The Checkout Girl (5 page)

Practising like Bobby, practising his flick of the wrist, almost invisible it was so casual. Backing away from an oncoming player, taking the puck to the side, up along the boards. Skating into another player, a deke to centre. Putting the puck in the net and starting over until her thighs ached.

Shelly bumps into Kathy. She grabs her jacket at the back and Kathy pulls her along, gently, slowly, a favourite game. Kathy turns and wraps her arms around her sister and they twirl together, the dervish twirl Connie taught Kathy when she was a little girl. Shelly's legs swing out and bob through the air and she screams her piercing almost-happiness into the night.

Kathy screams too, can't help it. It feels so good to be skating. She holds Shelly tight and twirls until she can hardly stand up, then she slows, lowers herself, Shelly still in her arms, until Shelly's skates touch the ice. They plunk down together, Shelly sitting quietly between Kathy's legs. When their dizziness passes, they slip cold feet into colder boots and clump home, almost touching but not quite.

Kathy's car is a 1966 Valiant, slant six 225, four-door, monkey-shit brown automatic with just over 90,000 miles on it. A simple car renowned for reliability. A gas jockey anywhere could fix it with a bobby pin and some chewing gum. All the parts are straightforward, cheap and easy to get. Nothing fancy, but always ready to go. That's what Al told Kathy. Ever since Charlie died, Al has done his best to be the man around the house, for the most part outside it, shovelling snow, fixing broken eavestroughs, selling Kathy a car, mowing the lawn, doing car repairs, anything to be on the same property as Connie, to be able to look at her, maybe even have a conversation.

When Al sold Kathy his old Valiant he said, in his reassuring salesman voice, “I'd sell this car to your mother because I'd never have to worry about her when she was driving it.” They stood on Al's black, perfectly sealed asphalt driveway, which was lined both sides like an airport runway with spotlights for Darlyn's night-time baton practice. Al rocked from foot to foot, looking over first one, then the other of Kathy's shoulders. Looking toward the house where Connie sat on the front porch on her aluminum chaise lounge with the white and turquoise plastic mesh. Connie faced away from them and toward the sun.

Connie was wearing faded brown short-shorts and a white halter top. Her skin was shiny with baby oil, her rolled-up hair covered with a black and white checkered kerchief tied round the back. A pair of faded yellow rubber thongs sat beside her on the cool grey concrete of the porch. She very deliberately read her newspaper, as deliberately as she ignored Kathy and Al.

It's not that Connie doesn't like Al, but he's married. And not just to anyone, but to Mah-gret. (The only way Connie can say Margaret's name the way it sounds when Margaret says it, is to hold her nose closed at the tip.) Margaret is Scottish, but has an English accent, acquired, she will tell anyone who will listen and Connie more than once, while attending St. Mary's School in Cambridge, England — a Catholic girls' boarding school — at the insistence of her maternal grandmother, who had enough money to have her way, and who loathed all things Protestant, and most particularly, all things Scottish and Protestant. It was her intention to school Scotland out of her granddaughter, come hell or high water, and reinforce all things British and Catholic.

Margaret calls herself a Pastonian, the name of her school alumnae. The Pastonians are hosting a tea this Friday, she once told Connie, who wondered if Margaret expected her to care. Margaret also told Connie that her one and only rebellion, her one rash act in life, other than getting pregnant, though she couldn't have been expected to know how rash that was going to be until she was in the middle of her labour, was to fall in love with a handsome Canadian soldier, Albert Smola, whom she met at a dance in Cambridge. She was married, like all the other English girls during the war, in a parachute-silk dress, just two months after meeting Albert and three days before he was sent to the front. He left, and she didn't see him for seven months, and if she hadn't had her wedding photo, she wasn't sure she would have recognized him when he returned. Then suddenly she was on a boat, throwing up every day, on her way to Canada.

“I guess you could say that was two rash acts,” Margaret had said, “falling in love with a Canadian, and then actually marrying him. At least he was Catholic.” And she added, “And he wasn't Scottish.”

Margaret's accent — the entire Britishness of her — makes her seem distant and cold. She doesn't come out to have a coffee and a smoke, gather on someone's porch or picnic table, with the other women on the street. The neighbours call her the Queen. Queen Mah-gret this, the Queen that. On occasion Connie defends Margaret, telling her friends she thinks Margaret is lonely and has never really established herself since she moved to Canada. Just imagine, Connie'd say, moving to a new country and leaving your friends and family behind. Imagine landing in this neighbourhood, she'd say, raising her eyebrows. And they'd laugh together every time.

Margaret is curt to the point of rudeness, and she calls her bluntness honesty. She boldly told Connie (who stopped defending her for a time afterwards) that she was lucky Charlie had died because then she didn't have to share her bed with anyone. And more importantly, she'd added, Connie didn't have to have “relations.” She confided to Connie that though they continued to share the same bed, she hadn't slept with Al “in that way” since Darlyn was born. The birth had been so hard, and so alarming, that Margaret never wanted another child ever again, and no sex ever was the only sure solution to that. As Darlyn is the same age as Kathy, that makes it nineteen, soon-to-be-twenty, sexless years.

As for Al, once when he came over to help Connie unplug her toilet and arrived drunk, he tried to convince Connie that he and Margaret really weren't married, not in the eyes of the Church, where sex must be a vital part of wedded Catholic life, he argued. “You're married as far as the Church of Connie Rausch is concerned,” she told him, “so you're shit out of luck, Al. So to speak.”

“I'm not a prude,” she added, which made him secretly hopeful, “but I'd never knowingly sleep with a married man. Now you go on home and sober up and we'll pretend we didn't have this conversation. And thank you for unplugging my toilet. Tell Margaret I'm sorry I took you away from the family.”

Considering that Connie hasn't had sex — other than masturbation — since Charlie died (although she's dated on and off over the years, she finds Shelly and serious dating, especially if it might involve sex, are incompatible), if you add Connie's sexless years to Al's, and then to Margaret's, that's one gaw-damned long sex-drought in only two of the houses on this one street. “Let's hope someone out there is making up for us,” she told Margaret in a fit of reciprocal bluntness she liked to think was honesty and not provocation. Margaret had shuddered.

“And hopefully it's not our girls increasing the neighbourhood average,” Connie added, to see if Margaret would shudder again.

Kathy bought the Valiant from Al two summers ago. She glued a plastic Jesus to the dashboard, strung purple whore-lure lights across the front and back windshields and set a nodding dog with glow-in-the-dark eyes on the shelf of the back window. But as the pièce de résistance, Kathy installed an 8-track tape player hooked up to a secondhand pair of walnut veneer household speakers that she sat on the floor in the back seat.

The house still smells like pot roast when Kathy pulls her jacket on and hugs Connie goodbye. Shelly's asleep, having gone to bed quietly for a change. The skating tired her out.

“Mary coming?” Kathy asks, knowing that she is, but it's neutral ground.

“As always,” Connie says.

Mary's a retired nurse, a friend of the family now. She answered Connie's ad looking for an overnight babysitter. Connie started working nights when Shelly turned three. Charlie's life insurance company helped Connie set up a trust with an annuity that paid the household bills. But when Connie realized Shelly was a special child who would need help for the rest of her life, she also realized she was going to need more money than the annuity allowed. One of her friends got her a job at the candy factory, and though the shifts changed every three weeks — a day, evening, night rotation — Connie decided that nights worked best for her. She could work, and she could still be home for Shelly and Kathy.

That's when she placed the ad for overnight babysitting. Shelly takes a sleeping pill, so she seldom wakes up, but in case Shelly did wake up and needed help, Connie wanted someone intelligent and kind. And she wanted someone to keep an eye out for Kathy, who had too much of the burden of Shelly's care. Although Kathy protested, she was relieved, especially when she met Mary.

Mary's eyes and mouth have smile crinkles. When she arrives at night, white pincurls crisscrossed with black bobby pins cover her head. In the morning there's no sign of a curl, just cotton-ball tufts circling her kind face. There is no bullshit in her, not one tiny bit.

Mary had worked nights and liked the hours, she told Connie. And if Connie had a TV with good aerial reception, Mary said she'd take less than the going wage, to help out like. Mary was devoted to late-night television.

“Johnny Carson's my boyfriend,” she told Connie at that first interview. “He makes me laugh. We have a date every weeknight, but I never have to clean up after him. Never have to smell his farts under the blanket in bed, or listen as he pees in the toilet. That's the way I like my men: on the other side of glass, with an ‘off' switch available at all times.”

Shelly met Mary and took to her right away, which was all Connie had to see. Mary came mornings for two weeks to get to know Shelly and the house, and it was hard at first to make Shelly go to bed when she knew Mary was coming to spend the night.

During the day Shelly goes to a special program started by Connie and the parents of six other retarded children, and run by a qualified special education teacher assisted by volunteers — do-gooders, Connie gratefully calls them — from Connie's church, Our Lady of Perpetual Hope. The parents pay a stipend for the teacher's salary, and for cleaning staff; the church gives them the space for free. One of the parents picks up and drops off Shelly. Connie goes to bed after Shelly leaves for school and sleeps until she arrives home around 3:30. For her part, Connie makes seven box lunches every morning after she gets off work, for Shelly to take for the children. They eat the healthy stuff, the fruit and raw vegetables and sandwiches, but they love the specially wrapped waxed paper packages of Easter eggs, or Valentine hearts, or hollow Santa Clauses.

“Are you going to stay to say hello to Mary?” Connie asks.

“I've got to get going,” Kathy says. She leans over and sniffs her mother's uniform at the shoulder. “Smells like Turkish Delight,” she says.

“You have a very sensitive sense of smell. Just like your father,” Connie tells her. “It's all sugar to me.”

“Right here,” Kathy says, tapping her mother's uniform just above her heart. Then she licks the spot.

“Jesus wept, Kathy. Stop that.” Connie pushes her away. “You're a strange one these days. Unhappy, I fear. I was serious before; you've got to figure out what you're going to do. Stop running away to places like Vancouver.”

“I didn't run away,” Kathy says, though in some respects that's what she and Doug had done. “I told you I was going, despite what you like to tell people. I lived in a nice house. I had a job. I had friends. Just like a regular person. Then one day I came back to Varnum. Now I'm living at Penny's.”

“Boarding,” Connie says. “With a snake. That ought to tell you something.” Taking Kathy's hand, she pets it. “That's not a home. Come stay with us until you save some money to get a nice apartment.”

“I've got money.” Kathy pulls her hand away.

“Then do something with it. Take a typing course. Or hairdressing. You can open your own shop right here in our basement, like June up the street. Remember? You're all grown up, Kathy. It's time…”

“Mom.” Kathy steps back just as Connie leans forward to kiss her.

“I'm talking to a stump,” Connie says to the air in front of her, for Kathy has gone out the door.

Outside, the vast black sky is lavish with stars, the cold is endless. Runway lights flash on along the Smolas' driveway, an obsidian void between the now glittering snowbanks. Martial music blares. And there's Darlyn, red car coat done up to the neck with white bone buttons, white tights, white mid-calf boots with white tassels. Darlyn strutting down the runway, eyes ahead. She throws her baton into the air and it rises, disappears into darkness, gone, gone, gone. Flashes into sight, so fast. Darlyn marching in place, arm out, snatching the baton. Six high steps forward, up it goes again, no hint of exertion, no vapour from her perfect lips.

“Darlyn, you're the champion of the world!” Kathy shouts from the sidewalk.

Darlyn catches the baton and turns.

“Kathy,” Darlyn shouts back. “Groovy.” She smiles as she walks, twirling one hand to the other; the air is strobing.

“Do you have a cigarette?” she asks when she reaches Kathy.

Darlyn Smola could be “Baton Barbie.” Full high breasts (less buoyant than Barbie's appear), spare waist, slim hips, slender legs, fine wrists, ankles and neck and all of it, every single bit of it, muscle. Brown eyes as depthless as milk chocolate. Red earmuffs over brown hair pulled back in a shiny ponytail. Perfect Darlyn, everything in proportion except her nose, which is not large so much as not small. Not a perky baton twirler's nose, nor even a formal Scottish nose. A Smola nose, her mother points out. From her paternal grandfather, Margaret says. Strong, long, foreign and entirely masculine.

Darlyn's nose always made her seem old and serious when she was little. More so because she was little and it wasn't. Looking at her friend, Kathy sees Darlyn has grown into her nose. She's taken it over, and she's become beautiful.

“You don't smoke,” Kathy says.

“How do you know? You've been away for ages.” Darlyn says. She shivers. “Can we sit in your car?”

“Be my guest,” Kathy says.

Heat on, windows steaming and rolled down an inch so they won't be asphyxiated, Darlyn goes through Kathy's box of 8-tracks.

“I never listen to this stuff unless it's at a dance or something,” she says. “Oh Leonard, sexy Leonard. Put him on.”

They lean back in the seats while Leonard sings about the Sisters of Mercy.

“I love that line,” Darlyn says, and she sings in a sweet un-Leonard-like voice, “It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.”

“Can't twirl to it, though,” she sighs.

“Have you tried?” Kathy asks.

“God, no. I still live at home, Kath. Get real. My mother listens to Gilbert and Sullivan and Gregorian chant, my father to polkas and Elvis. And to Bobby Curtola if he's being wild. There's only marching music for me. No, my friend, I haven't had a chance to twirl to Leonard. Don't think he'd appreciate it anyway.”