Stunt (8 page)

As we fall asleep on my bed, curling into the shape of fiddle-heads for the night to pry apart, Immaculata wrapped around me, stiff and suited, this is what she tells me, her voice a balm, her mouth suddenly full of hard stops: ‘Take a duck. Pull her feathers. Save for the head and neck. Baste her with butter. Make a fire around her. Not too close so that she chokes. She will run, walk and fly meekly amidst the flame. Cloistered in a roast, her heart and head will thirst. Wet her with a sponge. When she begins to stumble, she is quite cooked. Present her before your guests. She will cry as you cut into her and be almost completely eaten before she dies. It is mighty pleasant to behold!' Immaculata twines a strand of her floor-length white hair around my wrist. It is thick as fishing line. And then she says, ‘Meat is said to be more tender if it is made to suffer first.'

I wait for her to say something more but she doesn't.

It all started with Sudbury.

June
1, 1980.
One year and seven days before you duct-tape this note to your studio door,

gone to save the world
sorry mink,
immaculata,
sorry
yours
sheb wooly ledoux
asshole

and leave us with fish (mostly bone), Mink is called away to shoot a film. When she gets the call, she exclaims, ‘Oh,' as though something agile just flew up her skirt.

It is a B movie. Mink used to be Joan of Arc. She used to be Masha. She used to be Ophelia. Now she will be in Sudbury for seven nights shooting
Murder in the Tundra.
She shows me the whites of her eyes whenever she says
Sudbury.
She will stay in a college dormitory. It will smell of sneakers and spaghetti, rank as leftover childhoods. She will sleep on a cot under a poster of a fantasy girl who is not her. The walls will be white cement blocks. There will be fire routes everywhere. She will pack her own bedding. And her robes, morning and night, which she will wear while walking to the communal bathroom. Everyone will fall in love with her. Of this, she is almost sure.

Mink is to play the dim-witted but kinky Austrian prioress of a motel named the Lay-He-Ho and she must have sex with a demented dictionary salesman who is passing through town.
His name is Laird. But because of her station in life, she must call him Herr Laird.

‘We all have our station in life,' Mink tells me, offering her profile. It should be printed on thousand-dollar bills.

‘How true,' I say, not offering mine.

Mink hands me the script. She wants to rehearse. I rifle through the pages. It is mostly about dying and disrobing. When I remark that the film calls for full nudity, she slaps her thigh, a prize cow.

‘But aren't you being exploited?' I ask.

‘Pshaw. Doing nudity is high praise, Genie. High praise.' She says
high praise
like it is contraband. Like it is what everybody wants but only a few know how to find. This was not always the case. Once, when Mink had not had a call for months, she asked me if I thought she could pass for my sister. I said yes. My lie became every lie that had ever been told to her.

‘Swear on Sheb's life.'

It was up to me to undo them all. I couldn't. Mink kicked a cupboard door closed and told me that her industry did not know what to do with her as she got older and so it had abandoned her. Then she pulled on her cheekbones, ‘Aging is like misfiring,' and left the room, tipping on her heels.

There was a production of
La Finta Giardiniera.
Your favourite opera. You said, ‘Mozart wrote it when he was eighteen. Eighteen, Eugenius. Eighteen.' The final moment of the opera was to be a flock of doves flying high over the audience's heads. They rehearsed with fake doves. On the opening night, they stored the real doves in a net above the stage. When the time came for the doves' flight, they pulled back the net and instead of a flurry of
wings, the doves fell dead to the ground. They had been too close to the lights. The heat had killed them. This is what aging is like. You are supposed to be a dove in the air but instead you are burned alive. With an audience that, upon seeing you, is horrified.

More exercises. More cold cream for Mink.

We rehearse. Mink mostly says, ‘Oh yes, Herr Laird.' I play Herr Laird. I ask for a room key and then as I am unpacking my dictionaries I go demented like someone has poured hot grease into my ears. This is when I dial for room service. Mink arrives with a cart of dishes under domes. I make small talk until she undresses and then Mink, naked, says, cueing me, ‘Stab me, stab me,' under her breath. I can't.

She looks at me. I am ferocious, a barbarian. I am ruining the scene. And then I realize that she is still in character.
Tickety-boo.
Mink enacts her mortal wounds without my help. She runs behind her bedroom curtain and she screams. She yodels a bit and then dies. As she clutches her throat, her frayed jugular winks blood at the cosmos. She swans to the floor. I look at her with frightened curiosity, the way Frankenstein must have watched his monster bloom. She does not blink. I am sure she has stopped her heart. Then she comes to her feet and, with the curtness of a thing snapping shut, she says, ‘Scene.'

I wipe my eyes on my sleeve. I applaud. She is Joan of Arc. She is Masha. She is Ophelia.

‘You die very well.'

‘Thank you.'

Mink curtseys and then she puts herself back together, like a magician's assistant, not sawed in half after all.

‘Is there an android in your movie?'

‘Not this one.'

I sit on Mink's bed. A double with a dark throw. Three mattresses. I wilt into them, a small shock of milkweed. Her back to me, Mink brushes her hair. ‘One, two, three' – steady as a metronome, she counts the strokes under her breath. It falls in glossy switches. Red as embers. Red as Mars. If we were locked in this room until the end of time, all we would do is brush Mink's hair. I might say
chilly
once and then realize that this is beside the point. The point is this: Mink has a silver-handled hairbrush. It is her only heirloom. She says the word
heirloom
as though if she is not careful with it, it will crumble in her mouth and she will cough dust. Like Sheb, Mink was adopted. She does not know her true origins. This makes three things they have in common: feet, sex and question marks. This is why her hairbrush is so important. It is a visit from her ancestors. Every number: mileage covered. The more she counts, the closer they get. ‘Forty-nine, fifty.' She puts the hairbrush down. I have question marks too.

‘Tell me your beginnings,' I say for the first time.

She trains her eyes on me. They are violet and gold, glistening nuggets. She just plucked them from a dead sailor. From her trunk of faces. ‘My mother was an opium addict. My brother terribly ill. A lung disease. We lived by the seaside. There was whisky and whores. My father was cheap. A retired actor. Our maid was stupid. My father was the king of Britain. I had two sisters. They were both treacherous. I was my father's favourite and then he banished me from his kingdom. I was a child prodigy with a hole in my heart. My mother was a statue come
to life. She was in love with a man who was haunted by the ghost of his own father. We had a child buried in our backyard. Drowned. My father watched television. My mother turned to God. Our estate was auctioned off. We lived on a cherry orchard. It was cut down.
Que sera sera.
My mother was a witch and full of spells and she drove my father, an artist of some repute and much adored by all, mad, upon which he walked into the forest behind our home never to be seen again. That last part is true.'

I know to never ask her again about her beginnings. So they sit, hot blisters on her skin, never to burst.

Fingers stuck with rings, Mink directs me to her vanity table. She places me, pawn, in front of her, queen. Photographs and dried bouquets crowd the edges of the mirror. The hairbrush is cradled in her hands like it is made of sparrow bones. Will she beat me with it? No. She is trying to even out the attention she expends. She senses a deficit in me and she wants to correct this. Things should be symmetrical. Octagonal. Even love. So she picks me for the hour. She picks me for her riches. ‘You're so small, Genie. Some might call it a disadvantage. Even a deformity.' She pairs her face with mine. A rare bird on my shoulder, it could split apart into a swarm. ‘I wouldn't. You have your father's face. But you have good skin. My skin. Lit from within. Bet I could find you in the dark.' She straightens. ‘Don't look so sad. Sadness will wreck your face. It'll freeze that way.'

Mink touches my scalp. Her fingers are a pitchfork. She pushes my shoulders down. She lifts her one heirloom. It hovers above my head. I worry that it will break when it touches me and that her meagre history will be lost to her forever. It doesn't.
She brushes my hair. It is full of knots and tangles. But Mink ploughs through.
Tickety-boo.

The first few pulls make me feel seasick, but as she goes on, I hope that she will never stop. With every stroke, she is whispering to me. Grand whispers made of fur and dynamite.
This is where you come from,
she is telling me.
The land of smooth hair. Welcome back, child. You have been away too long.

I know this much. You told me. She was born here in Toronto and her parents named her Monique. They gave her away. You guess that her mother was probably young, even twelve, and lived in tenement housing and plunged needles into her arms. Mink is a nickname you gave to her. She is adopted by an older couple who dies before I am born. She is their only child. She goes to a private school. She wears a kilt and a blazer and a tie and she is on the swim team. The medley. She knows her lace, her silver and her seams. She goes to dance and piano classes. She has many trophies. Everything in her house is polished. At night, everything shines. When her mother drives through the city alone, she puts a dummy in their back seat to deter kidnappers. That is how rich they are. Everybody wants to take them for ransom money. Still, her parents worry about bills so they keep the house very cold. In the winter, Mink's trophies gather frost. When Mink marries you, an orphan painter from northern Ontario who does not cut his toenails, never uses a napkin and misquotes ‘Kubla Khan' (though you were very close to getting it right), her parents disown her. This is why she never speaks about them. This is why she did not go to their funerals. She needed a beast, one who would wrap her in a horse blanket and steal her from her front stoop.

Mink never met her birth mother. According to you, she wanted to remain hidden. Does she live in a bunker and carve the name MONIQUE into the wall over and over again? Are there other women in other bunkers carving names, names that no longer match faces? Somewhere Mink has a mother covered in needles. Somewhere Mink has a mother who could pass for her sister.

She steps back. She laughs. ‘You look like a peacock. Like peacock roadkill,' she says. I open my eyes. It's true. She strokes my cheek. Her hand is soft, kelp, and I am the swimmer guessing my way toward shore. I lick my lips. They taste of salt. ‘When I get back from Sudbury,' she rolls her eyes, ‘I'll take you to the beautician. She'll fix you.' I say, ‘That would be nice.' Her smile flashbulbs. I am caught in its frame. She laughs again. I laugh too. Her laughter is so voluminous that I bob inside it. Without warning, she shuts it off. Her eyes go flat. Scene. Too late, too easily overtaken, I am still laughing. I tell her, ‘I love your teeth so much.' It is time for her to pack. It is time for me to go.
Stab me, stab me,
I think as I close her door behind me.

June
7, 1980.
The day comes for Mink to leave for Sudbury. She gleams like the side of a never-flown airplane. A submarine before it plunges. A revolver. Immaculata and I cannot help but follow her around. She is having a torrid affair with herself. She is full of sideways glances. She calls this
method.
Her bags have been packed for a week. They sit by the front door, hounds panting at the gate. I wonder if they, like her, will break into a sprint.

Mink practices her diction while attending to her toilette and ministrations. She says, ‘Red leather yellow leather red leather yellow leather,' over and over again in the Austrian accent required of her. She moves with the deliberation of an empress inside a dark castle – her wrists heavy with gems, beheadings in the basement. And then she repeats, ‘
Sitzen, liegen, schlafen,
' in different pitches. Immaculata and I are her stunned ladies in waiting. We are bowed. We need aprons and moles. ‘
Sitzen, liegen, schlafen.
' Mink fixes her hair into place. Her hands are a cursive; the air, lap dogs. She pulls buttons through their holes. ‘
Sitzen, liegen, schlafen.
' She is already being watched. She has an audience of millions sitting shoulder to shoulder. After the show, she will sign posters of herself. She will look every single one of her admirers in the eye. They will see this as winking. She will be their fantasy girl.

Mink is picked up by a black limousine. Upon seeing the chauffeur, his hunchback frame in a dark suit, looking as though he has been living on arsenic and menthol cigarellos, Immaculata leans into the living room window and says, ‘The Grim Reaper,' like she recognizes him and his sallow visage. Like they were intimates and now she is welcoming him home. She knows all of
the chains that hang around his neck. One was a gift from her. She has been growing her hair all this time, her teeth turning soft, thinking only of him. And now he has come. For Mink. Immaculata's eyes water; they have been stamped upon by tiny hooves.

Before Mink leaves, she says to us, ‘This was always my dream, to be a travelling showgirl.' She sings one note. ‘Ra.'

‘But aren't you coming back?' asks Immaculata.

‘Ra.'

The chauffeur puts Mink's suitcases and hat box into the trunk. He holds the door open. Immaculata knocks on the window. Thinking the knock is for her, Mink glances over at us, her eyes not quite settling on our eager outlines. She opens her mouth and then closes it. Whatever it is she was going to say to us she decides to save for herself. She is taken away, the black limousine vanishing into traffic on the Gardiner. Immaculata's brow beads with sweat. She wipes it away with a stained white handkerchief, which she tucks back under the lace sleeve of her dress.