by Leona Theis
“Shh. Stay put. He’ll be out cold and the others don’t need to see you.”
She went to open the door at the bottom of the stairs. “Why didn’t you let him sleep it off?”
Cyril said, “We thought he might be needed here tomorrow.”
“Thanks a million.” Sylvie pointed to the couch and they lifted him there and arranged him on his side. He groaned and rolled off, onto the braided rug Sylvie’s aunt Viv had made “to soften those unforgiving tiles, dear.” When his head landed, Sylvie felt a clutch in her gut and looked away. Just like Jack, to sideswipe her most vulnerable spot.
“Ouch, jeez,” said Benj.
Whether to run up the stairs and away, or to see to his hurt.
“We could put him in the bedroom,” said Alex.
“No, leave him.” She knelt and lifted his head, curved her palm underneath it and felt its whiskied weight. There are falls and then there are falls. He would be fine. She reached for the satin Ripley cushion and slid it under in place of her hand.
“I don’t suppose he’s feeling any pain,” said Benj.
“All the same.” Alex looked toward the bedroom doorway.
Sylvie shook her head.
Once the three of them had tromped back up the stairs and the screen had slapped shut, Erik came out from behind the bedroom door. Sylvie let him take her hand and together they stood looking at Jack’s oblivious face. Sweet, she thought. Sweet, but she’d seen him like this a dozen times and she knew he wouldn’t be sweet tomorrow. Not horrible, not mean, but far from sweet. For a moment all her doubts attached themselves to his long, limp earlobe and the less than attractive line of his shoulders. But the earlobe and the slopey shoulders were nothing. Once you’d focused on them, you had to dismiss them, because it doesn’t do to be shallow. You couldn’t blame a guy for having a saggy bit of skin one side of his face.
Erik squeezed her hand.
“What was it we thought we were doing?” she said.
“Drastic times, drastic measures.” He wrapped her in a hug. “He’s not your man for the headlights.”
“Don’t go thinking you are.” She wished he wouldn’t talk as if her life from here to forever rested on what would happen the day after tomorrow. It was only a wedding. A party in the lit hall, little girls in ruffled dresses dancing past their bedtimes and half the town bellying up for their free drinks. It was what you did. It was what they all did, Shelley and Beth and Serena, and now herself.
“Oh, Syl. Maybe I’m not the one. Probably not.” But when she started to ease out of the hug, he pulled her close and said, “Don’t, not yet.”
On the floor, Jack drooled onto a silkscreened babe on the Playground of the Prairies. “Everybody’s got their faults,” Sylvie said, her cheek against the green plaid softness of Erik’s shirt.
“That’s a fact.”
“You have to back up now and drive away.”
“That is how the game goes.”
The strain in her head was like the strain she felt when Jack would interrupt a drinking party to get out The Riddle Game: people reading brain teasers off cards in their palms, and you couldn’t muddle through to an answer and you’d think, At this time of night, who cares? There were the flowers strewn on the table, and the girls would be back to help fold and tie and fluff come morning. There was the dress, too, oh, the dress. She’d pinned and cut yards of ivory satin and spent a week of evenings stitching it up on the Singer she’d inherited from her mother. Things were in place. There was the hall booked, and the church, and Aunt Merry baking buns, and Grandma on Mom’s side driving all the way from Calgary.
Erik pushed his toes underneath her naked arches and she stepped up and stood on his feet, skin over skin. They began a lumbering waltz, slow circles, each step coming down bare inches from where it originated. Sylvie felt the odd fit of her right leg with Erik’s left where his knee angled outward. She felt the upward press of his foot against her arch, then the moment of release, then the settling of weight with each graceless landing.
How Sylvie Failed to Become a Better Person through Yoga
WEEKEND AFTERNOONS during that hot, after-Jack summer, Sylvie and her roommate Lisa would wiggle into bikinis and slather themselves with baby oil and lie in the backyard under the sun. Periodically they wet themselves down using the hose in the shadowy space between the high walls of their house, where they lived on the second floor, and the neighbouring house.
Sylvie opened the tap one afternoon and held the hose above her head and closed her eyes while cold rivulets coursed her scalp. When she opened her eyes she saw the silver tabby that lived across the street. The cat arched its back and hissed at the stream of water issuing from the hose. Sylvie adjusted the tap so the stream became a trickle and propped the end of the hose on a cinder block. She called to the cat, coaxed, “Which of your nine lives are you in, kitty? Do you learn something every time, or do you get it wrong over and over?” Sylvie pinched a stalk of pigweed sprouting from a crack in the basement wall and shimmied it against the walk. The cat pounced. Sylvie moved the pigweed closer to the hose, and the cat followed. With patience she succeeded in getting the cat to drink. Lap-lap, lap. She shut off the water and kept her hand on the tap, at the ready. The cat stopped its lapping, sniffed, sat back and cocked its head, kitten-like. When want or curiosity made it lean in to sniff once more at the mouth of the hose, Sylvie cranked the tap and blasted the cat. It sprang from its crouch, letting out a yowl and landing two feet away. Sylvie’s eyes followed the leap and saw the blunt toes of Lisa. Bits of grass from yesterday’s mowing were scattered across Lisa’s feet like candy sprinkles on cookies. How long had she been standing there? Sylvie’s wet scalp puckered into goosebumps.
“That’s a horrible thing to do.”
As the cat slunk away with its wet whiskers and its grudge, Lisa picked up the hose, doused her strawberry blondness and her push-up bikini bra, and went back to lie on her towel. Neither she nor Sylvie mentioned the incident with the cat again, which didn’t mean it was forgotten.
Sylvie and Lisa started out as roommates of convenience. They’d met at a bus stop and got to talking about the cost of living, and from there they put one and one together. Their suite was half a second storey in a house that might have been grand in the twenties. Access was by way of a jerry-built outside staircase. Sometimes, standing at the top and looking down, she would take a moment to check her balance. It was a bit of a project, living here, to conquer her fear of falling down stairs. She was making progress.
Sylvie and Lisa each ran with a different crowd, and they agreed this would make for a good relationship, each of them minding her own business.
In theory.
Sylvie envied her roommate on certain points: her hair, her twenty-six-inch waist, her collection of lacy, underwire bras. At first, the envy had especially to do with those brassieres, for Sylvie believed a girl had to be endowed in order to wear such a thing. Then one day when the door to Lisa’s room was ajar, Sylvie caught a glimpse of her breasts and understood how a bra like that was the way to make a couple of unremarkable things remarkable. Later, when Lisa was out, Sylvie went into her room and tried the red one. Okay, she’d need to go one size down, but this would work. Next day at Eaton’s, three bras, three colours, yes.
Lisa had moved into the suite a week earlier than Sylvie, claimed the larger bedroom and stacked three twelve-packs of Labatt’s Blue empties on the floor at the end of the kitchen cupboard. Sylvie associated Blue with truck drivers and guys who went out to Alberta to work the rigs. As if to confirm, Lisa’s fiancé Dave, a house framer, came by one night with three of his buddies who were home from Alberta for the weekend. All of them wore their hair short; one guy chewed the corners of his mustache; their fun appeared to come from drinking and its related games. Sylvie knelt and put Led Zeppelin on the turntable.
“Anybody mind?”
“Far out,” said the burly guy in the quilted vest in the armchair, and Sylvie could sense t
he effort involved, like someone who’d never taken French at school trying to say au revoir.
She retreated to her bedroom and sat with her back to the door listening to the music. Static crackled through her hair where it rubbed against the wood. She heard one of the guys say to Lisa, “Wench, another beer!” These guys were not so different from Jack, and Sylvie had climbed onto a metal bedstead and shimmied out a window and left Jack behind, along with his Rod Stewart LPS, his running shoes he’d never run in, his coffee can full of bottle caps sitting in its rusty ring on the countertop. She missed him only on three-beer nights, and only then if she’d run out of friends for the moment. In her after-Jack life she’d latched onto a different sort of guy, the sort that wore dashiki shirts and seasoned leather hiking boots and knew the three best places to hide a dime bag in the alley.
Next morning from her bed, Sylvie heard the hungover rumble of Dave’s voice, heard Lisa’s hungover simper in reply, but couldn’t make out words. Rumble, simper. She was hungry but wasn’t about to walk through an argument between those two on her way to the cereal. Rumble, simper, silence. Silence stretching on. She heard Dave’s heavy tread, heard the closing of the outside door and felt the slight shudder from his weight as he booted it down the stairs. Sylvie came out of her bedroom and tinkled Cheerios into a bowl, a sound to rinse the air. Lisa’s face was red about the eyes and nostrils as she told Sylvie about the new rule: Lisa wasn’t to speak to other guys unless absolutely necessary. Apparently, as the lamplight cast rainbows on the spinning vinyl and Robert Plant sang about what went on way down inside, Lisa had sat on one arm of the armchair and had a longish conversation with the burly guy in the quilted vest. Dave would have no more of this; likewise, he would not engage in conversation with other women.
“What did you talk about?”
“The price of jeans, his sister’s horses. Shit, winter in Alberta.”
Sylvie went to the bathroom, unspooled a length of toilet paper and brought it out to Lisa so she could blow her nose. A moment later she fetched another handful so Lisa could wipe her eyes.
From then on, nights when he stayed over, if Sylvie and Dave found themselves alone together at the breakfast table he made no sound but for the crunch and swallow of his Froot Loops.
THE GIRLS COAXED a signal along the rabbit ears and into Sylvie’s little TV to watch The Partridge Family. The standing fan near the window pushed hot air at their sweaty faces. Lisa fetched her pins and elastics, did some fingerwork with her hair, and accomplished a twist arrangement on the crown of her head. Escaped locks floated in the breeze from the fan. “Here,” she said. “I’ll do yours. It’s cooler.” Sylvie slid down to sit on the floor in front of the couch, and Lisa positioned herself with her knees hugging Sylvie’s shoulders. “You have the floppiest hair.” She gathered and twisted, retwisted and pinned. “There. Finally.”
Sylvie turned to say thanks, and a hank of hair came loose and drooped over one ear. They laughed together, and Sylvie made a little snort on the intake of breath. Lisa mimicked the snort, and the two of them giggled and gulped and giggled again. Another hank came away. “Oh,” said Lisa, “I give up. But we’ll have to somehow figure out your hair if you’re going to be my maid of honour.”
“Maid of honour?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Okay, yeah. Wow.”
They heard footsteps on the outside staircase and looked over to see a hairy silhouette through the frosted-glass pane in the door.
“Looks like one of yours.” Lisa turned back to The Partridge Family.
“It’s only Will.” With quick fingers Sylvie disassembled what was left of the updo, grabbed her Player’s Lights, and went out to sit beside Will at the top of the rickety staircase. They’d first met at the laundromat on Avenue P and had gone down the block to Chin’s to have coffee and wait out the drying time. They couldn’t call it dating, she’d told him when they started hanging around together. She couldn’t make out with someone who’d seen her undies sunny side up in a laundry basket before they’d even exchanged first names. She was joking, of course; she was eager, in fact, but Will seemed content simply to pass time together. Fine, she would have her adventures elsewhere.
Sylvie pulled out two cigarettes and Will flicked his lighter. Ah, that first drag. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. Her leg bumped his.
He shifted casually away as he pocketed his Bic. “What’s the topic?”
“Self-improvement. It’s been brought to my attention I could use it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You agree then?”
“It’s an in-general thing, isn’t it, not a Sylvie-specific thing.”
Will worked at the used book store on Twentieth. He had a memory for titles and authors and the words of praise on the backs of the books, and so he could say things that made people think he’d read entire volumes. Sylvie would tease him: You’re so smart you could go to the you-knee-ver-settee. She mocked the place because she couldn’t see how a person would manage to rise beyond an everyday job — her own, for instance, binding journals in the basement of the campus library — to become an actual student. Someone should send out instructions. She’d been near the top of her class in early high school, but where did people find the money? What did they live on?
“Self-improvement.” Will’s voice was formal. For a few minutes they smoked in silence, looking into the leaves of the elm between the house and the street. Then he said, “You don’t want to try this alone. Let’s make a plan.” He exhaled and looked to be sifting the smoke for an idea. He elbowed her in the ribs. “We could join yoga.”
“Sure.” She elbowed him back. “Let’s go to confirmation class.”
“Let’s read The Prophet.”
“I’ve heard of that.”
The phone rang inside, and a minute later there was a rap on the other side of the frosted glass. Sylvie started to rise but stopped when Lisa said through the pane, “Dave called this afternoon?”
“Sorry. Forgot to tell you.”
“You have to tell me. When he calls, I’m supposed to call him back.”
And she was mean to cats. “Sorry, Lisa, I —” but Sylvie had no excuse to patch to the end of the sentence. Her thigh muscles, arrested between standing and sitting, burned. Lisa’s ghost left the window, saying, “Now I’m in shit!”
“Now you’re in shit,” said Will.
A WEEK LATER, Will called to say he’d seen a poster at the laundromat advertising Kundalini yoga. They should go. Starts next week.
“I didn’t think you were serious.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Neat. Let’s.” She set the receiver back in the cradle and immediately the phone rang. Dave. Yes, he knew Lisa had gone to her cousin’s place for supper, but wasn’t she home yet? No, okay. Before hanging up he said, “Hell of a heat out there today. Burnt my neck so bad it blistered.”
“Hot for sure. Did you just break the rule? The don’t-converse-with-girls rule?”
“Now, Sylvie.”
“Gotta go.” She hung up, pulled at a thread in the couch upholstery, wound it around her finger until the blood built, remembered her Aunt Merry’s warning about the little girl who’d lost a finger from tying a string too tight around it and leaving it there. She wondered what would happen if Lisa or Dave violated their new code and the other found out. Either one of them might just as easily throw their morning bowl of cereal at the person across the table, as scarf down what was in it.
SYLVIE WORKED WITH a drill press and a guillotine in the basement of the university library. She used the drill press, along with plastic pins, to bind a year’s worth of journals at a time. Once the holes were drilled and the pins were in, she’d pull a lever to bring down a hot iron that melted the raw ends of the pins into rounded caps. Voilà: a book. The guillotine was the final step. She would push a button to bring down an automated blade that descended at a slow and certain pace and shaved away the uneven edges of the pages. Sometim
es, as she pressed the button to bring down the blade, she’d think about sliding a finger on top of the stack of journals and into its path.
The sheared edges of the finished volumes were a fascination, smooth and sharp at the same time. They drew the hand. Her palms were nicked all over.
At noon she’d take her sandwich and find a patch of lawn out of range of the sprinklers and watch the university people as they carried their shoulder bags from one building to another. What would it be like to be one of them? To write the words in the journals that crossed her workstation. Even to read them. Maybe she would do that: begin to read them.
Her job, with its sunny lunch hours, was so much better than Lisa’s. Lisa worked at the jeans factory in the north end. Her fingernails were stained indigo. She arrived home droopy-lidded after her hour-long bus ride, some days eating her supper at five-thirty and going to bed right after, only getting up again if Dave called.
He rang one Friday when Lisa had already caught the bus back home for the weekend.
“She went to her mom and dad’s.” Like he didn’t know. Sylvie began to play with the upholstery thread she’d fiddled loose the other day. It was shiny and strong, with no stretch, no give. She rolled it between finger and thumb, a little rope anchoring her where she sat.
“Oh,” said Dave. “Forgot.” Liquor-laced enunciation. “How about I talk to you instead. Better yet, I’ll bring over some beer.”
She twirled the thread in a tight motion so it wound around the tip of her finger.
