Colours in Her Hands, page 1
COLOURS IN HER HANDS
COLOURS IN HER HANDS
A NOVEL
ALICE ZORN
© 2024 Alice Zorn
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Library and Archives Canada
Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Colours in her hands : a novel / Alice Zorn.
Names: Zorn, Alice, author.
Identifiers:
Canadiana (print) 20240410629
Canadiana (ebook) 20240410637
ISBN 9781990601774 (softcover)
ISBN 9781990601781 (EPUB)
ISBN 9781990601798 (PDF)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC ps8649.o67 c65 2024 | DDC c813/.6—dc23
Edited by Deborah Willis
Design by Natalie Olsen
Author photo by Michel Dubreuil
Printed and bound in Canada
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to people, places, and events is entirely coincidental.
First Printing
for Joann aubé (1958–2013)
“Normal, qu’est-ce que ça veut dire,
Caroline? C’est un cycle de lavage.”
— Pascale Quiviger, Si tu m’entends
“Normal, what does that mean,
Caroline? It’s a wash cycle.”
(Translated by Alice Zorn)
“Every heart I ever met
Is a work in progress.”
— Sheree Gilchrist, Facebook,
December 29, 2021
1
Bruno peered over the top of his glasses at the shaver he’d bought only a few weeks ago. Mina had called to say it didn’t work anymore. The depilatory cream she’d used for years had started giving her a rash, and if she didn’t do anything about her facial hair, she soon grew a wispy moustache and beard. She’d asked him for an electric shaver, a lady’s, she insisted. As far as he could tell, a lady’s worked the same as a man’s, only it was pink and it cost more.
“Hyundai!” boomed from the TV in the corner. The TV in the bedroom trumpeted a theme song. Mina got offended if a person raised their voice, but she adored the noise of competing TVs. Loud visuals too. The walls, armrests, and tables were draped with tangerine swirls, leaf-green zigzags, violet mandalas, scarlet clouds.
Mina sat in the corner of the small sofa, buoyed by the cushions she’d stuffed under, around, and behind her. Since she’d been a child, the corner of the sofa was her spot. That was where she stitched, did hidden word puzzles, practised her letters. She kept the shelves next to her crammed with balls of yarn, notebooks, framed photos, knitting needles, calculators in different sizes, pen holders stuffed with markers — everything she might at any moment need. Their dad used to tease her by pretending to sit there himself. And oh boy, what a scene she made then.
Bruno clicked the shaver on and off. The motor whirred but nothing happened when he ran it down his cheek. “What did you do with this?”
“T-t-told you. It’s broken.”
He blew along the shaver head. “You’re supposed to use it on your face, Mina. What’s this red stuff?” He pinched a speck he held out, but proof wasn’t a concept she’d ever acknowledged. On the carpet was the small toolbox he kept at her place because something always needed to be fixed. The plug torn off the toaster, a jammed dVd player, a fan with an inexplicably twisted blade. Mina was a force destined to sunder parts from their whole.
She waved a regal hand. “Take it back.”
“What do you mean, take it back?”
“Like the camera.”
Last summer she’d asked for a digital camera for her birthday. He showed her how to attach the strap to her wrist while she was taking a picture so she wouldn’t drop it. She slid the strap over her wrist, snapped a picture, slid the strap off, and dropped the camera on the sidewalk.
“The camera was still new. You used this — and on something that wasn’t your face.”
“No!”
“Okay, then you started growing red specks on your face.”
She glared at him, insulted.
“So what did you use it on? You might as well tell me.”
She jutted her lips. He waited. Laughter cackled from the TV. Finally she pushed herself off the sofa and toddled to the kitchen. She was so big all around and had such tiny feet. He hated to think of her walking on icy sidewalks, but it wasn’t possible to keep her indoors as long as the paradise aisles of the dollar store beckoned.
He heard her open a drawer and rummage inside, shoving and clanking objects. Something hard dropped to the floor.
Brushing past his chair again, she tossed a spongy red place mat on his lap. One edge looked chewed.
“Why did you shave a place mat?”
“Egg!” A sharp accusation.
Ah . . . the fault lay with the egg that had slopped off the plate, with the place mat she couldn’t clean with a dishrag, with the shaver that should have worked but didn’t. Perhaps she even blamed him for not having told her the shaver wouldn’t clean a place mat.
He sighed. Maybe a brush would get out all the red bits.
He got up to return the place mat to the kitchen. Picked up the ladle from the floor and tried to angle it into the overstuffed drawer she’d left open. He decided not to mention the dirty dishes crowded along the counter. Their mother had shown Mina how to keep a kitchen neat, but for ten years their mother hadn’t been there to check. Now Mina had someone who came to clean, and although Bruno had told her that was no excuse for making a mess, she ignored him.
Stacked unevenly against the wall were the week’s accumulation of empty TV dinner packaging. Up until a year ago she’d still been able to prepare simple meals for herself. Bake a chicken leg, brown hamburger meat, add sauce, boil pasta. Then she started to complain that it was too hard to open jars and cans. She made a couple of spectacular microwave messes. She didn’t always remember to turn off the stove. Her social worker arranged for Meals on Wheels, but Mina didn’t want them, even when Bruno tried to tempt her by reading out the menus. Cream of celery soup and chicken pot pie! Beef bouillon and cheese lasagna! She wouldn’t answer the door when meals were delivered, and if the trays were left on the floor in the hallway, she kicked them aside. Then someone else began taking them and he cancelled the service. Mina wanted Skinny Cuisine TV dinners because she’d seen on TV that they made you lose weight. Only if you ate only one, he said. He knew she would eat two. They were the most expensive option, ridiculous for someone on a limited income, but they ensured that she was getting a full, supposedly nutritious meal.
She’d taken up her embroidery hoop and was watching TV again. He pushed his toolbox onto the top shelf of the closet where he hoped she couldn’t reach even if she climbed on a chair. She did enough damage without recourse to a hammer.
“Bye, Mina.”
“Bye.” But she kept her eyes on the TV.
The row of beige doors in the hallway were stark after the caco-phony of noise and colour in her apartment. Before he reached the lobby, he heard the click of her lock followed by the rattle of the chain. She liked to be barricaded inside her fortress.
He pulled his chin into his jacket collar as he stepped outside. For days now, it had been cold enough to snow and he wished it would, but the air stayed dry, the sky blue. Except for the newer apartment building where Mina lived, row houses over a century old lined the street. Brick boxes with flat roofs, side by side. Simply carved wooden cornices, the same design often several houses along. Thick stone foundations. Three steps up from the sidewalk to the front door. Typical architecture for Pointe Saint Charles in southwest Montreal.
Bruno lived a few blocks away on a street that looked the same. The Pointe had been settled by workers employed in the railyards and the factories along the Lachine Canal. The factories had since been closed, but to Bruno the Pointe still looked like an obdurate working-class neighbourhood — even as the old houses were sold, had their brick sandblasted and windows replaced with thermal panes.
A few years earlier when Val, the choreographer with whom he worked, was looking for a new rehearsal space for their s mall dance ensemble, he suggested they move to the Pointe. For a third of the rent they’d been paying, they could get a large studio in an old textile factory. There were storage closets along one end and space for his carpenter’s workbench behind a dividing wall. He’d sanded the original pine planks and laid Marley flooring. When he’d heard of a hair salon being renovated, he rescued the old mirrors and installed them along one wall. The reflection wasn’t seamless but it was continuous.
Their group — Val, Tandi, Mathieu, and himself — had just taken almost a month off, following an extravaganza sixteen-dancer performance with Chair Vive that had been billed as the highlight of the 2010 fall dance season. There had been no talk yet of what they would be working on next, but Bruno knew Val’s brain could never rest long. He hadn’t been surprised to get an email summoning them to a meeting next week.
He had a few noisy, dirty jobs he wanted to finish first. At the factory he jogged up the metal stairs to the second floor. As he walked down the hallway, he could hear the grumble of industrial sewing machines from the small futon enterprise across from them.
He hadn’t expected to find their door ajar and gently pushed it wider. Val stood, legs braced as if against a strong wind, at the edge of the dance floor. Bruno couldn’t see her face but didn’t have to. He knew her tense-abstracted look. She still wore her street shoes but had dropped her coat on a canvas camping chair. She had wide hips with long thighs and such an astounding ability to spring that Jean-Pierre Perreault had famously asked if she was part Alpine goat. That was more than twenty years ago but old friends still teased her about it.
Bruno didn’t think he’d made a sound but she pivoted. “Bruno, what are you doing here?”
“I need to dismantle that star-shaped platform. It’s not easy to store and we might not use it again.”
“But if we do?”
“I’ll build another — maybe a better one. Remember how we said the angles should be less regular?”
“More asymmetrical, yes.” She walked to the camping chair and scooped up her shawl and coat.
“I don’t have to do it now, if you need to be here.”
“I need to go, I’m already late. Places to go, people to see . . . Isn’t that a line from a song? I’ll see you next week.” And whirling her shawl around her shoulders, she strode out.
He debated crossing the hallway to see if the futon seamstresses had any coffee on the go, but it would cost him half an hour of chit-chat. Maybe later. He pulled aside the tarp covering the plywood star that was propped against the wall and tipped it flat onto the floor. His tools were in the long cupboard and hooked along the wall next to his workbench. He blew sawdust off his safety glasses, wiped the lenses with the bottom of his sweater, and fit them over his glasses. Grabbed the crowbar, his hand comfortable with its familiar shape and heft.
* * *
Mina poked her needle into the fabric and reached underneath to pull the thread snug. It was getting too short. Time to change, the colours said.
She had lots of colours now that Iris was bringing them. They screamed and throbbed. Tingly, sleek, creamy, shimmering colours. Go crazy, Iris said. Use whatever colours you want. Iris was the crazy one. Who wanted to go crazy?
Mina squinted at the crimson she’d already stitched, and then at her tray of threads. Me! cried the pale pink. She lifted a strand, wet her fingers with spit, pinched the thread flat. Aimed it at the long eye of the needle. “D-d-do it,” she said and it did.
On TV, bells gonged wildly as a woman shrieked, “Harrison Ford! Harrison Ford!”
“I knew that,” Mina said. Harrison Ford was beau. She would let him kiss her. She would kiss him too.
The woman on TV won a lot of money with her shrieking. The numbers flashed by too quickly for Mina to fasten on, except for the many 0s. If she had that much money, she could buy everything she wanted. Now all she had was the twenty dollars the bank machine gave her. Other people got more. She kept trying to get more but it never worked for her. She knew why. Because stupid Bruno had a way of stopping the machine.
She stitched pink into the slits she’d left along the edge of crimson. The colours pulsed so she saw where to go. Up through here, down here.
Today’s story she was telling the colours was about the seven little animals. Seven was important. Numbers were always important. She couldn’t remember the name for the animals, but in her head she could see the pictures in the book. The animals had ears like a dog and were brown and white. Some wore dresses, some shorts. Their mama told them to be careful and not open the door. Doors, keys, and locks were important too. Who you let in, who you kept out.
On TV the bells gonged again and she wanted to look, but the colours were impatient to hear the rest of the story.
Yeah . . . the little animals were trying to be good. They stayed inside with the door locked. The way their mama had told them. A voice called, Open up! It’s your mama come home again. But they could hear how the voice was growly and they knew it was the wolf! They told him to go away. But the wolf kept trying to fool them. He was smart and finally —
Mina stopped stitching. This part was sad. He tricked them and they opened the door. And then you know what. “He gobbled them.”
The colours hummed. No, no, no, no . . .
Just wait, she thought, as she pulled the pink thread up through the cloth. I’ll tell you what happened next. He didn’t get the littlest who hid in a cupboard. Then, when their mama came home and she saw the chairs and table knocked upside-down, she started crying. All her darlings gone! From inside the cupboard the littlest called, Mama, I’m here!
“Mama,” Mina said out loud because that was the best word.
Mama and the littlest went outside and found the wolf sleeping under a tree with his hairy black snout in the air. That was another picture in the book, the wolf asleep and Mama with her apron. In her apron pocket she had sharp scissors she took out to cut his belly open. And out jumped all her children!
“Rocks,” she told them. Seven rocks for seven children. “In his belly.” Then flick, flick, flick, Mama’s needle sewed him up fast.
Mina stabbed her own needle into the cloth. Needles were magic too. Good magic.
With seven rocks in his belly, you bet the wolf died. No more big bad wolf!
Under her hand the colours vibrated. That was a good story.
* * *
Bruno had several antique dealers for whom he did odd jobs, repairing or replacing broken parts, doing deliveries. Since the dance studio was still empty, he’d gone there to work on a leg he was building for a Morris settee. On his work bench he had one of the original legs he was using as a guide.
He’d been there for a few hours and decided to cross the hallway for that piece of cake Liliane, one of the futon seamstresses, had told him she’d made. She’d even brought a bowl of whipped cream. Real whipped cream. She cut him a generous piece with a big dollop. He had a bite and said it reminded him of Austrian cake his mother used to make. Not Austrian! she cried. This is Slovenian and it’s better! He didn’t argue, but to him the buttery cake topped with cherries and whipped cream tasted like childhood.
Now, as he walked home, he felt tiny frozen pinpricks dissolving on his face. By the time he reached his street, snow was falling. The lights at his place were on. The upstairs tenants were home too, an older couple whose grandkids came once a month for Sunday supper. For an afternoon there was running and shouting, but otherwise he rarely heard anything from upstairs. The couple were clean and their rent paid his mortgage. He was glad to have them there.
He unlocked his door onto music with a blues beat and the smell of garlic frying, but when he came down the hallway, Gabriela was on the phone. She worked as a physiotherapist and still wore her leggings and had her dark curls twisted up. He hung back, waiting to hear what she was saying.
“A what? . . . Can you say that again?”
Mina. The more excited she got, the more she lisped and stammered. The skewed bounce of her logic didn’t help.
“Pierre wants a dress?” Again Gabriela listened. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t understand. I’ll tell Bruno to call you when he gets home.” Turning, she saw him, but he’d already lifted his palms and was shaking his head.
