ALSO BY KAREN CONNELLY
Come Cold River
Burmese Lessons
The Lizard Cage
Listen to the Reed: A Dialogue with Fereshteh Molavi
Grace and Poison
The Border Surrounds Us
The Disorder of Love
One Room in a Castle: Letters from Spain, France and Greece
Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journey
This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys
The Small Words in My Body
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2017 Karen Connelly
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2017 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Connelly, Karen, 1969–, author
The change room / Karen Connelly.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780345814265
eBook ISBN 9780345814289
I. Title.
PS8555.O546C43 2017 c813′.54 C2016-904987-6
Text design by Rachel Cooper
Cover design by Jennifer Griffiths
Cover image © Felix Clinton / Stone / Getty Images
v4.1
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Contents
Cover
Also by Karen Connelly
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1: Stars
2: If Only the Sea
3: Ice
4: Fleur
5: Snow Angels
6: Lost to the World
7: Family Stuff
8: Bodies
9: Firefly
10: Eggs
11: Spray
12: Tu Es Libre
13: Orchids
14: Rhymes With
15: Bone Picking
16: Domination
17: The Silk Route
18: Press Here
19: Open-Mouthed into the Sea
20: What Ecstasy?
21: Day of Liberation
22: Escape
23: Scheherazade
24: Enigma
25: The History of the World
26: Hiatus
27: The Land of Ray
28: To-Do List
29: Telepathy
30: I Forgot About This
31: Just a Phase
32: Thalia
33: Not Henry
34: Endless
35: The Change Room
36: The Good News
37: What a Coincidence
38: Tell Me
39: Flowers Instead
40: Who Eats Her Cake
41: An Almost Perfect Life
Acknowledgements
About the Author
For women who love
reading
For the woman who left Marseilles
In memoriam, for the women
and children of Shahr-e-No, Tehran
Ourself, behind ourself, concealed, Should startle most.
EMILY DICKINSON
Virtue is an excellent thing, and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.
BARBARA PYM, Excellent Women
Look at me
How I run fearless
To the borders
Of the old stories.
GOOGOOSH, from her song “Fasle Tazeh” (“New Season”)
1
Stars
SOMETIMES SHE FELT DESPERATE FOR IT.
After she dropped the boys off, she hurried along the icy street, afraid of slipping. A few other parents, late getting their kids to school, waved in her direction. They were also in a rush, no one could stop and chat. Thank god. I have forty-five minutes, she thought, and picked up her pace.
The intensity of her own need was unfamiliar. Not need. She didn’t need anything. That was for children. And Andrew. She wanted. It’s desire, she thought. One foot skated forward unexpectedly on the ice; her arm shot out as she caught herself. Resettling her heavy bag on her shoulder, she felt a twinge there, the old ache. Torn ligaments, years ago in Greece. One serious surgery when she returned. The sidewalks were treacherous, the roads worse. Accidents were already happening today, across the city, on the highways. She’d asked Andrew to leave the car at home, but he said, Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.
She had not thought of that word for a thousand years. Desire. Who had the time for it? De sideris. She’d taken two years of Latin at university, four of ancient Greek, the brilliant, useless languages. Dead, like the stars. “Desire” came from the Latin root de sideris. Meaning of the stars.
She had started to swim a year ago, when the boys were five and six, and she was in the floral studio again every day, working long hours. Her work was complicated, busy, mostly satisfying. She would never tire of flowers, though the people who bought them sometimes drove her crazy. Clients came to the studio as though to a therapist’s office, upset about their daughter’s choice of husband, worried about aging, or anxious about money, and good style. Human weirdness was part of the boutique flower gig. Her business partner, Kiki, often said that because flowers came from the natural world, they brought out the animal in people. Eliza loved the flowers first and foremost, but she also loved the crazed tap-dance of running a business that sold something as ephemeral and as unnecessary as flowers. Beauty, that’s what she sold, beauty’s ancient promises, too—this is true, this will be good—especially from May to October, when she and various wedding planners worked together to create lovely, personal, idyllic, glorious, increasingly lavish weddings. Approaching the city’s three top wedding planners had been her idea, and an excellent one. The clients who came through them were the wealthiest people she had ever met in her life. They could afford truth and beauty.
Eliza worked hard to give it to them, every day. Though she relished hard work, the pace had grown relentless since she’d had kids. The list of things to do constantly replenished itself. One after the other, she shot down the tasks, yet still they rose up and came at her (like zombies, naturally; her boys loved zombies). If it wasn’t the main sink clogging at the studio, it was the flooding basement at home, or a sick child, or a bossy client. In the past couple of months, it had been Kiki, in a romantic funk, whining about her loneliness and threatening, vaguely, to return to Montreal to find a real man. Wanting to be one of the “good” mothers, Eliza had even volunteered for school council. Now some disorganized flake of a woman called her every week, begging her to do yet another school-related task. Andrew never seemed to work himself into the same frenzied pitch. Was it because he was attached to an institution? Was it because he was a man, and didn’t know how to wash the floor?
She felt alone in her exhaustion, but she knew that she was not alone. She was one of millions of women working their brains out and their asses off. She had no right to complain, sitting as she was at the top of the pyramid: white skin, warm house, healthy kids, a loving husband. Some days, usually on the weekends when she read the newspapers, she felt her luck swell and stick in her throat. She swallowed it down with clean water, queasy, stomach churning, her eyes open, eating up the articles, the reports, the photographs in the world section. People stood at the flooded, burning heart of the world
, howling kids in their arms, or dead on the ground. Bombs fell, the plague spread, the refugees fled, and fled, and fled. And always, always, there were women trapped somewhere, in rape camps, raped lives.
Eliza was free. She said it out loud sometimes, in the midst of whining about all she had to do. This is freedom! Two times a year, she got melodramatically sick; her body knew that only illness would bring real rest. Last year, sitting on the examining table, she’d said to the doctor, “It’s just my cold, finally breaking up.” The doctor had lifted her eyes from her cool stethoscope on Eliza’s hot chest, and responded, “Actually, it’s just your pneumonia, settling in.”
Even while the kids were babies and toddlers, she had worked; maternity leave did not exist for the self-employed. Years passed, as they do, with at least one breast and half her mind attached to her babies. Now Marcus and Jake were big boys going to school. She still felt the elastic delight of being out of the house full-time.
Thumping their hips, her friends would say, The baby weight is disappearing. My body’s coming back. A lie. It never came back, the body before children, the old life. She knew the truth: love cleaves you right through the middle. She would never be closed again. Never again, singular. She was divided in three by husband and sons. No, she was divided in four, because of the house, an old Victorian four-storey, always clamouring for attention. They had renovated it slowly, room by money-sucking room. The house belonged to both of them, but she was the one who took care of it like the housekeeper out of an old English novel, right down to the keys, the platters, the good cutlery, the power tools, pliers and paint cans. To say nothing about keeping the place clean.
Which reminded her of that shelf in the fridge, covered in some sticky, gelatinous substance. She shook her head and stepped over a gleaming artery of ice. This was it, this gift of an hour on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, she must not think about the fridge. The water whispered: you are not as divided as you feel. Her skin was still complete, despite the cuts, broken glassware at work, a slip of a new pruning knife, her heel punctured by that nail during the flood cleanup in the basement last spring, even the way she tore—twice—with the births. The wounds closed. She floated.
Someone was out on the sidewalk breaking up the terrible ice in front of St. Anne’s Community Centre, referred to by those in the know as Annie’s. She liked the name; St. Anne was the patron saint of families. It was a solid place, built in the sixties, nothing fancy, no big glass window or state-of-the-art equipment, just a squat two-storey building at the edge of the park, operated by well-organized people who took good care of children. When the boys had been little, the daycare had saved her life.
She pushed through the first door, then the next. Tina at the front desk stamped her pass with a wink—she was busy on the phone. Eliza hardly slackened her pace down the hallway as she detoured around the mother who was down on her knees in front of her crying two-year-old. The change room door was yellow; she went through it into the warm, chlorinated air, and immediately felt better. Echoing voices drifted in from the pool, the lifeguards talking loudly across the water. And water falling: someone was taking a shower. Maybe it was Sheila, her neighbour. Just as she looked toward the shower area, her good friend Janet came out from behind the tiled wall, and said, “Hi there! I was wondering if you were going to make it today.” Janet had a towel around her voluptuous body—she claimed that her breasts simply never stopped growing—and another wrapping up her curly dark-brown hair.
Eliza hung her coat and bag on a hook. “It’s always a panic in the morning, but I will not give up my swimming! How are you?”
“Sophie is driving me bonkers, otherwise I’m fine.”
Eliza made sympathetic noises as she pulled her sweater over her head. Sophie was Janet’s increasingly argumentative teenage daughter. Another regular swimmer came from the showers into the change room, smiling nearsightedly. Annoying woman, with a perpetually sore neck. She always talked about her son in Vancouver, how much money he was making, tearing down old houses, ripping around the city in his fancy car. Who cares, Janet would say after the woman had left. Who cares about a damn Porsche?
Eliza was in her bathing suit already, keen to get in the water; it was only a half an hour before the toddler swim classes would arrive from the daycare. Sheila was in the shower room, a petite woman with what Eliza’s mother would call “a lovely figure”—and the only mother who swam in her bikini, which added to the impression that she was about twenty-five. But she was older than Eliza. The women greeted each other; Eliza glanced surreptitiously at the hourglass curve of Sheila’s waist. The deep brown skin was almost unlined. Sheila said, “Watch out, the showers are cold again today.”
Eliza stepped into the cool spray. “Brr!” She showered quickly and called out her goodbyes, then slipped through the last door.
Beyond the pool, the long eastern wall was painted in cartoon style with bright tropical fish, a diver, a red-haired mermaid peeking through seaweed. Above the mural, graffiti letters bulged: St. Anne’s Is a Good Place to Be. Only one other swimmer was in the water, finishing a length at a fast clip. Eliza was pleased that she wouldn’t have to vie for a clear lane.
She sat down and licked the insides of her goggles, embarrassed by her tongue sliding over the plastic lenses; saliva kept them from fogging up. The bored young lifeguards seemed always to catch her doing this; today was no exception. She waved at the one sitting across the pool in his raised chair and fit the goggles over her eyes. Blue lenses made the water bluer. She lifted her whole weight up with her arms and dropped herself straight off the edge of the pool.
2
If Only the Sea
DOWN SHE WENT, DOWN, DOWN. IF ONLY IT WERE DEEPER; if only, the sea. When her toes touched the rough paint on the bottom of the pool, she pushed off, stretched out, dolphin-kicked half of her first length underwater. The undulations made her think of an otter. Then a snake. She was animal again, returned to her element.
She loved the pool. It was in no way noteworthy, and only twenty metres long. The high-ceilinged room smelled of chlorine and wet cement. For most of the day it reverberated with the voices of small children. Now it was quiet with rhythmic splash and echo. She kept her head under the water as much as possible so she heard nothing but the water-insulated, held-breath, blood-in-her-head world. It counted, this half-hour of stretched-out amphibious memory. In a few spots underwater, the blue paint was worn through to other paint from years before, and years before that, blue, white, aquamarine.
The other swimmer was two lanes away. A woman. Once Eliza had done a few lengths to warm up, she tried to keep pace, but the other woman in her sleek black suit was too fast. Taller. Longer arms. That was all she could see underwater, or when she paused to get her breath at one end of the pool.
She returned to her own rhythm. Competition was not what she was here for. The dripping weight of her elbow lifted out of the water; her hand flicked forward, pointing down like an arrow. Her legs, silent, powerful propellers of the body, barely breached the surface.
She was on the east side of the pool, the far lane, for a reason. Here it came. The sun. It had been an overcast morning but now the sun shone through the narrow windows. Light fell in a band here, only here, refracted in rippling white and rainbow lines over the blue-green bottom, through the water itself. The sun illuminated the air bubbles, minuscule, shining globes; it was like swimming through glitter. The lines of light wavered forward, undulated back, the blue bluer, the white whiter. She stopped her front crawl and floated in the sun. The memory was bodily: floating in the sea, the Aegean, the sun warming her. The only salt water now was inside her; it stung her eyes. The joy and sadness came together. Water did that, blurred the lines. Keep swimming, she thought, and dove under, came up in breaststroke. But with each frog kick, she felt the memory pull at her, that place, its sun; she had fallen in love, once, on a Greek island. A lifetime ago.
The rippling net of light drew her down. She stayed un
derwater for the whole length of the pool, kicking hard, then returned to the front crawl, her best stroke even after the shoulder injury. For three lengths, she swam as fast as the tall woman. The other woman, sensing a race, picked up her pace. Eliza smiled as she flipped, pushed off, did the length stroke for stroke. But in her next flip-turn, only one foot fully connected with the wall; in those lost seconds, the Amazon leapt ahead. When Eliza finished the length, the woman was waiting in the water, goggles up on her forehead. It was over. The children were coming in, their towels over their shoulders.
The Amazon pulled herself out of the water in one motion, long and lithe and gleaming, water sluicing down her legs. Eliza watched her walk through the change room door. The lifeguard, down from his perch, gave her an inquiring look, eyebrows raised. Last week, he had to ask her, loudly, to get out of the water; she’d forgotten the time. “I know, don’t worry,” she called to him. It was like this every Tuesday and Thursday. She was always the last one out of the pool.
—
The woman was naked under the shower. It was impossible not to look at a naked body framed by the white tiles. Gorgeous breasts. Full but lifting also, lifting up into dark pink nipples. Such beautiful breasts were rare. She was shaved, too; the line of pubic hair that rose up from the slit was slightly wider than a finger. Eliza put her goggles around a tap across from the Amazon, then went to get her shampoo and conditioner.
Children were still getting changed; she wasn’t going to take off her bathing suit until all of them had left for their class. Two naked women might be overwhelming. They were three- and four-year-olds, the age of perfection. She felt a quick, light stab in her lower belly. No wonder she felt so in love with the water today: she was about to ovulate. Or maybe that was it, just then, the egg had dropped off the ledge into the Fallopian tube like a swimmer into her lane. Is that where the word desire had come from? Here they were, the children, every one of them pulled out of a woman who had ovulated nine months before they were born. The beauty of small children was a covert plot to make her get pregnant again. But she would resist. Not another one, no no no. They were rosy and talkative, bubbling with news and questions. Even the less-beautiful were beautiful, their large eyes vulnerable and open and (she always made a hasty prayer) not yet ruined by anything, by anyone. Two daycare workers herded the kids toward the showers. The women turned the taps on and jumped out of the way; the children rushed in. Their voices filled the white-tiled room like birds, squawking, cooing, complaining, But it’s cold! One of the workers replied, Don’t worry, the pool will be warm. Which was true. It was the warmest pool in the city—they kept it that way for the kids. A dark-eyed, olive-skinned little girl turned to Eliza and said gravely, “I can put my head under the water.” To which Eliza replied, equally grave, “Maybe you were a mermaid once, in another life.” The child’s eyes sparked; she ran with the story. “It’s true,” she admitted. “I was a mermaid once. In the ocean.” And she stuck her head into the shower. Coughed. The tall woman did not look at the children; she stood magnificently naked, her hair lathered with shampoo, eyes closed. She had a small loofah sponge, twice the size of a square of Shredded Wheat and the exact same colour. She was rubbing her thighs with it, then her flat, light-brown stomach.
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