The Checkout Girl (20 page)

Pete has to meet up with a friend at his house. Barry and Rachel are dropping him off, and Pete's friend will give him a ride to the park later. But not too late, he told Kathy as he was leaving Al's party. I promise, he said, and he smiled his winning smile and gave her hand a squeeze. Darlyn and Donny will help Al carry his birthday loot home before they leave. Kathy double-checked to make sure their plans were solid, that they'd all make it to the park at some point in the night.

It's after ten as Kathy drives down Regent Street, windows open, street lights sparking through the leaves of the mature maples and elms that line the road. A summer-soft night breeze slips over her, tickles her neck, makes her shiver. The radio's playing and Kathy wails along with Janis.

Janis is getting lots of airplay, since the Festival Express tour. The tour opened at the CNE in Toronto after the Montreal concert was cancelled by city officials. They were afraid of riots, they said, because the concert was being held on St. Jean-Baptiste Day. Huge crowds fuelled by alcohol and drugs, free love and rock music, and separation politics — nine bombings in a two-week period — seemed too volatile a mix.

Some day Kathy will go to Montreal for St. Jean-Baptiste Day, see what it's all about. It has to be more fun than an abortion. She wonders if Janis has had an abortion. Can't imagine that she hasn't; she's renowned for her sexual exploits. And whether or not the stories are sensationalized, fragments are probably true. One mistake, one drunken or stoned night without a diaphragm or a condom, just one indiscretion, that's all.

People talk about free love, they talk about what birth control they use, but no one ever talks about their abortions; certainly celebrities don't. Kathy told Darlyn and Donny and Barry, but none of them mention it any more. If she brought it up they'd talk about it, because they're her friends, but she doesn't bring it up. More than the abortion, for which she only feels relief, the secrecy makes her sad.

Kathy reads
The Recorder
and
Chatelaine
, every article that mentions abortion. It's the “issue” of abortion that's discussed, how women should have access to it or not, depending on a writer's slant. In the articles, no one says, “I had an abortion and this is my story.” They don't even tell you what you can expect, before, during or after. Margaret's consciousness-raising group might talk about particulars. Kathy should ask, but then Margaret will want to know why she's asking, and Kathy doesn't think she wants her best friend's mother, and lately a friend to Connie, wondering whether Kathy had an abortion.

Connie didn't ask, but Kathy's pretty sure she suspected the pregnancy. If she had asked, Kathy would have lied. But if pressed, or if something had happened and she had to, she would have said, yes, but she had a miscarriage. Miscarriages are legitimate. And Kathy thinks that sometimes, like D and Cs, miscarriages are a euphemism for abortion. Connie would have an opinion — some righteous socio-political theory — on the subject, that's for sure. And though in her heart Kathy knows her mother would be kind and say all the right things, the last person she'd tell about the abortion is her mother.

If Kathy did tell Connie, she wouldn't want her to say anything. Not one word. She'd want her mother to lead her to Connie's big double bed, where Kathy and Shelly slept with their mother when they were sick. She'd want to lie down on the bed with her mother, have her mother hold her, spooned around her back, no sound but the whispers of their breath.

Hold her and not let her go, not ease the pressure for one second, until Kathy slipped from her mother's arms and walked out of the room because she'd been held enough. That's what she'd do if she had a daughter who had to have an abortion.

She doesn't think about the baby often, but when she does, she's not happy, and she's not sad. Sometimes she wonders what her life would have been like. She'd be big, almost seven months by now, unemployed except for odd jobs and drug deals, boarding in a room with a boa constrictor, warding off her mother, and about to sleep with her landlord, who is married and a father.

The baby would have no father, or none that Kathy would admit to. Doug went back to Vancouver and no one has heard from him. Not Blanche, not Connie, and certainly not Kathy. If she'd had the baby she'd lie and says its absent father was a sweet young man who had come to Varnum under an assumed name because he was a draft dodger, but he decided, because his exile from America was breaking his mother's heart, to go to Vietnam. After he left Canada, Kathy never heard from him again. Or he was a brilliant mathematician, theirs love at first sight. But he died in a car accident. Or a tender, altruistic fellow who went off to help the poor people in Biafra before he ever knew he was going to be a father. No forwarding address. But none of these is a good enough story for a real baby, only an imaginary one.

She wonders if Shelly notices she doesn't have a father. When Shelly was a baby, Charlie was seldom home. And when he was, his unhappiness was palpable, yet he was so withdrawn, it was like being haunted by a father rather than having one. So if she did notice, what would she miss, unlike Kathy, who misses Charlie in invisible, mostly unconscious ways every single day?

At the campsite, she stops the car and turns off the ignition. Silence overwhelms, and Janis and the imaginary-baby stories are replaced by small sounds: the tick-tick of the car engine, crickets chir-upping, and a rustle of leaves as the breeze passes through them. In the distance there's the lilt of conversation, but nothing she can make out.

Saplings and low dense bushes grow beneath the beech and maple that surround the site. A thick cedar hedge beside the parking spot ensures privacy. On one side is a grassy tent site, on the other, a picnic table. In the middle is the firepit, a red brick patio circling it. Kathy walks to a nearby tap to fill the pail she's brought, just in case.

She digs a hole in the firepit with a trowel, and wedges a cross — a body with arms she made from a broken rake — long end down, as far into the ash and ground as she can. She piles stones around it and makes sure it's sturdy. She doesn't want it to tip over. Not right away.

The air is warm still, the night humid though not sticky. The sky is bright enough to see by, a dazzle, really, the moon a thick silvery wedge, stars flickering through thin wisps of quickly passing cloud. She sits back and watches. Laughter drifts on a breeze.

She gives the cross a shake — solid enough — and gets the garbage bag from the trunk of the car. The clothes are clean. She'd scraped away the vomit cemented to the material, and washed everything. Kathy slips the transparent green turtleneck over the stake, stretches the armholes to fit over the crossbar. She threads the sleeves of the pink satin jacket over the top. She shakes out the tiny black velvet skirt and pins it, with the safety pins she has in her pocket, to the bottom of the green shirt. Before coming, she'd sewed the pink satin underpants to the skirt so they dangle beneath its hem. She wraps the textured stockings around the base of the cross, lets the ends dangle.

She left the vinyl boots at home — they would melt rather than burn — and she took the sheets to the Sally Ann. Someone could use them. She builds a Girl Guide teepee around the stake: crumpled newspaper around the dangling ends of the stockings, dead twigs over the paper, kindling leaning over the twigs, and four dry sticks of firewood tipped up and resting on the stake. The fire is set.

Kathy rings the effigy with lawn chairs and sits down to have a cigarette. She waits. Car lights brush past her, past the site. Donny's car backs up and parks beside hers. And as Max says in
Where the Wild Things Are
,
Let the wild rumpus start
.

“I recognize these,” Darlyn says as she circles the effigy.

“Liberace night,” Donny says. “Oh my darlin', oh my darlin'…” he sings, and gives Darlyn a big kiss on the cheek. “That's the night I fell in love with my Darlyn.”

“I get it,” Darlyn says.

“Do I get it?” Donny asks. He looks at Darlyn. “What don't I get?”

Darlyn and Kathy look at him, look at the effigy.

“Oh,” he says. “Are you all right?” he asks Kathy.

“Right as rain.” It's the first thing she's said since they arrived.

They sit and pass a joint while they wait for Barry and Rachel and Pete.

“Rachel's pretty nice,” Darlyn says, sucking in some smoke. She hands the joint to Kathy and sits back in her chair. On the exhale she adds, “For a Westmount girl.”

Kathy snorts in the middle of her toke. Smoke shoots from her nostrils. She coughs.

“Gimme that,” Donny says. He leans over in his chair, almost tips, rights himself, and grabs the joint from Kathy. He takes a long drag, exhales a tiny smoke ring and sips in a few little tokes. He passes the joint back to Kathy, who takes a quick toke and passes it to Darlyn.

“Why do you keep saying ‘for a Westmount girl'?” Donny asks. He's holding his breath so the words sound like little oinks coming from his throat. “Is she nice? Or isn't she?”

“She's got perfect hair,” Kathy says.

“She's got perfect clothes,” Darlyn says and tokes. “This is good.” She exhales and sighs. “Where'd you get it?”

“Pete.” Kathy's holding smoke in, so it comes out, “Bleat.”

“She's got a perfect boyfriend,” Darlyn says.

Kathy mouths,
Barry
, and lifts her eyebrows, and she and Darlyn begin to bray.

“She's going to have the perfect wedding,” Kathy says, catching her breath.

“And she's the perfect virgin,” Darlyn hoots.

“No, she's not,” Kathy says. “Barry introduced her to marijuana.” She leans forward in her chair and stares at her effigy. “And one thing led to another and they're sleeping together now.”

“Far out,” says Darlyn, and she leans forward.

“Far fucking out,” says Donny, and he leans forward, too.

As one, they sit back in their chairs, and they laugh.

“Look at the moon,” Donny says. They look up.

“She lives in a great big fucking house,” Darlyn says, watching the sky.

Mansions, they call the houses of rich kids, whose parties they've attended in Westmount and Forest Hills. Houses at least twice the size of the blue-collar bungalows they grew up in, though Donny admits he grew up in a split level. A very small split level, he wants them to know. The kind of house Connie has always aspired to, Kathy tells them, a split level with a sunken living room and wall-to-wall shag carpet.

In dreamy voices they describe rooms they've been in, most of them, like Connie's dream house, carpeted wall-to-wall with broadloom or shag so thick you could sleep on it. They try to outdo each other: Kitchens with islands and breakfast nooks and dishwashers and maids. Zillions of appliances in pink or avocado or harvest gold and sound systems built into the walls. Formal dining rooms with more furniture in one room than they had in their entire houses, stacked with sets of dishes and crystal and real silver. Some even had fireplaces. In fact, fireplaces all over, upstairs and down, in dens and in master bedrooms. Libraries with desks and bookcases built in. Toilets with spray jets that washed your bum. Showers separate from the bathtub. Bathrooms with heated towel racks. Separate sinks for the husband and the wife. Some bathrooms were attached to master bedrooms, some to guest rooms where no one ever slept. Beds had more pillows than heads.

And not only that, rich people owned cottages right on the water, at Sauble Beach and Southampton and Port Elgin; they owned whole islands in Honey Harbour and the Muskokas. They had motorboats to get them to their islands. They had water skis and canoes and sailboats and houses to house them. Some even had cabins and chalets at Blue Mountain where they went to ski. None of them — Donny or Kathy or Darlyn — had ever skied. Skiing was for rich people.

They light another joint and are warming up to how Sand Hills thinks it's so good compared to Varnum, Sand Hills having the university and Varnum most of the heavy industry, when Barry and Rachel arrive. They can hardly stand, they're so stoned. Barry reaches for the joint and Rachel tells them about Pete's friend.

“He's gorgeous,” Rachel says.

She takes the joint from Barry and draws in hard and holds. Kathy waits to hear what she'll say next.

Rachel waves her hand in front of her face, the joint glows. Barry takes it from her. “He doesn't have it now, but he has lots of old acne scars, so you wouldn't think he'd be handsome. But he is.” She uses her hands to square her face. “You know how they say chiselled features? Well, that's him.” She stands on tiptoe and puts her hand in the air. “He's this tall, and bulging with muscles.”

“Lunch Box Man,” Kathy whispers.

“Pardon me?” Rachel says, but she doesn't wait for an answer. “Give me that,” she says, and grabs the joint again. “Did you get his name?” she asks Barry.

“Didn't say,” Barry says. He turns to Kathy. “So what's the agenda? Pete said to start without him. He'll get here when he can.”

Kathy nods towards the firepit.

“Oh, man,” Barry says, staring at the ur-Kathy rising on the stake. “How did I miss that?”

Kathy pulls a Zippo from her pocket. She flicks it as she walks to the car for lighter fluid. She sprays some fluid on the clothes and wood, then she lights the kindling. The fire licks up and catches on the stockings in a whoosh. The effigy is a conflagration. Bits of burning cloth float in the air.

“Get them!” Darlyn yells. They whoop and chase the cinders, beating them until they're out, running to the next one. When the fire calms, and there are no more flying sparks, they sit in the lawn chairs. They smoke joints and cigarettes, and they drink the beer Barry brought. They roast marshmallows on sticks until the bag is empty.