Read Online Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson - Free Book Online

hands—what, she couldn’t tell. In waking life Charles’s hobby was making and flying model airplanes. That was the boyish kind of man he was, the kind Larry scorned. In fact, she dreaded that Charles would invite Larry to fly one of his planes and that Larry would pretend enthusiasm and later mock his brother-in-law in a play, or worse now, in a television sitcom that Moira and Charles would be more likely to see. Would Larry ever write another play? She hoped so. The best of him came out in his work, the part she loved best, the humour and the tenderness. The best went to the play, and what remained was Ellen’s.
    In the dream, Charles must have been working on a model, but as the details were released to Ellen intermittently throughout the morning in mortifyingly erotic little fragments, the toy plane eventually disappeared and only the screwdriver remained.
    “For God’s sake,” Ellen muttered to herself.
    Then even the screwdriver vanished and she and Charles were entangled in coitus. It was very, very good, exquisite even. Because of his cock. There was something special about Charles’s cock, something ecstasy-inducing, but Ellen couldn’t remember what. In the kitchen kneading raw onion and garlic into a bowl of ground beef, she both wanted to remember, because she was curious, and didn’t.
    At just that moment, with Ellen torn between curiosity and embarrassment, in strolled Charles. Ellen yelped, tossed her head so her braid swung over her shoulder, then fled, awkwardly, her smocked belly leading the way to the bedroom, her arms up—
don’t shoot
!—because of the hamburger stuck all over her hands.
    She closed the door with her hip. She’d only been standing therea second when a car pulled up outside. The cab. Mimi, playing in the front yard in an inflatable pool with her cousins, started singing, “Dada, dada, dada!” Ellen heard her through the window and, relieved, opened the door again.
    Charles! Right there in the hall. He was a tall, pointily featured man who wore dress socks with sandals, and now this look of wounded bafflement. Ellen brushed past him.
    “Ellen?” Charles bleated.
    She ducked into the bathroom.
    With Yolanda performing a vigorous
in utero
callisthenic routine, Ellen scrubbed the E. coli off her hands. She heard everyone troop inside, Moira directing Larry to the spare bedroom, asking about the trip, and the besotted cousins chasing Mimi back outside under the suggestively clouded sky.
    One of the not-best things about Larry was his moodiness. Later, after Ellen started in publicity, she came to realize that most artists walk a zigzag between pathetically insecure and egomaniacal, except for the really good ones, who are quite normal. That day, preventing Larry from acting like an asshole with her sister overrode her fear of running into Charles. She stepped into the hall again and, thankfully, he was gone.
    “Baby,” she said from the spare room doorway.
    Larry was sitting on the bed talking to Moira. He looked up at Ellen, cringed. He’d forgotten she was pregnant, just like she’d forgotten he’d cut his hair and shaved. But while he looked better for this—tanned, dark curls held back by sunglasses on top of his head, a linen suit jacket she’d never seen before over a T-shirt she’d also never seen—after a ten-day separation Ellen only looked more of the barnyard.
    Ellen came over and they kissed, her dissatisfied tongue stirringin her mouth. A good little tongue, tucked behind her teeth. Then she remembered the hamburger on the counter.
    “I’ll put it way,” Moira volunteered.
    As soon as Moira was out of the room, Larry stood and emptied his pockets onto the bureau. He tossed the linen jacket on the bed.
    “This is nice,” Ellen said, sitting carefully beside the jacket, but not touching it lest she wrinkle it further. It was hard to believe that Larry had purchased this jacket, but of course he had meetings. He couldn’t schlep his scripts around