Stunt

by Claudia Dey

  But for a moment I imagined myself, barrelling toward the ground like the woman in the photograph did, barrelling so fast that even if you did want to catch me, you couldn’t.

  Partway to the roof, I crouch in front of Immaculata’s bedroom window. Between her thumb and forefinger, she holds a mouse by the tail. The mouse is as big as her tongue and brownish. If the mouse were a girl, she would be called plain. Immaculata pets her and places her on her stained handkerchief. Another common lump gone. Immaculata does not feel sorrow. She feels only curiosity, clean curiosity.

  She fills a glass jar with rubbing alcohol. I watch her breathe in the smell of it, a pure antiseptic, unabashed. She is grateful for the authority of a solvent. She holds the mouse up by her tail and drops her into the clear liquid. A small splash. She puts the lid on the jar. There is no sorrow around death for Immaculata. It is only the place where she has the most questions. She lowers her body to the floor and stares, in line with the jar, as if wishing the mouse’s dull brown eyes for her own. The mouse spins weightless.

  I pull myself onto Mink’s windowsill. She stands erect in her nighttime robe rubbing cold cream into her face, which is now a white mask. And then she does two things I have never seen her do before: she pulls out her teeth and she lifts a wig off her head. Underneath, she has a few strands of long grey hair. Without teeth, her face sinks inward. Without hair, her scalp is a shine, the last strands, crooked and desperate. Cracks on a shell. She could burst apart.

  My rope falls to the ground. And I fall, fast after it.

  My breath in pinpoints. Eventually it matches Immaculata’s, calm as a tidal pool.

  We sit at the edge of my bed, the rope still around my neck. A collar, brittle and sure, its bite rises red on my skin. ‘Don’t you dare.’ She smells like antiseptic. When she bolted into my bedroom, I was hanging from the rafter, my body kicking, a kipper on the end of a line. I will have a bruise on my stomach from where she charged me.

  Immaculata’s braids came undone in the struggle. Looking at her now, the colour of wax, I see that she has grown her hair to cover her face. Not because it is ugly, no, but because it has that quality of belonging to another world and she is tired of uninvited eyes. Her beauty has pried her open long enough. Her cheeks are Paleolithic slabs, her hair red as warning, her eyes: ink wells. She is betrayed by their depths, and tries to coat them, blinking back indifference. ‘Don’t you dare, Euge.’ She says it again, hard. With a period at the end of the sentence. Suddenly full of punctuation. Death for life. A clean trade.

  You taught me how to tie a noose, and after you did, you said to me, ‘Unlearn that, unlearn that right now, Eugenia!’ But I never forget anything.

  Mink appears in the doorway, her arms up against its sides, the threshold of a saloon. She is naked and sweating. Her breasts hang shallow. Her belly is round and small like the tip of a helmet. She gives the impression that she has been running for years, reached her destination and forgotten what it is that she wanted. She looks at us as though she has never seen us before. She does not come toward us in measured steps. She does not chide us. She does not hold our faces to hers and make promises about the future. She does not make us hot drinks. She does not cry. She barely interrupts this moment that is a lifespan in itself. Instead, bald and toothless, her face buried under a thick coat of white cold cream, she says, ‘How do you even know he was your father?’ and then, for one last time, she rises up onto the tips of her toes, those sharpened points, turns, opens the winter closet, pulls out a brown fur coat and a pink toque and makes her naked way down the hall and down the stairs. Too late, Immaculata says, ‘Where are you going?’ And then, never forgetting her manners, ‘Good night.’

  We listen to Mink’s footsteps fade. The retreat of an intruder. A perfect stranger. The click of the front door. The whine of the engine. We look out the window. The car pulls away. The sign still there: with my daughter. Mink is gone. We are safe. For now. We laugh. We laugh in shudders and balls, heaps and chokes, spores caught on the wind.

  Mink leaves her hairbrush behind.

  As though performing for my stare, Immaculata’s body begins to exaggerate itself, a swan attacking. In a shock, her red hair turns milk-white and her bones sling through her, multiplying themselves, an eerie mathematics. Immaculata does not groan or cry but watches intently, the spectator to a race, as she embodies her final transfiguration. She is a giantess with the appearance of a child bride. Her white dress is now shockingly short, pulled tight against her, a bandage. I realize it was this that stopped people in the street. They could sense that her form could shift. They would not so much watch Immaculata as they would be watchful in her presence, unsure of what they might witness; she could have a fit and lash out or bite her tongue or fly. Whereas, if she could, she would drop herself into a jar filled with clear liquid and spin weightless for the white noise of eternity, under a box spring, in a house soon to be entirely abandoned, a world abandoned of eyes.

  And then it is my turn. I grow. It is the sound of a heavy gate being opened, hands crowded against it, pushing. Then there is a loud crack – lightning cleaving a tree, and briefly the smell of burning. Immaculata is transfixed, her mouth a loose zero. She directs me to my door frame, presses my ruler against the top of my head, lilts, ‘Don’t move,’ measures and makes a mark. Three inches. She adds an exclamation point and dates it: June 9, 1981. ‘Whoa.’ She fumbles the ruler; it hits the hardwood floor and with everything around it – clay pipe stems, snow globes, my neat piles of feathers and shells, my owl lamp, my black corduroy dress – it is instantly a remnant of a previous life. My room smells like storage unit. I do too.

  As we fall asleep on my bed, curling into the shape of fiddle-heads for the night to pry apart, Immaculata wrapped around me, stiff and suited, this is what she tells me, her voice a balm, her mouth suddenly full of hard stops: ‘Take a duck. Pull her feathers. Save for the head and neck. Baste her with butter. Make a fire around her. Not too close so that she chokes. She will run, walk and fly meekly amidst the flame. Cloistered in a roast, her heart and head will thirst. Wet her with a sponge. When she begins to stumble, she is quite cooked. Present her before your guests. She will cry as you cut into her and be almost completely eaten before she dies. It is mighty pleasant to behold!’ Immaculata twines a strand of her floor-length white hair around my wrist. It is thick as fishing line. And then she says, ‘Meat is said to be more tender if it is made to suffer first.’

  I wait for her to say something more but she doesn’t.

  two

  It all started with Sudbury.

  June 1, 1980. One year and seven days before you duct-tape this note to your studio door,

  gone to save the world

  sorry mink,

  immaculata,

  sorry

  yours

  sheb wooly ledoux

  asshole

  and leave us with fish (mostly bone), Mink is called away to shoot a film. When she gets the call, she exclaims, ‘Oh,’ as though something agile just flew up her skirt.

  It is a B movie. Mink used to be Joan of Arc. She used to be Masha. She used to be Ophelia. Now she will be in Sudbury for seven nights shooting Murder in the Tundra. She shows me the whites of her eyes whenever she says Sudbury. She will stay in a college dormitory. It will smell of sneakers and spaghetti, rank as leftover childhoods. She will sleep on a cot under a poster of a fantasy girl who is not her. The walls will be white cement blocks. There will be fire routes everywhere. She will pack her own bedding. And her robes, morning and night, which she will wear while walking to the communal bathroom. Everyone will fall in love with her. Of this, she is almost sure.

  Mink is to play the dim-witted but kinky Austrian prioress of a motel named the Lay-He-Ho and she must have sex with a demented dictionary salesman who is passing through town. His name is Laird. But because of her station in life, she must call him Herr Laird.

  ‘We all have our station in life,’ Mink tells me, offering he
r profile. It should be printed on thousand-dollar bills.

  ‘How true,’ I say, not offering mine.

  Mink hands me the script. She wants to rehearse. I rifle through the pages. It is mostly about dying and disrobing. When I remark that the film calls for full nudity, she slaps her thigh, a prize cow.

  ‘But aren’t you being exploited?’ I ask.

  ‘Pshaw. Doing nudity is high praise, Genie. High praise.’ She says high praise like it is contraband. Like it is what everybody wants but only a few know how to find. This was not always the case. Once, when Mink had not had a call for months, she asked me if I thought she could pass for my sister. I said yes. My lie became every lie that had ever been told to her.

  ‘Swear on Sheb’s life.’

  It was up to me to undo them all. I couldn’t. Mink kicked a cupboard door closed and told me that her industry did not know what to do with her as she got older and so it had abandoned her. Then she pulled on her cheekbones, ‘Aging is like misfiring,’ and left the room, tipping on her heels.

  There was a production of La Finta Giardiniera. Your favourite opera. You said, ‘Mozart wrote it when he was eighteen. Eighteen, Eugenius. Eighteen.’ The final moment of the opera was to be a flock of doves flying high over the audience’s heads. They rehearsed with fake doves. On the opening night, they stored the real doves in a net above the stage. When the time came for the doves’ flight, they pulled back the net and instead of a flurry of wings, the doves fell dead to the ground. They had been too close to the lights. The heat had killed them. This is what aging is like. You are supposed to be a dove in the air but instead you are burned alive. With an audience that, upon seeing you, is horrified.

  More exercises. More cold cream for Mink.

  We rehearse. Mink mostly says, ‘Oh yes, Herr Laird.’ I play Herr Laird. I ask for a room key and then as I am unpacking my dictionaries I go demented like someone has poured hot grease into my ears. This is when I dial for room service. Mink arrives with a cart of dishes under domes. I make small talk until she undresses and then Mink, naked, says, cueing me, ‘Stab me, stab me,’ under her breath. I can’t.

  She looks at me. I am ferocious, a barbarian. I am ruining the scene. And then I realize that she is still in character. Tickety-boo. Mink enacts her mortal wounds without my help. She runs behind her bedroom curtain and she screams. She yodels a bit and then dies. As she clutches her throat, her frayed jugular winks blood at the cosmos. She swans to the floor. I look at her with frightened curiosity, the way Frankenstein must have watched his monster bloom. She does not blink. I am sure she has stopped her heart. Then she comes to her feet and, with the curtness of a thing snapping shut, she says, ‘Scene.’

  I wipe my eyes on my sleeve. I applaud. She is Joan of Arc. She is Masha. She is Ophelia.

  ‘You die very well.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mink curtseys and then she puts herself back together, like a magician’s assistant, not sawed in half after all.

  ‘Is there an android in your movie?’

  ‘Not this one.’

  I sit on Mink’s bed. A double with a dark throw. Three mattresses. I wilt into them, a small shock of milkweed. Her back to me, Mink brushes her hair. ‘One, two, three’ – steady as a metronome, she counts the strokes under her breath. It falls in glossy switches. Red as embers. Red as Mars. If we were locked in this room until the end of time, all we would do is brush Mink’s hair. I might say chilly once and then realize that this is beside the point. The point is this: Mink has a silver-handled hairbrush. It is her only heirloom. She says the word heirloom as though if she is not careful with it, it will crumble in her mouth and she will cough dust. Like Sheb, Mink was adopted. She does not know her true origins. This makes three things they have in common: feet, sex and question marks. This is why her hairbrush is so important. It is a visit from her ancestors. Every number: mileage covered. The more she counts, the closer they get. ‘Forty-nine, fifty.’ She puts the hairbrush down. I have question marks too.

  ‘Tell me your beginnings,’ I say for the first time.

  She trains her eyes on me. They are violet and gold, glistening nuggets. She just plucked them from a dead sailor. From her trunk of faces. ‘My mother was an opium addict. My brother terribly ill. A lung disease. We lived by the seaside. There was whisky and whores. My father was cheap. A retired actor. Our maid was stupid. My father was the king of Britain. I had two sisters. They were both treacherous. I was my father’s favourite and then he banished me from his kingdom. I was a child prodigy with a hole in my heart. My mother was a statue come to life. She was in love with a man who was haunted by the ghost of his own father. We had a child buried in our backyard. Drowned. My father watched television. My mother turned to God. Our estate was auctioned off. We lived on a cherry orchard. It was cut down. Que sera sera. My mother was a witch and full of spells and she drove my father, an artist of some repute and much adored by all, mad, upon which he walked into the forest behind our home never to be seen again. That last part is true.’

  I know to never ask her again about her beginnings. So they sit, hot blisters on her skin, never to burst.

  Fingers stuck with rings, Mink directs me to her vanity table. She places me, pawn, in front of her, queen. Photographs and dried bouquets crowd the edges of the mirror. The hairbrush is cradled in her hands like it is made of sparrow bones. Will she beat me with it? No. She is trying to even out the attention she expends. She senses a deficit in me and she wants to correct this. Things should be symmetrical. Octagonal. Even love. So she picks me for the hour. She picks me for her riches. ‘You’re so small, Genie. Some might call it a disadvantage. Even a deformity.’ She pairs her face with mine. A rare bird on my shoulder, it could split apart into a swarm. ‘I wouldn’t. You have your father’s face. But you have good skin. My skin. Lit from within. Bet I could find you in the dark.’ She straightens. ‘Don’t look so sad. Sadness will wreck your face. It’ll freeze that way.’

  Mink touches my scalp. Her fingers are a pitchfork. She pushes my shoulders down. She lifts her one heirloom. It hovers above my head. I worry that it will break when it touches me and that her meagre history will be lost to her forever. It doesn’t. She brushes my hair. It is full of knots and tangles. But Mink ploughs through. Tickety-boo.

  The first few pulls make me feel seasick, but as she goes on, I hope that she will never stop. With every stroke, she is whispering to me. Grand whispers made of fur and dynamite. This is where you come from, she is telling me. The land of smooth hair. Welcome back, child. You have been away too long.

  I know this much. You told me. She was born here in Toronto and her parents named her Monique. They gave her away. You guess that her mother was probably young, even twelve, and lived in tenement housing and plunged needles into her arms. Mink is a nickname you gave to her. She is adopted by an older couple who dies before I am born. She is their only child. She goes to a private school. She wears a kilt and a blazer and a tie and she is on the swim team. The medley. She knows her lace, her silver and her seams. She goes to dance and piano classes. She has many trophies. Everything in her house is polished. At night, everything shines. When her mother drives through the city alone, she puts a dummy in their back seat to deter kidnappers. That is how rich they are. Everybody wants to take them for ransom money. Still, her parents worry about bills so they keep the house very cold. In the winter, Mink’s trophies gather frost. When Mink marries you, an orphan painter from northern Ontario who does not cut his toenails, never uses a napkin and misquotes ‘Kubla Khan’ (though you were very close to getting it right), her parents disown her. This is why she never speaks about them. This is why she did not go to their funerals. She needed a beast, one who would wrap her in a horse blanket and steal her from her front stoop.

  Mink never met her birth mother. According to you, she wanted to remain hidden. Does she live in a bunker and carve the name MONIQUE into the wall over and over again? Are there other women in other bunkers
carving names, names that no longer match faces? Somewhere Mink has a mother covered in needles. Somewhere Mink has a mother who could pass for her sister.

  She steps back. She laughs. ‘You look like a peacock. Like peacock roadkill,’ she says. I open my eyes. It’s true. She strokes my cheek. Her hand is soft, kelp, and I am the swimmer guessing my way toward shore. I lick my lips. They taste of salt. ‘When I get back from Sudbury,’ she rolls her eyes, ‘I’ll take you to the beautician. She’ll fix you.’ I say, ‘That would be nice.’ Her smile flashbulbs. I am caught in its frame. She laughs again. I laugh too. Her laughter is so voluminous that I bob inside it. Without warning, she shuts it off. Her eyes go flat. Scene. Too late, too easily overtaken, I am still laughing. I tell her, ‘I love your teeth so much.’ It is time for her to pack. It is time for me to go. Stab me, stab me, I think as I close her door behind me.

  June 7, 1980. The day comes for Mink to leave for Sudbury. She gleams like the side of a never-flown airplane. A submarine before it plunges. A revolver. Immaculata and I cannot help but follow her around. She is having a torrid affair with herself. She is full of sideways glances. She calls this method. Her bags have been packed for a week. They sit by the front door, hounds panting at the gate. I wonder if they, like her, will break into a sprint.

  Mink practices her diction while attending to her toilette and ministrations. She says, ‘Red leather yellow leather red leather yellow leather,’ over and over again in the Austrian accent required of her. She moves with the deliberation of an empress inside a dark castle – her wrists heavy with gems, beheadings in the basement. And then she repeats, ‘Sitzen, liegen, schlafen,’ in different pitches. Immaculata and I are her stunned ladies in waiting. We are bowed. We need aprons and moles. ‘Sitzen, liegen, schlafen.’ Mink fixes her hair into place. Her hands are a cursive; the air, lap dogs. She pulls buttons through their holes. ‘Sitzen, liegen, schlafen.’ She is already being watched. She has an audience of millions sitting shoulder to shoulder. After the show, she will sign posters of herself. She will look every single one of her admirers in the eye. They will see this as winking. She will be their fantasy girl.