Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  Dorrie knows how to stretch money. She saves the fifty-cents-off coupons from Ponderosa — which’ll give you a rib eye steak, baked potato and salad, all for $1.69. Or she’ll hear a rumor that next week shoe prices are going to get slashed double. So she’ll say to the guy at Shoes Express, “Look, can you hold these for me till next Wednesday or Thursday or whatever, so I can get in on the sale price?”

  It comes to Larry, what the noise is. It’s the lining of his jacket moving back and forth across his shoulders as he strolls along, also the lining material sliding up and down against his shirt-sleeves. He can make it softer if he slows down. Or louder if he lifts his arm and waves at that guy across the street that he doesn’t even know. The guy’s waving back, he’s trying to figure out who Larry is - hey, who’s that man striding along over there, that man in the very top-line Harris tweed jacket?

  Actually no one wears Harris tweed much anymore. In fact, they never did, no one Larry ever knew. It’s vintage almost, like a costume. What happened was, Larry was about to graduate from Red River College (Floral Arts Diploma), just two guys and twenty-four girls. The ceremony was in the cafeteria instead of the general-purpose room, and dress was supposed to be informal. So what’s informal? Suits or what? The girls ended up wearing just regular dresses, and the two guys opted for jackets and dress pants.

  Larry and his mother went to Hector’s, which she swears by, and that’s where they found the Harris tweed, this nubby-dubby wool cloth, smooth and rough at the same time, heavy but also light, with the look of money and the feel of a grain sack, and everywhere these soft little hairs riding on top of the weave. The salesman said: “Hey, you could wear that jacket to a do at the Prime Minister’s.” Larry had never heard of Harris tweed, but the salesman said it was a classic. That it would never go out of style. That it would wear like iron. Then his mother chimed in about how it wouldn’t show the dirt, and the salesman said he’d try real hard to get them twenty percent off, and that clinched it.

  Larry wears the Harris tweed to Flowerfolks almost every day over a pair of jeans, and it’s hardly worn out at all. It never looks wrinkled or dirty. Or at least it didn’t until today when Larry put on this other jacket by mistake. So! There’s Harris tweed and Harris tweed, uh-huh.

  It was an accident how Larry got into floral design. A fluke. He’d been out of school for a few weeks, just goofing off, and finally his mother phoned Red River College one day and asked them to mail out their brochure on the Furnace Repair course. She figured everyone’s got a furnace, so even with the economy up and down, furnaces were a good thing to get into. Well, someone must have been sleeping at the switch, because along came a pamphlet from Floral Arts, flowers instead of furnaces. Larry’s mother, Dot, sat right down in the breakfast nook and read it straight through, tapping her foot as she turned the pages, and nodding her head at the ivy wallpaper as if she was saying, yes, yes, floral design really is the future.

  Larry’s father, though, wasn’t too overwhelmed. Larry could tell he was thinking that flowers were for girls, not boys. Like maybe his only son was a homo and it was just starting to show. In the end, he did come to Larry’s graduation in the cafeteria but he didn’t know where to look. Even when Mrs. Starr presented Larry with the Rose Wreath for having the top point average, Larry’s father just sat there with his chin scraping the floor.

  Larry was offered a job right off at Flowerfolks, and he’s been there ever since. Last October he got to do the centerpieces for the mayor’s banquet. It was even on television, Channel 13. You saw the mayor standing up to give his speech and there were these sprays of wheat, eucalyptus branches, and baby orchids right there on the table. Orchids! So much for your average taxpayer. But Flowerfolks has a policy of delivering their flowers to hospital wards if their clients don’t want them afterwards, so it’s really not a waste. They’re a chain with a social conscience, and also an emphasis on professionalism. They like the employees to look good. Shoulder-length hair’s okay for male staff, but not a quarter inch longer. A tie’s optional, but jackets are required. That’s where the Harris tweed comes in.

  Larry can’t help thinking how this new, new jacket will knock their eyebrows off down at work.

  Or maybe not, maybe they won’t even notice. He hadn’t noticed himself when he picked it up, so why should they? What happened was he went up to the counter to order his cappuccino. Not that he had to order it. He takes the same thing every day, a double cappuccino. He used to go to a bar for a few beers after work, but Dorrie got worried about all the booze he was soaking up. She was convinced his brain cells were getting killed off. One by one they were going out, like Christmas lights on a string, only there weren’t any replacements available.

  “Why don’t you switch to coffee?” she said, and that’s when Larry started dropping into Cafe Capri, which is just around the corner from Flowerfolks. A nothing place, but they’ve brought cappuccino to this town. Nobody knew what it was at first, and some people, like Larry’s folks, still don’t. Larry’s tried it, and now he’s on a streak with double cappuccinos. They start making it when they see him come through the door at five-thirty.

  He likes to put on his own cinnamon. He likes it spread out thin across the entire foam area, not just sitting in a wet clump in the middle. You take the shaker, hold it sideways about two inches to the right of the cup and tap it twice, lightly. A soft little cinnamon cloud forms in the air - you can almost see it hanging there - and then the little grains drift down evenly into the cup. Total coverage. Like the dust storm in Winnipeg last summer, how it coated every ledge and leaf and petunia petal with this beautiful, evenly distributed layer of powdery dust.

  Lots of coffee places have switched over to disposable plastic, but Cafe Capri still uses those old white cups and saucers with the green rims. You put one of those cups up to your mouth and the thickness feels exactly right, the same dimensions as your own tongue and lips. You and your cup melt together, it’s like a kiss. Customers appreciate that. They’re so grateful for regular cups and saucers that they carry their own empties up to the counter on their way out. That’s what Larry must have done. Taken his cup back up, put his fifty-five cents by the cash, and picked up a jacket from the chair. Only it was someone else’s chair. Or maybe the other guy had already made off with Larry’s jacket at that point. A mistake can work both ways. Larry was probably busy thinking about meeting Dorrie, about the movie they were going to see that night, Marathon Man, their third time, and then coming back to her place after, his prick stirring at the thought.

  When they first started going together they’d be lying there on top of her bed and she’d say, “Let’s fuck and fuck and fuck forever.”

  “Do you have to say that?” Larry said to her after he’d known her a couple of months. “Can’t you just say ‘making love’?”

  She got her hurt look. Parts of her face tended to lose their shape, especially around her mouth. “You say ‘fuck,’” she said to Larry.

  “You say it all the time.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Come off it. You’re always saying ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.’”

  “Maybe. Maybe I do. But I don’t say it literally.”

  “What?” She looked baffled.

  “Not literally.”

  “There you go again,” she said, “with those college words.” Larry stared at her. She actually thinks flower college is college.

  It was sort of a mistake the way they got together. Larry had taken another girl to a Halloween party at St. Anthony’s Hall. She, the other girl, had a pirate suit on, with a patch over the eye, a sword, the whole thing. And she’d made herself a moustache with an eyebrow pencil or something. That bothered Larry, turning his head around quick, and looking into the face of a girl wearing a moustache. A costume is supposed to change you, but you can go too far. Larry was a clown that night. He had the floppy shoes and the hat and the white paint on his face, but he’d skipped the red nose. Who’s going to
score points with a red nose? There was another girl, Dorrie, at the table who’d come with her girlfriends. She was dressed like a Martian, but only a little bit like a Martian. You got the general idea, but you didn’t think when you were dancing with her that she was some weird extraterrestrial. She was just this skinny, swervy, good-looking girl who happened to be wearing a rented Martian suit.

  “You in love with this Dorrie?” That’s what Larry’s father asked him a couple of months ago. They were sitting there in the stands. As usual the Jets were winning. Everyone around them was cheering like crazy, and Larry’s father said to Larry, not quite turning his face: “So, you in love with this girl? This Dorrie person?”

  “What?” Larry said. He had his eyes on the goalie all alone out there on the ice, big as a Japanese wrestler in his mask and shin pads, putting on a tap-dance show while the puck was coming down the ice.

  “Love,” Larry’s father said. “You heard me.”

  “I like her,” Larry said after a few seconds. He didn’t know what else to say. The question set a flange around his thoughts, holding back his recent worrying days and nights, keeping them separate from right-now time.

  “But you’re not in love?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You just like her?”

  “Yes. But a lot.”

  “You’re twenty-six years old,” Larry’s father said. “I married Mum when I was twenty-five.”

  Like a deadline’s been missed, that was his tone of voice.

  “Yeah,” Larry said. “Twenty-six years old, and the kid’s still living at home!”

  He felt his bony face fall into confusion. And yet he loved this confusion, it was so unexpected, so full of thrill and danger. Love, love.

  “Nothing wrong with living at home,” Larry’s father said, huffing a little, looking off sideways. “Did I say there was anything wrong with that?”

  Larry was running this conversation through his head while he walked along Notre Dame Avenue in his stolen Harris tweed jacket, seeing himself in his self’s silver mirror. The fabric swayed around him, shifting and reshifting on his shoulders with every step he took. It seemed like something alive. Inside him, and outside him too. It was like an apartment. He could move into this jacket and live there. Take up residence, get himself a new phone number and a set of cereal bowls.

  That’s when he realized he was in love with dopey smart Dorrie. In love. He was. He really was. Knowing it was like running into a wall of heat, his head and hands pushing right through it. This surprised him, but not completely. You can fall in love all by yourself. You don’t have to be standing next to the person; you can do it alone, walking down a street with the wind blowing in your face, a whole lot of people you don’t even know going by and they’re kind of half bumping into you but you don’t notice because you’re in a trancelike state. He forgot, suddenly, how Dorrie had this too-little face with too much hair around it and how he always used to get turned on by girls with bigger faces and just average hair size.

  He looked at his watch, worried. He knew she’d still be standing there, though, next to the cash with her arms full of shoes and she’d be pissed off for about two seconds and then she’d get an eyeful of Larry’s jacket and before you knew it she’d be rubbing her hands up and down the cloth and fingering the buttons.

  The problem, though, was tomorrow. Larry and his new jacket weren’t going to make it tomorrow. He could go to work in this jacket, but no way could he go back to the Capri at five o’clock. They’d grab him the minute he walked in. Hey, buddy, there’s a call out for that jacket. That jacket’s been reported.

  Wait a minute, it’s all a mistake.

  A mistake that led to another mistake that led to another. People make mistakes all the time, so many mistakes that they aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re just positive and negative charges shooting back and forth and moving you along. Like good luck and bad luck. Like a tunnel you’re walking through, with all your pores wide open. When it turns, you turn too.

  Larry remembers seeing a patient in the Winnipeg Chronic Care Unit when he delivered the flowers after the mayor’s banquet. This guy didn’t have any arms or legs, just little buds growing out of his body. He was one bad mistake, like a human salt shaker perched there on the edge of a bed. Larry, set the flowers down on the table next to him, and the guy leaned over a couple of inches and brushed them with his forehead, then he smelled them, then he stuck his tongue out and licked the leaves and petals, all the while giving Larry a look, almost a wink but not quite. Larry took a lick too, lightly. What he found was, eucalyptus tastes like horse medicine. And orchids don’t taste at all.

  The sun was dipping low, and Larry was at the corner now, only half a block from Shoes Express. There was a great big rubbish receptacle standing there with a sign on it: Help Keep Our City Clean.

  Larry unbuttoned the Harris tweed jacket, slipped it off fast and rolled it up in a sweet little ball. He stuffed it into the rubbish bin. He had to cram it in. He didn’t know if he was making a mistake or not, getting rid of that jacket, and he didn’t care. The jacket had to go.

  And that’s when he really knew how cold the wind had got. It puffed his shirt-sleeves up like a couple of balloons, so that all of a sudden he had these huge brand-new muscles. Superman. Then it shifted around quick, and there he was with his shirt pressed flat against his arms and chest, puny and shrunk-up. The next minute he was inflated again. Then it all got sucked out. In and out, in and out. The windiest city in the country, in North America. It really was.

  There were plenty of eyes on him, he could feel them boring through to his skin. In about two minutes some guy was going to pull that Harris tweed jacket out of the garbage and put it on. But by that time Larry would be around the corner, walking straight toward the next thing that was going to happen to him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Larry’s Love 1978

  On a Wednesday in winter Larry walked over to a barber shop on Sargent Avenue and asked for a cut. “Just a regular cut,” he told the barber in an unsmiling, muttering tone of voice that was altogether unlike his usual manner. This was after a decade of having shoulder-length hair. He came out of the barber shop half an hour later with hair that was short around the ears and cropped close at the neck. Even the color seemed different - darker, denser, and without shadows, a color hard to put a name to.

  He was shivery with cold for hours after his haircut, lonely for his hair, shrunken in his upper body, but he also felt stronger, braver. The new look made him want to bunch his fists like a prizefighter or cross his arms over his chest. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror working on new expressions, moving his mouth and eyebrows around, and trying to settle on something friendly.

  Vivian and Marcie who work with Larry at Flowerfolks were both bursting with compliments. Vivian, the store manager, said the new cut made him look “younger and healthier,” and that started Larry wondering about how he’d been looking lately. He was only twenty-seven, which was not really old enough to show up on his face and body - or was it? His own opinion was that he was in pretty fair shape what with all the walking he did to and from work, plus the weekend hikes out at Birds Hill with his friend Bill Herschel. Marcie chimed in then about how the new hairstyle made him look more “with-it.” “It’s 1978,” she said. “The sixties are over.”

  What would she know, Larry thought she was only a kid, seventeen, eighteen.

  Larry, at twenty-seven, still lived with his parents, Dot and Stu, in their bungalow on Ella Street, but this was his last week; he was set to move out on Friday, at long last. Both Dot and Stu approved of their son’s haircut. Not that they jumped up and down and waved their arms. It was more a case of pretend nonchalance. “About bloody time,” Larry’s father said, and started in about the number of times he’d had to open the bathtub drain and clean out all the hair and muck. “Why, you’re handsome as can be,” Dot said, reaching out and testing the flat of her hand against the new springiness of
Larry’s hair. It had been some time since she’d touched the top of her son’s head, years in fact, and now it was like she couldn’t stop herself. “If this is Dorrie’s influence,” she said, “then I say more power to her.”

  On Friday afternoon blizzards, high winds Larry and his folks, and his girlfriend, Dorrie, and her family, went downtown to the Law Courts and got married. Dorrie (Dora) Marie Shaw and Laurence John Weller became the Wellers, husband and wife. And on Saturday morning the bridal couple boarded an Air Canada jet for London, England.

  Most of the passengers on the plane were wearing jeans and sweaters, but Dorrie had chosen for her travel outfit a new rose-colored polyester blend suit. Now she regretted it, she told Larry. The suit’s straight skirt was restrictive so that she couldn’t relax and enjoy the trip, and she worried about the hard wrinkles that had formed across her lap. She should have invested in one of those folding travel irons she’d seen on sale. And she’d been a dope not to bring along some spot-lifter for the stain on her jacket lapel. By the time they got to England it would be permanently set. They put dye in airplane food, coloring the gravy dark brown so it looked richer and more appetizing. One of the salesmen at Manitoba Motors, where she works, told her about it. He also told her not to drink carbonated drinks on the flight because of gas. People pass a lot of gas on planes, he’d informed her. It had to do with air pressure. Also, one alcoholic drink on land equals three in the air. This is important information.