Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson Page B

you so much!”
    For here was another lie: contrary to what they’d learned in pre-natal class, the crowning of the baby’s head is not necessarily a moment of pure joy. Ellen was, in fact, at her lowest then, the most biblically wretched creature that had ever crawled the clodded surface of the earth. No one could feel more abandoned, more utterly abject, than she, Ellen Silver, in her final push.
    Two thousand kilometres away the father of the child ripping mercilessly through her body was probably screwing his slutty actress girlfriend
right that minute.
What could be worse than that?
    Something. What happened to Celine was worse.
    “A RE you on crack?” Tony, her hairdresser, asked in 2007, the week before Ellen left on her trip to France with Celine. “
That
Celine? The quack? The one you complain about
every time
you come here?”
    “Every time?” Ellen asked, surprised and a little ashamed she could be so consistently disloyal.
    To her relief, Tony moved on to the subject at hand, Ellen’s roots, how the grey was already showing again so how about something
dramatique
? He danced around the chair, running his tiny hands upward from the nape of her neck to her crown. These days Ellen wore her hair to her shoulders. The ungrey ends slithered between Tony’s fingers. He tocked his head from side to side, a dashboard ornament, formulating improvements.
    Recently, Tony had softened his own look. Because he was small, he seemed ageless. Not a perceivable minute had settled on him since 1983, when Ellen first sat in this chair. Now he’d turned himself into a tousled schoolboy just leaping out of bed, an effect that probably took hours to create.
    “I could do something to you today, Ellen, that I guarantee will draw those horny Frenchmen to you like, like—They will
oo-la-la
! They will fall on those shit-covered French sidewalks trying to get a glimpse up your skort.” (Ellen had brought her new skort in a bag to show Tony.) “They will curse that skort.
Merde, merde, merde
, they will say. I thought it was a skirt, but I can’t see
anything
!”
    “Skirt plus shorts. Skort,” Ellen said again.
    “It will put them into a frenzy, the skort together with what I could do to your hair, if only you’d let me. If only you would
laissez-faire
your hair the way you have your life.”
    “Don’t fuck up my hair, Tony.”
    “You take chances, Ellen. You’ll probably screw fifty horny Frenchmen over there. Or you could. If you’d let me do this one little thing.”
    “It’s tempting,” Ellen had said.
    N OW here she was! In France! In France, writing a postcard to Tony so he would get it before her next appointment. Until they adjusted to the time change, she and Celine were renting a six-hundred-year-old house in a tiny village in the Luberon Mountains. Celine, a practising herbalist, was all messed up. She’d locked herself in her room. But Ellen had been liberal with the Zopiclone, even on the plane. (If it went down, she preferred to sleep through it.)
    Ellen, in France, with her
café au lait
and chocolate
croissant
that she had ordered herself using actual French words, sitting in a village square waiting for a horny Frenchman she might claim in the postcard to have screwed to come along. Wild iris crowded the base of the fountain,
à la
Van Gogh. Chocolate bittersweet on her tongue. Then the bells in the eleventh-century church began to ring.
    Oh my God,
thought Ellen, clutching her head.
Sonnez les matines! Ding dang dong!
    It was almost too much, too beautiful.
    She wrote on the card to Tony,
Who needs a man?
    H ER relationship with Celine was complicated, more complicated than with Georgia, who, like Tony, had also expressed trepidation when Ellen told her about the hiking trip. Ellen and Celine had a long history together, yet this history, full of tribulations for both, as well as minor triumphs, did absolutely nothing to change Celine’s attitude toward Ellen. Celine was (Ellen thought) frozen