Lizards: Short Story Read online

  When Nicky was born, Emma’s father stood at the window of the hospital nursery and loudly compared his caesarean-section granddaughter to the brown, trammelled-looking birth-canal babies. Nicky was a plum among prunes, he said. Nicky was a Christmas doll among hernias.

  “We are all hernias, more or less,” Emma’s mother said in her sardonic way, which had a mollifying effect on the annoyed-looking relatives of the other babies.

  Once Emma and Nicky were back at home, he often dropped by in the afternoons, sometimes with Emma’s mother, usually not. If Emma had a cat to groom, he minded Nicky. He made tea for Emma’s clients and sold them life insurance. One day he answered the door and it was the red-haired guy.

  “Is that maniac your husband?” the guy asked Emma.

  “I thought you’d moved,” she said quietly. Her father had gone back to playing with Nicky.

  “I was in the neighbourhood,” he said. “So,” he said, “I guess you’re not up for any action.”

  She smiled. “No.”

  “Some other time,” he said.

  She started shutting the door. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  It wasn’t guilt, it wasn’t tiredness, it wasn’t worry that her father was listening. It was no interest. Since Nicky’s birth she’d had zero sex drive. Which was natural, so her baby book said. Natural and temporary. “It’ll come back,” she told Gerry.

  “Sure it will,” Gerry said enthusiastically, although he didn’t seem very disappointed that it was gone. Like Emma, he was all wrapped up in Nicky. They lay her on a blanket on the floor and knelt over her and kissed and nibbled at her like two dogs feeding from the same bowl.

  Nicky preferred the floor to her crib. If they put her on the floor and patted her bottom, she stopped crying. Emma’s father had discovered this. He was constantly trying things out on her to test her reactions and to nurture her perceptions. He carried her around the apartment and touched her hand to the walls and curtains and windows. He opened jars for her to smell. He warbled songs in what he claimed was Ojibwa, holding her foot to his throat so that she might pick up the vibration. One of the songs was apparently about how the toes of a baby’s feet are like pebbles. After Nicky died, Emma couldn’t stop thinking of her toes like pebbles. She raved that she wanted Nicky’s foot, she should have kept her foot and stuffed it, and then she would at least have her foot.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of something along those lines,” her father said. “A couple of months ago I read about a taxidermist in Yugoslavia who preserved his deceased son and claimed it was a great comfort.”

  He was stretched out beside her on her bed. Emma spent all day in bed, and her father and mother arrived at noon with lunch and Audubon field guides and photography magazines that had torn-out pages (where there were pictures of babies, Emma suspected) and editions of the American Journal of Proctology, which her father subscribed to for its dazzling full-colour photos of the colon, photos that if you didn’t know what you were looking at you’d think were of outer space.

  Her mother straightened the apartment and returned calls on the answering machine. Her father turned the pages. Emma didn’t know how he knew that looking at pictures was the only comfort, but it was. After her parents left, she slept until Gerry came home from work. In front of the television he wolfed down most of a family-sized bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. She lay on the couch and ate some of the french fries.

  One night, during a commercial, he said, “I was thinking today about when you walked off the end of the dock.”

  When she was ten or eleven years old, before she could swim, she walked off the end of a dock because she was attracted by the shimmering water. She sat at the bottom of the lake and waited to be saved. It was a story her father enjoyed telling.

  She looked at Gerry. “Oh, yeah?”

  “I was just thinking about it.”

  He told her he didn’t blame her. He didn’t blame Ed, although she did.

  5

  A woman in Argentina puts her fifteen-month-old son on the potty and leaves the room. A toilet falls through the floor of a passing airplane, crashes through the roof of the house and lands on the child, killing him. “Tot Terminated by Toilet,” the headline says.

  “Are you through with this?” Emma asks, holding up the paper.

  Marion doesn’t look. She is picking up live mice by their tails and tossing them from their cage into a box for a customer who owns a python. He’ll be in soon, the python wrapped around his shoulders. “Is that the one with the Siamese twins on the cover?” she asks.

  Emma closes the paper. “Yep.”

  “Well, I was thinking of writing to one fella in there,” Marion says. “Sounds up my alley, except that he wants long legs.”

  Ever since she stopped seeing Craig, Marion has been buying the tabloids for the personal ads. She confessed to Emma that last month she got up the nerve to write to a guy who described himself as a college-educated homebody and an animal lover. He wrote her back, on Ohio State Prison stationery, saying that he’d received forty letters and he’d need two pictures of her in the nude, a front shot and a back shot, so that he could narrow the field.

  “But go ahead,” she says to Emma. “Take it if you want. There’s an article about crib death. About how classical music prevents it.” She glances at Emma. “Hogwash, though, I’m sure.”

  “I played classical music for Nicky,” Emma says, tearing off the page with the toilet article. She folds the page and puts it in her purse. “My father made a tape.”

  “Well, there you go,” Marion says compassionately. She believes that Nicky died of infant death syndrome. When Emma and Gerry moved out here, they agreed that that would be the story.

  “Mozart, Haydn, Brahms,” Emma says. “All soft stuff.”

  Marion closes the cage and carries the box to the counter, where Emma is sitting on one of the stools. It’s a wooden box with thin gaps between the slats. A mouse must be hanging on the side. A pair of feet, four toes each foot, emerge from one of the gaps and grip the outside of the box. Emma runs her finger along the claws, which are milky and curled like miniature cat claws. “I wonder if they know,” she says.

  “Oh, Lord,” Marion says, grimacing. The two of them have had the conversation, several times, about the obscenity of the food chain. They agree on these things. They agree that dogs laugh but cats don’t. Fish feel the hook. They agree that there’s an argument to be made for lizards—the ones with break-away tails that grow back—as representing the highest order of life.

  It’s Hot Rod Reynolds, the male stripper, on the phone. “Jay Reynolds” is the name he gives, but when he says he got her number from Hal, the manager of the Bear Pit, it rings a bell and Emma says, “Not Hot Rod,” and he says that’s right.

  “You’re kidding.” She laughs. She’s remembering his acne and the woman shrieking to be wrapped in his cape.

  “So you caught my act,” he says.

  “Are you calling from Miami?” she kids.

  “So, what d’you think?”

  “About what?”

  “My act?”

  She takes a breath. “Why are you calling?” she asks. She suddenly has the sick feeling that Hal, a man she hardly knows, knows she sleeps around and has recommended her for a good time. She zeroes in on the guy who wears the hard hat as the guy who talked.

  But Hot Rod says, “I’ve got a dog here looks half dead.” He says he’s been staying at the motel behind the Bear Pit, checking out the trout fishing, and there’s this stray mutt he’s been feeding and letting sleep in his room. He phoned the vet, but nobody was there. Hal said that she was a sort of vet.

  “What’s the matter with it?” she asks.

  “It’s foaming at the mouth. Panting like crazy. Hal thinks it’s heat stroke.”

  She agrees. She tells him to put the dog in the bathtub and to run cold water over it. Half an hour later he phones back to say that the dog seems a lot better and to ask if he owes
her anything. “Forget it,” she says. But the next day he turns up at her house with a fish that he has gutted and wrapped in newspaper.

  “If you don’t want it, your animals might,” he says.

  She is struck by his awful teeth. “Thanks,” she says.

  “Emma Trevor, cat groomer,” he says, reading the calligraphic door sign that her father made for her. He looks off to one side as if for no other reason than to present her with his profile. His hair is slicked back. His nose is upturned. His skin is almost clear—from being out in the sun, she figures. He is wearing tight blue jeans and an orange tank top and holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. His teeth and unreasonable vanity she finds touching. As she expects a client any minute, she doesn’t invite him in. “Come back in an hour,” she says.

  These days she takes precautions. Condoms. A warning that if Gerry finds out he’ll blow the guy’s balls off. “With this,” she says, showing the gun. The gun was Gerry’s father’s, it isn’t loaded, and Gerry wants to get rid of it, but Emma keeps it beside the bed, to scare off intruders, Gerry believes, and he’s half right. If Emma feels guilt over other men it’s when she tells this lie about Gerry, who is so gentle he not only won’t kill the ants in their kitchen, he dots the counter with honey to feed them.

  But the warning works. She can see that the guys are scared, although never scared off. Hot Rod asks if he can hold it, and when she hands it to him he dances around the room, gripping it in both hands, arms straight, and getting hard so fast she suggests he use a gun in his act.

  He frowns, considering. “Too obvious,” he says.

  He’s a noisy lover. He groans and makes weird yelping noises and thumps the wall with his fist. Which is why they don’t hear the car pull into the drive or the front door opening. Gerry is right in the bedroom before they realize he’s home.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hot Rod says.

  Gerry bows his head. “Sorry,” he murmurs and leaves the room.

  Hot Rod lunges for the gun, rolls out of bed, throws open the window and tosses the gun into the neighbour’s yard.

  She accompanies Hot Rod to the door because she wants to retrieve the gun. TheTV is on. As they pass through the kitchen she looks into the living room and sees the back of Gerry’s head and his hand reaching toward a bowl on the end table.

  “Will he come after me?” Hot Rod asks when they are outside. His tank top is on inside-out. His hair is shooting off in all directions. He looks goofy and very young, and she knows that anything she says he will believe.

  “Probably not,” she says. “Not if you keep your mouth shut.”

  He bites his lip.

  “If I were you, though, I’d get out of town.” She says it to deliver her line, to sound like the sheriff. She doesn’t care if he leaves or not. Out here in the driveway, with the asphalt scalding her feet and the gun glinting in Mrs. Gaitskill’s rose bush, the possibilities of what might happen next seem endless and out of her hands.

  “I was thinking of leaving tomorrow anyway,” Hot Rod says.

  She climbs over the split-rail fence and plucks the gun from the bush. If Mrs. Gaitskill has seen her, she has no idea what she’ll say. She puts the gun on top of the fridge, out of sight, and then goes into the living room and sits on the couch. Gerry scoops a handful of potato chips from the bowl.

  “God speaks to us in silence,” the man on theTV says. He strikes her as a man who would either love you or beat you to death. Gerry seems arrested by this man. The notion that she has shocked Gerry into sudden religious fanaticism is preferable to what she is certain he’s thinking.

  “I’m sorry you walked in on that,” she says.

  Gerry switches off theTV and slowly turns his head. She sees his blue eye and then his gold eye and the redness around them that would appear to be from crying but isn’t. She imagines Hot Rod taking credit for the pain and incredulity that have been in Gerry’s eyes for five years, and now she is glad that he is leaving town.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” Gerry says quietly. “Except—” He glances at the blankTV screen. “Except that I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t,” she murmurs.

  “I know I’m a fat slob,” he says.

  “God, Gerry—”

  “It’s just that I’d prefer it if you did it somewhere else.”

  She looks down at her hands, and there is Hot Rod’s semen, dried and flaky on her palm.

  “I’m not blaming you,” he says.

  She can feel the pressure building behind her eyes.

  “Listen,” Gerry says. “Whatever it takes.”

  That’s it. That’s what she knew he was thinking. She begins to cry. “This is not consolation!” she wants to shout. She has it in her to show him the semen on her hand and shout, “This is recovery! Do you want the truth? This is who I am!”

  But she loves him. That is also the truth.

  She cries without a sound. Presently she stands up and says, “I’ll start supper.”

  “Okay,” Gerry says. He turns theTV back on.

  She sways a little. It’s a sweltering day, she is burning up. If a budgie lands on a hot stove, its feet melt. There are a million truths. She understands that she has no idea which ones matter.

  She is light-headed because she is pregnant. But she doesn’t know that yet.

  If you enjoyed “Lizards” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.

  E-book: 9781443402484

  Print: 9780006475231

  About the Author

  BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

  Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

  Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.

  Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

  Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

  Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel, Helpless, was published by HarperCollins in 2007.

  She lives in Toronto.

  Also by Barbara Gowdy

  THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY

  FALLING ANGELS

  MISTER SANDMAN

  THE WHITE BONE

  THE ROMANTIC

  HELPLESS
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  Copyright

  “Lizards” © 1992 by Barbara Gowdy.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  This short story was originally published in We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in print form in 2001, and in an ePub edition in 2011.

  Original epub edition (in We So Seldom Look on Love) April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4.

  This ePub edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-42187-4.

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