Ellen in Pieces (8 page)

I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning.

She’d misremembered it. She only realized what it meant later, when she and Brad sat down at her kitchen table.

Because the first thing she saw was her father moving his hands in the water, testing the temperature, and the typed note on top of all the papers.

I am sorry.

“What’s the matter, Ellen?” Brad asked. “What’s this all about?”

S
o Ellen had found herself alone with a two-year-old in a near-empty, perpetually cloud-scarved house halfway up the North Shore mountains, eight months pregnant with her second child. All those years ago.

Only twenty-two and already divorcing.

As desperate as she’d been to leave Cordova Island, population 357 born-again hippies, aging draft dodgers and sundry arty types, now Ellen missed it. Ellen and Larry had been passionate members of that close community (Larry too passionate, it turned out), contributors to its potlucks and Friday-night jams in the tiny island hall, users of its Free Store and babysitting co-op. If you met somebody on the road on Cordova Island, you stopped and talked for half an hour about your garlic crop and your aura. That’s the kind of place it was.

But now when Ellen took Mimi to the park, she felt she was from a far-off country, a land of long-tressed, naked-faced women and bearded, huggy men, she a resident alien among the feather-haired and Lycraed North Vancouver natives, all of whom chatted
in tight circles around the playground equipment, snubbing her. It was 1983. Mimi teetered then fell on all fours in the sandbox. Ellen marvelled at how she simply thrust her diapered bottom in the air and boosted herself up. “How do you do that?” she asked, for she, Ellen, was in mid-collapse and would never, ever right herself.

Every few nights she called Larry in California and asked him to please, please, just come back for the birth. He kept telling her, “Amy wouldn’t like it.”

Amy was the slutty L.A. actress who had stolen Larry from her.

At her core Ellen was resilient and practical—no crisis could override that—so one day she took the bus down to the Health Unit and signed up for pre-natal classes. Tuesday evenings for four weeks, babysitting provided.

In the second class they practised breathing exercises on mats. Ellen had to pair up with the instructor, which caused the pity level in the room to soar. Afterward a ringlettey woman, who was so petite and muscular her pregnancy barely showed, intercepted Ellen and asked if she wanted to go for coffee sometime. That was Georgia.

“Oh, thank you!” Ellen gasped.

When they met up later in the week, Georgia brought along Celine, the glamorous one who all through the class ostentatiously stroked her belly like she was accompanying them on the harp. She was much taller, massively pregnant, but only from the front and side. From the back, you couldn’t tell. (Ellen just looked fat under all her loose hippy garments, so no one offered her a seat on the bus.) By chance Georgia had run into Celine at the Park Royal Mall, recognized her from the class, and invited her along. None of them really knew each other.

Georgia, who seemed tactful and shy, might never have asked, but Celine did, the second their coffee mugs were set in front of
them. There was a boldness to Celine, a right-to-knowness that, combined with her overall perfection—clothes, hair, skin—would have smacked of bourgeois entitlement on Cordova Island.

“So?” Celine asked Ellen. “Are you doing this on your own?”

Ellen fiddled with her hair, still long then, more chewed-on rope than braid. Here in the city, her hair added to her pathos, but she hadn’t realized it yet. “Apparently,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

The interrogation obviously pained Georgia. She stared into her mug, then shot Ellen a lifeline kind of look. Ellen ignored it. Bobbing far out beyond her pride, she wanted, needed, Celine’s sympathy more.

“I
was
married. Until about a month ago.”

“That’s brave,” Celine said, taking in Mimi too, squeezed onto what little remained of Ellen’s lap, sucking on the crayons the waitress had brought. “I’m not sure I’d leave Richard in my condition. Not that I have reason to.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Ellen said.

“He left
you
?” Celine said, and both women, Georgia too, instinctively and together, reached for Ellen. “What a
bastard!
”

Ellen wished Larry could hear how she limped to his defence. “He had his reasons, I guess.” Then, without volunteering the fact of her own slip-up, she started weeping.

Georgia squeezed her hand; Celine hugged Ellen hard. This was the sisterhood they had celebrated in the Cordova Island Community Hall once a month when the Women’s Empowerment Group met, but which had proved to be a lie. Who would have thought she’d find it here, in a yuppie café on Lonsdale Avenue?

It was Celine who answered Ellen’s call when her labour started, who took Mimi to Georgia’s and coached Ellen all day,
rubbing the small of her back, timing contractions, reading out from her notebook the pertinent passages they had covered in class. Who drove Ellen to the hospital six hours later and remained steadfastly with her in the delivery room while Ellen, squatting, screamed out her agony, “I hate your fucking guts, Larry Silver! I hate you so much!”

For here was another lie: contrary to what they’d learned in pre-natal class, the crowning of the baby’s head is not necessarily a moment of pure joy. Ellen was, in fact, at her lowest then, the most biblically wretched creature that had ever crawled the clodded surface of the earth. No one could feel more abandoned, more utterly abject, than she, Ellen Silver, in her final push.

Two thousand kilometres away the father of the child ripping mercilessly through her body was probably screwing his slutty actress girlfriend
right that minute.
What could be worse than that?

Something. What happened to Celine was worse.

“A
RE
you on crack?” Tony, her hairdresser, asked in 2007, the week before Ellen left on her trip to France with Celine. “
That
Celine? The quack? The one you complain about
every time
you come here?”

“Every time?” Ellen asked, surprised and a little ashamed she could be so consistently disloyal.

To her relief, Tony moved on to the subject at hand, Ellen’s roots, how the grey was already showing again so how about something
dramatique
? He danced around the chair, running his tiny hands upward from the nape of her neck to her crown. These days Ellen wore her hair to her shoulders. The ungrey ends slithered between Tony’s fingers. He tocked his head from side to side, a dashboard ornament, formulating improvements.

Recently, Tony had softened his own look. Because he was small, he seemed ageless. Not a perceivable minute had settled on him since 1983, when Ellen first sat in this chair. Now he’d turned himself into a tousled schoolboy just leaping out of bed, an effect that probably took hours to create.

“I could do something to you today, Ellen, that I guarantee will draw those horny Frenchmen to you like, like—They will
oo-la-la
! They will fall on those shit-covered French sidewalks trying to get a glimpse up your skort.” (Ellen had brought her new skort in a bag to show Tony.) “They will curse that skort.
Merde, merde, merde
, they will say. I thought it was a skirt, but I can’t see
anything
!”

“Skirt plus shorts. Skort,” Ellen said again.

“It will put them into a frenzy, the skort together with what I could do to your hair, if only you’d let me. If only you would
laissez-faire
your hair the way you have your life.”

“Don’t fuck up my hair, Tony.”

“You take chances, Ellen. You’ll probably screw fifty horny Frenchmen over there. Or you could. If you’d let me do this one little thing.”

“It’s tempting,” Ellen had said.

N
OW
here she was! In France! In France, writing a postcard to Tony so he would get it before her next appointment. Until they adjusted to the time change, she and Celine were renting a six-hundred-year-old house in a tiny village in the Luberon Mountains. Celine, a practising herbalist, was all messed up. She’d locked herself in her room. But Ellen had been liberal with the Zopiclone, even on the plane. (If it went down, she preferred to sleep through it.)

Ellen, in France, with her
café au lait
and chocolate
croissant
that she had ordered herself using actual French words, sitting in a village square waiting for a horny Frenchman she might claim in the postcard to have screwed to come along. Wild iris crowded the base of the fountain,
à la
Van Gogh. Chocolate bittersweet on her tongue. Then the bells in the eleventh-century church began to ring.

Oh my God,
thought Ellen, clutching her head.
Sonnez les matines! Ding dang dong!

It was almost too much, too beautiful.

She wrote on the card to Tony,
Who needs a man?

H
ER
relationship with Celine was complicated, more complicated than with Georgia, who, like Tony, had also expressed trepidation when Ellen told her about the hiking trip. Ellen and Celine had a long history together, yet this history, full of tribulations for both, as well as minor triumphs, did absolutely nothing to change Celine’s attitude toward Ellen. Celine was (Ellen thought) frozen in the big-sister role she had taken on when they first met, a role that Ellen frequently resented, especially now that her actual sister, Moira, was back in her life.

After their father’s inexplicable suicide last winter, Moira had barged in on Ellen’s grief and taken control of practical matters—the funeral, returning the body to Alberta to be buried beside their mother. Ellen, named as executor of his will (again, inexplicably), still had many tedious and terrible tasks to perform (his taxes, for one). But she had put it all aside with Moira’s blessing for this rejuvenating trip with Celine.

All those years ago Ellen had been lost and desperate and she would never forget Celine’s kindness to her, which was probably why
they were still friends. (She wasn’t so disloyal after all!) She just didn’t want to be treated like a woebegone child at the age of forty-six.

This wasn’t Georgia’s take on it. Georgia said, “You’re exactly alike.”

“What? I’m flakey and judgmental?”

“Not flakey,” Georgia conceded, which shut Ellen up.

Every cell in Georgia’s body was powered by honesty and loving-kindness. She was entirely without ego or wiles. Georgia deserved her own constellation.

The proprietor of the six-hundred-year-old house had stocked it with tourist brochures. Discovering it was market day in a nearby village, Ellen left a note for Celine then drove off in the rental car along narrow winding roads, past tidily arranged vineyards and olive groves. Even on the curves dozens of lead-footed Provençals, heedless of the dividing line or death, overtook her. Of course they could die. They’d already been to heaven, which, Ellen soon realized, was a Provençal market. On the return trip the hatch of the Clio was stuffed with proof—a waxy yellow chicken, black and green tapenade, four kinds of chèvre. Baguettes. A pink, frilled, bridal bouquet of a lettuce. Two bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. She would have bought more, but they were leaving in two days and she would have to carry it all on her back.

That evening, with still no sign of Celine, Ellen set to cooking in the three-year-old kitchen in the six-hundred-year-old house, happily into the wine, so happy for the first time since Jack died, which was the purpose of the trip, Celine had claimed. To cheer Ellen up. She sang to herself, rubbing the powdery
fleur de sel
into the puckered skin of the bird. Sang and sang.

Until Celine shouted from her bedroom down the hall. “Can you be a little quieter in there, Ellen, for Christ’s sake?”

Two days later Ellen was packed and ready and waiting for Celine. Waiting for Celine to finish her yoga routine, then waiting while Celine reorganized her backpack so the heavier things would be on the bottom. There were no heavy things in Ellen’s backpack. It was practically weightless with newly purchased, featherlight, scrunch-able travel clothes, including a wrinkle-free peony of a little green dress that Ellen adored.

But for the first day of their hike she had put on the skort. She turned a circle for Celine. “What do you think?”

“Slimming,” Celine said.

The remark deformed in Ellen’s ear. She’d already lost ten pounds. That was the only good thing about her father’s suicide. When you take to your bed with the covers over your head, you don’t eat so much. But she was still too fat for Celine. Celine was too thin. Ellen suspected fasting and (shudder) herbal colonics zealously self-administered.

Finally, finally, Celine was ready. Bidding
adieu
to the hilltop village, they drove off to return the rental car in a town forty minutes away, Celine at the wheel because she’d been to the area several times and knew the roads. On the way, she pointed out various landmarks. “See that château? It belonged to the Marquis de Sade.” “That crossroads? That’s the exact spot where Beckett got the idea for
Waiting for Godot.
Later in the week we’ll come to the town where Camus died. We can picnic on his grave.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Ellen complained. She hadn’t even considered
Justine
or
Molloy
or
L’Étranger.
She’d brought Colette.

The rental car office was closed, not just for those two-hour French lunches. According to the handwritten message Celine read on the door, it was shut for the whole long weekend.

“Is it the weekend?” Ellen asked.

“This is outrageous.” Celine stormed over to the Clio, snatched the Europcar contract from the glove compartment. “It says we return it here. Today. Saturday, May 24.”

They found a pay phone a block away outside the train station. Celine bought a phone card, then called in her complaint in French. Ellen didn’t think Celine sounded angry enough, stammering like that, so she muscled her aside and grabbed the receiver.

“Do you speak English?”

The woman did, about as well as Celine spoke French, giving Ellen the upper hand. Yet this lackey didn’t crumple the way her North American counterpart would have done if blasted with consumer discontent. She didn’t even apologize, merely explained in a charming accent that they should drive to the TGV station in Avignon, where one of their offices was open. The two friends stomped back to the car, arms linked, for there is nothing more unifying than a common grievance, except maybe love.