Alligator - Lisa Moore [68]
She’s thirty-five and she’s pregnant.
Are you having a good time, Marty?
She falls asleep in her soup, Marty said. The assembly instructions were in eight different languages.
Another child, Marty, Madeleine said. She fit the central pole into the stand; it was a sizable tree. They have talked about the baby a hundred times. Marty says bringing a baby into the world is a show of faith that she, Madeleine, is too cynical to understand.
Am I crazy or what? Marty said. She held a big silver branch before her face and shut one eye. It was still a big silver branch.
The crazy things we do, she said. She put the branch down on the carpet where the diagram told her to.
I’ve got four white stallions in the ocean later this month, Madeleine grunted. A whole crew in scuba gear. She inserted a final branch and gave the red bulb on its tip a little twist and the whole silver tree glowed hotly, infrared.
What are you doing? he said.
I’m trying out my new Christmas tree, she said.
In the middle of August?
It was on sale.
She picks up clothes while he talks, she sorts the mail. She smokes near an open window. She confesses to putting a fist through a wall, he confesses the same.
I miss you, he said. The tree is a blinking tree. The thing about a Christmas tree is to tart it up. Feathery red bursts of light tremble on the wall every twenty seconds.
She knew immediately how she felt about the tree; she hated the tree.
It was as though she had unleashed all of her loneliness. Her loneliness had been imprisoned in a tree, which happens all the time; and she had been forced by some evil spell to walk up and down the aisles of Canadian Tire, forgetting why she was there (clothespins), until she found the tree. When she got it home, the tree leapt out of the box, screaming absurd loneliness in eight different languages. A burning bush of shame, how old she is and weak-feeling lately and the film is lost and how profoundly alone with a ball and chain of a film around her neck.
Don’t make me tell you what I paid for this tree, she said.
I miss you, he said.
You miss me, that’s nice, she said. She calls him from the bath and is self-conscious about splashes, a bath seems too sexy for talking to your ex-husband, but then she doesn’t care; what is too sexy? And she splashes all she wants.
She listens to Marty while she does the dishes; she loves having her wrists immersed in hot water; domesticity peeling away her daytime demeanour.
She likes being nobody in the late afternoon. She wipes the counter thinking about the cigarette she’s been waiting for and listening to Marty who, it dawns on her, is angling to come over. Could he possibly want to have sex with her?
He does; he’s angling for a languid tussle, something rich and familiar and longed-for with every fibre of his being.
There is no need to question the rightness of the tree. She wanted some stone stupid objects in her life that are irrevocably themselves. She stopped short of a tree that rotates and that was in the same sale bin for the same price and she has no regrets about this.
What she regrets, occasionally, is leaving Marty.
Occasionally, it’s as though she’s been struck in the forehead with a rubber mallet and she is overwhelmed with a feeling of regret. How much she loved Marty and what would have happened if she kept on loving him?
Just as quickly, she’s glad. She could not have stood it; always having to answer for herself, always making allowances.
She remembers one bad-ass night of drinking during a festival in New Mexico, after the divorce, when a security guard shone a flashlight at her naked bum while she ran across the lawn to the hotel lobby in this little towel, a hand towel for God’s sake, held over her crotch and went to bed with no one, absolutely no one, closed the door, full of giggles, on Bob Warren, who knocked with one knuckle and leaned heavily on the door, and waited. She heard the clunk of his forehead on the door: the one-knuckle knock again. She had her hand on the knob deciding, a light summery sweat, the chlorine and nighttime