The Big Dream (5 page)

THE BIRTHDAY COFFEE BREAK for Suyin is awful – Grig jams the coffee maker, forgets the English words to “Happy Birthday,” and no one eats anything. All the customer service reps show up because she's supervisor, but they leave almost right away. Suyin just says, “Ah, thank you so much, guys” and goes back to her office. Grig was so happy to pull Suyin in the birthday-duties draw – he needs to make up for his shitty performance evaluation, plus she's got such a hot little ass – and now it's just a wasted forty dollars on Cinnabon. He ends up giving them all to Wayne, the big black guy who sits in the call-station beside his.

“Why people don't like Cinnabons, Wayne?”

“
Every
one likes Cinnabons. But most CSRs are single chicks, dude, and they're not gonna risk getting fat with this shit.” Wayne carefully sharpies WAYNE on each box.

“I hate fat chicks.” Grig thinks for a moment. “Suyin has no boyfriend?”

Wayne shoves the boxes into the crowded staff fridge and tries to smash it shut. A magnet shaped like a sushi roll falls on the floor. “Someone fuck a tightass like that? Not likely.” The fridge finally seals, but they hear something thump, then crash, within.

At home, Grig bothers Mariska like her younger brother, which people sometimes mistake him for. Usually people think they're
at least from the same country. But they aren't, and they speak only English at home because Mariska says a good Ukrainian doesn't speak Russian even though she totally can. If he even starts a conversation with
zdrastvuite,
she talks all day about what a putz Yushchenko is.

“Do you worry about being fatso?” he asks her from the open bathroom doorway.

“No!” She is wringing water out of her pink sweater, her long pink nails delicately splayed. “You tell me I should?”

“No!” Grig looks at her ass, feels her glare, looks away. “Canadian girls worry.”

Mariska hangs her sweater on the clothesline between their faces. “Canadian girls are fat – they should worry.”

“Some girls are not fat and still they worry to keep the fat away . . . .” Grig knows he said something a Canadian would laugh at, but Mariska's English is even worse than his.

Mariska squeezes a pink lace thong until the whole thing disappears in her palm, then flips it over the line. “Grig, you think I am fatso!!”

“No! I think you are skinny girl. How do you do that, is what I want to know?”

Mariska's nearly invisible eyebrows twist and scrunch.

“What you eat? To be so . . .” He makes the hourglass gesture. She has a bra in her hand now, tightly squeezing. Grig puts his hands down. “. . . beautiful.”

“I eat normal food, but not like cow. You see me, I don't hide nowhere – breakfast is the yoghurt and the Corn Pops. Lunch – ” she pronounces it
lunk;
Grig wonders if he does this, too “ – at work is sometime chicken, sometime shrimp. At home, maybe potato in coat – in jacket? I like potatoes anyhow . . . .”

Grig realizes that this is one of the things Mariska could talk about for hours, and he's not actually learning what he wanted to know.

“So you eat normal food like everybodies . . . .”

“Like you, Grig. I eat what you eat, don't I? We have same fridge, same stove.”

“I – ” Grig throws his hands down across his small soft body. “I do not look like you. So what you do – exercises?”

Mariska laughs, rough and breathy, with her mouth wide and tongue peeking, reminding him that he once found her hot. That feeling is gone now. He knows her too well, knows the ease with which he could have her, since she's had everyone. That makes her unfuckable.

“Grig, we not all have the perfect English for the cushion desk jobs! Some of us have to run fast with heavy trays so the managers don't yell and the customers don't pinch asses. Jack Astor's is exercise gym, all right.”

“Oh.” Grig nods. Marishka knows nothing that applies to Suyin, it seems.

“But the womens who come to the restaurant . . .” she walks into the hall, not looking back to see if he follows “. . . they worry about skinny. They don't eat bread, don't eat croutons, talk talk talk about the yoga. They put their mats under the table to trip me.”

“Mats?” he asks, trailing her to the front door.

Mariska rolls her eyes; she was like a sister he couldn't yell at or shove. “Skinny rich bitches are lazy, but still they must exercise, so they do exercises lying down. Is like exercise nap, to get stretchy. For princesses, for rich girls.”

“Stretchy?”

“Yah. If you using my computer to Google, take your shoes off in my room.”

What he wants happens in the worst way possible. Suyin sends him an email – no mass-mail, addressed only to him – but it's “feedback.” His call logs are bad. He's had lot of hang-ups, lot of
escalations, lots of confusion. “I be right back in the queue-up” is listed as off-script dialogue that the subscribers to
Dream Parent
couldn't comprehend.

He has to go see her. Just the two of them in her tiny office that is glass on two sides, so all the CSRs know Grig and Suyin are alone together. Suyin sits facing the glass corner and motions for Grig to sit on the opposite side of a table so narrow they could kiss across it without standing up. But the table is scattered with goldenrod complaint forms, Suyin's face is red, and it's clear there will be no kiss. Maybe not clear through the window though – maybe everyone thinks they've got something hot going on.

“I think you know . . . probably know . . . why I . . . Don't you?” She sounds nervous – that he is so close?

The thing to do is be cool. “I have a few problems, I know, Suyin.” He has practiced pronouncing her name, gets it perfect: soo-YIN. “I must do better.”

“Yes, exactly.” She brightens and finally looks at him. “We need to go over some things.”

He says nothing, because she has spoken too fast and he was looking at her chest. She is wearing a soft minty sweater with a tiny V-neck – too small to even show a hint of a breast. Wayne is a little right, she is tight-assed, a bit frigid in her clothes.

When he returns his gaze to her face, Grig realizes she has said more things and he doesn't know what they are. He says, “I do better.”

“Yeees. You
must
be more patient with customers. When you interrupt, you not only miss info, it costs you the customer's trust. People don't like being cut off.”

“I must get the call-times down, yes? And many who call, they are old lonelies, talking and talking, pointless.”

Suyin's back stiffens, and her breasts point higher. “Not pointless. Many times, I think you'll find if you take a bit more time to find out exactly what the issue is – ”

“I am a good listener, is not a problem. I am caring to hear. I am a good guy.”

Suyin breathes out sharply, as if some dust had gone up her nose. “I know that, Grigori. But you need to concentrate on being
useful
to customers. Your goodness is no good if they can't get what they want.”

Suyin has sped up talking again, but he catches that she has called him
Grigori
, which no one says in English. So prissy. Aren't they friends? He threw her a party.

After a while, she picks up a new page and says, “Ok? Ring!”

He should have listened. He could have understood, if he really focused. The problem is that focusing takes a lot of energy, and he can shut it off too easily. In Cherkessk, he woke a hundred times a year to hear his parents yelling at each other, or drunken talk and songs in the street. In Russian, he couldn't not listen. The eyes close but the ears don't – words always got in and he always understood them, angry, pointless, incoherent, anything, pouring into his ears and brain unstoppably. English requires effort, which means when he relaxes, leans back, lets a stray thought lead his mind, he often drifts so far from the conversation there might be no way back.

“Ring?”

“Yes!” Grig is so fucked.

“Ok . . .” She points her small finger at her ear like a gun, and says, “Ring-ring!” and he gets that she's pretending to be a phone – it's a practice phone call. He hates these bullshit games, and yet Suyin's breasts are perfect, even in the dumb sweater.

He beams at her, points his own small finger at his ear, and says, “Ring!”

Suyin does not smile back. She whispers, as if they had an audience she is protecting him from, “No,
you
answer.”

He chuckles, then thinks, then flushes. “Hello?”

Still she is silent, as if the invisible audience prevents her explaining what is wrong. “Hello?” she says to her finger. “Who is this?”

“Oh! I never make that mistake on live line. No, never.” He shakes his head.

Suyin just nods and this time he understands that she will not stop this pretend phone call for anything. He feels suddenly that she is just processing him like a month-end report, not treating him as her office-friend Grig. He wonders if there are cameras in the ceiling or some other reason beyond her being a silly bitch.

“Thanks for calling Dream Magazines today. How may I help you dream?”

“I am so angry! The mail carrier informed me that yet
again
my copy of
Dream Retirement
is not in his sack! This is outrageous! That was the November issue . . . .”

Her voice has gone shrill as a cat, though her face is blank and her eyes focused on her page. Her soft sweetness is all gone – she is completely unfuckable now.

“Well? Are you going to
do
anything about it?
Well?
”

He will answer her, polite, professional,
Canadian
, in a moment. For that moment, he just sits there, hating her.

A lot of the guys he went to grade 12 with – he was only in Canada for grade 12, his father had thought that was enough – are still around Scarborough and they sometimes hang out. But this weekend no one calls with any invitations for clubs, any cheap weed or pills, any video-game nights in someone's basement apartment.

So he is awake and sober on a Sunday morning for the first time in ages. Mariska has figured out how to password-protect her wireless, so he can't look at porn on the internet. Which is fine, actually – he jerks off imagining Suyin's pretty little breasts, her pretty mouth all tight and prissy, imagining holding her head back and shoving inside, pumping into her throat. It is wonderful
when he shoots off, and then terrible when he's just lying there in his old Vanier T-shirt with a slimy sock in his hand.

He gets up and thinks about showering but just gets dressed. He puts the sock in Mariska's laundry. She won't notice until after she's washed it, and by then she won't be able to tell what was on it.