The Checkout Girl (2 page)

Once with Barry was enough, Kathy had told herself. After she found out his little penis actually did what it was supposed to do, Kathy felt they didn't need to test it again. Barry did, though. He wanted to marry Rachel, The Virgin Goddess, and he wanted Kathy too. Just not to marry.

“Don't you believe in free love? You're a women's libber, aren't you?” Barry asked her one night when she was putting him off.

“Love's never free,” Kathy told him solemnly. She'd heard that in some movie. Lovers discussing their future. It had sounded so profound. Now it sounded like the sorry excuse it was.

Barry lets Kathy take the Corvette for spins, its powerful motor thrumming under the hood (Rachel isn't allowed to drive it so Kathy is supposed to stay away from her neighbourhood in Westmount), and he buys a little hashish from Pete for her. He brings home dope munchies and cigarettes and beer, all in the hopes that she'll once again have pity on him and take him into her bed.

Kathy can walk to work from the Lehmans', walk to the library, walk to Regent Park, walk to market to get winter apples or maple syrup or schnitz pie, then have a beer at the Eby Hotel or a club sandwich in the Grill Room at Ahrens Department Store or just hang around downtown, see if some friends show up. When she lies in her bed at night she can hear the trains stop at the station going to, or coming from, Toronto. Soothing hopeful sounds, hisses and clanks, slow groaning starts.

Kathy would like to hold out on Barry. She likes to think she's superior to him. So it makes her sick. Not the sex, because Barry's so gentle and timid, so anxious to please that she can't feel bad about the actual sex. It's how sorry-ass and weak she is. That's what she can't understand right now: The way she didn't stand up to Doug, and left Vancouver without telling him. The way she doesn't say no to Barry. The way she likes Barry's warm body in bed next to her at night even though he's engaged to Rachel. She has nothing against Rachel, who's a really nice girl. In fact Kathy's glad he's engaged to Rachel because it means he doesn't want anything from her but the sex, but that's one more thing she doesn't get about herself right now.

Kathy likes Barry's wannabe rich-boy smell: Ban roll-on deodorant and Breck shampoo, and on alternating days Canoe or English Leather cologne. Likes the softness of his breath on the back of her neck as he falls asleep, each exhalation so full of gratitude.

Sometimes Kathy wonders how she got into this mess.

And when she's being honest, she even has to admit that Barry is fun to be with in an aspiring-to-Westmount electrician kind of way. Barry wears loafers and white socks, straight leg chinos, never, ever bellbottoms. He wears psychedelic print shirts with pointy collars and his hair, though shaggy, is neatly trimmed. He shaves every day and uses aftershave, and his sideburns are an ordinary length. He has a big watch. He's generous and likes to indulge Kathy, likes what he calls her wild side, will do almost anything she asks as long as it won't get him in trouble with Rachel. Sometimes they smoke dope and laugh and talk without making love. It feels so good to laugh.

But tonight Kathy decided to take Barry skating instead of smoking dope or having sex with him. She hadn't been skating since she got back from Vancouver, and on her way home from work at suppertime she noticed that the local rink was flooded and ready to go. She wanted to test the ice, test herself, because she hadn't been on skates for way too long.

But there's another reason to put Barry off. She's having supper at her mother's tomorrow and she doesn't want to betray herself, doesn't want to go home with even an inkling of Barry because she thinks her mother might be able to tell. Her mother's unhappy with her these days, and is only too willing to tell her so. Connie uses all the ammunition she can find against Kathy to press her to change her life, so Kathy has to stay alert. She doesn't want anything to distract her from whatever defence she'll have to mount against her mother, because, except for skating, she really doesn't know what she wants and it takes enormous effort to disguise the fact. To maintain that what she's doing right now is all she really wants to do.

When Freddy hit the glass and Barry ran into her room, Kathy told him to get dressed, they were going skating. When he said he didn't own skates, she dug out a pair from a pile of old sports equipment in Pete and Penny's furnace room. She told him to put on warm clothes. She told him it was skating or nothing.

Barry listened to her. He got dressed, got into her car, put on his borrowed skates. There he is now at the end of the rink, moaning and muttering about the cold, trying to keep his balance. Kathy skates hard, getting a sense of the ice, beginning to sweat. She stops hearing Barry's complaints; she pushes her mother's voice away. Worry slides from her shoulders, down her back and legs and into her feet, which slice the ice, over and over, slice it. Her body takes charge, as she hoped it would, and all she thought she'd lost returns. She is a skater.

“Listen to this,” Connie calls out. She knows Kathy and Shelly are around the house somewhere, but it doesn't matter. She talks to herself. And she reads the newspaper out loud, has done since Charlie died in the car accident ten years ago. Not that she'd been shy of the sound of her own voice before his death. But after he died there was far too much emptiness and she felt compelled to fill it in whatever way she could. The newspaper teemed with words, all of them soothingly impersonal and so removed from the rawness of her own pain that they became necessary, and she was soon in the habit of reading them aloud.

Supper is cooking, a pot roast especially for Kathy. Ever since she broke up with her no-good boyfriend, Doug, and moved back to Varnum from that hippie commune where they were living in Vancouver, Kathy comes every Monday after work at the grocery store to share a meal with Connie and Shelly.

Connie had read out how Egyptian President Nasser is promising an army of a million men to liberate Palestine, and before that how there's going to be a boost in their very own twin city population — Varnum and Sand Hills — as people move from Quebec. Some want to get away from the political unrest and financial insecurity caused by the separatist movement. Some are fleeing because the FLQ continues to set off bombs in mailboxes and they're afraid for their lives.

Now she's reading about Cassius Clay. Connie likes Cassius Clay, likes his solid Negro good looks, his quick smart-ass bravado with the press, and the lyrical provocations he tosses out at his opponents, both other heavyweight fighters and now his political foes as he fights to stay out of jail after refusing the US draft to Vietnam. He gave up his slave name and changed it to Muhammad Ali when he became a member of the Nation of Islam, but Connie can't get used to the change, so she still calls him Cassius Clay. He says his religion doesn't condone war, except those in the name of Allah, which is part of why he says he'd rather go to jail than fight.

Connie remembers when he first got in trouble, when he told the draft board — and the press, of course, for he never could keep his mouth shut — “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. They never called me nigger.” Connie has some views on the military herself, especially how Canada never formed a coherent strategy for its Forces after World War II, but she thinks the war in Vietnam is over for the Americans, and they'd do well to bring their boys home alive rather than in body bags.

Connie wonders why Negroes are changing religion. Her theory — Connie prides herself on her theories — is that it's linked to being underdogs. American Negroes are underdogs and they need a clear way to distinguish themselves from whites that's not based entirely on skin colour. A distinct culture — the Negro Nation of Islam culture, for instance.

She supposes the same thing could be said about French Canadians, the ones who say they're fighting to protect their culture and language, that is. On a good day she'll admit they have a point, but their fight scares her, especially the terrorism, because it's so close to home. She can understand why people are leaving Quebec. If she lived there, as an English person, she'd at least have to think about it. For Shelly's sake, her argument goes, if nothing else, because if anything happened to Connie…

And that's as far as Connie gets with her French Canadian liberation musings, because even though Connie has seen a lawyer and made arrangements for Shelly to live at the Sunshine Home if anything ever happens to her, she doesn't like to think about what Shelly's life would be like there. And she will never ask Kathy to take Shelly on. It wouldn't be fair. One life completely devoted to a retarded child's care is enough. Connie's taken out an insurance policy that will help cover everything. (Though if she ever became a cripple that would be another story.) She learned from Charlie's death what a godsend an insurance policy could be.

Connie's reading from the
Varnum Recorder
, the twin cities' main newspaper. She's leaning sideways in her chair to catch the best light from the lamp beside her. Her dressing gown, a full-length pastel pink terrycloth, new at Christmas — a gift from Kathy — opens across her breasts, revealing a deep, shaded cleavage inside a serviceable but well-fitting white bra. Connie might be a widow, but she hasn't let herself go, prides herself on not letting herself go in fact.

Her figure is full: wide shoulders, big breasts, small waist, round hips and bum. Strong and compact, but not fat. She doesn't work at keeping trim, but she doesn't overindulge, either. She wears a long-legged panty girdle to work every night, but under it her belly and thighs are still tight.

Occasionally she wonders why she bothers to look good. She rarely goes out except for groceries and to work and to church. When Kathy lived at home and was old enough to babysit, Connie went to a movie now and then with her friends. Since Kathy moved out, Connie's friends drop in to see her because it's easier that way. Connie hosts a card game once a month on a Saturday night. That's as often as the women feel they can spend a Saturday night away from their husbands.

Connie used to invite them with their husbands, but being the only single woman in the group started to cause tensions, a flirty moment here, a little too much attention paid there, the hurt in a friend's eyes when a husband complimented Connie on her independence and coping skills, or on the cheese puffs she'd made. Connie needed her girlfriends more than she needed the attention of men, though she misses the men. Misses the smell of them, their muscled solidness, the way they seem so sure of their sometimes foolish opinions. She misses their non-judgmental generosities and the look of their fingernails, black-rimmed and nicked from factory work. Connie and her friends play euchre mostly, crib if the group is small, Rummoli if she has a crowd. But the fact is, no matter who she's around, she likes to look nice, so she does bother to take care of herself, and that's all there is to it.

“Are you listening, girls?” Connie tries again. “It says, and I quote, ‘Cassius Clay, who now calls himself Muhammad Ali, continues his appeal of a possible five-year prison term for his 1967 conviction under the Selective Services Act.'

“Now listen up, because this is the part I really love,” Connie calls out. “‘Mr. Clay says boxing needs reviving: “There's no more poetry, no more shuffling, no more predicting rounds, they can't talk and they're ugly.'”

“Gaw-damn that man's a hoot,” she shouts. “‘They can't talk and they're ugly.'” She repeats it for herself this time, and she laughs and shakes her head.

She leans back in her chair, half closes the paper, and continues to talk to herself. “He's right; there is no poetry without him. Not that I ever liked watching him fight, mind you. Can't stand the sound of a fist hitting flesh. But I do miss his mouthy backtalk, and all the jive in his interviews with Howard Cosell.” She raises her voice and says, “Cassius Clay may be an underdog right now, losing his title and all, but he's no loser.”

The picture window curtains are open, the cold late afternoon an arm's length away. Frost patterns like shatters form along the bottom of the window near the sill. On the other side of the glass, doily-sized snowflakes drift so slowly and fall so gently they appear to be pausing in the air before they make their way to the ground.

“There's a difference between underdogs and losers,” she pronounces. She's using her French teacher “répétez-après-moi” tone now, the one she uses when she's really trying to get her daughters' attention.
Talking to you is like talking to stumps
, she tells them when she's particularly frustrated.

This time she's aiming her words at Kathy. Kathy's in another world these days, so preoccupied she doesn't notice Connie half the time. Or the rest of the world, for that matter. The other half of the time they'll be sitting together, talking, Kathy appearing to listen when suddenly her pupils will grow wide and dark, as if a cloud is passing before the sun. Her eyes lose their focus until they look like the eyes of a dead person. Connie knows that when Kathy shuts her out like that, she isn't listening to a word that she's saying either.

Now Shelly's a different story; Shelly has an excuse. She's autistic. Connie can talk and talk and she never knows if anything's going to stick in Shelly's mind. Shelly has never said an original sentence in her entire life; she only repeats fragments of information she hears. A single word, or a list of items. A simple rhyme, or a phrase from a book. Occasionally she remembers song lyrics, but never more than two or three lines.

Still, Connie's an optimist and thinks if she enunciates like a teacher giving a
dictée
, Shelly's odd and unfathomable mind will have a better chance of hearing particular words. Maybe she'll get their drift and possibly even put them together with some remembered image or thought and then turn them into an idea. Eleven years and counting and that's never happened.

Connie's general theory of talking to her kids — or to anyone's kids, for that matter — goes something like this: Kids' minds, even those of grown kids like Kathy, are like tape recorders. The machine is always on, always recording. Words go in and are entered on the loop of tape. Even if the brain doesn't seem to register the words, they're in there, stored for future use. And some day, maybe when the time is right, maybe when the words are needed, maybe when the mind is open to them, her daughters will unconsciously hit the play button at the right spot in the tape and they'll hear her words of praise, or advice, or some bit of wisdom inside their heads. Whatever it is they need to hear at the time.

So speaking to them is never a complete loss, because if she ever gave up and said nothing, then there would be nothing on the loop for them to hear in the future, and that, Connie's sure, would be a gaw-damned tragedy in any child's life.

“There's a difference between underdogs and losers,” Connie repeats, trying a more conversational tone this time. She knows Kathy's nearby, heard her rummaging in the ironing board cupboard in the kitchen a minute ago, though she doesn't notice her standing behind her in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining area.

Connie lifts her head. It gets dark so early this time of year. She looks out the window at the dazzle of snowflakes illuminated by the porch light. They spiral past her on a swirl of wind. And now she can see Kathy reflected in the glass. She watches her daughter for a moment, then sighs, and folds back the newspaper to an article she read earlier and has decided to clip. She takes the tiny scissors she wears looped around her neck on a long, frayed, faded green ribbon and cuts the article out of the paper. She leans over the arm of her chair and slips it into a shoebox she keeps beside her on the floor for that purpose.

Connie saves newspaper articles to tape to her refrigerator door. She calls the fridge door her scrapbook. She started it a year ago on New Year's Day and she's been taping clipped news items to it ever since. Every time the door is opened or closed, the articles flap like the prayer flags Kathy strung in the backyard two summers ago when she was going through some hippie oo-ooming meditation craze. Tibetan prayer flags. Kathy showed her the image of a horse on one of them. Lung-ta, Kathy said it was called, and it meant Windhorse. Each time the wind blew, she told Connie, the fluttering flags sent blessings for happiness, long life, and prosperity to everyone in the neighbourhood.

Kathy moves into the dining room and takes the iron from the table. She's slighter than her mother, smaller breasted, fair where her mother is dark, but she has the same green eyes, the same strong shoulders and back and the same small waist. Where Connie's figure might be considered lush, Kathy's is muscular and chiseled, athletic.

Kathy set the iron to
WARM
and now she's testing it to see if it's ready. The cord swings down, taps against the wall beside her. She spits on her finger and touches it to the metal. The spit doesn't sizzle but it does slowly evaporate.

She watches the snow fall around her mother's reflection in the window. When Kathy arrived after work she asked her mother why she had curtains if she never bothered to use them. Winter dark falls early and when Kathy drove up around 4:30 Connie was backlit in the window so that each detail of her face and hands and clothes, each movement she made was entirely, vividly visible to the world outside.

Connie said, “I have nothing to hide. The neighbours know what I look like. They know every gaw-damned thing about me, so what the hell is there to worry about?”

The snow is falling harder now, swirling on a gust of wind, obscuring her mother's reflection for a moment.

“You don't have to shout,” Kathy says, “I'm right behind you.” She touches the warm iron to the sleeve of her shirt.

“The Boston Bruins used to be underdogs,” Connie tells her, slightly less loudly. “Have you switched your allegiance to some other losing team now that they're winning? For all those years, Boston lost and lost, and you cheered for them. Your father cheered for them, too. Do you remember? But he was fickle. He cheered for any team that wasn't Montreal.

“God rest his soul,” Connie says, and she crosses herself. “I hate saying anything about him when he isn't here to defend himself. But he was a bigot, Kathy, sure as shit, and who he loathed were the French. Not French from France, French from Canada. Whores-de-horses he used to call hors d'oeuvres. Remember that? Probably better if you don't.

“I miss him, I really do, but I don't miss that part of him one little bit. He was a card-carrying Liberal, your father was, all his too-short life. But Monsieur le Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, would have tested his loyalty to the limit.

“Now you, Kathy, you're not like your dad. As a kid you were always so quiet. So kind, and so …”