Degrees of Nakedness (14 page)
I read, “the haiku is like a finger pointing at the moon. It’s important that it’s not a bejewelled or perfect finger. It only points to something.” I met Mike, my husband, after that. We were out drinking and Mike brought me home to his apartment, which was Gordon’s old apartment. Mike had used the last of Gordon’s shaving cream, wore a pair of Gordon’s construction boots that were left under the bathroom sink. They fit him perfectly.
My mother’s only sister, Sherry, is a real estate agent. The best in St. John’s. In the weekend paper there’s a whole page, a pyramid of real estate agents’ photographs. Sherry is always at the top, or in the second line from the top. The agents are placed according to their sales. Sherry is afraid of two things. Fire and cats. She says when she was a baby, a cat lay over her face, filling her mouth and nose with fur, almost suffocating her. She was less than two years old but she remembers it. Cats are attracted to the smell of milk on the baby’s breath. She didn’t want Mike and me to buy this house. A fire trap, she said.
I was sewing a dress for my step-daughter with a friend who lives on the other side of the city. We were drinking coffee and Tia Maria. The phone rang and it was Mike. He said he
was standing in the front doorway of our house. Fire was pouring down the street. He said it was still safe there, but embers as big as his fist were dropping at his feet. The sky is orange, he said. I pulled the phone over to the window. There was an orange and black cloud breathing in the sky on the other side of the city. I said, That’s over my house. He said, You should see it, it’s like lava in the street. They’ll evacuate us when it gets hot enough.
I ran home. Some streets were blocked. Ours was a frozen river of water from the fire hoses. A blizzard of orange flakes. I had to cover my head with my scarf to keep my hair from catching fire. Mike had closed the front door because of the soot and smoke. The radio said if the fire reached our street the whole of downtown would be lost. It said the firemen were losing control. There were high winds. A policeman rapped on the door of our house with a billy knocker. He said, Move now, NOW. The street was full of people carrying blankets, photo albums, figurines. A spark landed on my daughter’s hand, making a tiny burn. We went to my sister’s, stayed up all night listening to the radio, drinking, unable to get drunk. At three in the morning the radio said the firemen had contained it. Our house was safe. I felt a quick stab of disappointment. I wasn’t comfortable in the city any more.
I woke early, afraid of looting. The Dominion supermarket had burned to its foundation. Blackened girders twisted up from the debris. Beautiful arcs of water shot from the fire trucks at the four corners of the lot. Everything hissing, steaming, delicate rainbows. Under a broken metal shelf I saw a pile of
brilliant oranges, strangely preserved, each with a tiny white cap of snow. Our front door had been beaten in, tracks of soot over the carpet — the police had checked each house for someone left behind.
Since the fire the house has become infested with mice. The cat is playing with a mouse now, under my chair. I have my feet drawn up on the seat. I smash the mouse under a book. The cat finally bites its head. I hear the crunching of the bones of the mouse’s skull between the cat’s teeth; although the body is still moving, the tail has become a stiff S. In a few seconds the cat has devoured the entire body. She gives a cry. I half expect the mouse to scramble out of her mouth, whole. Perhaps because I know the mice will keep coming.
My daughter caught cold the night we were evacuated. Her cough sounds like cotton ripping. I draw her into me, her spine between my breasts, the soles of her feet burning against my thigh. I curl around her like a shell around a soft snail. Even her fingers are hot, as if the fire entered her hand through the little burn. When I was a child I used to climb into bed with my sister because I wanted to protect her from the devil. I believed the devil could draw my sister away through her dream, to a parallel universe, where there was a parallel city. Anything could be drawn out of this world, sucked into that one. Three years younger, she slept on her stomach. I’d put my nose in her hair. It had the colour and smell of unripe corn. She dreamed so strenuously that her cheeks were red, her lips slightly parted. I would lie on top of her, matching limb for limb, my arm over her arm, my leg over her leg, my fingers locked into hers.
The way you lie flat if someone has fallen through the ice. The devil couldn’t pull us both down. I’d hook the bone of her ankle between my toes. I could stop her from falling too deeply that way, by hooking the bone of her ankle, but that always woke her up and she’d throw me off.
I went to see a Japanese performance artist. Wine glasses set in a circle like the numbers of a clock. Each wine glass filled with a different coloured spice. Grey-green, mustard, turmeric. He tipped the contents out on the floor and they floated down in gaseous clouds. On the video screen it looked like an aerial view of the Earth. The way the Earth looks as though it’s made of water and cloud, with nothing holding it together. The video cameras were as fragile as cheap toys. He attached wires to himself, and a gas mask with a paper bag on the end, that filled and crumpled with his breathing. The screens showed a mushroom cloud exploding over and over, silently. Then he made a pyramid of the wine glasses and poured a jug of honey into them. The honey clung to the stems of the glasses until each glass was filled. It glistened in the spotlight, the whole pyramid one viscous city of glass. Then he put a syringe into his arm and poured his own blood into the glass, mixing it with his finger.
I became fascinated with real estate when Aunt Sherry became an agent. All of my cousins punctuated every emotional event by buying or selling a house. It took me a while to recognize this pattern. Who would expect symbolism in real estate? But when I think of it, Sherry has made real estate her life. There’s her religion — a private part of her I can just barely guess the workings of — the fierce and protective love
she has for her family, and real estate. I see all these parts of her bleed into each other. The houses she has bought and sold are spread out over the city like clues in a scavenger hunt. Some houses she’s sold three and four times to different families, noting the changes in wallpaper, carpet, light fixtures, as though the house has a camouflage that matches the families that move in. She will often point out houses that have ghosts. A house where a son murdered his seventy-three-year-old mother, and she was found two weeks later. Sherry says this property is eternally on the market, the house like a lost soul that can’t find bodies to move into it. She’s bought houses for all her children, and when any of them tell a story, they always start, When we were on Holbrook Avenue, or Forest Road, or Prince of Wales Street.
There’s a small island of trees and grass near my house. My daughter and I played there tonight, to bring down her fever. It had snowed the night before, covering the bone dry sidewalks, and another squall blew over in the afternoon. It was past Sarah’s bed time, and my toes were cold in my rubber boots, but we stayed out as long as we could. The streetlights threw perfect shadows from the trunks of the trees, thick straight columns like the Parthenon’s. An image drawn with sonar radar of a three-dimensional palace. I thought of Gordon Austin and his haiku books, of Philip’s daughter playing in the snow of another continent. Sarah and I trampled the snow but the columns still looked clean, the shadow edges hard.
I imagine a map of the city with plastic inlays of Sherry’s sales, family migration patterns from one neighbourhood to
another. Each move changing lives irrevocably. Sherry is responsible for it. You sell a house to a customer and five years later they’ll be back to you for another. There are only three things to think about in selling real estate. Location, Location, Location.
In India several years ago I was on a tour of a city palace. A guide separated me from the crowd, ushered me into a stone tower. Before I knew what was happening he had bolted the door and the windows. No light leaked in. The darkness seemed to affect my inner ear and I swayed. Before I could scream he struck a match. There were thousands of convex mirrors imbedded in the walls. The guide, myself and the flame — reflected, wobbling. The guide said, The bridal chambers, night of a thousand stars. Our image splintered infinitely. Smashed but contained whole in each of the convex mirrors.
Author’s Acknowledgements
T
he author would like to thank the following institutions for their support: The Canada Council, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, and St. John’s City Arts Jury.
I am grateful to my editor, Beverley Daurio. Many thanks to all the writers in The Burning Rock for sharing their talents, particularly Stephanie Squires, Claire Wilkshire, Lawrence Mathews and Michael Winter. Thank you to Jane Urquhart and Edna Alford and Roger Greenwald for their support and criticism. For all their love and laughter I am forever grateful to Steve Crocker and my big and extended family. I would also like to say a big thank you to the gang at Anansi, especially Sarah MacLachlan, Martha Sharpe, Laura Repas, Matt Williams and Kevin Linder, for his fine eye.
“Wisdom Teeth” and “Meet Me in Sidi Ifni” were published in
Canadian Fiction Magazine
.
“Degrees of Nakedness” and “Ingrid Catching Snowflakes on Her Tongue” were published in
Prism International
.
“Nipple of Paradise” was aired on CBC National as well as published in
Coming Attractions ’94
with “Haloes” and “Purgatory’s Wild Kingdom.”
“Carmen Has Gonorrhoea” was published in
Extremities
, an anthology of fiction from The Burning Rock, Newfoundland.
About the Author
LISA MOORE
is the acclaimed author of the novels
Alligator
, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, and a national bestseller; and
February
, which was a national bestseller and a
Globe and Mail
Top 100 Book. Her story collection
Open
was also a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a national bestseller, and it won the Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award. Lisa Moore lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
About the Publisher
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007 and 2009 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”
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