Ellen in Pieces

by Caroline Adderson

  She found him in the kitchen, dressed and brushed, with the pencils lined up in his pocket, swaying like a man standing in a canoe. “Good morning,” he said, and a bit of pink showed in the corners of his mouth.

  Poof! Un-angry.

  “How’s the tongue?” Ellen asked. He stuck it out, hideous and inflamed, a purple crescent at the end where his teeth had cut through. She shuddered. “What do you want for breakfast? Cereal, toast, eggs?”

  “Don’t go to any trouble.”

  “I won’t. Just tell me what you want.”

  “Cereal’s fine.”

  “It’s fine or it’s what you want?”

  He said he wanted it, but who could tell? Maybe he wanted Oysters Rockefeller. Why couldn’t people just say what they meant? This was Ellen’s downfall. She said what she meant (thereby offending nearly everyone) and assumed everyone else did too, assumed that “She’ll be fine” signified she would in fact be fine.

  In the hopes that at future 5 a.m.s her father might take the initiative to feed himself, Ellen directed him to the cereal cupboard and went to dress.

  He was tissuing orange juice off the seat of the chair when she returned. So much for sitting him down for a talk. She hurried over with the cloth. “There. Sit, Dad.”

  Dad. After twenty-three years, her mouth had formed the word.

  He obeyed, staring wistfully at the cereal box until Ellen filled his bowl for him. She watched him eat, saw how most of the cereal never completed the trip to his mouth on the wildly shaking spoon. Pity wrung her out the way she’d wrung out the sticky cloth a moment ago.

  “I heard you up in the night,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Can’t you sleep? What about your pills? Wasn’t Zopiclone on that list? It’s for sleeping. Does Moira know about the pills?”

  She hadn’t meant to bring up her sister, Moira, but she was, after all, a nurse. Presumably they were in touch. Presumably. How did she know?

  He burst out, “All of this is Charles’s fault! She should never have listened to him!”

  Charles, Moira’s husband. Ellen’s brother-in-law. Ellen took a backward step, wondering if Jack meant her and Charles. Also, Jack McGinty was not a yeller. He was, practically speaking, a Trappist.

  And now that he had humiliated himself enough with the Shreddies, he thanked her for breakfast and went downstairs to rest.

  “You do that, Dad. I’ll see you later.”

  Ellen still didn’t know why he’d come.

  SHE phoned the geriatric place. It had a two-week waiting list. She called her own doctor, but hard-line Carol did not accept out-of-province patients.

  Then her realtor called. “Ellen? Brad Wheeler.”

  It was a strain for Ellen not to reply, “Brad Wheeler-Dealer?”

  Brad was ramped up and ready to roll.

  “Ready to roll up the ramp?” Ellen asked.

  “You bet,” he said. So Ellen’s news could only disappoint. “How long’s he staying for?”

  “I wish I knew. I’ll call you.”

  “It’s a seller’s market, Ellen. Don’t put it off too long.”

  Downstairs, Ellen peeked in the bedroom to see if her father was awake. He was, sort of, lying on his back masticating at the ceiling, hands going abracadabra abracadabra against the bedspread. “Are you all right, Dad?” she asked.

  “Fine! Fine!”

  For Christ’s sake, this was not fine. It was alarming and weird. “I’m just going out to the store. Do you want anything?”

  “All-Bran!”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Regular All-Bran, not the flakes.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back shortly.”

  “Fine!”

  She ran upstairs to google Parkinson’s disease. Diagnosis depends on the presence of one or more of the four most common motor symptoms: resting tremor, rigidity, postural instability, and bradykinesia. Bradykinesia? Google said: Slowing of movements, short shuffling steps, sudden stopping of an ongoing movement.

  As in the empty spoon at breakfast, poised in mid-air, and Jack staring at it in complete bewilderment.

  She phoned again. “I talked to you about a half-hour ago? About my father? Jack McGinty.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “He’s got Parkinson’s. For sure he’s got Parkinson’s. He shuffles. He sways. He’s got bradykinesia. Now he’s just lying there convulsing.”

  “Convulsing?” the receptionist squeaked.

  “Pretty much. The thing is, we can’t wait two weeks. Can’t, can’t, can’t.”

  People said Ellen was pushy. All those years as a publicist, “pushy” was what she heard. That she knew how to get what she wanted. As if not knowing how to get what you wanted was better. Besides, had she really gotten what she wanted? What did she want?

  She could hear the woman clicking the computer keys, checking the schedule one more time. “I’ll squeeze you in next Wednesday morning at eight,” she said.

  “That’s a week and a day away. Is it the best you can do?” Ellen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I thank you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  She made a list. All-Bran, bread, prunes. Poppycock! She wrote Geriatric appt on the calendar and under it, in big letters, Flowers for the receptionist.

  No one could say Ms. Pushy Face didn’t show her appreciation.

  “I’VE started to forget things,” she told Georgia on the phone that night. “People’s names. Nouns. I stood in that airport saying ‘petunia, petunia, petunia.’ It took five minutes to come up with ‘rose.’”

  “How old are you?” Georgia asked.

  “The same age as you,” Ellen said. “Forty-six, right?”

  In the background, Gary asked, “How old is Ellen?”

  “The same age as me,” Georgia told Gary, who was probably tucked up in bed beside her reading the parts of Das Kapital he hadn’t memorized yet. He sounded very close and it was after eleven.

  “You look better,” Gary said.

  “Tell him I heard that!”

  Oops! No yelling. No yelling with an insomniac in the house. Besides, it wasn’t strictly true. Georgia was better, no question—kinder, sweeter, more tactful, loyal. (Ellen too could claim loyal. She could sew that badge on her sash.) Unlike Georgia, Ellen updated her look now and then, and wore adult clothes and, despite her ambivalence about her body, she carried it front and centre. Georgia worked with children and it had rubbed off. Also, she seemed about sixty percent hair. Gary probably meant Ellen was fatter than Georgia, who had the advantage of being a former dancer.

  “Am I fat?” she asked Georgia.

  “Is Ellen fat?”

  Gary of the meaty circumference was going to pronounce on Ellen’s BMI? “Don’t ask Gary! I don’t care if Gary thinks I’m fat!”

  “Ellen is hubba-hubba,” she heard him say.

  “Put that darling man on the line,” Ellen said.

  “Tell me about this long-lost father of yours, then let me go to sleep,” Georgia said. “Some people have jobs.”

  Ellen finished recounting the airport episode of the day before, how she had failed to recognize her own father, he was such a wreck. She described the seven pointless hours in Emergency.

  “They weren’t pointless,” Georgia pointed out. “You found out he might have Parkinson’s. Were there any cute doctors?”

  “It was horrible. The only good thing about yesterday was I realized I’m not that fat. Because the last time I saw my father? I was twenty-three and weighed one-ten. Well, I weighed one-forty, but thirty of that was Yo. I weigh one-fifty-three now. That’s less than two pounds a year.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Stop eating cheese. Just for a while. Rip Van Winkle!” Finally, the synapses connected. “That’s who my father’s like. He doesn’t know anything that’s happened to me in the last two decades. Tonight I found out he thought I was still with Larry.”r />
  “Do you know what’s happened to your father?” Georgia asked.

  “Yes,” Ellen said, for surely Jack McGinty had plodded on exactly as he had before turning fifty on that disastrous July day, living in the house by Nose Hill, working until he retired from teaching high school math. After retirement, there would have been news watching, tub caulking, yardwork, perhaps some symphony going. Also pill taking. He probably ate dinner every Sunday with Moira and Charles and—she could barely remember the kids’ names. Jenny, and the boy with a girl’s name, Sandy. The oldest was something with a C. Charles. No, he was Charles. Her niece and nephews would be grown up now. They would be finished university and working as accountants or computer programmers.

  “Does your sister even know he’s here?” asked Georgia.

  “Good question.”

  “You should phone her.”

  “I can’t,” Ellen said. “She hates me.”

  EARLIER that night, Tuesday, Ellen had gone down to tell her father dinner was ready. She’d waited, embarrassed, for him to finish in the bathroom, the steaks cooling on the plates upstairs, the little Parmesan popovers she’d taken so much trouble over, deflating.

  He shuffled out, champing.

  “Those laxatives are working, I guess,” she said.

  “Did you go to the store?”

  “Yes. I bought steak. Alberta steak. I remembered you like it. Do you still?”

  “Fine! Did you get toilet paper?”

  “There’s tons of toilet paper, Dad. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Where’s Larry?”

  She froze at the bottom of the stairs. What was that called? The Brady Bunch. Bradybunchkinesia. What to say about Larry? He left me on your fiftieth birthday? If that day came up, she would die.

  “Larry moved back to Cordova Island.”

  “You still have that place?”

  They were climbing the stairs now, laborious and slow. She and Whatshisname. The guy who fell asleep under a tree for twenty years.

  “No,” Ellen said. “He built another house on the other side of the island, near Yolanda. We’re divorced, Dad. He remarried.”

  She decided not to mention Larry’s third wife, Amber, his child bride (as Ellen liked to call her), Yolanda’s best friend, half Larry’s age. It was too confusing and Jack seemed not to be listening anyway as he reached the top of the stairs and lurched single-mindedly toward his dinner, feeling all over the chair back before he sat.

  “Didn’t Moira tell you Larry and I divorced, Dad?”

  “No.”

  “I used to run into Whatshername, who lived two blocks from us in Calgary. That poor girl with the moles? Remember? She was a friend of Moira’s. She lives out here now. No doubt she kept Moira apprised of my goings-on.”

  “I don’t listen to gossip.”

  “Thank you,” Ellen said.

  The cutlery shook in his hands but the fork steadied once he got it planted in the meat. Ellen was about to broach the subject again—why are you here?—when both utensils shot out of his grasp and the entire steak skidded off the plate and onto the tablecloth, trailing all its juices.

  She sprang up. “How long have you been like this? How long?”

  He hung his head, a bloom on a parched plant. “A couple of months.”

  “Months? Why didn’t Moira help you? Is that why you came? For help? I’d like to kill her! Leave it! Let me cut it! What was I thinking? Steak! What an idiot!”

  She cubed the meat savagely, scarring her sister for life. Again. Then, flinging the knife and fork down, she wept hot, self-hating tears into her napkin.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said.

  “What for? I’m sorry. Can you eat? What about your tongue? I forgot.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Eat then.” She blew her nose and poked at the popover, which was a letdown, and cold.

  When he finally got some steak in his mouth, the unceasing jaw movements blended heroically with the chewing. He swallowed, paused, started the whole agonizing procedure again.

  “Who’s Yolanda?”

  So he had been listening.

  “My daughter,” Ellen said.

  “It was another girl then?”

  “A girl. Yes.”

  He didn’t ask any more questions and neither did Ellen. It was like those meals after her mother died, chewing and scraping the only sounds, certainly no small talk, no big talk, no talking back. Ellen could have talked back but there was nothing to talk back to. The angel of silence had claimed her mother’s chair. How hard it was for Jack to eat off that vacillating fork now, what heartbreaking effort it took just to get through the meal.

  Maybe then as well.

  SHE popped a Zopiclone from her own stash and closed her bedroom door. Every night she would need to do this or she wouldn’t survive until his Wednesday appointment.

  When the alarm rang the next morning, she felt coated in a sticky residue of unease, as though she’d slept through something important, something everyone but her knew. Like when she found out Larry had been cheating.

  Her father was up, his dishes already in the sink, which she took as a good sign. Also, the file folders spread across the table.

  Ellen put on the coffee. “I was thinking last night.” During the five minutes before she plunged headlong into dreamless oblivion. “Would you like to meet Yolanda? And—surprise!—your great-grandson? They could come over on the ferry if Yo feels up to the trip. She’s pregnant again.”

  Under Jack’s crazy eyebrows, the veins in his eyes were like cracks in a china cup. “Do you have a lawyer?”

  The coffee machine started dribbling, reminding Ellen, as always, of an imbecile child in a Southern novel. “I did. Once upon a time. Why? Now can you tell me what’s going on?”

  It was all in the folders. The Power of Attorney. He was making his bank accounts joint.

  “With me?” Ellen said. “What for?”

  “It’s shutting down,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “My whole system’s shutting down.”

  “You’re constipated,” Ellen said. “Wednesday you’ll see the doctor. Unless you want to go back to Emerg.” She hoped he didn’t.

  “We have to get this done,” Jack said. “Before it’s too late.”

  Oh God, thought Ellen. Coffee, coffee. She poured them both a mug and, after a large swig to brace herself, began again. “Why aren’t you doing this with Moira?”

  “She’s married to that idiot! This is all his fault!”

  “Charles? What did he do?”

  “He got on the computer and looked things up! He said I didn’t need this medication! I didn’t need that one! Then Moira got involved! They’re in cahoots with my doctor! Now my system’s shutting down!”

  “Can’t you wait until your appointment? They’ll sort out your meds at the clinic.”

  Jack couldn’t wait, so Ellen opened the folders. He banked like a squirrel with a half-dozen accounts in different institutions. After an hour phoning, she managed to schedule all the appointments and find a Yellow Pages lawyer whose name she liked. Lawyers, wine, men—she chose with her ear and gut, despite the mixed results. Meanwhile, Jack paced the kitchen, from chair back to chair back, chewing the air.

  Moira, of course, would take this as a threat. If only Ellen had her e-mail address, Moira wouldn’t have to talk to her, or even reply if she didn’t want to.

  “Do you have Moira’s e-mail?” she asked.

  “Don’t bring her into this,” Jack barked.

  Then, a horrible thought. “You’re not changing your will, are you?” Moira would kill Ellen if she inherited anything.

  “It’s the same will,” he said. “Fifty-fifty.”

  “Dad,” said Ellen, cringing. “Don’t. I don’t deserve it.”

  “Why not? It wasn’t your fault. It was that idiot, Charles.”

  HE blamed Charles. Fine, thought Ellen, let Charles be the scapegoat. What was Charles to her
? Nothing, despite the fact that she’d slept with him. Well, not slept. She hadn’t even closed her eyes.

  Oh Christ. She wasn’t going to get off as easy as that. She had a conscience (disputed by Moira), and she couldn’t let it stand. How to set her father right, though? She could hardly give him the sordid details of the day he turned fifty, when, inconveniently, Ellen had been seven and a half months pregnant with Yolanda, and Mimi terribly two.

  While her father vibrated on his bed the rest of Wednesday, Ellen drove to Lonsdale Quay for dried porcini and a pound of oyster mushrooms, singing “The Sunny Side of the Street” fortissimo. She was giddy. Giddy with happiness. Because he blamed Charles, not Ellen. Because everything was fifty-fifty. Not the money. Ellen didn’t give a damn about the money. Wine. Nice crusty bread. She waltzed over to the cheese kiosk, remembered she was fat, and turned away.

  His love, equally divided. Right down the middle. That’s why he came.

  Something soft for a sore tongue. Something that would stick to an unsteady spoon.

  But her risotto, a lump of grey goo on his plate, barely registered with Jack McGinty that night. He didn’t care what he ate, Ellen realized. He probably didn’t even taste it. Afterward, he heaved himself out of the chair while Ellen dashed to the counter for the can.

  “Look, Dad! Poppycock!”

  “Fine! What time are we leaving in the morning?”

  “About nine.”

  He thanked her for the meal and headed back downstairs, the Poppycock under his arm.

  He loves me, Ellen thought. My father loves me.

  She heard the can strike the carpeted stair, then bounce the rest of the way down, rattling all the way.

  “OF course he does,” said Georgia when Ellen phoned her, the only person who knew that Ellen’s father had re-entered her life.

  He’d come in through a door labelled HEARTBREAKING LOSS. Ellen could take that sign down now, but she didn’t want to tell Yo and Mimi just yet. Not until Jack was in better shape.

  In the background, Gary asked Georgia, “Did she meet somebody?”

  “Her father loves her.”

  That night, despite her father’s prowlings, Ellen resisted the Zopiclone. So what if she was strung-out tomorrow? How often did this zingy feeling come along? She lay in bed basking in the zing and, the next day, exhausted, cheerful, utterly magnanimous in downtown traffic, she chauffeured Jack from appointment to appointment, meeting all those boring bankers, signing all those tedious forms. So illegible was his signature, he may as well have signed with the pen between his teeth. Even when Evelyn Letendre turned out to be less sympathetic than her name, Ellen shrugged it off. She was forgiven! Her father, her one remaining parent, loved her!