Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland
“Please. That’d be nice.”
I went to make it in the kitchen. A spate of pointed silence finally forced Liam’s hand. “I’m just coming back from choir practice.”
“Hmm. Really?”
Jeremy said, “Mom’s a really good singer.”
Liam looked at me. “Really now?”
My stomach did the let’s karaoke! lunge. “Jeremy, I can’t sing.”
“Yes you can. I know you can, because I’m a good singer, and genetically you need two good singers to make a kid who can also sing.” He turned to Liam. “It’s a fact. Mom hides her light under a bushel.”
Singing scares me. I only ever do it in the car, otherwise someone might hear me. Someone might know how I’m feeling inside. I’ll somehow bungle it. I’d spent a lifetime concealing my ability, even to the point of standing mute during “Happy Birthdays” over the years.
Liam said, “Liz—sing something for us.”
“The neighbours might hear.”
“Mom, do you even know who your neighbours are?”
I didn’t—I still don’t. Mine is not that kind of building. “It doesn’t matter. I still don’t want them to hear me.”
Liam said, “Sing the solo version of the Flower Duet.”
“Liam, that song is done to death. British Airways has wrecked it for me.”
“Mom, if you sing, I’ll sing something too. But you have to sing first.”
How could I resist hearing my own son sing? “Oh God, very well.” I realized I hadn’t sung in ages. Singing voices vanish as quickly as a bodybuilder’s triceps in the absence of training. I walked to the sink, poured a quick glass of water and contemplated the song to come, “Viens, Malika,” from Delibes’s Lakmé. It’s a good song, a classical staple that is to the highbrow world what the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” is to AM radio.
I came back into the room. “Remember, you two requested this.” I spent the next minute pumping out the song’s most signature portion, sad and lovely. I rather surprised myself. The two men clapped. I sat down and motioned Jeremy to stand.
He didn’t need a glass of water. He readied himself, and then frightening almost-but-not-quite-musical sounds came from his lungs. Buzz saws? Bees? I thought it was a seizure of some kind, and was halfway off my seat before he motioned me to sit. He went on for maybe half a minute.
There was a pause. I asked, “Jeremy, what was that?”
“That was your song sung backwards.”
I said, “You’re kidding.”
“No, not kidding at all. Want another?”
“How did you ever learn to do that?”
“I never would have known I could do it except that, when I was eleven, one of my foster brothers and I would play records backwards to look for satanic messages. The adults thought it was very devout of us.”
“Liz, can you sing backwards too?” Liam asked.
“No.”
Liam asked me if I had a tape recorder. I had one left over from the 1980s, and I went to fish it out of the cupboard. I’d liked it because it was so easy to stop and start. I used it for voice practice in the old days, when I was a bit braver about singing.
I came back in. “I can rig it to play backwards if I fiddle with these two switches for a second.” I prepared the machine.
“What song do you want me to do?” Jeremy asked.
Liam, AM to the core, said, “Try this.” He sang “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” emoting with his hands an Italian mio cuore. It was painful.
Jeremy said, “Cakewalk.”
I turned on the player, and Jeremy held it to his mouth and made his disturbing air-being-sucked-in noises for a minute. He stopped and I hit rewind. It was the song, not exactly perfect, but certainly better than most people can sing.
“Well, what do you know?”
Liam asked, “How rare is that—being able to sing backwards?”
“It’s pretty freakish. It has a name. It’s called melodioana-gramaticism. It’s a brain-wiring quirk, like Tourette’s. I can only do about thirty seconds at a go.”
“You didn’t know your son could sing backwards?”
“Long story.”
“Why don’t the pair of you come visit my choir? It can’t hurt, and everyone will get a charge out of your reverse singing.”
“I don’t know …” I’d never been invited to do something like this before; I had no idea of how to handle such a situation.
Liam’s request took me back in time to about five years before. I’d been downtown buying pastries. I was in my heels and good dress, feeling metropolitan and go-gettery, a soft harbour breeze on my face, when I walked one-foot, two-foot into eight-inch-deep wet concrete. I looked down and my feet were gone. I tried lifting them, but they were held in tightly. People walking by were unsure if it was a prank, and kept on walking. I then removed my feet, shoes trapped in the concrete (still there, too, I imagine), and walked with dignity to my car, parked four storeys up in an open-air parkade. I drove home in my encrusted pantyhose as if it had never occurred.
Jeremy answered Liam’s invitation on my behalf. “She’d love to.”
“Great, then. We meet over near Deep Cove. Liz, I’ll give you details tomorrow.”
I wanted to end the day as quickly as possible, to be lost in a lovely general anaesthetic dreamless sleep—what I hope death will be like.
Liam stood up but put his hand to the small of his back.
Jeremy said, “Back troubles?”
“The joys of getting older.”
“Almost all back trouble can be fixed with the right mattress. What sort of sleep system do you have at home?”
“Sleep system?”
Damn him. Within ten minutes he’d made another sale. I was in my housecoat. I looked into the living room, said good night and went to visit dreamland.
* * *
The next day at work was Casual Friday, a repugnant custom that permits the men to dress like teenage boys and the girls like tramps. After years of badgering, my co-workers still didn’t grasp the fact that I was never going to crumble on this issue. Donna was the worst, but she didn’t show up that morning, and I counted my blessings in being spared the no-team-spirit lecture.
Around ten-thirty my phone rang. Jeremy. “You’ll never guess what I just won.”
“What?”
“A George Foreman mean and lean fat-reducing grill machine.”
“Huh?”
“A barbecue.”
“Oh. That’s wonderful—now we have two. How did you win it?”
“I did double my monthly sales quota in one week.”
“Congratulations.”
“Again I have to say it, Mom, there’s a lot to be said for having a small and manageable dream.”
“That’s a very good philosophy.”
“If I make one more sale by five o’clock, I get a seven hundred-watt microwave oven too.”
Jeremy sounded happy, and this made me happy too. “You’re a marvel, you are.”
“You’ll never guess who just bought the mattress that sent me into barbecue territory.”
“Who?”
“Donna.”
“What?”
“Donna from your office. She bought a ten-inch-thick queen with a deluxe quilted cover atop a four-inch top layer of breathable, open-cell temperature-sensitive viscoelastic foam, plus a single layer of a patented airflow system.”
“Oh.”
“It gets better. The model comes with a certificate proving that non-toxic materials have been used in its manufacture. It also promises a firm orthopaedic support and keeps its shape for many years.”
“You don’t say.”
“Absolutely. And the mattress body is pelted with a soft, naturally treated terry/velour—seventy-five percent cotton and twenty-five percent polyester. It’s the latest in anti-mite and anti-allergy technology, with zippers on all four sides for easy removal.”
“That Donna is one lucky c
“She got a free barbecue, too.”
“I’m speechless.”
“We’re going on a date on Sunday.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Mom?”
“A date?”
“Yeah. Bowling. I’ve never done it, and I want to do it while I still can.”
“Jeremy, the woman is ten years older than you.”
“So?”
I bit my lip. “It’ll be fun for you.”
“I hope so. Wait a second—Mom—there’s a non-senior citizen staring at mattresses by the entrance. I have to bag this one.”
“Catch that brass ring.”
“Thanks. Let’s order pizza for dinner.”
“Roger.”
If nothing else, Jane was certainly out of the picture.
Donna didn’t show up at all that day, perhaps too embarrassed to look me in the eye, cradle-snatcher that she was. It was better that she didn’t. Her absence gave me time to assess the situation and decide what I was going to do. I’d barely had him to myself a week and suddenly I had to share my son? No!
But …
But …
I figured that I might not like Donna, but she wasn’t evil. She was probably even a lonely soul in the making, a future Liz, in spite of her thin figure and straight, unwilful hair. On the surface, Donna had all the social bonuses I lacked, and yet the world had changed so much for these younger girls that it was getting easier and easier to become a Liz Dunn.
I also had to keep in mind that Jeremy came with an expiration date on him. His life would be shorter than I could hope for myself. I wasn’t about to mess with what time remained solely because of selfishness. So I decided to try to be big about Donna.
This strategy came to me during lunch, which I ate by myself in my Honda down near the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool silos, where a thousand pigeons snacked on spilled grains from CN railway cars. How many times had I eaten there, looking at the pigeons, so easily fed and satisfied? Hundreds. That afternoon I decided I couldn’t eat there any more, and nor have I eaten there since.
Back at the office, I tried to catch up on my work backlog, yet I felt like I was only wasting time. Nothing about my job felt pressing or valuable, save for the fact that Liam became crabby if it wasn’t done quickly enough. The Dwarf himself hadn’t yet sent me details of the upcoming choir practice, and I was hoping he’d forgotten it, but Liam’s not the type to forget that kind of thing, so I adopted a “take whatever comes” attitude.
At my desk, my rate of errors went up, and the little blink-blink noise my monitor made began to annoy me. I went into the kitchen to make a Cup•A•Soup, when I noticed the soothing in-office music from the speaker above the fridge playing a Royal Philharmonic version of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” I remembered the night before. I had to smile at the craziness of it, and then hummed a snatch of the song, when …
… when the melody line began to see-saw back and forth in my head, note by note, in a stream, like a violin bow across its strings. No!
But it was happening. Inside my head I was playing music back and forth. For the first time, I felt socked in the stomach with the knowledge that I had a child, and that a mystery had passed between the two of us, and that no bond on earth could be closer.
I couldn’t delete the song from my head. It was like the smell of bacon on a Sunday morning. I went outside and had a quick walk down to the news shop on the corner. Nothing could weed that wretched tune from my brain.
The legend lives on …
From the Chippewa on down … … nwod no aweppihC eht morF … no sevil dnegel ehT
I went into the stairwell, concrete and ugly, but with gorgeous operatic acoustics. I began singing the song backwards and forwards. My armpits felt cold. I was so confused. I ran down to the underground parking lot and hopped into my car. My chest was heaving, my head felt overinflated. I put on the radio to find a song to replace “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” I switched it off, and then it too began to play in reverse in my head.
I ran red lights all the way home, parked the car diagonally on the street and ran upstairs. I walked into the apartment, and Jeremy was sanding away at the kitchen walls with sandpaper wrapped around a sponge. Beside him were two barbecues, a colour TV and a microwave oven, all in their factory boxes.
“Mom! Why are you home so early? I was going to surprise you with a first coat of red.”
I said nothing. I walked over to where he was sitting, on a chair beside a radiator. I sat down, and with a force I didn’t know I had, I pulled him up and clamped him to my chest.
“Mom?”
“Shut up, Jeremy.”
“Mom?”
“You don’t have to paint walls any more, Jeremy.”
He tried to reply, but I sat on a dining-room chair and pulled him onto my lap. I don’t think either of us had any idea what to say. Finally, I began to sing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” backwards. I said, “I gave it to you.”
“Gave what?”
“The ability to sing backwards. I didn’t know it, but today it all came blasting through my head.”
“Was that a good thing or a bad thing?”
I’d never held anybody before. People have weight. They’re warm. You can feel their heart and lungs pumping from within. I don’t know what it was I’d been expecting—a marionette?
Jeremy began to sing the song forwards, but I said, “No need.”
I looked over at the kitchen wall. I looked at the paint, and it struck me that between that paint and the kitchen wall there had to be a space of some sort—even if it was a millionth of an inch thick. I tried to imagine being in a microscopic spacecraft, digging into that paint, searching for that secret charmed space. Perhaps it only exists as a concept, but maybe it’s real, too. But I suppose to hunt for it is to kill it. You can only feel it surround you, feel it cover you, feel it make you whole.
It’s now time to take a very big gulp of air here, to remember that it was seven years ago when all of this happened. It often feels like just a week to me. Time is whimsical and cruel.
This whole story began on that evening I stood in a parking lot outside a video store, when I looked up into the sky and saw my first-ever comet—the ludicrously named Hale-Bopp—and decided I wanted peace, not certainty, in my life.
But now, seven years later, I ask you, what happens when a comet hits the earth? What happens when things stop being cosmic and become something you can hold in your hand in a very real sense? I’m not trying to be coy here. I’m about to describe two events that happened to me just a few days ago, the two events that started me telling this story.
First, on Thursday after work, I found a meteorite, or rather, one found me. What are the chances of that? I was walking home from the Mac’s Milk, and it was raining slightly—misting. I was maybe a minute from my condo building’s front doors, wondering what movie I might watch that night, or which DVD to rent. I heard a hiss and what sounded like an armload of heavy books slapping onto a freshly polished linoleum floor. It was just in front of me, and I jumped in shock, my cantaloupe, cottage cheese and Thai chicken Super Wrap falling onto the sidewalk.
There was a pothole in the road—one just large enough to make you phone city hall to complain. Its edges were uniformly round and crisp. I walked closer. Inside was a little brown rock that was steaming, to be frank, like dog shit on a cold winter day. I thought I had to be imagining this. But I wasn’t. But—well, what do any of us feel when something statistically odd occurs?
There were no other pedestrians on the street—mine simply isn’t a pedestrian kind of neighbourhood—nor were there any cars or, as I looked to see, anybody looking out onto the street from inside his apartment. This little event was mine, and mine alone.
I bent down and inspected the meteorite more closely. It was the shape and size of a baby’s fist, brown and covered with little craters, like an asteroid
I picked up my scrambled foods, stuck the meteorite into my coat pocket and ran upstairs. I dumped the groceries by the sink, placed the cooling stone on the counter and pulled up a stool, looking at my prize closely, as if it contained a space alien or a Kinder Egg treat. But no—it was just a pocked, dimpled, metallic lump, and that was fine by me.
I ate my cottage cheese and the Thai chicken wrap at the counter. I became paranoid. I didn’t want a neighbour with too much free time on her hands phoning city hall and reporting the pothole. The person sent to inspect it might recognize the hole as being meteoric and report it to the planetarium, and before I knew it my prize would be taken away from me and no longer be mine. I decided I needed to fill in the hole.
So, my meteorite and I got into my car and drove to Home Depot. There, I bought a sack of sterilized sand, and back at my building I parked by the curb, looked about for pedestrians—unlikely—and then went and filled in the crater like a small sandbox. Done. Nobody would recognize the hole for what it was. They couldn’t.
I crumpled up the empty bag, hucked it into the basement trash bin, then went upstairs, feeling as if I’d just dumped a body in the Fraser River. It felt good, actually. I was in cahoots with the stars themselves.
Concentrating on anything much that night was hard. I couldn’t even feel lonely, as every time I began to do so I looked at my stone, and I felt more special than I did lonely—what an odd cure for my problems.
Where had this meteorite been? Was it from some other star? From some Star Trek galaxy of people with bad latex forehead prostheses? My own knowledge of our universe isn’t broad, but I do know that stars don’t shed rocks—they shed energy. Something as dull as a rock had to come from a planet or a moon, most likely one that blew up or got hit by another planet or moon. Poor little planet. Poor little rock.
In any event, before going to bed, I poured myself a glass of Pinot Gris, looked at the lump and took it to my bedroom, where I set it beside my alarm clock. Just before I fell asleep, though, I grabbed my asteroid and placed it under my pillow, like a quarter from the tooth fairy. I remembered how odd it was as a child to receive twenty-five cents for a tooth from the tooth fairy. This guy—I’ve always thought of the tooth fairy as a guy—he goes into children’s bedrooms collecting dead teeth? What—for medical experimentation? Nobody ever tells you what he does with the things. I guess when you’re shedding teeth, you’re young enough to pretend to go along with your parents’ corny ideas. In my mind, the tooth fairy was actually that guy I found beside the railway tracks cut into two, back when I was twelve. If it really was him, he might have been relieved to be dead. I mean, come on, look at his job description.