The Checkout Girl (4 page)

She sets the iron on the chrome dining table and turns into the kitchen, puts on a pair of oven mitts that are crusty with food stains and dotted with burn holes. The oven door squeals and a thick spicy steam rolls up out of the roasting pan when Kathy lifts the lid. Pot roast is one of her favourite winter meals and her mother is cooking it for her tonight as a special treat.

“You could at least move out of that house you're boarding in. Everyone knows it's a dope dealer's house,” Connie yells from the living room.

“Go to hell,” Kathy mouths as she bastes the meat and vegetables with the oniony gravy. “I can't hear you,” she says out loud. She clatters the lid around to make noise, then sets it back on the pan and closes the oven door.

“There's been another hijacking,” Connie shouts.

“What?” Kathy asks, as she walks back into the living room.

“Did you check that roast?” Connie says.

Kathy sits on the arm of her mother's chair.

“Um-hm,” she nods. “What were you saying?”

“I said there's been another hijacking. Some Brazilians trying to get to Cuba. Here,” Connie says, reaching under her chair for the box with the clipped-out article. She hands the clipping to Kathy. “Add this to my scrapbook, honey.”

“Sure,” Kathy says and slides off the chair.

Connie's fridge scrapbook has categories: Vietnam War. Labour News. Entertainment. Sports. Sports is for Kathy and it's mostly filled with tiny articles about their neighbour — and Kathy's best friend — Darlyn Smola, about Darlyn's baton twirling competitions. “
Twin City girl wins firsts in the senior fancy strut, senior flag twirling and senior two baton twirling
,” one article says. Darlyn is good. Really good. She almost always comes first in her category.

And there are hockey articles:
Leading Scorers: Orr (Bos) 54 Goyette (St L) 47 Esposito (Bos) 40 Tkaczuk (NY) 38
and
Goalie Gump Worsley says he'll retire rather than accept demotion to farm team.
Occasionally there's something about Cassius Clay, who Connie thinks is some kind of damn-fool nutcase hero for defying the United States draft.

Not that Connie doesn't believe in war. Maybe because she'd lived through World War II, she says, once she's on the topic. But she feels what Canada needs is a strong military that knows its arse from a hole in the ground (her words) and has leaders who have vision. And when she's really rolling she also tells Kathy, and anyone who's listening, that she believes there should be some kind of national service. Not like the US draft. That's just a way to kill off Negroes and the poor. Who are mostly Negroes, she adds.

No, she says, more like the community work the Company of Young Canadians does. Or the Mennonite Central Committee or some other church or volunteer group that does relief work. Give young people — all young people, no exceptions — a sense of civic duty, which seems to be sorely lacking since the last war. Kids have it too good, Connie likes to rant. They take too much for granted. They need something to help them get their lives in order, to figure out what really matters to them. “In my humble opinion, at least,” she always adds.

Nine times out of ten this lecture is directed at Kathy. Especially the getting-lives-in-order part.

Kathy's unsure where she stands on the Vietnam War and the US draft, but she has been in bars and coffee houses and sat with boys running away from both the war and the draft, mostly working-class kids like herself who see no way out of going to Vietnam but to go into exile, who complain that university kids get exemptions and the rich boys' parents can afford to buy their way out of service.

Unlike Connie, who has the entire world and everything and everyone in it figured out, and knows the best way to do everything, Kathy can't figure out her own life, much less come up with ways that other people should be living. Still, she listens to Connie, tries to take in what she says, as long as she's not commenting too directly on her life. Then Kathy shuts her out, and every word Connie says is splintered almost to nothingness, into dust particles that drift away on the air.

If Kathy hears anything, it's the raw need in Connie's voice. (Connie calls this love —
I wouldn't say this if I didn't love you,
is her line.) Connie wants Kathy to be normal: have a reasonably good job with decent wages, preferably a union job with benefits and some security; have a stable relationship; live in a decent apartment; act like a responsible citizen.

In the kitchen Kathy notices a new sports article about a guy named Jerry Rahn, a bowler in Fergus who won three hundred dollars for getting a perfect score.

“Who's Jerry Rahn?” she calls to her mother as she tapes the hijacking article under
Reasons Not To Fly In Airplanes
.

“No idea,” Connie yells back, “but it's an article that doesn't have to do with war or strikes or airplanes, and three hundred bucks is a lot of money. I was thinking maybe I should take up bowling.”

That's how the hijacking section started. Connie thought she should take up flying. She'd never flown before. Still hasn't because she keeps developing theories about flying, or deterrents to flying, really. One of them has to do with the amount of worry it takes to hold an airplane in the sky.

Worry keeps airplanes from crashing, Connie's theory goes. Worry's a bit like prayer. Carries the same weight and has the same effect, which is sometimes none, depending on the moment. God — being arbitrary and not always up to the foolishness of mortals — listens or doesn't; acts or ignores. Worry's arbitrary too. You only know if worry works if you get a positive result.

The amount of worry necessary to keep an airplane flying is almost impossible to determine until a flight has successfully landed. Then there was enough worry. Everyone's done their part. So far, Connie hasn't found any newspaper articles to prove her worry theory, so
Hijackings
is a subcategory of
Reasons
Not To Fly In Airplanes
, because extra worry is most surely required to keep a plane flying when it's been hijacked. And lately there have been hijackings almost every day.

“Tell me again what that article says, Kathy,” Connie shouts.

“Four young men and a pretty woman landed the plane in Lima,” Kathy shouts back. It's easier to indulge this passion of her mother's than it is to try to ignore it or to argue.

“Then they got stalled on the runway in Lima due to a dead airplane battery,” she summarizes.

“Hear that?” Connie calls to her. “A dead battery saved them from crashing before they got to Cuba. Someone's mother had to do a lot of worrying to get that battery dead. They don't know how lucky they are.”

“Where's Shelly?” Connie asks when Kathy comes back into the room.

“Lying between her mattress and the box spring,” Kathy says.

“It's her comfort,” Connie says shaking her head. “Will you go get her for supper, please?”

Before Kathy goes to get Shelly, she heads for the bathroom. She closes the door, locks it, steps into the tub and opens the window. Snowflakes sift through the screen; the wind lows through the crack. Kathy sucks cold air, holds it deep in her lungs. Sometimes she feels there's a weight on her chest and she can't catch her breath. Sometimes, when she's listening to her mother, hearing the sureness in her voice, hearing her theories and what she wants for her, Kathy's heart races and her muscles tense; she feels light-headed and breaks out in a sweat.

Kathy exhales slowly, watches her breath condense in the cold air. She steps out of the tub and pulls two plush rugs together and lies down. The air from the window cools her. She closes her eyes and breathes. In and out. Her heart slows.

The bathroom is extravagant, an oasis, because Connie likes to bathe. Long, hot, deep baths, with crackers and Velveeta and a thermos of coffee on a little moveable shelf Kathy bought her that extends across the tub. Wooden shelves, just outside the tub area but handy to it, hold bath salts and bubble stuff, expensive French milled soap, a Blue Mountain pottery ashtray, emollients and lotions. Magazines pack a wooden stand. Fluff:
Barbra and Pierre: Romance? Lose 15 Pounds in Ten Days
.
How To Tell if Your Husband is Cheating on You
. And,
6 Quick and Easy Casseroles for Leftover Turkey.
Thick lime-green towels hang from wooden racks, and the two plush bubblegum-pink mats — the ones Kathy's lying on — match the toilet seat cover.

As Kathy's body gentles, as her breathing slows, Connie's voice plays in her head:
Get a union job
.

She had a union job once, wrapping and soldering electrical coils. It didn't last long. Connie was so disappointed when she quit that Kathy doesn't bring it up. Now it's as if it never happened.

The work was demanding and varied and Kathy excelled at every assignment, so her supervisor made her a time setter. Kathy's speed and technique on each machine was monitored. At the end of a month, her averaged stats were posted as the new standard for each machine. When some girls cornered her in the parking lot after work one day, and threatened to beat the crap out of her if she didn't slow down, Kathy was only a little surprised. She knew that she'd been showing off and that her standards were making their work lives harder.

These dyed-blonde, big-haired girls had quit school when they'd turned sixteen and moved south to Varnum from Kapuskasing and Temiscaming and Haileybury for the factory jobs and the big city life. They looked like they'd stepped out of old Elvis Presley movies: pouting rouged lips, innocent heavily made-up eyes, tiny waists cinched by wide belts, Jane Russell breasts in one-size-too-small blouses that strained their buttons. Kathy wondered if they were related, they looked so much alike.

They told Kathy they had no intention of meeting the pace she'd been setting. They had a plan, they said. They were going to stay in their jobs until some man rescued them from work, and no one, especially some hippie kid who thought she was special because she'd graduated from high school, was going to get them fired for working too slowly. No one was going to make them work harder than they had to until they reached their goal: a wedding.

“Kathy, what're you doing in there?” Connie calls from the living room.

“Nothing,” Kathy calls back.

Kathy admired these girls, liked their spunk and humour, their blue eye shadow, black eyeliner and hairsprayed hair. She really didn't want to make their lives more difficult, she had just been bored with the repetition of the work and enjoyed the challenge her supervisor had set for her.

Kathy liked their French accents and their stories of small-town life. They were brave. They'd left their families and homes to find a different life in Varnum, a better life. That their lives wouldn't be very much different from what they'd find up north — a husband, a car, a mortgage, a department store charge card, some babies — never seemed to bother them. It was the city that made all the difference, and that seemed to be difference enough.

She got a kick out of the stories of their beer-drinking English boyfriends who thought French girls knew how to do sexual things with their tongues. How all they had to do was stick their tongues in a guy's mouth, move it around a bit, then lick his neck or his ear a little and he'd come, just like that. Right in his underpants, or in their hands. It was the thought of what might happen next that brought them off. It was so easy, practically all the girls were virgins. And they'd laughed, and Kathy had laughed with them, even though she knew she didn't want what they wanted. And without the variety of pace setting, her job became dull. So she quit wrapping and soldering electrical coils and that was the end of her union job.

“Are you getting Shelly or not?” Connie yells.

Kathy can hear her mother in the kitchen now, setting the table. Then she hears her walking up to the door.

“Kathy!”

Kathy straightens the rugs and grabs a magazine from the holder. On the cover is a woman with long blonde tresses. That's the only way you could describe the enormous amount of blonde hair that falls in thick waves and curls: tresses.

“This,” she says, opening the door and flapping the magazine at her mother, “is engrossing.”

She turns back into the bathroom and stuffs the magazine in the rack.

“Shelly,” her mother says, and nods toward Shelly's room.

As Kathy walks to Shelly's room, she sees the set table, the steamed-up windows. On a platter in the middle of the chrome table is food for the gods: a slab of beef bursting its strings, surrounded by oven-browned carrots and onions and potatoes and turnips. Beside the platter, gravy congeals in a glass measuring cup, and the smell of it all, ambrosial.

Shelly's hair is red, bowl cut and thick. Her eyes are dark grey, the colour of rain clouds just before a storm. They have silver crackles like lightning through them. Her complexion is porcelain and, like a doll, she has a high red blush on her cheeks, though this is from skin irritation rather than a mark of beauty. Shelly rubs her cheeks round and round with her hands. Constantly. Her cheeks are always chapped, and at their worst they have open sores on them.

“Supper,” Kathy says, and with supreme care she takes Shelly's hands and pulls her from the sandwich of mattress and box spring. Shelly flops out onto the floor like a newborn, almost boneless. She is hardly ever this supple. The everyday Shelly is all stiff muscles and hard angles, sharp movements and jarring noises.

Shelly starts to rub.

“Gently, Shelly, gently,” Kathy says and sits beside the bed. She takes Shelly's hands and places them on her own cheeks. Shelly doesn't pull away; she laughs, a horsy ha-ha-ha without a trace of happiness. She rubs Kathy's cheeks.

Shelly was born too fast, Connie says, popped right out of her after some indigestion and a few hard contractions. She didn't breathe right away, too shocked for breath, Connie says. It was a good thing Connie was already in the hospital with high blood pressure, the birth was so fast. Shelly didn't cry when she was born. Her clear grey eyes were wide open and they looked at the ceiling or the wall. Anywhere but at Connie. She was the prettiest baby imaginable. But no crying, not then.

Once Connie took her home, Shelly never stopped crying. That was the first clue Shelly was different. Nothing comforted her. If Connie held her or tried to nurse her, Shelly resisted and cried harder. Kathy held her and she cried. Charlie held her and she cried the hardest.

Shelly didn't respond to cooing or smiles, she didn't look at people. In fact, she was almost aggressive in not looking at them. She hated to be held any time but particularly when she was fed. Connie took to propping her bottle on a towel. Only then would Shelly close her big grey eyes and fall not so much asleep as into a trance, making a rhythmical humming sound like a motor. The sound seemed to vibrate from her stomach like a cat's purr. It did not come from her throat like a normal baby.

When Connie took Shelly to the doctor, he said it was colic. Wait and it will go away. Then Charlie died in the accident and Connie stopped thinking about what was wrong with Shelly for a while, stopped thinking about anything or anyone. Kathy did what she could to help, but it was little enough. Mostly she kept Shelly away from Connie. Neighbours brought food, and a roster was set up to help with cleaning and other chores.

Connie's friends took turns sitting with her. They came in pairs. One would pull a chair up beside Connie's and talk in a low soothing voice; sometimes they held her hand, stroked it, while Connie stared out the window. The other was designated to hold Shelly, who would go silent in their arms. But it was a strange silence, stiff and formal and over-quiet, her little body rigid, her head turned away. It was as if she knew she had to get through this particular attention and she cooperated, but she wouldn't make anyone feel good. There was no cute in Shelly. When Kathy or Connie took her, Shelly reverted, and cried once again.

When Shelly was almost two and still cried more than a normal baby, and didn't talk and barely crawled, much less walked, Connie started taking her to the doctor so often that the doctor sent her to see a specialist. After months and months of tests, the specialist, a small man with a snowman shape who wore dull brown shoes and had nicotine stains on his fingers and on his teeth, told Connie that Shelly was mentally retarded, quite possibly a development problem called autism. He told her that Shelly was that way because Connie was a cold and distant mother. Connie never went back to see him.

“Do you want to skate tonight, Shelly?” Kathy asks her sister.

Shelly ha-ha-ha's her smileless laugh.

“Orr, Boston, 54. Goyette, St. Louis, 47. Esposito, Boston, 40. St. Marseille, St. Louis, 38. Tkaczuk, New York, 38.” Shelly hums the hockey stats under her breath, a tuneless song.

“You're so smart,” Kathy says. “You're the smartest girl I know.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” Shelly laughs and she rolls from side to side on the floor.

Shelly doesn't like toys or books, except for
Where the Wild Things Are
. “Let the wild rumpus start,” Shelly yells when Kathy reaches that part of the story. The book is tattered, the pages thin and soft as old skin, the words nearly worn away because Shelly likes to rub them, too. It doesn't matter, because Connie and Kathy know the words by heart, the way Shelly knows hockey statistics by heart these days.

Connie reads Shelly hockey statistics from the newspaper because Shelly seems able to memorize them. Just like that. She has pockets of brilliance, but they don't add up to anything. She's fickle. She'll give up an interest in a flash and never repeat information she once knew by heart, not even when coaxed. Connie says Shelly has a bright light in one little part of her brain, and that light shines on only one tiny bit of knowledge at a time. When the light switches and shines on something new, all that was once known becomes lost in a deep impenetrable darkness.

“Up now, Shelly,” Kathy says, and pulls her sister to her feet. She helps her wash up in the bathroom and they go to the table, where Connie is serving the pot roast.

“Bobby Orr, #4. Bobby Orr, #4,” Shelly shouts as she rocks back and forth in her chair.

“Shush, Shelly. Eat,” Connie says.

“Bobby Orr, #4,” Shelly whispers while filling her mouth with food. Bits of pot roast and gravy spray across the table.

“I saw Ted Kennedy on TV yesterday,” Connie says to Kathy. “Joan was with him. She has some tan, that woman, and she must wear sunglasses all the time because when she takes them off her eyes look raccoony. She did look relaxed, though. I don't know how she could be after that girl drowned. Mary Jo. The inquest has started, I guess.

“I wish the Kennedys weren't Catholic. It was so nice when Jack was elected; we were all so proud of him. It was a miracle. Then Robert. Now they're both dead, and that leaves the alcoholic philanderer. Now he's responsible for a girl's death. I suppose his brothers set a standard he couldn't meet. Could just be he's normal like the rest of us. Anyway, I wish he'd smarten up. His poor mother, what she must be going through.”

A snowmobile drives by, a loud, screaming whirr. Shelly covers her ears and screams along with it.

“I hate those things,” Connie says, getting up and going to Shelly. She takes Shelly's arms and holds them down at her sides, saying, shush-shush, until Shelly stops screaming.

“It's the Dietrich boy down the block,” Connie continues, and she sits again. “Rides up and down the street making that horrible racket. He drives on people's lawns. It'll ruin the grass, doing that. I passed one tearing into the Lutheran Cemetery when I was driving to work, so I phoned the City. The guy said they're drafting a by-law to keep them off the streets.”

“This is good, Mom,” Kathy says, trying to deflect her mother from her snowmobile rant. “Blade roast's on sale. Want me to pick one up?”

“No thanks, honey. Al bought a side of frozen beef from some farmer he knows out near Heidelberg. Ended up selling me some roasts and hamburger for next to nothing.”

They settle in to eat then, comfortably quiet, the clink of dinnerware on their plates. Al is Albert Smola, Connie's next-door neighbour, father to Kathy's best friend, Darlyn, baton twirling queen of North America. Al always has a friend, someone he knows who gets him cheap beef. Or flats of farm-fresh eggs, bushel baskets of peaches, grocery bags full of peas in the pod, and once a box filled with rhubarb roots, so that every house in the neighbourhood now has a rhubarb plant somewhere in their garden. Al always shares the bounty with his neighbours, but most especially with Connie.

Al sells insurance and Watkins products door-to-door to farmers. Likes to get out in the country, he says, so he works a rural route. One year he carried a line of dishes, Melmac, but it was too near the end of the Melmac craze and they didn't sell. Connie bought a set at a deep discount. Sky blue pine cones on white plastic, the plates now scored with knife marks and the pine cones worn away. They never look clean. Connie lets Shelly bang around with them in the sandbox.

For a while Al sold linens too, which he felt was a good complement to his main items, household cleaning and health care products. Recently he added a line of lingerie. Just testing the market, he told Connie when she asked him what was new. Connie told him she'd have nothing to do with lingerie; no self-respecting housewife would buy lingerie from a door-to-door salesman. And don't try to give me any samples, either. Since Charlie died, Al would do anything for Connie. Anything she asked. Connie never asks.

Connie pretends to ignore Al, says she doesn't want to encourage him, but she once called him debonair. Kathy had laughed and said, I think he looks like Elvis-getting-old. Like a greaser who's moved to the suburbs. Connie said, Al's not old. Kathy said, Mo-ther! He's older than you. Not giving up, Connie had asked, What's the matter with Elvis? And Kathy rolled her eyes and said, He's not Neil Young. Who? Connie asked. Exactly, Kathy said.

If Kathy accumulated all the things Connie has said about Al over the years, the list wouldn't be long, but it would add up to a positive image: He's dependable. He's a good father to Darlyn. He's a hard worker. He's a good neighbour. He's kind to Shelly, most particularly important. At least he's alive, she once joked. And he's debonair.

Al Brylcreems his dark brown hair — no grey yet — into a forward tilting shelf that juts above his brow, combed — tine marks showing in the grease — into a duck's ass at the back. His chore pants, old paint-speckled black Sunday trousers, are always pressed and clean. He wears thin beige dress socks, black pointy-toed shoes polished to a reflecting glow for work and dress-up. The same shoes, though battered and old, for at-home. His dress shirts are white. In winter he wears undershirts with short sleeves, a bit of chest hair curling above his crew neck collar, a grey wool car coat with wooden buttons done up with thick leather loops, zippered black galoshes stretched to a puckered rubber V in the front by his pointy-toed shoes.

“Do you want any more, honey?” Connie asks Kathy.

“No thanks,” Kathy says and leans back from the table. “What are you working on these days?” she asks.

“Valentine stuff. Marshmallow hearts, your faves. Want me to bring some home?”

Kathy does love chocolate-coated marshmallow hearts. When Connie first started working at the candy factory, almost a year to the day after Charlie's accident, they ate themselves sick. She brought home tins of seconds and refilled each tin when it was emptied. Turkish delight, cream-filled chocolates, peppermint patties, toffees. Kathy got pimples, Shelly got diarrhea and two cavities in her baby teeth and had to be knocked out to have them filled, and Connie started getting fat. Soon enough they all became sick of the sweets, or Connie and Kathy did. Shelly had no control at all and would eat until the tins were empty. Connie only occasionally brings candy home now.

“Bobby Orr, #4,” Shelly screams when Connie mentions marshmallow hearts. She flaps her hands in the air. “Bobby Orr, #4!”

“A couple would be nice. Thanks,” Kathy says. “And some for Shelly. You like candy, don't you, Shelly?”

“Bobby Orr, #4,” Shelly yells even louder.

After they clean up, Kathy helps Shelly dress. She'd checked the rink at the elementary school on her way over to supper. The ice was freshly flooded, a smooth silvery slab, seams rippled like soldered steel, but no deep cracks, no lines yet cut in the surface.

Tonight it's cold, but not bitter. No wind. The snow has stopped falling. As they walk down the path between the houses, they kick up snow like dust on a dry cornfield. The wind has blown most of the ice clear, drifts mound against the boards at one end. Laced up, Shelly takes off and skates circles along the boards, undeterred by the drifts, plowing through them. For such a stiff child she is graceful on ice, gliding steadily and rhythmically, turning with her left foot leading. Over, over, clack-clack-clack, three steps per turn, always the same. If she changes direction, she stumbles. Shelly can skate only one way, counter-clockwise, against the stream, but tonight there are only two other skaters so no one cares.

Kathy bought new hockey skates with her first paycheque from the store, boys' Bauers made right here in Varnum. They're a bit stiff still, but even so they feel like home. She moves to centre ice and skates backwards, imitates Bobby Orr's swishing hip movement, the technique he uses to block skaters, ramming them to stop a play, flinging them into the boards. Around the curve, foot behind foot, knees deeply bent, gliding back up the ice again. Her favourite sound, the slish of steel on ice.

Kathy used to try to get in on the shinny games guys played in the late evenings on school rinks. Fluid fast hockey, passes, a nod to a new player to let him know his team. She'd arrive early, warm up, wait for play to begin. But it was as if she were invisible. Few pucks were passed her way, play always shifting away from where she was on the ice to the other end or the other side of the rink. It wasn't aggressive, although she could have handled that; she was ready for action, for the odd check. She'd practised skating into the boards late at night, bouncing away while still stickhandling the puck. But no one checked her, no one told her to get off the ice. She could skate up and down, follow the play, once in a while tip a missed puck toward a nearby player, but for the most part, nothing. They sidelined her. She stopped going.

She'd never stop skating though. Nights when she was alone on the ice, she'd take a bag of pucks and stickhandle them, shoot them into the boards, skate to meet them, back into the boards, playing herself. Pick up a new puck, the nearest puck, when she missed one. Skate until she was sweating, steaming, adrenalin coursing, the thrill of it deep inside her body. Night, cold, stars, pretty moon — she didn't notice. There was only the thwack of her stick on a puck, the responding rumble from the boards.