If Sylvie Had Nine Lives Read online

  Merry slid a hand along her own skirt where the fabric was damp with rum and coke. Would anyone even care that a middle-aged woman’s skirt was no longer fit to swirl? At the finish of the butterfly the groom had stumbled into the table where she and two aunts from his side were sitting, their drinks half-full. Crash, splash. Living with Jack, Merry thought, might turn out to be a lot like living in Ripley, except in the city.

  SHE BRACED HER FEET to wheel the Creeper out from under the Dart, get off her back and stretch her shoulders. She began inching her heels along the floor but stopped when she heard footsteps, a relaxed tread. Looking to the side she saw a large pair of moccasin loafers pause near the front of the car, and she heard Greg Thompson say to Howard, “Got your girl mechanic changing oil on Bert’s hot rod.”

  Howard said, “Woman mechanic, is what I understand I’m supposed to say.”

  Merry held her heels steady. She would spare herself the cat’s eye view up past those loafers, along the soft crease of Greg’s Fortrel pants to the white plastic belt he was known for, the swell of his waist, and past that the pale underside of his chin, and above that the dark hollows of his nostrils.

  “Just mechanic is fine.” She watched the last of the flow into the catch-pan. Lit by the trouble light, even dirty oil had a shine to it. Small rewards.

  DARN THAT GIRL. Darn her now and darn her years ago. Take the night Merry went over to help Sylvie boil fudge for the Sunday bake sale.

  “You drop just this little bit into a cup of cold water. See how it makes a tiny ball?” Merry’s voice competed with Foster Hewitt’s eager play-by-play. Howard was watching the Leafs in the other room.

  “Ha!” said Sylvie. “A little turd!”

  “That’s how you know it’s ready. You have to pour it right away, or —”

  “Bitch!” There was Mavis, standing in the doorway from the hall and glaring at Sylvie. “Damn bitch!” In her hand was a tin globe the size of a grown-up fist. Her piggy bank. “You raided my paper route money again!” Her thin hair clung to her cheeks in static wisps. She heaved the bank at her sister. It bounced off Sylvie’s thigh and fell and rolled, and the pedestal, meant to keep the coins inside, twisted loose and spun across the floor. A nickel and a penny twirled on the linoleum.

  Sylvie grabbed up the globe and tossed it back fast and hard, and Mavis raised a forearm just in time to shield her face.

  “Snakes in a cake, Sylvia Fletcher!”

  “I didn’t mean to. It slipped.”

  “Howard,” Merry called, “this one’s yours.”

  He stomped around the corner, all six feet of him. The fudge boiled on and the soft ball twirled down through the water. Howard yanked a chair away from the table, sat and waved for the girls to sit opposite.

  He pointed at Mavis. “You. You watch your mouth!” He pointed at Sylvie. “You. You are a hankering child.” He jabbed at the table with his index finger. “Ever since the crib.”

  June’s voice floated out from the bedroom at the far end of the hall: “Mavis? Sylvie?”

  Howard leaned across the table. “Now you’ve bothered your mother.” He looked at Merry. “They’ve bothered their mother.”

  “It’ll be all right.” She moved the pot off the burner.

  Howard softened, leaned back in his chair. “Put your little bank on the table.”

  Mavis did so. The globe wobbled, then settled on its side, steadied by a dent where the equator passed through Africa. From where Merry stood, Howard appeared to be looking directly at the two girls. She knew, though, that he’d have crossed his eyes, and to the girls it would be as if he saw each of them, but with the opposite eye. It was a way he’d had since they were small. He used to say, “I got my eyes on you, one each,” and they’d collapse in giggles.

  “She took your worldly goods,” he said now, tapping the globe. Neither girl laughed. Howard looked down, picked at the threads that feathered from a hole in his trousers. A square inch of his long johns, their waffled knit, showed in the opening. The angle of his jaw gave him an extra fold of chin, grizzled with seven-o’clock shadow. A wisp of hair far back from his forehead, what remained of his young-man’s pompadour, had fallen forward. His height was in his legs, and sitting on a kitchen chair he never did look like a six-foot man. In the next room Foster Hewitt’s voice sped to a shout. The crowd hollered. Howard shifted. “You got to figure this out. Together.” He was standing now. “Your aunt will referee.” He glanced in at the game before going along the hall to look in on June and ration out yet more Aspirin against her arthritis pain.

  Referee, I don’t think so. Merry waved the girls out of the kitchen. “I’ll need a pick-axe to chip this out. Come back when you’ve settled up and we’ll start this candy over.”

  The girls took turns shoving each other along the hallway.

  “Are you gonna give me back my money?”

  “I spent it.”

  “Jesus God!”

  “It isn’t like I was going to keep it forever.”

  Merry shook the wooden spoon at their backs. “Jug feathers. Shush!”

  Ultimately Mavis split her paper route in two, giving Sylvie the right to deliver half until she earned out her debt. The idea was that each would do her own loop and they’d finish in half the time, but in fact Mavis walked Sylvie’s loop with her, the two of them bundled in parkas, before going off to do her own alone. After the first few days they were walking the entire route together, helping each other with scarves and mitts. What was it about those two? Was Sylvie a forgivable sort of girl or was Mavis the sort who easily forgave? Or was it that a sister — that other, ever-empty space in Merry’s own life — was a vein each girl’s blood ran through on the way to its own heart?

  MERRY ROLLED SLOWLY out of the shop in the principal’s Dart. A gold Swinger 340 and he’d ponied up extra for a bumblebee stripe and four-on-the-floor. She went for a spin, a little bit town, a little bit highway, grass skirt swaying on the hula girl suctioned to the dash. Shifting took more muscle than it ought to, and she could feel the grind from third to fourth and hear it, a transmission just crying to be taken apart. She’d make sure her brother was well out of earshot when she spoke to Bert, or he’d swipe the job out from under her. Later though, about 4:30, Howard told her the principal was coaching baseball at the schoolyard and wouldn’t be by till late. At 5:00 he told Merry to head home, he’d tuck the keys on the visor for Bert. She took a last glance at the Dart, for now, and headed across the street and along toward the grey bungalow she’d owned since her nieces were in diapers, title transferred to her at the time of the divorce. In the kitchen she held the phone receiver to her chest a moment, letting the dial tone hum through her bones. Out the window she saw two jays poking their beaks into the pea patch. She took a deep breath and whistled it out slowly and tried not to think of the transmission job she might be giving up completely, and good luck to Siding next time he tried to take flight. She’d have to tell Howard to look into it. There was the business to think of, to say nothing of a girl mechanic’s reputation. Darn it, Sylvia Callaghan. She dialled Saskatoon. Her niece wouldn’t need her right away this minute, not necessarily.

  “I can get there later this week. We’ll go shopping for maternity blouses. That discount centre at The Bay. Or Simpsons, you can always get a good deal at Simpsons.”

  Silence.

  “Or if you’re thinking about, um. We can talk about what —”

  “I’m keeping it. Maternity smocks are not my biggest problem.”

  “Sorry, honey. Yes.” The darn jays were still in the pea patch. Merry itched to run out the door and across the yard to shoo them. “Are you planning to come home? Have the baby here?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “But where are you staying?”

  “Will you sing to me, Aunt Merry?” Sylvie’s voice was high and not at all steady. Her plea called back to a bedtime tradition from her childhood.

  “Can you hold on for just a moment, Sylvie
? I won’t be long, I just have to … I’ll be back in a jiffy.” Merry set the receiver on the counter, hurried out the door and down the steps and clapped her hands at the jays. One took off and the other stayed, cheeky, its head cocked just for her, she’d swear. “Yeah, it’s always you, isn’t it? You, you, you.” She had to stomp right to the edge of the garden before the bird finally took flight.

  Stop. Look now. Look that image in the eye: teenage Sylvie trembling in her cut-offs and T-shirt, framed in the bright rectangle of the office doorway at the garage, her back to the sunlight, her features a scribble on a shadow. The room smelled of carbon paper and empty wrappers from Howard’s daily chocolate bars, with only hints of the heady mix of gas and grease from the shop. Howard was off in Foster on a parts run.

  Sylvie, her voice wavering, said, “We need some help.”

  The voice on the transistor radio said, “Here’s a timeless favourite,” while Merry groped for the knob and twisted it to Off.

  “We need help.”

  Mavis ran in, pushed past her sister and pressed her hands on the desk, breathless. “Mom — she fell.” She wiped her nose with the hem of her T-shirt.

  Sylvie stepped in close beside Mavis. “The basement stairs.”

  “Why would she even —?” Mavis took a deep breath. “I think she might, she might —”

  Sylvie reached for her sister’s hand. “She isn’t breathing. Mom isn’t breathing anymore.” They didn’t look toward each other, they looked toward Merry.

  Oh, my girls, my girls. You’ve had a measure of longing stirred through every one of your liquid days from childhood on.

  BACK INSIDE, Merry lifted the receiver again. “I’m sorry, Sylvie, I needed to — never mind. Where were we?”

  “I was asking you to sing.”

  “You’ll find I’m no better a singer than I was back then.”

  “Please, Auntie.”

  When was the last time Sylvie had called her ‘Auntie’? Merry cleared her throat and obliged with a tuneless, meandering la-la-la, on and on, the way she used to do, a non-song, though sweet, until she heard a small laugh over the line.

  “As a singer, Auntie, you make a pretty good mechanic.”

  “Just so.” Sure. At times she’d even tried to see it that way — her job was her child and no need for lullabies. A thin argument. “Your turn, my girl. Let’s hear it.”

  “Tonight, maybe. Try singing myself to sleep.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, I can get away tomorrow. I’ll leave first thing in the morning. Here, hold the receiver to your chest now. I want you to feel this in your bones.”

  Naked Bodega

  THE SHEET THAT LAY draped over her head and torso was thinning, polyester and pilled. Underneath it Syl’s breath swirled in a sour microclimate.

  “What in blazes?” Aunt Merry had said last week when Syl invited her to the city for the fundraiser. What in fury and blazes did she think she would prove, competing in a beauty contest at twenty-nine?

  “I wouldn’t call it a contest so much as a pageant.” Syl’s voice reached for irony. “To showcase our stunning legs.”

  “Well, honey, you do have those.”

  “And I wouldn’t call it competing. I’m participating.”

  “And a way with words.”

  Now Syl’s lower limbs, along with those of six other good sports, were on display and chilly. Fourteen naked legs, seven pairs of high-heeled shoes. A giant truck tire, fresh from the factory and smelling of it, lay on its side in the function room at the community centre, and the women’s bare legs rested at a slant against the hard-edged knobs of its tread. Their upper bodies radiated out, flat on the floor, covered with mismatched sheets from their hips to the tops of their heads, a shrouding meant to ensure the judges would concentrate on the limbs in question, the whole of the limbs in question, and nothing but.

  They waited.

  Gams, Erik liked to say: “Your prize-worthy gams. Just one more reason I had to step in. Woo you.”

  Ten years earlier, after deserting her fiancé a day and a half short of the walk to the altar, Syl had decided within weeks that yes, she would marry Erik. “And I already have the outfit.” She reached into her closet, brought out the ivory wedding gown she’d spent so many hours stitching, and swirled its generous skirt.

  Erik pretended shock. “You can’t wear the dress you would’ve worn for Jack.”

  “Suppose I alter it.”

  “Cut it shorter, maybe. Show off those beauties.”

  She’d been the only bride whose knees Ripley United Church had ever seen.

  IN HER AWKWARD POSITION Syl felt an annoying stretch along her right hamstring. From her hips to her ankles she was goosebumps, from her waist up warm and itchy. When they’d tried out this arrangement last night at rehearsal, Marilyn had caught the heel of her shoe in a crevice between treads and sworn quietly, then laughed and said, “We’re doing this for the children. Sure. Okay.”

  Once you angled yourself into the right mood it was a rationalization that almost worked. Ask me what I wouldn’t do for my kids. When Adam was born, after Syl had cuddled and fed him, and the nurses had rolled his bassinet away so she could rest, she’d said to Erik, “All along there’s been this club called Parents, and we had no idea what a huge, important, staggering deal it is.” Three years later, there was Brycie. “Imagine,” she said to Erik. “There are people who don’t even know.”

  “Imagine.”

  SEVEN WOMEN BREATHED into their sheets, waiting for the eighth pair of legs to arrive. Janet had been slow to change into short-shorts, slow to slip into open-toed stilettos, slow in the bathroom. “It’s like I have to pee,” she’d said from inside the stall, “but nothing comes out.” She’d emerged with her purse tucked awkwardly under one arm. When she leaned at the sink to wash her hands, the purse fell, and makeup, hairbrush, tampons and pens clattered across the lino.

  “Damn zipper doesn’t work.”

  “I know.” Syl knelt to help her gather her things. “Purses these days. Let’s get a move on.”

  “I can’t.” Janet tugged her short-shorts down and sat on the toilet again, stall door hanging open. “I just can’t.”

  “You can, Janet. By now, we have to.”

  IN THE WHIRL of a freak snowstorm in mid-October Syl had slipped on an icy stretch of sidewalk down the block from GetAway Tours. A common FOOSH, the doctor called it: Fall On Out-Stretched Hand. There are falls and there are falls. Once that knife of pain dulls, a broken wrist is nothing more than inconvenience. Before returning to work left-handed she’d treated herself to a few days’ recuperation downstairs on the comfy red couch, her arm in its cast resting on a throw pillow. The best was History TV — easygoing, put-your-feet-up fare, and Syl did in fact prop her feet on the kidney-shaped footstool she’d found at Rose’s Auction and fitted with a slipcover. A program about the fifties showed footage of a legs-only beauty pageant. (Footage, said Erik when she told him about it.) Eight women lay on the floor (eight lay-dees, he said) like the spokes of a wheel, covered but for their naked legs, which rested on a circular ramp that made Syl think of the poster at work of Mount Fuji, its simple geometry. Eight dainty pairs of high-heeled shoes met at the summit.

  “What do you think?” she’d asked Erik that night after they’d tucked in the kids. “Would I make a fool of myself even suggesting it?”

  He was the one with his feet up now, as he studied the new remote control. He ran his free hand along her thigh. “You’d be going out on a limb. Or two.”

  “I’m asking a serious question.”

  “You can answer it better than me.” He pointed the remote and, with some concentration, progressed through three channels. “Look at that, we don’t even have to walk across the room.” He congratulated himself by raising his glass and knocking back what remained of his rum and coke.

  AFTER A DISPIRITING START, Syl had managed to work her way through every binder of the Accredited Travel Consultant Course from Wellspring
Correspondence. Now, with the kids into their school years, Brycie swaggering every morning in her forgivable way into the grade one room and Adam slipping quietly in among his grade three classmates, Syl was once again in that happy club of the fully employed. Back when she’d made her eleventh-hour decision not to marry Jack she told herself her decision had nothing to do with his slopey shoulders and his funny earlobe, and everything to do with a settling fear that his lack of drive gave her a ready excuse not to find her own. Drive. Well, she had made something of herself. But among the other moms from the Beamers Swim Club she was surrounded by gynecologists and wives of gynecologists and lawyers and wives of lawyers and the wife of a newly minted judge and — who knew? — possibly his mistress. To make herself valuable she’d joined the fundraising committee. She wore button earrings to meetings and made the effort to match them not to her blouse but to one of her dozens of scarves. Took care when speaking not to slip into vestigial small-town turns of phrase. Cleaned her nails meticulously, though she stopped short of polish, and she sometimes thought, resting her hands on her notebook, that the group could use a little, I don’t know, life. At the November meeting, and with no clear notion of how they might use the idea to raise cash, Syl described the pageant she’d seen on History TV. Chairwoman Leslie’s lips spread into a wide grin. “This is what comes of watching television during the day.” Her nails with their neutral polish tapped the table. “You’re not proposing a fundraising event in this vein?”

  Janet, more pale than usual, said, “I’m a swim mother, not Miss Swimsuit.”

  “Exactly,” said Carol. “We’re not body parts.”

  “No, no,” said Leslie, “It’ll be fabulous.”

  “Right on,” said Marilyn. “It’s the eighties. Why shouldn’t we have a little fun?”

  Typically the swim parents raised money by working bingos, moms and dads patrolling the aisles in a smoky hall, taking orders from impatient players: “Over here! Today, all right?” Work a bingo, go to bed with your nose plugged from cigarette smoke. Wake up the next morning and spit yellow in the sink. And the house takes fifty percent. Home from the hall one night, Syl leaned in to kiss her sleeping daughter and heard, “You smell.”