Prerequisites for Sleep Page 3

  For the first few days, Magnus instructs me in the physics of inflatables and the need for reinforcements and baffles — inside walls that force them to keep a desired shape. Without them, everything would be round. When he isn’t available, I help May and Lin mend older inflatables. On the morning of my fourth day, I am sitting at a sewing machine when Magnus approaches, stops and looms above me. He is cartoonish in appearance, round eyes behind aviator-rimmed glasses and a fixed smile that pushes his cheeks back to his ears, Iceland’s version of the Grinch after returning Christmas to Whoville. He is tall and lanky, with thick blond hair that looks like it was cut with a mixing bowl. I have come to the conclusion that style means nothing to him. He has too many other things to do. For someone only nine years older than I am, he has accomplished so much more, including breaking the world altitude record in a hot air balloon. “Lisa, I have decided on your first project,” he says.

  “This is good news.” I try to sound confident, but my stomach is immediately invaded by Mexican jumping beans that can’t decide whether they are excited or anxious.

  “I would like a large cake, three tiers with icing and candles, something that can be rented out for celebrations. Each tier should also be able to hold a six-foot-high banner. Is that possible?”

  A cake. I’m pretty sure I can make a cake, at least one out of fabric. The beans in my stomach slow to a skip. “I don’t see why not. I can break it down into basic shapes. Let me do some sketches to show you.”

  It is easy to tell that Magnus is pleased. When I show him my sketches, he looks like an excited little boy with dollar signs in his eyes. “How much time will it take?”

  “I don’t really know. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Take Lin when you’re ready. She’s fast and can help sew it.”

  I do the math first, the circumferences and diameters that make up the shapes, additional measurements for inside baffles. These are easy; large rectangles of fabric sewn together can make cylinders for the layers; giant donuts and circles will do for the tops. The same idea will work for the candles. Based on the circumferences, I draft patterns for wavy tubes that will create two colours of piped icing. Then I design faux-icing flowers to be made from twelve petal-shaped pieces.

  In a few days, Lin and I are cutting and sewing yellow nylon to create sixty-eight flowers. Lin is a lot faster than I am. She brushes aside my words when I thank her. I try to engage her in conversation, succeeding when I ask about kids. She has two, one in university and one finishing high school. “I’m a proud mother,” she says. “My children are my greatest accomplishment, but they are a lot of work. No matter how hard you try, you can never tell how they will turn out.”

  “Like inflatables,” I say, but she doesn’t smile and I realize I am making light of something she takes very seriously. “Only harder,” I tack on.

  It takes the two of us three weeks working flat out to build the cake. I can’t sleep at night for fear it will fall apart or fail to inflate properly. I get a cold and my nose runs constantly and turns bright pink. Andy makes me hot rum toddies and rubs all the right places to help me relax. He comes to work with me on the morning the cake is going to be inflated.

  “This is Andy, my better half,” I say to Magnus. He is puzzled by my colloquial expression. “My boyfriend,” I say. Then Andy looks puzzled. This is not a term we’ve ever used. “We live together. He came to see my cake.” Magnus nods and walks to the fan and plugs it in.

  When the air starts to enter the pile of fabric, I hold my breath. We watch as the layers slowly rise upwards. Then each icing tube and yellow blossom takes shape, reminding me of a slow-motion nature sequence on TV. For a moment, we are suspended in time as we wait for the candles to stand up on top. They bounce into position and I imagine a cartoon boing. I jump up and down and hug Andy while Magnus tethers it to a couple of trees, then crawls inside to check the baffles. When he comes out, he says nothing, but I recognize his look.

  “It’s amazing,” says Andy. “When it started to rise, it actually looked like it was baking, like it contained yeast or baking powder. And I thought you couldn’t cook.”

  Later, Andy is making us a special dinner to mark the occasion. I watch him cutting celery, mesmerized by how he rolls the knife on the curve of the blade with one hand and slowly advances the stalks with the other. There is no chopping sound, just a slice of stainless steel and a green crunch. This is his art. I am sitting on a tall stool next to the island, jabbering on about my cake, when it registers that I am bordering on annoying so I change the subject.

  “You never tell me about your work.”

  He stops and looks up. “Not much to tell. I go into the kitchen. I cook someone else’s menu, then I leave.” He finishes the celery and reaches for a package of chicken livers. “A chef doesn’t really exist unless he is cooking his own creations.”

  The next day Magnus tells me that the cake has been rented for the weekend and we need to create the banners. He hands me a paper with the words HONEST AL’S BIRTHDAY SALE, and tells me to have Lin do them. He is smiling more widely than usual, something I didn’t think was possible. “I should take you up in the balloon,” he says.

  “Really! What’s it like?”

  “Peaceful. You’re drifting above the earth with only a basket between you and falling. Of course, things appear small, but not like when you see them from a plane — there is no glare from glass, so things have more depth. People sometimes reach out to try to touch them. For some reason, they need to make sure they are real. Some people can get carried away and you have to pull them back.”

  “Sounds surreal.”

  “I’ll take you sometime so you can experience it for yourself.”

  When I turn around, Magnus’s wife, Joanne, is glaring at me. She is sitting at the front desk training Nancy, the new secretary. Nancy is focused on the phone in front of her as if it is about to grow legs and walk away.

  On Monday, I arrive early to review my documentation on the cake. With written instructions and diagrams, May and Lin will create additional inventory. As I walk by his office, Magnus calls out to me. He is sitting at his desk, which is unusual, because Magnus is too hyper to sit still. Outside, it is raining and water is dripping from my jacket. I wipe away a drop that lands on my cheek and push my hood back.

  “Do you think you can design an elephant?” he asks.

  I take a moment to think. “Sitting down would be best.”

  “Yes, sitting down is best. Can it be done?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  At the drafting table, doodling some rough elephants, I hope I’m not getting too cocky. This could prove to be much harder than a cake. Magnus comes by and looks at my sketches. “This elephant that you’re making, what colour nylon should I order?”

  “Pink.”

  “Why pink?” he says, wrinkling his nose so that he looks like an animated rabbit.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of pink elephants?”

  “No.”

  “They’re an illusion. When someone has too much to drink, they begin to see things that aren’t there, like blue mice and pink elephants. If you really want some publicity, you could put one up at the top of the Don Valley where the highways all merge, and have banners that read DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.”

  He looks at me like I am speaking a foreign language.

  After work, I go to Toys “R” Us at the mall. The stuffed animal section is next to the baby products, just past bikes and outdoor toys. A little boy is riding a big-wheel trike up the aisle. His bum is only inches off the floor while his feet man the pedals on the large front tire. The noise rumbles through the store.

  I pick up a small elephant that is white with contrasting blue striped fabric on the undersides of its ears and the pads of its feet. Its trunk is up and I decide to buy it. I’ve read somewhere that elephants with
their trunks up are lucky.

  When Andy comes home from work he points to the elephant sitting on our dresser. “What’s this?” He tosses his cooking whites into the laundry basket. I catch a whiff of someone else’s menu. Garlic and onions and curry, and the lingering smell of cooking oil — too much oil. Andy would never overuse cooking oil in his own creations. “Is there something you want to tell me?” His eyes light up, and he delivers a grin that says he could handle it if I were to spring certain news.

  “It’s my inspiration. I’m making a twenty-five-foot pink elephant.”

  “Hey,” he laughs, “you could put it next to the highway during the holidays with a DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE banner.”

  “That’s exactly what I said, but Magnus didn’t get it. He didn’t understand the connotation, even after I explained it.”

  “Did you tell him it would make the news?”

  “I tried, but he has an entirely different thought process; and I don’t think pro bono is his style.”

  On Thursday, Joanne seeks me out to give me my pay. She works an hour a day in the shop, taking care of the money and the books. She is the opposite of Magnus, serious and tense with unruly brown hair. Shadowed crescents below her eyes give her a hollow look, although overall, she is an attractive woman. With makeup and hot rollers, she would be beautiful. I heard her tell Nancy the story of how Magnus swept her off her feet in a balloon when she was backpacking with friends through Europe.

  “Did you like the cake?” I ask when she hands me an envelope.

  “I like the idea of the cake,” she says. “It will be good for business.”

  Forcing a smile, I thank her for my pay and decide to save any future questions for Zoe, who brings me pictures and tells me that I should make them into inflatables. They all look the same, triangle bodies with big eyes. She has the basic shape right — inflatables need large bottoms.

  The elephant is coming along nicely, although I lie awake at night correcting design flaws. I make a small-scale model, stuffed with cotton fluff, to test a pattern I drafted on graph paper. Magnus runs a low-tech shop, so to create the full-scale version I have to grid up the pattern manually. This requires taping together large pieces of heavy brown paper and using bricks and boards to hold it flat because it constantly wants to curl. The second step is measuring and drawing the lines to create giant graph paper. Afterwards there is the process of filling in the large boxes with the same information that is on my miniature version. It’s not difficult, only time-consuming and hard on the knees and neck. I plug away at it while humming the jingle from an old cereal commercial. Pink elephants, pink, pink elephants, lots of pink elephants…

  Magnus, antsy as he is, checks on my progress about thirty times a day. He crouches on his haunches a couple of feet from where I am trying to work.

  “So when do I get that balloon ride?” I keep trying to make conversation because if I don’t, he just sits there watching me with his happy-Grinch grin.

  “When you finish your elephant.”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “I give you my word.”

  “Good, an incentive plan. If I don’t like it, you’ll have to come up with different rewards for future projects. How about cash bonuses?”

  “You’ll like it.”

  “Company shares?”

  “You are such a dreamer.”

  “Ah, but you like my dreams because I dream in 3D.”

  “Stop dreaming and build your elephant.” He laughs as he gets up and walks away.

  May and Lin are making a cake, so I surround myself with pink nylon and sew the elephant on my own. A cylinder-shaped baffle runs through the centre and reinforcements are necessary on the trunk and neck. For contrast, I make the insides of the ears and the toenails purple. I’m glad to be off my knees and the job goes quickly.

  “I wish you didn’t have to work today,” I say to Andy over an apple-crêpe breakfast. “Once I attach all the loops, we’re going to inflate my elephant.”

  “Take the video camera; we’ll watch it as soon as I get home. We can have popcorn to celebrate. I’ll pick up the candy-coated stuff you like from Kernels.”

  Later, May operates the video camera so I can see the elephant inflate at actual size. Magnus connects the fan and turns it on. The body begins to unfold, taking shape like an embryo developing its parts. My stomach clenches when the head and trunk emerge and I worry about pressure on the seams of the neck and gusset. In less than two minutes, the large ears snap into place and my pachyderm is sitting large and pink before me — smiling.

  Magnus is pleased. “Looks excellent,” he says, walking around and surveying the body from all angles. “Nice big ears for banners. And you gave him a tail.”

  “Her. I gave her a tail. Can’t imagine a pink elephant being a him.”

  “Perhaps you wish to name her.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Come, let’s check to see how she is holding up.”

  Undoing the back zipper, we crawl inside and stand up. The fan hums and cool air brushes my skin. Magnus closes the zipper and pulls on the baffle that stretches from the elephant’s neck to the canvas base, then inspects the flat-felled seams of the outer walls.

  “You don’t make mistakes,” he says. That little-boy look is on his face.

  “I do. I make hundreds. I just make them over and over in my head. I try to think things through before I jump in.”

  Without warning he wraps me in his arms and kisses me. His breath smells like Juicy Fruit. I try to recall if I have ever seen him chew gum. He kisses me again, this time it is long and passionate. I blink and struggle to focus. Everything around me is pink. I think about Andy at work, not existing among someone else’s creations, and about drifting in a balloon. I reach out and try to touch something real. There is no one there to pull me back.

  Prerequisites for Sleep

  It rained through the night and early morning, tearing the petals from the lilies in the garden. They lay on the ground like pieces of satin tinged with rust. The sky looked bruised, as if it had more crying to do. Anita stood in the kitchen, looking out at the day through the screen of the back door. The thin lines of mesh made everything appear slightly out of focus.

  “Some people believe that it is good luck to have rain on your wedding day,” Judith said cheerfully.

  Anita poured coffee into her favourite mug, a black one with a large white A on the side and a chip in the rim, then sat down at the table next to her aunt. Lately, she thought of her aunt as Saint Judith, Saint Jude for short. What else could she be after taking on the responsibility of raising Anita when her mother and father died? Judith had given up the career of an overseas correspondent to become a weekly columnist and an instant parent. In fourteen years, Anita had never heard her aunt complain. Any regrets, if she had them, were not voiced.

  “Kevin’s mother has rented enough tents to create an upscale refugee camp,” Anita said, scooping two heaping teaspoons of sugar into her coffee.

  “It is nice of the Sinclairs to host the wedding,” Judith ventured. “Kevin’s a dear, but you know we would have never been able to put on a spread for that family. Oh, they are always pleasant to everyone and not snobby by any means, but they are used to certain things. Do me a favour, don’t get so used to certain things that you won’t eat my macaroni and cheese casserole.”

  “Well, Kevin is her only child,” Anita said. “Some women like taking care of such details. I’m not one of them. The things I decided to take care of are more than enough wedding details for me. And I don’t think you have to worry about the casserole. It’s still my favourite.” The spoon, hitting the mug as she stirred, underlined her words with porcelain-steel music.

  “I know what you mean about wedding details,” said Judith. “They aren’t my forte, that’s for sure.”

  “Do you ever wish that you h
ad married?” Anita said. She searched her aunt’s face as she posed the question. Up until she was sixteen, Anita would look for her mother in Judith’s face, but the more she had looked the more she noticed the differences between the two sisters. What she saw these days was that the years had been good to Judith. Her mother, no longer accumulating time, existed only in the photo albums and old videos stored in the hall closet.

  “Oh, I think if the right person had come along, I would have married,” said Judith, “but who’s to say that the right person can’t still show up? Fifty-two is not that old, you know.” Her voice shifted and she leaned back in the kitchen chair to look directly at her niece. “Don’t go thinking that you’re the reason I didn’t get married. I had plenty of offers, just none that I could live with.”

  Anita brushed her teeth and stepped into the shower, surveying her body as she adjusted the water temperature. She had put on a few pounds since they announced the engagement, but not a noticeable amount. At her final fitting last week, the dress was perfect. How lucky that she had been able to find one she liked that was on sale.

  It was at a little boutique that Kevin’s mother had recommended, located in Barberry Market, an area of old stone houses that had been turned into upscale businesses. The signs hanging from each were understated and catered to a clientele that didn’t need to be shouted at. Anita drove down with Judith one afternoon, thinking they would just look. They found a parking spot on the other side of a street split by a median with a couple of benches and some annual beds. It was the end of April and the empty gardens filled the air with an organic smell of damp soil.

  They looked at several dresses, but Anita kept coming back to the same one. “Go ahead, try it on,” the woman said, unzipping the clear plastic so the gown could be viewed better.

  Her reflection: auburn hair, freckled skin, white dress, shouted at her without words. Was she ready for this? She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.