We All Need To Eat

by Alex Leslie

  first edition

  Copyright © 2018 Alex Leslie

  The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

  Book*hug acknowledges the land on which it operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and, most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

  Leslie, Alex, author

  We all need to eat : stories / Alex Leslie. —First edition.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77166-419-6 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-1-77166-420-2 (HTML)

  ISBN 978-1-77166-421-9 (PDF)

  ISBN 978-1-77166-422-6 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8623.E845W43 2018 C813’.6 C2018-904121-8 C2018-904122-6

  for Simone, still here

  Contents

  The Initials

  The Person You Want to See

  Stories Like Birds

  The Sandwich Artist

  Stargazer

  Who You Start With Is Who You Finish With

  Self-Help Liturgy

  Change Your Life Today

  A Brief History of Eye Contact

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Colophon

  “love is form”

  —Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems

  The Initials

  on the day of the inquiry, my grandmother stayed home in her apartment, drank red wine on her couch, watched back-to-back episodes of The Passionate Eye on CBC, and growled, “All those goddamn people are crooked anyhow,” and then she ordered in Chinese food and fell asleep for centuries. At the inquiry the man running the show walked to the front and said that he had lost our book of names. My grandmother kept the list of names in the guest room, bottom left corner of the bookshelf. She opened the book and said, “This is my last birthday,” and fell asleep again, while her apartment building rotated on the birdspine of a sundial. I went to the inquiry but never told her. She wouldn’t have liked it. The man at the front said without memories there is no past and furthermore everything you need to know is on The Passionate Eye on CBC. I went back home, hands empty. There was no inquiry in the place where her mother was from because they burned the Jewish men on the beaches and the Jewish women were the smoke. “Do you know how to name children?” my grandmother said to me. “You take the initials of their dead relative and use them again and again so that the letters are never lost.” This is written in a secret language. I often slept in her guest room except when I slept on the couch in the living room. I realized that the upholstery was patterned with her initials when I woke up to find her initials tattooed into my cheek. Alphabet welts, they faded but stayed. “Don’t sleep on the couch,” she said. “It’ll make you achy all over and besides we don’t get tattoos in this family.” She showed me the magic trick to remove the core from an apple without moving any of her fingers. She opened her mouth and gold coins fell out. There was no inquiry and no report either because we all have new names now. We took our names from the book in the guest room or we wrote our names down in a guest book, we can’t remember which, and there is no record of the threshold. When I got home from the inquiry, I lay down on my own bed and fell asleep. When I woke up, The Passionate Eye was on CBC again, part of a series she would have loved about Hillary Clinton and empowered female leaders. The next day we released her remains and the day after that it had been a whole year since her death. I received a book in the mail. All the rest had been sold or given away or disappeared. This book made it across the ocean, in the belly of a ship that my grandmother kept hidden in needlepoint art. A person with a jug. A boy squatting in shorts. There is no record of the boat’s arrival. She always said she didn’t know very much about what had happened, nothing that would be of much use anyway. An amnesiac with a stomach full of facts. I read the book but couldn’t find my name, so I looked for my initials instead and suddenly they were everywhere, a survival of stars. I could remember every moment of the inquiry but nothing that had happened and no words that had been spoken. I’d sat in the front row and taken notes like I always do because it is important to have a record, but only the first letter of every word, all of the initials. There was no inquiry for my grandmother’s relatives and the place they came from because she only used Yiddish to speak with her sister and with the dead. It isn’t a secret but it isn’t much of a history either. Only speak to yourself in a language only you can understand, and then you can put it away forever. The inquiry went on for a long time, until it was finished. No records were released until the ’90s and photos taken by the Extraordinary Commission are blurry as images of interstellar travel or smoke as it leaves a mouth, so who can really tell. It went on for a while and I was the last one to speak and I forgot everything I wanted to know, and said, “I’m sorry, I have to go, I’m late for the ferry to the island to go see my grandmother.” The lineup for the ferry was longer than it had ever been before. I waited for weeks and weeks, inching forward, past turnstile after turnstile, all the rows of cars winding around one another, so that I couldn’t see where the line began or ended. Service had been horrible ever since the ferries went corporate. Finally I got to the front of the line, and a BC Ferries employee leaned across her desk and snapped at me, “Where ya goin? Duke Point or Departure Bay?” I said, “I’m looking for the boat with the book.” She said, “It’s Duke Point you want then,” and gave me my ticket. It was very still. The parking lot stretched flat in all directions and I watched the people walk back and forth with their cups of Starbucks coffee and hot dogs in luminous foil wrappings. I watched a woman at the chain-link fence tell her dog to piss, command him like a soldier, kick at the mud in frustration. I watched a father tighten the yellow ropes over the top of his car to keep all his family’s stuff strapped on tight so their camping gear wouldn’t slide into the waves. I watched some children scream mindlessly, standing in a circle, small faces bright with cold. A bird fell out of the sky. I watched the ocean glow with its own secret light. Everybody rushed for their cars when the huge white metal boat appeared, the ramps attached to it like mechanical arms. Smoke drifted up off the water and got into our nostrils and eyes. Over the speakerphone system, the woman who’d sold me my ticket said, “There was no inquiry because she died before you learned how to write this poem,” and I waited for the boat to start loading, scanned my iPhone newsfeed for updates, stared at all the unanswered messages from friends. When the boat was ready to load, the line of cars started to move forward. We were all going somewhere new. In the back of the car was everything I’d ever written in paper bags, the first letter of every word circled so I would remember how to read it even while sleeping. As long as the initials are stable, other things can move around as much as they want. My grandmother came walking off the ramp from the boat, holding a bottle of wine. She walked down the line of cars and everybody held their cups out the windows of their cars and she filled the cups one by one
as she walked. She filled every cup less than halfway, so no one would drink too much while they were driving. She did not indulge and never touched the glass or the car with her fingers. She came to my window and I held out my cup and she filled it all the way to the brim without meeting my eyes and then the wine came pouring over the edges of the cup, red over my fingers, and she kept going down the line of cars. In the rear-view mirror, her body was very, very small. There was no inquiry because nobody knew where they were going or what was going to happen or how long it would take. It’s a simple story. She vanished into the flat grey line of the parking lot’s horizon, where the cement met the ocean in a blur, something solid becoming light. After she was gone, all the cars started to move again. I drove onto the ferry drinking from my wine glass. Like I always do, I went out onto the ferry deck and the salt wind sandblasted me clean.

  The Person You Want to See

  bodies open and close on the machines that fill the weight room. A man drags steel from his chest—front push, cheeks taut, and the winged twin paths of his arms move to full extension. His chest under the surgical light. Mechanical bird, his slow flight. Then, release. Arms in, he folds back in, weights clink into a neat stack. He rises, breathes, heads to the water fountain in the corner. At intervals, everyone in the room goes to that fountain, bends down to accept its hook of water into their mouths. The gym is at the front of the community centre, its long glass wall facing the street. The thick rainfall casts the gym in aquarium intimacy. Cars whip past, their headlights the eyebeams of giant fish. Inside, bodies struggle in the

  tinted air.

  Soma watches her body in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. Knee-length black shorts, a black T-shirt, broad shoulders. Behind her, women power the treadmills, knees and elbows in suspended animation. She is always the only woman on the weight machines. Men acknowledge her with nods. She knows them by the slogans on their giveaway T-shirts (RUN FOR THE CURE 1998 Home Hardware CREW, Who are you RUNNING for). Nobody speaks to her here, and that is part of why she continues to come back.

  In the locker room, women peel clothes from their bodies. Steam is carried out of the showers on their shoulders and hips. A locker door bangs and shatters the warmth. Laughter of the exercise-bike women entering in a crowd. After the quiet of the office and her condo, the locker room is jarring for Soma, a thousand electric shocks to her eardrums. As she adjusts her bra, Soma notices the clusters of red specks on her shoulders. She checks the other shoulder. The same. Twists her head to inspect again. A pattern of delicate explosions, where the blood vessels submitted.

  That night in bed, laptop nestled on her crossed knees, she googles: blood vessels shoulders woman lifting weights. The fitness pages instruct her to exhale while taking on more weight. Ease the speed of flow. Too much muscle development too fast and the body begins to break itself down, cell by cell. Gradual release of breath is easier on the blood. Trails leave her shoulders, head for her arms. She checks the rest of her body for implosions. Finds none. If she held her breath and lifted hard, how many marks could she make? Her body a map of ruined currents. She twists her torso, holds still for the MacBook camera’s inbuilt eye to take a photo of one shoulder. She saves the image to the desktop.

  When she double-clicks on the image of her shoulder, it springs up, huge, fills the screen. A planet in low light, a maroon edge, a dark world.

  She googles weightlifters, selects Images. Men with skintight balloons defending their necks, shoulders, chests. Their surplus limbs; her faint red trails.

  Soma has been coming to the gym every day for two months and she has felt the change. Not the slimming she expected, but a shift in texture. The ease of heaving the steel-and-glass doors to the government building where she works, doors that make the sound of a bank vault opening and closing. On mornings after she has lain in bed all night awake, the unexpected panic of being alone coming and going in surges, she climbs the stairs slowly and the secretary at the front desk nods sympathetically, knowingly. Her name is Phillipa and her son’s wife passed away five years ago, so she makes a point of overidentifying with every loss in the office—deaths of pets, ailing parents, breakups. Phillipa left a card on Soma’s desk when the news about Melanie got around. On the front of the card, a boy reached upward to catch a star, a Little Prince knock-off, a halo of text around his head that read, You don’t know what you’re reaching for until you find it. As if someone had died. Also? What an invasive bitch. But maybe Soma’s getting bitter. Mostly she’s just so tired, all the time. But when she feels her arms, they are hard and widening.

  Soma’s job at the passport office has rigidified as routine. She used to complain about it to Melanie—the endless supply of people who took bureaucracy personally, scream at her earnestly over the phone, But my flight for Cuba is tomorrooooow—but now she learns how routine is a crutch for numbness. Routine is everything to her now.

  And today, the gift from Phillipa of a meditation book (left anonymously at her desk). Soma picks it up, makes sure to look down at it with a neutral expression—a careful performance for whoever is watching. She leaves the book on the magazine rack in the reception area with the Visa pamphlets after reading the first line on the back: What you are experiencing is loss.

  Walking to her car, she texts her brother Josiah.

  Generous anonymous coworker AKA Phillipa Lady of Perpetual Mourning left book informing me I am having

  a loss

  His response buzzes her hand as she slips her phone into her pocket. Josiah, now over thirty, texts like an irate teenager.

  why r anonymous ppl

  all such fuckwits do

  they have meetings

  u need a new job

  Then,

  ROBOOOOOTS!!!!!!

  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Yeah.

  u could move now

  why keep the condo

  big

  Yes I am considering a year long cycle tour through the countryside.

  Thank you.

  haha fuck you too

  

  Fifteen minutes later, he texts:

  what you are experien

  cing is losing

  loss

  sorry

  Soma has watched other people go through breakups on Facebook. The suggestive status updates, half-scripts of a melodrama, the sound of a palm clapping on a hard bright screen. Sometimes a few old photos of the couple from early days, posted ambiguously—these photos had a tendency to disappear. It was what people posted and quickly deleted that was most self-revealing, Soma thought. People thought people didn’t see, but that’s what everybody wanted—the satisfaction of watching life through a two-way mirror. Then, eventually, the Rumi and Hafiz quotes on letting go, the mourner giving public signs of personal growth. The appropriate I-am-moving-on updates always earned many heart icons (Soma hated these); any persisting bitter or wounded posts were quietly ignored, or condemned by receiving supportive comments only from the mourner’s parents. Things will look up love mom. Soma has scrolled through many divorces. She read those stories distantly—the grinning avatars amassing sympathy. Facebook was not the place for tough love—you just looked like an asshole. Have some self-respect, she’d thought. This too shall pass. It was something buried deep inside her, this reticence. Really, this online gallery was only about who was watching you, not what you posted. Still, she couldn’t stop scrolling.

  When she starts to think about returning to Facebook, Soma isn’t surprised to get unsolicited advice from Josiah. Over the past three months, he’s called her up a few times a week from Halifax, making his two older kids warble pitchy hellos to Soma over the phone. In the summers during his undergrad in computer science he’d worked as a tree planter on Vancouver Island. Tree planting had transformed him, like finding a religion late in life. Soma dreads telling him about her weightlifting—doesn’t want to weather his enthusiasm. An outlet, he
will say. I’m so glad you’ve found an outlet. Like she’s an electrical plug. These days Josiah works part-time from home as a graphic designer. In his spare time he makes prints of his photos of trees. He gave Soma and Melanie a triptych of wind-bent arbutus trees for their third anniversary—trunks entwined, sinewy, red and gold. His wife’s father owns an American hotel chain. When they’d married, Soma sat in the first row, beamed politely, and thought, You will never struggle.

  “Just post something,” he tells her. “Then it’s done with.”

  “What’ll I do about the comments?”

  “You just have to post something if you go back on. Otherwise it will be just—It’ll be weird. Everybody knows you broke up. Melanie has like three thousand friends. You know?”

  “What? What do you mean? Did she post something? What did she post?” Soma, who’d never been very into Facebook, had put an embargo on it since Melanie packed her things and left.

  “Okay, okay. Never mind. Just give me your password. I’ll do it.”

  His youngest, just four months, screams in the background, and the older ones sing, “PHONE HE’S ON THE PHONE QUIET QUIET QUIET HE’S ON THE PHONE PHONE PHONE,” followed by maniacal pack laughter. Melanie had always said they all should live in the same city. She’d loved the kids, their insatiable love, how they shoved their fingers into her mouth, tried to unravel her tight curls. After their week-long visits, Soma always spent an evening on the couch, watching music videos or a movie on her laptop, slowly recharging. Melanie had laughed at her: You’re like an old lady. Melanie, an only child, had lovingly followed and viciously mocked Josiah’s novelistic Facebook albums of his family. Cherub-faced kid beside a potted rare kind of fern on his cedar deck. “Josiah is one step away from Gerber babies,” she’d say solemnly. “You need to stop him.”

  “Won’t I have to respond to what people say?” Soma says now.