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Eleanor was making everyone tell the moment they had come closest to death.

I like moments, she says, any kind of moment. Cut to the climax.

Glenn Marshall was once in a helicopter, sighting the neck of a galloping moose with a tranquilizing rifle, and they came
near a cliff, and whatever happened with the wind, the helicopter dropped for ten seconds. He told the story while buttering a roll. Turning the knife over and over to clean both sides in the bread. He said in accidents like this, the blades keep turning, driving down like a corkscrew, decapitating passengers.

Eleanor told about the crashing Nepalese tour bus, the front wheel over the cliff edge, the TVs bolted to the ceiling still blaring some Indian musical with a harem of dancers poised on three tiers of a fountain, all sawing on miniature violins. Big breasts, pillowy hips. When the second wheel of the bus thumped over the edge of the cliff, the fountain hung sideways, the dancers still perched, still grinning and sawing away on the violins in jubilant Technicolor, defying gravity. She had seen, through the window at her shoulder, fire smeared over the steel side. They were on fire. She and Sadie sleeping under a single bedsheet. The windshield shattered and fell into their laps. The bluish glass tumbling into the folds of the sheet, caught in their hair. They had raised their arms to cover their faces.

And there they were, in Nepal. What opulence, how quiet. The pressing crowd squished them, lifted them off their feet. They were borne out of the bus and fell on their knees and got up quick, quick.

Get away from the bus, get away before it blows.

Dawn; a woman in a sari on a dusty road with a water jug on her head and the sun coming up behind her. The real moment is the flutter of the sari. The snap and thwonk of fabric in the breeze. The silence. Someone taking out a map that
crackled in the hot air like eggshells. But Eleanor stops telling the story just as the second wheel of the bus flops over the cliff.

Leave your audience hanging.

She says, Beneath you could see buses that had already crashed, crumpled on the rocks. Then the second wheel rolled over the edge and we could feel the bus rocking.

Glenn leaned back and rested his arm over her chair. She could smell the muggy, spring-like sweat of his body. The nearness of his arm made her blush.

She thought: And Philip wants to leave me.

These were the categories of moments: the most famous person they’d ever met, the most romantic moment ever experienced, the most embarrassing. Earliest memory. Luckiest moment. The last time you peed your pants.

Constance told about waking in a field when she was seven with a bull eating grass, snorting water droplets on her cheek, horns yellowed like an old toilet. How she ran, hot pee trickling down her legs, yellow on her white ankle socks. When she’d climbed the fence, stopped to catch her breath, leaned over to puke, she could see the blue sky and clouds in the shiny black patent leather shoes an aunt had sent from St. John’s. She lights a cigarette and blows the wedding veil out of her face.

She says, Will someone get me out of this contraption?

Constance grew up around the bay, an only child, raised by her grandmother. She says she was bathed in the kitchen in a big galvanized tub in front of a wood stove. Can this be true?
She remembers when television arrived in Newfoundland. They all gathered in one house to watch. She’s a chef with a Master’s in Religious Studies. Medieval witches. Magic, black and white. Eleanor has watched Constance paint braided pastry with melted butter, skin rabbits, flick dollops of fresh cream off a wooden spoon into chocolate mousse.

Once Philip had made Eleanor open her mouth and close her eyes. He’d had candles, they’d smoked some dope, him scrabbling under the bed.
Keep ‘em closed
. A ball bearing dinging back and forth in the metal can he shook,
I said keep ‘em closed
, and the raucous sputtering, her mouth blocked with Reddi Wip. Loops of Reddi Wip over her nipples, her chin, her nose, her hair.

Constance looks like cotton candy in the dress. Eleanor can’t, for the moment, imagine her in other clothes. She was made for the wedding dress. Busty and pink-cheeked. Satin is perfect for her, iceberg cool and pleasure affirming. She was made, actually, to be in a Russian novel; a kitchen with a fireplace as big as a bed, the gamekeeper banging on the door with a wooden staff, a brace of quail over his shoulder, and there is Constance presiding over blood puddings, her four children in muslin walking in the pink cherry orchard.

The whole wedding dress swishes from side to side as she hands out puff pastry with brie and caramelized onions. Her auburn curls sliding from the combs. The low scooped neck. She’d pulled the whole wedding off by herself without complaint. She had enjoyed it. Constance knows how to get by on nothing, she and Ted, the four children, and the scabrous,
moulting husky with an eye infection — they are always broke. But when it comes to a party, Constance is easily extravagant. What’s money for? A tiny glass tube of saffron she’d picked up at a specialty store on the way back from the Sally Ann where she’d bought the girls’ jeans.

Yesterday Eleanor had visited and Constance was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking (an orange silk blouse, that’s the sort of thing she wears), cheek resting on her hand and the counter full of loaves of bread, the tops glistening with butter. More dough rising. She sat in front of the window, taking a break. Making Eleanor a cup of tea. The rowing shells on the lake passing by her shoulder. Yesterday the lake was still, and the oars touched down and came up splashless. The kittens knocking over the jade plant. Giant piles of laundry. A stack of books about the plague, one on alchemy. She’d had four children, each a year apart. Alchemy she knew; the Pill she didn’t bother with.

Eleanor had said, How do you do it? The bread. Constance waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the counter.

The bread makes itself, she’d said. There’s nothing to bread. But the lamb. She opened a magazine and tossed it toward Eleanor so she could read the recipe.

Maybe if I’d learned to cook, Eleanor said vaguely, snapping the pages of the magazine. She stopped at a perfume ad, a crystal decanter stopper trailing down a woman’s throat, her pouty lips parted.

Or wore perfume.

Constance narrowed her eyes, then opened them wide, tapped her cigarette vigorously.

You have to behave with grace, is my advice, Constance said.

Grace is boring.

Nevertheless.

You could uninvite her, Eleanor said.

I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

And now Constance is married to Ted. The service held on Signal Hill, the wind whipping her veil into a beehive over her head until the bridesmaid caught it and batted it into submission. The priest is the man who shot the windows out of that church you can see from the highway. Red paint along the white clapboard, “These Windows Shot Out By A Catholic Priest.”

Eleanor opens her purse, drops her corsage inside, and snaps it closed. She lifts the neck of her jacket. The ladybug is gone. She’d wanted to show her daughter, Gabrielle. They’d been looking for a ladybug months ago, to make a wish.

Frank Harvey is talking. Frank says he found himself doing the husband thing. A stone fireplace in the basement, some plumbing, other couples on Friday night talking about this shade of wallpaper or upgrading gas barbeques, and all the while he hated himself.

You discover that you are an asshole, he says. He winces. Tilts the lemon slice in his gin from side to side.

An asshole, he says. That’s what happened to me. It was a terrible thing. I took up yoga.

The moment you faced your worst fear, says Eleanor.

She tells about her mother trapped in her living room with a white weasel or mink. After Eleanor’s father died. Eleanor had been seventeen, in Stephenville, wrapped in a snowstorm, a giant wooden custard cone banging off the side of an abandoned convenience store. She’s trying to work it into the screenplay she’s writing — the custard cone squeaking on its hinges. Ice in her eyelashes. Later, in the student residence, the phone ringing down the hall, running to catch it, and it’s her mother, in her kitchen in St. John’s, standing on the counter. Somehow a rodent, fat as her thigh, long as her arm, had gotten into her house.

A white weasel or mink tearing through the green and gold shag carpeting, crazed. Eleanor could hear its piping squeals. Her mother, a tall woman, neck bent awkwardly, the back of her head touching the stuccoed ceiling. The stucco swirled with a scrub brush, a new idea then. They had a spiral staircase, a smoky mirrored fireplace. They had an open-concept upstairs, a lake, and in the winter veils of snow sashayed all over the dark ice. The snow could come up to her mother’s waist, and Howard, a mentally handicapped man who lived down the road, would come and shovel. Eleanor’s mother would bring him a Pepsi with ice, which he paused long enough to drink, his frosty breath hanging, his fluorescent orange cap. Just the two of them with no one around for miles. Her mother standing beside him, waiting for the glass.

And this became her mother’s life after her father died; she was only occasionally terrified; the mink’s eye flashing that alien
green of trapped animals and then black again, under the dining-room table.

Most erotic moment without touching. The cork of a wine bottle rolling over a faded yellow rose on the tablecloth under Glenn Marshall’s palm. His hand on her back. That might have been a moment of grace. The Ship Inn on a summer night blocked with people, standing space only, some event at the Hall getting out, the band deafening, summer dresses, tanned faces. The way the light slowly tinted the sky over the South Side Hills indigo, yellowish, pale blue. The desire to keep going, another bar, someone’s house, her new sandal destroyed. The sidewalk on Duckworth Street. A police cruiser slowing beside them and moving on. Glenn Marshall had whispered something in her ear, I’d like to go home with you. She had sobered up immediately. The cool breeze coming up from the harbour. The smell of the sea.

I’d like to do nice things to you, he’d said. How illicit and tender it had sounded. Sweetly wrong. Hokey and forward! The prim fervour with which she explained she could never, ever, ever hurt her husband.

Frank Harvey is still talking about the moment you discover you’re an asshole. A Sunday afternoon in Bannerman Park, he says, hungover, fragile, children making the diving board reverberate, wind in the leaves, and it hit me. It was so cleansing, such a relief. He’s smiling at everyone. Frank Harvey is holding court. The sun hits his balding forehead. It gleams as if he is
physically projecting his new wisdom. He’s good to have at a wedding; he’s the entertainment.

Eleanor thinks: How dangerous to fall in love with Frank Harvey. She could always do that if Philip leaves. It would be
torrid
. Yes, there would be battles in public, dishes shattered, lovemaking outdoors, in movie theatres, planes. Bike trips across Canada, leanness, bracing, voluntary poverty. She would have to shave her head or become vegetarian. Type on a manual typewriter. Maybe take up smoking. She could be a female Ernest Hemingway, grow a beard. It would be invigorating. Philip, stunned, shaking his head at some luncheon. Philip regretting his blonde. But Eleanor is already too old for Frank. His lovers are all under twenty-five, they are giggly, svelte, and have asymmetrical haircuts. Eleanor doesn’t have a haircut.

You see what I mean, says Frank Harvey, you’re an asshole, you have somewhere to go from there, don’t you? I rejoiced. No, seriously, I did. It was so unequivocal — my assholeness. The clouds broke and the sun poured down, cleansing me. I was cleansed.

Frank takes a moment to close his eyes and lift his palms and handsome face to whatever power cleansed him. This is ninety-two percent delivery, but the content he means. He means what he says. Timing, he understands. He’s parodying himself parodying himself. He’s dead serious. He opens his eyes and says almost viciously, I was brand spanking new.

Is Frank Harvey what they mean when they say bipolar? Or is he truly very, very near enlightenment? What enlightenment looks like: his eyes are so clear. He is so bursting with health. So
goddamn sexy. Eleanor decides enlightenment would take too much energy. A lot of honesty. She’s hardly ever deceitful — she imagines herself hacking a path of truth through a vast field with a machete, stopping only briefly to wipe the sweat from her brow.

But Philip believes he is duty-bound to lie whenever it makes life easier. Eleanor imagines herself from an aerial view, the path she’s hacked winding in on itself, a spiral. Then she briefly allows herself to imagine Frank Harvey’s penis. The word
dong
leaps to mind. Something big and friendly. The sound of cymbals at the gateway of the Forbidden City. The whack of a baseball against a bat. Ying yang, ding dong. With Frank she could be oblique, like a heroine in a bodice ripper, Frank,
take
me.

The smell of cinnamon from a tray Constance passes under her nose and Eleanor is back in India with Sadie, ten, no twelve years ago. Icy air-conditioning, thwack of ceiling fans. How real it becomes for her sometimes. She can smell it. They were asked to be extras in a movie. Two shady-looking men outside the Salvation Army hostel in Bombay. They said, Meet us here at five in the morning. We’ll fly you to Bangor. You’ll be paid. Eleanor terrified, Sadie gung-ho.

Is this a good idea?

Sadie: Are you kidding? This is the
movies
.

With yoga, says Frank Harvey, there is so much pain. I tried to bury my self-hatred in pain. The instructor was so good. She really hurt me.

The Indian movie agents came for Sadie and Eleanor at five a.m. Drove them to the outskirts of the city, and beyond, into a dry landscape, almost desert. How had Sadie become so brave? And somehow this drive, during which Eleanor believed her twenty-three-year-old life was ending, and during which Sadie sang Joni Mitchell songs for the two men who had abducted them, her elbows flung over the front seat —
he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator
— singing with deep feeling, though they are too young to understand how sad or practical a dishwasher can be — all of this becomes vividly present. She remembers even the crack in the window, the rubber Ganesh (why is he blue) jumping on an elastic hanging from the rearview mirror. She was once this: a woman in the back of a car in the desert about to be killed/be in a Bollywood movie.