by Lisa Moore
Philip didn’t raise his voice. He said, If you were a man I’d punch you in the face. What a stupid question. How can you ask something like that? If you don’t get away from me I will punch your face in. You’re a mother. I can’t believe you’re a mother. You haven’t learned anything in your whole life.
I almost asked Philip to punch me. I willed it. A smack in the face would have evened things out, tipped me off the bar stool. I realized that over the previous ten years I had gathered only little splinters of Philip.
That afternoon I had been on the veranda with my daughter blowing psychedelic bubbles. The bubble solution was saturated with glycerine and that’s what made the colour so lurid. Hot pink, chartreuse, turquoise. The bubbles trembled. One touched the splintery wood rail without breaking. My daughter and I, shadows stretching over the convex surfaces, bursting. I slid off the bar stool and went back to my seat before Philip decided to hit me. He stood up and pulled on his bomber jacket. It was grey nylon, and the wrinkles in its back seemed to shimmer a one hundred proof hatred as delicate as a bubble.
That night I dreamed I was about to take a penis in my mouth, but there was a jagged piece of glass embedded in it, and it split my lower lip. Blood gushed freely and I got weak, the same weakness that happens when you give blood. A beatific lightness that absolved me.
This incident with Philip was nothing. Something he probably wouldn’t remember in the morning. But it sank inside me. It made me avoid the cafes and stores and streets where I thought I might run into him. It made me want to leave the city. Move away.
I’m reading one of the volumes of The History of Haiku that Gordon Austin left for me before he committed suicide. He was someone else whose pain I brushed up against accidentally. I knew him for only one night. We went on a blind date. He was an American, a draft dodger who manufactured false eyelashes in Ontario, a front to employ illegal immigrants, he said. Gordon had followed a woman to Newfoundland. He took me to an expensive restaurant, but he couldn’t taste the food. Gordon had no sense of smell. He talked fast. I hardly said anything. The restaurant emptied. The waiters were leaning against the back wall waiting to go home. He kept talking. He said he was rich. He was working on sonar radar graphics, writing a program that could draw icebergs three-dimensionally for free floating oil rigs. You’re only seeing the very tip, he said. His heart wasn’t in it, though. He was thinking he’d buy a fast convertible, drive to Mexico. I could go if I wanted. He did buy the convertible shortly after our date, I heard. He bought it and left town for a month. Then he came back and left the haiku books for me in the restaurant where I was working, did a few other errands, and drove the silver convertible off Red Cliff. I couldn’t understand why he had driven back to St. John’s from Mexico to commit suicide. He had lived in St. John’s for only the last five years of his life.
I read, “the haiku is like a finger pointing at the moon. It’s important that it’s not a bejewelled or perfect finger. It only points to something.” I met Mike, my husband, after that. We were out drinking and Mike brought me home to his apartment, which was Gordon’s old apartment. Mike had used the last of Gordon’s shaving cream, wore a pair of Gordon’s construction boots that were left under the bathroom sink. They fit him perfectly.
My mother’s only sister, Sherry, is a real estate agent. The best in St. John’s. In the weekend paper there’s a whole page, a pyramid of real estate agents’ photographs. Sherry is always at the top, or in the second line from the top. The agents are placed according to their sales. Sherry is afraid of two things. Fire and cats. She says when she was a baby, a cat lay over her face, filling her mouth and nose with fur, almost suffocating her. She was less than two years old but she remembers it. Cats are attracted to the smell of milk on the baby’s breath. She didn’t want Mike and me to buy this house. A fire trap, she said.
I was sewing a dress for my stepdaughter with a friend who lives on the other side of the city. We were drinking coffee and Tia Maria. The phone rang and it was Mike. He said he was standing in the front doorway of our house. Fire was pouring down the street. He said it was still safe there, but embers as big as his fist were dropping at his feet. The sky is orange, he said. I pulled the phone over to the window. There was an orange and black cloud breathing in the sky on the other side of the city. I said, That’s over my house. He said, You should see it, it’s like lava in the street. They’ll evacuate us when it gets hot enough.
I ran home. Some streets were blocked. Ours was a frozen river of water from the fire hoses. A blizzard of orange flakes. I had to cover my head with my scarf to keep my hair from catching fire. Mike had closed the front door because of the soot and smoke. The radio said if the fire reached our street the whole of downtown would be lost. It said the firemen were losing control. There were high winds. A policeman rapped on the door of our house with a billy knocker. He said, Move now, NOW. The street was full of people carrying blankets, photo albums, figurines. A spark landed on my daughter’s hand, making a tiny burn. We went to my sister’s, stayed up all night listening to the radio, drinking, unable to get drunk. At three in the morning the radio said the firemen had contained it. Our house was safe. I felt a quick stab of disappointment. I wasn’t comfortable in the city any more.
I woke early, afraid of looting. The Dominion supermarket had burned to its foundation. Blackened girders twisted up from the debris. Beautiful arcs of water shot from the fire trucks at the four corners of the lot. Everything hissing, steaming, delicate rainbows. Under a broken metal shelf I saw a pile of brilliant oranges, strangely preserved, each with a tiny white cap of snow. Our front door had been beaten in, tracks of soot over the carpet — the police had checked each house for someone left behind.
Since the fire the house has become infested with mice. The cat is playing with a mouse now, under my chair. I have my feet drawn up on the seat. I smash the mouse under a book. The cat finally bites its head. I hear the crunching of the bones of the mouse’s skull between the cat’s teeth; although the body is still moving, the tail has become a stiff S. In a few seconds the cat has devoured the entire body. She gives a cry. I half expect the mouse to scramble out of her mouth, whole. Perhaps because I know the mice will keep coming.
My daughter caught cold the night we were evacuated. Her cough sounds like cotton ripping. I draw her into me, her spine between my breasts, the soles of her feet burning against my thigh. I curl around her like a shell around a soft snail. Even her fingers are hot, as if the fire entered her hand through the little burn. When I was a child I used to climb into bed with my sister because I wanted to protect her from the devil. I believed the devil could draw my sister away through her dream, to a parallel universe, where there was a parallel city. Anything could be drawn out of this world, sucked into that one. Three years younger, she slept on her stomach. I’d put my nose in her hair. It had the colour and smell of unripe corn. She dreamed so strenuously that her cheeks were red, her lips slightly parted. I would lie on top of her, matching limb for limb, my arm over her arm, my leg over her leg, my fingers locked into hers. The way you lie flat if someone has fallen through the ice. The devil couldn’t pull us both down. I’d hook the bone of her ankle between my toes. I could stop her from falling too deeply that way, by hooking the bone of her ankle, but that always woke her up and she’d throw me off.
I went to see a Japanese performance artist. Wine glasses set in a circle like the numbers of a clock. Each wine glass filled with a different coloured spice. Grey-green, mustard, turmeric. He tipped the contents out on the floor and they floated down in gaseous clouds. On the video screen it looked like an aerial view of the Earth. The way the Earth looks as though it’s made of water and cloud, with nothing holding it together. The video cameras were as fragile as cheap toys. He attached wires to himself, and a gas mask with a paper bag on the end, that filled and crumpled with his breathing. The screens showed a mushroom cloud explo
ding over and over, silently. Then he made a pyramid of the wine glasses and poured a jug of honey into them. The honey clung to the stems of the glasses until each glass was filled. It glistened in the spotlight, the whole pyramid one viscous city of glass. Then he put a syringe into his arm and poured his own blood into the glass, mixing it with his finger.
I became fascinated with real estate when Aunt Sherry became an agent. All of my cousins punctuated every emotional event by buying or selling a house. It took me a while to recognize this pattern. Who would expect symbolism in real estate? But when I think of it, Sherry has made real estate her life. There’s her religion — a private part of her I can just barely guess the workings of — the fierce and protective love she has for her family, and real estate. I see all these parts of her bleed into each other. The houses she has bought and sold are spread out over the city like clues in a scavenger hunt. Some houses she’s sold three and four times to different families, noting the changes in wallpaper, carpet, light fixtures, as though the house has a camouflage that matches the families that move in. She will often point out houses that have ghosts. A house where a son murdered his seventy-three-year-old mother, and she was found two weeks later. Sherry says this property is eternally on the market, the house like a lost soul that can’t find bodies to move into it. She’s bought houses for all her children, and when any of them tell a story, they always start, When we were on Holbrook Avenue, or Forest Road, or Prince of Wales Street.
There’s a small island of trees and grass near my house. My daughter and I played there tonight, to bring down her fever. It had snowed the night before, covering the bone dry sidewalks, and another squall blew over in the afternoon. It was past Sarah’s bed time, and my toes were cold in my rubber boots, but we stayed out as long as we could. The streetlights threw perfect shadows from the trunks of the trees, thick straight columns like the Parthenon’s. An image drawn with sonar radar of a three-dimensional palace. I thought of Gordon Austin and his haiku books, of Philip’s daughter playing in the snow of another continent. Sarah and I trampled the snow but the columns still looked clean, the shadow edges hard.
I imagine a map of the city with plastic inlays of Sherry’s sales, family migration patterns from one neighbourhood to another. Each move changing lives irrevocably. Sherry is responsible for it. You sell a house to a customer and five years later they’ll be back to you for another. There are only three things to think about in selling real estate. Location, Location, Location.
In India several years ago I was on a tour of a city palace. A guide separated me from the crowd, ushered me into a stone tower. Before I knew what was happening he had bolted the door and the windows. No light leaked in. The darkness seemed to affect my inner ear and I swayed. Before I could scream he struck a match. There were thousands of convex mirrors imbedded in the walls. The guide, myself and the flame — reflected, wobbling. The guide said, The bridal chambers, night of a thousand stars. Our image splintered infinitely. Smashed but contained whole in each of the convex mirrors.
MELODY
– I –
Melody lets the first half dozen cars go by; she says she has a bad feeling about them.
The trip will take as long as it takes, she says. There are no more cars for an hour. She pulls her cigarettes out of her jean jacket and some matches from the El Dorado. We had been dancing there last night until the owner snapped on the lights. The band immediately aged; they could have been our parents. They wore acid-washed jeans and Tshirts that said ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING, VIVA LA SANDINISTA, and FEMINIST? YOU BET!!!
Outside the El Dorado two mangy Camaros, souped up for the weekend Smash Up Derby, revved their engines and tore out of the parking lot. I watched their tail lights swerve and bounce in the dark. They dragged near the mall and sparks lit the snagged fenders. A soprano yelp of rubber and then near silence. I could smell the ocean far beyond the army barracks. The revolving Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket still glowing in the pre-dawn light. Waves shushing the pebble beach; Brian Fiander falling in beside me. He had been downing B52s. He was lanky and discombobulated until his big hand clasped my shoulder and his too long limbs snapped into place like the poles of a pup tent.
The clock radio in my dorm room came on in the early afternoon and I listened to the announcer slogging through the temperatures across the island. Twenty-nine degrees. Mortification and the peppery sting of a fresh crush. I’d let Brian Fiander hold my wrists over my head against the brick wall of the dorm while he kissed me; his hips thrusting with a lost, intent zeal, the dawn sky as pale and grainy as sugar. Brian Fiander knew what he was doing. The recognition of his expertise made my body ting and smoulder. My waking thought: I have been celebrated.
I felt logy and grateful. Also sophisticated. I’d had an orgasm, though I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know that’s what that was. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d said the word out loud, though I’d read about it. I believed myself to be knowledgeable on the subject. I’d closed my eyes while Brian touched me and what I’d felt was like falling asleep, except in the opposite direction and at alarming speed: falling awake. Wildly alert. Falling into myself.
I made my way down the corridor to the showers, the stink of warming Spaghetti-Os wafting from the kitchenette. Wavy Fagan passed me in her cotton candy slippers and she smirked. I had a crowbar grin; his hand on my breast, slow, sly circles. Wavy smirked and I knew: Oh that’s what that was .
The showers were full of fruity mist. Brenda Parsons brushing her teeth. Her glasses steamed. She turned toward me blindly, mouth foaming toothpaste. She had been going out with Brian Fiander.
We can see anything that’s coming long before it arrives, and nothing’s coming. The highway rolls in the sulky haze of midafternoon and Melody and I are eternally stuck to the side of it. The night before comes back in flickers. A glass smashing, swimming spotlights, red, blue. Hands, buttons. The truck, when it appears, is a lisping streak, there and not there as it dips into the valleys. A black truck parting the quivering heat. A star of sunlight reaming the windshield.
I say, Do I stick my thumb out or what?
I’ll do the thinking, says Melody. She ties the jean jacket around her waist in a vicious knot. We don’t hitch but the truck pulls over. I run down the highway and open the door. Melody stays where she is, she just stands, smoking.
My friend is coming, I say. I climb up onto the bouncy seat. The guy is a hunk. A happy face on his sweatshirt. Smokey sunglasses. Brian Fiander barely crosses my mind. Brian is too willing and skinny; he’s unworthy of me.
This guy tilts the rearview mirror and puts his hand over the stick shift, which vibrates like the pointer of a Ouija board. He has a wedding ring but he can’t be more than twenty. A plain gold band. The fine hair on his fingers is blonde and curls over the ring, catching the light, and I almost lean toward him so he will touch my cheek with the back of his hand.
I’ve had too much sun, may still be drunk from the night before. Is that possible? I experience a glimmer of clairvoyance as convincing as the smell of exhaust. I close my eyes and the shape of the windshield floats on my eyelids, bright violet with a chartreuse trim. I know in an instant and without doubt that I will marry, never be good with plants, suffer incalculable loss that almost, almost tips me over, but I will right myself, I will forget Melody completely but she will show up and something about her as she is now — her straight defiant back in the rearview mirror — will be exactly the same. She’ll give me a talisman and disappear as unexpectedly as she came.
Melody is still standing with her cigarette, holding one elbow. She’s looking down the road, her back to us, the wind blowing a zigzag part in her hair. A faint patch of sweat on her pink shirt like a Rorschach test between her shoulder blades.
She finally drops the cigarette and crushes it with her sneaker. She walks toward the truck with her head bent d
own, climbs up beside me, and pulls the door shut. She doesn’t even glance at the driver.
Skoochie over, she says. My arm touches the guy’s bare arm and I feel the heat of his sunburn, a gliding muscle as he puts the truck in gear.
We all set, the guy asks.
We’re ready, I say. There’s a pine-tree air freshener, a pouch of tobacco on the dash, an apple slice to keep it fresh, smells as pristine as the South Pole. It’s going to rain. Melody changes the radio station, hitting knots of static. The sky goes dark, darker, darker, and the first rumble is followed by a solid, thrilling crack. A blur of light low and pulsing. The rain tears into the pavement like a racing pack of whippets. Claws scrabbling over the top of the cab. Livid grey muscles of rain.
Melody and I are working on math in my dorm room. She kisses me on the mouth. Later, for the rest of my life, while washing dishes, jiggling drops of rain hanging on the points of every maple leaf in the window, or in a meeting when someone writes on a flowchart and the room fills with the smell of felt-tip marker — during those liminal non-moments fertile with emptiness — I will be overtaken by swift collages of memory. A heady disorientation, seared with pleasure, jarring. Among those memories: Melody’s kiss. Because it was a kiss of revelatory beauty. I realized I had never initiated anything in my life. Melody acted; I was acted upon.
I’m not like that, I say, gay or anything.
She smiles, No big deal. She twists an auburn curl around in her finger, supremely unruffled. Aplomb. She’s showing me how it’s done.
I like you and everything, I say.
Relax, she says. She turns back to the math, engaging so quickly that she solves the problem at once.
