Stunt (4 page)

Immaculata slinks down three stairs so she can watch. I don't. I can't. I write a letter.

I have never seen Mink cry, except at sports on television. She cries at victory; finally, after this endless human slog, she recognizes one of her own. A champion. She does not cry at loss. When there was a fire around the corner from our house, the smell of tar and hair burning filled the air. The smell of old. Doilies, photo albums, a recliner and a basement full of hockey cards and comic books, all of it in an uproar of flame. In a trance, Mink excused herself from the dinner table and slid out the front door. When she came back hours later, she leaned her face in close to mine and said, ‘She smoked in bed. The dunce. Everyone knows that one.' Mink was bored. Her face was hot from watching.

Now she has stopped working. Her mechanisms are sputtering and flailing. I do not want to see this in Mink. I do not want to see this mess. One thing in our life was supposed to be tidy, sure. One thing was supposed to never change.

The Mime has a coughing fit.

When the policemen start back to their cruiser, after Mink rights herself, a resurrection really, I run past her, a feral kitten, to the Turban. I hold a letter in my hand.

‘Mail this for me. Promise.'

The Turban stonewalls.

‘Promise,' I repeat myself.

He looks at the Mime. The Mime nods.

‘Promise.'

‘I don't have an address.'

I slip the letter, rolled into a scroll, into the Turban's hand. He looks at it; it is a baton and he did not realize he was running the relay. He won't even read it. His curiosity is that dead.

Walking away, they turn back one last time. Together they say, in different pitches, ‘What if we don't find it?'

‘What?'

‘The address.'

‘You will. You have to.'

The cruiser pulls away. One hand on the radio dial, the Mime looks at me. I wonder if he lives in a storage shed. I wonder if he wants me to live there with him and breed goldfish and play with a rescued, chewed-up doll on the sawdust floor. I wonder if he wants to change my name.

Walking back to our house, I see a glimmer in the grass. It could be the Mime's gum, the Turban's medallion, their bitten ears. It is my tooth, my last baby tooth, white, small, bloody at the root. It must have fallen out when I slept.

Mink waits for me in the doorway. From here, you could convince me that she is made out of marble, cut out from a block
into this tiny, immovable shape. I hope she does not touch me. Or console me. I smile at her, wide, with my bar-brawl mouth, my incredible ugliness. These empty spaces, a baying. I am the mascot for what is missing. I am filthy. My eyes go dull. She lets me pass. I don't even know if she is breathing. She closes the heavy door behind us. I look up at her. Still, she is the colour of orchids.

Mink yanks the curtains closed. The show is over. The house takes on the quality of a cellar. Let there be root vegetables. Let there be murder. Let there be cards and cigars and whisky. Let there be pickling and ladies of the night missing pinkies and a dozen black cars idling in formation outside, their exhaust a potion to the air. Let our shoes be polished with beet juice. Let one of us be dead. Let it be me. A slit throat or, better, a bullet hole still smoking in the forehead, halos lifting themselves to the heavens. Let there be some kind of stringed instrument moaning in the corner played by a one-eyed sloth in a beige tuxedo. He taps his foot through the rotting floor. Potato bugs scurry for peace. We have been here for centuries. Deciding how to live. When, finally, the verdict comes down, intrusive as daylight.

‘It is better to be widowed,' Mink says with the clarity of a snapped elastic, one burst blood vessel on her cheek. ‘The funeral will be tomorrow afternoon. They're calling for rain.' When I protest, ‘But he's not dead,' she says, ‘He is not coming back, Eugenia. Waiting is for dunces.' She is all full stops – a telegram. Immaculata bows her head in shame or prayer, I cannot tell. Mink goes on, ‘He could slip in the shower. Choke in his sleep. Fall down the stairs and break his neck. He could catch fire in any number of ways. He could have some crippling, surprise disease. He could be standing still and just die. A heart attack. A clot to the brain. To the lungs. Blood poisoning. A tropical flu. An arrow. A rabid bear. An elephant seal. Mouse droppings. Strangulation. A bone in the throat. He could be the victim of malice. A gang of thugs. He could drive into a telephone pole. He could drown in a culvert. He could be hit by a train. Gruesome has a kind of endless quality to it, girls. Pick.' She has foam at the corners of her mouth.

‘Drowning it is rumoured to be peaceful and besides he could not swim,' says Immaculata with the fixity of a logician.

Even though you could not swim, you could splash. At first, it would seem you were attacking, pounding the water with your fists; it would come up in rapid shocks around you. But then, too quickly, you were being attacked by something flexible and all-knowing – something that, patrolling the shoreline, I could not quite see.

‘Do you second?' Mink asks me. ‘I need you to second, Junior Miss. I need you to second.' And then, the general flicking dander from her epaulettes, she says, ‘Pull it together, Genie. Drowning it is. He drowned. In the lake. Fishing.' She glares in my direction.

Mink pushes her chair away from the table with a skid, turns on the radio and piles the clean dishes into the cupboards. When Mink does what she calls
women's work,
she is a robbery in reverse. Returning everything to its rightful place. The opposite of a thief, she is loud and careless. Daring the world to catch her, to find her out. Clattering, slamming, fighting the furniture, beating the carpet, huffing at the sinks, the shelves, the floors, Mink must keep track of all the misplaced pieces, for only she knows where they go. I wonder if this is what motherhood is: the noisy race, the impossible task of staging wholeness.

Mink starts to make dinner, wraps a tea towel around her waist instead of an apron, says, ‘What the fuck am I doing,' throws the tea towel to the ground, tells me to stop my whimpering even though I am not making a sound, it is Immaculata imitating a mewling calf, which she does when she is afraid.

With that, Mink goes upstairs to her bedroom. There is not a step or a gesture out of place. She cannot help but be
choreographed. Watching her round the stairwell, I wonder why it is that I am living with a perfect stranger. Roofs constellate and land on us like children who do not know their own strength. Family too.

Like a ghost baby, Immaculata follows Mink, her feet barely touching the ground.

The wind picks up. Like my mind, it is an itch. The creak and sway of the walls. The shift in the floors. The rattle of the windows. Without you in it, this house is unfamiliar. This house is not mine. The green fridge and matching stove, pot holders with beehives on them, a spider plant dangling behind the sink on a shelf with spices. Who lives here? And really, why should I?

Tell me, why did that woman around the corner burn along with her son's Scout uniform? Why did she stay in her bed swearing it all existed, that it was true – people used to live here and some of them loved each other – hand on her heart, cigarette in her mouth, the flames licking her knees, quick and feisty, carnival clowns? Why, when it would have been so easy for her to walk out the front door and through another one, the old love having been so well beaten out, a broom to a rug, that it does not even smoulder? Why is it that she stayed and you left, seamless as a good thief?

Or did you just need to lose yourself in the night? A deeper black than yours. A gangrene all its own. When you're sick, you love the sicker thing. Well, I can be sick too.

I sock myself. Right in the eye. Fist whistling through the sponginess of cartilage. It is the sound of a boy bouncing a ball once in an empty stadium. It is an excellent punch and the blood, obedient, my intimate, shoots itself to the surface and pools there. My eyes water, and then I am presented with pain. It wears a pressed suit. I welcome it. I shake its hand. It is a shape, something I can turn over and examine. The black eye is a relief. The boon to inflicting pain on yourself: you can predict its arrival. I look at my reflection. Slowly, it rises, the bruise, as though you left a jar of paint on my face to shimmer like the inside of
your mouth. You would say, ‘See, Eugenia, my darlin', everything's built for injury,' and then you would punch yourself too. ‘We're the same.'

The wind again. Babble, babble, the entire world is telling its secrets at the same time. Mink returns. I can smell her. She has washed her face and put on fresh lipstick. Menthol and blubber. I sneeze. She stands behind me, hesitates, says, ‘Hm,' and then she leans down and does exactly the wrong thing. She puts her hand in the centre of my back and runs it up to my neck, spiders losing their balance. She kisses me with a trace of her teeth on the spot where my spine meets my skull.
This is where the mother cats carry their kittens, Genie. Vets are trained to hold them here. It keeps the critters calm when they feel threatened.
Then she leaves. A cartoon tunnel. She is a dot shrinking in the distance. Not a perfect stranger after all.

I remember the cats in our yard picking up their litters by that loose skin, and how the kittens would immediately go limp. I throw up in the sink. And then I cry. I cry so much that I fog up the windows of the kitchen. By the time I lift my head and see what I have done – changed the ecology of the place into steam and salt – I want to show someone. I want to get Immaculata and I want to tell her: it is so weird how powerful we can be when we are sad. I want to tell you.

Instead, I stare at nothing. I am sitting for a portraitist and I am saying,
This is how we live, this is how we live.

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

my darlin',

one one thousand. two one thousand.

s

From the kitchen, night a black spill, I hear Mink in the living room doing her exercises. I know that she is wearing her turtleneck and her tights and that she is thinking to herself:
Why wear pants when you got gams like these?
She is so flexible she can kiss her own tailbone.

After Mink explained the scruff of the neck and its significance to a kitten, I asked her if she loved me.

‘Of course I love you. I'm your mother.'

‘But that's not real love. That's theoretical love. Like theoretically, I am deserving of your love because I am your daughter. But do you feel love for me?'

‘How would you describe that?'

‘There is no description. It just is. Everyone knows that one.'

That night she got out the toothbrush for the first time.

Last night was the third.

This is the letter I rolled into a scroll and placed in the cold but firm chlorine hand of the Turban while the Mime, tenor, said, ‘Promise.' This is what should be in the mail by now, and maybe, just maybe, open on Finbar's kitchen table, his exploded face above it.

June 8, 1981

Dear I. I. Finbar Me the Three
Handsome Funambulist and Colossal Menagerie,

I will keep this brief as you are either very old or very dead.
Though the unauthorized autobiography I have has been largely
distressed by my father's palette knife, you are, by my
calculations, eighty – if you are even living. I am nine.
My name is Eugenia. My address is Number 101 Dunn
Avenue in the City of Toronto, Mother Six Kidlet Two
Robber Eight. I weigh eighty-five pounds. I am five feet tall.
My mother is Mink. My sister, Immaculata. My father, Sheb
Wooly Ledoux, portraitist. Last night, my father vanished. He
left a note behind that did not include my name. I took this to
be a sign that he was coming back for me. I think I was
wrong. I think he might be on his way to you. This may take
a while. He is not one for straight lines. In the meantime, if I
had two words written on my eyelids and I was blinking, you
would read: Rescue. Urgent. Rescue. Urgent. Rescue. Urgent.
Sheb is a forthcoming sort. Forgive him this. And please forgive
his lunatic ranting. Forgive him this at least until I get there
too. If in doubt, give him an apple.

Whether this letter will even find you is another matter
altogether, and one that I have little choice but to leave in
the hands of two singing police officers.

Eugenia Ledoux

We sit in your studio and listen to Merilee Rush and the Turnabouts sing ‘Angel of the Morning' for an entire day. Juice Newton just came out with a version, but this is the original and you insist on originals. You do not paint. A new canvas sits on your easel in the corner, a face waiting to be filled in. It is really just an eye. A left eye, floating. The only event of the day is the song. You say that you need to
understand the song
!We sit on the floor cross-legged like sages, reflecting each other – my hair, your hair, your eyes, my eyes, my face, your face. We listen, and every time it finishes you leap up, move the needle back again, scratch, scratch, to the beginning.

A hundred listens later, your beard that much thicker, as I am about to spell it out, you finally proclaim, ‘I get it, Eugenius, I get it.'

‘What?' I pounce back.

‘She is saying goodbye. She is saying goodbye before she has to, while she still has the chance.'

The needle bumps over the blank space at the end of the record – a message being nervously tapped out. The unfinished face is your face. I look away from it to you. Tears skip into your eyes. And with that I see there is a whole layer of sadness to the world that I have not yet begun to uncover.

June
9, 1981
. The backyard. Your funeral. Mother Mink Ledoux in black. Gloves and two girdles. Sister Immaculata Ledoux in white. Both: hair lined up and soldiered into braids. I am in your pinstripe suit, the one you left behind. Cut and sewed and shrunk. Cowboy boots too. Found glowing and snorting in a corner of the closet; I step into them, they fit.