by Jessica Bell
She extends the flexible branches and stands the tree up by the window. The corners are filled with snow. Her first white Christmas.
Ivy notices some damp in the skirting boards. We’ll need to get that looked at.
Oh. Did I just say “we”?
Ivy scoffs, continues to hum while simultaneously biting her conscience’s tongue. Perhaps some psychological pain might wake her up and plummet her back into the world she lived in before she moved to Seattle, into a world she would go back to in a heartbeat.
I overreacted. A lot. Amir and I would probably have been fine.
As she lifts a shiny red ball to hook onto a branch, she sees the reflection of her face, distorted and fishbowlesque, as if screaming to be let out. But it’s not her own reflection she sees, after all. Startled by the image, she turns her head to find Brian hovering over her with a flicker of Mad Hatter in his eyes. For a moment Ivy feels drugged.
“Hi. I-I didn’t hear you come in. How long have you been standing there?” she asks, turning her attention back to the tree. She places a silver ball in a position on the tree so she can observe Brian’s full-bodied reflection.
“Not even a second.” Brian looks around the house and takes a deep breath. “The place is still a dump. What have you been doing all day?”
“Research. On the Internet. Proposals. For work. I was going to tidy up after I fixed the tree,” Ivy replies, standing up from her kneeling position on the floor. She brushes off her knees, and flecks of glitter from the decorations fill the air and gradually waft to the ground.
“Ah, look at that. Pretty, huh? Almost like magic.” Ivy smiles. She thinks about giving Brian a kiss hello, but doesn’t when she sees the look on his face.
Brian drops his briefcase to the floor with a thud and clenches his jaw.
“What’s the matter?” Ivy asks, in a tone so insubstantial it is almost a whisper. “What’s happened to you these past couple of weeks?”
Determined not to start a yelling match, she maintains her calm, pretending for a moment that this reaction is the result of fatigue and not because the house is still untidy. Last night’s yelling match was enough to last the week. Especially considering it was over something as meaningless as using olive oil to glaze the pasta instead of butter.
Ivy folds her arms below her breasts and looks Brian directly in the eye. She cocks her head. She’s not going to let this behaviour intimidate her and must exert a flavour of dominating courage. There’s no way she’s going to let Brian walk all over her. No. Way. She was a doormat once, and she vowed to never be again.
But she buckles. Is this really buckling? And apologizes to keep the peace. It’s almost Christmas, after all.
“I’m sorry. Maybe this was a mistake. I shouldn’t have …” Ivy is about to say that she shouldn’t have put the tree up without asking if he wanted one, but Brian interrupts.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” he snaps. “This whole moving-in-together business was a huge mistake.” Brian spreads his hands out in front of him to emphasize how big “huge” actually is.
What?
The room grows smaller around Ivy. The sound of life, the atmosphere, the atoms in the air adopt a shallow hum. A thump in her ears pounds like a draw hoe in clay, as reasons Brian would say such a thing flash through her mind like moments of life before death.
“Pardon?” Ivy asks, drawing her chin to her chest as if she’s having difficulty swallowing. Tears teeter behind her eyes and constrict her throat. It’s the same feeling she felt when catching Amir in the act. The need to escape afflicts her like deep vein thrombosis, initiating the possibility of it dislodging and travelling to her lungs. Panic. And what do I do now? Ivy folds her arms, waiting for Brian to explain.
Brian looks at the wall, avoiding eye contact. “Remember when you went for the interview at the museum?” Brian asks, not moving an inch from his stance by the front door. He doesn’t wait for Ivy to answer. “Well, all I wanted to tell you was that I thought I might be in love with you. I hadn’t intended to ask you to move in with me at all.” His face goes pale. Expressionless. He puts his hands in his pockets and rolls, once, on the balls of his feet.
“Excuse me?” Ivy screeches, stepping closer to Brian. “And it hadn’t occurred to you to tell me that earlier? Before I uprooted my whole fucking life?” Ivy loosens her folded arms, but immediately folds them again. She feels vulnerable letting them dangle by her sides as if suspended in indecision.
“I, uh, thought I could get used to the idea, Ivy,” Brian replies, stammering a little. “I had no idea I would feel so—.
“So what, Brian?” Ivy asks, a shrill through clenched teeth. She backs him up against the front door, standing so close she could give him mouth-to-mouth.
“I don’t know.” Brian shakes his head. Ivy can hear his hair crunch against the surface of the door.
“You must know,” Ivy screams. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have found the nerve to say something after all this time. Spill it!”
Brian swallows, shakes his head, his façade of power melting away like a snowman in sun. “Trapped! I feel trapped!” Brian retorts, pushing Ivy off him.
Ivy trips backward on a rug and falls on her backside. She’s faint. Lightheaded. Lost in a chaos she feels she should have taken control of before it got so out of hand.
“Oh God.” Brian kneels down to try to help her up. “Ivy, I’m so sorry, I really didn’t—.
Ivy flicks her arm in the air, shoos him away like cigarette smoke. “I can get up on my own.”
“I didn’t mean to—.
“I know. Forget it.” Ivy stands and brushes off her bum. Tears fall down her cheeks, hot with self-disappointment. She’s the one to blame for this. She shouldn’t have jumped into this so fast and for all the wrong reasons. “So, what now?” she chokes out. “I’m supposed to leave, after I’ve just moved in?”
Brian walks to the kitchen, hanging his head, and fills the kettle with water. “Tea?”
Ivy glares at him. “Tea? That’s what you have to say? Tea.”
“It’ll be the best for both of us, Ivy. I mean, Jesus, how long have we been dating? One month? It’s happening too fast. Don’t you think it’s happening too fast?”
“Brian.” Ivy closes her eyes and pushes down on her eyelids so hard that the blackness starts to resemble the Big Bang. “Is there someone else?” She sits on the couch and feels between her teeth with her tongue. It begins to rain, and a loud crack of thunder causes her to jolt.
“No. I just need some time, Ivy. I need some space.” Brian turns the heating dial up a notch and leans against the kitchen bench, rubbing his brow.
“Space. Huh. Easy excuse, isn’t it? Where the fuck is this need for space supposed to leave us now, Brian? Should we just end this for good?” At the bottom of the hurt, the rejection, the dull ache at the base of her chest that wants to take the place of her pulse, Ivy can’t help but notice a twinge of relief. She stops crying and wonders if this is an opportunity to get Amir back. Maybe she should go back home.
“Ivy. I don’t want this to end. I love you. I just want to take it slower.” Brian sits next to Ivy on the couch. “Come here,” he whispers, and tries to pull her close, but she snatches her arms away.
She wants to say it’s over, to stop getting mixed up with men as a way of escaping her problems. She wants to feel like she couldn’t spend another moment in this man’s house, but the sudden thought of never seeing him again triggers a torrent of tears. Am I in love with you? Why can’t I decide?
She lowers herself to the floor, surprising herself with a childlike wail, then crosses her legs and wraps her arms around her shins. She hunches over so that her head rests on her left knee, and succumbs to the tears.
“Ivy.”
Her heaves echo through the hushed apartment like an abandoned child in an empty football stadium. Brian crouches down beside her, but he doesn’t touch her. His warmth permeates through her clothes. I do love you. He’s
the only person she has besides Gabriel. The only person she hasn’t pushed away. Everyone is alone in this world. Everyone.
Brian’s cell buzzes. Ivy’s chest tightens, and she jumps for the cell in Brian’s briefcase as if an instinctual reflex.
“Ivy, what are you doing? I’m not cheating on you.” Brian huffs and runs his fingers through his hair.
Ivy scoffs. “See, that’s just proof that you are. I didn’t even ask such a thing.” Ivy sniffs, unfastening the phone from the pouch attached to the handle. Ivy looks at the screen, then at Brian. Rage creates a pocket of air in her windpipe.
“Oh, really?” Ivy chokes. “Then who the hell is Janine?”
“Just a friend. Can you please give me my cell?” Brian holds his hand out, nodding at her as if the gesture will somehow convince her to abide.
But Ivy opens the message. It reads: Divorce hearing, Mon. Jan 9.
Ivy looks up. Brian’s top lip twitches.
“Divorce hearing? For whom?”
Brian shakes his head in his hands, groans, and levers himself back onto the couch. “Me.”
“You’re married?” Ivy squeaks, failing at trying to sound hostile.
Brian looks like he’s just bitten into a lemon. Ivy hands the phone back to Brian in silence, grabs her handbag off the hat stand, and wipes away her tears with her sleeve. She opens the front door, pausing, opening and closing her mouth two or three times to speak, unable to utter the words bombarding the tip of her tongue. She won’t say what she wants to say. Such inflammatory outbursts have no meaning in situations like this. Not anymore.
“I-I’ll be back tomorrow with Gabe. To get some stuff.”
“Wait,” Brian says, grabbing hold of the door before it closes. “Call Kit.”
Ivy squints and shakes her head in question, wishing he might have begged her not to leave.
“Just call her. She’s your sister. She’ll understand. Forgive and forget, Ivy. Just forgive and forget.”
Ailish
Ailish isolates herself in the bathroom. She locks and unlocks the rotund brass latch five times, afraid she misheard the click. It needs to click twice for it to be secure. But the second one is quiet, as quiet as a bubble in soda rising to the surface to pop. Kit says she can’t hear it. And that’s why the door always swings open when she least expects it.
Ailish leans with her back against the door and lets out a deep sigh laced with a hoarseness she hasn’t been able to soothe since she smoked that marijuana. She opens the stiff wood-framed window to its highest point before it tends to slam shut on its own. Ailish has become accustomed to the correct position, but still continues to mark it with black crayon for Kit when it wears off. She has done so since Kit grew tall enough to open the window on her own.
She reaches into the bottom of her makeup bag—which is not filled with commercial cosmetics but with her own moisturizing concoctions stored in old black film canisters with grey caps that snap shut like insults—and pulls out a rolled apricot-coloured facecloth. She opens it to reveal a ready-made joint and a box of Redhead matches. Her emergency stash.
From the rear of the bathroom cabinet behind the sink pipes, she removes a pencil and sketchpad waterproofed by a Safeway bag that is probably more than ten years old. She’s never liked to write on lined paper. For some reason she feels it’ll influence her writing; it might become too linear if she has to keep her pencil between the lines.
She sits on the tiled floor, secures the joint between pursed lips, and strikes a match. Before lighting the joint she savours the smell of the burning match. She has always thought it smelled like sugarcoated melting rubber. There’s something sickly sweet yet grave about the smell, as if it were the soul of Frankenstein finding life again.
She lets the first match burn out until the flame licks her thumbnail. She strikes another match, lights her joint, and begins to write.
Crooked, girls’ voices,
literature hums, pounds, theoretical
notes through miniature rooms and rose
soaps. Crash. Advert tunes inside
stethoscope beats, to wind
shield wiper. Little girls cry, big
boys bite their bottom lips; gin
and bear it—the scheduled revelation,
melting ice crackling, sound of pink
jewels hitting tiles—numbed neglect.
Fatherly love can’t be found
in cookie jars. Especially when mother
needs grass, to take it
on her back; to see the red raw
rubbed flesh—proof he did it.
Ivy
Ivy heats up some ready-made Napolitano pasta sauce from a jar. It smells too rich for her liking, but it’ll have to do. The last thing she has a mind for at the moment is grocery shopping. She could order pizza, but even the thought of deciding on a topping would prove too difficult right now.
Gabriel puts some of Ivy’s cups and saucers back in her cupboards where they belong. There are a half-dozen broken ones at the bottom of the box. No wonder. Ivy didn’t even bother wrapping them in newspaper this time.
Ivy stirs the sauce and observes the way it bubbles. Each bubble that pops leaves a red pockmark on the white stove surface. She watches as the bubbles become fiercer, like molten lava, hell, a place she feels she ought to live. Guilt about how she treated Kit surfaces like ringworm. An itchy, ugly, vicious circle.
“I’m gonna go back,” Ivy announces, turning the heat down and wiping up the disease spread all over her stove with a sopping and tattered pink sponge. Gabriel freezes, eyes wide, plate midway between box and cupboard shelf. She prematurely shakes her head at his predictable response.
“But. You just left.”
“Not to Brian’s. To Australia.” Grief stings the rims of Ivy’s eyes like new liquid liner. But she refuses to blink it away. I deserve every pinch of pain.
“What? Oh, sweetcakes, why? You need to move forward, not backward. Are you sure that’s a good idea? I mean, honey, you gotta quit running.” Gabriel rests the plates on the kitchen bench as if the news has injected weight into his arms.
Ivy blinks. She won’t respond to that. She won’t try to explain why it isn’t really running; it’s confronting. She has to forgive and forget, just like Brian said. Well, perhaps attempting the “forget” part first might be more efficient. And in order to forget, she has to run. It’s the only way. It’s her first-aid system. And she only has practice implementing the rules of resuscitation.
“Look. Gabe. I’ve decided I want to see my father. That’s the only reason I want to go back. okay?” I can’t tell you the real reason. You wouldn’t understand.
Ivy turns on the fan above the stove when she realizes the kitchen window is steaming up from the pot of boiling water.
Gabriel nods, raising his eyebrows so high they look like they’re preparing for takeoff. He licks his lips. “That’s kinda rash, isn’t it?”
“Rash? I’ve only been thinking about it my whole life.” Ivy laughs, opening a packet of spaghetti, snapping the 250-gram bunch in half and tossing it into the pot. If only that pasta were Brian. Boiling water splashes on her hand. She winces and runs her hand under the tap. Haven’t you burned me enough?
Gabriel throws the broken plates in the trash and dissembles the cardboard box. He places it on the kitchen table, flattens it out like a bedsheet, and groans.
“I assume you’ve made up with Kit, then?” Gabriel says, swinging around to face Ivy on one foot and flicking his hair behind his shoulders.
“God, no! Are you kidding me?” But I should. And I should tell her about the letter from Dad. But she’ll kill me. And she’ll hate me forever for keeping it from her. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to say anything …
“Wouldn’t it be better to make up before you see her face-to-face? That could get a bit awkward, couldn’t it? Just arriving on her doorstep after what you said to her?” Gabriel sits down at the kitchen table and watches Ivy wipe away splatters o
f red off the jade tiles behind the stove. She throws the sponge in the sink without rinsing it out.
“I won’t be arriving on her doorstep. I’ll stay with my mother. Then I’ll work stuff out with Kit at Christmas. She’ll be in the holiday spirit. It’ll be the perfect time.”
“Or the worst time,” Gabriel mutters under his breath. He grabs a bottle of Limestone Coast Shiraz from the fridge. Another of Ivy’s Aussie imports. “Stop being so stubborn and apologize already. I realize you’re the victim of constant shit-luck, but that doesn’t mean you should make someone else suffer with you.” Gabriel tugs off the cork. The hollow pop echoes in Ivy’s head like a finger flicking the inside of her cheek.
She pricks her shoulders up. “Look who’s talking. I’ve seen the way you act around your boy. You totally manipulate him.”
Gabriel rolls his eyes and tsks. “Honey, don’t start. I’m your friend. I want to help you.” He tries to grab a pair of wine glasses out of the dish rack with one hand, but doesn’t manage it. Ivy grabs them instead. Their hands don’t even collide.
“Well, if you want to help me so much, stop telling me what I should be doing and just let me do what I want to do.”
They move into the lounge room and sit on the couch. Gabriel pours the wine, biting the tip of his tongue between his front teeth.
“Look. Sweetcakes,” Gabriel says, smacking the bottle of wine on the coffee table. “I know you’re angry with Brian. But running away again isn’t going to stop your pain. Please, just think about it seriously. You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’re going to find yourself running in circles.”
“I told you, I’m not running away. And I’d like to get there for Christmas. Can you have a look on the Internet for a flight out tomorrow? I’m going to check if the spaghetti is cooked.”
“Tomorrow? Are you flipping serious? What about the museum?”
Ivy stands and crosses her arms, “I’ve got a month.”
“A month.” Gabriel nods as if trying to understand what that means.
