The Gum Thief (3 page)

I was tipsy, so I said, "I know about my past. Tell me about my future."

She said, "What am I supposed to tell you-that your future's going to be different, or better? I can't, because you're never going to change. You may have a red-haired son and a left-handed daughter. You may be stung by a jellyfish in Mexico and die within an hour. But so what? In your head, you're this neither-here-nor-there person. The experiences won't change you. Who cares?"

She said, "You think I'm trailer trash, but so? What of it? I have a certain power, but having it doesn't mean I have to embrace it. Most of the time I reject my powers, but today I needed money, and that money is going to come from you. A hundred dollars. Pay me now."

"Why should
I?"

"Because otherwise
I'll
tell you even more things about yourself you'd rather not know. Buy my silence."

I did.

She folded up my five twenties and her card table and walked away. Then, from behind me, a woman's voice said, "I bet you like animals." 1turned around and there was Joan, with a Jack Russell on a leash straining to sniff curb side newspaper boxes.

"Huh?"

"Animals. I bet you talk to animals all the time, whenever you see them. Like right here, right now."

She was the same age as me, but without the mileage. She looked like Jane, from the Dick and Jane books, grown up, apple-cheeked, healthy and itching to correct my grammar. She saw that I was maybe a disaster, and yet she approached me.
She
began our dance together. I looked at her dog, Astro. "Hey there, boy. Yeah, I do love animals." I scratched him behind his ears. "Why would your mistress be telling me that?"

"Why?" she asked. "Because people who talk to animals are people who are easily disinhibited. Certain situations take them out of themselves-talking to animals, or talking to fortune tellers. A fortune teller gives you permission to relax and not keep everything plugged up. You can tell them anything. And once it's over, back in goes the plug and you feel better for having vented." "You heard her?" "I couldn't help it. Young Astra here had to do his

business and I had to wait." "She saw you there, listening, the whole time?" "Yup." "And you still want to talk to me?" Brendan indeed had red hair, and Zoe is left-handed. But I've never gone to Mexico, never will.

Bethany (for real)

Sparrows!

Sparrows are everywhere!

At McDonald's! On the park benches! On branches!

Roger, what a complete loser you are for leaving your diary in the coffee room. As if people weren't going to find it, let alone
me.
I'm totally creeped out by your description of me and my mother and my life. Creeped out to the point where I could get you fired. But that would mean acknowledging you in a way that would fit too neatly into your self-described loser profile. I can hear it now:
That caustic little slut got me fired because I wrote about her black lipstick.
You talked about my
body,
Roger-and what I felt like being inside my body. What kind of perv are you?

But the bit about the sparrow was nice, I have to admit. And I've actually seen birds yawn before, but then I think of you staring at me at a bus stop staring at sparrows and I get creeped out. BTW, you saw me at a bus stop and drove by when you could have driven me to work? Nice one.

And what's with you stealing all my comments about birds and biology? We have to talk about
something
in the staff room-besides Darrell and Raheed and Shawn bitching about customers, especially the needy ones in Hand-Helds
&
PDAs. Customers are all the same. They're all little children. I hate children. Children are like small brain-damaged adults with no attention spans and no capacity for conversation. Children should be sent away to school until they turn twenty-one and can speak normally. Darrell, Raheed and Shawn should also be sent away until they learn to speak properly, but that'd be age eighty-four, if ever. Man, their bitching drives me nuts. And how dare Shawn tell you about the spit on my locker in grade twelve!

And don't think I didn't notice that last Thursday you got yourself transferred from Laser Printers into stocking the bond paper so you could drink while you work. I was in the staff room, and I gagged on a saltine cracker and reached for your water bottle, which was on the counter, and got a mouthful of vodka. Yes, you're in winner territory, Roger. And I heard you sold some geek $5K worth of computer crap and forgot to tell him it wouldn't work on Macs. Chris had to stay late and process the returns, and he cursed your existence for an hour.

I'm sorry people in your life seem to have died or left you or something. So I won't be a total witch here. And two kids-really? Because, Roger, you can barely knot a tie onto one of your semi-washed shirts every morning, so I have to wonder if your kids get fed properly.

That was mean. Sorry. Shawn says you live alone.

My mother-you make her sound like a mystic who goes through life singing songs and making people feel campfire good about themselves. Please! She's tortured me my entire life, and she's also the inhabitant of a faraway land called Uselessness. Last week she pushed the wrong buttons and microwaved a bun for ten hours, and the condo smelled like an electrical fire for days.

Yes, I know what you're thinking:
Bethany lives with her mother.
Why is it okay for guys to stay home
forever
but if a girl does she's damaged goods? Have you priced condos lately? And working at Staples is a career? I can't believe the government even classifies what we do as a job. A job is something you can do for life. A job has some dimension of hope to it. Setting up fresh little sheets of white paper for people to use
to
test magic markers is not a hope scenario. All people ever draw is squiggles. It'd be fun if they wrote the occasional
fuck
or drew anarchy symbols. I still can't believe people ever
pay
for pens. Talk about the world's most shopliftable item. Staples must die.

At least your waste-case diary is something I can fume about while I'm installing the Halloween display this afternoon. (Note: What kind of person buys a jar of orange and black jellybeans to "celebrate" Halloween? Everyone thinks that because I wear black lipstick I live for Halloween or something. It's such an embarrassing holiday. They should call it Alter Ego Day-everyone dresses up as who they'd rather be instead of themselves. Sort of like what you said about people wanting out-or people wanting to be anything except what and who they are. I'd dress up as an ivory-billed woodpecker. Imagine everybody wondering if you existed, hoping you did, longing for a quick glance of you.)

BTW, did you see the tattoo of the devil on Shawn's ankle? I used to think that tattoo
=
slut, but now I think it's the total opposite. When you get a tattoo, it means you want your sexual partner to remember you and bond with you which is to say, it's more about monogamy than it is about sluttitude. Nature is crafty, but you know, black lipstick or not, I draw the line at tattoos. Because I like my skin to be deathly white. Michael Jackson white. I want it to look like it's easy to bruise. I want it to look like I taste like almond paste.

I can't believe I'm writing this to a total perv like you. Well, it's something to kill time here at Shtooples.

Here's what I'm going to do. When we see each other, neither of us is allowed to acknowledge that we've written or read these things we've written and read. We have to pretend we're cats and dogs, like normal. It'll make life interesting, which is a supreme challenge in this place. Boy, would I like to open a stockroom door one day and find people doing something shocking.

Describe something shocking, Bethany ...

Okay, how about Chris using an oversize oak peppermill to grind crack cocaine onto Shawn's rectum because Shawn's nose is so coked out that she's had to find a new absorbent membrane. That's shocking. That'd be fun to see. Or maybe Kyle using words longer than three syllables. But guys like Kyle don't need words to succeed in life, merely a pair of tight jeans and a dab of hair product.

What's on today's To-Do list? Besides the Halloween display, I have to redo Jamie's lame "Make Your Office Your Home" display down by the business furniture section. All she had to do was put coffee cups on a desktop and set a wacky stuffed animal beside the PC monitor. Instead, she created a scarecrow-ish stuffed body with a head made of pantyhose filled with bubble wrap, the face drawn with a bingo-daubing marker. It's ... disturbing.

BTW, you owe me, buster. I was walking down your aisle, and I had to reorganize a pile of Sharpie pens into their correct nooks because somebody had scrambled them this morning-some brave anarchist in training. I also saved you from a future shit storm by cleaning off the dust and fingerprints that were all over the cardboard box display for Zebra mechanical pencils.

Remember, no acknowledging to my face that you've read this.

Glove Pond
begins

"You're drunk again."

"I'm always drunk, you combative harridan. Shush."

"Don't shush me, you failure of a man. You manfailure."

"At least I don't sleep with a lawn sprinkler repairman as an act of retaliation sex."

"At least he's a man."

"Meaning what, Gloria?"

"You figure it out. I'm having more Scotch."

Gloria and Steve were being drunk and witty. Daylight savings had just ended, and the world was getting dark way too soon. They had each emerged from their respective realms to forage for liquor in the living room.
It
was a space defined by its rice-paper-thin Persian rugs and homely, expensive oak furniture made in the late nineteenth century by underfed, uneducated children with scurvy in rural Michigan factories. Random felts of house dust rested where Gloria had not deigned to drag a chamois during her random bouts of chatelaine energy.

The year was 2007. Steve's head felt like crumpled paper after six hours of departmental meetings. Gloria's blood chemicals were shooting in all directions after an
unexpectedly cancelled tryst with Leonard, the director of the local dinner theatre. She would be appearing in three weeks as the lead in the local dinner theatre production of
Lady Windermere's Fan,
and she was insecure about her adequacy for the role.

Steve barked, "More Scotch. I don't feel drunk enough." He filled his glass and added one ice cube as an afterthought.

"Are you sure you want an ice cube in there?
It
might dilute your buzz." "Why is it that all we do is battle?" He sighed, rattled his ice cube and coughed.

Back in her thirties, one by one, all of Gloria's other powerful emotions had gone out to get a pack of cigarettes and had never returned. Only anger remained. "We don't battle. We drink. It's different with us."

Steve looked at his watch. "The guests will be here in a half-hour. What are we having?"

"I don't know. I'll figure something out."

"We have guests coming over and you haven't figured it out yet?"

"No."

Roger