Open (22 page)

She has no life experience, says Constance.

What do you mean, Eleanor says, she has her own apartment. She drives a rusting Volvo. What do you want? Eleanor’s thinking of this girl hanging by her feet, bouncing like a Yo-Yo, up and down the side of a ravine on a bungee cord. Also her reportedly tidy apartment fitted with a Web-cam, and the grants that sustain her. Eleanor sees the lipstick mark on the gown’s shoulder, a perfect full mouth.

Let’s dance, Eleanor says.

What you need, says Constance, is a drink.

Eleanor tries to gather herself in, but she’s too drunk. There’s her face in the mirror, her cheeks, forehead. She’s a skyful of
fireworks, a roller coaster, a birthday cake. She grips the bathroom sink but her shoulder hits a wall.

The sink is the wheel of a pleasure cruiser on a big sea and she must turn it into the wave before they capsize. She’s in the basement of the Masonic Temple on Cathedral Street in downtown St. John’s, Newfoundland. It’s a steep hill, the harbour, the cliffs, the North Atlantic, a sheer drop (the Grand Banks), and nothingness. She clings to the sink. Everybody at the wedding, two floors above — dancing, shouting, drinking beer — has been washed out to sea in a wave shot through with tuna and capelin and electric eels, especially Frank Harvey with his flamboyant tie, and Dave Hogan who drives to Florida in a Tilley hat, and Matthew Shea who puts his thumb over the top of his beer spraying Gerry Pottle, who holds out his hands going, What’d I do? What’d I do? And Matthew’s wife with a daiquiri held above one shoulder saying, Matthew, that’s so unim
press
ive. Amelia Kerby just now smacked Philip’s shoulder with the back of her hand and was ambushed by silent jerks of laughter — all of them are depending on Eleanor to alter the course of the evening, to drag the sink hard in the other direction, until she’s lifted off her feet. She has to bring them into port. She won’t abandon her post, even in the face of this brick shithouse of a wave. How had she gotten so drunk, she had only been drinking.

If she could count how many beers in the afternoon, but it was the gin. The gin was insubstantial and avid, intrinsically cold, like reptile blood. At some point in the evening the word
juniper
had seemed like a self-contained poem. There is no
turning back, they can only brace themselves. She has begun to think of herself as them. She’s the entire wedding party, and the city beyond. Dragged out to sea.

The face in the mirror is starting to look exactly like her, she’s coming into herself too fast. Philip was dancing with Amelia when Eleanor careened out of the banquet hall, down the musty staircase, platform heels, rickety handrail.

The bathroom floor buckles in the grip of a swell and Eleanor is flung against the wall and hauls herself, hand over hand, up the roiling radiator to the cubicle. She lets her head drop against the door of the stall. If she can just hang on she will reach her purest self. She may have to puke to get there. Something pure, like a breeze through the pines of the Himalayas. She’d camped once in a forest in Kashmir. Slippery pine needles slicked the paths. At night the guide called from his tent: Watch out for the snow leopards!

The outer door bangs and she feels it reverberate in her bum. Two women have burst into the bathroom.

Sadie says, Someone in there?

I am, says Eleanor.

And who is I am? A fairy in a CBC Christmas special once when she was fourteen. They chromokeyed her so she floated over a frozen lake, pointed toes wiggling, to touch down beside an ice-fishing folksinger who grabbed up his guitar to play a carol. She’d once knit a long red scarf. Rode in a mock foxhunt. They had several bloodhounds, but it was Eleanor’s French poodle, Monique, who treed the old fur hat doused with musk hidden in the crotch of a birch. She’d hitchhiked the
island maybe seven times. She’d taken all kinds of lessons: raku, clay animation, Spanish, watercolour painting. The secret to a successful watercolour is to use many, many transparent veils of colour. This is also the secret to raku, vegetarian cooking, synchronized swimming, and being very, very drunk when your husband is dancing with a bubblehead from British Columbia, or from anywhere for that matter. It is not the secret to flying trapeze, belly dancing, waitressing at the Blue Door, or being very, very drunk when your husband picks up the fine gold necklace that lies flat against Amelia’s collarbone with his lips. There is no secret for that. You must carom like the silver balls in a pinball machine, spitting sparks with each wall your forehead smacks. You must grip the wheel with both hands, you must pick a star and aim true.

Eleanor realizes that she’s unable to puke. She is bloated with woe. There’s so much woe. Puking she can forget. She drank; she is drunk. These honest statements grip hands like used car salesmen. She straightens up and steps out of the cubicle.

Sadie is holding her wrist to Constance’s nose.

It’s called Celestial Sex, says Sadie, everybody’s wearing it. Both women turn to face Eleanor and then lurch forward to catch her.

Eleanor says, Constance, your dress. It’s smeared with lipstick.

The women grip Eleanor’s shoulders just as the tiled floor slants toward her chin. They squash her between them.

Eleanor lets her face fall into Sadie’s cleavage. Eleanor wants to let go the wheel. Let them dash against the cliffs, let the
ocean crunch them in its rotten chops. She closes her eyes, nuzzling Sadie’s breasts with her nose, and plummets. She’s a jellyfish pulsing through infinite inkiness, the ordinary encumbrances giving way: bone, jealousy, the smell of smoke and shampoo, the stinky emerald cloud of pot that still hangs over the cubicles, the way her mother stood a boiled egg in her wedding ring, her father smoothing cement with a trowel, Eleanor’s horse pawing the clouds with his front hoofs, the pink of his nostril, the white of his eye, good olives, her name, streets, books, aspirations, socks, coins, hair clips, all of it giving way. Then she grabs Sadie’s spaghetti strap and drags herself back up, surfacing amid the bagpipe screams of the toilets. What it means to be human is spelling itself in the grey mould spreading over the ceiling. She must speak. She will hint at the immanent peril. Sadie can take it.

Philip is all over her, Eleanor says.

Downer, says Constance.

Remember who you are, says Sadie.

She had imagined herself in love lots of times. Sometimes she knew she wasn’t and fought to convince herself, saying, See? That must be love, see? He’s done this, you felt that way, you thought of him while making mashed potatoes, you thought of him when the chain came off your bike, you thought of him.

Knowing she wasn’t in love but not knowing what love was and thinking, it might be this. It might be she and Sam Crowley hidden under the dripping laburnum, the poisonous flowers bright at dusk, his kid sister standing on the pedals of
her bike, whizzing by like a thought through the liver-coloured maple trees. Clem Barker tearing the condom wrapper with his teeth. Paul Comerford, between the rolls of unlaid carpet, leaving the impression of his bum in a pile of sawdust. Eli Pack kissed the back of her neck, and led her to his back seat, his finger and thumb circling her wrist loosely, but it might as well have been a handcuff, because she couldn’t have said no if she tried. Then on a plaid blanket covered with cat hair. Eleanor is all of this. Tom O’Neill in a field of wild roses he claimed was inhabited by fairies. Stoned with Harry McLaughlin so his fingers stirred up a trail on the inside of her thigh like an oar in a phosphorescent shoal. When she was sixteen, Rick O’Keefe held her against his greasy coveralls, a fresh whiff of gasoline. With Brian Bishop in a motel in Port Aux Basques, a snowstorm, they’d missed the ferry. Afterward they devoured a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Wiped their greasy mouths in the tail of the bedsheets. Mark Fraser, on a bale of hay, a surprise because he’d sworn all summer he hated her. Hunched over, he had flicked a Bic lighter until it ran out of juice and he’d tossed it and gathered her roughly, the hay pricking through her jeans, he’d knocked her riding hat so the elastic tugged at her throat and then he had stopped, astonished. He’d whispered, You’re a nice girl, as if he’d opened her like a parcel. Donny White had let a line of sand spill from his fist into her belly button, up her stomach, and over the triangles of her glossy orange bikini. Mike Reardon had rubbed his jeans against her bum, pressing her hipbones against the counter until she rinsed the last cup.

Sadie tugs Eleanor’s dress roughly, this way and that, as if she were making a hospital bed. Constance trawls the bottom of her tiny purse until she draws out a lipstick, lethal as a bullet. She dismantles it and screws up the explosion of colour. She grips Eleanor’s jaw and covers the pouting bottom lip and says, Rub them together. Sadie has got her by the hair, dragging a punishing brush through so fast that Eleanor’s scalp yelps.

Listen, Sadie says, it’s only that
yahoo
Amelia Kerby,
who cares?

And then it rises in her, the wave, plowing up through the guts of the evening, up through her platform shoes, grinding her kneecaps to dust, into her thighs, a spraying granite of surf hitting her crotch, stomach, her breastbone splintering, all blown apart.

I care, wails Eleanor, I lo-huv-huv-huv-huve him.

She and Philip bought a house around the bay. The grass up to their waists. Tiger lilies. Fireweed. Crabapples. Philip pulled over on the side of the road and rolled down the window.

Why are we?

Shhh.

Can we just.

Shhh.

He’d pulled over next to a copse of whispering aspen. The car filled with the leafy, percipient surf. The wind blew, and the leaves showed their silver undersides as if the tree had been caught naked and was trying to cover up.

And the wave withdraws. Eleanor is still standing. The bathroom is lustral, the fluorescent lights thrumming like
an orchestra of didgeridoos. Sadie and Constance are angels with tangy auras like orange zest. They are springtime, a Scandinavian polar bear swim, they are the girls in the cake, Isadora Duncan, they’ve bested the mechanical bull, they’re electricity after an outage, they are her friends. Eleanor is okay. She’s okay. She’s going to be
fine
.

I will fight, Eleanor says.

There you go, says Sadie.

She had awakened in Philip’s apartment, ten years ago. Trembling, partly from the hangover, but mostly from fright. She knew she was in love. How terrible. She could still feel his finger tracing the elastic of her underwear. She lay on her back, her arms over her head, her wraparound dress — he had untied the string at her hip and lifted the fabric away, and untied the other string inside the dress, beneath her breast. Little bows he pulled slowly. So she lay there in the black bra and underwear. His finger moved from one hip to the other, tracing the elastic. It was that finger moving over her belly that tipped her. It spilled her over. A car roared up the steep hill outside the apartment and squealed its tires, and the squeal felt like her heart, as if her heart were tearing around the corner of an empty street in the last sleeping city on the Atlantic. A brass candle holder crusted with wax. A Fisher Price telephone with a glowing orange receiver. She had stumbled over it on their way in and the bell rang clear. When she awoke in the morning she came into herself. Sunlight piercing the weave of a rosy curtain, the wardrobe door hanging open, his jeans on the back of a chair,
the red suspenders sagging, exhausted from the effort of holding him back.

Eleanor jerks the wine glass back and forth as if it is a gear shift manoeuvring her across the room. She stumbles forward and grabs Sadie’s arm.

She says, This is the sort of drunkenness it takes a lifetime to achieve. I must actualize my potential before it wanes. I may never achieve this clarity of purpose again as long as I live.

Sadie says, You might regret this.

Whose side are you on?

I’m just saying, in the morning.

Because I’m ready here.

In the clear light of day.

If I’m all alone, just say so.

You’re not alone, it’s just I’m thinking a glass of water, a Tylenol, forty winks.

So you’re with me?

Whatever you say.

You’re in?

I’m in.

Let’s actualize.

Eleanor drags Sadie across the dance floor, grabbing at dresses and suit jackets to stay standing. Finally she taps Amelia on the shoulder. Amelia turns.

You, she says. Amelia smiles.

Eleanor says, You, you, you. Where is your husband?

I have no husband.

That’s right, says Eleanor. She grins triumphantly.

Your boyfriend, then, where’s he?

It was nothing, Amelia says, my last boyfriend.

Nothing? It was nothing? Okay, the one before that.

Him too, nothing. She makes a sound, Pfft.

Okay, the one that broke your heart, where is he?

Pfft, says Amelia.

Pfft? Pfft? says Eleanor. She suddenly rests her forehead on Sadie’s shoulder. It’s true the girl has no life experience. There is no way to make an impression on her. There is no way to dent that lamé. She is what she appears, bubbly and handsome with a certain talent for academic lingo and a healthy bank account. Eleanor feels no match.

Well, you’ve started it now, Sadie says.

Eleanor rouses herself. She will do it then, if she’s forced, finish this girl off, although already a new clarity has befallen her. The girl has nothing to do with it. Where, she wonders sadly, is Philip. Who is he? How can she remind him who he is?

I mean the boyfriend, then, says Eleanor, who took his bare hands and tore your flesh and pried the bones of your ribs apart and reached up and tore your beating heart out with his fingernails and then put it in his mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it. And then smiled at you with your own blood dripping down his teeth.

Here Eleanor mimes as she speaks (a trick she’s learned from Frank Harvey) a pulsing heart in her fist. She mimes the heart almost slipping out one end of the fist, but catching it,
cupping it in both hands. The heart truly appears to be pulsing in her cupped hands. She looks at Sadie, astonished by her own facility. Sadie looks astonished too. Eleanor is holding Amelia Kerby’s slithering, tough little bungee-jumping heart. And then, snarling like a dog, Eleanor chews the tough meat of Amelia’s heart. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.