Alligator - Lisa Moore [82]
We were in school together, she said, patting the seat beside her on the couch.
You’re Colleen, right? She wiggled her fingers at Colleen. What do you think of my engagement ring?
Colleen decided instantly she wouldn’t be painting murals. Something had happened when she and Frank were having sex and she felt it and he felt it too because her eyes flew open and his eyes were open and he saw it. They both felt it, which, that’s why she took the money and also because it was a lot of money. She got up from the couch.
Where are you going? Fitzy asked.
Way the hell out of here, Colleen said.
ISOBEL
WAVES TRAVEL A long distance without effort. They curl because they cannot not curl. Because when a wave is punched in the gut it caves. Because a wave is all show and no substance. The curdling spew rushes ahead. Foam scribbling over the sand, a note to say the wave is over. Because the glare on the water is in Sanskrit. Because the sea smells like the sea and she’s got the dress wet already and it’s clinging to her shins. Because she believes in submitting and has made a minor religion of it. Because there’s a big fat red-haired man, pale as potato in a sunhat, charging through the water with an inflatable shark. Because the theatre is a cult and people give their whole lives to the cause, which is what exactly? Because perfume is looking good right now, making a living is looking good. Not having to worry about money is looking good. Because only women who have come and come and come and come or who wear thick silver bracelets or who have lost a lover or who have vision or who have lost everything or who know what limelight feels like could possibly understand her and there are none of those women left.
Because she gave up everything and came home to Newfoundland. Because she had nothing to give up in the first place. Because early on she fell in love with Chris, who led her astray. Chris Morgan, who took her cross-country skiing, and they found their way out of the wilderness with a compass. He’d found the compass in a junk shop and had to hit it with his axe to get the needle to waver. Chris, who had drawn their supper out of a hole in the ice and built them an igloo with a fire in the centre so all night long they kicked off the blankets and slept naked and were soaked with sweat, and who made love to her in every single way it is possible to make love and the roof collapsed. Blocks of snow fell on their heads.
Chris, who was ridiculous, vital, super-horny, athletic, a liar and a cheat, who had a photographic memory, who always knew what regime had fallen where and what their major export was and how it related to the spoonful of cereal she was about to put in her mouth, who was untamable, who had introduced her to tahini and Tarkovsky, who was vigilantly agnostic; it had required a vigilance because his natural inclination was to believe.
And Isobel couldn’t not think of him whenever she snapped the clunky silver bracelet onto her wrist, the bracelet from Mexico. They had taken an outdoor steam bath in the backyard of a minor politician they’d met while hitchhiking. The pool was cobblestones and fed by a natural hot spring and there were seven or eight of them. The steam rose and shredded when it met the night air and his naked thigh bumped against her with the hot bubbles and whir of water and she loved him. Or she loved something so huge it must have been him and later there was the bracelet on her pillow.
She had come home to Newfoundland because she had failed. She didn’t get the soap and there was Chris, my God, directing a soap opera.
The anticipation of the hurling mass of the next wave, which is cold and mounting triumphantly and about crotch high, is huge, and if this wave hits her she’s getting all the way in. Like the world exhaling. A hammering home of the truth. A refusal to be a wave any longer. The wave