If Sylvie Had Nine Lives Read online

  A wide shot again. Long legs and short, skinny legs and shapely. She recognized her own, but with no feeling of ownership, the way sometimes you see an old snapshot of yourself and for an instant you see just a person, an anyone. There they were, an anyone’s legs.

  She rolled the hem of her sweatpants to her knee and flashed a calf for Erik, who wasn’t looking. The station had cut to commercial and he inspected the remote as if he might discover a new function. “Are you getting a drink, babe? Can you get me one, too?” He’d parked his glasses on his forehead, nose pads digging in just above his eyebrows.

  “I wasn’t, in fact.” She reached for the footstool, pulled it close and tugged the slipcover into place. Before she could put her feet up, Erik’s clunky size elevens landed. There was that damn orange vinyl peeking out. “Cripes,” Syl said as she leaned forward, lifted his heels — not a simple business from this angle — and pulled hard at the fabric. She let his feet fall and slapped his sock foot. “This is what I keep telling you. It has to line up just so, or it may as well not even be there.”

  “Aw, babe. Come here.” Erik swivelled his head and his glasses dropped and settled at the tip of his nose. “You worry too much, Sylly.”

  Soon she’d feel a stitch in her neck, but for now she nestled under his arm. “Someone has to.”

  Our Lady of Starting Over

  SYLVIE WATCHED through her sister’s kitchen window as her teenage nephew lifted his bike onto a sheet of plywood propped on four stacks of tires. He climbed up after it, and the platform jiggled on its rubber pillars as he readied himself to ride down a do-it-yourself ramp and into the deep end of the swimming pool.

  “Your Chad’s about to break his neck,” Sylvie said to Mavis, just now home from her shift at the Co-op. She reached for her coffee mug and held it tight. “I know I’m just the never-married aunt, the family spinster, but.”

  “I haven’t heard that word in a while.”

  “Spinster? I’m trying it on. I like that it sounds chaste.”

  “So it’s chastity now?”

  “I could use some.”

  Mavis poured herself a coffee, uncapped the bottle of Bailey’s on the counter and poured a dose into her own mug, then Sylvie’s. “A belt for chastity.” She reached out to clink cups. “Chad’s fine. A typical afternoon’s entertainment.”

  “How can you bear to look?”

  “I don’t.”

  Sylvie did. She watched as he pushed off and sped down the ramp. Waterslap along his shins and full on his knees, his face. A huge and glorious splash, the far drops falling on the tin chairs and the pot plants beside the pool. The ripples settled and the view into the water cleared. Chad came up for air, dove deep again and began to maneuver the bike up the slope toward the shallow end. Sylvie’s breath came quick with the effort of watching him push through water. Such a leap. She wondered if Mavis had ever told him what happened to his Grandma Fletcher. He leaned the bike against the wall and hiked himself onto the pool surround. She went out to help him heave it onto the concrete.

  “Glad to see you’re alive.” Still, the way he’d let go and flown down that ramp, the thrill and pain of hitting the water hard and sure yet knowing it wouldn’t break him. She lifted a towel draped over a chair and handed it to him. He took it but didn’t use it, stood dripping in the sun, grinning; shook water beads from his hair onto his mother’s pot plants, shivering their leaves. Potted pot plants, the sort you could

  harvest and

  hang ten days or more in a box and then

  cure in a mason jar

  Tall, lush and lovely, layer over layer of hand-like fronds. Fat drops of water sat on their green fingers, trapping sunlight, turning it silver.

  “Say, Chad, I’m looking for a favour.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your mom says you need opportunities to use your week-old licence with an adult in the vehicle.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you ferry me over to your Uncle Geoff’s so I can look at this building of his?”

  “Lemme get some pants.” He went dripping into the house.

  Sure, she thought, barrel along back-country gravel with a stunt boy. How did he come to be old enough to drive? More sobering still was a reminder that often surfaced when she saw Mavis’s eldest: if she hadn’t had the abortion, her own child would be only a couple of years younger.

  Beside her lay the shining wet bicycle, the tilt of it leaving the rear wheel free of the ground. She spun the tire and watched the blur of the spokes and wondered just how much it would hurt to poke a finger down through them and stop the spin, and would the hot jolt be worth the pain?

  THE QUONSET BUILDING stood at the verge of Geoff’s abandoned farmyard. Sylvie took the heavy padlock in hand, slotted the key past built-up rust, coaxed until it sprang open, and slipped the lock free of the heavy chain that passed through the handles of the double sliding doors. The long end of the chain made a single loud clank as it hit the door. A sound that said take note, like the drumbeat at the beginning of her favourite Dylan tune.

  The best thing about Sylvie’s apartment in Saskatoon was that the concertmaster for the symphony lived next door. All sorts of music would float through their shared wall, but most often it would be one of three types: classical recordings; or the concertmaster herself, practising; or Dylan tunes. Sylvie recognized most of the Dylan. Of the classical she was familiar with little but happy to listen, even to the practising — the repeats, the pauses, the occasional soft curse. She admired the concertmaster for the effort she invested, her perseverance through the difficult parts. Sylvie’s old stereo from RadioShack was toast, and until she could replace it with something up-market she was doing without. She’d moved her bed so the headboard was against the common wall. Some days, even if Mary Tyler Moore was about to come on, or if she’d just opened Maclean’s, when she heard music she’d go to her bed and let the sound float her weightless. Occasionally she’d unzip her jeans and slide in a hand and move to the melody while she imagined a man: sometimes a former boyfriend; sometimes even her old friend Erik, who lived on an acreage near Ripley not twenty minutes from Mavis; sometimes — though less and less often — Barry. Less and less often Barry because until recently she’d been sleeping with him for real.

  At times, listening as the hesitations of practice built into smooth passages, she imagined the touch of the concertmaster. She pictured her fingers on the frets. If Sylvie could reach through the wall she would massage the tips of those fingers. Yet another new beginning, exploring a woman. After all, she knew the map.

  She and the concertmaster had a shared love for Highway 61 Revisited. What made it through to Sylvie was faint, and she never could make out the single drumbeat at the beginning of “Like a Rolling Stone,” but memory delivered it, sharp like a shot. Get ready, it said. Swing out of the holding pattern. Find a different job in a different place, and no Barry to stand in her office doorway radiating expectation. Better yet, invent a job. Hence this trip home to Ripley, this scouting of a padlocked building that belonged to her brother-in-law’s brother. Maybe she would convince herself.

  She pulled the chain free of the handles and let it slither into a coil on the ground in front of the Quonset. Chad helped her slide one of the doors open, lean and push, lean and push. The place smelled of old dust and still air. Inside she made out irregular shapes, the jumble of decades. Chad’s hand searched the wall for a switch. A row of incandescent bulbs, unshaded and spaced at long intervals, lit up. The accumulation of junk cast new shadows now.

  “Wow. I don’t suppose, Chad, that you and your buddies are looking for summer work? Help clean this out.”

  “What’s the pay?”

  “I’ll have to see. It depends whether your uncle Geoff will back me.”

  “Maybe, sure. D’you need anything else?”

  “Don’t go far.” She handed back his headphones, which she’d confiscated in the car once she saw he planned to wear them while he drove. He
pressed play on his Walkman and waded through wild oats in the direction of the dugout. He had his dad’s wide shoulders. His finely shaped nose was patterned after Mavis’s, as were his deep-set eyes, both traits that Sylvie shared with her sister. Never a child in her own life, not yet; the most she might see of herself in the next generation would be that shape of nose, the set of those eyes in Chad, and the long, slim line of leg she’d noticed in Mavis’s daughter Kayla.

  The light from the doorway had a short reach, and the naked bulbs strung from the ceiling were weak. Of the three side-by-side panes that should have constituted a window over the workbench a few yards in, one had been replaced with plywood and one with a piece of tin. The third was encrusted, the colour of parchment, yielding only a soft glow that burnished the scatter of wrenches, nails, bird droppings and drill bits on the bench. She tried to imagine the window replaced, and the flat expanse of a well-lit cutting table below it. Come on, what are you afraid of? Fabric? Measuring tape? Scissors?

  MAVIS HAD HELPED Sylvie unpack the car after the four-hour drive from Saskatoon. “Let’s see these, then. The — what did you call them?”

  “Prototypes.”

  Sylvie dragged her giant vinyl suitcase to the living room and opened it on the floor. “You have to like these.” Not only did her sister have to like them, she had to think they would fly off the shelves, because it was Mavis’s job to convince her husband’s brother Geoff to put his unused building and some several thousand dollars at Sylvie’s disposal.

  “What I’m asking for — the figure isn’t so high,” Sylvie said. “Not compared to the numbers when he was farming.”

  “Still. A lot of dough.”

  “Not even the price of a grain truck.” Well, more, but this was the placeholder Sylvie had conjured to make the number less frightening.

  “I’m working on him.”

  Sylvie would need more than money, more than practical, stylish designs and more than her sister’s faith. At business-readiness seminars she’d seen the bright world of commerce projected through a sequence of overhead transparencies, the screen lit time after time with the message that crucial to her future success would be

  market reach

  One of the perks at the community college where she ran the office was the invitation to drop in for free to any evening class that piqued her interest. She’d soldiered through four business seminars, bulleting notes in her scribbler, her grip on the pen sometimes firm, sometimes quivering with anxiety.

  A couple of nights, stepping quietly as if she had to sneak past herself, she’d turned left instead of right and found a chair in the front row of Classics for Canucks. This was a more soothing place to be, with a less intimidating instructor. Sheilah had a tiny stud in her nose, waist-length grey hair and an eye for a designer find at the thrift store. She rested her bum on the table at the front of the room and talked about Sophocles. In her old job at the university library, Sylvie had occasionally picked up a classics journal and taken it to lunch, dropping sandwich crumbs on the ancient Greeks with their heroes and myths and their dramas that turned on the idea of an otherwise smart person getting the crucial thing wrong — what Sheilah called Error, straightening the hem of her Chanel-cut jacket. A capital E. Something the character has to get through so as to move on. The business prep seminars told Sylvie there was no room for Error in the first place.

  UNZIPPING ONE OF THE prototype handbags she’d pulled from Sylvie’s giant suitcase, Mavis, who hadn’t even been to a single seminar, had said, “We need to get you on Oprah.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “I’m serious. That woman from South Dakota selling the high-waisted pantyhose that snap onto your bra — she made it to Oprah.”

  “I tried those pantyhose. They don’t breathe.”

  “So why not you, Sylvie, with something beautiful and practical?” She picked up the current TV Guide with its cover shot of an impossibly sexy Winfrey draped in gauze and perched on a hill of greenbacks. She tossed the magazine so it fell on the open suitcase lid and slid to the lip, Oprah-side up.

  “Right. Call Chicago for me.”

  WATER HAD LEAKED in here and there, and Sylvie caught a whiff of damp earth that lifted her out of the Quonset, landing her elsewhere and else-when. She’d once snuck into the skating rink with Erik, two kids in a prairie spring taking turns holding the loose door out at the bottom just far enough to make a triangle of space to crawl through. Once inside, kneeling in the mud the melted ice had left behind, they’d performed the first-ever kiss for both of them. Twelve years old, a practice kiss between friends so they wouldn’t be smooch virgins when it came to the real thing. The musty summertime rink was a cave of escape from the house, her mother having one of her low months, Sylvie and Mavis apologetic about every creak of the floor, every little bicker between them, each clatter of knife against sink. “Tongues too,” Sylvie said to Erik, and so they explored. Thrills coursed through from her lips to her kneeling knees. And then they made a promise: that was that. They never needed to kiss each other again. Why? she thought now, breathing the smell of earth and dampness. Such a cautious beginning, and she’d turned into quite the adventurer in the years since, and what was wrong with that? She could tell you what was wrong with that: touring from one mattress to the next certainly could distract a person from noticing that the only thing changing in her life was her lover.

  A few more steps into the shed, and she smelled oil from a row of old cans. Another whiff of memory — her dad’s hands, her aunt Merry’s hands, the honest waft from their overalls when either of them gave Sylvie a bear hug at the end of their day at the garage. And another scent memory, of the man she’d almost married. He’d spent the afternoon at his uncle’s acreage puttering with the lawn tractor, and he was about to shower. “No,” she’d said. “It’s working-man’s cologne.” But if she wanted to put six or eight people in here and have them operate sewing machines hours at a time, she’d have to rid the place of its odours.

  A few steps more and she caught the reek of old rubber from a leaning stack of tires. She’d crafted her samples entirely of cloth but hoped that with a generous backer she’d manage leather trim. Until then, braided rubber shoulder straps?

  It was hard to see the consumer going for that, unless — well, she’d learned such things depended on

  sexy marketing

  She sits on Oprah’s talk-show couch, angled toward Our Lady of Starting Over. “I was standing in a shed on the prairie feeling daunted. Having so little money, I asked myself — let me rephrase: I asked the Universe, How will I manage? And I saw that stack of tires, and the Universe answered: Recycle, Sylvie. So I consider this business to be, in some small way, helping to save the Earth.”

  Applause. The Universe strikes a chord.

  Sylvie heard the wing-beat of a frantic sparrow high under the galvanized arc of ceiling. It fluttered into light and then shadow. I can’t help you, little bird. She felt a shrinking inside herself. Parts of her story fell short of Oprah friendly. All those years ago, tangled half-naked on the couch with her roommate’s fiancé, two bottles of Blue on the coffee table open and untouched. Dave had known full well when he called that she was alone, and Sylvie knew he knew, and still she hadn’t declined when he said he could be there with beers within minutes. The decrepit couch mind you — bad springs, loose threads and scratchy upholstery; between the two of them they hadn’t mustered the etiquette to make for the bedroom. And in walked Sylvie’s best friend.

  “What the hell?” Will kept his voice low and quiet. He raised a hand and pulled at a tangle of his curly hair as if pulling would undo things.

  “Relax, hippie boy,” Dave said. He zipped up and walked out the door and shambled down the stairs with his shirt still open. She didn’t even like him, never had.

  “But don’t you think —” Sylvie said once she’d zipped her own zipper and buttoned her blouse with shaky fingers and both she and Will had calmed a little. “Don’t
you think Lisa should know what this guy’s capable of?”

  “Do I hear you right?”

  She burned with shame. But she wanted. More touch more thrill more people paying attention more of what she couldn’t even name.

  Will walked out of her suite and down the outside staircase leaving the door open. Out of her life. She never climbed past her defences to ask him back into it.

  How did people fill the void?

  Sheilah, at the front of the Classics class, long grey hair tucked behind her shoulders, said, “Look.” She reached into an insulated black bag on the table, then held out her cupped hand, palm up. “Sophocles talked about desire as pleasure and pain intermingled. A ferocious bite, and at the same time a hot melting.” Sheilah lowered her hand and the class saw that she cradled an ice cube.

  THE FIRST KEY to a successful venture is to

  find a void in the marketplace

  Easy. No one made a decent bag. Purses, shoulder bags, book bags, clutches. The deep end of Sylvie’s closet was stacked with her rejects, some paid for, some not, some she hadn’t even granted a day’s use to.

  Still. The first key implied a second key. Every one of those workshop leaders with their laser pointers had put up a transparency that said

  What’s your hook?

  See above. The rejects piled in her closet had too few pockets or too many, pockets which at any rate were the wrong sizes and in the wrong places. Zippers that failed. Zippers that opened too far or not far enough. Zippers you had to clamp in your teeth at one end if you needed to close the thing single handed because of the sloppy Fudgsicle in your other hand. Had any one of those folks responsible for the design of the purses for sale from Eaton’s to Saan Stores to wobbling tables at summer craft markets ever tried to use one? Had they ever looked for a Kleenex to stop a nosebleed with one hand still on the steering wheel, or suffered a sudden tickle in the gullet when their niece’s Christmas concert was about to start, or searched through four likely pockets in search of a pen when one pen-likely pocket would do?