Open

by Lisa Moore

  My husband yelling, Hey, get that thing away from us. Jeremy, the girls are trying to peek.

  Stella yelling back, Listen you guys, looks to me like you could do with a little magnification. You know what I’m saying?

  A sailor on the deck dressed in white. He raises his arm, tentative. Shimmering. The boys have walked, dressed now. They are near. I hear them, and a metal eyelid falls over the gorgeous blue. Our quarter’s worth. Step back from the eyepiece. Towels around their necks. We ate lobster in the Cow Head restaurant with the big window, linen napkins. Our cheeks sunburned, sneakers full of sand. Mussels, alive, alive oh. The sun went down and the room turned vibrant red.

  Things I’ve never tasted before. Wrapped in brown paper, dripping. What haven’t I eaten, ever? Tripe. Brain. Once on a beach in Morocco with my husband and a French couple. She wore a white scarf, the wind fluttered, there was a bonfire, a bucket of fish. A table, there on the beach, a checkered cloth. The Frenchman lifted out the spine of my fish with one motion. His wife’s gold earring shot out light. You will not find a single bone, the Frenchman said. As though this kind of thoroughness was exquisite. Something we could strive to achieve. I want to be that couple still, fourteen years later. I want to be French, on the beach in all that wind. Fresh fish still panting in a galvanized bucket with a skim of water, the shiny blue eye reflecting sky, cloud. The table on the sand, the sharp knife opening the fish, the gentle tugging until the spine parts from the flesh, intact. Ocean.

  My husband is tall, big bones. I like the large bones, he has substance, sleeping beside me. He can ward things off. How committed he is to his sleep. The ringing chink of the weights he brings together over his chest while lying on the living-room floor. The abandon with which he flings himself into whatever he does. Hard to get along with when he’s working. Peculiar about meat. His grasp. He knows everything, everything. He exhausts me. Makes me shake with anger, slobber with tears. Grey long johns he got second hand. I think, perhaps an affair in Berlin last year. Never losing his temper: he doesn’t believe in it. A temper is something you choose to lose, he says. You decide. Then the extravagance with which he loses his temper: You have never watered a plant in your life, have you? Have you? Screaming: You’ve never watered a fucking plant in your entire life. We ate wild boar in a French village, the lavender in the fields. A big table, a dinner party, and we were looking at each other, each tasting boar for the first time. The world goes canny and alien, and you both experience it. Succulent, earthy, unnameable boar.

  Your bike?

  We’ll leave it.

  Jeremy claps his gloves in front of him. One smack.

  So, how about green tea ice cream? We’ll go somewhere else.

  He stops on the corner of Bloor and Spadina, he seems to have lost his sense of direction entirely.

  Now, we are where?

  Spadina, I say. This is Spadina. And you’re doing okay, I say. I make one eyeball fierce. It’s the best I can do since I’m so short beside him. Give him an eyeball. I got this eye from my father. Also a short person.

  The strangest thing I ever ate was with Stella. Two Panamanians once made us a grey stew with pigs’ hocks, which are ankles, essentially, and a slow, bouncing, naked onion, roiling in the glass pot on the stove top. Did we sleep with them, the Panamanians? Of course we did, that was love too. Cartilage, a couple of carrots. So hot my nose, my eyes. Whatever spices they used. So hot I became new. Try that.

  After the ice cream on Spadina I watch Jeremy walk into the crowd. It’s the last time I will ever see him.

  The Stylist

  The stylist stands behind you and leans in. She scrunches your hair in her fists, testing bounce. She lifts it to the sides like wings, tugging her fingers through the snags.

  She says, What’s the idea here?

  The idea is I want to look good.

  You want a change, she says. Your husband left you. Your husband left you. Your husband left you.

  Uncross your legs, she says. You adjust your posture. She spreads her hands on your shoulders, meets your eyes in the mirror.

  Now listen, you’ll have to sit up straight.

  You have hunched since competitive diving at the Aquarena when you were twelve and grew breasts. Your bathing suit, the frosty green of the old Ford. The green of leaves covered with short silver hair, lucent grapes. You wore this bathing suit every day after school. The chlorine wearing the lycra thin, fading the sheen. When the bathing suit was wet your nipples were visible. The colour of your nipples.

  You hunch your shoulders. You aren’t like the older girls whose breasts are a fact.

  Your breasts are tender, a rumour, the beginning of a long story, a page-turner. It’s the worst when you’re speaking with your coach. The bathing suit transparent as the skin of a grape you peel with your teeth.

  The lineup for the ladder is the worst. Long enough for the warm lights to make the beads of water on your arms creep to a standstill, chlorine tingles your skin. Under the water nobody can see your nipples. Diving practice enchants you. You fall asleep as soon as you get home. Asleep before the soaps, drooling on the cushion. Over your fried eggs and beans, the ketchup screaming on the white plate.

  This is what the table looks like: placemats with illustrations of a fox hunt. Red riding jackets, top hats, hounds. A silver water pitcher, greasy with condensation. An ashtray with a smoking cigarette. Your father’s empty chair. His placemat, without the cutlery. Your mother is likely to cry. She cries every night. Sometimes while watching the news, sometimes over supper. These are her specialties: sweet-and-sour ribs with tears, spaghetti with tears, steak, baked potato, tears. Mom, hold the tears.

  This is what you see out the window: hideous icicles, a row of fangs. You dream you kiss your coach.

  A kiss so ripe and desperate, nothing else will ever come close.

  He kisses you and cups his hand under your chin and one of your front teeth drops into his open palm. Blood seeps from the fleshy hole. You know at once it isn’t a baby tooth. Now you must go through life like this. Icicles crash from the eaves.

  In the morning you run your tongue and run your tongue. Your mother and you live in the mouth of winter, waterlogged. The sky is a ravenous mink, the spruce trees raking its wet fur underbelly. You have become enchanted. Your coach lifting weights in the chrome gym, wiping his glistening neck with a white towel, rolling his shoulders, sweat in his eyelashes. He lies on his back, a leg on either side of the black vinyl bench. The leg of his shorts gapes and you see the white perforated cotton inside and the bulge of his penis, pubic hair. You have never seen. This is something else. Something else again. When he stands up the foggy print of his sweat in the vinyl, his spine, his shoulder blades like the wings of a dragonfly. Rank gym, feet, the iron smell of clanking weights, chlorine, boiling hotdogs from the hot air vent, the tangy liniment. The slap of his hand against his wet neck. The smell of his liniment. Like laundry dried in the wind and licorice, coniferous.

  How fickle the water is. You slip in from a great height and the blush in your cheeks cools. The water unzippers your new-girl body, your breasts, the hunch. The water peels you. The saddest thing you’ve ever seen is the back of your father’s green Ford raising clouds of dust that make the alders unshiny. The saddest thing is that Ford turning the corner.

  Or the pool rises up in a fist and mangles your face.

  A month ago you blackened both your eyes. They swelled shut. Two plums sitting neat. Sockets like eggcups. A blow so stunning it seemed ordained. The fangs snapped shut. Mink savaging the hind leg of a cloud. Your mother kneeling near your head on the concrete.

  Next we’ll see the macaroni, she says.

  You vomit chlorine and macaroni. Where has she come from? She was supposed to be at work. How long have you been out? She would have had to come across the city. The back of her hand on your cheek
. She would have had to know without being told.

  But here you are again, toes curled over the edge of the ten-metre board. It’s warm up here because you’re near the lights. You’re in the rafters. Far away, at the other end of the Aquarena, an aerobics class.

  Your coach could turn on the bubbles. No matter what, it will be okay if he turns on the bubbles, which cost money, which aren’t allowed at the Nationals, which make the water as welcoming as whipped cream.

  He wants to see a triple.

  You want the bubbles but you don’t ask. You are in love, the black Trans Am with a flame that bursts over the hood, the megaphone. He’s sitting in a canvas chair by the side of the pool and he’s wearing black flip-flops with red plastic flowers. He speaks to you.

  Shoulders, he says. Although it’s a megaphone, his tone sounds bedroomy. He calls you by your last name.

  Fo cus Malone.

  It’s strange, but you are very good at diving. You are the youngest on the provincial team. You will go to the Nationals. You have come to suspect you can do absolutely anything. It’s intoxicating, this glimmer of your will. The pool crunches your ribs like a nutcracker, the board nicks your shin, unspooling a ribbon of blood in the water, a love tap on the left shoulder so you can’t lift your arm.

  Or the pool plays dead. It doesn’t matter, you keep doing it. Doing begets doing. You could go on like this forever.

  You unhunch. It’s a magic trick, the triple. The action doesn’t happen until it’s over. It happens in the future and you catch up. A triple is déjà vu. Trusting the untrustable.

  The key: give yourself over/over/over.

  The stylist reams a finger around your cape collar, loosening. Takes a steel comb, flicks it against her hipbone. You are thirty-four and you’ve been to a stylist a handful of times. Maybe six, not ten.

  She says, That length is doing nothing for you.

  She whips your swivel chair: slur of mirror, porcelain, chrome, fluorescent nettles stick themselves to the glass. Droning hair dryers, running water, phones.

  The stylists talk. A mazey, elliptical daisy chain of talk. They adhere to nothing. Vacation packages, electric toothbrushes, blind dates. (He’s got to be kidding: coffee . Going for coffee equals death . Night skiing, spritzers, bowling, sea-kayaking, I’m like, Okay. Let’s go . But coffee? He’s kidding, right?) They are the experts on every topic. Hair is a mild distraction. Hair happens.

  She flicks the steel comb and it whirs near her hip. She’s drawing a conclusion.

  Your hair: upkeep, damage, regrowth, definition, product, lifestyle, frost, frizz, product, streaks, foils, body, cut. Where you’re a small person. Where you’ve got a round face.

  Outside, the storm slows traffic like a narcotic. You haven’t seen a winter like this since. The equipment is breaking down. Bring in the army, they’re saying. At night the snowplows crash into the drifts and stagger backward like dazed prizefighters. The windshields have bushy eyebrows. Cars stuck on the hills, smoking tires, engines squealing like dolphins. You haven’t seen anything like this since you were a kid. You and your mother, the icicles, the lake catching over, the wind circling the glassy trees like a wet finger tracing a crystal rim. Her sleeping pills, the alarm clock blaring near her ear. Stumbling from your room at dawn to wake her so she can drive you to diving practice. The smell of chlorine in your skin always, your hair.

  You like your driveway to be scraped down to the pavement since your husband left you. You get out there early every Saturday morning. The children watch from the living-room window. Your little daughter taps the glass. She waves. Your son puts his lips against the glass in a big gummy kiss.

  The hospital room zings. Your husband says he wants a smoke. His forehead is gleaming, his eyebrows raised. He’s feral, acute with stillness. His hazel eyes, flecks of rust, hair white as a fresh sheet of paper. He’s socking one fist gently into his open palm.

  You breathe. The minute hand reverberates each time it moves, a twang . You wait, wait for it, wait. The minute hand moves. Your mother lays an icy towel on your forehead. A drop of water moves down your temple and into your ear. The moving drop is exquisite in every way. The contraction recedes. The nurse is driving a spaceship in her sleep. She’s gripping the arms of the chair, leaning slightly forward, snoring.

  Go have your smoke, you say. Nothing’s happening yet.

  But it starts to happen while he’s in the parking lot. He tells you later about his moment: how he will never be the same. He’s standing on a slab of concrete near a loading entrance at the back of the hospital. The door is tied open with a piece of rubber tubing. The smell of cold food, sausage, powdered egg, the churning of dishwashers, spilled cutlery. It’s a foggy night and he can smell the harbour and something bitter, pigeon shit. He’s bewildered, hardly able to remember how he got where he is.

  When he goes back to your hospital room his son’s head is visible, becomes visible with each contraction and disappears again. It’s the most awesome, unlovely, soul-quaking thing he has ever seen. He cups one of your heels in his hand, your mother holds your other heel. The baby is mauve coloured, smeared darkly with guck, and crying.

  Your hair will be by Suzanne.

  They’re single or have just eloped, the stylists, young or staving off age with fashion, trend. The best one-room apartments in the city.

  Do you have children, Suzanne?

  Nope. No. Thank. You.

  And you don’t ever?

  You got that right. Kids are so expensive . Why would you?

  Suzanne knows what she doesn’t want. Sometimes desire is forged by the process of elimination. Your husband wanted golfing and hockey, a new tent, to celebrate his Native heritage (hitherto unmentioned during seven years of marriage), to become a theologian, to hunt seals. (There’s a white mask the Inuit hunter holds to his face while approaching the seal basking at the edge of an ice floe. Everything is white, the hunter’s white furs, the ice, the air. When he lifts the white mask he’s obliterated. Your husband, the empty landscape, your husband, the empty landscape.) You prefer oblique dreams but you are too tired to manufacture the oblique. He wanted to be a vegetarian. (There are foods you can’t face anymore. Basil you can’t eat because of him. Even the smell of it.) To add on an apartment. (He got to keep the house through a conspiracy inspired by his mother.)

  Then he realized what he didn’t want. To be married anymore. To you. And now he’s with Rayleen, an airhead.

  The idea is to look good, you tell the stylist. That’s the idea.

  Things the stylists insist upon: a fireplace, a cappuccino maker. Toronto once a year, loyalty, techno music. A stuffed toy.

  What’s going on out there?

  Suzanne: Still snowing.

  The streets have become impossibly narrow. Snowbanks muscling the cars like ululating throats. The stylists win dance contests. Drink B52s, martinis.

  You are here to learn how to become vulnerable again. How to give yourself over. They like a nice glass, fruit. They like their drinks to be blue, orange slices; they tip flamboyantly. There’s a big, decaying city in their past. Havana, maybe.Venice. They have no past.

  The stylist absolutely insists upon silence at certain hours. Watching the February snow make the sky listless, the slob ice on the harbour lifting in swells so gentle it seems the couch moves beneath them. Hand-knit socks. Original art. Brand names: Le Chateau, Swatch, Paderno. To watch the dusk settle. Soap operas. The primacy of their cats.

  Suzanne has one item in her fridge: dehydrated miniature crabs. She can see the whole city from her window in the Battery.

  Your mother has been begging you for years to get your hair streaked. You have breakfast together and she puts down her fork.

  Enough, your mother says. She leans over the table
and touches your cheek with the back of her hand. You have been going with the salt over the eggs. You stop. And you go and go and go with the salt. Then you toss it across the kitchen.

  You have made everything soft for him, like whipped cream.

  There he is in the La-Z-Boy, hungover, misty-eyed.

  I made a mistake, he says, I fucked someone.

  Enough, you say.

  Your mother cannot understand, nor will she accept, that you don’t want streaks. You had no money in law school. Sometimes you were hungry. You left home, and your mother had to shovel. Sleeping pills. It got dark so early. There aren’t even streetlights out that way. Her asthma. She’d have to walk through waist-deep snow and stop to use her inhaler. Icicles glinting. Leaks in the roof. You hear her smoke over the phone. A pause while she smokes. You hear the whir of the microwave, the bell. You hear the ice in her glass of scotch. You hear the icicles dripping outside. You hear her crying. What will make you stop crying, Mom?

  She says, Have you thought about streaks?

  Your husband wants to be an actor. He wants to give up his career as a bank manager. He wants a break from the kids. He wants the kids in his arms. He wants to go bankrupt, be a filmmaker. He has begun to identify with the clients whose assets he’s been forced to seize. They aren’t such bad guys.

  The stylist takes a pair of scissors from the jar of blue liquid. Snaps them twice, flicking drops.

  Suzanne’s hair is short, stucco-like in texture, blond with ironic roots. Black-framed glasses. The bones of her hips pressing the red plastic jeans. Her shirt is clingy, reveals her belly button, a piercing. There are two kinds of hair, you’ve been told. The long and wispy: fuck-me hair. The short and androgynous: fuck-you hair.

  You don’t have the money now nor you will ever have the money to get your hair done every four months, which is how often you must in order to keep the roots from showing. You do not like roots. You hate them. You will not incur the extra expense just now when your bastard prick of a husband, who has run up every jointly owned credit card, who has spent the nest egg saved to help your mother retire early and not have to wade through snowbanks with her inhaler. The bastard prick has a spending disorder, in fact, hitherto unmentioned, and has left you with half his debt, which is the law, and is seeing an airhead, and you can’t trust him to come up his half of the. You won’t incur the extra expense for anything because you had to buy a new house and a second-hand car, the engine of which is tied together with dental floss.