Stunt

by Claudia Dey

  The Turban does the talking. The Mime just chews.

  ‘Missus Monique Ledoux.’ He says Ledoux like LeDukes, like she is all flying fists.

  ‘That is me.’

  ‘It would appear, ma’am, that your husband, Sheb Ledoux, has blown up a factory on the outskirts of the city. A shoulder-pad factory. He left a handwritten note behind for their security enforcement outfit to the effect that he is going to save the world and that he is – ’

  ‘An asshole,’ says Mink.

  ‘Correct. Have you seen him in the last twenty-four hours, ma’am?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Heard from him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you expect to?’

  She pauses. ‘No.’

  The Turban takes a breath, recalibrating. ‘Is your husband violent?’

  ‘Not violent enough.’

  The Mime clears his throat. It is suddenly full of metal filings and wood shavings. He has walked into something hazardous with the possibility of collapse. He is sounding warning. The Turban goes on, undeterred.

  ‘Were you his only – ?’

  ‘Girls, to your rooms.’

  We go. We open our doors. We close them behind us. We open them again. We return to the top of the stairs. We have missed it. Pinhole into the adult world gone.

  ‘If you hear from him …’

  The Turban passes his card to Mink.

  ‘Thank you.’ She studies and paws it. Still looking at it, she says, splicing her S’s, ‘He’s sick.’

  ‘How so?’

  I can’t see but I know that Mink is making a sign. My guess: a curt finger to the head.

  ‘Suicidal?’

  ‘Not yet anyway.’

  Mink shifts in her stocking feet. And then there they go, the arches, tongues with destinations, they lift, all prance and flutter. Before she became the B-movie actress she is now, Mink was a professional dancer. Attuned to the interests of the times, she developed a coffee-house routine in which she lifted her leg above her head – slow as the hand on a clock – while swearing a blue streak in French. Her leg stopped at midnight. She became immensely popular. She signed her autograph on men’s biceps and eyelids. She had a stalker. Her stage name was the Mouth. Her promise: ‘I will make you blush.’ This is when you first saw her. At Grossman’s Tavern on Spadina Avenue. In a beaded evening gown, slits up the sides, matching elbow-length gloves, her left leg in the air contorted above her head, while outside, Chinatown, elderly couples with hospital masks doubled each other on their bicycles and coaxed slender eggplant from their front lawns. This, before the times changed. Colline de bin de bobby pin, sac à patates, crème glacée molle, beurre d’arachide, au chocolat, con, cul, couilles, chier, bite, nichons, putain, merde. You saw her act so many times you had it memorized before you even crossed the room and introduced yourself. Sheb Wooly Ledoux. Portraitist.

  Mink stands on the pads of her feet and then on her toes. Bedazzling, she comes to a sharpened point. She is a prospector and she is instantly six inches taller. She could drill a hole through the ground. The Mime and the Turban step back. Are there other tricks? Will she blow fire? Mink’s feet are as gnarled as yours. Like a standard greeting, it is one of your only commonalities. Mink is surveying. The neighbours must have pulled open their curtains. Sensuous Marta and her fretting gnomes. Cruiser on our front lawn, blinking red, uniformed hulks in the doorway. We are the stage now. We are the players. Mink misses nothing. Especially an audience.

  She topples to the floor. A melodrama of grief, she wails and sobs. But the performance has chinks in it, and it gets the better of her. It turns real. It turns sour. She cries, a thing snarled in a trap, nothing but the expanse of a deaf world around her, idiot hunter turned loose within it, knowing that she is alone in the woods, and that she will bleed to death, and that the only one who might have saved her is gone.

  Immaculata slinks down three stairs so she can watch. I don’t. I can’t. I write a letter.

  I have never seen Mink cry, except at sports on television. She cries at victory; finally, after this endless human slog, she recognizes one of her own. A champion. She does not cry at loss. When there was a fire around the corner from our house, the smell of tar and hair burning filled the air. The smell of old. Doilies, photo albums, a recliner and a basement full of hockey cards and comic books, all of it in an uproar of flame. In a trance, Mink excused herself from the dinner table and slid out the front door. When she came back hours later, she leaned her face in close to mine and said, ‘She smoked in bed. The dunce. Everyone knows that one.’ Mink was bored. Her face was hot from watching.

  Now she has stopped working. Her mechanisms are sputtering and flailing. I do not want to see this in Mink. I do not want to see this mess. One thing in our life was supposed to be tidy, sure. One thing was supposed to never change.

  The Mime has a coughing fit.

  When the policemen start back to their cruiser, after Mink rights herself, a resurrection really, I run past her, a feral kitten, to the Turban. I hold a letter in my hand.

  ‘Mail this for me. Promise.’

  The Turban stonewalls.

  ‘Promise,’ I repeat myself.

  He looks at the Mime. The Mime nods.

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I don’t have an address.’

  I slip the letter, rolled into a scroll, into the Turban’s hand. He looks at it; it is a baton and he did not realize he was running the relay. He won’t even read it. His curiosity is that dead.

  Walking away, they turn back one last time. Together they say, in different pitches, ‘What if we don’t find it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The address.’

  ‘You will. You have to.’

  The cruiser pulls away. One hand on the radio dial, the Mime looks at me. I wonder if he lives in a storage shed. I wonder if he wants me to live there with him and breed goldfish and play with a rescued, chewed-up doll on the sawdust floor. I wonder if he wants to change my name.

  Walking back to our house, I see a glimmer in the grass. It could be the Mime’s gum, the Turban’s medallion, their bitten ears. It is my tooth, my last baby tooth, white, small, bloody at the root. It must have fallen out when I slept.

  Mink waits for me in the doorway. From here, you could convince me that she is made out of marble, cut out from a block into this tiny, immovable shape. I hope she does not touch me. Or console me. I smile at her, wide, with my bar-brawl mouth, my incredible ugliness. These empty spaces, a baying. I am the mascot for what is missing. I am filthy. My eyes go dull. She lets me pass. I don’t even know if she is breathing. She closes the heavy door behind us. I look up at her. Still, she is the colour of orchids.

  Mink yanks the curtains closed. The show is over. The house takes on the quality of a cellar. Let there be root vegetables. Let there be murder. Let there be cards and cigars and whisky. Let there be pickling and ladies of the night missing pinkies and a dozen black cars idling in formation outside, their exhaust a potion to the air. Let our shoes be polished with beet juice. Let one of us be dead. Let it be me. A slit throat or, better, a bullet hole still smoking in the forehead, halos lifting themselves to the heavens. Let there be some kind of stringed instrument moaning in the corner played by a one-eyed sloth in a beige tuxedo. He taps his foot through the rotting floor. Potato bugs scurry for peace. We have been here for centuries. Deciding how to live. When, finally, the verdict comes down, intrusive as daylight.

  ‘It is better to be widowed,’ Mink says with the clarity of a snapped elastic, one burst blood vessel on her cheek. ‘The funeral will be tomorrow afternoon. They’re calling for rain.’ When I protest, ‘But he’s not dead,’ she says, ‘He is not coming back, Eugenia. Waiting is for dunces.’ She is all full stops – a telegram. Immaculata bows her head in shame or prayer, I cannot tell. Mink goes on, ‘He could slip in the shower. Choke in his sleep. Fall down the stairs and break his neck. He could catch fire in any number of ways. He could ha
ve some crippling, surprise disease. He could be standing still and just die. A heart attack. A clot to the brain. To the lungs. Blood poisoning. A tropical flu. An arrow. A rabid bear. An elephant seal. Mouse droppings. Strangulation. A bone in the throat. He could be the victim of malice. A gang of thugs. He could drive into a telephone pole. He could drown in a culvert. He could be hit by a train. Gruesome has a kind of endless quality to it, girls. Pick.’ She has foam at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘Drowning it is rumoured to be peaceful and besides he could not swim,’ says Immaculata with the fixity of a logician.

  Even though you could not swim, you could splash. At first, it would seem you were attacking, pounding the water with your fists; it would come up in rapid shocks around you. But then, too quickly, you were being attacked by something flexible and all-knowing – something that, patrolling the shoreline, I could not quite see.

  ‘Do you second?’ Mink asks me. ‘I need you to second, Junior Miss. I need you to second.’ And then, the general flicking dander from her epaulettes, she says, ‘Pull it together, Genie. Drowning it is. He drowned. In the lake. Fishing.’ She glares in my direction.

  Mink pushes her chair away from the table with a skid, turns on the radio and piles the clean dishes into the cupboards. When Mink does what she calls women’s work, she is a robbery in reverse. Returning everything to its rightful place. The opposite of a thief, she is loud and careless. Daring the world to catch her, to find her out. Clattering, slamming, fighting the furniture, beating the carpet, huffing at the sinks, the shelves, the floors, Mink must keep track of all the misplaced pieces, for only she knows where they go. I wonder if this is what motherhood is: the noisy race, the impossible task of staging wholeness.

  Mink starts to make dinner, wraps a tea towel around her waist instead of an apron, says, ‘What the fuck am I doing,’ throws the tea towel to the ground, tells me to stop my whimpering even though I am not making a sound, it is Immaculata imitating a mewling calf, which she does when she is afraid.

  With that, Mink goes upstairs to her bedroom. There is not a step or a gesture out of place. She cannot help but be choreographed. Watching her round the stairwell, I wonder why it is that I am living with a perfect stranger. Roofs constellate and land on us like children who do not know their own strength. Family too.

  Like a ghost baby, Immaculata follows Mink, her feet barely touching the ground.

  The wind picks up. Like my mind, it is an itch. The creak and sway of the walls. The shift in the floors. The rattle of the windows. Without you in it, this house is unfamiliar. This house is not mine. The green fridge and matching stove, pot holders with beehives on them, a spider plant dangling behind the sink on a shelf with spices. Who lives here? And really, why should I?

  Tell me, why did that woman around the corner burn along with her son’s Scout uniform? Why did she stay in her bed swearing it all existed, that it was true – people used to live here and some of them loved each other – hand on her heart, cigarette in her mouth, the flames licking her knees, quick and feisty, carnival clowns? Why, when it would have been so easy for her to walk out the front door and through another one, the old love having been so well beaten out, a broom to a rug, that it does not even smoulder? Why is it that she stayed and you left, seamless as a good thief?

  Or did you just need to lose yourself in the night? A deeper black than yours. A gangrene all its own. When you’re sick, you love the sicker thing. Well, I can be sick too.

  I sock myself. Right in the eye. Fist whistling through the sponginess of cartilage. It is the sound of a boy bouncing a ball once in an empty stadium. It is an excellent punch and the blood, obedient, my intimate, shoots itself to the surface and pools there. My eyes water, and then I am presented with pain. It wears a pressed suit. I welcome it. I shake its hand. It is a shape, something I can turn over and examine. The black eye is a relief. The boon to inflicting pain on yourself: you can predict its arrival. I look at my reflection. Slowly, it rises, the bruise, as though you left a jar of paint on my face to shimmer like the inside of your mouth. You would say, ‘See, Eugenia, my darlin’, everything’s built for injury,’ and then you would punch yourself too. ‘We’re the same.’

  The wind again. Babble, babble, the entire world is telling its secrets at the same time. Mink returns. I can smell her. She has washed her face and put on fresh lipstick. Menthol and blubber. I sneeze. She stands behind me, hesitates, says, ‘Hm,’ and then she leans down and does exactly the wrong thing. She puts her hand in the centre of my back and runs it up to my neck, spiders losing their balance. She kisses me with a trace of her teeth on the spot where my spine meets my skull. This is where the mother cats carry their kittens, Genie. Vets are trained to hold them here. It keeps the critters calm when they feel threatened. Then she leaves. A cartoon tunnel. She is a dot shrinking in the distance. Not a perfect stranger after all.

  I remember the cats in our yard picking up their litters by that loose skin, and how the kittens would immediately go limp. I throw up in the sink. And then I cry. I cry so much that I fog up the windows of the kitchen. By the time I lift my head and see what I have done – changed the ecology of the place into steam and salt – I want to show someone. I want to get Immaculata and I want to tell her: it is so weird how powerful we can be when we are sad. I want to tell you.

  Instead, I stare at nothing. I am sitting for a portraitist and I am saying, This is how we live, this is how we live.

  {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

  my darlin’,

  one one thousand. two one thousand.

  s

  From the kitchen, night a black spill, I hear Mink in the living room doing her exercises. I know that she is wearing her turtleneck and her tights and that she is thinking to herself: Why wear pants when you got gams like these? She is so flexible she can kiss her own tailbone.

  After Mink explained the scruff of the neck and its significance to a kitten, I asked her if she loved me.

  ‘Of course I love you. I’m your mother.’

  ‘But that’s not real love. That’s theoretical love. Like theoretically, I am deserving of your love because I am your daughter. But do you feel love for me?’

  ‘How would you describe that?’

  ‘There is no description. It just is. Everyone knows that one.’

  That night she got out the toothbrush for the first time.

  Last night was the third.

  This is the letter I rolled into a scroll and placed in the cold but firm chlorine hand of the Turban while the Mime, tenor, said, ‘Promise.’ This is what should be in the mail by now, and maybe, just maybe, open on Finbar’s kitchen table, his exploded face above it.

  June 8, 1981

  Dear I. I. Finbar Me the Three

  Handsome Funambulist and Colossal Menagerie,

  I will keep this brief as you are either very old or very dead.

  Though the unauthorized autobiography I have has been largely

  distressed by my father’s palette knife, you are, by my

  calculations, eighty – if you are even living. I am nine.

  My name is Eugenia. My address is Number 101 Dunn

  Avenue in the City of Toronto, Mother Six Kidlet Two

  Robber Eight. I weigh eighty-five pounds. I am five feet tall.

  My mother is Mink. My sister, Immaculata. My father, Sheb

  Wooly Ledoux, portraitist. Last night, my father vanished. He

  left a note behind that did not include my name. I took this to

  be a sign that he was coming back for me. I think I was

  wrong. I think he might be on his way to you. This may take

  a while. He is not one for straight lines. In the meantime, if I

  had two words written on my eyelids and I was blinking, you

  would read: Rescue. Urgent. Rescue. Urgent. Rescue. Urgent.

  Sheb is a forthcoming sort. Forgive him this. And please forgive

  his lunatic ranting. Forgive him this
at least until I get there

  too. If in doubt, give him an apple.

  Whether this letter will even find you is another matter

  altogether, and one that I have little choice but to leave in

  the hands of two singing police officers.

  Eugenia Ledoux

  We sit in your studio and listen to Merilee Rush and the Turnabouts sing ‘Angel of the Morning’ for an entire day. Juice Newton just came out with a version, but this is the original and you insist on originals. You do not paint. A new canvas sits on your easel in the corner, a face waiting to be filled in. It is really just an eye. A left eye, floating. The only event of the day is the song. You say that you need to understand the song!We sit on the floor cross-legged like sages, reflecting each other – my hair, your hair, your eyes, my eyes, my face, your face. We listen, and every time it finishes you leap up, move the needle back again, scratch, scratch, to the beginning.

  A hundred listens later, your beard that much thicker, as I am about to spell it out, you finally proclaim, ‘I get it, Eugenius, I get it.’

  ‘What?’ I pounce back.

  ‘She is saying goodbye. She is saying goodbye before she has to, while she still has the chance.’

  The needle bumps over the blank space at the end of the record – a message being nervously tapped out. The unfinished face is your face. I look away from it to you. Tears skip into your eyes. And with that I see there is a whole layer of sadness to the world that I have not yet begun to uncover.

  June 9, 1981. The backyard. Your funeral. Mother Mink Ledoux in black. Gloves and two girdles. Sister Immaculata Ledoux in white. Both: hair lined up and soldiered into braids. I am in your pinstripe suit, the one you left behind. Cut and sewed and shrunk. Cowboy boots too. Found glowing and snorting in a corner of the closet; I step into them, they fit.

  You must have left barefoot. In your black suit. Your winter suit.

  You have moved from the ravine now. South. Probably to a rooming house on Shuter Street. You are gathering your wits. Deciding on your next move. You have not slept since you left home. Your body is the hand of an elderly woman reaching for a teacup: shaking and determination. Piss-stained corridors, musty lighting of an old submarine, the rooming house has the quality of a thing that is sinking. It is full of coughing and lesions. Hair skidded across balding heads and overcoats, always overcoats, winter or no, usually with egg stains, hard, on the lapels. The lucky ones have a bottle in their breast pocket, hot as an extra heart. The others are draped on chairs staring at the communal television. It blinks its picture clean. In their rooms, the men’s socks soak in sinks like dead fish. There is no one to call. They are all of the love letters the world meant to write but didn’t. They have not been touched in years.