Suitable Precautions

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This book is for Larry Garber, as promised.

T
RY THE MUSHROOMS, he says. They're barbecued in their own juices. There are people eating the mushrooms, holding their cocktail napkins like offerings. Yes, their own juices, one of the women says, touching her fingertips to her chest in a way that makes me reconsider grilled vegetables. The walkway is crowded and people turn to slide past one another, chest to chest, as they edge over to the girl with wine-stained lips who asks, Red or white? and then looks at you disapprovingly if you reach into the ice-filled garbage can and fish around for a beer. Or maybe she only looks that way if you dry your hand on her tablecloth when you think she isn't looking. But we are all friends here, and so what is a little impropriety among friends? The plastic sheeting canopy protects us, even though there is nothing but sunlight falling from the sky, and in the cozy haze of not-yet-dusk we meet each other again and again and for the first time and say, by way of introduction, How is it that you know Mary? And have you tried the mushrooms?

You look beautiful, someone says to someone else. And it must be true because there can be no lies on a patio where people are whole-face laughing about a punch line that goes, But I thought you were writing a novel! I look around to make certain, and sure enough we are beautiful. Even the man in the rumpled brown suit who is spilling his glass of wine is beautiful. He pinballs around the party, bumping into chairs and bouncing off elbows, veering towards a woman with a short skirt and particularly freckled legs. I am a poet, he tells her, emphasizing the “am.” Yes, I believe you, the woman says. She says it with the sort of kindness that only ever comes from concerned strangers and friends who have seen you naked. The poet sloshes a few drops of wine onto her legs. The spots blend with her freckles.

And because there are no lies here, I almost believe it when a man says to me, Don't I know you from somewhere? I know I've seen you before. And he seems so sure that without even really meaning to I say, Yes, I believe you. My one small lie, if it is one, goes unnoticed on the patio, what with the sun having nearly set and our shadows looking alike and blending together. Maybe that is the source of the confusion, if there is any. This new familiarity breeds conversation between me and the man who knows me from somewhere. Quickly we make intimate exchanges of shadow space and pheromones and business cards. When we are done, he asks me, Have you had anything to eat yet? Because all I see are mushrooms. I can't think of anything to say except, I have to go to the bathroom. I say it with the indeterminate sort of kindness that comes from trying not to trip on uneven patio stones while intoxicated.

A sad-eyed woman sings on the stairs in the living room, accompanied on guitar by a man who sticks his tongue out
in concentration as he strums. They are in love it seems, even though she looks right at him when she sings, Did you ever go clear? When the song is done and we have clapped until the sad-eyed woman has kissed her guitar-strumming man, a poet who is not in a rumpled brown suit reads a poem that has a line in it about being so happy that sunshine shoots straight out of your asshole. You know it! shouts one woman, who is, luckily, sitting down. There is one more performer, and his story ends with the words, You can start running the bath—I'm coming home, which is a beautiful way for a love story to end, Mary says. The band fires up. The bagpipes are loud, but Mary has taken suitable precautions. And you would never know that Alec from next door only started playing tambourine tonight.

A man with a camera is photographing a woman's foot. The woman, happily flustered, has removed her shoes and pointed her toes with unexpected humility, five-alarm-red polish excepted. In some cultures, the man says as the shutter clicks, the feet are considered the most beautiful part of the body. Ankles, the woman says as she reties the laces of her espadrilles, are power. A man is dancing barefoot in the kitchen, probably because it seems the only decent thing to do under the circumstances, and I can see his ankles. They are hairy. The photographer does not seem interested. We collide in the kitchen, me and this dancing man, and he says to me, Promise that you will never watch where you are going. We laugh in time to the music. Excuse me, someone says as I am dipped by the dancing man, but you're blocking the sink.

A man in a Honk If You're Going To Hit Me t-shirt and cycling shoes is asleep on the couch. Mary is calling him a cab. I could use a whisky, a woman with a baby in her arms
says, and Alec, putting down the tambourine, knows a place. There are plans. We say to each other, It was a pleasure meeting you, as we try to find our jackets and handbags. We kiss each other on the cheek or on the mouth, depending on the precise level of our pleasure. One last wine glass is accidentally smashed in celebration. We realize that punctuation is everything. People stream through the front door, mouthing cigarette smoke into goodbyes and thank yous, and through the haze of all our exhalations we make our way to the street.

T
HE FIRST TIME ELLA MET CHARLIE he gave her the letter. She had just moved into the little blue house with flaking white trim and a leaky basement. She had looked all over the city at three-floor Victorians and coach houses in alleyways, bungalows built just after the war and sterile new condos, and the little blue house, though not her favourite, was what she was able to afford. It had a backyard with a garden and thick grape vines that separated her from the embankment where teenagers met to smoke cigarettes and drink beer they stole from their parents. The house had three bedrooms upstairs. The front one was small but sunny, just the right size for a crib and a rocking chair, perfect if Ella ever had a baby, her mother said. The kitchen came with a new stove and a fridge that had recently had its compressor fixed, and outside there was a wooden shed where Ella could lock up her bike for the winter and store potatoes when it got above zero. It was a good house, Ella thought, and so what did it matter if she heard the train through the single panes of glass at night?
“Thank God for train tracks,” Ella's father had said as he took the bank manager's pen. Ella was lucky. There was no question about that.

Ella was stacking boxes when the doorbell surprised her. She had tried the dented button the week before and it hadn't worked, so she had posted a sign for the movers that was still there, the Scotch tape cracking from the cold: Knock loudly. Yet there was the bell, chiming a metallic intrusion. Ella was struck by the newness of the old house and annoyed by everything she still didn't understand about it. Her real estate agent, a fat man who wore perfectly tailored suits, had said something about property taxes, something Ella had forgotten to write in her notebook, and her mail was still not being redirected from her old apartment. The only thing in her mailbox was a notice of an outstanding hydro bill in the name of Matilda Giacoma, but when Ella called the company hotline to explain that she was the new owner, Charlene the chatty service representative had asked for information Ella didn't have: what was her new account number and security password, did she like the new neighbourhood, and could Ella please spell her mother's maiden name? Ella had hung up the phone, ashamed she didn't know how to spell Wojnarowicz.

“I'm coming,” Ella shouted as the bell rang again and again, interrupting itself.

“Shovel,” the mailman on the front step said as Ella opened the door. He handed her a stack of letters, their yellow and black address labels stark against the whiteness of his unmittened hand. He almost looked young enough to have a mother who might still scold him for this. “I don't get paid to break my neck out here.”

Ella flipped through the mail. Junk offers and a puffy envelope from her grandmother. A belated birthday card, probably, with a five-dollar bill camouflaged in a stack of tissues. “I've been waiting a week for these.” Ella tried to sound indignant. “I paid thirty-six dollars for the redirection service.”

“Sometimes they collect a bit before we send them on,” the mailman shrugged, his jacket swishing. “Shovel your walk, lady. Then maybe you'll get your mail faster.”

Ella stood on the steps as he cut across her lawn to the next house, his boots punching holes in the pristine whiteness of her yard.

“I just moved in,” Ella called to his back, but he raised his arm and shook a pack of letters without turning around and Ella shut the door feeling lost. She didn't even own a shovel.

She put her grandmother's letter on the mantle and tossed the rest into a pile by the fireplace. A pale, creamy white envelope, lovely in a stark way, stuck out against the flyers. She had missed it before, perhaps because it was so small, hardly bigger than a deck of cards. She ran her fingers over the heavy paper, tracing the postmark.
Roma
. It was addressed to M. Giacoma.

Imagine, Ella thought, sending a letter all the way across the ocean only to have it arrive too late. She didn't know what to put on the envelope. “Return to sender” seemed vague and “Recipient deceased” too brutal. She thought about it for a moment before taking a pen out of her purse: “No longer at this address.”

The mailman was a jerk, Ella decided as she put the pen behind her ear and went back to work. She was tired of men
like that. Men with bad tempers and superiority complexes. Still, she made a plan to salt the walkway later in the afternoon and buy a shovel. But only if she found one on sale.

Ella balanced a box of old books on the stairs. One day she wanted to line the living room with heavy oak bookcases, organizing them according to her own secret system, but for now she only had one cheap bookshelf that had been damaged in the move—dropped out of the truck, the base of it cracked—and she didn't have the money to replace it right now. The books needed to go somewhere. It was depressing to see them in beaten-up liquor boxes in front of her fireplace. She was going to pay off her debts, have bookshelves and side tables and things on the walls. Paintings. She might take up painting. In the meantime, the front bedroom was empty and it might be a nice place to read, if she found a chair to put in there. I should check out the attic, Ella thought as she reached the landing. Maybe there was a chair in the attic. Even if there wasn't and it was just more empty space, it was still hers. She owned it.

The attic was supposed to be insulated and dry, good for storing Christmas lights and all kinds of other things she didn't own. Ella wasn't expecting the blackness of the old wallboards to be broken by a bright hole the size of an intrepid raccoon or an especially industrious squirrel. A small cascade of snow lined the hole while insulation spilled out of crevices and twisted around strips of newspaper that curled themselves into a balled up nest of the past. There was an ad from Sears: a picture of a woman in a blazer with wide shoulder pads and high-waisted pants; modern fashions for women, twenty percent off.