Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

  She’s marking time, Joe thinks, waiting for this to blow over, as though what’s happened to them is only temporary and not a life sentence. He thinks to tell Pete to pull over so he can let her know where he’s going.

  “How do you think I lost my teeth?” Pete asks.

  “What?”

  “My teeth. How do you think I lost them? My old man, that’s how. He winds up and plows me one. I was eighteen years old, right? He still thinks he can push me around. Chips my teeth. I showed him. I took the money he gave me to get them fixed and had the dentist yank them out. He’s never laid a hand on me since.”

  Joe watches in the side mirror as Laurie and the city fall away behind him.

  There’s a pay phone near a row of shopping carts just inside the door to Home Depot, and when Pete heads into the store, Joe calls out that he will catch up with him.

  He pecks out the information number for Manitoba, asks for the liquor store, then clenches the receiver under his chin while he fishes for change in his pocket and pools it on the metal shelf below the phone. He wants to reserve what time is left on his cell in case Alfred calls after the X-ray, in the event that he’s unable to buy more time before calling Deere Lodge in the evening.

  The phone rings as he looks out across the parking lot through the tinted windows, the sky darker than it really is, the sun a splotch of putty behind the clouds. He thinks of the brutality of Pete’s father. He’s heard similar stories, knows how lucky he’s been.

  When a clerk answers the telephone, Joe tells him what he wants and where to send it and then gives him his credit card information.

  A moment later the clerk says, “It looks as though you’ve exceeded your limit. Do you want to use another card?”

  Laurie, Joe thinks. The clothes, the hair, the flowers. Laurie, Laurie, Laurie.

  Pete stands just inside the Home Depot waiting for Joe, hands on his hips. You idiot, Joe says, and when he slams the receiver into its cradle it falls out and dangles round his knees. Again he slams it into place, and again it falls. He picks it up and smashes it against the number panel. Idiot, he says to Pete waiting beyond the doors, to himself, to Laurie going off down the street.

  Three

  LAURIE CAN’T HELP BUT BE ELATED by the growing brightness of the morning, the way Albert Street, wet with melted frost, mirrors the traffic, and daylight convulses like a heartbeat between the passing vehicles. Yes, she says to that pulsing of light, the music playing on her iPod, and the residue of Joe’s angry departure vanishes.

  As long as she says yes she’s moving forward, bringing Joe’s lunch to him, and not backward to their old house on Arlington Street, to the six months paid in advance at Curves, to her little blue Zoom Zoom hanging off the back of a tow truck. She isn’t without hope as she imagines that somehow, in the near future, their life will continue to be, more or less, what it’s been for the past eighteen years. She’s not someone who wants much, she only wants enough. Enough not to have to worry, or think twice before spending money. Enough.

  Across Albert Street the buildings lined up in a row leap forward in their wet vividness, colours vibrant and primary like plastic pieces on a Monopoly board. The jittery movement of light, the gleaming sprawling city, are a backdrop to Van Morrison playing on her iPod, achy, melancholy, as though he’s underground and calling out to be rescued from his past.

  She thinks of Van Morrison, a small man in a grey fedora emerging from the dark at the back of the stage into the spotlight at the concert she and Joe had attended only weeks ago. How he became a large man the instant he opened his mouth and sang. The air was thick with the smell of weed and musk, and she remembers Joe’s arm touching hers, his thigh, his body humming. I’m seeding the economy, maybe we’ll get a return, she’d joked when Joe had voiced concern over the expense of the tickets. She felt vindicated when he gave himself over to the music.

  Lost now in the soundtrack in her head, she sees herself and Joe going arm in arm along the street after the concert as though they aren’t hanging on by their fingernails to a life that’s made them thick around the middle, as though they aren’t down to their last real dollar. Morrison’s songs seem to begin midstream and go on in a way that suggests they may never end. But of course every song has an end, and the concert ended as abruptly as it began, only this time with Van Morrison exiting into the dark at the back of the stage while the band played on. What a way to go, Joe says, as though Morrison has died and not just left the building. A bloody feast, Joe says, struggling to describe the effect of the music on him.

  Two children on bicycles sweep past her and she pulls out the ear buds to let the brisk little city inside. In bringing Joe’s lunch to him she hopes to restore the truce that bound them for moments earlier in the morning. Did you write these down in the book too? After she drops his lunch off at Canadian Tire she plans to continue on downtown where she’ll find the bronze buffalo in an open square, and in a street near the square, the flock of stone geese. Just keep going toward the towers, the woman at the information centre in the mall had said, which this morning are a dull patina of light against the clouded grey skyline.

  When she and Joe were approaching on the Trans-Canada Highway, Laurie had seen how Regina seemed to rise up from the earth as though it’d been summoned. From the highway, at sunset, the twin green glass towers are like beacons of fire and during the day like columns of lead crystal. She passes a strip mall featuring a cheque-cashing establishment, a tanning salon, and a pet supply store whose portable sign advertises in Day-Glo letters a sale of authentic Saskatchewan homemade dog biscuits. In another strip mall the Western Baptist Union office shares one wall with a pizza takeout and the other with Oral Arts, which proves to be a denture clinic. Beside the clinic there’s a tobacco and pipe store.

  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the variety of services being offered in such close proximity to one another, although she allows that pipe smokers are usually older people, as are denture wearers, and for that matter, people who might have business at the Baptist Union would be older too. Perhaps she’ll find more than the usual farther down Albert Street, beyond the man-made lake, downtown among the life-size statues of the buffalo and the stone geese.

  When she enters the parking lot at Canadian Tire she sees the manager unlocking the gate to the garden centre.

  “Where’s Joe?” she asks.

  “You tell me,” the manager replies.

  “He hasn’t come in?” In all the years they’ve been married, any unforeseen absences on Joe’s part have always been benign. Her friends have envied her Joe’s steadiness, his thoughtfulness. Until recently, nothing about Joe has given her cause for alarm.

  The manager takes in Laurie’s expression and offers her a crumb. “I was late getting in this morning, so maybe he was here and left. Could be he’s across the street at Robin’s. I’ll bet you a donut Pete’s there too. If they are, why don’t you tell them it’s time to get shaking and baking.”

  “Will do,” Laurie says.

  She waits for a break in the traffic then jogs across Albert Street. The door to Robin’s swings closed behind her and she knows instantly Joe isn’t among the people lingering over coffee.

  “I’ll bet you’re looking for someone,” a huge man calls out from a table near the back of the room, peering in her direction overtop his glasses. In comparison to his body, his face looks inordinately childlike. “Dark hair, about six feet tall, a good-looking fella? He’s wearing a black leather jacket with a crest on the back. Wildcats. Right?”

  Honing his skills for Crime Stoppers. “That’ll be him,” Laurie says.

  “He and Pete just left,” the thin-faced woman behind the counter calls out, her sharp nose made even sharper by the visor she wears.

  “About fifteen, twenty minutes ago,” the other waitress chimes in.

  “Less than that,” the thin-faced woman corrects.

  “Well, pardon me. I’m just the one wearing the watch,” the
waitress says, and resumes unloading a tray of donuts onto the rack of shelves.

  The thin-faced woman grins at Laurie and jerks her head in the direction of the other woman. “PMS. Watch what you say. Cheri, here, keeps a chainsaw in the back.”

  “Ever funny,” the other waitress says.

  “They went to look at a job,” the fat man calls out.

  “Pete’s always got some scheme going,” the thin-faced woman says with what sounds like exasperated affection.

  “Did they say where?” Laurie asks.

  “Nope,” the man says.

  “He’s my husband. Joe,” Laurie says, sensing that he wants something from her before he’ll give her more.

  He takes a large handkerchief from his pocket and wipes perspiration from his face before stuffing it back, the entire production striking her as a means to keep her waiting. “This place is Pete’s office. If I know him, he’ll be back sooner or later. You want me to tell your husband you’re looking for him?” he asks.

  “If you don’t mind, just tell him I was here.”

  Laurie leaves the donut shop feeling optimistic, and drops the rather soggy bag of sandwiches into the trash can at the side of the door. Joe wouldn’t have gone with Pete if he wasn’t on to something more lucrative than Canadian Tire. She takes in the Help Wanted sign taped to the window. Judging from the faded look of it, it’s been posted for a while. Everywhere she goes in this city, there seems to be Help Wanted notices. Opportunities.

  She hesitates, debates whether to return to the Meridian in the event Joe might stop by. On the boulevard, a row of newly planted trees are tethered to the ground as though to prevent them from flying away, the spindly branches knobby and greening with unfolding buds.

  She’ll still go downtown, she decides, go and see the buffalo beside the glass towers. And near the towers is a park and a coffee shop, a place called Roca Jack’s where the coffee is just as complicated but cheaper than Starbucks, the woman at the information centre said, a woman who seemed to take a single question as an opportunity to start up a lifelong friendship.

  Within moments she comes upon yet another strip mall and beside it, a store whose windows are filled with several mannequins. Clara’s Boutique, the sign above the entrance says in flourishingly pink script. At last, something worth stopping for. She sees herself in the door as she approaches, her tall beige and brown figure, strands of bright copper hair that have pulled loose from the alligator clip being lifted and twitched about by the wind, the ring of keys swaying between her breasts. Like a house on fire, she thinks, recalling Alfred’s description of her. Next to New Fashions, a smaller sign in the window informs her.

  She doesn’t expect to find anything of interest in a secondhand shop, but she has all day, and curiosity compels her to investigate. She’s reassured by the bulging heaviness of the knotted sock in her side pocket, which holds the cache of garage sale change, her copy of Joe’s credit card, the roll of bills fastened with an elastic band, a lipstick.

  A brass bell tinkles as she enters the brightly lit store, and the young clerk, hanging clothing on a rack, glances up at her. The skirt of her iridescent blue dress is made of strips of fabric that sway around her legs when she moves. Like in a car wash, Laurie thinks, and notes her sixties-era yellow and blue platform shoes. She’s almost certain she won’t find anything here.

  Several women chat among themselves over a rack of dresses; one of them exclaims loudly as she holds up a garment and the others rush over to her. “The wrong colour green for me?” she asks.

  “You won’t really know until you try it on,” the youngest of the three women says with some authority, a small-breasted woman with narrow hips.

  “Right,” the woman with the dress concurs.

  They’re dressed in a mishmash of styles from various decades. Three generations, Laurie decides. Grandmother, a grey-haired woman wearing stylish red-framed glasses, mom holding the green dress, and her daughter, all heading to the back of the store and the corridor to the dressing rooms.

  Nice. She’s never had the experience of going shopping with her mother, and over the years she’s vacillated between thinking she has missed something vital or nothing of consequence.

  Laurie comes upon a white jean jacket, and soon after that a black linen bolero that could have been made for the sundress she’d bought the day before. She takes both garments to the three-sided mirror at the back, slips out of her sweat jacket and tries them on. The colourful and well-ordered store opens up behind her, the mannequins in the windows facing the street as though guarding the entrance.

  The three women emerge from the dressing rooms, the oldest stopping to look at Laurie’s reflection in the mirror.

  “It’s perfect,” she says.

  “I don’t usually wear white,” Laurie demurs, thinking that at least someone in this city has style. The jacket is cut in panels and trims her waist, accentuates the curve of her back.

  “But that’s such a warm white. You look great,” the woman says and goes away to join the others.

  Liar, Laurie thinks, but she keeps the jacket and the bolero over her arm as she wanders among the racks. This place is nothing like the dingy, jam-packed used clothing store she and her grandmother frequented, a sour-smelling place. The real bargains, her grandmother said, were to be found in the barrels, among a tangle of assorted items that were often torn and mismatched.

  At the shoe racks she comes upon a single brocaded black flat with a rounded toe, and looks for its mate. When she finds it on a rack behind the counter, along with the mates to all the other shoes, she’s surprised that a secondhand shop would need to protect itself against shoplifting. She calls to the young clerk to bring her the other shoe, and immediately the three women are interested. The clerk comes toward her, and Laurie notes the yellow silk flower pinned to her dress, the too earnest attempt to try and pull her outfit together. The three women watch as Laurie strips off her running shoes and socks and slips into the shoes. A perfect fit.

  “Awesome. How did I miss those?” the daughter moans.

  “You want to try them on?” Laurie asks and takes off the flats, slides them toward the young woman with her foot.

  “Oh, I want these,” she says after she has them on and does a short tap dance that makes them all laugh.

  “They’re yours,” Laurie says with only a twinge of regret. She would have worn them with rolled-down white socks and a short skirt.

  The door opens now and several women enter the store, one carrying a garbage bag of clothes she unpacks on the counter. The three women go over to see what she’s brought, while Laurie sees the sign, REDUCED, 50 PERCENT, hanging from a rack of sweaters, and goes over to browse.

  “Check this out, it just came in.” The tap dancer rushes toward Laurie holding up a leopard pattern knit dress.

  Holy. Shades of Maryanne Lewis, the pastor’s wife. “Does it come with a matching pillbox hat? Never mind,” Laurie adds with a laugh when the young woman looks puzzled.

  “I’ll bet it’d look great on you. Why not try it on?”

  “No thanks,” Laurie says too quickly and adds, “but thanks, anyway.”

  She continues browsing among the sweaters, remembering Maryanne Lewis in the leopard-spotted suit and pillbox hat, stationed at the church entrance greeting parishioners on one of those rare occasions when Laurie let Joe talk her into going. Maryanne in a zebra-striped sheath dress conducting the children’s choir. For a time Joe kept a photograph in his meditation book as a marker. A picture of himself as a boy, holding up a Bible he’d won in a Sunday school contest. Maryanne is at his side, in a faux wolf vest and pencil skirt, plastic daisies clipped in her platinum hair, her arm about his shoulder.

  That woman didn’t resemble the person Joe used to go on about, the pastor’s wife who had slaved away in the church basement teaching young women to sew. While with the other hand, apparently, she baked half a dozen or so loaves of bread to send home with them. He and Pastor Ken would
launder the clothes that piled up in boxes and bags on the church steps, while Maryanne ironed and patched, the clothing destined for the drawers and closets of families known to be less fortunate than most. Maryanne had gone knocking on doors for donations of rice and raisins, sardines and flannel blankets. She’d raised a tractor-trailer load of care packages that she and a committee of women assembled and shipped to World Vision for their orphanages in Vietnam; and when Saigon fell, she organized an ecumenical city-wide day of prayer for the safety of the children.

  Laurie grew to dread picking up the telephone and hearing the woman’s jelly bean voice. She would call to remind Joe of a church meeting, and then again, if he’d happened to miss it. Why don’t you tell her you got tangled up in my pyjamas? Which, on the occasional Sunday morning when Laurie brought breakfast to bed, was what did happen—a leisurely, long sex-saturated morning, the clock radio turned up to cover the sounds of their lovemaking. After the Lewises left Winnipeg, the calls continued for a time, but less frequently—praise the Lord, as the pastor was forever saying—and then stopped. Their contact with Joe had been severed, or so she thought. Something good is going to happen for Joe. Of course, Maryanne’s prediction hadn’t included her.

  Her cheeks are hot, her legs shaky from trying on clothes in the cramped cubicle in the corridor of cubicles, the doorways hung with brightly printed curtains. The usual moans are coming from behind the curtains, the exclamations, the disconcerting heavy sighs. The tap dancer has ventured out from her refuge to preen in the three-sided mirror, and as Laurie emerges from hers the young woman looks at her as though expecting a compliment or a least an envious glance. That trim figure is not going to last long, Laurie tells her silently.

  At the counter she unknots the sock and spills her loose change, feeling that in purchasing second-hand merchandise she is doing penance for what she spent the day before. She unrolls the bills and realizes that she’s not going to be able to buy everything. She decides between two sweaters and sets one, and a black tulip skirt, aside.