The Checkout Girl

“You have to be patient,” he said. “You have to wait until at least four inches of snow has fallen to make a solid base. Six inches is better, but four works. Most of all, you have to wait for the cold.”

They started after supper. Kathy's mother, Connie, opted to stay inside to clean up. “Get out of here so I can read the newspaper in peace,” she told them, pretending to be cross, pretending she didn't want them around. “Dress warm,” she scolded.

Charlie wore earmuffs, no scarf, the buttons of his car coat open at the neck. A clear bead of snot dangled from his nose. He wiped it on his sleeve when it got precarious. The frayed stitching on his old Sunday gloves exposed a thin beige lining. He said the felt slippers he'd tucked inside his galoshes kept his feet toasty warm.

Though the pompoms on her toque bobbled, Kathy's scarf was wound so tight she couldn't move her head. With flannel-lined jeans and an extra sweater under her leggings and parka, she looked like a sausage. Minutes after stepping outside, her toes were frozen inside her rubber boots, but she didn't complain.

Charlie wasn't going to use boards; he said when you didn't have much, boards were a waste of money. Instead he'd mound snow around the perimeter of the rink, pack down the bank, and square off the top and the inside. His plan was to flood the snow wall from the outside with a gentle spray of water from the hose, being careful not to over-saturate it. He didn't want water to flow through the wall onto the base, didn't want anything to mar the smooth snowpack he and Kathy were preparing. He explained every detail to Kathy as they worked.

“I'm going to make a windbreak near the back door,” he said, dabbing his nose on his sleeve, “with hay bales from Schultz's farm. Five or six for the wall and a couple for a bench. Keep our bums all snuggly warm.”

“Charlie,” Connie had called at that exact moment, and she had leaned her warm bum against the storm door to hold it open. She handed Charlie a steaming mug of coffee. “There's a shot of rye in it,” she said.

Connie was often benevolent, but not always. She let the door slam shut and returned with a mug of hot cocoa for Kathy, marshmallows glowing like the moons of Jupiter.

“Don't forget Kathy has school,” she said. And because she knew they weren't listening â and because she couldn't help herself â she added, “Don't stay out too long.”

They stayed out until she came to the door again, pounding on the frosted windowpane, motioning with her thumb for them to come inside. They came in then, not because Connie wanted them to, but because they knew it was time â and only fair â to share their happiness with her. After putting Kathy to bed, Charlie went out alone and flooded the snowpack, methodically laying the first layer of ice.

The night the rink was ready, the ice a wide glassy runway through the yard, they wolfed their grilled cheese sandwiches. They smacked their lips and laughed too loud and left the dishes on the table. Their skates, sharpened, waited at the back door, lined up side by side: Connie's â the same skates she'd worn since she was twelve â brightened with white shoe polish. Charlie's brown and worn, a pair he'd found at the church bazaar. Kathy's brand new, because Charlie insisted she start right. Hockey skates.

Connie glided around the rink, one, two, three times, and then into the centre, fast. She was terribly beautiful. She brought her skates together, crossed her arms and twirled. They waited, hushed. She tipped her toe pick into the ice and stopped.

“You did it!” she called to them. They breathed, for they had been holding their breath, and they joined her on the ice.

They skated, each of them alone â Connie and Charlie orbiting Kathy, who click-clacked up and down the middle of the rink â until Connie grabbed Charlie's hand and skated with him to Kathy. They each took one of her hands and they skated together in the dark.

“Yippie-yi-yo-ky-yay,” Charlie shouted.

What did Kathy say? Not a word, for on this cold, clear night she wore a new pair of hockey skates. The gleaming ice on which she skated, she had made with her father. Her beautiful mother held one of her hands and her father the other. There was nothing to say. So she listened, and all the sounds â her parents' voices, the slish-slish of their skates on the ice, the whooshing of their breath and the sigh of the wind in their wake â were sounds of love.

It was 1955, the year Kathy turned five, the first time she and Charlie flooded the backyard to make Rausch's Rink. They'd moved that year to a brand new bungalow in Pleasant View Subdivision in the east end of Varnum. They made a rink every winter until 1959, the year Shelly, a distant and fretful baby, was born. As if contagious, Shelly's unhappiness spread through the family, first to Connie, then to Charlie and finally to Kathy. The next year Charlie was killed in a car accident.

1955 was the same year a hockey coach named Anthony Gilchrist wrote Punch Imlach and told him he might want to send out a scout to watch a young player from Parry Sound, a twelve-year-old. Gilchrist told Imlach he might want to get the boy on the Toronto Maple Leafs' signing list before some other scout got to him. Bobby Orr was the kid's name.

Of course, Charlie didn't know anything about Bobby Orr, and Kathy didn't either, not then. But in 1966, when Bobby started playing for the Boston Bruins, anybody who knew anything about hockey knew he was the Canadian hope that was going to save the Bruins, and maybe some day take them to the Stanley Cup. What Kathy came to know about Bobby, the thing she knew Charlie would have seen too, that even Connie could see, was that Bobby Orr could skate. He laced his bare feet into a pair of hockey skates and once he hit the ice he was part of it; he never looked down, always knew where his feet were, where the puck was, where the opening was going to be. Always knew when to shoot. Bobby Orr skated as if the ice spoke to him.

Yes, Charlie would have liked Bobby Orr. And everything Kathy hadn't learned about skating from her father before he died, she learned later from watching Bobby.

Winter, 1970

Let me say it flat out right here: skating is the single most important part of the game of hockey.

â Bobby Orr

Snow-filled cracks traverse the ice. Kathy zigzags her way down the rink avoiding them. Barry, on the other hand, hits every one.

“Mother of God,” he whines. His cheeks are red, his ears are redder, the tip of his nose the reddest of all. His too-big borrowed skates tap-tap-tap as he baby-steps his way to equilibrium. He hits another crack, bends forward and twists.

“Shee-it.”

His arms windmill; his windbreaker rises at the back, exposing tender flesh. Kathy catches him on the turn. She grabs the bottom of his jacket and yanks it over his goose-bumped skin. With her arm tucked around his waist, she skates beside him, holding him up, propelling him faster and faster.

“I told you to wear a warmer coat,” she sings into his right ear. “It's winter, Barry. You know, true north strong and free?” She skates behind him, switching arms and sides. “Hey, man,” she says into his left ear, “you're Canadian, right? You remember snow? Cold? Ice, maybe?”

She lets go his waist. Barry stumbles, leans back and thumps down on his bum. He groans.

Kathy turns. She smiles at him, big and hard. “I bet you remember ice now,” she says as she skates away.

“Come back,” Barry calls after her. He pulls the waistband of his chinos down, showing off his left buttock. “Look here. Bruises.”

Skating backwards, Kathy glides away. Cross-stepping the turn, leaning into it, she picks up speed. When she hits the stretch she imagines a puck on the far side of the rink, changes direction, crosses over to it. Imagines balancing the puck on her stick, an offenceman coming toward her. She sidesteps him, cups the puck with her stick, changes direction and skates forward. Holds the puck. Holds it. Patient. Moves to the net. She shoots.

“And she scores,” she screams, throwing her arms in the air. “Bobby Orrette scores!”

“What?” Barry asks as she does a little jig. Barry's sprawled on his side, elbow on the ice, head in his hand. He's been watching her.

“How did you get so good?” he asks. Turning onto his belly, he pulls his knees up under him and struggles to stand.

“My dad. Then Bobby Orr. Everybody watches Bobby play hockey,” Kathy says, “I watch him skate.”

“Who scored?” he asks again when he's upright.

“Me,” Kathy says. She's skating circles around him. “Kathy Orrette. Best damned girl offensive defenceman Canada ever exported to the U. S. of A. Saviour of the Boston Bruins. Don't you know anything?”

“I know who Bobby Orr is,” he says.

Kathy ignores the hurt in his voice. That's what this night-time skating trip is all about. Ignoring Barry. And more than just the hurt in his voice, and the bruise on his buttocks. She's ignoring the fact that he wants to sleep with her.

Kathy skates away. She's not going to let Barry ruin this first skate of the season. Because this is when she's happy, this is part of the reason she left Vancouver and came back to Varnum, to be outside in real cold, on real ice, with the hockey skates on her feet as natural as eyelashes, as fingernails, as teeth. Ever since she and her father made their first backyard rink, this is all she ever wanted.

“I haven't skated since grade eight.” Barry follows her with his voice. “Compulsory PE. Fucking freeze your feet off, not to mention the family jewels. Some smart-ass saying, âlet's play crack-the-whip,' so they can let you go at a zillion miles an hour. And you're scared shitless, so you look like an idiot even before you get the snot smashed out of you when you hit the boards.

“Bigger guys with hockey sticks trying to whack your ankles. They couldn't find mine because I was skating on them. And to top it off, tear-factory Maureen Zimmer peeing her pants, every single skating class, and then crying and telling everyone she peed them. That girl had no dignity. Made me sick, all of it. Hated skating. And I hate it now.”

Kathy slows to skate beside him. “Feel better now that's off your chest?” she says.

“How'd you ever talk me into this?” he asks.

“Sex,” Kathy says, the word flying out of her mouth.

“I'm absolutely sure Barry won't mind,” Penny said when she offered to rent a room in her basement to Kathy, and Kathy had accepted.

Kathy had known Penny McDonald forever, though she wasn't Penny McDonald any more. She was Penny Lehman. In grade school, Penny was a four-foot-ten potato of a girl with dull stringy hair always drawn back in an elastic, one of those almost invisible kids who hit high school looking exactly the way they always did. Then part-way through grade ten, the Tuesday after the Easter holidays to be exact, Penny arrived in homeroom looking at least two inches taller. Her hair â glossy black shot through with copper â almost touched her bum. She blinked four-inch, teased and hair-sprayed bangs up and down on eyelashes so stiff with mascara they looked like shelves. Her lips were frosted white, her breasts 36B, her waistline cinched tight in a wide white vinyl belt.

But the real holy-shit-how-did-this-happen moment came after school when Penny told Kathy she wasn't going for french fries and gravy with her girlfriends. She was going with Pete Lehman. Sloe-eyed, dark-haired and languid with a bad-boy rep, Pete had been in grade twelve when they entered grade nine. After graduation he'd started working part-time at the university maintaining the labs. Rumour was, he made LSD in one of the labs at work, and grew marijuana downtown among the peonies and asters in the perennial beds in Regent Park.

No one â none of her friends at least â was surprised when Penny quit school in grade eleven and moved in with Pete, then went to work at the cookie factory. Nor were they surprised when she had an empire-waist wedding the next summer and produced a big fat baby boy five and a half months later. She named her baby Rhettbutler. She'd read
Gone with the Wind
while she was pregnant, a copy that had a picture of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh on the cover. The baby had curly black hair and thick black eyelashes and Penny said she hoped he'd turn into a handsome, good-hearted rogue just like the Clark Gable Rhett. And like his father, Pete, of course.

After Rhettbutler, Kathy didn't see much of Penny. At the occasional party where Kathy and Penny would chat while Pete sold a few nickels and dimes of marijuana or hashish. Once or twice when Penny was out walking the baby in Regent Park. So when Kathy literally bumped into Penny at the schnitz and shoofly pie counter at the farmers' market a week after she moved back to Varnum, they hadn't talked in over a year.

“Kathy Rausch,” Penny said. “I thought you were out west. When'd you get back?”

“October,” Kathy said.

“Where's Doug?” Penny wanted to know.

“Vancouver,” Kathy told her. “I think.”

“You think?” Penny asked.

“I'm pretty sure.”

“Did you break up?”

“Sort of,” Kathy said.

Doug had been down in Gastown panhandling when Kathy left. That's what he did then, panhandled and picked up his welfare cheque, smoked dope, did a little acid, shot a bit of speed. She was supposed to be at work at the store, but she'd given her notice the week before. She hadn't told Doug because they weren't talking much. Besides, he knew everything anyway, or so he let on. She'd packed her bag, got in her car, and abracadabra â well, maybe not that fast, but she didn't do any sightseeing along the way â she was back in Varnum.

“How'd he take it?”

“Don't know,” Kathy said. “I haven't talked to him. He calls my mother, but she won't tell him anything. Connie never liked Doug.”

“Kathy, Kathy,” Penny said, shaking her head. Then she laughed and asked Kathy where she was staying, and when Kathy said the Y, she offered her the room.

“There's a snake in it,” she warned.

“Who, Pete?” Kathy asked.

Penny laughed again and told Kathy it was a pet snake named Freddy and he lived in a cage Pete built, a very large, very secure cage. That was the deal. She said she and Rhettbutler hated snakes. Kathy asked if they had any other pets and Penny said a tame one they let out occasionally. They called him “Little” Barry Bender and he'd be thrilled to have a cute hippie chick living down the hall. Even if he was engaged.

“How little,” Kathy asked, “is Barry Bender?”

“Very little.”

“Shorter than you?” Kathy asked.

“Looks it,” Penny said. “He's small all over: little nose, little hands, little feet.”

“Sure he won't mind?” Kathy asked.

And Penny said, “Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

A blush rises up Barry's neck and turns his cold cheeks redder when Kathy says the word sex. She wishes she hadn't said it, because it's the last thing she wants: to have sex with Barry. It's why she dragged him out skating tonight. Because when Freddy hit the glass she didn't want a Barry rescue.

Freddy the snake is a boa constrictor, seven feet long and as thick as Kathy's arm. He lives in Kathy's room in a Plexiglas cage that takes up most of one wall. He's pretty quiet most of the time, lies at the back of his cage in a mottled, muscled coil. But every once in a while, for no particular reason Kathy can figure, he shoots straight out from where he's resting and slams his nose, BAM, into the Plexiglas. The firstÂ time, Kathy screamed. Now she tries not to scream because when she does, Barry comes running into her room.

“Ta-da,” he sang when he came in tonight. “Barry Bender to the rescue.”

During the week, Barry works as an electrician up on the Bruce, at the Douglas Point Nuclear Plant. Shutdowns began almost as soon as the plant opened, and Barry's one in a large pool of workers hired to fix the problems and keep the plant running. He makes big bucks, which is good because he just bought a shiny new Corvette Stingray, and because he's saving to marry The Virgin Goddess, the beautiful, platinum blonde, Westmount-born-and-bred Rachel Anderson.

When he's home on weekends, Barry takes Rachel to expensive restaurants, where they talk about The Wedding. Rachel lets Barry make out with her on Barry's basement bachelor bed, but she won't let him Go All The Way. (That's the way Rachel talks, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes wide for words with especial meaning.) For that, Barry waits for Freddy to make Kathy scream. Then he can run into her room and rescue her.

Kathy sleeps in the buff. Barry used to pretend he did, but Kathy now knows he wears old-man pyjamas, and not just because Rachel told her one Friday night when they were sitting together at the Lehmans' kitchen table drinking instant coffee while Rachel waited for Barry to arrive home from the Bruce. Rachel said she doesn't want to see Barry naked until after their marriage, so she buys him those cute flannelette pyjamas with button flies, white or beige with little blue anchors, or brown and red pheasants all over them. She gets them at Ahrens Department Store.

Once she bought him a pair with Disney characters, novelty pyjamas, Rachel said, that she got when she went with her family to Disneyland. She was disappointed, she said, because Barry wouldn't wear them. Barry's allowed to take his clothes off when they make out, but he has to wear pyjamas, Rachel told Kathy. You know how men are, Rachel said. They dribble here and there when their “thing gets big.” She didn't want to get any of that stuff on her. Rachel kept her bra and panties on at all times, and she wore a long-line panty girdle for extra protection.

So Kathy believed Barry when he told her his sex life woes. His blue balls, as he called them, and how Rachel wouldn't touch him and didn't want to see him naked before they get married. Kathy thought that if Rachel ever saw Barry's penis, she'd find another man to marry, invest in a potentially larger growth fund.

Barry's little penis works, as Kathy found out the first time Freddy hit the Plexiglas. Kathy screamed and Barry stood in front of her so quickly it was as if he'd spent every night waiting for this moment, had been practising this particular rescue all his life. Kathy stopped screaming. As she sat naked at the side of her bed, she watched Barry's penis stiffen inside his flannel Disney pyjamas.

(She'd have to remember to tell Rachel he did wear them. Then again, maybe it would be better not to tell Rachel anything.)

Daffy Duck grew bigger and bigger, and moved closer and closer, until he was almost touching Kathy's nose. When Barry dropped his drawers, the edge of his pyjama top lifted and fell with the gentle bobbing of his little swelling. Kathy sat on the edge of the bed and gripped the mattress. She tried not to laugh. And her eyeballs crossed, she was trying so hard not to look. Barry looked down at her naked breasts.

“Oh, Kathy,” he said.

His penis reminded her of an aging Pinocchio, a slowly growing nose-like woody making its way from between two wee wrinkled whiskered puppet ball cheeks. Barry sat down beside her on the bed and his little penis poked up between his legs. Kathy had to look away.

“Kathy,” he said again.

Kathy felt so sorry for him she let him into her bed.
I'm freezing
, she told herself as she slid back under the covers. Barry came in after her. Kathy was being nice to Barry. Trying to make him feel better about his tiny penis, that's what she told herself.

Kathy's breasts are small and firm. She tells herself that's why she felt sorry for Barry that first time. She had a sense of what he must go through worrying all the time about the size of his appendage.

“More than a handful's a waste,” Doug used to say about her breasts every time they made love. Or in front of friends, or at a restaurant, always loud enough for strangers to hear. It never made her feel better. Partly because she had never thought much about her breasts until Doug started commenting on them, never worried about their size until he reassured her they were adequate. She felt this was Doug's way of making fun of her, of saying they were very, very small and he didn't like them. Doug excelled at the backhanded compliment. That's partly why she left him in Vancouver.

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