by Andrew Hood
Out back in the parking lot Lorrie is on the curb smoking and waiting for a ride still. Hunched over, I can make out the line of spine through her shirt, clear as the cut here dots on a coupon. Her hair still holds the shape of her cap.
Erma wobbles ahead of me and climbs into the car.
“Need a ride?” I ask Lorrie, locking up.
“No. They’re coming for me.”
“Want me to wait around until they show up?” I shake my keys in my hand like mixed nuts.
“That’s fine. I’ll be fine. Take off. Have a good weekend, Ivan.”
“Okay,” I say, agreeing with her in that Erma way because this is not fine and she will not be fine and I will not have a good weekend.
Three months into my working at that Place, J.R. calls me into his office for a sort of performance review. This was long before I was his best friend, back when he was still Mr. Roberts. He sits me down and what is it he says to me exactly?
He asks me out of the gate what my problem is, asks me why my work isn’t getting done, and why it’s getting done so slipshod when I actually do it. The pie that was my shift back then also had only two slices: flirting with the girls I worked with—the larger piece—and striving to be just vaguely insulting enough to the customers that they couldn’t actually complain. And here’s J.R. wanting me to account for the crumbs.
“Honestly?” I ask him.
“I’d rather you be,” he says. “Saves me the trouble of having to sort through your shit.”
“I don’t care,” I tell him flat out.
“And just what do you care about, Ivan?”
Not thinking about it, I’m pretending to, but I just stare at the calendar on the wall behind him, which has a picture of a different burger and combo for every month.
“Ivan,” he says to me, sadly, after I don’t answer, “Can I be honest with you?”
“Saves me the trouble of having to sort through your shit.” Maybe this was the first time I made him smile.
“I don’t care either,” is what he finally says, laying his hands flat out on his ink blotter and letting his shoulders crumple. “I don’t care, but, you know, I do it all the same. Because this is what I do. Pretending won’t get you to the end, but it will get you pretty far. So, while I can’t ask you to care, you can never make a person care, I can ask you that while I’m putting money in your pocket that you at least do me the solid of pretending that you do.”
“Do the whole horrible world a favour,” is what he says to me.
“Erma,” I prod.
How the headlights gawk at her dark house makes it feel like we’re here to burgle the place. This is the house J.R. grew up in and it’s a small, pointless house with a lawn that means nothing, that hasn’t changed since it was built, that the world has grown past and changed around, and a house that students will probably move into and hang flags and sheets instead of curtains in the windows of not long after Erma leaves it or she dies in it.
“Erma,” I jostle.
These two mason jars full of pungent, yellow, swirling smoke with a few holes poked in the top to let that dirty haze out is how I imagine Erma’s lungs. Because after the fifteen-minute ride where she slept the whole time the car smells like she’s snarfed a pack.
A cough either wakes her up or she wakes up and coughs.
My workdays now end with these as painful as they are awkward two or however many minutes where we just sit in Erma’s driveway. First it’s me waiting for Erma to wake up on her own cognizance, and then it’s Erma’s baby-dumb wonderment of having woken up in a place different than where she fell asleep, and then it’s just us waiting for something to happen. We never look at each other, but just sit and stare forward like two cats taking a shit in the same box, waiting. I know what it is I wait for: for her to clear out so I can move on to something that even if it’s nothing like poking my head into a few bars to see if anyone I know is around, or renting a movie, or just going home and starting back up a paused game and getting drunk enough to fall asleep. Even if it’s dick-all I’ve got on my plate it’s mountains more important than idling in an idling car with a groggy old idling woman. But what Erma holds onto in those two minutes—okay: there’s always this datey air in the car like a gas leak that I can’t put my finger on, as if Erma’s waiting blithely but also kind of impatiently for me to make some goodnight move on her, to jump her arthritic bones, to get a good and thorough feel of her scales, to let the hairs on my chin make static sparks with the hairs on hers, or at least for me to do the gentlemanly thing of getting out and opening the door for her.
Of all the girls I’ve driven home it’s true that none were women, and I don’t even know what you’d call Erma. The only thing Erma has in common with all the girls I’ve driven home over the past nearly fifteen years is that Place. And you can put bunny ears on driven home if you want. It’s grodier than the floors there to think of J.R. hiring new girls with me in mind, but at the same time there was never a moment when I was without a fruity-smelling little blond to train, with soft hairs on her arms that would curl and char when she got too close to the grill. But you bet all that driving home—with and without bunny ears—had to stop as soon as I became a boss. But the thing is that as soon I stopped dating Place girls, I basically sort of stopped dating altogether. J.R. had done all the work for me up to that point, and now I feel sometimes with girls like this domesticated animal released into the wild, expected to open his own cans of chow all of a sudden. I can’t help but suspect that J.R. knew he was making me reliant on him. The best way to make an animal love you is to make it need you.
Erma opens the door to finally get out and the insides of the car light up. She’s stopped by some thought that has her take the smoke she has ready in her mouth out and then closes the door shut again, bringing back the muddy darkness, and turns to me.
“The light in the kitchen has been out for weeks,” she crows like it’s a fact I should already be aware of. “And Ken left a fridge of beer if you want.”
I don’t want to set foot inside that house, but when you’re old there’s no such thing anymore as asking questions, and in Erma’s foreign language there’s no such word as please. So, “Fine,” I say, and cut the engine.
I follow behind Erma through the front door and knuckle the foyer light switch, but no light comes on.
“And that one too,” Erma says from somewhere in the dark house ahead of me. “Bulbs’re above the fridge.”
Feeling my way along the walls, every bulb in the house is unresponsive, I find out, and flicking the switches I’m just some brain sending signals to a dead heart. “Erma?” I call out, but she only responds by closing a drawer in some room somewhere. The only working light I find is the pimple of a bulb in the fridge, which gives the room only the pathetic sort of light that comes out of a cave when someone’s gone in ahead of you. But it’s enough light for me to make some sense out of the cupboard just above and find out of something like twenty bulbs enough that don’t tinkle with a shake.
Condiments and beer is all Erma has. Having seen enough ketchup and mustard in a day, I take a beer. And a second for the road.
The colour in the kitchen for a second glitches from blue to yellow. The window above the sink stares down on Erma’s Chinese backyard neighbours. There’s a tame party going on out there. The strips of flame they’re responsible for light up the lighter’s face and of course their happy, drunk expression looks evil in that light. They’re down there all laughing about something, that’s for sure, and I can make out the bodies of darting children around the edge of the pool. If this is the spot where Erma snoops and reports to her son of course she assumes the worst, because whatever you’re watching happen always seems more sinister anyway when you’re watching it from a dark place.
I twist in the bulb and feel the first burn of working light on my fingertips.
Pipes
vibrate and grumble from somewhere in the house that’s a tap coming on. Working towards the water sound, I detour back into the foyer and bring light there, poke my head first into a closet and then through the door to the basement, where I screw in fresh light, and then the living room. A silver frost is settled all over the coffee table and in the strands of the carpet, along with an even finer, duller white-grey powder. Scattered over the tables and sticking out of the couch cushions are loser tickets. And ashtrays. Ashtrays overflowing and overflowed, yellow stubs doubled over like people in pain.
The walls in Erma’s house are a dull buttery brown, but not one solid colour. The walls are the uneven, hazy colour of Erma’s fencepost teeth, the colour of Erma’s tired, empty eyes, the colour of her lungs as I see them. Probably these walls were once pristine white, or maybe some cheerier yellow, or at any rate some colour clean and new and they’ve been gradually painted over by years of smoking. Filth gathers so gradually you don’t even notice.
Hanging over the couch there’s the Roberts family, a big wide portrait of them. There’s J.R. with ears sticking out like thumbs wanting a ride and his unruly hair obviously fixed in a rush, probably around the age that he started working at that place. It’s him at the end of his life, when you think about it. Lording over his family there’s newly dead Ken Roberts, looking forward like he’s just recognized the camera guy as someone who’d done him wrong years ago. He’s large and imposing and defeated and smiling because he was told to. J.R. and his dad are smiling, but they’re obviously not happy. Erma’s the one that’s not smiling, sitting there in front of her boy and her man, there with a flowery knotted scarf around her already withered neck, her glasses as thick as if I’m running out of patience with her, Ken and J.R.’s hands resting like dead animals on either of her shoulders. And she has on her face that look of stern, detached pride that people have on their faces when they’re holding up some wound or injury to be photographed. It’s like it doesn’t hurt as much when you’re presenting it as a fact and not a feeling.
With one bulb left I call “Erma?” and get a sustained cough with tears in it back to follow down the hall to the door open there, which is the bedroom. Water’s being run inside, I guess in the connected bathroom, and there’s some porcelainy tinkling on the sink and cabinets being rolled open and shut.
Not wanting to stand up on the bed to change the ceiling fan bulb, I give her light enough to find her smokes in the middle of the night by and change the bedside lamp. The water stops and Erma comes out of the bathroom prepped for bed. Across the bed from me Erma is lit up in her nightgown and underneath the fabric the shadow of her body is in the shape of a woman’s body in the way that those chicken nuggets are in the shapes of what they’re supposed to be.
“That’s the last,” I tell her.
She takes off and folds her glasses and not magnified and now squinting in the light her eyes look like her original eyes have been ripped from their sockets, and these little bulbs there now are the weird, gnarled, staved-in way they healed.
“Then have a lie down,” is what she says.
“Until I fall asleep,” is what she says to me, or what she asks to me.
The weirder things she could be asking me are she could be asking me to take her to the tub and reach with one of those hand loofas the spotty, rotting places that she can’t get to anymore. Or she could be asking me to administer some strange-smelling medicinal vagina cream, or she could be flat out asking me to make love to her like her husband used to. Or she could be with trembling hands pulling a gun from the bedside table’s drawer explaining to me that every night she sits up with the mouth of that thing kissing her forehead goodnight because she came all this way, lived all this way, if only to see what was at the end of the road, and only found a dump of loneliness and rejection and losing lottery tickets where she supposed there would be a park or a lake or at least some nice view. But she’s only asking me to lay down for a few minutes, on top of the covers, no closer to her than we just were in the car.
Except I’m already on the bed when I’m thinking about this, trying to answer for myself why I sat so agreeably down. Why I reached across her to turn out the light.
She sparks a cigarette in the dark and her face lights up and as near as I can tell she takes only a lung full like it’s a last breath before diving to the bottom of a pool, and then she puts the thing in the ashtray to let it burn like a stick of incense.
“I got so used to him,” she whispers after us lying quiet for a while, her voice sounding like it’s coming from in her chest. “I got so used to that fatso taking up all the room. You live long enough,” and she here yawns with the whine of a dog yawning, “You realize that the only thing you can rely on is those goddamn annoying things. They somehow make life… Okay.”
Only she says Okay in her way of agreeing only to get me to stop talking to her, and not Okay like Okay, fine, I think. Ken’s beer’s gone flat enough to drink the rest of the can easy.
One night after work and after 40s for both of us I was lying wasted next to Lorrie in that park where the Canadian Tire is now, us angled towards each other so that only our shoulders touched barely and our heads touched even more barely, and I became aware the way you become aware of things when you’re newly drunk like that that something had to happen right then. It just came to me that if anything was ever going to happen between her and me it would have to be then, and it would have to be nudged into action by me. And what I did was I didn’t do anything. There were these dark things swooping all over the sky and I wondered what sort of bird would be out that late until I realized they were bats, and instead of moving one inch towards her, or reaching out and simply dropping my hand on top of hers, I just watched those bats, listened to their weird chirping. And we lay for like an hour in that moment where something has to happen, we just lay there in that, at least I did, and what I’m realizing now is that who knows where Lorrie’s head and heart was about all that stuff going on between us. Either she was completely into it and that explains why she’s so cold to me now, because I didn’t do anything and she blames my not doing anything for the way her life went, or else she was completely out of it and that explains why she treats me like nothing. Whatever it was, we lay there with that discomfort, and we just got used to it. I got used to the pain of not doing anything because I decided without deciding that the pain of doing something might be more painful. For an hour we were splayed out, and then sure we hung out again still, but never the same way, and then she left, and then she came back. And now I can’t put my finger on the difference between not caring and not being willing to take the lumps that come along with caring.
Breath comes into Erma like the melt of a milkshake being sucked through a straw clogged with still solid milkshake.
“Erma,” I say. And then “Erma” again, to make sure she’s asleep. The smoldering eye of her cigarette burning is the only light in the room.
Leaving her, I go to the fridge for another beer. Out the window the Chinese family have tossed in the towel, and now there are only streamers of reflected patio light waving on the pool’s surface and what’s either a fat cat or a raccoon pawing at those wiggles. Watching the thing work, I empty that second beer and decide on another and then a few more just in case.
Put up on the fridge with a campaign magnet for Pierre Elliott Trudeau there’s a yellowed black and white picture of Erma and Ken standing in some driveway at hardly twenty I bet. Ken is clutching his beefy arm around Erma, who poses for the shot with that same frank look of injury on her face from the family portrait. I want to decide if she was ever attractive so I take the picture off the fridge for a closer peek. Where the magnet was there’s a perfect, full white sun high in the tea-stained sky and where the picture had been is a perfect white square on the fridge. The fridge is the colour of phlegm spat up by someone who’s smoked their whole life, and right in the middle of it is this clean, untouched plot of
healthy white.
I go and from over the couch I lift the Roberts family off their hook, which is like pulling the blinds or parting the curtains or lifting the flag and letting the day in because underneath the picture is this long rectangle of bright new wallpaper like a picture window. Here’s the same coral colour that J.R. must have lived in as a boy, that got murky and dull along with him as he grew older. And somehow the light I let in through this window shines on how filthy Erma’s living room is, like daylight will show the dust over everything, and the screen of mote always in the air, and the texture of grime over everything.
In the light of that day, and with whatever buzz of the beer I’ve already drank, I start to tidy up the living room, the mess so obvious now it’s impossible to just leave. Mostly this cleaning up is just gathering up all the butts and pitching them and collecting all of Erma’s loser cards. Opening another beer, I sit down on the couch with that stack of all different games, and with a dime double-check Erma’s work. And I think about going through the whole house with this dime, scratching at the walls with it. Erma’s missed boxes on every card, and while not all of these reveal a win some of them do, and by the dregs of the last of who knows how many of dead Ken’s beers I’ve killed I’ve won Erma sixty dollars. Not exactly enough for her to retire from the fast food industry, not exactly enough to escape that Place, but nothing to wag a stick at.
At this point too wasted to drive home, I try to pass out on the couch. When that doesn’t take, I stumble back to where I left Erma. Behind me as I go I turn out all the lights.
I’d say Erma looks dead, only I’ve never seen a dead thing to compare to how Erma looks lying in the bed. She looks unoccupied—no lights on inside. From the racket of her breathing, though, I can say for sure that she’s not at all dead. Standing in the doorway, considering the big empty spot beside her, I listen to her painful-sounding shallow gurgle. As horrible as it all sounds, it at least lets me know that she’s still alive, which is something.
