The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore Read online

  I say, I’m breastfeeding you know, there could be anything in that.

  Mina says, We used to give our hens lobster shells and the yolks would be bright red. Bright red yolks in a cast iron skillet. Too bad this film isn’t about a red insect.

  She’s fastening a necklace with a pendant of medicine-blue beach glass.

  Fold your limbs like an insect, I say. Mina raises her arms to the back of her neck, elbows jutting. The green velvet dress she got married in.

  Lean into the mirror and put on lipstick, I say.

  I’m getting all this on video, then I capture stills on the computer, print them. Twenty-four pictures for one second of film. I’ll loop the clip of the lipstick moving over her mouth. During the twenty-four frames her eyelids droop and close, then open. An amber ring on her finger fires a sparkle of light in frame twelve. A bar of sunlight moves over her nose and across one cheek. I’ll colour the background with oil pastels, lime green, lemon, emerald, an ocean of grass.

  Jason looks at the print I’ve tacked to the wall over the computer. He says, Mina O’Leary could be a movie star.

  You think?

  She has that kind of face.

  Mina says, I wrote a novel while I was in France. But I used too many words. I’d rather a novel with fewer words.

  Shorter, you mean?

  Not necessarily shorter.

  What was it about?

  It was about — she looks up from her beer and adjusts the collar of her jacket, a big, distant smile as if the novel is unfolding in front of her and she likes it.

  Just then a Scottish swim team crowds through the door with a blast of snowy wind. Snow on their shoulders and caps. One of them, a man with a beard full of ice and steamed glasses, interrupts Mina, begins a conversation about trade unions. The singer is doing Bruce Springsteen, snapping her fingers and tapping one foot. When she’s finished she scans the audience with her hand over her eyes.

  She says, I’d like my bass player to come on up, unless he’s taking a leak.

  She tells a filthy joke and the whole bar groans. Mina takes a notebook from her purse, writes something, tears off the page and gives it to the Scottish swimmer, who balls it up and swallows it. She laughs and lays her hand on his cheek. The team has gathered around her and they all raise their pints and give a cheer.

  I say, I’m surprised anyone would tell a joke like that.

  Mina’s eyes narrow.

  She says, I’m not surprised at all. I’ve seen her tend bar at the Spur, not that I go there.

  All of the joy from flirting with the swim team vanishes. She is grimly considering the singer.

  Finally she says, I’m not that keen on other women.

  Green things. Lantern glass, John Steffler mentions. Escapes.

  INT. ABSTRACT SPACE - DAY

  Mina hammers another lobster, the crackling of shells. She’s talking to her friend. Her face is full of the memory she’s describing.

  MINA He took me up in his arms in the middle of the night. A drop fell from the eave onto my forehead, and that’s how I woke. I was about eight, too old to be carried. He walked over the field of snow for a long time and into the woods. We hadn’t seen him for months maybe, or days, I don’t know. We got to a clearing, and there was an eclipse of the moon. It turned red. The moon was red, a bright red yolk.

  Mina thinks Liv Ullman’s face is grotesque.

  She says, Her lips are so puffy, her cheeks, bone structure. Her face bugs me. But she’s beautiful too. A face can be beautiful and grotesque by turns.

  The thing about beauty, says her husband, it’s mostly anticipation and memory.

  Somehow, when she was in France, Mina met Yvonique, a very, very rich man who was working as a bicycle courier. He had wanted to try out work, and he’d enjoyed it, liked winding through traffic in black spandex, lithe and rubbery as a stick of licorice. His bike was so light he could lift it with his pinky. She married him and brought him home. I met him for the first time at a party. He was handing out tiny drinks called lemon drops, which you toss over the tongue. After three of these the black and white tiled floor karate-chopped my knees. I demanded of Yvonique that we become blood brothers. He took up a paring knife from the counter, wet with lemon juice and pulp, and cut his thumb. I cut my thumb, felt the sting of lemon, and we staggered around the crowded kitchen, yelling and holding each other up by our joined thumbs. Mina helped me home, through Bannerman Park, where the trees lay down on their sides and the moon shot through the air like a high bouncer, crazy zigzags. There was no hangover the next morning. It was as though the party hadn’t happened. It made me think their marriage couldn’t last.

  INT. A COMMUNITY HALL - NIGHT

  The hall is crowded for a turkey-tea. A HANDSOME MAN in a cowboy hat sits alone on the stage playing a guitar and singing “Your Cheating Heart.” Nobody listens.

  HANDSOME MAN Thank you very much, thank you. Now I’d like to invite my daughter Mina up here with me for a duet we’ve been practising together.

  An eight-year-old Mina dressed in frilly pink with a bow in her hair walks onto the stage and the room goes silent.

  EXT. AIRPORT RUNWAY - DAY

  Eight-year-old Mina, in the frilly pink dress and bow from before, stands on an empty runway in a blizzard. The sound of roaring planes, descending. She looks up into the storm trying to decide which way to run. We hear adult Mina speak and the roar subsides.

  MINA I got a phone call while I was in Ottawa at a swimming competition. They told me there was a call. I was watching through a big glass window, girls from all over Canada, diving into the pool. The way they entered the water with hardly a splash. My aunt told me I had to come home, I had to be on the next plane. I knew he’d died somewhere, probably drunk. That I’d never see him again.

  EXT. COUNTRY ROAD - DUSK

  An isolated trailer on cement blocks in the middle of a field of dead grass and snow. One window is lit, and we see a woman passing back and forth. A hungry dog trots across the lawn and disappears into the woods.

  INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT

  Mina is sniffing a line of coke on her vanity table. She stares at herself in the mirror. There is a vase of dried roses, the petals covered with dust. She touches the petals and a green spider drops on a thread. The bedroom door bursts open behind her and with it the noise of a loud party, laughter, techno music. Her husband waves a bottle at her and goes to the closet, grabs a tuxedo jacket, is telling her to hurry up, but we can’t hear him over the noise. She watches him in the mirror behind her. He shuts the door and the room is silent. She stands and puts on a long gold satin coat with a cream lining. She flaps it once, twice. The fabric falls over the lens and the screen goes gold.

  We show Mina the video of my son’s birth. Her face is contorted, her fingers gripping her toes. She writhes.

  Do you want us to stop?

  She puts one hand over her eyes, and drags it down her face. For a moment I can see the pink of her under lids.

  Keep going, she says.

  The baby’s head. I see my own fingers — reaching between my legs trying to pull the skin of my vagina wider. The ring of fire, a friend told me later. All the burning.

  I say, It hurts, it hurts.

  Jason shot video only during the contractions. During the three minutes between contractions I was joyous. I made jokes. The room was full of laughter. Keith Jarrett playing on the stereo. The way he sighs, the piano bursting loudly into the room and dragging itself out like a big wave over stones. An ambulance attendant in training was invited to watch. He stood in the dim part of the room in a uniform, his hands clasped behind his back. The baby’s head emerges, the doctor lifts the cord away from the baby’s shoulders. Watching the video, I am amazed by the skill with which the doctor lifts the cord. Unhurried, like crowning a prince, a rite that requires a
lifetime of devoted practice to perform simply.

  There was a complication. The doctor’s voice off camera: We have an emergency.

  Everything speeds up. The baby’s head is between my legs, the doctor’s hand tugging the cord out of the way, and a giant gush of blood.

  Jason puts the video on pause. On the still TV screen the splashing of blood stands out around the baby’s neck like an Elizabethan collar.

  That’s it, says Jason, his first second in the world, right there.

  He presses play and the baby’s body comes out after the head and the blood flashes like a bullfighter’s cape twisting in the air. I wanted to ask everyone to leave the room. I remember suddenly the desire to be alone. I wanted to die alone, and it seemed I would die. But I didn’t want to offend the ambulance attendant by asking him to leave. He’d stood so straight and quiet, I can barely make him out of the dark in the video.

  Everyone who reads John Steffler’s poem says, Wow. Or, Pretty powerful. Everyone knows what it means to want something with such intensity you crush it in your haste to have it. I felt a terrible vertigo during those moments while the blood poured out of me. As if I were falling from a great height, and I hit the hard bed with a jolt. Jason stopped shooting then. But in the next shot on the videotape we are fine. The baby is in my arms, and I am holding the receiving blanket open, I am touching his foot.

  EXT. BASILICA - NIGHT

  It’s midnight, New Year’s Eve. People have gathered on the steps of the basilica to watch the fireworks. I’m there with my eight-year-old and my new infant under my coat. The fireworks fall through the night like bright, spurting blood. Mina is standing beside me. Horns honk, cheering, party hats. Mina closes her eyes and the screen goes dark for a few seconds. Silence. We see an ultrasound of a fetus kicking against the dark, we see gushing champagne, then champagne bubbles falling through the night sky, the statue of the Virgin Mary in front of the basilica with a mantle of snow, her hand moves just slightly, a benediction, Mina’s husband grabs her and kisses her. The video of the birth seen previously plays in reverse, until the baby has disappeared, unwinding history.

  I say to Mina: Now, try to look as if you are about to alight.

  CRAVING

  Jessica laughs very loud and the candle flames lie down stretched and flat. She moves the candelabra in front of her husband.

  She says, I like aggressive men.

  I say, I like aggressive women.

  She dips her spoon into the mushroom soup.

  But this is delicious, she says.

  Vermouth, I say. On the way back from the liquor store a plastic bag of fierce yellow slapped against my shin. I peeled it away, meat juice coursing in the wrinkles like a living beast. It clung just as viciously to a telephone pole when I let it go. There was a poster on the pole just above the bag, Jessica Connolly at Fat Cat’s. A band of men behind her. She looked resolute and charged, just like twenty years ago when the three of us would crush ourselves into a change room in the mall, forcing our bodies into the smallest-sized jeans we could find — she and Louise and I, twisting on the balls of our feet to see how our bums looked.

  I like aggressive women too, she says.

  That’s because we’re both aggressive.

  I put my arm around Louise and squeeze her. I like you anyway, Lou, I say.

  Jessica says, Oh, she’s passive aggressive.

  She isn’t though, I say. Jessica pouts her lower lip, contemplating. We both concentrate on Louise’s sweetness for a moment. Louise reaches for the bread, her brow furrowed. She’s trying to think of something bad.

  Lou’s so wonderful, though, Jessica says, giving up. I glance at my husband. The men don’t know each other. I should be drawing them into the conversation, but this is too heady. Jessica’s so thoroughly herself, the genuine article.

  Louise says, Do you remember when our class used to go to church? I loved the feeling of the sleeve of someone’s blouse touching my arm. If they were unaware of it. Just brushing against my arm. Someone else’s sleeve.

  Jessica says, I love my daughter.

  She’s holding her spoon in the air. Jessica is far away, her eyes full of her daughter. She’s in the park or the delivery room — somewhere with a lot of light — and the child is vigorous, screaming or running. Jessica sent a picture at Christmas of the four of them. The boy resting his cheek on her bare shoulder. Her daughter trying to tear off a white sunhat.

  I love my son too, she says, and dips the spoon. But my daughter is going to do things. She’ll get into a lot of trouble too. Jessica grins at her soup, proud and grim about the trouble her daughter’s going to cause.

  I tell them a story about a Bulgarian woman that ends with the shout, No matter, I must have it!

  I say, This should be our motto. We clink our wine glasses and shout, No matter, I must have it! But the men go on with their conversation at the other end of the table. They are talking music, the different qualities a variety of sound systems offer.

  Then Jessica says, I’m going through flux right now. Her eyes flit to her husband. I slam my hand flat on the table, the wine glasses jiggle.

  Stop it, I say.

  Stop what? The flux?

  I won’t have flux at the dinner table, I say.

  Okay, she says, and she laughs, but it’s more of a sly chuckle. We are twelve again, in the bloating, compressed heat of the canvas camper in her parents’ driveway. She and Louise are trying to convince me I have to come out now. One of her brothers noticed my new bra and made some remark. Sitting alone in the trailer, with my arms crossed so tight over my chest that the next morning my arm muscles are stiff and it hurts to pull a sweater over my head. Jessica full of worldly disgust. Louise obstinately refusing to make Jessica relent, which she could do with a single tilt of her chin. They are united in the desire to punish my vanity. They don’t have bras, but they have braces on their teeth, and that makes them a club.

  Jessica says, Fine, if that’s the way you want it.

  I start to cry, knowing it’s a gamble. Louise wavers but Jessica’s scorn fulminates into a full-blown denouncement. She won’t let me ruin all the fun. It’s sunny outside and the camper smells of her brother’s sports socks.

  They wander off, their voices fading, Jessica’s ringing laugh the last sound, not a forced laugh, they have forgotten me. Then I listen to the wind through the maples, straining to hear my parents’ car coming for me.

  Jessica admired the characters of her Siamese cats, haughty and lascivious. She could suss out the swift-forming passions of the gang of boys we knew, and make them heel. She knew the circuit of their collective synaptic skittering and played it like pinball. She couldn’t be trusted with secrets, and we couldn’t keep them from her.

  I ask her husband if he wants more soup. I won’t play a part in excluding him, though I’m sure everything is his fault.

  He says, I don’t know what else is coming.

  There’s dessert, says Louise. Lou wants to save him from the flux too. Save us all, because it’s a big wave that could make the panes in the French door explode and we’d be up to our necks with the soup bowls floating.

  Then Louise’s boyfriend says, But pollution is a by-product of industry and we all want industry, so. He shrugs.

  Lou catches my eye. She’s thinking, Remember the guy on the surfboard in Hawaii? I felt total abandon. An evanescing of self, my zest uncorked.

  Yes, but if you had kept going, it wouldn’t have been abandon. He wouldn’t be a man swathed in the nimbus of an incandescent wave, muzzling the snarling lip of that bone crushing maw of ocean with a flexed calf muscle. He would be one of these guys at the table, half drunk and full of mild love.

  There’s my husband, heavy-lidded, flushed. The first time I saw him my skin tingled with the nascent what-would-come. Shane Walker. Red suspenders tugging
at his faded jeans. The best way to make a thing happen is to not want it. I didn’t want him so bad that he strode right over to the table and dropped down his books, Mexico in Crisis and The Marxist Revolution . He rubs his hands down the front of his faded jeans.

  I read your sexy poem, he says.

  A sheet of water falling from a canoe paddle like a torn wing. That’s the only line of the poem I remember. So much bald longing in a paddle stroke. A torn wing, big deal, yet Shane Walker is blushing. Then I decided — No matter, I must have it.

  Jessica taps her spoon on the edge of her cup. She’s furious — why won’t I have flux at the dinner table? It’s only emotion, everything blows over. What am I afraid of? Let Louise have her beach boy.

  I think, What if it wasn’t abandon? What if some part of Louise stays on a surfboard in Hawaii forever when this guy, who considers the politics of pollution, wants her. Would Jessica have Louise long eternally for something that never existed? It’s perverted. And what about Jessica? How long can this last, this brave refusal to compromise? There’s redemption in submission. If Jessica wants to strut her charisma I’ll stand aside, but in the end she’s wrong and I’m right.

  Why does the end matter, shrieks Jessica, there is no end. She doesn’t say anything, of course, she’s gone to the bathroom. We’re only on the soup, there are several courses, whose idea was this, the plastic bag on my shin, her poster. Wouldn’t it be fun? How have we changed? I think, This may be the end.

  She says, I’d rather die ignited than sated.

  I realize now, totally zonked — Jessica has rolled three joints since she got here, I haven’t been stoned in years, it’s so pleasurable, so good, I can hardly collect the plates — that I have always believed the flaws of men are born of a stupidity for which they, men, can’t be held accountable. I recognize in a flash — I have balanced the sixth soup bowl, a spoon spins across the floor — that all my relations with men have been guided by this generous and condescending premise. I see now that the theory comes from the lack of courage required to face the truth, which is that men are pricks. They’re aware women like me exist, women who believe they have been shafted in terms of a moral spine, and these men welcome these women’s low estimation of themselves, and capitalize on it.