The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (18 page)

Louise: Why don't we unleash a primal battle screech, our friend is in flux for fuck's sake.

I think, Oh yes, it would be great to be Jessica. Let's all be Jessica, ready to burst into flame over an unpaid parking ticket. Ready, anyway, to sleep with the window washer who lowers himself to her office window on rope and pulley, blue overalls and cap, his powerful arms cutting slices of clarity through the soapy blur.

Fabulous, says Jessica.

We are very drunk now, it seems. Or I am, not used to
smoking, but Jessica has a bristling fixity. She flicks her wrist to look at her watch. I have to go downtown, she says.

But it's our dinner party. We haven't seen each other. We don't know how we've changed.

Her husband says, I'll come with you.

Jessica says, You have to relieve the babysitter.

I think, It's too late. I didn't do my part. I have forsaken the promises of our adolescence; hiding near the warm tires of parked cars while playing spotlight at dusk, holding still while curling irons burn our scalps, splashes of silver raining from the disco balls in the parish hall, mashed banana emollients, face scrubs with twigs and bits of apricot, ears pierced with an ice cube and sewing needle, and the disquieting loss of a belief in God. The saturated aura, a kinetic field of blue light, that surrounded a silent phone while we willed it to ring. Our periods. Dusk, all by itself, dusk, walking home from school after a volleyball game and the light withdrawing from the pavement. I look at my husband, I try to feel dissatisfied but I can't, he's a beautiful man.

Jessica's husband wants her to give him money for the babysitter but she won't. She's angry he didn't take care of it himself. The chink of a wine glass on the marble fireplace. Louise's boyfriend rises from his chair and sways a little, he moves across the room and pats Jessica on the head.

Patronizing bitch, he says.

Jessica grins. She unfurls a peel of giggles tinny as a dropped roll of tinfoil bouncing across the kitchen tiles. She picks up her
leather jacket and fires up the zipper. She grabs me by the shoulders, presses me into her big breasts. Then she holds me at arm's length.

You, she says, haven't changed a bit.

She moves to Louise, lifts her from the couch also by the shoulders, gives her a big hug.

She kisses her husband on both cheeks and hands him forty bucks.

She says, I love you, even at this moment.

She says to Louise's boyfriend, You, I'm not hugging.

She opens the French door and the window panes rattle.

Thank you so much, it was lovely.

The front door slams behind her. We each sit up a little, adjusting our posture, the draft from the front door sobering. Outside the dining-room window, we can hear her platform heels slapping the sidewalk, she has broken into a trot.

L
yle and Anna hardly speak on the way to the Ivanys' dinner party. At a red light on Empire, Anna asks him what he thinks the Ivanys will serve. Lyle says he doesn't know.

They drive past the graveyard. There's a group gathered in the dark, huddled near a canopy covering an open and empty grave. A woman on the edge of the group holds a fat bunch of yellow roses wrapped in plastic, the blossoms hanging down toward the mud. Anna can't think what they're doing in the graveyard at night. The roses are vibrant against the woman's black coat. They look like they're floating. An angel grave marker near the chainlink fence of the graveyard has snow on her wings and in her eye sockets, on her bottom lip. The chainlink is furred over with snow too. The woman with the roses speaks to the man beside her. He tilts an ear toward her.

Lyle pumps the brakes and the car slides sideways, the rear swinging like a boat pushed away from the dock. A Cadillac,
grey and graceful as a dolphin, plows nose first through a deep, curving drift on the opposite sidewalk. Anna throws her arm over and back, grabbing for Pete's car seat. Lyle stops just before they nudge the bumper in front of them. The light changes; they pass the graveyard.

Anna says, I know what I wish they were serving. I'd like a roast, a nice bloody hunk of meat.

Lyle says, That's probably what it'll be.

No, it won't, she says. She feels so tired that she just wants to go home. She's angry with Lyle because he's enthusiastic about the party. He's a herd of wild horses, he's already abandoned her. Thrumming the wheel with his leather-covered fingers. They haven't discussed who will stay sober, but it was decided long ago, perhaps when she discovered she was pregnant. He gets to drink; she doesn't. He rolls down the window and wipes the windshield with an old newspaper. Cold wind and snow blow through the car.

Some night, he says.

She flips open the makeup mirror in the sun visor to check on Pete. He's asleep, the snowsuit hood cupping his face, his tiny eyebrows bent with concentration.

He hasn't been sleeping much lately. It's an ear infection, or cutting teeth, Anna doesn't know why. Wait it out, the doctor said. But she and Lyle have aged more in the last three weeks than they have in the last twelve years. Last night, at two-thirty, Pete started to cry and Lyle threw off the blankets and just sat on the edge of the bed, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands covering his face. Anna waited for Lyle to move but he didn't.

I wanted to be doing other things at this stage in my life, he said.

What other things?

Sleeping, for one.

Anna felt for her glasses and put them on. Pete was standing in the crib, gripping the bars. Anna switched on the bedside lamp and she could see the lines of his tears shining in the bar of lamplight. Pete drew a deep breath, his body became rigid. He inhaled and there was absolutely no sound. His mouth wide open, his face getting redder and redder. Anna imagined the whole universe being sucked into his tiny body, she and Lyle, their eleven-year-old daughter, Alex, the telephone poles, grimy snowbanks, loose pennies, Christmas presents, the Atlantic, asteroids. Then it reversed. Pete tilted his head back and the world, ragged and inconsolable, came back out. She heard, from just below the bedroom window, a snowplow lowering its shovel, the arthritic grinding and ringing clang as the grizzled teeth of the plow hit the pavement, then the wheeze of brakes before the warning bell. The white blinds of their bedroom turning apocalyptic blue and underworld orange by turns. She hadn't expected to feel old.

Anna said, Are you going to do something here, Lyle?

Lyle didn't answer, so Anna got up and took Pete out of the cot. She switched on the overhead light.

What do you want me to do, Lyle asked. His hands had dropped from his face so they hung over his knees, but he didn't lift his head. He was looking at the floor. She told him to go back to sleep.

But what about you? He sounded genuinely baffled. He had never wanted children, any children, but once they came he tried to do his share. He found Pete's bottle in the blankets of the crib and went down the hall, stopping at his daughter's bedroom.

Alex was sleeping with her arm thrown over the dog, whose back legs were hanging open, his penis distended and raw looking, the balls shiny with short, silvery hair, pink skin showing beneath. They needed to get the dog neutered; he was barking in the garden, even with the muzzle, and the neighbours were complaining. A crayon had melted onto the radiator and the room smelled of burning dust and wax, fusty and fruity, like cherries and velvet. The quilt had slid off Alex's bed. Her pyjamas were printed with red umbrellas, the dye was bleeding so each gale-tossed umbrella had a pink aura. The window opaque with frost, Alex's mouth parted — her bottom lip gleaming in the sepia light from downtown — all of this woke Lyle up. He was awake. Finally, irrevocably alert.

Lyle pulled the blanket up to Alex's chin. He stood there remembering a summer afternoon last year when he and Alex had gone swimming at Archibald Falls, near the house they had in Conception Bay. The falls were a long hike into the woods, and he and Alex were usually the only ones there. They'd picked wild strawberries and blackberries, eating them as they went. Then they'd put on yellow-tinted goggles and watched two small trout swimming in circles just below the waterfall's ramrod, feathery spine. Afterwards they sat on the lichen-splattered boulders and read their books together.

Standing at the foot of Alex's bed with the empty baby bottle in his hand, Lyle felt that specific summer afternoon roaring through him. The thrashing of the falls, the smell of wild roses, and when the wind shifted, a sweet, poisonous smoke from a dump far off in the hills. In the evening he had heated beans and made scrambled eggs on the Coleman stove for supper. They ate outside, reading as they ate. It had been a full day of reading. They'd hardly spoken but had achieved an unequivocal harmony until the boy from next door had waded through the grass. The boy was Alex's age, just eleven, with a jagged haircut and freckles, his eyes pale blue and commanding. He held before him, on a Dominion bag, a fresh cod. Without a word, Alex had turned her book over so the library plastic crackled. She hooked her dangling sneaker over her heel with one finger and followed the boy around the corner of the house.

Lyle watched them through the wavering old glass of the kitchen window while he washed the dishes. The kitchen smelled of wood smoke and bitter crabapples. Lyle's dog, Sic'um, tore through the grass after the boy until the nylon rope snapped taut and drops of water and mist were flung from it to hang iridescent over the grass and the dog boomeranged a couple of feet back. The children stood still, facing each other. The boy joined his hands in front of his chest and bowed deeply. Then he clenched his fists near his hips, lifted his foot high above his shoulder and swung it with slo-mo gentleness toward Alex's chin. She pretended the foot had caught her jaw. She began a flailing, ballerina dive into the grass, where she
disappeared. The boy stood waiting as though he were watching a lake for a swimmer who had been under too long. Then he dove into the long grass where Alex had disappeared. They stayed there, in the grass. When Alex came inside to help with dishes she was overtaken by a self-absorption Lyle had never seen in her before. When she finally met his eyes — he had lit the kerosene lamp and the darkness of the kitchen had cupped them like two giant palms cupping a moth — she seemed surprised to see him. She'd said, Girls in my class wear training bras. She was mangling a slice of bread with a knife and gob of butter. Of course, she'd said, I don't have anything to
put
in a bra. She looked up and her whole face was rosy with shame and exultation.

After they'd cleaned up they went outside, where there was still enough light to read. Their books were damp, a fine, settling dew put a wave in the pages of his Heidegger. They read together until the boy returned, beating the grass with a plastic hockey stick. He wanted Alex to play spotlight.

Lyle looked up from his book. Reading Heidegger that afternoon, Lyle had been like someone copying pans of ice, desperate to cover distance, grasping a difficult phrase only long enough to leap to the next. A fast squall of grace had raced across the ice to engulf him. He had dipped a gingersnap into his coffee while he read, and had forgotten it was there in his hand.

But there was the boy and his daughter, the fringe of her cut-offs, red flashing lights in the soles of her sneakers. The cookie had sopped up so much coffee that it was falling over,
and he caught it in his mouth. Alex's face: the big, new teeth, her sunburned, peeling nose, her fiercely blue eyes, a moist film of perspiration near her temple. He felt a physical ache in his chest because she was so unspeakably beautiful to him. Then he couldn't remember what he had been reading, the argument fell apart. When he glanced back at the book the letters were fuzzy. It was too dark to continue reading. This was why he hadn't wanted kids. They were a constant interruption. The field of loose ice sank away, nothing remaining but a phrase,
the abandonment of being
, which might have been Sanskrit. Where had Anna been that day? She was pregnant with Pete. Lyle had watched the pale arm of the flashlight riffling through the trees.

Anna said, Lyle, are you getting the bottle? Because I'm waiting here.

He was a man dreaming he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. The winter night asserted itself. Snow pinging the glass. He could hear music, from downtown. The red
S
of the Scotiabank was in the top right corner of Alex's window, it had a chef's hat of snow glowing pinkly.

When Lyle was eighteen he'd slept with a girl named Rachel he'd met in first year university. Rachel was seventeen and he slept with her maybe half a dozen times. The first time, they'd met in the Breezeway, a raucous university bar with roving coloured spotlights.

They had never made an effort to get together after that; they'd just happen upon each other. The last time they met like this was in the wind tunnel between the library and the chemistry building. She was wearing a long candy-cane striped
scarf. It stood out in front of her, rippling. The wind was blowing her across a skim of ice and she was squealing and she slid into his arms. Their chests smacked, and when he bent his nose into the icy fox-fur trim he could smell her lipgloss.

It was four-thirty in the afternoon, already dark. His wrists stuck out of the leather gloves his mother had insisted he wear and he remembered that his wristbones felt like glass, that a sharp bang might have cleanly snapped off his hands. It was below zero. They'd gotten a bus to her parents' house. The windows of the bus were grey with salt and a man sat beside him with crutches that cuffed his forearms and his legs were twisted and stiff like pipe cleaners.

Rachel told Lyle he should stop reading philosophy. She said, Literature is such a kick. You've got to read that. And she looked out the window over her shoulder as if one of the stout, soft-covered Penguins she had jammed in her knapsack —
Middlemarch, Anna Karenina
, or
Crime and Punishment
— was unfolding on the street. He told her his wrists were cold and she took the glove off his right hand and put her searing mouth over his wristbone so it bristled with needles like a startled porcupine.