The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (6 page)

Then a male voice said, Your roommate.

Joyce said, She's asleep, she talks in her sleep, she's always yelling stuff.

It took me a full two minutes to get back in the bed without a creak. Then I lay there listening. Frightened they would figure out I was awake, my heart pounding so hard I felt short of breath, and at the same time conscious that I had to make my breath sound deep, the way it is when you're asleep. The more I tried to breathe evenly, the more erratic my breathing, until I had the bed sheet stuffed in my mouth. It was the first time I had ever heard what sex sounds like, the bed creaking, the moans. It stopped suddenly and Joyce asked him to pass her a Kleenex off the desk. I fell asleep deeply, for the first time since my father died, without dreams, as if I had been given an injection.

T
he top half of Joan's house caught fire and burned while she slept downstairs. The microwave and television melted into lumps as smooth and shiny as beach rocks. She woke up to make herself a cup of tea in the morning and when she got upstairs everything was black. The furniture was in cinders. The windows were blackened with soot. She walked into the centre of the living room and looked around her. Her footsteps had exposed the green and gold shag carpet beneath the soot. It occurred to her that she must be asleep.

She went back downstairs and sat on the edge of her bed. Then she went upstairs again. She picked up the phone but it was dead. Her greenish gold footsteps were the only colour in the room. It reminded her of Dorothy on her way to the Emerald City.

The fire chief said it was a miracle Joan was still alive. The temperature had risen to three thousand degrees. There were
large double-paned patio windows. The inside panes had broken but the fire ran out of oxygen before the outside panes could break. The fire chief said if the second pane had broken or if she had gotten up in the middle of the night and opened the back door, the house would have exploded. Joan said she felt as if she had been stripped.

She and her twelve-year-old son, Wiley, moved in with us. Wiley had been at his grandmother's the night of the fire. Joan says she keeps having the same nightmare. Her hand on the doorknob of the back door. Everything in sharp focus, like before a storm. Wiley is standing outside the door, in the forest. In the dream, Wiley is a baby. Joan knows she can't open the door, he's toddling through the woods to the highway. He waves to her the way he first learned to wave, with both hands, the fingers pointed toward himself. Her palm is sweaty, and she turns the knob. The house blows up. In the dream, she sees two-by-fours twirling into the sky like batons.

One night, during the dream, she reaches for the glass of water by the bed and throws it over herself. She wakes because she smacked the bridge of her nose with the glass, and water is running down her nightdress, between her breasts, down her belly. She has a little half-moon bruise on the bridge of her nose.

I have become interested in nakedness. All the different kinds. Especially since my sister-in-law moved in. It's as if she can't keep herself covered. Things always seem to slip away from her. I walked in on her in the bath once. Her skin was tanned in the
shape of her bathing suit. The skin of her torso seemed very white, the colour of a tree when you strip off the bark.

I have this idea for an art exhibit. I want to get myself photographed all over town, nude. Sitting on a bench in Bannerman Park, reading the newspaper, riding my bike past the Salvation Army and Bowring's, sitting on the War Memorial with a take-out coffee. I'll keep a wrap-around dress nearby in case anybody shows up. I figure it can be done at five in the morning when nobody's around.

Before supper, my husband, Mike, shoves Joan out the front door and locks it. There's a small square window in the front door. Joan has her face pressed against it. She's giggling, and saying, “Come on now Mike, let me in.”

There are seven neighbourhood boys armed with water balloons standing in a semi-circle around her, arms raised.

Mike puts his face to the window so he can meet Joan's eyes and quietly lifts the mail slot, sticks a pistol through and squirts, hitting the crotch of her jeans. It takes her a moment to realize what's happening. Then Wiley, who has gone to the third floor, opens the window over the front door and drops a wobbling balloon on her head. She shrieks. The boys open fire, and balloons splat against her. The breeze changes direction. At the end of the street eight girls are lined up from one sidewalk to the other. They seem to be advancing to the music of the sea cadets' band in the Star of the Sea Hall at the end of the street. Each one has a swollen balloon, held like a baby. The boys are still for a second, then one of them yells, “Run!”
and they tear down the street, their sneakers slapping on the pavement. Mike lets Joan inside.

I've persuaded Joan to go to the only strip joint in town with me the next night. I just want to see what it's like. A woman can't get in without a male escort. Joan's hair is very short, and she's going to dress like a man to get us in. The newspaper ad says formal wear required. The woman on the phone said that means no construction boots or torn shirts. I dig out the tuxedo Mike wore to our wedding for Joan to wear.

I'm not usually one for telling strangers things but I've gotten into the habit of telling the woman who sells the coffee and muffins in the cafeteria of the building where I work the most intimate things about myself. Early in the morning, the ugly cafeteria is huge and empty; my footsteps echo as in a cathedral. Usually, it's just the two of us at that hour. She wears a brown polyester suit with two seams down the front, and a gold bull horn on a chain around her neck. Sometimes when I fall asleep I can see that horn and the skin of her neck. The exact location of her mole, the tiny gold horn jiggling while she wipes the counter. When I give her a twenty she looks at me as if I should know better. She says with her eyebrow arched, “Are you trying to break me?”

Sometimes, just as I'm dropping off to sleep, I see her arched eyebrow, exaggerated, and a disconnected voice “Are you trying to break me?”

I have told her, for instance, that my sister-in-law has moved in because her house burned down, that Joan hates her
ex-husband, and that we have no idea when she will move out. That my husband had a daughter with another woman, before he met me. Sometimes we have the child over for supper. I have told the cafeteria woman I believe Joan got drunk and set fire to the house on purpose. Often I find myself saying to her, “Strange old world, isn't it?” and shaking my head like an old man. She wears a plastic name tag that says “Cathy.” Once I said, “Good morning, Cathy,” and she said, “That's not my real name.”

At the dinner table, Mike says, “Joan, I bought you a little present.”

Mike drops a tape into the tape deck. It's Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Joan squeals with delight and jumps up to dance to “Tijuana Taxi.” At the end of all the big brass, there's a deep honking sound. Joan wiggles and struts, and when the honk comes, she sticks her bum out. Then she falls onto the floor, giggling. From the floor, she wheezes, “That's what Mike and I did when we were kids.”

Wiley takes this opportunity to scrape his broccoli into the garbage. I take a single triangle of cold pizza out of the fridge, hold the pizza in front of my crotch, lay a bunch of bananas on my head, and start miming a striptease while the Tijuana Brass do their thing. Joan drags herself off the floor, pulling herself up by the rungs in the chair, still panting with laughter, and starts to drink her coffee. We tell Wiley, “Okay, okay, settle down.” But when another honk comes, Joan almost chokes and the coffee comes out of her nose. She is snorting and choking, her eyes watering. Wiley says, “Jeez, Mom, will you give it up?”

With the fourth honk, Joan bursts into tears. Mike turns off the tape. “For God's sake, Joan.” I point my fork and a limp piece of broccoli at Mike. “Leave her alone, she's allowed to cry.” Joan has been bursting into tears a lot since the fire.

Joan's last boyfriend broke up with her two or three nights before the fire. She says he was a real sweetie. She slapped a newspaper at his chest outside a restaurant and it bounced off and fell between a mail box and a newspaper vending box. It's still there. We walk past it on the way to the supermarket. It's waterlogged and you can see she twisted it in her fists before she flung it at him.

I remember the cover of the album, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. A naked woman covered in whipped cream, the heart-shaped swirls of cream covering her breasts, she licking a blob of cream from a long red fingernail. One smooth long leg parts the soft folds of cream, almost up to her hip. You can almost taste that cream in the brass music.

Later that night, when Wiley is in bed, Mike and I fight. I throw my cup of coffee across the room as hard as I can. The cup hits the wall behind his head and leaves a mark in the gyprock like a frown. There are no curtains on the front window. It's dark outside and the living room is lit like a fish tank. A woman in a cotton skirt with a black palm leaf print is standing on the opposite sidewalk under a street lamp, arms crossed over her breasts. She is watching our fight as if it were a movie. Then, on our side of the street, two heads pass under the window, a man and a woman. They wave, surprised to see us. Mike's face is stiff with anger, but both of us wave back, uncertainly.
They knock on the door. It turns out they were neighbours of ours two years ago. We hardly spoke to them then and haven't seen them since, but they seem delighted to see us. Mike and I stand in the doorway to talk to them. I can feel the snarl on my face thaw. The breeze is warm and it rushes through the trees on the traffic island as if it can't make up its mind which way to go.

The guy is tanned and carrying a tennis racket. He mimes taking swings as he talks. He says, “Yeah, I was away studying giant clams, they weigh as much as fifty kilos. The shells don't really shut all the way, you can stick your whole arm in there, it's real fleshy. Isn't it, honey?” he says to his girlfriend. “They'll suck your whole arm for hours if you let 'em. The islanders say that clam flesh is an aphrodisiac, makes the adolescent penis grow or something. You know, they're a small people down there, aren't they, honey? They used to joke about how big I was, they said Barb must be a happy woman.”

Barb smiles up at him. Her mouth glitters, unexpectedly, with braces. “Oh, they thought Tony was real big.”

When Mike shuts the door, he says, “That cup could have killed me.”

I say, “Are you trying to break me?”

Then he gets a cloth from the kitchen and wipes the splattered coffee off the wall. Joan walks in at that moment, sees the broken cup and leaves.

When Mike and I make love, a blush comes into his cheeks and the tips of his ears. That's my private colour for him, almost
plum. The first time we were together we were behind the row housing under criss-crossing clotheslines, white shirts laughing with their bellies. We were drunk and his tongue in my ear sounded like a pot of mussels boiling, the shells opening, the salty shells clicking off one another, a riot of tiny noises. I got the flu. He made a pot of tea: cinnamon, cloves, apple and orange chunks. The next day we made love in his new house, empty of furniture except for a couch, covered with satiny parakeets, belonging to the former owners. Streetlight poured in. A plastic bag of chicken breasts glowed on the floor where I'd dropped it. I had been swimming in a hotel pool that day where they sold paper bathing suits. I made Mike close his eyes, and I put on the damp suit, which smelled of chlorine and was indestructible.

Once Mike did a tour of a glass blowing factory. They chose him out of the tour group to do the blowing. When we first met he gave me an irregular perfume bottle with his breath caught in the bubbles. I've worn lilac since I was thirteen. When he took the stopper off, it surprised me that it smelled like myself. Lilac on the sanded wand he rubbed down my neck, sticky and warm. It was as if he had trapped all my years in a bottle, then tickled them down my neck. Now he wants to leave for a year, to work. I don't want him to go. I need him here. I'm afraid of him leaving. It looks as though Joan and I will share an apartment if he leaves.

Today, around five, the doorbell buzzes and it's Jill, a little girl who plays with Wiley. The street is full of squad cars. The police are putting on bullet proof vests. They take rifles and
guns out of the trunks of the cars and load them with bullets. A cop comes to the door. Pushing Jill from behind, he says, “Can she stay in there? She can't go around the corner.”

I ask what's going on, my voice shrill. The cop looks as if he's going to answer me but then he turns away and trots down the street with the gun. A CBC van arrives. Some guy coming up the street says there's a man in one of the houses around the corner with a gun. Princess Anne had been on George Street earlier in the day. I'd taken Wiley and a bunch of neighbourhood kids to see her. It must be a sniper who has run up from George Street. Wiley is on the concrete step of the house across the street, eating a supper of Jiggs dinner a neighbour has given him. The cop cars glitter between us and I say, “Get over here.”

“What about my supper?”

“Just get over here.” He comes over with the plate. I phone Jill's mother, Maureen, to tell her Jill is with us. A cop answers the phone.

“Sergeant Peddle,” she says.

I say, “Can I talk to Maureen?”

She says, “I wish you could, but I can't get her down. What do you want?”

I say I just wanted to tell her her daughter's at my house, I'm a neighbour.

“The daughter's at your house.” Sergeant Peddle hangs up.

I whisper to Mike, “The man with the gun is in Maureen's house.”

We met Maureen through Wiley. Maureen's a lesbian. We've never seen much of her partner, who's a surgeon. They keep
pretty much to themselves, but since Joan moved in, she and Maureen have called each other every now and then to ask if the other would mind babysitting for half an hour.