The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (26 page)

The male stylists are openly gay, mavericks, blithe, built. But
it's the women who interest you. The women are beautiful, or look beautiful, stubbornly independent, current, childless. They enter and win lip-sync and wet T-shirt contests. At home in airports. Their families make allowances. They don't shovel. At Christmas they are the most extravagant, most deflated by the aftermath of unwrapped presents. They are the babies in the family. They're allowed to pick at the turkey. Suzanne brings you to the porcelain sink with the scoop for the neck. You lean back, close your eyes. You are determined to enjoy this.

She says, You don't have to hold your neck like that.

You have been holding your neck. You let your neck go loose. You are submitting. You let go. The salon falls away. Your scalp is a grass fire. You would kiss something if you could, or drift to sleep. The long, greying hair is such a weight. The hose makes you tingle all over. A hot, delicate raking. She's raking you to the surface of yourself. She drops the hose. Squirts a thread of viscous cherry over your scalp and begins with her fingers. She lets her nails graze. No one has touched you like this since your husband left. You almost kiss the snow white inside of Suzanne's wrist.

You are alone. It's your husband's night with the kids. Since your husband left, you have been falling asleep early in the evening. You haven't bought a TV. You got to keep the CD player but you only have a handful of CDs. You have listened to Cat Stevens's
Greatest Hits
so often you can. At first you kept the radio on all the time. A cheap radio in every room. Then you got tired of the radio. You listen hard but there's nothing to hear. A row of icicles falls from the eaves startling you so badly
you almost. You don't turn on the lights. You see your neighbour across the street pull into his driveway, his headlights lighting up falling snow. He can't see you in your window because the lights are off. He has asked you over for a glass of wine. Once you awoke to the sound of him shovelling your driveway. He gets out of the car and the light over his porch comes on. He looks up into the sky. He's standing in his driveway with his hands in his pockets, his head tilted back. He stays that way. Your fridge cuts in. Nothing moves on the street for a long time, no cars, just the snow. Your neighbour goes inside and you are alone. You are very much alone.

Suzanne fits a rubber skullcap over your head. The skullcap is full of holes and she tugs strands of hair through each hole with a metal hook. It hurts so much you think you might cry. Then you do cry. Suzanne doesn't make a big deal of it. She's seen all this before. She keeps pulling your hair.

That's the price, she says. She paints your hair with a foaming chemical. It's an awful stink, poisonous and angry. It makes you feel exuberant.

Everyone has left the Aquarena because of the storm and your mother hasn't come. Your coach switches off all the lights. They make a thwack noise when they go off, and the filaments burn pink then blue. The pool is empty and has gone still. The pool is a chameleon and it has changed its skin so it resembles nothing more than a swimming pool. It has become invisible. Your thirteenth birthday is coming and very soon
you will lose interest in diving. One day you can think of nothing else, you are haunted. The next day diving hardly exists. You can't remember anything about it. You let your mother sleep in.

The storm has closed roads. Where is your mother? Your coach drives you home. The Trans Am flies through whiteouts. You lose the road. The flame on the hood swallowed by the mouth. You have been saying. Talking. Telling him. Your eyes two soft plums, and a soft plum in your throat. Your heart is aching, but your heart is your eyes and you have two and they are bruised and weeping. Your coach pulls over. You pull over into Lovers Lane together. The trees slap the windows, paw the roof. He cups his hand under your chin and he kisses you. He gently sucks a bright plum from your throat. He kisses and kisses. You have never. Nothing will ever be as wonderful as this. You give yourself over/over/over.

You want Suzanne to give you some advice before you leave, and she does. She tells you that from now on you must use a round brush. She holds a mirror behind so you can see how sharp the cut is. You can see your neck. You don't recognize yourself from this angle. She's sprayed you and blown the whole thing dry so your hair feels as hard as a helmet. The blond is called ash and it glints like a tough metal.

O
n the shiny collar of her black tuxedo jacket, at a potluck after the wedding, Eleanor notices a ladybug. Orange shell, two black spots. Under the jacket she wears a crimson dress. The skirt a pattern of folded, satin diamonds, each diamond held with a red bead, so that if she were to attain grace, or spill her beer, or be overwhelmed with some fleeting infatuation — she shouldn't drink in the afternoon; she can see herself in Glenn Marshall's sunglasses, her black patent leather purse like a match head folded in the flame of her skirt — if she were visited by a moment of grace, the beads of the dress might drop to the grass and the diamonds unfold into butterflies. She grips the wet beer bottle. Too cold to be outside. The tulle under her skirt scratchy against her bare legs. She'll shave them before the reception. Where is Philip? At the heart of everything, she thinks, is the question of behaving with grace. He is falling in love with someone else. They have an understanding,
is the phrase people say. Couples who agree to open marriages, an understanding.

A big wind lifts the umbrella out of the hole in the centre of the plastic table and it pirouettes for a few seconds across the lawn on its white metal spike. Glenn Marshall makes a swipe for it, arm raised, fist empty. What she has decided: She will sleep with Glenn Marshall. An understanding is something for which you must acquire a taste, like all the other great things in life: coffee, wine, oysters, bungee jumping. A crowd of guests move out of the path of the careening umbrella. It knocks against the picket fence. A paper napkin flutters off the table and dips, like a dove shot out of the sky, a gash of lipstick on its breast. The crystal bowl of strawberries catches the sun, a tiny prism shoots across its sharp rim. The rowing shells on Quidi Vidi Lake glide fast. A team of women with yellow caps hold the oars above the water. They lean forward, they lean back. A riot of sparkles bursts around the prow. The last rower raises her hand to her cheek and is obliterated in the glare.

The ladybug on Eleanor's jacket is still anchored. She's here somewhere, this woman Philip's seeing.

Eleanor closes her eyes. The afternoon sways, the lawn, the voices. The summer is almost over. She can smell fall. Once at the Ship Inn Glenn Marshall put his hand on the small of her back. She'd been dancing in a black minidress and the cotton was damp.

He said, What are you doing?

Getting a beer. What are you doing?

It's dangerous, talking to you.

Dangerous?

You have beautiful legs.

That was last summer, the same hint of fall. Just that, his hand on her back, the cotton damp with sweat.
You have beautiful legs
. She was ahead of him, leaning into the crowded bar, one heel lifting out of her shoe. He steadied her.

She can see Philip in the sunroom window, listening to a woman with a blond ponytail. This must be the woman. She's on tiptoe, he bends his ear toward her. Eleanor sees him yank his tie. Her mouth close to Philip's ear. Then a cloud moves, making the window darken, and she can't see him.

What's Philip doing, she asks Glenn Marshall.

Philip is having a good time. Believe me.

She feels the earth turning. The heels of her sandals driven into mud beneath the wet grass. She'd made a rice salad with sesame oil, red peppers. Last night the taxi driver said, See that moon, that's weather. I had a wife once who could make a meal out of nothing. You had your moose, you had your garden. I got a different wife now, different altogether.

Eleanor was making everyone tell the moment they had come closest to death.

I like moments, she says, any kind of moment. Cut to the climax.

Glenn Marshall was once in a helicopter, sighting the neck of a galloping moose with a tranquilizing rifle, and they came
near a cliff, and whatever happened with the wind, the helicopter dropped for ten seconds. He told the story while buttering a roll. Turning the knife over and over to clean both sides in the bread. He said in accidents like this, the blades keep turning, driving down like a corkscrew, decapitating passengers.

Eleanor told about the crashing Nepalese tour bus, the front wheel over the cliff edge, the TVs bolted to the ceiling still blaring some Indian musical with a harem of dancers poised on three tiers of a fountain, all sawing on miniature violins. Big breasts, pillowy hips. When the second wheel of the bus thumped over the edge of the cliff, the fountain hung sideways, the dancers still perched, still grinning and sawing away on the violins in jubilant Technicolor, defying gravity. She had seen, through the window at her shoulder, fire smeared over the steel side. They were on fire. She and Sadie sleeping under a single bedsheet. The windshield shattered and fell into their laps. The bluish glass tumbling into the folds of the sheet, caught in their hair. They had raised their arms to cover their faces.

And there they were, in Nepal. What opulence, how quiet. The pressing crowd squished them, lifted them off their feet. They were borne out of the bus and fell on their knees and got up quick, quick.

Get away from the bus, get away before it blows.

Dawn; a woman in a sari on a dusty road with a water jug on her head and the sun coming up behind her. The real moment is the flutter of the sari. The snap and thwonk of fabric in the breeze. The silence. Someone taking out a map that
crackled in the hot air like eggshells. But Eleanor stops telling the story just as the second wheel of the bus flops over the cliff.

Leave your audience hanging.

She says, Beneath you could see buses that had already crashed, crumpled on the rocks. Then the second wheel rolled over the edge and we could feel the bus rocking.

Glenn leaned back and rested his arm over her chair. She could smell the muggy, spring-like sweat of his body. The nearness of his arm made her blush.

She thought: And Philip wants to leave me.

These were the categories of moments: the most famous person they'd ever met, the most romantic moment ever experienced, the most embarrassing. Earliest memory. Luckiest moment. The last time you peed your pants.

Constance told about waking in a field when she was seven with a bull eating grass, snorting water droplets on her cheek, horns yellowed like an old toilet. How she ran, hot pee trickling down her legs, yellow on her white ankle socks. When she'd climbed the fence, stopped to catch her breath, leaned over to puke, she could see the blue sky and clouds in the shiny black patent leather shoes an aunt had sent from St. John's. She lights a cigarette and blows the wedding veil out of her face.

She says, Will someone get me out of this contraption?

Constance grew up around the bay, an only child, raised by her grandmother. She says she was bathed in the kitchen in a big galvanized tub in front of a wood stove. Can this be true?
She remembers when television arrived in Newfoundland. They all gathered in one house to watch. She's a chef with a Master's in Religious Studies. Medieval witches. Magic, black and white. Eleanor has watched Constance paint braided pastry with melted butter, skin rabbits, flick dollops of fresh cream off a wooden spoon into chocolate mousse.

Once Philip had made Eleanor open her mouth and close her eyes. He'd had candles, they'd smoked some dope, him scrabbling under the bed.
Keep ‘em closed
. A ball bearing dinging back and forth in the metal can he shook,
I said keep ‘em closed
, and the raucous sputtering, her mouth blocked with Reddi Wip. Loops of Reddi Wip over her nipples, her chin, her nose, her hair.

Constance looks like cotton candy in the dress. Eleanor can't, for the moment, imagine her in other clothes. She was made for the wedding dress. Busty and pink-cheeked. Satin is perfect for her, iceberg cool and pleasure affirming. She was made, actually, to be in a Russian novel; a kitchen with a fireplace as big as a bed, the gamekeeper banging on the door with a wooden staff, a brace of quail over his shoulder, and there is Constance presiding over blood puddings, her four children in muslin walking in the pink cherry orchard.

The whole wedding dress swishes from side to side as she hands out puff pastry with brie and caramelized onions. Her auburn curls sliding from the combs. The low scooped neck. She'd pulled the whole wedding off by herself without complaint. She had enjoyed it. Constance knows how to get by on nothing, she and Ted, the four children, and the scabrous,
moulting husky with an eye infection — they are always broke. But when it comes to a party, Constance is easily extravagant. What's money for? A tiny glass tube of saffron she'd picked up at a specialty store on the way back from the Sally Ann where she'd bought the girls' jeans.

Yesterday Eleanor had visited and Constance was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking (an orange silk blouse, that's the sort of thing she wears), cheek resting on her hand and the counter full of loaves of bread, the tops glistening with butter. More dough rising. She sat in front of the window, taking a break. Making Eleanor a cup of tea. The rowing shells on the lake passing by her shoulder. Yesterday the lake was still, and the oars touched down and came up splashless. The kittens knocking over the jade plant. Giant piles of laundry. A stack of books about the plague, one on alchemy. She'd had four children, each a year apart. Alchemy she knew; the Pill she didn't bother with.

Eleanor had said, How do you do it? The bread. Constance waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the counter.

The bread makes itself, she'd said. There's nothing to bread. But the lamb. She opened a magazine and tossed it toward Eleanor so she could read the recipe.