Ellen in Pieces

by Caroline Adderson

  Tonight though, she felt nothing. Something rang false.

  A few days after noticing Anna Sergeyevna, the lady with the lapdog, Gurov seats himself close by at an outdoor restaurant. He wags his finger at the Pomeranian, and, when it growls, appeases it with a bone off his plate. It’s a ploy, of course, to secure Anna Sergeyevna’s acquaintance.

  After dinner, Anna and Gurov take a long walk, just as Ellen herself had done that afternoon when she returned home with the leash and collar and a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth of dog food and paraphernalia. What happened with Ellen was that the dog—the black one, the flesh-and-blood, tongue-and-tail one—made straight for the nearest tree and began to circle it, forcing Ellen to leave the sidewalk and slop around on the saturated verge. It was as though he were searching for something he’d lost in the longer grass at the tree’s base, something he was desperate to recover. Finally, he found it, this precious thing invisible to Ellen. When he did, he lifted his leg and pissed all over it, then romped ahead to the next tree where, evidently, he had also left something in the grass.

  After ten minutes of this Ellen grew impatient and tried to pull the dog along. He stiffened his legs, effectively putting on his brakes, and stared at her, ill-done-by. She had to coax and herd him, then pick him up and carry him. In other words, the entire walk had been about getting the dog to walk instead of sniff. More than once she became tangled in the leash, or he did.

  Yet when Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna go strolling after dinner, talking the whole time, marvelling at the way the light falls on the sea, the dog isn’t even mentioned. Presumably he was there, or had they left him tied up back at the restaurant?

  A week later, Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna retire to her hotel room to consummate their affair. Again, no reference to the Pomeranian. Does he object to their lovemaking? Is he jealous? Have they shut him in the bathroom? It doesn’t say. In fact, the dog is only mentioned once more in the story. Months after they both leave Yalta, Gurov finds he can’t forget the lady with the lapdog. He travels to her town and loiters in front of her house until, after a miserable hour, an old woman comes out with the Pomeranian.

  Gurov was about to call to the dog, but his heart began to beat violently and in his excitement he could not remember its name.

  Here Ellen lifted the real nameless dog out of her lap so she could return the book to the shelf. It was the first time the story had failed her.

  An hour later while brushing her teeth, she realized something: the story was in Gurov’s point of view! It wasn’t Chekhov, but Gurov who was indifferent to the dog beyond the purpose it could serve him in seducing a young woman. Whatever Chekhov may have felt about the canine species, Ellen knew this: if the story had been from Anna Sergeyevna’s point of view the dog would certainly have had a name. And a patronymic. And a diminutive too.

  So she settled on Anton. The resemblance was obvious by then—the longer black chin hairs, the compassionate tilt of the head. Tony for short, in honour of her dog-loyal hairdresser.

  THE next day Matt was out front getting rained on when Ellen and Tony returned from their walk. Her heart stuttered at the sight of those bare knees. According to the clock with movable hands on her door, Ellen was late. This clock had proved useful in their affair, which was being conducted strictly on a drop-in basis. Now it provided Matt with a grievance.

  She pointed to her goateed excuse, though Tony’s goatee was not so obvious with the wet sock hanging down.

  Matt asked, “What’s it got in its mouth?”

  “A sock. Isn’t that cute?”

  Before the door was fully open, Tony bolted in ahead of Matt, who threw back the dripping hood of his Gore-Tex and sampled Ellen, her mouth and neck. After they separated and shed their rain gear, he asked whose dog it was.

  “Well,” Ellen said.

  She told him the whole story of bringing the dog home and the trip to the pet store. She might have been reading a script. Did he hear it? This was how she lived now, hovering above her own life, watching herself so that later, when she recounted her day to Matt, he would be amused.

  He checked his phone.

  “You would not believe what they had in that store!” Ellen babbled. “See? Party-balloon poop bags! I can coordinate Tony’s poop bag to my outfit. Or I can say, ‘I’m feeling existential,’ and take a blue one.”

  Everything was in the box Tony and the can of corn had come across the street in. Matt reached for the plastic banana, squeaked it. Tony snapped to attention.

  “That’s a lot of stuff to take to the SPCA, Ellen.”

  “And I hate shopping. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Let’s go up,” he said, starting for the ladder to the loft, pulling on her sleeve.

  Ellen sashayed over to the sign and turned the hands of the clock forward another forty minutes, remembering how, not so long ago, their pleasure hadn’t been so stingily meted out, yet still feeling grateful, so very grateful.

  SHE walked Tony to the vet, paid for shots, deworming, and the flea treatments she had to purchase in a six-month pack. Wheaten terrier, the vet thought, with a dash of Labrador. Maybe even a little corgi. He lectured her on neutering.

  Ellen said, “The thing is, I’m not keeping him.”

  She should have been churning out Christmas pots, but couldn’t settle at her wheel, not since that debilitating conversation with Mimi the day before.

  “You’re not coming home for Christmas?” Ellen had asked.

  “I hate Christmas.”

  “Say the word and I’ll buy you the ticket, sweetheart. All of us together for once, even your dad.”

  “Who?” Mimi said, and Ellen sighed.

  “Listen, Mom. I’m not in the mood for this. I just had my pubes waxed. I’m dying here.”

  “You what?” Ellen asked.

  She was practically shaking with mortification when Mimi finished explaining. “Everyone does it, Mom. No one would ever go around all hairy down there.”

  Another thing for Ellen to fret about: her wild bush. If she went and had it done now, Matt would notice. Boy, would he notice.

  She started training Tony out of library books, glad to have found a use for all that corn. Tony was gaga for niblets. Within days she had him sitting and lying down for niblets, though no inducement would endear him to the leash. He was a free spirit and, respecting that, Ellen let him sniff along behind her.

  On YouTube, she watched Pumpkin the beagle read. It really seemed that he could. When shown a picture of a cat and offered a selection of words printed on cards, Pumpkin selected C–A–T one hundred percent of the time.

  Some old competitive streak surfaced in Ellen. She opened another can of niblets.

  Finally, finally, Matt dropped by. “Sorry,” he said.

  “What for?” Ellen chirped.

  “I couldn’t get away.”

  Ellen pictured the girlfriend, not her ineffable face, but her tidy little Chekhov mound, pristinely waxed. All her thinking about the Russians had brought her to this unflattering comparison, that, pubically, Ellen was in the Tolstoy camp.

  Matt said, “And I’m going home for the holidays. Did I mention that?”

  One of the dog books explained stances, tail positions, barks. Ellen had noticed that though Matt always said “I,” when he really meant “we” he cast his eyes down and to the right. And if she told him how desperate this news made her, would he ever come back?

  “And where is home?” she asked.

  “Spruce Grove. Outside of Edmonton.”

  She feigned nonchalance, said she was going away herself.

  “Cordova Island?” he said. “Where’s that?”

  “I used to live there a long time ago. When I was married. My younger daughter Yolanda lives there now with her partner and their kids. She dropped out of pre-med to relive my life. The weird thing is, then my ex-husband moved back.”

  “Oh,” Matt said. “Should I be jealous?”

  Ellen laughed, but
he didn’t. His face folded up in a way she hadn’t seen. He was always so uncreased, so playful, except when lamenting his penis size or paying obeisance to his phone. It frightened her into blurting, “Oh! We’ve got something to show you!”

  “We?”

  It seemed Matt had forgotten Tony until Ellen called him. His black head popped up among the couch cushions.

  Ellen selected three books from the shelf—Lady with a Lapdog, The Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina—books the average undergrad couldn’t tell apart. She stood them up on the floor. Tony waited, shifting from side to side, licking his lips, which Ellen knew now was a sign of anxiety. She showed Matt the index card with its neatly printed question: Which book did Chekhov write?

  “Read,” she commanded, holding the card in front of Tony.

  He pranced over to Lady with a Lapdog and brought it back to Ellen. For this, she rewarded him with a palm full of corn. Then she turned to Matt so he might—she hoped—claim his reward too.

  BUS to Horseshoe Bay, ferry to Nanaimo, bus upisland to German Creek. Ellen pulled her suitcase—stop-start, stop-start—stones jamming the wheels, through the gravel parking lot to the government wharf where the ramp was angled at eighty degrees. And she remembered how, all those years ago, whenever they left Cordova Island or returned, it had seemed so difficult. Inevitably it would be low tide like this and Ellen would have to negotiate the ramp with all their groceries and bags, and Mimi, just a baby. Ellen had needed a sherpa. And where was Larry? Why couldn’t he sherp?

  She let the suitcase go first, clutching its strap and the railing, inching her way down, thinking of Tony pulling on the leash. She’d left him with Tilda.

  It was the same ferry, a metal tub with a covered freight area, rows of wooden benches inside. Ellen loaded her suitcase on. Eventually other passengers began arriving with backpacks and Rubbermaid bins filled with provisions or the Christmas presents they’d come to the mainland to buy, stacked on foldable dollies. A group of strangers. It used to be that whenever she took the ferry, she knew everyone and they knew her and half of them, it would turn out, had slept with Larry.

  Last year Ellen had slept with Larry at the Winter Solstice party at Larry and Amber’s house. Amber had gone to bed early. “Cramps,” she’d announced to the room. The island was full of secretless women, their menstrual cycles public knowledge. Ellen used to be one herself, though last year she had taken this information to mean that Amber’s body, if not Amber, accepted that these intermittent reunions between Larry and Ellen were Ellen’s only opportunity for sex.

  That was Ellen’s point of view anyway, that she threatened no one.

  And this year? This year Ellen was besotted with Matt, who kept coming around. If he had a reason apart from sex, it was his secret.

  The ferry backed out of its berth. A seal watched, head and shoulders out of the water, then ducked. Gulls screamed in a wheel above the dockside fish store. Ellen had forgotten the Solstice Party until now. At the end of Ellen and Larry’s marriage, when she’d learned that friends of hers had slept with him, she’d sought them out, shrieking, “How could you?” Very easily, it turned out. As easily as Ellen slept with Matt, rationalizing all the way. Ellen didn’t know the girlfriend. She was young. She would pity Ellen if she knew.

  But Ellen knew Amber. She was practically related to her.

  Tossed in the bag with the Christmas presents, Lady with a Lapdog. During the crossing, Ellen took out the book and sniffed it, ran her fingers over the dog-Braille inside the front cover. She’d intended to reread the whole thing, but instead found herself back with poor Anna Sergeyevna, stuck in love with Gurov, a man who classifies the women he sleeps with according to three types: carefree, good-natured women, whom love had made gay and who were grateful to him for the happiness he gave them; those who made love without sincerity, with unnecessary talk, affectedly, hysterically; and two or three very beautiful women whose faces suddenly lit up with a predatory expression, an obstinate desire to take, to snatch from life, more than it could give.

  This last type were no longer in their first youth.

  And Ellen? Which type was she? Grateful and utterly sincere, yes. But it was true, too, that she was chatty in bed and freely voiced her pleasure. And that in two years she’d be fifty.

  Then she felt it, the sob that could never be released, pressing hard behind her ribs. She put both hands over the place at the same time she glanced out the window, glanced at that precise December moment out on the open ocean with the solstice approaching when the colour of the sky and the colour of the water merged and there was no light anywhere to orient her. The great grey middle of her life.

  The sob absorbed back inside her body. Next time she looked, it was night.

  HER son-in-law, Sean, picked her up in the truck. They drove the main road companionably, Ellen shocked by the winter darkness. Off the grid, the island shut down on these long, overcast December evenings. They passed the Post Office, the Community Hall, the Free Store; Ellen couldn’t see these structures, only the forest in the headlights. She marvelled that Sean knew onto which rutted lane to turn. They bounced along, cedar boughs brushing against her window, spookily, like the memories of her former life here clawing to get in.

  Eli ran out of the cabin when he heard the truck. “Nonny!” He was almost seven, with wild clown-hair he’d got from his dad. Sean, though, had sheared off his Medusa dreadlocks and reinvented himself—toque-wearing father, entrepreneur.

  Taking her hand, Eli dragged Ellen inside. Sean followed with her suitcase. Eli looked from it to Ellen.

  “Did you bring me a present, Nonny?”

  Yolanda came over from the stove with baby Fern in a sling on her back, tsking at Eli, her glasses half fogged from cooking, exhausted and angelic in her half-hearted ponytail. She’d thickened from having babies, the way Ellen had. That’s what motherhood did, puffed you up, then beat you down.

  “Give me that baby right now,” Ellen said in the middle of their hug.

  Yolanda loosened the knot on her chest. Ellen waltzed Fern over to the couch lumped with sleeping cats. “Eli, come here,” she called. “I have some news. I have a dog staying at my house. His name is Tony. And you will not believe this, but it’s true. He can read.”

  Yolanda, back at the stove, said, “I thought we were cat people.”

  “Where are our presents?” Eli asked.

  “Don’t give in to him. He has to wait.”

  “Why should you?” Ellen whispered. “Bring me that bag next to my suitcase.”

  In it was Lepus arcticus. Arctic Hare.

  At dinner, Ellen told them about her neighbour Tilda. “She knits Canadian wildlife. She spins the yarn herself.” The white hare slouched on the table dangerously close to Eli’s bowl of chili. “That’s why he’s so soft,” Ellen told him. “He’s got real bunny fur mixed in with the wool.” She didn’t want to say what the hare and the tiny Townsend’s vole she’d bought for Fern had cost. “They’re not really toys. They’re works of art.”

  Yolanda said, “The Solstice Party’s at Mason and Spirit’s place this year. And Amber invited us over tomorrow night. Do you want to go?”

  Likely Ellen blushed. She fanned her face, pretending the chili was too hot. If she said no to Amber’s invitation they would wonder why.

  Sean was trying to get Fern to eat a bean, washing the sauce off in his mouth, spitting out the bean, and feeding it to the baby by hand. At the same time, he glanced at Ellen and smirked.

  “What?” Ellen said.

  “Amber alert!” he cawed, flapping his hands on either side of his toque. “Amber alert!”

  Yolanda slapped him on the shoulder.

  “What does he mean?” Ellen asked, but Yolanda wouldn’t say.

  Before bed Ellen read to the children and tucked them in. Then she stumbled in the starless dark to the outhouse and back. Calling good night to Yo and Sean, she retired to the tiny, frigid room, the one too far from the wood stove, less a
bedroom than a pantry lined with dried beans and canned preserves. The cats joined her, bed-warmers, slipping out later to kill.

  Last year she’d lain in this same rack of a cot listening to the ocean’s restless exhalations, wondering what would happen between her and Larry. This year, the ocean was still exhaling, but the hands Ellen imagined moving over her were young.

  “WHEN I say walkies he grabs something that smells like me. A sock. Once he headed out with my panties.”

  Yolanda asked, “Are you keeping him or not?”

  “I didn’t plan on it. Now I’m in something of a situation. Because I care about him. I can’t stop thinking about him. Like now. Talking about the dog counteracts the pointlessness I feel going for a walk without a dog.”

  They were following a rocky trail through the woods down to the beach, Fern in the sling wearing a bright Peruvian cap with ties, twisting her head back to look at Ellen, Eli marching ahead pretending to shoot things, while Yolanda intermittently called out, “Cease-fire!”

  “I should give him up. I’m not getting any work done. I feel like I’m being dragged around by the hair.”

  “Sounds like you’re in love,” Yolanda said.

  Ellen halted in the middle of the path with her mouth open, her hand clutching her heart. Was she? The other hand reached for the support of a tree. She leaned in, pressing her forehead to the rough bark.

  “Mom?” Yolanda hurried back and slipped an arm around Ellen. “What’s wrong?”

  Fern’s small hand patted her head. It felt like the touch of a crow’s wing, over and over.

  “Are you depressed?”

  “No.”

  “Last night I thought you looked so beautiful when you came into the cabin. You seemed so happy.”