E. D. MORIN
At half past five, Sam sets the glue brush down on her worktable and inspects the tiny vacuum cleaner. She rotates the piece with care, tilting her head, clucking quizzically, asking herself if this bone sculpture is still relevant. With all the noise out there, she’s not so sure. She smoothes her paint smock absently, her fingers restless, and there’s the sting — her left thigh tender from the needle and ink punctures. Twin swallows chasing each other’s tails. She recalls the hours reclined in the tattoo artist’s chair, this tolerance for pain she didn’t know she had. Her hand moves across her thigh and she smiles, closes her eyes.
The tattoo reminds her that relevance is irrelevant. She has always hated rules. She has always hated convention. She is her mother’s daughter, in love with two men more than fifteen years her junior. The beautiful brothers Germain.
Piper and Tyrrell bash through the door, home from the gallery. Their entrance is boisterous. Mid-story, in the middle of a stupid gag, they stomp through the house in their boots, fists laden with plastic bags. Bursting with male bravado, they parade past her studio to the kitchen where they crack open dark brews and begin their Monday ritual. Wing night.
She always ends up joining them, not for the glistening red wings (she doesn’t eat meat) but for their infectious youthful hijinks. Every Monday night they perform for her. There’s an unwritten rule they will leave gallery politics behind. There’s another unwritten rule that says any rule is verboten.
When Sam enters the kitchen, Tyrrell is telling a story about the new female intern they have taken on in the gallery framing shop.
“So she’s asking me what jig to use.”
Piper adds chili peppers and maple syrup to the sauce bowl. “Go on.”
“I tell her, you’re the boss. You pick. And of course it’s the wrong jig.”
“Of course.”
Of course? Jesus.
Tyrrell strips the cellophane off a boat-sized package of chicken wings. “It’s entirely the wrong weapon.”
“You let her ruin the frame.” Piper starts in. “Tell me you didn’t—”
“Nah uh. Better than that.”
Sam can already tell where the story is going. The unsuspecting intern is the target of one of their pranks and, as usual, Tyrrell’s account is peppered with lewd military jargon. She feels sorry for the unwitting young woman, but Sam keeps quiet and maintains the Monday code. No gallery politics. Enjoy the show. If there are any real transgressions, she can bring them up later. She has her ways.
Tyrrell moves to the sink and begins rinsing the meat. He places the wings on a clean tea towel and pats them dry. The raw chicken flesh is revolting. But these wings feed her sculptures, after all. Her tiny bone machines. She recalls that Tuesday morning, over a year ago, when she found the detritus of another wing night in her best ceramic bowl, and had on impulse dumped the mess into a pot, boiled, dismantled, cleaned, and dried the wings, and from their skeletal parts had built her first bone sculpture. A tiny domestic robot. Who knew what that act would lead to?
Tyrrell arrives at the end of his story. “Rat a tat tat, dusted,” he says, punching the air with imaginary gunfire.
“You better believe it,” Piper adds wryly, ever the elder brother, even if it’s by less than a year.
At the gallery, Piper runs the show. Under his direction, Tyrrell cuts glass and matte board, builds frames for art pieces, and mounts them on the walls. For Sam’s recent show, The Bone Machine, Tyrrell erected curved stud walls and built all the platforms. He drywalled and rolled on coats of white gallery paint. Then, under Piper’s precise curation, he positioned and repositioned her sculptures on the platforms until the elder Germain was satisfied.
Piper can be a control freak in the gallery, but together they make a good trio. Sam creates, Piper curates, and Tyrrell completes. The atmosphere is civil. These brothers know how to be good feminists.
But on wing night, something else happens. She’s at a loss. She can’t explain it.
The throttle of engines breaks Sam’s sleep. Outside, husky female voices shout over the engine rumble. Sam props herself up, jaw stiff and gritty, and squints over Tyrrell’s unshaven chin to the clock’s glowing digits. One-eleven. She groans and collapses onto her pillow. The bed is a king, wide enough that she can nestle between them without touching either, unless one exceeds his allotted space. Tonight, she can’t sleep for their heat. Sweaty and annoyed, she wants to extricate herself from the covers, kick out from between them, and holler at these neighbour biker chicks, launch a salvo of obscenities. Open fire. Get your derrières in gear and move the fuck along! Just like her mother.
Instead she slides her palm across the mattress and touches Tyrrell’s midriff. He is her grounding rod. He could sleep through an earthquake, she is certain, or the end of the world. He is so utterly transparent. As for Piper, how to tell what is in his head?
These noisy engines could leave her spinning for hours. She massages her jaw and surrenders to these biker chicks, picturing them: not the shampoo commercial types — no perfect tresses coiled under helmets and released with a sexy flourish — but sporting barber cuts. Leather-clad legs straddling huge Harleys, owning the street, defiant. She might have aspired to their female bravado once.
But it is one-eleven in the morning.
Three bones, she can hear Tyrrell say. He loves abusing the word bone, loves its layered meanings, especially since The Bone Machine. Last night, at eleven minutes past eleven, it was four bones, a continuation of the wing night spectacle. Sam presses her knuckle to her cheek. Outside, the noisy throttle sets her off again. Move the fuck along!
This is not the first time she’s noticed her mother in her. Last week in the garden, she gave refuge to an injured songbird. Her mother would have done that too. So hopelessly naive. The songbird’s breast was throbbing madly, one wing broken and an eye socket pecked out. Sam knew it was pointless, she knew she was interfering with nature, but she couldn’t stand to leave it there and simply return to her worktable as though this little drama were not unfolding right in front of her. So she brought the bird inside and set it in a small turquoise bowl on the windowsill. A finch, she was almost certain. She might have dug up worms for it to eat, or found an eyedropper to dispense water, but she resisted, knowing the futility of the act. She was the interloper. She was meddling in avian affairs. Better to leave the poor finch on the windowsill with a view of the mountain ash and its bright red berries.
Her mother would have stayed to witness its dying breath. Probably, she would have cried. Sam simply became engrossed in her work. Such is the amnesia she is capable of, this ability to blot out news, bad or good, anything beyond the confines of her studio. And then, with her ward long forgotten, Piper came into the studio holding the turquoise bowl. His face was pale.
“You found my finch.”
“It’s disgusting.” He glared at the bowl. “And dead.”
Rosie. That was the name her mother gave every bird, as if each were her pet, her confidante even. As if the avian umwelt was in any way knowable.
Other people were as unknowable as finches, each isolated inside their human umwelt or bubble, destined to be distinctly apart. Piper was shaken, and how to explain that? She couldn’t. The brothers served up a mound of dead bird flesh every Monday night. What was this, then? A transference of grief?
The engine rumble continues. The women break hoarsely into a chorus, shouting over their motorbikes, drunk or stoned or high on something. Still in their twenties, Sam guesses, their singing blatantly deep-toned and boyish. It’s a wonder one of her neighbours hasn’t come out.
Tyrrell is softly snoring. She wonders if Piper is awake.
Sam thinks of Piper and his magic sleep aid. He grinds his teeth too. She still bristles when she recalls her visit to Piper’s dentist, the infantile blue whales on the dental clinic walls. After years of grinding her teeth, she was willing to try whatever the dentist proposed. A moulded thermoplastic appliance for her lower teeth, he suggested, just like Piper’s. But as Dr. Maligne was about to take an imprint, he called the thing her binkie. Seriously?
Sam feels her skin grow hot. She wonders if this is a female thing. She wonders if this is the treatment the dentist gives to women and kids. She had held it up and asked Piper. “What does Dr. Maligne call this thing?”
“A dental guard. Maybe an appliance. Why?”
She didn’t bother explaining. “What do you talk about at your appointments?”
“We talk about art.”
“You’re kidding me.” Sam fumed.
Sometimes, in the quiet of her studio, she is so infuriated with men, she wants to launch her bone sculptures at them like Tyrrell’s missiles. Her sculptures are selling, they have hit a cultural nerve of sorts, but sometimes she wishes her art had real power. She’s afraid she’s wasting her time.
She can tell Piper is awake now. She moves to him, her hair falling in a silver glow. She is fully awake. Her mother’s voice in her ear whispers, “This is what crazy is.”
Piper’s hands move to the soft curve above her hips. He skates his fingers down her left leg, presses against her tattooed swallows.
Sam winces, moves Piper’s hand. “There,” she whispers.
Piper removes his night guard, sets it atop Wharton’s Icefields, part of his research for the gallery’s next show.
Sam wrestles Piper and straddles him, pinning him to the pillow. He makes a show of wiggling out from under her, then easily surrenders. “You win.”
“Shhh,” she whispers, glancing over at Tyrrell. He is still out cold.
The engine resonance enters her. Tyrrell would say he’d hit her sweet spot; he’d call himself the missile. Tyrrell is so beautiful, but why this military jargon? Where does he get it? Guns and ammunition, the training of arms, on her, his ground zero. Let’s flip to see who’ll be tail gunner, he’ll say to Piper.
She is hot. She has spent her currency with Piper, burned up the night with her fury. Meanwhile, these crazy biker chicks continue to race their engines — as if oil were a limitless resource, as if this were broad daylight. She should open the curtains and bang on the glass, show them what crazy is. She rests on her back between Piper and Tyrrell, not touching either one.
This looming threshold. She is her mother’s only child. She has never wanted to be a mother. Her sculptures are babies enough. Yet what must it be like to be a mother? The threshold is disappearing, falling behind her. When her mother birthed her, it was at home with a midwife, no instruments, no painkillers. Is the pain of birth anything like a tattoo?
Piper whispers in her ear. “They’re saying things about us.”
Another one of his gags, she supposes. “They’re not. They can’t hear us over their engines.”
“Not the bikers. Your fans. They’re saying things about the three of us.”
She feels penned between them, these brothers. She wishes she could carve a wider space in the mattress. Her fans? This talk is the reason she hates her métier sometimes, the need for buyers, the need for a gallery, these art connoisseurs who think they can purchase her. Moneybags who jest that she too would go nicely inside their Spanish villas.
“They want to know what we do in bed. And which brother is your favourite.”
Her skin feels sticky.
“And which of us is the alpha male,” Piper adds.
“Seriously? Why do people even care about these things?” Sam swallows a grin, knowing which of them is alpha. She is.
She slides out between the brothers and off the end of the bed. Sleep is impossible. She will fill the kettle, boil water for tea, make her sleepless night official. She will begin another sculpture, another household machine, another space-age artefact from the domestic prison. In a radiant brainwave Sam sees a birthing apparatus. Robot-operated forceps.
At the bedroom window, she yanks open the curtains and raps noisily on the glass. She squints. Through the headlamp glare she sees these aren’t women bikers after all. They are bearded. The men stare, their grins goofy and lopsided. Sam wavers. She is naked. Wilderness on one side, caged animal on the other. But which side is which?
Barely tolerating their gaze, Sam glares back. She flips them the bird.
“Dusted,” Tyrrell croons.
Something has finally woken him. Sam turns to say something but Tyrrell is already vaulting off the mattress, throwing his arms around her, hugging her.
She shuts the curtain. “None of your business,” she whispers at the glass.
Tyrrell takes her by the hand and pulls her back to bed.