Something for Everyone

by Lisa Moore

  A boy beside Chelsea had made his desk creak as he leaned forward to get a gawk at the teacher’s leg. The kit like a holster and gun.

  They were doing Othello. You had to have English 1080: Critical Reading and Writing for nursing. Smothered her, according to SparkNotes. With a pillow, or what? One hand over her mouth, the other squashing her nose flat; breaking the bone in the nose by slamming it with the heel of his hand, what a seismic pain, then squishing the nostrils into flat, closed seams. Her eyes watering and wide, just a single candle near the big hard bed, streaks of yellow light on the flagstones, his shadow wagging on the velvet curtains at the window, every movement exaggerated by the wiggling candle flame, tears blurring her vision, her hands on his wrists, her fingers trying to pry his hands away from her windpipe, but losing her strength, does she give up? Is it a decision to submit, her last decision, does she decide? Or is even that taken from her, the final decision, is everything taken from her? Which way would be better? To own something of the death, to have a say, to not let him take her last breath? It might be a simple courtesy, before you take the last of something. To simply stop breathing voluntarily? Or to fight until the end, to not give up, to never give him the satisfaction of seeing her acquiesce? Loss of peripheral vision, until she can only see what fits in the small, closing circle, like the wrong end of a telescope, she can only take in parts of Othello’s face, his eye, one eye, the red veins from drinking, his teeth with the lips drawn back off the top gums, from the fierce strain of crushing her windpipe, the vision shuts down entirely, just blackness, though her eyes are not entirely closed, the slivers of white eyeballs show through the lashes. Can she hear anything? She can hear his hard breathing. Does she hear his exhilarated grunt at the end? Does she feel his grip relax on her throat, or does he squeeze for several seconds after she is gone? To make sure?

  Chelsea can see the bluish tinge of the soles of her feet and the greying fingers, the cold mottling, which happens so quickly, travelling up Desdemona’s arms. Does he become disgusted? Death is already decay. Is he flushed? Endorphins careening through his brain; that’ll show her.

  Chelsea won’t read the actual play. This prof is supposed to be an easy marker.

  * * *

  The landlord of the last apartment Chelsea had seen worked for the coast guard. He was out on the ocean with limited reception. His texts came all at once, cushioned by hours of silence. It made him seem taciturn and impulsive. He’d arranged for the upstairs tenant to show the apartment. Chelsea had arrived fifteen minutes early and knocked and rang the bell but there was no answer.

  She’d stood on the sidewalk in a dense fog that beaded her cardigan and windbreaker and dampened every stitch of clothes underneath. She’d come from her four o’clock shift at Shoppers Drug Mart, where she worked cosmetics. Her last customer of the day was a tall woman in her fifties who had noticed the new metallic lipsticks — blue, silver, gold, and pink — on display near the cash.

  Where could you go with a lipstick like that? the woman had asked.

  They’re not for everyone, Chelsea said. The woman had picked up the gold sampler and twisted the lipstick up and down, stroked it twice on the back of her hand.

  I’m dating, she said. I’m looking for two things in a man. They have to be tall and they have to have a pension. Is a pension too much to ask? I have a pension. Why can’t they have a pension? I hate short women who date tall men. There are only so many to go around. You don’t date tall men, do you?

  I wouldn’t do that, Chelsea said. The woman pulled the oval mirror close.

  I’m kidding, she said. She put the gold sampler on her lips. I don’t care about a pension really. Tall? I care. Teeth? Nice teeth. Yes, a pension, actually. Why the fuck not. Do you suppose this has been tested on animals?

  It’s more for a night out than ordinary daywear, Chelsea said.

  A night out, the woman said. She had dark hair with a streak of white and small blue eyes with eyebrows plucked in a dramatic arch. Chelsea glanced beyond the woman to the big window that looked onto the parking lot. The rain was hurled sideways in terrific gusts. An umbrella popped inside out, the chrome struts exposed. Everything bent the wrong way, the fabric quivering like the wings of a shot bird.

  Do you ever wear this stuff? the woman asked.

  I’d maybe try the pink, Chelsea said. The other ones are too far out for me.

  The woman pouted her gold lips; she turned her head and glanced sideways to catch her own profile. She looked like she was from deep space, or the deep past. C-3PO or King Tut.

  Listen, the woman said. Go as far out as you can. Don’t let anybody stop you.

  I don’t think I’d like it out there, Chelsea said. The woman plucked a tissue out of the Kleenex box on the counter. She rubbed viciously at the gold and handed the tissue to Chelsea. Then she picked up the metallic blue.

  Nice blouse, the woman said. Looks silk. Is it silk? You have taste. That will get you places. I suppose you want to go places?

  Serafina had shown up behind Chelsea, towering over her in her heels, ready to do the cash for the evening shift. The woman paused before putting on the blue lipstick and lifted her chin at Serafina.

  She’s tall, the woman said. How do you feel about short women going out with tall men?

  Not good, Serafina said.

  My gosh, the woman said. I love your hair. Did you do that yourself?

  My mother does it, Serafina said.

  Must take a while?

  Better part of an afternoon, Serafina answered. Hurts like hell. But then it’s done.

  Where are you from? Originally?

  Serafina narrowed her eyes: Sudan, okay? My Mom came over with four of us. I’ve been here since I was three. I’m Canadian. Did you ask her where’s she’s from?

  You don’t have to get huffy. I’m only interested is all.

  They’re going to Toronto, Chelsea said.

  My boyfriend and me, Serafina said. She had once told Chelsea that she couldn’t stay mad at every ignorant remark, there were just too many of them to keep track of.

  As soon as we get the money together, she said.

  What do you think of this lipstick on a woman my age, the woman asked. Serafina had done modelling work, and had even had a bit part in a local movie. She had four shifts a week at Shoppers and worked night shifts as a cleaner for Eastern Health. She was almost done her dental hygienist accreditation. Soon as that was done, she was gone. She wore shades of coral eye shadow, the shades getting lighter as they moved from the inner corner of her eyebrow outward. Her lipstick a plum, shiny gloss. She held her lower lip in her teeth, contemplating.

  You’d have to own it, Serafina said.

  So, Toronto, the woman asked.

  Just to get out of the wind, Serafina said. The wind never stops here.

  Look out there, Chelsea said. All three of them looked out the window. A chip bag was suspended, jerking back and forth, lifting up over the streetlamps and telephone wires.

  What about you, honey, the woman said. Chelsea had to catch a bus to view the coast guard’s apartment. It would mean getting soaked. She imagined the river at the edge of her mother’s lawn in Grand Falls. It would be swollen and fast and the waterfall deafening.

  I’m going to be a nurse, Chelsea said.

  Have you girls got someone picking you up after work? I hope you’re not going anywhere alone. One of those rapes happened in this neighbourhood. Behind the gas station, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  The door of Bitters smacked open and several people jostled out. They were headed toward the parking lot. They’d probably go through the skywalk and Chelsea thought she could follow them, never mind about the boy, David or Dave. But they stopped at a parked car. They got in and the headlights hit Chelsea and Dave and his stunt bike, blasting them with light.

  He said he was doing computer
science and he asked what she was doing. She could see his face in the headlights, a tiny mole on his cheek, blonde down on his chin and jawline, big eyes. As the car reversed, the headlights swung an arc across the lawn and Chelsea and Dave’s shadows shot out, spread to the curb and over the asphalt of the parking lot so they were giants. Then the shadows shrank back into their shoes. She blinked away the spots.

  You could get charged with identity theft using that ID, Chelsea said.

  But it’s my real name and address, David said. I’m stealing my own identity, from thirty years in the future. She was shivering now.

  So, she said. I live downtown and I don’t want to go through that skywalk by myself. I want you to talk to me on your phone is all I want because of this fucking rapist. Is that okay? Something you think you can do? She guessed she was drunk.

  * * *

  Chelsea had caught the bus after work to the coast guard’s bungalow with the basement apartment. She’d knocked on the front door of the first-floor tenant and had rung the bell but nobody answered. It was quarter to five and she was supposed to be there at five for the viewing. She’d checked out the windows of all the bungalows on the cul-de-sac. They were dark, and the driveways empty. Nobody home from work.

  She’d heard the car coming when it was still several streets away, and even as it approached the cul-de-sac she could hear Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” the volume so loud it dissolved into bleats of static.

  A silver Honda Accord. It stopped in the dead centre of the street and trembled on its struts. The driver must have put his feet on the gas and the brake at once. The tires spun fast and the smell of smoke full of particles of ground metal clouded the air. Then the driver took his foot off the brake and the car jolted forward and whipped its tail end so hard that it completed a full circle around the pivot of the front wheels.

  The squealing engine was very loud; a flock of sparrows lifted from a tree at the end of the street, lifted in a black smear across the grey sky, twisting as it rose and breaking apart until each bird was a single dot. The car jerked forward violently and was spinning again, another three-sixty. It hit the curb and then choked and sputter-jerked forward and pulled up leisurely in front of Chelsea.

  Teenagers, piled onto each other’s laps. There were a lot of them and she had the impression they were all boys. The car was full of smoke. She could smell the weed through the front passenger window that was opened a crack. It took a moment to understand what she was seeing. One of the guys had managed to press a cheek of his naked ass against the backseat window.

  A suctioned oval, murky white like a pickled egg floating in brine. Chelsea could see the reflection of her face on the white buttock. Then she saw the cheek unpeel. A transparent black streak left in the condensation on the rest of the window, ribbons of smoke smeared against the glass. They were laughing high and falsetto. She heard one voice above the others, maybe the driver, raucous laughter like a hawk’s screech.

  It sounded like the hawk that had swooped down on her fox terrier back in Grand Falls, two years ago. The dog had been on a leash tied to the clothesline. She was at the kitchen table with her books out, doing math homework. She could see the problem, burning into her brain from the white glossy page of her textbook. The overhead fluorescent light, the flecks of grey and gold on the white Formica tabletop, the Venn diagrams: one circle indicating All Living Creatures With Teeth; the other circle All Living Creatures That Eat Mammals. The circles had overlapped like the tire marks on the asphalt from these boys’ donuts.

  She’d heard the dog’s peculiar, panicked yips, and the eerie screech of the hawk in the garden and she’d burst out the back door, run through the snow in her socks, breaking the glassy crust of the drifts until she grabbed Candy into her arms. She felt the sheaves of beaten sky buffet her ears: the wings were over her head for only a second or two. She barely understood anything except the dog scrabbling wildly against her chest, as if to get inside her ribcage. By the time she was tearing open the back door and stumbling into the porch, the hawk was just a circling speck in the grey snowy sky.

  The whole thing had been caught on the security camera they had, and her mother had uploaded it to YouTube. The image was milky grey, pixelated, the bare light bulb over the back door splintering the dark. Chelsea was wearing a housecoat that flapped out limply as she bent to scoop up the dog.

  The Honda Accord pulled around the corner of the cul-de-sac, was gone. The weather had been fluctuating since September started: one night chilly, the next day balmy. She was shivering so hard her teeth had started to chatter. The blouse she was wearing was, in fact, one hundred percent silk, and too big for her. She’d been going for waifish elegance but in truth she’d found the blouse that past summer in an abandoned house in Lewisporte. The roof had collapsed and one side of the house bulged out like a goitre. She and her friend Maeve had lifted the rusted latch on the storm door in the back and found the inside door was unlocked. In an upstairs bedroom there was a chest of drawers with clothes probably from the sixties — polyester mini-dresses in psychedelic prints. Chelsea had taken the blouse. It took several washes to get rid of the musty smell of the house and old-lady sweat, a mixture of rust and rotten apple, sharp and turned, like burnt sugar.

  She’d also found a photo album at the bottom of the same drawer, with heavy black paper pages and tiny black paper hooks to hold the corners of each picture. There were photos of the old house with rows of vegetables out front and a horse with his head lowered to eat the grass, a woman and man standing together. A wedding, the bride with a huge bouquet of roses, the groom with big ears and pants too long, the legs crumpled over his shoes. At the back of the album, a picture of an old woman, her white hair parted in the middle, a droopy nose, firmly pressed lips, eyes shut tight. She was in a plain wooden coffin, her hands bound with rosary beads.

  The sparrows that had burst so violently into the sky when the boys made the car spin had reconfigured into a dense black clot overhead. They dive-bombed the tree. The leaves all over the tree shook and quivered and the sound in the still air was like a brief gush of water. The streetlights came on then, and lit up the thick fog that was pressing itself against the backs of the house, rolling down the driveways toward the street.

  Chelsea had walked back up the sloped driveway to the coast guard’s house and rang the bell for the second time, looking through one of the rippled, amber-tinted strips of glass that ran down both sides of the front door.

  There was a pair of house slippers on a rubber mat. Ankle-high floppy boots with a pilled, synthetic sheepskin lining. Those slippers had a white rubber sole, she knew, and had sold for $23.99 at Walmart, three years ago, for two months before Christmas.

  She’d bought her mother a pair for a Christmas gift, and her mother had worn them even when the sole had come apart at the toes, flapping with each step. She kept mentioning the slippers when they talked on the phone, asking Chelsea to replace them. They didn’t have them at the Exploits Valley Mall, or in the mall in Gander. Since Chelsea’s father had committed suicide, she’d felt an urgency to fulfill her mother’s requests for inconsequential conveniences. Minor requests that made Chelsea feel moored in the ordinary exchanges of small comforts. She’d called the Walmart on Kelsey Drive, thinking she could get the bus, if they had them. The saleswoman said the slippers had been discontinued.

  They’re not making them anymore, Chelsea told her mother.

  That’s ridiculous, Chelsea, her mother said. I see them everywhere. Everyone’s got a pair of them slippers. Go to the mall, for the love of god.

  A light came on in the upstairs apartment. Chelsea looked at her phone. It was exactly five. She saw a girl descend the short staircase and bend to tug on the slippers. The warbles in the amber glass broke the girl into a million flickering candle flames. She opened the door and stepped out onto the concrete path in front of the house. Her hood was up and she wore a black toque.


  I’m Trina, the girl said. Want me to show you the apartment? Then she stood with her fists jammed into the pouch of her hoodie, face tilted to sky, her eyes closed. She had gronky metal braces that made her mouth swell under her big, soft lips. She drew in a slow, deep breath. And then exhaled.

  This is it now, Trina said. She looked grim and consoling.

  It’s all over, she said. She stamped her foot, and wriggled her ankle, trying to wedge her heel into the slipper.

  We had the nice weather and now it’ll be raining for days, she said. She hobbled along the concrete path at the side of the house that led to the door of the basement apartment.

  You a student? Chelsea asked.

  I’m doing cooking. It’s a program they’re going to cut, probably, before I get to do the second year. First year is worth fuck all without the second year.

  You’re at the college, Chelsea said.

  We only got six signed on so far, and they had to go ahead or we’d all lose our student loans, but they need four more in order to deliver the whole program. Without them four, the rest of us is fucked. I’m out here from Isle aux Morts to get on the rigs. You can’t get on the rigs you haven’t got a diploma. But they never said nothing about the second year until I was after selling off all my furniture and moving to St. John’s. Nobody said nothing about it all being contingent on how many people wants to do cooking.

  I’m doing nursing, Chelsea said. Trina halted on the path so suddenly Chelsea almost banged into her. She cast a stagey backward glance over her shoulder.

  Jesus, look at the brain on that, nursing. You’re welcome to it. I knows nurses can’t gets shifts let alone contracts. They’re crying out for cooks on the rigs. Or up to Muskrat. Says they has people up there making six thousand a week, doing fuck all. Standing around. You should listen to the radio. Nurses are going to be cut.