Literary Flaneurs: Elise Levine

 

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

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Axioms of Euclid Avenue: herself, by herself

by Elise Levine

 

 

My mother in her beaver coat, me in skirts and cut-offs: a swagger never hurts.

The ways of walking never end: or they do: smile, nice ass.

 

*

 

I’m eighteen, crossing Toronto’s Spadina at College on a sweltering August night.

I’ve fought with my mother: earlier that evening, in suburban Willowdale for a visit, having recently moved into the city: a top-floor one-room shared-bath hot-plate no-kitchen on Euclid: twenty bucks a week.

The fight: don’t go, I’m going, so go: who do you think you are you dirty: the ashtray flung: by her, me: no shit: we’ve always fought: always will until her last conscious day, nearly three decades later: the mouth on me, mouth on her.

And so on: as if I care: College to Huron to Bloor to St. George then double-back west to Bathurst: people fizzy as bees in jars: traffic lights, taillights, storefronts constellate: in a month I’ll start university: I’ve been reading Cortazar, years of Woolf and Beckett already in my head: in Hopscotch what sticks most is the male lead’s callous indifference bordering on cruelty toward his female lover: his: she is no one: I know and don’t: already I’ve hitchkiked Europe with my fucked-up suicide girlfriend: only recently fucked my first boyfriend, long-hair lawyer who picked me up one afternoon as I sauntered the plaza outside new City Hall: eager: embarrassed to be a late bloomer in this way of being a late bloomer: my sort-of boyfriend: as if I care: roaming: reading Celine too that asshole: somehow I know enough to know: asshole: already other midnights, Dupont, Bloor to Danforth, Broadview to Gerrard, Parliament and Queen: lost and not I have no idea: demand I have no idea: mother’s daughter stiff-necked, and this is to not even speak of the father in this: to speak at all: molten: making an unmaking: and Woolf: her anonymous trampers: this dominion: thrilling privacy: unleashed: provisional because: baby: let me suck your pussy: baby, no one I know, though seriously, still: surmise a crowded street can harbor more than does the home: what I mean when I say why say more: parse a map, take a picture, fatten on nostalgia for what no longer exists: hours become years: hot smells: yellow dress.

 

*

 

He bums a smoke from me: Yorkville in those days both upscale and seedy: on a dark sidestreet I step off the curb.

 

*

 

It takes three nights with the help of a friend to trick him sinewy and fearsomely thick-cocked, destitute and talking off the top of his head, scrutably crazy, from my bed and out the door.

Two weeks solid: him: screaming up at my window from the sidewalk: Ellen, Ellen: : and I am not Ellen: not in my room: nor in my bed: : in these days I keep a journal: over and over I write How to Live a Life: a Life: not My Life.

One semester: his occasional appearances: my neighbors’ complaints: history textbook underlined and notated and not making sense: Some Life.

The end: I move: other side of town: Keep Moving.

 

*

 

Desire a heroine for this tale.

For my mother in her beaver coat shepherds my little brother sleeting suburban miles to his bar mitzvah lessons our family can barely afford: for it is always winter: for in the years to follow, her wasting insurrections and conformings: self-starving she marches come hail or shine the avenues, pain mapped and expunged daily: controlled: and when the cancer finally comes of her pack-a-day habit and my now-grown brother buys her Meals On Wheels she won’t eat, still she walks, a walking stick.

For finally one afternoon it is summer-stormy: she and I tread the parking lot at Sunnybrook Hospital post-chemo post-radiation post-wig-fitting: as long as it’s not red, she tells me under an angry sky: but it is red: she herself has picked it out: hair colour of the woman my father once had an affair with, and told my mother about in detail, and she told me: and this is not to speak of the father: to speak at all: it is red, I tell her: cruel: she clams: and honest to fucking not six months later her mouth stitched in death: for custom’s sake, so as not to sully the white shroud: believe it, I myself take the call from the funeral home: for her gut still bubbling: and nearly erased, naked but for the scars: what is seen: only the invisible: veiled by such draperies: I know and don’t: for who knows the hunger and ferocity: all rise: for the going, the gone.

*

 

Desire: a heroine.

Though Toronto’s old streetcorners no longer hold me: this inborn telemetry, skin and bone, Ossington and Draper, Dupont and Langley: though why even say: Avenue Road: love’s redactions: splendors non-navigable: fierce ungovernable solitude: joy non-negotiable: and sad: why sightsee the ancestral taverns, clocks and spires, and fucking: avenues roads: all blank as beauty thinking leaps and ghosts: for starters.

Thus begin.

Let it be demanded: a city that no longer exists: exists: urgent insurgent zone: the mouth on me on her.

 

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Elise Levine is the author of the story collection Driving Men Mad and the novel Requests and Dedications. Her work has appeared in publications including Blackbird, Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, Prairie Schooner, and Best Canadian Stories. She teaches creative writing and English literature at Dickinson College and Chatham University’s low-residency MFA program, and lives in Baltimore, MD.