If Sylvie Had Nine Lives

by Leona Theis

  “What’s in yours? Boring girl stuff?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I guess if you don’t have a teenager in the house, you get to be the teenager yourself.”

  “Could you maybe think before you say a thing like that?”

  TODAY MAVIS SAW Jack’s door standing open for the first time, the sign aslant on the door, the room empty but for two boxes taped shut in the corner and assorted fishing tackle lying loose under the window. Fresh vacuum tracks on the carpet. The blind was rolled all the way up, daylight reaching to the corners and into the open closet with its bare hangers. So he really had cleared out. When he’d called Mavis last night he’d said he was weary of living with crazy. For a man like Jack to reach for a word like “weary” when he could have said much worse suggested there were plenty of words he’d left unsaid.

  Today as always the door to Sylvie’s private room was closed, and out of long habit Mavis tried the knob on the way past. In the bathroom, while enthroned, she thought ahead to what she’d say to Pete when she called him tonight. Weird as ever but I’m hanging in. The last time Pete was in this house he’d made a trip to the bathroom and then come back to the living room rolling his eyes. He looked toward Mavis and mouthed the words “The Kids in the Hall.”

  Maybe she had baby clothing stashed in there from fifteen years ago, tiny yellow onesies and hooded towels still folded in tissue paper or hanging from little plastic hangers. Or maybe inside the room were leaning columns of diaries scrawled with her darkest secrets. Or stacks of hoarded magazines like their mother had kept in case she might feel good enough to sit up one day and leaf through them. Or Sylvie was having an affair, ha, and that room was where they had their fun, she and her lover, and where she kept a lacy pair of white stockings, a rose-pink garter belt, a Victoria’s Secret bra and an extra-large mirror.

  Still seated, still midstream, Mavis reached a hand toward the vanity — rising a little off the seat, careful now — curled a finger around the handle of the drawer next to the sink and pulled it open. From where she sat she couldn’t see inside. Finish first. As she soaped her hands she looked over the drawer’s contents. She needed something skinny with enough length to it. Let’s see. Lipstick, lipstick, lipstick. Mascara twice over. Ah, a metal hairclip with a long beak that tapered to a point. She snapped it in two and did her best to straighten its slight curve. Worth a try. At home she’d used a barbecue skewer on Kayla’s room. You just push straight in till you feel it hit the mechanism, then give a quarter turn. Kayla had started throwing things as soon as Mavis cracked open the door, but she’d walked right through the barrage — a plush penguin, an old Raffi cassette, an algebra workbook — and set a tray on the dresser. “Pot roast, potatoes and veg. Help yourself.” A yo-yo landed in the gravy and tepid splatter landed on Mavis’s cheek, her shirt, her forearm. No doubt Kayla had the knife from that dinner tray slotted into the door frame now.

  Last week Mavis had said to young Gloria Shane when she came through her checkout at the Co-op, “Don’t ever have kids.” Vera, listening in from Produce and ever the supervisor had said, “Please, Mavis, that’s the third time this week you’ve given unsolicited advice to a customer.”

  “They shouldn’t take me seriously.” The whole town knew about Kayla’s current troubles, there was no percentage in pretending life was lollipops and gumdrops. Mavis swiped a box of spaghetti past the scanner and looked up at Gloria. “I don’t suppose I mean it.” No one would say whether it was Kayla or Jen who’d thrown the first punch, least of all Kayla or Jen. Their friends, of course, were mute, no matter the carrots and sticks old Principal Siding waved about, and good for them, good for all of them. It was the third fist fight this school year though, and only three months in. Once Gloria had left and the store was empty but for herself and Vera, Mavis said, “Everyone makes a colossal deal of it when it’s girls.”

  “They do.”

  “A boy gets into a fight, he’s a magnet for cheerleaders. A girl gets into a fight, she’s kicked off the squad.”

  “Well. Either way.”

  IN SYLVIE’S HALLWAY, Mavis considered the lightning-spiked cloud on the door. I dare you, Zeus. She tried jabbing the half hairclip into the small hole, but its width stopped it short. She pulled it back out and pressed it against the doorframe, trying to bend it double lengthways along the shallow V already there. No dice. She put it in her mouth and the tang of tin seared a line along her tongue. She positioned it between her teeth and bit down and yelped at the sudden pain in a back molar.

  “Mavis, you’re pathetic,” said Sylvie from the entrance to the hallway. She turned and disappeared. Mavis heard the scrabble of cutlery and shortly Sylvie reappeared waving a barbecue skewer. “If you want to see so badly.”

  “Sylvie, you don’t have to.”

  “You might as well look. I think you better.” She poked the skewer into the hole and gave the knob a quarter turn. Just before she swung the door in, she yanked the cloud with the bolt of lightning off the door, leaving behind three dime-sized wads of yellowed stick-up gum. Inside the dim room was a welter of slouching, knee-high piles of yard goods and clothing. In one corner, stacks of shoeboxes. A few long robes or dresses hung in the closet, but all else was in crazy piles on the floor or sliding heaps on the two club chairs under the window. Sylvie made her way along a meandering path through the mess and raised the roller blind. Mavis blinked against the new light. Some of the clothing and fabric lay loose, some was in plastic bags, pink or white or gold, some in paper shopping bags with embossed logos.

  “Sylvie, um, well. Wow.” Mavis reached up and used a fingernail to pry a wad of stick-up gum from the door. “Is this all stuff you stole?”

  “Most of it I paid for, but yeah, some of it I just took.”

  “Sylvie.” Mavis kneaded the gum, small in her hand.

  “I know. Two winters ago I brought home the same coat three different times. I forgot I already had it. Twice from Sears and once from the thrift store. Same brand, different colour, same big buttons. You’d think I’d remember the buttons.”

  Her sister’s hunger. Go back to those weeks in June the year Sylvie was in grade eleven and Mavis about to graduate. Mom in bed again after a brief few joyous days of mobility and Dad, when he wasn’t at work or watching a game or cooking soup to last a week, seated at the table counting out Aspirin rations to take the edge off their mother’s arthritis. And Sylvie, hankering after something, anything new, pillaging their mother’s closet while she slept, looking for dresses she didn’t wear anymore, hoping to shorten or alter or cut them apart to make patterns. How glad Mavis was that she’d never given up the refuge of her paper route — her legitimate hour away from the house, something to do besides sweep the floor or clean the tub or put on the Minute Rice and pork chops. Home one day from walking her route in the rain, Mavis let her canvas carrier bag, heavy and wet, drop to the kitchen floor. She heard a sound that by now was familiar: Dad, in the hallway, shaking the Aspirin bottle slowly back and forth like a sad damn maraca. They didn’t know it then, but those were final days. Within two weeks their mother would be gone and the three of them left to puzzle through the shape of her last hours.

  Sylvie stood at the table cutting out a final pattern piece, dressmaker’s pins sticking out between her lips like spokes of a rimless wheel. She finished cutting, leaned forward and opened her mouth to let the pins fall on a scrap of fabric. “I’m taking this over to Auntie’s to use the machine. But here, I made you something.” She lifted a minidress draped across a chair and held it up to show how the gap at the front of the skirt showed off the shorts underneath. “Hotpants. I think they’ll fit you.”

  They weren’t her style — too short, too bright a blue — but Mavis wore them once or twice. The hem-stitch showed through where it shouldn’t, and a close look showed lines of tiny holes around the sleeves where her sister had ripped out stitches and resewn. The practice version.

  A few days later Sylvie came home with her
own set. Some people could carry off that sort of look, and Sylvie with her coltish legs and brand-new breasts was one of them. Some people seemed to need to carry it off, and that was her as well.

  Now this cache of fabric, and you could bet it would never see a pattern. A little scrap of a question that blew through Mavis’s mind at intervals through the years whisked past, but she didn’t reach for it. This was not the time.

  “Sylvie.” Mavis took a few steps in. Heaps everywhere, a hundred colours. “So. Most of it isn’t stolen.”

  “Stealing isn’t what it used to be. Pesky inventory tags.”

  “If it isn’t stolen, why is it stashed away like this?”

  “I couldn’t let Jack see how much.”

  “But if you paid for it. Mostly.” Mavis pulled the gum wide, then folded it small again. “God, it’s too bad we’re not the same size. I wonder if Kayla would be interested in any of it.”

  “I brace myself and I show you all this shit.” Sylvie pushed a slither of pale blue fabric onto the floor to clear an arm of the nearest chair and sat down. “And that’s where you go with it?”

  But jokes had always worked between them. Try again. Mavis held up a tunic sweater on a hanger so flimsy the plastic bowed under the weight of the knit. “On second thought, this might not be Kayla’s style.” A couple of sequins drifted to the floor. There was no tag, but she pretended: “Winners. $5.99. Compare at $6.99.”

  “Yeah, most of it’s cheap.”

  “I’ll say.” But Mavis was still thinking of Kayla; of Kayla and clothing; of Kayla and leather pants and bribery.

  Sylvie’s voice fell to a quivering lower register with pauses for control between her words, but the cutting tone came through. “It’s not as if I have the kind of money a farmer from Ripley has.”

  Mavis raised a hand, slid her fingers through her hair and began with small motions to rub her scalp. She turned toward the hallway. “What have you got for rye?”

  Sylvie brushed past, wiping her eyes as she went, and headed for the living room. Mavis aimed for the kitchen. A farmer from Ripley. Sylvie had never held back her un-humble opinion that there wasn’t enough of the big world in their hometown. How did she think that made Mavis feel, and Mavis’s kids? You make your own world, and you make it big or you make it small, and don’t you dare think for a minute that a farmer from Ripley has it easier than anyone else.

  Bottles clanked in the living room. “How about vodka?”

  “No rye?”

  “Might have, at the back. Jack took the CC.”

  In the kitchen they slid the coffee mugs aside and set their glasses on stylish coasters pinched from God knows where that looked like slices from unusually fat lemons. Mavis watched her sister pour Coke over Walker’s Special Old. “Is Jack coming to court tomorrow?”

  “I highly doubt it.”

  “Sylvie, don’t you care that he’s moved out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Another thing Jack said on the phone last night: “Not to be insensitive, Mavis, but you lost a baby too, way back, and you’re more or less normal. You weren’t so far along as she was — as we were — but still. And me, in case anyone cares. I lost that baby, too, at five months and a half. Would it have made a difference if we’d had another, do you think?”

  “Jack, she’s always had her battles.” Mavis was thinking about when they were kids and Sylvie learned how to make peanut butter fudge. The night she went to the kitchen once everyone was asleep and boiled up a batch and washed the pots and bowls and put them away so Dad wouldn’t know, and then she sat on her bed in the dark with the pan in her lap eating square after square alone and Mavis lay across the room in the other bed looking at the wall and wondering how anyone could want that much of anything all at once.

  “THEFT UNDER FIVE THOUSAND,” said Mavis. “I called a lawyer I know in Yorkton. It turns out they’ll give you a fine to work off. They’ll have you help out at Habitat for Humanity’s Re-store or some such.”

  “I called a lawyer too.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “You’ll meet her tomorrow. The maximum’s six months, or a fine up to two thousand.”

  “I think it’s up to five thousand.”

  “Christ, you’re a help.”

  “Look, it’ll be time at Habitat, no need to worry.”

  “You saw my room.”

  “Granted, there’s that to worry about. But all you have to do is just stop.”

  “I did think I could. I thought maybe.”

  “But?”

  “Then there was yesterday’s two metres of gabardine. Silverblue.”

  “Did you pay for it?”

  “What do you think? Of course I did. You wouldn’t have a smoke on you?”

  “I don’t smoke anymore. Please don’t say you’ve started up yet again. I worry.”

  “I haven’t, not really. And don’t worry about me, ma’am, I’m not your problem or whatever.”

  Mavis reached a toe toward the blue purse on the floor, and Sylvie’s foot rose to interrupt — not a kick, but a definite push.

  “Can I — sorry — can I,” said Mavis, “— can I just use your phone a sec? Check in with Pete about a thing for Kayla’s school?”

  Sylvie gestured at the wall phone by the fridge.

  “The other one?”

  Sylvie waved in the direction of the hallway and Mavis headed to the bedroom. Over her shoulder she said, “Why don’t you just bloody sew some of it?”

  “What?”

  “Sew some of it. Anything. Jesus! Steer the obsession in a different direction. You know?” She closed the bedroom door and the scrappy little scrap of a question that had whisked by earlier floated down from the ceiling. What was their mother’s errand that day? When they found her at the foot of the stairs, one cane beneath her and one angled to the left, it seemed as if that second cane pointed like an arrow toward a shelf that held, among an accumulation of souvenirs from healthier times, a shoebox stuffed with old dressmaking patterns. Mavis couldn’t honestly say if she’d built her very precise memory of that fallen cane after the fact, in need of a pointing finger. A cane has to land at some angle or other, and its angle will be nothing more than an accident of physics.

  Still, Mom was on her way to the basement to fetch something that day.

  Go away, question, you’re no help to anyone. Whatever your answer, no one’s to blame. Mavis lifted the pink receiver from the phone on Sylvie’s bedside table and punched in her home number.

  “How’s the patient?” said Pete.

  “Worse than I thought. How’s yours?”

  “Better than I thought: she came out of the bedroom just before noon and ate a quarter bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios.”

  “That’s great.”

  “No milk though. And nothing to say.”

  “Still,” said Mavis.

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, I bought something for her. This gorgeous pair of leather pants. My thought was, we might use them as a, as a little, say, incentive, say. I know, I know, but nothing else was working.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now she’s out of her room, though, I guess we don’t need bribery. If she’s turned a corner.”

  “Reward, then?”

  Mavis set the receiver on the bedside table and lay back on the quilt and took in the small dimensions of the room, the plain lines of the square glass light fixture. In Kayla’s room a girly chandelier hung above the bed, and the dimensions were more generous, the windows taller, but still it amounted to a small place to close yourself into day after day. A cell. Was that a bad thing? Mavis thought she might like a small room of her own to close herself into. Just herself, alone, away from everyone and their weirdnesses. She spread-eagled her body on the bed, trying to claim all four corners. Reaching. Reaching.

  Pete’s telephone voice threaded through the air: “Mavis?”

  A few days before the accident their father had come home from work
one evening and noticed that all the flat surfaces in the living room and dining room had been dusted, and neither girl had done it. On a different day Mavis had come home from school to discover that her laundry, which she’d pulled from the line at noon and dumped on the couch, was folded and stacked in tidy piles. She’d shown this to Sylvie and they’d looked at each other a moment without a word, not to break the spell. Acts of care and, in the circumstances, considerable and painful effort, but neither one especially risky, not like attempting narrow basement stairs.

  “Mavis?”

  “Hell if I know.” She brought her hands to her scalp and began to massage. She pressed hard with all her fingers, as if she could make her head smaller, along with everything inside it.

  What Erik Saw

  STANDING IN THE SHOWER with his eyes closed, a few days after his second surgery in as many weeks, Erik saw two bright kidney beans of light facing each other, a dark line between them. A bad sign, said his ophthalmologist. Erik and Syl made the six-hour drive to Edmonton for a second opinion, which echoed the first.

  What Erik saw as he lay on the operating table for the third time, his head clamped motionless and his left eye still as stone because they’d stuck him with a needle to freeze it, was the business end of a medical instrument probing inside his eye. A small round tip of something pale and brown moving about.

  “Ah,” said the surgeon when Erik told her about it afterward. “Hardly anyone sees it. One percent, at the outside.”

  “I’ll consider myself lucky then.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way.”

  “Perceptive, too,” said Erik. “So to speak.”

  The surgeon looked him directly in the eye, the one that wasn’t covered with a bandage, and set a hand on his shoulder, a light pressure, steadying. “That will depend entirely on how things heal up.”

  Let this be over now, please. Three weeks ago, a Tuesday morning and he was on his way to the reno in Lawson Heights, the truck box weighed down by a thousand-dollar toilet he’d just discovered was cracked, his mind working on who he could hold responsible for the damage. Sun flashed bright on the river and spikey heads of purple thistle in the ditches stood tall above the grass, the punk of posies. Forget about the crappy toilet, this was the kind of drop-dead gorgeous day this place will hand you one after another in the summertime, making the blizzards in December and the week of minus forty in February worth it. Thank you, Saskatoon. The truck phone rang beside him and he reached for the receiver. Cynthia, who was doing electrical on the Lawson Heights job, and who happened to be Syl’s cousin, was calling to ask where he was. She was cooling her heels at the site without access to the house and she needed to pee and maybe this time she’d put her waiting-around time on her invoice.