by Ron Thompson
“Hey, Clinton!” a guy said. “Lotsa puck bunnies tonight. I’m gonna introduce you.”
“You know my buddy?” Clinton asked.
“No. Hey.” He gave me a cool, appraising look that told me I had failed a test then turned back to Clinton. “The Hardass said he might come by later on.”
Other Ice Dogs greeted Clinton, and he introduced me, but I stood awkwardly while they talked, my eyes roving, avoiding anyone in particular. Once again I studied everything on the counter (plenty of liqueur bottles and empty shot glasses, puddles of spilled booze, bottle rings) then turned to the herb rack, then found a bookshelf with cookbooks and read their spines. Clinton was still talking to the Dogs so I decided to push back towards the living room where “Hotel California” was blaring and people stood talking in groups or accompanying Joe Walsh on air guitar. Couples sat on the couch and necked. I knelt beside a tidy record shelf and pulled out album covers until Clinton turned up. “Hey look,” I said, showing him a Jim Nabors album. He grinned. “These people could use some Bowie.” One of the hockey guys came over to us. “Hey, Sturj, c’mon downstairs. I want you to meet someone.”
Clinton looked at me and tilted his head in the direction of the stairs. I shook mine and pointed at the billet family’s record shelf.
There was some Hank Snow, several Lawrence Welk records, a collection of Christmas albums, some Elvis and Buddy Holly. Nothing more recent.
“Are you the deejay?” a girl asked.
“No, I’m just looking.” I pointed to a guy beside the stereo who was crouched over a stack of albums someone had brought. He found what he was looking for and slipped a record from its sleeve.
“Anything interesting?” She was pretty, fine-boned and slim in a snug sweater. She had sandy hair. Her pupils were huge. She looked very young.
I handed her a Lawrence Welk album as “Bohemian Rhapsody” began to play.
She looked at it blankly as I drained my beer.
“Are you on the team?”
“Which one?”
She blinked at me. “Ice Dogs, of course.”
“No. Lakers.”
“What’s that?”
“Football.”
“Oh! Okay. The Lakers. What grade are you in?”
“Ten. You?”
“Ten. I go to St Vitalis.” She looked younger than Ten but you never knew. She observed me with her saucer eyes then looked around the room and over my shoulder, distracted by a group that was laughing and goofing around. Her eyes lingered there then she looked back at me. “Sodoyawannaneck?”
“Pardon?”
“Neck. Do you wanta neck?”
“Um . . .”
Suddenly, from brassy and bold, she looked hurt and vulnerable, and much younger. “You don’t have to be so keen.”
“No I do! I do! But . . . here?”
“Why not?”
Behind us, people began to sing along with Freddy Mercury.
Her eyes flicked towards the singing then back to me. Her expression softened and a grin slowly widened across her lips.
“Are you shy?”
“HELL NO I’m not!” My bottle was empty but I tipped it up and drained the last suds.
“You are! Aren’t you? Then let’s find someplace . . .” Taking charge, glancing coolly at the commotion behind us, she took my hand. Apparently she found shy appealing.
As we went through the kitchen I grabbed a fresh beer before she tugged me towards the basement stairs where one of the Ice Dogs blocked our way. “Kevin,” she said. “Let me go down.”
He hesitated then grinned and said, “Yeah, maybe later.” But he let us pass.
At the bottom of the stairs we stepped over a boy and a girl playing caps. Four guys I didn’t know were playing pool at a fullsized table, and on the couch next to it there was some serious co-ed mingling going on. There was no sign of Clinton. The girl pulled me towards the pool table and said “hi” to the players who nodded distantly. “Let’s go in here,” she said. She opened a door onto a room full of people, teenagers splitting a gut, chattering, talking seriously. Clinton was there, sitting on the floor betweentwo Ice Dogs, his back against a wall. One of the Dogs was the guy who’d invited him down; he had a bottle and was pouring shots for everyone around him. Clinton held his own glass extended for a refill. He looked up and met my eye, jerked his head to say c’mere, but at that moment someone else shouted, “Hey! Close the door. Private game!” It was a guy on a bed, where two other guys and two girls sat cross-legged playing cards. One of the girls was down to her bra, one of the guys was bare-chested and one-socked. Everyone on the bed looked up at us. “What are you doing here?” one of the guys asked, but he wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to the girl who held my hand. She looked stricken and backed out of the room. A guy in an Ice Dog sweater closed the door in our faces.
The girl stood staring at the door. After a moment she tugged me briskly down a brightly-lit hallway. “In here,” she said, and pulled me into a chilly closet hung with garment bags and clothes sheathed in dry cleaning plastic. Her breath was sweetly minty. “My name’s Carrie,” she said. “What’s yours?” But she stepped into me and kissed me before I could speak.
A few minutes later it was getting warm in the closet. Dry cleaning plastic clung to my back. “Do you want to touch me here?” she whispered, moving my hand. I did not have to think about the question.
Still, I’d drunk four beers and was going to have to take a leak soon. I definitely didn’t want to interrupt things—trust me to blow it, that’s what Victor would have said. Her hand went down to the region of my belt where I was of two minds, really, two things on my mind just then, one urgent and increasingly painful, the other pressing as well. She scrabbled around ineffectually, not helping with my dilemma. Then she whispered, “Do you—” but at that instant the door flew open, and light burst in, along with a gust of air. A largish figure stood outlined against the hall light.
“Carrie, you little slut.”
“Larry! What are you doing here?”
“I’m on the team. It’s my party.”
“You didn’t call me.”
“Yeah, well.”
“I saw you check that guy, last game.”
“Which one?”
“The guy you knocked out.”
“Oh yeah. He had his head down.” Larry looked modestly down the hall towards the pool table, as I tilted my own head up. This was awkward. I really had to pee now. Thankfully, my other problem had disappeared with Larry’s arrival.
“Who’s this?” he said, looking at me.
“A guy I met upstairs. He plays for the Lakers.”
“Hey,” I said.
He looked at me critically. I recognized him now as one of the air guitarists from the living room. “Why didn’t you call me?” Carrie asked.
“I’m going to find a bathroom,” I said. I stepped into the hall and Larry moved aside to let me pass. I went towards the stairs and up to the ground floor, grabbed my coat from the pile in the back closet and went outside to piss in a snow bank. It was bitterly cold now, colder even than before. I walked home, remembering the soft tingle of Carrie’s lips on mine, the sickly scent of crème de menthe on her breath, its sweet taste on my tongue.
* * *
“What time’d you get home?” I asked Clinton next day. We were watching Sunday football at his house.
“Late. Why’d you leave?”
He laughed when I told him about Carrie. “Puck bunny,” he said. “That guy Larry’s been trying to dump her.”
“What happened after I left?”
“The Dogs were firing shots and talking crap.” A disdainful shrug; his eyes drifted away, back to the game. “The Hardass came by later.”
“How’d that go?”
He watched a running back get hit and
grimaced. “Ah. You know what he’s like. He comes in like the king and lords it up—people wanna kiss his ass. He makes a big speech. ‘Boys, have fun, but careful with the booze. Don’t do drugs. Work hard, stay focused, go to church . . .’ He had a beer or two, frowned a lot, and took off.”
“Did you see Carrie after I left?”
“Oh, yeah. She stayed and kinda did the rounds. Carrie’s like all the rest.”
* * *
Of course I didn’t tell Genny any of that. I showed her pictures of the football team and me running track, then she got distracted by the Boat People Club, which had sponsored a Vietnamese family’s resettlement from a camp in Thailand. I wasn’t in the picture. Had I joined?
No, I said, I was never a joiner, and boat people weren’t really my cause.
And besides (I thought), I was more adrift myself than perhaps they’d ever been.
CHAPTER 17
Genny closed my Grade Ten yearbook. Her hand hovered over Grade Eleven and came to rest upon it. And stayed there. I glanced her way and saw that her expression was thoughtful. I tensed, steeling myself for what was sure to come. “What did Edie do when you were older? Did she stay at home?”
This was not what I had expected. I exhaled softly. No Grade Eleven, and we only had two more days in town.
I told her how my mother had always said she’d go crazy without her boys to organize—but her boys grew up. The year I entered Grade Seven, Andrew and Simon were away at university, and Victor was in high school. Everything seemed stable on the home front, and Mom announced she was “going back to work.”
But at what? She had been out of the workforce for more than twenty years. Motherhood had derailed her ambition to be a teacher, and she had only ever had one job; she had worked in ladies’ wear while saving for teachers college—and been good at it, confident and discerning, surprisingly so, given that she had learned the essentials from the Eaton’s catalogue. Back home on the farm, perched on the bench in the drafty outhouse, she had carefully studied the women’s clothing section before disposing of its pages, singly and economically, in the rural manner.
She must have been a natural, for she developed a discriminating sense of style, and at the store she smoothly nudged her customers out of fashion choices born of hardship and austerity, and into the Fifties. Young Edie was bright, pretty, and energetic: she was modernity incarnate. She reminded her clients that they were women and inspired them to revel in it.
Now, decades later, considering her prospects, she decided she would go back to ladies’ wear. But she was forty-five now,no longer a comely sprite who charmed matrons, but a matron herself. Her competition for a job would be a sweet-faced teenager or a twenty-something shaped like a mannequin.
When Frocks ’n Frills advertised for a part-time salesgirl, she put herself together, fussed over her hair, dressed and changed and changed again and went downtown to apply with a composure she did not feel. That night she got tipsy on the Baby Duck Dad brought home to mark the occasion and told us how it had gone. She was interviewed by the owner, Rose Kindersley, and her husband, Allan, who ran the tackle shop next door. She described her experience for them, acknowledged it wasn’t exactly recent, and admitted she was a bit rusty (four boys, none of them in the Pen!). Recent experience counted, no question about that, but what Frocks ’n Frills really needed was someone with drive and gumption who could sell dirt to a farmer. She said this with a pleasant, not-too-pushy certitude that made the Kindersleys smile and nod. In fact she was doing quite well, until she held up a hand and inexplicably called time. Then she pulled out a book of tickets for the Anglican Church raffle and spoke for ten minutes about the good works performed by the parish Fishes and Loaves Society. It works with the local down-and-outs, she said, providing hot meals and shelter. Most of them, poor dears, have a drinking problem. And worse. Mental illness. Did you know almost everyone is touched by mental illness? Someone in the family, someone they don’t talk about. It’s a scandal, really, a hidden plague, swept under the rug in shame. She talked and she reasoned, she presented the case for the Fishes and Loaves Society—and sold the Kindersleys the whole book of tickets. Then, she held up her hand again and said, Wonderful cause, just wonderful. Thank you for your support. And did you notice I just sold you an entire book of raffle tickets? For the Anglican Church—and you’re United! Think what I can do for you at Frocks ’n Frills. And by the way? Whatever you decide, no hard feelings, I’ll understand but (she tapped the raffle tickets and winked) all sales are final.
Genny smiled but said nothing. Her expression was thoughtful.
Edie worked at Frocks ’n Frills for the next decade, six months beyond my father’s retirement at sixty-five. That had been just the year before, and she only left then because they were taking the trip of a lifetime. They bought a truck camper and spent three months on the Grand Tour of prairie retirees, a great circle that took them to the Little Big Horn and Mount Rushmore, through Nashville and New Orleans, along the Gulf Coast with a swing north to the Alamo then along the Rio Grande to their eventual destination: a trailer park near Phoenix. It was a favourite winter getaway for their crowd from the Legion. Don’t ask her about photos, I warned.
Genny had known about the trip at the time and had expressed no interest in it; she had not yet met my parents then. Now, though, her face lit up. “Photos! Of course . . . she’s got pictures! I suppose they’re in albums?”
* * *
That afternoon we went with my mother for groceries, and as we were rolling out of the Safeway with a cart full of flyer specials, Genny looked down the mall and said she hadn’t been to the far end yet. Would Edie mind showing it to her? We’ll be quick, she told me. Meet you here.
They went off in the direction of Woolco while I wheeled the groceries to the car. When I returned there was no sign of them. Shoppers hustled by, mothers with kids, seniors on outings, men and women running errands or playing hooky from work. I sat down on a bench, nodding to acknowledge its other occupant, a man in sunglasses. I sat and waited, knee jacking, fidgeting, twirling the car keys on my finger.
Ten minutes later I saw them bustling towards me, and as I stood to meet them my mother pointed and called, “There you are!” as if I’d gone missing.
“You know how I was saying I need to pick up some things for Africa?” Genny said. “Clothes for the heat, and all? Well, we found a sale! We’re going to spend a few minutes there. Is that okay? Just a few minutes?”
She knew I hated shopping—and waiting, even worse. “We won’t be long,” Mom said.
“Back in a jiff,” Genny said in her play-English accent, giving me a peck on the cheek. I stood watching them hurry away, trying to remember when she had said she needed to buy anything for Africa. “Huhnn.”
It had come from the man on the bench, whose mirrored sunglasses reflected my standing figure back at me. His skin was weathered and coppery, his face impassive. After a moment he looked away.
I sat once more and squirmed and fidgeted and watched passersby, rubbernecking at random voices, eavesdropping on conversations. I studied the nicks and grooves on the car keys and used them to clean my nails. My leg jack-hammered and I cast around, starting to feel apprehensive—until an approaching figure caught my eye. She was young and slim and moving fast, wearing a summer dress, swinging a leather tote bag at her side. Her hair, which was sandy and shoulder-length, bounced with her movement. Her features were fair, her eyes dark, her expression open—she was a good looker with a nice smile, and there was something about her that was familiar. I sat forward and stared, trying to figure out what.
She had confidence, an energy, a spring in her step, as thoughshe were moving to the tune of “Pretty Woman,” with Roy Orbison himself crooning it for her, and her alone, and she knew that she deserved it, every appreciative, sugar-coated lyric and yeah-yeah-yeah. She was thirty paces away, twenty. She was going to pass in front
of me. I had an unimpeded view of her now, but still I could not place her. At ten paces she sensed my scrutiny and looked my way, made eye contact, and smiled coolly, as if she should know me but was having a hard time placing my face, and in that instant I recognized Carrie the Ice Dog puck bunny, grown up now, an attractive, purposeful, secure woman. I might have smiled then, or I might have frozen, I was unsure what my face conveyed before she broke eye contact and looked away; and then, still swinging her bag, she was past, moving with a jaunty step, vibrant, beautiful, in the prime of her life, and headed for somewhere at the far end of the mall. I watched her go and tasted crème de menthe, remembered soft lips and heavy wool, a steamy closet full of dry cleaning plastic. I leaned and twisted in my seat, staring after her, willing her to turn and remember too, but she did not look back before she disappeared into a crowd of shoppers.
I stared after her, until I realized I was peering over the head of the man at the other end of the bench, and he was grinning at me. “You know, I got a bit of a wandering eye myself,” he said now, chuckling. He reached up to scratch the bridge of his nose and began to remove his glasses.
“Oh, no, no. It’s not that at all. I—” HOLY SHIT did he ever have a wandering eye! His glasses were off now and one eye was dancing a slow random circuit in its socket, roving with a mind of its own. And his other eye was watering uncontrollably. He dabbed it with a tissue then returned his glasses to his nose.
“She’s pretty, eh? Reminds me of something the old man used to say, when the old lady wasn’t around. ‘It don’t matter where you get your appetite, boy, so long as you eat at home.’” He shook his head and chuckled at his own joke. “He was a real philosopher when mum wasn’t in the room.”
“No, no, I was really . . . I used to . . . I used to know her, a long time ago.” “Oh-kay.”
We sat in silence, each watching the crowd, until he turned back to me.
