The Checkout Girl (6 page)

“Bet he loves women in tights,” Kathy says. She snaps Darlyn's stockings and dust drifts through a thin slice of light from the porch. Darlyn takes Kathy's hand and holds it.

“Why did you stop writing me?” she asks.

“Once I finished writing about the pretty mountains and the pretty ocean and the wild and wonderful characters in our communal house, I ran out of good things to say,” Kathy tells her.

“Doug?” Darlyn asks.

“As I said, I ran out of good things to say.”

“You could have called when you got home.”

“I'm sorry,” Kathy says.

“I missed you,” Darlyn says. “I'm glad you're home.

“And I'm glad you came out to practise.”

Leonard's singing about eyes soft with sorrow and they sing with him, “Hey that's no way to say goodbye.” And they laugh.

“Remember when Mrs. Norris used to come out with the axe?” Darlyn says. “She'd walk beside George's car when we got home from a date. Then she'd linger in front of us, but she'd never look in the window, like she was pretending we weren't here. Like she just had this sudden urge to go for a little stroll with her trusty axe. She'd hold the axe down beside her leg, almost hidden. We could see the metal glint in the porch light every now and then. Scared George shitless. No making out with her around.”

“Remember Mrs. Hauser, the Regal card lady?” It's Kathy's turn. “How she never left the house, not even to go to church. Mom sent me over there to get cards sometimes. Her hair was always perfect, in waves like chocolate icing on a bought cake. And Jake and Frankie — remember them? — they delivered the catalogues and orders when they did their paper route until their mom got uterine cancer and died. She used to tell Mom the tumour felt like a baby in there, floating around. Felt just like when she was pregnant with her boys.

“Did you know that Jake and Frankie bought cars with their paper route money?” Kathy says.

“Go away.” Turning to look at Kathy, Darlyn adds, “My mother told me Mrs. Hauser was addicted to Valium.”

“How would your mother know?”

“Because she's addicted to Valium.” Darlyn laughs, but not very hard. “Did the boys really buy their cars with paper route money?”

“Yup. Jake and Frankie. We shoulda married us those rich paper boys. Frankie was in love with me in grade two. Remember? Used to follow me into the girls' washroom. Sister Ursula would head him off at the pass. She left the convent; did you know that? She came through my checkout at the store. I hardly recognized her; she's a middle-aged hippie with a long greying braid. Looks good, though. Still a do-gooder. A peacenik. She's going to Biafra because of the famine. She knew me right away,” Kathy says.

“Where's Biafra?” Darlyn asks.

“Aren't you smart?” Kathy laughs. “That's the exact question Trudeau asked, according to the newspaper article my mother has pinned to her fridge scrapbook. Africa, west coast, broke away from Nigeria. That's all I know. What are you up to these days?”

“Doing some substitute teaching, twirling in between. Still winning the big prizes but it's not exciting anymore. I'm competing against sixteen-year-olds. I was named North York Twirling Queen for baton and two kinds of strutting. I also took a first in senior fling twirling and twirling with two batons last week.

“I love twirling, Kath. But I'm getting too old. Turning twenty, and who twirls at twenty? I don't know. Feeling kind of lost lately. Time to move out. Maybe I'll open a studio and teach. Twirling. Some dance. A wall of trophies to impress the Westmount types. What about you?”

“I'm a checkout girl again, same store as before, except now I'm at the bottom of the food chain again. When I left Vancouver, I somehow forgot to tell Doug I was going. Pretty funny, eh? If you're lost, Darlyn, then I'm so far off the path I'll never find it again. But don't tell my mother I admitted that.

“You know what I really want? I want to do something with skating, but I don't know what, except I want to be able to skate all the time. Maybe we can have a school together, you teach baton routines and I'll teach hockey moves, except I need a rink for that.”

The runway lights flash off and on. Al's standing on the porch. They wave, and he waves and goes back inside.

“You still going with George?” Kathy asks.

“We fight and make up,” Darlyn says. “I suppose I'll have to marry him one of these days.”

The first time George asked Darlyn to marry him was in grade seven, on a school bus trip to Niagara Falls. Darlyn ignored him, so he said he'd let her off the hook if she'd go out with him instead. She ignored that too. George periodically asked her for dates until she consented in grade nine. They've been going out ever since.

In grade eleven Darlyn decided to have sex with George. She and Kathy found a doctor in Guelph who would give girls under twenty-one the birth control pill without permission from their parents. Kathy and Darlyn went to the doctor together and both got prescriptions, even though Kathy wasn't planning on sleeping with anyone at the time. They were sixteen-and-a-half and had borrowed Connie's car. Said they were going swimming at Elora to account for some of the miles.

It was a good thing they'd gone because Kathy decided that seventeen was the exact right age to have intercourse with Donny, her new boyfriend, who was exotic not only because he was Protestant, United Church of God, which was really like having no church at all, Connie told Kathy when Kathy told her, but also because he was old — almost twenty. And he could skate; all Kathy's boyfriends must be able to skate. Donny's dark eyebrows bushed over his cheerful chestnut eyes, his heart-shaped mouth nestled right in the centre of dimpled chipmunk cheeks.

He was ambitious, an apprentice drywaller. Drywallers are the up-and-coming tradesmen, he told Kathy. With all the new suburbs and shopping malls popping up, he'd never be out of work. He wanted to start his own contracting company; that was his goal. He was saving his money. Even after a shower, Donny's hair was chalky, his skin pale with residues of gypsum.

Older and working, a man with goals, a good skater, surely he was experienced at sex, Kathy thought. But Donny turned out to be a virgin, a hesitant one. And even though he told her he loved her, he loved somebody more than Kathy, but he didn't tell her that until later. The first time they tried, which turned out to be the last time, Donny stopped halfway between getting in and being out and rolled onto his back, his damp penis quickly wilting and flopping over on his naked leg.

“It's doesn't seem right,” he finally said, after saying nothing for a long time.

By then they lay side by side on their backs looking at the poster of Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy, tacked to Donny's bedroom ceiling. His parents had gone to their cottage, taking Donny's younger brother and sister, so the house was empty. Donny still lived at home so he could save money for his business. He took Kathy's hand, and lifting her fingers one by one he listed his reasons: What if Kathy got pregnant? I'm on the pill, Kathy said. He was too nervous (two); she was too young (three). I'm not too young if I say I'm not too young, she said, but the nervous part surprised her.

“Why are you nervous?” she asked him.

“I've never done this,” he said.

“None of it?” she asked.

“The last part,” he said.

“Coming?” she asked.

“No, before that, getting in there,” he said.

“Shit,” Kathy said. “I thought all boys knew how to do that. Don't you practise?”

“Maybe. Sometimes. Not on girls.”

“Practise on me.”

That's when Donny told her he loved her, but he loved somebody else more. And now that he was supposed to be having sex with Kathy, all he could think about was Janet Stuebing. So he thought he had better stop and tell Kathy.

“Janet Stuebing?” Kathy asked. “From the Chuckling Hen?” She had started to cry, but quietly.

Yes, that Janet Stuebing, he told her. Janet was his girlfriend before Kathy. He really loved Janet. He wanted to marry her. She broke up with him, and he was never sure why. Maybe because they didn't have sex, maybe that was it. Janet had nice breasts, he said. Her nipples were purple and there were little black hairs growing around them. Those little hairs made him horny, just the thought of them made him horny. But he never told Janet. He wished he'd told Janet.

Donny turned to Kathy and told her how sick he was after Janet left him. How every day his stomach hurt, and he couldn't eat. How lonely he'd been.

“Whoa, Donny,” Kathy said, and she pulled the sheet up to cover herself. “I don't want to hear any more.”

Donny looked surprised; he said Kathy was so easy to talk to. He'd never opened up like this before, and he began to cry. And Kathy cried harder. Bawled actually. Because her nipples were pink and hairless. Because she was only seventeen, and Janet Stuebing was nineteen and had a job at the Chuckling Hen where, it so happened, Kathy and her friends went for fries and gravy after school. She'd never be able to go back there because she'd know that under her uniform, Janet had little black hairs growing around her nipples. She cried because she was ready to have sex, had picked Donny, and now it wasn't going to happen.

After they stopped crying, they had showers. They decided Kathy should stay at Donny's house because she'd told Connie she was going with his family to their cottage. They brought blankets to the couch, and snuggled in together to watch TV. They talked and made popcorn. They smoked pot, and laughed, and listened to Neil Young. They talked some more. By Sunday afternoon, when they were still talking, they realized they were friends. Virginal friends, they said, and they laughed about that, too.

While Kathy was in Vancouver, Donny wrote and told her he was coming out to visit, hitchhiking. He was on a lay-off because the electricians were out on strike, and you couldn't drywall until a house was wired. He made it as far as Regina when he ran out of cash, so asked his parents wire him some so he could get home.

He brought a girl named Brenda Butt home with him. (Yes, indeed, that's her name, Donny told Kathy in a letter, so stop laughing.) Kathy got to meet her one night at the Rue, after she moved back to Varnum. A wisp of a woman with no butt to speak of, Brenda had a long neck and long thick wavy hair that made her look like the Lady of Shalott in the picture beside the poem Kathy studied in grade twelve.

Or when the moon was overhead,

Came two young lovers lately wed.

‘I am half sick of shadows,' said

The Lady of Shalott.

Those were the words she remembered. Tennyson. About a girl sitting around waiting for something to happen in her life, sort of like Kathy's doing these days. In the picture, the Lady lies in a boat with her hair spread out around her head. Lilies float alongside, so of course she's dead; lilies are always a giveaway. She died because she was a bad girl; she gave up longing and did what she was told not to do: take life straight on.

Brenda Butt circles her eyes with kohl and draws a different black beauty spot on her face every day like Marilyn Monroe. She wears long skirts in layers and thin cotton peasant tops with no bra. The masses of silver bangles on her arms jingle like a tinker's cart when she moves. Kathy likes her. She smells earthy, like dust and dried flowers.

“The prairie,” Brenda told her when Kathy mentioned how good she smelled. “Wheat and soil. Gets in the pores and you can never get it out.”

Donny borrowed Kathy's room at the Lehmans' a couple of times when she was out, because he still lived at home. Though his mother, reluctantly, let Brenda sleep in his room, on a mattress on the floor she made up every day when she made Donny's bed, Donny found making love in his parents' house, with his mother and father in their bed one room away, more than a little trying.

Kathy's pillow smells like Brenda, her sweet dry scent. It fills Kathy with sadness, and a longing for something she can't pinpoint. Sometimes she places her face right into her pillow and draws Brenda's smell in. She breathes it out slowly. And then she cries for no reason she can figure out at all.

Leonard's finishing another song. Darlyn squeezes Kathy's hand.

“It really is good to have you home, Kath,” she says. Then she asks, “Is Donny still around?”

Before Kathy met Doug, when Darlyn wasn't doing something with George, she sometimes hung out with Kathy and Donny, who hung out together when they weren't going out with anybody else. An off and on, copacetic threesome. That was Donny's favourite word, then. Copacetic, can you dig it, he'd say, and they'd laugh as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

When Kathy started dating Doug, everything changed. Though she still talked to Donny and Darlyn, she didn't see them often; it was all Doug, Doug, Doug. Doug was funny and could be charming, a muscular, compact, broodingly good-looking man who had played Junior A hockey. It was an irresistible combination.

They met at the Aud when Doug asked Kathy to skate to a couples-only song. (“Moon River.” She never much liked it, but she hates it now.) Doug told her he'd been kicked off the Junior A team when he got caught smoking marijuana in the washroom of the team bus. He said he was going to quit hockey anyway. Too much like the military, regimented and no life of your own. The chicks were great, he said, he'd miss the chicks. But he'd get over it, especially if Kathy became his girlfriend.

They skated every chance they got. Doug said he gave up hockey, but not the rink. They'd toke up in the parking lot and go in. The high created a bubble around them in which every move they made was perfect, every word they said was witty. They were in love. So, at four minutes after midnight, January 1st, 1969, when Doug asked Kathy to take off to Vancouver with him, of course she said yes.