Ellen in Pieces

by Caroline Adderson

  “Why is mine the smallest?”

  Gerhard checks his watch again. “Now is the time to count. Ten, nine …” Ellen frowns. Gerhard tells Tilda, “Trade with her.”

  Tilda, bless her, does.

  Five, four, three, two, one. Happy new year! They cheer and clink glasses, and Ellen tries to fit them, penises and all, in one picture while holding the camera out at the end of her arm.

  Gerhard lights the taper, lets it burn for a minute. When the wax is flowing, he passes it to Ellen, who leans over the pot of cold water with the taper angled so the molten wax runs into it. On Gerhard’s signal, she hands the taper to Tilda. Their penises knock together, giving Ellen the idea to engage in a little swordplay. Even Tilda, who generally looks on the verge of tears, laughs. Gerhard tells them to grow up.

  All three take a turn. When Gerhard determines that their futures have solidified (if they handle them too soon—Bleigiessen they are called—they may deform), Ellen scoops out the hardened shapes. Gerhard snaps off the light.

  “And now we read them.”

  He sets up the candle just so, while outside in the rain-washed night, the newborn year, pots bang on and firecrackers screech like shrapnel.

  Something’s gone from his wall, Ellen can’t recall what. Now there is this white space on which their shadowy futures will be projected, interpreted, accepted or denied, all without influencing the actual events to come. Or so thinks Ellen, who is having a lot of fun. She’s reached the stage in her drinking where she laughs through her nose.

  Gerhard holds his Bleigiessen between the flame and the blank wall. “Some shapes have traditional meanings. A bell, an egg. They mean good news. Das Kreuz—a cross—it signifies death. Ah!” he declares to the shape on the wall. “A spider. Die Spinne.”

  “What does a spider mean?” Ellen asks, already sensing Gerhard, like everyone, is seeing what he wants to see.

  “Happiness hangs in the balance,” he says.

  “Okay,” she says, pushing away his hand. “My turn.”

  And the dark shape of Ellen’s destiny silhouettes itself on the blank wall, a Rorschach divination. Ellen tries. She strains.

  “I see a heart,” says Gerhard.

  “To me?” Ellen says. “It looks like a lump.”

  THIS she completely forgets by morning when she wakes in the grey light of the new year. The year she will finally become a potter, which, ironically, will make her less inclined to call herself one. “I mess with clay,” she’ll say, because that’s what it feels like to carve away most of a pot’s substance until it becomes a container for light and air. The year she stops caring about success, or what anyone thinks she’s worth.

  Well into January, though, she’s still in her funk.

  The day of her breakthrough, January 21, Ellen is especially irritable. It seems that she’s forgotten something, which is in itself normal. For the last few years even people she’s known for ages have devolved into “Whatshername,” entire countries to “that place,” objects to “thingies.” This morning, though, there’s some kind of urgency to the unretrievable memory, a sense of jeopardy sparking around its edges. It torments her as she disgruntledly pokes at the clay.

  She’s making anuses. It’s a nostalgia exercise more than anything, for she used to make anuses years ago on Cordova Island when she was first learning to throw a pot. To make a pot, you slap a lump of clay on the stationary wheel, enclose it in wet hands, and start it turning. The clay needs to be worked before it accepts its proper form. It needs to warm up. Gently, you squeeze until it rises into a column, then, with the palm of your hand, press down to make it squat again. Draw it into a column once, twice, three times. Then dig in your thumbs to make a hole.

  It’s hard work. You need strong hands. In the beginning Ellen’s hands tired—not to mention her back (she was pregnant with Yo at the time)—and she would let the wheel spin to a stop so she could rest. There, sitting on the wheel, was a narrow cylinder with a hole down its middle, a sea anemone with its tentacles withdrawn.

  Or an anus.

  She cut it off the wheel with the wire and set it aside to dry. She made another. And another. Three weeks later she carted a dozen pink-glazed anuses to the Cordova Island market.

  “Pencil holder?” someone asked.

  “Ouch,” Ellen replied.

  She made a little sign: ANUSES. At the Christmas bazaar: AN ANUS FOR THE ASSHOLE IN YOUR LIFE!

  Needless to say, she couldn’t make them fast enough. Here she is, a quarter century later, trying to unfunk herself with anuses even as she understands you can never go back and, anyway, it’s childish—though Gerhard will like his, she’s sure.

  All the while, it needles her that she’s forgetting something. Finally, she thinks to look in her date book.

  Leaving in a hurry, she runs into Tilda, who is just scurrying back from the store clutching her cloth bag as though it’s filled with acorns and nuts, clearly sorry to have met another person, even Ellen. She only wants to get back inside and knit.

  “I can’t stop, honey,” Ellen tells her. “I have a whatsit at the you-know-what.”

  An hour later, bibbed in the hygienist’s chair, wearing the plastic sunglasses that protect her from flying chunks of her own tartar, she realizes the dental appointment isn’t it. The important thing she’s forgetting is still waving its arms in her peripheral vision, but she’s not in any position to turn her head and look with the suction tube gurgling in her mouth and the hygienist’s rubber-gloved hands in there too, wrist deep.

  “Okay?” the hygienist asks, taking a break to pat Ellen’s lips with the bib.

  “Do you like your job?” Ellen asks.

  “I love it!”

  “Love it?” Ellen says before opening wide again.

  Now she’s really twisted up. This woman leaning in to scrape accretions off Ellen’s molars, lifting out on her hooked tool a rotten shred of lettuce that, having somehow eluded the toothbrush, has been composting in Ellen’s mouth for days, wiping it on a gauze pad and (here’s the kicker) smiling? She loves her job.

  Ellen hates her job, if she can even call it a job. Even if she didn’t hate it, if she was contented instead of bored, Ellen, who once yearned to be an artist, is back making anuses. Anyway, pottery is so dead. Plastic killed it. Her days would be better spent flogging Tupperware.

  The hygienist interrupts Ellen’s downward spiral. “Your saliva has a really lovely consistency.”

  Accepted here: flattery, compliments, affirmations, praise however faint. Ellen is not just distracted from, but pulled right out of her funk by these words. She raises one finger in the air, signalling for the hygienist to remove her tool so she can speak.

  “It’s not too stringy?”

  “Oh no!”

  “Because I sometimes think it’s overly viscous. When I spit, it won’t let go. It just dangles there. I feel embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” the woman says.

  IT’S a mystery how art happens. Patience, hard work, coincidence—in some combination. Quantities need not be exact, but it’s more work than anything. The other really crucial thing is to reach zero. To be abject.

  That morning Ellen McGinty sat at her wheel, sat for ages until, erupting in frustration and rage, she attacked the anuses. Clawed and squished until they extruded, shitlike, between her fingers. She howled and, howling still, staggered out of the garage behind the triplex and into her studio, where she threw herself onto the foldout couch, careful not to smear it with clay.

  Sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Ellen emptied out.

  Afterward, she washed her hands in a trance and put on the kettle. On the windowsill, a dead plant and, beside it, her lumpy Bleigiessen from New Year’s Eve. While she waited for the water to boil, she pushed a finger into the powdery soil of the plant. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. The leaves had sun-bleached to a linen-textured translucency, held together by fibrous veins.

  Which was when Ellen
thought to check her date book and saw she had a dental appointment.

  She dressed in a rush, thinking that the life that was behind her showed like a dirty slip. All she had wanted was a fresh start.

  Now she’s in the dentist’s chair, feeling flattered and affirmed, grateful for, and touched by, the words of the bright-toothed woman leaning over her with her tool. The sight of the tool and the hygienist’s kindness coincide (the coincidence) with Ellen’s months of frustration (the hard work, the patience). Ellen remembers the dead plant and how the light shone through a part of it that should have been opaque. The negative space. How it opened to the light. At that moment, stretched out long in the chair, relinquishing herself to its embrace, Ellen breaks through.

  Afterward, in the liquor store, the clerk scanning her bottle says, “You’re happy.”

  She’s seen him before. He’s a liquor-store lifer, slightly grizzled, eyes pouched. He probably gets a discount.

  “I’m very happy,” Ellen tells him. “I just had an epiphany at the dentist.”

  “No kidding.”

  Not only that, she finally remembered that elusive thingy. Driving her eye along the shelves, looking for a label that she liked, it came to her in a flash, unheralded, and not so important after all.

  Her eye parked on a bottle of Fat Bastard and Ellen remembered. January 21. Today’s date. Larry’s birthday!

  When she gets home, she’ll give him a call.

  “An epiphany,” the clerk says. “And what is that again?”

  “Halfway between an orgasm and an epileptic seizure.”

  NINE months later it’s fall again. The purple whatchamacallits are in bloom, also the yellow whatsits. Ellen slips out midday to buy coffee, which she discovered she was out of when she woke, but hasn’t done anything about until now because she’s working on a new pot.

  These days her work absorbs and enthralls her, so much so that when passersby drop into the studio (which they do more often), when one of them actually wants to buy a pot, Ellen feels protective of it. She looks the prospective buyer up and down while probing for the sort of information that is usually asked of people adopting pets. (How many hours of the day will the pot be left alone? Are small children likely to be handling it?) This way she has inadvertently bartered up her price. She can get as much as two hundred and fifty dollars, but she will also give one away if she thinks it will be particularly loved.

  Her studio window has changed too. In the beginning there were those stolid, cabbagey pots she used to make. Then, for the months that she was teaching herself new techniques with porcelain, it was strewn with broken shards of the old pots with a couple of cabbages tossed in. Plenty of people stopped to comment on that. And now there is just one small white pot on a wooden pedestal in the window heaped with carded fleece that she got from Tilda. The pot is rising out of a cloud.

  Another thing that’s different: her vintage dentist’s chair bought in an antique store on Main Street.

  The sign on her door shows a clock. She moves the hands to say she’ll be back in ten, then heads off in the direction of Fourth Avenue.

  On this day, Ellen McGinty, forty-eight, has reached the point where she would give herself away if she thought she would be particularly loved. From the outside, it seems as though she’s been doing this her whole life. There have been a lot of men since Larry, short-term boyfriends, one-night stands, but they always shared her with Larry, a person they may not have known existed. Why this should have been the case, and why it suddenly isn’t any longer, Ellen can’t say. She’s just enjoying the fact of it.

  She buys a pound of coffee, returns home to grind it and make herself an espresso. The dead plant still sits on the ledge above the sink and beside it, her Bleigiessen, which has been changing shape all summer, softening and spreading.

  In the main studio window a white curtain hangs. Ellen leaves it open during the day. She throws her pots out back, but does the carving here at a workbench in the corner. She felt isolated out there. Here she sees it all—who admires her wares, who walks right by. Right now a man with a takeout coffee in his hand is looking in, first at the pot in the window, then right into the studio. Because it’s so bright outside, and because Ellen is standing at the rear of the studio, in the kitchen doorway, he probably can’t see her. But she can see him, backlit, autumn sunshine all around his edges. He’s just a shape now, but somehow familiar. Who? She leaves her cup of coffee on her workbench and starts toward him. It’s Whatshisname—no, Whosit. The closer she gets, the less sure she is because the years keep dropping off him. A few steps across the studio’s battered fir floor to the dentist’s chair and he’s already a younger man than she first thought. By the time she reaches the door, still unnoticed by him, he’s a young one.

  In a moment she’ll open the door and he’ll fall back in surprise, as if she has caught him red-handed in some subterfuge. This will be quickly overridden by a powerful mutual recognition. The widening of his sleepy eyes, the way he pushes the heavy waves of hair off his forehead, revealing the whole of his face, which has a sweetness to it—baby cheeks, fleshy nose. She knows this face, yet can’t quite place him.

  “Come in,” she’ll say.

  Shyly, he’ll step inside and look around. Ellen will point to the small case in the corner where three more pots are displayed, then settle back at her workbench. She’ll unwind the damp cloth from the new pot, take up her tool again. This is the moment when visitors to the studio either thank her and slip out, or ask her a question to signify their interest in actually making a purchase. Either way is fine with Ellen, who will have commenced the delicate scraping of the semi-hardened clay. She’ll forget all about this vaguely familiar visitor.

  When she pauses for a sip of lukewarm coffee, he’ll be there still, watching her. And Ellen will ask, “Do I know you?”

  “In the café. Ten minutes ago. I was in front of you in line.” He’ll lift his paper cup in the air, as though toasting her. “Matt.”

  Now Ellen will remember. The tag of his shirt showed, the side with the washing instructions. The nape of the neck is such a vulnerable place. (When her daughters were babies, she loved to nuzzle them there.) Impulsively, she tucked it in, which caused him to turn around, a young man in shorts who might have been offended to be touched by an older stranger, who instead said in a startlingly deep voice that did not match his baby face, “Your hands are cold.”

  “Cold hands, warm heart,” Ellen chirped.

  “I can see that.”

  At her age flirting warms her cockles. She left the café pleased.

  She’ll reswaddle the pot and rise from her stool with her coffee cup in hand. “Do you want another, Matt? Mine’s cold. I’m making more anyway.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m Ellen.”

  He’ll follow her to the small kitchen in the rear with its geriatric appliances and knobless cupboards. He’ll say, “What’s going on next door?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those trees with dicks.”

  Laughing, Ellen will bend to knock the puck of old coffee out of the portafilter basket into the compost.

  When she straightens, he’ll wave the empty paper cup, say, “Can I toss this?” and lean in to drop it in the garbage can. He’ll be close enough then to kiss her, and will.

  When he pulls away, he’ll say, “Sorry. I wanted to do that in the café. I was kicking myself that I didn’t.”

  IN a moment all this will happen. But not yet.

  Ellen is still watching him, a stranger, through the glass door as he gazes at the pot, which is actually less a pot now than the filigreed outline of one, the clay scraped away with the pin tool or the fettling knife and sometimes actual pins or nails. In the beginning she copied patterns she found on the Internet, jewellery and lace, even a surprisingly beautiful pattern in a tumour, discovered by Googling the word filigree. (Needless to say, she did not tell this to the person who bought it.)

  Lately, th
ough, she just lets the pattern flow out the end of her tool, following it, instead of leading. So far she’s been pleased. She works her way around the pot, liberating its negative space, creating the pattern that she somehow senses was always there in the clay, waiting for her. Sometimes it meets up perfectly where she started.

  Sometimes it doesn’t.

  5

  ERECTION MAN

  In the fall Matt’s girlfriend, Nicole, spent six weeks up north doing fieldwork for her thesis. When she returned, she asked Matt to go to a craft fair. She said it was famous, this huge craft fair at the Convention Centre, as famous as the Christmas train through Stanley Park, the carol ships in the harbour, the bridges and construction cranes outlined in coloured lights. Matt, heading into his first sodden coastal winter, concluded that Vancouver had a snow complex. When you have the white stuff, you don’t need convention-sized craft fairs in early November to get you in the mood. But he went. Nicole wanted him to. Not for one second did he imagine Ellen would be there because he’d forgotten all about this other thing she did, this thing that had nothing to do with him.

  He’d seen the sails of the Convention Centre before, while biking around the seawall. Ten white tentlike peaks. The day of the craft fair he looked up at the ceiling and realized where he was. Not across the water from this canvasy structure, but inside it. When he levelled his gaze again, he was looking right at Ellen. Just the day before he’d frolicked nakedly in her loft, yet it took a full second for the seismic shudder of recognition to move through him. He nearly fainted and popped an erection at the same time. Nearly collapsed on the red industrial carpet, a tent rising in his pants.

  Nicole touched his sleeve and pointed into the crowded maze of booths. His eyes felt weird in their sockets, like they were floating in brine; he wondered if they looked weird to her.