The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore Page 7

  She talks more about the father of her child. She has glow-in-the-dark stars pasted onto the bedroom ceiling. When Harold removes his glasses, the galaxy blurs and it looks as though they are really sleeping under the milky way. While she talks he puts his hand under her shirt onto her belly. The warmth of it, the small movement as she breathes is so charged with unexpected pleasure that Harold becomes almost tearful. He can’t trust his voice to speak, so he lies beside her silently. They both fall asleep.

  Olivia’s eight-year-old daughter, Rose, is awake in her bed, terrified. She heard the thumping of something large and dangerous on the stairs outside, and drunken laughter. She heard whispers from her mother’s room. She makes herself small against the headboard of the bed. She sits there watching the door of her room, waiting for something terrible to bash it open. She watches the clock radio with the red digital numerals change, change, change. Then she gets out of bed. She creeps along the hall to her mother’s room. The hall light is on. She squeezes the glass doorknob with her sweaty hand and slowly, so the hinges won’t creak, pushes the door open. The light falls on the raging polar bear, frozen in the act of attacking her sleeping mother. Rose doesn’t move. The bear doesn’t move. Everything stays as it is for a long time until the man next to her mother raises himself up on his elbow and says, “Little girl?”

  Rose slams the door and runs to the phone. She dials the number and it rings several times. She can hear her mother calling her. Then a man answers the phone. She says, “Daddy, is that you?”

  Julian has been awake, although it is four in the morning. He has been sitting on the couch holding Marika’s hand. He hasn’t moved her or disturbed her in any way since he took the chip bowl from her, except to hold her hand. He says, “Yes, this is daddy.”

  He has been awake but it feels as if the child’s voice has awoken him. He knows who she is but for a moment her name slips his mind. For a moment, he can not for the life of him remember it.

  THE LONELY GOATHERD

  The houses dig their heels into the hill to stop from tumbling into the harbour. The clapboard faces are stained with last night’s rain. Everything is squeezed together and sad. Carl loves Anita but lately he’s been sleeping with other women. It’s not idiosyncrasies he’s been sleeping with, it’s bones. Cheek bones, hip bones, knees. He sees inside apartments of St. John’s he will never see again.

  Two nights ago he was in an apartment over Gulliver’s Taxi Stand. The girl’s stereo speaker picked up radio messages of the dispatcher. At about four in the morning Carl heard the taxi driver say, Sure that’s only your imagination, almost as if he were tangled in the bed sheets with them. Carl felt like a kid.

  The sad thing is Anita’s art. She is painting golf courses from the TV set. The old man she nurses watches golf, tapes it with his VCR. She takes Polaroid snapshots of the screen. She wants to capture in her paintings the glossy finish of the Polaroid, the snowy texture of the video, the play of light on the manicured lawns, and the slow motion time of the ball flying through the air. She says it’s an analytical reduction she’s after, always keeping herself distanced from the subject. They don’t talk about their problem, but when he looks at her paintings he feels she is stripping him like an onion, layer by layer, her eyes watering.

  Carl works at the Arts and Culture Centre, building sets. He makes an adequate living working chiefly with Styrofoam. This week he is building sets for a fairy tale amusement park. He shows his own sculpture once a year.

  A sea of white Styrofoam beads covers the floor, clings to his pants, his bald head, and sticks to his hands like warts. Thumb-tacked on the wall are several eighteenth century fairy tale illustrations, before illustration got cute. Red Riding Hood in the gnarled forest, eyes wide, the wolf, saliva drooling from his fangs. Where Red Riding Hood’s cape parts you glimpse a white vulnerable breast. Carl flicks his pocket knife into the illustration like a dart. Carl has been provided with an assistant from the Student Employment Office. The assistant studies day care management. Her name is Sarah. She is about ten years younger than Carl, and is now sweating in her paper suit over the giant chunk of Styrofoam from which the wolf will be carved.

  Anita found out she was pregnant the same time she took the job nursing Mr. Crawhall. He sleeps most of the time she’s there. This gives her an opportunity to paint. The house is on Circular Road, surrounded by trees which block the sound of traffic. Toward the end of the first week with Mr. Crawhall she entered the house and was assaulted by a loud consistent buzzing. She thought it was the buzzer by his bed, that Mr. Crawhall had died and his hand had fallen on the buzzer, but it was the egg timer on the stove. She has to serve him a three-and-a-half-minute egg every day. Her fingers shake a little on the silver teaspoon when she brings it near his mouth. It’s different from feeding a baby, there’s the question of Mr. Crawhall’s dignity. Because of her condition the egg makes her nauseous. Once a hairline crack ran down the side of the egg and yolk seeped through it over the gold rimmed egg cup down to the saucer, threatening Mr. Crawhall’s thin white bread. He said quite slowly, with his hands squeezed in the effort to speak, Oh, how have we managed to waste all that lovely yellow yolk?

  Anita thinks of painting the egg as seen from under Mr. Crawhall’s magnifying glass, but the jelly of it and the overt symbolism make her sick. She’s planning an abortion. The baby isn’t Carl’s.

  Sarah, the assistant, is more of a hindrance than a help. Her professional opinion after six weeks in day care training is that Carl is making fairy tale props too realistic. The Momma Bear and Poppa Bear look like real bears. Strands of melted clear plastic hang from their teeth. She says they’ll have a damaging psychological effect. She feels fairy tales are violent and sexist. She thinks we should ship loads of grain to India, she talks about McDonald’s hamburger containers polluting the environment, American aggression in Nicaragua, and acid rain. Carl is building a cage for her out of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting so she can work with contact cement and the fumes will be contained within the cage. He gives her a gas mask, tightening the rubber strap around her fine hair. He puts her in the cage with one of the wolves. It’s impossible to talk with a gas mask on. The rest of the afternoon the studio is quiet, except for the chain saw.

  Anita watches The Sound of Music with Mr. Crawhall. He tells her to fast forward over the scene with Liesl and her boyfriend in the gazebo where she sings I am sixteen going on seventeen, innocent as a lamb . This scene bores Mr. Crawhall, so they watch it in fast forward. The dance number changes Liesl into a maddened butterfly batting the wings of her white skirt against the boy’s head. She circles round and round him, flinging her arms this way and that, trapped in the amorphous white cloud. Her face in the close-up is contorted and pulled like plastic across the jiggling screen. When Anita presses “play,” Julie Andrews sings, These are a few of my favourite things .

  When Carl gets round to asking Sarah to sleep with him he tells her he is bored sleeping with his wife. Sarah asks, Is she intelligent?

  Carl says, Yes, of course, she’s a very articulate woman.

  Does her conversation bore you? asks Sarah.

  No, I love her.

  Then I don’t see why she should bore you in bed.

  Well, her conversation might bore me if she were the only woman I had a conversation with in seven years.

  He says after a moment, Don’t worry about Anita; she gets it whenever she wants it. She has no idea how I feel.

  Although Sarah feigns moral indignation, Carl feels her going soft like butter. She blushes when he compliments her and enjoys the special attention she gets around the workshop.

  Mr. Crawhall’s house is designed to allow as much sunlight as possible. When he’s asleep Anita watches a white chair with faint apricot flowers. The shadows of the leaves on the chair are in constant motion. At about seven in the evening it’s almost as t
hough the chair catches fire, a silent fire. It’s the only moving thing in the stiff-backed room besides the two goldfish. They are kept in a clear glass bowl with no plants or coloured stones. A soft spoken friend speaks to Anita over the phone, You really have no choice, Anita. This will hurt Carl so much. It was a one-night stand.

  The goldfish are identical. Anita calls one fish the option of keeping the baby and the other the abortion. She watches them swim around and makes a game of seeing how long she can tell which is which.

  That night Anita says to Carl, about her new painting, If you spend enough time alone the pain of emptiness passes and you realize your own voice is the only company you need.

  The image is entirely nonrepresentational, red and yellow dots only, but the canvas shimmers with anxiety.

  Carl tries to remember what it is he loves about Anita. The smell of turpentine on her flannel painting smock, burnt match sticks and beer bottle caps between the bed sheets. The squeezed paint tubes in her leather box, curled in on themselves, the limbs of their shirts and jeans twisted together on the floor. The photographs in his sock drawer, in the beaten Tooton’s envelope, of the night they walked to Signal Hill. It was summer and the sky was a skin of ticklish rain. Anita was drinking pop that turned the down of her upper lip and tongue orange. She tasted like summer, childhood. In the photographs the lights of the city at night burned coloured sizzles on the film. They made love on the grass, watching out for broken beer bottles, an aureole of amber glitter around their bodies.

  Anita slept with a tourist named Hans. He was a German gymnast who had trained for the Olympics for eleven years and gave it up. Now he was driving a VW van across Canada. St. John’s was his starting point. He was golden, muscular, but small. He walked with his hands loosely by his sides. He seemed to place his steps, walking on the balls of his feet as if he were stepping onto a mat in front of a large audience. He had been sitting alone at the Ship Inn drinking milk. It was as though the blondness of his hair alarmed almost anyone who might have joined him. Hans and Anita discussed what was scenic, the hospitable Newfoundlander, and Jiggs dinner, briefly. He had come from California, that was his first stop in North America. He had learned to speak English in a place called Pure Springs, a self-awareness camp with hot springs where they practised Gestalt and taught hyperventilation to relax. Hans talked about group therapy.

  You are one of twenty-five for a month. You come to know each other very well and one day you step outside the room and the others decide on one word or a simple phrase that describes your essence. Sometimes it’s very painful, but for the first time you see your true self. Everyone hugs and is supportive.

  Anita asks, What was your word?

  Cold fish.

  Outside the Ship Inn a rusted sign pole stuck out from the brick wall. The sign itself had been removed. Hans climbed on the windowsill easily and, jumping, gripped the bar. He swung back and forth, then with his legs straight, toes pointed, lifted himself into a handstand. It was the moment while he was upside down that Anita realized she would sleep with him because he was passing through and because her faithfulness to Carl was a burden. When he swung down, Anita felt the pocket of warm night air he cut with his body.

  Hans swept the seats of the VW van with a small hand brush before she got in. The van was spotless. There was a string bag full of fruit, none of it bruised. On the wall was a calendar from Pure Springs. The photograph for June was four pairs of naked feet, toes twisted, all caught in the same hammock net. Nestled between the hand-brake and the driver’s seat was a glossy purple diary. Anita picked it up and opened it.

  What’s this?

  Inside were poems written in German, diary entries, dried flowers, and coloured pencil drawings of mountain peaks.

  My ex-fiancée made that for me.

  Hans took out his shiny Swiss Army knife from the glove compartment and effortlessly cut the rind from a pineapple while he spoke, She was a gypsy. Long dark hair, black eyes, small like me, we wore each other’s clothes. We hiked together in the mountains of Switzerland for two and three months at a time. We were together for ten years and were to be married. The invitations were sent. One hundred invitations. A week later she said she wanted to go to Africa. She met another fellow there, a German. The wedding was called off.

  Hans held a quivering slice of pineapple out to Anita on the blade of the knife.

  You must be very hurt, said Anita.

  No, at Pure Springs they taught me to see myself as I really am. When I have finished my trip I will return there as a counsellor.

  They sat in silence looking at the stars over Long Pond.

  The fruit is very sour, remarked Hans. In the morning Anita could see the Arts and Culture Centre from where they had parked. She saw Carl get out of his car.

  Hans dropped her off later at Mr. Crawhall’s. When he left she could only imagine him in a hat with a little red feather, shorts with straps, and a walking stick; Julie Andrews’s voice echoing off the Alps. Such is the cry of the lonely goatherd la-he-o, la-he-o, dee-lo .

  It shocked her later to think her baby might be blond with eyes like an iceberg, if she had it.

  Carl’s troll is hunched under the bridge, naked, its long green fingers hanging between its knees. Carl is placing glass eyeballs in the carved eye sockets. Sarah is standing on a wooden chair, perfectly still, her pressed lips full of pins. She’s modelling the Red Riding Hood costume for the seamstress. She’s identical in size to the five Styrofoam Red Riding Hoods standing in various positions around the warehouse. The roar of the chain saw subsides. Carl holds the glass eyeballs over his own eyes and tilts his head mechanically from one side to the other. He laughs and snorts, feigning a limp.

  My dear, what firm milky breasts you have, all the better to …

  He pops the glass eyeball into his mouth, rolling it between his lips, which close over it like eyelids. Slowly he reaches for Sarah’s throat and pulls the bow of her cloak so it falls off her shoulders onto the floor. Sarah squeals through tightly pressed lips.

  For Christ’s sake, Carl, she’ll catch her death of cold, says the seamstress.

  Carl and Sarah have been using a glue that foams into a cement. It has been taken off the market because the fumes are highly toxic, but over the years Carl has grown accustomed to using it and he knows a guy who imports it from Italy. It’s a two-part solution and becomes active when the two separate solutions are mixed. Sarah and Carl are the only ones in the workshop. She’s pouring the solution and he’s holding the bucket for her. She spills the solution over his hands and frantically tries to wipe it. The foam has an acid base, and in her effort their hands have become stuck together. Carl shouts obscenities between his teeth and drags her to the sink. It’s difficult for him to get at the cold water tap. Sarah is crying hysterically and his other hand is stuck to the bucket. It takes him fifteen minutes to separate their hands. The seamstress hears the commotion from the kitchen down the hall and gets the first aid kit. She wraps their hands with burn ointment and gauze. Carl apologizes for cursing at Sarah and sends her home. He stays a long time in the empty warehouse, his burnt hands cradled between his knees.

  HALOES

  A halo is the vibration of that which is perfect. Once the fish in the harbour of St. John’s were so thick and silver they slowed sailing vessels. The great fire of 1892 razed the city when it became imperfect. Now sometimes, something is added, a hoar frost, a shipment of mangoes, fog, and the equation of the city can’t contain its perfection. There’s a surplus that you must stand very still to see. Perfection spills over in a glow at the edges of the city.

  There’s a photograph of the house my parents built together when it was just a skeleton. Blond two-by-fours like a rib cage around a lungful of sky. They worked back to back shifts in the restaurant they sold before I was born. The house was built on the weekends. I never once heard my parents m
ake love, or saw them naked together. But the photograph of the two-by-fours is like walking in on them, unexpected. The house without its skin. Their life together raw, still to come.

  I sat on the bar stool next to Philip. I can talk to Philip only when I’m drunk. I know things about him. He has a small daughter in Germany. He doesn’t talk much. At the bar, I said to him, Now, Philip, how do you justify having a kid in Germany? Some poor young woman taking care of a baby all by herself? Philip barely moves his lips when he talks. There’s a lisp like a run in a silk stocking. A ventriloquist throwing his voice into his own mouth.

  He has that weird relationship with alcohol few people can maintain. He soaks himself in it every night without letting it own him. He’s forty-six and liquor hasn’t ruined his face. Instead of making him old, it’s kept him from maturing, from ever making enough money to leave the city. He designs stained glass windows. I saw him in a church once, staring at his work, red and blue light floating over him like tropical fish; another face surfacing in his face, his true expression. There’s something sexually magnetic about Philip’s drinking, as if he could easily ignite.

  His face turned crimson. I was giggling. We had been walking across a lake of clear alcohol, our fingertips barely touching, and suddenly lost belief in our buoyancy. I know a woman who left her house at two in the morning and knocked on Philip’s door. He was watching television with a remote, the empty walls reflecting a syncopated beating, like butterfly wings. He had a plaid wool blanket wrapped around his knees. Whatever happened between them wasn’t pleasant and she didn’t say anything much about it. She said he had just finished an orange and two of his fingers were sticky, webbed together. She separated his fingers with her tongue, tasting the orange pulp. This is a strange detail, but I have picked up a few esoteric things like this about Philip without even listening for them. He eats marmite. Once some teenagers lured him into an alley and beat him with pickets torn from a fence, breaking two of his ribs. When he’s absolutely drunk he can sink every ball on a pool table. I asked about his daughter again, not making the connection between his red face and his rage.