If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  When something urgent needs figuring out, I find it’s helpful to walk through it as if I were trying to explain my actions to a person who loves me without question, say my kind and wonderful Aunt Merry. Tell my own side of the story on the way to seeing its possible other sides. What would I say to my aunt if she were to walk in here and vouch for me — if, that is, she weren’t at the moment sunning herself on a beach in Martinique — if I could see the shine of her silver pixie cut under the fluorescent lights as she strides up the alley between Baby Care and Foot Care to arrive at the four steps that lead to the glassed-in office where I sit overlooking this two-bit pharmacy?

  I didn’t mean to say two-bit; I meant to say modest.

  If Merry were to negotiate my release on an aunt’s recognizance, I’d feel compelled to present her with the entire sequence of events. I would begin with the simple facts, not just this drugstore-cowgirl incident today, but last night’s dilemma as well: left to my own devices, what would I have done with the money I found at Top of the Evening?

  It would be best, in fact, to begin as far back as Wednesday: Jack and I got married in 1974, which on Wednesday made twenty years, a remarkable accomplishment. We don’t often go out on work nights (“school nights,” Jack calls them; he likes the joke because, aside from occasional training junkets the city sends him on, neither of us has been to school in decades), so we decided to delay our celebration, with a reservation for Friday evening at The Tavern on Twenty-First. It didn’t seem right, though, to let the actual date pass without recognition, so on Wednesday Jack suggested I stop after work at the video store. I rented Drugstore Cowboy, which had Matt Dillon and company laying waste to small-town pharmacies, scooping up brightly coloured pills to brightly colour their brains. I loved this movie, the attitude it took for granted, the on-the-road feel, even the flying pigs; Jack, on the other hand, did considerable head shaking. After a while, things didn’t go so well for Matt and his friends. This was the part where I didn’t like the story so much any more and Jack began to enjoy it, nodding along to the dark horrors of poetic justice.

  The machine was still on rewind when we left for the bedroom, where we stripped each other in a hurry. A special occasion will do that for us, even now and even on a work night. Once naked, though, I had trouble surrendering to the moment. The movie, with its other world, had given me a thought that seemed bound right in with the passage of our twenty years, and just as my attentive husband was heading southward under the sheets, I said, “You know —”

  “Huh?”

  “Sometimes I think about how there are so many different doors a person has the choice to walk through, and if you happened to —”

  “Shush, honey.”

  I don’t suppose that, if I included this scene in my explanation to Aunt Merry, she’d be comfortable looking in on my bedroom goings-on, but it’s so much a part of the story, this wondering and wanting. And she is, after all, a grown-up.

  “But Jack, don’t you ever think about a set of doors like that? Don’t you ever look at all those choices and think, This one looks interesting, but this one grabs me in a different way, and, wow, what about that yellow door?”

  “Gee, Sylvie” — he lifted the sheet so he could see past the spare geography of my body to my face — “why don’t you just get a bag of frozen peas and wrap it around my parts?”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  Later, coming back from the bathroom, I saw how he’d pulled the sheet to his neck and was holding it taut with his stubbled chin as if he was afraid a draft would find its way in. One of his eyes was lit yellow by a slice of light that angled in from the hallway. He said, “I always knew which door I’d go through.” This wasn’t news to me, but still I felt disappointment roll and resettle low in my gut like a handful of marbles.

  “Twenty years of marriage, and my wife thinks she’d be better off with a dark-eyed dope fiend.”

  “Aren’t we dramatic.”

  “Aren’t we.”

  I wanted him to know it was nothing to do with him. I love him, I almost always have, though sometimes more and sometimes less. Truly I didn’t wish I’d turned the handle on some alternate door. Couldn’t he see that the mulling was about how a person only gets the one, single door, and she has to fit everything into the room she finds beyond it? And the fact you can’t try them all — those other lives you’ll never, ever know — didn’t that make him sad? A little? Jack is not the sort of person a woman would say that to, so I said, “Don’t worry, babe.”

  And now we come to last night, Friday, and the dilemma of the money. There was a moment in the early evening when I feared our anniversary dinner at The Tavern would be preempted. Jack got in at 7:00 and immediately switched on CNN to follow the same slow drama I’d been watching before I left work. A group of us from the basement offices at the university library, with the full consent of department head Patrick, had gathered around a TV on a cart in the hallway to track the progress of a white Ford Bronco as it rolled along the freeway between Disneyland and LA at thirty-five miles an hour, OJ Simpson in the back seat, cops behind, helicopters above.

  Jack settled into his habitual hollow on the couch and I sat down in my lesser hollow beside him. Black and white police cars were strung out behind the Bronco like wasps in formation. Restless, Jack got up and paced, tossing the remote hand to hand. “OJ’S all-time rushing record. Should we cancel the reservation?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “But this is news, Sylvie. This is Current Events. What if there’s a test?” He raised his eyebrows to mock himself. I raised mine back and he pushed OFF. I could see the effort, but it’s a simple trick of momentum: as soon as you let the screen go blank, you’re good to go. “Anyway,” he said. “I’ve never been one for snuff.”

  Was that what my workmates and I had been doing in the basement hallway of Murray Memorial Library — hoping to watch someone die in plain, mass media sight? At first there had been little to see but lawyers and the DA and the police chief speaking into a forest of microphones. We stayed in the hallway long past quitting time, reluctant to leave in case the drama was about to escalate. But the talking heads talked on. I was at my desk pulling my purse out of the lower drawer when Patrick said, “You guys, you have to see this,” and there was the pursuit, in real time. The Bronco, the squad cars, the seamy creep of anticipation. It wasn’t so much a car chase as a following, an escort. “Like a Hot Wheels set in slow motion,” said Patrick. He put his hand on my shoulder in front of everyone. “The Deluxe Law Enforcement set.”

  I slipped out from under his hand in what I would say was a smooth and assertive motion, for he and I have already had that conversation, and although I might be interested, he has a wife and I a husband. As I’ve said, it would be a treat to peek around door after door, but I don’t want to hear the one behind me slam shut. The camera panned the crowds lining the route holding signs that told OJ to RUN, or DIE; people waving, crying, laughing. All that whirling emotion looking for a landing pad.

  AT THE TAVERN the TV above the bar was on, the chase apparently the only event unspooling in the whole wide world of news. I asked for a booth near the back.

  “That’ll be the end of the Ford Bronco,” Jack said with satisfied wisdom as we opened our heavy menus and the brass doodads at the corners landed on the table, tap-tap. “Sales will tank, you watch.”

  I did want to talk about it, wanted to twist in the booth and look at the screen, but I gathered my willpower. “Let’s ignore it. Please.”

  After a moment Jack said, “Okay,” and after another moment, “Let’s talk about doors, then.”

  I slapped my menu shut, tip-tap. “I’m sorry I said that the other night. I’ll have a chicken Caesar. I don’t want to run off with, as you say, a dope fiend, I only ever wanted you.”

  What do couples talk about after twenty years, once they’ve ruled out Current Events and the Human Condition?

  “I love you.” I squeezed his hand across the tabl
e. It was true, is true. “Happy anniversary.”

  Later we walked a few blocks north to Mayhew Tower and rode up to the glitzy new Top of the Evening in what’s billed as the swiftest elevator in town, glass on three sides and a one-eighty view of the city lights. Me being not so fond of heights, I faced the only solid wall as we rode up, and Jack held his hands like blinders on either side of my face. Friends had told us if you wanted a sense of occasion this was the place. Jack sees better than I do in dim light, and he led the way through the room, slow and snaking, to an empty table. My eyes still hadn’t adjusted, and I had to feel my way to sitting down. I touched something — a papery tongue sticking out where the back of the chair met the seat. I took it for an upholstery tag that should have been removed. “Still working out the kinks.”

  The chairs were plush and low, and if we both sat back we were too far apart for conversation. We settled in, leaning forward and smiling at each other over a teardrop bowl with a squat candle inside, which lit his face from below so he looked like a character in a fright movie. How, in the long term, can a lounge succeed as a venue for wordplay-foreplay if your date looks a fright?

  Jack ordered two whiskies, neat. “Canadian Club if you have it.”

  “We do,” said my-name’s-Kyle, I’ll-be-your-waiter.

  My jacket was bunched behind me in a bothersome way. I reached back to rearrange it and again felt that upholstery tag. Wait a minute, there was more than one, maybe five or six, and they weren’t sewn in, they were loose. I could tell by feel they weren’t ordinary scraps, not cashier slips or abandoned to-do lists or lost can-I-have-your-numbers. Paper money, even after it’s been folded a thousand times, offers the fingertips its own unmistakable texture. It’s a satisfaction.

  I looked across at Jack’s fright-movie face and said nothing about what I’d found. I moved my hand underneath the loose folds of my jacket, trying to hide the bills and count them at the same time.

  Kyle-your-waiter set our whiskies on the table. As Jack said thanks and Kyle turned to go I slid one hand into the crevice where the back of the chair met the seat and found a stack ten or fifteen thick. While Jack looked about and rated each element of the plush décor on a scale from one to four, I slid the stack of bills underneath my bum. Then, with my secret pumping inside me, I raised my glass in honour of our twenty years. It could be enough to buy a leather jacket, hell, leather pants. Jack considered the low-loop carpet, brown as dried blood, and said, “I give them only two stars for the rug.”

  “I think three.”

  Over his shoulder on the small TV above the bar I saw dark streets lined with police cars; above, helicopters whirling; on the sidewalk, uniforms holding back onlookers; and repeated close-ups of an iron gate. I did my best to look at Jack rather than past him. Inside the teardrop bowl the candle struggled against invisible currents. He moved it to the side and his face softened, but now the shadow and flicker across his features aged him by a decade. I realized the effect would be the same when he looked at me.

  The many ways we’ve seen each other over twenty years. Once, when I’d called in sick for no reason other than a person deserves an occasional reprieve from typing numbers on labels and pulling away the backing and fitting the label onto the spine of a book entitled, say, The Elements of Social Scientific Thought, and I was sitting in bed wearing a matched set of blue lace undies unfamiliar to Jack, with a Pepsi on the nightstand and licking the salty orange dusting from my fingers having just finished a bag of Cheezies, he happened home from work at lunchtime. Just to check in, he said.

  “I thought you were sick.”

  “I’m recovering, is what I am.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and scrunched the empty cellophane bag, and I said, “Is there any privacy in this life?” At that he walked out and closed the bedroom door behind him. I heard him leave the house. He didn’t mention it again, but I’ll bet that colour picture persists inside his head, ocean-blue bra, orange under my fingernails.

  There are things I’ve never told Jack and possibly never will. He doesn’t know, for instance, that over the past five years three promotions have come open at work, and I applied for only the first, and didn’t succeed. Though I do take mental health breaks once in a while I’m not, in fact, unhappy typing labels nine to five. I used to be a go-getter, now I’m not. Sometimes I’m disappointed in myself, but the world needs plenty of people who are satisfied to do such work. Aunt Merry has backed me up on this in private conversation. Or, she hasn’t faulted me for it.

  Something else I’ve failed to tell him: when we lost the baby fifteen years ago, the miscarriage might have had something to do with the night that — not admitting even to myself how late my period was — I went out with the girls and drank five Depth Charges inside of two hours. Three weeks after that wasted night I deposited a small jar of morning pee at the clinic and within days received a call from Dr. Carla herself, offering congratulations. In a rush I understood what it was to have mixed feelings: I was afraid I had damaged a tiny life; also, I had decided I wasn’t a good fit for marriage, this marriage at least; also, a baby for God’s sake.

  By then I’d even sorted through our suitcases to choose the one I could best handle if I were to load my old Meteor and head west toward the fabled opportunities of Calgary. Two weeks after the test results, I still hadn’t told Jack. After a screaming row on a Saturday night I woke up exhausted and pulled out of a Sunday trip to Uncle Walter’s cabin. Alone in the quiet apartment, a pair of sweatpants in hand and the suitcase open on the bed, I felt a twinge in my gut and a wetness in my underwear. When Jack walked in from his day at the lake, woozy from beer and sunstroke, I’d already been to Emerg and back, stowed the suitcase back under the bed and tucked myself in. I asked him please to bring two glasses of water. He did, and made to hand me one but I said, “Sit on the bed and drink them both, and listen.” He drank the first while I told him about the pregnancy and the bleeding and the fact the doctor had ordered bed rest until further notice. While he drank the second I considered telling him about the five Depth Charges, but said nothing.

  After two weeks Dr. Carla gave me the all-clear to return to work. Fine, good, take it easy. A few months on, a pain sharp and heavy like the forward edge of an axe travelled through my gut from front to back at two in the afternoon. I’d just finished lining up a spine label on a replacement copy of The Golden Bough, and I doubled over. My forehead landed hard on the front cover. Mixed feelings all over again. My boss called an ambulance, then called Jack, who rushed across town from the bus yards. When I woke up in the hospital I asked him if the title of the book was reverse-embossed above my eyebrows. He said he could see what I was trying to do, but it would be better right then if I didn’t make jokes.

  He breathed life back into me day after day until I stood on my own again, taking shape around the gift of his care. Maybe the D&C that followed the miscarriage compromised what my mother-in-law called my woman parts, or maybe the responsibility lies with simple chance, but we never had another pregnancy. It disappoints me, but that’s life. Or rather the absence of it.

  Here’s where I might pause to ask Aunt Merry, presuming she’s still listening, if she’s ever noticed how rumination will pull in other things from all around the rim to think on: Is honesty a matter of either/or? Is guilt? Is want a river that never finds the sea?

  The anniversary card the pharmacist found hiding in the pocket of my jacket this morning had a scroll in relief on the front: To my one true love on our anniversary. When I passed my hand over it I felt the slight rise of the letters, fine silver italic. It reminded me of our wedding invitations. The card was for Jack. The card was for me. We’ve lasted.

  THIS WALK-THROUGH has rambled further than I ever meant it to. I’m no longer captive in the raised office at Andersen Drugs. No cops, no charges filed. The man with the beard of salt and rust took no action beyond confiscating what was his. Compassion, or lack of nerve? At any rate he won’t see me again. Altho
ugh it’s right here in the neighbourhood, I rarely visit his store. Shoppers Drugs on Eighth has so much more to choose from. An emporium. And crack security, the big No.

  I’ve managed to escape this morning’s scrape, unscraped. Does this mean I wouldn’t owe Aunt Merry the rest of the story? She would say, Hold on, girl. Tell me what you did with that money last night.

  Literally, I sat on it while I considered my options. If I told the waiter, he would surely ask to hold it in case someone came looking. If no one came looking he’d keep it for himself and tell me otherwise, which would seem to break the law of finders keepers. I could, on the other hand, take it to the police in hopes they’d let me have it if no one claimed it after a certain period. A way to do the right thing yet hedge my bets. One possibility.

  If you were to ask Jack about my honesty or lack of it, he might mention the time we stayed at the rustic lodge in the Rockies and he walked into the room when I was folding the cloud-like hotel towel into my suitcase. So precious. That morning when I’d wrapped it round my naked torso it had made me feel cared for with a special tenderness. As if he knew anything of its true value, Jack said, “It’ll just show up at twice what it’s worth on the Visa bill along with the room charge.”

  In my defense, I will say there have been numerous times I’ve wanted to take something and I haven’t. This doesn’t make me a saint, but it’s a fact worth recognizing. Sometimes it seems I’ve spent my life specifically not taking things. I don’t think the average person has any idea what a challenge it can be. If a person’s never taken anything, but they’ve never been tempted either, what have they proved? I’m forever walking past a darling ring or a bottle of perfume and hearing it say, clear and sweet, Do you love me?

  At Top of the Evening, Kyle was beside our table again. Why? — our whiskies were still half full. My left hand had once more wandered hopefully behind my back, and I’d found two more stray bills, their texture soft and strong at once. Wondering if the waiter could see this, I broke out in a sweat. I wished I hadn’t chosen a blouse made from non-breathable, one hundred percent polyester just because it had a neckline that flattered my shallow cleavage, but I do try to look my best for a special occasion.