me if you can, Eleanor moves her head, feels her earrings jiggle. The woman leaning against the wall, her breasts, the gleaming satin of her bra, Danny Martin's kiss. The man slowly lowers his arm, he cannot hold the gun out any longer. The gun drops from his fingers to the floor. The woman steps out of her skirt, walks across the tiles in her high heels, and steps into his arms. The screen door slams. Eleanor drops the book, kicks it under the skirt of the couch (the screen door slams, it's Constance, checking the garden for Eleanor). Mr. Ryan is surprised to see her. For a moment he stands on the other side of the room, basket of cod tongues. The eels are
undisturbed, writhing together between the crevices of rock at the bottom of the lake.

The editor snaps the top back on his felt-tip marker. He taps the flowchart with it.

We should see the father, he says. Who was he?

Eleanor and Philip take Gabrielle home in a taxi before the reception. Apple air freshener. She meets the eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror. It's the same driver. The one with the different wife altogether. She grabs her lapel.

Gabrielle, look! But the ladybug is gone.

Eleanor's mother, Julia, comes to pick up Gabrielle. She's babysitting so Philip and Eleanor can have a night together.

She says, Yes, you do, you need it.

Eleanor's sister has shaved her head.

Why would she do a thing like that, Julia asks. Who will hire her now, a bald woman? It's dark in the house after the lake, after the wedding dress blaring like a trumpet, the tinfoil trays of food floating through the party like a school of capelin. Eleanor closes her eyes and sees the lake spitting sparks, soft sparks. A wedding is a sham, she thinks. Constance letting the screen door slam behind her. Shading her eyes to check the children, the dress lifting like the lip of a snowdrift.

Eleanor says, Mom, was that weasel white? That weasel that ran through the rungs of the dining-room chairs.

What weasel? There was no weasel.

Eleanor thinks of Amelia on tiptoe, reaching for Philip's ear.

I want nothing to do with Philip, she thinks. My life should have gone another way. Climbing hills in Nepal. But if there were no Philip, there would be no Gabrielle. She fills with a gutful of love for her daughter. Gabrielle's braids in her hands. Braiding her hair while it's wet. One loose strand near the temple.

Why can't Gabrielle stay here with her? Why can't she and Gabrielle curl up in bed and sleep and forget the reception? Forget Philip. If he wants to get loaded and sleep with someone, just let him go. Dusk, almost night, and she and Gabrielle could order fish and chips. All the rooms in the three-storey house dark, except the kitchen, salt and vinegar. She imagines a rumbling under the ocean around Australia, the coral reef bursting apart, bits of brittle coral flying into the sun like batons.

She feels a catch — and leave Philip to be drunk with that blond woman, dancing, pouring beer over each other's heads, and finally kissing? Glenn Marshall is wrong. You don't wait for grace, or anything, you make it happen.

The last time she had take-out she saw the cook, in whites, lift baskets of fries from the roaring fat and stop to tip a sickly bottle of Pepto-Bismol down his throat. Straight from the bottle, and drop it back into the breast pocket of his apron.

You go on, Julia says. Gabrielle is fine with me. You need a party.

Then Philip comes from the kitchen with a mug of ice cream.

Lots of people shave their heads, he says.

He puts a mound of ice cream in his mouth, leaning against the wall, and pulls the spoon out of his mouth slowly. The
mound of ice cream like a fossil of the roof of his mouth, a soft steam. He sees Eleanor looking at his mouth and he raises an eyebrow. Immediately she wants to be with him, get drunk with him, dance, she is grateful that her mom is taking Gabrielle.

Julia says, Was that the groom I saw on Prescott Street directing traffic with two soup ladles? They got a picture of it, someone did. He'll be nice by midnight. Say goodbye to your mother, Gabrielle. Kiss your mother goodbye.

Gabrielle throws her arms around Eleanor's neck, their foreheads gently knock, they look straight into each other's eyes.

Gabrielle whispers, I'm going to have chocolate.

Philip squeezes past them on the stairs. Eleanor sits and listens to her mother's car doors. Hears the car pull away.

In the bathroom, Eleanor and Philip stand side by side brushing their teeth. He pauses, his mouth foaming, the toothbrush still.

What were you and Glenn Marshall saying?

He gets in the shower. Eleanor undresses and gets in with him. The water hits his shoulders hard. She lets her wrists rest on his shoulder bones.

Then she kisses his chest, down his belly, until she is on her knees. The water slides down his ribs like cloth. She makes seams with her tongue. She puts her hand on his chest and the water flows down her arm to the elbow, like an evening glove. The hot water costing a fortune.

She says, Will I shave my legs?

Philip draws her up, takes her breast in his mouth.

The reception is at the Masonic Temple. There are perhaps two hundred people. More than the potluck — and the food. Constance has relatives from Heart's Desire, older women in shiny dresses, purples, scarlets, blues, clustered at long tables with pink streamers, and flowers and platters of marshmallow cookies, coconut-covered. Old-lady bifocals cutting the reflection of candle flames in half. They have brought trays and trays of food. Constance likes flowers. White roses at Christmas, always. Once on a winter afternoon she and Eleanor sat on the sofa and Constance said, I don't love him.

She picked a rose petal off the coffee table and smoothed it onto her chin. It hung there. It had been nothing more than a mood. It had passed. He asked her to marry him and she did.

But the relatives sit back as if they've done nothing. Arms crossed over broad chests, they sit back and the reflections of candle flames align in their glasses like the vertical pupils of cats, glowing from the dark corners of the Masonic Temple.

Sadie says to Eleanor, I kissed Constance on her satin shoulder. My lipstick on her wedding dress. My God, I'm not kidding. The whole dress is
ruined
.

There's a lineup at the bar. Eleanor sits and looks at the dance floor. Her eyes adjust to the dark. She can see Amelia Kerby's lame flashing in the crowd. Her blonde hair is down now, curly. Her naked shoulder. She has someone by the tie. A chair screeches opposite her and Glenn Marshall gives her a beer.

She says, It's Glenn Marshall again.

He says, I don't dance.

Dance with me, Glenn, she says. She feels desperate.

That's exactly what I don't do, he says. It's Philip's tie. Here at a wedding with all of their friends. He is already drunk and she's holding him up by the tie. Constance drops into the seat beside Eleanor.

It can't last with Amelia, she says.

Things end, Eleanor says. She has heard this idea all her life — that things end — but took no interest. Now she tries it on to test its durability. She has always imagined she was building something with Philip. She had a do-good work ethic toward love. It was something you hammered, chainsawed, sized up with a spirit level, until it was absolutely durable and true. Along with something less substantial, a blithe, unexamined faith, airy as a cloud, that things were meant to be. There had never been a need to reconcile these conflicting notions.

She has no life experience, says Constance.

What do you mean, Eleanor says, she has her own apartment. She drives a rusting Volvo. What do you want? Eleanor's thinking of this girl hanging by her feet, bouncing like a Yo-Yo, up and down the side of a ravine on a bungee cord. Also her reportedly tidy apartment fitted with a Web-cam, and the grants that sustain her. Eleanor sees the lipstick mark on the gown's shoulder, a perfect full mouth.

Let's dance, Eleanor says.

What you need, says Constance, is a drink.

Eleanor tries to gather herself in, but she's too drunk. There's her face in the mirror, her cheeks, forehead. She's a skyful of
fireworks, a roller coaster, a birthday cake. She grips the bathroom sink but her shoulder hits a wall.

The sink is the wheel of a pleasure cruiser on a big sea and she must turn it into the wave before they capsize. She's in the basement of the Masonic Temple on Cathedral Street in downtown St. John's, Newfoundland. It's a steep hill, the harbour, the cliffs, the North Atlantic, a sheer drop (the Grand Banks), and nothingness. She clings to the sink. Everybody at the wedding, two floors above — dancing, shouting, drinking beer — has been washed out to sea in a wave shot through with tuna and capelin and electric eels, especially Frank Harvey with his flamboyant tie, and Dave Hogan who drives to Florida in a Tilley hat, and Matthew Shea who puts his thumb over the top of his beer spraying Gerry Pottle, who holds out his hands going, What'd I do? What'd I do? And Matthew's wife with a daiquiri held above one shoulder saying, Matthew, that's so unim
press
ive. Amelia Kerby just now smacked Philip's shoulder with the back of her hand and was ambushed by silent jerks of laughter — all of them are depending on Eleanor to alter the course of the evening, to drag the sink hard in the other direction, until she's lifted off her feet. She has to bring them into port. She won't abandon her post, even in the face of this brick shithouse of a wave. How had she gotten so drunk, she had only been drinking.

If she could count how many beers in the afternoon, but it was the gin. The gin was insubstantial and avid, intrinsically cold, like reptile blood. At some point in the evening the word
juniper
had seemed like a self-contained poem. There is no
turning back, they can only brace themselves. She has begun to think of herself as them. She's the entire wedding party, and the city beyond. Dragged out to sea.

The face in the mirror is starting to look exactly like her, she's coming into herself too fast. Philip was dancing with Amelia when Eleanor careened out of the banquet hall, down the musty staircase, platform heels, rickety handrail.

The bathroom floor buckles in the grip of a swell and Eleanor is flung against the wall and hauls herself, hand over hand, up the roiling radiator to the cubicle. She lets her head drop against the door of the stall. If she can just hang on she will reach her purest self. She may have to puke to get there. Something pure, like a breeze through the pines of the Himalayas. She'd camped once in a forest in Kashmir. Slippery pine needles slicked the paths. At night the guide called from his tent: Watch out for the snow leopards!

The outer door bangs and she feels it reverberate in her bum. Two women have burst into the bathroom.

Sadie says, Someone in there?

I am, says Eleanor.

And who is I am? A fairy in a CBC Christmas special once when she was fourteen. They chromokeyed her so she floated over a frozen lake, pointed toes wiggling, to touch down beside an ice-fishing folksinger who grabbed up his guitar to play a carol. She'd once knit a long red scarf. Rode in a mock foxhunt. They had several bloodhounds, but it was Eleanor's French poodle, Monique, who treed the old fur hat doused with musk hidden in the crotch of a birch. She'd hitchhiked the
island maybe seven times. She'd taken all kinds of lessons: raku, clay animation, Spanish, watercolour painting. The secret to a successful watercolour is to use many, many transparent veils of colour. This is also the secret to raku, vegetarian cooking, synchronized swimming, and being very, very drunk when your husband is dancing with a bubblehead from British Columbia, or from anywhere for that matter. It is not the secret to flying trapeze, belly dancing, waitressing at the Blue Door, or being very, very drunk when your husband picks up the fine gold necklace that lies flat against Amelia's collarbone with his lips. There is no secret for that. You must carom like the silver balls in a pinball machine, spitting sparks with each wall your forehead smacks. You must grip the wheel with both hands, you must pick a star and aim true.

Eleanor realizes that she's unable to puke. She is bloated with woe. There's so much woe. Puking she can forget. She drank; she is drunk. These honest statements grip hands like used car salesmen. She straightens up and steps out of the cubicle.

Sadie is holding her wrist to Constance's nose.

It's called Celestial Sex, says Sadie, everybody's wearing it. Both women turn to face Eleanor and then lurch forward to catch her.

Eleanor says, Constance, your dress. It's smeared with lipstick.

The women grip Eleanor's shoulders just as the tiled floor slants toward her chin. They squash her between them.

Eleanor lets her face fall into Sadie's cleavage. Eleanor wants to let go the wheel. Let them dash against the cliffs, let the
ocean crunch them in its rotten chops. She closes her eyes, nuzzling Sadie's breasts with her nose, and plummets. She's a jellyfish pulsing through infinite inkiness, the ordinary encumbrances giving way: bone, jealousy, the smell of smoke and shampoo, the stinky emerald cloud of pot that still hangs over the cubicles, the way her mother stood a boiled egg in her wedding ring, her father smoothing cement with a trowel, Eleanor's horse pawing the clouds with his front hoofs, the pink of his nostril, the white of his eye, good olives, her name, streets, books, aspirations, socks, coins, hair clips, all of it giving way. Then she grabs Sadie's spaghetti strap and drags herself back up, surfacing amid the bagpipe screams of the toilets. What it means to be human is spelling itself in the grey mould spreading over the ceiling. She must speak. She will hint at the immanent peril. Sadie can take it.

Philip is all over her, Eleanor says.

Downer, says Constance.

Remember who you are, says Sadie.

She had imagined herself in love lots of times. Sometimes she knew she wasn't and fought to convince herself, saying, See? That must be love, see? He's done this, you felt that way, you thought of him while making mashed potatoes, you thought of him when the chain came off your bike, you thought of him.