Ellen in Pieces (6 page)

Later in the afternoon she visited his tiny cupboard of a room in the psychiatric assessment ward. While he quivered silently in his bed, Ellen perched on the chair with a fruit basket in her lap. Now that she knew what was the matter with him, it seemed so obvious.

“I still miss Mom,” she told him. “Every single day. There are so many things I wish I could have talked to her about. Sometimes I do talk to her. Sometimes she even answers. Once I was complaining about Mimi. You know what she said? She said, ‘She’s just like you were.’ I heard her, clear as anything.”

Ellen looked over at her father. His eyes had rolled back in his head, like she’d shot him.

Earlier, walking into the hospital, Ellen had tripped. Some of the fruit had spilled out of the basket. She got up now and went over to the little basin in the corner, filled it with soapy water. Every piece of fruit she washed then dried with paper towels.

The human heart is about the size of your fist. Where had she
learned that? About the size of a Macintosh apple, all dented and bruised to mush.

“H
E’S
there, isn’t he?”

This was Wednesday, the day Jack McGinty was supposed to see the geriatric specialist. Ellen had just left a message cancelling the appointment she’d finagled. Assuming it was the clinic calling back, she’d answered without looking at the call display.

Moira said, “I thought you were going to stay out of our lives. I thought you were going to leave us alone. What do you mean by this? You are not to interfere! Do you hear me? You are not to get involved! Put him on the line! Put him on right now!”

“He’s not here.”

“Liar! We all still hate you!”

Her sister breathed hard, catching her breath for the next round.

“How do you really feel, Moira?” Ellen asked.

Moira hung up.

But now Ellen had the number, not unlisted at all, right there on the call display.

J
ACK
McGinty’s fiftieth birthday party, August 2, 1983. Larry had insisted on cabbing from the airport.

“How much is that going to cost?” Ellen had asked him on the phone, before remembering that Larry was making real money now.

She wanted to pick him up. She wanted to get out of her sister’s house and away from Charles.

In her dream the night before, she’d encountered Charles
somewhere innocuous, the backyard or the garage. He was doing something with his hands—what, she couldn’t tell. In waking life Charles’s hobby was making and flying model airplanes. That was the boyish kind of man he was, the kind Larry scorned. In fact, she dreaded that Charles would invite Larry to fly one of his planes and that Larry would pretend enthusiasm and later mock his brother-in-law in a play, or worse now, in a television sitcom that Moira and Charles would be more likely to see. Would Larry ever write another play? She hoped so. The best of him came out in his work, the part she loved best, the humour and the tenderness. The best went to the play, and what remained was Ellen’s.

In the dream, Charles must have been working on a model, but as the details were released to Ellen intermittently throughout the morning in mortifyingly erotic little fragments, the toy plane eventually disappeared and only the screwdriver remained.

“For God’s sake,” Ellen muttered to herself.

Then even the screwdriver vanished and she and Charles were entangled in coitus. It was very, very good, exquisite even. Because of his cock. There was something special about Charles’s cock, something ecstasy-inducing, but Ellen couldn’t remember what. In the kitchen kneading raw onion and garlic into a bowl of ground beef, she both wanted to remember, because she was curious, and didn’t.

At just that moment, with Ellen torn between curiosity and embarrassment, in strolled Charles. Ellen yelped, tossed her head so her braid swung over her shoulder, then fled, awkwardly, her smocked belly leading the way to the bedroom, her arms up—
don’t shoot
!—because of the hamburger stuck all over her hands.

She closed the door with her hip. She’d only been standing there
a second when a car pulled up outside. The cab. Mimi, playing in the front yard in an inflatable pool with her cousins, started singing, “Dada, dada, dada!” Ellen heard her through the window and, relieved, opened the door again.

Charles! Right there in the hall. He was a tall, pointily featured man who wore dress socks with sandals, and now this look of wounded bafflement. Ellen brushed past him.

“Ellen?” Charles bleated.

She ducked into the bathroom.

With Yolanda performing a vigorous
in utero
callisthenic routine, Ellen scrubbed the E. coli off her hands. She heard everyone troop inside, Moira directing Larry to the spare bedroom, asking about the trip, and the besotted cousins chasing Mimi back outside under the suggestively clouded sky.

One of the not-best things about Larry was his moodiness. Later, after Ellen started in publicity, she came to realize that most artists walk a zigzag between pathetically insecure and egomaniacal, except for the really good ones, who are quite normal. That day, preventing Larry from acting like an asshole with her sister overrode her fear of running into Charles. She stepped into the hall again and, thankfully, he was gone.

“Baby,” she said from the spare room doorway.

Larry was sitting on the bed talking to Moira. He looked up at Ellen, cringed. He’d forgotten she was pregnant, just like she’d forgotten he’d cut his hair and shaved. But while he looked better for this—tanned, dark curls held back by sunglasses on top of his head, a linen suit jacket she’d never seen before over a T-shirt she’d also never seen—after a ten-day separation Ellen only looked more of the barnyard.

Ellen came over and they kissed, her dissatisfied tongue stirring
in her mouth. A good little tongue, tucked behind her teeth. Then she remembered the hamburger on the counter.

“I’ll put it way,” Moira volunteered.

As soon as Moira was out of the room, Larry stood and emptied his pockets onto the bureau. He tossed the linen jacket on the bed.

“This is nice,” Ellen said, sitting carefully beside the jacket, but not touching it lest she wrinkle it further. It was hard to believe that Larry had purchased this jacket, but of course he had meetings. He couldn’t schlep his scripts around L.A. dressed like a hobo.

She settled on her side and arranged her top so as not to look like a nursing sow. Or a cow. Larry hadn’t specified which farm animal. “How was the trip?”

“Exhausting,” Larry said. He stripped while Ellen watched.

“How’s your mother?”

“Good.”

“It wasn’t broken?”

“What? No. Sprained.”

“Come here,” she said.

“I really need a shower. Where is it?”

“Down the hall.”

How quickly showers became essential when for two winters he had uncomplainingly sponge-bathed in diaper water. When in summer, they’d hooked a hose to a tree.

Larry stepped out of his jeans and there it was, his cock, so longed-for and pink, seemingly innocent, like something you’d cradle in your palm and feed from a dropper. He moved toward the door. Ellen gestured severely to the clean towels folded nearby on a chair and Larry, smiling for the first time, covered his nakedness and left.

And she remembered what was so special about Charles. He had two.

Two cocks.

She got off the bed, cumbersomely, and began to gather Larry’s clothes off the floor, also cumbersomely. She sniffed the T-shirt, but it hadn’t absorbed his scent, not even in the armpits, which smelled like deodorant. Honestly, though, she was weary of pong. She wiped the door handle with a tissue, then tidied the bureau strewn with his passport and wallet and various paper scraps including his boarding pass, which she looked at twice before the inconsistency registered.

He returned, hair dripping, face shiny from Moira’s Lady Schick. Ellen was still holding the boarding pass. Strangely, she wasn’t angry, not yet.

“You didn’t even go to Florida. Is that why you didn’t want me to pick you up?”

Larry, using the towel from around his waist to dry his hair, looked like an abashed schoolboy. “I was going to tell you, babe. Really. I just thought that we should get through this party first. Can we?”

S
O
for the first time in more than twenty years, Ellen phoned her sister Moira. She phoned in the middle of the day, when everyone was likely to be at work. “The good news is they’ve already moved him to this other ward. For geriatric cases. It’s much, much better.”

In the psychiatric assessment ward all the other patients had been young. Jack McGinty, who would not leave his cupboard, had seemed worse off than them, except when Ellen ventured to the
open kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and saw all the apocalyptic drawings fixed to the fridge door with ladybug magnets.

Someone has spent the last thirty years trying to make me crazy and they have more or less succeeded!!!!

But yesterday the friendly nurse with all the piercings told her Jack McGinty was upstairs in the Geriatric Psychiatric Centre. Ellen found her father there, glassy-eyed but miraculously sitting up.

“Oh!” she said.

“They gave me something last night, I don’t know what. It sure worked.”

For the first time in nine weeks, he’d slept more than two consecutive hours.

When Jack McGinty was better, Ellen told Moira’s voice mail, she would put him on a plane to Calgary, if that was what he wanted. But first she needed to know what had happened to reduce him to such a state. No doubt that would set Moira screeching. She also apprised her sister of the Power of Attorney, the joint accounts, the unchanged will, so Ellen wouldn’t be accused of anything underhanded. It took three calls to say all this because she kept getting cut off.

“What do you mean by accusing us?” Moira called back to yell, not screech. (The hatred in her sister’s voice had diminished several decibels from that first call.) “Who’s been looking after him for the last twenty years? Not
you
, that’s for sure.”

“I would have,” Ellen said meekly, “if someone had told me I was allowed to.”

Moira huffed.

“You can’t have it both ways, Moira. You can’t expel me from the family then say I never helped.”

“We don’t want anything to do with you.”

“I understand and respect that. And let me say one more time
that I’m sorry. I said it then. I wrote you fifty letters. I’m saying it now. I’m sorry. But the fact is, Dad’s here. If we could cooperate on this? That would be big of you. Huge. I’ll never ask for anything else.”

“You took everything already,” Moira said.

“Did I? I mean, Moira, come on. Are you still married to Charles? Dad says you are. Am I married to Larry? No. I’m married to nobody.”

Ellen took off her glasses and squeezed the bridge of her nose. She hoped she didn’t sound pathetic or manipulative. She was startled by how matter-of-factly she had said it.
I’m married to nobody.
She flinched, but she didn’t howl.

A long pause followed. Ellen expected Moira to hang up, but she didn’t. She let Ellen sit alone with her pain. Eventually it passed, like a contraction.

“How’s Mimi?” she finally asked.

“Good.”

“I heard she got into drugs.”

Ellen sighed. “She’s fine now. She’s in Toronto. She’s a dancer. Yolanda has a five-year-old. There’s another on the way.”

“Jenny had a baby too! Finally!”

Ellen looked at her watch. Four minutes and Moira was still on the line.

A whole team combined forces to get Jack McGinty back to normal—psychiatrist, psychiatric resident, social worker, O.T., not to mention the cheerful army of nurses in their coloured Crocs, dispensing laxatives. And Ellen McGinty, who came twice a week. With this gap of days between visits, his improvement showed; the
jaw movements grew less ferocious, his hands a little steadier. These were withdrawal symptoms, Dr. Tung (older, Chinese, moderately cute, she noted for when Georgia asked) explained.
Nortriptyline, Felodipine, Quetiapine, Loxapine.
Ellen knew she should try to understand the pharmacology, but after this ordeal, she wasn’t going to suggest taking him off anything.

Soon Jack was taking his meals in the dining room. One afternoon she found him there with three crones, the women slouched at one end of the long table, walkers and canes stationed nearby, Jack at the other suddenly seeming the junior to everyone, flush-faced and alert, a box of tissues within reach. He brightened when he saw Ellen and she reciprocated.

“You’ve got mail.” She waved it.

It was a knife-free ward so she used the handle of a plastic spoon to slit the envelopes. The first contained a cheque.

“It’s a reimbursement from my drug plan,” he said.

“You’re rich,” Ellen said.

“Put it in the TD account.”

Ellen tucked the cheque back in the envelope and wrote
TD
on it. Jack blew his nose.

“Do you have a cold?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” He handed her the tissue.

“I should deposit this too?”

“Moira called. Tell her not to call here anymore. It’s long distance. I’m fine. Tell her not to come.”

“She’s coming here?” Ellen said, astonished.

“I don’t want her to. I’m fine.”

“She told me Charles had nothing to do with switching your meds. She says it was her. She thought it was time someone updated them.”

“It was
Charles!
”

Ellen leaned away from her father’s vehemence. Just then a silver-haired man with a showy belt buckle breezed through to announce gold was up. The three crones did not react.

“Thinks he’s a big investor,” Jack whispered. “Hogs the TV. Always checking his stocks.” He passed her the cable bill. “Pay that.”

“Please?” Ellen hinted.

How annoying Jack was today, she thought as she nosed the car out of the hospital parking lot into rush-hour traffic. Do this, do that. Empty the dishwasher. Clean your room. His old, order-barking self. What was she, his secretary? And why did he keep blaming Charles? Poor Charles.

It got dark so early now. Clouds, shiftless, loitered over the city, accumulating moisture, then sidled off to drop their load on the North Shore. After she sold the house she was going to move into a mirrored downtown tower high above all weather systems. She’d get rid of the car too, but in the meantime here she was, peering through the liquid smear, hoping vainly to merge onto the highway.