Ellen in Pieces

by Caroline Adderson

  Ellen glanced up. “Did I?”

  “Yes. Sean even said so. He said you looked hot.”

  “I love that man,” Ellen said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I’m—”

  No, she was too embarrassed to confess.

  “I know,” Yo said. “It’s the holidays. They get me down too. Maybe we shouldn’t go tonight.” Her lips brushed Ellen’s cheek.

  “Go where?” Ellen asked.

  YOLANDA went ahead with the kids in the truck while Ellen and Sean walked over with flashlights, Ellen hugging the ditch. Any old draft dodger with one headlight and a medicinal marijuana permit could round the bend, but Sean strode fearlessly up the middle, the way he would, on a dry day, streak down it in a death-defying crouch. He custom-made longboards and sold them online, or bartered with them. Somehow the boards, their Child Tax Benefit payment, and Ellen’s occasional cheques sustained them, the way Larry’s plays and Ellen’s pots and her mother-in-law’s handouts had sustained Ellen and Larry all those years ago.

  The glowing glass lantern of Larry and Amber’s house appeared through the trees, the opposite of Yolanda and Sean’s cabin. The opposite, too, of the shack where Larry had once lived with Ellen. This house, architect-designed, cathedral-ceilinged, powered by the sun, was built on sitcoms. You walked right into the heart of it, where Larry’s big, sturdy child-bride Amber stood at the stove talking to Yolanda, but falling silent when she saw Ellen come in the door.

  Amber had changed her hair, sheared the sides and beaded the long part on top.

  “Nice,” Ellen said, smiling and opening her arms.

  On Cordova Island the standard greeting was a hug. You hugged the postmistress when she handed over your mail. You hugged the man who filled your propane tank. But Amber turned away from Ellen.

  Bewildered, stung, Ellen tried again. “What are you making?”

  “Latkes.” Amber transferred one out of the pan onto a paper-towel-lined plate.

  “I have the best latke recipe,” Ellen said. “Grind the potatoes in the food processor. Then they’re fluffy instead of rubbery and don’t look so grey. Do you have a food processor?”

  “No,” Amber said.

  “Are we doing Hanukkah?”

  “No,” Amber said.

  “Can I help?” Ellen asked, sincerely.

  “No,” again, just as a latke slapped the floor. When Amber bent to pick it up, the not-too-small of her back showed, along with her thong.

  “I see London, I see France,” Ellen said, and Amber straightened with such a look of undiluted hatred, Ellen backed away.

  All the way to where Yolanda had escaped to nurse Fern in the big armchair by the fire. She sank down on the hearth. Amber was never really warm with Ellen, understandably. Her best friend’s mother was also her husband’s ex-wife, but they’d always muddled through. Now Ellen, who had only expected, along with the usual awkwardness, the guilt anyone would feel returning to the scene of a crime, was confronted with a hostility whose source she quailed to guess at. Amber was the one who’d invited Ellen. Yolanda had said so. Why would Amber do this if she knew what had happened between Ellen and Larry last year?

  “Where’s your father?” Ellen asked Yolanda.

  “I don’t know. Sean’s checking on Eli in the bath.”

  They came over once a week for this purpose, Ellen remembered, trying not to panic. Because Sean and Yolanda would take a bath, too, probably together, while Larry hid in his study—like now, leaving Ellen alone and defenceless against Amber.

  “Sure you’re okay, Mom?” Yolanda asked, touching Ellen’s hair.

  Larry didn’t show himself until dinner. Unshaven, in slippers and a stretched-out cable-knit sweater, the kind on offer in the Free Store, covered with pills, he finally appeared. At the sight of Ellen, he drew his head back sharply, which confused her. Also, she didn’t know if she should hug him with Amber right there carrying in the plate of latkes, and, instead of setting it down on the table, letting it drop the last two inches so it clattered.

  Ellen decided to behave normally and hug Larry before he sat down. It was awkward and his sweater was pungent with old wood-smoke. Strange how different his once-loved body felt when for all these years it had been everyone else’s body that felt strange. All those lovers who weren’t Larry.

  Last year, and the year before, over the last quarter century, in fact, when she knew she would soon see Larry, she would always be in some kind of state. Excitement sometimes, often rage. At any rate, some form of passion would carry her away. But this year? This year all she felt looking across the table at the delicately made, silvering man who had ruled her heart for decades was a mild irritation that he couldn’t be bothered to put on something presentable.

  She raised her wineglass high in the air. “Cheers, everybody.”

  “IT’S not you,” Yolanda told Ellen after they had got through the incredibly strained meal, made bearable to Ellen only by her own inane chatter. No one else would step up to the plate and talk. Except the children. Fern had blatted her few words, then guffawed as though she’d cracked a joke.

  Ellen, with much nervous lip-licking, had explained how to teach a dog to read. “Take soap. Rub it on the card with the correct word. Rub the corresponding picture or object. Leave the other pictures unsoaped. What the dog is actually doing is reading the smell. That’s what smelling is for them.”

  Eli asked what grade Tony was in.

  (Lying with Matt, listening to Tony singing at the bottom of the ladder, she had used Lady with a Lapdog to teasingly fan his face. “Aren’t you curious how I taught him?”

  “I know how you did it,” Matt had said. “That’s the book with teeth marks all over it.”)

  Amber wouldn’t make eye contact, even when Ellen complimented her on the latkes, which were in fact rubbery and grey. Neither would Amber look at Larry. Instead, she shot secretive glances at Yolanda as though the two of them were teenagers.

  Afterward, Ellen volunteered to do the dishes. Yolanda offered to dry.

  Two rubber duckies, one with a bow tie, the other in a flowered bonnet, perched on the window ledge above the sink amid the driftwood and shells and coloured bits of beach glass. Ellen wondered about the pretty detritus, the shells and glass, things you’d pick up on a beach holiday to take home as mementoes. What possessed Amber—it had to be her—to gather and display things so commonplace to island life? Ellen pictured her moping down at the beach, noticing a shell, and stooping. And in her mind’s eye Ellen saw the thong again, the world’s most uncomfortable undergarment, and was glad, very glad, no longer to be young.

  Yolanda whispered, “So Dad told Amber—”

  The plate Ellen was washing nearly slipped out of her hand.

  “—that he didn’t find her very interesting.”

  Ellen untensed. “Why is she mad at me, then?”

  Yolanda said, “It’s not you. She’s mad at Dad. See how the boy is facing straight ahead?” She pointed to the duckies. “That means Dad wants to make up. But the girl has her back to him. So Amber is still pissed off.”

  “Are you serious?” Ellen asked.

  Yolanda picked a dripping plate out of the rack and, covering her face with it, giggled.

  WHEN the dishes were done, Yolanda went out to the greenhouse with Amber, ostensibly so Amber could smoke. Sean was in the bath with Fern. This left Ellen and Larry effectively alone, except for Eli, who was walking on Larry’s back.

  “Why do you like to get stepped on?” Eli asked.

  “It’s what I’m used to,” Larry said.

  Ellen snorted. Soon Eli lost interest and scampered off to look for his Arctic Hare, leaving Larry face down on the rug.

  “Those are great kids,” Ellen said. “It’s nice you see so much of them.”

  “I’m wanted for my indoor plumbing.”

  She laughed and went to the kitchen for more wine, found Eli crouching behind the island counter with the hare that had cost her three hundred and fift
y dollars, its face stained with chili now. He’d discovered chopsticks in a drawer and was carefully inserting them between the stitches into the animal’s body.

  She returned with a glass for Larry too. By then he’d resurrected himself and was stoking the fire, stabbing the burning logs with the fresh one.

  “Did you lose weight?” he asked.

  “No,” Ellen lied.

  Larry closed the fireplace doors. “You seem happier.”

  “You don’t. And your sweater is ugly.”

  She felt sorry for him, the way after seven or eight readings she had begun to feel sorry for Gurov, shackled by bitterness. Every new affair inevitably grew complicated and problematic; love always became an unbearable situation. When Yolanda moved here to be with Sean after Eli was born, Larry visited them. His visits to his own children had been infrequent, but now that he was a grandfather, he came. At some point he decided to move back, possibly when he met Amber. Ellen had never asked why, but now she did.

  There turned out to be a story. The way Larry offered it up made Ellen think he had been waiting a long time for someone sympathetic to lend an ear, and that no one had until now. Until Ellen. It concerned a play Larry had gone to see in L.A. five years before.

  “A play everyone was raving about. By a young playwright.”

  “A woman.”

  Larry nodded. “It was pretty good. I liked it. The playwright was there so afterward I went over and introduced myself. She didn’t know who I was.”

  Ellen sensed what was coming. She disguised her cringe with another sip of wine.

  “I told her about Talking Stick and the awards it won and my TV projects.”

  “Talking Stick was a great play,” Ellen said. “Your best.”

  “I only wrote two plays,” Larry said.

  “That was my favourite.”

  He looked at her. Larry had a look like a Taser—it disabled you with feelings of stupidity and self-doubt. But Ellen had been looked at by Larry so many times over the years she was as desensitized as a lab rat. “And?”

  “That’s it,” Larry said. “I told her who I was. She didn’t have a clue. She’d never heard of A Principled Man. It ran two seasons. I was head writer. Curve Ball?”

  “The baseball show,” Ellen said, being kind. She’d never seen it. She’d never watched a baseball game in her life.

  “Curve Ball drew a blank too.” He scratched his stubble, then admitted that he had asked the young playwright to go for a drink sometime, not necessarily that night. “‘To talk about your play.’ I said I had a few suggestions. Well. She took gross offence. It was unbelievable how she overreacted. Like I’d just said her play was shit, when I’d said the opposite.”

  “Unbelievable,” Ellen said, thinking of Tony in full snorkel mode at the base of a tree. Now that she’d read all those dog books, she knew what he was so desperately seeking there. Some other dog’s three-week-old piss to dilute with his own.

  Amber appeared out of nowhere with Yolanda behind her. “I’m going to bed,” she announced.

  “See you,” Ellen sang. “Thanks for dinner.”

  Larry looked at Amber and it had its intended effect. She swung around and stomped off like a giant little girl, her beads clacking.

  Yolanda said, “I’m just taking a quick bath, Mom. Do you want to walk now with Sean and Fern or come later with me and Eli in the truck?”

  “We’re talking,” Larry told her.

  “Well, don’t talk too much,” she said to Ellen.

  “Gotcha,” Ellen said as Yolanda left.

  “The last time I wrote something decent was when we lived here,” Larry said, as though those discomfiting walk-throughs hadn’t happened. “That’s your answer. That’s why I came.”

  “So how’s the play?” Ellen asked.

  “There’s no play,” Larry said, and he turned and opened the doors of the fireplace and slammed another wood chunk in.

  “Did you tell Amber about last year?”

  Larry said nothing.

  “Larry? You shouldn’t have. She’ll tell Yolanda if she hasn’t already. And now she hates me. Is that why she invited me? To show me that she hates me?”

  “It’s a test,” Larry said.

  Ellen threw up her hands. “It was nothing.”

  “Was it?”

  The way Larry looked at her then was entirely unfamiliar. There was a softening in his eyes that seemed more than the creases of middle age. She saw his pain too. His back, and now his play. Larry had always had a tortured process.

  “My therapist?” Larry said. “The one in L.A.? He used to say I was addicted to Act One.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I like beginnings. When I lived with you? Here? That was the only time I ever finished a play.”

  Ellen stared at him. The sweater made him seem shrunken. He pressed both hands to the small of his back. Also, now that his legs were stretched out in front of him, she saw two different coloured socks, brown and black.

  Larry stood. Last year she’d followed him to his office, to his battered leather couch calicoed with the stains of former conquests. Not then, not during any of the other times that they had coupled up for old times’ sake, or relief, had he ever indicated that she might be his muse.

  Now he limped out, leaving Ellen by the fire in the lonely cathedral of the room, wondering where everyone had got to and how they’d ended up this way, so miserable. Well, the children were all right, and Sean too. Yolanda was just tired.

  “Nonny!” Eli called.

  Ellen had forgotten he was behind the kitchen island. She hurried over. Eli held up the hare, impaled with chopsticks now—a voodoo doll—and Ellen sighed.

  She lifted him off the floor, set him on the counter next to the sink.

  “Look at these two,” she said, showing him the duckies on the windowsill. She made the girl ducky fight the boy ducky, and Eli threw back his head and laughed.

  It was laughable. Pathetic.

  Then she turned the girl ducky so it faced the boy ducky, so it seemed to be nuzzling the boy ducky’s neck.

  SOMETHING happened just as they were leaving that changed the entire holiday for Ellen. Larry, when summoned by his daughter, shambled out to be hugged by her, then Ellen. After helping a squirming Eli into his coat, Ellen pulled her gloves from her pocket. And something fluttered to the floor, something orange that Larry bent, wincing, to pick up. To her amazement, and Yolanda’s apparently, he straightened with a smile, his first that evening—for all Ellen knew, that year.

  A poop bag.

  “I know what’s different about you, Ellen,” he said. “You got a dog.”

  IN the truck, as they drove away, Ellen told Yolanda, “I love him.”

  “Who? Dad?”

  “My dog.”

  She came to her decision then. She would forget Matt. Forget Larry. What had they, or any man, ever done for her? She was always giving, giving herself away. No more, she decided. No more. She would get Tony neutered and live with him instead. Long slow walks in the morning, reading together every night. In between, a little bit of squeaky banana and some fetch. The second half of her life unspooled before her like a newsreel, its headline blazing: CONTENTMENT! CONTENTMENT!

  After that, Ellen just had to talk to Tony. She used Yolanda’s phone to call Tilda.

  Tilda said, “Yesterday there was so much corn in his poo. Today he’s better.”

  “Have you been practising with the Henry James?”

  “Um,” Tilda said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Right here. He’s sleeping.”

  “Put him on. Tony? Hi, Tony! Whatcha doing? Do you miss me, Tony? I sure miss you. What’s he doing, Tilda? Does he know it’s me?”

  “He’s wagging all over the place.”

  So who was Ellen’s grand passion? She wondered this after she hung up. Of course it was Larry. It had always been Larry, her Gurov. (But this was only her point of view. Larry, of course, woul
d have a different opinion. He always did.)

  Then this past October she’d found herself standing in line behind a young man whose shirt tag poked out the back of his collar. She’d tucked it in. He’d turned and said, “Your hands are cold.”

  Your hands are cold. Your hands are cold. Let me. Warm them. Let’s go up.

  She hadn’t told Larry about Matt, though she’d planned to. She’d planned to say, “See? I, too, can snatch from life all that it can give.”

  Then, what with the Winter Solstice party, and Christmas, and visiting old friends who still lived on Cordova Island, Ellen did forget Matt. She barely thought of him after that night at Larry’s. Things were getting complicated between them anyway, especially now. Now that she had Tony.

  WHEN she got home to Vancouver, he was waiting for her. Tilda opened the door and he leapt against her legs and dervished all around her. The whole dog wagged. He wagged for Ellen.

  She threw her bags inside and out they went. Tony sniffed and peed, sniffed and peed. Reaching the end of the block she turned; he was far behind. But all she had to do was call his name and he ran right to her, tongue out.

  A child’s pink purse lay in the gutter in front of the corner store across the street. Ellen wiped it on the grass and showed it to Tony, who took the handle in his mouth.

  In the next block, an elderly woman came along. “What in the world is he carrying?”

  “We’re just coming back from Saks,” Ellen said. “Gucci’s on sale.”

  “Well, he is cute.”

  “Smart too. This dog can read.”

  The woman’s face crinkled all over when she smiled, in a way Ellen found very beautiful.

  Back home, the mail was in a drift behind the door. She unpacked her suitcase first—she had bones for Tony—then checked her phone messages.

  “Ellen? Are you back? It’s Matt. I’ve been calling and calling. I really have to see you. I have to.”

  She pressed the phone against her ribs, pressed it hard, but it wasn’t any use. It had been building all this time. And out it came. Out and out and out.

  Tony laid back his ears and cocked his head to one side, but both of them knew because both of them had read the story. The end was still a long, long way away and the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.