Ellen in Pieces (12 page)

“I gave you my address,” Ellen hisses.

“I lost it! I had to look for it in the guest book!”

“What guest book?” Ellen says. “I didn’t sign any guest book.”

Jean-François lifts his shoulders, his Gallic, tragicomic shrug flowing into a lean. He leans into Ellen and she responds, so they meet in the middle of this terrible gap of geography and misunderstanding. Then, instinctively, she puts out her hand. Drunkenly, with a strength she doesn’t even know she possesses, she smacks it flat against Jean-François’s chest, pinning his eager heart beneath her palm.

This way, she holds him back.

B
ECAUSE,
when Yolanda was born, Celine was the first to cradle her, even before Ellen. Celine, who kept sniffing the top of the baby’s head, the dark, pasted-down fluff. Celine was a week overdue then.

She told Ellen, “I can’t wait. I just can’t wait.”

T
he triplex Ellen moves into that September is old. Eighty years old, even a hundred (what is time?). Three shops stood here once, but now they’re artists’ studios, green-shingled with large windows, in the heart of Kitsilano. Time has played a trick on the neighbourhood too. Once Kits was the Cordova Island of Vancouver, a hippy paradise, but after four gentrifying decades only pockets of this patchoulied past remain.

The studio is about a quarter the size of Ellen’s former house in North Vancouver. She’s had to sort and cull her life’s artifacts down to a cruel minimum. Unloading her car that first day, backing up with a box of books she couldn’t bear to part with, she crashes into her new neighbour Gerhard standing too close behind her. She bounces off him, one of those large, incompressible Germans with a shaved head, unnerving blue eyes, and chains. Jangling, he stoops to gather the fallen books, then carries them into the studio half filled with her scant cardboard-boxed possessions.

And won’t leave. He stands like a monolith in the middle of the empty space, talking about his work. Ellen, flustered, locates
the espresso machine in a box, fires it up. She knows by the display in his window that video is his medium, the wilderness his muse, as it often seems to be for Germans. (Ellen, who has never been to Berlin, where Gerhard says he’s from, pictures it in black and white with beautiful soot-dark buildings, a city without chlorophyll.) The video monitor in Gerhard’s window shows a forest clearing, static except for the occasional meanderings of a squirrel or the winged interruption of a bird. This may draw crowds in Berlin, Ellen thinks, but here?

After she brings out the coffee and they settle on the floor to drink it, Gerhard explains the significance of the penises.

Ellen says, “What?”

She leaves him sitting cross-legged, a position he struggled into, the espresso cup in his big hand like a part of a doll’s tea set, and goes outside to look in his window again. There they are, rearing up from a dozen trees, wooden phalluses that she somehow missed on first glance. She wants to watch longer in case a hiker or a school group accidentally stumbles into the clearing, but she can’t; she has company.

When she returns, Gerhard’s lengthy, blue-eyed appraisal causes her to blush. Can he see it? Forty-seven years piled on her face, her nervousness making this move?

“And you, Ellen McGinty?” he finally says. “Tell me about your art.”

“I’m a potter.”

Is she even allowed to say that when, except for last summer’s refresher at the community centre, she hasn’t actually thrown a pot for twenty-five years? She points across the terrifying studio space, past the tiny kitchen. There’s a tumble-down garage out back.

“I’ll mostly be working in the garage. That’s where I’ll put the wheel and kiln. I’ll sell the pots here. Make some kind of window display, like you have. It’ll be wonderful. Every day, heaven.”

“H
ELL,
” she tells Tilda, months later.

Tilda is a fabric artist, a knitter of iconic Canadian wildlife, who lives on the other side of Ellen in the triplex. Big round glasses on a gaunt face emphasize her waifishness, as do her hands, perpetually chapped from the wool. Tilda looks like a thirty-year-old Joyce Carol Oates who knits, rather than writes, compulsively.

For Ellen, after the initial excitement of the move came the inevitable letdown: such is the human condition. Since then she’s been, creatively speaking, funked. On the plus side, she has some furniture now and a broad knowledge of Japanese penis temples, Thai penis amulets (Gerhard’s are displayed in small velvet-lined boxes), and the famous penis park in Korea. Thanks to Tilda, she knows the difference between a Townsend’s vole and a Short-tailed shrew and how one is much harder to knit. But the pots are giving her trouble. They are the irritants in what would otherwise be the life she saw in dreams.

“I like your pots,” Tilda tells her.

“Even in the way you say that. You might have said, ‘I like cabbage.’ I thought I would feel fulfilled. Creative. I’m just bored. Also, no one buys my pots.”

“What is your problem?” Gerhard asks, carrying in from the kitchen a large bowl filled with water.

They’re in his studio awaiting the new year. He sets the bowl on the coffee table in front of the women, checks his watch. “There is art and there is commerce. Which is making you unhappy? That
no one buys your product? Or that you are not creating the art you yearn to create?”

“Is it too much to ask that I create beautiful art that lots of people want to buy?”

“Yes,” Gerhard says.

“It sometimes happens,” Tilda says. “But do you need money, Ellen?”

“Not really. I sold my house, remember?”

She doesn’t mention the inheritance from her father. Her years as publicist taught her that people in the arts can be resentful. Such, too, is the human condition when everyone is desperate for a grant.

“What is your problem then, Ellen?” Gerhard asks on his way back to the kitchen.

“I feel my pots are worthless if no one wants them. And if they’re worthless, I’m worthless. Also, there’s a space issue. Where am I going to put them?”

“You are confused!” he calls.

Gerhard returns with a lighter and a long, perfectly innocent beeswax taper. Ellen holds out her wineglass to be refilled. Tilda covers hers with her hand (headaches).

“What is this thing you call ‘worth,’ Ellen? A perception. Make your worthless pots and sell them for a thousand dollars. More people will buy them than if you charge ten bucks. But are they worth more because of that? Are you worth more as a person?”

“I would feel more successful,” Ellen says.

“What is success?” Gerhard asks.

“Why is it so hard to talk to Germans?” Ellen asks Tilda.

“Answer me. Is success only to be measured in terms of money?”

“If you knew how poor I was twenty-five years ago. Larry, my ex? He left me when I was pregnant. I had a two-year-old. I didn’t
know how to do anything but read a book. Well, I knew how to throw a pot that wouldn’t wobble. You can guess how much use that was.”

“Wa-wa-wa,” Gerhard says, rubbing his gargantuan fist in his Aryan eye. “Wa-wa-wa.”

He can be too blunt, cruel, and his forceful,
über-correct
English makes the unilingual Ellen wither. But there’s a truth in what he’s saying too. She’s been holding onto that sob story for years. Even she’s tired of it.

When he has finished mocking her, he says, “It’s almost time. Put on your hats.”

Gerhard created penis hats for their first New Year’s Eve as side-by-side neighbours. They get along, the three of them, so much that Ellen turned down several invitations in order to stay home tonight. No doubt Gerhard will go out later, but he has chosen to be with Ellen and Tilda at the crucial moment.

The unicorn horn of the
papier-mâché
erection juts from Tilda’s forehead. It looks to have been constructed around the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels, as does Gerhard’s, while Ellen’s is obviously built up from a measly toilet-paper tube.

“Why is mine the smallest?”

Gerhard checks his watch again. “Now is the time to count. Ten, nine …” Ellen frowns. Gerhard tells Tilda, “Trade with her.”

Tilda, bless her, does.

Five, four, three, two, one. Happy new year!
They cheer and clink glasses, and Ellen tries to fit them, penises and all, in one picture while holding the camera out at the end of her arm.

Gerhard lights the taper, lets it burn for a minute. When the wax is flowing, he passes it to Ellen, who leans over the pot of cold water with the taper angled so the molten wax runs into it. On
Gerhard’s signal, she hands the taper to Tilda. Their penises knock together, giving Ellen the idea to engage in a little swordplay. Even Tilda, who generally looks on the verge of tears, laughs. Gerhard tells them to grow up.

All three take a turn. When Gerhard determines that their futures have solidified (if they handle them too soon
—Bleigiessen
they are called—they may deform), Ellen scoops out the hardened shapes. Gerhard snaps off the light.

“And now we read them.”

He sets up the candle just so, while outside in the rain-washed night, the newborn year, pots bang on and firecrackers screech like shrapnel.

Something’s gone from his wall, Ellen can’t recall what. Now there is this white space on which their shadowy futures will be projected, interpreted, accepted or denied, all without influencing the actual events to come. Or so thinks Ellen, who is having a lot of fun. She’s reached the stage in her drinking where she laughs through her nose.

Gerhard holds his
Bleigiessen
between the flame and the blank wall. “Some shapes have traditional meanings. A bell, an egg. They mean good news.
Das Kreuz
—a cross—it signifies death. Ah!” he declares to the shape on the wall. “A spider.
Die Spinne.
”

“What does a spider mean?” Ellen asks, already sensing Gerhard, like everyone, is seeing what he wants to see.

“Happiness hangs in the balance,” he says.

“Okay,” she says, pushing away his hand. “My turn.”

And the dark shape of Ellen’s destiny silhouettes itself on the blank wall, a Rorschach divination. Ellen tries. She strains.

“I see a heart,” says Gerhard.

“To me?” Ellen says. “It looks like a lump.”

T
HIS
she completely forgets by morning when she wakes in the grey light of the new year. The year she will finally become a potter, which, ironically, will make her less inclined to call herself one. “I mess with clay,” she’ll say, because that’s what it feels like to carve away most of a pot’s substance until it becomes a container for light and air. The year she stops caring about success, or what anyone thinks she’s worth.

Well into January, though, she’s still in her funk.

The day of her breakthrough, January 21, Ellen is especially irritable. It seems that she’s forgotten something, which is in itself normal. For the last few years even people she’s known for ages have devolved into “Whatshername,” entire countries to “that place,” objects to “thingies.” This morning, though, there’s some kind of urgency to the unretrievable memory, a sense of jeopardy sparking around its edges. It torments her as she disgruntledly pokes at the clay.

She’s making anuses. It’s a nostalgia exercise more than anything, for she used to make anuses years ago on Cordova Island when she was first learning to throw a pot. To make a pot, you slap a lump of clay on the stationary wheel, enclose it in wet hands, and start it turning. The clay needs to be worked before it accepts its proper form. It needs to warm up. Gently, you squeeze until it rises into a column, then, with the palm of your hand, press down to make it squat again. Draw it into a column once, twice, three times. Then dig in your thumbs to make a hole.

It’s hard work. You need strong hands. In the beginning Ellen’s hands tired—not to mention her back (she was pregnant with Yo at the time)—and she would let the wheel spin to a stop so she could rest. There, sitting on the wheel, was a narrow cylinder with a hole down its middle, a sea anemone with its tentacles withdrawn.

Or an anus.

She cut it off the wheel with the wire and set it aside to dry. She made another. And another. Three weeks later she carted a dozen pink-glazed anuses to the Cordova Island market.

“Pencil holder?” someone asked.

“Ouch,” Ellen replied.

She made a little sign: A
NUSES
. At the Christmas bazaar: A
N ANUS FOR THE ASSHOLE IN YOUR LIFE!

Needless to say, she couldn’t make them fast enough. Here she is, a quarter century later, trying to unfunk herself with anuses even as she understands you can never go back and, anyway, it’s childish—though Gerhard will like his, she’s sure.

All the while, it needles her that she’s forgetting something. Finally, she thinks to look in her date book.

Leaving in a hurry, she runs into Tilda, who is just scurrying back from the store clutching her cloth bag as though it’s filled with acorns and nuts, clearly sorry to have met another person, even Ellen. She only wants to get back inside and knit.

“I can’t stop, honey,” Ellen tells her. “I have a whatsit at the you-know-what.”

An hour later, bibbed in the hygienist’s chair, wearing the plastic sunglasses that protect her from flying chunks of her own tartar, she realizes the dental appointment isn’t it. The important thing she’s forgetting is still waving its arms in her peripheral vision, but she’s not in any position to turn her head and look with the suction tube gurgling in her mouth and the hygienist’s rubber-gloved hands in there too, wrist deep.

“Okay?” the hygienist asks, taking a break to pat Ellen’s lips with the bib.

“Do you like your job?” Ellen asks.

“I love it!”

“Love it?” Ellen says before opening wide again.

Now she’s really twisted up. This woman leaning in to scrape accretions off Ellen’s molars, lifting out on her hooked tool a rotten shred of lettuce that, having somehow eluded the toothbrush, has been composting in Ellen’s mouth for days, wiping it on a gauze pad and (here’s the kicker)
smiling
? She loves her job.

Ellen hates her job, if she can even call it a job. Even if she didn’t hate it, if she was contented instead of bored, Ellen, who once yearned to be an artist, is back making anuses. Anyway, pottery is so dead. Plastic killed it. Her days would be better spent flogging Tupperware.

The hygienist interrupts Ellen’s downward spiral. “Your saliva has a really lovely consistency.”

Accepted here: flattery, compliments, affirmations, praise however faint. Ellen is not just distracted from, but pulled right out of her funk by these words. She raises one finger in the air, signalling for the hygienist to remove her tool so she can speak.

“It’s not too stringy?”

“Oh no!”

“Because I sometimes think it’s overly viscous. When I spit, it won’t let go. It just dangles there. I feel embarrassed.”

“Don’t be embarrassed,” the woman says.