The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  That’s a blessing, she acknowledged, eyes flitting back and forth from mother-in-law to husband. Corinne and Bruce must have done something right. The saving grace of copulation had mixed up the genes. She watched Corinne demonstrating for Jake with her own knife. Just let him do it the way he wants to do it. Let them be who they are. Why was that so difficult? She was guilty, too. Sometimes she heard herself say, “Oh, you’re so good at drawing,” or whatever, and even the praise sounded bossy and instructive. She didn’t know how to let the boys be more free, though until her father died she herself had been free as a child, bicycling and skating and tobogganing through a landscape of almost endless parkland and sky and long afternoons with friends. Free of their parents, free of adults. Free. Would her sons remember any freedom? She feared not.

  The boys got up to take their plates to the island. Marcus snapped, “Jake, stop pushing me. I’m trying to put my plate up here.” Jake elbowed him. That was that. After abiding his grandmother politely throughout dinner, Marcus had reached the end of his patience. He pushed his plate onto the counter with a clatter, turned, and swiped a handful of lamb bones off Jake’s plate; they landed on the floor. Somehow Jake managed to hold onto the plate itself.

  “Marcus!” There it was again, a voice like a machine gun, her very own. “Pick those up right now!”

  “But Jake was pushing me! He kept sticking his elbow into me. I was just trying to find a space on—”

  “Please pick the bones up right now.”

  Jake was staring down at the floor, his lower lip pushed out. “Mom, I didn’t do it!”

  “I know you didn’t, dear, it’s all right,” she said. “Marcus. The bones please.”

  “No! He was pushing me and he never gets into trouble.” He looked at his brother with narrowed, hateful eyes. “You stupid little kid!”

  “Marcus! Apologize to your brother!”

  Andrew just sat there, saying nothing. Chewing his cud! When the kids misbehaved in front of his parents, he often pretended it wasn’t happening. Eliza had to handle it. Didn’t she?

  Sneering at Jake, Marcus sauntered past his father, his grandparents and his mother. He was aimed for the staircase near the front of the house. She knew he wanted to go upstairs and watch TV.

  At least Bruce had stopped talking about the uselessness of the current mayor of Toronto. That was a blessing. Eliza said, “We don’t throw food on the floor. No TV without picking up the bones and apologizing to your brother.”

  She heard him take a sharp right, away from the stairs and into the front vestibule. Everyone heard a susurrus of coats, the thunk of boots. “Andrew?” Eliza said.

  “Marcus,” Andrew said through a mouthful of food, “could you please come back here and just do what your mom asked you to do?” He wielded a half-cleaned bone in his own hand; a moment later, he bit into the remaining meat with gusto. Marcus yelled, “Only if Jake says sorry to me, too!” Then he muttered loudly, as if to himself, “Where’s my other boot?”

  Jake cried, “I didn’t even do anything!” Corinne sat up straighter and put her hands in her lap, prissily, back to her old self. Both she and Bruce believed their grandchildren were overindulged. That was rich, considering how undisciplined they were about spending Andrew’s money. Eliza tried to find her husband’s eye, but he was busy with the kale salad. He served himself a dark green scoop of it and said to his father, “Have you tried this, Dad? Eliza marinates it with lemon overnight, so it softens up. Delicious.”

  Fine, if that was his contribution to disciplining their child. There wasn’t going to be a big scene. No screaming, no yelling. She ignored the son who was running away from home and turned to the one standing by the island. “Jake, don’t worry about it.”

  “I don’t have to pick the bones up?”

  “Only if you want to. As a favour to me.”

  Though he obliged her and tossed the bones into the sink, one by one, he said in a constricted voice, “I didn’t throw anything on the floor. Marcus did it. On purpose.” It was an expression he had just learned.

  “I know. Thank you for being helpful. I appreciate it. Do you want dessert now or later?”

  The offended expression transformed into a big smile. “Now!”

  From the front vestibule, Marcus yelled, “I’m running away from home.” It was one of his favourite threats.

  Bruce glanced toward the front of the house; Corinne gazed at Eliza. They did not look at Andrew, who put another forkful of kale in his mouth; his big lantern jaws pumped obliviously. I am married to a cow, Eliza thought. To Jake, she said, “Come and sit down, honey, I’ll get your dessert.” She rose from the table. “Marcus, if you run away from home, you will not get to have apple pie and ice cream. But if you come in here and say thank you to your brother for picking up the bones, you can have your dessert. You decide.”

  He yelled, “Apple pie is disgusting. I’m never eating it again. I’m leaving. For real.”

  “Okay. Goodbye, honey.” She smiled at Bruce. “May I take your plate? You don’t have to eat the kale.” He blustered about how good it was, then let her lift the plate and uneaten salad away from him. Eliza glared at Andrew before taking a few other plates to the kitchen island to add to the expansive array of cooking implements, bowls of sauce, pots, cutting boards and leftover appetizers. Eliza looked over the mess. In magazines, the kitchen island was always spotless, pristine. It must have been invented by a man, for it bore the mark of male delusion: a clear surface in a family kitchen. She said aloud, “No man is an island cleaner.”

  The front door opened. Slammed shut.

  Sometimes Marcus faked his own exit and hung around to hear what his parents were saying about him. But no sounds filtered back into the dining room; he was gone. She glanced out the large kitchen window into the backyard; it was dark out there. Eliza served Jake his apple pie and ice cream. “Corinne, Bruce, would you like some, too?” Bruce, she knew, would eat a big piece; Corinne would have nothing.

  Andrew stood up to fetch his father’s and his own dessert and sat down again. Corinne asked Eliza, “Don’t you think it’s a little late for him to be out on his own?”

  Busy scraping leftovers off a plate, Eliza asked her own question without looking up. “Corinne, I do think it’s too late. What do you think, Andrew?”

  She knew this would piss him off. He snapped at his mother, though the bite was meant for Eliza. “Just relax. He’s not going anywhere. He’ll be back in five minutes. No wonder he’s stir-crazy, all this pick-pick-picking. No wonder he wants to run away from home.” Andrew plunged his fork into the piece of pie that Eliza had set down beside his dinner plate.

  Eliza and Corinne exchanged a comradely glance. Men. Eliza shrugged. “Andrew thinks I’m too controlling.”

  “Eliza, that’s not what I think. But the kid has a big personality. He needs space, instead of adults always pushing back at him so hard. So he threw something on the floor. It’s no big deal. It doesn’t have to become a huge—”

  The high screech of brakes shot through the front window of the house. It seemed to go on and on, sounding in Eliza’s inner ear long after she dropped the plate in her hand, raced to the front door and out of it in her stocking feet. She leapt down the steps. Andrew and Bruce and Corinne were still rising from their chairs as she was high-stepping over the bank of ice and slush, leaping into the street from behind the tall parked van. She was dazzled by the glare of headlights. Like her son, she didn’t look; she just ran out from behind the big vehicle that had been sitting there for days, blocking their view. It hid a child completely, especially a petulant child who was looking back at the house he’d left, not at the road in front of him.

  Marcus was in a crumpled pile in front of the car, his arm and his head underneath the front bumper. She saw his blue and red Spiderman boots. The driver’s door was already open, a person rising out of the car like a ghost, floating toward her, but she couldn’t see into the headlights and she didn’t care. She had
already dropped down and said his name into the freezing air, afraid to touch him.

  Icy slush soaked through her socks, her jeans, soaking her knees and shins. Everything she had ever done in her life had led to this moment, and it was wrong. Everything had been wrong and here was its issue: the child in the road, headlights shining above him. He was curled away from her. She had to turn him over. But maybe she shouldn’t move him. She found her voice but was afraid to look at his face. “Marcus, Marcus!”

  The small body rolled of its own volition; she jumped. His face was unmarked; his eyes opened and fastened onto and into Eliza’s like the day he was born, when the nurse had laughed and said a newborn can’t focus; but she knew he saw her. And now he saw her and only then started crying in a way she had never heard before, low-toned, short cries, as though he was trying to say something but couldn’t. He’s been hit, she thought again, his head, he can’t speak. The young man from the car knelt down beside Eliza and raised his voice over Marcus’s weird keening. “I didn’t hit him. I’m sure I didn’t hit him. I stopped in time. The car didn’t touch him, I would have felt it.”

  As though to confirm these words, Marcus cried, “Mommy!” Then Andrew was there, too, bending down, asking him to move. “Does it hurt? Did the car hit you?”

  “I don’t know,” Marcus said, and began to sit up. Andrew lifted him off the road then, and Eliza stood up, too, her hand still on his head. The young man had stopped talking but he was there, waiting. It wasn’t dark out at all, with the headlights, the streetlights. She saw him so clearly, clean-shaven, dark-haired, his soft, youthful face altered, marred by fear. With an odd formality he shook her hand. Eliza thanked him, which seemed paltry, Thank you for not running over my son, so she stepped forward and hugged him, briefly, a small woman’s bear hug. She felt it go through her, his tremor; his shoulders and back were shaking, his teeth chattered above her ear. Another car came up behind his now. The driver, unaware of the nature of the gathering in the middle of the road, laid on the horn. The young man hurried back to his car and drove away with his excellent twenty-four-year-old reflexes, his 20/20 vision, his tendency, irritating to his friends, to drive conservatively, a habit that would never leave him now.

  Eliza pulled Marcus out of Andrew’s arms and carried him into the house herself; she needed to hold his intact body, to keep him in her arms even as she scolded him for leaving the house, for not looking, for not being careful.

  He stopped crying soon enough, snuggled up with her on the sofa, almost too big for her lap. “Mommy,” he said, timorously. Andrew, Bruce and Corinne were there, too, and Jake, who had stood at the door with his grandparents and still didn’t fully understand what had happened. “Mommy,” Marcus said, “I’m sorry I threw the bones.” Then he remembered who he was supposed to apologize to. “Jake, I’m sorry. Mommy, can I still have my dessert? Please.”

  16

  Domination

  AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, CORINNE WAS MERGING, nervously, onto Highway 401, the boys were asleep, and Eliza stood at the sink with a sponge in her hand. She’d turned up the volume on the radio to hear the news above her dishwashing. Hundreds of thousands of people across the Middle East and North Africa were in the streets, demanding political reform.

  Eliza frowned at the burnt-on potatoes as the report moved from the reporter’s excited voice—Here in the square, tens of thousands of ordinary people from all walks of life have come together—to the people shouting slogans in Arabic. The oldest, most entrenched regimes in the Arab world were changing, hopefully for the better. Could anything be worse than the dictators? Yet the sound of this good news frightened her. Eliza’s only phobia was large crowds, getting crushed by a throng of people. That’s why she did her Christmas shopping in November; even a busy mall put her in a cold sweat. She didn’t know how the diminutive reporter, Adele Tabrizi, did her job.

  The voices surged into the dining room. Tabrizi was recorded, somehow, speaking over them. She was the foreign correspondent for the public broadcaster’s TV channel; the sister radio station often borrowed voice footage for important international news. Andrew was probably watching her right now upstairs on the TV. Eliza could see her pale face, the dark, curly hair pulled back. Eliza had been following her for years, and especially in the last few months, as she bounced from North Africa to Oman to Egypt to Syria, back to Egypt, describing the relentless engine of change that had turned over with a fruit cart in Tunisia and was still roaring through the Middle East.

  Eliza scraped rib bones into the compost bucket as snapshots of Marcus flipped through her mind: in the bathtub, perfect in his nakedness. Fighting with his brother at dinner. His body prone on the road, head under the car’s bumper. His ribs were thicker, now, than these lamb bones. She snatched one of them out of the compost and felt its texture, tested its strength under her thumbs, as though trying to snap a thick twig. But she didn’t want to break it. It reminded her of their wedding feast—whole roast kid. Turned on a spit in Thalassa’s courtyard. One of her Greek suppliers and his brother had pried up a few flagstones, dug a trench and sat there all morning, turning the souvla by hand.

  This evening, too, she had eaten from the body of a young animal, torn the flesh off its bones. She liked eating meat, always had. She had learned how to cut up freshly slaughtered lamb and goat at Aphrodite’s, the restaurant on the island. Aphrodite. It was a common name for women there, without silly overtones. It was Aphrodite, the woman who ran the eponymous restaurant, who showed her how to feed two hundred people a night with unfailingly delicious food.

  The bone snapped under her thumbs. She saw Marcus sitting in the tub, sucking in his belly, each rib visible. The air whisked cleanly out of her lungs for a few seconds and she gasped to bring it back.

  If the driver had been going too fast. More ice. Bald tires. Even here, a peaceful city, with a hospital straight down Bathurst Street, she could not have saved her son from the force of impact. Her stomach churned; she literally felt sick with relief. With luck, blind, unknowable luck, so good, so harsh. Parents the world over had just lost a child.

  If Marcus had been hit. Her thought braked there, over and over. Instead of crying, she became furious at Andrew. Though it wasn’t his fault. But he was so passive. After turning off the water, Eliza dried her hands quickly and aimed the remote control at the radio, silencing the world.

  The next moment her phone buzzed. She glanced around. There: her leather bag slumped on the writing desk. She crossed the room and dug out the phone.

  Hello swimmer. Was unexpectedly out of town this wk.

  Home again! You free tonight, quick drink?

  Though it was the message she’d been waiting for, it did not please her. This woman expects me to drop everything, just like that, and rush out to see her? Oh, sure, baby, whatever you want. She threw the phone back into her bag and returned to the sink. She wasn’t going to leave those last pots; she was going to clean them. Fucking things. Those burnt-on potatoes; that lamb grease. Cleaning, in the end, was domination. A brief, unsatisfying domination. They should make deposed dictators do it: life sentences of washing floors, toilets, the constant dirt of human life. For a few minutes, the only sound in the kitchen was the cratch-cratch-cratch of the metallic sponge. She rinsed out the last pot and flipped it over on the counter.

  Why was she doing the dishes? To go upstairs to fight with Andrew, she had to pass the small desk, their bill and junk table. With her bag still on it, with her work iPad, makeup bag, bulging wallet and phone. A woman was hiding in her handbag. Sure, a word from you and I will come running like a dog.

  Disgusted, she dropped the steel wool in the sink and took her first step away from the island. It was a gauntlet, to move along the table, walk past the chairs, the desk, away from the Amazon. But she triumphed, placing her foot on the bottom step of the staircase. She rose up the stairs, almost floating, the way heroines do. It was easy.

  17

  The Silk Route

 
SHE LOST HER NERVE AT THE STREET WHERE SHE USUALLY turned right to go to the studio. Pulled over and sat blinking in the icy air. She had told Andrew the truth: the revision of that wedding proposal was driving her crazy. And she often slipped out at night, when the studio was backlogged, and put in a few hours. She was on her third try, flowers, candles, table configuration, the whole scheme. Mrs. Minta, mother of the bride, just kept saying no. Her money gave her veto power. The official wedding planner was equally exasperated; she had called Eliza twice, mostly to vent. “How can the woman be against twenty different varieties of roses? Who is against roses?” Eliza answered, “It’s not the flowers. It’s the wedding. She doesn’t want her daughter to marry the guy.” That was also true. Meaning that Eliza might reconfigure the proposal and lay it all out again—different flowers, different tableware, taller candles, which were a fire-code nightmare—and Mrs. Minta could still reject it.

  Thinking of all that work, gone to waste again, made her put the car in gear and drive straight south, to Queen Street.

  —

  It was as dark as a movie theatre. She had forgotten bars, except for the pub up the street from their house, where they sometimes took the kids for french fries and hamburgers. This was not that kind of place. You would never bring a kid in here.

  The Silk Route. Deep plush divans were tucked into the corners. The Amazon was not sitting on any of them. I’ll get used to the dark, Eliza thought, trying to keep her breathing steady. My eyes will adjust. She began to notice the carpets on the walls, a couple of pieces of elaborate jewellery hung in shadow boxes.