On the Rim Read online

  To Hugh, as always, and to Kat, Lyn, and Jenn.

  Thanks also to my editor, Allison Hirst,

  for her insightful comments.

  — 1 —

  ELLEN’S FINGERS PLAY WITH the worn gold band on her left hand, as if to confirm its presence. But the assurance is false, like so much else in her life. She should have stripped it from her finger two years, eight months, and five days ago, when her divorce became final. Or earlier, when Al walked out. Or when any one of a thousand things happened. But she didn’t. Now she can’t. Her fingers are too pudgy. She and the ring are locked together.

  One of these days she’ll do something about it. About the ring. About her weight. About her life. She turns her attention to a shopping list. She’s learned to ignore the impulse items that once slid so easily into her shopping cart. Now she adjudicates her needs more carefully.

  She glances at a group of young women walking through the mall. Their carefully made up faces radiate youth. Ellen runs her tongue over her lips, cruelly aware that her lipstick has worn off; her eyelashes, lacking a coat of mascara, are short, stumpy, and almost invisible.

  She remembers a day long ago when she was their age. She had loosened her hair from its confining braids, the neat, tight braids she wore every day at school, allowing the tresses to fall over her shoulders in what she imagined was a cascade of shimmering beauty.

  Her father had come into the kitchen as she helped her mother prepare dinner. “Your hair looks godawful. Do something with it.”

  “But everyone wears it like this.”

  “Not in my house, they don’t. And if you’re going to work around any food I eat, wear a hair net, like your mother does.”

  “But …”

  There was no reasoning with her father, no discussion, and, as far as she could tell, no logic. Just pronouncements that came like bulletins from God.

  “Fix it.”

  It was only one in a long series of arguments: the clothing she wore, the makeup she tried to use, the music she listened to — the list went on and on.

  Ellen puts away the memory, turning her attention to a gaggle of school girls strutting past. Cropped tops clearly reveal nipples, unconfined by any type of bra. Jeans hang low on their hips, flaunting navels in front and buttock cracks in back. She wonders what her father would say if he were still alive. So much is bared today; he might have become accustomed to it. She snorts. No, there would be no chance of that.

  Ellen squirms when one of the girls returns her gaze, but the flickering eyes weigh and dismiss Ellen in micro-seconds. She’s relieved. She doesn’t want their attention. The young people are compelling, complete and whole, with an intensity, a confidence and belief in themselves, that Ellen has never had despite a lifetime of matched cardigan sweater sets and colour-coordinated purses and shoes.

  Her daydreams are interrupted when she catches sight of her reflection in the store window. It shocks her. Is that her face? With that thin little stretch of mouth? Carefully, so no one notices, she presses her lips together, takes a deep breath, and tries a smile. Somewhere, she read that F. Scott Fitzgerald told his daughter, Scottie, that the most important thing in life was a great smile.

  Did he really say that? Her father never said anything about smiling. Only about saving money, doing chores, and turning off the lights.

  Ellen thinks about the smiles that decorate the magazine covers at grocery store checkout counters. Julia Roberts, with her great, generous smile; Ellen couldn’t smile like that if she practised for a thousand years.

  “If smiles are so important, why don’t they teach them in school,” she asks herself. Startled looks remind her she’s talking out loud. She rephrases the question in her mind. Why not Smiling 101? Happiness 205? That should be more important than algebra.

  That night, she places her fingers on her cheekbones, pulling the skin back and up until it lies snug and tight against her bones. I can have my face fixed, she thinks. But her father’s voice intrudes on her thoughts: “What’s wrong with the face God gave you? What makes you think it would look any better if you had your nose stretched or your wrinkles stitched?”

  Always, when her father was angry, he mixed his words. It enraged him if she laughed, setting off a tirade that mangled the language in truly spectacular ways.

  “If Julia Roberts had a father like mine, she wouldn’t have such a great smile either,” she mutters to her mirror.

  Her father wouldn’t wear a seat belt. “You don’t need one if you’re a good driver,” he once said. When he swerved on the highway during a snowstorm, the car flew off the road, killing both her parents.

  An aunt took in her young brother. “Lloyd will be like a son to us,” she declared.

  But she didn’t want the problems of a seventeen-year-old daughter. Someone else could take Ellen.

  In a burst of rebellion, Ellen turned to the boyfriend her parents hadn’t known about.

  “Al, would your mother let me stay at your place, just until school ends?”

  Al’s widowed mother was dubious, but she found it hard to say no to her only child — and there was a spare room.

  “Just till the end of school,” she stipulated. But by that time Ellen was pregnant. She and Al got married right after graduation in a hurried and harried ceremony performed by a justice of the peace. Neither her aunt nor her brother attended.

  Sighing, Ellen brings herself back to the present.

  This place is so different from the home she and Al had built. Rented rooms don’t smell like real homes. Teasing wisps of cookies or pot roast are replaced by the canned scent of air fresheners — a beige smell that matches the neutral paint on the walls. There are no yards, no gardens. That can be a good thing, or bad, depending. Poking around in the dirt and watching things grow is satisfying; other times it’s a chore to cut the grass, weed the garden, and remember the times and days you’re allowed to water.

  Another memory kicks in.

  “Al, it’s four o’clock. Time to turn on the sprinkler.”

  “You do it. You’re awake.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You must be. You know what time it is.”

  A symphony of sprinklers susurrates as she jams her arms into a dressing gown and stumbles outside, crossly cranking the water on just a little too much, warming to the knowledge that the whump whump of water hitting the driveway will keep Al awake.

  In her fantasy, they always rush out together, tend the sprinklers, then return laughing to bed where they make passionate love. But it never happens. She yearns for the funny, spontaneous, warm and witty boy she knew in school. The man he became is more often cranky, harried, petulant, and dull. Like the lawns and sprinklers, her romantic dreams have washed away.

  These days her interest in lawns and gardening is purely academic, like her interest in almost everything else. After the separation, she dragged her way through eighteen months of depression, when she literally didn’t care if she lived or died. Her doctor’s trial and error pharmaceutical experiments had brought dizzying ups and downs, alternating manic highs with hellish lows. Getting through each day was a major challenge, the simple mechanics of survival almost more than she could manage.

  Her life is level now. No ups, no downs, no highs, no lows. Just dull. She’s dull. Her small apartment looks dull. Utilitarian. Uninteresting. Uninspired. Unpacked boxes hunker in the corners of her space. She’s forgotten what’s in most of them. She still misses the easy familiarity of her home, where she didn’t have to think about where things were, where she knew her way to the bathroom in the dark of night, the path down the hallway to the children’s rooms, the route to the kitchen. Here, she stands for a moment before heading off in what she hopes is the right direction. Several times she�
��s been jolted awake by bashing her toes into something she thought was somewhere else.

  The front room contains one comfortable chair — enough, since she never has visitors — a bookcase, and a battered desk from the Thrift Shoppe that holds a small TV. A good reading lamp stands beside her chair.

  The front room and kitchen are parts of an L-shape, with the shared centre designated as a dining area. Two chairs huddle around an Arborite and chrome table. Logic tells her that’s all she needs, but there are days when she craves a larger table and many chairs, like her old dining room suite with eight side chairs, two arm chairs, a big glass-fronted buffet, and a table with extra leaves that invited her to spread out her craft projects in roomy splendour. Ellen’s eyes have yet to adjust to her altered status.

  I’ll need extra chairs when the kids come, she tells herself each time she wanders through a furniture store in the mall. Then she looks at the price tags. What she has will do for now.

  She rarely hears from the kids, and they’ve never come to visit; just the obligatory phone calls on Mother’s Day, her birthday, and other mandated holidays. Judging from the talk shows she watches, this is a common complaint. In one way, she’s relieved that the problem is general and not related specifically to her; in another, she’s saddened that her children aren’t the superior beings she thought she’d raised.

  She tried brightening her apartment: Plastic placemats make red splashes on the table, gleaming wetly like spilled tomato juice. A brightly coloured dish towel hangs on a rack, its matching pot holders perch on the stove hood. The counters are woefully bare. No knick-knacks, canisters, or animal-shaped cookie jars clutter their beige surfaces. Her cupboards are equally bleak. A small fridge stands at the end of the counter; it holds little of interest, but its constant hum disturbs her sleep and scatters static through the radio broadcasts by day.

  Her bedroom boasts a large, sprawlable bed. That was a mistake. The bed is comfortable, but its emptiness reminds her no one shares it. Matching night tables flank the bed, giving a sense of balance to the room. One holds a lamp, a book, a box of Kleenex, and her glasses, the other carries a clock radio whose green digital readout flips through the long hours of the night. At times she thinks about the contents of the night tables — photo albums that show her with Al and the children in earlier, happier days, a few birthday, Mother’s Day, and Christmas cards from the children — nothing current. These are from childhood, when their printing wobbled across the bottom of the card and the words weren’t always spelled correctly. Once saved, it seems disloyal to throw the cards out, even though she can’t think of anything to do with them and rarely looks at them anymore.

  Memories bang at the edge of her brain, like fat and sleepy houseflies, trying to force their way through window panes.

  She hears the sound of Al’s voice booming from the foot of the basement stairs, which was also the entrance to the garage. “I’m away. See you in a couple of hours.”

  “Okay,” she called, without taking her eyes from the book. She sat, curled cozily in a corner of the chesterfield, the light of a reading lamp defining her territory. The gas fireplace hissed quietly, flicking flames through its imitation logs. The cat crept closer to the glass screen, intent on baking its brains until it went giddy with the heat.

  Al was off to play racquetball. He was strong, active, and athletic. He loved the drive, the demands, and the quick responses that racquetball requires. He rejected Ellen’s suggestion that he wear safety goggles.

  “What’s this?” he demanded when she gave him a pair as a birthday present.

  “Sport goggles,” she explained. “A lot of players wear them.” She paused, frozen by his glare. “To protect your eyes,” she added weakly.

  “I don’t need protection. I’m not some doddering old man who can’t get out of the way.”

  Months later, she got a late-night call from Ben, Al’s racquetball partner. They were at the hospital; Al had taken a ball to the eye.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” Ben said when she arrived at the waiting room.

  When Al dropped to the floor he smacked his head as well, so now he was in Emergency with possible occipital damage and a split scalp. A lumpy pad of gauze decorated the top of his head. Mercurochrome stained his forehead. An ice pack covered his eye.

  “You’re going to have a great shiner tomorrow,” she told him.

  “I know.”

  “Does it hurt much?”

  “Not now. They gave me a couple of shots. You’re looking pretty fuzzy right now.”

  “That’s okay.” She laughed. “I’m feeling pretty fuzzy.”

  He scowled.

  She corrected herself, saying what she should have said in the beginning. “I’m so sorry. You don’t usually have accidents.”

  There was a pause.

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Put a couple of stitches in my scalp. And look at my eye.”

  “Too bad you didn’t smack your nose too,” she quipped. “They could do a little plastic surgery at the same time.”

  His beak is a family joke. His father had a nice nose: inconspicuous, straight — the kind of nose politicians like because it doesn’t lend itself to caricature. No one knows where Al’s nose came from, but it’s a generous-sized honker. He’d injured it a couple of times — once when he was young he broke it playing lacrosse and another time he didn’t duck quickly enough during a boxing match. Still, it suits him.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” he said, dismissing her attempt at humour. “It hurts when I move my face.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  A washed-out silence hung between them. The medicinal smell of the ward was mixed with other scents: dirt, sweat, grease, and things she couldn’t identify. A cacophony of noise provided an urgent background. Pagers, telephones, and an overhead PA system competed with crisp commands from nurses, orderlies, and doctors.

  “Is there anything I can bring you?”

  “No. I’ll be out in a couple of hours.”

  Silence again.

  “I think Ben got my racquet. Call him and make sure.”

  “I will.”

  Al dozed off. Ellen wasn’t sure if she should stay or go. A nurse walked in, writing something on a metal-backed chart. Ellen expected a white uniform, but the nurse wore a colourful cotton pant suit in a print that looked like children’s pyjamas.

  “We’ll move him soon,” she told Ellen. “We’ll discharge him from ER and admit him to hospital.”

  She finished with the chart and hung it on the end of his bed. “You can take his clothes home if you want. He won’t need them for a while.”

  “I thought he was going home in a few hours?”

  The nurse smiled. “He’ll be in for several days at least. He’ll need reconstructive work.”

  “What reconstructive work?”

  The nurse’s face went blank. “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss that. You’ll have to check with his doctor.”

  That didn’t match Al’s version — that he’d be going home after a few stitches. But it was typical. He assumed that if he wanted something to happen, that’s the way it would be. Better to let the doctor tell him. It would be one less argument she had to have.

  Ellen walked back to the bed and gently touched his shoulder.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll let you know when to pick me up.”

  Racquetball marked a turning point in their relationship, planting the seed of a subtle grudge, but Ellen didn’t realize it at the time. Al’s idea of sharing an activity was for him to do it and her to watch. When he took up racquetball, he wanted her to come and watch. She did, reluctantly. She didn’t enjoy it much. She didn’t understand the game. There was a spectator’s gallery, but it was more popular with teens as a place to hang out or sit in the corner and neck. Besides, it was hard to stay out late when there were young children to look after the next day. Ellen soon stopped going.

&nb
sp; After the men finished their games, they used to stop at the bar to unwind, and it was usually one or two in the morning before Al arrived home. By that time, Ellen was in bed.

  Did he blame her for not being there when he was injured? He never said. Luckily the operation went well. The eye socket was reconstructed and there was minimal damage to the eye. Before long he was back at work and returned to the racquetball court several months later. This time he wore goggles. The only reminder of the accident was a small scar at the corner of his eye that gave him a raffish Robert Redford look.

  Ellen attended the end-of-season tournament, along with most of the wives and girlfriends. After, there was a big banquet where trophies were awarded and the players punched one another on the shoulder and told dressing room jokes.

  In summer, Al played softball. When they were first married, Ellen went with him, loving the lazy feel of warm summer evenings. Not that she enjoyed softball. She found it funny: the catcher slipping sly signals from his crotch, the pitcher adjusting his jock, the players in their tight pants realigning themselves as they approached the plate. It reminded her of little boys at summer camp feeling the first stirring of their manhood, but caught in a cultural desert of self-denial that prevented them from celebrating their discovery.

  Still, to please Al, she turned out for a few games, taking along a folding chair. There were no bleachers at the park where the amateurs played. And she kept a book in her shoulder bag.

  “You might at least pretend to watch the game,” he grated, after a strained and silent drive home one evening.

  “What difference does it make? I thought you played because you enjoyed the game, not because of the spectators.”

  His breathing became slow and even — a metronome of anger.

  “Other wives seem to enjoy it. They keep track of the scores and statistics. You should try it sometime. They don’t complain about being bored.”

  “I’m not complaining,” she said. “And you’re wrong about the women. They talk about everything but the game. I can tell you who couldn’t get it up last week after the game and who comes home horny. I just don’t happen to be interested in listening to them. It’s a treat to just sit quietly and not have to do anything.”