The Checkout Girl (3 page)

Connie pauses and Kathy waits to hear what she will say, wonders how her mother saw her as a child.

“… so receptive. You hardly said boo, and you went along with almost everything you were told. Never had a mean bone in your body, always loved everyone,” Connie says. “Most especially underdogs. Like that retarded kid at school you were always getting in fights over? Stevie what's-his-name? You were his very best friend. His only friend, if I remember correctly.”

“Pocock,” Kathy says, running the iron across her breasts and along her shoulders.

“Pocock? What the hell kind of name is that?” Connie says. “If I recall correctly, his mother had him late and he was never right. Didn't look mongoloid. Looked like Ichabod Crane when his hormones hit, tall and thin, though he had a chubby bum, poor soul. Didn't have those hands mongoloids have, either.”

“Lordy, Kathy, will you look at these.”

Kathy watches Connie flap her hands in the air. The newspaper slips from her lap onto the floor.

“They look like an old woman's,” Connie says.

“Hazel!” Connie shouts, and she snaps her fingers.

Connie's fingernails are manicured and painted fuchsia and do not look like an old woman's.

“That's her name. Hazel Pocock. I remember now. I admired her. She forced the school to pass Stevie through every grade until grade eight. I never had the energy to fight the school for Shelly. But then, autistic retards are different from mongoloids. Stevie could talk. He liked to be around people.

“Hazel moved the family to North Tonawanda — you remember that kids' talent show you used to watch from there — so Stevie could go to a high school for special children. They had lots of money. I wonder what happened to him.

“Some people take in stray animals,” Connie says as she leans over and pulls the newspaper back onto her lap. “You, my gentle-hearted and hopeless daughter, adopt losers.”

Kathy switches the iron to her left hand and tries to press the sleeve on her right arm. Her mother is sitting with the paper in her lap, staring out at the snow that sifts past the window. One of the toilet paper rolls Connie uses to curl her dyed black hair slipped forward when she picked up the newspaper. Kathy watches Connie push the roll back into place and take the loosened bobby pin and shove it along her scalp, securing the roll to her head. Her mother shakes out the newspaper and begins to read again, but to herself this time.

There's a paper bag in the cupboard under the bathroom sink for old toilet paper rolls, overflowing last time Kathy checked. The empty rolls are the exact right size for the large glossy bouffant with an Annette Funicello curl-under that Connie likes to dry set and hairspray into place every night before she leaves for work at Smiles 'n Chuckles. Kathy wonders why Connie bothers, because her hair gets squished under a net every night anyway.

But that's her mother, every hair in place, nails manicured, lipstick on, eyebrows plucked to a thin black “Oh really!” line above her green eyes. She looks like a backup singer for some Motown girl group, for Aretha Franklin or Diana Ross. Except Connie's white and middle-aged. Still, Kathy can picture her in one of those tight Supremes dresses, short and sparkly, Connie all long-line panty-girdled curves with cross-your-heart breasts. Too bad about the Supremes break-up. Diana's going solo. Kathy wonders if she's scared about going out on her own.

“Stevie Pocock wasn't a loser,” Kathy says. “He was slow.”

She reaches the iron around her back and tries to run it up her backbone. She pushes it up as far as she can reach, which isn't very far.

“With a name like Pocock… oh, you know, everybody called him Poop-Cock.”

“Now look at Boston,” Connie interrupts. “From last to first. After they got Bobby Orr, they stopped losing, just like you said they would. One more Canadian Bob gone south for the big time. Like Bob Goulet and Bobby Curtola. So tell me why Mr. Smarty Pants Orr didn't sign with Toronto or Montreal? Keep the talent here in Canada for a change. Like our factories. Paper says they're being bought up by US companies every day. Pretty soon everything worth anything in Canada will be owned and run from the United States of America.

“Bet Boston takes the Stanley Cup this year because of him.” Connie snaps the paper open and starts to read again. A loose piece drifts to the floor.

“Bobby never was — and never will be — a loser,” Kathy says. “He signed with Boston because some idiot in Toronto wasn't smart enough to sign him.”

Connie repeats what she reads in the sports section when Kathy's home, but she doesn't follow hockey on TV, has never gone to a live game. Her mother doesn't get her passion for hockey, why Kathy insisted on watching
Hockey Night in Canada
even after Charlie died.

At first she watched exactly because Charlie had died. Because it was something they'd done together, so she couldn't imagine not doing it. Then she watched because she wanted to learn, to improve her moves. Without her father to coach her on their backyard rink, without his running commentary at Junior A games at the Aud, she wasn't getting any better. And she wanted to get better because she wanted to think her father would be proud of her.

She watched to see how someone stickhandled or made a fast turn. See how a play formed on the ice. How a player on a breakaway skated down along the boards and after a quick turnaround flicked the puck in front of the goal where a rushing forward picked it up, shot, and scored.

She was learning technique. And she started to apply it when she skated after supper, whenever Connie let her go to the school rink. Practising abrupt turns. Practising backward starts and stops. She took her stick and skated with a puck, fast stops, restarts, caressing the puck with her stick, or deftly dropping the puck, an almost invisible move — she had it, then she didn't — for another player, one of those imaginary ones, the only ones she ever got to play with.

When she turned twelve, her mother let her take the bus to Junior A games on Saturday afternoons. She went alone and sat behind some regulars, men who had known Charlie, and who reminded her of her father. Working men who huffed warm breath into their callused bare hands and had weekend-stubbled cheeks. Who wore clean green cotton work pants with faded knees and baggy bums, school janitor pants. They called her Charlie's kid.

“Hey, it's Charlie's kid,” one of them would say as she settled in her seat. Another would ask, “How're ya today?” Then another, usually the one with the Rangers toque — the one growing the Fu Manchu mustache that the other men kidded him about — would ask, “How's your mother doing these days?” Sometimes he'd add, “And that sister of yours, how's she getting along?”

Kathy said, fine and fine and fine. But once the game started it was all hockey talk. And she listened. Listened to their comments on who was good that day and who was having a hard time, and why. She listened to their commentary on the play. She brought her skates because after the games, after the ice was cleaned and smoothed, there was an hour-long free skate for the fans. Kathy practised what she'd learned from the men and combined it with what she saw on TV. And she improved, getting faster, stopping easier, turning on a dime.

When she got home, Connie would ask, “How was the game?”

“Good,” Kathy told her, because that's all she wanted to hear. For a while Kathy tried to tell her what had really happened: a brilliant goal, an unfair penalty, a brutal drop-the-gloves fight. But Connie's hockey-talk stamina lasted about a minute before she'd tell Kathy there were leftover egg salad sandwiches in the fridge.

Then Bobby Orr joined the Bruins. If Connie came down to the rec room to watch a game with her, Kathy tried to explain what a good skater Bobby was. She'd use words she thought her mother liked. Dazzling, she said once. Like Cassius Clay dancing around the ring, evading opponents, making them look clumsy and slow. That was Bobby on the ice, she told her mother. An artist. She could watch him forever.

That night Connie called Kathy's enthusiasm for skating a hobby, like it was knitting or stamp collecting. Kathy had just told her mother that doing something with her skating was her dream, even though she had yet to figure out exactly what that dream could be. She was so excited she couldn't stop the words coming out of her mouth, even when she sensed she was going to get hammered.

She certainly wasn't going to get into the NHL, she told her mother. And she didn't figure skate, so that eliminated competitions. There didn't seem to be a job out there for a girl on hockey skates, who could skate circles around imaginary opponents, and stickhandle imaginary pucks into imaginary nets. Or none that she knew of. But she wasn't going to stop dreaming.

Her mother said, “Face it, Kathy, it's just a hobby.”

Connie's turning from the window, and she's giving Kathy her I-don't-understand-you-I'll-never-understand-you look.

“Good Lord Jesus, Mary, and gaw-damned Joseph, Kathy. What are you doing?”

“Ironing my shirt.”

“While you're wearing it?”

Kathy presses the cloth under her small breasts and across her flat abdomen. The shirt, shiny from the iron, is a psychedelic swirl of brown, turquoise, white and two shades of orange. The sleeves are long and tight, enormous cuffs balloon over her small wrists. The neck is a high wide band with a little zipper at the back. Her nipples are erect; she's not wearing a bra. The chemical scent of polyester sizing rises around her, almost, but not quite, obliterating the fine rich smell of the pot roast, smothered in carrots and potatoes and turnips, that is bubbling in the oven in Lipton onion soup mix gravy.

“The setting's low.”

“You shouldn't have to iron polyester. Wash and wear, isn't that what the label says?” Connie looks down at her paper. “I can't watch,” she says.

“So who's a loser if Boston's an underdog?” Kathy asks, wondering as she asks it if she really wants to know. She yanks the cord from the kitchen wall socket from where she's standing in the doorway.

“Don't yank the cord like that! You'll electrocute yourself,” Connie says without looking up. “Doug. I'd say Doug's a big-time loser.”

Doug still calls Connie trying to find out where Kathy is. Connie says she doesn't hang up, though she is tempted to, but she doesn't tell him anything, either. And Doug sends letters, mails them to her mother's address. Connie leaves them on the counter, where Kathy picks them up when she comes for supper.

“I could have put this in the garbage and you'd never have known it came,” her mother had told her, waving that first letter in the air.

“But you didn't,” was all Kathy said, and she grabbed the letter from her mother's hand and shoved it in her coat pocket.

Doug's still living in the communal house she shared with him and eight other hippies, up off Cambie on West 14th. The letters have intricate psychedelic drawings along the edges, and
I Love You
written over and over again in many scripts. He has calligraphy talent and he's persistent. But he's lying, because he doesn't love Kathy. He just doesn't like surprises. And he hates to lose.

He writes once a week, trying to get Kathy to come back to Vancouver, and back to him. She doesn't answer because she has no intention of going back to him. As far as she's concerned — and she's already told her mother this — it's over with Doug.

“I told you, he's history,” Kathy says. “Why are you bringing him up again?”

“Maybe because I don't believe you. Maybe because every time you get a letter from him you look weepy,” Connie says. “And like I said, it's a fine line between underdogs and losers. Underdogs have a chance. You're wasting your time on Doug. He's not a good man. You've said so yourself. Get over him.

“And while we're at it, while we're examining the life of Kathy Rausch, you're wasting time on that loser checkout job in a store that's on its last legs. You're smart, Kathy. All your teachers said you were smart. Go to college. Or at least get a job in a union shop.

“Look here,” she says, and she shakes the newspaper, “the firemen are getting a 17% raise this year. Unionized job. And you remember Shirley Goetz from church? Promoted to line supervisor last week. Unionized job. That'll never happen in a grocery store. Women don't get to be managers in supermarkets. Even packers get promoted because they're boys, but women… never!”

“I order the cigarettes,” Kathy interrupts.

Then she stops speaking because if she says more she will only get in deeper trouble. Cigarette ordering is a prestige position in Kathy's store, but it's just a bone they threw her when she threatened to quit when all the guys got a raise and Kathy's pay packet was exactly the same as always. Unmarried checkout girls are on the bottom of the grocery store food chain. Even Kathy knows this. And though her mother is right about wages and promotions, Kathy will never admit it, at least not to her.

“Yoo-hoo! Kathy-Kathy-Kathy! I'm talking to you. Do they pay you more for ordering cigarettes?” Connie calls.

Kathy very carefully and very slowly wraps the cord around the handle of the iron. She doesn't say anything because there's nothing to say.

“Do something with your life,” Connie almost hisses. “You're going to be twenty soon.”

Kathy leans on the door jamb. Holding the iron in one hand like a shield, she runs the fingers of her other hand up and down the thin strip of blond moulding along the edge of the walnut panelling her father installed in the dining area two weeks before he'd died in the car crash. Kathy had handed him nails and fetched cold beer. Her father told her she was a good carpenter's helper and she should consider becoming an apprentice when she grew up. Something to fall back on, he had said and winked, when she got too old to play hockey.