The Checkout Girl (7 page)

Connie was uncharacteristically quiet when Kathy told her she was going west, considering she had carried on a non-stop negative commentary about Doug until then. He was moody, she'd said. She didn't trust him because sometimes he was nice to her and sometimes he acted as if she didn't exist. Darlyn cried when Kathy called to tell her. Donny said, “Groovy, I'll come and visit.”

Kathy's just about to tell Darlyn about Donny and Brenda Butt when the driveway lights flash on and off again. Kathy flashes the car lights; she presses the accelerator and makes the engine race, vroom-vroom. Again the girls wave to Al, who is silhouetted in the doorway. He waves and shuts the door.

“He's lonely,” Darlyn says a bit wearily, “but he hates to be with my mother since she became a feminist. So he roams the house, going where she isn't.

“My mother says she doesn't want to spend time with one of the ‘fascist prison guards,' as she calls all married men. She says the reason she's been on Valium all these years is because society likes to keep women drugged and quiet, not angry and asking questions and pissing people off.

“She's in a consciousness-raising group that meets twice a week at the university. They read women's poems and sing women's songs. They check in, everybody gets a chance, and that means they confess intimate stuff about their lives — ‘the personal is political' is Mom's mantra. Then they trash men and try to figure out how to overturn the government.

“Mom comes home and tells Dad, ‘One is not born a woman; one becomes one.' She tells him he's part of a patriarchal conspiracy that says if you're female, you're not fully human. He asks, ‘What's patriarchal? Who's not human?' She says, ‘Read
The Second Sex
.' So he sits in his chair in the rec room at night trying to read Simone de Beauvoir. He sits there and he cries.

“Kathy, I can't stand it. That's why I came out to practise tonight. I had to get away from them. I'd move out right now, but I think it would kill Dad,” Darlyn says.

“Who's Simone de Beauvoir?” Kathy asks.

“Some French women's libber,” Darlyn says. “Dad doesn't get it. He asks her, ‘Margaret, what I can do?' Mom tells him, ‘It's not up to me to tell you, Al. You've got to figure it out for yourself.' So he brought her home a black corset with these red satin garters hanging from it. Mom tells me this stuff. I don't want to hear it, I tell her, but she says I need to hear so I don't get caught in the trap. I don't ask what trap, because I don't want to know that either. Mom said she didn't say a word to Dad about the corset, but walked to the garbage can, opened it, and threw it in.”

The lights flick again and there's Al walking toward the car. He's holding his brown cardigan closed across his chest; he's wearing backless brown and green plaid slippers that flip away from his heels and make puffs of snow rise around his feet. He walks down his walkway, along the sidewalk in front of the house, and up Connie's driveway to the Valiant. He tilts sideways at the waist and places his mouth near the small opening of Darlyn's fogged up window. Steam from his breath comes into the car.

“Darlyn,” says his voice, which Kathy always thought sounded like a funeral director's voice: deep, serious and terribly polite. “Darlyn, bring Kathy into the house instead of sitting out here in the cold.”

As Darlyn rolls down her window he pulls his head back. Still tilted sideways, still holding his sweater in his fist, he nods towards Kathy.

“Kathy,” he says. “How're you doing?”

“Fine, Mr. Smola. Thanks for the invite, but I have to get going. I have to work in the morning.”

“As you wish,” Al says. “Always good to see you, Kathy. You know you're always welcome in our house. How's your good mother doing these days?”

“Fine. Working too hard,” Kathy says.

Al nods. “She's always been a hard worker,” he says.

“Will I see you shortly?” he asks Darlyn, though it isn't really a question. Without waiting for an answer, he turns away. The tiny clouds of snow follow his feet back to the front door.

“Guess I'd better be going so you can go in,” Kathy says. She squeezes Darlyn's hand. She's thinking: if Margaret Smola left Al, and Connie could see her way to marrying him, Darlyn would become her stepsister. She doesn't say this out loud.

“Don't be a stranger,” Darlyn says. “Oh, by the way, I've got that corset if you ever need one. Rescued it from the garbage. I'm trying to figure out how to work it into a routine, but it hasn't come to me, yet. Not too much bordello baton twirling that I know of.”

She leans over and brushes her lips along Kathy's cheek, then is out the door. She twirls her baton behind her back as she walks, flips it into the air, spins around and salutes. Kathy slips her car into gear. Darlyn catches the baton, turns and goose-steps into the house. The driveway lights go out. It is suddenly too dark, too quiet, a lesser world for the loss of Al's fine spotlights. And Darlyn.

The road is icy when Kathy pulls away from her mother's house. She bounces the rear end of the car off a snowbank, for fun, not hard enough to cause damage, just enough to glide sideways around the corner, a tap on the other side to straighten out, and she's away. The street is lined both sides with bungalows, each placed squarely in the centre of a 50 X 120-foot lot. About five variations on a theme, most a pinky-peach brick, the odd one a dusty grey with yellow tints.

Concrete porches, some with railings now, some still plain slabs, are built over fruit cellars with shelves lined with canning — summer peaches, mustard beans, eons-old dill pickles with brined-white lids, strawberry jam. There could be Christmas cake wrapped in brandy-soaked cheesecloth, soft drinks or extra beer for the weekend, leftover stew in the pot too big for the fridge. On hot days in the summer when Connie had to get some sleep before her night shift, she'd set up a camp cot in the fruit cellar, wrap a flannel sheet around herself, breathe in the cool damp air and sleep like a baby.

Some days, after Charlie had died, when Shelly was having a bad day, Connie took a chair into the fruit cellar and stood on it, closed her eyes and placed her face just in front of the tiny metal grille to the outside. Shelly's screams became a vague background noise then, while in front of her on a rush of cool air, there was the smell of grass, of damp concrete and earth; there was the sound of happy children playing in a sprinkler, the thick tarry suck of tires on hot asphalt.

Kathy found her there once, had gone looking for her mother because Shelly was crying. She looked in the fruit cellar only because the door was slightly ajar. It was a rule that the door be closed at all times to keep the cold air in. Kathy was about to close it when she sensed rather than heard someone inside. She looked through the crack and there was her mother standing on a chair, her face illuminated by a small pale rectangle of light coming in through the vent.

Kathy wanted to call out to her, but she didn't. She was not so much afraid as embarrassed, as if she had come upon her mother naked and not this ordinary woman dressed in brown slacks and a pink cotton blouse, standing on a kitchen chair with a paint-spattered seat and missing rungs. Standing absolutely still in the darkness, her face pressed to the light coming in from a frail bit of screening.

Tonight the sidewalks are cleared of snow, the driveways too. Germanic tidiness still influences these neighbourhoods that are a mix of immigrants now, no longer mostly German. They are still predominantly working class, though. In the summer there are neatly edged loamy gardens filled with annuals: petunias, geraniums, marigold, with some salvia and dusty miller and cosmos in the more adventurous plots. Or, in the few Portuguese gardens, there are flowering vegetables mixed in with more flamboyant groupings of annuals. All the gardens are set between neatly trimmed juniper or cedar shrubs that bookend the picture windows that look out on to the wide avenues. Snow covers the gardens now, except for the naked maples, one per boulevard. Red and green maples on alternating properties: artful city planning.

Kathy's parents had joined a Catholic housing co-operative chartered to buy suburban lots in an area called Pleasant View (flat as a pancake with no view at all, Connie liked to remind Charlie) to build affordable bungalows for its members. The lots were mapped and surveyed, the house designs drawn up, the project about to commence, when the deal fell through. Money problems, Connie told Kathy.

Affordability had brought them to the project and when the deal collapsed Connie was just as happy. She was a downtown girl. She liked a corner store to be on the corner, not ten long suburban blocks away. She liked to be able to walk to the pharmacy, the Capital or Starlight theatres, the Nut Shoppe for warm popcorn and fresh nuts, to the Palace for a tin roof sundae. Or wander out of their apartment on a warm summer evening, Gwen from upstairs keeping an ear out for Kathy. They might end up at the Varnum Hotel in the “Ladies and Escorts” beverage room having a draft. Or at Five Corners, where they'd buy an ice-cream bar and dawdle home.

Kathy's father liked Pleasant View and decided they should buy one of the bungalows being built a few blocks from their proposed co-op. He begged part of a down payment from his parents, who farmed near Meaford, and raised the rest himself. One Sunday afternoon in early fall of 1955, he borrowed a friend's car and brought Connie and Kathy through a wasteland to an almost finished house in the middle of a mound of mud and told them they'd be moving in after Remembrance Day.

They tiptoed across a two-by-six spanning the gulf between the mud in the driveway and the doorway. There was no porch yet, no fruit cellar. Kathy's father unlocked the door and swung it open, saying,
Ta-da.
Kathy ran through the house yelling, “Bedroom. Kitchen. Bathroom,” her shouts echoing back to her from the pure white Gyproc walls. She flushed the toilet, turned on the taps, stuck her head into the milk box beside the back door, shouted, “Mud” at the mud in the backyard.

She ran down the open wooden stairs to the basement, which was enormous, one huge high-ceilinged concrete room. She could hear the click-click of her mother's two-toned high heels on the hardwood floors above her, the cul-umping of her father's Sunday browns as he followed her from room to room. Then, from a vent above her, Kathy heard her mother crying, her father speaking hushed words, a soothing sh-sh.

Kathy pressed her cheek to cool cement; she licked the concrete, tasted limestone, permanent and cold. Smelled fresh wood so sweet it was like being in a forest. She didn't care if her mother cried forever; she wanted to live here. “House,” she whispered. “My house.”

Aluminum doors, occasionally bearing the suburban coat of arms — the circled first initial of a family name — still predominate. Many yards are fenced now, but when Kathy was growing up, the yards were one vast playground, big enough for games of scrub baseball, backyard rinks for figure skating and shinny, hide-and-seek that went on for hours, neighbourhood fireworks displays, the May 24th burning schoolhouse the kids' favourite. They cheered as it curled in on itself, charred and smoking. They played ball against the wall, the girls skipped in newly paved driveways, the boys zoomed Dinky Toys between their legs. They all played war or road hockey or touch football or Red Rover or Statues. Marbles in the spring, conkers in the fall.

The neighbourhood men lived outdoors in those yards, clearing snow after supper with heavy square metal shovels, working on the rinks, telling dirty jokes, their breath as hot and steamy on the cold air as the bad words slipping off their tongues. Kids sitting on sculpted snowbanks silently tying their skate laces strained to hear. “Bugger!” “Dummkopf!” they'd shout after their fathers had gone inside. “Pussy!” “Prick!” “Schweinehund!” “Boobies!”

In summer the men shared a beer while they built picnic tables, identical dimensions, regardless of family size, all painted the same dull red stain that rubbed off on clothing, bought in quantity for a good price at Mainway Market. They played horseshoes in the pits dug at the Rausches', the rhythmical clank and thud covering laughter, ohs and ahs, the swear words absorbed by the heat and lushness of summer. Played darts on a board Al Smola made and hung from cement hooks on his back wall.

They dug gardens for the women to plant the year's annuals, then weeded them, edged them, tidied them up in fall, covering new shrubs and the odd perennial, chrysanthemums maybe, with leaves from the maples. They mowed and raked lawns and drank more beer sitting on porches, or leaning against the sides of older model cars, which they had just washed and waxed, gleaming Fords and Chryslers and GMs, nothing foreign, for you had to support the local industry that made tires or springs or parts for American automobiles assembled by their union brothers in Windsor and Oakville. They dug worms for fishing, piled coolers and waders and fishing gear into cars and disappeared for long weekends up north — Lake Nipissing — to catch pike and pickerel and bass.

That's when the women came out to sit on the picnic tables in the shade, little kids playing at their feet. They smoked cigarettes, drank coffee and talked about sales at Foodmart and Loblaws, or how Ahrens had kids' canvas sneakers for a good price. They reminded each other that the public health nurse was coming to Our Lady of Perpetual Hope and Maple Avenue Public schools to give vaccinations to the children starting kindergarten. Talked about men, but only in the most general terms, an illness or a holiday or the possibility of a strike.

The Whites, second owners of their house, were the first to fence their yard, cutting it off from the others. They moved in after the lawns were well established, the gardens and trees beginning to look permanent. Foreign: British. Not snobs, but they had a dog. The only dog in the neighbourhood at that time, which made their ordinary spotted beagle named Flip seem extravagant, exotic even. Children begged to walk him, begged parents to get a Flip of their own.

The Whites didn't want Flip digging up anyone's garden or biting anyone's leg, didn't want him wandering away or getting hit by a car. That's what they said, anyway. So they built a ranch-style woven three-board fence that Flip dug under two days after it was finished so he could make his regular rounds of neighbourhood back doors, begging for treats. The Whites painted their fence the same dull red as the neighbourhood picnic tables.

Mr. White was the first grown-up Kathy knew who died who wasn't her grandfather or another really old person. Came home for lunch, ate a tuna salad sandwich (flaked premium tuna, Miracle Whip, finely chopped green onions, two washed pieces of iceberg lettuce overlapping — Mrs. White's usual) on lightly margarined pumpernickel delivered that morning to the door, with two home-canned gherkins on the side. For dessert, a cup of coffee, black, half a saccharin tablet, as Mr. White wanted to lose a bit of weight, and one butter tart, store-bought, on sale at Mainway Market at three packages (six in each) for a dollar. Washed his hands and wiped his mouth at the kitchen sink, dried them on a blue-checked terry tea towel, which he folded and placed on the counter. Smoked a Rothman's standing up while talking to Mrs. White about seeding the side yard, which was shaded, so the grass had become patchy. Tapped the ashes directly into the drain. Ran water over his cigarette butt, put the butt in the avocado green flip-top garbage can under the sink. He kissed Mrs. White goodbye on the lips, an everyday friendly kiss, nothing passionate, an I'll-see-you-later kiss.

Mr. White drove to work and was just about to sit at his desk, was lowering himself into his chair, talking to his secretary Bernice Clemmer about refilling the dye in the Gestetner machine. The mimeographs were getting a bit pale, he was telling her, when an artery blew up in his head.

He died, just like that. A little sigh, a look of shock in his eyes, then he fell rather gently, Bernice later said, like fainting in church, which she did on occasion if she fasted for Communion and went to 11:30 Mass. Crumpled in on himself first, then onto the floor. Blood all over, she said, coming from his mouth and nose and even from his ears.

These exact details of his last hour were discussed over and over by the women at the picnic tables, as if dissecting what had been eaten for lunch, or the kind of kiss that had been offered, could account for early mortality. Tuna with onions to be avoided at all costs, especially in combination with store-bought butter tarts. (Cigarettes couldn't matter — everyone smoked — it was agreed.) Children and husbands had to be kissed (and were pressed to kiss back,
just in case
) before leaving for school or work, the extreme import of the last kiss an essential feature in the pre-death drama.

But soon life became ordinary again and only when a husband came down with the flu and stayed home from work, or a child was having his tonsils out in hospital, only then was the spectre of early death reawakened and the rituals of kinds of kisses and forbidden combinations of food once again noted.

Kathy had flown up from Brownies to Girl Guides with Glenda White only the week before Mr. White's death, and her troop formed an honour guard for the funeral. The girls wore their blue uniforms, and poked each other while waiting for the hearse to arrive. Most of them had never been to a funeral and they wondered if the body would smell, if they would get to eat some of the triangular sandwiches with their crusts off, no tuna salad, no one in the Catholic Women's League had made tuna salad, and the funeral cookies, especially Connie's melt-in-your-mouth chocolate macaroons, which were famous throughout the Our Lady of Perpetual Hope parish. They wondered if Glenda's little brother would cry.

Everyone cried at the funeral mass, Glenda, Glenda's brother and all the Girl Guides. The men sniffed into clean, pressed handkerchiefs tucked into jacket pockets by wives, just in case. The women cried and cried, especially Mrs. White, who was now a widow. As if it were a disease they might catch, the women said the word “widow” tentatively, quietly, whispering it through their fingers into the ears of their friends. And true enough, before too long, Mrs. White was avoided like the plague by all except for a few brave, immune — or stupid, depending on how you looked at it — souls like Connie. Connie said it was scandalous the way women suddenly didn't invite Mrs. White to barbeques or potlucks or baby showers. As if she might steal away one of their lumpy, ill-tempered, balding, farting husbands.

Mrs. White learned to drive, found a job, lost some weight, bought some very nice new clothes and started to have her hair styled once a week in a classic Jackie Kennedy flip. Eventually she found a boyfriend, a gentle well-off bachelor, Basil Burkhardt, an engineer, whom she brought over to meet Connie. She moved with her children to California to be near him when he was hired to raise up by four feet the historic Bridgeport covered bridge in Nevada County to protect it from floodwaters. They never returned to Canada.