The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  Janet still mourned the loss of her sweet girl to this secretive, angry teenager who smoked on the sly. She said they fought almost every day. Janet couldn’t help blaming it on her ex-husband—what the hell had happened in Victoria? Nothing, he maintained. Sailing. Gulf Islands. Yoga. (The yoga had incensed Janet: his new lover was a thirty-year-old yoga instructor.) But Sophie was always relaxed with Eliza. She pulled one of the buds out of her ears and waved back, calling out in her usual sweet way, “Hi there!”

  Eliza grinned conspiratorially. “Aren’t you walking away from your school?”

  The young woman stage-whispered, “You do not see me, okay? I’m just skipping English.” The whisper became matter-of-fact. “I’m good at English.”

  Eliza winked; she used to skip high-school classes all the time. “Are we still on for this Saturday?” Sophie was her most reliable babysitter.

  “Of course! Six o’clock, right?”

  “Until about midnight. So where are you off to?” As if Sophie would tell her.

  “Coffee with a friend. At that new café.”

  “With all the old painted trays on the walls?”

  “Yeah! Amazing coffee.” She did a curious little hop, straight up in the air, and Eliza had a flash of the pretty little pre-Raphaelite child she’d been. “This meeting is our little secret, right?”

  Eliza squinted at her. “Who is that beautiful young woman? She looks like someone I used to know.” Sophie walked backwards for a few steps, waved again, then popped the music back in her ear and spun around, her school-girl-fantasy skirt swinging in a worrisomely tantalizing way.

  Thank god I have sons, Eliza thought. Did Sophie look slutty or horny? Both, poor thing. Yet she also looked innocent. Sexed-up and innocent. It was precisely that knot of contradiction that made teenage girls so attractive and vulnerable. There she went, sashaying into a world of online stalkers, Facebook bullies, revealing photos gone viral. Janet was always worried about pictures, and videos, and how much time Sophie spent on the Internet; apparently she loved taking pictures of herself and her friends.

  What kind of pictures, Eliza wondered, as she walked on. See? The children always tug at us, even when they aren’t ours. They need us to think about them. Is it a crime to think about myself for five minutes? She tried to conjure up the flirtatious Amazon again, but her mind looped back to Sophie—her cold red cheeks, her clandestine mission at the beginning of the day. Coffee with a friend. Right.

  She walked through her own breath as it hung white in the air. The cold was so wet that it set her teeth on edge, yet she craved its sharpness. If only it would snow. Today was the twelfth of January; Christmas had barely been white. She missed the snow, loved how it concealed the dirt but revealed the shape of the city. Roads, sidewalks, the parks—all became land, again, to be traversed. You had to wear boots, lift your feet, move through, fly down. She loved tobogganing. Her sons loved it, too. But they’d only been tobogganing once this winter, two days after Christmas. Then the snow was gone.

  She started down the next block, old houses on either side, mostly renovated, with manicured gardens and slate pavers. Stout, well-crafted retaining walls. Always a lawyer or doctor or corporate person in the couple. This was not a block of massage therapists and graphic designers; only one person in the pair could make under $60,000, she thought, doing her own calculations. Suddenly her legs whisked out from under her. She crashed down on her back; her skull cracked against the ice. The pain dazzled right through her head and poked through her eyes. Tears burned and blurred her vision for the third time in an hour. She lay there. Waiting. Had she re-injured her shoulder? She blinked down the tears and stared up at the cross-hatching of black branches above her, up and up, blinking, from the lower limbs of the little ash tree into a tall Norway maple. The tire of a parked car was a couple of steps away from her head. No one had seen her. Not that she cared. She was not going to do what she usually did when she fell or slipped: jump up, grab for balance and pretend everything was fine.

  She could feel a goose egg already forming at the back of her head. Marcus, her older boy, would be impressed. He was fascinated by wounds and abrasions of all sorts. He wanted to be a doctor, as well as a fireman.

  Then, as she lay gazing upward, she saw the snow. Perhaps it had begun to fall the moment she did. Some of the big cottony flakes landed on her face; she felt them melt. Her eyes followed the flakes up through the lattice of branches, trying to find the beginning of them. Snow caught in the woollen threads of her lime-green hat.

  She blinked and felt the cold of the melted flakes on her eyelids. When she blinked again, tears slid down either side of her head. She turned on her side, bent her knees, rolled. Lifted the weak shoulder: no serious damage. This realization brought a surge of gratitude. Nothing broken. Or re-broken. That was the forties; that would be the rest of her life. At twenty-two, she had torn her shoulder from its socket in a riding accident (she had always called it an accident) but the searing pain hadn’t prevented her from getting back on the horse for another hour, worsening the damage. Not now. She stood up and carefully swung her arm forward. Back. Down the street, more patches of ice gleamed dully on the sidewalk; her eye went again to the dry winter gardens in front of the houses. She saw a butterfly bush, rosehips, lavender. Marcus had given her a handful of dry lavender the other day from their own front yard.

  She felt giddy, mildly drunk. “It’s snowing!” she said aloud. No one was in the street to hear her announcement. It was blowing every which way now. She started walking again, slowly.

  The snow thickened as she approached College Street. When the wind whipped around her head, she had to shield her eyes. The street and its red brick houses drained of colour; the air whirled white and beneath the white, the buildings turned grey. It hadn’t snowed like this for so long that the entire streetscape seemed unrecognizable. Could she be concussed? The wild squall was invigorating, but it disoriented her. She put her hands in her pockets. No gloves. Her fingers scrabbled, blind, among the dry, pokey bits, until she realized what they were, desiccated lavender. Flowers! That’s why she loved them. They were the earth in fancy dress, dirt and light turned into lace and colour. She rubbed the crumbling blossoms between her fingers and breathed in the familiar perfume. Marcus’s face rose into her mind, hazel eyes more green than brown; he raised his cold hands, offered her the pale blue confetti.

  The scent cleared her head. She squeezed the lavender, loving him, that boy, her boys. Her life. Sometimes love was like this, inchoate, rising out of nowhere and suddenly everywhere, thick, blinding. It knocked you in the head, tossed you into the storm. And smelled sweet. Flecks of white and silver-white blew into her sideways, wind-propelled, caught in her eyelashes and hair and mouth. Love. It was exactly like this.

  Walk, she thought. Here is the first blizzard of the year. Go into it.

  In she went, letting the blue flowers drop from her hand.

  4

  Fleur

  ELIZA WALKED PAST THE BRICK STOREFRONTS AND HIP cafés, greeting various sidewalk shovellers, including the gruff landlord with the handlebar moustache (clotted with snow) and the tall, skinny woman who ran the laundromat with military precision. Both of them smiled at Eliza with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. The gallery owner a few shops away from the floral studio had only a broom to face the storm. “Thank you,” she said, crossing the stretch of sidewalk he had just cleared. His trouser legs were dusted white to the knee, but he, too, grinned happily.

  Her place, Fleur, was not so different from the other two- and three-storey shops on her block, though she had chosen the corner-lot building because it was slightly larger than most on the street. It also had big west-side windows and a finished basement for storing all manner of accumulated event gear: glassware, standing vases, pedestals, baskets, the cloth-and-wire tree, the papier-mâché unicorn, hundreds of wedding candles and holders.

  As Eliza pushed open the glass front door, the cape of cold around her met the a
lmost tropical heat and scent of green stuff. “Bianca! Thank you for shovelling the walkway.”

  “No problem,” Bianca murmured. She smiled up, calm and beatific, Madonna as receptionist and worker of organizational miracles. “It’s gorgeous outside.”

  “I know. Everyone seems thrilled by the storm.” But when Eliza banged off her boots, her head throbbed. She slid her fingers through her hair, searching gingerly for the lump. The skin felt as though it had broken; she felt for the scabby blood, but there wasn’t any. “It’s like a skating rink out there, though. So slippery!” She put on her shoes and went past the front desk and the flower fridge, to the workbenches at the back of the studio. One was piled high with delivery boxes. Kiki was trimming and dipping new hydrangeas, stem by stem, into conditioning fluid. “Bonjour,” she said, eyes flicking up to Eliza and down again to the cutter in her hand. “You smell like snow.” Kiki looked sharp, as usual, in a little green knit dress with brown tights and ankle boots; perfect colours for a redhead. Eliza glanced at the new boxes of orchids, roses, alstroemeria, aspidistra leaves, eucalyptus. Kiki anticipated her question. “Jack Armelle was ’ere; all de orchids are from ’im. Good stuff. Even these amazing purple alstroemeria. No one else knows ’ow to find these flowers.”

  And no one else knew how to make such beautiful designs out of them. A sculptor, Kiki was adept at handling wire, glass, foam, cloth, clay, even ice; she could make any space look extraordinary—ballet-infused, Gothy, romantic-cottage, old European, whatever adjective the clients laid down with their credit cards, and wherever: a warehouse with the pipes showing, a cavernous tent, the icy rotunda foyer at the Royal Ontario Museum. She was a genius.

  Eliza opened another box of hydrangeas. “The Mandarin’s standing order is today, right?”

  “It is. Can you ’elp me with it?”

  “Absolutely.” Sometimes, if they hadn’t hired freelancers, Kiki got grumpy about doing the standing orders by herself. Because she was the better designer, it was natural that she would do most of the arranging; Eliza was the business person. But the weekly and biweekly standing orders bored Kiki, especially if they involved a lot of small, cookie-cutter arrangements.

  She usually wanted either Eliza’s or Bianca’s help to finish the order quickly. The Mandarin, a fancy three-storey dim-sum place, was that kind of job.

  On her way to the shelf to get a clean stem cutter, Eliza walked through a band of light. “Look! The sun’s already coming out! And it’s still snowing!” Two large industrial sinks and counters lined the western wall; above the sinks, long windows let in snowy beams of winter sun. The room was narrow but deep, lined with shelves that rose to the ceiling and were packed with vases in various shapes, sizes and colours. She went back to the workbench and started cutting the ends of the hydrangea stems. She did a lot of the prep, and followed along behind Kiki. Eliza was a competent designer now, but she was slower than Kiki, who barely needed to look at her hands. She rarely hesitated; she simply knew what would work.

  The phone rang; Bianca picked up. “Three arrangements? Oh…but those are out of season right now. Even if you were willing to pay a premium, we wouldn’t be able to get peonies in time….” Bianca listened without rolling her eyes, which was more than Kiki and Eliza could do. She refrained from looking in their direction, though, because they often made lighthearted jokes about phone clients with impossible orders. With the patience of a good kindergarten teacher, Bianca said, “I’m so sorry, but the good news is we have the most beautiful orchids. They just came in this morning from our favourite supplier….White, yellow and deep orange with a dappled throat. Absolutely. I promise that we’ll make something beautiful for her. What would you like for me to write on the card?”

  Eliza lifted her eyes to the ceiling and whispered, “Peonies in January! Where do people think they live, the Garden of Eden?”

  Bianca put down the phone and called, “Kiki, you were so right to get all those orchids from Jack Armelle today! This guy is throwing a lavish party for his wife at Sunfish, in the back room.”

  “A fancy place to throw a private party. I took them their new arrangements on Friday.”

  Bianca said, “That’s why he called. The manager recommended us. Isn’t that sweet?”

  Kiki shook her head. “Amazing dat da ’usband leaves it until one day before the big occasion.”

  “Not really,” Eliza said. She lifted a tall bucket of water up onto the workbench; they started putting the new round of conditioned hydrangeas into it. Ten tall stems to a bucket, that was the rule, to prevent cross-contamination if one of the stems had a fungus. “Most husbands leave flowers to the last second.” Or forget them altogether.

  Kiki smiled, without irony. “But Andrew would remember flowers!” It was not dangerous that she had a crush on Eliza’s husband; she was an honourable woman and he rarely visited the studio. Tall, lanky, good-looking in an unkempt, professorial way—he was, in fact, a professor of mathematics—Andrew was charming and reliable. No doubt Kiki wished he were younger, and not married to Eliza. Kiki was thirty-five. The tick of her biological clock was like the time-bomb in a Hollywood movie. Everyone could hear it.

  “But Andrew does forget the flowers. On a regular basis.” Eliza felt an unpleasant wish to criticize her husband. If she could enumerate his faults, she would have cause. Cause for what? Thinking lustful thoughts about a beautiful swimmer, of course. “When I met him, he’d almost killed not one but two gardens. In the front of his house and behind it. The only reason he remembers flowers now is because of me. I’m always the one who reminds him to stop and pick up something nice before we drive out to see his parents.” Even Eliza found the Chinese grocer’s flowers cheaper than her own shop’s. She smiled fondly, falsely, while a sharp flare of anger shot up into her mouth. She was not going to say anything, though. Her parents-in-law had serious money troubles. Last week, she noticed that Andrew had once again paid his mother’s Visa bill. But she would never talk about that at work.

  Kiki hauled a freshly washed bucket up onto the workbench. “De only reason you complain is because you know Andrew is the perfect ’usband!”

  Eliza laughed. “You’re such a romantic. There are no perfect husbands. Or wives. Do you want me to stay tonight and do the Sunfish arrangements? You’ve been working a lot of evenings lately. It’s my turn. I just need to get hold of Andrew and make sure he can pick up the kids.”

  She snipped another stem, trying to cut away her irritation, pluck it off with the blemished hydrangea leaves. Part of her was gone, slipped away into another world. With a lover. Who had breasts. Yet here she was, up to the elbows in the water buckets of her life.

  She put down the cutters, dried her hands, and tapped out a quick text to Andrew.

  This is real. This is reality. Andrew, the kids, our schedule. She pressed Send and put her phone on a shelf away from the water, then picked up two buckets of conditioned flowers and went into the fridge. It was good to stand in the cold. She tidied up the greens shelf, pinching off dried fern fronds and tossing out three whole stems of asparagus greens. The cocculus and coffee leaves were fine; they lasted for a long time. It was important to get rid of anything that could start decaying; she kept the fridge as clean as possible, to avoid passing any mould or fungus among the plants. She took stock: ten different kinds of roses, snowberries, bells of Ireland, lilies, lots of cedar and holly left over from Christmas. Her teeth started chattering. She would freeze the heat of the pool right out of her flesh.

  How quickly you could cross from one world into another…if you did actually cross. She walked out of the chilled air carrying a bucket of dark orange roses. A moment of lust meant nothing. She was here again, this side of the border, with a thousand things to do.

  5

  Snow Angels

  THE SNOW KEPT FALLING. ALL DAY IT CAME DOWN, covering the cars, the dirty leaves, filling in window ledges, drifting in waves across the sidewalks. The keen morning shovellers surrendered; they would
wait until it stopped. It did not stop. It caught in people’s eyelashes and hid the wickedly slippery streets. Cardboard coffee cups, cigarette butts, black stains of gum on the pavement disappeared.

  All day long, Eliza tried to get in touch with Andrew. He didn’t answer his phone or text messages. He rarely used his office phone at the university, but she left a message there, too, and heard nothing back from him. If she couldn’t get in touch with him, she couldn’t stay late to do the Sunfish arrangements. Late in the afternoon, she had to go downstairs to the bathroom, close the door, sit on the toilet and take deep breaths. Was he dead in a car accident? Or just being the absent-minded professor? Should she weep for Andrew or swear at him? She peed, flushed the toilet and ran back upstairs.

  Kiki said she didn’t mind staying late. Again. Bianca slowly lifted her head up from her laptop—her gaze like melted chocolate—and said, “Eliza, don’t worry. I’ll stay tonight and keep Kiki company. I’ll trim and wrap.” Their policy was to make sure that all morning deliveries were finished the night before. “And I’ll pop out at six and get us some Thai food.”

  Eliza pulled on her boots. “Bianca, you are an angel.”

  “Oh, please,” she said modestly, smiling from one woman to the other. Then Eliza rushed away to fetch the kids from their after-school program at Annie’s.

  —

  The snow had transformed the old grey city into a newly painted door. She and the boys walked through it, laughing. At the house, she found mittens for herself and went to the shed to get shovels. The boys refused to put on their snow pants. They set to heaving snow into the street, onto the garden, until the shovels rasped against ice and concrete. Still the snow floated down, so light in the air and heavy on the ground, accumulating quickly.

  “I give up!” Marcus cried dramatically and fell over backwards. Jake copied him. They made snow angels, swish-swish swish-swish, mouths wide open, tongues skyward. Then Jake asked, “Do angels eat snow?”