Alligator - Lisa Moore [67]
They said about you on the radio, Frank, she said. They said about the hot dogs. A real entrepreneur, the guy said, standing out in the rain.
Then she whispered, Frank, don’t talk to those men upstairs. I’m warning you, Frank. Those men, you can’t reason. You’re a nice boy, well-mannered. I can say to you Frank with conviction. I have a bad feeling.
Frank watched her absent-mindedly picking the worms out of her underwear as she spoke.
MADELEINE
THEY WERE GOING to an awards dinner, a gala, in honour of Isobel.
I should call Andrew, said Madeleine. She feels a panic about her son, who works for Médicins Sans Frontières in Ethiopia. What if Andrew is in trouble? There will be nothing she can do.
She thinks of him digging in the garden when he was a small boy; the day she found all the snails in the pockets of his tiny jeans, globs of moving slime and crushed shell.
Now he performs surgeries in canvas tents all over Africa with only a naked light bulb hanging from a pole and the sounds of gunfire in the background.
Her daughter, Melissa, is in Geneva and married to a heroin addict with old money. Melissa, in tailored suits and sensible shoes, striding down sidewalks lined with pristine fountains and gargoyles. She sends jewellery made from volcanic rock and woven wraps that snap under the arms and zipper across the breasts like straitjackets, the height of European fashion. She skis in the Alps and sends pictures of herself buoyed up by white wings of spraying snow.
Just tell me, though, said Isobel. Is this too ancient Greece? She had the hanger with the gold toga under her chin.
I’d have to see it on, Madeleine said.
Isobel pulls a black sequined dress down over her hips. The dress left one shoulder bare. She snapped the fishnet stocking, at her knee and at her ankle, and stood with her back to the mirror looking over her shoulder.
That’s the dress as far as I’m concerned, said Madeleine. The director of Streetcar had bought Isobel the sequined dress. He had a raw-boned face and wild black eyes and Isobel might have liked him if he had not worked her so hard. He was tired of naturalistic theatre, he had shouted at them while they stood blinded in the stage lights.
Isobel Turner, he had screamed. Do I give a damn about Isobel Turner? They had been rehearsing for six hours in the heat. Isobel put her hand over her eyes in an effort to see him. There was a silence.
No, I don’t give a damn about Isobel Turner, he screamed. She had slept with him the night before and this outburst was disorienting.
Audiences aren’t paying to see Isobel Turner from Newfoundland put on a Southern accent. Haven’t you ever lost anything? he screamed at her.
It was true there was something she didn’t get about Stella.
Isobel would never have let them take Blanche away. Even if she did stand for the South and all that was corrupt and decaying. Isobel would have saved her sister.
She stood with her back to the mirror, looking over her shoulder at her bum.
I didn’t get the soap, Isobel said.
Lately, Madeleine listens. Or rather, she doesn’t speak as much. Part of it is that she’s too tired to talk. She’s got the phone pressed to her ear and the aluminum tree branches spread out on the floor. It’s August, but she came across Christmas trees on sale in a bin at Canadian Tire. Fifty extras in the shoot with the stallions and there’s the underwater shot. Five divers lined up and they know the tides and they have to get the horses out in the surf. But at night she stops thinking about the shoot. She is mesmerized by an aluminum tree.
She listens to Marty. They have conversations lately, in the evening, after his pregnant wife, Gerry-Ann, has gone to bed. They talk about his wife.
She’s what? Madeleine