The Checkout Girl (15 page)

“It's just that suddenly my life seems very complicated,” Kathy says. “I got fired, and because I got fired Marvin's arrived bearing beer and flowers. It's Mother's Day and I'm trying really, really hard not to remember how close I recently came to becoming a mother. Darlyn's coming over with her boyfriend to get away from her mother who's turned into a fem-Nazi who thinks sports are pissing contests that governments use to keep men happy and women in their place. Darlyn's bringing her poor hurt and confused father who just happens to be in love with my mother. Now you, my engaged-to-Rachel-The-Virgin-Goddess sleeping buddy, have arrived to protect me from Marvin. And all I really want to do today is sit on my ass with my mom and my sister and watch Bobby Orr try to win the Stanley Cup.

“So forgive me, please, if I sound a little pissed off,” Kathy says.

Barry watches Kathy. Kathy watches Barry right back. It's a watching contest to see who can watch the longest, and Kathy knows she can win. And if she wins, Barry will have to leave.

As she waits, this is what she sees: a very short, very tidy, very patient man with kind, watchful eyes, and small feet and hands. A man who, despite having a fiancée, sleeps in Kathy's bed, but who doesn't try to have sex with her. She sees a man who has come to her mother's house because he's worried about her. Because he's her friend.

“Of course we're friends,” she sighs. There's no contest, no reason to make Barry leave. She leans over and kisses his cheek just as Darlyn crosses the driveway and walks up the porch steps to the door.

There's always been a quality to Darlyn that says “Baton Twirling Queen.” Something to do with a swishy ponytail and erect posture. But more and more lately, the majorette looks like a hippie. Today it's the fringed buckskin vest she's wearing over her short-sleeved white blouse. Must be Donny's influence, because there he is, wearing a matching vest, though there's nothing but skin under his. Al, uninfluenced, looks decidedly and resolutely like himself.

“Don't want to disturb anything.” Darlyn says. She laughs and comes right up behind Barry.

Barry turns to her.

“Darlyn Smola,” she says.

“Barry Bender,” he says, sticking his hand out to her.

“Barry,” Darlyn says, smiling widely at Kathy while shaking Barry's hand.

“We've met,” Donny says, leaning his head over Darlyn's shoulder and winking at Barry. Donny's got a 2-4 of beer lodged against his hip.

“Kathy,” Al says. He ignores them all and squeezes past Kathy into the house. He looks around the living room, then turns to Kathy and asks, “Will we be graced with your mother's company this evening?”

“She's changing for work, Mr. Smola. I'm sure she'll join us when she's ready,” Kathy says. The words are just out of her mouth when the bedroom door opens.

“Well then, the gang's all here,” Connie says as she walks toward them. She's all white — skin, tunic, pants, apron, socks and shoes. All except for her perfect lips, which are candy-apple red. A smell like buttered toffee precedes her. As one, they turn to her and sniff the air. When she's finally standing in front of them, they sigh.

“Connie,” Al whispers. He closes his eyes, cranes his head towards the scent of her and sniffs again. Connie leans as far from him as she can without moving her feet.

“Heavenly,” Al says, and he shudders a little.

Darlyn looks at her father and groans. Connie rolls her eyes and laughs. From the basement they can hear Shelly yelling,
Bobby Orr, # 4. Bobby Orr, # 4.

“Game time,” Connie says. And when she turns and walks away, they follow her like ants on the trail of sugar.

Overtime is about to start. The Boston Bruins have cruised through three games against St. Louis, but tonight the Blues are fighting back. The score's 3-3.

Only crumbs remain in the chip and pretzel bowls; a thin haze of cigarette smoke drifts past the TV screen, more hangs near the ceiling. Empty beer bottles lie on the floor beside chairs and cushions.

Donny's under the coffee table beside Shelly, who picks at a bit of rug near his hand and shoots him furtive glances. Even though she knows Donny, this is as close as they've ever been. Donny grins at her when she turns toward him and Shelly laughs ha-ha-ha. Donny laughs right back.

“Can't help it,” he tells Darlyn.

Darlyn's sitting between Marvin and Kathy. She kicks Donny's ribs when he laughs. But then she laughs too.

“Hey, man, why'd you kick me then?”

“I know, I know,” Darlyn says, and laughs some more.

“Stop kicking me.” Donny grabs her foot, pulls off the sock and flubs farts on to the soft flesh of her arch. Darlyn screeches and Barry starts to laugh.

“What're you laughing at?” she says, turning to him.

“Fucked if I know,” Barry says. Then quickly, “Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to say it.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Shelly says softly, but they can hear her. Then she flubs fart noises on her arm. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she says again.

“Barry!” Al scolds. It's the first time he's acknowledged Barry. He looks over at Connie. Connie's looking at the TV, ignoring them all. Donny, looking at Shelly, who is trying not to look at him, flubs farts on his arm.

“Don't provoke her,” Al says.

Donny says, “Shush,” to Shelly. She looks right at him. She closes her eyes, puts her mouth on her arm, and makes more fart noises. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she says when she's finished.

Donny grunts so as not to laugh. “Sh-sh-sh,” he whispers, but he can't stop himself now.

“I'm so sorry, Mrs. Rausch,” Barry says.

“What on earth for?” she says to the air, because she still isn't looking at anyone.

“Don't worry,” Kathy says. She's nearly shouting to be heard. “Shelly learned the f-word ages ago. She'll get bored soon.”

“We want Bobby Orr. We want # 4,” Marvin shouts, surprising them all. Except for grunts and hoots when the play's been close, or a goal's been scored, he's been silent the entire game.

“Bobby Orr, # 4,” Marvin shouts. Shelly stops making fart noises and looks up at him. She joins in. Soon they're all chanting, facing the TV, watching the gate open and the players come on the ice. The puck is dropped.

“Shut up!” Connie yells. “It's my day and I say shut up; I can't hear a thing.”

They ignore her. She goes to the TV and turns up the volume. Sound booms.

“… Westfall rolled it in front. Sanderson… tried a shot that was wide. Kennan cleared it but not out. Bobby Orr… behind the net to centre. And Orr… Bobby Orr… scores! And the Boston Bruins… have won the Stanley Cup…”

They stand and scream. Al kisses Connie. Connie pushes him away. He steps on a beer bottle; his foot rolls forward, then back, and he loses his balance and thuds to his bum.

Donny tries to catch Al. The coffee table catches on his shoulder and tips sideways. Beer bottles, snack bowls, ashtrays and the Easter lily bounce around Shelly. Dirt flies across the carpet. Lily death-smell fills the room.

Shelly closes her eyes. She rubs her cheeks and screams louder than anyone. Marvin chants, Bobby Orr! Bobby Orr! Darlyn and Barry join in.

On TV, Bobby Orr is horizontal, flying through the air, mouth open, arms forward, legs out, launched into a dive.

“… Orr putting it in….”

“Bobby,” Kathy cries. She walks forward and touches the screen.

“… as Bobby Orr, the 22-year-old… sensation scores… after 40 seconds of overtime… and the… Boston Bruins win the Stanley Cup!”

Inside the ring or out, ain't nothing wrong with going down. It's staying down that's wrong.

— Muhammad Ali

It's 8:00 a.m. and already 80 degrees. The air in her room is fusty. Kathy pushes Barry away, her skin slick where his touched it. She kicks the sheet from her feet; the blanket's already on the floor. Barry rolls on his back and groans. With his shoulder more off the bed than on, his forearm flops in the air, his hand brushes the floor. Kathy pulls herself up and leans against the wall, her back against it cool. She presses her cheek to the paint. Relief, then none.

It should seem strange that Barry sleeps in her bed whenever he's home, but it doesn't. They don't have sex; they talk instead. She said, he said: it balanced out. Last night Barry talked and Kathy listened, dozing off in the heat, waking to some change in his voice. His holidays start today, and he and Rachel are going with her parents to their cottage in Sauble Beach. Separate bedrooms, of course. They'll finalize their wedding plans: make up the guest list and pick invitations from a vast book Rachel borrowed from the printers; there are bridesmaids and best men to choose, a hall to rent, food, music, gifts, and all of it, every tiny detail, must pass the parent test. Barry said he just hopes they have plenty of beer to get him through the ordeal.

Last time Barry went to Rachel's cottage, he fell asleep on his back in the sun their first day at the beach. He couldn't put clothes on without crying, he was so badly burned. He won't do that again, he said. But it did provide a topic of conversation, because otherwise he and Rachel's parents have little to say. Every exchange for the rest of the holiday began,
Barry, how's the sunburn?
Even now when he sees Rachel's father, it's the first thing he says, then he laughs and says, just kidding. They're nice people, Barry said, though once, while Rachel was helping him peel the blistered skin from his shoulders, her mother said,
Oh dear, don't take too much off. We don't want him to disappear.
And she giggled. Barry said he hoped he wasn't getting a mother-in-law who made short people jokes.

Kathy and Barry talk about anything, parents, work… well, maybe not hockey, because Barry isn't much interested in it, but anything else. About a month before she left him, Kathy remembers telling Doug she wanted to talk. A distance had grown between them and maybe it was just her, maybe it was because she was working and Doug wasn't. She was a bit jealous of all his free time. Or, she said, maybe it was all the drugs they were doing. (When she said
they
she meant
him
, because she had to be straight enough to go to work every day so other than smoking a bit of dope she wasn't doing many drugs.) But most of all, she wondered if he still loved her. Doug looked at her as if she were a Martian. He said to give him a minute, as he was trying to figure out what she wanted him to say.

It was after supper. They were sitting at the dining room table in their kitchen in Vancouver, a rare time when they were alone, their housemates at the park for an outdoor concert. They had smoked a joint before supper but they were no longer stoned. Doug set his empty coffee mug on his bread plate. He set the bread plate on his dinner plate. He placed his cutlery along the edge of his dinner plate and pushed this neat little stack to the right of his placemat.

Using her finger, Kathy played tic-tac-toe in the gravy congealing on her plate. Without looking up, she said she was lonely, but she didn't know why because there he was sitting across from her, not an arm's length away. She got up to clear the table. She put the ketchup in the fridge, and the butter, salt and pepper on the counter. She ran hot water into the sink and squirted in some dish detergent. She shook the placemats and put them in the drawer. She set the dirty dishes in the middle of the detergent suds, which funneled up around them. She wiped the table and the counter and began to wash, rinse and stack the dishes in the drying rack.

Doug got up from his chair and got his cigarettes, matches and an ashtray. He sat back down, this time in Kathy's chair, which faced the open window. A pigeon cooed. They both heard it. Pigeons were nesting in the rafters under the awning. Doug struck a match and lit his cigarette. He shook the match in the air and put it in the ashtray.

“Of course I love you,” he said.

Kathy washed and rinsed the dirty pots, let the water out of the sink and swished it clean with fresh water.

“I said I love you,” he said in the whoosh of his exhale.

“I heard,” Kathy said. She folded the dishcloth and hung it over the water spout.

Doug sat at the table and smoked. Finally he asked, “Are you happy?”

“I don't know,” she told him.

She should be happy, she said, so if she wasn't, the fault must be hers. Maybe she needed to find a place to skate, maybe that would make her happy. They hadn't been skating since they arrived in Vancouver eight months ago, she said. Maybe he'd like to skate with her again, maybe that would help. She was relieved to hear he loved her, she told him, because she hadn't been sure.

What she didn't say was that after hearing it she still felt lonely. She wanted more words than I-love-you-are-you-happy. She wanted an avalanche of words, enough to bury the sadness and unease in her heart. None of this had slipped off her tongue while she sat at the kitchen table in Vancouver. But the words Doug said that day were the exact right number for her to know she was going to leave him; it was just a matter of time.

Barry opens his eyes.

“Did you sleep well?” he asks Kathy. His breath smells like Limburger cheese.

“Too hot,” Kathy says.

“I have to get moving,” Barry says. “We're going to the farmers' market before we head out.”

He rolls sideways off the bed onto his knees and hoists himself up; his wrinkled pyjama bottoms sag at the bum. He taps Freddy's window as he goes by but gets no response. Pete fed Freddy a lab rat the day before. Freddy retreats to digest, into a stillness like death.

Kathy stretches her arms and legs, exposing as much skin as she can to what little air circulates. Where Barry slept, the bed is damp. A breeze puffs the curtain on the window high up on the wall, but it doesn't make any difference. Kathy watches the curtain drift in and out. Mesmerized, she almost slips into sleep. She'll lie here a few minutes while Barry's in the shower.

She has an interview at Canadian Tire on Main Street at eleven o'clock. They have an employee share-buying policy, and Kathy likes the idea of owning part of the company she works for. She also has an application in at the post office. The money's great, but she's pretty sure nothing will come of it. They don't hire many women, not for the good jobs, and there have been rotating strikes across Ontario, seventy-eight so far, by Connie's count. Kathy told her mother her life must be pretty damn dull if she's counting the number of postal strikes reported in the newspaper. Connie told Kathy her life was far more full and productive than Kathy's seemed to be these days, so she'd best get a job, or shut up.

The strikes are a pressure tactic, to force the government to settle their contract. Last Friday the postal workers walked off the job at the Varnum plant. Kathy passed their picket line and stopped to chat with Harry Edmonds.

“Hey, Kath,” he'd called, waving his
ON STRIKE
placard at her, “long time no see.”

Kathy wouldn't have recognized him; the last time she'd seen him was in grade eight. He told her he quit high school when he turned sixteen and worked nights in the warehouse at the Post Office, first as a temp, then permanent full-time. In the winter he delivered mail for guys who were sick or on holidays. He was getting his own route this summer, but contract talks soured and the rotating strikes began, and now everything was on hold.

“I'm getting on the gravy train,” he said, “once this strike is over.”

Harry said he married Margaret Ann Geisler, remember her, the smartest, prettiest girl in their class. They had a baby girl, Judith Ann. Margaret Ann's gone back to her job as legal assistant to the judges at the courthouse and her mother babysits Judith Ann. When Harry gets his mail route, he said, and a nice fat raise, Margaret Ann can stay home.

(A housewife, Kathy thought. If Harry became a full-time postman, Margaret Ann could become a full-time housewife. At twenty. It made her want to cry, and she was immediately grateful she wasn't in that position.)

Harry told Kathy not to count on the post office; no one would be hired until the dispute was settled. He wondered if she was mistaken about the ad, perhaps what she saw was for casuals. That's what management called scabs, and scabs are not in unions. If it's a legitimate ad, she'll end up on strike anyway, Harry said. Kathy told him she wouldn't work as a scab.

Or get blown up. Connie says the mailbox bombings in Montreal have nothing to do with postal strikes anywhere else. It's the FLQ, she says. So far no one's been killed, but it's only a matter of time before someone dies, and it won't be a politician or terrorist, Connie told Kathy. It'll be some old lady mailing a birthday card to her grandson, or a mother with her newborn baby in a stroller sending a birth announcement to her friends and family. Or some poor bugger who happened to be walking by a mailbox while taking his dog to the park for a crap.

Kathy's glad Martin lives in Quebec City, not Montreal. Or she hopes he's still living there. She can imagine herself a separatist — what young working-class Catholic didn't have a teeny-tiny understanding of what it might be like to be French in Canada, in Quebec especially, and have to fight to keep your Frenchness? That's how she and Darlyn and Donny talk when they're having a beer or smoking a joint. But she can't imagine hurting people, and certainly not killing them. She hopes Martin is a pacifist separatist, though what members of the FLQ are being called these days is terrorists. Like the Arab guerillas in Lebanon who are killing Israelis.

Kathy has put in applications at other union plants as well — Schneiders, Marsland, Grebs, Weston's. Good money, good benefits and generous vacation pay. Then Connie might get off her back. Right now not much is available and most summer jobs have already been filled by university students, but Kathy isn't too worried. Her pogey will last until November.

Connie is worried. She calls every day to see if Kathy's found anything, or if she's had an interview. She told Kathy she put a word in for her at the candy factory. Kathy told her she wouldn't be caught dead working in the same place as her mother.

“I won't be provoked,” Connie said. “This is serious, Kathy. You're twenty years old and you don't have a job.”

And then the old saw. Kathy knew it was coming.

“In fact, you don't seem to have any direction right now,” Connie said. “You could apply for days or afternoons when I'm not there.”

“I'll find something on my own,” Kathy said.

Connie didn't reply.

“Thanks anyway, Mom,” Kathy said. She was groveling and she hated it.

“How's Barry?” Connie asked, changing the subject.

Since Stanley Cup night, Connie hasn't stopped pointing out how different Barry is from her other friends. Things like his manners (he called her Mrs. Rausch and said please and thank you), his clothes (clean and tidy and classy — Kathy didn't tell her that Rachel shopped for him and did his laundry at her parents' house every weekend, didn't tell Connie about Rachel at all) and his job (unionized electrician). Kathy sometimes wonders, if she married into a union job, married a union man, if Connie would be happy then. When Kathy complains that her mother's interfering, Connie says, “I just want you to be happy.”

When Kathy was ten (and still happy) she told Connie she was going to marry someone just like her dad. Connie told her that a man like her father was exactly the wrong man to marry. But she didn't tell her why. Even when Kathy cried, Connie didn't explain or try to make her feel better. She said she wasn't going to explain, not because she was mean, but because she wanted Kathy to remember what she'd said. What do you remember about being happy, except that you were happy? Connie said. But when you cry, especially when your mother makes you cry, something sticks, some little bit of pain or anxiety stays in your mind, and you remember it.

Don't marry a man like your father, that's what I want to stick in there. That's what I want you to remember, Connie said. And here Kathy is, remembering. And hating that Connie is so often right.

Lately, in direct contradiction to her get-a-good-job-and-get-your-life-together routine, Connie's been telling Kathy, if she ever gets married, to go wild, to marry someone who makes her feel alive, not someone who makes her feel safe. But not someone like Doug, he's not a good man, there's something missing in him.

Charlie had been a good man, Connie said. But it would be better to marry someone so different from her father that she'd spend her entire marriage being surprised, discovering something she didn't know rather than putting up with what was familiar because it seemed comfortable. Marriage should be a rollicking and fearsome adventure, Connie said. It should never be boring. Boredom kills marriages. Calm is OK. Calm is not the same as boring, because calm doesn't last even if you want it to. But boredom can go on forever and ever. Boredom means the people lack imagination, or they lost it along the way.

Kathy asked her mother how she could be so sure about marriage when she'd been a widow for as long as she'd been married. After she stopped crying (it seems one or the other of them is crying or trying not to when they talk to each other these days) and asked Kathy where she got her cruel streak, Connie said it's exactly because she's a widow that she can be so sure. People in marriages aren't honest most of the time because they're trying to make things work and because they're afraid of what will happen if they don't work. Unless they're angry, they don't want to rock the boat, and they rarely say what they mean.