The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (3 page)

Did you see that, she asked.

See what, the guys said.

Max was focusing on different sets of muscles, small groups of three or four, he said. He was methodical and the skin bulged and the bulging moved over his back as if there were a small animal foraging under the skin, a rodent that hesitated and then rippled on. He watched the animal move over one shoulder, and tossing the pompom of his Santa hat out of the way watched the animal slide across his back to the other shoulder.

Most people forget all about their backs, simply because they can't see them, he said. His head looked so small on his massive shoulders. He was intent and she saw his bum tighten as hard as concrete.

And left buttock, he said, releasing the muscles in his left cheek. He'd told her they met in big warehouses — the single Mormons — so that they could find dates. There were mixers but they didn't dance or touch or kiss.

And right buttock, he said.

For the first time it occurred to her how innocent he was. His strength and undiluted dedication, the half-crazed solemnity he brought to the simple things. Mostly he lived on eggs and green shakes of vitamins and chlorophyll that looked like windshield washing fluid. She and Basil had seen him eat six raw yolks every morning they'd been on the road together. He'd crack the shells and drop the insides from one half shell to the other until the whites slopped over the sides and then he'd tip the half-shell into his mouth.

I am going to design a regime for people who have forgotten their backs, Max said. Yes, abs are important. I'm not going to pretend they aren't. But a big thick back gives the illusion of a smaller waist.

Basil had found Laurie's bag of stocking stuffers and he had taken Seraphim's yo-yo out of the plastic package and was flicking it out fast so the sparks spat and sizzled.

Then I'll go into politics, Max said.

I admire your bum, Laurie said.

Max looked away from his reflection. He turned and kneeled in front of her as the men had been directed to do now and then.

We aren't allowed to have premarital sex, he said. For a moment she thought he was talking about the three of them and the Plexiglas box they were hurtling toward Christmas in, but of course he meant the members of the cult to which he belonged. He put his small hands on her knees.

God asks that we keep ourselves pure.

I've been having sex like a bunny, she said softly. She could not bring herself to be any more vulgar with him than that, afraid of the damage it would do. She had decided that beneath the bulk and heft of both men there was something as fragile as a Christmas ornament batted about by the paws of a kitten. Besides, it was in their contract. There would be no self-discovery, no falling in love, no imminence or epiphanies, no gathering together of the universe, no speed bumps of Salvation. There were to be no unexpected miracles. There were no small parts; there was the cap gun in the first act but no shot would be fired. They were trapped in amber, they were coal burning white in engines of fun.

I know your boyfriend broke up with you, Max said. But I think you might be pregnant.

My God, Laurie said. She touched her naked belly with one hand and then tapped each of her fingers against her thumb, counting off the weeks.

They were back in Toronto by the twenty-second. Laurie stopped at the hospital on the way home to her apartment to give Seraphim's mother the Santa and Mrs. Claus salt and pepper shakers, along with the presents she had picked up for the children.

She found Elizabeth in a chilly basement hallway lined with empty hospital beds and laundry bins. She was wearing a pale green hospital gown and she was sitting on a cot and her head was bowed either in pain or prayer. Laurie called her name.

What are you doing here child, Elizabeth asked.

This is just a token, Laurie said.

I don't have anything for you.

Why don't you go ahead and open it, Laurie said. Elizabeth pulled the crushed lump of tissue paper out of the mouth of the bag.

What is it, she asked.

Go ahead, Laurie said. See what's inside.

Elizabeth slit the tape on the lid with her fingernail. The ceramic Mrs. Claus had a big belly under her white apron and her hands were spread over her girth as if to contain a volcano of laughter. There were perforations on the top of her white gathered bonnet.

That's the salt, Laurie said. But Elizabeth was pinching the bridge of her nose with her fingers and thumb. Her lips parted and all her teeth showed. She drew in a deep breath through her clenched teeth and when she opened her eyes they were covered with a limpid film and they were a more luminous brown than before and Laurie realized Elizabeth was crying. She was crying without making any noise at all.

Laurie looked down the long corridor. One of the fluorescent lights way at the end fluttered and pinged and went grey.

This is a cold country, Laurie said. You must find it awfully cold.

It is cold, Elizabeth said. It's really cold. Especially at this time of year. She grabbed Laurie's shoulder and squeezed it hard.

You have a good Christmas, Laurie, she said.

I'll try, Laurie said.

On her way out of the hospital Laurie passed through a large group of couples, young men and women, crowded in the Emergency entrance.

And this is the door you'll use when the time comes, a nurse told them. The group turned at once and Laurie saw that all twenty or thirty of the women in the group were pregnant.

Some of the women held their partners by the hand, a few were teenage girls with their mothers, one rested a hand on the small of her back, a couple of the women were alone, some of the women had spread their fingers against their big hard bellies, cradling them. Some of the women had tilted their heads as though they were listening to something deep inside or far, far away.

I
expected some epiphany during the birth. Some way to order the material, some profound wisdom. It seems important to document exactly the way it went. In fact I would like to set the whole summer down in point form. Collect it, pin it. The birth, the affair, the postpartum-affair depression. Already I remember the summer in short-hand, distilled, made up of only a hundred or so specific images intermingled; meals, sex, nights on the fire escape, hours in the office, the birth, the affair. And by next summer I won't even remember it that clearly. But for now it has reached the half-dissolved stage, the separate gestures of the summer exaggerated like the colour in Polaroid photographs.

After I found out that Cy had slept with Marie I sat on the fire escape with my foot on the railing, and a spider crawled over my foot, my toes tensed, each toe stretching away from the others. I could feel the spider make its web, lacing my toes
together. It struck me that I had never felt anything so sharply before. That's how a story should work. Like that Chinese ribbon dance. They turn off the lights so you can't see the dancer. All you see are two long fluorescent ribbons, drawing in the dark, like the strokes of that summer. Or that guy Volker we met in Germany, did drawings with a pen flashlight inside a cave. A photographer Volker knew shot them with fast film. Volker was a shadow but he drew the outlines of men and women embracing. He said it took incredible concentration because he had only ten seconds to make the drawing. The result was a fury of limbs locked through each other, the lines themselves seared onto the walls of a cave, the condensation glittering like sweat.

Example: Hannah, Cy's daughter, in her satin ballet costume, black with red sequins, lime green tulle, dragging herself up the staircase, howling like a wolf, “I got no one to play with, I got no one to play with,” hand over hand on the banister while the sky blisters with rain, while Cy and I make love in the bathroom. He's soaking in this chemical blue bubble bath Hannah bought him for Christmas the first year I met him. It comes out of a plastic bottle shaped like a Havana nightclub dancer. The woman's hat, a mountain of bananas, unscrews, and although the bubbles are turquoise, the bathroom stinks of synthetic bananas. We try to make love first on the side of the tub but it's slippery from the steam, then on the toilet, and then one foot on the radiator, hiked up on the sink so I can see my own sunburnt face in the antique mirror we found in an abandoned house around the bay. The mirror is watery, my face wobbled
with laughter because the position is so ridiculous, my legs bound by the pink maternity overalls wrapped around my knees and Hannah banging now on the bathroom door. Cy comes, and then both of us are completely still, him hugging me from behind. We look at each other's faces in the mirror. His hand is on my belly and the baby kicks so hard that both our eyes widen at the same time. We answer Hannah in unison, “Just a second.” I haul up my overalls while Cy opens the door. “Jeez,” says Hannah and sits on the toilet to pee.

After the baby was born, and I was still drugged, I thought I felt her move again, inside me. I guess it was like when someone feels an itch in a missing limb. It was only a ghost of the way she felt inside me, and already I was forgetting what it had felt like to have her flutter in there, as if a million years had passed.

I didn't really get the chance to read very much birthing literature. I'd collected it, seen a film of an Australian woman who gave birth in her own living room. Her next-door neighbour dropped over, made himself a cup of tea and ended up holding the mirror for her, between her legs. She wore an old T-shirt and moaned in an Australian accent. The baby was blue when it came out. Cy gritted his teeth while he watched.

Our Bodies, Ourselves
says that some male partners seek other sexual partners during the pregnancy. “You wouldn't do that, would you, Cy?”

We only got to one of the pre-natal classes. It happened to be the one on “Things that can go wrong.” The nurse started off by assuring everyone that in most cases nothing goes wrong,
but that we had to go through this anyhow, just in case. She showed the suction cups the doctors sometimes use during natural births. They had pink cups and blue cups, the nurse told us, “… but as sure as shooting, if you used the pink cup you'd get a boy and vice versa. The funny thing about these cups is they seem to go in and out of fashion. You might notice a certain doctor using them for a couple of months and then it seems the cups stay in the cupboard for six months and nobody uses them. They don't hurt the baby, of course, except they do sometimes come out with cone-shaped heads when the doctor uses the suction cups. In fact you have to be careful after you have the baby that you lay him on different sides every time you lay him down, otherwise his head will go flat. Actually, there's a little community up the southern shore that's into head sculpting. All of them have heads as flat as frying pans on one side.” And she snorted, “No, that's only a joke.”

She said the last time she brought the forceps to a lecture one of the dads got upset, so this time she was only bringing a diagram. She held up the diagram for a moment without comment and then slid it behind the next diagram which was of a baby whose head was too big to fit through the pelvic hole. At the end of the session she got everyone to lie down on a mat and she played a relaxing tape. “Come on, now, dads, don't be shy, down on the mats with the moms.” She turned the lights off so the room was black. Cy and I lay down on a gym mat and listened while a sultry female voice told us our toes, ankles, knees, hip joints and so on up the body were feeling feather light, as if all the tension of the day was leaving our bodies in
waves. There was a soundtrack of waves and sitar music in the background. Beside me I could feel Cy's shoulder shuddering in a silent fit of giggles.

I guess I should describe the woman Cy slept with, Marie. She was beautiful and unemployed all summer. Thick curly black hair, long suntanned legs. She didn't believe in marriage. Not only did she never plan to marry but she didn't acknowledge anyone else's. She had a Marxist approach to the whole thing. “Love isn't a commodity. A wife is a whore, only real whores are more honest about it and have more fun. Marriage is a business contract whereby women sell men exclusive sex rights, allowing the male to control the means of reproduction in exchange for financial security. Romantic love is a corrupt notion that leads ultimately to death by excruciating boredom. Besides, I can't help how I feel about Cy.” And she winked at me.

Marie, the night I found out they had slept together: Cy has invited her to supper. She brings us chocolates wrapped in gold foil with miniature Rembrandt paintings printed on it. Rembrandt's fat creamy wife. Cy is excited about the wrappers because he's working on a thesis for an Art History degree. He collects everybody's wrappers and begs Marie to eat the last chocolate. She laughs and tosses it at his chest. It bounces off and nearly hits the baby rocking in her cradle beside Cy's chair.

The Party: we are having fondue. Cy spills the starter fluid and when he lights it the fondue pot bursts into flames. The table is full of flammable things we somehow hadn't noticed
before: dishtowels, the bottle of starter fluid, a yellow Styrofoam duck that Hannah's art teacher made for parents who volunteered to wear it on their heads for a swim-a-thon for cancer. Cy and I are screaming at each other. Hannah comes into the kitchen and we both scream, “Get out of the kitchen” in unison. Marie promptly throws a dishtowel on the fondue pot. There are a few clouds of black smoke. She lifts the towel off, magician-like, and there are no more flames. We stare at the pot for a few seconds and the flames burst back to life. The heat reaches the neck of the duck, melting it so the duck's beak opens angrily. Marie puts the cloth back on the pot and the fire goes out. Later in the evening, everybody is drunk and raucous except me, because I'm still pregnant. We have eaten all evening, asparagus, carrots, broccoli dipped in hot wine cheese fondue, chunks of pumpernickel. Someone has suggested I wear the Styrofoam duck on my head throughout the evening. I protested but everyone booed me. I don't want to seem excruciatingly boring, so I wear it. Marie picks up an empty wine bottle and blows into it. It sounds eerie and hollow and for a minute it sobers everyone. Suddenly Marie's chair collapses beneath her. In slow motion she reaches both her arms out to Cy. Their fingers grip for a second and she hits the floor. She is laughing so hard she's in tears.