Colours in Her Hands, page 5
Bruno wrote home / homeless.
Tandi began looking around and scooping her arms toward her.
Val scooped too, both women gathering nothing — but nothing was all they had. A desperate but necessary gesture.
Mathieu had begun stomping a circle around himself. Tandi’s arms stretched ever farther, her grasping more erratic, until the fingers of one hand scraped across Mathieu’s arm and he wheeled around as if to defend his territory, albeit no larger than his feet.
They sensed and reacted to each other, each twist, each leap, each crouch, each roll across the floor shaping a sequence of movement that might become a dance.
* * *
The sewing machine whirred as Iris folded fuchsia bias tape around piping cord with one hand. With the other, she kept the silk bias tape aligned with the edge of grey linen she was feeding under the bite of the needle.
Her friend Jenny sat on a high stool, twisting from side to side. She was waiting for Iris to finish so they could head uptown for a bite and to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Jenny had read the novel. Iris hadn’t but she liked the title.
“I can’t even think about sleeveless in the winter!” Jenny raised her voice over the machine. “Just watching you work on that dress is making me shiver!”
Iris stopped sewing to shake a curl out of the bias tape that trailed onto the floor. “The client isn’t going to wear the dress to go skiing.” She reached behind the machine to examine what she’d sewn. A thin gleam of deep pink against the weave of grey linen. She pressed her foot on the pedal again.
The friends had known each other since college where Iris studied fashion and Jenny graphic design. Jenny worked at a small advertising firm now. Her parents had paid for her condo and she had an on-again, off-again lawyer boyfriend. Iris sometimes wondered if Jenny’s life might have been too easy and that was why her ambition didn’t stretch farther. She had a good eye, a sense of composition, and could draw. At college she’d always told Iris which of her fashion designs were the best, and those were the ones that got the highest marks. Jenny could easily have put together a portfolio and applied to a fine arts program, but she had an uncle who was an artist and she didn’t want that uncertain boho kind of life.
She’d abandoned the stool and was pacing around the studio now. In one corner was a bamboo screen where clients could change, next to it a coat stand and a three-way mirror. There were two large tables for sewing and cutting, another table topped with a sleeve ironing board on sturdy wooden feet, a wall unit of fashion textbooks and binders filled with drawings and clippings, shelves of fabric samples, bins filled with interfacing and lining, skeins of waxed silk thread pinned to a corkboard, fabric scissors hanging from hooks on the wall, a cabinet of many tiny drawers filled with spools of thread, zippers, and other notions.
Jenny picked up one of the fabric hams that were used for pressing curved seams open, hefted it like a football, and mimed throwing it.
Iris, who caught the movement, stopped sewing. “The more you distract me, the longer this will take.”
Jenny made a deferential show of returning the plaid ham to the ironing table. She approached the four headless cloth dummies and straightened the mock-up shell for a dress that one wore.
During another lull in the noise of the machine she asked, “How’s your little friend, the one who does embroidery?”
“Hardly little,” Iris murmured as she pressed the pedal again. Not in size nor how she used a needle.
“What did you say?”
Iris stopped. “She’s working on . . . I don’t know how to describe it. The last piece she did looks like blue and green cucumbers on acid. Or maybe they’re giant rain worms that got poisoned. I don’t know where she gets her ideas. Her stuff is wild.”
“So you keep telling me. It’d be nice if I could see something she’s done.”
“I told you. She won’t let anything out of her apartment. She’s territorial about what she makes. It’s hers and that’s that.”
“But you bring her the thread she’s using, right?”
“Doesn’t matter. She assumes that’s what I do. She’s not big on thank yous.”
Jenny sucked her teeth with resonance worthy of her Bajan grandmother. “Didn’t anyone teach her how to share?”
Iris smoothed the next length of silk tape around the piping cord and pressed the pedal again. That was the kind of thing you would say about a child. Though she understood what Jenny meant. Trying to reason with Mina could be frustrating.
Jenny had stopped at the cutting table where Iris had laid strips of different colours across a length of ochre pea-spotted silk. “You know what I’ve noticed?” Jenny shouted over the noise of the machine. “Your colours have gotten more interesting since you’ve known her.”
Iris heard but didn’t answer. She’d studied design and colour theory. She had skills and expertise. What was Jenny implying? Although . . . she had sometimes wondered if Mina’s very ignorance of colour theory and psychology was the secret. The way she paired and mixed colours was unique and unpredictable.
Behind her now, Jenny ran her fingers up Iris’s nape through her hair. “This is good. You should do it again.”
Usually Iris had her hair cut in a bob, but this time she’d had it cut very short up the back, longer on the sides and permed. Loose curls twirled in soft ringlets to her cheeks. “You like it?”
“It suits you. Your face is thin. Curls fill it out.”
“Curls cost, let me tell you.”
Jenny puffed out air. “You can’t begin to compare to what I have to spend.” She circled her arm high in the air around her weave.
“And my face isn’t thin. It’s perfectly normal.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep your freckles on.”
Iris stepped on the pedal again. She knew how to see her face and body critically. She had to. A couturière was a living, 3-d model for her work. The proof that she knew how to dress a body to advantage.
She reached the end of the seam and snipped the threads. With the whole dress on her lap, she ran the piping she’d sewn through her fingers. Touch could feel imperfections the eye couldn’t see. The seam was smooth and even. Deep pink silk and grey linen: a good choice.
“That’s it for today.” She got up from the machine and lay the dress on the ironing board.
“About time,” Jenny said, though she was the one who’d suggested coming to the studio to wait for Iris. She lifted her duvet coat off the stand, zipped it, and pulled up the enormous hood. “Look at me.” She posed before a mirror. “I’m a walking sleeping bag.”
Iris took longer, winding herself in layers. A snug cloche hat that bundled her new curls close to her cheeks, a wool cardigan over the cashmere pull she already wore, a pashmina scarf. Over that, the wide- shouldered coat she’d designed to match the 1950s glass buttons she’d cut off a thrift-store find.
She held the door open for Jenny, who flounced out as only she could inside a sleeping bag and in heavy heels.
* * *
Tuesday evenings Gabriela worked late at the clinic and Bruno was usually alone at home. He sat on the sofa with a heap of laundry still warm from the dryer. The Tragically Hip played from the stereo in the dining room. His hands moved mechanically, folding T-shirts and matching socks, turning them into flat oblongs the way his mother had. He’d never thought that the way he made sock packages was unusual, but over the years different girlfriends had commented on his orderly Teutonic habits. He had no idea if all Austrians or only his mother folded socks like this. People were so ready to generalize.
He’d only been to Austria once, with his parents when he was seven. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles had examined him from head to toe, pinched his cheeks, shouted at him to eat more, grasped him to their full bosoms. The relationship they so boisterously claimed made him feel strange and shy. His cousins were either much older or much younger. There was no one to play with. He got lost in his uncle’s enormous house with its marble floors and broad echoing hallways. His grandparents lived in one corner, his uncle, aunt, and cousins in another. The largest part of the house were the workshops where statues lay on their backs on tables, their beckoning hands paralyzed mid-motion, and crucifixes with sorrowful faces leaned against the walls. There were so many that they crowded into the hallway. To go to the bathroom meant walking a gauntlet of men with drooped heads hanging from nails stabbed through their hands and feet. No one ever explained, and he only pieced together later that the family business was church restoration.
One time his uncle saw him staring at the burlap sheets of paintings that hung from the ceiling to the floor. A man on a horse slaying a dragon. A woman holding a bloody head aloft.
His uncle said the paintings were frescos that had been painted on church walls. They’d been removed to expose an older fresco beneath. He knew the technique for how to peel them off intact. It was a secret passed down from his father, who had it from his father, who had it from his. The knell of ancestors and the mystery of what he was describing had stayed with Bruno, so that even now, forty years later, he recalled the suspense of hoping his uncle might tell him.
Another equally magical memory was of going with his mother to the workshop where her sister was gilding a wooden statue. Feel, his aunt said, holding out the leather pad she had strapped on her palm. On the pad lay a tiny glistening square of gold leaf. He’d been careful, understanding it was delicate, but before he even thought he’d touched it, the square crumbled into weightless flakes. Eat them, she said, nodding at the specks on his finger. Gold is good luck. On his tongue he tasted and felt nothing, but after he returned to Canada and his teacher asked him to tell the class about his trip, he didn’t talk about his family, the large house and the statues, or swimming in a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains. He said he ate gold leaf. The teacher thought he meant paint. Not paint, but he didn’t know how to explain the ephemeral squares of real gold.
The only hard proof he had of a connection to that time and place were the two Baroque angel heads — one in his bedroom, the other in Mina’s living room. Their mother had realized she was pregnant while in Austria and she’d wanted angels for her two children. She said it was their birthright, by which she didn’t mean religion but connection to the family business. For herself, she’d brought back the doll that had belonged to her grandmother. She said her brother and sister had twelfth-century Venetian glass, silver coins stamped with the Crusaders’ cross, thousand-year-old Etruscan drinking bowls. They wouldn’t miss an old doll and two cherubim.
While he was there, Bruno’s opa had also given him a book of Grimms’ fairy tales. Their fatalistic tone reflected the dark postwar years when the book was published. In these stories the wicked stepmother was forced to step into red-hot iron shoes. The evil sister was drenched in tar. Rumpelstiltskin stomped his leg so deeply into the ground that he ripped himself in two when he tried to pull it out again. Bruno’s mother had helped him read the German, and later he read out loud to Mina, her leaning so far over the drawings that he had to keep nudging her aside so he could see the print. The scratchy ink illustrations were as frightening as the stories. Sagging jowls and bulbous eyes. Hairy warts and crooked toes. Bruno could still recall the snaggle-toothed devil snoring. Rumpelstiltskin whirling in a rage.
He flapped out a tea towel as he peered across the room at the bookshelves. There: he made out the glimmer of the tooled gold letters on the spine, and dropping the towel on the folded pile, he got up.
The cover was worn, the edges rubbed soft. A book much read and loved. It fell open on a page with a puckered mark where Mina used to plant a wet kiss on an elderly woman whose cartoonish jaw was shaped like two bony hills, one trailing a long wiry hair. The German was dense and old-fashioned, but he could still half-understand it. He flipped ahead to a drawing of a woman with greedy, fleshy lips, stooped to drink from a pond where a duck swam. She planned to cook and eat her two stepchildren. To outwit her, they’d turned themselves into a pond and a duck. When she bent to drink, the duck pulled her into the water and she drowned. She was bad and deserved to die. The logic of a Grimms’ story was implacable. He kept leafing through the pages. A wolf with his belly distended with the little goats he’d gobbled. A girl who had to cut off her finger to use as a key because she’d lost the key to open a door. He recalled being a boy, with Mina beside him, reading the stories with a horror that felt delicious.
When he heard the front door open, he returned the book to the shelf. With her coat still on, Gabriela hurried past down the hallway to the bathroom.
The phone began ringing and he picked it up. “Allô?”
“S-s-something to tell you.” Although this was how Mina started every phone conversation, today the words sounded like an echo from a fairy tale.
“I’m listening.”
“My groceries.”
“What about them?” The latest person Social Services was sending to do Mina’s groceries either lacked common sense, was stealing, or both. He’d questioned why there was a box of a hundred teabags and a jumbo tub of margarine on every bill. Social Services said they would look into it but they hadn’t yet.
“She got cookies. I’m dibète!”
“So don’t eat them.”
“Mais sont ici!”
“I’ll take them away the next time I come.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. But not now.”
“I can’t eat cookies!”
“So don’t eat them. Just. Don’t. Eat. Them.”
“They’re here!”
“How about you put them in the bathroom?”
“Salle de bain?” She sounded horrified.
Gabriela had quietly come into the room and sat in the armchair. She’d changed from her work clothes into a loose sweater, pyjama bottoms, and fuzzy socks. Her hair, released from its bun, tumbled onto her shoulders.
“You don’t eat in the bathroom, do you?” he said.
A snort of disgust.
“So put them in the bathroom and you won’t eat them.”
Mina was quiet for a moment.
“I’ll stop in after I finish work tomorrow and get them.”
“Quand?”
“I don’t know when, but you can go out if you have to. I’ll find them in the bathroom.”
“I’m n-n-not going out.”
“In case you’re going out. In case something comes up. Don’t stay there waiting for me.” He could have told her that he would be there by five, but then she would be in a snit if he was a few minutes late.
Finally she sighed. “D’okay.”
He didn’t know if she thought d’okay was a word or if she knew their dad had made it up, crisscrossing English okay with French d’accord. She’d deliberately adopted a few of his habits. Only Pepsi, never Coke. For breakfast one piece of toast with Cheez Whiz, another with peanut butter. And once she moved into her own apartment, she announced that she was going to start smoking. Their mother told her it was a dirty habit and that cigarettes were expensive. She was going to have to pay for them out of her weekly spending money. Mina said she wanted to smoke because Daddy did. She was also only going to smoke one a day. When their mother told Bruno, he was surprised by such willful nostalgia. Mina was only ten when their dad died.
When he hung up, Gabriela said, “What is she not going to eat in the bathroom?”
He explained and she gave a soft laugh. “At least she knows she can’t resist cookies.”
“She cheats often enough. I don’t even think that was about the cookies. She wanted me to know the woman who does the shopping is making mistakes.”
Another soft laugh. “She’s the ceo of her little world.”
“And wants me to play henchman.”
Gabriela smiled. The evening clinic was always busy and she looked tired, but also more relaxed than she’d seemed lately. “Work okay?” he asked.
“This guy. How he ended up . . .” She swung her head in disbelief.
“Klutz of the year?” But he said it gently, not sure if he was presuming too far by making fun of her patients.
“His desk job was giving him a stiff back, so he decided to start jumping rope. Why jumping rope and not stretching, I have no idea. He grabs his skipping rope, except he’s also still trying to read his screen. His rope hooks his screen, he tries to save it, gets tangled in the skipping rope, falls over his chair, and ends up in a neck brace and with a sprained ankle. He’s actually pretty lucky that’s all that happened.”
“I don’t even think you could choreograph that.”
She sniffed, agreeing. “What about you? Your gang met today? You know what you’ll be working on next?”
“A new idea, yeah . . .”
“Wait. I put water on to boil. Let me get tea.”
He carried the folded laundry to the closet in the hallway and into the bedroom. He’d meant to talk with her about telling Val that they were going away when they hadn’t even made plans. She’d made him look like a fool. But they were having a quiet evening. Why start an argument?
She’d put on Yolandita Monga — slow, soulful music — one of her favourite singers. There were two mugs on the coffee table and she’d moved to the sofa. He sat close enough that she could put her feet on his lap and she did. He began to massage them as he told her about Val’s idea to intimate the horrendous disparity in a city, where there were buildings as far as the eye could see, and still there were people in the street who had no home. Val wanted to focus on their plight, really try to understand it. Not having a home, how desperate that could make a person. How they would fight for whatever they could still call their own.
Now and then Bruno wheeled a hand in the air to help him find the words. Talking about dance wasn’t his forte. He preferred to stay in the background, doing just about anything but talk. Gabriela nudged him with her foot to remind him to keep massaging. Her dark eyes watched him, her round cheeks dimpling even when she asked a serious question. This was how they used to talk, understanding each other, no bristle of conflict between them. Relaxing together in the evening.
