by Lisa Moore
Sadie tugs Eleanor’s dress roughly, this way and that, as if she were making a hospital bed. Constance trawls the bottom of her tiny purse until she draws out a lipstick, lethal as a bullet. She dismantles it and screws up the explosion of colour. She grips Eleanor’s jaw and covers the pouting bottom lip and says, Rub them together. Sadie has got her by the hair, dragging a punishing brush through so fast that Eleanor’s scalp yelps.
Listen, Sadie says, it’s only that yahoo Amelia Kerby, who cares?
And then it rises in her, the wave, plowing up through the guts of the evening, up through her platform shoes, grinding her kneecaps to dust, into her thighs, a spraying granite of surf hitting her crotch, stomach, her breastbone splintering, all blown apart.
I care, wails Eleanor, I lo-huv-huv-huv-huve him.
She and Philip bought a house around the bay. The grass up to their waists. Tiger lilies. Fireweed. Crabapples. Philip pulled over on the side of the road and rolled down the window.
Why are we?
Shhh.
Can we just.
Shhh.
He’d pulled over next to a copse of whispering aspen. The car filled with the leafy, percipient surf. The wind blew, and the leaves showed their silver undersides as if the tree had been caught naked and was trying to cover up.
And the wave withdraws. Eleanor is still standing. The bathroom is lustral, the fluorescent lights thrumming like an orchestra of didgeridoos. Sadie and Constance are angels with tangy auras like orange zest. They are springtime, a Scandinavian polar bear swim, they are the girls in the cake, Isadora Duncan, they’ve bested the mechanical bull, they’re electricity after an outage, they are her friends. Eleanor is okay. She’s okay. She’s going to be fine .
I will fight, Eleanor says.
There you go, says Sadie.
She had awakened in Philip’s apartment, ten years ago. Trembling, partly from the hangover, but mostly from fright. She knew she was in love. How terrible. She could still feel his finger tracing the elastic of her underwear. She lay on her back, her arms over her head, her wraparound dress — he had untied the string at her hip and lifted the fabric away, and untied the other string inside the dress, beneath her breast. Little bows he pulled slowly. So she lay there in the black bra and underwear. His finger moved from one hip to the other, tracing the elastic. It was that finger moving over her belly that tipped her. It spilled her over. A car roared up the steep hill outside the apartment and squealed its tires, and the squeal felt like her heart, as if her heart were tearing around the corner of an empty street in the last sleeping city on the Atlantic. A brass candle holder crusted with wax. A Fisher Price telephone with a glowing orange receiver. She had stumbled over it on their way in and the bell rang clear. When she awoke in the morning she came into herself. Sunlight piercing the weave of a rosy curtain, the wardrobe door hanging open, his jeans on the back of a chair, the red suspenders sagging, exhausted from the effort of holding him back.
Eleanor jerks the wine glass back and forth as if it is a gear shift manoeuvring her across the room. She stumbles forward and grabs Sadie’s arm.
She says, This is the sort of drunkenness it takes a lifetime to achieve. I must actualize my potential before it wanes. I may never achieve this clarity of purpose again as long as I live.
Sadie says, You might regret this.
Whose side are you on?
I’m just saying, in the morning.
Because I’m ready here.
In the clear light of day.
If I’m all alone, just say so.
You’re not alone, it’s just I’m thinking a glass of water, a Tylenol, forty winks.
So you’re with me?
Whatever you say.
You’re in?
I’m in.
Let’s actualize.
Eleanor drags Sadie across the dance floor, grabbing at dresses and suit jackets to stay standing. Finally she taps Amelia on the shoulder. Amelia turns.
You, she says. Amelia smiles.
Eleanor says, You, you, you. Where is your husband?
I have no husband.
That’s right, says Eleanor. She grins triumphantly.
Your boyfriend, then, where’s he?
It was nothing, Amelia says, my last boyfriend.
Nothing? It was nothing? Okay, the one before that.
Him too, nothing. She makes a sound, Pfft.
Okay, the one that broke your heart, where is he?
Pfft, says Amelia.
Pfft? Pfft? says Eleanor. She suddenly rests her forehead on Sadie’s shoulder. It’s true the girl has no life experience. There is no way to make an impression on her. There is no way to dent that lamé. She is what she appears, bubbly and handsome with a certain talent for academic lingo and a healthy bank account. Eleanor feels no match.
Well, you’ve started it now, Sadie says.
Eleanor rouses herself. She will do it then, if she’s forced, finish this girl off, although already a new clarity has befallen her. The girl has nothing to do with it. Where, she wonders sadly, is Philip. Who is he? How can she remind him who he is?
I mean the boyfriend, then, says Eleanor, who took his bare hands and tore your flesh and pried the bones of your ribs apart and reached up and tore your beating heart out with his fingernails and then put it in his mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it. And then smiled at you with your own blood dripping down his teeth.
Here Eleanor mimes as she speaks (a trick she’s learned from Frank Harvey) a pulsing heart in her fist. She mimes the heart almost slipping out one end of the fist, but catching it, cupping it in both hands. The heart truly appears to be pulsing in her cupped hands. She looks at Sadie, astonished by her own facility. Sadie looks astonished too. Eleanor is holding Amelia Kerby’s slithering, tough little bungee-jumping heart. And then, snarling like a dog, Eleanor chews the tough meat of Amelia’s heart. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
That boyfriend, she says.
Um, that’s never happened to me, Amelia says. Sadie puts her arm around Amelia and gives her a squeeze.
I think what my friend is trying to say is stay away from her husband. He’s a little confused right now, but they have a kid and a really great marriage and you don’t want to inadvertently fuck that up, now, do you?
At four-thirty in the morning everyone forms a circle around the bride and groom on the beer-soaked dance floor. They hold hands and sway violently, some of them fall over and the other side of the circle drags them up from their knees. Then that side, because of the exertion, topples and they must be hauled back on their feet. They rush into the centre of the dance floor, joined hands raised over their heads. The circle rushes in and pulls out. The bright dresses like bits of glass and sparkle in a kaleidoscope that fall to the centre with each twist of the lens and drop away. Blue stage lights splash over them, up the walls, across the ceiling, the floor. The bride and groom hug the guests, making their way around the circle.
Constance holds Eleanor’s head in her hands tightly, she presses her cheek against Eleanor’s cheek, and her face is wet and hot. She draws back and the red light falls over her, splinters of purple searing from the sequins in her veil, on the bodice of her dress.
I love you, Eleanor, she says, I love you. And I love your husband too. And I love my husband. I love everybody’s husband.
She lets go of Eleanor’s face and falls into the arms of the man next to Eleanor. Ted grabs Eleanor and holds her. He has a beer in each hand and the bottles chink behind her back.
Eleanor tugs Philip’s shirtsleeve.
Come home with me?
Not yet, he yells.
She is lying in bed waiting for him. It’s 7:32 a.m. She lies still. There is a fear rushing around in her body. She remembers her mother call
ing a few years ago about the weasel. Eleanor can feel that mink fear rippling through her body because she fell in love the first night she slept with Philip and after that she fixed on him.
A body slams against a wall and falls onto the opposite wall of the porch. It’s either Philip or the three Norwegian sailors who rent the attached house. The angry saints with their haloes of white hair and steady brawling.
Philip lurches to the banister, wraps his arms around it as if it were the mast of a capsizing ship.
He looks up at her.
He says, I went to Signal Hill in a Cadillac.
Eleanor is standing at the top of the stairs.
We stopped at the Fountain Spray to buy candy necklaces and we had a giant bottle of wine. I bit the necklaces off all the women’s necks. He burps.
Glenn Marshall’s neck too. Spectacular Sam was there. That guy who dances on broken glass. Do you remember that guy? He does a lounge lizard thing, and the Caribbean drums.
He lunges past her and she follows him to the bedroom.
He says, Spectacular Sam poured cognac over broken beer bottles on the parking lot of Signal Hill. Lots of smashed glass. He lit it, fell into a trance, and danced on it with his bare feet. Then he knelt and scooped the glass up in his hands and splashed his face with it, and drops of blood came up all over his face. You know, there was the sun too, coming up.
Philip struggles for a long moment with the buttons of his shirt, tipping slowly on his heels like a punching clown in a breeze. He sighs and rips the shirt open. Buttons hit the wall above the lamp. He falls onto the bed.
She gets up to turn off the light, but he grabs her arm.
Stay here, he says. Stay here.
Acknowledgements
This book is for Steve.
I am grateful to the following people who read these stories with love in one fist and a hatchet in the other. Thank you all for the sound and cacophonous advice: Ramona Dearing, Steve Crocker, Susan Crocker, Michael Crummey, Jack Eastwood, Mark Ferguson, Michael Jones, Mary Lewis, Nan Love, Beth Ryan, Medina Stacey, Larry Mathews, Lynn Moore, Claire Wilkshire, Michael Winter.
For being as exacting and generous an editor as one could possibly hope for, I am grateful to Martha Sharpe.
Thank you to my big, gorgeous, rowdy, loving family.
Versions of these stories first appeared in the literary journals Best Canadian Fiction, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Journey Prize Anthology, This Magazine, TickleAce, and the anthologies Hearts Larry Broke (Killick) and Turn of the Story (Anansi). Thanks to the editors of these publications.
Thank you to the Canada Council and The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council whose support made this book possible.
About the Author
LISA MOORE is the acclaimed author of the novels Alligator, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, and a national bestseller; and February, which was a national bestseller and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Her story collection Open was also a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a national bestseller, and it won the Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award. Lisa Moore lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
About the Publisher
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007 and 2009 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”