And the steady, heavy, greasy grief had oozed out of her as she tried to turn the warm water tap for some sort of relief. She had used the little cream-coloured waxy rectangle on her face. Wiser women knew not to do that but there were never wiser woman around to advise Olive when she most needed advising. So she had hard lathered bar soap directly onto her face, which only made her feel worse off, and so gave up in a panic because she had to get out of there before they came back.
Olive ran out of that hotel room without her mittens like so many kittens before her.
Olive’s abandoned attempt at recovery had resulted in the opposite effect, which was glaringly visible as she walked finally forward into the dingy lobby where the overhead lighting magnified the rubbed raw nature of her cheeks. Her puffy eyes had been scoured of makeup but there remained residual lines that would not come free.
Crying lines are always the last to let go.
And Damian wanted her to leave. Just go home. Anywhere. Not here.
That’s all he could think. He wanted desperately for this little woman (girl?) walking out of the hotel to definitely definitely not tell him what happened to her. He did not want to know that. Damian could always claim to have not noticed her leaving if she did not direct address him, and so he had kept his head down fixed hypnotically on his tiny black mirror as Jimmy Carr made quips about not paying taxes.
Oh how absolutely droll for the oft-praised, openly applauded, previously charmed to shirk tossing a few coppers into the poor pot. Funny stuff indeed.
And Damian knew there was something foul in that but also knew his most favoured comedy men (and the occasional woman) had their feet lit at Cambridge. There was nothing particularly hardscrabble about it and they all had a great laugh at their agreeable good fortune. Goddamn it though, they were clever. Damian could have proceeded admiring their aptitude for satire if only he had not looked up as Olive passed by the desk.
What had made him look up? Curiosity? Guilt? Sheer stupidity? But it had been something about her gait that he could detect even while pretend-focused on his phone.
She was teetering.
Human instinct made Damian look toward a person perceived to be falling.
And then there was something about her tights. He could not look away from them. They were incorrect. They were inconsistently coloured. Stained on the inside which was not typical for stains. And try as he might to override all his wiring, Damian watched Olive make her wobbled way toward the glass door. He could not help it. Perhaps it was all those years with a sister. Or growing up gay. Perhaps it was feeling evermore vulnerable. Some coddled combination. Whatever the reason, Damian could not sober look away for fear she would collapse. And as he looked on, the brain in his head did what brains do and took in the qualities of the stain, noticed the red that was a darker drying red reaching down the inside of her thin thighs.
The sight of her would be indiscernible on the other side of the automatic sliding doors.
No one would be able to tell from where she sat in a cab or, god forbid, the side of the street if she had to in fact walk to her destination. Which she did of course. Of course she walked home. Roger said he was going to pay her for the time she had unknowingly agreed to provide. But he didn’t because he didn’t have enough cash on him just then. He was going to, though. This is a sticking point he would get stuck on for the rest of his life. Roger was going to pay her but he forgot. But he was going to because she sometimes was paid for sex, wasn’t she? That’s what Calv had led him to believe, and Roger was certain that this information pardoned him. He was going to pay her. Was going to but didn’t.
Would Olive taking his money make this more or less worse?
Regardless, there was no money for Olive to agonize over, and so she walked home after having spent the last of her dollar dollar bills on these sad tights. The street lights would not downcast enough light for random passersby to see the ruination of them. Damian knew, as Olive knew, that the cameras wouldn’t really spot the stains and thus there would be no kind of proof. It was just the moment passing between the two of them that they would have to contend with later.
This moment was a pivot.
Olive, familiar with the feeling of men’s eyes on her backside, knew the hotel clerk was seeing how her holiday tights clung but chose not to acknowledge. She knew well the feeling of a man’s gaze desperately hoping she would not look up to meet it. So Olive just walked across the shiny floor reflecting the overhead ceiling lights she counted to track her progress. She caught a slight glimpse of herself in the golden arch of a baggage cart as she neared the door, and her reflection’s ghastly nature moved her forward faster out of the hotel where she had awoken forty minutes earlier.
A quick cry. A gathering. And then an escape.
She didn’t even have to look for her tights because they were still hanging from her foot.
And she had pulled herself into them like packing a bloody sausage into its casing. Damian would not, could not know that Olive could, would feel those parts grow cold as she walked the whole way home like leftovers tossed in the freezer. He would not, could not know that she could, would eventually run a putrid bath in her dirty tub to soak in fully clothed. Damian would not, could not know that Olive could, would fall asleep in that tub water until waking to find herself in an even colder position. That, without thought of mind, she could, would pull everything from the back of the bathroom door down into the tub with her. Used towels. A sweatshirt. A handed down robe. The lightest pink bra, a gift from a fading Iris, even her old belt.
Olive would pull it all down into the cold water bath with her and attempt to cocoon herself in some kind of comfort only to wake again hours later colder still. There was never enough hot water. Not enough hot water in the world. And Olive would pickle in this wet mix while watching a fat earwig make its way onto first her foot and then her leg.
Once upon a time, Olive would have gasped at the magnitude of it. Crushed it under a wad of toilet tissue before dropping it in the bowl. Though, that day, because it was the day when she awoke in a mushy tub, she just watched it crawl over her, thinking it was full up with baby earwigs that would perhaps flood free and wiggle into the holes of her not yet sealed up parts. And she thought on worse things that could get inside while witnessing the plump shiny candelabra bug move off her arm back onto the tub’s lip. Perhaps it could sense she was not an ideal place for a pincer princess to burrow. It went behind the cheap tub kit to born its brood.
Olive wished she could crawl in behind the tub kit, too.
* * *
Damian would never, could never know the worst of it so he would never, could never tell these parts to Tom.
The only parts he would tell, could tell Tom were the parts he knew for sure and that was parts enough. Because Tom would not, could not believe Damian let that girl walk out of there without trying to help her.
Didn’t even ask if she was okay. Didn’t even call her a cab.
Instead, Damian had gone drinking after his shift ended without even a text. Had shown up the next morning ranting unintelligibly about some girl in bloody tights.
Though Damian was quick to defend himself because he was taught, long before he understood the implication, to perpetually feel deservedly under attack. When bombs rained from the sky to destroy the little life comforts Damian had constructed for himself, he knew that these bombs were made special for him. The stocked artillery that floated in the acid cloud above him became apparent to him long before his vocabulary could produce retorts.
Damian knew he was made wrong before his father
confirmed it. He knew he was a loser before any girl, and then any guy, chose not to talk to him. There was not one single moment that he could pinpoint to attribute this knowledge. When he searched through his recess, he only found an elementary generalized understanding of self-disgust.
The games he liked on Nintendo were the same as his little sister and that was not normal.
This notion of normal was readily adhered to by his normal mother who would go on to steal thousands of normal dollars from her normal job.
Dot had prided herself as ordinary. Upstanding in all aspects of her womanhood. Even when her husband left, especially then, she storyboarded her reaction as normal. It set her apart from her horrible ex-husband and his much too young new wife who were for sure abnormal. Dot needed so desperately for that to be true. It kept her in her life. She insisted that Anthony was exceptionally deceitful because to suppose that he was in fact the normal one and that these situations were actually ordinary was more than she could bear.
It belittled Dot’s experience. It dismissed her heartache. And it suggested it could happen to her again and again. So she sketched out a villain in her ex-husband who also happened to be Damian’s father.
It was not hard. Tony was sort of a dickhead.
Not to his second family. He was very present in the lives of his younger daughters, which totally supported Dot’s case because he was not at all present in her children’s lives. Dot could not accept that this was how it was, she reviled Tony endlessly for the rest of her life. Every time her children received Christmas presents at Easter, she reiterated the same sorry story about his exceptional idiocy. Her friends thought her exceptionally bitter. Her friends’ husbands said she needed a good screw. Dot was not a popular character but she characterized her reaction, even to this, as very innately normal. While half of people were preoccupied with adding an extra to their ordinary, Dot was passing out her regular card like someone simply obsessed.
Nothing to see here.
But theft and fraud over five thousand is the same as theft and fraud over five hundred thousand.
That’s what was printed constantly in the press coverage, alongside the information regarding the charges and then the court case and then the sentence and now incarceration. Over five thousand. They never said under ten thousand because that would make the bad guy in the tale less bad. Namely Dot. The satisfaction felt by all for nabbing a thief would be diluted if they knew she in fact stole so little. Not even enough to purchase herself a proper car. Dot still drove the same ageing beige Camry.
Damian’s mother was found guilty, because of course she was found guilty, because she was guilty, of forging documents and breach of trust. Selling fictional family homes to fantasy families. This was Dot’s great skill. Creating imaginary standard families with reasonable incomes purchasing starter homes at probable prices in banal centre city neighbourhoods all along the downtown fringe. Nothing fantastical to see here. Nothing that would alarm the underwriters in Toronto. Two working parents, teachers, nurses, two kids, preferably school-aged to allow for more income, one car, four-door Civic was good, believable, etc., etc., until the turnaround and a real family could be found. Dot had no intention of a full fake out. That would be wrong. This was just a grift grafted on her by her wealthy boss who lived in a house designed specific by an architect from Nova Scotia who designed similar houses up and down the coast of New England.
Not old England. New England. America: home of greatest grift. Wall Street.
This all trickled down to Dot when her boss suggested she could do better.
St. John’s was a housing market mecca for the housing market mecca makers and they went with the inflate like marketers after politicians. There was a feeding frenzy like something off Discovery. Everyone watching the rapture coming like it was written by a staff writer rather than the real actual housing market eating its own tail. Dot was not even really playing. She was barely participating at all. Kings were building kingdoms in wetlands up the hill. Dot was not imperial. She was just pre-empting the truth. A little advance sale here to cover the waps on the weekend. It was that or staying home. And home was so quiet.
Melanie and Damian were grown up and gone and set on never returning.
Dot watched programs on Hidden Homes in Wales and Latina virgins. It was all a lot of hooey to pass the time. She gave up on cleanliness as there was no one to admire it. Sometimes she put dirty dishes in the oven and forgot them until they smelt foul. Dot’s own mother would have been appalled but Dot’s own mother was dead. She had never lived alone. Dot’s mother had lived with Dot’s father and then Dot’s aunt and then thankfully died.
Dot did not like eating every meal on her lonesome but she preferred it to the prospect of eating with her own mother, who had continuously wondered aloud why Tony had left.
Dot was glad she died.
It was painless. In her sleep after complaining of indigestion. Dot hoped to go before collections caught up to her, though debtors’ prison was not the one that got her in the end. Dot has since realized all prisons are debtors’ prisons full up with people who found themselves insufficient. Before this move toward bankruptcy, Dot been had blissfully unaware. She did not know who would pay for stuff after her death and did not care. No one talked to her. Melanie was always claiming to be depressed which was a popular excuse for women her age. And Damian was gay.
So Dot gambled. She didn’t decide to gamble. Not really. It just sort of happened that way.
One Sunday she was at Shoppers Drug Mart during the supper hour. She was buying stamps. The post service was not even open and she did not even need them. But it was something to be at. It was a thing to report on Monday. When her co-workers asked her how she spent her weekend, Dot would say running errands and it would be true. Not like when she said running errands when really she had been looking through old photo albums and not getting dressed for two days. When everyone was delighted about hunkering down for a storm with a bag of potato chips, Dot pretended she too was anticipating this event rather than admit that every day was storm chip day. Or just chip day. Or just eating.
So she sometimes made up arbitrary errands to fill the time and ward off her never-ceasing boredom. Going to the pharmacy during Sunday supper started like that: an excuse to get out of the house. Dot knew most people were having family dinner, half napping on sofas, packing school lunches for the week. She knew this because she had lived this, but that was not her life anymore. Browsing or having a little shop was something Dot did to kill time. Her daughter despised it. Would bark that Costco was not a place to go unintentionally or without purpose. But Dot ignored Melanie’s insistence she get a hobby or Damian chastising about unnecessary clutter. Her children did not know what she needed or enjoyed.
And besides, Dot loved pharmacies. Especially the ones in Bay Roberts or Carbonear. Everything was cheaper out there. Bay women would never pay tag price for a lipstick when they could wait and get it half off later on. The Shoppers in town were not as good but still better than her living room on a Sunday.
Dot didn’t expect it to be full of people at that hour. That came as a surprise.
She had started going to this Shoppers by a set of lights and then another one on a big road. They were full of people on Sundays, whole families getting their court-appointed serving of suboxone which everyone now agreed was superior to methadone.
Methadone was yesterday’s answer to Capitalism.
It was at Shoppers that Dot had first observed the women her age buying tickets. A swarm of tickets. All brightly coloured and glossy like bridal
magazines she would never need buy because Melanie was dreary and Damian was, well, gay.
And Dot knew men could marry men but even if Damian ever found a man to marry, he would not need bridal magazines cause he would already know all about all of that because he was, well, gay. Dot had watched the women scratch their games the first few weeks. She stood holding discount nail polish or nuts or stamps. Dot liked to buy stamps. They felt like a normal thing to buy.
Dot would stand there empty-handed staring at the stamps in the same case as the tickets, and soon she was staring at the tickets because the moms and grannies had time to spare too. They were waiting on the rest of their crowd to get their medicine before they all got into a cab to travel a distance Dot would never travel in a cab. Dot had at first been greatly annoyed with the scratchy women until that annoyance turned into admiration. They made everyone wait. They made the whole place wait on them. Perhaps the only time they could extend such control. So Dot tried it. And then she tried it every time. And then she went there on purpose to do so. She would never see anyone she knew. And she always bought stamps as cover.
But then the need grew as needs do and Dot needed something more.
Dot needed to take up more space than just counter space.
Which was how she was delivered to those machines.
This was the other tidbit the press insisted on including in every article discussing the fiasco. Not that Dot had been a volunteer Girl Guide leader for the better part of her life. Or that she walked shelter dogs on the weekends. They neglected to include her love of musical theatre and her annual monetary donation to the Food Sharing Association. Not one reporter thought it appropriate to report why she had felt the need to embezzle money to support a recreational habit recently discovered in a checkout line. Or to ask after her plans upon release for recovery.
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club Page 26
