If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  © LEONA THEIS 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical — including photocopying, recording, taping, or through the use of information storage and retrieval systems — without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  Freehand Books acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program provided by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Media Fund, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: If Sylvie had nine lives : a novel in stories / Leona Theis.

  Other titles: If Sylvie had 9 lives

  Names: Theis, Leona, 1955– author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200221426 | Canadiana (ebook)

  20200221515 | ISBN 9781988298719 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988298726

  (EPUB) | ISBN 9781988298733 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8589.H415 I32 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Edited by Deborah Willis

  Book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Author photo by Shannon Brunner

  Printed on FSC® recycled paper and bound in Canada by Marquis

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, or events either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  for Murray

  JUNE 1974

  High Beams

  JULY-AUGUST 1974

  How Sylvie Failed to Become a Better Person through Yoga

  1979

  The Last Days of Disco

  Three Mothers

  1984

  Naked Bodega

  1989

  Our Lady of Starting Over

  1994

  Honestly,

  May Zeus Strike You with a Lightning Bolt

  1999

  What Erik Saw

  Game Face

  2004

  Nekyia

  Things He Will Not Tell Her Daughter

  2009

  Philosophies

  2014

  Blueberry Hill

  As she danced, the image of a river came to her. A river branching into multiples of itself, no longer a single stream but a delta. And if her life were such a delta she might let the flow take her in a direction far from the current she was in now. If only there were more Sylvies, to ride the separate streams. The further she went, the further she’d be from herself. She could end up way down the shore, so far from this Sylvie, the Jack-marrying version, that all she could do would be to wave, and hope to be seen.

  High Beams

  TWO NIGHTS BEFORE the date printed in silver italic on her wedding invitations, Erik called, the guy she’d ridden with through all those dust-hung after-darks on country gravel roads in his mom’s long Meteor, boat-like in the night. He was on his way through the city, he said. They should have a drink. In her right hand Sylvie held the clunky weight of the phone receiver, and in her left she held a half-made yellow wedding flower. Begin by stacking half a dozen squares of coloured, see-through plastic. Pleat the stack accordion-style, then bind it at the middle. Spread each side into a fan; fluff. Repeat four dozen times. Get married.

  “Hang up the phone,” said Margo. “Pay some attention already.” She took the flower from Sylvie’s hand and fluffed the unfinished side and handed it back. Among the rules for nuptials in 1974: decorate the wedding car with flowers the colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses. Or, in Sylvie and Jack’s case, decorate the wedding truck. They might have used Jack’s Corolla, but rust had made macramé of its lower regions; Sylvie’s dad’s Dodge pickup was the better choice, looking new except for a few pocks in the paint along the driver’s side from stones and speed, her father’s refusal to concede ample passage to oncoming traffic.

  Sylvie angled the receiver away from her mouth. “I am paying attention.”

  “Course you are, it’s just not all that obvious.”

  Sylvie held the flower to her nose as if she expected perfume. Somewhere in this city was Erik, also with a receiver in his hand and a cord leading away from it. Tug. She looked out the high, small window. Living in a basement suite, you see the lowest quarter of anyone walking around to the back door at the head of the stairs. She knew her friends by their legs, their shoes, the size of their feet. Here came Cynthia’s sneakered feet now, cousin Cynthia arriving to help with the flowers.

  Things get away on you, the better part of a year goes by, next thing you know your dad’s booked the United Church back home and your aunts have made arrangements for the midnight lunch: assorted cold cuts and homemade buns and Uncle Davis’s special pepper pickles.

  “Yes, let’s,” Sylvie said into the phone.

  “Good,” said Erik. “I’ll meet you at that club, what is it — The Yips?”

  “Sure.” Sylvie thought how he sounded like a hick, referring to Yip’s as The Yips. She hung up and said, “Let’s wrap this up, Margo. I’m going out.”

  “Without Jack?”

  “Without Jack.”

  “Who then?”

  “Not your beeswax.” She went up to meet Cynthia. “Thanks for coming,” she said, “but it turns out this isn’t a good night for making flowers after all.”

  “But Sylvie, you only have tonight and tomorrow and then that’s it.”

  Yes, Sylvie thought, that’s true.

  They used to drive at night, she and Erik, along the back roads near Ripley looking for parked couples. Once they found a vehicle, they’d train their high beams on the rear window for a bit, then back up, turn around and take off to find another car, laughing to think of Paulie or Stuart bare-assed in the back and Shelley or Beth struggling to do up her blouse, the buttons so big and the buttonholes so small and the fingers so suddenly fat. In the wee hours Erik would drive up Sylvie’s street, headlights off, and let her out three houses ahead of her own so as not to disturb Snoring Dad and Laid-up Mom.

  (“I get it, Syl. If you didn’t love them you wouldn’t give them nicknames.”

  “Think you know me?”

  “Think I do.”)

  Sylvie and Erik called their game birth control. Let’s go do some birth control tonight. Let’s go do some back seat interruptus in Ripley, Saskatchewan, Playground of the Prairies. In those days Sylvie’s Grandma Fletcher had in her living room a green satin cushion that dated from the forties. It was silkscreened with the Playground of the Prairies slogan and pictures of babes water-skiing and men golfing and fishing. In the real-life Ripley, there was no lake where a person could launch a boat or water-ski. There was no fishing hole, no river. There was a nine-hole golf course that would flood in the spring, and for a week or so kids would put on rubber boots and go out and sink the rickety rafts they knocked together out of branches and tail-ends of lumber. These days, Grandma Fletcher’s satin cushion sat on the couch in Sylvie and Jack’s basement suite, a slippery joke.

  The day after tomorrow Sylvie and Jack would get up and have breakfast, then take their finery, sheathed in plastic bags, four hours o
ut to Ripley where they would tape the yellow flowers to the Dodge and have the ceremony. Tonight the boys had already come to pick up Jack. Took him out to party. The girls had given Sylvie a bridal shower last Thursday where they made her wear a tin pie plate with an orange pot scrubber stuck over to one side, supposed to look like a bow on a bonnet. They played parlour games. Margo won a Tupperware citrus peeler for having in her purse the item voted most unlikely to be found in a purse, specifically, a moo-cow creamer from the truck stop south of the city on Number 11. Tea and instant coffee and Tang had been the beverages on offer, so it was no wonder the thought that came to Sylvie’s mind now was, You have to make your own fun.

  “OKAY,” SAID ERIK as they raised their bottles of Boh and brought them together in a clumsy kiss of glass. “Okay, you’re already living with this guy anyway, and day after tomorrow you’ll drive out to Ripley for the wedding, and then what?”

  “What do you mean, then what?”

  “Then you just come back to your same place?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Too far to drive. We stay overnight at the Capri in Foster and drive back the next day.”

  “And you get up Monday morning and go to work at, what did you say, the basement of the library, same as always?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a point?”

  She stamped circles on the tabletop with her bottle. “Eight months in Edmonton pouring concrete for, what did you say, driveways? And now you’re moving back to Ripley.”

  “The job was great, the boss wasn’t. Bags of money, though.”

  “Anyway,” Sylvie said, getting out of her chair, “this place has a dance floor.”

  THEY DROVE BAREFOOT in the long dark car, shoes and socks stripped off and thrown in the back. They took turns at the wheel. When Sylvie drove, the hard rubber ridges of the gas pedal and the brake pedal pressed into the sole of her naked foot, patterning her skin. When she was the passenger, she sat on her heel, switching legs when her knee cramped. They never once parked as a couple, though one night, after backing away from Paulie’s old Buick and laughing at the idea of Paulie with his trademark white pants around his ankles — he wore them pretty tight and it wouldn’t be an easy dance to pull them up in a hurry, wiggle waggle, and would he even care or would he simply carry on? — after turning around and a few miles later driving slowly past Panchuck’s grain bins and seeing that no one had rolled the signal tire out to the middle of the lane to show that the spot was taken for the evening — Sylvie and Erik did each press a look on the other across the wide space between them in the front seat. Sylvie, sitting on her heel, allowed herself to grind against the bone. She wanted him to notice, and she wanted him to not. She told herself the rush and flush were no more than heightened feelings from the game. She and Erik were each waiting for the single, right match, the ones they’d be willing to be exposed with through it all — jobs and kids and grandkids and laid-up, hope-to-die. They had talked about this.

  THE BAND AT YIP’S was midway through “Proud Mary.” On the dance floor Erik leaned in close and said, “You didn’t invite me, Syl.”

  “I don’t hear from you for ten months, I don’t know where you are, I’m supposed to invite you?”

  He waved to show it didn’t matter. “This guy then, you’re fine about being naked in the headlights with him, yea unto glory-be?”

  “Yea in the when and the what?” she said, stalling, standing on the dance floor, her hand palm-up, a blank where she dared him to put the specifics.

  “You remember.”

  “Is this a test?”

  “Come on. First the babies, then all the way through to the nursing home.”

  She was annoyed with him for mentioning babies. It was only a wedding; they were only going to see how it went. The band sang for Proud Mary’s big wheel to keep on turning, and Sylvie began a slow 360 on the dance floor, arms in the air, moving only to every second beat in order to prolong the attention her movement called to itself. She was somewhat on the skinny side, but she was pretty sure Erik appreciated skinny, and what’s a little appreciation between friends?

  Proud Mary. A riverboat. By the time she’d finished her first revolution she was thinking less about the look of her hips under the strobe light and more about the image of a river that came to her as she danced. A river branching into multiples of itself, no longer a single stream but a delta. And if her life were such a delta she might let the flow take her in a direction far from the current she was in now. If only there were more Sylvies, to ride the separate streams. The further she went, the further she’d be from herself. She could end up way down the shore, so far from this Sylvie, the Jack-marrying version, that all she could do would be to wave, and hope to be seen.

  Over the music, she said, “I guess we considered ourselves pretty important back then, to think anybody would be watching what we did. Nobody’s exactly training their headlights on us, on me and Jack.”

  “Not even yourself?” Erik said. “Even you’re not watching?”

  “You think too much.”

  He shrugged, which was infuriating.

  “Erik, just dance.”

  When Yip’s let out they drove across town, she in the rusty Toyota, he following in the Meteor. His lights glared off her rear-view mirror and made her squint. They parked on Fourth Street in front of the bungalow where Sylvie and Jack lived downstairs.

  She set a hand on the warm hood of the Meteor. “Great memories here. Just, I don’t see how the old boat lines up with your motorbike and your Ski-Doo.”

  “Got it from Mom for cheap, which means I can afford my toys for boys.” At the gate he reached in front of her and flipped the latch. “You lurch a lot.”

  She saw he was barefoot, carrying his shoes and socks. She said, “I’m not good with a clutch. Jack won’t have an automatic.” She slipped out of her sandals. The grass teased her naked arches. “Wet,” she said. “There’s dew.” The pattern on the concrete tiles that led around back pressed into the soles of her feet. She unlocked the door. A quick inhale before taking the first step down; that old fear, hardly conscious by now, of falling. On down, then, past the furnace, the washer, the dryer, and into the suite.

  “Bathroom?” he said, and she pointed the way. He touched her shoulder as he passed. It’s the wedding coming up, Sylvie told herself as she waited for him to come out. Only tonight and tomorrow, and then that’s it.

  They didn’t bother with drinks. They stood with their bare feet inches apart and ignored the half-finished heap of flowers on the table. Behind Sylvie was the stove. Beside the stove was a squat water heater and beside the water heater was the bedroom door, open. Erik looked up at the little kitchen window. “You live underground,” he said as he moved his gaze from the window to the bedroom doorway. Those were the actual words, but he could have strung together any old combination of syllables and the meaning would still be, There’s a bed in there.

  “Hold on a sec.” Sylvie went into the bathroom and closed the door. She sat to pee and whispered to herself, Think this through. But it wasn’t the time of night for in-depth thought. She ran a powder blue movie that featured Erik. How his hardness would press into the hollow beside her hipbone, how his bare shoulders would feel new under her hands, like something she’d coveted on a walk through Eaton’s and slipped into her pocket without paying. Different from Jack’s, whose deep-slanted shoulders might be her least favourite of his physical traits; the shoulders and the fact that one of his earlobes was weirdly long, which wasn’t his fault, but still.

  She flushed. Ran the tap.

  “You get swamped by a motorboat in there?”

  “Just a sec.” Sylvie turned the slick bar of soap between her palms. There must be an equivalent, in Erik-terms, of the weird earlobe. Yes: the way his left knee angled outward when he walked — something you stop noticing in a friend once you’ve known him awhile, but that knee, in a boyfriend, would be more than itself. It would be
the single thing you wanted to change and couldn’t. Along with all the other single things. His inherited weakness of eyesight. Erik’s eventual wife would be leading him and his white cane around before he turned sixty. Sylvie took a moment to dry her hands.

  She came out of the bathroom and led Erik into the dark bedroom. Light from the street came in through the small window high above the bed. Erik pointed to the bell-shaped red decal stuck to the pane. “What’s that?”

  “The fire department gives them out to mark where they might have to come in and rescue someone.”

  “How would they get in through an eensie opening like that? And how am I supposed to get out through an eensie opening like that when your old man comes down the stairs?”

  “He won’t be home tonight.” She knew about these stag parties. He’d sleep where he passed out, and she wouldn’t see him before two in the afternoon.

  Erik guided her onto the bed. He sat down and took her foot in his hand. “This part’s already naked.” He began to massage — his thumb inside her arch, his hand travelling from her ankle, up inside the leg of her jeans, his finger wiggling its way between the tight fabric and the back of her knee. Who knew the back of a knee could start a quiver that would travel out so far from the source.

  She heard the scuff of shoes against concrete. Erik’s hand pulled out, interruptus, and came to rest on her heel. Sylvie opened her eyes and saw in the pale glow from the streetlight three pairs of running shoes passing the bedroom window. Alex, shuffling along backwards; two other pairs of feet — Benj and Cyril? — shuffling forward. Clueless damn bozos. There was heat on the back of her knee in the shape of Erik’s finger. Cooling. Gone. She put a hand to his wrist and the two of them held still.

  She heard Alex say, “Lemme find his keys here.” They were a noisy crew, shuffling and grunting and letting the screen door slap behind them. Then an uneven rhythm, step-thud-step, thud-step-step. Sylvie pictured them in the stairwell, Alex with Jack by the armpits, below him Benj and Cyril, each gripping an ankle. Don’t slip, don’t let go. Jack’s inert body hitting the walls of the stairwell side to side. She looked at Erik, who was looking up at the emergency decal on the window. She had the fleeting thought that she could be the one to climb out. Stand on the metal bedstead, make herself small and shimmy through, run seven blocks barefoot and knock on Margo’s back door. Leave both these guys in the basement. She could feel how the metal would press into the ball of her foot as she hoisted herself. Erik sneezed, sending a shiver through the bed, and the moment she’d imagined vanished.