by Andrew Hood
I’m waggling this cup I need in front of Erma’s face until I get the focus of the dull fish swimming in the bowls of her eyes, then I fit an extra-large cup into that regular so that the lip of the extra sits up from the lip of the normal. With my fingers I make a pinch of the difference and hold that gap up for her to make the difference extra-clear, but also to kind of say This is how much patience I have left for you, Erma.
“Extra.”
Wiping down a table in Section 3, Lorrie looks up and gives a tired, sympathetic smile for me. More like for the situation than for me.
“Okay,” Erma agrees, nodding at me as if the problem’s one of semantics, or it’s a philosophical quandary, and not just that she was smoking out back all that time and forgot what she was supposed to grab exactly. Mind settled, she staggers to the stockroom with the two cups to take another crack at it. But she’ll just end up having another smoke, like she always does. And then she’ll fall asleep in the stockroom, like she always does, until I come wake her up after close to take her home, like I always do.
I shrug my shoulders for Lorrie to see like What can I do? and she shrugs back like What can any of us do?
You can’t help but talk to Erma like she’s foreign. She’s not, of course, but she also basically is. Because she’s so, so old that she’s practically from another time that may as well constitute a whole other country with a whole other language. And Erma’s not even the only citizen of the Republic Of Old And Out Of It we’ve got. There’s a baseball team’s worth of blue hairs who run breakfast and who move at the same befuddled, disinterested pace, except they keep to the day shift, which is out of my jurisdiction. If Erma was any other old lady off the street working the 3-to-close shift I would have shit-canned her before you could say “Canada Pension,” except Erma’s not just any old lady. She’s the boss’s mom is the thing.
As a matter of policy we’re expected to call this Place a Restaurant, but we’re a Fast Food Joint, or simply a Place. The owner, J.R., has been working at this same Place since he was fourteen, the same age I was when I started. He climbed the ladder from mop jockey to owner, and he seems out to chart a similar trajectory for me. Because misery loves company is the thing. And J.R. loves me. I’m reliable and I’m a hard worker, but more than those things he trusts that I’d never breathe a word to his wife or to anyone else about the shit he talks to me about, the things he has in his head. Like this one night he called me into the back office during the thick of an unexpected after-supper rush just to bounce the benefits of making it with younger girls off of me. “If there’s grass on the field,” he assured me after some chin scratching, “I’ll play.” He’d apparently given the matter a lot of thought. Then he started wondering out loud about diddling old ladies, and said that he never did like playing ball on a snowy field but then admitted that sometimes a game of pick-up could be fun at just the right time, when you don’t mind soaked clothes and frozen hands you can’t even handle the ball with, and being dragged around through the snow so much that you start to get muddy as well as snowy, and then he forgot we were talking about pubic hair altogether and we wound up discussing football for fifteen more minutes. Up front, the girls got inundated and fell behind.
So it came as no big surprise that when J.R.’s father kicked it from this lung thing he had, mine was the lap into which he dropped his freshly widowed mother. And that’s who Erma is.
“I don’t think she’s hardly slept since Dad died,” J.R. was complaining to me the few days before he figured out to hire her. “All she does is sit around smoking and scratching lottery tickets.” He said that she’s up all night doing that, and spying on her neighbours, too. Erma phones J.R. at any hour to report what her Chinese neighbours are doing in their backyard. They go swimming and set off fireworks, the Chinese people, and Erma doesn’t like that. J.R. described to me this thing that Erma described to him where the Chinese people light toilet paper on fire and make these long wriggling snakes of flame in the air, which actually sounds fairly awesome. All the while they’re laughing. “And Mom hates the sound of their laughing because she doesn’t know what they’re laughing about. Chinese-y things, she says.” He was going nuts until he figured out that he could keep her busy and out of his hair by making me busier and tangling her up in mine. He gave his eighty-one-year-old mother a job on the supper shift.
“Let me know about whatever she eats or steals,” was all the instruction I got from J.R. Not a word about whether or not she was actually expected to do work like the rest of us. And not even the beginning of a hint about what I was supposed to do about her disappearing acts or her chronic smoking or her incessant napping. If Erma’s eight-hour shift was a whole pie, it would be cut up into only two pieces: sleeping and smoking. The actual work Erma does is the crumbs left over in the tin and all over the table after the thing gets wolfed.
When she’s slugging about and dropping off the face of the earth, and I’m ready to have kittens on her, I have to stop and remind myself of Erma’s deal. I look at her and see this pathetic munchkin of a thing, all humped-over and small, with all these deep, deep creases running over whatever flesh she’s got exposed like grey, hairy tree bark, and these big, hazy, empty eyes the colour of faded jeans where there’s a yellow now to the almost white blue, bulbous behind lenses that are about as thick as the difference between large and extra-large cups. I look at Erma looking like that and it takes all the imagination and sympathy I’ve got to remind myself that underneath that gross husk are probably feelings. Or things like feelings. To keep from losing it on her, I have to remind myself that life must not be very good or very easy for Erma right now, to have lost her husband like that, and to have been sloughed off by her son like that. And to be working here, at this Place. At least we have that one burden in common.
All of this Erma stuff could have been worse. The old lady was one more hassle I didn’t need, but when your job is nothing but a cobbling together of hideous, pointless hassles, one more is not that remarkable a thing. Like I imagine if I were to be shot with a machine gun, only the first few shots would hurt and then the rest would just be force without pain. But then Erma and the night bus driver got into some major spat. Something about Erma smoking on the bus and then howling all these racist invectives at the guy when he was telling her to stub it out, which is hard to imagine her doing, seeing as she has said hardly more than Okay and Yes and Extra to me all this time working together. Now none of the buses in the city will stop for her and it’s fallen to me to drive her home nights after work.
And that’s the thing about things. They could always be worse. All this Erma stuff is just regular-shitty and so who knows what extra-shitty actually looks like. Like even when things actually do get worse, you always say Oh, but they could always be worse, which is what you said last time. Which just means that you’ve gotten used to the way things have been since they did get worse. The worse gathers and piles up, but you just accustom yourself to it, I guess. Or else you just forget how good it used to be.
How much worse things would have to get for them to be extra-worse, frankly, is beyond me. I look at Erma—at and sometimes into those eyes with almost no colour in them at all—and wonder how well she might actually understand all that. All that extra.
When Lorrie mops she’ll hunch over to scrub and down the V of her shirt you can make out the lines of ribcage beneath her freckly pink skin, like the rungs on a ladder that leads into the darkness and shadow of whatever else is down there, under her undershirt. She’s putting up the chairs and mopping in what six years ago was the smoking section, trying to drop a hint to the old guy lingering there like we’re a café. Two hours ago he ordered a cup of hot water and a kids’ chicken nuggets. The nuggets are supposed to be in the shape of jungle animals, but they’re really just humpy, knobby blobs of batter and are in the shape of elephants and lions and zebras like clouds are in the shape of anything. He has refilled his hot water three
times and there is not two hours worth of news in that newspaper of his.
This guy is the guy that used to come in all the time with this other guy, The Captain. The Captain was this tall, hefty guy that had this stark pink line of scalp where his white hair parted to the side like the margin on notepaper. And he always had on pristine new sneakers that he would have been shot for in the ghetto back when that was happening. He was not decorated with any medals, and no sailing hat, and not much sign that his skin had ever been toughened under the sun on open water, but he was irrefutably The Captain. And it was just accepted that you were to treat him with this jovial reverence, and act vaguely subservient to him, and pour him a large club soda but only charge him for a small. When some new hire who didn’t know would call him Sir—like Would you like fries with that, sir—everyone else would smirk, and The Captain would smirk, and that new guy would feel so completely alone without knowing why. Whoever the manager was would swoop in and apologize, saying how it’s impossible to find good help these days like good help hasn’t existed since the Captain’s day, and The Captain would nod and wink, all assuaged and forgiving. Without ever being filled in, that new guy would catch on after a few visits and would adopt that same reverence like The Captain had saved his life once and they went way, way back.
So The Captain would come in here and command all this mysterious respect, and with him always would be this other guy. This is hot water and chicken nuggets guy. He didn’t have a nickname and was treated just like any other old guy off the street. The two of them would sit across from each other, always at a window seat in what was then the smoking section, The Captain leaning back and staring off like in thought, and this other guy listing across the table like he was waiting to take notes of whatever The Captain said. They never did talk that I heard. The Captain would watch the parking lot and this other guy would just watch The Captain. The only indication that those two were at all friendly was when The Captain would drift away from his lot watch and make a little kissing motion and tap two fingers on his lips, and this chicken nuggets guy would pull out exactly two cigarettes from his breast pocket. Only hot water and chicken nuggets would smoke. The Captain just looked his smoke over, inspected it, tapped it thoughtfully on the table, and would eventually drift back to his perusal of the parking lot.
One day the bald guy came in without The Captain, got what he always got, sat alone and quiet for a few hours, took out his two smokes, smoked only one, left the other on the table, and then left. No one said anything. After years of this routine, after years of pretend respect and just the kind of intimacy there is in a shared joke or some shared secret—even if no one actually knew what the secret was—there was nothing. A part of me felt grieved and heavy, felt that someone should take the initiative to find out what had happened to The Captain, but this other part of me didn’t care, and forgot about him altogether except when hot water and chicken nuggets comes in and all that rushes back like food I ate too quick.
It gets to eleven and I let Lorrie put up the chairs and put on the most grating music she has and dim all the lights but the ones directly above him and still this guy is flapping the paper like he’s trying to get off the ground with it. Lorrie comes to me behind the counter. “You don’t mind if I don’t wait around all night for this guy to just keel over already, do you?” she asks me. She takes her cap off and tries her best to fluff her frizzy hair back into some presentable shape, but the top holds its dome.
Only a year shyer of thirty than I am, we started working at this Place around the same time and shared the same level of non-responsibility throughout high school. We would flirt and joke and would even get drunk together after work. We would get near to doing something together and being something together, always in the park adjacent to this Place where they’ve built a Canadian Tire now. But in her last year of high school she got caught up with some health or emotional something that she had never talked to me about and disappeared. Nine years later she came back to put herself through veterinary school and it was like she never knew me before. “Oh. You’re still here,” was about all she said. And we went from almost something to nearly nothing.
“Go ahead and take off,” I tell her. “Me and Erma can finish everything up.”
“Erma’s still here?” Lorrie lifts her apron over her head and there’s the pink fish eye of her bellybutton. And fuzz. Lorrie came back without fifty pounds she couldn’t afford and this real fine but also real prevalent hair all over her arms and her neck and her cheeks. The internet has all kinds of ideas about what this might mean.
“Around here somewhere.”
“Well thanks, Ivan,” she says, like my name could be a substitute for Mr. or Sir or Boss or Captain or any other name under the sun.
“Okay,” is what I say.
Before giving hot water and chicken nuggets the boot I do my cash-out at the counter instead of the back office. Slapping the bills down like I’m dealing a deck of cards, letting him hear how put out I am, I stare at him shaking his paper there in what used to be the smoking section.
And this happens: looking at the guy, thinking about The Captain and about that area having been the smoking section, it’s like I get sucker-punched in the gut. Because here is how time moves: time moves so automatically that it’s basically like breathing. You don’t pay attention until the wind gets knocked out of you, and then you feel and scrutinize every breath that you drag in and force out of yourself and along with the pain there is suddenly the something like pain that comes from focusing so tightly on a thing that you otherwise always take for granted.
Ruminating on those two old guys smoking in the smoking section, I start to think about back at the same time when Lorrie and I used to get along as easy as math on a calculator, and then about when the Canadian Tire was a park with climbers like dinosaur skeletons that we used to dangle from the ribs of wasted. And then here comes stupid remembrances of all the different coloured caps we’ve had since I’ve been here and from that comes the different ways J.R. has styled himself in a decade. When I started it was a ponytail and beard, which became a beard and a brush cut, and then a mustache and mullet, and then the same hair he has now except grey for a while and now it’s been dyed this impossible brown since he’s got his mistress and he’s only got a plug of hair under his lip that he calls a flavour saver and that’s disgusting. Thinking about him gets me thinking about me, about how I’ve only gained 10 pounds since starting at this Place but have somehow managed to get fat. At the start there were all these things I’d considered doing with my life, except there were too many things I half-wanted to do so I chose nothing instead of the wrong thing and so stuck around this Place until I decided, and how I’ve decided nothing. And I think about how things might have been different if Lorrie had stuck around, how if we weren’t strong enough people on our own we might have added up to something that might have gone somewhere and done something, but now we’re just who we are in the same Place we started anyway. All this from hot water and chicken nuggets.
Here’s a fact: you can spend a week cleaning this Place from toe to head and still it would be filthy. From the meat sizzling on the grill and fries popping in the fryer this skin of grease has settled on every surface. I have to buy new sneakers every three months because this filth eats away at the rubber, exposing the honeycomb of bounce in the sole. Poolside rules apply around here: you don’t dare rush or run because you’ll for sure slip and crack your head wide open. I’ve seen it happen. Now, the work here has become so automated over time that the garbage bins have to be put in the exact same spot every night, otherwise you’ll end up with a heap of wax burger squares on the floor beside the grill and the bunched up, sweaty plastic bags that the fries were in beside the fryer and turds of unwanted receipts on the floor beside the till. When you move these bins what you uncover are these sterling circles of tile that the grease hasn’t been able to mar over all that time.
I
pull up a chair, the seat across from the guy that used to be The Captain’s. Hot water and chicken nuggets folds the paper in toward himself.
“It’s past eleven,” I say.
He flicks his wrist a few times like his watch is a Magic 8 ball and then squints at the time there, and then puts the thing to his ear. He looks back at his watch and stands up, giving one of those Erma nods, like the time is a matter of my opinion and not a fact up on the wall in plain sight.
“Well,” he says, looking down on me, tapping the table. “Well,” he says, “Time makes fools of us all.”
Hot water and chicken nuggets folds the paper under his arm and I follow him to the door.
“Someone said that,” he says as I open the door for him to leave out of.
I lock that door after him and stand there and watch him wander out alone into that dark, empty lot not overseen by any sort of Captain.
Erma’s where I know she is, laid out dead to the world, spread over a few garbage bags of plush dinosaur dolls that we’re giving away with the kids’ meals, pillars of cups around her and a wall of jugs of fryer oil. J.R. is probably right about her not having slept regularly since his dad’s death, the way Erma conks out like she does. Her whiskery, wrinkled mouth hangs open, her lids seem barely closed like she’s not very deep in, and there’s a sleeve of regular-large cups beside her on the floor.
“Erma,” I say, pronouncing her name like I’m picking sides for teams.
“Okay,” is what she says. She touches at her glasses to check that they’re still there, and then touches her belly, to check that her cigarettes are still in her apron’s pouch. Her eyes creep open like they’re two small mouths too parched to ask for water.
