The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore

by Lisa Moore

You’re so shy, I say, this Contact thing is so.

  It’s about right for me, she says. It’s just about my speed.

  We walk along Queen and a man on crutches offers Lily daffodils. His eyes watery, knuckles on the handles, leaning forward.

  I bought these for you, he says.

  Let me give you some money. She has taken out a coin purse and ten dollars.

  I wouldn’t take a penny, he says. I couldn’t take it from you. I could not. I absolutely. Those flowers are a gift. He puts the money in his pocket.

  He says, What’s your name?

  Lily.

  Lily. This money is going to Sick Kids’. That’s where your money’s going. I want you to know. We walk away and Lily turns and waves to him. She waves goodbye with the daffodils, and puts her face in them.

  We got some flowers anyway, she says. Her nose reddens and a gleaming line of tears. But she forces her eyes wide so they don’t fall and she bursts into laughter.

  It’s just that it could be my father. Or any one of us.

  Lily. You shouldn’t be allowed out.

  Lily’s husband, Marco, is a physics professor. I have always hugged Marco without a second thought. There’s no question. There has never been a warmer guy. Sitting at his computer, halo of grey hair. Clicking. He tells me about gravity.

  We don’t know if it’s instantaneous, or does it propagate through space like electricity. If God puts this here. He swivels in his chair and places his cup.

  I say, God, but there is no God.

  As you know, there is no God. We are talking about a cup. How long does it take? He slides the cup to the edge of the table and almost lets it fall. Lily gives him a piece of bread covered with butter. Puts it down on the side table. Marco stands, stretches.

  Baby, he says. He takes her face in his hands.

  This girl, he says, can you believe this girl?

  I thought there was a given amount of matter, I say. I thought if something disappeared from this side of the world it would show up on the other side, drawn by gravity. I imagine Jeremy in Trafalgar Square, putting his suitcase down, the fountains, children with bright, unbuttoned coats, the double-decker buses. He’s just standing.

  Marco has already sat back down. The bread and butter will go untouched for a long time. He is almost lost to the computer. But he swivels. My ignorance bewilders him. A given amount of matter? His eyebrows, his eyes.

  No, he says, this goes on all the time. Matter gets changed into energy. You didn’t know?

  How easy it is for me to forget the cold facts. Energy, grammar. I like it loosey-goosey. I like the fact of Marco. The fact of Lily. But mostly there are no facts worth counting on. I don’t like to think someone can hug you goodbye, that he can disappear in a crowd. I don’t like that people go away, or worse, I might forget them. Cling, goddamn it.

  Jeremy, I’m at a pay phone on Bloor, listen, if you’re there could you just —

  Hellllooooo.

  Jeremy. You’re there.

  Jeremy! He sits. I stand. We stand and I hug him. My cheek on his chest. Some snazzy shirt. If I’m going to do this hugging thing. I don’t let go. That’s the way they do it in Toronto. He’s been up here long enough, he’ll be used to it. I hug and hug. I feel all his bones, his shoulder blade. He does not pat my back in the way that means a fine, over-now-though hug. Rather, he accepts the hug expertly. Perhaps he has always been able to hug. Maybe all of my friends. The Contact dancer laying her hands on my hips and drawing me up from the floor, lifting me onto her shoulder.

  I say, I thought we were getting Vietnamese.

  We’re not staying here?

  No, I want to eat Vietnamese.

  You look good. Do I? But your coffee? I’m done. It’s. No. It’s so great to see you. So, I’ll take you. You said a place on Spadina. We said, didn’t we? You do, are you good? I’m good, yes, I’m yes. But you’re not good, you’re sad. I’m sad, he says. I’m sad but I’m good. I’ll fix you up, I say, let me tell you what I think you should do. Tell me, he says.

  I never believe Jeremy’s eyes are green. I believe that’s an affectation he cultivates. Or in a certain light. But it’s true. Today. Alive in his face. The whole street, octopus, mussels, dolls in plastic wrap. I pick up my chopsticks and he picks up his. I know him inside out and I know he doesn’t know how to use chopsticks. I know him, this guy. Everything. He picks them up while looking into my eyes. He’s bluffing. He picks them up without thinking. Snaps them. A man the world sparkles for, or on account of. What if something should ever happen to him? Unpeeling my forearms from the warm plastic tablecloth. The sun cuts across my neck, the blind halfway. We are the only white people.

  You order for me, I say. He tells me what he’s ordering. But I’m not listening, just watching him, the waiters behind, a jug of water, a woman with a lime green ribbon in her shiny, straight black hair.

  Red Dragon, Dragon Star, Dragon’s Claw, some fruit the name of which I can’t remember. He gave me an exotic fruit for my birthday two years ago. Always something I’ve never tasted before. Cut it open on a wooden board, the flesh such a shocking fuchsia, so vibrant against the waxy green peel. I wouldn’t eat it because I thought I was pregnant. The spikes. Passed my plate on. He was disappointed. Still, it reminded me of the beach at Cow Head, vibrant colour. The men getting out of the ocean, naked, way down the beach. The wind trying to rip away their white towels. Stella and I at the coin-operated telescope, training on a ship.

  My husband yelling, Hey, get that thing away from us. Jeremy, the girls are trying to peek.

  Stella yelling back, Listen you guys, looks to me like you could do with a little magnification. You know what I’m saying?

  A sailor on the deck dressed in white. He raises his arm, tentative. Shimmering. The boys have walked, dressed now. They are near. I hear them, and a metal eyelid falls over the gorgeous blue. Our quarter’s worth. Step back from the eyepiece. Towels around their necks. We ate lobster in the Cow Head restaurant with the big window, linen napkins. Our cheeks sunburned, sneakers full of sand. Mussels, alive, alive oh. The sun went down and the room turned vibrant red.

  Things I’ve never tasted before. Wrapped in brown paper, dripping. What haven’t I eaten, ever? Tripe. Brain. Once on a beach in Morocco with my husband and a French couple. She wore a white scarf, the wind fluttered, there was a bonfire, a bucket of fish. A table, there on the beach, a checkered cloth. The Frenchman lifted out the spine of my fish with one motion. His wife’s gold earring shot out light. You will not find a single bone, the Frenchman said. As though this kind of thoroughness was exquisite. Something we could strive to achieve. I want to be that couple still, fourteen years later. I want to be French, on the beach in all that wind. Fresh fish still panting in a galvanized bucket with a skim of water, the shiny blue eye reflecting sky, cloud. The table on the sand, the sharp knife opening the fish, the gentle tugging until the spine parts from the flesh, intact. Ocean.

  My husband is tall, big bones. I like the large bones, he has substance, sleeping beside me. He can ward things off. How committed he is to his sleep. The ringing chink of the weights he brings together over his chest while lying on the living-room floor. The abandon with which he flings himself into whatever he does. Hard to get along with when he’s working. Peculiar about meat. His grasp. He knows everything, everything. He exhausts me. Makes me shake with anger, slobber with tears. Grey long johns he got second hand. I think, perhaps an affair in Berlin last year. Never losing his temper: he doesn’t believe in it. A temper is something you choose to lose, he says. You decide. Then the extravagance with which he loses his temper: You have never watered a plant in your life, have you? Have you? Screaming: You’ve never watered a fucking plant in your entire life. We ate wild boar in a French village, the lavender in the fields. A big table, a dinner party, and we were looking at each othe
r, each tasting boar for the first time. The world goes canny and alien, and you both experience it. Succulent, earthy, unnameable boar.

  Your bike?

  We’ll leave it.

  Jeremy claps his gloves in front of him. One smack.

  So, how about green tea ice cream? We’ll go somewhere else.

  He stops on the corner of Bloor and Spadina, he seems to have lost his sense of direction entirely.

  Now, we are where?

  Spadina, I say. This is Spadina. And you’re doing okay, I say. I make one eyeball fierce. It’s the best I can do since I’m so short beside him. Give him an eyeball. I got this eye from my father. Also a short person.

  The strangest thing I ever ate was with Stella. Two Panamanians once made us a grey stew with pigs’ hocks, which are ankles, essentially, and a slow, bouncing, naked onion, roiling in the glass pot on the stove top. Did we sleep with them, the Panamanians? Of course we did, that was love too. Cartilage, a couple of carrots. So hot my nose, my eyes. Whatever spices they used. So hot I became new. Try that.

  After the ice cream on Spadina I watch Jeremy walk into the crowd. It’s the last time I will ever see him.

  THE STYLIST

  The stylist stands behind you and leans in. She scrunches your hair in her fists, testing bounce. She lifts it to the sides like wings, tugging her fingers through the snags.

  She says, What’s the idea here?

  The idea is I want to look good.

  You want a change, she says. Your husband left you. Your husband left you. Your husband left you.

  Uncross your legs, she says. You adjust your posture. She spreads her hands on your shoulders, meets your eyes in the mirror.

  Now listen, you’ll have to sit up straight.

  You have hunched since competitive diving at the Aquarena when you were twelve and grew breasts. Your bathing suit, the frosty green of the old Ford. The green of leaves covered with short silver hair, lucent grapes. You wore this bathing suit every day after school. The chlorine wearing the lycra thin, fading the sheen. When the bathing suit was wet your nipples were visible. The colour of your nipples.

  You hunch your shoulders. You aren’t like the older girls whose breasts are a fact.

  Your breasts are tender, a rumour, the beginning of a long story, a page-turner. It’s the worst when you’re speaking with your coach. The bathing suit transparent as the skin of a grape you peel with your teeth.

  The lineup for the ladder is the worst. Long enough for the warm lights to make the beads of water on your arms creep to a standstill, chlorine tingles your skin. Under the water nobody can see your nipples. Diving practice enchants you. You fall asleep as soon as you get home. Asleep before the soaps, drooling on the cushion. Over your fried eggs and beans, the ketchup screaming on the white plate.

  This is what the table looks like: placemats with illustrations of a fox hunt. Red riding jackets, top hats, hounds. A silver water pitcher, greasy with condensation. An ashtray with a smoking cigarette. Your father’s empty chair. His placemat, without the cutlery. Your mother is likely to cry. She cries every night. Sometimes while watching the news, sometimes over supper. These are her specialties: sweet-and-sour ribs with tears, spaghetti with tears, steak, baked potato, tears. Mom, hold the tears.

  This is what you see out the window: hideous icicles, a row of fangs. You dream you kiss your coach.

  A kiss so ripe and desperate, nothing else will ever come close.

  He kisses you and cups his hand under your chin and one of your front teeth drops into his open palm. Blood seeps from the fleshy hole. You know at once it isn’t a baby tooth. Now you must go through life like this. Icicles crash from the eaves.

  In the morning you run your tongue and run your tongue. Your mother and you live in the mouth of winter, waterlogged. The sky is a ravenous mink, the spruce trees raking its wet fur underbelly. You have become enchanted. Your coach lifting weights in the chrome gym, wiping his glistening neck with a white towel, rolling his shoulders, sweat in his eyelashes. He lies on his back, a leg on either side of the black vinyl bench. The leg of his shorts gapes and you see the white perforated cotton inside and the bulge of his penis, pubic hair. You have never seen. This is something else. Something else again. When he stands up the foggy print of his sweat in the vinyl, his spine, his shoulder blades like the wings of a dragonfly. Rank gym, feet, the iron smell of clanking weights, chlorine, boiling hotdogs from the hot air vent, the tangy liniment. The slap of his hand against his wet neck. The smell of his liniment. Like laundry dried in the wind and licorice, coniferous.

  How fickle the water is. You slip in from a great height and the blush in your cheeks cools. The water unzippers your new-girl body, your breasts, the hunch. The water peels you. The saddest thing you’ve ever seen is the back of your father’s green Ford raising clouds of dust that make the alders unshiny. The saddest thing is that Ford turning the corner.

  Or the pool rises up in a fist and mangles your face.

  A month ago you blackened both your eyes. They swelled shut. Two plums sitting neat. Sockets like eggcups. A blow so stunning it seemed ordained. The fangs snapped shut. Mink savaging the hind leg of a cloud. Your mother kneeling near your head on the concrete.

  Next we’ll see the macaroni, she says.

  You vomit chlorine and macaroni. Where has she come from? She was supposed to be at work. How long have you been out? She would have had to come across the city. The back of her hand on your cheek. She would have had to know without being told.

  But here you are again, toes curled over the edge of the ten-metre board. It’s warm up here because you’re near the lights. You’re in the rafters. Far away, at the other end of the Aquarena, an aerobics class.

  Your coach could turn on the bubbles. No matter what, it will be okay if he turns on the bubbles, which cost money, which aren’t allowed at the Nationals, which make the water as welcoming as whipped cream.

  He wants to see a triple.

  You want the bubbles but you don’t ask. You are in love, the black Trans Am with a flame that bursts over the hood, the megaphone. He’s sitting in a canvas chair by the side of the pool and he’s wearing black flip-flops with red plastic flowers. He speaks to you.

  Shoulders, he says. Although it’s a megaphone, his tone sounds bedroomy. He calls you by your last name.

  Fo cus Malone.

  It’s strange, but you are very good at diving. You are the youngest on the provincial team. You will go to the Nationals. You have come to suspect you can do absolutely anything. It’s intoxicating, this glimmer of your will. The pool crunches your ribs like a nutcracker, the board nicks your shin, unspooling a ribbon of blood in the water, a love tap on the left shoulder so you can’t lift your arm.

  Or the pool plays dead. It doesn’t matter, you keep doing it. Doing begets doing. You could go on like this forever.

  You unhunch. It’s a magic trick, the triple. The action doesn’t happen until it’s over. It happens in the future and you catch up. A triple is déjà vu. Trusting the untrustable.

  The key: give yourself over/over/over.

  The stylist reams a finger around your cape collar, loosening. Takes a steel comb, flicks it against her hipbone. You are thirty-four and you’ve been to a stylist a handful of times. Maybe six, not ten.

  She says, That length is doing nothing for you.

  She whips your swivel chair: slur of mirror, porcelain, chrome, fluorescent nettles stick themselves to the glass. Droning hair dryers, running water, phones.

  The stylists talk. A mazey, elliptical daisy chain of talk. They adhere to nothing. Vacation packages, electric toothbrushes, blind dates. (He’s got to be kidding: coffee . Going for coffee equals death . Night skiing, spritzers, bowling, sea-kayaking, I’m like, Okay. Let’s go . But coff
ee? He’s kidding, right?) They are the experts on every topic. Hair is a mild distraction. Hair happens.

  She flicks the steel comb and it whirs near her hip. She’s drawing a conclusion.

  Your hair: upkeep, damage, regrowth, definition, product, lifestyle, frost, frizz, product, streaks, foils, body, cut. Where you’re a small person. Where you’ve got a round face.

  Outside, the storm slows traffic like a narcotic. You haven’t seen a winter like this since. The equipment is breaking down. Bring in the army, they’re saying. At night the snowplows crash into the drifts and stagger backward like dazed prizefighters. The windshields have bushy eyebrows. Cars stuck on the hills, smoking tires, engines squealing like dolphins. You haven’t seen anything like this since you were a kid. You and your mother, the icicles, the lake catching over, the wind circling the glassy trees like a wet finger tracing a crystal rim. Her sleeping pills, the alarm clock blaring near her ear. Stumbling from your room at dawn to wake her so she can drive you to diving practice. The smell of chlorine in your skin always, your hair.

  You like your driveway to be scraped down to the pavement since your husband left you. You get out there early every Saturday morning. The children watch from the living-room window. Your little daughter taps the glass. She waves. Your son puts his lips against the glass in a big gummy kiss.

  The hospital room zings. Your husband says he wants a smoke. His forehead is gleaming, his eyebrows raised. He’s feral, acute with stillness. His hazel eyes, flecks of rust, hair white as a fresh sheet of paper. He’s socking one fist gently into his open palm.

  You breathe. The minute hand reverberates each time it moves, a twang . You wait, wait for it, wait. The minute hand moves. Your mother lays an icy towel on your forehead. A drop of water moves down your temple and into your ear. The moving drop is exquisite in every way. The contraction recedes. The nurse is driving a spaceship in her sleep. She’s gripping the arms of the chair, leaning slightly forward, snoring.

  Go have your smoke, you say. Nothing’s happening yet.