| August 2007 |
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FICTION
Poor, Sad Pears
by Anne Sorbie
Allison thought that she was bad mother. She thought she was because there were days like today when she couldn’
t remember how to care for her children, when her head felt empty and her lower back screamed, as if someone had
hit her with a mallet.
Allison’s daughter, Linda, was still in bed. Allison knew that because Linda’s bedroom door was closed and the blue
beads, which meant, leave me alone, were still hanging from the antique brass door handle. It was about noon, and
as far as Allison could remember, it was a Tuesday. She assumed that her twin sons were eating the lunch that her
husband prepared for them; their morning of hockey school was over. She couldn’t remember what activity would
keep them busy that afternoon.
Allison caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror outside Linda’s bedroom. She saw black pools under her eyes
and she wondered when she last put on mascara. She touched her hair; it looked and felt like colourless straw. Then
with trembling fingers, she traced the purple spider veins that dissected her cheeks. Her appearance didn’t upset
her, nor did she care that her bathrobe was open and that her withered body was exposed. She pulled on the rolled
collar that ended at her waist and raised her chin as if admiring her reflection, but the shape of her breasts made her
start. Poor, sad pears, she said before cupping them and stepping into the bathroom.
Allison knelt in front of the toilet bowl waiting. Vomiting and diarrhoea had marked her days for seven weeks. Just
when she had resigned herself to the idea that she was going to have another bad day, she remembered the tiny
bottles of vodka she’d hidden in the box of sanitary napkins under the bathroom sink.
Derek sat at his desk answering questions. They were the same questions that the summer student asked him the
day before: Who was the contact at the service company? How many shallow gas wells were in the work-over
program? What specific services should the budget cover?
Derek told the young man with the baldhead to ask John, who sat two offices away. He ran his hands through his
mop of grey hair and wondered why every other twenty-something-year-old male shaved his head. Derek shivered at
the thought of Allison tugging clumps of his thick hair while she made love to him. He and Allison hadn’t been
intimate for more than a year, so Derek had found a physical substitute that made celibacy bearable.
Rhegan made arrangements with her neighbour to look after Maya. She spent the morning cleaning her house,
ironing clothes, and watching Maya play. Now the girl was at her father’s desk, her small body lost in the depths of his
big leather chair. Her legs were curled up and she was carefully turning the pages of a picture-laden book about Peru.
Rhegan wandered into her bedroom and stood in the middle of her walk-in closet wondering what to wear. Clothes
were her shield. She took pride in making herself look aloof. She often wished that hats with large brims were
fashionable, especially the kind with veils. No one would be able to penetrate the circumference without permission.
She knew she should wear something casual; it was Tuesday, the day of her weekly to visit Allison, but her hand fell
on a sleeveless, knee-length, navy silk dress with a lime-green lining. She took it off the hanger and slipped it on. The
dress had a serious air about it, but green was—for Rhegan—always a sign of life—and she fervently believed in
signs. Rhegan checked the stacks of shoeboxes for the matching flats and put them on before gathering her sleek
auburn hair into a clip at the base of her neck.
Alex was eating Stephen’s sandwich for the third day in a row. He couldn’t stop talking about Jerome Iginla who
would be showing them how to power skate that afternoon. Stephen wasn’t interested in what Alex was saying. He
hadn’t really felt the puck that struck his collarbone that morning when he was in goal. The coach wanted to call
Allison, but Stephen insisted repeatedly that he didn’t need his mom. After that Stephen made sure to yell at the other
players every once in a while because the coach watched him constantly and he was afraid of being sent home.
What’s this? Alex asked, hand on the back of Stephen’s neck. Alex knew everything about his identical twin. They were
ten and they always wore the same clothes, usually in different colors.
Stephen pulled his mother’s locket out from under the red t-shirt that he wore between his skin and his chest pads.
The boys hunched over the photos of their parents inside.
The coach saw Alex put his arm gently around Stephen’s shoulder and decided that the bruised boy should sit out the
afternoon session. No sense in taking any chances, the coach thought. Especially if the boy was hurting more than
he’d let on.
Linda called her dad when she realized that she would have to use the basement bathroom—again. Derek asked her
not to make a fuss. Allison usually managed to get herself to the kitchen before Linda got ready to take the bus to her
summer job at the movie theatre. For ten days now Allison had been in the bathroom when Linda needed to use it
and the fifteen-year old had decided that she’d had enough. After Derek said, goodbye, she threw the phone against
the wall and stormed down the hall expecting to do battle with Allison—again. Instead, Linda sank to the floor beside
her mother, and tried to ignore the smell of vomit.
Allison stretched her bone thin arms toward her daughter and said, I love you, you know.
By the age of ten Linda had learned that those words meant her mother had just given her a gift. When she was
twelve, Linda understood that she was expected to reciprocate. Before she got ready for work, she helped her mother
retrieve the box of sanitary napkins from under the bathroom sink.
When Linda called her dad the second time, Derek wasn’t in his office and she didn’t leave a message.
Allison decided that she was having a bad day. Two hours after her daughter left, she only managed to move from the
floor to the toilet seat. She wasn’t sure she could stand up and she really wanted to wash her hands. She turned on
the faucet, reached the soap, and pressed it hard between her palms, scrubbed them rapidly. She was salivating,
her heart racing. She threw the soap away and picked up one of the little bottles. Her throat burned at the sound of
the crack made by the first perforated cap when she broke the seal. Allison drank the contents despite the taste of bile
lingering in her mouth.
After the seven little bottles she had concealed in the box under the sink were empty, she hid them under the tissue in
the bathroom waste bin. She knew that her sister, Rhegan would approve.
Allison needed to use the phone in her bedroom to call for her daily delivery, but she was afraid. Her bowels moved
whenever she did and her arms shook as she tried to steady herself on the toilet. She held them out in front of her
torso, balancing to the sound of the water still running in the sink.
Allison imagined that she was floating toward Rhegan, imagined that they were swimming together just as they did
when they were kids. She was sit-leaning against the wall next to the toilet when she felt cold porcelain against the
soles of her feet. That’s when she decided to push off and catch her sister’s hands.
Derek ran marathons. Every weekday at precisely 11:42 am, he trained; he took the stairs three at a time from the
sixteenth floor to the eighteenth floor of his office building. Then he walked briskly to the corporate locker room,
changed his clothes, and plunged into the stairwell that took him to the building’s east exit. As soon as he got to the
street, he began the rhythmic breathing that his trainer was advocating he adopt for his ninth, twenty-six point two-mile
race: in-in-out-out, in-in-out-out. The open-mouth exhalations were supposed to engage his diaphragm and
contribute to his core stability.
He felt light headed after just one block. He decided to tell the trainer that he was a chest breather, not a belly
breather. Derek picked up his usual four-beat gait pattern as soon as he reached the riverside path, ran southeast
past people sleeping on the grass near the local drop-in centre, and picked up his tempo as he left the lunchtime
crowd behind. When the first needle drop-box came into view near Fort Calgary, he sprinted until he thought his lungs
would explode. Hey, he called out when he met his running partner near the Deane House. They turned and headed
west, pounded pavement together for the next hour and a half.
Afterwards, Derek used his electronic key card to access the stairwell for his cool-down. He climbed the eighteen
flights one step at time. He knew he’d been at his desk for exactly sixty-three minutes when he felt a stabbing pain
above his left eye. He’d been monitoring his recovery heart rate since returning to his office. He tried to concentrate
but that was always difficult when he was waiting for his sister-in-law’s weekly phone call, the one she made after her
visit to Allison.
Rhegan sat in her car gripping the steering wheel. She parked in the driveway of Allison’s home and nodded with
approval. The lawn service was doing a fine job and things looked, as they should. The clippings had been picked up,
the flower beds turned, and the hedge trimmed.
Rhegan visited Allison once a week although it didn’t bring her any comfort to do so. She always left her sister’s
home feeling battered. She had come on that particular Tuesday to tell Allison that she wouldn’t be visiting again—
unless she received a sign to the contrary.
Rhegan had written a letter, saying goodbye to her sister. She had undertaken this task with the approval of her
psychologist who counselled that Rhegan had to let go of Allison, had to let her hit the proverbial bottom.
Rhegan tried to take Allison to her doctor the Tuesday before. It was clear for weeks that her sister’s body was
rejecting everything she tried to ingest, but she refused to get out of the car when they reached the clinic. After that,
Rhegan admitted that she was powerless to help her sister. Rhegan sat in her car as she always did waiting for
Allison to recognize her arrival by opening the front door of her home.
Linda didn’t go to work. She got off the bus three stops before the movie theatre and walked into the arena where the
twins’ hockey school was held. She looked like the other girls who were there to ask Iginla for his autograph. Her jean
shorts were low on her hips and her abdomen was exposed below her t-shirt. She saw Stephen sitting alone at the
top of the bleachers. He seemed to be studying the group of parents who were watching the famous hockey player
instead of focusing on their children.
Linda waved at Alex through the glass, threw the bag containing her work clothes over her shoulder, and climbed the
stairs toward her brother.
Allison thought she was swimming. She thought that she’d reached the edge of the pool because her head had
banged against something hard and cold, and she thought that she saw Rhegan standing on the pool deck waiting
to help her out of the water when she looked up.
After sitting in her car for twenty minutes, Rhegan quietly opened and closed the front door of her sister’s home. Then
she stood in the entranceway listening before climbing the 75-year-old fir staircase to the second floor.
Allison’s head reeled when she sat up and leaned against the bathtub; her hair felt sticky and cold. She pulled a
towel from the rail on the wall behind her, wrapped it around her shoulders, and tried to stand. Something warm ran
down her legs when she reached for Rhegan. She imagined it was water from her bathing suit. Help me up, she said
to her sister the way she always did after too much time under water.
Rhegan stood in the bathroom doorway. She crushed the letter in her hand and let it fall to the floor.
After Rhegan’s telephone call, Derek left his office. While driving to the arena to pick up his sons, he used pre-race
visualization techniques to prepare himself mentally for what he would say to them. When he arrived, he was
surprised and glad to see Linda sitting on the grass with Alex and Stephen.
Derek got out of his car, baffled because he couldn’t speak. He sat down beside his kids and cried, the way he had
after finishing his first marathon.
Allison thought she was dreaming. She lay in a strange bed covered in warm blankets. There was something damp
under her that had a plastic edge, something that was soft against her raw buttocks. It crinkled when she moved.
She opened her eyes, took her hands out from under the covers, and looked at them. They seemed to be miles from
her head and one of them had something attached to the back of it. Allison couldn’t make one touch the other.
Rhegan caught her sister’s hands. She held them steady, and beyond their locked fingers, Allison saw blurred faces.
Derek, Linda, Stephen, and Alex stood at the side of the bed holding on to each other.
Poor, sad pears, Allison said, before tightening her grip on Rhegan’s hands.
Poor, Sad Pears
by Anne Sorbie
Allison thought that she was bad mother. She thought she was because there were days like today when she couldn’
t remember how to care for her children, when her head felt empty and her lower back screamed, as if someone had
hit her with a mallet.
Allison’s daughter, Linda, was still in bed. Allison knew that because Linda’s bedroom door was closed and the blue
beads, which meant, leave me alone, were still hanging from the antique brass door handle. It was about noon, and
as far as Allison could remember, it was a Tuesday. She assumed that her twin sons were eating the lunch that her
husband prepared for them; their morning of hockey school was over. She couldn’t remember what activity would
keep them busy that afternoon.
Allison caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror outside Linda’s bedroom. She saw black pools under her eyes
and she wondered when she last put on mascara. She touched her hair; it looked and felt like colourless straw. Then
with trembling fingers, she traced the purple spider veins that dissected her cheeks. Her appearance didn’t upset
her, nor did she care that her bathrobe was open and that her withered body was exposed. She pulled on the rolled
collar that ended at her waist and raised her chin as if admiring her reflection, but the shape of her breasts made her
start. Poor, sad pears, she said before cupping them and stepping into the bathroom.
Allison knelt in front of the toilet bowl waiting. Vomiting and diarrhoea had marked her days for seven weeks. Just
when she had resigned herself to the idea that she was going to have another bad day, she remembered the tiny
bottles of vodka she’d hidden in the box of sanitary napkins under the bathroom sink.
Derek sat at his desk answering questions. They were the same questions that the summer student asked him the
day before: Who was the contact at the service company? How many shallow gas wells were in the work-over
program? What specific services should the budget cover?
Derek told the young man with the baldhead to ask John, who sat two offices away. He ran his hands through his
mop of grey hair and wondered why every other twenty-something-year-old male shaved his head. Derek shivered at
the thought of Allison tugging clumps of his thick hair while she made love to him. He and Allison hadn’t been
intimate for more than a year, so Derek had found a physical substitute that made celibacy bearable.
Rhegan made arrangements with her neighbour to look after Maya. She spent the morning cleaning her house,
ironing clothes, and watching Maya play. Now the girl was at her father’s desk, her small body lost in the depths of his
big leather chair. Her legs were curled up and she was carefully turning the pages of a picture-laden book about Peru.
Rhegan wandered into her bedroom and stood in the middle of her walk-in closet wondering what to wear. Clothes
were her shield. She took pride in making herself look aloof. She often wished that hats with large brims were
fashionable, especially the kind with veils. No one would be able to penetrate the circumference without permission.
She knew she should wear something casual; it was Tuesday, the day of her weekly to visit Allison, but her hand fell
on a sleeveless, knee-length, navy silk dress with a lime-green lining. She took it off the hanger and slipped it on. The
dress had a serious air about it, but green was—for Rhegan—always a sign of life—and she fervently believed in
signs. Rhegan checked the stacks of shoeboxes for the matching flats and put them on before gathering her sleek
auburn hair into a clip at the base of her neck.
Alex was eating Stephen’s sandwich for the third day in a row. He couldn’t stop talking about Jerome Iginla who
would be showing them how to power skate that afternoon. Stephen wasn’t interested in what Alex was saying. He
hadn’t really felt the puck that struck his collarbone that morning when he was in goal. The coach wanted to call
Allison, but Stephen insisted repeatedly that he didn’t need his mom. After that Stephen made sure to yell at the other
players every once in a while because the coach watched him constantly and he was afraid of being sent home.
What’s this? Alex asked, hand on the back of Stephen’s neck. Alex knew everything about his identical twin. They were
ten and they always wore the same clothes, usually in different colors.
Stephen pulled his mother’s locket out from under the red t-shirt that he wore between his skin and his chest pads.
The boys hunched over the photos of their parents inside.
The coach saw Alex put his arm gently around Stephen’s shoulder and decided that the bruised boy should sit out the
afternoon session. No sense in taking any chances, the coach thought. Especially if the boy was hurting more than
he’d let on.
Linda called her dad when she realized that she would have to use the basement bathroom—again. Derek asked her
not to make a fuss. Allison usually managed to get herself to the kitchen before Linda got ready to take the bus to her
summer job at the movie theatre. For ten days now Allison had been in the bathroom when Linda needed to use it
and the fifteen-year old had decided that she’d had enough. After Derek said, goodbye, she threw the phone against
the wall and stormed down the hall expecting to do battle with Allison—again. Instead, Linda sank to the floor beside
her mother, and tried to ignore the smell of vomit.
Allison stretched her bone thin arms toward her daughter and said, I love you, you know.
By the age of ten Linda had learned that those words meant her mother had just given her a gift. When she was
twelve, Linda understood that she was expected to reciprocate. Before she got ready for work, she helped her mother
retrieve the box of sanitary napkins from under the bathroom sink.
When Linda called her dad the second time, Derek wasn’t in his office and she didn’t leave a message.
Allison decided that she was having a bad day. Two hours after her daughter left, she only managed to move from the
floor to the toilet seat. She wasn’t sure she could stand up and she really wanted to wash her hands. She turned on
the faucet, reached the soap, and pressed it hard between her palms, scrubbed them rapidly. She was salivating,
her heart racing. She threw the soap away and picked up one of the little bottles. Her throat burned at the sound of
the crack made by the first perforated cap when she broke the seal. Allison drank the contents despite the taste of bile
lingering in her mouth.
After the seven little bottles she had concealed in the box under the sink were empty, she hid them under the tissue in
the bathroom waste bin. She knew that her sister, Rhegan would approve.
Allison needed to use the phone in her bedroom to call for her daily delivery, but she was afraid. Her bowels moved
whenever she did and her arms shook as she tried to steady herself on the toilet. She held them out in front of her
torso, balancing to the sound of the water still running in the sink.
Allison imagined that she was floating toward Rhegan, imagined that they were swimming together just as they did
when they were kids. She was sit-leaning against the wall next to the toilet when she felt cold porcelain against the
soles of her feet. That’s when she decided to push off and catch her sister’s hands.
Derek ran marathons. Every weekday at precisely 11:42 am, he trained; he took the stairs three at a time from the
sixteenth floor to the eighteenth floor of his office building. Then he walked briskly to the corporate locker room,
changed his clothes, and plunged into the stairwell that took him to the building’s east exit. As soon as he got to the
street, he began the rhythmic breathing that his trainer was advocating he adopt for his ninth, twenty-six point two-mile
race: in-in-out-out, in-in-out-out. The open-mouth exhalations were supposed to engage his diaphragm and
contribute to his core stability.
He felt light headed after just one block. He decided to tell the trainer that he was a chest breather, not a belly
breather. Derek picked up his usual four-beat gait pattern as soon as he reached the riverside path, ran southeast
past people sleeping on the grass near the local drop-in centre, and picked up his tempo as he left the lunchtime
crowd behind. When the first needle drop-box came into view near Fort Calgary, he sprinted until he thought his lungs
would explode. Hey, he called out when he met his running partner near the Deane House. They turned and headed
west, pounded pavement together for the next hour and a half.
Afterwards, Derek used his electronic key card to access the stairwell for his cool-down. He climbed the eighteen
flights one step at time. He knew he’d been at his desk for exactly sixty-three minutes when he felt a stabbing pain
above his left eye. He’d been monitoring his recovery heart rate since returning to his office. He tried to concentrate
but that was always difficult when he was waiting for his sister-in-law’s weekly phone call, the one she made after her
visit to Allison.
Rhegan sat in her car gripping the steering wheel. She parked in the driveway of Allison’s home and nodded with
approval. The lawn service was doing a fine job and things looked, as they should. The clippings had been picked up,
the flower beds turned, and the hedge trimmed.
Rhegan visited Allison once a week although it didn’t bring her any comfort to do so. She always left her sister’s
home feeling battered. She had come on that particular Tuesday to tell Allison that she wouldn’t be visiting again—
unless she received a sign to the contrary.
Rhegan had written a letter, saying goodbye to her sister. She had undertaken this task with the approval of her
psychologist who counselled that Rhegan had to let go of Allison, had to let her hit the proverbial bottom.
Rhegan tried to take Allison to her doctor the Tuesday before. It was clear for weeks that her sister’s body was
rejecting everything she tried to ingest, but she refused to get out of the car when they reached the clinic. After that,
Rhegan admitted that she was powerless to help her sister. Rhegan sat in her car as she always did waiting for
Allison to recognize her arrival by opening the front door of her home.
Linda didn’t go to work. She got off the bus three stops before the movie theatre and walked into the arena where the
twins’ hockey school was held. She looked like the other girls who were there to ask Iginla for his autograph. Her jean
shorts were low on her hips and her abdomen was exposed below her t-shirt. She saw Stephen sitting alone at the
top of the bleachers. He seemed to be studying the group of parents who were watching the famous hockey player
instead of focusing on their children.
Linda waved at Alex through the glass, threw the bag containing her work clothes over her shoulder, and climbed the
stairs toward her brother.
Allison thought she was swimming. She thought that she’d reached the edge of the pool because her head had
banged against something hard and cold, and she thought that she saw Rhegan standing on the pool deck waiting
to help her out of the water when she looked up.
After sitting in her car for twenty minutes, Rhegan quietly opened and closed the front door of her sister’s home. Then
she stood in the entranceway listening before climbing the 75-year-old fir staircase to the second floor.
Allison’s head reeled when she sat up and leaned against the bathtub; her hair felt sticky and cold. She pulled a
towel from the rail on the wall behind her, wrapped it around her shoulders, and tried to stand. Something warm ran
down her legs when she reached for Rhegan. She imagined it was water from her bathing suit. Help me up, she said
to her sister the way she always did after too much time under water.
Rhegan stood in the bathroom doorway. She crushed the letter in her hand and let it fall to the floor.
After Rhegan’s telephone call, Derek left his office. While driving to the arena to pick up his sons, he used pre-race
visualization techniques to prepare himself mentally for what he would say to them. When he arrived, he was
surprised and glad to see Linda sitting on the grass with Alex and Stephen.
Derek got out of his car, baffled because he couldn’t speak. He sat down beside his kids and cried, the way he had
after finishing his first marathon.
Allison thought she was dreaming. She lay in a strange bed covered in warm blankets. There was something damp
under her that had a plastic edge, something that was soft against her raw buttocks. It crinkled when she moved.
She opened her eyes, took her hands out from under the covers, and looked at them. They seemed to be miles from
her head and one of them had something attached to the back of it. Allison couldn’t make one touch the other.
Rhegan caught her sister’s hands. She held them steady, and beyond their locked fingers, Allison saw blurred faces.
Derek, Linda, Stephen, and Alex stood at the side of the bed holding on to each other.
Poor, sad pears, Allison said, before tightening her grip on Rhegan’s hands.
