Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  Ten minutes later Morley and Susan were in the kitchen.

  “Are you still married to the dentist?” asked Morley. She was fixing coffee.

  “Orthodontist,” said Susan.

  “Bruce,” said Morley.

  “Brian,” said Susan.

  That’s right. Brian.

  Susan had begun dating Brian at the end of their graduating year. It was coming back. He was an athlete. Football? Or swim team? Almost went to the Olympics. Or something. Morley couldn’t remember his face. She tried, but all that came back was the vague smell of chlorine.

  “The swimmer,” ventured Morley. “Right?”

  “Diver,” said Susan. “He almost went to the Olympics.”

  “Right,” said Morley.

  Susan was fiddling with her wedding ring. Taking it off, putting it on. Twisting it around and around. Morley took a sip of her coffee and remembered the rainy Saturday afternoon the two of them had sat on the floor in Susan’s bedroom with Susan’s monumental collection of bridal magazines piled around them. They had spent the afternoon designing their ultimate wedding. Morley thought they were goofing around, until she realized that Susan was serious—Susan was making plans.

  Upstairs, Sam was sitting on his bed, watching Matthew unpack. He stared with fascination as Matthew lined his toiletries in order, by height, along the window ledge: a bottle of vitamins, a bottle of Tommy Hilfiger cologne, plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner, a hairbrush, a toothbrush. When Matthew was satisfied with the way they looked, he turned his attention to his clothes, which he arranged in the corner on the floor as carefully as if he were arranging a window display for a fancy men’s store—an island of calm amid the storm of Sam’s bedroom.

  When he was finished, he stood up and smiled at Sam. “That feels better,” he said. Then he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a thick blue binder with the Junior Achiever crest stamped on the cover.

  “Do you want to see my business plan?” he asked.

  Next door, Jennifer was sitting on Stephanie’s bed, watching Stephanie root through a pile of clothes, a pile on the floor of her bedroom that began at the door and was almost level with the mattress by the time it reached her bed. Stephanie was looking for lip gloss.

  “I know it’s here somewhere,” she said.

  “Don’t you have to make your bed in the morning?” asked Jennifer, looking around the room with what was clearly admiration.

  “What?” said Stephanie. She was peering with satisfaction at a CD that had dropped out of a handful of dirty laundry.

  “I’ve been looking for this for weeks,” she said.

  Downstairs, Dave was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper when something distracted him. He looked up, not sure what was tugging at his attention. Then he frowned. It was perfume. He turned and there was Matthew, standing not three feet away, staring at the back of his head. Or was it the paper? He was staring at the paper.

  “Would you like some of the paper?” asked Dave.

  “Could I please look at the business section?” asked Matthew.

  This must be what small towns are like, thought Morley later, as the kids arrived in pairs for dinner—everyone struggling to fit around the too-small kitchen table, Dave helping her carry dishes back and forth from the stove. She was happy. There is something lovely about seeing your children paired up with the children of your old friends. The chaos reminded her of dinners at the Bird House.

  Halfway through the first course, Matthew put down his knife and fork, looked around and said, “These are delicious mashed potatoes.”

  Morley caught Sam rolling his eyes at Stephanie.

  She threw him daggers. Then she smiled at Matthew.

  “Thank you, Matthew,” she said.

  Morley had, during the three brief hours since they arrived, become painfully aware that there was a chasm separating her children and Susan’s children. Susan’s children, it would seem, had manners, as if they had been raised by humans. Sam and Stephanie, on the other hand, seemed to have been raised by wolves. Look at them, thought Morley, slouched in front of their plates, smacking and snorting, wiping their greasy paws on their fur.

  Later that night when they are alone in their bedroom Dave will shake his head and say, “That is one weird kid.”

  He’ll be talking about Matthew.

  “I don’t think he even liked those mashed potatoes,” Dave will say. “He didn’t even finish his mashed potatoes.”

  “Those were manners, Dave,” Morley will say. “In case you didn’t notice.”

  “‘These are delicious mashed potatoes.’ Jeez! Come on, Morley. It’s the sort of thing you’d do if you were eating dinner at your boss’s house. He’s twelve. He’s twelve years old.” He will almost tell Morley about Matthew’s business card, but before he does, he will notice the way she is looking at him, and he won’t say any more.

  But that is later . . .

  Now they are still at the table . . . eating.

  And in that moment after Matthew had said, “These are delicious mashed potatoes,” and Morley had frowned at Sam because he was rolling his eyes at Stephanie, a silence settled on the dinner table. All you could hear was the rattle of cutlery, as if everyone was enjoying the potatoes.

  But the silence lasted a beat too long and abruptly deepened and became a tomb-like silence, so no one was listening to the cutlery anymore but to the silence itself—a silence that was spiralling deeper by the second. Morley was desperately trying to think of something to say, something to get them out of the silence before it was too late, imploring Dave with her eyes for help. Say something!

  Everyone was thinking the same thing now—the whole table bound together in silent agony, everyone struggling against the surface viscosity of the silence, like a table full of water bugs squirting around a dark pond, like a table of slow-motion scuba divers floating away on a deadly current of silence.

  It was finally Sam who put down his cutlery with a flourish. And everyone thought, Thank God, turning and looking at him with relief and expectation and great hope.

  Sam smiled at them all and said, “You know what really pisses me off? ”

  Morley saw Susan clutch her knife and fork, and watched her check her children’s reactions: Matthew, his brow furrowed—puzzled; Jennifer staring at Sam with a mixture of awe, respect, disbelief . . . and ohmigod . . . approval!

  Not twenty minutes later, just when she thought things couldn’t get worse, Morley caught Susan frowning at the floor by the stove. Morley followed her eyes to the crack between the stove and the kitchen counter and saw what had caught Susan’s attention, a forgotten Roach Motel, lying there like a pile of dirty laundry.

  An hour later Morley came into the kitchen to fill her coffee cup and Susan was wiping the counter with a sponge. Susan looked up and smiled self-consciously.

  “I was just wiping the counter,” she said unnecessarily.

  They both stared at the sponge awkwardly and then back at each other. Both remembering that twenty-five years ago, when they lived together, everyone always knew Susan was upset when she began to clean compulsively.

  The next night Stephanie came bouncing down the stairs when she was called to dinner, but there was no Jennifer.

  “Where’s Jennifer?” asked Morley.

  “I lent her one of my tops,” said Stephanie. “She’s getting changed.”

  When Jennifer came downstairs she was wearing Stephanie’s yellow lip gloss and a matching yellow halter top. She dropped into her seat and arched her back coyly, which made the tank top inch up her midriff, exposing her navel.

  No one said anything.

  Jennifer picked up her fork, looked around the silent table and said, “You know what really pisses me off ?”

  Susan picked up a napkin and started to polish her spoon.

  After dinner Morley walked into the kitchen, and Susan was standing by the sink with her hands behind her back. Morley pretended not to see the can of cleans
er Susan was hiding. She had been washing the table.

  Susan left the next afternoon. Two days early.

  “I decided we should visit their grandparents for a few days,” said Susan.

  They both knew that wasn’t true. Oh, they were going to stay with their grandparents, all right. But not because Susan thought a visit would be nice. The truth was Susan couldn’t get Jennifer away from Sam and Stephanie fast enough.

  After they left, Morley sat on the stairs and had a good cry. The aborted visit had rattled her. Things that she thought she loved looked shoddy now that she was looking at them through Susan’s eyes. The jukebox in the living room looked . . . juvenile.

  The house looked . . . dirty.

  She scooped up a dust ball from behind a chair and stuck it in her pocket as she wandered into the kitchen. The breakfast dishes were still not done. Arthur the dog was sitting in a chair licking a sticky half-full bowl of pinkish cereal milk someone had left on the table.

  Morley thought of the house that she grew up in. Bathrooms that never seemed to get dirty. The smell of furniture polish and lemon cleanser. Ironed sheets folded neatly in orderly cupboards. The comfortable warmth of home baking.

  When she began to measure her house against her mother’s house, Morley felt like a failure. She thought she had been running a casual, comfortable house. She was abruptly aware that she had been neglecting the wider implications. She’d been raising a herd of slobs.

  After dinner she sat everyone down.

  “There are going to be some changes around here,” she said.

  Beds had to be made before anyone went to school.

  Sam would wash dishes after supper.

  Stephanie was in charge of the upstairs bathroom.

  Dave avoided looking at Morley during her speech. Sam and Stephanie both opened their mouths at the same time, but neither got a word out.

  “No allowance,” said Morley. “No allowance if your chores aren’t done. And done properly.”

  That was January.

  Everything went surprisingly well for a week or two.

  More or less. As okay as these things go. Well, they didn’t really go okay at all. Things were actually rather unpleasant.

  Every morning began with a fight over the beds. They were made, every morning. More or less. The way beds get made under these kinds of circumstances.

  After about two weeks the alarm rang one morning and Dave opened a weary eye and proclaimed the arrival of the day like a ring announcer proclaiming the beginning of a prizefight. “Oh good, it’s morning again,” he began. “And this morning we have, in the south bedroom, with allowance in her pocket and determination in her heart . . . Mom. And in the back bedroom, twisted in sheets that haven’t been washed in weeks, months, years . . . a ten-year-old boy. Let the fun begin. What is this? Round twelve?” He got out of bed and slouched into the bathroom. That’s how things were going.

  In the middle of week three, Sam, who was supposed to be washing the dinner dishes each night, took his allowance to the Biway and came back with a huge package of paper plates and three boxes of plastic cutlery.

  That night he came into the kitchen while Morley was cooking so he could monitor the number of dishes she used.

  “Why do you need another pot?”

  “You don’t need a new spoon for the gravy. Use the spoon from the peas.”

  Stephanie started to patrol the bathrooms—refusing one night to let Dave use the one by the bedrooms. She stood in front of it, her arms across the door.

  “I just cleaned this one. He can use the one downstairs. He’s too lazy to go downstairs.”

  One morning Stephanie went to leave the house without making her bed.

  Morley said, “You are not going to school until your bed is made.”

  They stood in the hall glaring at each other, nose to nose. Neither of them about to give way, until a dim light began to shine in the back of Stephanie’s eyes—an idea was approaching, like a train coming from far away in the night. Morley saw it coming and thought, Oh no, but what could she do?

  You are not going to school until your bed is made.

  “Fine,” said Stephanie. She went back into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her. Morley stared at the closed door and thought, Now what do I do?

  It was not a happy home.

  But it was cleaner and it was neater. And that was good enough for Morley. That is what she wanted.

  A month after Susan left, Morley’s mother, Helen, came over for dinner. The plan was for Helen to eat dinner, then sleep over Friday night. When Morley went to pick her mother up, she thought how nice it was going to be to have someone in the house who would share her point of view—someone who would approve of the changes. Morley had told Helen what was going on—about her plans to organize the house. She was sure Helen would be delighted.

  But on Saturday morning Helen seemed agitated. Instead of sitting at the kitchen table reading bits of the newspaper out loud to whomever happened by, Helen was suddenly anxious to help out. Each time Morley came into the kitchen with a load of laundry, a rag or a dirty plate, Helen kept pushing the paper aside and struggling up.

  “Can I help?” she kept asking.

  Morley didn’t understand what was going on at first. Helen normally loved to sit at the table and read the minutiae of the nation out loud to anyone who wandered by. Having Helen over for breakfast was like eating with CNN, and Morley couldn’t figure out why the visit was going so badly. She almost snapped at her mother once, but she bit her tongue. Just before lunch she finally realized her mother wasn’t going to relax until everyone else did. She wanted to be a part of whatever was going on. Morley went into the kitchen with a can of polish and asked Helen if she would like to help dust the den.

  Helen looked up at her, irritation clouding her face.

  “I was just reading the book reviews,” she snapped.

  Later, after she had dropped her mother home, Morley drove across the city, alone, listening to the radio, remembering another night years ago, when she had also been in the car alone. It was not long after her father, Roy, had died. She was worried about Helen. She had driven out of her way to knock on her mother’s door.

  Helen had been sitting in the living room reading. Morley had seen the book open on the chair by the window. But what had caught Morley’s eye wasn’t the book, but the wooden tray with Helen’s dinner dishes still in front of the television. Morley couldn’t believe her eyes. Couldn’t believe that her mother had let the dishes sit while she sat and read. It was a small thing but it was completely out of character. It wasn’t something she thought Helen was capable of doing.

  “I am worried about her, Dave,” said Morley when she came home that night.

  Her mother, who had been so neat and so perfect all her life, would never have let the dishes sit around like that when her husband was alive. Roy was a policeman. His basement workshop was as clean as Helen’s kitchen. His garden tool shed was as tidy as her cupboards. Roy liked things orderly and precise. What would Roy have thought of those dishes?

  It was Dave who said, “Maybe that’s the point.”

  Morley didn’t get it. She had fretted for a week, worried that her mother was coming unglued. Worried she was losing it. She called her every day—sometimes twice a day. And then one afternoon, on her way up from the basement, she understood. Understood that the small and insignificant act of leaving those dishes unwashed was an act of letting go. An act of healing. Helen had spent her whole life keeping her house perfect because that’s what Roy had wanted. All those perfect beds, all those spotless counters were in deference to her husband. Now she was living alone. She wasn’t about to live like a slob, but she wasn’t going to worry so much anymore either. It was a liberating insight.

  Those dirty dishes left in front of the television turned out to be a gift to Morley. They had given her permission to run her house her own way, and now years later Morley was aware that the way she had been running h
er house was a conscious choice—a choice she had made paying attention to the lessons of her mother’s life. Morley realized that Helen didn’t just approve, she liked Morley’s house. She liked the jukebox in the living room. She liked her grandchildren. She felt comfortable with the way Morley and Dave were bringing them up. They might not be collecting Junior Achievement awards, but they did have standards. Different from Susan’s certainly, but so what?

  Morley didn’t put any cutlery on the table that night. “Caveman,” she said. “Caveman dinner.”

  “How am I supposed to eat mashed potatoes without a fork?” said Stephanie.

  “Like this,” said Sam, dipping his fingers into his potatoes. Smacking his furry little paws clean.

  “You’re disgusting, Sam,” said Stephanie.

  And just like that things returned to normal.

  Of course things never really return to normal. Two weeks after the caveman supper—two months after Susan’s disastrous visit—Morley got up one morning to find Sam already up and dressed. When she walked into his room to wake him, he was making his bed.

  She was about to say something, but she bit her tongue. Instead, she said, “It is a lovely morning out. I think, no jacket. When you’re finished, we’ll make pancakes.”

  Sam was oblivious. He was struggling with his bed, his brow furrowed in concentration.

  “How do you do the tight corners?” he asked. “I’ve always liked to make my bed with tight corners.”

  Morley shook her head in sympathy.

  “It’s tricky,” she said, reaching for the sheet.

  I Fall to Pieces